“And you have no idea at all why he backed out?”
“No. The story was that he got a call, some sort of problem at the office. But I don’t know the source. And you won’t find it recorded anywhere.”
“Were there any problems at Survey at the time? Something so serious that he’d have canceled out?”
She shook her head. “There’s nothing on the logs for that date. There were calls to Skydeck during the departure, but nothing official. It was all just to wish everyone good luck.”
“Maybe it was personal,” I said.
“He told Mendoza it was a call from the office.” She was bored with the subject.
“Of course, it could have been personal. Could have been something they were just relaying. Does it matter?”
“Do we know,” Alex persisted, “whether he returned to the Survey offices that day?”
“The day the Polaris left? I really have no idea, Alex.” She tried to look as if her head was beginning to hurt. “Look,” she said, “we have no record of the call. And it was all a long time ago.”
I asked Jacob what we had on Chek Boland.
Boland’s specialty was the mind-body problem, and his tack had been that we’d always been deceived by the notion of duality, of body and soul, of the mind as an incorporeal entity distinct from the brain. Despite thousands of years of evidence to the contrary, people still clung to the old notion.
Boland had done the breakthrough work, mapping the brain, showing why its more abstract functions were holographic rather than embedded in a specific location.
Why they were part and parcel of the way a brain was supposed to function.
Boland had been the youngest of Maddy’s passengers. He had dark eyes and looked like one of those guys who spent two or three hours at the gym every day. I watched him in the visual record, watched interviews, presentations at luncheons, watched him accept awards. The Penbrook. The Bennington. The Kamal. He was self-deprecating, easygoing, inclined to give credit to his colleagues. It appeared that everybody liked him.
Despite his accomplishments, he seems to be best known as the onetime mindwipe expert, who worked with law enforcement agencies for thirteen years to correct, as they put it, persons inclined to habitual or violent criminal behavior.
Eventually, he resigned, and later he became an opponent of the technique. I found a record of his addressing a judicial association about a year after he’d terminated his own law enforcement career. “It’s akin to murder,” he said. “We destroy the extant personality and replace it with another, created by the practitioner.
We implant false memories. And no part of the original person survives. None. He is as dead as if we’d dropped him out of an aircraft.”
But he’d spent thirteen years performing the procedure. If that was the way he felt, why did he not resign sooner? “I thought it was useful work,” he said in an interview. “It was satisfying, because I felt I was removing someone’s felonious characteristics and replacing them with inclinations that would make him, and everyone who had to deal with him, happier. I was taking a criminal off the streets and returning a decent, law-abiding citizen. It was painless. We reassured the victim that everything would be fine, and he would be back out in the world again by dinnertime. That was what I told them. Out by dinnertime. And then, God help me, I took their lives.
“I can’t answer the question why I was so slow to accept the reality of what I was doing. If there is a judgment, I hope I’ll be dealt with in a more lenient manner than I have dealt with others. I can only say now that I urge you to consider legislation banning this barbaric practice.”
TEN
She crash-landed among the classics, and never fully recovered.
- Bake Agundo, Surfing with Homer
A day or two after I’d looked through Boland’s background, we took several clients to dinner. When it was over, and they’d left, Alex and I stayed for a nightcap at the Top of the World. We were just finishing when I got a call from Marcia Cable.
“Chase, you told me to get in touch if anything unusual happened about Maddy’s blouse?”
We were sitting looking out over the vast tableau that Andiquar presents at night, the sky teeming with traffic, the two rivers filled with lights, the city aglow. “Yes,” I said, not quite focused yet. “What’s going on?”
“There was a guy just left here who came to look at it. It was the damnedest thing.”
“How do you mean?” I asked. Alex signaled for me to turn up the volume so he could hear.
“He told me he wanted to buy it. Offered a barrel of money. Damned near three times what I paid for it.”
“And-?”
“I’m not sure whether I’d have sold it or not. I’ll be honest, Chase. I was tempted. But after he looked at it he changed his mind.”
Marcia came from money. She’d gone to the best schools, married more money, was a skilled equestrienne, and specialized in taking over failing companies and turning them around. She had red hair, dark eyes, and a low tolerance for opposing opinions.
“He withdrew the offer?” I said.
“Yes. He said it wasn’t quite what he expected and that he’d decided it wouldn’t go well with his collection after all. Or words to that effect. Thanked me for my time, turned around, and left.”
Alex said hello and apologized for breaking in. “Marcia,” he said, “you say he looked at it. Did he handle it?”
“Yes, Alex. He did.”
“Any chance he could have done a switch?”
“No. After what Chase told me, I never took my eyes off him. My husband was there, too.”
“Okay. Good. What was his name?”
She paused, and I heard the bleep of a secretary. “Bake Toomy.”
Alex shook his head. The name was not familiar. “Did you ask how he came to know you had the blouse?”
“I think everybody knew. I told most of my friends, and I was on the Terry MacIlhenny Show with it.”
“That’s the one you sent us?” I said. I’d noticed it in the queue, but hadn’t really gotten around to watching it.
“Yes.” She was trying to decide whether she should be worried. “I was wondering if he was trying to pin down where we keep it. Maybe he’s going to try to steal it.” I told Alex, out of range of the link, that I hoped we weren’t getting people upset for no reason. “I asked him,” Marcia continued, “if he knew you, Alex. He said he did.”
“What did he look like?” Alex asked.
“He’s a young guy. Not very big. Midtwenties. Auburn hair cut short. Sort of old-fashioned style.”
“Did he leave contact information?”
“No.”
“Okay. Marcia, I have a favor to ask.”
“Sure. Alex, what’s this about anyhow?”
“Probably nothing. Just that somebody’s showing unusual interest in the Polaris artifacts. We don’t know what’s going on. But if you hear from him again, try to find out where he can be reached and get in touch with us. Right away.”
Young. Not very big. Midtwenties. Auburn hair cut short. Old-fashioned style.
“Maybe he’s legitimate,” I said. “Just wanted to look and changed his mind. No big deal about that.”
A call to Paul Calder confirmed that Davis, the purchaser of Maddy’s vest, fit the description of Bake Toomy. It seemed to be the same person.
Marcia lived in Solitaire, on the northern plains. Paul was a local. “Whoever this guy is,” Alex said, “he gets around.” He instructed the AI to check the listings in Solitaire for anyone named Toomy. “Can’t be many,” he said. “The population’s only a few thousand.”
“Negative result,” said the AI.
“Try the general area. Anywhere within a six-hundred-klick radius.”
“I have eighteen listings.”
“Anybody named Bake, or any variation like that?”
“Barker.”
“Any others?”
“Barbara. But that’s it.”
“What do we have on Barker Toomy?”
“He’s a physician. Eighty-eight years old. Attended medical school-”
“That’s enough.”
“Not our guy, Alex.”
“No.”
“Bake Toomy might be unlisted.”
“He might. But that would be unusual for a collector. Or a dealer. Check our clients. You won’t find any of them who aren’t listed.”