Phantom Instinct (9780698157132) (5 page)

H
arper's expression remained searching. “If you're a head case, so am I.”

“I doubt that.”

“You were there. You saw him,” she said. “You're here now, and you still agree that you saw him.”

Her eyes were blue, bright, piercing. Gulls wheeled overhead. The salt air was so sharp, Aiden could taste it on his tongue.

“I know you were injured. Bad,” she said. “I know it didn't affect your eyesight.”

His heart beat heavily in his chest.

“Did it?” she said.

“You're blunt.”

“The internal limiter on my mouth blew out after the sheriff's department told me I was imagining things. On this topic, I have no inside voice.”

She was deadpan. He set down his mug.

“I saw him. I had him in my sights. But the crowd was running between us, and I had no shot,” he said. “Then the floor opened up. Drew and I and those two men . . .”

“I know.”

Along with Drew Westerman, two other civilians had been killed when the floor collapsed.

“Sheer luck that I was ten feet away from them,” he said. “The heaviest debris missed me.”

He kept his voice flat and mentally repeated the mantra he had learned during recovery:
Remember it without reliving it.

The collapsing floor had pitched him into a void. He had tried to roll, calling on his combat jump experience. But training was useless against walls and beams and splintering floorboards. He hit and broke his shoulder and elbow and collarbone and four ribs and his left leg. One rib shattered and punctured his right lung. The building's CO
2
fire suppression system had kept the flames from reaching him. But smoke inhalation and internal bleeding did a crapload of additional damage. And there was the head injury.

“I got bunged up pretty solidly,” he said. “I didn't see the shooter escape.”

“I understand. I'm glad you're on the mend.”

“Getting there.”

Two weeks in ICU. Six more in the hospital. A season. A life, a sloughing off of one skin, leaving him raw and shiny, unready for the outside world. He didn't tell her that the finish line forever seemed to recede, always out of reach.

“How about you?” he said.

She attempted a smile. “I was ten inches luckier than you. Minor injuries.”

He had seen what she was made of and knew she didn't need his problems on her shoulders. That night, as gunfire tore through Xenon, she had forsaken her chance to escape. She could have dropped behind the bar and shielded herself before running out the staff exit. Instead, she went over the top and risked herself to try and rescue one of the wounded.

She was a hero. He couldn't bitch to a hero.

“Why do you think the person you saw in the trees today was the third shooter? Besides having a right-hand tattoo.”

She breathed and spoke dispassionately. “I know he was just a shadow, but . . . the way he moved. The—”

“You know the gunman was male?”

“Heavy shoulders, slim hips with boxers exposed above sagging blue jeans. Plus, he had a thick line of hair running up his stomach.”

“Fair enough.”

“And that night, the strut. The black hoodie—I think one of the other men wore green. That hand with the tattoo, holding a silver handgun. It caught the light.” She looked at him. “Then I saw you behind him, coming toward me through the crowd. I
saw
you. I . . .” A breath. “I thought—
please let him get the guy
.”

She put her hands between her knees.

Aiden said, “That's the guy I saw. But we won't convince the sheriff's department. I told the department all of this. They took my statement in the hospital, as soon as I was able to talk.”

“You're a detective. A sworn deputy. An experienced investigator.”

He exhaled as though the air was being pushed from his lungs by a heavy hand.

“What do you think he was doing at the memorial?” he said.

“You believe me?”

“What do you think he was doing there?” he said again, gently.

She took a second. “Watching.” Another pause. “Stalking.”

“For what reason?”

“I don't know.”

Her voice remained strong, her eyes clear.

“What do you want me to do?” he said.

“Back me up. Help me get reinforcements. Because that guy's out there.”

“And he killed your boyfriend.”

“He killed my boyfriend.” She colored. “And he's
back
. He's sniffing around people who lost loved ones in the attack, and . . .” She pressed her fingers to her eyes. “What the
hell
was he doing there? What if he wants to target survivors? What if he's some psycho who's been biding his time before picking off people who made it out alive? Jesus, does he want to hurt Drew's family?”

“The Xenon attack wasn't random. They sprayed gunfire, but they had targets.”

She said, “You have to have an idea of who it is.”

He shook his head. “I don't. And the LASD doesn't either. And there's no way to tie the bullet that hit your boyfriend to . . .”

She flinched.

“Sorry.” He reminded himself that she was a victim, not a cop. “There's no way to match rounds fired to the weapons recovered at the crime scene. The barrels were heat damaged. They couldn't be test-fired.”

“I need your help to convince the sheriff's department I'm not hallucinating. I know you're on medical leave, but . . .”

“You didn't drive sixty miles to ask me to be your sidekick. What do you want? Revenge?”

She colored.

“Do you?” he said.

“I want this bastard found and arrested,” she said. “He was there. Watching us. I want him caught before he does something bad.”

He stood and walked to the counter at the snack bar and refilled his coffee mug. When he returned, he said, “I've seen him.”

She stilled with surprise. “When?”

He held on for a second and finally decided: Screw it.

“I've seen him several times since that night. I've been absolutely convinced.”

“Are you serious?”

“Dead. Once, I was sure I saw the shooter in a crowd near the docks here.” He gestured at the harbor.

She knew something was off. “You haven't told the police, have you?”

“They'd say what other people have told me: It's a delusion.”

“Because you were so badly injured?”

“Because it's true.” He smiled now, without humor. “I see ghosts.”

The clatter of plates grated on the man's ears. The waitress was clearing the next table at the sidewalk café, piling plates one on top of the next, cheap thick china that scritched and plinked. Seagulls hovered overhead, shrieking for scraps. The sky was hard with sunshine. The palm trees along the boulevard gave no shade. He cupped his hand over the display on his phone and flipped through the photos he'd shot at Clearview Park.

So many sad pandas. The photos suffered from being shot deep in the trees, but he'd
snapped snapped snapped
and captured every face at the memorial. Rich people. Pretty people. Scared people. All boo-hooing, including Mama and Papa Westerman, who spent the family's banking money to dedicate a rock to their son.

The waitress scraped half-eaten fries into a busboy's bucket. At the next table, a couple held hands. Their twining fingers looked like sea anemones, soft and wriggling. The whine of traffic saved him from hearing their smiley smug talk.

Nobody from the L.A. Sheriff's Department had attended the dedication. Their investigation was closed, done, shoved in a drawer. The cops had looked away.

They wouldn't look back again.

The field was open at last, unobstructed and ripe for picking. Finally, finally. He sent a text.
Event was badge free, target rich.

Picking up his knife, he poked the last of his sausage onto the point and flicked it onto the sidewalk. The seagulls descended. Before they could nab the sausage, the dog stirred. It lolled over and snaffled the tidbit from the concrete.

The smiley smug couple glared at him. The woman's mouth went prissy. She pointed to a sign on the restaurant wall:
PLEASE DO NOT FEED
THE BIRDS.

“This is Sambo's, not the sultan's palace,” he said.

“The gulls are a problem,” she said.

“I'm not feeding the gulls. I'm feeding my dog.”

She scowled. He scrolled, examining each photo. He recognized six people who had been at Xenon that night. Staff, customers, even the drummer from the band. What were they, bored? Did they like wallowing in grief? He didn't get it—why people kept coming back for more.

But if they wanted more, he'd give it to them. Nobody was looking at the Xenon fire anymore.

Except.

His final photo showed her—lots of brown hair, dark glasses, white blouse, no bartender's apron today but yeah, her—holding on to baby sis Piper Westerman and staring into the shadows where he had stood.

He took his cigarettes from his pocket, tapped one out, and stuck it between his lips.

Prissy Mouth said, “You have got to be kidding.”

He paused and pulled the cigarette from his lips. She smirked and returned to dabbing at her food.

He grunged a ten-dollar bill from his jeans pocket and dropped it onto the remains of his fried egg. He took a last look at the photo on his phone. Center of the frame, she was staring straight at him but didn't see. Just like she didn't see him now, a hundred yards away, across the wide boulevard and the moored boats at the Santa Barbara harbor. He took a second to watch her and the sheriff's detective huddling over coffee at a dockside table.

He stood up, whistling at Eagle. The dog slowly roused itself, haunches rippling as it raised all its hundred pounds to its feet. He stuck the cigarette between his lips again. Prissy Mouth turned, but he said, “I'm going,” and waited until she and the man stopped staring. People always lowered their eyes eventually.

He grabbed a crust of toast from his plate and flicked it into the air above their table. It landed between them. The seagulls dove on it, squalling and biting. The woman shrieked. The man shoved back, waving a napkin like a panicky matador.

He took one more look across the boulevard. She hadn't moved. The brunette still huddled toward the sheriff's detective, her hair witching in the breeze.

He snapped his fingers at the dog and strolled away to the sound of beating wings.

H
arper gave Aiden the deadpan tone and the piercing gaze. “Want to explain?”

He stood up. “Let's walk.”

She left her coffee. He led her along the edge of the harbor, past the commercial fleet, toward the sailboat marina.

“There's a reason the sheriff's department and fire department and ATF won't listen to me,” Aiden said. “And it's not because I broke my leg in three places.”

She glanced at his leg.
Don't limp
—the orthopedist, the physical therapists, and his mother all hectored him about that. Limping, favoring an injury, could make his condition worse. Could unbalance him in other ways.

Too late
.

“I'm back to eighty percent, physically. Eighty-five percent on a good day.”

“Great. But?”

“But physical recovery is one thing. A traumatic brain injury is something else.”

“What happened?”

“Coup-contrecoup injuries.”

“Meaning?”

“The head comes to a sudden stop. The brain slams into the skull. Then it bounces back and hits the opposite side.”

“I know the term. I meant—what happened? Debris hit you?”

“I hit the debris. A floor joist.”

“Blunt force trauma.” Her head was down, eyes on the sidewalk, hands in her jeans pockets. “Excuse me if I seem ignorant. You have use of all four limbs. You can see. You can talk. You can hold a conversation and have a sense of humor, or at least you're trying to.”

“It could have been much worse. I know that.” Then he realized. “I know I'm among the fortunate. And I'm sorry for your loss.”

She glanced up at him. “Thanks.”

“I apologize if I sounded self-pitying. I shouldn't. Your boyfriend's gone. I'm here.”

“So am I.”

She raised her chin and waited, while he got it.

“Understood,” he said.

They walked on. Yeah, he was Mr. Lucky—two Afghan tours with nothing worse than insect bites, then six healthy years with the sheriff's department. Until.

“TBI can screw you up without you knowing it at first. It doesn't always look like a stroke or paralysis. It . . .”
Talk
. “Sometimes it manifests as changes in personality. Issues with anger and impulsivity. Depends on which part of the brain is damaged, and how tethered and healthy you were before the injury.”

Traffic lazed past along the seafront on Cabrillo Boulevard. On the beach, kids ran along the wet sand near the surf line. Harper listened with attentive reserve.

“For months, I felt like I'd been knocked sideways through a wall, into a dimension that ran on a different frequency. I had double vision, tinnitus, problems with my memory.”

“Memory. That's why they discounted what you told them?” she said.

“One reason. The other reason didn't manifest right away. When it did, nobody understood it. Least of all, me.”

“Aiden, just get down to it. What's going on?”

“It's called Fregoli syndrome.”

“What's that?”

“I have a problem with facial recognition.”

Her lips slowly parted. “You can't recognize people?”

“Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, I recognize people just fine. You, my brother, the guy who served us coffee. But my brain got beat up and now sometimes it misfires,” he said. “It glitches. And I think that a person I'm looking at is actually somebody else.”

She looked at him sharply. “Excuse me?”

“Yeah. It's also known as the Fregoli delusion.”

He waited for a response, but she simply looked concerned. “It's named after a quick-change artist, Leopoldo Fregoli. It leads you to believe that the people you're looking at”—he gestured at the beachfront boulevard—“are actually other people in disguise. A patient could see his father and think it's actually his wife disguised as his father.”

He'd read the literature. Looking for a cure, an explanation, an escape.
Patients with Fregoli syndrome think that the people around them are capable of changing their appearance, dress, and gender in a few instants, with only nearly imperceptible clues to their real identity
.

“And this happens to you?” she said.

“It does.”

“You seem calm about it.”

“I'm not.” Not calm at all. Almost never. “I'm good at putting on a front myself.”

“Aiden, I'm sorry.”

He nodded. “Thanks.”

“So the authorities dismissed your entire statement in retrospect. Jackasses.”

“Appreciate that.”

“Did you see the third shooter or not?” she said.

“I did.”

She squeezed his arm. “All I need to hear.”

He kept walking, his throat tightening. He forced himself not to hesitate.
You're going for it: Just go.

“I saw the same man you did. No doubt. That's not the problem.” He blinked at the sun. “The problem is, at unpredictable moments, I can become convinced that a random person—a neighbor, or somebody crossing the street—is the shooter.”

“Jesus God.”

“It's an injury to the temporal lobe. My wiring sees faces and tries to map them into familiar-unfamiliar . . .”

“Identify Friend or Foe.”

He nodded. “And sometimes it blows a circuit.”

“What's your status?”

He let out a non-laugh. “I feel like I'm in
The Thing
. Like maybe next time, I'm going to see my nemesis in the face of a dog.” He glanced at the sailboard masts in the marina. “It's treatable. To an extent. It rarely resolves.”

“Define
treatable
.”

“Kept in check.” He eyed her. “Most of the time. They're still dinking with my meds.”

Cars drove past, windows down, hip-hop thumping. She said, “What a truckload of shit to get dumped on you.”

“More kind words. You were raised to say thoughtful things no matter how bitter the situation, I'll bet.”

“I was brought up without a single concern for manners. And the Navy taught me to tell it like I see it.”

He faced her. “So what do you see?”

She turned to him. “You're telling me this injury will disqualify you from returning to duty.”

“The department feels insecure about issuing me a firearm, when at any moment I might decide that the kid checking my groceries is actually a killer in disguise.”

She didn't laugh. He looked at the sun flashing off the ocean.

“I'm still on medical leave. But my job as a detective . . .” He spread his hands, as though sand were running through them.

His colleagues were withdrawing. Even his allies and friends. They thought he was off-kilter at best, ruined at worst. His career was in the shitter.

“That's why the department excluded so much from your statement,” she said.

“They only trust the testimony that was corroborated by my partner.”

Her hands clenched. He recognized the signals: frustration, even rage.

“They might have believed me—if there'd been any physical evidence. But you know the score. No forensics. No video.”

The CCTV cameras at Xenon had burned. So had the hard drives that stored recorded video. Hundreds of people in the club had been carrying cell phones, and the cops had recovered dozens of photos from them, but only a few photos had been taken after the shooting started, by people in the heart of the panic. No photos captured the shooters entering the club. Certainly, none showed a masked shooter leaving. He was a ghost. Smoke. Just . . . nothing.

“Aiden, he's
back,
” she said. “We have to find a way to convince the department to listen.”

He started to shake his head, but she said, “When did you first see the third shooter? How did you identify the guy that night? Tell me everything.”

“Detective Sorenstam and I followed Arliss Bale to Xenon, surveilling him. Sorenstam saw a car drop off some guys by the alley. It felt wrong.”

“How many guys?”

“She saw two. I know there could have been a third she didn't see. Doesn't matter—I went to check but found no sign of the car or the guys. So Sorenstam and I went in the front door. Five seconds later, the shooting started.”

Harper's hair lifted in the sea breeze. Her eyes were hard.

“I saw him through the crowd, advancing in a straight line,” Aiden said. The guy had been walking, while everybody else was running, pushing, screaming. “He raised his weapon in the direction of the main exit. It was jammed with people. He was almost strutting. Movie gangbanger style. You know?”

She lifted her arm as though she was holding a gun.

“Exactly. Up on his toes like a boxer, the pistol turned sideways in his hand. When he raised his arm, the sweatshirt rode up his back. It exposed about six inches of skin around his waistline. The tattoo stood out,” he said.

“Tattoo?”

“In gothic script. The letters ran sideways up his spine. Like a word climbing his back. They were three, four inches tall.”

“Could you read it?” she said. Her eagerness was palpable.

“I only glimpsed it. A portion of a word in black ink:
E-R-O.
”

She didn't react.

No, that wasn't right. She stilled so completely that it was the opposite of a reaction. It was a negative, a disappearance somehow.

“Harper?”

She was there, but absent. Her face had paled. Even her blue eyes had dimmed.

“Harper, what's wrong?”

She turned to bolt. He shot out a hand and grabbed her arm.

“Hey.”

She tried to pull away. He found his balance, got both hands on her, and said, “Stop. What's wrong?”

Her shoulders were tight and shaking. He held on.

“Not cool. What's going on?” he said.

She was as white as flour, breathing hard. “The tattoo. It doesn't say
E-R-O
.”

“What?”

“It says
ZERO
.”

“You saw it?” he said.

She shook her head. “No. I mean yes.”

He held on tight. “What? You saw the tattoo and only now remember?”

“I've seen it before. Not that night.” She blinked, tears brimming. “I know who it is.”