three hours of surgery. He was in critical condition, unconscious, but hanging on.
Even then, in the women’s lavatory, Martie panicked and almost stopped scrubbing off the blood, for fear that this link to Skeet, once washed away, would leave him unable to draw needed strength from her, spirit to spirit. She surprised herself with this superstitious hysteria. Having survived an encounter with the devil, however, maybe she had reason to be superstitious. She finished washing her hands, reminding herself that the devil was dead.
Shortly after eleven o’clock, more than seven hours after he was admitted to the hospital, Skeet regained consciousness, coherent but weak. They were allowed to visit with him, but only for two or three minutes. That was long enough to say what needed to be said, which in the ICU is always the same simple thing that family members come there to say to every patient, the same and simple thing that matters more than all the words of all the doctors:
They stayed that night with Martie’s mother, who set out home-baked bread and homemade vegetable soup for them, and by the time they returned to the hospital Saturday morning, Skeet’s condition was upgraded from critical to serious.
How big the story would eventually become in the national news was foreshadowed by the fact that two TV crews and three print journalists were already camped out at the hospital, waiting for Martie and Dusty to appear.
Armed with a warrant, the police required three days to conduct a thorough search of Mark Ahriman’s vast house. Initially, nothing stranger turned up than the psychiatrist’s enormous collection of toys, and halfway through the first day, the investigation seemed as though it might founder.
The sprawling mansion featured an elaborate automated-house system. Police officers with specialized computer knowledge cracked the privacy code, which previously ensured that only Ahriman enjoyed full access to every aspect of the system; soon they discovered the existence of six hidden safes of various sizes.
Once combinations were decoded, the first safe — in the lacewood study — proved to contain only financial records.
The second, in the sitting room of the master suite, was larger and held five handguns, two fully automatic machine pistols, and an Uzi carbine. None were registered to Mark Ahriman, and none could be traced to any licensed gun dealer.
The third safe was a small box cleverly concealed in the master-bedroom fireplace. Therein, police discovered yet another handgun, a ten-shot Taurus PT-111 Millennium with an empty magazine, which appeared to have been fired recently.
Of greater interest both to criminologists and to film buffs was the second item in this box: a vacuum-sealed jar containing two human eyes in a chemical fixative. A gummed label on the lid bore a neatly hand-printed haiku.
The media squall became a media storm.
Dusty and Martie could no longer stay at Sabrina’s house, which was for days thereafter under siege by newsmen.
On the third day, the police found a trove of videotapes stored in a vault that was not included in the list of safes known to the house computer. A contractor had come forward to report that he had bootlegged this bit of construction for Dr. Ahriman subsequent to the psychiatrist’s purchase of the house. The tapes were the doctor’s prized mementos, the record of his most dangerous games, including the candid video of Susan and her tormentor, shot from the potted ming tree in her bedroom.
The media storm became a media hurricane.
Ned Motherwell ran the business, while Martie and Dusty lived for a while with a series of friends, staying one step ahead of the microphones and cameras.
The only story that displaced the Ahriman extravaganza from the top of the nightly news was the insane attack on the President of the United States at a Bel Air fund-raiser, and the subsequent shooting to death of the megastar assailant by those outraged Secret Service agents who weren’t otherwise occupied with recovering and preserving the nose. Within twenty-four hours, when the discovery was made that the megastar had known Mark Ahriman and had in fact recently been a patient at a drug-rehab clinic partly owned by Ahriman, the media hurricane became the storm of the century.
Eventually, the storm blew itself out, because it is in the character of these strange times that any outrage, regardless of its unprecedented dimensions and horror, is inevitably followed by another outrage more novel and more shocking still.
By late spring, Skeet was finished with physical rehabilitation and fleshed out as he had not been in years. The lady in pink, at her instigation and without threat of suit, settled upon Skeet the sum of one and three- quarter-million dollars, after taxes, and with his health restored, he decided to take a few months off from housepainting to travel and consider his options.
Together, Skeet and Fig Newton had planned an itinerary that would take them first to Roswell, New Mexico, and thereafter to other points of interest on the UFO trail. Now that Skeet’s driving privileges had been restored, he and Fig would be able to spell each other at the wheel of Skeet’s new motor home.
Because the pink lady contended that she had been brainwashed by Mark Ahriman and subjected to sexual depravities, she resorted to a plea of self-defense. Skeet, she claimed, had unfortunately gotten in the way of her first shot. After furious debate and tumult in the district attorney’s office, she was charged with manslaughter and released on bail. By summer, the smart money was betting that she would never stand trial. If indeed she were hauled into court, what jury of her peers would ever find her guilty after her moving appearance on the talk show of all talk shows, at the end of which Oprah had embraced her and said, “You are an inspiration, girl,” while an entire audience had wept uncontrollably.
Derek Lampton, the younger, was a hero for a week and appeared on the national news, giving archery demonstrations. When asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, Junior said, “An astronaut,” which seemed not in the least childish, for he was a straight 4.0 student with a flair for the sciences and already a student pilot.
By midsummer, the Bellon-Tockland Institute in Santa Fe had been cleared of any involvement with Mark Ahriman’s bizarre experiments in mind control. The belief that he had worked at the institute or had been associated with it in any way was disproved beyond contention. “He was a sociopath,” noted the institute’s director, “and a pathetic narcissist, a pop-psych lightweight who wanted to legitimize himself by claiming to be involved with this prestigious institution and its great work for world peace.” Although the nature of the institute’s research was described in various ways by the media, no reportage from that in
Martie canceled her contract to design a new video game based on
The surgery on the president’s nose was successful.
Ned Motherwell sold three haiku to a literary magazine.
The two lottery tickets were losers.
From time to time during the summer, Martie and Dusty visited three cemeteries, where Valet loved to explore among the stones. In the first, they brought flowers to Smilin’ Bob. In the second, they brought flowers to Susan and Eric Jagger. In the third, they brought flowers to Dominique, the half sister whom Dusty had never known.
Claudette claimed to have lost the only picture ever taken of her infant daughter. Perhaps that was true. Or perhaps she didn’t want Dusty to have it.
Each time that Dusty described Dominique’s sweet, gentle face as he recalled it from that photograph, Martie wondered if that baby, allowed to live, might have redeemed Claudette. By providing care and protection for one so
