The Murderer's Memories

by T. S. Nichols

  “Yes,” said the woman. “He was teaching my son how to play.” With that, the woman moved her son from behind her to in front of her. Her hands were gripping the boy’s shoulders with a firm but somehow gentle grasp. Cole recognized the boy and felt a surge of warmth inside.

  “I know your son needs to go to sleep,” Cole said to the woman, “but do you think I could play your piano for just a moment first?”

  The woman looked at Cole like he was a madman. Without responding, she took a step backward, pulling her son along with her. She was getting ready to close the door. “It’s okay,” Cole shouted out to her before she could. He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out his badge. “I’m a cop,” he finally blurted out. He took a step toward the woman and her little boy. “It will only be a minute. I promise.” What Cole had neglected to tell the woman was that he didn’t know how to play the piano—at least, not as far as he knew, anyway. He simply had an intense urge to try.

  The woman stared skeptically at the badge. Cole held it toward her so she could get a closer look. She gently guided her son behind her again, putting her body between Cole and her son. Then she took a small step forward to inspect the badge. Cole had no idea what she might be looking for, what signs of authenticity might make her believe him. He glanced at the young boy standing behind his mother. The child was staring up at her, wide-eyed, trying to figure out if he should be afraid. His black hair was a tousled mess in the back; he’d already been in bed. As the woman leaned in to inspect Cole’s badge, Cole whispered to her, “I’m investigating the bombing. We’re trying to gather as much detail as we can on all of the victims.”

  The woman glared up at Cole, seemingly convinced of his badge’s authenticity. “But why the piano? How does that help your investigation?”

  Cole was at a loss for how to respond. It was such an obvious question but still he wasn’t prepared to answer it. He raced through possible answers in his head but none sounded plausible to him. None, that is, except for the truth. “I have Ivan’s memories,” he finally said to the woman, “but I need help unlocking them.” He had stopped whispering. The woman hadn’t whispered in front of her son so he didn’t either. “We think that Ivan might have seen something important during the bombing. I think playing that piano might help to unlock some important memories.”

  The woman looked down at her son, who was holding on to her dress. He gave his mother a quick nod of his head. “Okay,” she said, though she still did not sound happy about the whole ordeal. “Five minutes,” she added as she let Cole walk past her. “Father is at work,” she said in response to Cole eyeballing the apartment. “Boy is supposed to be asleep.” She gave Cole a little shove toward the piano. “Go. Play. Play.”

  Cole sat on the piano bench. It was an old wooden upright piano that somebody had painted an emerald green. He lifted the lid off of the keys. The young boy stood beside him. “Your name is Andy?” Cole asked, the name popping into his head as he looked into the boy’s bright eyes. Andy merely giggled in response. Cole stared blankly at the keys. He had no idea how or where to begin. Then the boy reached over, grabbed Cole’s hands, and moved them onto the keyboard, He then placed each finger, one at a time, on the appropriate keys. “Thank you,” Cole said, but the boy wasn’t finished yet. He placed his own fingers on top of Cole’s and pressed down. Cole felt the initial firmness of each key, and then felt it give. A moment later, he heard the sound echo out of the piano and felt the vibration in his fingers. When the boy lifted his hands, Cole began to move his fingers along the keys all on his own until that one tone became music.

  Cole could feel the pain of Ivan’s arthritis in his fingers but he was happy to play through the pain. He had no idea what he was playing. It was a melancholy classical piece, the type of music that, if you’re happy, will make you happier, and if you’re sad, will make you sadder. Cole’s fingers danced across the keys, moving up and down the piano with a speed and grace that he could hardly believe. He didn’t have to think. He only had to let go. As he played, even more of Ivan’s memories came to him. He remembered listening to his grandmother play the piano when he was a little boy. He remembered how much he loved her piano lessons because he got to spend time with his grandmother, but how much he hated them because they took him away from baseball. He remembered playing the piano at church and how the sound of his playing filled the air. He remembered giving up on the piano when he was sixteen and his grandmother died. Then, for a long time within the music, Cole stopped remembering anything. A hole erupted where the memories had been, but Cole kept on playing. He played through the emptiness.

  Then Cole remembered the day Ivan had come home early from work because his hands hurt him too much. He walked toward his apartment. It was a hot day. Ivan’s arthritis frequently acted up in the heat. Mrs. Chang had left her door open to try to get a cross-breeze in her apartment. Ivan heard the muddled, choppy sound of beginner playing coming from the apartment. His playing had sounded like that once, until his grandmother shaped him into something else, until she turned him into a piano player. Ivan walked past his own apartment and toward his neighbor’s open door. When he got to the doorway, he looked inside. A little boy was sitting at a bright green piano. Ivan could only see the boy’s back. He looked so small sitting there, with his feet inches off the ground and the ends of the piano still out of his reach. The boy was struggling through a simple version of the piece that Cole was in the middle of playing. He was only playing one note at a time but he was using both hands and all of his fingers. Ivan imagined that the boy whose face he could not see was none other than his younger self. He imagined that he was a child again who was still learning to play the piano. He imagined tapping the boy on the shoulder only to see his childhood self staring back at him.

  The young boy had potential. It was barely tapped potential but potential nonetheless. Ivan could feel the music flowing out of his fingers and onto the piano keys. The boy merely needed to learn technique, to learn how to control the music inside of him. Ivan stood in the doorway, listening to the music and watching the boy’s fingers. The pain in Ivan’s fingers was still intense. He rubbed his clawlike hands together to try to ease the pain a bit. Then he reached out and gently knocked on the open door.

  Immediately upon hearing the knock, the boy stopped playing and turned toward the door. Ivan was almost surprised that the face looking back at him was somebody else’s. It belonged to a young Asian boy. He stared at Ivan, confused about what a strange man was doing standing outside, knocking on their open door. A moment later, the boy’s mother came in from the kitchen, a towel draped over her shoulder. For the first time, Ivan noticed the wonderful smell coming out of their apartment. He wondered how long they’d been neighbors. He truly had no idea.

  “Is he too loud?” Mrs. Chang asked Ivan. “We can close the door.”

  Ivan shook his head. “It’s fine. I like the music. Does he take lessons?”

  The mother shrugged. “YouTube,” she answered.

  Ivan rubbed his hands together even harder. “I can teach him,” he told her. “I can give him lessons.”

  Mrs. Chang gave Ivan a once-over. “You are a piano teacher?”

  Ivan shook his head again. “No,” he admitted, “but I can play. I took lessons for a long time. I can teach him.”

  “We don’t have much money for piano lessons,” Mrs. Chang informed Ivan, though he had already guessed as much.

  Ivan thought about it for a moment. “Ten dollars and a dinner for every lesson. That’s all I’ll charge.”

  “Play.” Mrs. Chang began shoving Ivan toward the piano. As Ivan neared the instrument, Mrs. Chang motioned for Andy to get up. “Play,” she ordered Ivan again.

  Ivan sat down at the piano. He splayed his fingers as far as his pain would allow. Then he played for Mrs. Chang and her son. It was the first time that Ivan had played the piano in years, but it all came back to him almost instantly. He played a much more elaborate version of the piece that Andy had
been struggling through, the same version that Cole was playing in their apartment now.

  Cole finished. He could barely breathe. “You play like he played,” Mrs. Chang said to Cole after they let the silence settle into the room. “He was a beautiful piano player. You are almost as good. Now my son needs to go to bed.”

  “Wait,” said Cole. “Before he goes, can he play one short piece for me?”

  Mrs. Chang looked down at her son. Other than the nest in the back of his hair, the boy didn’t look tired. “Please, Mommy,” said the boy as his mother stared down at him.

  “One piece,” Mrs. Chang said. Cole stood up from the bench and the boy sat down. His toes touched the ground now. His arms were much longer than the first time Ivan had watched him play. Andy began to play a piece that Ivan had been recently teaching him. It was clear that the boy had been practicing, maybe even more since the news of his teacher’s death. Maybe, if he practiced hard enough, Ivan would come back to hear him. Of course Ivan would never come back, but this audience was the next best thing. Andy couldn’t play for Ivan ever again, but he could play for the man who had Ivan’s memories.

  As the boy played, Cole began to remember all the lessons Ivan had given him. Andy was quiet, but funny and fiery when he needed to be. He worked hard. Cole could feel the bond between him and Ivan grow with each lesson. Cole felt an immense wave of love and pride well up inside him as he listened, and he knew the pride was a memory too.

  The piece the boy played wasn’t complicated. It was beautiful, and Andy performed it to near perfection. It was the same piece that Cole remembered Ivan’s grandmother teaching him when he was about Andy’s age.

  Something suddenly popped into Cole’s head. It startled him, but he did his best to suppress the memory. He wanted to stay in the moment. Then Andy finished the piece and looked up lovingly at Cole, waiting for his approval. He didn’t need it, though. The kid knew that he’d nailed it.

  A few seconds after Andy finished, Cole blurted out the first thing that came into his mind. “He was going to buy you a present,” Cole said to Andy. “That’s why he was at the mall.” Cole’s mind raced. Ivan had finally saved up enough money from these piano lessons to get his student a gift. He hadn’t gone to the mall to blow anyone up. Cole looked down at the boy who had barely finished playing his heart out on the piano and he was suddenly engulfed by an immense sadness, one that he’d somehow avoided on this case so far. Ivan had gone to the mall to buy this boy a gift to congratulate him on how much better his playing had become, to thank him for being such a good student and for working so hard. Ivan had wanted to thank Andy for giving his life a purpose again, for the first time since he’d given up his dream of becoming a baseball player. Ivan had gone to the mall to buy Andy a gift to tell him, without words, that he loved him. Instead he’d been blown to pieces by a bomb. The boy would never receive Ivan’s gift, never have another piano lesson with his beloved teacher.

  Cole did his best to cover up his sadness. He didn’t want Andy to see it. Instead, he leaned in toward the boy and forced a smile onto his face. He placed a hand on the boy’s small shoulder. “That was wonderful,” Cole told him. Andy smiled up at Cole and nodded. “You had a good teacher. He would have loved to hear you play like that.” Cole choked back all the emotion he could. It was hard, though. Remembering how Ivan felt about this child, Cole needed to say more, felt like he owed it to Ivan. “Your teacher loved you very much.” With that, the boy leaned into Cole, wrapped his small arms around him, and, without a sound, began to cry. Cole did the only thing that his memories would let him do. He bent down, hugging the boy back, never wanting to let him go.

  Andy never spoke a word. Eventually, Cole felt the boy’s grip on him loosen. With that opening, Cole loosened his own grip, without even looking down at the boy. He had work to do and couldn’t spend any more time here. The clock in his head was still ticking down the minutes. Cole turned and walked toward the door of the Changs’ apartment, passing Mrs. Chang on his way out. “Thank you,” she said to Cole with a small bow as he walked past her. “You can come again.” It was half a statement and half a question. Cole didn’t respond to her. He simply headed out the door and back down the stairs. Once downstairs, Cole walked through the doors to the street.

  Cole took out his cellphone. He called Ed first. “It was her,” Cole said as soon as Ed answered.

  “You remembered?” Ed replied.

  “No,” Cole admitted. “Her memories still aren’t coming to me. I still can’t break through.”

  “Then how do you know it was her?”

  “Because I remembered why Ivan was going to the mall. He was just fucking shopping. There was no bomb, no evil plan. It was her. It was Faith. She’s the bomber.”

  “You’re sure?” asked Ed.

  “Yes.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Take everyone off investigating Ivan. Shift all our resources to Faith.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got to break into Faith’s memories. I know they’re in there. There has to be a way.”

  Chapter 15

  THREE DAYS AND ONE HOUR AFTER THE FIRST BOMBING

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” Cole said, pushing his eggs around on the plate.

  “And you’re sure they’re in there?’ Ed asked, pointing his fork at Cole’s forehead.

  “Yeah. I can feel them. It’s like having a word on the tip of your tongue but instead of a word, it’s an entire life. Besides, I remember the morning of the bombing, as strange a memory as that is. I just can’t remember anything else.”

  “I still don’t understand why she would do it.” Ed shoveled a hunk of pancake into his mouth.

  “You get some sleep last night?” Cole asked Ed.

  Ed swallowed his food, then nodded. “A few hours. You?”

  “As much as I could. I was hoping some sleep might help.”

  “What’s the closest you’ve been to having something like this happen before?”

  Cole thought about it. He mentally ran through every case that he’d worked since he’d become the Memory Detective. He shook his head. “There have been times where it’s taken me a while to remember what I needed to break a case. A couple times it took weeks before the key memories broke through. I know we don’t have weeks here. But this is different. In all of those cases, I could remember something. Before, it was always about finding the right memories, never about breaking into the memories completely.”

  “On the cases where it took weeks for you to remember the memories you needed, what did you do? How did you break through?”

  Cole knew where Ed was going. He’d interrogated enough criminals to know how to lead someone to an answer that the person did not want to give.

  “You want me to call Dr. Tyson,” Cole said. He didn’t want to do that. Dr. Tyson was one of the world’s leading experts on memory transplants. She’d been working with Cole almost from his first case. Over the years, she had repeatedly helped to keep him sane. She knew almost everything there was to know about him. Then Cole found out that she’d been selling his information to the Company, and the Company had been using it to help them sell people’s memories to the rich on the black market.

  “We both know that she could help you. We’re running out of time, Cole.” Ed looked at his watch. “We’ve got less than three days. I don’t know what happened between you and her, but I have to think that this is more important. More people are going to die if we don’t figure this out.”

  “We?” repeated Cole.

  “I was trying to be nice,” Ed said. He stared out the window of the diner at the people walking past them on the sidewalk. Then he tried again. “More people are going to die if you don’t figure this out, Cole.”

  Cole glared at Ed; he knew that his partner was right. “You never asked me why I don’t see Dr. Tyson anymore.”

  Ed shrugged. “It was never any of my business before. But i
t’s my business now. It’s our job to save people’s lives.”

  “I don’t know if she’ll be able to help me.” Cole thought about Dr. Tyson. He had trusted her. He had shared every detail of his crazy life with her, and she betrayed him. He knew he couldn’t trust her anymore, and he didn’t know if the relationship would work without that trust.

  “I can call her,” Ed said. “I can ask her to come down to New York. You have to admit that it’s worth a shot, Cole.”

  Cole stood up from the table. He’d eaten only about a third of his breakfast and even that he’d had to force down. “Fine,” he said to Ed. “Call her. Until then, I’ll keep working on Faith’s memories on my own.”

  Chapter 16

  TWO DAYS AND TWENTY HOURS UNTIL THE SECOND BOMBING

  When she knocked on his apartment door late that afternoon, Cole was going over Faith’s file again. He’d deleted Ivan’s file from his computer. He didn’t need the temptation. The allure of using the folder to help escape into one of Ivan’s memories was too distracting. It barely mattered anyway. Ivan’s memories kept coming to him whether Cole tried to trigger them or not. Every time Cole thought he was close to triggering one of Faith’s memories, one of Ivan’s came to him instead. Cole admired their persistence, even if the memories were often more of the same.

  After his breakfast with Ed, Cole had arranged to spend the morning in Brooklyn with Suzanne Lantz, one of Faith’s good friends from high school. She and Faith had stayed in touch and saw each other periodically but weren’t close anymore. She said that she wasn’t sure who Faith was close to nowadays. They had run in the same group in high school. They weren’t really the popular girls, but they didn’t aspire to be. It was simpler hanging out with friends, dating the cute boys who just happened not to play sports, and generally doing what they wanted. Suzanne said that they all got good grades but they weren’t nerdy. They just kind of were. She described it as a sheltered but otherwise pleasant childhood. Cole didn’t bother asking the woman what might drive one of their old crew to become a terrorist. It was clear from their conversation that she wouldn’t know, and the fact that Faith was the terrorist was still not something that the authorities were going public with. Instead, Cole asked her to tell him about specific memories that she had of Faith. Concerts, boys, teenage traumas, anything.