The Dinosaur Chronicles (17 page)

“Are you sure the woman’s a fake?”

Brill nodded. “The resemblance is there, but I’m sure she’s not the Eleanor Greavey of six months ago.”

Pengold asked, “What do you want me to do?”

“Do you have someone in Irving, Texas, who could check up on Dan Greavey’s background?”

“No. But there’s a firm in Dallas that I work with, and that’s within a spit of Irving. What else?”

Brill opened the paper bag she had brought. Carefully she pulled out the picture of her “niece.” Brill looked at Pengold and grinned. “Remember I told you Greavey passed the test of not remembering my niece?”

Pengold’s eyes widened, and his voice showed a new respect. “Aha! You’ve got the false Ms. Greavey’s fingerprints on that picture!”

“I polished the frame and the glass before handing it to her, but a few of my prints are there, too. You’ll need to take mine to eliminate them from hers.”

“Not a problem,” Pengold said, getting up from his chair. “Step into the work room and we’ll take care of that right now.”

After taking Brill’s prints, Pengold said, “I’d rather have a tech I know pull the prints off the picture. Can I keep it a couple of days?”

Brill nodded. “The girl’s mother comes back to work next Monday.”

Pengold said, “I’ll get it back to you. And I’ll try to have an answer on the prints by next week.”

—

Night had fallen by the time Gladys Brill pulled her car into the driveway of the old split-level rancher. The porch was unlit and the front yard overgrown. The only lighting came from the moon and from Brill’s headlights.

Brill cut off her lights and stepped from the car.

After leaving Pengold’s office, Brill had gone home, eaten and changed, and had gotten Aloysius Carfack’s number from the telephone book. The first time she called the phone had just rung; the second time an answering machine picked up the line. So Brill decided to drive out and see Carfack in person.

Carfack lived on the outer bounds of the city. A dark, patched, two-lane road wound through developments-in-waiting and struggling family farms before Brill arrived at her destination.

Her ring at the door went unanswered. So did her second and third rings, and several knocks. But the grey flickers of a large black-and-white television, thrown onto the drapes of what Brill assumed was the living room, showed the house was not deserted. She went back to her car, put on her lights and stood in their beams. Then she cut off her lights and knocked on the door once more.

A voice filtered through the door. “What do you want?”

Brill raised her voice. “Dr. Carfack, it’s Gladys Brill—”

“Don’t know any Gladys Brill!”

“I work at the Institute. First shift nurse supe.”

“So?”

“So I want to talk with you about Daniel Greavey.”

The door opened so abruptly Brill jumped.

“Confound it! D’you want the whole world to hear?” The bent, silhouetted figure that opened the screen door for her added, “C’mon in. Watch the cat on the rug. He doesn’t move for anyone.”

Aloysius Carfack showed Brill past a curled, dark spot on the living room rug, to an overstuffed chair. The chair sat next to a vinyl-covered recliner clearly marked with Carfack’s own impression. Before seating himself, he turned down the volume on the television.

“My wife used to sit in that chair and watch TV with me.”

Brill thought for a moment. “Am I then Guest of Honor?”

Carfack laughed. “A good, positive-neutral response. You’ve had some psychological training. So what about Greavey? Has he croaked?”

No other light in the living room was on, but in the glow of the large black-and-white TV, Carfack’s eyes were two black voids set above a pointy nose and parchment-white cheeks. Brill said, “No, he’s doing fine. But I had occasion to look at his records today, and they’ve been reworked. I thought you might know why.”

Carfack stared at Brill for several long seconds. “Astute of you to notice. No one at the Institute remembers the fire in Drawer G, do they?”

Brill raised her eyebrows. “No. What happened?”

“Someone apparently tossed a lit butt into a trash can. The papers in the can caught fire, and the flames lit the contents of Drawer G, which had been left open in the file cabinet.”

Brill blinked. “I have a hard time picturing that.”

“I did, too. But I had no evidence with which to raise a stink. So the records in G were re-created. Some from extinguisher-soaked originals, some from memory—from what the doctors and the nurses and the patients at the Institute could remember.”

“And Greavey’s was one.”

“And Greavey’s was one.” Carfack laughed again. “Course, I could have helped out—could have restored Greavey’s records entirely, but that would have meant admitting I had carried copies of confidential records home with me—away from the Institute.”

For Brill, it took a moment for this disclosure to sink in. “You’ve got an original of Greavey’s file—
here?
” She leaned forward and said, “Can I see it?”

“You don’t want to know why I had it copied?”

Brill settled back in the chair. “All right. Why did you have it copied?”

“You want a drink?”

“I’m
fine
.”

In a flare of the TV’s light, Brill saw the wrinkled amusement around Carfack’s eyes. “I’ll get us drinks, anyway, and Greavey’s file. It’s a bit of a story.”

Ten minutes later, Carfack returned to the living room carrying a tray with two cups, two saucers and a thick manila envelope. He toed the switch of a floor lamp and set the tray on the coffee table between the chairs and the television.

In the yellow lamplight, Brill for the first time got a good look at Carfack’s cat. An old, huge Tom—and by the marks on the furniture never declawed—the cat looked big enough and willing enough to take a chunk out of anyone invading its space.

Carfack sat down again and picked up his tea. He left the envelope untouched. He sipped and said, “When Greavey came to the Institute, he got my attention because his type of amnesia was totally new to medicine. And it’s still new, ‘cause I haven’t heard about anything similar since. And I do keep up with what’s going on in the field.” Carfack pointed at a bookshelf crammed with journals and correspondence. “It keeps me alert and feeling useful. Retirement, you know, is the leading cause of death.”

Brill bent forward to pick up her own tea. “So you wanted a copy of his records for your own personal research.”

“Yes. And what a case! A boy shoots his old man in a hunting accident and then not only forgets the incident, he forgets about the father
utterly
, as if the father had never existed!”

“Did you think he was faking?”

“
Everybody
thought he was faking. But in the envelope is a polygrapher’s report. After the death of Joshua Greavey, Daniel Greavey was interrogated by police. He denied ever knowing Joshua Greavey and denied the man had ever been his father. It was such an obvious bald-faced lie so vehemently maintained that the police called in a shrink, who after listening to the boy for several hours suggested a polygraph. And Greavey passed the lie-detector without so much as a single suspicious jiggle on the readout.”

Brill said, “Some psychopaths can fool a polygraph. They simply don’t have a conscience that reacts to the concepts of right and wrong.”

Carfack nodded. “But not Greavey. While hooked to the machine, the examiner asked him about pranks Greavey had pulled in school—information the police had gotten from Greavey’s mother and teachers—and Greavey’s traces on the polygraph showed the twinges of guilt that every normal kid exhibits.” Carfack sipped again and added, “What was most fascinating was the way Greavey’s mind would ‘fix up’ or ignore secondary references. For example, when asked whom his mother had married, Greavey answered ‘No one.’ And the thought of being a bastard child—then much a disgrace—seemed not to affect him. Indeed, Greavey was quite matter-of-fact about it. Other questions, however, showed the limits of his mind’s creativity. Greavey had once broken his leg, and his father had driven him to the doctor’s office. When asked how he’d gotten to the doctor’s office after breaking his leg, Greavey would just look at you with the biggest blank stare on his face. If you pressed him, he would eventually just say he didn’t remember.” Carfack set down his drink. “I think, for questions like that, his mind did realize something strange was going on, but it never made the connection to the sequestered memories. And I’m sure the memories are still there—it’s just a matter of sending the right trigger to release them. There’s no organic disease involved in Greavey’s amnesia.”

Brill ran her finger around the loop of the teacup. “Is there any doubt that Greavey did the shooting?”

“For a time there was. Dan and Joshua Greavey were accompanied on their hunting trip by a family friend, and for a time this friend came under suspicion. But the ballistics tests matched the slug to Dan Greavey’s rifle, and under the polygraph he insisted he had never given his rifle to anyone. That, coupled with the friend’s testimony—he was there when Dan pulled the trigger—settled the matter.”

“So it really was an accident.”

“Seems that way. This was before the days of blaze orange, y’know, so shooting at a rustle in the bushes often brought tragedy. And nailing Joshua Greavey right between the shoulder blades—” Carfack pointed his finger and squinted down an imaginary rifle “—at two hundred yards with an unscoped rifle would have been an unbelievable shot for a boy of fourteen to have done deliberately.

“Ouch!” Carfack winced as his cat, evidently annoyed by the attention given the stranger in the house, jumped into his lap. Carfack held up his tea with one hand and began stroking the animal with the other. “Hector’s not declawed,” Carfack said, “and he sometimes confuses his papa with a pincushion.”

Brill reached for the envelope. “May I?”

Carfack waved his hand. “Go ahead.”

Brill undid the clasp on the envelope and pulled out a half-inch-thick stack of paper. From the grayness of the reproduction, it was obvious that these were old-style photocopies from the days before xerography became the industry standard. Brill flipped through the pages, reading bits here and there. Occasionally she would look up, but Carfack would be sipping his tea or petting his cat; only the cat’s unblinking eyes seemed to follow her hands as she turned the pages.

Time passed, and Brill hardly noticed when Carfack de-lapped his cat to refill her tea. Eventually the last page was turned, and she said, “There’s much less about the murder of his brother Timothy than I would have expected.”

Carfack, back in his chair, said, “Agreed. The whole business with the brother is a mystery. Dan and Timothy were alone in their home at the time of the killing, and all we have are neighbors reporting a loud argument and a single gunshot. The voices were too muffled for the neighbors to figure out what they were arguing about, though one neighbor said he heard them mention ‘Samarkand.’”

“Samarkand!”

“A city in present-day Uzbekistan. It was a famous stop on the Spice Route, visited by Marco Polo, among others.”

Brill shook her head. “I know where it is, but it doesn’t make any sense. What about Samarkand could have made Dan Greavey mad enough to kill?”

“Beats me. And it beat everyone else. But there were only two people in the house: Dan Greavey and his brother. A shot was fired. No one left the house, according to more than one neighbor. When the police got there, only Dan was still breathing. So he must have done the killing, though motive has yet to be established.” Carfack shrugged. “If it ever can.”

Brill nodded and glanced at her wristwatch. A full three hours had passed since she arrived at Carfack’s house. “Lord, it’s late, Doctor. I had no intention to impose on you like this. I only wish I could make a copy of these records so I could study them more thoroughly.”

Carfack got to his feet, and Brill rose from the chair. Carfack stared at her for a long second and said, “It’s not a problem. Keep the copy you have. I have others.”

Brill blinked and stared right back. Then she picked up the pages of Greavey’s file and held them up to her nose. What she had been reading weren’t photocopies, but
xerographic copies
of the original photocopies. She looked up at Carfack as she stuffed the sheets into the manila envelope. “Why? Why the extra copies?”

Carfack guided Brill around the cat, which had resumed its accustomed spot on the rug. “After the fire in Drawer G, I became worried, so I had a copy made of my copy of Greavey’s file. I put that away in a safe place and left my first copy in my desk drawer. Three days after the fire, I was visited by a government agent—FBI perhaps, perhaps other—who asked me for ‘help.’ Said he knew about the fire and ‘hoped’ I had made a copy of Greavey’s complete file for use at my home office.”

Brill said, “And you just let him have the file?”

Carfack said, “Course not. I played my role as a doctor. I asked him what his interest was. He said it had to do with the murder of the brother, that it was a law-enforcement issue. I told him he’d still need a warrant, and—lo and behold—he pulled out a warrant signed by some judge I’d never heard of. I made a few more objections, saying I couldn’t very well treat Greavey without complete records. He promised to send me a copy of the file, which, of course, he never did. Eventually I let myself be persuaded to go to my desk and hand over Greavey’s folder.

“Some years later, after copy services became available to the general public, I went out and had twenty copies made of my backup of the file.” Carfack chuckled. “Those copies are scattered about in various places—except for the one in your hands.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“I’m eighty-seven. I feel all right—as ‘all right’ as one could hope to feel at my age. But I could kick off tomorrow. I hope to outlast Hector, but after he goes, I won’t be getting another cat.” Brill looked down at the cat, and Hector glared up from his spot, apparently aware that he was a topic of conversation.

Carfack went on. “After I’m gone, I want someone to pick up the research. And believe it or not, you’re the very first person who’s applied, so to speak. True, I’ve spoken with other doctors over the years, and some have shown interest, but later they’ve begged off for one reason or another. Strange.”