Simple Genius

by David Baldacci

  “And what will you be doing in the meantime?”

  “Getting ready for my date.”

  She scowled. “You really piss me off sometimes.”

  “Really? I wouldn’t know how that feels.”

  CHAPTER

  51

  MICHELLE SPENT THE NEXT HOUR going through the mansion’s main floor as methodically and yet unobtrusively as possible. She made rounds through the billiards room, the vast library, a smoking room, gun room with ancient rifles and shotguns kept behind iron grille doors, a parlor, and a trophy room with the requisite animal heads on the walls. Yet nowhere did she see any indication of a room that wasn’t supposed to be there. Tired of dark worm-eaten paneling, thick Persian rugs underfoot, the musty smell of another century grabbing at her twenty-first-century edges, and weary of making no progress she went outside to ponder her options.

  It was too early to get Viggie, and yet it took another half-hour of fits and starts before Michelle climbed in her truck and drove to see Horatio.

  “I’m doing this only for Sean,” she said as they sat down in the same room where Horatio had met with Viggie earlier.

  “I’m just glad you’re here, whatever your motivation. You really left an impression on the psych facility, I can tell you that. You caught a criminal and literally saved that woman’s life. That has to make you feel good.”

  “Yeah, I was feeling really good until Sean said you wanted to talk to me.”

  “I’m just trying to do my job any way I can.”

  “Look, let’s cut to the chase. I attended my little sessions, did my little exercises, answered your insulting questions, spilled my soul, caught a drug dealer and, like you said, saved a woman’s life. I think we can conclude that I’m cured, so we can just stop spending Sean’s money, okay? Now I’m going to go back to doing my job. And why don’t you go back to whatever it is you do, I guess I’ve never really been clear on that.” She got up.

  The bark of his voice startled her. “You’re not cured. You’re not even close to being cured. You’re totally and completely fucked up, lady. Things will continue to spiral down and the day will come when you’re doing your job that you totally whack out and get yourself and maybe Sean killed. Now if you’re cool with that, keep on walking, climb in that Dumpster you call a ride and drive off into the sunsets of a gathering hell. But don’t sit here and think that you’re cured, because that’s the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard. People who want to get better, they work at it. They don’t lie to themselves and everyone else. They don’t sit on their ass and sink deeper into a pathetic existence while denying anything’s wrong at all. They have balls not bullshit. And I’m pretty much fed up with yours.”

  Michelle felt a blinding fury gathering inside her. Her fists clenched, her body tensed to strike.

  He calmly continued. “See how much anger you have inside your gut right now? You see how quick it is to build, Mick? Just because of a few words I said. True words by the way, but still just words. That’s called losing your self-control. You want to kill me, right? I know you do. I can see it in every molecule. Same way you wanted to kill that poor slob back at the bar. The difference is at the bar you had to get wasted first before the rage became so bad you just had to release it on another human being. This time you’re stone-cold sober and that rage is taking control of you and makes you want to knock my head off. That’s what I meant by things spiraling down. What next? Will the rage be triggered by the way some stranger looks at you on the street? Or bumps into you on the subway? Or maybe just the way someone smells? It all comes down to that inner rage, Michelle. And you have to deal with yours right now.”

  “And if I don’t?” she said hollowly.

  “You lose. And the demons win. It’s your choice.”

  Slowly, by almost imperceptible degrees of movement, Michelle sat back down.

  Horatio watched her steadily. Her gaze remained on the floor while a muscle tremor worked its way down her neck.

  When she spoke, her voice shook. “I don’t know what you want from me.”

  “I could be flippant and say the truth, but that’s not really how the mind works. I want to talk, Michelle, that’s all. I want to ask some questions, listen to your answers, but mostly I just want to talk to you. About you. That’s all. You think you’re up to that?”

  A full minute went by as she white-knuckled the arms of her chair. “Okay,” she finally said in a voice so small he could barely hear.

  “I went to the home you lived in when you were six. Sean told you that.”

  “Yes.”

  “I met a woman named Hazel Rose. Do you remember her?”

  Michelle nodded.

  “Hazel certainly remembers you. She told me to tell you that she’s very proud of you.” Horatio waited a few moments but Michelle gave no reaction to this news. “Hazel said you used to come over to her house for tea parties with some of the other neighborhood kids. Do you remember those parties?”

  “No.”

  Horatio continued to watch her closely. There was no manual on how to do this. Essentially Horatio read the body cues of the patient and hoped those reads were right.

  “Hazel told me about this beautiful rose hedge you had.”

  As soon as he said it, Michelle’s entire body went lax, as though someone had pulled the plug on her heart. At first he thought she was going to faint. Then she rallied and sat up straighter in the chair.

  “My father planted that rose hedge,” she said in an automatic tone.

  “Right. An anniversary present. But someone cut it down.”

  “Some kids, mad at my dad.”

  “That’s one theory.”

  She stiffened again, but didn’t look at him.

  “Hazel noticed a change in you too back then. Can you remember why?”

  “I was six, how am I supposed to know?”

  “Well, you remembered the rose hedge. And you remembered that your father planted it and that someone cut it down.”

  She snapped, “Maybe I brutally murdered someone when I was six and I’m repressing it. Would that satisfy your curiosity?”

  “Are we going back to wisecracks already? I was hoping you’d hold off for at least ten minutes based on my big, pull-no-punches speech. I don’t drag that one out very often.”

  Now she looked at him and her gaze was curious, hungry. “So why’d you use it on me?”

  “Because I see you slipping away, Michelle,” he said quietly. “And I don’t want you to reach the point of no return.”

  “Dammit, I’m here, Horatio, I’m working, thinking, helping Sean and a little girl who needs someone right now. How bad can I be? Tell me, how bad can I be?”

  “That’s a question only you can answer.”

  For a moment Horatio thought he could see her eyes moisten, and then they became hard and dry. “I know you’re trying to help me. I know Sean is too. I’ve got issues, I know that too. And I’m trying to deal with them. I’m trying to stay productive.”

  “That’s all well and good. But while you’re staying productive you’re not addressing those issues. You’re ignoring them, Michelle.”

  Her tone became defiant. “You say I changed at age six? Well my life hasn’t turned out too badly. Were you ever an Olympian? Or a cop? Did you ever guard the president? Well, I did. Did you ever save someone else’s life? I have. More than once.”

  “I’m not saying you haven’t had an exemplary life. What you’ve achieved has been extraordinary. What I’m talking about is the future. What I’m talking about is self-destructive behavior. What I’m trying to make you understand is that at some point you have to pay the piper.”

  She stood. “Are you telling me that everything I’ve done in my life is tied to something that might have happened to me when I was a kid? Are you possibly trying to say that to me!” She screamed the last word at him.

  “No, I didn’t say that. You did.”

  Just as Viggie had, in an instant Michelle was
gone. He heard her truck start up and shoot gravel out as she sped off.

  Horatio rubbed his temple, walked outside, hopped on his Harley and followed her. This time he wasn’t letting the lady go.

  CHAPTER

  52

  AT THE VERY LEAST I think you should have me cover your back, Sean,” Sheriff Hayes said. The men were in Hayes’s personal car heading toward Williamsburg.

  “That won’t work, because Whitfield knows what you look like.”

  “One of my deputies then. Whitfield is not the kind of guy who’s going to let you screw around with his wife.”

  “He doesn’t seem to have a problem with his wife frequenting bars and getting hit on. It wasn’t like it was the first time she’d been in that place.”

  “But he knows who you are too. If he sees you around her, he might think you’re trying to spy on him.”

  “But he doesn’t know that I know she’s his wife. If he or his muscle shows up, I act surprised and go on my way.”

  “You really think a guy like Whitfield is gonna buy that?”

  “Probably not, but if you have a better lead we can run down I’m listening. Hell, I have no idea if she’ll even be there tonight. This could be a complete wild-goose chase.”

  “But even if Messaline knows something, why would she tell you?”

  “I’m not exactly a novice at getting information out of people.”

  “But you said she blew you off the first time.”

  “That was the first time.”

  “So you really believe Whitfield had something to do with Monk’s and Len’s deaths?”

  “Monk died on CIA soil. Whitfield made a special point of calling us off the case. Even got the DDO on my butt. And from that same plot of land somebody took a shot at me. And planes flying without lights land there in the middle of the night.”

  “Planes?” Hayes said.

  “They come right over Babbage Town. And they’re big jets, easily capable of intercontinental flight. No one knows who’s on those flights. And there was hush money funneled through Congress to build what was termed a new dorm for agent trainees at the Camp, even though they have lots of housing there already.”

  “What do you mean ‘termed’?”

  “A building can be lots of things. Including an interrogation center. Even a torture chamber.”

  Hayes almost drove off the road. “Are you out of your damn mind? That’s totally and completely illegal in this country.”

  “Maybe Monk saw prisoners no one knows about getting their organs tickled by electrical current. What better motive to kill the man?”

  “I can’t believe that. And what about Len Rivest?”

  “Monk told him, or else he suspected, or found out somehow. Whitfield discovered that and no more Len Rivest.”

  “But if he knew something why wouldn’t Len have gone to the police? He was ex-FBI for God’s sake.”

  “Maybe he didn’t want to go up against the CIA and Ian Whitfield. Maybe there are folks even higher up in the government who know about what’s going on at Camp Peary. And maybe he did tell someone and that person was the wrong person to tell.”

  “Now you’re talking some kind of major conspiracy.”

  “So what? They happen every day. If the stakes are big enough the conspiracies tend to grow large enough to accommodate them. And by the way, in D.C. they’re not referred to as conspiracies, they’re called policies.”

  Hayes said nervously, “This is getting way over my head, Sean, I don’t mind telling you. I’m just a small-town cop looking to retire in a few years.”

  “Merk, you can just drop me off and don’t look back. Our partnership can be dissolved with no hard feelings, but I am not letting this go.”

  Hayes seemed to consider this for a minute. “What the hell,” he finally said. “If I’m going down it might as well be over something important. But I still think somebody should be following you tonight.”

  If either of them had turned around, he would have noticed that someone already was following them tonight.

  CHAPTER

  53

  HORATIO PULLED HIS MOTORCYCLE to a stop next to Michelle’s truck. The woman had turned off the main road and parked under some trees down near the river. She wasn’t in the truck and Horatio followed a dirt path down to the water where he found her sitting on a fallen tree that extended partially over the water. She didn’t acknowledge his presence as he sat down on the other part of the tree that was still firmly on land.

  “Nice evening,” he said as he tossed a pebble into the fast-moving York, which was carrying debris from an earlier thunderstorm down to the Chesapeake Bay.

  She was silent for some minutes, just staring at the water until Horatio started to fear she might jump in.

  Her first words definitely got his attention. “I cleaned my truck out once. I did it for Sean.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I liked him and he’d been going through a bad time.”

  “Was it hard, cleaning out the truck?”

  “Far harder than it should have been. Everything in there seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. But it’s just a truck, right?” She swiveled around on her backside until she was facing him. “It’s just a truck,” she said again.

  “Truck, bedroom, lifestyle. I can imagine it was very hard.”

  “I couldn’t keep it clean. I tried. Well, I didn’t really try. I just couldn’t do it. Within a day I put everything back.”

  “Sean says your racing scull is pristine. You could eat off the hull, he claims.”

  She smiled. “He would say that. Although he’s not exactly without his quirks. Have you ever seen anyone so neat and orderly? I mean, come on.”

  She snapped off a small branch from the fallen tree and tossed it in the water. As she watched it sail away she said, “I don’t know why I changed, Horatio. I really don’t. I don’t even remember changing to tell the truth, but with so many people claiming I did, I guess I have to accept it.”

  “Okay. That’s a good admission. A very positive step, Michelle. Yet when I mentioned the rose hedge you reacted to that. Why?”

  She’d visibly shuddered again when he’d said it. Another few minutes of silence went by. Michelle stared at the tree trunk she was sitting on; Horatio’s gaze was directly on her. He didn’t say anything, fearful he might ruin the possibility of the first real breakthrough since he’d started seeing her. His patience was amply rewarded.

  She said, “Can you be afraid of something and you don’t even know what it is?”

  “Yes. It can be buried so deeply within your mind that all you can register is the fear without realizing what the source of that fear is. Repression into the subconscious of past events that were beyond someone’s ability to deal with at the time is the brain’s fail-safe mechanism to protect us. We simply block it out.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that. But it’s akin to water in the basement that you try to fix by patching here and there. Eventually the damage becomes so severe that the entire foundation of the house is threatened as the water starts to seep into unexpected places, places you can’t even see until the damage is done.”

  “So I’m a rotting house?”

  “And I’m the best house fixer you’re ever going to run across.”

  “But if I can’t even remember why I’m so scared, how can you help me?”

  “There’s a tried-and-true method: hypnosis.”

  Michelle shook her head. “I don’t believe in that crap. No one can hypnotize me.”

  “Usually the people who are certain they can’t be are the easiest to do it to.”

  “But you have to want to be hypnotized, right?”