The Dead Man

Frank Gentry called, confirming that he'd deleted Anthony Corliss's alert software and installed it on the desktop computer in my office and that no one else was using the software. I caught Simon while he was still at his office, telling him to bring an additional laptop for me.

Lucy left and came back carrying pads of poster-sized Post-its and a fistful of markers in a rainbow of colors. Her cheeks were red from the cold and her eyes were dancing and bright, fueled by our chase of the dead man.

She stripped the living den walls, papering the empty spaces with blank Post-its. I needed to rest so I sat in the recliner watching her work, genuflecting with intermittent spasms.

'I learned under a great homicide detective,' Lucy said. 'She taught me that the best way to put a case together is to visualize it. Put it on the walls, let the facts paint the picture.'

'I do it the same way. Put each case on a separate wall. Start with what we know about each of the victims and how they died. Then we'll fill in what you saw at each of the scenes. We'll also have to keep track of witnesses, evidence, and questions we need answered, plus links between the cases.'

She turned toward me, hands on her hips. 'Gee, great ideas. I never would have thought of any of that.'

We mirrored each other's grins, both glad to be back in the hunt, realizing how much we had missed it.

'Okay, okay. I get it,' I said, the words staggering out of my mouth like drunks leaving a bar at closing time. My neck arched and stretched, shoving my head upward and back, raising my chin like the open end of a drawbridge and locking me in the pose until the spasm passed. 'I guess this isn't your first time.'

'No. But it's my first time in a while, same for you. We need to check each other's work. Shake the rust off.'

'Might as well. I'm shaking everything else.'

She stood over my chair, looking at me with soft, sad eyes and laughed, giving me a quick hug. 'You are something, you know that. Tell you what. I'll write. You edit.'

'This isn't the first essay I've ever written, Dad,' Wendy said.

She was applying for college. The application included an essay on the highs and lows of her life and what she'd learned from them. She said her lows were the death of her brother and her addiction and her highs were staying straight and sober for over a year and graduating from high school. She wrote that she learned the same thing from the highs and the lows. You can't always choose what happens to you but you can choose how you deal with it.

'Are you sure you want to put yourself on the line like that?' I asked her when she showed me a draft and asked for my comments.

'This is who I am. What else would I write about?'

'Something that doesn't label you as high risk.'

She laughed. 'Are you serious, Dad? High risk is tattooed all over me. I can't run away from that. Tell you what, I'll write, you edit.'

'Works for me,' I told Lucy.

She made her way around the room, using different color markers for different topics: black for victims, blue for witnesses, green for evidence, red for the crime scene, though she labeled it THE DEAD MAN in all caps, winking at me over her shoulder as she wrote. Her handwriting was hurried, her shoulder and neck muscles bundled and flexed as she worked.

She didn't look like Wendy. She was taller and her hair was shorter and darker. She was cocky while Wendy was leery. In spite of their differences, I sensed in her the same urgency about life Wendy had shown, as if they knew that they'd closed more doors than they'd opened and that they were running out of doors. There were no words for how much I missed my daughter. There were only memories Lucy was bringing to life, making me realize that this could be the land of second chances for both of us.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Kate rang the doorbell while Lucy was still hanging the new wallpaper. When I introduced them, Lucy leaned into Kate, whispering something in her ear that made them both giggle like schoolgirls, look at me, and laugh again.

'What?' I demanded.

'Oh, nothing,' Kate said.

She was holding two bags of carryout from Bo Ling's. She handed one bag to Lucy as they locked arms and headed for the kitchen.

When Simon arrived a few minutes later, he stared at Lucy's handiwork, then looked at me, his mouth open.

'Everything will be illuminated,' I said. 'After we eat.'

I spread out dinner in the kitchen while Simon set up an office in the dining room. The dogs, exhausted from the parade of people, slept under the kitchen table, waking long enough to scavenge for crumbs. When we finished our fortune cookies, I laid everything out for Kate and Simon.

Simon pushed back from the table, his eyebrows raised. 'Lucid dreaming sounds like junk science to me.'

'Maybe, maybe not,' Kate said. 'The work I do is all about what's going on beneath the surface. Dreams are part of that so I stay current with the research, which is all over the place. Freud thought dreams were the way we fulfilled our forbidden aggressive and sexual wishes. Later, people thought that dreams were the cognitive echoes of our efforts to work out conflicting emotions. Now some researchers will tell you that dreams are just epiphenomena.'

'Translation, please,' Simon said.

'Sorry,' Kate said. 'They think that dreams don't mean anything at all, that dreams are just the mind's attempt to make sense of random neural firings while the body restores itself during sleep.'

'So, dreams are noise the brain makes while it's doing its homework?' Lucy asked.

'That's exactly how one researcher at Harvard explains it. But there's other research that suggests that dreams are a training ground where people rehearse survival behaviors. I read a report by one psychologist who said he helped a patient reframe his nightmare by rehearsing alternatives to the most frightening part while he was awake. Eventually, the nightmare went away. That doesn't sound so different from what Anthony Corliss is trying to do.'

'Except for one thing,' I said. 'Instead of helping his subjects reframe their nightmares, he may be helping to turn them into reality.'

'Why would he do that?' Lucy asked.

'It's the rule of unintended consequences. It's not what he's trying to do but it's what happens,' I said, repeating Maggie Brennan's explanation that lucid dreaming may help people overcome their inhibitions, causing them to do things they would otherwise never do.

'Do we know if anyone else is doing this kind of research?' Kate asked. 'Maybe they've had similar experiences.'

'I don't know about that, but this has happened before with Corliss,' I said, telling them about the girl at Wisconsin who drowned.

'If Milo Harper knew about that, how could he have hired Corliss?' Kate asked.

'Corliss told him all about it and Harper's lawyers talked to the lawyers for Corliss and the university. They say Corliss got hosed.'

'Of course that's what they would say,' Kate said. 'They didn't talk to the lawyer for the girl's family. They made their mind up after hearing only one side of the story. Harper wanted to hire Corliss. His lawyers knew that and they made sure their client got what he wanted.'

'You don't know that,' I said.

'I know Harper and I know lawyers. That's enough for me,' she said.

'I'm a software guy,' Simon said. 'I can program a computer but I don't believe you can program someone to kill themselves. Besides, you said the mailman was murdered.'