“He’s on the phone.” Kyra stared at her. Obviously too old to be Susanna. A stunning face. “Will you come in?”
The woman picked up her suitcase and entered, glancing around.
Incredibly gorgeous. Wearing a red silk blouse, shimmery pants and sandals with three-inch heels. “He won’t be long, I don’t think.”
The woman smiled. “And who are you?” Glancing at Noel, “And your friend?”
Noel joined them. A beautiful woman. Beautiful and hard. He felt a triumphant superiority: the kind of beauty that didn’t move him. He introduced himself and Kyra.
She told them she was Dr. Celeste-Antoinette deBourg, a friend and colleague of Professor Rossini.
Who, at the moment, returned to the living room. “Toni! What are you doing here? Lovely to see you again!”
“I’ve come for a brief visit.”
He grinned with pleasure. “That’s good, very good. Here, let me get your suitcase.” To Kyra and Noel: “I reached Marc. Here’s his address. It’s very close. He’s expecting you.”
Why did Noel feel he was being rushed out? Pushed out, even. “Thank you. We’ll be in touch tomorrow.” He headed for the still-open door, Kyra following. They both called, “Good night.”
The door closed behind them. They said nothing till they were seated in the Honda. Noel turned the key. “And who do we suppose that is?”
“A woman who can come to Larry’s home just like that. With a suitcase.”
“Anyway, not our problem.”
“As far as we know.” Kyra combed her hair with her fingers. Damn curly stuff always all over the place. How do women like that get hair like that? Unfair.
A long kiss, and afterward they held each other tight. Larry stroked the line of her spine. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
“Even uninvited,” she whispered.
“I wanted to ask you to come over. But I was frazzled. I could easily have brought you back.”
“This way I have my own car. My rental.” She smiled and pecked at his lips. “Since I had nothing else to do this evening . . . And since my flight doesn’t leave till the day after tomorrow, in the evening . . .”
“I’m very glad.”
“And those two were?”
“Oh. Yes. The investigators I hired.”
“You went ahead anyway.” She scowled. “Even if it’s dangerous.”
“We don’t know if it’s more dangerous than doing nothing. And I’m incapable of doing nothing.”
She set her cheek against his. “I do understand. But you worry me sometimes. Doing what isn’t helpful may make the situation worse.”
“Let’s leave it, okay? Would you like a drink? Or do you want to get settled in first?”
She smiled, as coyly as she could. “In the guest bedroom?”
He picked up her suitcase and headed upstairs. “I hope not.”
In his bedroom they made love with so much intoxicated passion, neither would have thought they’d been together only hours earlier. After, they lay silently for a few minutes, holding each other. Till Toni nibbled at his ear and whispered, “Larry? Would you demonstrate the Dream Visualizer for me?”
For a moment he said nothing. Then he joked, “Right now?”
“Tomorrow will be fine.”
“I—I’m not—I mean, I haven’t—except for the team—Oh, I don’t know.”
“You’ve told me everything about it. It’s not really a secret from me. I’d be fascinated to see images on the monitor. It must be exceptional to actually view someone’s dreams. Magical.”
He chuckled. “Now there’s a real scientific term.”
She smiled back. “From a real scientist.” She slid a hand down to his bare buttock and palmed it. “So. A demonstration?”
He sighed. “Toni, Toni, you’re impossible. You make me break all my rules.”
“Like I break mine. With you.”
“What? What have you broken?”
“To come to you when you’ve abandoned me.”
He kissed her deeply, then pulled away. The idea of her pleasure at seeing the Visualizer’s images suddenly appealed to him hugely. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Electronic recordings? Or a live session?”
He buried his face between her breasts. “I’ll see what I can do.” But that would be the end to their discretion. They’d been so careful. Till now. What did it matter anyway. Soon he’d want to proclaim their love, shout it from the rooftops. As it were.
Still light enough to distinguish house numbers. They found the Sheriff’s home up Tucker Avenue around the corner from Peter’s condo. They pulled into the drive and walked to the deck of a cedar-sided two-storey coastal home, large front windows facing south. Noel knocked on the door and waited.
It opened. A tall man with a blond ponytail said, “Yes?”
“Are you Sheriff Coltrane?”
“I am. And you are Franklin and Rachel, yes?”
“We are.”
“Please come in.” He stepped aside to let them pass.
A short hallway with stairs leading to the second floor. Coltrane continued past them into a living room. Three couches surrounded a large coffee table like a U. Beyond, a deep built-in fireplace. To its right a cabinet with doors open, revealing a large-screen TV, fifty inches at least, muted. Coltrane turned it off. “Have a seat.”
They both chose the couch at the bottom of the U.
“Get you something to drink? Beer, wine, coffee?”
They declined. Kyra said, “Thanks for seeing us so quickly.”
“Nothing’s quick about this case,” said Coltrane. “Nothing’s much of anything about it.”
“Except a missing young woman.”
“You got that straight. So Larry’s hired you to do what we don’t seem to be getting done, is that what we have here?”
“Look, Sheriff,” Noel said, “we don’t plan to step on your toes. We’re just a couple more pairs of eyes and nosy dispositions. We want to work with you.”
“Yeah, well, and I guess I appreciate it. But we don’t have a clue where to go. We need for the kidnappers to make the next move, give their hand away.”
Noel now wished he had a drink to hold on to. He realized he was ripping at a cuticle. He stopped himself. “What have you learned?”
The Sheriff repeated what they’d learned from Rossini. “What else we’ve learned? Nothing. We can’t give the local paper a press conference asking for help from people or send out an APB to the State Patrol, see if they’ve found an unidentified female body—” He rubbed his knees. “Without witnesses or others who might have seen her, it’s near impossible.”
“So you haven’t even contacted the State Patrol?”
“Oh, yeah, they have her description. She’s officially a missing person, low priority. But Susanna’s kidnappers have tied all our hands. Larry won’t even let us borrow a photograph of her.” He sighed. “Here’s something I haven’t told him yet. Couple of days ago the State Patrol found her car.”
“Where?” Kyra asked.
“Long-term parking at Sea-Tac.”
Noel said, “The airport?”
“Right. Seattle’s and Tacoma’s.”
“What did the car tell you?” Noel clasped his hands together to keep them still.
“Nothing. No prints, no DNA possibilities. Vacuumed, washed and wiped clean.”
Kyra didn’t quite believe the Sheriff’s nothing. Something must have been left by whoever had parked the car. She wondered how good the State Patrol labs were. “So you figure whoever grabbed her took her far away?”
“Or you can double think that. Could be she’s right next door but we’re supposed to think she’s been shipped out of state, out of the country even.”
Noel said, “I figure transporting someone who’s been kidnapped can get dangerous. Best to lock her away, move her as little as possible.”
“Even taking her off the island could be tricky,” Kyra added.
/> “Yeah, that’s what we guessed. Maybe get her into a boat at night; that’d be possible. Or in the trunk of the car and onto a ferry. But all that’s more complicated than leaving her here on San Juan. We’ve been trying to learn if anything suspicious has been happening around the island.” He clicked his tongue. “Be a lot easier if we could tell people to be on the lookout. We’ve talked to a few prudent folks, not mentioning names, just advising them to let us know if something’s out of the ordinary. We’ve checked empty summer homes. Nada.”
Kyra felt discouraged. If the Sheriff who knew the island hadn’t learned anything, how could they be of help? But right now that was a problem for tomorrow morning. Noel said, “Don’t know if Larry told you. Susanna called him. So she’s alive.”
“Yep, mentioned it when he said you two were coming over here. One of my deputies is seeing what he can find out.”
Kyra stood. “Thanks for your time, Sheriff. We’ll stay in touch. And if anything breaks at your end, please let us know.” She took a Triple I card from her purse and handed it to him.
He too stood, and Noel followed. “If we’re going to work together,” he glanced at the card, “Kyra and Noel, you better call me Marc.” He took his own card from a folder on the mantelpiece and handed it to Kyra.
Kyra watched Noel out of the corner of her eye as he drove them back to the visitors’ house. The baby question was burbling within her. She wished he’d start the discussion, but in fairness why should he? It was hardly his problem. Though she remembered his reaction when she’d said—and the idea had come out of nowhere—that if he didn’t provide the sperm, she’d just have to get it from someone else. Mentioning Peter at that moment had been an unplanned stroke of genius. Noel had looked—what? Hurt? Disgusted? Maybe jealous? If he wouldn’t provide the sperm out of generosity, maybe he would out of self-defense?
She liked this idea, Noel begging: Please, Kyra, don’t take a chance with someone you don’t know; you trust me and even like me, and if the Institute says my sperm are healthy then you’ll know it’ll be a fine baby. His words—even if only projected—played like a lullaby in her ear. And I’ll come to visit often and maybe one day he or she will call me Daddy—
No way could she guilt Noel like this! Then he’d be right, it’d break up their friendship completely. She better not raise the issue tonight, not coming from where she just was. She squeezed her eyes shut, clamping down on donor thoughts. Back to the kidnapping. The car at Sea-Tac, all prints wiped off, any threads vacuumed away. Who—and where—were these people who had taken Susanna?
She felt the car come to a stop and heard Noel say, “Like a nightcap and a what-do-we-know?”
“Sure,” she said and glanced at the dashboard clock in the darkening twilight. Couldn’t be after 9:30. “That’d be great.”
Toni showered after their lovemaking. She came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel.
He asked, “Why bother? You’ll just have to take another shower in the morning.”
She giggled. “I’ll put my suitcase in the guest bedroom—don’t worry, I’ll sleep here. But I can lay my clothes out overnight.”
“Of course. Be my—haha—guest.”
She took her suitcase and disappeared. When she returned, she was dressed in jeans and a white blouse. In her right hand, a pair of sneakers.
Larry lay, still naked, under the sheet. “Going visiting?”
“I thought I’d go outside and breathe deeply. The air feels so soft.”
“Want me to join you?”
“If you’d like. But you don’t need to. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“I will wait for you here longingly.” He paused. “You want me to take a shower?”
She stepped over to the bed and sniffed. “You smell perfect.”
He took her hand and kissed her fingers. “Come back quickly. I’ll miss you.”
She stroked his cheek. “I’ll breathe fresh air on you shortly.”
In the kitchen Noel poured them both vodka-tonics. They toasted each other. He said, “I’ve been thinking about these cases. In one way they’re similar.”
“Plagiarism and kidnapping? Pretty different, I’d say.”
“Not in the way we’re expected to handle them. I couldn’t tell any of Beck’s friends and acquaintances why I was asking about him, and we and the Sheriff can’t let on anything about Susanna.”
“Oh yeah, that. Tie our hands and bind our lips. But I was thinking, maybe there’s another way to figure this.”
“Yeah?”
“What do we know about the kidnappers?”
“Nothing. That’s the trouble.”
Kyra took a large swallow. “But we do know something. They want Larry’s Dream Visualizer. That means they have to know such a thing exists. Who knows what it is, what it does? One of them’s the kidnapper.”
“Except that anyone who knows might have mentioned it to other people. Information disperses quickly.”
Kyra drained her drink. “Still, it’s a place to start. First conversation for the morning, with Larry.”
Noel picked a small piece of ice from his drink, dropped it on his tongue and let it slide against his cheek. “There’s another thing too, now that we’re thinking this way. Whoever kidnapped Susanna because he wants the Visualizer has to know a great deal about the science behind it. So we need to find someone who’s on top of those algorithms and carbon nanotubes and the biology and chemistry of the protein synthesis and the engineering of the machine itself.”
“Yeah, but maybe not a single someone. Maybe a team.”
Noel sat down at the table. “Yeah. Damn.” He stared into the middle distance.
After a minute of silence, she said, “Anyway, we know the questions for tomorrow.” She took her drink to the kitchen counter.
He noticed. “Another?”
“Enough for today. Going to get some sleep.” She pecked him on the cheek. “G’night.”
He sat a moment longer, then went to his room, brought out his computer, set it on the table. He needed to know more about this Dream Visualizer phenomenon. He plugged the computer in—save the battery—and turned it on. He googled dream visualizer. Well how about that! 919,000 results! Dream visualization might be the new super-technology. He checked through the listing of the first ten. Lots of repetition. Four were blog segments, people talking about how visual their dreams had become. Six were variants of something called Max My Dream. He clicked on it. In a box, a command to complete the sentence, “I dreamed that . . .” Okay, why not. He typed: “I dreamed that I arrived at the station just as the train was pulling away. I ran after it but couldn’t catch it.” The command box disappeared, replaced by a clock, bouncing about on the screen. What, please wait? Yes, because a few seconds later he watched a running shadow of a man, and a cartoon cutout of a train, red and blue and black, both racing across the screen—but it looked like the man was running away from the train, getting ahead of it. Hmm. The “dream visualization” lasted for about ten seconds, giving way to a blank screen and suddenly the words, Start dreaming, heartburn free, with maximum strength Pepcia. Not exactly the kind of project that Larry Rossini seemed to be working on.
Noel flipped to the second page, ten more listings. Mostly variants of either the blog self-aggrandizements, or referring back to the Pepcia ad. Ditto pages three, seven and fourteen. One new recurring reference: Sekath Thinkgear API demo applicator. He selected it. The screen showed a man lying on a bed. On his head, a kind of skullcap with wires coming from it. A monitor stood on a table by his side, the screen blue. At the bottom of the screen, a dozen or so white balls lying still. The balls suddenly rose, not together or in any obvious pattern, and fell again. More rising and falling. A note on the screen: Gravity is removed from the balls with raised brain-wave activity. Noel watched for three or four minutes. Rising and falling and over again. Made him sleepy. Way tamer than what Rossini was describing, but possibly of the same ilk. He closed the site.
Noel got up from the table and made himself a new vodka-tonic. He sipped. He paced. He stood still. He listened. No sound, nothing at all. He’d not realized till then how quiet it could be in the woods on an island. Silence from Kyra’s room. He paced some more, had a notion and returned to the Internet. He typed thought visualizer. Wow! 14,300,000 results. A growth industry.
He scanned the results on the first page. Oh dear. “Visualization: the road to health.” “Think into yourself.” “Your thoughts belong to you.” “Positive thinking will drive away your cancer.” “Thinking yourself to wellness.” Unhelpful, at least relating to what he was looking for. He added the keywords electronic imaging and reduced his results by 90 percent. Still a lot of health and wellness stuff, as well as blogs proclaiming miracles and failures, but he found several more directly in line with what he’d hoped for. After half an hour of scanning the articles and other entries, he printed several that came from sources he felt he could trust.
From the International Herald Tribune, March 3, 2009, an article titled “Watch what you think.” It seemed that neuroscientists were “cataloguing brain patterns to match up with actual words, sentences and intentions.” A lot of this work was being done at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University. A researcher claimed that “every thought is associated with a pattern of brain activity.” A team was setting up “a database of brain patterns we all share.” As remarkable, “Brain specialists have identified areas in the brain where certain concepts are stored.”
Noel sat back. Heady stuff, scientists sneaking around in someone’s brain. Might be justified if that someone gave permission for it to happen to him. But if one were forced to undergo that kind of probing, what happens to the ethics of it all? The final privacy is inside one’s head. Now it seemed that they could just look inside the brain and export one’s secret thinking.
Was this part of Larry Rossini’s intention, but dealing with dreams rather than thoughts? How far apart are dreams and thoughts? And what was he planning on doing with his project? Suddenly the ransom for Susanna’s kidnapping made a great deal more sense.
Always Love a Villain on San Juan Island Page 19