Monica drew back, eyes widening. People don’t know how to handle schizophrenics. They’ve read stories, seen films. We make them afraid, though statistically we’re not any more likely to commit violent crimes than the average person.
Of course, several people who wrote papers on me claim I’m not schizophrenic. Half think I’m making this all up. The other half think I’ve got something different, something new. Whatever I have—however it is that my brain works—only one person really ever seemed to get me. And that was the woman in the picture Monica had just slapped down on the table.
Sandra. In a way, she’d started all of this.
“The picture wasn’t hard to get,” Monica said. “When you used to do interviews, you would talk about her. Obviously, you hoped someone would read the interview and bring you information about her. Maybe you hoped that she would see what you had to say, and return to you . . .”
I forced myself to sit back down.
“You knew she went to the train station,” Monica continued. “And at what time. You didn’t know which train she got on. We started taking pictures until we found her.”
“There must have been a dozen women in that train station with blonde hair and the right look,” I said.
Nobody really knew who she was. Not even me.
Monica took out a sheaf of pictures, a good twenty of them. Each was of a woman. “We thought the one wearing sunglasses indoors was the most likely choice, but we took a shot of every woman near the right age in the train station that day. Just in case.”
Ivy rested a hand on my shoulder.
“Calmly, Stephen,” Tobias said. “A strong rudder steers the ship even in a storm.”
I breathed in and out.
“Can I shoot her?” J.C. asked.
Ivy rolled her eyes. “Remind me why we keep him around.”
“Rugged good looks,” J.C. said.
“Listen,” Ivy continued to me. “Monica undermined her own story. She claims to have only come to you because the camera was stolen—yet how did she get pictures of Sandra without the camera?”
I nodded, clearing my head—with difficulty—and made the accusation to Monica.
Monica smiled slyly. “We had you in mind for another project. We thought these would be . . . handy to have.”
“Darn,” Ivy said, standing right up in Monica’s face, focusing on her irises. “I think she might be telling the truth on that one.”
I stared at the picture. Sandra. It had been almost ten years now. It still hurt to think about how she’d left me. Left me, after showing me how to harness my mind’s abilities. I ran my fingers across the picture.
“We’ve got to do it,” J.C. said. “We’ve got to look into this, skinny.”
“If there’s a chance . . .” Tobias said, nodding.
“The camera was probably stolen by someone on the inside,” Ivy guessed. “Jobs like this one often are.”
“One of your own people took it, didn’t they?” I asked.
“Yes,” Monica said. “But we don’t have any idea where they went. We’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars over the last four days trying to track them. I always suggested you. Other . . . factions within our company were against bringing in someone they consider volatile.”
“I’ll do it,” I said.
“Excellent. Shall I bring you to our labs?”
“No,” I said. “Take me to the thief’s house.”
Four
“Mister Balubal Razon,” Tobias read from the sheet of facts as we climbed the stairs. I’d scanned that sheet on the drive over, but had been too deep in thought to give it much specific attention. “He’s ethnically Filipino, but second-generation American. Ph.D. in physics from the University of Maine. No honors. Lives alone.”
We reached the seventh floor of the apartment building. Monica was puffing. She kept walking too close to J.C., which made him scowl.
“I should add,” Tobias said, lowering the sheet of facts, “Stan informs me that the rain has cleared up before reaching us. We have only sunny weather to look forward to now.”
“Thank goodness,” I said, turning to the door, where two men in black suits stood on guard. “Yours?” I asked Monica, nodding to them.
“Yeah,” she said. She’d spent the ride over on the phone with some of her superiors.
Monica took out a key to the flat and turned it in the lock. The room inside was a complete disaster. Chinese takeout cartons stood on the windowsill in a row, as if planters intended to grow next year’s crop of General Tso’s. Books lay in piles everywhere, and the walls were hung with photographs. Not the time-traveling kind, just the ordinary photos a photography buff would take.
We had to shuffle around to get through the door and past the stacks of books. Inside, it was cramped quarters with all of us.
“Wait outside, if you will, Monica,” I said. “It’s kind of tight in here.”
“Tight?” she asked, frowning.
“You keep walking through the middle of J.C.,” I said. “It’s very disturbing for him; he hates being reminded he’s a hallucination.”
“I’m not a hallucination,” J.C. snapped. “I have state-of-the-art stealthing equipment.”
Monica regarded me for a moment, then walked to the doorway, standing between the two guards, hands on hips as she regarded us.
“All right, folks,” I said. “Have at it.”
“Nice locks,” J.C. said, flipping one of the chains on the door. “Thick wood, three deadbolts. Unless I miss my guess . . .” He poked at what appeared to be a letter box mounted on the wall by the door.
I opened it. There was a pristine handgun inside.
“Ruger Bisley, custom converted to large caliber,” J.C. said with a grunt. I opened the spinning thing that held the bullets and took one out. “Chambered in .500 Linebaugh,” J.C. continued. “This is a weapon for a man who knows what he’s doing.”
“He left it behind, though,” Ivy said. “Was he in too much of a hurry?”
“No,” J.C. said. “This was his door gun. He had a different regular sidearm.”
“Door gun,” Ivy said. “Is that really a thing for you people?”
“You need something with good penetration,” J.C. said, “that can shoot through the wood when people are trying to force your door. But the recoil of this weapon will do a number on your hand after not too many shots. He would have carried something with a smaller caliber on his person.”
J.C. inspected the gun. “Never been fired, though. Hmm . . . There’s a chance someone gave this to him. Perhaps he went to a friend, asked them how to protect himself? A true soldier knows each weapon he owns through repeated firing. No gun fires perfectly straight. Each has a personality.”
“He’s a scholar,” Tobias said, kneeling beside the rows of books. “Historian.”
“You sound surprised,” I said. “He does have a Ph.D. I’d expect him to be smart.”
“He has a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, Stephen,” Tobias said. “But these are some very obscure historical and theological books. Deep reading. It’s difficult to be a widely read scholar in more than one area. No wonder he leads a solitary life.”
“Rosaries,” Ivy said; she picked one up from the top of a stack of books, inspecting it. “Worn, frequently counted. Open one of those books.”
I picked a book up off the floor.
“No, that one. The God Delusion.”
“Richard Dawkins?” I said, flipping through it.
“A leading atheist,” Ivy said, looking over my shoulder. “Annotated with counterarguments.”
“A devout Catholic among a sea of secular scientists,” Tobias said. “Yes . . . many of these works are religious or have religious connotations. Thomas Aquinas, Daniel W. Hardy, Francis Schaeffer, Pietro Alagona . . .”
“There’s his badge from work,” Ivy said, nodding to something hanging on the wall. It proclaimed, in large letters, Azari Laboratories, Inc. Monica’s company.