“Hey, man.”
He turned toward the voice, which belonged to a skinny brunette with a pixie haircut and a silver raincoat. Her bony shoulders were slumped and defeated. Her eyes were already dead. She wouldn’t meet his gaze.
“Hey,” he replied.
“Got a light?” she asked, raising an unlit cigarette to her chapped lips.
He pulled a disposable lighter from his hip pocket, cupping his hand over the flame, and lit her cigarette. She inhaled deeply, gaze flicking up to him for a fleeting second, then away again.
“So,” she said. “You wanna...?”
She tipped her chin back toward the door behind her.
He nodded.
She led him past a row of warped, pried open and broken brass mailboxes, then into the dim and stinking lobby. She paused for a second, her back to him, then toed a crumpled Chinese takeout menu on the octagonal tiled floor. He thought maybe she was having second thoughts. Rightly so, considering what he planned to do to her. But then she plunged her cigarette into the dirty sand that filled the tall steel ashtray and motioned that he should follow her up the cracked marble stairs.
Her single room was on the third floor, at the end of a long, crooked hallway that smelled like urine, roach-spray, and despair. From behind one of the doors there came a vociferous argument going on between two drunks of indeterminate gender. This might be a good thing for Allan, because it would mask any sounds the girl might make during their encounter. Or it could be problematic if it became too violent and attracted the police.
Allan smiled to himself at his overly cautious thinking. After all, how often did the police get called by the denizens of a place like this? Not unless someone was dead, Allan surmised. And by that time, he would be long gone.
Inside the girl’s room it was dank and shabby. The kind of room that was destined to be immortalized in a crime scene photo. The only decoration was a torn and peeling black light poster of a topless woman with an afro and a pet panther. The bed was a spavined, overworked wreck that sagged in the center. The colorful Navajo blanket thrown over the worn-out mattress didn’t do a very good job at hiding the stains.
The girl’s name was Desiree, or that’s what she said it was anyway. Allan honestly could not have cared less. What he did care about was the impression that she was a woman who had completely and utterly given up on life. Under her raincoat, she wore only a bra and panties, both of them cheap and mismatched with worn-out, sagging elastic.
Her emaciated arms and legs were peppered with weeping, infected track marks. She moved as if hypnotized, face mask-like and eyes far away. Going through the motions, like a person who was already dead and just didn’t know it yet.
Like a Casanova who sees a frigid woman as a challenge, Allan found himself profoundly aroused by her indifference. How sweet it would be to torture her and make her want to live again, only to see that fresh, rekindled hope die in her eyes as she realized that wasn’t going to happen.
“Why don’t you lie on the bed,” he told her. “On your stomach.”
She did what she was told.
He took out his knife and smiled.
19
“Institute for the Advancement of Bio-Spiritual Awarness,” Walter read off the small, unassuming sign above the buzzer in a urine-scented Berkley doorway, between a delicatessen and a head shop. “Sounds intriguing.”
“Sounds like some kind of cult,” Bell said. “You know, like est, or the Moonies, or something.”
“Doctor Raley’s not a guru,” Nina said, pressing the buzzer. “He’s a scientist. You’ll like him.” A muffled buzz and a click, and Nina pushed the door open. Walter and Bell followed her through.
Inside was a clean, modern waiting area with several groupings of orange and white plastic chairs and low Lucite tables strewn with a variety of interesting scientific journals and magazines. It looked not unlike an ordinary doctor’s office. A slender young Asian woman in a lavender pantsuit was sitting behind a desk and reading a dog-eared copy of Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life.
She stood when they entered and greeted Nina warmly.
“Hi, May,” Nina said. “These are my friends William Bell and Walter Bishop. They’re in town for the ABS Conference.”
“Nice to meet you both,” she said, reaching out a delicate hand to shake first Walter’s, then Bell’s. “I have a background in biochemistry myself.” She smiled, revealing gapped teeth. “I did my thesis on the circular dichroism of helical polypeptides, but more recently I’ve become interested in the use of biofeedback technology to regulate what up until now has been considered involuntary organ function.”
“Fascinating,” Walter said, utterly charmed by this lovely and studious young lady. “My colleague and I just presented a very well-received paper on hepatic microsomal drug-binding sites. Have you had any success using biofeedback to regulate other kinds of liver function? Perhaps we could compare notes sometime.” He reached into his pocket. “Necco wafer?”
“Walter...” Bell warned.
“Is the good doctor in?” Nina asked, suppressing a grin.
May reached out and selected a clove-flavored purple wafer from the roll. That was his favorite.
“Thank you,” she said, popping the candy into her mouth with what Walter swore was a flirtatious expression. Though he was the first to admit he was often wrong about such things. “Doctor Rayley is in the lab working on a new experiment. You can wait for him in the observation room, if you’d like. This way please.”
At that point, Walter was prepared to follow May anywhere, but he was disappointed to find that she had no intention of joining them. She just showed them to a door at the end of a long hallway, and then returned to her desk.
“I think I’m in love,” Walter stage-whispered to Bell, taking a lime Necco wafer off the roll for himself, before putting the package back in his pocket.
“I hardly think this is the time for sexual liaisons, Walter,” Bell said.
Nina said nothing, but her subtle smile and arched brow made Bell stammer and blush.
“Well,” he said. “I mean...”
“Come on,” she said, opening the door and ushering the two men inside.
The long narrow room reminded Walter of the viewing area adjacent to an old-fashioned operating theater, where medical students would observe various procedures, back before sterilization and the invention of closed circuit television cameras. There were three rows of stadium-like riser seats facing a large one-way pane the size of a movie screen. And, like an old-fashioned operating theater, there was a small group of enraptured young people with notebooks—students, presumably— observing the procedure occurring on the other side of the glass.
Walter stepped up to the glass to see what was going on in the adjacent room.
There were two subjects, both male and Caucasian, but that’s where the similarities ended. The man on the left was young and gangly, with an unfortunate beaky profile and long, sandy hair. The man on the right was older and pudgy, with a gleaming bald head and a weak chin hidden beneath a steely gray goatee. Each man was hooked up to a heart rate monitor that displayed the function of that organ for the students to observe.
The two were laid out on the sort of low-profile, bedshaped couches you might see in an analyst’s office, heads toward the middle of the room. In the center, sandwiched in the narrow space between two folding rice paper screens, was a third man.
He was in his mid-forties, with a thick shock of unruly white hair, large square glasses, and a jovial, slightly mischievous manner that reminded Walter of Willy Wonka in that film that had come out a few years back. He was dressed in a lab coat and was fiddling with a toaster-sized machine that sat on a spidery steel table. This, he assumed, was Doctor Rayley.