Eye to Eye: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (2 page)

She was giving me a cool
appraisal as Souza told me, still barely articulating, "Like I
said, I don't want to give you too much—no, belay that—I have to be
honest with you, Ash—there's a lid on this thing—I
can't
give you much.
Look, it's a missing person. Male, white, age seventy-two, missing
since the middle of October. Walked out of this building in broad
daylight and never seen again. Now, you take it. Take it from
there."

Like giving a bloodhound a sniff of an old
shoe and saying, "Okay, boy, go get 'im."

I said, "You know I need more than that,
Greg. Did the man work here?"

The lady looked at the
floor and told me in a cool, controlled voice, "'The man' is a
senior astrophysicist, one of the world's best. He is largely
retired but still takes on graduate students from time to time and
he was doing a lecture series here at Griffith for the lay public.
He has an office here. Would you like to see it?"

Souza was all smiles as she led us to a
small, almost bare office in the rear. She threw the door open,
almost defiantly, and stood aside while I entered. I went in and
sat at the desk in a creaky swivel chair, lit a cigarette, relaxed.
It was not so important that I "see" the office. I wanted the
office to "see" me. And something "came" almost instantly.
Understand, I have no control over these things. I command
nothing, invite everything. And something came. Don't ask what it
was; I don't know what it was. I just felt compelled to be up and
out of there, and as I passed Dr. Harrel, I casually asked her,
"Who is Mary Ann?"

She shook her head and gave me a cold reply.
"Pretty good guess, there must be millions of Mary Anns, but it
doesn't ring anything here."

"There is no Mary Ann, Ash," Souza said,
aggrieved by my apparent strikeout.

I said, "Shut up, Greg," and pushed past
him, went on along the back hallway and out a rear door onto the
parking lot.

It was heavy on me—some
cloistering, wriggling emotion that had my spine dancing and my
eyes smarting—moving me out across the mist-enshrouded parking area
and along the low rock wall, down the gently curving drive. I must
have been walking quite fast; I was vaguely aware of Souza huffing
along to the rear. I paused once and looked back, I guess to get my
bearings, saw Jennifer Harrel following at a distance. But I could
not stop and I could not wait. Something was doing me, and
urgently. Let me make it quite clear I did not know where I was
going, nor why. This particular type of "psychic" activity is a
form of surrender, a total surrender of the will, a willingness by
the "psychic" to be influenced. I was not in a trance, and I could
have killed the whole thing in an instant by simply taking back the
responsibility for my own actions. I do not pretend to know the
source or the nature of the influencing force. I know only that it
sometimes comes to me and I sometimes accept it.

I was not trying to be
cute when I said that I wanted the office to see me. I believe the
thing may work both ways; the influencing force, whatever it is,
may need a receptive center on which it can focus—and it may need
to feel an attraction to that center. I will elaborate on that
later. For now, I just want you to know that I was not in some sort
of robot mode, out there on that mountaintop. I knew where I was
and who I was; I just did not know where I was going, or
why.

But of course you must know, by now, where I
was going, and why. This is how I found the mortal remains of Mary
Ann Cunningham; or, to put it another way, it is how Mary Ann found
me.

I could smell her from the roadway, and I am
surprised therefore that she had not already been discovered.

Greg Souza knew immediately what that odor
meant.

So did Jennifer Harrel,
moments later, when she joined us at the scene. "Oh my God,
it's
that
Mary
Ann," she moaned sickly.

I felt like crying, and I
felt like hitting or kicking something, though I had never known
this young lady in the bloom of her life. And I was stuck in the
apperception that a death such as this is a monstrosity in a
rational universe. Things simply should not happen this way,
especially not now when the human mind can straddle the entire
universe, not now when the ingenuity of man has allowed him to
actually hear the residual echoes of the "big bang" that started it
all to going... not now. This sort of death belonged to another
place and time.

But then I was reminded that time and place
are always relative and that the past just keeps on booming along
at the speed of light, looking for a place to land. Maybe there is
a planet in a neighboring galaxy where right now furry little
animals are beginning to descend from trees and to walk upright—and
ten million years from right now, a descendant of one of those may
bend his head to a reflecting lens and marvel at the destruction of
a galaxy at the edge of the universe. Then he will step outside and
another descendant who for whatever reason never evolved
sufficiently in his own mind to even wonder about the edge of the
universe will bash him over the head, turn out his pockets for a
few coins, then trash him.

"Thank God," said Greg Souza.

"Thank God for what?" I growled.

"Well, that it's not the professor."

"It's all of us," I said. "It's every damned
one of us."

Souza did not get that. Jennifer Harrel did.
She took my hand, and squeezed it tightly, and murmured, "Ask not
for whom the bell tolls..."

It takes a certain perception, yeah, but a
death like this touches us all. And the bell tolls, maybe, clear to
the edge of the universe.

Chapter Two: Point of View

Her beauty is not of the
type that leaps across a room at you; it sort of steals over you
and takes you by surprise in the close examination—a quiet beauty,
deeper, more organic than cosmetic, much of it coming probably from
the eyes or from behind the eyes, although the physical angles and
planes are pleasingly harmonized, as well, the look of Jane Fonda
or Ingrid Bergman in their prime—as opposed to, say, Jane Mansfield
and Marilyn Monroe—and you feel comfortable with that kind of
beauty, whatever the situation. Having said that, I guess I'm not
sure I know what I mean by "comfortable"—though that word certainly
describes the feeling— unless I am trying to say that Jennifer
Harrel's beauty was not provocative, did not really invite
subconscious seduction scenarios or other masculine tensions—which,
I guess, is another way of saying that she was not sexy, which is
not true, at all; she is a very sexy woman—but maybe, I guess, not
at first, not right up front, her sexiness steals over you and
surprises you the same way her beauty does.

Such, anyway, was the
general content of my thought as we sat across from each other in a
quiet coffee shop on Los Feliz, just down the hill from the
observatory.

"You're an unusual man," she'd just said to
me, so I guess I was thinking that she was unusual, too.

We were both tired and cold and jangled from
a long vigil on the hillside with officialdom—and probably from an
overexposure to Greg Souza, also—and I was also thinking that it
was just a bit remarkable that here we were, the two of us, sharing
intimate coffee after such an unpromising beginning.

Maybe she was thinking the same thing,
because she quickly added, "If I seemed cool to you at first, it
was probably because I very nearly detest that man."

"Why don't you fire him, then?" I asked
casually.

"Can't," she replied, smiling ruefully.
"Didn't hire him. But I feel obligated to cooperate. I don't have
to like the man—hell, I'd warm his bed if that was the only way to
find Isaac."

"Isaac is...?”

"The missing man, yes, Isaac Donaldson.
You've probably never heard of him, but anyone who ever took a
course in solar physics—"

I interrupted to say, "I have, and I've
heard, and I'm impressed—but I've heard nothing about his
disappearance. Surely that would be worth a mention on the evening
news."

She said, "Isaac was working on some secret
project for the government when he disappeared. I assumed—he's so
absentminded these days—I thought at first he'd just forgotten to
say good-bye to anyone and he's just sequestered somewhere on this
secret project, but..."

"But now?" I prompted.

She raised her hands in a
mystified gesture. "We can't find anyone in government who'll own
up to him. And when one of my associates went to the police for
information, someone very high at L.A.P.D. personally delivered the
message that 'the situation' was 'federally sensitive' and that we
should leave it alone."

I thought about that for a moment, then
asked her, "What about his family?"

"Isaac has no family that I know of," she
replied. "He was an only child. He never married. Parents died
before I was born."

"You are... ?"

She smiled. "A friend and a disciple. I
adore the man, the only one I've ever known who I would consider
marrying, but I'm a couple of generations too late. He wouldn't
have me, anyway" She showed me a gold band adorning her third
finger, left hand. "Isaac put this ring on my finger the day I
received my doctorate, as a reminder of something he'd told me
while I was an undergraduate. I'd asked him why he'd never married.
He told me he'd taken a lesson from the church. Priests don't
marry, nuns don't marry, he said, a true scientist also should not
marry because it is all the same work. If a scientist is not
thoroughly absorbed by his work, he told me, then he is not a good
scientist, and the work—the work, he said, with a capital
'W'—cannot tolerate a bad scientist."

I said, quietly, "Interesting point of
view."

She twisted the ring on her finger and said,
"Not only that, but it's true."

I said, "The right man maybe could change
your mind about that."

She shook her head. "About marriage, maybe,
but I would have to give up one for the other."

I decided to change the subject. "So who," I
asked, "called in Greg Souza?"

"He's very mysterious about that," she
replied, frowning and still twisting the ring. "So much so, in
fact, that I first thought he was connected to the government. He
didn't actually say so, but..."

I said, "It's possible. He has had federal
contracts in the past."

She blinked and asked, "For what?"

I shrugged. "Greg was in Naval Intelligence.
It's all one small, crazy world, the intelligence community. There
are those times when it is convenient for one agency or another to
farm out certain routine tasks. Greg has contacts. He gets some of
the work."

Her eyes narrowed just a bit as she
inquired, "How do you happen to know all this?"

I said, "I was part of that community, too,
once."

She was cooling again. "He told me he had
retained you as a psychic consultant."

I said, "Well, that sounds a bit more formal
than the reality. I knew Greg at ONI. He—"

"What is that?"

"Office of Naval Intelligence. We were—"

"Why did you leave it?"

I held up my left hand to show her bare
fingers. "Used to be a ring on this hand, an Annapolis class ring.
Decided I didn't want to be married to the navy. Or to anything
else, for that matter. So I..."

"So you do what?" "

"What do you mean?"

She was still frowning. "For a living."

I said, "Oh," and waved it away.

"What does that mean?"

I smiled. "It does me."

"You're worse than Souza," she said, but
with a tiny smile.

I said, "God! Then let me change the
impression, quick. What do you want to know?"

"I want to know what you do for a
living."

I said, "This is embarrassing."

"Why is it embarrassing?"

"Because I don't do
anything for a living. Oh I do stuff, sure, lots of stuff. But I
don't do it for a living. I do it because it's interesting. And
somehow, along the way, I pick up enough money to keep
going."

She said, incredulous, "Don't you have any
ambition?"

"For what?"

"For anything! Don't you have a goal in
life? A program of some sort? A direction, at least?"

I told her, "Sure I do. I want to go on
living the way I live right now. What's the connection between Mary
Ann and Isaac?"

She blinked, trying to shift mental gears,
and said, "What? Connection? There's no connection."

I said, "Then why did I pick her up in
Isaac's office?"

She blinked again and said, "How do I know
that you did?"

I told her, "Doesn't matter whether you know
it or not, I know it, and I feel that there has to be a
connection."

"Look, I'm sure you're very sincere—I mean,
you probably think that you know what you're talking about,
but..."

I said, "But it's all hogwash."

She said, "Okay, you said it, I didn't."

"Where's your scientific objectivity?" I
asked her. "Can you argue with the result? I found the girl's
body."

She said, "Any dog could have done that.
Maybe you caught the odor."

I replied, "Any dog didn't. But let's leave
it at that, it really isn't important to the question. Mary Ann was
a part-time employee of the observatory. Isaac spent time there.
Were they associated in any way? Did they know each other, work
together, eat together—what?"

She was really agitated. "Why are you trying
to link a sadistic rape-murder to the disappearance of a sweet old
man? What are you trying to say?"

I guess I had become
rather agitated myself, because I slapped the table with an open
palm with enough force to