Afterparty by Daryl Gregory

eventually.”
    The Vincent pulled the hood from the pastor’s head. Rudy’s face was covered in sweat, and he blinked to keep it from running into his eyes.
    The Vincent said, “I can tell that you’re a good man, trying to do the right thing. But no one but you expects you to keep all this secret.”
    Rudy looked to his left, as if someone had just stepped into the room. The Vincent couldn’t stop himself from glancing in that direction. Of course no one was there.
    “I think it’s time we move on to the next phase,” the Vincent said. He walked to his carry-on bag and unzipped it. He took out a pair of pliers, a serrated knife, a roll of duct tape, a punch awl, a plastic bottle of lighter fluid, and a box of kitchen matches. Set them on the floor in a row. They were all new, picked up from the Walmart soon after he’d landed in Toronto.
    He made sure Rudy was watching this presentation of the props. The interrogation was, after all, a theatrical performance. You had to engage the victim in the narrative, a story that followed the classic structure: The hero (our victim), faced with a dire situation, overcomes adversity, and achieves his goals. Well, one goal, really: survival. But it was important that that modest happy ending seemed within reach, right around the corner. The Vincent’s job was to inspire not only fear, but hope.
    The Vincent picked up the awl. “Rudy, I need you to tell me where you got the printer. It’s not like anything I’ve seen. Was it given to you, or did you buy it? Who did you get it from?”
    Rudy shook his head.
    “Just one name,” the Vincent said reasonably.
    “I’m not going to tell you that,” Rudy said.
    “Why not?”
    He opened one eye, squinting. “I’m not going to point you toward another brother or sister.”
    “So you got it from someone else in the church. One of the members.”
    “Not this congregation,” Rudy said. “Not this building.”
    “So if I looked for other congregations of—what do you call it? The Church of the Hologrammatic God—I could ask them. Maybe do a few more pastoral visits.”
    Rudy said nothing.
    “I’m going to level with you,” the Vincent said. “I’d rather not go to all that trouble. But you’re putting me in a corner. If you don’t give me some information that I can take to my employer, then I’m going to have to talk to other people in your church, as I’m talking to you now.”
    Rudy glanced to his left again, a gesture that was getting tiresome. The man just wasn’t scared enough. And the Vincent couldn’t just start slicing skin and breaking bones. Pain at that level was counterproductive, not only because of the well-documented willingness of prisoners to say anything to stop it, but because of the opposite: Many victims discovered that their tolerance was higher than they expected. And death threats were worse than useless; hold a gun to a victim’s head, or a blade to his throat, he might start to think he was going to die no matter whether he submitted or not. The Vincent had seen this happen during an interrogation of a poppy farmer in Afghanistan. The army had botched the job, and the farmer shut down completely. He almost seemed to be at peace. By the time the Vincent had arrived at the scene, there wasn’t enough time to win him back. Another human resource, unexploited.
    No, it wasn’t death threats that motivated his victims to cooperate, or pain, but fear of pain. And this man, Pastor Rudy Gallo Velez, seemed to have an extreme deficit of fear.
    If he was drugged—and his employer said that he’d be dealing with criminals and users, starting with the addict Lyda Rose—it was no drug the Vincent had seen before. The Vincent had a bad thought: What if his own medication was interfering with the job? Maybe if he had some of the emotional sensitivity that he possessed when he was off duty and off the meds, then he could figure out where Rudy was vulnerable. But off the meds, the Vincent wouldn’t