The Dead Man (12 page)

Suspects are labeled as much by circumstance, bias, and behavior as the facts. Some liked to dance, flirting with the facts and playing hard to get, confident that they are too clever to be caught. Others liked to wrestle, flexing their muscles and taking their shots, certain they were too tough to be taken down.

Corliss knew I had accessed his project files and that whatever I'd seen had brought me to his door. That was enough to make him suspicious and wait for me to tell him why I was there rather than offer his conjecture. It didn't make him guilty of anything, but it did make him dance and I liked to make dancers wrestle.

"You know the funny thing about bullshit?" I asked him.

He gave me an ear-to-ear grin. "I don't but I got a feeling you're gonna tell me."

"Everyone thinks theirs doesn't stink."

He laughed, but there was no joy in the sound. "You are right about that. I'm guessing that you're catching my scent."

"Like a feedlot on a hot day. Is your Nashville act for real?"

"I'm not the first one of my people to come down out of the hills but I am the only one with a PhD. They'd be proud of me too if they had any idea what it is I do."

"Try explaining it to me."

He put his feet on the floor and pulled up to his desk.

"Like a lot of science, it's easier to describe than it is to explain. Bad things happen to people all the time and, by the way, it doesn't matter a bit if you're good or bad, shit happens and forgive and forget is overrated. The bad memories take root in the brain and poison our dreams. Digging them out is harder than yanking out a tree stump with a pair of tweezers. Isn't that right, Maggie."

She nodded. "We fill our dreams with the things we can't cope with when we're awake," she said. "The things we are afraid of, ashamed of. The things we want but believe we don't deserve. The things we'd like to say and do that we lack the strength to make real and the things we've said and done that could bring us down. All those things run wild in our dreams. They are beneath the surface but not so far that we can't learn to control them so they don't control us, so we can make peace with them."

"And you can teach people how to do that?"

"We're trying real hard," Corliss said. "Our brains have to process and manage traumatic memories so we can live with them without beating our kids, robbing banks, or just plain going nuts. A lot of that work is done in our dreams. Maggie and I are studying how that work gets done and how we can learn to do it better. We think that if people can learn to recognize when they're dreaming, they can learn to control their dreams and flush out their bad memories. If we're right, a lot of shrinks will have to find another line of work."

"Any side effects from what you do?"

"Like what?"

"Like people shooting themselves in the head or falling off buildings."

Maggie Brennan flinched, her chin snapping down to her chest, then up to the ceiling. If tics were contagious, I'd have thought she had caught it from me. Corliss shot her a hot glance; his eyes and mouth narrow darts.

"The police," she said, her voice so soft I wasn't certain she'd spoken until she said it again. "The police looked into what happened to Tom and Regina. It had nothing to do with our project."

"What Maggie means," Corliss said, "is that Tom Delaney committed suicide and Regina Blair slipped and fell. It's a sad coincidence that both of them were volunteers, but that's all it is."

"You're not troubled by the fact that both of them died in the same way they dreamed they would die, dreams that you were teaching them to control?"

"Hell, yes, it bothers me. It bothers me more when people like you come around trying to blame it on us. Look, every volunteer signs a waiver acknowledging that we are not treating them for any mental or physical condition and that they should consult their own doctor, whether psychologist or psychiatrist or podiatrist, before participating in the project. We are not responsible for their choices or their carelessness," Corliss said.

"Delaney's and Blair's families have hired a lawyer named Jason Bolt. He's got both of your names on a lawsuit. And he's got an expert witness who will testify that you are responsible."

"Lawyers and lawsuits don't intimidate me, Jack. That's what insurance is for and I'm betting Milo Harper has a shit-bucket full of insurance."

"Insurance will buy you a lawyer and pay a claim but it won't keep your name out of the paper. How do you feel about that, Dr. Brennan?"

She looked at me without feeling or expression. "When you've seen the things I've seen, the things people do to one another, it numbs you to something so trivial as a lawsuit. No one knows my name. If it's in the paper, it will be forgotten soon enough."

"If neither of you are impressed by Jason Bolt's lawsuit, why did you erase Delaney's and Blair's records from your project files?"

Maggie Brennan repeated her head bob, facing me. "We didn't do that."

"Who did?"

"Sherry Fritzshall," she said.

There was another label I left out—person of interest. It was reserved for people who hadn't earned the suspect label but had demonstrated great potential to make the jump. Sherry Fritzshall had moved to the top of that short list.

"When did she do that?"

"Right after the police finished looking into everything," Corliss said.

"Why did she do that?"

Corliss shrugged. "You'd have to ask her. My guess is she was afraid Delaney's or Blair's family would sue the institute, waiver or no waiver."

"What about Walter Enoch?"

Maggie Brennan fixed her eyes on her lap. Corliss shook his head.

"Wasn't he something? I about fell out of my chair when I read about him in the paper," Corliss said. "Squirreling away all that mail. Damn!"

"You keep losing volunteers, you're going to have to start drafting them."

"Hey, Walter was my mailman," Corliss said. "I talked him into volunteering. He went through the intake process, did the video, the initial EEG and fMRI testing, and then he quit before he ever did any of the lucid dreaming training."

"What did he dream about?"

"Walter had nightmares, not dreams. Nightmares are bad dreams that wake you up screaming at the demons," Corliss said.

"Suffocation," Maggie Brennan whispered. "He couldn't breathe. That's what he dreamed about. He was terrified to go to sleep."

"That boy was something else," Corliss said. "I wonder if he stole any of my mail."

Corliss thought he was a better dancer than I was a wrestler. He was trying to slip away before I could get a grip, let alone win the best two out of three falls.

"I imagine the FBI will want to know too."

Corliss's eyes popped. "The newspaper said that the postal service was responsible for returning the stolen mail. What's the FBI got to do with it?"

"Walter Enoch was murdered. You be sure to hold on to his file."

Corliss's office was in the middle of the floor across from a maze of cubicles that occupied a third of the interior space. Down the hall from his office, away from the elevators, was the entrance to a break room. That's where Janet and Gary were standing when I left Corliss's office. She was lecturing him, her back stiff against the wall, punctuating with her hands, chopping and circling the air, bouncing fingers off his chest. Gary stood at her side, nodding while looking at me.

Janet was full-figured and short enough that she had to look up to make eye contact with Gary as she brushed her shoulder length auburn hair to one side and then poked him to get his undivided attention. He was big and soft, a few strands of his finger-combed, tousled brown hair hanging down his forehead, his cheeks and chin flecked with a patchy scruff.

He broke her rhythm, tilting his head at me. She spun my way, peeled off the wall, and grabbed his hand. They walked past the break room and into an office, closing the door.

I couldn't tell whether they were waiting for me or avoiding me. Either way, I wanted to talk with them. Corliss hadn't wasted any of his charm on them. Some people who are embarrassed by their bosses in front of others are reluctant to trash them behind their back, too afraid their rant will get back to their boss; others can't wait for the chance.

I knocked and opened the door. It was a cramped, windowless office, two desks pushed together, a crowded bookshelf on one wall, file cabinets against another, journals stacked on top of the cabinets, room carved out for a framed photograph of the two of them, Janet in a wedding dress, Gary in a tux. They were sitting at their desks, silent, their faces tense and expectant.

"I didn't get a chance to introduce myself before," I said, letting the door swing closed. "I'm Jack Davis."

Gary looked at Janet, nominating her. "I'm Janet," she said. "He's Gary."

One wall was papered with their undergraduate diplomas from Indiana and master's degrees in psychology from Wisconsin. The dates on the sheepskins put them in their mid-to-late twenties.

"You're Casey and he's Kaufman," I said, reading their last names. "Married too," I added, pointing to the photograph.

"Married too," she said.

"Kids?"

"No kids, dogs, cats, or birds. Just us," she said.

"I'm new here," I said. "Just trying to get to know people. Matter of fact, today is my first day. What's it like working here?"

Janet let out a sigh, raising her eyebrows, passing the question to Gary.

"Depends on whom you work for and what you do," he said. "We're researchers. We stick to our project and don't really have much to do with any of the other stuff that goes on."

"You guys work for Anthony Corliss and Maggie Brennan. How's that?"

Gary shrugged. "Maggie's okay."

"She gives me the creeps," Janet said. "She wears that same gray coat and scarf every damn day, hot or cold, rain or shine, it's like a shroud. The woman is in serious need of some color in her life."

"What do you do?" Gary asked.

"My title is director of security."

"What is that?" Janet said. "You're like Homeland Security? Are we going to have to pass through metal detectors and put our liquids in three-ounce containers?"

"Not unless we turn this place into an airport."

"What then?" Janet asked, giving me a microscopic look, daring me to be straight with her.

"Depends on the situation. Could be something as simple as making sure the institute's intellectual property is protected. And, it could be more complicated, like making certain that no one who volunteers to participate in an institute research project gets hurt."

"Like Tom Delaney and Regina Blair," Gary said.

I nodded. "Like them."

Janet slammed her palm on her desk, glaring at Gary. "I told you we shouldn't have come here."

He threw his arms up. "Like we had another choice."

"What am I missing?" I asked. "Were you drafted or did you enlist?"

Gary answered. "You have any idea how hard it is to get into a decent graduate PhD program in psychology? Let me tell you. It's harder to get in to than law school, medical school, or business school. The numbers will make you faint. Plus, you apply to work with a specific professor as much as the university. We were lucky. Corliss took both of us to work in his lab at Wisconsin. The odds against that happening were astronomical."

"And then he left Wisconsin to work here," I said.

"Exactly," Janet said. "And we were screwed. We'd finished our master's but we still had another three years for our doctorates."

"Couldn't you have stayed and worked in another lab or transferred to another school?"

"Not after what happened."

I waited for one of them to volunteer the details, letting the uneasy silence ask the question. Gary filled the void.

"We were doing the same kind of research at Wisconsin as we're doing here, running the same kind of subjects, doing the lucid dreaming training. All the subjects were undergrads. They did it for extra credit. One of the volunteers, a girl, drowned in Lake Mendota. Her parents claimed she committed suicide and sued the university, said we should have known she was suicidal and referred her for treatment. The university wrote a big, fat check to her parents and shut down Corliss's lab."

"Where's Lake Mendota?"

"Not far from Madison, where the university is."

"Did she leave a note?"

Janet answered. "No. No note."

"You said you used the same protocols at Wisconsin as you do here. Did that include videotaping subjects about their dreams?" They both gave me sharp, questioning looks. "Anthony Corliss told me about the videos," I said, hoping that would satisfy them.

Gary leaned back in his chair, hands in his lap. "Yeah."

"Tell me about the girl's dream. Did she dream about drowning?"

Janet looked at Gary, nodding. "Yeah, she did. That really freaked us out," he said.

"Afterward, nobody at Wisconsin wanted anything to do with us and no other schools would touch us, even though Gary and I had nothing to do with what happened. We weren't named in the lawsuit, only Corliss was. On top of everything else, her parents claimed Corliss was screwing their daughter," Janet said.

"That part was bullshit and you know it!" Gary said. "There was never any proof."

She crossed her arms over her chest, her eyes flaring and then turned toward me. "We owed over a hundred thousand in student loans, our lab was gone, and we couldn't get a job selling shoes. Corliss got a good deal to come here that included bringing us along."

"Well, the good deal may not be so good," I said. "Delaney's and Blair's families are suing the institute, Milo Harper, and your bosses, Dr. Corliss and Dr. Brennan."

"Oh, crap!" Janet said.