opening, a few seconds’ pause, then the file cabinet closed with a slam. He heard the click of a lock engaging in the cabinet.
Then feet crossing the floor, the office door opening, shutting, locking again.
Miles remained perfectly still. Frozen. He counted to three hundred. Then he counted it again. Slowly he unfolded himself from the closet, hands shaking. He inspected the file cabinet. He could pick the lock – but, no, he couldn’t peruse her patient files. Too much of a betrayal. He unlocked the door. He relocked the office door and left, pocketing the lockpick.
He glanced up and down the street. No sign of Sorenson. Nothing made sense, Sorenson mucking about on her computer, going through her files, hiding a briefcase in her office. He hurried back down Palace, toward the Plaza. He dug his cell phone out of his pocket and tried Allison’s number again.
‘Allison?’ he said when she answered.
‘Yes. Michael?’
‘Please tell me what’s going on. What trouble are you in?’
She didn’t answer right away and he heard the rumble of an engine; it sounded as though she was in a car. ‘Can you come at seven?’
‘Yes.’
‘I can explain then. Before Sorenson comes at eight.’
He risked a shot across her bow. ‘Is Sorenson really a doctor?’
An awkward laugh. ‘Very good. No, he’s not.’
‘Why did you lie to me?’
‘Because I didn’t want him to know… that you could help me.’
‘Who is he? Is he threatening you?’
‘I’ll tell you all tonight. I can’t talk now.’
‘He’s planning something tonight at your home.’
A pause. ‘How do you know?’ A tinge of shock in her tone.
He decided to wait. See her face to face. ‘I just know. I’m – I was an investigator, I find out things.’
‘Is that how you’ve spent today – investigating?’ She sounded surprised.
‘Yes. I used to be good at it.’
‘I don’t doubt it at all. I know I can trust you. Come at seven and I can explain it all.’
‘All right. Allison – who’s Dodd?’
But she had hung up.
He tried her phone again. No answer.
As he walked, the wind began to gust and the air carried the raw scent of storm. He ran up the stairs to his apartment. The rooms were too warm; he opened a window a couple of inches, let in the chilly air. WITSEC had offered to rent a house for him but a house meant too much space and quiet, too much room for Andy to roam free.
Exhausted from his close call, he collapsed onto the bed.
He read Allison’s note again. He shook one of the pills from the bottle into his palm; a tiny white slug of a capsule. He’d decided against taking one after the flashback in Joy’s office, not wanting to talk with DeShawn while medicated. The pill was light as a feather. He fingered the capsule; the casing dented under his fingernail. Pushed harder. The dent went deep.
He pulled apart the two halves of the capsule – empty.
She’d given him a vial of fake pills. Odd on top of odd.
He lay down on the bed, contemplating the ceiling. The burden of responsibility – of helping her, of making a decision to do rather than just to be – pressed on him. The lack of sleep from the night before, restless and frantic as he considered writing the confession, made his eyes hurt. What if he couldn’t help her, if he was unequal to the task? He touched the confession in his pocket and closed his eyes to try to think.
SEVEN
‘Does it work?’ Groote asked. He nearly held his breath and thought: This is it, Amanda, here’s the miracle that saves you and makes you all right again. He had flown out from Orange County to Albuquerque, then sped the hour north to Santa Fe. His exhaustion from the long night of waiting to kill the accountant evaporated. ‘Does it really work?’
And in the hospital conference room, Doctor Leland Hurley smiled at him and his hopes and his question. Hurley started talking again about lessening the vivid emotional toll of the most horrifying of memories, rattling off a glossary of brain chemicals: epinephrine, propanolol, super beta-blockers, adrenergic receptors. Hurley spoke of giving patients back their normal lives and all Groote could think was, Does it work, does it work, does it work?
Doctor Hurley gestured at the elevator. ‘Let’s go to the top floor.’
The top floor meant Frost. The medicine.
Most of the patients were in their rooms after an early dinner, small but comfortable cubbyholes. At the end of the floor’s main hallway stood an expansive group room where they could talk and gather.
‘Here’s a treat you won’t see every day,’ Hurley said, leading Groote through a door that read VIRTUAL REALITY TREATMENT. QUIET, PLEASE.
The room was dark, separated in half by a glass screen, a jumble of computers loading the walls. A young man, on the other side of the glass, dangled by four elastic cables from the ceiling. A strange helmet covered his eyes and ears; he wore a tight white bodysuit, webbed with wire and tiny gadgets that Groote guessed were recording heartbeat, breathing, and other functions. The patient hung, almost motionless, jerking now and then as he reacted to the scenes playing out of the goggles. On a screen, what appeared to be a computer-animated movie showed a darkened alleyway, wet with rain, three men walking close. One held a chain, the other a blade.
‘What are those scenes?’ Groote asked.
‘We re-create their traumas for them,’ Hurley said with a thin knife of a grin. ‘We do extensive research and interviews to get the details of their individual traumas, then we construct a computer-generated scenario that matches those details. We watch it onscreen – he sees it on the goggles, as though he’s immersed in the scene. You see it’s like a rough cut of a video game, except it’s tailor made to help them face their worst fears. It helps those who aren’t yet willing to talk consistently about their experiences process the memories, so they can discuss them and the medicine, Frost, can weaken the bad memories. This subject was attacked and nearly murdered in a vicious gang mugging in Washington. So he’s experiencing a re-creation of the mugging.’
‘Virtual reality,’ Groote said. ‘But it’s not required for the medicine to work, right?’
‘For us, it serves as camouflage for Frost. Every patient here believes they’re testing the effectiveness of the virtual-reality treatment – they don’t know they’re being dosed with Frost.’
Groote frowned. ‘They don’t know they’re test subjects.’
‘No. We couldn’t let them know. It’s important we not publicize the research, since we’ll be selling it to a pharmaceutical that’ll claim the research for their own.’
The young man jerked against the suspension cables, started to gasp and plead for help as, on the screen, the computer-generated thugs attacked him with chains and knives. A technician sitting on the same side of the glass as Groote and Hurley spoke quietly to the patient through a microphone, reassuring him.
‘I understand your stepdaughter suffered an interesting trauma.’
Interesting? Nice word; this guy was a lab-rat freak. ‘Daughter. I adopted her. She and her mother were driving on a canyon road when another car fired shots at them and drove them off the road. They were pinned in the wreckage. My wife died a few hours later, my daughter lay trapped in the car with her mother’s body for another thirty-six hours before they were found.’ Tightness filled his chest. He was surprised at himself, sharing his family’s horror with a near-stranger – but he knew this was it, clear and present hope for Amanda, the promise of a future for her beyond tiled hallways and sedatives and twenty-four-hour care. ‘The doctors haven’t been able to help her. She tries to hurt herself.’
