Pyramid Lake (35 page)

“Type one bipolar,” I said.

Cassie’s eyes widened. “You
knew
?”

“No, I didn’t—not before now. But in retrospect, it’s obvious. All the signs were there; I just didn’t see them. The hypomanic focus on work, the hypersexuality, the alcohol abuse, the cyclic manic and depressive phases. She would often call in sick for days, and we never knew why. Now we do.”

I hugged my knees and looked at the ceiling, fifty feet above. “What meds is she taking? Lithium? Lamotrigine or carbamazepine? And benzodiazepines, I suppose.”

“That’s uncanny.” Cassie stared at me in surprise. “I was holding Kate’s hand while she talked to the doc. She didn’t want me to leave, so I heard everything. But how the hell can
you
possibly know all this?”

I looked away, not wanting her to see my face. Hearing her confirm Frankenstein’s diagnosis of Kate as 100 percent accurate shattered the last tiny shred of hope I had been holding that he was mistaken about Amy. I stood up. Keeping my back toward Cassie, I walked over to stand in front of Frankenstein’s dark central screen.

“Frankenstein, did Kate kill McNulty?” I asked. “Did she kill Bennett?”

Cassie cleared her throat. “Of course she didn’t.”

Frankenstein’s voice was now his old one, once again free of any sign of emotion. “I’m not so sure, Cassandra. As you said, Kate suffers from a serious psychiatric condition. It’s a complicating factor that makes her microexpression patterns somewhat unreliable for determining guilt.”

I watched Cassie’s reaction carefully, noting her quick glance toward me.
Shit.

“Unreliable?” she asked, still looking at me oddly. “In what way?”

“That’s hard to say.”
Failure to comprehend
. Frankenstein was following my earlier instructions to keep my co-lead in the dark by pretending not to understand.

“It’s okay, Frankenstein,” I said. “Let me explain this to her.”

I took a deep breath and faced Cassie. She deserved to know everything. And eventually she would. But I could reveal only a little bit to her right now.

“It turns out that different psychiatric illnesses also exhibit distinct patterns of microexpressions,” I said. “Frankenstein and I have been working to formalize and catalogue these psychiatric microexpression markers for diagnostic use.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? And where did you get patient data to train on?”

I shook my head. “You don’t want to know.”

“Oh, shit.” She stood up. “No, you’re right, I probably don’t… But when you publish this it’s going to turn psychiatry upside down.”

“That doesn’t matter right now,” I said.

“How accurately does it work?”

Frankenstein answered before I could. “Ninety-nine-point-seven percent, Cassandra. Far better than any human clinician.”

“And you were spot-on with Kate,” she said. “But can you explain what you meant about her condition making her microexpressions unreliable, so you can’t tell if she’s lying or not?”

“Yes,” he said. “Kate is type one bipolar. During severe manic episodes, patients like her can become delusional, suffering from hallucinations or other symptoms of psychosis. After a manic episode with psychotic characteristics, type-one bipolar patients often exhibit deficits in their working memory. This is very likely the reason Kate retained so little recollection of the events portrayed in Trevor’s video. She may not be aware of what happened in reality. Like schizophrenics, type one bipolar sufferers can become quite adept at reconstructing false memories of past events, as a coping mechanism.”

“So we have a definite maybe,” I said. “Not very helpful.”

Cassie curled into my arms, and I hugged her. Her hands rose between our chests, shaking.

“This is a lot to absorb,” she said. “I feel so sorry for Kate. She’s trying really hard to have some kind of a normal life. It must be awful to be like that. But I still can’t believe she killed anyone.”

“What about Roger?” I asked Frankenstein. “I could totally see that douchebag killing a bunch of people.” I couldn’t really, but Roger’s constant jokes about
me
being a murderer were getting old.

“Roger does not know who killed either of the two victims,” Frankenstein said. “He exhibits some degree of belief that it was Trevor, although he remains uncertain.”

“Great,” I said. “Fucking loser thinks I might be a serial killer, but he still wants to hang out with me.”

“I find Roger’s reactions a little abnormal, also,” Frankenstein said. “He appears to find the idea that you are guilty of murder exciting rather than perturbing. But that is because of his overriding antipathy toward you, Trevor.”

“Antipathy?”
I frowned. “The fuck are you talking about? Roger’s my friend.”

“Trevor…” Cassie’s voice was soft. “Frankenstein’s right: Roger hates you. It’s all over his face, even if you can’t see it. Or maybe you just don’t want to.” She swallowed and leaned her head against my collarbone. “The way Roger looks at you is even uglier than the hungry way he stares at
me
.”

I dropped my arms from around Cassie and stalked down the ramp, feeling a burst of sudden irritation. But on top of everything else, this little surprise shouldn’t have meant much. Why should I care if suck-up, toadying Roger was only pretending to be my friend while secretly hating me? It was pathetic, actually.

“Think about the way you treat him,” Cassie called after me. “You really didn’t have any idea how he felt?”

I shook my head and buried my indignation. I’d deal with Roger later. In fact, I’d plan something
really
nasty for him. He should have been more up front with me. But we had more important things to deal with now.

Turning around, I climbed back up the ramp and rejoined Cassie.

“So Kate may have done it but might not remember,” I said. “And Roger definitely
didn’t
do it, but he hopes I did, because he hates me. We’re getting nowhere fast.”

“I just can’t see Kate as a killer,” she said.

“Hell, maybe two
different
people killed McNulty and Bennett,” I said. “Still, Bennett was frozen nearly solid. Think about that for a minute in a Dante context.”

“I have been,” she said. “The cold ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno was reserved for the worst sin of all.”

I nodded. “Treachery.”

Twenty minutes ago, I had spent some time on Google, looking up images. Even rendered in black and white, Gustave Doré’s paintings of the frozen lake at the bottom of hell had made an impression on me. The heads of those whom Dante considered guilty of unforgivable betrayals dotted the lake’s icy surface—their frozen, half-submerged eyes staring, their bodies hidden beneath the ice. In particular, I couldn’t shake the grisly image of Count Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri, buried together neck deep in the ice, with the count gnawing hungrily at the back of his enemy’s skull. It bore a chilling similarity to the way Bennett’s jaws had been frozen around Frankenstein’s coolant pipe.

I almost asked Frankenstein to display a panorama of those images now, but I caught myself just in time. Displaying Googled images would reveal to Cassie the existence of the Trevornet. She was smart enough to have probably guessed that I had enabled Internet access somehow, in violation of security. But I didn’t want to force her into the awkward position of having to acknowledge it.

“According to Dante, Bennett was punished for betrayal,” I added lamely.

Cassie looked thoughtful. “So tell me, who would consider Ronald Bennett, a deputy director of Homeland Security, guilty of betrayal?”

I would,
I thought, but didn’t say. Bennett had betrayed both Frankenstein and me. He and his colleagues had made Frankenstein an operational part of Pyramid Lake’s rendition and detainment camp for suspected terrorists, without even informing me, the principal investigator for the MADRID project.

Once again, the Dante interpretation seemed to point a finger at me, the way it had in McNulty’s case. Just like the planting of my keys, it felt deliberate. But questioning Roger and Kate hadn’t brought us any closer to an answer.

We were still missing something. Or someone.

Shrugging off my co-lead’s question, I thought about my discussion with Garmin. According to him, during the time window when Bennett died last night, security key-card records had placed
all
of the DARPA leads on base.

I turned to Cassie.

“When’s the last time you saw Blake?”

W
hen Cassie’s Prius pulled away from the guard post at the base gate, just ahead of my Mustang, a tribal police car made a U-turn on the dusty shoulder and fell in behind her. I was pleased to see it because our MP escorts had stayed behind to await our return tomorrow morning. The tribal police would keep Cassie safe on her way down to Wadsworth, where she would stay overnight at her uncle’s place.

I was less happy to see my own escort waiting a hundred yards down the road. Peterson and Zajicek hadn’t gone far after Garmin and I sent them packing. Their presence was an annoyance I didn’t need right now, because I planned to track Blake down myself and ask him some very pointed questions.

The two Washoe County sheriff’s deputies stayed visible in my rearview mirror all the way back to Flanigan, even following me into the drive-through lane of a Starbucks.

At the window, I ordered a selection of four dozen doughnuts and dessert pastries, going heavy on starches, sugars, and fats. Checking an imaginary text message on my phone, I leaned out the window and gave Peterson and Zajicek, behind me, an exaggerated thumbs-up for the barista’s benefit.

Both officers kept their faces impassive beneath the mirrored sunglasses.

I added another two dozen muffins for the imaginary Sheriff’s Department fund-raiser I was supposed to be helping set up. Then, pretending I’d forgotten my wallet, I apologized to the barista and sent a text to myself. I waited for a nonexistent reply, then gave the squad car behind me another thumbs-up.

“Cool, no worries,” I told the barista, pointing back at the deputies. “They’ve got this.”

Looking in the rearview mirror as I pulled away, I was gratified to see a frustrated-looking Evan Peterson climb out of the car, wallet in hand, to accept the oversize pastry boxes, which were too big to fit through the squad car window.

I grinned watching him hand them through the open door to a pissed-off looking Zajicek. Neither of them wanted to make the Washoe Sheriff’s department the laughingstock of Flanigan’s café crowd, though, so they were playing along.

Turning the wheel, I rounded the corner, and they were lost to sight.

Five minutes later, I was sitting on my couch with my MacBook in my lap. I looked out the window and watched the Sheriff’s Department car pull up across the street from my house. But they didn’t get out.

At least they wouldn’t get hungry now. Chuckling, I considered ordering them a dozen pizzas just to be sure, and maybe some flowers, and a singing telegram and a birthday-party balloon clown, followed by a tow truck… Then I sobered. No more fun and games—I didn’t have time to waste.

The side-by-side icons of two encrypted folders stared out from my screen: the contents of McNulty’s and Blake’s hard drives. Although I was more interested in Blake’s, I started with McNulty’s. Hearing Kate’s drunken ramble about getting HR involved had gotten me thinking. The “nice guy” she had railroaded with a phony sexual assault claim: had he worked at Pyramid Lake?

A quick Spotlight search for “criminal,” “rape,” “assault,” “sexual,” and similar terms turned up nothing that related to Kate. But I did find something else that made my eyes narrow.

A three-year-old bulletin to department administrators informed McNulty of a prison parolee—a sex offender—recently hired by the civilian food service concession that ran our on-base cafeteria. The routine announcement to management, which was required under Nevada law, included the ex-con’s name, Douglas Hensley, and his home address. There was a photograph, too. It was blurry, but I recognized the teardrop tattoos descending from the corner of one eye. Doug was the guy who worked the cafeteria grill, whom I’d gotten into it with a month ago. He had gotten into a snit because I took one look at the half-raw chicken breast he’d given me and tossed it back at him, bouncing it off his chest.

He had pointed at his tattoo. “Do you know what this means, punk?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “It means you’re stupid. Only an idiot would think it’s a good idea to advertise to the world how much time he spent grabbing his ankles or bobbing on his knees in a lockup shower stall.”

The cafeteria shift supervisor had stepped in front of Doug before he got his grill apron off. Holding him back with two hands, the supervisor whispered something to restrain him, while I laughed.

Doug glared at me and clenched and unclenched his fists. “We aren’t done.”

“Neither was my chicken,” I told him. “Get it right next time.”

Bringing up a browser window alongside Doug’s picture now, I checked his name against Nevada’s sex offender registry, which told me more than I wanted to know about why he had done time: sexual assault on a 9-year-old girl.

I angrily closed the browser, remembering Cassie’s story about the 1860 Pony Express station-keepers who had abducted and molested two Paiute children.

Her great-times-four grand-uncle Natchez had known how to deal with that kind of human garbage. The five of them hadn’t been serving half-raw chicken to anyone afterward; that was for goddamn sure. Glancing at the picture of Doug Hensley and his teardrop tattoos again, I shook my head in disgust.

Somewhere in the past 154 years, civilization had taken a wrong turn. Now a lump of dog shit like Doug got a couple of years’ free room and board, courtesy of taxpayers like me, while he worked out and watched TV. Then they cut him loose so he could smirk at me while he undercooked my lunches and spent his weekends trolling for his next victim.

And yet, the same civilized people who thought it was a good idea to let Doug walk around free would take one look at my daughter’s real psych evaluation and label
her
a monster. They would want my sweet little 7-year-old girl, who had never hurt anyone, locked up forever and drugged senseless because of a brain abnormality she couldn’t help.