We jump into the middle of other people's lives, expecting them to be waiting for us, surprised when they're too busy with their own problems to make time and space for ours. In a more perfect world, this would be a time to leave Harper alone but that wasn't the world we lived in.
'I ran into Jason Bolt yesterday. He was parked out in front looking at the real estate like he was getting ready to take over the title.'
'What did he want?'
'He said he was sending you a settlement offer on Delaney and Blair that would only be on the table until the end of the week.'
Harper laughed. 'I give ultimatums. I don't take them.'
'Bolt knows about what happened with Corliss at Wisconsin and he said to remind you what happened the last time you took him on and to tell you that he knows about Peggy Murray. He thinks that will motivate you to settle in a hurry.'
Harper laughed again, shaking his head. 'Peggy Murray! Damn. You know what's funny about Alzheimer's? The old memories last the longest. Some stuff is just too hard to forget.'
'I know about her too.'
He straightened, hands on his desk. 'Bolt told you?'
'No. Simon did. He's one of the people I hired to help me. I told him to do a background check on you. He printed out the story on Jamie Del Muro's blog.'
His eyes widened. 'You hired Simon Alexander to investigate me? Why would you do that?'
'I had him run background checks on anyone that had a connection to Delaney, Blair, and Enoch. You're on that list.'
'For Bolt's lawsuit,' he nodded. 'That's what Bolt will do. I guess it makes sense for you to know what Bolt knows.'
'I didn't do it because of the lawsuit.'
'Then why do it?'
'Delaney, Blair, and Enoch were dead. Anne Kendall was the fourth and Leonard Nagel makes five. I want to know why.'
Harper rocked back in his chair, my meaning registering with him. 'Everyone is still a suspect, is that it? Including me? Jamie Del Muro is a lunatic.'
'Then why haven't you sued her for libel and slander and shut her Web site down and taken every penny she has?'
'I wanted to but my lawyers talked me out of it. All that would do is draw more attention to her. She'd like nothing better than for me to sue her. I'm a public figure which means people can say practically whatever they want about me. Besides, she's not the only one who takes shots at me. Like the song says, money can't buy me love. If I sued everyone who made up shit about me, that's all I'd ever do. Jason Bolt will have to do better than that to bring me to the table. You should be digging up dirt on Delaney and Blair, not me. What have you found out about them?'
'Delaney was murdered. Blair almost certainly was too. Probably by the same person who also killed Walter Enoch and Anne Kendall.'
He smiled. 'Great! Then I'm off the hook and Jason Bolt can pound sand.'
Harper had a singularly egocentric outlook, more concerned about Jason Bolt's lawsuit than the likelihood that a serial killer was working his way through the institute.
'Why did you access Delaney's, Blair's, and Enoch's files in the dream project?'
'I told you. That's how I keep track of the research projects.'
'There were two hundred and fifty volunteers in that project. You picked the three that were murdered and you looked at their files before and after they were killed. How does that happen?'
He rose, coming around to my side of the desk, getting in my face. 'How do you think it happens?'
'You tell me. Was it an accident like Peggy Murray's bicycle running off the road after she designed your Web site or a coincidence like Kate Scranton's practice going under after she turned you down?'
Chapter Forty-nine
'So that's what this is about? Kate Scranton?'
'It's about a lot of things. She's one of them.'
'I hope you're sleeping with her. Otherwise, you're blowing the job of a lifetime for nothing.'
'And you're blowing the chance to convince me I should take you off my list of suspects. I'd say that gives you more to worry about than me.'
'Me? A murderer? First Peggy Murray and now four more people. I'd have to be one of the all-time great serial killers.'
'More like one of the ordinary ones. You have to at least get into double figures to be one of the great ones. Serial killers sometimes go years between binges. It will be easy enough to find out if there were any other unsolved murders around Palo Alto around the same time Peggy died.'
He took a step back, squinting at me. 'You're serious, aren't you?'
'You're about to find out how serious.'
He put his hands up and then wiped his mouth with one, holding me at bay with the other.
'Okay, okay. Peggy first. We worked on the Web site together. It's hard to say who came up with what. We were kids. We didn't know the first thing about intellectual property rights or anything else. Later, when the company took off, I made a deal with her parents, giving them stock for Peggy's contribution to the Web site. They had lawyers and I had lawyers. It was an arm's length deal.'
'And what about Peggy's bike accident?'
He stuffed his hands in his pants pockets and circled the room, stopping at the windows overlooking Brush Creek, turning back to me, his voice soft, his throat full.
'We'd been out riding all day. Peggy was as competitive as I was, maybe more, always trying to beat me. Didn't matter if it was about getting the better grade or getting to the bottom of the hill first. She took off down this long steep hill, really kicking it. There was a blind curve at the bottom, no guardrail, and a long drop. It was the first time we'd been on that stretch, so we didn't know. I was drafting behind her. We hit some loose gravel and spun out and both of us lost control. I laid my bike down but she flew off the road. She broke her neck and I got a bad case of road rash.'
His narrative matched the police report Jamie Del Muro had posted on her blog. I studied him, looking for the practiced recitation of someone expecting to be accused only to be betrayed by a liar's tics and twitches, seeing instead a face grimacing with pain, gone pale from a memory relived.
'I think about her everyday,' he said, his voice a whisper, his eyes wet. 'And I have nightmares about the accident two or three times a week. That's why I funded the dream project.'
'Maggie Brennan says you threatened to cut off the funding if she and Corliss couldn't prove that people could learn to control their nightmares with lucid dreaming.'
'The institute is a not-for-profit but that doesn't mean I'm in business to lose money. I'm rich but not rich enough to fund projects that don't produce results.'
'How's the dream project doing?'
'Not great. I tried the lucid dreaming techniques and they didn't help. I met with Corliss at the end of November. I told him he had three months to produce results or I was going to pull the plug. That's why I looked at those videos. I wanted to see whether he was making progress.'
'Why Delaney's, Blair's, and Enoch's videos? Why not any of the others?'
'I didn't pick them. I told Corliss I wanted to see some representative videos. Those were the ones he suggested. He said they were a good cross-section of different types of nightmares. After they died, I went back and looked at their videos again.'
'Why?'
'For the same reason I built this place-to try to make sense of things. Look at what happened to Delaney,
