by Adira August
“I see,” he said. Cam looked over at his tone.
“It’s supposed to be a secret from everybody. I promised.” Asher sat forward suddenly, leaving the warmth of Cam’s arm and shoulder. Hunter knew he needed to be reassured by someone here. By him.
“Asher, this team has only five people, and you’ve met them all. It’s a special unit. Special because we keep serious secrets, and no one finds out unless we tell them. My father showed you the starfish, so I’d know it was him. It makes sense he led you to me, to this place, because we’re excellent at what we do and you’re safe here and so is your information.
“If you want to tell someone, I’m the one to tell. But you have to decide. It’s what’s so hard about being like us and being young. It can make us know things only an adult should know. We have to decide what to tell and who to tell it to.”
Asher’s thin face scrunched up as he thought about what Hunter said. He heaved a big sigh and looked up at Cam, who looked back.
“Can we figure out who Minnie really is?”
Cam winked at him and Asher smiled. Cam focused on his laptop and everyone else, including Asher, watched the big screen. A few images appeared: a very dark picture from Twee’s cell, a copy of a PEV registration, a driver’s license.
“Wait.” Hunter stared at the driver’s license, but he couldn’t figure out why it bothered him. “Cam, check the license with the DMV.”
“No record found.”
A window opened. Cam searched through the listings for the name online. Articles and images were rapidly rejected.
“What’s ‘Minnie’ a nickname for?” Natani asked.
An ancestry site popped up:
● Amelia
● Hermione
● Mary
● Minerva
● Wilhelmina
“It’s Minerva,” Asher said.
“How do you know?” Natani asked. “Did you see it written someplace or …?”
“I just do.”
But neither Minerva nor Minnie Houston appeared to exist in Colorado, or anywhere else that made her a likely candidate for the woman at number 20 Hanging Valley Road.
Cam switched to the Secretary of State’s website and the property listings. He found nothing under her address. Then he found nothing under his own address.
“Looks like more than the maps have been erased,” Cam said. “Asher, does everybody call her Minnie?”
“They call her Ms. Houston, mostly. Except Davey, he says ‘Minnie’. A couple times I heard him call her Anna-banana. It’s like he’s her brother sort of. Only not.”
Cam blocked Anna Houston, actress, from search results. Still too many. He added “Minerva” as a middle name. Nothing. He tried variations of Ann, Annie, Annette, Annabelle. Many hits—none that could be her.
“Well, you got her bracketed, at least,” Hunter told him. “No one or a million people.”
Cam smirked and ignored him. “Asher, she’s interested in you because of what you can do, right?” Asher nodded. “What else is she interested in?”
“I dunno. Just these machines she builds, I guess.”
“What kind of machines?” Hunter asked, opening his notebook.
“Coin-flipping ones.”
“She makes machines that toss coins?” Natani asked.
“Just, like, electronically,” Asher told her.
Cam already had “random event generator U.S. patents” onscreen.
He scrolled down through the listings and highlighted
DATE OF PATENT: MAY 2, 1994
INVENTOR: M. ANNE TUSSEY, PH.D.
ASSIGNEE: INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF ANOMALOUS DATA ACQUISITION AND TRANSMISSION
Asher stood up, excited, and looked at Cam’s screen, one hand on his shoulder. “Is that her?”
“We’ll see.” Cam entered another search: Women in engineering 1980-1994.
1985 MINERVA ANNE TUSSEY
Princeton University summa cum laude
He searched images under her name, with and without “Minerva.” Several popped up, all before 2000.
“You found her!” Asher looked at Cam as if he’d just won a gold medal, though Asher wasn’t a boy who’d ever be impressed by medals.
There was a sound of chimes. A request for video hook-up from the morgue popped up on the screen.
Dan Gordi’s thin, bespectacled face appeared. He was Hunt’s favorite pathologist, and the only person besides Hunter Dane and a few doctors who knew Cam had Huntington’s Disease. He was in his office, a relief to Natani with Asher present. Often, Dan appeared in front of a body halfway through an autopsy.
“Dane,” he said by way of greeting. “I have a revised TOD and other info.” Gordi looked toward Asher; he could see the whole table on his screen.
“Ms. Natani is going to show you her office,” Hunter told Asher.
“Can I go to the bathroom, instead?”
“Sure.”
Natani led Asher into the hall.
“Go ahead,” Hunt told Gordi, picking up his pen.
“The body was moved. You want pictures?”
“Snow’ll download them. Give us the bullet.”
“At the scene, I estimated time of death based on the body being in a vehicle with the windows open, parked in a shadowed location. It’s going to cool fairly rapidly. But the body was moved. No way to know what conditions were where it was previously. So body temp alone gives us a very broad and probably skewed estimate.
“That leaves postmortem lividity. From the way the blood settled and resettled, the victim starts out sitting up, weight on his left side. He ends up also sitting up, weight evenly distributed.”
Hunter flipped a notebook page. “You’re saying he could have been killed anywhere, his body in a sitting position, then put in the PEV?”
Gordi shook his head. “I’m working on some computer models, but my instinct is he was moved from one vehicle to another. From driver’s seat to driver’s seat. And, yeah, he could have been killed anywhere.”
“You’re officially confirming homicide?”
“Somebody broke his neck. That’s not easy, it takes training. Pressure bruising showed up overnight on the mandible.”
“What can you tell me about the victim?”
“Prematurely grey, mid-forties. Clothes off the rack, no identification, the book was behind him when he was moved into the PEV or placed there shortly thereafter. Indications he was wearing a sidearm in a shoulder rig when he was killed, under his left arm. Right-handed. Some hair and skin under his nails, killer might have scratches. Tell you what, Dane, from the calluses on his right and left hands, he was a shooter. Regular practice.”
Hunter finished making a note. “New TOD estimate?”
“For court, between nine am and three pm. For you? See how your case works if he was killed between eleven and noon.”
“IF ONE MAN CAN figure out where I am, so can another. If he sent a report to someone, there’ll be a flood of people up here. We should have left last night, Max. We’ve got to go.”
“There aren’t any hospitals close to where we’re going. Another twenty-four hours, Anne. Just to be sure.”
“I can be in pain in the camper.”
He knelt next to her and touched the side of her face that was free of bruises. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. The upload went hours ago. Everyone will be talking about it. Nothing’s left to keep secret. No one has any reason to come after you, not anymore.”
Anne “Minnie” Tussey shifted in her chair. When a position worked for her shoulder, it hurt her neck and vice versa. Her bruises were worse today. Bigger, darker, swollen. Painful to touch.
“The police have reasons to come after us. There’s a dead man and Asher’s right in the middle of everything.” Tears tracked down her face. “I’m so stupid, so stupid. I did this.”
“It’ll be fine,” he said. “Asher’s alibi is a decorated cop a
nd an Olympic medal winner.”
“We don’t even have the evidence,” she said.
“If the cop is a normally suspicious member of his profession, everything is safely locked away.” He kissed the top of her head. “It’s not evidence in any crime. Jason Furney is a thing of the past. When we get settled, we’ll claim the backpack. You just get better. Pretty soon, you’ll be a talk show regular. A star!”
She wanted to hug him but settled for a deep breath, drawing in his scent and warmth. “I don’t want to be a star,” she said. “I want to tell people the facts before I die. I want to publish my research.”
“Stars get their research accepted by important scientific journals,” he said.
“Screw them. I’m starting a blog.”
He grinned. “There’s that fighting spirit I find so irresistibly sexy.”
She tried to smile. “I’m afraid it’s going to be a while. … Leon’s still here?”
“Packing. Be gone within the hour.” He stood up. “I’m going to make sure we shredded and burned and smashed everything on your list. You’ll be okay for an hour?”
“Go. I’ll nap,” she told him, knowing she wouldn’t.
“Good,” he said, knowing she was lying.
“ASHER, WHAT ARE the machines for and how do you know the men at her house are ‘army men’?” Hunter asked.
“The guys have tattoos and talk about the war and stuff.”
“Which war?”
He looked confused. “It’s just one big long one, isn’t it?”
Natani couldn’t disagree. “And the machines?”
“They tell her when people on the other side are around.”
“The other side of what?”
“The veil.” It was Cam who answered. The screen was full of journal and press articles.
“The Institute for the Study of Anomalous Data Acquisition and Transmission, aka SADAT, couldn’t be erased. Too many references in the popular press and a few journals. Anne Tussey, our Minnie, ran the place. They studied, well, telepathy they call ‘remote viewing’, precognition and psychokinesis.”
“Can you tell who funded it?” Hunter asked.
Cam flashed Hunt an appreciative smile and put up a popular psychology magazine article. “They were open about it all. Loose university association, funded by four wealthy benefactors who said they had an interest in the power of the human mind. One of them actually seemed to.”
Brief bios of the money men appeared. Three industrialists and a film and television producer who specialized in paranormal-themed projects. The three industrialists all had military contracts.
Hunt’s face went hard and his lips pressed into a thin line. Sonovabitch. He glanced at the time on his cell. “Okay, what else?”
Cam cleared the screen and reloaded the SADAT and Anne Tussey information.
“Tussey’s research focused on establishing the existence of universal consciousness. Sort of like Newton developed the concept of universal gravity. There’s a name for it …” He scrolled up, looking for it.
“Noosphere,” Hunter supplied.
“Right. Then, she just quit publishing.”
“When?” Hunt asked.
“After Nine-Eleven.”
Natani looked skeptical. “That’s pretty precise.”
“That’s when Minnie got mad and started her own project,” Asher said.
“I think he means these.” Twee was just closing the door, a handful of white sheets in one hand. She crossed over to Cam. “‘Start here’,” she quoted. “Put the bookmark picture up, please.”
The copyright page for On Death and Dying appeared with the bookmark. She went around the table and handed Hunter the papers.
“These were in the backpack?”
She took her seat. “These are copies I made and scanned for Cam.”
Cam checked for a new upload, while Twee went on.
“The originals were in a plastic sleeve sewn into the back protector. The whole pack is full of … things. Some kind of parts of a device, I think. DVDs, ones she made, I guess. Some of Asher. Memory cards with what looks like thousands of read-outs, trial runs, statistical analysis, pages and pages of notes on many years, decades, really, of research.”
She gestured at the screen. “That’s where she starts. With death.” She wiped at her face. She was teary, which startled everyone.
“There’s a kind of video journal explaining everything. Her research, how she proved it.”
“It?” Hunter asked. But he already knew.
“That we never die. She proved it. Or Asher did.” She looked at the boy.
He shrugged. “It was them, mostly.”
“Minnie Houston and her men?” Natani asked.
“No, them,” Asher said as if she was being deliberately obtuse.
“Your guides?” Hunter asked.
“Sometimes, but mostly it was the people the Army men killed. Sometimes their moms and stuff. One guy’s brother.” He waved his hand in his impatient gesture. “You know.”
Hunter nodded. “But everyone else doesn’t. Ms. Natani doesn’t. Cam doesn’t. Tell me what the machines do.”
“It sends out waves,: He said. “Long, slow ones. Energy, you know? Minnie said if she sent out the fast short ones they’d hurt us. She said all it was, really, was pulses of light. You can see them, wavy lines, on a screen. She printed some of it out. When the Other Side people are around, the waves change.”
“Interference patterns,” Twee supplied.
Asher nodded.
“What did you do, Asher? What was your part?” This from Cam, concerned about adults using him when he was too young for informed consent.
“Just tell her when they were there,” he said. “ I’d just hang out with the guys in the hot tub. There wasn’t any water in there. The machines were all around the hot tub, like radios playing with the sound turned off. Minnie gave me a special cell phone. Only you couldn’t call, just push a button and send a signal. I pushed one button when they showed up and another when they left.”
Twee was nodding. “I didn’t have time to go over much, but the experiment coordinated Asher’s reports with the appearance of interference patterns. They were incredibly consistent.” She handed a sheet to Cam. “Can you find this and put it up? Asher, do you know what this represents?”
The image popped up.
“It means nobody’s around.” Asher told them. “This is what the machines do when everybody leaves the house. I don’t know what the blue line is.”
“That’s P. It represents the null hypothesis, the expected or normal state,” Merisi said from his desk.
“State of what?” Natani asked.
“Of anything you’re measuring or observing,” he said. “I’m not a statistician, but I know a P-value is the calculated probability of finding the results congruent with the null hypothesis. It’s not a direct probability, that’s the level of significance. But they make all that shit up anyway, which is why accounting is better.”
The women looked at each other and back at Merisi. “What?” Twee.
“A lot of scientists think effect size is a more reliable indicator of significance,” he told them. “If you have large number of trials or events, small effects are considered significant. The smaller the sample, the greater the effect size has to be.” They all stared at him.
“What? They use statistics when they test load bearing ability and shit in construction,” he said.
“You’re smart,” Twee said as if he’d been keeping it a secret.
He rolled his eyes. “Look, let’s say you have a factory that makes widgets. You want to know how many workers call in sick during a flu outbreak so you know how many widgets to stockpile for when production is down. That wiggly line at the bottom would be the actual instances of workers calling in sick. The blue line is the maximum number of absences you can normally expect in and out of flu season. You with me?�
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“Right,” said Natani. “Go on.”
“But then you notice these weird spikes. Lots of absences over your blue line and the spikes only happen for one day. Very regular. Doesn’t fit the flu pattern at all. Cam, what would you do? What hypothesis would you form?”
“Does the plant have an evening shift?” Cam asked.
Merisi nodded, grinning. The two women looked back and forth between them, clueless.
“Monday Night Football,” Cam said. “I’d check to see if the absences were mostly from the evening shift and the dates correlated.”
“Right in one,” Merisi said. “So Asher, this print-out is when nobody is at the house where the machines are?”
“Yeah. They only come around because of us.”
“So Minnie’s theory was that if you were around, the men and you, people on the other side would show up? And their consciousness would affect the wave patterns from the machines?”
“Yeah. Because of the other scientists who did a thing like this. Only they picked something, like the Superbowl, and predict the line will go up. See, they have these machines all around the world and they flip coins all the time and when something big happens, like a lot of people watching the Super Bowl, people all thinking about the same thing makes it be more heads than there should be.”
“That can’t work,” Natani said.
Twee handed Cam one of her copies. He popped up an image.
“Cam?” Twee asked.
“What? I’m a dumb jock not a statistics expert.”
“You were there! What do you see as not an expert?” Natani asked.
He sighed and considered the image. “It looks like all the results are right up at the place that means it’s not chance. If people watching affected these random event generators, then I see people coming home from work and turning on the opening ceremonies and getting bored or whatever and then everybody wanted to see the torch lit. I’d want to see a picture of like, the whole day, though, for comparison.”
“Yeah,” Asher said, apparently enlivened by Cam’s comment. “That’s how they cheated. The other guys. They had a read-out thing like that”—he pointed to the Olympic image— “from nine-eleven that went like, practically off the paper. Way, way bigger than anything before. Way bigger than tidal waves and the Olympics.”