The Kaleidoscope (23 page)

Stan came back, stirring his cup.

“I can’t offer much information.”

“It was obvious you were traumatized.” Stan skimmed the file. “They had to sedate you.”

“You want me to conjure painful memories that won’t bring my mother back anyway?”

“Well. Yeah. As long as it’s an unsolved murder, Harold, it’s important,” Stan told him. “Don’t you want to help me put him in jail? Now that we know where he’s living, it should be pretty open and shut.”

Harold stood up and slid his trembling hand in his pocket to hide it. “I need to get back to work.”

Stan watched his pocket. “There’s another way we can go, Harold.”

“What’s that?”

“People, specifically your grandmother, suggested he was mentally unbalanced. That would change how he’s handled. It’s not an easy process, but you understand it might mean the difference in sentencing.”

Harold watched his lips moving, speaking aloud what he’d feared all his life. A few days ago he was free to ignore the possibilities of his dad’s existence, much less his mental status. Now he was not only alive, but his grandmother’s prophesy that Harold carried the evil gene would be confirmed once and for all if Walter was found to be unstable.

“There’s no way I could know that for sure.”

“Of course you wouldn’t.” Stan’s steady voice evoked calm authority. “Unless someone else in the family manifests the same psychoses. Is there anyone in your family who’s mentally unbalanced? Harold?”

No one glanced up from their PDA’s or stopped thumbing their smartphones. No one else could hear the whirring in Harold’s brain. He sank back down. “No one is left but me.”

Stan clicked his briefcase closed. “If that is your dad up there, we need to go get him, and find out once and for all what happened. If he didn’t kill your mother, the actual culprit may still be out there.” He thumbed a stumpy finger at his own chest. “And I don’t mind telling you, I want to be the man to solve this. Ever since my own injury I’ve been shoved aside, disregarded. Well, I’m not a useless doorstop. You don’t know how it feels, but it’s awful to be scrutinized like that constantly.” He tapped his forehead. “Does crazy things to you.”

They walked together to the door and stepped outside, and Harold sneezed as his eyes adjusted to the bright light. His shirt had dried with a giant mark down the front. “I appreciate your help.” He estimated how long it would take to go home and change.

“Not only that, but it’s my duty. This bullet may have forced me into retirement, but I’m not dead. Now I have the time to really devote to a cold case such as this.”

“I really have to go.” Harold reached to shake his hand.

“Why don’t we reconvene, say eighteen-hundred hours and do some more brainstorming. I have another buddy sending me what he can find—”

“I’ll have to work late tonight.”

“Then tomorrow? I expect to receive the files from storage, my sergeant’s letting me—”

“All right. Tomorrow.”

“Bring your friends if they’re able to help. We’ll have a ton of reading and reports to go through.”

****

Harold asked Pepper, and she was eager to go. After making excuses that he was too busy, Morrie changed his mind and said he’d come along. By nightfall, Stan’s kitchen table was papered with files, testimony, diagrams of the crash intersection, and interview notes. Pepper and Harold read articles and eyewitness testimony, even down to the insurance adjustor’s summary of the impact. Stan instructed them to keep an eye out for clues as to what Harold’s dad was doing before the crash, and anything that would jog Harold’s memory, or that might tie Gus, aka Walter, to the tiny cabin in the mountain town.

Several times Pepper had to help Harold read through a painful paragraph of information about the crash, but the more they dug, the more determined he became to uncover any details that would move toward closure.

Finally, at about ten o’clock, Harold pushed back, tired of sitting. He could not inspect one more file. “It doesn’t seem possible that we’ll find something a trained detective would have missed.”

“You may be the missing piece since you were there that day.” Stan studied Harold over his bifocals. “Can you think through what you saw, what you felt? Anything you remember, no matter how small or insignificant, could help.”

“Have you ever meditated?” Pepper’s eyes followed Harold pacing. “Even a small child has eyes and ears. You’re just so used to repressing the memories, it could take some real work to blast through. What about the Kaleidoscope?” she prodded. “Did you try looking in it again?”

Harold shook his head. “It only shows the future.”

“That we know of!” Pepper could see through his refusal to admit he’d seen nothing. “Try, Harry.”

“Keith told me about the toy.” Stan’s calling it a toy irked Harold for some reason. “Perhaps it works by the power of suggestion?”

“Don’t be so quick to discount it. That
toy
is why you’ve got your son in your life again,” Pepper scolded, and Harold gazed at her. She understood so much. About him. About life.

Pepper told Stan about the other visions, and why they’d taken the trip to Yosemite in the first place. “Morrie would like to find his cousin. Instead we found the man who may or may not be Harold’s dad.”

Stan regarded Pepper. “Did you see any evidence of drugs, or anything else we could check out? For the purposes of a warrant.”

“I saw a shrine of some sort!” Pepper told him about looking for the bathroom and stumbling upon Gus’s wall covered with articles and pictures.

Harold stood at the window peering between the blinds at the street while they discussed the implication of pinning newspaper articles to your bedroom wall. He was tired, his ribs hurt, and he was ready to give up. To return his life to normal. None of this would bring back his mother, anyway.

“I want to take a step back and reconsider everything we know.” Stan folded his hands across a stack of folders. “We keep going over everything as if something new will occur. But it’s possible they’re all taking us down the wrong trail.”

“What do you mean?” Harold turned around. “What else is there? My father was whacked, he lost it one day, and rammed my mother’s car in a rage, killing her. Then like a coward, he runs away.”

“Or…?” Pepper swiveled from one to the other. Morrie held a file open, but wasn’t reading it.

“It’s a method I learned when you don’t seem to be getting anywhere in an investigation. When all your trails seem dead ended, back up and go down another.” Stan drummed fingers on the tabletop. “Harold, did you know your father was actually a genius?”

Harold thought about that. “He had advanced degrees, but his research went in so many directions I don’t know if he arrived at any real breakthroughs or even anything useful. That’s why my grandmother hated him so. Absentminded professor type maybe. But a genius? I’ll need more proof.”

“Oh yes,” Stan insisted. “By peer accounts and papers written before he disappeared, he was most definitely. Misunderstood and controversial, but not absentminded. So instead of thinking of him as having anger issues, let’s focus on his other traits and how that might play in. Neither one is illegal.”

“But rage can lead to murder,” Pepper half whispered.

“Like I said, he was never known for physical violence.” Stan examined a sheet of information.

“What does frustrated academic genius lead to?” Harold wondered. “Lashing out at those closest to you? I’ve heard of misunderstood geniuses who resorted to jealousies, turning on their own and—”

“Corporate espionage!” Pepper shrieked. “Of course! This is not about a man angry with his wife for leaving him!”

“She has a point,” Stan agreed. “Your father may have been tangled up with someone who was jealous of his advances.” He flipped over several sheets of paper. “Let’s review all his contacts at the time your mother was killed. It’s possible she got caught in the middle. People, even someone you may not suspect, can do horrible things to each other when money is involved. Especially if they are desperate.”

“So what you’re saying is, he was innocent, and someone else killed her.” Harold tried to understand the implications. “He could have been framed? What possible gain would that have earned someone?”

Pepper unfurled her legs, tapped a pencil on the pile in front of her. “We see this all the time at the firm. When a lot of money is at stake, look out, mister. All bets are off.”

Stan removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “If he had been working on some kind of breakthrough and someone realized what he was on to, he would have attracted a lot of attention.”

“How would they know?”

Stan shrugged. “Peer review? Copyrights? I’m not sure.” He shuffled through another stack. “If he was working for government agencies on secret programs, there will be information we don’t have access to. But just because we don’t have access doesn’t mean we can’t follow the trail. Harold, what was your dad’s degree in?”

“Industrial robotics.” Harold was well aware of that.

Stan swept an arm across the table. “All these lead to the conclusion that he was either an out-of-control alcoholic with anger issues…”

“A mean drunk,” Pepper spat.

“Or a lunatic,” Harold croaked.

“And you say there’s a third?” Pepper watched Stan.

“…or he was a genius on the cusp of a technological discovery people would kill to own.”

“That sounds so much better, doesn’t it Harry?” Pepper tried. “If you take out the killing part.”

“It also lines up better with the facts as we know them.” Stan lifted his arms over his head, stretching one arm up, then the other. “Have you ever studied personalities, Harold?”

“A little.”

“I don’t believe your dad had the personality of someone who’s unbalanced, unless you count having an extremely high IQ as being abnormal. Our psychologists’ cursory report doesn’t even profile him as being dangerous. Except for the accusation of being involved in the car crash, he’d never owned so much as a BB gun.”

Harold had skimmed some of his dad’s papers published before he went missing. “He was making remarkable advances. Miles ahead of the peer articles. I studied many of them in college.”

“See? He wasn’t a crazy man. He was inventing the next geegaw,” Pepper said.

Stan picked up a file marked “Research and Business Contacts” and flipped it open. “I will call every number in here if it takes me the rest of my life.”

“Does all this mean what I think it means?” Pepper’s brows shot up. “He was a spy?”

“I don’t think Walter was a spy. But he may have been operating on top secret research,” Harold said.

Pepper blinked. “Why don’t you think he could have been a spy, Harry? Corporate, government…everyone has them.”

Morrie had been so quiet Harold forgot he was there until he spoke. “Many would kill for information that provides breakthroughs in technology most people think is decades in the future.”

On “kill,” Pepper winced, but something about this thread niggled at shadowed events in Harold’s memory, and he concentrated on recalling the weeks leading up to the crash.

“One of the arguments I recall, and my grandma retold whenever she could, was how often he’d disappear without telling anyone where he was going. She said my mother would yell at him when he returned, that she couldn’t take not knowing where he had gone. All she wanted was the white picket fence, kids, and a husband who came home every night.”

Stan chewed a thumbnail, considering Harold’s remark. “Like he couldn’t risk telling his family where he was going or what he was working on?”

Harold stood up, paced, then sat down again. “So you think that my father was involved in corporate espionage?” The term resonated in the recesses of a child’s fuzzy memories.

“Or he was onto something others wanted,” Stan said. “And if your dad wasn’t working for any recognized organization or the government, he would have had no protection. None.”

“That still doesn’t explain his mother’s death,” Pepper said. “And why he ran from the scene of the crash.”

“No. It doesn’t.” Stan lifted a photocopied sheet and handed it to Harold. “This is his last application for patent. Your father was a complicated man, Harold.” He ticked off what they already knew. “He was known to drink back then, but not even a DUI. No record besides the warrant for the crash.”

“Everyone has some kind of vice or deep dark sin. Maybe you’re missing something else.” They all turned to face Morrie again. Harold wondered if he meant something specific and remembered the night of the porn.

Stan nodded.

“You said your mom didn’t seem to know what he was up to?” Pepper prompted. “The more we break this into smaller parts, the weirder it gets. What do you know about your parents’ relationship, Harry?”

“They met at Berkeley and had a small wedding…no, wait, I think they eloped.” He tried to recall anything he’d heard. “Why?”

“She’s right.” Stan tapped a pen on the tabletop. “If the marriage was a sham or front, perhaps she was actually more involved than we’d assumed, and a closer search into her past would reveal why he, or someone, killed her.”

“As in keep your friends close, and your enemies closer?” Pepper wondered.

Harold dropped his head in his hands. “Now you’re suggesting my mom was a corporate spy and married my dad, then had me, and he killed her? For what purpose?”

“He’s right, that makes no sense.” Pepper wagged a finger. “Especially if they were really in love.”

“And if they met in college, wasn’t that before his dad got involved in his artificial intelligence research?” Morrie’s point made sense.

“So what are the other possibilities?” Harold had to think at least his parents married originally for happy reasons, or his entire existence would be a cosmic mistake.

“Perhaps a kidnapping attempt gone wrong?” Pepper suggested.

“If that was the case, after she died, wouldn’t he have sought help from the police?” Harold said. “Instead of running?”

“Because if it wasn’t him driving, then someone drove his car that day, and if he was being framed for something he was doing illegally,” Stan said, “he might have panicked and disappeared until the police found the real perp.”