Mind to Mind: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (5 page)

The police had no leads at all in this case.
And actually there had not been a lot of push toward developing
any. She's a big city, Los Angeles is, with undoubtedly one of the
finest police departments in the world but also beset by a criminal
population that exceeds the total population of most American
cities. The cops in this town are virtually under siege—to the
extent, at least, that there is always considerably more crime
than there are time and resources to respond to it. So Cochran's
"Jane Doe" case—which only very lately had become a homicide—had
not received a lot of attention.

What they had, until now, was an assault
victim and a weapon. They did not know the victim's name or place
of residence. No one had been pressuring for a quick solution here.
No one had come forward to identify the victim or her assailant. It
had been, therefore, one of those "backwater" cases that a guy like
Cochran was expected to work on only when there were not more
pressing matters at hand.

But this one had gotten
under Cochran's skin. He'd been working it on his own time, for the
most part. He had distributed her photograph around the country.
He'd kept up with missing-persons reports from every region. He'd
put the arm on every informant on his list, several times around,
and he'd even taken to hounding the lockups and questioning
suspects in other assaults.

Cochran was a good cop, and he had done all
the right things with all the time at his disposal. He'd come to me
as a last resort, and I suspect that he'd intended to pay my fee
out of his own pocket. He was that kind of cop. He didn't even mind
that I punched his door bell at midnight, though I suspect that
his wife did, and even she plugged in the coffeepot and tried to
put the best face possible on that midnight invasion of their
privacy.

I had not met Georgia Cochran before that
visit to her home. Jim had spoken of her, and of their two kids,
but he was not the type to say a lot about his personal life. From
what he had said, it was my impression that he had a happy marriage
and a satisfying home life. I liked her instantly. And I liked the
sleepy-eyed ten-year-old who came to the kitchen to investigate the
late-night sounds in there. She wore an old-fashioned flannel
nightgown, and her blond hair was braided and tied with ribbons, a
vision straight from a child's storybook. What really arrested my
attention, though, was this kid's strong resemblance to our Jane
Doe. Jim saw me looking at her as her mother shooed her back to
bed, and I guess he knew what I was thinking. Neither of us needed
to say anything about the resemblance; I thought I understood why
Jane Doe had found a place beneath this tough cop's skin and why
he'd devoted so much of his own time to her.

But he could not tell me a
hell of a lot more than I already knew. The killer was either very
lucky or very cagey. Other than the unfortunate nurse who had
walked in on the murder scene, no one at the hospital had noticed
him. The nurse's description was worth nothing. The guy was wearing
surgical togs and had the mask covering his face from the eyes
down, cap pulled down onto the brows. She described the eyes only
as being "very cold." As for the rest of it, he was "very strong"
and wore blue-and-white running shoes. Apparently the guy had
thought it out rather carefully; he also wore rubber surgical
gloves; the outfit was found abandoned in a public rest room two
floors up.

That was all the substance. I had told
Cochran earlier, at the hospital, about the "mental alarm" that
sent me scrambling to Jane's room but too late. We talked a little
about that, that night at the Cochran home, and I told him about
the rush of symbols that remained etched in my brain. I
quick-sketched several of them for him; we drank coffee and talked
a little about diseased minds and heinous crimes until Georgia shut
us down with a shivery complaint about "the horror show."

I left a few minutes after
that. Cochran walked me to my car, held the door, and leaned in to
tell me, "I should have pulled your chain a week earlier. Wish I
had. Sounds like you were getting onto something. Nothing you gave
me jogged anything, but ... I already looked into the devil
worship bit. There’s enough of that around, but all I could make
of it is a few pathetic sickie kids who'd grab for anything to give
them a sense of power. I tend to agree with Dr. Saunders that it
was just a camouflage job, that cigarette tattoo on Jane's belly. I
think the killer knew her, probably intimately. That was a
desperation stunt, you know, walking into that hospital in broad
daylight with murder on the mind. She could have identified him,
I'm sure of that. Well ... I doubly want the bastard now. Let me
know if something else floats in on you, eh?"

I assured him that I would, then followed an
impulse to ask him, "What is your daughter's name?"

He gave me an odd look as he replied, "We
call her Vicky Victoria because it means victory and she was the
pick of the litter. She's adopted. So's the boy."

I said, "No need to tell me that, Jim."

"Plenty of need," he
replied. "I caught your notice. The resemblance is almost uncanny,
isn't it? I know how that murky mind of yours works. And you're
right; I've had to wonder ... Jane Doe was old enough and
apparently unrooted enough to ... could be, yeah, it's possible,
who the hell knows in this crazy world. Vicky was a doorstep
abandonment, hours old. So ... damn, Ash. I couldn't get it out of
my mind."

I said, "Well, do so now,
pal. More than five billion people on this planet. Not nearly that
many possible facial configurations. There's got to be a lot of
coincidental similarities spread around. Have you mentioned this to
Georgia?"

"Christ, no! I was scared
to death you would say something."

I zipped my lip and pushed
him clear of the doorway, closed the door and fired the engine,
told him, "Rest it. I'll take it for a while. You take care of
Vicky Victoria."

"You'll take it where?" he asked,
frowning.

"Along the synapses of my murky brain."

I was moving along the driveway, and he was
pacing me out. "What the hell does that mean?"

"Jane gave me a picture,"
I told him. "I just have to decipher it. Keep you posted. But don't
call me, I'll call you."

"No fee, asshole!" he yelled after me. "Work
with me or work for nothing!"

That was okay with me. But I would not be
working for nothing. I was working for Jane Doe.

And maybe, "crazy world" or no, I would be
working for Vicky Victoria.

Chapter Seven: Right Side
Up

It was past one o'clock
when I got back to my place on the beach, but I knew I would not
sleep with a burdened mind so I took the burden into my office and
fired up the computer for a little cryptographic go. I call it an
office purely because that makes what I do sound a little
businesslike—and I get a bit sensitive with myself about that from
time to time. Actually I have no desire whatever to be "in
business" or "in" anything, for that matter. I think I am probably
a constitutional bachelor. I know very well that I am lazy. And I
make no apology whatever for a love of personal freedom. I am
devoted to the idea that each of us inhabits the world of his own
making. The personal worlds we build are constructs of our own
consciousness, and our consciousness, in turn, is further shaped by
the worlds we build with it. There's a constant feedback, to the
general effect that I build my world and that world builds me while
I am building it. Of course, I have to interface with all the
worlds being built by everyone else. Problem with an interface of
this nature is that, most usually, it's more of a conglomeration or
accretion, sort of like crystals forming. It's like the whole human
species constitutes a single organism and everyone is expected to
look and act and think and feel exactly like everyone else if we
mean to qualify as "human.'' I consider that a rip-off of the human
spirit; more, it is a theft of mankind's most precious asset: the
mind that knows itself and knows that it knows.

I doubt very seriously that dogs or cats or
mice or turtledoves have any claim to objective reasoning power. A
dog does not even "know" that he is a dog, I trust. In the wild
state he may form packs and run with his own kind for mutual
survival. But as much as I like dogs, I just can't see one ever
painting a picture of a sunset or composing a sonata.

'Course, I know people who
swear by their dog's "great intelligence" and can tell you story
after story about how the dog responds to this and that. I love
that stuff myself; it's all very cute. I had a dog once who could
stand alone on her hind legs and dance, as a pup, without ever
being trained or even asked to do so; it was a spontaneous talent,
but the only tiling she ever danced to was Herb Alpert's recording
of
Taste of Honey
. Turned her on every time, but no other music ever did. And,
of course, it does not say a thing as to what came into that pup's
head when I put Herb on the turntable. Except that it made me
wonder about genetic memory; maybe she had show biz in her
bloodline and Herb's music triggered something there. Why couldn't
dancing be as instinctive as retrieving a bird?

Point is, the major
difference between man and beast lies not so much in brain size
(consider the elephant) or degrees of "intelligence" (whatever that
is), but the wiring of the brain itself. You and I, pal, walk
around in an upright position and eat with a fork not because
we're smarter than the dog but because we are
designed
to do it—our brains are put
together in a different way and for a whole different purpose—and
that brain of yours defines the world you live in, the same as the
dog's brain defines the world he lives in. A dog screws in the
front yard and licks his ass at the dinner table because he lives
in his world, not yours, and because such behavior is natural and
right for him. That is why he looks at you so oddly when you scold
him for breaking the social taboos of your world; your world is an
alien world to him, pal, and you are an alien being.

You're a human. That
defines not an organism but
beings of a
certain class
who possess certain shared
characteristics.

I have betrayed my family line because I
elected not to assume a certain set of shared characteristics
peculiar to my genetic trace. But, see, that is my option as a
human. I can either dance or not dance when Alpert toots his brass.
I get to choose my own world. Every male Ashton before me, since at
least the American Revolution, was a career naval officer. Of
course, that's only one side of the trace. Somewhere probably a
derelict wino beachcomber who no longer even remembers his name is
the repositor on that other side. If my mother ever knew his name,
she never shared the secret with anyone. She assigned the name Ford
to the record of birth as a humorous footnote to my conception upon
the backseat of an automobile but raised me as an Ashton and gave
me the name up front, maybe as a token compensation.

Even so, I allowed myself
to become organized to the point of carrying through an appointment
to Annapolis and the minimum mandatory service afterward. I earned
a B.S. degree and went to work in the mystical, magical maze of
naval intelligence, learned some very interesting routines in the
wondrous worlds of electronic spying and cryptology, good stuff
like that, attended every war college I could find my way into, and
got the hell away just as quickly as possible.

I started off, here, by
telling you about my "office" and the reason I call it that, even
though I really do not regard myself as a businessman of any kind.
I prefer to think that I do not work for money. I am lucky that I
am in the position where I can afford to feel that way. I'm a kept
man. Kept by my family line. Not in a grand manner, of course, but
there is this tidy little trust that provides income enough to
handle the essentials and allows me the options I so happily
exercise.

I have a dowager aunt back
in South Carolina who refers to me as "the bad seed." She thinks
it's terrible that I have never really "committed" to anything.
Seems that I had two honorable choices: one, a career in warfare
(the U.S. Navy is
always
in a state of war), which is considered
"service"; the other, the pursuit of wealth, regarded as the only
sane alternative to service.

I am not knocking either of those. I just
feel very fortunate to be in a position to do the things I enjoy
doing. I enjoy tennis, for example, and I do a lot of that. I enjoy
learning something new, and I try to do a lot of that too. I enjoy
a puzzle or a mystery, and they do me quite a bit. I enjoy people,
too, for the most part, those who will allow me the room to build
my own world my own way.

More than anything else I enjoy being alive.
And I take the whole bag with that. It's a hell of an adventure. I
love it all. And I guess that is why I pretend that I have an
office in my home. Maybe I feel like I have to pay for the
adventure, and the "office" is my token way of taking care of the
tab.

Well ... it really is an
office, I guess. I mean, there's a desk, sort of. An acrylic table,
actually. Serves the purpose just fine. The computer, of course.
Couldn't live without a computer. This one's nice. I just upgraded
to a hard disk. Tandy 1000 with 640K and ten megs on the disk.
Color monitor. Telephone, naturally. Even an answering machine.
Couch and a couple of comfortable chairs for clients. Yeah, I get
clients in here sometimes. I try to discourage it. Usually, if
someone wants to see me, I try to arrange a meeting at my tennis
club. Also have a mobile phone in the Maserati, but I think I got a
lemon; sometimes it works okay.