Once the plane rose above the clouds, Fergus dialed the number. He let it ring until the voicemail clicked on, then hung up. He didn’t leave a message. He waited three minutes. Then he dialed again. It went to voicemail a second time. He hung up again without leaving a message. Then he sent a text to the number. It’s on its way. Call me to make arrangements. You have two hours. Fergus’s texts always had perfect punctuation. Once he sent the text, Fergus sat back in his chair. It wouldn’t be hard for him to find another customer, not with the product he was selling, but he had high hopes for this one in particular.
Fergus only had to wait about ten minutes for his new client to call him back. Carter Green was in a meeting in the large conference room on the thirty-eighth floor of his company’s offices on the corner of Madison Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street. From where he was sitting, he had a clear view all the way across Central Park. Eight other people were in the meeting, six men and two battle-worn women. If Carter had to estimate the aggregate net worth of the eight people in that meeting, he would have guessed somewhere in the range of a billion dollars. The poorest one was probably worth over ten million, the richest—well, the richest was worth a lot more than that. About half of them had families, though Carter guessed that they didn’t see their families very often. He also guessed that was by design. Families had never been of much interest to Carter. Money, however, had always been of great interest to him. By the time he’d run out of things to buy, he realized that he was old and had spent most of his life in offices and conference rooms, just like the one he was in at that moment.
A long wooden table sat between the nine of them, and they were each staring down at a PowerPoint presentation one of their hotshot young executives had put together about potential expansion in Asia. Everyone was interested because they suspected that they might have already bled every available dollar out of the Western half of the world. The presentation was full of charts and diagrams and littered with the latest corporate buzzwords. Not very long ago Carter would have laser focused on each word and every number, down to the second decimal, but today he was having trouble. The presentation began to look too much like a thousand other presentations that he’d been handed over the years. He’d seen enough of them by now to know that very little of it actually meant anything other than that whoever put it together hadn’t been home for a few days, not even to sleep. The truth was, Carter was finding it harder and harder to care about the bullshit. He used to love the bullshit. All the good ones did. They lived for it.
Carter felt his phone vibrate in his pocket when he got the first call. He ignored it. It was only a phone call. Then he felt it vibrate again a few seconds later. If he had had a family or anyone else to worry about, back-to-back calls like that might have made him nervous, might have made him worry that there was an emergency somewhere. But he didn’t have a family. If there was an emergency that would have any impact on him, one of the other eight people at that table would likely be the one to tell him because the only emergencies Carter had were related to his business. So, even after he got the second phone call, he wasn’t worried. Then he felt the shorter vibration telling him that somebody had sent him a text. Carter hated text messages. How hard was it to send a fucking email? Carter slipped the phone out of his pocket to see what sort of clown was trying to reach him now. Then he saw the message and the sender’s name.
Carter read the message three times before he reacted. It’s on its way. Call me to make arrangements. You have two hours. He looked at the time of the message and then at the clock on the wall just to make sure. Only three minutes had passed. He still had more than a hundred and fifteen minutes to get back to Fergus. He didn’t care. He didn’t want to wait. He stood up. He was a middle-aged man, pale from spending all his time in the office and a bit doughy in the middle. But in that room, in those offices, he was a titan. When he stood up, everything stopped. He’d earned his reputation through years of devotion to building up his empire, regardless of the sacrifices he had to make, whether those sacrifices were in hours or days or other people’s careers. “I have to make a phone call,” he announced to the silent room. Everyone had been staring at him. Once he spoke, they all stared at one another, their jaws dropped in disbelief. He had to make a phone call? When had Carter ever had to do anything? “It shouldn’t be long. I’ll be back in a couple minutes. Feel free to continue without me.”
“Is everything okay?” a younger executive with slicked-back hair and a sharp pinstriped suit asked. He didn’t ask because he cared. He was merely curious. He’d never seen Carter Green walk out of a meeting before.
Carter shot him a look, one of Carter’s patented looks, the one that caused people’s mouths to shut tight and their assholes to shut even tighter. Carter looked around the room. He wouldn’t call a single person in that room a friend. Sometimes they were allies, sometimes they were enemies, but they were never friends. “I just need to make a phone call,” Carter repeated. Then he headed for the door and stepped outside.
He went up to the roof. He could have gone to his office, but the roof felt more private. He was confident that no one else would be there to hear his conversation. He only had to walk up one flight of stairs. Above him, the enormous bright blue sky was dotted with crystal-white clouds. Carter barely noticed. He dialed the number that he’d been assigned. Every client was assigned his own dedicated, untraceable phone number. He heard the phone ring once. Fergus answered before the second ring. “You got my text,” Fergus said before Carter could say a word.
“Yes,” Carter replied. He recognized Fergus’s voice. They’d been working together for nine months now. Fergus was the only person at the Company with whom Carter had ever dealt, and Carter admired Fergus’s dedication to his company and his craft. He wondered why he couldn’t find more people with Fergus’s client management skills.
“Good. Then you know we’re on our way. Everything is set. We can discuss logistics tomorrow.”
“When will we do the procedure?” Carter asked, more anxious than he’d felt in a long time.
“In two days,” Fergus told him.
Carter looked out over the miles and miles of New York City laid out below him. “Two days? I thought you were going to give me more notice than that.”
Fergus didn’t hesitate. “We need to do this quick, the quicker the better. I have other buyers who will take this with an hour’s notice.”
Carter paused. He understood what Fergus was doing. Carter was used to applying pressure to the people he did business with. He wasn’t used to being on this end of it. He considered trying to negotiate but thought better of it. This wasn’t an ordinary business transaction. He had no idea what Fergus was capable of. Even though he’d known Fergus for almost a year, he still didn’t know a single thing about him other than his pitch and what he’d read in the catalogues. But, if you had the money—and Carter had the money—it was a hell of a pitch. “No. No. Two days is fine.”
“Good. I’ll come to your apartment tomorrow at two P.M. Be there.”
Fergus didn’t wait for Carter to reply. He hung up, and Carter heard the line go dead.
—
Back on his plane, Fergus smiled, happy with how the call went. Giving it any more time could only turn it for the worse. Fergus could line up other buyers on a couple of hours’ notice, but Carter was an important client. It wasn’t just Carter’s money that made him important, it was his entire profile. If Fergus managed him right, he suspected that he and the Company would make a lot of money off Carter.
Fergus put his phone down and walked back toward the cargo room. Pierce’s body lay there, strapped to the bed. The only movement that Carter could see was the gentle rise and fall of Pierce’s chest as he breathed. Fergus checked Pierce’s vital signs. Everything looked good. The heart rate was slow but steady. The brain activity was at a healthy minimum.
Fergus thought back to when he’d first recruited Pierce. Of course, he hadn’t been Pierce then. Fergus couldn�
��t remember the kid’s real name. He remembered just about everything else about him, though. Pierce really had been special, doing everything that he’d done from where he began. Fergus reached down and brushed the hair off of Pierce’s forehead, away from his eyes. Fergus’s new client was going to be very pleased.
Chapter 6
In cases like the dead girl’s, the John and Jane Does, the lost ones, the forgotten ones, where the only information Cole had about the victim came from the autopsy report, the memory of the murder was actually the easiest memory for Cole to recall, since it was the only one with a known trigger. If he knew more about the victim—where she was from, where she lived, anything—he could use that information to trigger more memories. Most of Cole’s cases were a lot like this one. He had only worked a couple of cases in which he’d known anything much about the victims. In those cases, they’d known the victims’ identities, but no one who knew the victim would volunteer to take their memories. It’s not easy to volunteer to inherit the memories of a murder victim. There’s a bit of bravery in it. But in cases like this, lacking any other useful information, Cole had to go out and find those triggers on his own. So the first mystery for Cole in this case, as in so many of his others, wasn’t who killed her or why but simply who was she? What sort of life had she lived to make it seem like no one missed her now that she was gone?
After lunch, Cole spent the day walking around the city with the hope of seeing something that would trigger new memories. He walked with his head down, trying his best not to be noticed. Cole never knew what the next memory trigger might be. It could be a sound or a smell or a ray of light bursting through leaves. Every memory had its own triggers. Even now, Cole could be walking down the street and a certain odor could hit him and pull up a stranger’s memory that he’d never encountered before, that he hadn’t even known was in his head. That’s why moving was important. In the early stages after a transplant, Cole’s process was all about change: seeing new things, hearing new sounds, smelling new scents. Even if he walked by sights and sounds and smells that he had experienced before, experiencing them again could trigger something new, now that he had new memories to trigger. As he walked through the city that day, memories came to him, flooding his brain, but none of them were hers. They were all memories that Cole recognized, each slightly duller than the first few times that he had remembered them.
When nothing seemed to be working, Cole went home and fell asleep on his couch. That night he had strange dreams, as he always did after a procedure. He knew enough not to trust anything in his dreams.
It wasn’t until the next morning that a new memory finally came to Cole. He felt it coming, felt a dizzying sensation in his head and stomach when he was about to open his eyes. Then the whole memory came to him in that split second between his eyes being closed and his eyes being open, and in an instant it was all there, in his head, as if it had always been there. Simply waking up had been the trigger.
She was on a bus. It was nighttime. She’d been sleeping. The bus was mostly empty, so she’d been able to lie down across two seats with her legs bent and her knees pointed into the air. The bus’s wheels rumbled on the road beneath her. Her eyes opened slowly. He could see everything as if he were inside her head, could remember everything as if he’d experienced the memory himself. Most of the lights in the bus were off, but there was enough light from outside for her to see into the shadows. She lifted up her hand to try to look at her watch, but her wrist was bare. Only then did she remember that she’d pawned the watch to help pay for her bus ticket. It was an antique watch that her grandmother had given her. Now all that was left was the dim outline of a tan line where the watch used to be.
“It’s two-thirty,” a voice said to her from across the aisle. She sat up, slightly frightened by the idea that somebody had been watching her. It was a boy. She could see shadows dancing across his face. He didn’t appear to be much older than she was, maybe twenty-one. Cole studied the boy’s shoulders and his neck, trying to assess whether or not he might be the killer without pulling himself out of the memory. Cole didn’t think the boy was the murderer, though memories can be tricky sometimes. People become bigger or smaller for reasons unrelated to their actual height.
“Huh?” the girl said. Her head was still groggy from sleep. If the boy was giving her the right time, she’d been asleep for over three hours.
“It’s two-thirty,” the boy said again. “You know? The time?” He smiled at her. “Isn’t that why you were looking at your wrist?”
She looked at her bare wrist again, at the tan line where the watch used to be. “Yeah,” she said. “I forgot I wasn’t wearing a watch.” Then she let out a small, fake laugh.
“Where’re you headed?” the boy asked.
The girl hesitated. She wasn’t sure if she should tell him. He was a stranger on a bus. He looked friendly enough, though. “New York,” she said.
“Me too,” the boy said. “You visiting friends?”
She looked past him, out the window behind him and into the passing darkness. “No,” she said softly and slowly. “I’m just going.” As she said the words, Cole could feel the sadness inside her like a chill running through his body. “What about you?” she asked, hoping to perk herself up by hearing someone else’s story.
“Yeah,” the boy said, “one of my friends moved out there a few months ago. He’s got an extra room for me.”
“Have you been to New York before?” the girl asked.
“No.” The boy shook his head. “You?”
The girl laughed. “I’ve never been out of Kansas before.”
The boy slid in his seat to get closer to the aisle, closer to the girl. “Well, we left Kansas about an hour and a half ago. So you’ve been out of Kansas now.”
“Really?” the girl asked, and some of the sadness left her.
“I’m Matt,” the boy said, reaching his hand across the aisle.
“I’m Meg,” Meg said, reaching out and shaking Matt’s hand.
Meg, Cole thought. Her name is Meg.
“Can I come over there?” Matt asked Meg, eyeing the empty seat next to her with that look that she had seen on teenage boys. That look had scared her before but not anymore.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Meg answered Matt.
“Why not?”
Meg’s heart started to race. Cole’s heart raced with it. He could recognize her fear before she spoke. Everybody feels fear a little bit differently. Everyone feels love, joy, and sadness differently too, but it’s not quite like fear. Fear is primal. It’s like a fingerprint. Cole recognized her fear from the memory of the moments before she was murdered, staring at the back of the man who would kill her. This was a little different, though. Excitement mixed with the fear. She started to go through the excuses in her head, the excuses that she normally used to get boys to leave her alone. She couldn’t blame her parents anymore. She was on her own now. They’d left Kansas an hour and a half ago. She had escaped. Maybe if she was honest, the boys wouldn’t be so bad. The courage built up inside her, and the memory of her courage nearly stole Cole’s breath. She said the words. “Because I’m gay.” She’d said the words out loud before. She’d practiced saying them in her room, in front of a mirror, just to see what it was like to say them. This was the first time she’d said them to someone else, though. So she traded her fear of saying the words with the fear of how this strange boy would react.
Matt looked up at her and smiled. “Well, that stinks,” Matt said. “I mean, that’s cool for you. It’s just that you’re really cute and you seem really nice, so it stinks for me.”
Matt’s fumbling, shy reaction made Meg feel like she could fly. All the fear was gone, not forever but for now. The fear ran out of Cole’s body at the same time that it rushed out of Meg’s. He was fully immersed in the memory, and that rush was electric. Few things can match the sensation of fear rushing out of you in a wave. “Does it make me less cute? Or less nice?” Meg aske
d Matt. The questions weren’t rhetorical. She wanted to know what Matt thought. He was the beginning of her new life.
“I guess not,” Matt conceded but, after that, there was a long lull in their conversation. Both of them began staring out the windows at the moonlit fields that the bus was cutting between. After a few minutes of silence, Matt spoke again. “Are you sure that’s not just a line?” Matt asked. “You sure you’re not just saying that, you know, to scare me off? Because the way you say it, it kind of sounds like a line.”
Meg shook her head. “It’s not a line,” she assured him. “I’m just not used to saying it out loud.”
“Is that why you’re leaving Kansas?” Matt asked.
“Yeah,” Meg confessed. “That’s a lot of the reason, anyway.”
“Well, that’s just about as good a reason to leave Kansas as any,” Matt said, balling his jacket into a makeshift pillow. “I guess we should get some more sleep. We’ve got a long way to go, Meg.” Then he pushed his jacket up against the side of the bus and placed his head on it. When he did, the moonlight hit his face, making it glow an ivory white. It made him look a bit like an angel—a scruffy, ragged angel. Meg could feel the absence of fear. She wasn’t afraid of Matt, and she wasn’t afraid of tomorrow. That was enough for now. Meg lay back down and, as she closed her eyes, Cole’s eyes opened.
The Memory Detective Page 3