Jericho's Fall (12 page)

Audrey hesitated. “I was a psychologist, Beck. That’s how I was trained. And, well, I think you’re worrying too much.”

“You think I dreamed it. Or I’m making it up.”

“I think you’re worrying too much.”

Exhaustion and frustration fought an inconclusive battle. Beck’s voice was brittle. “Let’s say you’re right about the random scatter. That explains the snippets of voice mail. It doesn’t explain Jericho’s voice.”

“Or what you thought was his voice.”

“I know what I heard.”

Audrey shook her head. “No, Beck. You don’t. You can never know what you heard. You can only know what your mind tells you that you heard.” She waved down the rising objection. “Listen for a minute. Please, honey. When I was a psychologist, my field was cognition. The tricks the mind plays to make sense of the world. One of the classic cognition experiments involves playing static for people but telling them that there are voices hidden in the noise. In fact, there’s nothing but static, but if the subjects think there are words, they’ll find them. They’ll sit and strain and shut their eyes, and then, when the sounds are done, they’ll tell you they heard somebody reading Bible verses, the President giving a speech, their grandmother’s dying advice. It happens all the time. There’s even a name for it—”

“We can skip the details, thanks.”

“It doesn’t mean you’re crazy, honey. That you heard Jericho’s voice. It means you’re normal.”

Another awkward hiatus. Audrey was back at her scrubbing. Rebecca sipped the tea, then tried the phone again, but there was no service. She cocked an ear toward the window. “Listen,” she said.

“It’s raining.”

“No. Not just the rain. Hear that? It’s a helicopter.”

The nun dutifully shut off the water. She shook her head. “I don’t hear it.”

“It’s very faint. But, Aud, the thing is, Dak said people might be watching me. Let’s say you’re right. I’m making things up based on the static. Well, every time I get the static, the helicopter is around. I don’t know how they do it, but whoever’s up there has been sending static to my phone. Messages, too. Even Nina’s voice mail—”

Rebecca stopped. Audrey’s eyes had that kindly look again. Beck realized how she must sound.

“Forget it,” she said, not wanting to hear another lecture from the former psychologist about how the mind plays tricks. Beck tried to remember exactly how many beers it had actually been. Angry, bitter, exhausted, a little tipsy: oh, Audrey could cite a million symptoms if she tried.

But the nun was washing dishes again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Whatever you heard, I’m sorry you have to go through it.”

“Thank you,” said Beck, and meant it. A beat. She listened, but could no longer hear the helicopter.
You’re about to become very popular
. “Can I ask you something else?”

“Sure, honey.”

“Jericho said—well, he seemed pretty adamant that I should ask you why you quit your job. Why you left your husband. Why you became a nun.”

Audrey smiled. “I bet he told you I like girls, too.”

“That’s not my business.”

“It’s not even true. Well, maybe it is a little. But that’s not why I left my husband. Dad just likes to get under people’s skin. He’s desperate to get under mine.” She had moved on to the pots now. “My husband was a very sweet man named Teddy Gould. I left Teddy because he wanted children and I didn’t. He was a nice guy, ergo, in Jericho’s mind, I was gay. But, the truth is the reason I didn’t want children had nothing to do with sex. It had to do with children.”

“You don’t like children?”

“I love children, Beck.” Scrubbing harder. “I just didn’t particularly want to bring any into the world my father made. The world I helped him make.”

“You?”

“Didn’t he tell you? We used to work together.”

Beck shook her head, but already the pieces were falling into place. Jericho was angry at his elder daughter for quitting the family business. And what was the family business? Beck had assumed he meant the academy, but Jericho was a professor for all of two years. Dak had told her that the Agency sometimes employed psychologists. Her father had specialized in—

“Interrogation. You worked with him on interrogation techniques.”

“Only the painless ones,” she said, then laughed at her own glib self-justification. “Yes, Beck. That’s what I did. This was the nineties,
the early days of what everybody wound up calling the War on Terror. I don’t want to go into details.” She put one pot on the drying rack, took up the other. “This was when I was a professor. My dissertation was about containing certain cognitive deficits by controlling the environment in which the patient functioned—never mind. The point is, when my father saw it, he realized there were applications to—well, to his work.”

“Brainwashing. You’re talking about brainwashing.”

“Not exactly. No. But interrogation, yes. Getting the subject to the point where he wants to cooperate. Oh, no, not like you’re thinking. Not like in the movies. Drugs. Torture. Not like that. Just slowly breaking down the world your subject knows, and replacing it with a world of your own devising. You never touch him physically. You control his environment. You keep him guessing, keep him off balance, keep changing the rules, until, after a while, he doesn’t know what’s real and what isn’t. That’s when he’ll cling to any anchor. And you give him a new reality. A better one.”

“Sounds awful.”

The nun was unfazed. “You’re right. It was awful. Only I didn’t know it. I had consulting contracts with the Agency. I made a good living, dispensing advice. And sometimes I got to help put my own theories into practice. Pretty exciting for a social scientist.”

Rebecca felt slightly ill. “Are you saying you actually participated in—”

Audrey held up a hand. “Yes.” She dropped her eyes.

“But you stopped.”

“Let’s just say I got disgusted with myself. I became a psychologist to help people, not to—”

A roll of thunder, loud as a car bomb, distracted them both.

“I stayed at the Agency after Dad left,” Audrey resumed. “I was there until shortly after 9/11. I had charge of an interrogation of one of the suspects in—well, never mind what he was a suspect in. We always did these interrogations abroad. No lawyers, no courts, no journalists. We were the Morlocks. That’s what we told ourselves. The Morlocks,
protecting the country in ways you could never explain in the sunshine.” She saw Beck’s face. “Yes. I see he’s told you that line. Pretty pitiful, isn’t it? But that’s what we were. The Morlocks. Anyway, this particular interrogation—well, things got a little out of hand. We followed the rules, we applied my theories, we didn’t do any physical harm, but the results—oh, Beck. We had a man who had done—well, something really terrible—and we used my techniques, and they all worked perfectly, and he wound up regressing so far that he—he just couldn’t—” She stopped. The broad shoulders slumped. “Anyway, when I got back to the States, I realized things were getting out of hand more and more often. I won’t say extreme measures are never necessary. I will say, well—once you admit they’re necessary in certain rare cases?—you wind up deciding that all the cases are rare ones.” She returned to her scrubbing, although everything glistened. “Anyway, my marriage was going to pieces. I was traveling all the time, Teddy was getting adamant about kids, and—well, I came up here to see my dad, and he was his usual crazy self. ‘You can be a torturer
and a
mother,’ he said. ‘It’s pretty much the same job.’”

“He could be nasty,” Beck breathed, but her mind was on something else.

“Still can. Anyway, we argued for a couple of days, Dad and I, and then I just left. I had no idea where I was going. I just got in the car and drove around. For two, three days, staying in motels. I was near Colorado Springs when I saw the sign. A convent. An Episcopal convent. The nuttiest thing—but I was curious. I’ve never been a shrinking violet. I rang the bell and had a bite to eat. Had a little tour, saw the work they did, and”—she looked up, an unexpected defiance in her glare— “and it was like God had hit me over the head. I knew what I had to do. I left my job, I left my husband, and I gave away what money I had. The rest—I wrote instructions for the lawyers to get rid of that, too, once I inherited it.” The anger melted into peace. “We’re not like the Catholics, Beck. We don’t require a vow of poverty. Celibacy, either. But I took both. It made things—better.”

Beck sipped her tea. “And that’s what Jericho wanted me to know?”

“I have no idea what he wanted you to know.” Scrubbing the gleaming refrigerator now, still refusing to let her guest lift a finger. “But that’s why I left the family business.”

“It doesn’t make sense. None of this makes any sense.” “What’s going on, honey? Why are you so spooked?” “I’m not spooked,” she said, too fast. “I was just wondering.” Audrey did not turn from the sink, but her gaze lifted. She was looking out at the brightly lighted grounds. “I don’t know exactly what’s going on here, Beck. It’s obvious that Dak told you something that you haven’t told us. Ever since you met him in town, you’ve been on the lookout for—oh, I don’t know. But it’s obvious that you’re on the lookout.” She put the sponge aside. “If you need any help, you only have to ask.”

Rebecca stared. Why was everyone so determined to know what was going on in her head? Then she talked herself down. Jericho used to say that only paranoids thought everybody was in on the conspiracy. In real life, he would preach, it’s usually two or three idiots, a mascot, and a dog.

A dog?

Sure. Because you need somebody to kick when the plan doesn’t work
.

(iii)

Up in her room, Rebecca perched on the window seat, looking out on the storm. Floodlit trees snapped angrily in the wind. The clatter shook the panes. Why had Jericho wanted her to hear Audrey’s story? Was there a message, or was Jericho just having his mad fun?

She thought about Audrey, so strong and self-certain, her stolidity itself somehow proclaiming an eternal faith. Colorado Springs was three hours away. Three and a half at the most. Dak had said someone out here was helping Jericho with—well, with whatever madness he was up to. Audrey was his daughter, she lived nearby, she had been, as he quaintly put it, in the family business. And yet, even on her first
night back under Jericho’s roof, Beck had detected his sizzling anger at the woman he derided as
Saint
. Had Audrey been helping and then quit? Was that the point? Or was the message in the story itself?

Lightning flashed. Beck jumped.

Ask her
, Jericho had said.

Ask her what?

Why she became a nun. Why she quit the family business
.

The story. What did the story boil down to? Audrey used to be a consultant to the Agency. A specialist in interrogations. The painless kind, just in case anybody might be up there keeping track. Something had gone wrong, Audrey had quit, she had left her husband, given away her share of the money, become a nun. Maudlin, yes, but a message? Beck could not find one. What was she missing?

She yawned. Too much for a single day. Or a single night.

She stood up, moved to the bed, slid at last between the sheets.

But not before turning her cell phone off.

Still, in the night, she dreamed that it rang, and whined its whine at her; and when she woke on Tuesday morning, the phone was on.

TUESDAY

CHAPTER 11
The Deputation

(i)

On Tuesday, the sheriff returned, with Deputy Frias rather than Deputy Mundy in tow. The weather was clear and cold. On her early morning ramble, Beck had encountered no dead dogs and heard no gunshots. Back at the house, she had just settled down to review the memoranda for the weekend meeting when the
beep-beep-buzz
of the sensor said that a car had entered the forecourt. Audrey was busy with Jericho, and Pamela was on the telephone, so it was Rebecca herself who admitted the officers.

Sheriff Garvey demanded to speak to Dr. Ainsley Beck said he could not be disturbed. The sheriff said it was important.

“Then maybe you should tell me.”

Garvey sized her up, much as he had the night before: the way a policeman appraises a potential suspect. “You had a drink with my deputy, Pete Mundy,” he said. Beck noted the possessive pronoun, but said nothing. “He says he interviewed you about what’s been going on in town.” Still she kept silent. “Deputy Mundy is a good man, but he gets a little wild sometimes. He has these crazy ideas.” The hard eyes were awaiting her confession. “There’s nothing going on in town. Is that clear?”

Rebecca had not liked condescension even when she was a teenager. She was not going to put up with it now. “Is that the message?”

The sheriff flushed, and she knew at once that he was not a man to cross. “That’s for you personally. Pete Mundy arrested a couple of folks in Corinda’s last night. Private investigators. Licensed. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“Well, he did. Said one of them threw a punch at him. My Deputy Frias here backed him up.” She glanced at Tony, but he was examining Jericho’s bookshelf. “I don’t put up with anybody assaulting one of my deputies, but I had to turn them loose this morning.”

“Why?”

“I just did. Never mind why.” His irritation at her was growing. Well, she had always had a talent for rubbing men the wrong way. “Now, look, Miss DeForde. My Deputy Mundy is a good man, but lately he’s been asking a lot of silly questions, and causing a lot of silly trouble. I would like you to please keep out of his way. Is that too much to ask?”

She folded her arms. By now Audrey had crept down the stairs. “It’s good of you to come all the way up here, Sheriff Garvey, to tell me who I should and should not spend my time with. But I’ve been making up my own mind on that subject for about twenty years, and I don’t think I’m ready to stop.”

“I’m telling you for your own good, Miss DeForde. I wouldn’t want you to get in any trouble.” The words were conciliatory. The tone was not. “I have a lot of respect for Dr. Ainsley Ask him. He’s been good for this community. He’ll tell you I only want what’s best for everyone.”