Roland was sickened by the look in the woman’s eyes and was ashamed how cheaply she could be led into conspiracy. But he was quite possibly a murderer, and bribery was several notches down the moral scale.
She took the bill and secured it in her pocket. Roland wondered if, when the police interrogated her, she would tell them about the money. He figured its DNA and fingerprint evidence would never enter a courtroom. He only hoped she had a green card, for her sake.
“Five minutes?” she asked, glancing at the office again and the omnipotent front desk that was hidden behind its tinted glass.
“Cross my heart,” he said, declining to complete the last half of the promise. He closed the door, found that sweat had stained the underarms of his shirt, and wondered if five minutes would be enough.
Even if he mustered the will to touch the body, the maid would find it whether it was tucked in the closet or hidden under the bed. He considered turning on the taps in the bathtub and locking the door, letting the maid assume he was showering. That might buy him an extra half an hour.
But minutes meant nothing in the face of eternity. In recovery from alcoholism, Roland had practiced principles of rigorous honesty and self-examination, including a core commitment to purposely harm no one.
Somewhere in the space of maybe three days, he had not only traveled five hundred miles but had lost his identity. Or maybe he hadn’t lost his identity at all, but found it.
If I’m David Underwood, who the fuck was Roland Doyle?
As he gathered his belongings and wiped down the telephone with the sock, he realized the police would be looking for David Underwood, not Roland Doyle. The world believed David had rented this room, and the police would put out an All Points Bulletin not for Roland, but for his spontaneous alter ego.
Despite the roiling of his gut and his hop-scotching pulse, he found comfort in the idea that David would be the fall guy. The latest contestant to suit up and show up for the Blame Game.
The car keys jingled in Roland’s jacket pocket. He pulled out the orange plastic vial and gave it a shake as he held it up for inspection. It contained maybe eight pills. A plain white label bore bold print that read simply, “D. Underwood. Take one every 4 hrs. or else.”
Or else what?
LSD? A kick-ass barbiturate? Diazepam?
And, the bigger question, how many of them had he taken? Enough to blot out a murder?
He shoved the vial back in his pocket. Two minutes until the maid returned.
Run now, sort it out later.
That’s what drunks and cowards did.
That’s what Roland Doyle had always done.
Familiarity gave him comfort.
A drink would offer even more comfort.
He slipped his bare feet into his Oxfords, gathered his laptop and satchel, and took a final look at the bathroom. Hand in sock, he twisted the door handle, exited the room, and hurried along the balcony, hoping that bastard David had left him the right car key.
The outside surroundings were urban, but rounded hills and a river bordered the low buildings, a series of steel bridges glistening in the morning sun. The air smelled of coal smoke and chemicals. He recognized the city now as definitely Cincinnati, its Revolutionary War roots giving way to redevelopment, the arts, and young corporate professionals.
And the occasional surprise corpse.
He picked out the car and slid behind the seat.
Sitting on the dash in front of the speedometer was a handwritten note. It said, “Or else you’ll remember.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“The chair recognizes Dr. Morgan. Alexis?”
The chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, Dr. Michael Mulroney, had an irritating habit of referring to all committee members, and those providing testimony, by their formal titles. Except for the women.
No doubt he assumed it was part of his Texas charm and he probably wasn’t even aware of it. But Alexis had noted, even in a cutting-edge field where women had credentials equal to men’s, a sly sexism still existed. And the Good Ol’ Boy network drew even tighter the closer she got to the Capitol Building.
She gave no sign of her feelings, though. “Thank you, Dr. Mulroney. This seems to be more of a moral issue than a scientific issue. From what I’ve heard here, we tend to view social anxiety as a welcome trait. Indeed, as an essential survival mechanism. When the monkeys came down from the trees, we couldn’t instantly trust all the other monkeys-some wanted to steal our food or our mates, and maybe even kill us to protect their territory or eliminate competition. Fear was not necessarily a bad thing.”
She could always count on Wallace Forsyth, a wispy-haired former U.S. representative from Kentucky, to stir himself any time she used a monkey metaphor, and she had taken to using at least one per session just to keep the old codger awake. As the token Christian Coalition appointee to the President’s Council, Forsyth made it his mission to frame every issue as a war on religion.
Specifically, his religion, which to him was the only one.
Alexis was privately a Taoist of no fixed beliefs and was willing to throw anything at the wall and see what stuck. But she took an agnostic approach in professional matters. Her work was complicated enough as it was.
Crossing thin ice is even more dangerous if you believe you can walk on water.
“Mrs. Morgan”-Forsyth refused to call her “Doctor,” as if he resented the fact that she had neglected to wear an apron and serve up coffee for the committee-“we all respect your behavioral research, and I’m sure we’ve all bought your book. I’m still on page eight but I’m enjoying it so far.”
The chamber erupted in uneasy laughter. All’s Well That Ends Well had been released four years ago, and though it had received brief attention in pop psychology circles, it had gone out of print within a year.
Since most of the committee members had published books, Forsyth’s veiled jab went directly to their own egos-scholarly tomes had notoriously low print runs, and unless you were featured on Oprah, Dr. Phil, or one of the network morning shows, the fruits of your loving labor ended up buried in the eBay graveyard.
Alexis managed her most winning smile, having learned that in the political world, the best response was often the exact opposite of your true feelings.
“Then I envy you the pleasure of discovery,” she said. “But many of the points in my book have already been covered in this session. The core question is not whether we can make people feel better about themselves, but whether we should.”
“If this was just a question of physical illness, there wouldn’t be no debate,” Forsyth drawled. “If a brain tumor was causing somebody to misbehave, we’d cull it out like a rotten apple in a bushel basket. But if somebody’s misbehaving all on their own, because God made them that way, would we really want to be messing in that?”
To his credit, Forsyth refrained from referring to the brain as “God’s domain,” as he’d done during his first few months on the committee.
“Mr. Forsyth, the deeper question is just who we are,” Alexis continued, noticing Mulroney had opened his mouth to interject. “If our thoughts are nothing more than a series of electrical impulses, and our actions are nothing more than responses to those impulses, then you could argue we have no self-control at all. And whether you couch it in physical or spiritual terms, it comes down to chemistry versus individual will.”
Mulroney leaned toward his microphone in an overt gesture of control, perhaps sensing Forsyth was about to shift the discussion toward God’s will trumping the will of man. And especially the will of woman.
“You’ve given us much food for thought, Alexis, and now it’s time for some food for the belly,” Mulroney said, tapping his gavel. “We’ll reconvene at one thirty.”
Alexis busied herself sliding documents in her briefcase. Dr. Rita Wynn of Harvard patted her on the shoulder in passing, as if to congratulate her for fighting off the lions. Forsyth wiped his bald spot and gave his American eagle glare. She smiled in response and hurriedly left the conference room.
Nine of the fourteen people in there are doctors, and I wouldn’t trust so much as an aspirin from any of
