night. Her nightmares affirmed her unspeakable certainty that she would leave this life the same way as had her parents.
She rose from her chair, her voice quiet and calm when her killer appeared in the doorway. 'What took you so long?' she asked.
French doors opened behind her onto the balcony, the frozen earth two stories beneath sloping away from the house, rough and rocky. She swung the doors wide, stepping onto the balcony, her feet bare, frigid air rippling through her thin nightgown, pickling her skin. Branches of an oak tree just beyond her reach swayed in the starless night, the eaves above her whining, complaining of the cold.
Her back was to the bedroom. She felt him approach, felt the wooden planks of the balcony sag, then felt a hand slide down the length of her neck, settling into the base of her spine, the push firm as she went over the rail and the unforgiving ground rushed to meet her.
She awoke, as she always did, the instant before impact, her mouth coated with bile. Why, she wondered, was it so easy to kill and so hard to die.
Chapter Three
'Jack, this job is perfect for you.'
'I haven't had a perfect job since Sue Ellen Erickson asked me to carry her books home in the fifth grade.'
Simon Alexander and I were having coffee late Friday afternoon on the Country Club Plaza, the gray day giving way to full night, snow coming down sideways. The after-Christmas sales were over and the quarter million multicolored lights that turned the Plaza's shops and restaurants into Disneyland from Thanksgiving through mid- January had gone dark. The sidewalks were empty. People with sense were home or on their way.
'You can set your own schedule, spend as much time as you want, take a break whenever you need to, you know…'
'Stop shaking.'
'Yeah, that.'
The FBI had retired me at age fifty because of a movement disorder that makes me shake, sometimes bending me in half, sometimes strangling my speech, sometimes leaving me the hell alone. The cause and the cure are both mysteries, the symptoms a capricious mix of hiccups and hammer blows. The more I do, the more I shake but a friend once told me that the more you do, the more you do. So I put as much into my days as I can, accepting that it will rattle my cage. Some days are diamonds and some days are stones.
Simon was in the technology security business. He called me when his clients' problems got more complicated than a string of ones and zeros.
'I keep telling you, Simon, you don't have to dance around it. I shake. It's not a big deal.' A flurry of mild tremors stutter-stepped my automatic denial. 'Tell me about the job.'
'You've heard of Milo Harper?'
'Kansas City's hometown billionaire. He offered Kate Scranton a job but she turned him down, says she doesn't trust him.'
'She'd do better reading astrology charts than her facial action coding system. If someone winks when they should blink, she thinks they're guilty of something they haven't even thought of doing.'
'Trouble is, she's usually right. What else should I know about Harper?'
'We grew up together and were roommates at Stanford. He dropped out during our sophomore year. I stayed and got my degree while he left and got rich. Created one of those social networking sites and sold it for a couple of billion. I've done some work for him since he came back to Kansas City.'
'You and a billionaire? I don't see it.'
'Who knew? He was the tall, good-looking guy with wavy hair, a square chin, and pecs he could make dance. I was the short nebbish geek with early male pattern baldness whose idea of a good pickup line was would you like to play Simon says.'
'How'd that work out for you?'
'It was the ones who said yes that scared me.'
'Harper plowed a bunch of the money into that place. . what's it called?'
'The Harper Institute of the Mind.'
'He keeps trying to recruit Kate. She keeps telling him no but he keeps asking.'
'That's Milo. He can charm you if he wants to but he doesn't care what you think about him as long as you've got talent. And he doesn't take no for an answer. He says the brain is the last frontier. He's recruited some of the top people in the field, except, apparently, for Kate.'
'What does he want from me? Is he short on guinea pigs?'
'No, but I told him you were available in case the lab rats got a better offer.'
'Nice. Then what is it?'
'He's worried about one of his projects, something having to do with dreams.'
'Who's having nightmares?'
'He is. Two of the volunteers participating in the project have died in the last month. According to the cops, one death was accidental and one was suicide.'
'Bad luck, but what's that got to do with Harper and his institute?'
'Hopefully nothing, but the families have hired a lawyer named Jason Bolt who has sent Milo the proverbial get-out-your-checkbook-or-prepare-to-die letter. He wants someone to take another look. I suggested you.'
I'd heard of Bolt. He'd made a fortune taking down corporations for everything from defective products to defrauding shareholders. He was one of a handful of lawyers who could force a settlement on the strength of his reputation.
'A billionaire takes your advice?'
Simon laughed. 'I was the one who told him to quit school.'
'What else did he tell you? Why does Bolt think these deaths could be tied to the institute?'
'I'm Milo's friend, not his priest. He doesn't tell me everything. He asked me for a name and I gave him yours.'
'You know him. What's your sense of this?'
'Milo is a passionate guy. He loves the institute. The look in his eyes, the way he talks about it, you'd think it was his child, like the walls were papered with his DNA. When he called me, he sounded like a parent whose kid had gone missing.'
I knew that fear, how it leeches into your bones, like poison with an eternal half-life. But the Harper Institute of the Mind didn't have dimples, skinned knees, or a smile that could light up a room and break your heart at the same time. It was bricks, mortar, and money.
'Is he married? Does he have kids?'
'Neither. He's married to the job. His first kid was the business he built and sold. Now he has the institute. It's not an accident that the abbreviation for Harper Institute of the Mind is HIM.'
My doctor told me that the only way I could control the shakes was to change my lifestyle, to slow down. That was fourteen months ago and I still hadn't found the sweet spot between alive and dead. The work Simon sent me tilted the scale toward alive but sometimes it's better to let the scale swing the other way. Rich people who substitute the things they build, create, and run for the relationships they never had can be more irrational than any overprotective parent.
'I think I'll pass.'
'Why? Because of Kate Scranton? Give me a break. I was there for your last fight. I'm surprised there were any survivors.'
I laughed. 'We're a work in progress. I'm having dinner with her tomorrow night. The problem is that she sees things in me that I don't always want her to see.'
'The micro-expressions that she claims give away your secrets?'
'Yeah. It's how her brain is wired. Sometimes I don't handle it very well but I still respect her judgment. Plus,
