Numismatist by Richard A. Lovett
Seamless interfacing between people and their machines makes it easier to do things--all kinds of things. 
* * * *
What made Steve Simons' death unusual wasn't that he met his end in a hail of bullets. Nor was it that he died proclaiming himself to be an instrument of God's wrath. Events like that are depressingly common. The strange part was that up until the day of his demise, Simons was a Presbyterian elder.
Presbyterians make a fetish of doing things decently and in good order. Translation: slowly, carefully, and unemotionally. I know. I grew up among God's frozen-chosen. One winter, my brother and I wanted to put a bin in the narthex to collect coats for the homeless. Everyone thought it was a great idea, but by the time the Outreach Committee approved, and Property and Worship weighed in on location and décor, it was swimsuit season. My point is that Presbyterians are not known for walking into shopping malls with handguns and opening fire on tattooed teenagers, screaming about how they've made desecrating abominations of their pierced and painted bodies.
"It's just not the type of thing Steve would do," the Reverend Melissa MacDonald was telling me for the fourth or fifth time. "You can't imagine a sweeter, quieter guy. I've never seen him get angry at anything--not even to raise his voice. I just can't imagine him doing such a thing."
What she was giving me, of course, was a textbook profile of a repressed-angerkiller: the type of guy who stores up every tiny insult, every little provocation, until something pushes him over the brink. I know that, too. My name is Adam Lamb, and I'm a psychological consultant to the Metro police force. That means I've seen way too many textbook killers. I wasn't even surprised that he was deeply religious: I've also seen more than my share of God-fearing family men turn guns on children, spouses, and themselves. Some are psychotic. Some think they're sending their families on shortcuts to heaven. Some just don't care anymore. Almost all were sweet, quiet guys whose friends struggle through denial, just as the Reverend Melissa was doing now.
In her heart, Ms. MacDonald knew as well as I did that her parishioner had managed to fire off three full clips of bullets before police and security guards swarmed the scene. Luckily, he'd been a lousy shot, and had barely managed to nick his intended targets. At worst, a couple of them would have interesting scars to explain in old age, along with those from the tattoos they would someday be having removed, when the fashion pendulum swings and body art goes the way of bobby socks. What I wanted to know was why Simons had done it. If there was a why. Sometimes, there isn't--at least not one that makes sense.
"He even worked with our youth program," Ms. MacDonald added.
"In what capacity?"
"Each summer we do a mission trip. Last year, the kids went to Mexico to build a community center. This year, they'll be on the coast, helping low-income families repair flood damage. Steve was one of the counselors. I don't think he's missed a trip in a dozen years." Her voice caught. "Well, I guess he's missing this one." Another pause. "The kids loved him. He did lots of other things with them, too. He was single, lived alone, said it gave him lots of time."
I digested that for a moment. A youth-group advisor who watched kid-culture decline, year after year, feeling that the world was accelerating toward total decadence? Hell, that described everyone over thirty. But youth advisors tend to be nonjudgmental. Could one internalize all of the judgments everyone else makes, until eventually he explodes? Theoretically possible, but unlikely, my intuition said. Still, when the guy blew up, he'd started shooting at kids. There had to be a connection. I was surprised the Reverend Melissa didn't see it. Well, almost surprised. Denial is powerful. I know about that one, too.
* * * *
I wasn't sure what to expect from the bachelor pad of a Presbyterian elder. Hopefully no kiddy porn, but who knows? Plenty of staid religious groups have found themselves harboring pedophiles. Still, Simons had shot at kids, not abused them. The profile said rage--tightly controlled and probably not well recognized until the end. If you'd asked me to guess, I'd have predicted Spartan furnishings, with a place for everything and everything in its place: the lid tightly clamped on simmering anger. Either that or a trashed apartment in which he'd vented his fury in symbolic form before carrying it to the mall.
The address was in a neighborhood called Rhododendron Hill: an area of gingerbready Victorian houses and ancient trees arching across the street. The trees were nature's own cooling system--so effective that most of the houses had never installed air conditioners and people still sat on porches, watching the world go by. Not exactly the place for a recluse trying to conceal an anger problem.
"Here we are," Detective Morris said as he pulled his latest experimental car to the curb. Morris is an impassive fifty-year-old with whom I've worked on more cases than either of us could easily count. We like each other, I think. At least, we work well together. Morris gets me access to things I need to see, then stays out of the way while I try to get into the head of a victim or a perp or a witness. Maybe what I like about him is that he keeps to himself, never asks personal questions. I'm not a counselor; I'm an observer. My job requires empathy but doesn't require me to bare my soul to anyone. I like it that way.
Morris is a gadget freak who uses his seniority to commandeer the latest equipment. Like the little save-the-planet car we were driving today. It had all the acceleration of a golf cart but got enormous mileage out of its hybrid natural gas/electric motor. Morris-the-gadget-freak envisioned a future in which filling stations would be unnecessary and you could recharge such things simply by swiping a credit card and hooking them to natural gas taps that would be as common as parking meters. Morris-the-cop knew this wouldn't work without a foolproof way to make the system safe from kids with matches. As long as I've known him, he's struggled with these two sides of his personality: the geek who loves inventions and the cop who knows that the first thing that happens with any new discovery is that someone figures out how to sabotage it just for the hell of it. The car itself was a mixed blessing. Great for puttering around town on an investigation, hopeless for chasing perps in muscle cars. Which was fine by me. High-speed chases aren't part of my job description, either.
Simons had lived in a newer building, although in this neighborhood, "newer" meant anything after 1900: a squat, stucco affair with a flat roof and no gingerbread, but lots of trees. The first-floor apartments had porches framed in colonial-style pillars that provided support for equally spacious second-floor patios. No barbecue grills, but lots of deck chairs, chaise lounges, and even picnic tables. An all-round friendly looking place. On one of the upper patios, a twenty-something woman was celebrating the afternoon by displaying a pale yellow Jogbra and cycling shorts to the world from a chair positioned as close as possible to the railing. Most likely, everyone in the neighborhood knew her. She had a body to be proud of, and she'd not moved it close to the rail in search of sunbeams. At this time of day, the trees pretty much shut off all opportunities for melanoma.
"He lived up there," Morris said, pointing to the adjacent patio.
The inside wasn't anything I would have predicted.
The first thing I noticed was that Simons was a bibliophile. It was hard not to notice: no less than six floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined the walls of the living room alone, with heaven knew how many others in the apartment's back rooms. Additional books were piled on end tables, the floor--even the TV.
"Can I touch?" I asked.
Morris nodded. "The crime unit's already been over everything. Just put things back where you found them." His nose wrinkled in distaste. "If you can. How could he live like this?"
Easily, I thought, as I glanced at the spines of the books piled haphazardly on the end of the coffee table nearest a comfortable-looking chair. These would be the ones Simons had been reading shortly before his shooting spree. If I were lucky, there'd be titles like What's Wrong with America's Youth? or A Generation of Slackers, Out of Control. But the raciest I found was a Nevada Barr mystery, with a bookmark ninety percent of the way through. I myself had read that book a few months ago: a real page-turner with a half-dozen major surprises before the end. Years ago, my grandmother had died in her sleep, sitting in her favorite reading chair with a book on her lap. I'd been ten at the time, and whenever I start a good novel, I have an irrational fear that I too will die without finding out how it ends. Someday, of course, that will happen--I'm always midway through three or four books at once--but Simons had deliberately chosen to exit the world a mere thirty-four pages before finishing his novel. Very strange.
The rest of his books were interesting mostly for their lack of interest. Nothing about the decline of American morals. No militant fundamentalism. There was a book by Dietrich Bonhoffer, a German theologian who, if I remembered correctly, had been executed for taking part in a plot to assassinate Hitler. But it was a major stretch to extrapolate that to randomly shooting at kids in a mall. Not to mention that the plot against Hitler was well organized, while Simons' assault showed every sign of impulse: the man hadn't even learned to shoot straight.
I set down the Bonhoffer and turned to Detective Morris. "Have you traced the gun yet?"
"Yes. He stole it from his neighbor."
"What?" I tried to square that with the woman in the Jogbra, lounging so nonchalantly on her balcony. "Why'd she wait so long to say anything?"
Morris gave his closest approximation to a grin, which isn't all that close. "Wrong neighbor." He jerked his thumb the opposite direction. "That one. He didn't report it because he was on vacation. Still is, for that matter. Simons was feeding his cat. Tracing the gun wasn't the lab's highest priority, then it took a while to find the guy." Morris propped his backside against a wall. "He wasn't too happy when the Maui police pulled him in for questioning. I was getting the report while you were in church. Did you learn anything from the pastor?"
"Our guy's a Boy Scout."
Morris snorted. Or maybe it was a laugh. "Aren't they all?"
"Anything worth seeing in the neighbor's apartment?"
"Don't know. He gave us permission to look, but not to break down the door. Someone's on the way over with the key--at least I hope it's the right one. There was an unidentified key in Simons' pocket. If it doesn't work, we'll need a warrant."
"So our guy goes next door, grabs the pistol, and heads for the mall." This was beginning to look like the most impulsive impulse killing I'd ever heard of. According to the preliminary report, Simons hadn't even taken time to lock his door before leaving. Though he might well have realized that he wasn't coming back.
I took another look around the living room, then started checking out the rest of the apartment. Everything had the same cluttered feel. But it wasn't oppressive--just full. The guy could have used a bigger apartment. The kitchen was cramped, but semi-tidy. No more than a day's worth of unwashed dishes, an open bottle of wine on the counter. I bent down to assess the level of liquid. Down maybe one-fifth. I couldn't remember any mention of alcohol in the report I'd read before setting out for the church, but maybe toxicology hadn't been any higher priority than tracing the gun.
I glanced at Morris, and he shook his head. "Tox says his blood alcohol was only .02 percent. There's a partial glass of wine on his computer desk. Apparently he never finished it." Morris's tone was dry, but I knew he had to be as baffled as I was. The wine said that Simons wasn't a teetotaler. But even though he'd had the chance to fortify himself with the whole bottle, he'd rushed off to kill without even finishing that which he'd poured. Maybe I should just give back my retainer and admit this one was beyond me.
The computer was in a back room that looked as thoroughly lived-in as the rest of the apartment. A bicycle rested against a wall; telemark skis stood in a niche between two bookcases. Backpacking gear peeked out of an overstuffed closet, and cheerful photos decorated what little wall space wasn't blocked by something else. I studied the pictures, but couldn't find any themes that weren't obvious from the rest of the room: bicyclists on a windy headland, skiers in parkas, cold-looking hikers on a snowy summit. A disproportionate number of kids. Happy kids. If they were any more wholesome-looking they could have modeled forNorman Rockwell.
"From the church?"
"Yeah," Morris said. "You can talk to them if you like." But we both knew what I'd find. The guy was a Boy Scout. Everyone loved him. Hell, the photos loved him. What on Earth had caused him to snap?
* * * *
The desk was a different kind of clutter. I'd never seen so much computer equipment in so little space. According to the report, Simons had been a CPA tax consultant, not a computer worker, but computers were obviously one of his passions. He had the latest gazillion-gigahertz processor, a hard drive that could have held half the Library of Congress, three kinds of scanners, photo-quality printers, etc., etc., etc. But the thing that really caught my attention was the neural-inducer headset. Anyway, that's what it said it was on the headband. I'd never seen one in the flesh before--or silicon, or whatever they're made of. Now I understood why Simons lived in this cramped apartment. Tax consultants make decent money, but Simons obviously preferred spending it on toys rather than living space. This particular toy must have set him back at least a couple of months' pay. The ultimate in virtual reality, if it lived up to the hype. Once you got used to using it, you were the Web, surfing at will, absorbing information as fast as it reaches your computer--which with this setup would be pretty damn fast.
The headset lay on the desk, atop an assortment of large copper disks--coins about half-again the size of a quarter. I picked one up and examined it. "ONE CENT," it read on one side, surrounded by something that looked like a Christmas wreath. The other bore a bust of someone I didn't recognize and a date that might have been 1798. Or might not have been. The coin wasn't in good condition.
"That's a large cent," Morris volunteered. "Simons collected the things. Apparently he bought them in batches, ten or twenty at a time, from eBay. We found hundreds of them in a safe deposit box."
I nodded. I'd once had a friend who collected old coins. He spent hours poring over reference books, trying to figure out exactly what he had. Early American coins were struck from hand -engraved dies, each slightly different. If you spent enough time studying such trivia as the coiffure of poor old whoever-it-was or the exact layout of leaves in the wreath, you could figure out which die was used for any given coin. Me, I'd been a stamp collector, but it was the same thing. You always hoped the one you were holding was the super-rarity worth thousands of dollars, but of course, if you were the one holding it, you could be pretty sure it wasn't. And in the process of figuring out you weren't suddenly rich, you about went blind staring through a magnifying glass, back and forth between the stamp and the catalog that told you how to tell the difference.
Which raised an interesting question.
"Where's the reference book?" I asked. Simons had left a dozen coins sitting on his desk. They were a lot more valuable than my stamps--he'd not just leave them lying around that way all the time, so he must have been working on them shortly before he headed for the mall. Not to mention that the partially finished wine glass was nearby.
"There isn't one," Morris said. "He was using the computer. It was still logged onto the site when I got here." He checked his notes. "Numismatist something-or-other." He showed me the page, then folded the notebook back into his pocket. "That means coin collector," he added unnecessarily. Collectors love those fancy names. Me, I'd been a philatelist.
I had no idea what to do next, but was saved from having to admit it by the arrival of the key, in the custody of a young officer who barely looked old enough to shave, let alone serve a warrant. When I was in college, we used to joke about how the freshmen got younger every year. Now, it's the cops.
The key worked and Morris led the way inside, stationing the baby-faced patrolman outside to deflect inquisitive neighbors--although so far we'd not encountered anyone other than the woman across the hall, and she'd stayed on her patio.
Compared to Simons' cluttered abode, this apartment was tidy. Comfortable chairs and a couch faced a thirty-two-inch TV, and books were limited to a single, glass-doored case, half of which was devoted to ribbons, medals, mugs, and trophies topped by gilded figures of pistoleers. A framed and matted newspaper clipping was propped against the back of the case. Curious, I stepped closer and learned that Howard W. Delmoret, then of Rock Island, Illinois, had made the Olympic Trials two Olympiads ago in the rapid-fire pistol event, which I'd never heard of before. A smaller clipping, matted into the same frame, indicated that Howard had finished sixth--good, but not good enough to make the team.
"Quite a ‘me' display, isn't it?" Morris said.
"Yeah. No wonder Simons knew there was a gun here."
Morris nodded. "So where do you figure it was?"
"Master bedroom?"
"That would be my guess." He led the way down a short hallway, past a bathroom and a laundry niche barely large enough to hold a stacking washer/dryer. Two doors opened off the hall. The first led into a guest bedroom, as tidy as the living room. The second was closed but not latched. Morris pushed it open, revealing a room that was yet another kind of disaster. Dresser drawers had been pulled out and dumped on the floor, then hurled, empty, into a corner. Capping the mess, the mattress had been tipped off its frame and flopped across part of the pile.
"Wow," Morris said. "So here's where he finally started to vent that rage."
"Maybe. But notice that he didn't touch any of the wall hangings, or rip up the mattress, or do anything nasty like defecate in the middle of that big pile of junk. It looks more like he was in a huge hurry to get the gun, but didn't know where to look."
Morris's gaze swiveled across the destruction. "Doesn't look like he found it here. What do you bet it was in the closet?"
One of my rules of life is to never bet against Morris. We picked our way across the room and pushed open another door, revealing a spacious walk-in. Inside, we found walls of suits, slacks, and shirts, and another mess similar to the one in the bedroom. The light was dim, but not so murky that we couldn't see, atop a pile of debris, a hard-sided case with foam padding shaped to hold a long-barreled pistol. Additional slots held room for five ammunition clips--the three Simons had emptied, plus two more that had been in his pockets. A gun-cleaning kit remained in the case.
Morris squatted down and examined the case without touching it. "I presume it's littered with Simons' fingerprints," he said. "I'll call the lab, but it looks like our boy in Hawaii really didn't know anything about this." He stood up, his knees popping loudly. "Not that I'd doubted his story. It just pays to be suspicious."
I started to respond, but was interrupted by a glimpse of motion in the dark recesses of the closet. For a moment, panic reared--did Simons have an accomplice who was still hiding here? Then I realized that he did have an associate who'd been his ticket into the apartment. I crouched, held my hand out in front of me, and rubbed thumb and forefinger together, all the while making pshh-pshh-pshh noises between my teeth. A moment later, a large gray cat was butting its head into my fingers.
Morris had backed away to keep from interfering. "How do you do that?" he asked. "If I try to call a cat, it's guaranteed to go the opposite direction."
I stroked the gray fleece and was rewarded with a purr. "The trick is not to care," I said. "A cat can sense that. If you can convince it that you really don't give a damn whether it pays attention to you, it'll come every time. If it thinks you need it, it'll do the opposite just to demonstrate its independence." I didn't bother to add that not-really-caring was a mental state I'd spent a lot of time cultivating. Luckily, my line of work had a lot in common with calling cats: detachment was a virtue.
* * * *
We found cat food under the sink and left the animal crunching away while we went back to Simons' apartment. Morris got on his cell phone and asked the crime unit to come take a look at the mess Simons had made of his neighbor's apartment. Not that they were likely to turn up anything useful, other than fingerprints proving that it really was Simons who'd trashed the place, looking for the gun. But the crime unit would be thorough. Sometime tomorrow, they'd give Morris a report that would reconstruct such trivia as whether Simons had swept the books off the shelves before or after he'd upended the mattress. I'd dutifully study it, trying to figure out what that revealed about his state of mind. Two hours later, I'd be no closer to understanding him than I was now. Sometimes, my job sucks.
In the mean time, I took another pass through Simons' abode, trying to make sense of his last minutes of life. According to the preliminary report, he'd eaten dinner on the way home from work at a sidewalk café on Woodburn Avenue, paid for it with his credit card at 6:17 PM, and was home in time to log onto his computer at 6:44. Easy enough to do; Woodburn was only a half-mile from his apartment. That left plenty of time for him to uncork the wine and pour himself a glass. There was no indication that he'd been in any particular hurry. He'd even taken time to read the mail: the crime unit had found a bunch of that day's advertising fliers in a wastebasket. Other mail had joined the clutter on his desk.
Simons had stayed on the computer until sometime after 7:09, which was when his browser log showed him logging onto the coin-collecting site. How long he'd been there wasn't clear because he'd not bothered to log off, but by 8:03, he'd located the gun, driven to the mall, and begun shooting. Four minutes later, he was dead.
In early evening traffic, the mall was a ten-minute drive away. Add another ten minutes for the frantic search for the gun and five minutes to park and take up station in the mall, and that left about twenty-five minutes unaccounted for--an interlude in which there was no evidence he'd done anything other than sip his wine and play with his coins.
"Has anyone done a tox screen on the wine?" I asked. What were those toxins historians think may have caused the odd behavior that triggered the Salem witch trials? Some kind of strange-sounding alkaloid. Escargot? No, that would be snails. Ergot alkaloids, that was it. Except, they came from moldy grain. What could you get from moldy grapes? Nothing I'd ever heard of, but who knows?
Suddenly I really, really wanted the wine to be the culprit. It was a wish for vengeance, pure and simple--a flashback that struck out of the blue, with a fierceness that was almost palpable. All those kids' families could sue the booze industry and get back at them for--I took a deep breath, forced my fists to unclench, tried to will my heart to slow. That was history. It was over and done with and nothing could ever change it. I would not go there. Yeah, right.
"Yeah," Morris said, in a weird echo of my internal voice. "Something in the wine crossed my mind, too. But it came up negative. Same on the contents of his stomach."
All at once, I needed air. The place stank of stale wine. Morris hadn't said anything, but maybe he didn't notice. I'd never asked him whether he drank. Didn't want to know, because I probably wouldn't like the answer. Still, this place had been closed up for the better part of a day, with that bottle of wine oxidizing in the kitchen. A wine connoisseur wouldn't like it, either. I slid open the patio door and stepped into the muggy-but-fresh afternoon air.
The young woman was still on the next-door balcony, still showing off her Jogbra and shorts to passers-by.
"Hi," she said. "Are you investigating what happened to Steve?" What happened to Steve, not What Steve did. I knew the next line before she offered it. "I didn't know him all that well, but he always seemed like such a nice guy. Did you know he liked to bake? Last Easter he made these great cinnamon rolls. And at Christmas he made this seven-layer strudel. I think that's what he called it. He said it was an old family recipe. I can't believe he did what they say he did. It's just not Steve, if you know what I mean." She reached down beside her and picked up a bottle from the floor. Even from the distance, I could see that it bore the label of a high-end microbrewery. "Want a beer?" she said. "Or is that against the rules?"
I should have responded by asking her more about nice, sweet Steve. Was he really nothing more than a casual friend? If so, did he date at all? Was the nice guy who had all the time in the world and no sign of a woman in his life actually gay? Though there was no sign of a male lover, either. For that matter, what the hell would Presbyterians think of a gay youth advisor? Could fear of being outed be a secret simmering below Steve's nice-guy personality--except that if it had been, why had he finally vented it on kids, rather than whatever real tormentors he might have had? Not to mention that there was no indication he was gay, and today it probably wouldn't matter, anyway. Maybe he was one of those few, fortunate people whose lives revolve around things other than the sex they are or aren't getting.
All of this I should have probed, and more. But I didn't. "Isn't it a bit early for that?" I asked instead.
The only thing I learned from that question was that she wasn't the type to hide her emotions. A stream of them ran across her face in rapid succession: shock, hurt, anger. Nothing that looked like shame or denial--not that it was any of my business, anyway. For a moment, I thought she was going to tell me it was her birthday or something. Even if it wasn't, she had an absolute right to enjoy a beer on her balcony, and I had no right to tell her otherwise.
But instead, she simply shut down. "Whatever," she said. Defiantly, she took a long pull on the beer, then turned her attention back to the street.
Morris had followed me onto the balcony and I could feel his eyes boring into the side of my head, but I refused to look his way. "That was helpful," he said, sotto voce.
Not trusting myself to speak, I didn't respond. Looking down, I noticed that my hands were again balled into fists, the arms tensed as though ready to swing. Damn, I thought, will it always be like this? Maybe such things are always lurking just beneath the surface, ready to pounce when the rest of your life gets too weird, like this case that made no sense, and your guard is down. All I knew was that it felt just as it had eight years ago, when the too-polite police officer arrived on my doorstep, calling me "sir" and telling me there was no good way to convey the news that was to follow. That very phrasing itself tells you the gist of the news, but how do you brace for it in the ten-second window such an opening permits? Traci and Michael were gone, the twin lights of my life, extinguished in a heartbeat. Physician, heal thyself. Yeah, right again. Even now, all it took was the smell of stale wine and the sight of a damn beer bottle to bring it all back. Maybe I don't really want it any other way.
I had no idea how much of this Morris knew. It wasn't like he couldn't run it down the same way we did the backgrounds on folks like Simons. Simons was the perfect Boy Scout youth advisor. Me, I was the shrink who'd lost his wife and kid at the hands of a drunk driver who at two o'clock in the afternoon had careened across a sidewalk at sixty miles an hour as though he'd drawn a bead on my family. A split second later, he'd killed himself by slamming into a tree, depriving me even of the chance to watch him squirm before a judge and jury. Not that this was an excuse for snapping at the neighbor. She was safely at home, not pub-hopping. But life brands us all with emotional trigger points that can rear up when we least expect it. Most of us, anyway. What if I never figured out Simons' hot buttons? What if he didn't have any, and exploded anyway? What did that mean for people like me who sat in lonely apartments trying not to remember things that could have been?
However briefly, I'd lost control and alienated a witness. I would not lose it again in front of Morris. Stiff upper lip and all that crap. "It's the case," I finally said. "I hate these things that make no sense." I walked back into the apartment, resisted the impulse to pour the wine down the drain, and strode out the front door so briskly that I nearly knocked the baby-faced cop off his feet. A moment later, I was on the street, waiting for Morris to unlock his silly little eco-car.
* * * *
Four hours later, I was back in the apartment, this time on my own. Morris was off duty after a long day, but before he left I'd asked for a copy of the key so I could work some overtime of my own. Penance, I suppose. The woman in the Jogbra was gone, as was the baby cop, which probably meant the crime unit had already done its thing next door and departed as well, leaving the mess for Delmoret to deal with on his return. Welcome home, Howard. I made a mental note to ask Morris whether anyone was feeding the cat.
The remainder of the afternoon hadn't been totally unproductive. After Morris had dropped me at my office (neither of us having spoken on the brief ride downtown) I'd buried myself in a DVD-ROM's worth of security-cam vids of Simons' shooting spree. On my initial review, before going to see the Reverend Melissa, I'd contented myself with the crime lab's 3-D computer reconstruction of the event, as pieced together from cameras with multiple lines of view. But useful as such reconstructions are, they lose detail preserved in the original flat vids.
By the time I'd watched from a half-dozen angles, I was beginning to think Simons' choice of targets hadn't been random. For one thing, he'd shot up a couple of store windows, even though nobody appeared to be even remotely in his line of fire. Apparently, the windows themselves were his targets. More tellingly, he'd let several kids escape without shooting at them.
Setting aside the puzzle of the kids for a moment, I turned first to the store windows. The freeze-framed images were grainy, but it was obvious that one shop was a software outlet, the other a clothing boutique. It was hard to figure out precisely what was displayed in either window, but a few months ago, Morris had given me a copy of the Department's image-enhancement software, plus a crash course on how to use it. My skills were no match for the lab's, but twenty minutes of fiddling brought one of the software store's windows into sufficient focus that I could recognize a display: the life-sized skull and inverted Iron Cross of the DeathQueyst line of total-immersion gaming products.
With that clue, the clothing store fell into place, as well. The particular window Simons had targeted had held an assortment of items too small to identify, but the background was full of black leather, studded vests, and mannequins displaying tight, black latex. In another part of town I'd have presumed it was a sex shop, but the mall would have frowned on that. More likely it sold party attire in the DeathQueyst fashion mien.
It's amazing how easily a computer full of fancy software can make you forget about simple, low-tech alternatives. Feeling sheepish for not having thought of it earlier, I looked up the store in the Yellow Pages. In addition to party clothes, it sold amulets, pendants, and "dark-arts accessories"--no doubt the small items in the front window.
I then pulled up freeze-frames of the kids who'd escaped, but they just looked like kids to me. Screaming, running, or in one case rooted in place while Simon seemed to be trying to shoo her away. Unfortunately, none had stuck around long enough to be interviewed.
I put in a new DVD and pulled up interview vids from Simons' victims. Someday, I'd have to listen to them all, but for the moment I was looking for the gestalt: an overall impression of the kids Simons had targeted.
At first glance, they were a diverse bunch. There were guys who looked like gangbangers, and girls who looked like prom queens--if prom queens can show that much skin. There was a high fraction of tattoos: not the delicate body art that had originally brought tattooing into the mainstream, but rough stuff: misogynistic, violent, dark. The tattoo equivalent of DeathQueyst. One boy also sported a death's head nose ring, and two kids, a boy and a girl, were in full death-rock regalia. Your typical dark-side-of-the-mall assortment.
Sampling the voice tracks revealed more of the same. F-this, f-that, f-the-other. Repetitive rather than creative.
I finished by arraying stills of all of Simons' targets, twenty-some in all, on my screen like so many mug shots in a lineup. The gestalt had become abundantly clear. Simons hadn't been shooting randomly; he'd picked targets that, from his sheltered, nice-guy perspective, looked like bad influences on his Norman Rockwell clones. Perhaps he thought that by eliminating them, he was protecting his youth-group charges from the worst of today's kid-culture. It wasn't rational, but it was the first thing in this case that made any sense at all.
Unfortunately, why a sweet guy with no history of violence had suddenly chosen to do this was as inexplicable as ever. Which was why I had decided to relive his last hours as closely as possible.
* * * *
Before returning to his apartment, I'd begun at the restaurant on Woodburn, mulling over the case as I ate a quiet dinner. At about the same time that Simons had finished his last meal, I paid and walked to his apartment, hoping the exercise would stir something useful from my recalcitrant brain cells.
If it did, I didn't know what it was. In the apartment, I went to the kitchen and visualized the process of opening a wine bottle, wishing I'd brought a cup of coffee from the restaurant. For most people the opening and decanting of wine is a soothing ritual. Needless to say, that's not the case for me. I tried to distance myself from the bad associations, but it didn't work. I was agitated rather than relaxed when I stepped into Simons' spare bedroom and slipped into his computer chair.
The lab had long ago copied the entire contents of Simons' hard disk onto an equally voluminous unit of its own, and I knew the basics of his pre-rampage evening. He'd read his e-mail, deleting spam and answering a couple of bland notes with equally bland missives of his own. "Hi, how ya' doin'? What's the weather in Chicago?" That kind of thing. The most interesting one congratulated a friend on a new job, finishing with, "Drinks after work on Friday? Say, City Club at 5:30?" It was yet another indication that Simons was either engaged in a consummate case of self-deception or really believed he had a future to plan.
I shifted to the Internet, logging onto the coin-collecting site to see exactly what he'd been looking at when he abandoned the computer to go searching for his neighbor's gun. The site had a variety of options, of which "large cents, 1793-1857" wasn't the most prominent. Apparently, large-cent collectors aren't exactly on the forefront of the coin-collecting world. I clicked a button and found a bewildering array of options: one of those irritating websites laid out by someone who presumes you already know how to use it. A few random clicks produced nothing useful except to remind me how much time I'd spent that afternoon on my own computer, image-enhancing the damn vids. I don't care how ergonomically your life is arranged, you only have so many clicks in you per day, maybe in a lifetime, before something starts to go. In the months after my family died, I'd buried myself heavily in computers, and my wrists and shoulders had been paying for it ever since.
The neural-induction headset still sat on the desk. Voice-recognition software had taken some of the strain off my wrists, but true VR would relieve it altogether. Or were my present symptoms merely psychosomatic urgings, my subconscious providing a handy excuse to try out the headset? Still, there was no reason not to.
"Unknown user," the screen asserted when I slipped the headset over my temples. "Do you wish to reinitialize?"
I thought about it a moment, then clicked "Yes."
"Initialization will take approximately 10 minutes," the screen informed me. "Continue?"
In for a penny--I clicked another "yes," then called for instructions, which informed me that the process involved reading on-screen material while the interface tuned itself to my brainwave. Not all that different from training a voice-recognition program, but faster.
The computer then fed me a couple of pages of text that told me things I already knew about neural induction, plus a lot of puffery about how it is the ultimate in virtual reality because it bypasses the "bottleneck" of sight, sound, and touch to go directly to the brain's information-processing centers. At the end of each page, I clicked a button calling for "more," wondering whether this really was going to take only ten minutes.
By the third or fourth page, it began feeling like a speed-reading course I'd taken years ago, in which I'd practiced pushing my pace to the ragged edge of comprehension, then pushing one step more, and one more after that. The pages were flying by now, and I realized I was no longer actually clicking the "more" button. I was merely thinking about clicking it, and then watching it click itself before my mouse-finger could react. The pace continued to accelerate until the pages sped to a blur that made my eyes feel grainy, like they'd been exposed too long to a hot, dry wind. I gave a slow blink to try to lubricate them--and discovered that I no longer needed to be looking at the screen.
A moment later, the system informed me, directly in my brain, that initialization was complete. I experienced a brief now-what moment, then my mind kicked back into gear and I realized I knew everything I needed to know to use the headset like a pro, that during that high-speed "initialization," I'd read the entire operating manual. But it wasn't as though I'd memorized it or somehow had its full text poured into my memory--it was more like I'd sat down and carefully studied the thing, cover to cover, retaining about as much as I normally would.
I opened my eyes and found that I had a weird kind of dual vision. The spare bedroom was there, unchanged, as was the computer screen, slaved to the inducer input, showing the last page of the manual. But overlaying that, in an eerie shadow vision, was my awareness of the Web, spreading before me in infinite possibilities. My newfound "memory" of the manual told me how to shift from one type of vision to the other, and practically without conscious thought, I was doing so, gliding through favorite websites. I tried a MEDLINE search on a topic I'd researched in a few weeks ago, and found my head filled with scientific abstracts, practically in the blink of an eye. Again I had that reassuring sense of having read and processed them all, but not having my brain stuffed full of uselessly memorized text. It was exhilarating. I wondered how much these things cost and my consciousness flowed to a string of websites, offering inducers at "very competitive" prices that I couldn't possibly afford. This thing must have set Simons back a lot more than two months' pay, but in my euphoria, I could see why he'd splurged. Who needs a big house or fancy car when the world of information is yours to command? The moment the price came down to something more reasonable, everything else was going to be obsolete.
My "real" eye fell on Simons' coins, and I remembered the coin-collecting site. With the thought, my consciousness jumped back to it, then to its large-cents section. I wondered how well the inducer distinguished thought from command, and tested it by thinking of my own home page, which I really had no reason to visit. The headset read the distinction perfectly and remained encamped on the numismatist site. But when I got wondering about what might have happened in today's stock market, it jumped to a financial site, and I realized that part of the art of using it was ensuring that stray thoughts really were stray, and not subconscious desires. Lying to myself about such things might be harder than lying to the inducer. Cautiously, I thought about porn sites and was pleased to discover that my brain wasn't suddenly filled with images of naked women, or worse. I'd always claimed that such things disgusted me. Apparently they really did. What an intriguing therapeutic tool this thing would make, in the right hands, for those bold enough to risk communing directly with their subconscious. Then I thought of Traci and Michael and was horrified to find myself launching a search for old newspaper accounts of their deaths. Luckily, I was learning to react as fast as the Internet and yanked my attention away, landing, seemingly at random, on a weather site.
How interesting, a detached analytical side of me observed as the adrenaline subsided. Like a casual acquaintance uncomfortable with a real conversation, my subconscious had picked the weather as the safest diversion. Social programming, or something deeper? Not that it mattered. Perhaps directly communing with your subconscious wasn't such a good idea after all. Repression and denial aren't without their uses.
Could that be what happened to Simons? Maybe the headset had shown him something in his subconscious that convinced him he was a killer--and which he then decided to live out. No, that would have sent him hopping all over the Internet, like me, as the headset responded to a word-association trajectory that eventually led to murder. The log said he'd never left the coin-collecting site.
The inducer correctly read that as a command to return, and I again found myself faced with vast amounts of information on oversized copper pennies. But thanks to the headset, I was no longer overwhelmed.
Randomly, I picked up one of Simons' coins.It was from 1807, and without conscious effort I knew that there were six varieties, all readily distinguishable. I put the coin under the magnifying glass, mentally flipped through the list of options, and presto, I knew it was one of the more common varieties, worth $50 to $200 depending on condition. I'd barely formed the question before I also knew that this coin was merely in "good" condition, and would fetch about $50.
It was stunningly easy. In something under a minute, I'd picked up an unknown coin and identified it. A great tool for a dealer, but was this something a collector really wanted? The headset had taken Simons' arcane hobby and turned it into something anyone could do. Some people wouldn't like that. It would leave them feeling diminished, deprived of a rare expertise. That, in turn, could fuel anger. But again, I was grasping at straws. What was the connection between the devaluation of Simons' hobby skills and his rampage against teen-agers? Not to mention that he'd deliberately brought the inducer into his hobby, knowing full well what would happen. Maybe his interest in the coins was the thrill of the hunt, not the time-consuming process of keying them out. That was how it had worked for me and stamps. I'd been hoping to find overlooked rarities, but I'd quit collecting because it was too much work to figure out what I had. I'd have viewed the inducer as a blessing.
My eyes returned to the desk, where I spotted the 1790s coin. Its front-and-center location made it likely that this was the last one Simons had been working on. It was also older than the 1807 penny, inherently more interesting.
The date was almost impossible to ascertain. What I saw was a very clear "179" followed by the top of a rounded digit. Earlier, I'd thought it was an "8." Now I wondered if it might be a "9." Thanks to the inducer, I knew it had to be one or the other. Large cents hadn't been made before 1793, so the worn digit wasn't a "0" or a "2," and "3" was ruled out by the fact that the earliest cents had a distinctively different design. There was no way it could be a "4," "5," "6," or "7."
I decided to start with "8." The Web blinked and with the briefest of delays told me that there were forty-six known varieties, ranging in price (for a coin in this condition) from virtually nothing to about $2,000.
It took only a couple of minutes to discover that even with the inducer, this hobby wasn't quite as easy as I'd thought. I couldn't hold forty-six design varieties in mind all at once, and even if I could, the coin was too badly worn. Starting with the cheapest variety, I went back and forth between my enhanced Web-vision and the magnifying glass, systematically ruling out one variety after another until eventually, I'd run through even the high-end-rarities and convinced myself that what I was holding was actually none-of-the-above.
By that time, my eyes were hurting again, and my back was feeling the strain of hunching over the magnifying glass. Glancing at a clock, I was startled to realize that I must have been staring at this one coin for the better part of half an hour. I couldn't imagine how long it would have taken the old-fashioned way.
I took off the headset, stretched my arms and shoulders, and did a few neck rolls, again regretting that I didn't have some tea or coffee. I was more baffled than ever. If this coin thing was so all-consuming for a newcomer like me, how could a dedicated hobbyist like Simons suddenly abandon it to dash next door searching for the gun? Surely he'd have at least finished with the 1790-whatever-it-was penny, then put it safely away.
I put the headset back on and returned to the Web. If not 1798, then it had to be 1799. The thought linked me to a new menu, and I found that there were only three varieties--and now the minimum value was $750, even for a worn coin like this one.
It wasn't even my coin, and I could feel my heart lurch. The dream of my childhood: a genuine find! Presuming I could figure out which variety it was.
Again, the obvious place to start was with the least expensive. Simons temporarily forgotten, I asked the Web for a list of identifying marks ... and was suddenly struck by the foolishness of the whole endeavor. What was I doing, fiddling with coins when the world was afloat in evil?
With that thought came rage, flowing through me in an almost palpable wave. It was accompanied by a desperate need to do something, now, to rid the world of at least a small part of that evil. I was a bit vague on exactly what that meant, but playing with the damn inducer had nothing to do with it. What use were old coins, anyway?
I ripped off the headset and shoved my chair back from the desk so viciously that coins danced across the desktop. I ignored them. What caught my attention as I grabbed at the desk, barely in time to keep from toppling over backward, was Simons' abandoned wineglass, still two-thirds full of red liquid. There was one of the world's true evils. Simons drank and he'd shot kids. How could I not have seen that link before? The driver who'd killed Traci and Michael had been drinking wine, too--a couple of bottles of it from what the police later discovered.
I snatched the glass and hurled it against the wall, where the liquid splattered like blood across the faces peering at me from the photos. How fitting. That was the image I'd not wanted to face. But now, finally, I was ready to actually do something about it.
Traci had been flung nearly a hundred feet by the force of the impact, but Michael had been caught between the vehicle and the tree that had also killed the driver. Perhaps it would have been better if I'd insisted on viewing his poor, crushed body, but I'd acceded to well-meaning pleas that I not do so, that I remember him as he'd been, not as he'd become. The result was that my dreams were plagued by imaginings of how bad it might have been, dreams made worse by the fact that my work too often exposes me to the contents of other families' closed-coffin funerals, and I know how awful the carnage can be.
Now, my rage had a target. Maybe I couldn't rid the world of drunk drivers, but I could reduce their opportunities. Without really understanding how I'd gotten there, I found myself in the kitchen. The wine bottle smashed beautifully against the counter, though I barely managed to blink quickly enough to escape the shards from a rack of dishes I took out along with it. Something red and sticky was running down my arms. Wine? Blood? A mixture? I was beyond caring. I was on a mission--if not from God, then from Michael and Traci. Especially Michael. I flung open cabinets, looking for more booze, but Simons wasn't really much of a drinker. Had I seen anything in Delmoret's apartment? Nothing I could remember, but I'd not been looking. But wait, what about Jogbra? She'd been drinking well before mid-afternoon.
I dashed across the hall and rattled her door. Locked. I pounded on it and heard stirrings within, but she must have looked out the peephole because she didn't respond. I kicked hard, trying to break the door off its hinges, but I was wearing soft-soled shoes and all I succeeded in doing was bruising my foot.
The restaurant came to mind, with its bar and post-happy-hour patrons. Or better yet, there was a sports bar next to it--a rowdier hangout whose denizens were probably more thoroughly sloshed. But before taking them all on at once, I needed some kind of weapon. Might was well deal with Jogbra first. Especially because she might decide to call the police.
I dashed back into Simons' apartment and yanked open the patio door. The next-door patio was several feet away, separated by a nasty drop, but some kind of lintel or rooflet above one of the first-floor units provided a convenient foothold, and I was across in seconds.
I didn't even test whether her patio door was locked. I stooped, grabbed a flowerpot, and hurled it through, following so close behind that glass was still falling as I entered the kitchen.
The apartment was a mirror image of Simons'. I found her in her living room, in the process of plucking a cordless phone from its cradle. All told, only a few seconds had passed since my abortive attempt to break down her door.
Somehow, I'd expected to find her guzzling an entire case of that designer beer, car keys in hand. Or perhaps dressed for a night of pub-crawling in the latest Looking for Mr. Goodbar fashions. Either way, I'd be the white knight charging to the rescue as I backed her into a corner and choked the life out of her so there would be one less person in the world who could ever harm someone else's family.
But she wasn't drinking, not even a cola. And instead of being dressed for a night out, she was wearing jeans and a T-shirt from something that called itself the Race to Stop Global Warming. Maybe the Jogbra hadn't been as much for show as I'd thought. A delicate chain suspended a tiny silver cross in the hollow of her throat. I could almost feel my thumbs pushing, right there, pressing more and more firmly until there came the crunch of a collapsing windpipe. On the far side of the room, the TV was tuned to an old movie. A comedy, from the sound of it.
The desire to act was as strong as ever. Just because she wasn't drinking and driving tonight didn't mean she wouldn't do so tomorrow or the day after. Better to prevent it now, before she had the chance.
A tiny piece of my mind was starting to realize that something was badly wrong with that logic. The man who killed my family was eight years dead. This terrified young woman had nothing to do with it. She'd have barely been out of her teens when it happened. But the need to act was as powerful as ever.
She was backing toward the corner, just as I'd envisioned in my fantasy. As she retreated, she transferred the phone to her left hand and plucked a heavy-looking sphere from an antique marble-topped table. The sphere was made of clear glass, but its center was opaque with something white, and I realized that it was one of those shake-it-up-and-it-snows-inside paperweights. It looked like something her grandmother should own, not her, and as I registered that thought, it occurred to me that maybe she'd inherited both the table and the paperweight from her grandmother.
The idea that Jogbra must have had a grandmother did nothing to dull my rage. But it did further convince that tiny corner of my rational mind that something was horribly wrong.
I realized that I was no longer advancing, that my arms and legs were locked in rigid tension. The tension simultaneously released a small fraction of the rage still boiling within me while holding me in place so that I was less likely to act on it. Trying to buy time, I devoted as much energy as I could to locking my muscles as tightly as possible. It was a delicate balance--a standoff against myself--and I hoped she didn't break it by suddenly chucking the paperweight at me. If she didn't manage to kill me or knock me out, I'd lose what little control I'd regained and be on her in a flash, as self-defense mutated into offense. Luckily, she seemed to have figured out that screaming, or even speaking to me, might also be counterproductive. The fight against myself required as much concentration as I could muster.
The tableau stretched for an interminable interlude that was probably only a few seconds. I had to do something. With an effort that felt like I was mired in tar, I lifted one foot microscopically and shuffled it backward. Her arm tensed and cocked, but nothing else happened. She herself had no more room to retreat.
I shuffled the other foot backward. Six inches, no more. Another step, and then another. Enough to demonstrate intent to disengage. But the effort was too much; I couldn't keep it up. Every fiber in me still wanted to rush her, and the impulse was getting stronger, not weaker, as I retreated. Time to try something else. Fighting against an amazingly strong internal resistance, I closed my eyes. They popped right back open--reflex, wondering whether she'd take the opportunity to clobber me with the paperweight--but when there was no glass heading my way, I closed them again, and kept them closed.
My first attempt to speak was a wordless croak. Not exactly the most reassuring sound, even to myself. I tried again, and found that my tongue was indeed mine to command--and that it wouldn't rebel and scream imprecations at her about Traci and Michael.
"Call 911," I managed to get out. It was barely more than a whisper, so I devoted a bit more precious energy to speaking clearly. Years of psychology had drilled into in me the need to be calm and reassuring when talking to people in crisis, but for the moment, that was irrelevant. What I needed now was to communicate. "Tell them you have a madman in your living room who needs to be sedated. Then ask them to patch you through to Detective Morris from Central Precinct. Tell him that Adam Lamb knows what happened to Steve Simons."
* * * *
I woke up in a hospital bed--under restraints, I discovered when I tried to scratch an itch on my left cheek. That discovery, of course, instantly converted a minor irritation into a fearsome prickling. I tried to rub it against the pillow, but that just made it worse. But it also helped bring me more fully back to consciousness. Even without an unquenchable itch, trapped isn't my favorite sensation.
"Welcome back," a familiar voice said. "Are you yourself again?"
I shifted my gaze and found Morris slouched in a faded-green chair. He looked tired. Behind him, a window revealed what looked like dawn. It had been dusk when last I'd seen the sky.
My memory felt like a loaf of raisin bread, without the raisins. I had the big picture, but details were missing. Luckily, Morris was looking for a big-picture answer. "If you're asking whether I'll try to kill you if you take off the restraints, the answer is ‘no.'" As far as I could tell, my thought processes were normal--or as normal as could be expected, under the circumstances. Anger still burned within me, but at a controllable level, where I, not it, was the one who determined my actions. Of course, psychotics don't know they're psychotic, but I could remember behaving bizarrely, and that was a good sign.
"Good enough." He loosened one arm and then the other, but left my feet strapped down.
The itch proved to be a scabrous lump beneath some kind of slick bandage. "Stitches," Morris said. "Or more precisely, Superglue. They say you'll retain your good looks, such as they are. What the hell happened?"
I touched the bandage again. The raisins were returning, though not in chronological order. "Simons' dinner plate, I think." Either that or fragments of the wine bottle. The young woman hadn't actually hit me with the paperweight, had she? No, I remembered being conscious as the medic stuck me with the needle that finally released me from having to fight for control.
More raisins fell into place. Even before the police had swarmed her apartment, I'd been conquering the rage. The desire to rid the world of everything to do with alcohol was still there, but I'd been slowly gaining ascendancy over it. Somewhere during the seemingly endless wait for the authorities to arrive, it had crossed my mind that getting beaned with the paperweight was the least of my worries. If I wasn't careful, I was going to get shot when the police found me, especially if their arrival disrupted my still-precarious control. I'd tried to take a few more paces backward, but I was afraid of stumbling over something and losing myself again to the anger. Eventually, I hit on another solution: I sat down on the floor, then scooched backward until my spine bumped into a table leg. "Go," I'd said, and heard the rapid scurry of footsteps, followed by the thump of a door. I was still afraid to open my eyes--what if her grandmother had also given her a hutch of antique crystal wineglasses and those turned out to be the first things I saw?--but for the first time, I'd begun to believe the evening might have a happy ending. Then the police had burst in, but there'd been no reason to shoot me, and happily they hadn't.
Morris coughed. "I wasn't asking just about the cuts," he said. "But before you start, there's someone else who wants to know, too. She's been camped out here all night."
"What?"
"You don't have to talk to her if you don't want to. But I don't see much reason to keep her out of the loop, especially since you've already used her to relay a message to me. She insists she has a moral right to know what happened, and she does have a point. She also says she wants to know whether the next person to step into Simons' apartment is going to go off his nut, too. But I think she actually cares what happens to you." He paused for a moment, and for the first time in our long acquaintance, abandoned his dry, briefing-voice tone. "She was rather impressed by the way you restrained your episode--especially the bit about letting her get out the door." Another hesitation. "I was, too." His lips twitched. "I think she's afraid we're going to disappear you into a room with rubber hoses or something. I told her we don't do that anymore, but I'm not sure she believed me. I think this one really is the Boy Scout type."
I tried to grin, but it pulled oddly at the pasted-together pieces of my face. "Girl Scout," I said. Then the attempted grin faded. Simons had been the real thing, too.
Morris's dry tone returned. "The essence of political correctness is pretending you don't know the difference," he said.
This time, I grinned despite the Superglue. Morris was full of surprises today. Though come to think of it, I'd never gotten to know him well enough to know what, for him, "surprising" really was. He wore a wedding ring, so I presumed he was married, but for how long and to whom I'd never asked. Arms-length with the living--that had been my style. Yet apparently, he really had been worried about me.
"Sure, let her in," I said. Hopefully, I was well enough recovered to be coherent, though my memory still had gaps. "But before you do, maybe you should replace the restraints." I didn't feel like I was on the verge of doing anything rash, but there was no sense in scaring her any more than I already had.
"No need," said a voice from he door. "I trust the detective." I'd not seen the signal that had let her in, but the door had a large, wire-reinforced window, beyond which I could see two uniformed officers. People hospitalized for attempted murder can't expect much privacy.
She was still wearing the blue jeans and T-shirt, her hair pulled back in a ponytail that made her look even younger than the night before. I realized that I didn't know her name, but it didn't seem an appropriate time for introductions.
"So," Morris said, "what happened? By the time I got there, the ambulance crew already had you pretty well under, and you were mumbling a lot of nonsense. The only thing I got was that you wanted me to shut down that coin site, immediately."
The last of the raisins fell into place. "Did you?"
"Yeah. You were rather insistent, and I figured it couldn't hurt."
"Good." I paused. The pieces were back, but I needed to organize them. And however much it had receded, the rage was still there, making it hard to think straight. The lingering effects of whatever meds I'd been on didn't help either, though the latest generation of sedatives releases you with remarkable ease.
"Okay, I said. "Something from that website attacked me via the headset. I suppose you could call it a mind virus. Whatever it was, it was fast and powerful. All I know was that I was suddenly so filled with anger that I forgot everything else."
"So why did it cause Simons to go to the mall to shoot kids, while you trashed his apartment and attacked Ms. Jamison?"
So that was her name. "I don't think the virus is all that specific," I said, then paused, trying to recall the exact order of events. "It was more than just rage; I had a sense that the world was full of injustice."
Morris grunted. "Isn't it?"
"Sure, but I'm not talking about anything normal. I was suddenly the avenging angel out to cure--well, something. Whatever needed to be cured. I think that was as far as the virus went. We're probably lucky it didn't make Simons and me into terrorists and send us on bombing sprees."
Briefly, I glanced at Ms. Jamison, still standing in the doorway. "Well, it wasn't lucky for you." She might trust Morris to keep me restrained, but she was staying well out of reach, her arms protectively wrapped beneath her breasts. I wondered how much it cost her to be in the same room with me, how deeply her Girl Scout reflexes went, and how severely I'd wounded them. The tiny silver cross I'd seen the night before caught the glow filtering in from outside, but instead of being a magnet for murder, this time it made me wonder how much she and Simons had in common. All that do-unto-others stuff sounds naive, but it's psychologically sound. Ultimately, the experts say, forgiveness is something you do for yourself.
I turned back to Morris. "It's possible that a more sophisticated virus would have told me precisely what to do." I didn't have to add that someone might be creating such a thing, right now, as we talked. "This one left it to the victim to find a target. I bet Simons saw all those pictures on his wall and set out to protect his church kids from the ills of the world. Me, I've kind of got a history of ... bad experiences ... with alcohol." I turned my attention back to Ms. Jamison. "That's why I snapped at you on the patio yesterday afternoon. You didn't deserve it, and I apologize."
Morris pondered. "So you went after anything that had anything to do with alcohol, whether it was related to the death of your family or not."
From the corner of my eye, I saw Jamison's face jerk as my gaze snapped back to Morris.
"Yeah, I know about that," he said. "I figured that if you wanted to talk about it, you would, and if you didn't, you wouldn't. Anyway, you go on a crusade against alcohol, and Simons goes after kids?"
"Kids he sees as a bad influence, but yeah, that's basically the idea."
"So, two more questions. First, why is this thing hiding out only on some arcane coin-collecting website?"
I had to think about that one for a moment. "Well, there is a connection. Whoever designed the virus probably wants it to stay undetected, and that's not going to happen if he puts it on a site frequented by the whole world. He'd also want a site with relatively lax security. As for why the coin site? Well, inducers cost a lot of money, as do coins--particularly the one I was looking at when I got hit. And let me tell you, keying that one out without the inducer must be a real bitch. So it may be an arcane hobby, but I bet Simons isn't the only collector who either has an inducer or would love to have one. And who says it's only on the coin site? Personally, I'd check out unexplained killings by anyone who ever bought an inducer."
Morris said something I won't repeat. I'm sure he was thinking the same thing I was, that life had just gotten a lot more complex. There was no way a miracle gadget like the inducer wasn't going to find an ever-larger market, which meant the stakes had just gone up enormously in the computer-virus wars. Me, I don't care what kind of filters they start putting on those things, nothing would ever convince me to try one again. I'm sure Morris felt the same way. I may not always like being me, but I sure as hell don't want to become someone else.
"And your other question?"
"Oh, that one's hers," he said, nodding to Jamison.
"I just want to know why I'm alive," she said. "I mean, Steve really was the dearest, sweetest guy. I know you didn't believe me when I told you that before, but it's true. And, don't take it personally, but the first time I saw you, it was obvious that you have this edge to you that he didn't have. So why were you the one who was able to shut it off?"
That one, unfortunately, was easy: lots of practice thanks to all those years of denial and repression. But how do you tell a Girl Scout that her very kindness puts her at greater risk of succumbing to a mind-altering virus?
I decided to give her two answers. The first was a bald-faced lie. "Professional training," I said, knowing she'd believe it. Everyone thinks psychologists are better at holding our lives together than the average person. Actually, we're just people, like anyone else. Dear, sweet Steve hadn't had a chance, but that had nothing to do with professional expertise. With no experience repressing violent emotions, the virus must have hit him like a sledgehammer. Me, my entire life was built around repression and denial. When all was said and done, the virus had simply been more of the same. Life is ironic that way. Sometimes, the good is bad, the bad, good. Some people think that's part of what makes it interesting. I'm not so sure about that, but it might be why, even though it's been a while since I was a Presbyterian, at core I probably still believe in God.
The other answer was true. "It was also because you did everything perfectly." I might not have a lot of recent experience dealing with living, well-adjusted people, but that didn't mean I don't know what to say. Giving her the right words mattered, because she'd be replaying the past twenty-four hours for the rest of her life, just as I'd been replaying Traci and Michael.
And, irony of ironies, now that my inability to accept the loss of Traci and Michael had saved my life, maybe I could finally let them go. Stranger things have happened. There's nothing like having your mind taken over by an external force to make you realize how much control you've been giving to an internal one.
Maybe after the hospital discharged me--after I'd convinced Morris and the doctors and everyone else that the virus wouldn't suddenly rear up again--I'd try having dinner, or at least coffee, with a real, well-adjusted, living person. Not Jamison. I was a long way from being ready to contemplate a woman again, and besides, she needed me out of her life. Not to mention being too young. Maybe Morris. Maybe it was time to find out about his family. Maybe I could tell him about Traci's special smile or the way Michael loved squirrels and called them "squitchells." Or maybe not. Even sports chitchat would be a huge improvement over what I'd come to accept as normal. But it would definitely be coffee, not beer. I suspect I'll always be a teetotaler. Some things don't change.