Rollins and I looked at each other. “How do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean, she didn’t sound American. Like she thought about this guy. I think he was… you know, she… was doing what Mackie made me do. Only either his name was like a joke in her head or she really didn’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“In my head, she said he was Call-Me-Bob. You know, the old joke. Guy shakes your hand and you say, ‘Lily’ and he says, ‘Call me Bob.’ Like that. And she mentioned a place named Poy… Polypett or something, and said a bunch of words… yama and mutra… stuff I didn’t get.”
I snagged on mutra. Like Wylde… “Tell me the rest.”
She did. It gave me a little chill, the way she described a presence residing in her mind, watching, waiting. Of being yanked around like a doll and commanded to do a horrible thing.
I couldn’t help but think of Wylde.
I expected to see Gerber waiting when Rollins and I pushed through the curtain. But he wasn’t.
“Detective Saunders?” Dr. Wylde offered her hand. “I haven’t had a chance to thank you properly.”
I liked her grip: firm but not overly so. I introduced Rollins, then asked, “How’s the lip?” Actually I could see how the lip was: swollen.
She touched the knot with slender fingers. “I think the plastic surgeons were disappointed. My dignity’s hurt more than anything else. We usually don’t have situations like that get so out of hand here. Anyway.” She held up a chart. “Ms. Hopkins has been transferred to the psychiatry service for evaluation. Dr. Gerber will consult, if needed. He said that he hadn’t had a chance to go over the EEG results with you. So.”
We followed her to the nurses’ station. A quick glance at Dickert’s bay-empty now, I saw. Ten to one, his ample butt was parked on his Harley. Ten to one, he didn’t use a helmet.
Good. The world needs more organ donors.
Wylde flipped pages. “Okay, here are the EEG findings.”
A lot of scratchy scribbles. “What am I looking at?”
“We do a routine run to get a baseline, and then we introduce various types of stimulation to evoke a response. For example, here, you see normal brain activity and then, with photic stimulation-light-there’s activity in the occipital lobe, where visual information is processed.”
“Okay. So?”
“So, everything’s going fine, with no abnormalities until… right… here.” She stretched past to point with a pen, and I saw the vivid scroll of a tattoo at her right wrist, a weird line of script.
Angelina Jolie.
What?
Before I could figure out what my brain was trying to tell me, she rolled on: “Time index is plus thirty minutes. Where the waves are faster, closer together? That’s called beta rhythm. You see beta in REM sleep, when we dream. But she wasn’t asleep at the time. This rhythm just appeared.”
“Was she having a seizure?”
“No. If she’d been asleep and then awakened, I would’ve said sleep paralysis. In REM sleep, we’re all partially paralyzed. It’s called REM atonia. Perfectly normal. In sleep paralysis, the subject awakens, but the paralysis persists. Many subjects experience quite vivid hallucinations. In some cases, sleep paralysis will transition to what we call lucid dreaming. For all intents and purposes, the person is conscious, but the brain is still in REM sleep. If you listen to Lily, she was in deep sleep, and then she awakened, convinced there was someone else in her mind. This EEG records REM breakthrough into the conscious state, which you might interpret as a lucid dream. But I don’t think so. Here, it’s as if there are two brains. Two people. One’s Ms. Hopkins,” she indicated a set of tracings, “and the other’s not. Like a split brain: two completely independent patterns, but her CT is stone-cold normal.”
“Was she aware of it when this happened?”
“Yes. She said someone else came in.” Wylde paused. “Not-Lily was how she put it.”
“Is she…?”
“Crazy? No.”
I said nothing. My eyes dropped to the EEG again, those two independent brains occupying the same space at the same time. Then my eyes snagged on the initials on the front sheet. One set was P.G.: Phillip Gerber.
The other: S.W.
She said someone else came in.
I said, “When did you come into the EEG suite, Doctor?”
Rollins said, “What?”
Her expression was unreadable, though I saw her pulse bounding in her neck. She opened her mouth to reply, but Rollins’s pager chirped. “Computer guy,” he said, heading for the exit. “I’ll let him know we’re on our way.”
I waited until Rollins had gone and then looked back at Wylde. Just came out with it. “You’re Preston Wylde’s daughter.”
“It is an uncommon last name. My father’s always tried to maintain a distance between his professional life and home, but…” She shook her head. “Things have a way of coming to roost.”
An odd statement. I let it hang.
She said, “Is the fact that my father works for the FBI a problem?”
“No. But I can’t imagine it’s easy being the daughter of a famous profiler, especially given the men your father tracks down.”
“Demon hunter is what the press prefers.”
“I don’t get anything near that sexy when the press talks about me.”
“Maybe you need to get sexier then.” She checked her watch. “I have to go. Was there anything else?”
“Yes. What was that, Doctor? With Dickert? And don’t tell me nothing. I know what I saw, damn it.”
Her face was still as smooth glass. “What do you believe happened, Detective? What do you think you saw?”
Not what,who. And I believe you stopped him somehow. I believe you command things the rest of us only have nightmares about.
And does it have anything to do with what’s happening tome?
When I still said nothing, only then did her expression shift: a tiny blur, as if she were a projection going briefly out of focus, the pixels scattering, then coalescing around the edges until she was sharp edged, like something scissored out of black paper and superimposed upon a perfectly white background. She was almost too real.
“I’ve got work.” She turned to leave.
For no reason I could think of, I said, “Dr. Wylde, how is the old man? Mr. Choun?”
Her back stiffened just the tiniest bit, and when she turned her face was midway to rearranging itself into something close to neutrality. But I saw the emotions chase through-and there was grief, most of all.
“He’s about to give up the ghost,” she said.
“That’s an odd way of putting it, Doctor.”
“I guess it depends on your point of view. One thing, Detective, about my father? What they call him?”
This was not what I expected. “Yes?”
“Sometimes, a name isn’t all about sex. Sometimes, Detective, the truth is right under your nose.”
V
“I’ve been able to clean up the image pretty good,” said the computer guy. “Best I can tell, this is old stock film transferred to three-quarter inch and then to disk. A lot of degradation in the transfer. Black and white, silent. Almost looks like newsreel footage, you know what I’m saying?”
Black and white? I could’ve sworn I saw colors: the dirty brown of that bedspread, that girl’s black hair. The blood where she’d bitten her tongue. That green and white thing on the bed. “Let’s see it.”
The thing was no easier to watch the second time around. But the computer guy had been right: black and white.