“Meg met someone. A woman. Her name is Sam. I think Meg was in love with her.” Cole could hear the crack in his own voice. “Your daughter’s murder was random. It wasn’t anybody’s fault but the killer’s.” A sigh came out of Meg’s mother that could have been heard at the other end of the hallway. It was as if she was releasing all of her built-up despair, like she had been waiting for someone to tell her those exact words. “And she was happy,” Cole said. “She really was happy. Tell Annie that she was happy.”
Meg’s mother walked up to Cole, put her arms around him, and hugged him. She was saying goodbye to her daughter, the only way she could. She couldn’t hug her daughter again, but she could at least hug her daughter’s memories. Cole didn’t fight it. He had no desire to. Cole felt Meg’s mother’s embrace and let the memories flow through him. Years and years of memories big and small surged through him like water down a raging river. The rush he felt was nearly indescribable.
Then Meg’s mother let go.
“You know where to find me?” Cole said to her as she took a single step away from him. She looked dazed, as if she’d forgotten that she wasn’t actually hugging her teenage daughter but, instead, a world-weary middle-aged man. Meg’s mother nodded. “Good,” Cole said. Then he turned and walked away.
Chapter 19
Two men dressed in dark green painter’s uniforms pulled a lifeless body from the back of a van. It was dark out, even darker under the canopy of tall pine trees. They were in the woods somewhere in upstate New York, parked alongside a river that eventually ran into the Hudson River and then to the Atlantic Ocean. They didn’t know anything about the man who once inhabited the body they’d been tasked with dumping into the river. They didn’t know his names, the one he was born with or the one he picked when he contracted with the Company ten years ago. They didn’t know a single one of his epic, wild tales of adventure and debauchery. They didn’t know where he was born or what he’d become or how he’d become it. They never saw him surf a forty-foot wave. They didn’t know what Carter knew. They were only in charge of one thing. Body disposal.
The body was still partially clothed when they pulled it out of the van. They laid the body out on a tarp behind the van and began to take off what was left of the body’s clothes: a T-shirt, hospital pants, and boxer shorts. The body had already been shaved from head to toe. Its bald head shone in the shards of moonlight that slipped through the trees. Even the eyebrows had been shaved. The theory was that too much history, too much evidence, can be caught inside hair.
The two men couldn’t see any signs of foul play. They never could. Only a handful of doctors would be able to figure out the cause of death, even if given full access to the body. The body was pristine. Its dark tan and firm muscles were still clearly visible. The two men could see the muscles in the moonlight even though the man had been dead for a few hours at least. “Jesus Christ,” one of the men said, “this guy must have gotten some serious tail.” His partner just laughed as they pulled out alcohol and antiseptic wipes and began to clean the body from head to toe. The washing was the last step in ensuring that nothing traceable could be found on the body. The water would help too, but they had their instructions. This whole process was already a cost-saving measure, so the Company didn’t mind being too careful.
The two men didn’t take any steps to hide the body’s identity. That had all been taken care of beforehand. Nobody would know who he was because, as a matter of public record, he hadn’t existed. Everything about his prior life had been erased, and nothing about his life funded by the Company was publicly documented. Travel documents were always forged and aliases always used. So, before disposing of the body, they never felt the need to impair fingerprints or pull teeth. They only tried to make sure that nothing could be traced back to the Company. So they scrubbed the cold, lifeless body until they were sure that it was completely clean.
“You think we’re ready?” one of the men said to the other after they’d been wiping down the body for about forty-five minutes.
“Yeah, I think that’s enough. Let’s get him into the river.” The two men positioned themselves around the body. One grabbed it beneath its knees and the other behind its shoulders.
A small pier jutted out into the river below where they’d parked the van. They carefully carried the naked body down to the pier. Then they walked out to the edge. “You think the current’s strong enough?” one of the men asked. They looked down into the water, rippling past them.
“Sure,” the other man said. “He’ll move.”
“Okay, on three?” The second man just nodded. It was brighter down by the river, out in the open and with the moonlight reflecting off the water.
“One.” They began to swing the lifeless, hairless body back and forth. “Two.” The body’s arc grew even higher. “Three.” On three, both workers let go of the body. The body lifted up in the air for a second and then came flopping back down into the moving water of the river.
The body floated, twisting in place for a moment. Then the current picked it up. The two workers stood on the pier and watched it as it floated downstream, bobbing up and down as it went. They waited until the body was completely out of sight before they headed back to the van.
“You up for a beer before you head home?” one of the workers asked.
The other man looked at his watch. “Sure, but just one. My wife will be pissed if I get home too late.” Then the two men walked back toward the van while the body continued floating away.
Chapter 20
“Thanks for coming,” Cole said as he sat down in the booth across from Allie. As usual, he was late and she was waiting for him. “I really appreciate it.” Allie watched him as he motioned for the waitress. “I’ve kind of had a rough day.” The waitress came over. “I’ll have a Bloody Bull,” he said to the waitress. Allie could have guessed. A Bloody fucking Bull, Allie thought. He’d never ordered that before all those dead people’s memories invaded his head. She didn’t think he’d ever even tried one before. Now it was every time. Allie didn’t know which memory turned him on to the drink. She only knew that it wasn’t one of his own.
“I heard you made an arrest in your case,” Allie said. She still stayed in touch with a few other cops, the ones Nick had been friends with before he started changing into Cole.
Cole stared at her. “You look great,” he said to her. She really did. She’d put on makeup but with the light touch that Cole had always preferred when they dated. She’d pulled her hair up into a loose bun, letting a few strands fall, framing her face. She knew how much the old Cole—Nick—had loved that look. She wasn’t trying to impress him. She wasn’t trying to win him back. She was simply doing whatever she could to remind him who he once had been.
“Congratulations on the case,” Allie said, ignoring his compliment.
“Thanks,” Cole replied. Then they went silent while Cole waited for his drink. The waitress arrived a moment or two later with a drink that looked like a Bloody Mary but smelled like raw leather. Cole swallowed half of it in one pull. Then he wiped the red juice off his lips with a napkin. “This one got kind of close at the end.” Allie could hear a hint of fear in his voice.
“What do you mean?” Allie asked him. She hadn’t heard the details of the arrest, only that he’d made one.
“The girl’s killer, he almost got me,” Cole said in a faraway voice. “I let him almost get me.”
“On purpose?” Allie asked, not understanding what he meant.
“No,” Cole assured her, taking another, smaller sip from his drink. “But the memories, they’re hard to control sometimes.”
Allie laughed at this. She couldn’t help it. It was a laugh full of tired sarcasm. How many times had she warned Cole? “What are you laughing at?” Cole asked, surprised by her response.
“You,” Allie said. She looked around her. “God, I hate this bar.” Cole looked around when she said the words, searching for something to hate. The bar was dark and
never more than a third full. Most of the bar’s light came from the jukebox in the corner, which was full of old country songs. The ceiling and walls were covered in fake plastic fish and other phony sea life. A fake rowboat hung from the ceiling and a fishing net and fake spear hung against one wall. The centerpiece, a giant plastic shark with a gaping mouth full of teeth, was mounted over the bar.
“We could have met somewhere else,” Cole said with what sounded like genuine remorse.
“Do you even remember why you started coming here?” Allie asked Cole. She remembered.
Cole tried to remember. Allie watched him as he searched through his Rolodex of memories. It was too many memories for one person. He couldn’t find anything. He only knew that he felt comfortable here. He shook his head.
“The bartender,” Allie said to him. “He was your fourth. He was an old guy with no family. When no one claimed him, you felt bad. You agreed to take his memories, and about three weeks later we started coming here. I’ve always hated it.”
“Why?” Cole asked, looking around again. Cole remembered now. The bartender had been shot in a robbery. At first it looked random, but the robber turned out to be one of the waitresses. Being at the bar gave Cole comfort. There wasn’t anything he could do about it anymore. Every memory changes you.
“It’s not you, Nick,” Allie said. “This is someone else’s bar—an old, lonely man. So do you realize how fucking absurd it is for you to tell me now, after all these years, that the memories are hard for you to control? Are you honestly just realizing that?” She didn’t want to be mad at him. She had promised herself that she wouldn’t get mad.
Cole was used to having people frustrated with him. They didn’t understand. They couldn’t understand. He let it go. Cole cleared his throat and took another swig of his drink. “I remembered things today,” Cole said, his voice growing grave as he spoke. “The killer got me on the ground. He was standing above me with a hammer, just like he’d done to the girl. I thought it might actually be the end. I was lucky to make him miss.”
“I can’t do this, Nick.” Allie reached for her purse. She wanted him, nothing else. She didn’t want any of this bullshit. “I can’t listen to another case of yours. I know how much they mean to you, but I can’t.”
“I wasn’t talking about the case,” Cole assured Allie.
“Then what are you talking about?”
“You,” Cole told her. “I was on the ground. The killer swung his hammer down toward me. I expected memories to come, but I expected them to all be the girl’s, since those memories were the newest. Instead other memories rushed out too—so many I could barely make sense of them.” Cole finished his drink. “It felt like every memory in my head was fighting to be remembered one last time. That’s never happened before. When most people prepare to die, they have only one life flash before their eyes. I had fifteen. I couldn’t tell you whose memories most of them were. So many of them have blended together in my head like a giant Frankenstein monster of lost memories. But a few of the memories stuck out.” Cole looked up. Allie stared at him, stared into his dark eyes, still searching. “Those were the memories of you. My memories of you.”
“What are you trying to tell me, Nick?” Allie asked Cole, barely able to speak in more than a whisper. So much had changed as Nick became Cole. The one thing that never left him was his strength. That’s why she could never fully abandon him.
“I’m not sure,” Cole admitted, “but after everything that happened today, I just wanted to talk to you. I wanted to talk to someone who was alive and who knew me and who maybe still cared about me. And I wanted to let you know I haven’t forgotten you. I haven’t forgotten us. I know sometimes you think I have, but those memories aren’t lost. They’re still there. After everything I’ve done to myself, they’re just sometimes a little harder to find.”
“Tell me what you remembered.” Allie was almost afraid to ask him for this, but she needed it.
“You don’t believe me?” Cole asked her.
“I believe that you think you remember us, but how can you be sure, when you can’t even remember why you come here? So tell me what you remember, and I’ll tell you if it’s real.”
The waitress came and put another Bloody Bull in front of Cole. He took a sip. Allie watched him. He looked confident. Scared, but confident. “I remember dancing with you at your brother’s wedding. It was outside at night, in a field. They’d laid down a hardwood dance floor on the grass.” Allie remembered that night as Cole spoke. His words and her memory intertwined. “You were wearing a dark blue sleeveless dress. I remember watching the curve of your neck from across the room as you were chatting with your new in-laws. You were electric. Then the band began to play ‘It’s Been a Long, Long Time.’ The singer even went into his full Bing Crosby croon. I watched you as the song started. You started to look for me so we could dance. Your eyes were almost in a panic as you scanned the space, not wanting the song to end before we could dance to it. Then I grabbed your attention by waving.”
“I love that song,” Allie said into the air.
“Do you know why they played that song that night?”
“No,” Allie said, and she let a soft smile cross her lips.
“I requested it,” Cole said. “I wanted to get you away from everyone else. I wanted to have you all to myself again. That’s the memory I saw right before I dodged the hammer. That memory helped me dodge the hammer. And when it is my time to die, I hope the memory of that night is the last memory I see.”
That was enough for Allie. Even one memory was enough. She knew it wouldn’t last. She knew she would never get Nick all the way back. For that one night, she didn’t care. She was happy to grab hold of the shreds of the past one last time.
At some point later that night, while Cole was lying in bed next to Allie’s nude body, the cold, naked corpse of a man was pulled out of the Hudson River. He didn’t show any visible signs of violence. He hadn’t been dead for very long, a couple days at most. They might have ignored it, passed it off as a suicide, if it hadn’t been for the others. They weren’t all exactly the same, but they were close enough to make people suspicious. Healthy thirty-something-year-olds don’t often die for no reason, so each unexplained death aroused some suspicion. The fact that they were pulling each of these seemingly healthy bodies out of water after they’d been shaved from head to toe made it almost impossible not to draw connections. People began to whisper about the possibilities of prolific serial killers. They had no leads. Somebody brought up Cole’s name. Maybe there was something hidden in the memories. Maybe Cole could help them crack the case. To that point, Cole’s cases had a history of being small and low profile. He had never been asked to catch a serial killer before.
Chapter 21
After they helped Carter find the second memory, others started to come to him more easily. Carter slept well that night inside his luxury room that they wouldn’t let him leave. He woke up a few times, pleasantly haunted by the wild memory he’d experienced earlier, but every time he was able to push himself back to sleep. Since the room had no windows, they used the lights as an alarm system. As day approached, the lights would slowly brighten, mimicking the dawn outside. That morning, the lights were half up when Carter first opened his eyes. The memory came to him as he drifted out of sleep.
Instead of opening his eyes to a dimly lit room, Carter opened his eyes to a strange darkness. Everything around him was black. The only thing the least bit visible was the night sky above him. The dark sky was dotted with what seemed like an infinite number of stars, spreading from one horizon to the other. He didn’t think he had ever seen darkness like this, not darkness that went this deep and this far. He was certain that he had never seen stars like this before. You couldn’t see stars like this within a hundred miles of a city. He was sure that he could see the whole universe stretching out above him. He felt so small beneath that enormous sky. It wasn’t a feeling that Carter was accustomed to, but he didn’
t hate it even though he thought he should. The stars didn’t move, fixed in their place in the sky. He hadn’t even known that the sky could look like this. It looked like a backdrop from a science-fiction movie, but it was real. He could remember how real it was. He wondered how many thousands or millions of years the light had traveled before reaching him. He wondered how far into the past he was looking.
At the edges of the sky, he could make out only the tops of hundreds and hundreds of trees. That’s how he knew that he was in a clearing in some sort of jungle. The only noise he could hear was the rhythmic hum of insects and animals from the trees around him, as if the heart of the jungle was beating. The rhythm of the forest spread through him. The surfer sat in the middle of the darkness, and Carter waited without knowing what he was waiting for.
He heard a whisper somewhere off to the side. He looked over and could see the shadowy silhouettes of a man and woman sitting next to each other about fifty feet from him. They were waiting too. Even as Carter recognized the feeling of that body, that same undeniable and irrepressible feeling, like a coiled spring, he felt relaxed under those stars. Some of his muscles were sore, his legs mostly, but even the soreness felt good.
As Carter waited for the memory to evolve, he couldn’t suppress a little bit of disappointment. He was hoping for another memory like the last one, full of barely believable debauchery. He wanted more of that. He had to remind himself that he had no idea where this memory was going. Maybe this memory would be worth it too. He tried to focus on letting the memory come to him, like they had taught him, and on staying inside of it.
The sounds changed first. At least that’s what Carter noticed first, before the light. It was only after noticing the change in the rhythms around him and hearing the first cries of new birds that Carter started to notice the stars vanishing on the edge of the sky. One by one, the stars began to disappear as if they were being extinguished. Then the sky began to glow. Soon, it was a fiery red. It came on fast. Everything around him began to light up with the sky.
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