Two more long, slow blinks. He said calmly, “You’re mistaken.”
“Okay,” said Dax. “You tell me then, friend. Where were you born?”
He shook his head quickly and answered without hesitation.
“My New Day dawned on April 3rd of this year. I am reborn as the Universe intended me, free of attachments and addictions.”
Dax looked at him. Charley was calm, certain of his statement, his half-smile unwavering. He looked at Dax with clear blue eyes beneath the purple shiners. His skin had a milky quality to it and it was pulled taut over a jutting collarbone, shoulder knobs that pressed through the cotton on his tunic, pronounced cheekbones. His hands looked skeletal.
“And before that?”
“There is nothing before that.” He lifted a bony hand and ran it through his silky blonde hair; it fell like sand through his fingers. Dax saw Charley’s eyes shift down and to the right, as they tend to when a person is trying to remember something or to make sense of a confusing situation. There was something delicate, effeminate about him.
Dax smiled kindly, slid his chair in a little closer.
“Your girlfriend, Amanda Knight, told police that on the night you disappeared you admitted to her that you were gay. That the relationship you’d been carrying on with her was more of a sham for your parents than anything. And though you cared for her as a friend, you didn’t love her in the way she loved you.
“You told her, James, in a room full of the friends you shared, that the only way you could become aroused with her was to imagine that she was another man. You were drunk at the time, James, terribly drunk and furious with her, with yourself, with your parents. Friends tried to stop you from leaving, but you fought them off. They never saw you again.”
A slight quiver had started on Charley’s bottom lip.
“Do you remember?”
“You are mistaken.”
Dax waited a second and listened as Charley’s breathing became labored.
“I don’t know how you heard about The New Day,” Dax said, keeping his voice measured and calm. “Maybe the Internet, maybe an ad on the subway. But to someone who was as lost, as headlong into personal crisis as you were, James, it must have seemed like a safe haven. Maybe you went to them. Maybe they came to you.”
Charley didn’t say anything right away. His eyes had taken on a kind of glazed-over look, like he had disappeared into himself.
“I was lost,” he said. “I walked blindly for so long trying to make sense of all my pain. And then The New Day dawned. Everything that came before is darkness, like the time before birth.”
His words had the practiced quality of a mantra. He knew them by rote, like he’d spoken them a thousand times. Dax let a few beats pass before talking again.
“About two weeks after you dropped out of your life, you showed up at the bank and withdrew all your money. Cashed in your CDs and money market accounts, cleared out your savings and checking. You had quite a bit of money for a young guy, between a trust from your wealthy uncle and the money you were raking in as a trader on Wall Street. Nearly a quarter of a million dollars. You took a cashier’s check when they couldn’t give you cash.”
“I have no need for money any longer. It’s a drug, you only want more and more. There’s never enough, there’s nothing you won’t do for it. We’re junkies for the green stuff, all of us.”
Dax took a picture from his pocket and handed it to Charley. It was a picture of Mickey with his girlfriend Mariah.
“Do you know these people?”
Charley laid his eyes on the photo briefly and shook his head. He tried to rub his eyes then pulled his hand away quickly and groaned at the pain he caused himself. He reached for the ice pack that lay beside him and put it back to his forehead. Dax thought it was notable that the kid never once asked where he was, who Dax was, or what the hell had happened to his head. He seemed to accept his surroundings and situation without question.
“How about this girl?” Dax asked, handing him another photo, this time of Lily Samuels. Another quick shake of his head, a shift of the eyes.
“I’m tired,” he said.
“Okay, James. I’m going to give you a little time to think.”
He walked over to the table that sat in the center of the room and took the article he’d printed off the Internet, complete with a picture of James Rainer. He placed it next to Charley on the cot.
“When you’re feeling up to it, why don’t you read this article? I’ll be back in a little while.”
He left the room then and locked the door behind him. He walked into an adjacent room where Lydia and Jeffrey were watching through a two-way mirror. They were in Dax’s dungeon, as Lydia liked to call it, that mysterious maze of rooms in his basement that was an endless source of fascination for Lydia.
Dax saw as he entered the darkened room that Charley sat perfectly still and hadn’t made a move for the article.
“We better take it easy on him,” said Dax. “With that kind of conditioning, he could crack up, get lost forever in there.” He tapped his temple.
“We might need a professional,” said Lydia. It had taken her about a half an hour on the Internet searching stories on missing young men to come up with the website James Rainer’s parents had posted, the articles that had run in the wake of his disappearance, the blogs from friends who recounted the night he’d disappeared, pleas from people who wanted him to know that they loved him and wanted him home no matter what. Jeffrey had recognized the picture from before his eyes had turned purple and swollen.
“Like a cult deprogrammer?” asked Jeffrey.
She nodded. “But first, we need to get in touch with his family.”
“Well,” said Dax, reluctantly. “Once we do that, we’re going to lose him.”
“Dax,” said Lydia, looking at him incredulous. “You’re implying that we keep him here and only let his family know when we’re done with him?”
He shrugged. “He’s been missing for eight months. Another day or two isn’t going to kill them.”
“Jesus, Dax,” said Lydia. “Are you even human?”
Another shrug. “That kid’s the only thing we got out of our botched visit to The New Day.”
“Not quite,” said Jeffrey. He took the blank visitor’s page from his pocket and laid it on the table. Dax and Lydia leaned in.
“Oh, good. So we have this blank piece of paper, too,” said Dax. “Congratulations, Detective, you cracked the case.”
Jeffrey gave him a look and sat down at the round metal table that stood in the corner of the room. He flattened the page out in front of him and turned on the halogen lamp, which shone a bright, direct beam onto the paper.
“You can see the indentation of writing from the page that was above this one on the clipboard. It’s a visitor’s log.”
Dax opened a drawer in the table and took out a pencil. He sat down beside Jeffrey and slid the paper away from him.
“Let me have it,” he said.
“Don’t fuck it up,” said Lydia, leaning over his shoulder.
Slowly, as Dax delicately shaded over the page, a list of names in a long scrawling hand started to appear in relief. Much of it was illegible, the impressions from the handwriting above uneven in the pressure applied. They could make out some common surnames, like Walsh, Smith, Jones.
Lydia looked away in frustration and noticed Charley reaching for the article beside him. She watched as his eyes scanned the page and his hand started to shake. She started to wonder if maybe they shouldn’t have left that for him to read. Maybe it was too much for him, to see it in black and white. She was about to say something when Jeffrey said,
“Whoa, is that who I think it is?” He reached into his coat pocket and took out his glasses.
Lydia looked down at the page and saw what he had seen. Just then, Charley began to cry.
You have no right to take these people into custody,” said Jude Templar on the walkway. He’d jumped out of his Jag when he saw the van approaching and the members of The New Day began filing out of the building. He approached the van’s back door as Matt and a couple of the uniformed officers led The New Day members out into the cold. Everyone was getting tired, the sun starting to make its debut over the horizon. Even Templar was starting to look a little wiped out, a little frayed.