False Memory

peppers.

“My information was that Ahriman’s patient was often brought to his office by the sister, by the woman who had accused the Ornwahls.”

“Like I took Susan,” Martie noted.

“If that were true, then there was no way he couldn’t have met her at least once. But I didn’t have proof, just hearsay. Unless you want to be sued for defamation of character, you don’t go ranting in public about a man like Ahriman until you’ve got the evidence.”

Earlier in the day, in his office, Closterman had tried a frown, which hadn’t worked on his balloon-round features. Now anger overcame facial geometry, and a hard scowl fit where a frown had not.

“I didn’t know how to get that proof. I’m no doctor detective like on TV. But I thought … Well, let’s see if there’s anything in the bastard’s past. It did seem odd that he’d made big moves twice in his career. After more than ten years in Santa Fe, he’d jumped to Scottsdale, Arizona. And after seven years there, he came here to Newport. Generally speaking, successful doctors don’t throw over their practices and move to new cities on a whim.”

Closterman finished cutting the peppers into strips. He rinsed the knife, dried it, and put it away.

“I asked around the medical community, to see if anyone might know someone who practices in Santa Fe. This cardiologist friend of mine had a friend from med school who settled in Santa Fe, and he made introductions. Turns out this doctor in Santa Fe actually knew Ahriman when he was out there…and didn’t like him a damn bit more than I do. And then the kicker…there was a big sexual abuse case at a preschool out there, and Ahriman did the interviews of the children, like he did here. Questions were raised then, too, about his techniques.”

Dusty’s stomach had soured, and though he didn’t think that the coffee had anything to do with it, he pushed his cup aside.

“One of the children, a five-year-old girl, committed suicide as the trial was starting,” Roy Closterman said. “A five-year-old. Left a pathetic picture she’d drawn of a girl like her…kneeling before a naked man. The man was anatomically correct.”

“Dear God,” Martie said, pushing her chair back from the table. She started to get up, had nowhere to go, and sat down again.

Dusty wondered if the five-year-old girl’s body would flicker through Martie’s mind in grisly detail during her next panic attack.

“The case might as well have gone to jury right then, because the defendants were as good as cooked. The Santa Fe prosecutor obtained convictions across the board.”

The physician took a bottle of beer from the refrigerator and twisted off the cap.

“Bad things happen to good people when they’re around Dr. Mark Ahriman, but he always comes out looking like a savior. Until the Pastore murders in Santa Fe. Mrs. Pastore, perfectly nice woman, never known to have a bad word for anyone or a moment of instability in her life, suddenly loads a revolver and decides to kill her family. Starts by blowing away her ten-year-old son.”

This story fed Martie’s fear of her own violent potential, and now she had somewhere to go. She rose from the table, went to the sink, turned on the water, pumped liquid soap from a dispenser, and vigorously washed her hands.

Although Martie hadn’t said a word to Dr. Closterman, he didn’t appear to find her actions either forward or peculiar.

“The boy was a patient of Ahriman’s. He was a severe stutterer. There was some suspicion that Ahriman and the mother had been having an affair. And a witness placed Ahriman at the Pastore house the night of the murders. In fact, standing outside the house, watching the carnage through an open window.”

“Watching?” Martie said, pulling paper towels off a wall-mounted roll. “Just…watching?”

“As if it were a sporting event,” Roy Closterman said. “Like…he went there because he knew it was going to happen.”

Dusty couldn’t sit still, either. Getting to his feet, he said, “I’ve had two beers this evening, but if your offer still stands…”

“Help yourself,” Roy Closterman said. “Talking about Dr. Mark Ahriman doesn’t promote sobriety.”

Tossing the paper towels in the trash can, Martie said, “So this witness saw him there — what came of that?”

“Nothing. The witness wasn’t believed. And the rumored affair couldn’t be proved. Besides, there was absolutely no doubt at all that Mrs. Pastore pulled the trigger. All the forensic evidence in the world. But the Pastores were well-liked, and a lot of people believed that Ahriman was in the background of the tragedy somehow.”

Returning to the table with his beer, Dusty said, “So he didn’t like the atmosphere in Santa Fe anymore, and he moved to Scottsdale.”

“Where more bad things happened to more good people,” Closterman said, stirring the meatballs and sausage in the pot of sauce. “I’ve got a file on all this. I’ll give it to you before you leave.”

“With all this ammunition,” Dusty said, “you must’ve been able to get him off the Ornwahl case.”

Roy Closterman returned to a seat at the table again, and so did Martie. The doctor said, “No.”

Surprised, Dusty said, “But surely the other preschool case was enough, by itself, to—”

“I never used it.”

The physician’s deeply tanned face darkened further with anger, grew stormy and empurpled under the sun- browned surface.

Closterman cleared his throat and continued: “Someone discovered I was phoning around to people in Santa Fe and Scottsdale, asking about Ahriman. One evening, I came home from the office, and two men were here in the kitchen, sitting where the two of you are sitting. Dark suits, ties, well-groomed. But they were strangers — and when I turned around to get the hell out of the house, there was a third one behind me.”

Of all the places Dusty had expected to follow Closterman, this wasn’t on the list of itineraries. He didn’t want to go here, because it seemed to be a highway to hopelessness for him and Martie.

If Dr. Ahriman was their enemy, he was enemy enough. Only in the Bible could David win against Goliath. Only in the movies did the little guy have a chance against leviathan.

“Ahriman uses cheap muscle?” Martie asked, either because she hadn’t quite leaped to the understanding that Dusty had reached — or because she didn’t want to believe it.

“Nothing cheap about them. They’ve got good retirement plans, excellent medical coverage, full dental, and the use of a plain-Jane sedan during working hours. Anyway, they’d brought a videotape, and they played it for me on the TV in the den. On the tape was this young boy who’s a patient of mine. His mom and dad are my patients, too, and close friends. Dear friends.”

The physician had to stop. He was choking on rage and outrage. His hand was clamped so tight to his beer that it seemed the bottle would burst in his fist.

Then: “The boy is nine years old, a really good kid. Tears are streaming down his face in the videotape. He’s telling someone off-camera about how he’s been sexually molested, since the age of six, by his doctor. By me. I have never touched this boy in that way, never would, never could. But he’s very convincing, emotional, and graphic. Anyone who knows him would know that he couldn’t be acting, couldn’t sell a lie like this. He’s too naive to be this duplicitous. He believes all of it, every word of it. In his mind, it happened, these vile things I’m supposed to have done to him.”

“The boy was a patient of Ahriman’s,” Dusty guessed.

“No. These three suits who have no damn right to be in my house, these well-tailored thugs, they tell me the boy’s mother was Ahriman’s patient. I didn’t know. I’ve no idea what she was seeing him for.”

“Through the mother,” Martie said, “Ahriman got his hands on the boy.”

“And worked him somehow, with hypnotic suggestion or something, implanting these false memories.”

“It’s more than hypnotic suggestion,” Dusty said. “I don’t know what it is, but it goes a lot deeper than that.”

After resorting to his beer, Roy Closterman said, “The bastards told me…on the tape, the boy was in a trance. When fully conscious, he wouldn’t be able to remember these false memories, these dreadful things he was saying about me. He would never dream about them or be troubled by them on a subconscious level, either. They would have no effect on his psychology, his life. But the false memories would still be buried in what they called his