“You need to see a doctor!”
“Just do it. Do what I ask. Please.”
“But—”
“Please!”
“Okay, okay. Which room?”
“Along this corridor. Two or three from the end. On the left. Dominic Adler’s office.”
Kayla’s grandfather had been blind; she knew how to lead someone by cupping their elbow, and she instinctively did just that.
“Who are you?” Warkentin said.
“A student,” Kayla said. “You taught me last year.” She quickly found the room he wanted. The door was closed. Kayla let go of Warkentin’s elbow and opened it, and—
“Oh, God!”
“What?”
She crouched down next to the fallen man, checking for a pulse—but the coolness of his skin told her she wasn’t going to find one. “There’s—there’s a dead man here.”
“Oh, shit!” said Warkentin. He started fumbling toward the doorway, and Kayla got up to let him get in. Once he was, he snapped, “Close the door!”
She did so. Warkentin was breathing in loud, raspy gasps. “Okay,” she said, “we have to call the police.”
“No,” the professor replied sharply. “No. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“But he’s dead.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Thin, black hair. Sir, I think his neck is broken.”
“Is he wearing a calculator watch?”
“Um—yeah.”
“Damn it. That’s Dom. Jesus. Jesus.”
“There’s a phone here,” said Kayla. “Do I have to dial nine to get an outside line?”
“Don’t call 911,” said Warkentin. “Don’t call anyone.”
“Why not?”
“Help me find a chair.”
Kayla wheeled the one out from behind the desk and placed it between the wall and the body lying on the floor; she then guided Warkentin toward it, and he lowered his bulk into it. His chest was visibly heaving, he was slick with sweat, and his skin had turned a yellow gray.
“Okay,” he said, once seated. “Listen to me. This”—he gestured at his own face—“can’t be reported. Nor can that.” He waved vaguely in the direction of the body.
“But—”
“Listen to me! There’s classified research going on here. It—um, it got out of hand, but—”
“Classified?” Kayla repeated, astonished.
“Yes. For the US military. So we can’t go to the Canadian authorities.”
That all seemed rather improbable to Kayla, but it was also weirdly fascinating. “Are you sure you don’t need to see a doctor?” she said.
“For God’s sake, of course I do!” He didn’t seem to be actively bleeding anymore, but he winced frequently—which looked odd and creepy with his eye sockets the way they were. He fumbled for his wallet and proffered it. She noted it was rather fat with bills, including a couple of brown ones, a denomination she rarely saw.
“My cousin is a doctor, a surgeon. He’ll help. There’s a little slip of paper in there with phone numbers on it, see? Jacob Reimer, that’s my cousin. Call him.”
“I will,” said Kayla, moving over to the phone, “but—”
Warkentin was breathing rapidly, great shuddering inhalations, and he was hunched over now, clearly in agony. “Oh, God,” he said. “Oh, God. Oh, God.”
“—but, sir, what are we going to do about the body?”
“We’ve—God, fuck, damn, shit—we’ve… we’ve got to get rid of it.”
“What?” said Kayla.
“We’ve got to dispose of it. No one can ever know.”
Kayla felt the old excitement welling inside her. Carving up neighborhood cats and dogs had been glorious, but this—this would be so much better! Such a release, such a wondrous release!
“I’m in,” she said.
38
I’d been half-prepared, I supposed, for there to have been something traumatic in my past—but, really, what could have been more shocking than being knifed in the heart, my pericardium slit open, my left atrium pierced, my lifeblood spilling out? More disturbing than being left to die on an icy sidewalk on a cold winter’s night? Surely when you’d come that close to death, no horror you could have survived would be any worse.
But no. I had to keep telling myself that that had never happened. This—the things I recalled now—was reality. And almost being killed paled to having actually killed.
“But why don’t I remember doing that?” I said, looking up at Namboothiri from the little swivel chair.
“Well,” he said, lifting his unibrow, “if I had to venture a guess, I’d say it was because you didn’t sleep prior to Warkentin knocking you into a coma the second and third times. It’s during sleep that the day’s memories are sorted and the salient ones encoded for long-term storage.”
“But people put under for an operation remember both going down and coming back up.”
“True. But you also had paralimbic damage. I’m not surprised it took a little while for verbal memory encoding to start working properly again. I suspect if we shifted over to probing your verbal index, we’d find you immediately started confabulating stuff to fill in your dark period. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the mind wants a continuous narrative—even if it has to make one up.”
“Hmmm. And—hmmm.”
“Yes?”
“I’ve had a recurring nightmare for years: a monster I needed to destroy, and me holding a wooden torch, but with dark, frozen flames. That’s got to be the splintered baseball bat.”
“Ah, then you did at least partially encode what happened during that brief period.”
“Lucky me,” I said softly. And then I got up and headed toward the door.
“Where are you going?” asked Namboothiri.
“To see Menno Warkentin.”
Menno was waiting at the entrance to his apartment as I came off the elevator, Pax in a sitting posture next to him. “Padawan,” he said, moving aside to let me in.
The spacious living room, with its silver-and-cyan furniture, hadn’t changed since the last time I’d been here. Menno headed past the twin totem poles into the kitchen, Pax following dutifully behind; I’d seen the dog lead the way when they were in unfamiliar territory, but she understood Menno needed no guidance in his own home. “Coffee?” he called out. “Tea?”
“Nothing,” I said.
He emerged holding a red coffee mug for himself.
I sat on the couch. “You know Bhavesh Namboothiri?”
“Psychology prof at U of W? Met him once or twice.”
“He’s been helping me recover the memories from my dark period.”
A long pause; even Pax turned to face her master. “Oh,” Menno said at last. “And?”
“I know what happened to Dom. And what I did to you.”
“So long ago,” said Menno. “Another lifetime.”
“How come there was no follow-up? No criminal investigation?”
Menno sat down opposite me. “Somebody helped me dispose of Dom’s body.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. I never saw her. I tried to track her down afterward, but no luck. She took some cash, though, and my cards—ran up some big bills. But I never heard from her again.”
“Weren’t there questions about Dom? About what had happened to him?”
“He’d been fairly loose-lipped about doing consulting for the DoD, so I told everyone he’d moved to Washington and had taken a job with them. It sounded plausible; no one questioned it. And the DoD was happy to help cover things up; national security and all that. I think they’re still cashing his U of M pension checks down there.” He lifted his shoulders. “It’s like he isn’t even really dead.”