Night Talk (7 page)

Rohan's allegations about aliens were nothing new—he was constantly on the run from things from the dark side sent by Carl Murad, the psychology professor who oversaw the sleep experiment and who Rohan claimed was in league with a secret entity that was seeking world domination.

There were two strange things about the timing of the call. Rohan had made it twenty minutes after Ethan jumped, fell, threw himself out the window or however it would be described. The ambulance had hardly arrived by the time Rohan called. Far too early for Rohan to have heard a news report.

Second, Greg had looked at his phone earlier when he got the phantom call—and there had been no voicemail icon.

He ignored Rohan's request not to call his number and tried it anyway. He got a recording that said the line was not in service. The message gave him pause. He could understand if Rohan turned off his phone or refused to answer and let it go to voicemail, but “not in service” meant the line had been disconnected.

He tried Rohan's neighbor's line. Not in service.

Greg checked the time. Unless he was in some sort of time warp, it hardly seemed possible for Rohan to know about Ethan's death and to have disconnected his line with the phone company and have a “not in service” message up and running in the middle of the night while Ethan's body was literally still warm.

Another curious thing about the call struck him. Ethan had appeared on the show under his user name, RainbowHat, but Rohan had used Ethan's real name in a familiar way, as if he knew the hacker. It wasn't impossible that the two knew each other, but while they were both into conspiracy theories, from what he knew about them Greg couldn't see much common ground between them. So what were they up to that had Rohan panicking?

Stealing government secrets and using Greg as their fall guy was the answer that came to mind.

He stood on his balcony while thoughts roiled in his head—Ethan, a call from the dead, intimidated by a van, a mysterious woman, now Rohan jumping in and generating more questions.

The woman at Angels Flight had ripped open and exposed wounds he already had. Her enigmatic comment implied that worse things were coming and at the moment he wasn't ready to rebut that take on his life.

The root of his connection to callers troubled by strange forces went back to a time when he faced the unexplainable and incomprehensible. He had been the sole witness to his own strange encounter, but as with so many reported encounters, there was a void in his memory. It happened when he was in his teens, but he still felt the trauma and even the fear. He was sure everything he experienced was still registered in his brain, but it had a lock on it. He was certain he had the key to unlock the memory, but the door refused to open, remaining just out of reach.

For a time he was relentlessly and even foolishly drawn to probe the dark matter lying just out of reach in his subconscious, and those urges still erupted some nights when he awoke in the middle of the night. With sleep eluding him, as oblivious to the danger as a moth batting its wings on the edge of a fiery volcano, he tried to probe his memory, to reconstruct what had happened when he encountered the terrifying and the mystifying.

His whole life—his relationships, his career, his fears and triumphs—had been affected by that knowledge wrapped in fog and shadows in his mind, which he couldn't access.

Greg hadn't spoken to another person about the experience in nearly three decades, but it was still there, in a dark place in his mind.

When he was a kid and spoke about his traumatic experience, his parents warned him not to tell others because people would make fun of him—even think he was lying or imagined it. When he did tell friends, he got howls of laughter and ridicule rather than understanding.

He got the last laugh because as an adult he took on a challenging career that brought him into contact almost on a daily basis with people who had experienced strange encounters.

But the early experience left him not just with empathy for people who'd had their lives twisted by events that defied acceptable explanation—it taught him that paranoia can be heightened awareness of the strange and unimaginable because he often sensed things about people and places that were out of reach to the five senses.

He gave his callers the freedom to tell the world their innermost thoughts, but kept his own deepest beliefs a secret—along with his fears.

His experience made him a seeker on a quest that he couldn't define. Rather than backing away from the unknown, he had been drawn to it in a large way, driven to become a national nighttime host of a radio show with a paranormal theme because he sought answers to the unexplainable.

The show wasn't just a job for him, but part of his quest to find answers. He had told Josh and many others that they were not alone, that he had had an encounter with the preternatural, as had many callers on his show. Millions more looked up at the stars and the utter darkness of the infinite universe beyond and realized that we are not alone in the universe. Even the pope in Rome had established a committee to investigate the existence of extraterrestrials.

He left the balcony and collapsed in bed weighed down by death and conspiracy, a warning from a strange woman and a threatening set of headlights that tried to run over him.

He was awakened hours later by a call from his producer.

“There's a homicide cop here who wants to talk to you about Ethan.”

 

13

Two plainclothes officers were waiting in the reception area of the broadcast studio. Greg invited them into his office. He hated talking to people over a desk and had them sit with him in the conference area in the corner of his office, four chairs around a table.

Lieutenant Batista was with the LAPD and introduced his companion, Mond, as being with Interagency. Greg had never heard of Mond's department. The name of the agency was so vague it sounded like one of those units that had sprouted between the cracks of bureaucracy. He assumed it dealt with suicides.

Batista looked like a man who had seen and heard everything and didn't believe much of it. He had shiny black hair combed straight back, tired eyes framed by wrinkles and a mouth shaped by cynicism.

Mond was short, stocky and bald. His thick face, broad nose and large eyes reminded Greg of a big frog. A poisonous one. Mond's dark eyes were recessed behind puffy pouches and all Greg could make of them was that they never altered from looking at him, as if the man was seeing something behind Greg's facial mask.

Mond's quiet menace made Greg more uneasy than the homicide cop's blunt approach. The expression “lock and load,” about getting ready to fire, came to mind as the big frog stared at him. He hoped Mond wasn't the person whose duty it was to pass news of Ethan's death on to loved ones.

Batista started hammering him with rapid-fire questions about his relationship with Ethan the moment the two police officials sat down. How long had he known Ethan? What was their relationship on and off the radio? When did they first meet? When was the last time he saw Ethan?

Greg didn't like the machine-gun approach but figured cops only expected other people to pass an attitude test. And his responses were simple—Ethan had been a caller for a couple of months. They had never met in person. The only thing about Ethan's work he knew was that Ethan was a reformed hacker working for a government agency. Which agency, he didn't know.

Only Batista hit him with questions. Mond sat quietly and stared, like a frog ready to pounce. Or lash out with its tongue.

The questions appeared to be fishing for a connection between him and Ethan. There was none. “I know zero about Ethan's personal or professional life other than what I've told you. He's one of hundreds of callers to the show who shared his concerns about the state of the world.”

“But you had enough problems between the two of you to ban him from the show,” Batista said.

“We had no problems between us. He wasn't allowed on the air recently because he sounded like he was high and used profanity. The FCC prohibits it. Look, I don't mind telling you what I know about Ethan, but if he committed suicide, why do I have a homicide cop asking me questions?”

“Just routine, violent death, we need to fill in the blanks. So you say you never met in person.”

“Never met in person. What little I know about him was what he revealed over the air. Said he'd got busted for hacking and ended up working for the government testing security systems. I don't know how old he was—”

“Twenty-seven.”

“Or much else about him. He was concerned about what he considered hidden forces attempting to control our society but that's a fear many of my callers have, including me.”

Batista leaned forward with a smirk. “Mine's aliens that look like big snakes. I saw the movie.” He chuckled and turned to Mond for support but the agent didn't crack a smile or divert his stare from Greg.

Batista put back on his serious face and puckered his lips. “So you say this guy was just another conspiracy theory nut who called in, period, full stop.”

“I said he was concerned about the state of the world as he and many others see it. About the only thing that set Ethan Shaw apart from other callers I've gotten over the years was that he started losing it during calls. Using foul language and sounding high. Ranting about how the time had come, that the world was coming under control of secret forces.”

“Your producer confirmed that you banned him. But you took a call from him last night anyway.”

“Not on the air. We took the call to pacify him.”

“And he said you killed him.”

“And he said I killed him. And you focus on that despite the fact that I was here with witnesses when he threw himself out of the building across the street. Are you finished with your questions?”

“Close. He said you killed him. What did he mean by that?”

“I don't know. Crazy talk. I told you he sounded high.”

“Your producer said he sounded panicked.”

“That, too. Why do we keep going back to what Ethan said? He was obviously high and I didn't kill him. I'm getting the feeling that you're trying to make something out of nothing.”

Batista waived off the accusation with his hands. “Hey, he said you killed him, I have to ask. Maybe he was using the accusation metaphorically. You know what I mean?”

“No. Killing by metaphor is a little too far-fetched for me.”

“Maybe he got himself deep into something with someone and killing himself was the only way out.”

“Because of something I did? Is that what you're saying?”

“I'm not making accusations, I'm asking questions. For all we know, someone might have bullied him into killing himself. When I was a kid bullying was bad behavior—now it's a crime.”

“He was just a listener calling in.”

“Your producer says you had trouble with him.”

“You keep going back to that but it's not that kind of trouble. Every word I've ever spoken to him has been on the air and none of it was personal. And I told the cops last night what he said.”

“All he said was you killed him? Not how or why?”

“I'm going to start grinding my teeth and run up a dental bill if you keep asking me that.”

“Do you keep copies of the calls?”

“We keep everything on a cloud server. He talked about technology out of control, about global conspiracies. He was out of control.”

“He had enough meth in him to kill an elephant.”

“From the way he sounded, I imagine he did.”

“The medical examiner says he took some really rich stuff, so pure that it's hard to imagine it out on the street. What he would have considered to be his usual dose blew his brains out.”

Greg tried to hold back his exasperation. He learned the hard way as a kid that arguing with a cop was a no-win proposition but he had had it with being treated as a suspect. “Okay—he's a drug addict who overdosed. Why are you asking me about it as if I was his meth supplier?”

“I'm just—”

“Doing your job. Can we get this over with so I can do
my
job?” That wasn't exactly true; it was the weekend and guest hosts handled the show.

Batista glanced at Mond. “We want a copy of all of Ethan Shaw's calls.”

“Easily done. The calls are indexed by date and name of caller.”

Greg left the room and told Soledad to download a copy of the calls.

“How are you doing in there?”

“Cops two, me, zero. The homicide cop has a laundry list of my sins, all imaginary. The other guy hasn't said a word but he stares at me as if he'd like to stick my head in a toilet and call it waterboarding.”

He left Soledad to do the download and returned to Batista and Mond, holding up his hand to block a question from Batista as he walked in.

“I understand that this is a tragedy,” Greg said. “I don't know Ethan's personal circumstances but there's probably family out there grieving. It's too bad he couldn't get the help he needed, but there was nothing I could do about that; I didn't really know Ethan. I've given you everything I can. You've held me upside down by my ankles and shook all I know about Ethan out of me.”

“What about the money?” Batista asked.

“What money?”

“The money you were paying him.”

“For the top-secret information he passed you.”

That from Mond.

 

14

Greg stared at Batista with openmouthed surprise. “That's crazy. I've never paid him anything. If someone told you that, they're a liar.”

“Actually, it was Ethan who told us,” Batista said.

“If he did, he was hallucinating.”

“You might say it's a voice from the grave.” Batista took a piece of paper he had tucked between the pages of his file and threw it on Greg's desk. “This was found on him.”