Campbell stops pacing, her eyes on the gun that is still in the same spot where she dropped it. Just as far away from her right now as it is from Mara. She seems frozen, only her glances are moving. From the gun to Mara and back again. She has to make a decision and before she does, the detective in her rates the situation. If she went for the gun now, she would only lose. Mara´s eyes are telling her so, and even if she were to get there first: Mara looks angry, and wouldn't go down easily.
Campbell never wanted to go against her in the first place, she is on her side. That considered, she should probably tell her the truth. About ´them` and everything else she knows. Hesitantly she moves her hands up, the palms outwards to signal that she comes in peace, when she slowly approaches again.
"You are right," she gives in, "you deserve the truth and you should get to know who ´they´ are, because then you will get closer to finding out who your husband really was. As much as you may think that he wasn't, Mara, he was one of them."
There is only one person faced with whom Mara has ever felt smaller: Aaron, in each of the thousand moments that he petted her head and sweet-talked her in order to avoid a disagreement.
Yes, she may not have known who her husband really was, but how dare Campbell to point it out?
How dare she make Mara feel like it was her fault that Aaron didn't tell her things?
How dare she pretend to know the man that Mara loved better than she ever will herself?
Mara´s anger is getting the better of her. Her eyelids are shaking, when she slowly steps closer, halts right in front of the woman and calmly raises her hand. As if in slow motion, she reaches back and gives her a smack.
Jesus Christ, does that butcher bitch have bones of steel?
Mara´s hand hurts, but she feels relief, regardless. She has been feeling so angry ever since she heard the gunshots. Yes, although she didn't say it to anyone, she was at the house when Aaron got killed, and the person she wanted to slap was Aaron himself, but as much as he would have deserved it, he wouldn't have felt it anymore.
Where would the fun in that have been?
She stares at Campbell to see if at least the detective felt her fist.
Oh, yes, thank God!
Despite her bones of steel, she looks like it hurt a bit!
Her right hand on her red cheek and her jaw dropped so far that it nearly touches her chest, she stares at Mara blankly, as if she cannot comprehend what just happened.
Well, Mara just assaulted a detective, and in the worst case scenario that is a crime that could get her prosecuted. Ah, fuck it!
She just assaulted a goddamn detective, okay, and feels super proud of it!
Ever since her hooker days and the way that girls like herself were treated by the force she has dreamt of this moment. Campbell´s lip is shaking, probably of rage, but wait: Is that blood on it? Mara´s smile grows bigger. The corners of her mouth are nearly touching her ears.
Bring it on, Campbell, fight back, she thinks. Even though looking at her arms, Mara is pretty sure that she would lose against her. But can you imagine all the anger that she would get to let out in a full grown fistfight? That is all the rage that has built up inside her in more than 15 years of marriage to a man who she didn't really know and who would never even fight with her, that was how little he cared.
Campbell seems to care just as little. She has taken a deep breath and her hand off her cheek. Now she seems calmer than Buddha himself.
"Not too bad, I didn't see that one coming," she at least acknowledges Mara´s efforts. "I will let this one go. It mustn't be fun to only get to know your husband when he dies, but let me tell you this, it is usually like that. I´ve barely ever met a spouse of a murder victim who didn't have to go through it. In some ways people only show you who they really are when they cannot show you any longer. I´m saying show to imply that the way we present ourselves to others is always just that, a show. My advice? Don't feel bad that you didn't see past his, when he was still alive."
Did Mara ask for fucking advice?
She wants to slap the detective again, but as she is just about to raise her hand, she has to admit that Campbell has a point. It was the same with Mara´s mother. Only after she had died Mara really saw her. When people are gone, they cannot pretend anymore. They cannot try to adjust to the expectations that they think others have on them, and they cannot prevent anyone from finding their darkest secrets anymore. As they are down there, naked, in the morgue, who they were is up here, just as exposed and waiting for a post-mortem.
As much as Campbell deserved a slap earlier for what she had said, she doesn't deserve one for this statement. Mara has stopped smiling. Right now she looks like crying and her voice sounds unusually gentle as she replies.
"Well, detective, the funny thing is that I always knew that Aaron played a show. In 15 years of marriage there wasn't a single moment when I felt like he was his full self, can you believe that?"
Disappointed in herself, she shakes her head.
"What kind of a fool stays with a man who they know they don´t know? I think I persuaded myself that I would break his shell if I had enough time. That I would make him comfortable enough to show me all of himself. He never did, but believe it or not, I would have loved him, for fuck´s sake, all of him! I know I would have, because even though I didn´t for definite know who he truly was I could sense it. I think I loved all of Aaron, even the many sides I never got to know."
With her cheek still red and scratched, for once Campbell smiles a smile that doesn't seem superior, but full of empathy. Because maybe she has lost someone someday as well and therefore knows what it feels like when they reveal themselves only when they go.
"Well, Mara, now I will help you fill in a few missing pieces to the puzzle that your husband was," she mumbles. "The people that Aaron worked for… The same one that I meant by ´they`... When they started out, they were a group put together by the government and called the preservers of the world. At the start they were meant to look for ways that could ensure the congeniality of this planet for the next generations."
She takes a deep breath and shakes her head.
"Well, things like this always go the same way. The initial, rather selfless idea to preserve earth and with it the human race was extinguished by what makes the human race human, the egos of the individuals who were involved in the work, and even worse, the ones of those who sponsored and chaired the organisation. Some of the richest people in the world."
Mara´s gentleness freezes to ice and crumbles off her face until her expression is empty.
"How do you know that Aaron worked for them?" She asks. "If they are who Melanski works for, then I doubt it, because, yes, I mentioned Melanski´s name to Aaron, but I couldn't ever do what I had promised. I didn´t ever get a chance to introduce them to one another. Aaron asked me out, regardless, and it must have been maybe half a year in that he proposed. Just two weeks earlier he had told me that he'd finally found a job which actually made him money, and he said that he had signed a confidentiality agreement and wasn't at liberty to tell me the name of his bosses or anything else about it. I kept on asking and was hoping that he would let it slip someday, but he never did."
Campbell´s eyes light up with excitement, because finally everything is coming together. At last she knows that Bob Melanski is who she always thought he was. She will get him now, she has no doubt.
"I believe that Aaron found out where Melanski worked after you gave him the name. Until today I could only assume that the dirty bastard was involved with the preservers of the world, but as for your husband, Mara, I know for sure that he worked for them. When the other side approached me they showed me. He was their main target."
"The other side…" Mara's eyes fill with confusion.
"Who are they then?"
Campbell sighs, as if she doesn't enjoy the walk down memory lane.
"The first contact was nearly 16 years ago now, I was just about to finish police school back then, as the best of my year."
She pauses and her eyes start jumping up and down the walls. Her legs cannot stand still, she moves them on the spot, as she silently goes on.
"On my tenth birthday my mother never returned from a shop she went to, because ecoterrorists had set the fuel station just next to it on fire. The explosion had taken over everything around it, my mother included. When I finished police school everyone knew that this incident was where my drive came from. And the guys from the other side… They are a network of regular people like you and me. They started out as a few who considered the government's project wrong, but years later they had grown into thousands all around the world. They constantly comb through databases and look for people like me. People who have good reason to be against a bunch of starry eyed idealists who think they need to preserve the earth for the next generations, no matter what they have to destroy in the process. As for me, on my graduation day they recruited me, and the target they gave me was your husband, Mara, but then they called me off just a bit later, around the time that you got engaged."
Insane.
To Mara, it just sounds impossible, but as she studies Campbell she knows that the detective isn't lying.
"Why Aaron?" She asks and her eyes fill with disbelief. "He was brilliant, fair enough, but he would never have harmed anyone, I'm sure of that. Why would anyone think that out of all of them he was the one who would become a threat?"
"Well, I don´t know," Campbell shrugs, "I didn't know him, but they gave me everything that there was to know about him, and honestly?"
She sighs and glues her eyes to the ground, as if she doesn't want to face Mara when she goes on.
"He looked like a big-headed narcissist to me. I guess they probably thought he would go through with an idea he has even if he knows that it will kill half the world. And the project that he was working on… "
Terror takes over her tense gestures, and she groans.
"Nobody in the world should ever get permission to work on anything like that."
Mara´s heart is racing. She hangs on to silence for a while, because she isn't sure if she wants to hear it, isn't sure that she really wants to know what her husband was doing when he wasn't at home.
With her he was quiet and held back. He was considerate, shy and polite. He was gentle with her. No, small whenever he was next to her.
Could he really have been a different person when at work?
It takes her a few deep breaths to react.
"What exactly was it, his project?" She suddenly whispers. "What was Aaron working on?"
For her answer Campbell needs just as much preparation as Mara just did in order to ask, but then she does it like you would do with a bandage: She gets it over with fast. The eyes locked with Mara, she just blasts it out.
"He was building an artificial sun. He was given permission to play God and replace the sun in the sky right now with the one he created."
An artificial, what?
Mara gulps.
She must have heard it wrong.
When Campbell´s face tells her otherwise, she doesn't know what to reply. For half a minute she stares into nowhere and isn't breathing, while the detective watches her closely. She is expecting a reaction. She is expecting Mara to be taken over by shock, to fall apart or to blow up, whichever. But what she wouldn't have expected, at all is the way that Mara is actually reacting.
After what seems like an eternity of silence, she bursts out laughing. So loud, that the decaying ceiling is about to fall down. She is laughing and laughing like she has never done before. So hard that she nearly suffocates, so much that tears are climbing down her cheeks and when Campbell tries to speak her voice is nearly drowned out by laughter.
"Pull yourself together, Mara, do you hear me? We have no time for you to lose your mind. I told you what Aaron was working on, because I'm sure that this was why he was killed. The people who recruited me back then must have sent somebody else when he became a threat, and if it wasn't you who they recruited to take him out, then we have to figure out who it could be. If you want to know who murdered your husband then you will help me."