Back at her desk, Anne began going through the internal messages, most of which could safely be ignored. After she’d responded to the last of those requiring an answer, she picked up her phone and punched in the access to her voice mail.
Most of what she heard was just as inconsequential as the stuff that had been in her electronic mail — suggestions for stories, questions about things she’d written, pleas for her to give a mention to one cause or another, some of them good, some of them not so good.
Toward the end of the long series of recordings, there were several responses to her article this morning.
Again, some of them good, some not so good.
One, the last one, was disturbing.
It was a woman’s voice, and it sounded strained.
“I got to talk to you,” it said. “He killed my son! I know he did, but nobody listens! ’Cause we’re Indians, no one listens!”
There was a name and a garbled address, but though she played it over and over, Anne couldn’t quite make it out.
She spent the rest of the day at the police department, beginning her search through the boxes of files that Mark Blakemoor and Lois Ackerly brought to the storage rooms even while she worked.
To her surprise, Mark Blakemoor came downstairs in mid-morning to find out how she was doing, then showed up again at noon, this time with sandwiches and a couple of Cokes.
“Anything in particular you’re looking for?” he asked as Anne tore the wrapper off a pastrami on rye and hungrily bit into the thick sandwich.
Chewing hard, Anne shrugged and signaled him to wait until she’d swallowed. “I don’t know,” she said. Then, remembering the garbled message on her voice mail that morning, she frowned again. “Do you remember any reports of a Native American boy?” With the skills she’d honed in her years of reporting, she repeated the message verbatim.
Mark Blakemoor gazed at her. “That’s all? Just ‘He killed my son, but nobody listens’?”
“That’s all.”
A resigned sigh emerged from Mark Blakemoor’s chest as he recalled the hundreds — thousands — of calls he’d fielded over the years of investigating the Richard Kraven murders. How was he supposed to remember just one? Still, if it would help Anne out … “Tell you what,” he offered. “I’ve got some time this evening. Maybe if I go through the logs, something will jog my memory.”
“You don’t have to do that—” Anne began, but Mark silenced her with a gesture.
“If I don’t do it, you will, and at least I know where the logs are and what to look for.” Before Anne could respond, he spoke again: “Hell, at least it’ll keep my beer intake down for a night, right?”
There was a plaintive ring to his voice that made the last of Anne’s polite objections to his working overtime die on her lips. If he wanted to do it for her, why not? “I’d offer to give you a hand, but with Glen in the hospital—”
“It’s okay,” Blakemoor assured her. “In fact, why don’t I get started right now?”
For the rest of the hour the two of them searched through boxes, Mark Blakemoor hunting for the telephone logs, Anne scanning the file folders for a name, a notation — whatever might catch her eye.
When he finally emerged from the storage area at one-thirty, covered with dust and sneezing more than he had since he’d left the Midwest twenty-two years before, Mark realized he’d enjoyed his sandwich in the basement with Anne Jeffers more than any other lunch he’d had in recent memory.
Anne, on the other hand, didn’t give the lunch another thought. She hadn’t noticed that all the time they were together, going through the boxes, the detective had kept glancing at her out of the corner of his eye, just like some high school kid with a crush on the prom queen.
CHAPTER 16
The long spring day was finally fading into night, and as dusk settled over the city beyond the hospital’s windows, Glen Jeffers grew more anxious. All day he’d drifted between a fitful sleep that gave him no real rest, and a drowsy kind of wakefulness that never left his mind unfogged. As he gazed out the window, watching people move up and down the sidewalk two stories below, and lights come on in the apartment buildings across the street, he had the strange sensation that time had somehow twisted around: as the rest of the world drifted toward the end of the day, he was only now coming fully awake. Unless he could convince the nurse to give him something to send him back to sleep, he was certain he would lie awake all night.
Anne had come to visit him; so had the kids.
For some reason — a reason he couldn’t quite figure out — he felt disconnected from them. It was the drugs, of course; once he was finished with them, he’d be back to himself. But today when the kids had come in after school, he found it hard to concentrate on what they were saying, hard to pretend interest in the fight Kevin had had with Justin Reynolds, or the new CD Heather had bought that afternoon. What was the name of the group? Crippled Chicken? Something like that.
While he was pondering the possible hidden meanings of the names of rock bands and poking at the tray of food they’d brought in at exactly six o’clock, Anne arrived. He’d had to concentrate to follow her conversation, as his mind kept veering off to other places.
Or, more specifically, one other place.
The nightmare he’d had early this morning, when Anne had come in on her way to work.
The dream was still vivid in his memory, and had never been far from his consciousness all day. It kept reaching out to him whenever he drifted into the fringes of sleep, threatening to draw him once more into its dark terrors.
When Gordy Farber had come in an hour ago, Glen told him about the dream, and it hadn’t taken the heart specialist long to come up with an explanation: “Well, I’m not a psychiatrist, but I’ve had a lot of experience with people in your situation. You’ve had a heart attack, which makes you feel helpless. And what could be a better symbol of helplessness than a little boy hiding in the dark from a threatening father?”
“But my father wasn’t threatening,” Glen objected. “In fact, my dad was so modern he never even spanked me! Said spanking was child abuse way back when everyone else was still using the belt every day!”
Farber’s brows arched into an expression of exaggerated envy. “Wish my dad had thought that way — he was a big one for the ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ routine, except his bark always turned out to be far worse than his bite.” The doctor’s features assumed a more serious mien. “But what your dad was like doesn’t really make much difference, because we’re not talking about reality here. We’re talking about dreams and symbols.” His gaze shifted to the array of tubes and wires attached to his patient. “As for the electrodes your father was hooking up to you, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you’re sprouting more wires and tubes than a high school science fair project.” He’d grinned as another thought came to him. “Hey, maybe I’m the father figure in the dream. After all, who could be more fatherly to you than your doctor right now?”
Glen knew the explanation made a lot of sense. The nightmare’s fear made sense, for what could be more terrifying than a heart attack? Even now he could remember the panic he’d felt as that band tightened around his chest, the pain shot up his arm, and the blackness closed around him. But although the explanation fit perfectly, Glen had a nagging feeling there was something else — that the terror he’d felt from the dream went beyond the fear he experienced when the “incident”—as Gordy Farber insisted on calling it — had occurred.
The incident. He kept going back over the whole experience. It wasn’t a complete blackout, for he remembered being awake for a while in the ambulance. After all, if he wasn’t awake at least part of the time, how had he been able to hear the paramedics talking? And he had heard them; even now he could clearly remember their voices.