Gray Matter (26 page)

In the kitchen he ran his finger along the filthy, scarred countertop, trying to imagine what Paul Macmillan’s childhood was like. He looked into the bedroom, where the bodies had been found. It had the same plank flooring, and there were dark stains in the wood along one wall, especially in the grooves between the boards. It could have been something else, though. Animals clearly had free access.

When Schultz walked back to his car, he was certain that Paul Macmillan was responsible for three deaths in St. Louis and at least two dozen elsewhere.

Now all he had to do was find him. And prove it.

MERLIN HERE. WHAT’S THE
buzz, Keypunch?

I’m trying to sort out some things that happened. Can we talk?

Wait just a minute…there. I’ve got my cyber-shrink hat on. Go.

You know I’m working on a murder investigation. It’s been made clear to me here that I’m an outsider. I don’t have cop mystique, or whatever it is that glues these people together.

You mean you don’t get asked out for a drink with the boys?

That’s part of it, certainly, but there’s more to it than what equipment you
’ve
got under your trousers. There’s a woman on my team, Anita, and I get the same feeling from her. It’s us and them, and I’m definitely in the them crowd.

Aren’t you used to that as a psychologist?

It’s not the same. With a patient, I have to be able to empathize and still maintain some distance, for a lot of reasons. Here, I’m the one being held at arm’s length.

Oho. Sauce for the goose. Think of it this way: you have your skills and they have theirs. Put them together, and whammo! The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

I want to make a real contribution.

You have. You will. Now stop whining.

PJ told Merlin what had happened since their last online conversation: Vanitzky’s murder, the videotape with the offscreen humming, the red letters on her kitchen wall, Sheila coming to her, Schultz dropping the ball, Sheila’s death.

I’m sorry to hear this news, Keypunch. It sounds like you and Sheila could have become good friends.

Yes.

No tears. You’ll short out your keyboard. What about Schultz?

He’s punishing himself, and he’s good at it. He doesn’t need any help from me.

Thomas?

Better.

How about that contact from Wash U.? Anything come of it?

Now there’s a bright spot. Mike lent me the hardware I wanted, although I haven’t had time to integrate it yet. He’s very nice. A real hunk, too. You might have warned me he was bald. When we had lunch, I dropped some pizza and he wanted to wipe my chest with a napkin.

Sounds promising. Next time, let him.

Dirty old man.

Want some candy, little girl? How about a sucker?

Pervert. How unattached is Mike?

Got the hots, eh? No significant others, as far as I know. His divorce was finalized almost two years ago. Very, very messy. You’ll have to get the gory details from him, if and when he’s ready. You should be good at that.

Damn it, I don’t want him to think of me as his psychologist!

Next time you see him, take off all your clothes and dance on the table. That will minimize, but probably not eliminate, the possibility of him thinking of you as his psychologist.

Thanks for the advice. Bye.

Wait! You haven’t gotten your list:

1. On being an outsider: live with it.

2. On losing an almost-friend: live with it.

3. On Schultz messing up: live with it, or don’t. But know which one.

4. On pursuing Mike: lust can be good.

5. On getting older (oh, that wasn’t in our discussion?): live with it.

6. The word for the day, and a versatile word it is: lust.

Sleep well.

A
LL OF A SUDDEN
it was Friday morning, Thomas’s last day of school. PJ had spent the last hour on the phone in her bedroom, talking with Schultz, catching up on everything he had learned from his trip to Tennessee. The phone had rung just as she was stepping out of the tub. She was mildly peeved that he hadn’t invited her along, as her psychology training might have been of some use in dredging up impressions of Paul Macmillan. She wasn’t sure he was on the right track in pursuing the boy from Fallsburg, but she couldn’t discount anything in which he had so much faith. She had a lot to think about, to try to integrate her own thoughts and feelings about the case with all the information he had dumped on her in the last hour.

PJ sat across from Thomas, watching him shovel cereal into his mouth while reading at the table. He must have been at an exciting part of his book, because his hand and mouth were on automatic, and his eyes were fastened to the page. She hated to interrupt.

“This is your last day, isn’t it?” she said.

“Huh?” The rhythm was disrupted, and milk dribbled out of the corner of his mouth. She wanted to take a napkin and wipe it, but he was far too old for that. When had that happened? When had her little boy turned into this quasi-teenager?

“Last week we said we’d talk again about what to do when school’s over.”

“Aw, Mom, can’t I just stay home? I’m twelve years old, you know. I’m not a baby.”

“Ordinarily I would say yes. But after the break-in we had, I’m just not comfortable with you being alone in this house all day.”

“I’m not alone. I have Megabite.” As if waiting for her cue, the cat jumped up on the table. She approached Thomas for her customary stroking, then sniffed at his face. She delicately licked at the milk on his chin. “Look, Mom, she’s kissing me.”

“She’s just after the milk, slop-face. And don’t start with me about not being alone. Megabite doesn’t count. I could call your dad today, and you could fly out over the weekend.”

“I don’t want to go stay with Dad.” His face took on a determined look.

“Why not? It would just be for the summer, maybe just a month or so. I’m sure he would be happy to see you.”

“I don’t think so. He and Carla like privacy. They don’t like having a kid around.”

What, they’re doing it on the kitchen table?
“You could go out a lot, visit some of your old friends in Denver.”

“I just don’t want to go. I don’t like being around Dad anymore.”

Uh oh.
“Can you tell me why not?”

“I guess I’m mad at him. What did he need Carla for, anyway? He had us. We were a family. Besides, he said some really nasty stuff about you. He blamed you a lot, and tried to make me think bad things about you. I know now that wasn’t right.”

PJ tried to hold back her anger. She and Steven had agreed early on that neither would disparage the other to Thomas. She had held up her end of the bargain, sometimes having to bite her tongue. She was disappointed to learn that Steven had not made the effort. She reached across the table and took both of Thomas’s hands in her own.

“I’m sorry you got involved in that way,” she said. “He’s still your father. He’s going through a difficult time, like the rest of us. I’m not trying to excuse what he did or said, but I know he still loves you.”

“Mom, I don’t want to see him now.”

Searching her son’s face, she knew that he was telling the truth. It saddened her, but she hoped that he would be willing to resume his relationship with his father sometime in the future. It wouldn’t be wise to press it on him now.

“All right,” she said. “But we need some other alternatives. I wasn’t kidding when I said I don’t like the idea of you here by yourself. Let’s both work on it.”

“I will, Mom. Actually, I’ve got an idea,” he said, “but I have to check some things out first.”

The HMD Mike had given PJ wasn’t the sleek commercial type. It didn’t have smooth black plastic and lightning decals down the sides. It looked more like something you would drain pasta in, and it was heavy and uncomfortable to wear. The balance was off, so that it listed to one side. After repeated use, the wearer’s neck muscles began to ache from constantly correcting.

All morning, PJ had been working on isolated bits of the playback, in order to get the headset meshed with her software. When she first tried it, the virtual world that was placed in front of her eyes by the dual displays on the headset was flat and unconvincing, the motion jerky, the perspectives not right, and the response from the data gloves was practically nonexistent. Her software routines that handled the input from the gloves had only been tested a couple of times before, and that was three years ago with different hardware. But she found that her routines were basically sound, and simply needed tweaking. Small changes led to big improvements. Finally she was ready for a full run-through. She chose Burton’s apartment and immersed herself in the recreation of his murder. She used manual mode, so that she, rather than the computer, was directing the action.

After a while, PJ took the headset off. Her heart was thumping in her chest, and her lungs ached as though something had sucked all the air from them. She stood up and circled her desk a couple of times, reorienting herself, pulling her familiar office around her like a blanket.

She hadn’t been able to get very far into the simulation. Even though she knew that she was actually facing a wall of her office, her mind told her she was walking up the steps to Burton’s apartment. Her hands, which she held in front of her body, carried a box of long-stem roses. She could look “down” and see the box. It was too real. When she swung her arm toward Burton’s head, her hand tightly clutching a short length of pipe, and saw him crumple at her feet, she didn’t want to continue.

She wondered if she should go back to the simpler screen simulations, without the headset and gloves that put her into the scene. What was to be gained by playing the part of the killer? Would it help the investigation, or was it a sick voyeurism, a desire on her part to vicariously murder someone?

Ridiculous. Get a grip, woman. This is a tool, nothing more,
she told herself. She was about to put the headset back on when there was a knock at the door.

“It’s open,” she said. She couldn’t deny her relief when she put the headset on the desk.

Schultz came in, dropped into a folding chair which barely survived the experience, and looked curiously at the hardware on her desk. Then his gaze shifted to the gloves she was still wearing, with their webbed network of wires and sensing terminals.

Letting him wonder about it, she asked what he wanted.

He cleared his throat. “The medical examiner says there was a blow to Armor’s head, apparently not hard enough to be the cause of death. Left some very odd impressions in the skin, little spike points in a pattern of two rows. She has no idea what the weapon might have been. Didn’t take kindly to my suggestion that Armor was whacked in the head with a golf shoe.”

“I can understand that.”

“My next suggestion was a meat tenderizer, one of those kitchen tools you use to pound a tough cut into something edible. Julia swears by them. Or used to, at any rate. Now she just swears.”

“Have you spoken to her?”

“Yeah. She’s living with her sister in Chicago. Didn’t even ask about Rick the last time I talked with her. I can’t figure it, Doc. I thought she left because I wouldn’t get Rick off the hook. Now I think that’s just part of it, and a small part at that. It seems she was about ready to give Rick the boot herself. Maybe she was just waiting for some excuse to get out of the marriage.”

PJ didn’t know how much she should involve herself in Schultz’s private life. He seemed to want to talk about it, so she played her part. “Have there been problems before this?”

He folded his arms over his ample belly and began to talk.

“When we were first married, we acted like silly kids. We were in love, very romantic. Holding hands, kissing in public, six phone calls a day, that kind of thing. Hard to picture, isn’t it?” Schultz didn’t wait for an answer. “After Rick was born, we grew up a lot. We still loved each other, but it was a quieter kind of love. I was working long hours, didn’t spend a lot of time with her and the kid. But I made up for it when I could. Lots of fathers are like that, aren’t they?”

PJ nodded, not wanting to interrupt the flow, but she was thinking about how different her own father was from the kind of person Schultz was describing.

“Julia and I drifted apart. She had her friends, I had mine. Mine were all cops. I hadn’t realized how far apart we were until that time my partner got killed. I needed all the support I could get, but I couldn’t even talk to her about it. From then on, we’ve just been two people living in the same house. She fixes the meals, I take out the trash.”

PJ felt a hollowness inside herself. She knew firsthand how it felt when intimacy died. In his case, it had been a gradual process, hardly noticeable over the years, until that moment when his heart twanged and he realized it was all gone. It was like a garden slowly overtaken with weeds until the fine straight rows of flowers and vegetables were no longer visible. No longer harvestable either; they had been choked out. For her, the process had been telescoped into a few days, maybe a few hours within those terrible days.

“But we got along OK. Not a lot of fights. Like a couple of well-adjusted roommates, we knew what not to say to each other. It wasn’t so bad. At least there was some companionship, somebody sitting across the table at breakfast. Then I had to go and stir things up about Rick.”

“If it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else,” PJ said. “Once the slide begins, it’s hard to crawl back up.”

Schultz shook himself in his chair. “How’d we get on this, anyway? Christ, I sound like a sad drunk.”

“I think it started with a meat tenderizer,” PJ said.

“Oh, yeah. Mind telling me what that stuff is on your desk?”

“That,” she said, pointing, “is a personal dilemma, Detective. Maybe you can help me out.”

“Shoot.”