False Memory

On the back porch, he slipped his spare key under the doormat, where the next visitor would be instructed to look for it.

Before morning, he would torch the house, but by proxy rather than with his own hands. He had a candidate, programmed and easily reached by phone, who would commit this bit of arson when told to do so, but who would never remember striking the match.

The night remained wind-rattled.

On the walk to his car, which was parked three blocks away, the doctor tried to compose a wind haiku, without success.

Driving past the Rhodeses’ quaint Victorian, he imagined it in flames, and he searched his mind for a seventeen-syllable verse about fire, but the words eluded him.

Instead, he recalled the lines he had composed extemporaneously and so fluently when, on entering Martie’s office, he had seen the work piled on her desk.

Busy blue-eyed girl. Busy making Hobbit games. Death waits in Mordor.

He edited the work, updating it to reflect recent developments: Busy blue-eyed girl. Busy playing detective. Death in Santa Fe.

63

Larger than San Quentin quarters, far different from the drab gray of prison decor, the colorful and overly patterned hotel room felt nonetheless like a cell. In the bath, the tub reminded Martie of Susan soaking in crimson water, though she had been spared the sight of her dead friend. All the windows were permanently sealed, and the pumped-in warm air, even with the thermostat dialed down to the lowest comfort zone, was suffocating. She felt isolated, hunted, all but cornered. Autophobia, which had been simmering at extremely low heat since nine o’clock, seemed about to be reborn as full-blown claustrophobia.

Action. Action, shaped by intelligence and a moral perspective, is the answer to most problems. So it is written on chapter 1 of the philosophy of Smilin’ Bob.

They were taking action, too, although only time would reveal if there was enough intelligence shaping it.

First, they pored through Roy Closterman’s file on Mark Ahriman, paying special attention to the information dealing with the Pastore murders and with the preschool case in New Mexico. From the Xeroxes of newspaper articles, they extracted names and made a list of those who had suffered and in whose suffering there might be both clues and damning testimony.

Finished with Closterman’s file, Dusty used Raymond Shaw and the leaf haiku to access Martie and return her to her mind chapel — though first he made a solemn promise to leave her psyche utterly unaltered, all her faults intact, which she found both amusing and touching.

As with Skeet, he carefully instructed her to forget everything that Raymond Shaw had ever said to her, to forget all the images of death that Shaw had implanted in her mind, to be free of the control program that Shaw had installed in her, and to be forever free from the autophobia. On a conscious level, she heard nothing of what he said, and later remembered nothing that happened after he spoke the activating name until—

Snap, whereupon she woke and felt free and clean, as she had not felt in almost two days. Her old friend, hope, took up residence in her again. When tested, she did not respond to Raymond Shaw anymore.

In turn, Martie liberated Dusty after accessing him with Viola Narvilly and the heron haiku.

With a snap, he returned to her.

She was staring into his beautiful eyes when they cleared from the trance, and she understood the terrible sense of responsibility under which he had labored when accessing and instructing Skeet. How awesome and frightening it was to have had her husband so vulnerable before her, the innermost chambers of his mind presented to her for remodeling as she wished; how awesome, too, and humbling, to present her most fundamental self to him, to be so naked and helpless, with no defense except absolute trust.

When tested, he could not be accessed for control.

“Free,” he said.

“Better yet,” she said, “from now on, when I tell you to take out the garbage, you’ll really hop to it.”

His laughter was out of proportion to the joke.

As a declaration of independence, Martie flushed her Valium down the toilet.

* * *

Having been in high spirits when he’d left home earlier in the night, the doctor was driving his cherry-red Ferrari Testarossa, which was as low to the ground and as quick as a lizard, but it was too flashy to match his current mood. His Mercedes would also have been the wrong vehicle, too stately and ambassadorial for a guy in a down-and-dirty, throat-cutting frame of mind. One of his collection of street rods would have suited him better: in particular, the ’63 black Buick Riviera with its chopped top, split grille, elliptical hood scoops, sectioned rear fenders, and other custom details, which looked like a demonic car that, in the movies, would drive itself on murderous missions, possessed and indestructible.

He stopped at a convenience store to make the call, because he didn’t want to use either his cell phone or his phone at home.

This land of the brave new millennium was one giant confessional booth, with listening priests of the secular church monitoring every conversation from behind concealing electronic screens. The doctor swept his house, his offices, and his vehicles for listening devices once each month, doing the work himself, with equipment he purchased for cash, because he trusted no one among the private-security firms that offered such services. A phone, however, could be monitored by an off-site tap; therefore, incriminating calls must always be made from telephones not listed in his name.

The pay phone outside the convenience store was racked on the wall. The wind would foil a directional microphone if a surveillance team was stalking the doctor, though he was confident no one was tailing him. If this phone was a known contact for drug dealers, there might be a passive tap recording every conversation, in which case voice analysis could eventually be used to incriminate Ahriman in a court of law; but this was a minor and unavoidable risk.

Although the doctor’s friends in high places could be counted on to ensure him against a successful prosecution for virtually any crime, he was nonetheless cautious. Indeed, it was the possibility of being monitored by these friends that motivated him to conduct an electronic sweep of his house each month, and he was more concerned about keeping them ignorant of his private games than he was worried about the police. The doctor himself would have sold out a friend without hesitation if he benefited sufficiently from the sale, and he assumed that any friend would do the same to him.

He keyed in a number, fed coins to the phone, cupped his hand around the mouthpiece to keep out the shriek of the wind, and when he got an answer on the third ring, he said, “Ed Mavole,” which was the name of a character in The Manchurian Candidate.

“I’m listening.”

They proceeded through the lines of the enabling haiku, after which the doctor said, “Tell me whether or not you are alone.”

“I’m alone.”

“I want you to go to Dusty and Martie’s house in Corona Del Mar.” He checked his wristwatch. Nearly midnight. “I want you to go to their house at three o’clock in the morning, a little more than three hours from now. Tell me whether or not you understand.”

“I understand.”

“You will take with you five gallons of gasoline and a book of matches.”

“Yes.”

“Please be discreet. Take every precaution against being seen.”

“Yes.”