Beyond belief (11 page)

About the size of a baseball bat, a handheld hydraulic power pole operated on the same principle as a powered automobile jack. Commonly used in factories and construction sites, it exerted a force of hundreds of pounds per square inch. Two or even three poles could have been brought into the library under a large overcoat and braced between the back wall and the first row of shelves.

Joe walked along the toppled shelves, looking for the distinctive pitchfork-shaped marks that a power pole's pronged tip would leave.

No prong marks.

He reached into the spirit kit, pulled out a spray bottle, and coated the shelves with a fine mist.

“What's that?” Potter asked.

Here come the questions, Joe thought. They had been too quiet. He went into autopilot as he slipped on a pair of illuminated goggles. “It's furniture oil mixed with a phosphorous compound. This wood is so old, it shouldn't absorb much of it. But if there are any places that have been pinched or clamped by a vise, the wood there might be softer and more absorbent.” He wiped the shelves with a rag. “It should soak in a bit in those places.”

Joe put on the goggles and flipped the ultraviolet switch. Although he usually preferred the fingerprint lantern, the goggles were better for close-up work. Again he walked down the row, studying the shelves.

“See anything?” Potter asked.

“Afraid not. Other than a few scratches, there's nothing here.”

“Back to the weight-lifting squad theory, huh?”

“Not yet.” Joe sprayed the phosphorous oil on the top shelves. It was possible, however unlikely, that ropes might have been used in some kind of pulley arrangement. Here, too, there should have been some softening of the wood.

There was none.

Damn.

He examined the floor where the shelf had rested. The floorboards had cracked and splintered under the immense weight of the pivoting edge. He picked up a few pieces of the broken floor and placed them into a plastic sample tray.

“Well?” Potter said.

“I'll let you know.”

It was after two
A.M.
by the time Joe got home and went to bed, but he was too wired to sleep.

What the hell was happening?

There was no chance Jesse was responsible. But it was sure being made to look that way.

Why? However he figured it, it didn't make sense. Why would anyone go through all this trouble to kill him, when a simple bullet would do the trick?

Someone obviously wanted the world to believe that Jesse was killing people with his mind. But who? The one person who had the most to gain from such a deception, Dr. Robert Nelson, was dead.

Nothing seemed to fit.

Joe considered the elevator. Had it been rigged
somehow? He'd thought it was an accident, but now he wasn't so sure. He tried to put himself back in the moment, imagining all the sights and sounds in the malfunctioning elevator car.

He had some ideas how it could have been pulled off, but he wasn't sure. If he hadn't thought it was an accident, he would have checked it out immediately.

Finally, at a few minutes to four, Joe climbed out of bed and sat in front of the television. He glanced through the tapes of Jesse Randall's test sessions to find the one he was looking for.

Jesse's final session with Nelson.

Joe popped in the tape and pushed play. Jesse was agitated from the start, glaring at Dr. Nelson and scowling at his every request.

In the test, a group of six recruited volunteers were shown a simple drawing and asked to reproduce it on a piece of paper. After that the original drawing and volunteers’ reproductions were removed from the room.

Jesse was brought in. “Okay, are you thinking about the drawing?” he asked.

A few of the volunteers nodded.

“Come on, are you thinking about it?” he snapped.

They all nodded and mumbled, “Yes.”

“When I count to three, I want you to imagine actually drawing it, one line at a time, okay? Imagine it!”

Again they nodded.

“Okay. One, two, three!”

He stared intently at the volunteers, his eyes flicking between them. Finally, he picked up a marker and moved to a large pad at the front of the room. He drew a circle with a triangle on top of it.

There were gasps from the volunteers, and the original drawing was brought back into the room.

A triangle with a circle on top of it.

Not exactly the same thing, but close enough, Joe thought. Very impressive.

But apparently not impressive enough for Nelson. He spoke sharply: “You can do better than this, Jesse. Do you like wasting everyone's time?”

Joe had never seen Nelson speak that way to any of his supposed psychics. If anything, he usually erred in the other direction, pandering to the subjects and allowing them to run roughshod over the agreed-upon test protocols.

Nelson leaned into Jesse's face. “We're going to stay here until you get it correct five times out of five, do you understand?”

Joe sat forward as he saw Jesse's face change, the expression becoming almost demonic. He knew that expression. He'd seen it before. He also knew the words that Jesse spit out at Nelson a moment later. He'd heard the exact same words from Jesse only hours before almost dying in the elevator shaft:

“Don't you do this to me!”

N
ate Dillard looked the same as he always had, Joe thought. Even though the guy was pushing seventy, he still had the same rosy cheeks and elastic eyebrows that danced with each spoken syllable. Nate stood on a small stage at the end of the Peachtree Corners High School gymnasium, demonstrating rudimentary magic techniques to a Learning Annex class.

He was a heavy-lifting specialist, and Joe's earliest memories of him were of a flaming trunk rising high over the stage at the Fox Theater. He'd thought of him almost immediately after examining Nelson's murder scene. Although it was unlikely Nate could tell him anything he didn't already know, it was worth a shot to see if there were any rigs out there he hadn't considered.

Joe glanced around the gym, where the class sat on metal folding chairs. About forty people were there, and as usual at these things, men outnumbered women four to one. There were people from all
walks of life, Joe guessed, including doctors, laborers, lawyers—

And a spiritualist.

Suzanne Morrison, the attractive medium he'd been studying at the Landwyn parapsychology program, was sitting in the third row. He was scheduled to observe one of her séances the following morning.

Joe smiled. A spiritualist in a magic class?

She was obviously bored. Small wonder, he thought. With the impressive performances she put on at her séances, this had to seem like small potatoes. She yawned and glanced around the room.

He caught her eye. Still smiling, he gave her a quick salute.

A deer caught in the headlights. She turned back to the instructor.

After Nate dismissed the class, Joe ran the particulars of Nelson's murder scene by him. Nate was just as confused as he was.

“Jeez, Joey. I don't know.” Nate, like many of the old-time magicians who knew him from his childhood days of hanging out in Sam's shop, still called him Joey. “I'm stumped. Have you stopped to consider that maybe it's
not
a trick?”

“Aw, come on, Nate. Not you too?”

Nate's large belly shook as he laughed. “Who knows? The world's a strange place.”

“Uh-huh. Speaking of which, what can you tell me about Suzanne Morrison?”

“Who?”

“She's one of your students. Very pretty—green eyes and long brown hair.”

Nate grinned. “Looking for a date, Joey?”

“Hardly. She's been passing herself off as a spiritualist. How long has she been in your class?”

“This is the fourth week of a six-week course. She's been here every time. I don't know anything about her being a medium, but she's smart and catches on quick.”

“I don't doubt it.”

Joe left Nate with a breakdown of the physical characteristics of Nelson's murder scene, but he could tell the guy wasn't going to be much help.

Joe left the building and wasn't surprised to see Suzanne Morrison waiting for him outside. He smiled. “Well, well, well.”

“This isn't what it looks like.”

“Really? Well, it
looks
like you were here doing a little occupational research. Did Nate teach you how to rig those séances?”

“No. And they weren't rigged.”

“Then tell me this: Why would a spiritualist need to take magic classes? Did Houdini tell you to sign up so you could pass along the latest techniques to him?”

“Are you through?”

“Oh, I'm just getting started.”

“I have a good reason for being here.”

“This I gotta hear.”

“You will, as soon as you lose that smirk.”

“It'll take a while to wipe this one off.”

Suzanne glared at him.

Joe shrugged and dropped the smile. “As you wish.” He looked at her with mock earnestness.

“You bastard. I should just walk away, but I don't want to give you the satisfaction of thinking you've caught me at something.”

“Too late. Please tell me.”

She glanced away. “I wasn't born with this ability.”

“The ability to take magic classes?”

“Do you want to hear this, or not?”

“I'm sorry. Go ahead.”

Suzanne took a deep breath. “It started when I was eleven. I had a friend, Daphne, who was killed in a car accident. She was my age. My parents wouldn't let me go to her funeral, but that very day Daphne came to me. She spoke to me. I realized that through her I could speak to other people who had died.”

Joe nodded. “I read all this in your case file at Land-wyn.”

“Then you also read that everyone thought I was crazy. They put me in an institution. I spent my fourteenth birthday in there, and the only reason I got out is that I pretended I couldn't hear Daphne's voice in my head anymore. Later it became more than just the voice. It was moving objects. But ever since I was a teenager, I've been looking for someone who can do the things I do, who's been feeling the things I've been feeling. I go to two or three spiritualists a week, hoping to find someone like me, but they've all been frauds.”

“That still doesn't explain why you're taking a magic class.”

“I study books and take classes so that I can spot the phonies. I
have
to be an expert. How else will I know if they're putting one over on me?”

Joe stared at her. “That's
good.
Very good. Did you come up with that just now, or had you thought it all out before, in case someone ever saw you here?”

“It's the truth.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I probably know as much about phony spirit rigs as you do.”

“I don't doubt it.”

She rolled her eyes. “Fine. Believe what you want. I understand you'll be sitting in on another session of mine tomorrow. Maybe
that
will convince you.”

Joe shrugged.

“Am I the reason you came here tonight? Did someone tell you I was in the class?”

“No, I needed to talk to your teacher about something.”

“About Dr. Nelson's murder?”

He hesitated before answering. “Yes.”

“It's no big secret that you're investigating it. Nate Dillard is a good heavy-lifting guy. Was he any help?”

“Not really.”

“Did you consider a Harrison winch?”

“Almost immediately. It wouldn't have worked.”

“Center-of-gravity problem?”

“You got it.”

A broad smile lit her face. “I guess you haven't considered the possibility that the boy
did
cause it to happen?”

“No. Is that what you think?”

“Not likely. In my experience, pretty much all mediums and psychics are fakes.” She smiled again. “Except me, of course.”

“Of course.”

She gestured down the street. “I'm going for coffee. Would it compromise your objectivity to join me?”

He thought for a moment. “It would have to be
very
good coffee for that to happen.”

Joe hadn't planned to make an evening of it, but he found himself enjoying Suzanne's company. If this was part of her con, at least it was an interesting variation.

They bought their coffee and sat at an outdoor table beneath a historical-landmark sign reminding them that hundreds of Confederate soldiers had died horrible deaths on the same spot where affluent young adults now enjoyed cappuccinos and iced mochas.

“You know, we're really on the same side,” Suzanne said. “We both hate frauds who pretend to have paranormal abilities, and we both have our reasons to expose them.”

“Who, exactly, have you exposed?”

“I don't mean ‘expose’ in the sense that I arrest them or put them out of business. I just find out what they do and how they do it, and I move on.”

“That could fall under the category of occupational research.”

“It could if I were a fake. But I'm not. I knew about Merrill Hawkins and the broomstick kids long before you did.”

Joe laughed. Hawkins was an elderly woman in Ac-worth who had convinced Nelson, Kellner, and the rest of the parapsychology program that she was
summoning rambunctious spirits to her farmhouse. In reality, the disturbances were caused by the woman's teenage grandchildren, who shimmied in the crawlspace beneath the house and poked broomsticks through removable wood plugs in the floor. They raised tables, knocked over chairs, and caused a general ruckus in the darkened house while their grandmother was in her “trance.”