The Dead Man (11 page)

None of this made much sense, and some of it wouldn't make sense even when it was all over. That was the trouble with murder. It made things weird.

Milo Harper opened my door without knocking, the interruption finishing my to-do list. His sweater hung tentlike from rounded shoulders, his cargo pants sagged from his waist to the floor. He had a slight sheen on his forehead as if he'd ran up three flights of stairs but his gray pallor made it more likely that he was fighting a fever.

"Busy?" he asked.

"Not for you."

He took a seat across from my desk. "You look like you've taken a punch that you didn't see coming."

I laughed. "It's the shaking and it doesn't matter if I see it coming. You don't look so good yourself."

He sighed. "Three hours of sleep will do that to you after a while."

"So dial it back. You must have people who have people who can do whatever it is you're doing between midnight and six A.M."

He ran one hand through his hair. "Actually, I've got more people than that but none of them are on my clock. You know what I see everyday when I look in the mirror? I see the light in my brain getting dimmer. I'm not going to waste any of the time I have left before it goes dark."

"I've got to say it again. You don't look or act like anyone I've ever seen with Alzheimer's. You don't miss a trick."

"I can still navigate but I know what's coming and I'm not going there. I won't end up lying in bed, weighing eighty-five pounds with a feeding tube waiting for a nurse to wipe my butt not knowing who or what I am. I'll check out on my own terms long before then."

I had no answer to that and no idea why he was in my office. I waited for him to tell me.

"Sherry came to see me."

"I was late for lunch. She didn't like that."

"No, she wouldn't like that. She says you think one of our people murdered Tom Delaney. Is that true?"

"It's possible," I said, running through the anomalies in the Delaney report.

"You've got to go to the police with this."

"I did that. McNair likes his closed cases to stay closed."

"Go over his head. I'll call the chief of police."

"He'll back up his people unless we've got something better. Plus, Jason Bolt will scream cover-up if he finds out you pressured the department."

"So what do we do?"

"You do your job and I'll do mine."

"I can do mine a lot better if Sherry isn't in my office every five minutes complaining about you. Do me a favor, work with her."

"I can do that as long as I know where she fits in."

"She's my older sister. Practically raised me. She's smarter than me and she's my eyes and ears. When you have as much money as I do, someone always wants something. She keeps all that away from me."

"But, you didn't tell her that you've got Alzheimer's. Why not?"

He grinned. "Because she would drive me absolutely, fucking nuts. She'd make me go to every doctor on the planet who could spell Alzheimer's."

"I never had a big sister but I get the picture. It's not because you don't trust her?"

"Hell, I love her but that doesn't mean I trust her with everything in my life. The first lesson in the billionaire's manual is to know what to give up and to who and what to keep to yourself."

"What's the second lesson?"

"Do what has to be done. Don't look back and don't second-guess. You've been on the job half a day. What else have you got for me?"

"I logged onto the dream project to look at the videos of Tom Delaney and Regina Blair describing their nightmares. Their videos are missing and their names don't show up on the list of participants. It looks like they've been erased from the project records."

He nodded, processing the information without a visible reaction I could detect. I wished I had mastered Kate Scranton's talent for dissecting the involuntary facial flickers she claimed shined light on our true selves.

"What else?"

"You heard about the mailman who stole the mail?"

"Yeah. It was all over the news."

"Except for the part about him being a participant in the dream project."

His face remained flat while he absorbed the additional data as if an internal algorithm suppressed his emotions, keeping him focused on the problem, not the people. "How did you make the connection?"

"The mailman's name was Walter Enoch. I ran across it when I was searching for Delaney's and Blair's names on the list of project volunteers."

"The paper said he died of a heart attack."

"He had help."

Harper looked away for an instant, hiding his face, then came back to me, his eyes narrowed. "He was murdered? If you're right about Delaney, he's the second dream project volunteer to be killed. My God, what if Regina Blair's accident was staged too? How do you know about Enoch?"

"People I used to work with at the FBI told me this morning."

"Will they help us?"

"No."

"Then why would they tell you?"

"That's my business."

"Not as long as I'm paying you."

"You hired me, you didn't buy me. I'll tell you what I can when I can."

He stared at me, waiting for me to fold. When I didn't, he stood and reached for the phone on my desk. "Let's get Anthony Corliss and Maggie Brennan up here and find out what's going on with those files."

"Not so fast. I'd rather get to them on my schedule. No point in letting them know what we know until we're ready."

"Corliss's computer has software that tells him whenever anyone at the institute goes into his files. You were logged on to the system. Believe me, by now he knows that you were on and what you were looking at."

"Then I'll go see him. I don't want him to think he's been called to the principal's office."

"I'll go with you," he said making it a decree, not an offer.

I stood. "That's okay. I'd rather talk to him alone."

"Why? He'll know that you're going to tell me whatever he says."

"I can't help what he thinks. If you're there, it will change the dynamic. He'll be more concerned about you than me."

"He damned well better be more concerned about me than you. I sign his check and yours for that matter. Both of you work for me, something you keep overlooking."

His impassive façade gave way, his face coloring from pale to pink to red. Kate's belief that he was trying to ruin her business as revenge for her refusal to work for him didn't seem so far-fetched. I had warned him when we first talked about the job that he and I would get to this moment. There was no reason to duck it.

"Your sister tried to run me as soon as I walked through the front door. I don't know whether that was her idea or yours. When she couldn't, she ran to you. I get that. Now you have to decide what you want to give up and to who and what you want to keep to yourself because you're not going to run my investigation or me. I'll tell you when I've got something or when I need something. Until then, this stays between you and me so just sign my check or get someone else."

We measured one another across my desk; neither backing down until he conceded with a cracked grin.

"We've got the same problem, you and me," he said.

"What's that?"

"We're both losing the one thing we can't afford to lose—control. You over your body and me over my mind. I don't know why you won't tell me about the FBI but I gather you've got something else at stake, something personal. I could get anyone I want to do this job but I like having someone with a lot on the line. I'll stay out of your way but I want results or I will get someone else."

"What if you don't like the results?"

"That's tomorrow's problem. The question is whether you can do this today."

More than the shaking or the brain fog, I resented that my condition compromised my choices, forcing me to accept weakness as normal, walking away instead of pushing on as unavoidable. If I was going to give in, I might just as well quit. The FBI forced me to do that and the bitter taste hadn't gone away.

Simon Alexander was wrong when he told me that this would be an easy gig, a job I could do on my own schedule, and I was right when I told Milo Harper that something like this doesn't want to be controlled. Neither mattered now. What mattered was whether I was going to answer the bell or pack it in, taking the rest of the day off because I felt like I'd gone ten rounds or rattle Anthony Corliss's cage, knowing that the surest way to chill an investigation was to wait until it was convenient for me.

"It's no hill for a climber," I told him.

The personnel directory Leonard gave me listed Anthony Corliss's office on the fourth floor and Maggie Brennan's on the third. I tried Corliss first. He answered on the first knock.

"Door's unlocked."

The lights were turned off, the blinds drawn, the only illumination coming from a desk lamp and a flat panel television mounted on one wall. Corliss was leaning back in his chair, feet on his desk.

Two people, a woman and a man, their backs to me, occupied chairs in front of his desk. I stepped to one side, giving me a view of their profiles. Both looked to be in their midtwenties, the guy wandering from the screen to his iPhone to the books on the wall. The woman leaned forward, arms across her middle, eyes narrowed on the television, a legal pad in her lap filled with notes.

I recognized Maggie Brennan from the photograph in her bio. She was sitting on a small sofa and turned toward me, her brows rising, her eyes flaring like I'd snuck up on her in the dark. She shifted her weight, giving me her back and facing the screen.

Corliss held a finger to his mouth, telling me not to speak. They were wrapped in the shadows, watching the television.

I put Corliss in his early forties, enough mileage in the wrinkles and folds on his face to separate him from his youth but not enough that it was all in his rearview mirror. Though he was Milo Harper's contemporary, he had an easy energy about him in contrast to Milo's urgency, the difference no doubt owing to the distance on their horizons. His sandy brown hair was cut short, framing a full face. He was shorter than me, creeping past stocky with a black sweatshirt bunching over his belly.

He'd frozen the image on the television when I opened the door, now waving the remote at the screen where a young man, maybe twenty, sat in a chair, the camera in tight, his face locked in a blank stare, the soul patch beneath his chin more like a mud smear. Corliss clicked the remote and the image jerked to life. The man rocked back and forth, palms on his knees, then squared up to the camera.

"Go on," an off-camera female voice said, the tone anxious and encouraging. The young woman with the legal pad was mouthing the words that I assumed were hers.

"Man it was crazy. Scared the shit out of me," the man on the screen said. "I had to get home but it didn't matter which way I went, it was wrong. The streets didn't go where they were supposed to go and then the road disappeared and I was falling."

"What happened next, Quentin?"

"I stopped falling but I never hit the ground. Then I was running, trying to get to class to take a final but it was too late and I flunked out of school. I tried to find the professor, but this giant snake jumped up and the next thing I knew I was sucking my own dick. That's when I woke up," he said, biting his lip to stop from laughing.

"Thanks, Quentin, that's all for today," the woman's voice said and the screen went blank.

"Janet," Corliss said to the woman with the legal pad, "you think that boy is for real?"

Corliss spoke with a soft Ozark twang though his good-old-boy manner stiffened Janet rather than put her at ease.

"His dream had some of the features we're looking for," she said to her pad, not meeting his gaze.

"What do you think, Gary?" Corliss said, swinging his feet to the floor and his attention to the man sitting next to her.

Gary raised his head, glancing first at Janet then at Corliss like he'd been woken from a nap. "I don't know. The guy seemed legit."

"Children," Corliss said, "that boy is why you all got to do a better job screening these subjects before you sign them up. We're paying these people good money and I don't want to throw it away on some kid's jack-off fantasy. Now, get out of my office and find me some nightmares that are worth a damn."

Janet and Gary nodded, rose, and brushed past me, Janet turning on the lights as they left. Maggie watched them leave. She sighed, folded her hands in her lap and looked at Corliss.

"I'm Jack Davis, new director of security for the institute."

Corliss pointed to one of the empty chairs. "Take a load off, Jack, and say hello to my partner in crime, Maggie Brennan. Milo said you'd be coming around to see us. What can we do for you?"

I ignored his offer. His chair was raised higher than either of the other chairs or the sofa, giving him the visual advantage of looking down on his guests, an edge I preferred to keep since I couldn't pee in the corner to let him know I was the new sheriff in town.

"Milo tell you why he hired me?"

"Yep. He said you're going to protect our intellectual property."

"You have any that needs protecting?"

"Matter of fact, we don't. We do pure research, trying to get a handle on nightmares and posttraumatic stress disorder. We've got nothing to patent or trademark and the stuff we publish is copyrighted as soon as the ink is dry."

"Well, then, is there anything else you think we should talk about?"

He leaned back in his chair, putting his feet on his desk again, his hands banded across his belly.

"Can't think what it would be."

Cops categorize people caught up in a murder investigation as victims, witnesses, and suspects. The dead are known, while witnesses may be eager and helpful or scarce and reluctant.