In Dark Places

by Michael Prescott

  She wasn't tied down, wasn't encumbered in any way. She was free to get out of the chair whenever she wished, if only she could get her limbs to respond. She couldn't. She was paralyzed by the electromagnetic frequencies inhibiting her motor functions.

  She had designed the MBI program to minimize the risk of seizure by suppressing motor response. Now she was trapped by her own technology.

  He kicked the swivel chair backward and stood up. "I've got to admit, Doctor, it makes things very convenient for me."

  She noticed he'd stopped calling her by her first name. He had, in fact, been strangely reluctant to do so from the beginning. Perhaps he needed to depersonalize her, distance himself from his victim.

  He got out of the chair and surveyed the room, taking a letter opener from her desk.

  Cut my throat, he's going to cut my throat amp;

  But he made no move toward her. He looked up at the ceiling, then climbed onto the sofa underneath the smoke detector. With the letter opener, he began to pry the detector loose.

  She knew, then. She knew exactly what he was going to do. She remembered his talk about throwdown guns, untraceable because the serial number had been eradicated. If he'd had a gun like that, he would have used it on her. He didn'tnot with him, anyway. If he cut her throat or strangled her, he would get blood on himself or leave hair and fiber evidence.

  But fire amp;

  Fire would erase all evidence. Fire would reduce the room to ashes. There would be nothing for the crime-scene technicians to find.

  The smoke detector had come loose. With the letter opener he cut the wires, then extracted the battery.

  She tried to figure out how it had happened. Wolper and Brand were in it together. That was clear now. Together they had done everything they could to stonewall her. Brand had refused to show up for his session. Wolper had tried to talk her out of pursuing the case. When that failed, he sent her to the worst neighborhood in town, obviously expecting that she wouldn't risk the trip.

  Still, nothing Brand said had implicated Wolper. And Wolper didn't strike her as the type to take undue risks out of loyalty to a subordinate. If Brand had taken the payoff from Valdez and then shot him amp;

  But maybe he hadn't.

  Wolper went into the waiting room, where he discovered a second smoke detector near the bathroom.

  Robin thought back to the session. Brand had been resisting the MBI process. She remembered his fear of going into a trancebeing hypnotized, as he called it. Of course he didn't want to be hypnotized when there were secrets he was afraid to reveal.

  To overcome his resistance she had told him to report the scene in the parking garage as a spectator. He had reported witnessing a confrontation between a cop and Eddie Valdez. She had assumed the cop was Brand himself. What if it wasn't?

  What if the cop had been Wolper?

  In the waiting room, he slid an end table underneath the smoke detector and stood on it as he disabled the device. That detector was not wired into the AC, and all he had to do was remove the battery.

  She replayed the session in her memory. Brand's voice, slow and thick, recounting the events.

  "Eddie brings out the money. Thick wad, wrapped in wax paper, all taped up. Looks like a fat deli sandwich. Makes me hungry when I see it. I didn't have lunch that day"

  Her own voice, interrupting.

  "Not you. You're the observer, Alan. You're only watching. Tell me about the two men. Eddie and the cop."

  And Brand going on: "The cop takes the money, puts it in his coat. It doesn't print too bad against the material. Nobody will notice it there."

  Every time he'd injected himself into the story, she had made him pull back and focus as an observer. It had never occurred to her that he might have actually been an observer all along. Maybe he had been making the pickup with Wolperno, that made no sense; he had called in the report on his radio before entering the garage. He must have followed Valdez inside and stumbled on the transaction, watched from the shadows as it went down.

  When Wolper realized he had a witness, he swore Brand to silence. More than that, he made Brand take the fall for the shooting, since Brand had already radioed that he was in pursuit of Valdez. Wolper, or perhaps others involved in the conspiracy, had finessed the shooting review so Brand was assured a positive outcome. Whatever discrepancies there were between the bullet that had killed Valdez and the gun Brand carried would have disappeared.

  Finished with the smoke detector, Wolper went into the kitchenette. She couldn't see him without turning her head, and her head wouldn't turn, of course. But even over the clicking of the magnetic coils, she could hear drawers and cupboards being opened as he looked for flammable materials.

  The conspiracy had all been covered upuntil Brand started talking under the influence of MBI. Although he hadn't implicated Wolper, he had opened up the incident for a new investigation. Wolper had to take care of things before they went any further. She had told no one but him about her findings. He stalled her for a day with a bogus claim that he was going to review the case file on the Valdez shooting. Then he came after her.

  At dinner she'd told him she was treating an inmate. She'd even said when her session with the convict was held. While the session was under way, Wolper must have entered the waiting room, made small talk with the deputyand killed him with a knife or other sharp instrument when the man's back was turned. He came into this room, concealed by darkness, unheard because both she and Gray were wearing headsets. He would have killed her the same way he'd killed the deputy, then found a way to make Gray look responsible. Maybe he was planning to shoot Gray and then claim he had arrived early for his four-o'clock appointment. He would have been a herothe off-duty cop who stopped a serial killer's rampage.

  But Gray spoiled his plans. He had the screwdriver. He used it to free himself from the straps. And when Wolper attacked her, Gray took him by surprise.

  Gray really had saved her life. The blood on the screwdriver was Wolper's, not the deputy's.

  Wolper had fled. He would have had to bandage his cut, dispose of any soiled clothes and other evidence. Then he returned to her office, feigning shock and sympathy. He had to return. He had to know how much she remembered.

  He had taken a terrible chance. Suppose, when she saw him, her memory of the attack had instantly returned. He would have been finished. No more cards to play.

  Except that wasn't true, was it? He'd had another card. The highest card of all.

  He'd had Meg.

  That was why she'd been taken. She was Wolper's insurance. His guarantee that whatever Robin remembered, she wouldn't dare talk. At the first hint that her memory was coming back, he would have quietly informed her that if she breathed a word, her daughter would die.

  He had pretended to be concerned about her. He'd stuck close to her, handling her interview himself, chauffeuring her to Hollywood. He had needed to stay close so he could be sure she didn't start to figure out what was really going on.

  Wisps of smoke drifted from the kitchenette. The smoke had an oily smell. She guessed he had poured cooking oil on the stovetop's electric burners and turned them on. The heat of the burners would ignite the oil. No doubt he'd put down paper towels and paper plates as kindling. It wouldn't take long for the fire to grow and spread.

  Wolper emerged from the kitchen. "Clock's ticking, Doctor. But you already knew that."

  He clapped his hands, a man satisfied with his work.

  "To be honest," he added, "you should've been dead already. Would be, if Brand had come through. I told him to take care of you when you left Parker Center. Problem was, he wouldn't give me a commitment. Didn't have the stones. So when you went sightseeing, I had to play chaperon, make sure you stayed out of trouble. Then, surprise, Brand shows up at the arcade. Doesn't shoot you, though. He cuts and runs. And when I frisk him, what do I find? His off-duty gunand nothing else. No throwdown."

  He paused as if the significance of this statement were obvious. She just st
ared at him.

  With a sigh, he explained. "You don't carry out a hit with a gun that can be traced to you. So if Brand wasn't planning a snuff job, what kind of bullshit game was he playing? I think he intended to warn you. He wanted to be a hero. I talked him out of that. Still, it was a close call. Too close. Lots of things have gone wrong tonight." He smiled. "But now I'm going to make everything right."

  She spoke slowly, her voice dull and faraway. "They'll know it's arson."

  Wolper shrugged off the remark. "That's not a problem."

  He checked to be sure the windows were tightly closed. Already the smoke was getting dense, making her eyes water and her throat burn.

  "Meg amp;" she whispered. She couldn't frame it as a question, but he understood her meaning.

  "Don't worry about your daughter," he said. "She's a corpse."

  The words made sense, but she wasn't able to take them in.

  "We stashed her in an old bottling plant on South Central Avenue. I sent Tomlinson to take care of her."

  Tomlinson. The detective who'd tried to talk her out of treating Brand.

  Wolper looked briefly concerned. "Hasn't reported back. But he must've done it. She's a kid. How hard can she be to kill?"

  So he wasn't certain Meg was dead. It hadn't been confirmed. There was a chance.

  He read her thoughts. "Always hope, huh, Doctor? Good for you. Keep the faith. Me, I'm a realist, like I told you all along. You and your daughter are dead. Both of you."

  He left, shutting the door to the waiting room, sealing her in to ensure a quicker suffocation.

  The heat wasn't too bad yet, but the air was already fouled with smoke.

  She still couldn't move. She would never move again. She would die in this metal chair. And Meg amp;

  Meg was probably dead already. Even if she was somehow alive, Wolper would see to it that she didn't survive for long.

  There was no hope for either of them, not anymore.

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Gray steered the Crown Vic onto the Santa Monica Freeway, eastbound, keeping one hand on the wheel. The other hand held the gun pointing at Sergeant Brand in the passenger seat. He was pretty sure Brand had been whipped into total submission, but it didn't hurt to be careful. A guy like him could come up with a surprise or two, especially if he had nothing to lose.

  "Your file says you got, what is it, post-dramatic stress?" Gray asked over the hiss of the road surface.

  "Post-traumatic. How the hell did you see my file?"

  "I'm everywhere. I see everything. I'm like Santa Claus or God. I see when you are sleeping; I see when you're awake amp; You never had no post-trauma stress, did you, Sarge?"

  "I had the symptoms."

  "Symptoms. Like what, as a for-instance?"

  "Insomnia, anxiety, fatigue."

  Gray glanced at him, then looked away. The guy was tough to look at, what with the circular scar of the lighter on his cheek and the oozing mess of his left ear. The right side of his face was untouched, but the left was a horror show. He was like that Batman comic book bad guy, Two-Face.

  "Sounds like a case of the shakes to me," Gray said. "You were shitting your diapers 'cause you thought you might get found out or maybe turned in by your good buddy Wolper."

  "I was scared, yeah. I knew about what he was up to for a long time, but I was never, you know, directly involved."

  "Till recently."

  "Yeah."

  "So it wasn't no post-traumatic whatchacallit. It was plain old fear."

  "And maybe guilt."

  "Ooh, your conscience doing a number on you, huh? You mean to say you ain't a complete scumbag?"

  "I'm not sure what I am. At the arcade, if Wolper hadn't been there"

  "Yeah, you said something about that before. What would've happened if the lieutenant hadn't been hanging with the doc?"

  That face of his was sort of fascinating, Gray decided. Two-Face wasn't precisely the right reference, though. It was more like Brand had partially melted. The Incredible Melting Man, that was it.

  "I followed her and Wolper over there," Brand was saying. "I thought that maybe I'd come clean with her."

  Gray smirked. "Maybe?"

  "I'm not sure what I would've done. I mean, the thing is, they've got her kid, you know? I don't want that on my conscience. Not a kid."

  "Who took the kid? Wolper?"

  "No, I don't think so."

  "So there's other cops in on this?"

  "There are others, yeah. I don't know how many. I don't know how far it goes."

  "This is a big fucking deal you got yourself mixed up in, Sarge. You really think you're smart enough to outfox all these other players?"

  "No. I don't. I'm not smart."

  "Gotta agree with you on that one."

  Come to think of it, he wasn't sure there was an Incredible Melting Man. It was the shrinking man, right? Not melting. So maybe Brand was Darth Vader with the helmet off. Or the Phantom of the fucking Opera.

  "I tried to stay clear of it," Brand said. "I never wanted to be part of the action. I'm still not really part of it. I mean, Wolper figures I won't sell him out, but that doesn't mean he lets me in on all the details."

  "Did you know what was going down today?"

  "Snatching the kid? No. I'm not even sure they knew. It might've been improvised."

  "How about the hit on Doc Robin?"

  "I didn't know for sure."

  "But you kinda knew, am I right? Be straight with me, Sarge."

  "I suspected."

  "And you let it happen."

  The scarred head turned in Gray's direction. "What, are you lecturing me, for Christ's sake? I don't need any goddamn lessons from a guy who snuffs high school girls"

  Gray lifted the gun in his right hand, just enough to remind Brand of its existence. "How about from a guy who snuffs cops? You willing to hear a lecture from him?"

  Brand settled down, cowed once more. "Fuck."

  "So you were gonna come clean to the docmaybe."

  "I knew they still wanted to hit her. Wolper even called me at home, tried to get me to do it. I let him think I might play ball. But like I said, what I really wanted to do was"

  "Confess. Bare your soul. I got that. But you didn't."

  "Cameron and Wolper saw me. I ran. I didn't want to face Wolper. But he chased me down. He frisked me, found my off-duty piece but no throwdown. So he knew I wasn't there to whack her. I couldn't use a traceable gun for that job. He must've figured I was gonna double-cross him."

  "Which you were."

  "Yeah, maybe. If Cameron and Wolper had separated. And if I could've figured a way to do it so that I could warn her and amp; well amp;"

  "Save your own ass." This guy was a piece of work; he really was.

  Brand seemed to hear the contempt in Gray's voice. "Survival is what it's all about," he said belligerently.

  Gray almost smiled. Yeah, Sarge, he wanted to say. Just look at you, with your Frankenstein face and your scared-rabbit heart. You're surviving real good. But he let it pass.

  "I hear you," he said. "How'd Wolper take it when he tumbled to you changing teams?"

  "Told me not to even think about trying anything. Said if I tried to rat him out, he would see that the whole mess was pinned on me. Said there was already enough evidence to put me away if Robbery-Homicide ever decided to look at me close. I would take the fall."

  "He planted some shit."

  "That's what he told me. I didn't know if it was true."

  Gray figured it probably was. That was the way he himself would have played it if he'd had to keep a weak link like Brand in line.

  "Anyway," Brand said, "I had to assume he wasn't bluffing. I went to the Newton station house, checked my locker. Nothing there. Next place to look"

  "Was home sweet home. You would've torn the place apart looking for the stuff he planted. Wouldn't have found it, neither. Whatever Wolper laid on you was hidden too good for you to find. He wouldn't have told you a
bout it if he thought you could sniff it out."

  "Yeah, maybe."

  No "maybe" about it, Gray thought. This Wolper is smarter than you. He sees two steps ahead.

  "So you didn't say nothing to the doc?"

  "I said what Wolper had told me to saythis bullshit story he fed me about how I was trying to redeem myself by assisting with your arrest. I'm not sure she bought it."

  "She didn't."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because she's still trying to remember who conked her on the noggin. Which means she thinks it might've been you. She's over at her office right now getting her brain dry-cleaned in that space helmet of hers."

  "Alone?"

  "Wolper's with her."

  The melted-candle face turned toward Gray again. "If she remembers it was him"

  "He'll waste her." Gray nodded. "That's why we're riding to the rescue."

  "So you're on her side?"

  "I'm on my side."

  There was a pause, and Gray figured Pumpkinhead was out of conversation. He was wrong.

  "I don't get it," Brand said. "Why do you care about any of this?"

  "Two reasons. One, I don't like being set up by any goddamn gangsta cops. And two, you assholes got the doc's daughter. You got Meg."

  "You're worried about Cameron's kid? After you amp; I mean"

  "After I wasted five perfectly healthy teenagers with their whole lives ahead of 'em? I guess that's right."

  "Doesn't make sense."

  "I am a mystery and a conundrum, Sarge. I got layers. It's what makes me so goddamn fascinating. Now I don't suppose you know where Meg's been hid away."

  "I don't."

  " 'Course not. They don't tell you shit, right, small fry?"

  Brand stared into the darkness. "Never thought they'd take the kid. Fuck, that's low. Should've expected it, though. It's like the fights."

  This baffled Gray. "Fights? What fights?"

  "The dogfights." Brand's voice was a low drone. "She probably thinks I go there for entertainment. That wasn't it. I went because that's what this city is. Whole fucking city's one big dogpit, and we're all caught in it."