“But you never said?” Duncan said, perching on the arm of the sofa. His eyes were confused behind his glasses.
“I forgot,” Grace said. “I only remembered later, and then it didn’t seem relevant.”
“But even after we found her?”
“Then it didn’t matter,” Grace said, pressing her palms against the nubbly fabric of the sofa.
Duncan seemed to notice that the two men were watching them. He shrugged, although he was still frowning.
“What exactly did the message say, Dr. McCloud?” Dyson said.
Grace could feel her heart begin to pound hard. She wondered if they could hear it. She had never been good at lying outright. “I don’t remember the exact wording. Something like she wanted to see me and meet Duncan.” She leaned forward to straighten the New Yorker magazines lying on the coffee table.
“There was nothing else? No reason given?”
Grace shook her head, trying to push Angie’s words out of her mind. How you both feel. “I already told Detective Mortensen all this,” she said. She tried to still her thoughts. Why did they care? Had they found out something?
“We are verifying some information,” Dyson said, rubbing his hands together. Grace breathed deep, trying to focus on the chafing sound his hands made.
“Is this about Angie’s death? Was it not a heart attack after all?” Duncan said, looking from Dyson to Mortensen.
“It was ruled a heart attack,” Dyson said. His knuckles popped softly as he cracked them.
“Marla said you weren’t dealing with Angie’s case anymore,” Grace said to Mortensen, hoping to divert the conversation.
Mortensen glanced at Dyson, who shook his head slightly.
“Ms. Osborne herself may have been investigating a death,” Mortensen said. “That is what we are looking into at present.”
“The hit and run?” Grace said. The image of the lilies tied to the tree flashed back to her.
“Huh?” Duncan said. “What hit and run?”
“Mrs. Muller contacted us this afternoon,” Mortensen said. He balanced the notebook on his knee and smoothed the page with his pen. “She mentioned you went along to Ms. Costa’s apartment.”
“I was just starting to tell you,” Grace said to Duncan. “Marla and I went to look for a friend of Angie’s, but we found out she had died in a hit-and-run accident.”
Duncan’s frown changed to an expression of horror. He slid off the sofa arm. “That’s terrible. But I don’t get what that has to do with—”
“Can you tell us what you found out?” Dyson said, massaging one palm with the other.
“About Minowa Costa?” Grace said, relieved to have the focus shifted.
After she’d recounted what had happened at the apartment in Newark, Mortensen leafed through the tiny pages of his notebook. “You mentioned, Dr. McCloud, that you thought it was odd that Ms. Osborne had called you?”
Her heart began to race again. She took in a slow breath. “Yes, because I hadn’t been in touch with her.”
“The last time was twelve years ago, you said?”
Duncan turned to her. “No, she didn’t come to the wedding, remember? So it must have been longer, in high school?”
“I thought I told you . . . I ran into her twelve years ago, in Chicago. Before the wedding. Sometime in the summer, during those three months . . .” Grace met his eyes briefly. He was looking puzzled. She plumped the embroidered pillow lying under her arm and addressed Mortensen. “But it was just a brief conversation. We didn’t stay in touch at all. That’s why I thought it was odd that she called me. I think probably she was just reconnecting with everyone. She must have called everyone else who came to the reunion, or at least the ones she hadn’t seen for a while.”
Mortensen’s lips tightened. He looked again at his notepad. “Did she say anything at all that was unusual? Something about what she was working on?”
Grace wished she could slow the racing of her heart. “Nothing like that,” she said. “Just that she wanted to meet, to talk. The message kept cutting out. I couldn’t make out most of it. Just words here and there.” She wondered if she should just get up, signal an end to the conversation. But that would seem uncooperative.
“What were the words?” Dyson said. Was there a sarcastic edge to his voice?
Sure Duncan knows. That was a natural assumption for Angie to make. “She mentioned the name of a bar. Where I ran into her. Maybe she was referring to something we talked about back then.” Seeing Dyson’s expectant expression, she added, “I don’t remember much about that conversation. Just personal stuff. About our lives. It was so long ago.”
“What was the bar?” Dyson said.
“Sinners,” Grace said.
“In Palmer Square?” Duncan said.
Grace nodded. “What does this have to do with Internal Affairs?” she said to Dyson.
Mortensen and Dyson exchanged glances again. Then Dyson said, with a hint of humor, “That has to do with the department. We aren’t called Internal Affairs for nothing.”
He rose to his feet. Mortensen followed suit, unraveling his immense length.
“Thank you for your time, Dr. McCloud,” he said, tucking his notebook into his pocket.
13
DUNCAN
Wednesday
“There are several hours left of this segment,” Derek Weinberg said, when Duncan paused the film after only a few minutes.
They’d been watching the film in Duncan’s office, on a large screen Geri had brought in on a rolling cart. On the screen, an adura dressed in a spotless white bodice and sarong was frozen in middance, one knee raised, his hands held high, a frill of crimson, white, and black cloth binding his waist. Silver bangles were slipping down his dark, wiry arms, and a necklace with an ornate pendant was swinging across his chest. His eyes glared in his white-powdered face, beneath an elaborate headdress made of coconut leaves and richly colored cloth. Plumes of incense were shooting from a brazier nearby. Other men in bulky silver jewelry and elaborate red costumes were frozen with muscled biceps gleaming and hands poised over their drums. Behind the exorcist, a woman in white, obviously the patient, reclined against a pile of pillows, the whites of her eyes wild and bright against the dark skin of her face. A lily leaf, a coconut, and an iron-ringed wooden pestle were arrayed before her, for protection from demons. The scene was lit by flaring torches, and oil lamps glowed a feeble yellow near them.
“This is part of the midnight watch,” Duncan said. “There should be an evening watch before this, and a morning watch after. Do you have those?”
“We have all three parts for each ceremony,” Carson Lacey said. He gulped from his coffee cup with an audible slurp. He had been introduced to Duncan as the research coordinator. He was a pasty-skinned man in his midthirties, with a striking cauliflower ear and bulging green eyes that were accentuated by a tendency to stare. His manner was oddly direct, which had made the past half hour of intermittent conversation uncomfortable for Duncan.
“So you can tell which part this was just from watching this,” Weinberg said. He seemed impressed. “That’s a good sign.”
“Sure,” Duncan said. “I’ve seen a lot of these ceremonies. So this was an actual patient? I mean, were the subjects ill in all the ceremonies you studied?”
“Obviously, they had complaints of different kinds. Otherwise why would they have gone for this . . . this?” Lacey had a low opinion of the ceremonies, Duncan could tell. Even during the few minutes they had been watching the video, his contempt had been evident in his snickers and the derisive remarks he’d made about the exorcist’s chants.
“What conditions did they have?”
“They were all different,” Lacey said. “I don’t think you should know the details before you see the videos. It might bias your view.”
Duncan wondered what Lacey’s qualifications were. He seemed to have a science background. Did he have a graduate degree?
“Carson’s right,”
Weinberg said. “But we did see a difference between the ones who got the blocker and those who didn’t, after the ceremonies.”
“So just to be clear . . . No one was given Symb86?”
“Correct,” Weinberg said. “We were trying to confirm that Symb86 has the same effects on the body as the ceremony. Both groups had the ceremony, and neither got Symb86. One group got a Symb86 blocker—which, as I said, is a drug that neutralizes Symb86, prevents it from having any effects on the body. The blocker prevented the ceremony from having any effects on the body just like it prevents Symb86 from having any effects, so that gives us evidence that the ceremony and Symb86 operate on the same biological pathways.”
“How did you manage to give patients a blocker?” Duncan said. “This was a pill that blocks Symb86?”
“Of course it was a pill,” Lacey said. “And there was no question of managing to. The patients agreed to take the blocker.” He was sitting with his legs spread wide, his feet planted firmly on the flame-colored streaks that ran across the black-and-white rug.
“We told them it was like a vitamin. Obviously, they couldn’t be told that the blocker could stop the ceremony from working. They were properly compensated, of course,” Weinberg said. “We worked through locals. They followed standard ethical procedure.”
Weinberg poured another cup of coffee from the urn Geri had placed on the coffee table. They had turned the lights off in the room to see the video better, and the dark furnishings seemed more somber. Duncan wondered if he should ask how much money the patients had got for agreeing to take the blocker. “Ethically . . . if the ceremony didn’t work, isn’t that a problem for the patient?” he said.
“We paid for them to have the ceremony done again,” Weinberg said, pushing his thick hair back from his forehead. “Without the blocker. A pretty good deal for them, I’d say.”
“How do you know if they did or didn’t improve?” Duncan said.
Lacey’s protruding eyes fixed on Duncan. “The patients were assessed before and after the rituals. Physical exams, interviews with the patients and families.” He said it snappily, as if Duncan had attacked him in some way.
“So if the rituals are all the same, but only the ones who didn’t get the blocker improved, then that means Symb86 works the same way the ritual does. Hmm. Okay.”
“Right, as I said, that’s where you come in,” Weinberg said. He had unbuttoned the sleeves of his white shirt. Now he folded them back, exposing the weathered skin of his wrists. “We want you to look closely at the videos and compare them. Identify the key steps. Code them as being present or absent.”
“But the problem is . . .” Duncan paused and took a breath, making an effort to tamp down his rising frustration. “As I said before, Derek, there’s really no way to tell whether the rituals are the same across the board. There are so many specific details that are going to vary from instance to instance. The space it happened in, the decorations, the colors, the way the patient reacts, how the exorcists respond, the audience. These aren’t things that can be measured, you know.”
“Anything that’s real can be measured,” Lacey said. He poured himself more coffee.
“That’s one perspective,” Duncan said, trying not to let his irritation show. “And a particularly narrow one, I would say.”
“All of these had the same mumbo jumbo,” Lacey said.
Was this guy for real? “So you’ve already seen them all?”
“I was there at the recordings,” Lacey said. “I told you I coordinated the Sri Lankan sessions.” There was an edge to his voice, as if Duncan had slighted him in some way again.
“I didn’t realize you were actually on-site,” Duncan said. How could this guy have been there? He shuddered, imagining Lacey sitting, sneering and smirking, in the crowded scene of an exorcism. How many people he must have insulted with his attitude.
“How would I have had them recorded properly otherwise?” Lacey said. He slurped again from his cup.
“Carson oversaw the experimental setup,” Weinberg said. He didn’t seem to have noticed anything amiss in Lacey’s manner.
“You worked with Frank Salgado?” Duncan said.
Lacey recoiled. “You knew him?”
Duncan nodded, watching him.
“He got the locals involved. Thought he knew everything,” Lacey said. Ah, Duncan thought. He’d had some conflict with Salgado. Salgado wouldn’t have put up with his supercilious attitude.
“We are very sorry to have lost Frank,” Weinberg said, looking pointedly at Lacey.
“He’s dead,” Lacey said, as if conceding. “I was there for two months,” he went on. “The team had already been set up by the locals. But someone had to be there to manage everything. Nothing would have got done otherwise.” He emitted a short bark that could have been a laugh. “Anything goes there. Third world science.” His lip curled in a sneer. “You’ve been there. You know how it is.”
The best approach would be to pretend not to notice the guy’s attitude, Duncan thought. “Yes, I know some excellent scholars there,” he said. He took off his glasses and polished them on a napkin. “I lived there for months at a stretch, back when I was doing my doctoral work. And my wife is Sri Lankan. A geneticist, actually.”
Lacey’s green gaze didn’t even flicker. “She was trained here then, obviously. But two of the people I worked with had degrees from the University of London, and they still believed in the mumbo jumbo. Spirits and magic. Salgado was no better.” He let out another bark of a laugh. “One fellow, a doctor at the University of Colombo, told me some story about how he had once seen a table running down the street. An enchanted table, he said. The owner of the table was running behind it was what he said.”
“People believe different things there,” Duncan said, trying not to sound defensive. “Why not? Different cultures, different beliefs. Here, we believe drugs work even when they don’t. Not much different from believing in a running table.”
Lacey’s mouth had dropped open a little. With the bulging eyes, he looked like a frog, Duncan thought.
Weinberg closed the binder he’d been consulting and set it on the coffee table. “Duncan here is proud to be a nonscientist,” he said to Lacey, winking. “We need all kinds on our team. That’s why his expertise is so valuable. He sees what we don’t see. What other cultures value. The emic perspective, isn’t that what you anthropologists call it?”
“I just accept that there are other perspectives than our own,” Duncan said, shrugging.
Lacey barked again.
Weinberg glanced at him, then tapped the binder. “Okay, so are there any other questions you want to ask Carson before he leaves? The experiment design is clear? Not that you really need to know much about that. Just the basics should give you an idea of why what you’re doing is important.”
“I think I’ve got the picture,” Duncan said. You’re trying to boil down something as mysterious as belief, and something as complex as ritual, into a set of codes, he thought. It would be futile. But he only had to do what interested him, to observe. If Cinasat had really done as many research studies as Weinberg had claimed, and they had found that Symb86 worked, this study was only going to be confirmatory, anyway.
“Just to reiterate,” Duncan said. “This all depends on the level of detail in the film. It’s not like being there. I won’t be able to see some features. So this will really be a very basic comparison, which may not be useful because the ceremonies are so incredibly detailed. The requirements are minute, you know. For example, the demon palace—the place to which the demon is confined after it is summoned—has to be constructed out of very specific materials. I can’t see that. The offering cup has to contain five metals—gold, silver, copper, iron, and lead. I can’t see that. The food offered has to include—”
“We don’t care about all that,” Lacey said. “The patient isn’t going to notice all that, so how could it possibly have an effect?”
“The ceremony wouldn’t
be a real ceremony if it didn’t follow the ceremonial rules,” Duncan said.
“It’s not like demons were really summoned and banished,” Lacey said, his lip curled.
“What Carson means,” Weinberg said, “is that we need a broad idea of the similarity. Enough to describe in a paper. All we need to do is generate a table, outlining the steps, and state whether each of the steps is present in both ceremonies.”
“You don’t seem to understand,” Duncan said. “These aren’t just steps. You can see, these are more than twelve hours long. They are incredibly intense theatrical events. The space is elaborately decorated, and the costumes are just magnificent. There’s comedy and music and chanting. Drums beating, bells jingling, feet pounding, dancers whirling around like demons are after them.” He directed his eyes at Lacey, trying to keep his face neutral. “There’s a certain atmosphere. Incense smoking, lamps burning, torches heating the place up. The dancers, the drummers, the spectators, the patient—they’re all in a trance. What you’re asking me to do is boil this all down into a series of steps?”
Lacey snorted and stood up.
“I understand it won’t be a complete representation, from your point of view,” Weinberg said. “But for our purposes, a series of steps is sufficient.”
Lacey jerked his head in what could have been a nod and moved toward the door.
After he had left, Weinberg picked up the binder on the coffee table and put it into his briefcase. “He’s very efficient,” he said. “A bit brusque, but he knows what he’s doing. You can contact him if you have any questions while you’re going through the videos.”
“What’s the time frame on this?” Duncan looked up as a quick buzzing near the door caught his attention.
“Identify the key elements as soon as you can. We need to get this paper out. Time is short. Maybe in the next two weeks?”
“That’s much sooner than I had expected,” Duncan said. The buzzing sounded again, and a fly zipped past them. Duncan swiped at it and missed.
“Sometimes we end up working overtime,” Weinberg said. “But that only happens once in a while.” He handed Duncan a thumb drive. “Copies of the films,” he said. “They’re on our server, but in case you want to work on them at home. But remember the nondisclosure agreement extends to family members and spouses. All our data are proprietary, and that includes the films. Not even your wife can see these.” He got to his feet.
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