by Sarah Lovett
She blinked as if coming from dark to light, disoriented, mustering herself. Her head ached, her deltoids were so tight they burned, she had to pee—but the last thing she’d do was take a break now and end up with nothing.
Outside, in the hallway, heavy footsteps sounded. The urgent tones of an argument penetrated the walls of the room.
Taking her seat opposite him for the second time, she said, “This conversation—and the test results—will not be confidential, but the project’s coordinators will make every attempt to keep transcripts secure and available only to participants—”
She stiffened when Dantes’ hand suddenly covered her own.
“Lunatics and inmates. We’re not so bad, are we?” he whispered.
Wrenching her hand away, Sylvia felt Dantes watching her, felt the hunger of his curiosity.
“You can’t save them all, can you, Sylvia?” Dantes’ voice was soft, seductive.
Sylvia stared at him, blinking, hearing another voice internally. Dr. Strange, although the committee finds no grounds to cite you with an ethical violation in the death of Mona Carpenter, we do have concerns. It seems you did comply with the standards of your profession regarding safeguards against suicide, but when it came to the use of your judgment you could’ve gone the extra mile, relying less on intuition and luck, more on solid follow-up.
Dantes gazed back at her, his face a study in compassion, his voice soothing, as he said, “Tell me about Mona Carpenter.”
The shock registered. She said nothing. She focused on a single thought: I know how to handle this—it comes with the job.
Dantes said, “Pills and cutting—isn’t that overkill?” With each word his breath quickened as if he was aroused. If he had assaulted her physically, it couldn’t have been worse. But he wasn’t finished yet.
“What did it feel like to actually hear her death?” he asked.
Sylvia gathered together the tests and the tape recorder, sweeping them into her briefcase. She watched her sunglasses skid to the floor. Her heart was racing.
Dantes rose straight up from his chair, his presence filling the room as he whispered his last question. “What’s it like to know you could’ve saved her?”
For an instant Sylvia believed he would go further than verbal assault—but he’d already drawn blood. He stood rooted, burning her with his stare.
She knew the protocol for threatening or aggressive patients: remain calm, maintain distance, keep a barrier between you—always know where to find the panic button. She’d been here before—she’d be here again. None of that seemed to matter. She felt the rush of adrenaline, every synapse trapped in looping panic.
“You pathetic son of a bitch,” she hissed, suddenly coming to life. “Do you really believe you’re any better than a common sociopath?” She turned and took four steps to the door, her fist hitting metal.
The door swung wide. A uniformed guard blinked at the sight of Sylvia. “Done already?”
She left Dantes behind as the door slammed shut.
Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous going-across, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and staying still.
Nietzsche
9:55 A.M. From an office in his Hollywood Hills home, Professor Edmond Sweetheart watched as the female psychologist unceremoniously exited the private visiting room at MDC.
As an image captured by the hidden video camera and transmitted via a live satellite feed, Dr. Sylvia Strange appeared shaken and disturbed by Dantes’ verbally aggressive assault; but Sweetheart thought the woman possessed her own raw energy, her own dangerous edge, visible even on the small screen. And when she whispered some inaudible but clearly intense farewell, he was disappointed that the camera angle didn’t allow him to read her lips.
He still wasn’t sure about her; she was an unknown element—a positive or negative charge—introduced into this particular chemical equation. She was a catalyst—and when it came to John Dantes, a catalyst was exactly what they needed.
Strange walked into the hall, her screen image disappearing as the door closed behind her back. Sweetheart was left to study the prisoner, John Freeman Dantes. In turn, Dantes studied Sweetheart. He did this by facing the eye of the camera hidden in the wall-mounted clock.
Dantes stood without moving, without blinking as the seconds passed, adding up to one minute, then two. He stared through the lens, the wall, seemingly straight across the city into Sweetheart’s ebony eyes. Finally, his mouth took a slow turn, curling into a smile. He raised his right hand, middle finger extended.
Sweetheart’s eyes didn’t waver. He didn’t shift his posture on the tatami. His mouth was set in a rigid line, every muscle in his 280-pound frame was firing, but his breathing stayed slow and steady. Each inhalation, each exhalation helped still his violent thoughts.
Nor did Dantes break concentration—or the level of threat in his stance—not even when the prison door swung wide and three BOP officers entered the room. The door slammed and locked as the first officer shoved Dantes off balance. The prisoner resisted against the odds, refusing to relinquish power, even when the second officer raised a rubber baton. With one practiced blow, the guard barely grazed Dantes’ ribs as a warning.
The inmate dropped to his knees, apparently compliant.
Watching the show from his war room, Sweetheart didn’t bat an eye. His expression was as calm as the faces of the sumo wrestlers whose portraits decorated his walls. His gaze never strayed from the scene taking place on the monitor. The hum of computers, the distant buzz of traffic from Sunset Boulevard, the rustle of bamboo in the garden, the rhythm of his own breathing melded into white noise undisturbed even by the audio transmission coming from MDC. Thanks to the miracle of technology, the live feed could just as easily be originating from four thousand miles away instead of four.
Now the audio transmission was filled with the sounds of physical exertion and pain—grunts, groans. Sweetheart watched calmly, perhaps inclining his body just a fraction of an inch. No one in that small prison room was lifting an aggressive finger. The noise was coming from John Dantes as he collapsed to the floor apparently ill and retching violently.
Sweetheart studied the kinetic reactions of the prisoner. (That’s how he usually thought of Dantes these days—in the abstract. It was safer that way.) There was an abnormal spastic quality to those movements, as if they were the result of seizure activity. But Sweetheart had read the most recent physical and neurological reports on the prisoner, who despite institutional life was in near perfect health. The professor stored this latest bit in his own organic information processing system for later retrieval and evaluation.
As suddenly as it had begun, the apparent seizure ended. Dantes stood with the aid of the officers. As the inmate was led from the visiting room—and out of camera range—Sweetheart shifted on the tatami, relaxing almost imperceptibly. He took a sip of green tea from a raku cup before punching a button on a tiny keyboard.
The monitor responded with a new image, which was provided by a second camera at MDC. Sweetheart was now watching the Bureau of Prisons correctional officer Deborah Florette, hunched despondently in a chair inside a security office located in Metropolitan Detention Center’s administrative wing.
As the professor adjusted the volume of the audio feed, a disembodied male voice became distinguishable: “Who gave you the money, Florette?”
“I don’t know who he was,” Florette mumbled, shifting uncomfortably. “I never saw him.”
“But you were paid to courier contraband to Dantes. What’d you take him?”
Florette’s mouth set in a obstinate line. She shook her head, crossing her arms, every inch of her body language screaming emotional lockdown.
“How are your math skills, Florette?” A red-haired man stepped into the range of the camera’s lens, half filling the monitor. LAPD detective Red Church settled on the corner of a desk. “You’re looking at twenty
years, two decades, ten-and-ten behind bars.”
Mutely, CO Florette shook her head.
“C’mon, Deb.” Church sighed, his eyes sad. “A smart, pretty woman like yourself, two little ones, it’s a damn shame and a waste. You want to let the state raise your kids?”
“They were pictures,” Florette whispered. She dropped her chin, shielding herself from view, surrendering. “That’s all.” She looked up, dark eyes flashing. “Like baseball cards, that’s all. He’s a celebrity, right? Dantes is on those serial killer baseball cards. And this guy just wanted autographs.” Florette’s voice rose to the edge of hysteria. “This is Hollywood, right? Listen, if you want to go after somebody, go after the guys who make those cards in the first place!”
“Yeah,” Red Church said quietly. “We found it when we shook down his cell. And damn it, Florette, I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt.” Church leaned in close to the woman. “Tell me you didn’t know you were carrying a message.”
“I swear it—you’ve got my word of honor—I didn’t know.”
Sweetheart gazed down at the words transmitted and printed out from his computer twenty minutes earlier—a copy of the communication discovered in Dantes’ cell while Dr. Strange kept him busy.
dear friend
thru me the way into the woeful city
thru me the way to eternal pain
sacrifice the children of heathens
until no innocents lay claim
first circle broken
8 circles remain
I do your bidding faithfully
M—
A cold rage slowed Sweetheart’s blood. The second and third lines—the beginning of Dante Alighieri’s third canto of the Commedia—took him back to the Getty bombing and the obscure scratches on the end cap of pipe bomb. A child dead, his own flesh and blood—“sacrifice the children of heathens.” Eight days to the anniversary of the bombing—“8 circles remain.”
After the Getty, he’d led the pursuit to track down Dantes. The evidence had been good—a detonating chip traced to a single manufacturer, a transport trail that led straight to Dantes.
Had it been too good? Had his lust to bring in Dantes blinded him to the possibility of a collaborator? If a collaborator existed, Sweetheart wanted his head.
The FBI would be monitoring the movements of the psychologist, Dr. Strange. She’d passed the profiling project’s security protocol, her credentials seemed clean enough, but the timing of her visit to Dantes was going to interest them keenly. He imagined they would keep an agent on her for the next twenty-four hours.
Sweetheart had his own way of tracking human subjects.
He shifted his body to face another monitor, this one a flat screen mounted directly on the white wall. He typed in a search string for Strange, Sylvia.
The computer fluttered its eyelashes—flirting with offers of infinite data—the blink-blink of information flashing across the screen. Within forty-five seconds he was looking at Multiplex prOfiles Systems AnalysIs Kit data.
MOSAIK was his baby; her specialty was agent-based, multitiered profiling.
Quickly, he screened past the basic (and now familiar) biographical data, which included medical, academic, professional and legal records, as well as geographic and personal history. Bits of information registered:
Ht: 5 feet, 9 inches; Wt: 141; eyes: brown; hair: brown; skin: olive; scars: left eye, left hand; tattoos: NA; moles: right shoulder, right breast
Profession: psychologist, forensic
Marriage status: divorced
LINKS: relationships, personal
LINKS: history, sexual
Heritage: Irish, Italian
hospitalizations, general: tonsillectomy, 1977
hospitalizations, psychiatric: 1981, Los Angeles, CA
LINKS: evaluations, psychiatric.
The data flow was never-ending; it documented her extensive research on prisons, on attachment disorders, on psychopathy; the foster daughter who had been rescued from a barrio on the border of Mexico and Texas; the love affair with a psychiatrist now dead of cancer; her engagement to an investigator with the New Mexico State Police; a long-ago marriage so brief it hardly registered; the tentative relationship with her mother; the father who had deserted his wife and daughter many years ago.
Sweetheart gave MOSAIK a verbal command and a new screen appeared:
Father: Strange, Daniel, Danny; born 1940, CO, Colorado Springs
REMARKS: missing person
LINKS: Strange, D, military; Army service record
LINKS: training record CLASSIFIED
LINKS: Vietnam; Cambodia
LINKS: Strange, D, POW
LINKS: covert operations; special ops
LINKS: CIA
LINKS: Strange, D, missing person
LINKS: global tracking, current status CLASSIFIED
He was fishing.
As he stared at the screen, he calculated which pieces of information would provide him with the most leverage.
Sweetheart knew Strange was investigating her father’s whereabouts—she’d hired a private investigator named Joshua Harold. She’d even visited morgues to eliminate the possibility that Daniel Strange was a John Doe. With one command, Sweetheart could pull up the entire file . . .
He scrolled past screen after screen, ignoring data on DNA and voiceprint and fingerprints, momentarily excluding the photo library, video storage, linguistic samples, GIS mapping of mobility.
He reached into a glazed ceramic bowl and selected a salted plum candy. The soft tech hum provided background for his thoughts.
Sweetheart typed in a new name: Carpenter, Mona Suzanne.
He added relationship modifiers: client; deceased.
He gave a verbal command.
As new information filled the screen, Sweetheart thought of Dr. Sylvia Strange, the catalyst. It interested him . . . this connection between Strange and Dantes had just taken an unexpected turn: suicide; two women separated by three decades; each had taken her own life. Dantes’ mother. The doctor’s client.
This morbid connection between Dantes and Strange made her valuable—it also made her vulnerable. Especially if another bomber was loose in LA.
10:09 A.M. Sylvia hunched inside the leathery cave of the Lincoln nursing the last of a cigarette.
Ten minutes earlier, she’d stepped out of MDC’s artificial womb into searing Los Angeles sunlight. Half blind and conscious only of the sign for the car park on the side of the large concrete structure ahead, she’d stumbled across Alameda, a wide downtown boulevard surprisingly free of traffic. The sun had assaulted eyes already glazed and heavy lidded from stress and chemicals. And fear. Dantes had made her afraid.
It almost felt good—that forced exile from a deadened world.
She exhaled smoke, studying the cigarette she gripped between taut fingers. The ragged, charred edge of tobacco had almost burned down to the yellowed filter. She opened the door of the Lincoln just long enough to jab the cigarette butt on the pavement, then she jerked the door shut and set the locks. Shaking off the fear and a fleeting sense of doom, she turned the key in the ignition. The engine awoke with a powerful growl.
She followed the I-10 west until it slapped smack up against ocean. The Pacific shone with the watery blue of ink. It stretched and rolled and heaved its weight against the wide lip of sand. With Missy Elliott singing about D.C., Atlanta, and LA from the radio (volume cranked), Sylvia watched lunar magnetism muscling the tides.
Traffic was backed up two blocks in front of the neon entrance to Santa Monica Pier. Inching toward the intersection, and finally turning north onto Ocean Avenue, she caught a catty-corner view of the restaurant where she was due to meet Leo for dinner. The Lobster, a glaringly white beach-box structure, stuck out like a swollen jaw on a neck of stilts. A banner advertised Thursday evening concerts on the pier; next week, oldies by the Velvet Underground.
Joggers, sunbathers, tourists, and street people shared the slice of gre
en known as Palisades Park. As she drove past the looming, funky deco prow of the Shangri La Hotel, she tried to reach her fiancé in New Mexico by cell phone. Matt England didn’t answer but his machine managed to cut her off just as she told him she loved him. She left a message for Leo Carreras—moving their meeting up to three o’clock. She tossed the phone onto the passenger seat as she drove past Wilshire and Montana, finally turning right onto Marguerita Avenue.
She parked the Lincoln in front of the property owned by Leo, and she stepped out into a balmy ocean breeze. Carrying her briefcase, garment bag, and overnight case, she crossed manicured grass skirting lemony tufts of daffodils until she reached the tiny yellow thirties-style bungalow that was one of a quartet. Leo’s stark and glassy condominium occupied the south end of the large lot. He rented the cottages to various LA standards: a television writer, a character actor with a fondness for Irish whiskey, a waiter/singer. The last bungalow, Numero Quatro, was reserved for Leo’s visiting colleagues. Over the past two years, Sylvia had stayed here on consulting trips. The key was under the familiar ceramic pot that overflowed with night-blooming jasmine.
Inside, the house smelled of old wood, salt, the faintest hint of ocean mildew, and perfume. She located the source of the sweet fragrance immediately, a fat ocher-tinted porcelain vase filled with white, yellow, and lavender orchids, gracing an antique writing desk. She experienced a moment of pleasure tinged with uneasiness knowing Leo had chosen the flowers especially for her; breaking off one delicate blossom, she pressed it to her cheek. The petals felt silky against her skin.
The bungalow had been built around a simple rectangular floor plan: kitchen and dining nook, living room, bedroom, bath—and tiny sitting room, which functioned as an office—all connecting around a compact central hall.
After cracking louver blinds in the living room, she moved to the bedroom, where she tossed her bag on the nubby white spread. Pulling out shorts, T-shirt, cross-trainers, and her blue Dodgers cap, she stripped off her work clothes—she’d been wearing them since 4 A.M. in New Mexico—and quickly changed into running gear. In the kitchen she poured herself a tall glass of tap water, draining it in seconds. Then she was out the door.