The Dead Man (3 page)

"What about Regina Blair?"

"She was thirty-five. She and her husband live up north at Riss Lake. She had a baby last year. They were active in their church and she volunteered for Big Brothers and Sisters. Her husband teaches at Park University."

"A boy scout and a girl scout. Not much chance I'll find anything in their backgrounds that you can use."

"I'm not looking for dirt. I want to know more about them than their credentials for getting into heaven. I want to know why Delaney dreamed about killing himself and what made Blair so afraid of heights. That could help us."

"What if your institute is responsible?"

"Then we'll pay what we owe and fix what's wrong with our project."

"Don't you have lawyers and an insurance company to take care of that?"

"We have a ten-million-dollar deductible and the right to control the investigation and handling of any claim. I've got the lawyers but I need you for the investigation. Your title will be director of security. You can start Monday morning. I'll pay you double what you were making at the FBI. Your office will be down the hall from mine. You'll have free rein to go where you want to go and talk to whomever you want. When this is over, I'd like you to stay but that's up to you."

Before I could respond, a spasm twisted my head sideways and down, locking my chin against my raised shoulder. I waited for it to pass, time and my body both held hostage, the cycle repeating twice more in a twisted game of catch and release.

"I've got a..."

"Movement disorder called tics. Simon told me. The brain can be a real bitch. It's okay."

"You aren't concerned that I'll shake when I should shoot?"

Harper smiled. "Superman was allergic to kryptonite and things worked out for him."

He reached into his briefcase again and slid a skinny black binder onto the table. "These are summaries of the projects we're working on, plus the names and contact information for the people running each one."

"Why do I need to talk to everyone when this case is only about the dream project?"

"I want to make certain we don't have problems with any of the work we're doing, not just the dream project, and I don't want to broadcast that we may be getting sued so I told the project directors that I hired you to review our internal security procedures to make certain our intellectual property is protected. I sent everyone a memo telling them to cooperate with you."

"I haven't said yes."

"Why wouldn't you? Kate Scranton won't work for me but Simon Alexander will. I'd call that a wash in the who-do-you-listen-to sweepstakes."

"I listen to my friends but I make my own decisions. You might not like that. You don't like people telling you how to do your job. Same goes for me. I start looking for one thing and I may find another you don't want found. You need to be in control and something like this doesn't want to be controlled."

"Open the binder. Read the tabs out loud."

They were organized alphabetically by subject matter. He interrupted me when I got to Alzheimer's.

"Makes tics look like a walk in the park."

"It's not about the work you're doing. I'm sure it's all important."

"Some more important to me than others."

I looked at him, saw how his eyes changed from lively to hot, how his face darkened.

"You? You're what—forty?"

"Forty-one. Six to ten percent of Alzheimer patients are under age sixty-five and that number is only going to go up. A few are younger than fifty and the youngest on record was twenty-nine."

"I don't know what a person your age who has Alzheimer's is supposed to look like, but you act like you're on top of your game."

He held up the small journal he'd been writing in when I arrived. "I try to write everything down in here on my laptop or my iPhone. I even use a Web service called Jott. I call a phone number and record what I want to remember and they send me an e-mail with my verbatim message and, if I want, a text message reminder. Even with all of that, I'm one step away from pinning notes to my sweater and leaving bread crumbs to find my way home. The trouble with memory loss is that you don't remember what you've forgotten until it's too late."

"Who else knows about your condition?"

"For now, no one besides you and my doctors. The institute is only one of my investments. I've got a lot of balls in the air and I don't know how much longer I can keep juggling them."

"I'm sorry."

He flattened his palms on the table, his fingertips arching, hanging on. "People are always sorry but that doesn't change what's happening to you or me. You're going to shake for the rest of your long life but I'm going to spend the rest of my dwindling years disappearing one brain cell, one memory at a time until I won't recognize you or me. The research we're doing might, just might, stop all of that, if not for me, then for someone else, and I'll be damned if I'm going to risk people's lives or the future of the institute. I don't care what I have to do. I thought you would understand that better than anyone."

Harper was right. I had been primed not to like him whether it was because of Kate or his phone call or the rotten weather or the fear of putting myself on the line again, a shaking and shaken man uncertain if I could do more so I could do more, too concerned about myself than fellow travelers like Milo Harper. I closed the binder, tucked it under my arm, and stood.

"I do. I'll see you Monday morning at eight."

The hooded light over my front door was on when I came home, bathing the snow that had fallen during the day and drifted onto the porch in soft yellow. More light shone through the curtains in the living room that fronted the house and around the edges of the blinds in the bedroom on the east end of the second floor. The bedroom window looked down on the driveway where I was parked.

The lights had been off when I left earlier in the day. I lived alone except for my dog, Ruby, who knew when it was time to eat but not how to flick a switch. Ruby is a cockapoo—half cocker spaniel, half poodle—a breed that dilutes the poodle's high canine IQ with the cocker spaniel's indiscriminate affection, the combination a perfect antiwatch dog. If someone were robbing me, Ruby would help him pack up my stuff.

I sat in the car, studying the front door and windows. No one peeked at me. It had stopped snowing. My headlights bounced off the white powder and ice crystals swirling in the wind like frozen dust mites.

I wondered who had been in my house and if they were still there; the effort stalled when the day caught up to me. No one knows what causes tics. In terms I can understand, there's a short somewhere in my brain's wiring that does more than kick me from the inside out as if something is trying to escape. At times, it blurs my brain, gumming up the neurons and hijacking the synapses, feeling like a burst of fever that slows me down to a crawl. I leaned back against the car seat, squeezing my eyes closed, waiting for the fog to lift, my body shuddering with aftershocks when it did a few minutes later.

I looked at the house again. Nothing had changed. I got out of the car, the cold air picking me up. There were footprints in the snow leading from the curb, through the front yard and to the door. The street was empty.

Lorraine Trent owned the house. She was a biology professor who was spending a year in Africa doing research. She had needed a tenant and I had needed a furnished place to live after my divorce. When I signed the lease, she gave me the only key. I doubted that she had come back eight months ahead of schedule.

The house is in Brookside, a friendly midtown neighborhood with well-kept houses built fifty years or more ago and shops and restaurants you can walk to, including a dime store with its original creaky wood plank floor. For all its charm, Brookside wasn't immune to crime.

Two kinds of thieves leave the front porch light on while they rob a house. The first kind wants the neighbors to think that nothing unusual is going on while they're in the house. Those thieves are smart enough to have transportation and there was none, unless the getaway driver was waiting to be summoned from around the corner. The second kind is too high to think straight, content to get out with whatever he can carry. Either way, I had to assume that the thief was armed.

I would have felt better if my gun was holstered against my back instead of locked in a case on a shelf in my bedroom closet. Both Kansas and Missouri allowed concealed carry and I had a permit. After I left the Bureau, I quit carrying unless I had a reason. Seemed like a good idea at the time. At the moment, it was a bad idea, increasing the odds that I might get shot with my own gun.

Part of being an FBI agent is having the balls to kick in the door even if it's your own door. Another part is having the sense to wait until someone can watch your back when you put your heel to the door jamb. Part of being an ex-FBI agent with a bad case of the jumping beans is missing kicking in doors so much that you decide not to wait for help.

It was my door and I missed it that much. I was standing on my driveway, ankle deep snow seeping into my shoes, calculating the odds that I could take whoever had invaded my house and not liking the numbers. My days were manageable, my nights not so much. I flipped open my cell phone to call the cops, hearing the conversation in my head before I dialed.

"You say the lights are on in your house?"

"Yes, Officer. Over the front door, in the living room, and one of the upstairs bedrooms."

"And you're afraid to go inside your house when the lights are on? Most people, it's the other way around."

I stuck the phone in my pocket, cut through the snow, and stopped at the front door, which was opened a crack, enough that I could hear a man and a woman shouting at each other. Another woman shrieked
he's got a gun!
I slammed my shoulder into the door. My momentum carried me inside, my snow-packed shoes flying out from under me as I slid across the hardwood floor into the bottom of the stairs leading to the second floor.

A woman had been sitting on my landlady's couch, her feet on my landlady's coffee table, eating my popcorn and watching my landlady's television. The images on the screen were frozen, two women and a man struggling over a gun. She'd stopped the action with my landlady's remote control and bolted to her feet.

She looked to be in her early thirties, lean and muscled with light brown curly hair framing a round face, her eyes wide open and curious but not afraid, her arms hanging loose at her sides, a compact light featherweight. She shifted her weight, subtly setting herself for a confrontation. I recognized the automatic response of someone who been trained and under the gun.

"Who the hell are you?" she asked me.

Ruby sprang off the couch and into my lap, planted her front paws on my chest, and licked my face, cleaning my chin and both cheeks.

"I'm Jack Davis. I live here. Who the hell are you?"

"I'm Lucy Trent and this is my house."

"I don't think so. I mean you may be Lucy Trent but this isn't your house. I rented this place from Lorraine Trent."

"She's my stepmother."

I pulled myself off the floor, taking a breath and holding onto the stairway banister.

"She's my landlady."

Another burst of shakes whipped through me.

"Are you okay? Why are you shaking?"

"It's what I do."

"All the time?"

I walked into the living room. Lorraine Trent had called it the living den, the house not big enough for both a living room and a den. She'd bragged about the new hardwood floors, the fresh paint, and the new appliances that justified the rent she was charging me.

"No. Not all the time."

I was within arm's reach of her but Lucy didn't back up or relax, telling me with a wry smile that she didn't consider a middle-aged man with the shakes to be much of a threat.

"Well that's a relief. I'd hate to put someone on the street who shakes all the time."

"Don't be in such a hurry. Follow me," I told her. I kept the lease in the top drawer of a desk in the kitchen. I showed it to her. "Like I said. It's my house for another eight months."

She skimmed it, nodding at the signatures. "My turn."

She led the way to the bedroom that overlooked the driveway. A duffel bag and backpack lay on the bed. She rummaged through the backpack, handing me an envelope. I opened it. Inside was a copy of the deed to the house naming Lucy Trent as the owner.

"Lorraine didn't say anything to me about this."

"Don't feel bad. She didn't say anything to me about you but, then again, we don't talk much. My father left my mother for her when I was ten. Kind of chilled the whole stepmother-stepdaughter bonding thing. Dad's will provided she could live in the house for five years after he died. Then the house went to me. The five years was up four months ago. I wasn't ready to move back until now."

"She said she was a biologist, that she was going to Africa to do research for a year."

"With luck, she'll lose her passport."

I sat on the bed, another tremor rippling through me. My ex-wife, Joy, and I bought a house in the suburbs when the FBI transferred me to Kansas City. We sold it when we got divorced, the proceeds paying our debts and our lawyers and putting a small stake in both our pockets. Either of us could have left, picked a place without the raw memories of our failed marriage and dead children, but Kansas City was a good place to heal. The pace was easy, the people friendly. The city was comfortable and comforting, like a soft sweatshirt on a cool day.

The house I'd rented was part of that fabric. The fireplace, the overstuffed furniture, and the trees that towered over the front and back, home to enough birds and squirrels for Ruby to chase until she was exhausted, were all part of the balm.