The Murderer's Memories

by T. S. Nichols

  “Just let me try to remember,” Cole begged. “If she did do it, wouldn’t you want to know why? I’ll tell you everything.”

  “You’ve already made up your mind.” Carl looked up at Cole’s forehead. “I’m not going to let you twist my daughter’s memories to show that she did something that I know she didn’t do. I wish to God we never let you take her memories to begin with. If I could pull them out of your head myself, I would.” Then he turned and began to walk back to his house.

  “Don’t you want to keep more people from dying?” Cole called out to the man’s back.

  He turned around, lifting his finger at Cole one more time. “I do,” he answered. “That’s why I’m not going to let you waste your time rummaging through my daughter’s life. You should be focused on whoever actually did this.”

  “But how can you be so sure it wasn’t your daughter?” asked Cole, in one last desperate effort.

  “Because she’s my daughter, asshole.” Cole could tell that he was thinking about closing the gap between them again.

  “Carl, please,” Evelyn’s small voice sang out from behind him. “Come back inside.”

  Carl turned away from Cole again and walked back into the house, and Evelyn closed the door behind him. Cole took another deep breath. He looked at his watch. He looked back at the house. Nothing had changed but time. Faith’s memories remained elusive, and now they had two fewer hours to get the job done. He’d have to search out other triggers. The house wasn’t working. The parents weren’t working. It wasn’t Ivan’s memories that had been blocking Faith’s. It was something else entirely. Cole knew that now. Being yelled at by Faith’s father should have triggered something. That is, unless her death had changed him so much that he wasn’t even a shadow of who he used to be.

  Cole was still standing in the middle of the front yard, staring into the windows. He picked up his phone and called Ed.

  “Cole,” Ed said when he answered, “where the hell have you been?”

  “I’m in New Jersey,” Cole answered him. “I need you to come get me.”

  “Where in New Jersey?” asked Ed.

  “Faith’s old house,” Cole answered without giving away any emotions.

  “Isn’t there a faster way for you to get back?”

  “Just come, Ed. I need the time to think.”

  “Have you remembered anything yet?” asked Ed.

  “Not a damn thing,” Cole answered. “And you don’t have to tell me how much time we have left. Believe me, I know.”

  Cole ended the call without waiting for Ed to respond. Then he walked over to the curb in front of the neighbor’s house and sat down. He wondered if they’d made any progress so far at all or if giving him Faith and Ivan’s memories had been a giant mistake. He was chasing memories that he couldn’t remember, like a blind dog chasing his cropped tail. Cole placed his head in his hands and waited.

  It took Ed well over an hour to get to Cole. Every minute felt like an eternity.

  Chapter 25

  TWO DAYS AND TWO HOURS BEFORE THE SECOND BOMBING

  Cole didn’t tell Ed about the Company. The more Ed knew, the more dangerous it would be for him and his family. Instead, Cole told his partner a version of the truth: that Dr. Tyson had performed an experimental procedure on him with the goal of erasing Ivan’s memories so that they’d stop blocking Faith’s.

  “But it didn’t work?” Ed asked, steering the car on to the highway toward the Lincoln Tunnel.

  “Not yet,” Cole said. “Well, it seems to have half worked, since I can’t remember Ivan’s memories either.”

  “So you know that they’re gone?”

  “I haven’t tried to remember them since the procedure, but they’re not coming to me like they were before.” Cole didn’t mention that, during the run-up to the procedure, he’d tried to hold something back, to save something. It wasn’t important, not to the case anyway. “They’re definitely not getting in the way of Faith’s memories anymore.”

  Ed maneuvered the car into the far left lane and started passing all the other cars. He thought about putting on his sirens to get them into the city as fast as possible but he didn’t know what good it would do. “All that and you still haven’t remembered any of her memories?”

  “Nope. Not yet.”

  “Not even when you talked to her parents?”

  “No, but I’m not surprised. I don’t think the people I just spoke to would remind her of her parents. I think that what they’ve been through probably changed them. At least, I don’t think they ever talked to her the way they talked to me. Her dad blamed me for saying that she was the bomber. He said that she couldn’t have been.”

  “Why not?” asked Ed.

  “Because he knew her. Because she was his daughter. How old are your kids, Ed?”

  Ed shook his head. “No. I don’t want to bring my kids into this conversation.”

  “But do you think you know them? Do you think you can know everything that they’ll do?”

  “I don’t want to do this, Cole,” Ed repeated. They were nearing the entrance to the tunnel.

  “I just want to know if he could be right.”

  Ed glanced over at Cole. “Don’t doubt yourself now,” he encouraged him.

  “You’re confident that I’m right?”

  “Cole, we don’t have time for you to be wrong.” Ed reached across and opened the glove compartment. “I’ve been working on something while you were MIA. There’s papers in there that you should look at.”

  Cole reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a stack of papers, but it was too dark in the tunnel for him to get a good look at them. He reached up and turned on the interior lights. There were ten pages, each one a map of a city neighborhood. A few of the neighborhoods repeated. On each map was a squiggly red line, with red numbers next to a few spots on the red line. “What is it?” Cole asked.

  “Faith’s cellphone. She left the geolocation on. This is everywhere she went during the ten days before the bombing. We got the data from one of the apps. We figured out that it was her by backtracking her between her apartment and her job.”

  “What did you learn?”

  “Not much,” Ed admitted. “We were hoping that it would lead us to the other bomber, but whatever planning she did started too far in advance for us to get the data. What we found was pretty normal, other than the fact that, in the ten days we were able to track her, she didn’t seem to see any friends.”

  “Can’t you go back farther?”

  “We’re trying. We haven’t been able to find the data. We think that maybe she didn’t have her geolocation on while she was actually planning the bombing. Maybe she didn’t want to be tracked then, and later she just didn’t care anymore.”

  “Okay, so what am I supposed to do with this?” Cole asked. They emerged out of the tunnel and into the traffic of midtown Manhattan.

  “These are all days of her life, Cole. Look at the bottom of each sheet. It’s got a date on it. There are weekdays and weekends. The numbers indicate when she stayed in one place for over thirty minutes.” Cole still didn’t get it. He was tired, and Ed was a few steps ahead of him. “Take out the Sunday sheet,” Ed ordered. Cole flipped through the pages until he got to Sunday. “What did she do? Where did she go?”

  Cole stared at the map. “It looks like she went up to Central Park in the morning. To the lake.”

  “And then?”

  “She stayed there for over an hour. Then she walked over to the Met.” Cole was finally beginning to understand. “She spent all afternoon at the Met.”

  “Don’t you think that maybe you’d want to spend the last ten days of your life at places that mean something to you? I know I would.”

  “The maps? They’re memory trigger guides?”

  “Exactly.” Ed smiled.

  “You’re a fucking genius, Ed. This map of the museum—how accurate is it?” Cole noticed that, three of four times, Faith had spent more than half an ho
ur in one place inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  “It can’t tell you what floor she was on, but it can tell you where she was within the museum’s floor plan. If you get a museum map, you can probably figure out what rooms she was in. You may even be able to figure out what she was looking at.”

  Cole looked at his watch. They were down to the last fifty or so hours. “Bring me to the park first. I’ll get started right away.”

  Chapter 26

  FORTY-SIX HOURS UNTIL THE SECOND BOMBING

  Cole stared at the painting. He’d already been staring at it for almost forty minutes. Faith had spent nearly an hour in the same room of the Metropolitan Museum of Art only a few weeks prior. Cole felt almost certain that he was staring at the same painting that she had stared at. The problem was that he didn’t feel anything else. The painting was by an artist named Jules Breton. It was called The Weeders. It depicts a group of women at work in a large field beneath the setting sun. All but one of the women are kneeling, pulling weeds out of the ground. They all wear light hoods and their faces are stern and focused. A sliver of moonlight shines behind them. One woman stands straight up, staring across the fields at something far off, something outside the painting, something we will never see. It was a beautiful picture. Cole admired the magnificent blue and golden sky and noticed how none of the women, not even the one who wasn’t working, took a moment to look up at it themselves.

  Faith had stared at that same picture. Cole knew it. She saw something in it. It should have triggered memories. The trip to Central Park, where Cole had spent hours watching people paddling across the lake on their rental boats, should have triggered memories as well. Cole had seen other paintings too. He’d walked all through the museum, following the little swirling red line on his map. He’d stopped in the Indian art section to stare at some sculptures that he’d felt oddly drawn to. Then he walked through Egyptian art and Native American art and finally came to this painting that he had never seen before by an artist that he had never heard of. Yet here he was, transfixed. She had stared at this same painting, he was sure of it, and still nothing of any use came to him.

  Cole moved on to another room, to another painting. This one was a self-portrait by another artist that Cole, never a student of the arts, had not heard of before: a man named Eugène Carrière. This self-portrait was done almost entirely with different shades of drab brown paint. The painting showed only the artist’s face. The image was fuzzy, almost as if the subject was stepping out of a haze. His features lacked any definition other than how the light played across them. Cole got very close to the picture, so close that one of the security guards asked him to take a step back. Up close, Cole could see the brushstrokes on the canvas, could see where the image of the man disintegrated into the background, as if the painting might eat the man whole. The eyes of the man in the picture were small and dark, squinting out of the painting into the world from the fog that surrounded him. The eyes looked somehow both confused and indifferent. Once again, staring at that painting, Cole felt emotions he never would have felt before, felt a melancholy that he was sure came from Faith. He had never had a desire to look at a painting before in his life, but he could have stared at these for hours.

  Cole didn’t have hours, not without memories. Every moment without a memory was a moment closer to disaster. He now had less than two days to not only find the second bomber but to stop them. It wasn’t enough time, and he was sitting there staring at paintings.

  The museum was closing soon. Cole walked over and sat down in the middle of the room that housed Eugène Carrière’s self-portrait. He felt almost like the man was watching him. Cole took out the maps that Ed had given him again and began looking at them, trying to decide which one he should try next, tracing the lines on the map in his head, imagining what the paths would look like through the actual city streets. As he perused the maps, his head started to drop. Tired, Cole dozed off for a second, and dreamed about colors and dust. Nothing else, just bright colors and brown dust. He woke up when his phone buzzed.

  Cole looked down at the phone. Dr. Tyson had sent him a text message: “Call me. Have info.”

  Cole immediately stood and walked out of the museum. He got to the steps in front of the building and called Dr. Tyson. He didn’t have time not to trust her. He could not trust her later, after this was all over. “What is it?” Cole asked as soon as she answered the phone.

  “Depression,” Dr. Tyson answered.

  “Go on,” Cole prodded.

  “I’ve been doing some more reading. I think the bomber may have been suffering from depression.”

  “Are you saying that she blew up twenty people because she was depressed?” Cole paced the large white steps as he spoke, walking from one end to the other and back again.

  “No. Of course not. I have no idea why she did what she did.”

  “Then why does it matter whether or not she was depressed?”

  “Because depression has an effect on people’s memories.”

  “How?”

  “Well, we used to think depression affected how people remember, that depressed people could remember the big picture but would have difficulty remembering specific details and trouble distinguishing between similar memories.”

  “And now?”

  “There have been studies by some of my colleagues on how people have reacted to receiving memory transplants from people who suffered from depression. What we’ve learned is that depression doesn’t affect how people remember, it affects how their brains create and rebuild memories.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that the reason that you can’t remember any of Faith’s memories is because you’re trying to use specific triggers to unlock them, but that’s not going to work, because if Faith was depressed, that’s not how her brain built memories.”

  “So what do I do?” asked Cole. He stopped pacing and stood looking out across busy Fifth Avenue.

  “I don’t know. You need bigger-picture triggers. Some of the studies suggest that the only people who can remember the memories of someone suffering from depression are other people suffering from depression. There’s a quote about how, when you’re depressed, you can’t remember what it’s like to be happy. Well, apparently, the reciprocal might also be true.”

  “So you’re telling me that I need to be depressed to remember Faith’s memories.”

  Cole waited a moment. He heard nothing but silence on the other end of the phone as Dr. Tyson tried to think of her response. “No. I don’t think so. I don’t know. I think that you need to focus on different types of triggers. Specific triggers aren’t going to help. The triggers need to be bigger and broader.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  His question was answered by another moment of silence. And then, “I’m not sure.” Cole could hear the remorse in her voice. “Have you remembered anything yet?”

  Cole thought about the paintings and how he felt when he looked at them. He thought about the dream of colors and dust. “Nothing that makes any sense,” he admitted.

  “How much time do you have?” asked Dr. Tyson.

  Cole looked at his watch. “Not enough,” he answered.

  Chapter 27

  FORTY-THREE HOURS UNTIL THE SECOND BOMBING

  Cole needed something to eat. He needed some sleep. He knew that time was running short, but it didn’t matter. His body was becoming more and more useless. He had tried. Now he needed to reset so that he could try again. He headed home from the museum. He picked up some cheap takeout Chinese food on the way home. Then he ate. And then he went to sleep. He set his alarm to wake him up in five hours so that he could get back to work.

  Chapter 28

  THIRTY-FIVE HOURS UNTIL THE SECOND BOMBING

  Cole woke up to his alarm. He got out of bed and walked over to his open window. It was the middle of the night. The sky was dark, and the city as quiet as it ever gets. It was time for him to get back to work, b
ut he had no idea what to do.

  Cole began to think about the other cases he had worked on and all the other memories he had inherited. They were murder victims. He had always known that their memories would end in death, sometimes brutal and always violent death. But all memories end in death and, even if not brutal or violent, it’s always blunt. Their endings never took away from their power and beauty. In fact, to Cole, it was often the opposite. The fragility of the victims’ lives made their memories that much more meaningful. Then there was Faith.

  Cole felt the cool night breeze blow in through the window. It would all be over soon, one way or the other. Cole thought about the one memory of Faith’s that he could remember, the mechanical, seemingly robotic memory of the bombing itself.

  Faith’s memories scared him. He was finally willing to admit that to himself. Maybe that’s why he couldn’t remember anything else. Maybe it wasn’t because Ivan’s memories had been getting in the way or because Faith had suffered from depression. Maybe Cole was just afraid to remember and he couldn’t control his fear. If that was the case, then his fear was going to lead to an untold number of new deaths and he had no idea what to do about it.

  Cole sat down, closed his eyes, and tried to remember. The memory of the bombing came to him first. The memory hadn’t changed. His own experiences and biases hadn’t twisted it yet. It was too calculating for that, too exact. This time, however, he remembered it all the way through, past the moments when before something had stopped him. He remembered sitting down on a bench in the middle of the mall. He remembered the weight of the bomb. He remembered the feeling of sweat running down Faith’s back. She knew that the longer she waited, the more crowded the mall would become, so she waited.

  Ivan spotted her as he walked out of the toy store. They made eye contact. Ivan was holding the purring ball of fur that he’d bought for Andy. Faith quickly looked away. Something in her face drew Ivan nearer to her, though. He looked like he was worried about her. She must have looked nervous and uncomfortable. He began walking toward her. She didn’t know what to do. This strange man was going to ruin everything. That’s how he got so close to her. She tried to ignore him but he kept coming. Of course he kept coming. With the way she was acting, his concern must have grown with each step. He was almost to her now. She couldn’t let him ruin everything. She had only one choice. “Excuse me, miss,” Ivan said with only the hint of an accent. “Are you okay?”