The Devil's Elixir

by Raymond Khoury

  “Is he in his room?” she asked.

  Jules nodded. “Yeah, I was about to call him to give him these.”

  “Give me a second with him, will you?”

  Jules gave her a confused look, then just nodded. “Sure.”

  Alex was on the floor of his bedroom, playing with his figurines. He glanced at Tess as she came in, but didn’t say anything.

  “Hey, what’s Ben up to today?”

  Alex shrugged. “He’s helping his grandpa Max save Gwen.”

  “Sounds like he’s got his hands full.”

  She sat down on the floor, next to him. “Alex, I need to talk to you about something.”

  He didn’t look over.

  “I’ve asked you about this before, but I really need to ask you again and I need you to answer me, Alex. It’s really, really important.” She hesitated, then added, “I talked to your mom’s friend, Dean. He said it’s okay. He said you can talk to me about it.”

  Her heart was kicking against her chest, her veins throbbing with tension as she pulled out the drawing and set it on the floor in front of Alex.

  “I need to know, Alex.” She pointed at the other figure in the drawing, the one that seemed to be threatening Alex. The one that now looked like it was holding a gun at him.

  She tapped it with her finger.

  “I need to know who this is, Alex. I need you to tell me who this is.”

  He just stared at it, without moving—almost without breathing.

  “Alex, please,” she insisted, gently. “I need to know. It’s just between you and me. There’s nothing to be scared of. Nothing at all. I’m your friend, Alex. You have to trust me on this.”

  His mouth slid open a touch, and he glanced at her sideways, his expression mired with hesitation.

  She met his gaze and gave him a warm, comforting smile. “Tell me, Alex. I’m here to help you.”

  Alex’s eyes were wide with fear. “But he’s your friend,” he mumbled.

  The words tore through her.

  She knew the answer, but she needed to hear him say it. She felt breathless, felt she could barely utter the words, but she steeled herself and asked, “Who, Alex? Who’s my friend?”

  He twisted his lips and curled in on himself, like it was the last thing on earth he wanted to say, then he said, “Reilly.”

  He looked up at her, fear and confusion playing across his face.

  “Reilly killed me. He shot me.” He raised his hand to his head and pointed his finger at the middle of his forehead. “Right here.”

  She nodded, her entire body numb to the world, like she was in a trance.

  “Tell me what you remember, Alex. Tell me everything.”

  And he told her.

  Everything.

  When he was done, she edged closer and took him in her arms and hugged him. She kept him there, close, hugging him tight against her, caressing his hair gently, feeling his little heart beating against her chest.

  After a long moment, she gave him a kiss, got up, and headed out of his room. She walked into the living room, slowly, feeling like she’d fallen through a crack in a frozen lake and was floating around aimlessly in the icy darkness.

  She found her phone and dialed Reilly’s number.

  “Sean,” she told him, “I need you to come over. Like, as soon as you can. We need to talk.”

  He said he’d be back as soon as he could.

  She put the phone down and stared out into the fading light and wondered how she could have been so wrong about everything she thought she knew about her world.

  57

  As he drove home with the sun setting up ahead in lush pink and purple brushstrokes, Villaverde resolved to rise before dawn the following day and drive up to Black’s Beach to hit the surf.

  In the time before he was made Special Agent in Charge, he would go there at least three times a week. He would drive the six miles up to UCSD, park in an almost-deserted lot as the sun just started to glimmer over the mountains to the east, then take the steep path down the cliff to the best waves in the county. He would spend two hours riding the sometimes ten-foot breakers back to shore, stop on La Jolla Village Drive for breakfast, then head back south and still be behind his desk by eight thirty.

  Since taking over responsibility for the San Diego field office, he was lucky if he got to surf once a week off Pacific Beach, which, although it had the benefit of being a mere eight blocks from his house, had erratic waves that never got over a couple of feet high. He still couldn’t get his head around how anyone in the Bureau managed to have a family on top of the job and still have any kind of time to themselves. When he’d separated from Gillian three years earlier—she’d moved to Chicago with her firm while he’d chosen to stay in San Diego—he’d agonized for weeks over whether he’d thrown away his one serious chance at having kids, but as the days turned to weeks, he realized that he was actually much happier on his own.

  He turned off Grand Avenue, drove the three blocks to his house, and carefully turned the Chevy Traverse into the driveway. It was always a tight squeeze maneuvering the SUV up onto the narrow, upward-sloping driveway, but he was well practiced and always managed just to clear the vehicle’s rear end off the sidewalk.

  He had stopped at Margo’s Mexican Grill for takeout and picked up a six-pack of Corona from Vons, all of which he now gathered from the passenger seat foot well. As he swung the door shut, he did a quick subconscious sweep of the street, as he did every night when he returned home. Everything was normal. As it always was. He was looking forward to unwinding in front of his TiVo. Unlike the handful of cops he knew, he never took his work home. He’d seen one of his partners drive himself into the ground, obsessed with a particularly gruesome and labyrinthine gang-related murder case, but even before that Villaverde had always made it a rule to work at the office and relax at home. Of course sometimes it meant that he didn’t leave the office till three in the morning, or sometimes not at all—there was a pretty comfortable sofa in one of the meeting rooms—but he’d always finish whatever he was doing before heading back.

  Villaverde unlocked the door, collected his mail from the floor, flicked on the lights, and walked through to the kitchen. He unscrewed the cap off a beer and took a long swig. Tomorrow, he’d empty his mind completely at Black’s Beach, get into work early, then supervise the sting operation at the KGTV news studio out on Air Way. He and Reilly had already taken a conference call with Channel 10’s editor in chief and executive editor. They had agreed to put Reilly on the air, and they’d start trailing his interview from six in the morning, which should give El Brujo plenty of time to get his act together.

  An act he hoped to break up.

  Permanently.

  He heard the doorbell ring. He took another gulp of beer, set down the bottle, and walked over to the door. He hadn’t bothered to close it; the night was cool and he loved the feel of the breeze inside the house. On the other side of the screen stood a tall, dark-skinned man in a very well-cut suit. He was waving hello hesitantly and seemed confused.

  “I’m sorry, this isn’t the Prager house, is it?” the man asked.

  Villaverde instinctively dropped his left hand to the Glock at his belt as he opened the screen door with his right, keeping his sidearm angled away from the open door.

  “They’re next door,” Villaverde told him. “Fifty-eight.”

  “Oh, man, I’m sorry,” the man said as he smiled at him sheepishly and rubbed a few days of growth on his chin with a well-manicured hand.

  A hand that had something around its wrist.

  A tooled leather wristband.

  Villaverde’s eyes locked on it, with the soft click of the door at the back of the kitchen reaching his ears at exactly the same instant that his brain matched the wristband to the video from Deputy Fugate’s in-car video.

  He took a step back and pulled his sidearm, but before he could raise it, the man at the door had charged in and grabbed his left arm with both hands, an
d he was now trying to twist it up behind his back.

  Villaverde knew this move. He dropped his left shoulder, recentered his weight, then kicked out with his right leg, sweeping his assailant’s legs out from under him. The man let go of Villaverde’s gun arm with one hand, but still kept the other firmly clamped around his forearm. Villaverde threw himself on top of the man’s lower body and followed through with a succession of punches to his abdomen while twisting his own gun around to face the second assailant, who he knew would reach him any second.

  As he swung the gun out, he felt a sharp pain in his right thigh. He looked down to see a thin metal spike sticking out of his leg and understood, with sudden horror, that the man had let himself be brought down specifically so he could stab him.

  Villaverde fired a couple of shots at the second assailant as the man approached from the kitchen, but his vision was already blurring and his muscles relaxing involuntarily. The bullets went wide and missed their target.

  He felt himself sliding into sleep, and just before he lost consciousness entirely, he realized it was highly unlikely that he’d be riding the breakers the next morning.

  58

  Tess looked totally spooked right from the second I saw her. She seemed to want to jump right into things and just led me out into the garden as soon as I came in, away from the house. I didn’t know exactly what was troubling her, but I assumed it was fallout from our talk the night before and suspected this wasn’t going to be a fun chat.

  She surprised me by saying, “I called the shrink, Dean. Dean Stephenson.”

  Not what I thought this was about.

  I asked, “The one you think Michelle took Alex to see?”

  “Yes. Turns out he’s not just any shrink. He’s a practicing child psychiatrist, but he also runs the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at Berkeley. And, more specifically, he runs a subsection called the Division of Perceptual Studies.”

  I wasn’t sure where she was going with this, or what the urgency was. But clearly, it was important. I tried not to be too flippant and said, “Okay.” Though I might have stretched the word out a bit more than was wise.

  “His central focus—his focus for more than forty years of study and field research,” she told me, “is survival research.”

  She paused and gave me a look, like she was waiting to see if I’d heard of it. I made a face to indicate I hadn’t. “What’s that?”

  “Survival research is about looking into whether or not any part of us can ever survive the death of our physical body.”

  Survive the death of the physical body? She was losing me. “What are you talking about?”

  “People like Stephenson explore whether or not our souls might be able to survive the deaths of our bodies, and they do this by looking into things like near-death and out-of-body experiences, deathbed apparitions, after-death communications . . . and what they call ‘transmigration of the soul.’ And that’s what Stephenson’s speciality is. Reincarnation.”

  “So . . . you’re saying the guy Michelle chose to take Alex to see is an expert on reincarnation?”

  “Yes. And before you give me that roll of the eyes you’re so fond of, try and keep one thing in mind here: We’re talking about a seriously qualified, high-powered academic, okay? This isn’t some turban-wearing medium in a fairground Michelle took him to see. The guy’s a legend in the parapsychology community. Which isn’t a big one, for all the reasons you can imagine, starting with its name. He’s got impeccable credentials. He’s got a PhD from Harvard. He’s a fully qualified psychoanalyst who’s had scores of papers on psychiatry published in all kinds of professional journals. He’s written books on psychiatry that are required reading in classrooms. He’s got fellowships at the most prestigious hospitals. The guy’s a bona fide member of the medical elite of this country.”

  “And he studies reincarnation,” I reiterated, trying to keep all cynicism out of my tone. Then I had to ask, in case I was missing something, “So he believes in it?”

  “Yes. Well . . . in his own, guarded way. This is a guy who’s studied thousands of claims over the years. He’s got a team of researchers working for him. He doesn’t deal with past-life regression, with hypnotizing adults—he doesn’t believe in it. He only looks at cases where children are having what’s called spontaneous recall. When they remember stuff. Out of the blue. And despite all the evidence he’s collected over the years, he doesn’t go around making claims he can’t back up. He acknowledges the fact that he doesn’t have any proof of reincarnation. What he says is that, in a lot of the cases he’s studied, reincarnation is the best explanation he can think of. It’s the one that fits best. He’s got evidence, but not proof, if you see what I mean.”

  It still sounded to me like something James Randi would have a field day with, but if Tess was taking it seriously, I was all ears. I’d kind of learned that lesson the hard way over the years.

  “Okay,” I said. “So how’s this related to Alex?”

  “It seems Alex was exhibiting unusual behavior—behavior that points to reincarnation.”

  “ Spontaneous recall?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like what? Is this about those drawings you showed me?”

  “Partly, yes,” she said, fixing me intently as her hands went all animated. “Typically, in these cases, kids who claim to remember past lives start talking about them at a very young age, sometimes as soon as they can speak. They start saying things that they shouldn’t normally know about—names of people they’ve never met and places they’ve never been, sometimes in a language they’ve never learned. They’ll talk about stuff that’s beyond their age, like technical details about, say, a World War Two plane, like they’ll see a picture of one and they’ll know whether the thing hanging under its wing is a bomb or a drop tank. Details. And when they talk about them, they’re more articulate and more lucid than they normally are. More than would be expected at that age. Then, typically, these memories fade by the time the kids reach six or seven. The theory is that other memories—current ones—crowd them out.”

  I was doing my best to keep an open mind. “So you’re saying Alex knew stuff about some past life?”

  “According to his teacher, he started saying things that surprised Michelle. And a couple of things that surprised his teacher, too. And the drawings. And he was having nightmares. Michelle didn’t seem to want to talk about it too much, but it must be why she took him to see Stephenson.”

  I tried to picture Michelle doing that. Weirdly enough, that didn’t seem too outlandish to me, given that she was into a lot of New-Agey stuff that I used to like ribbing her about. I’m not saying I was buying it. I’m just saying I could see why she would think that and take him to see someone like Stephenson.

  Tess obviously read the doubt on my face. “You think this is nonsense.”

  “No, I mean—hey, what do I know?”

  She gave me a small, reproaching shake of the head. “Look, I’m as much of a skeptic about this as anyone. But after reading all this stuff about Stephenson and his work . . . It’s amazing, Sean. These kids, the ones whose stories he examined . . . Stephenson and his people aren’t fools. They pick at these claims like they’re reincarnation CSIs. They interview the kids, they talk to everyone around them, to family members from both their present and past lives. They record everything and cross-check it all, word for word, and all the time, they’re looking for reasons to dismiss them. They look for holes or for alternative explanations or for parents who are inadvertently feeding their own wishful thinking or their cultural predispositions—and, obviously, they also look for outright scams. But in some of these cases—dozens of them, over the years—Stephenson and his team ended up convinced that the kids could very well be reincarnated souls. And it’s not just memories. Some of these kids have physical links to what they claim are their previous lives. His website’s full of them—it blows the mind. One kid who started talking about a past life had been bor
n with a serious birth defect where his main pulmonary artery hadn’t formed completely. By the time he was three, he was telling his mother things like, “I never used to hit you when you were a little girl, even when you were really bad,” and remembering all kinds of things about his grandfather—his grandfather who was a New York City cop who had died long before the kid was born, from being shot six times while trying to stop a robbery. And the bullet that finished him off had gone in through his back, through his lung and cut open a major artery that caused him to bleed out. Wanna guess which artery it hit?”

  She didn’t even wait for me to answer, her face ablaze with excitement. “The pulmonary. Another kid who started remembering a past life had this birthmark under his chin. The past life he was talking about matched that of a drug dealer who killed himself by holding a gun to his chin and pulling the trigger. When Stephenson and his team looked into it, they got coroner reports and eyewitness testimonies, then they checked the kid more closely and you know what they found? A hairless birthmark on the top of his head, exactly where the autopsy report said the bullet’s exit wound was. Stephenson’s website says that in many cases where they saw a birthmark that corresponded to the entry point of a bullet, they discovered another one that matched the exit wounds on the autopsy reports. It’s mind-boggling.”

  My mind was definitely in a major boggle. Two tides were pulling at my better judgment. One was that it was Tess telling me all this, and Tess had a finely tuned bullshit detector, one I trusted. The other was Stephenson. The fact that a Harvard PhD with all his credentials could devote his life to researching hundreds of cases and end up being convinced by a significant number of them wasn’t that easy to dismiss. I just couldn’t believe I was actually sitting here entertaining this insane notion, but I was intrigued and found myself going along with her and asking, “Do all the past lives that these kids recall involve a violent death? Hasn’t anyone remembered a past life that ended peacefully in bed?”