Placebo (19 page)

The sheriff's department deputies question me about the assailant, and I walk three of them to the place where Glenn Banner's body lies sprawled on a bed of soggy, bloody pine needles. They ask me to explain what happened, talk them through the fight, and I do. Blow by blow.

Two of them jot notes while the third, a man with a snarled brown mustache whose name tag reads Jacobs, slowly circles the body, taking photographs with his mobile phone. I figure I don't need to tell them about the pictures in Banner's wallet. They'll find them soon enough.

I'm finishing recounting what happened when Deputy Jacobs begins to go through Banner's pockets.

He locates the phone, the note, the keys, the newspaper page, the wallet. He flips it open and after a moment pulls out the photographs.

Pauses.

He quietly calls the other men over, and the three of them go through the photographs of the dead and mutilated bodies one at a time. A dark, uncertain storm of shock and fury seems to settle all around us in the small clearing.

I wait for them to finish.

Honestly, I'm unsure how much they'll want to question me, or
even if they might take me to the station or arrest me. After all, a man is dead, and I was the one fighting him when he died. I have no idea what the legal ramifications might be, but the longer I stand here, the more I begin to wonder.

Finally, one of the officers, a looming, sloping-shouldered man with a stern face, turns to me. “Looks like you're lucky to be alive.”

“Yes.”

I wait to see what will happen next. He folds his notebook shut, turns to Jacobs. “Walk Mr. Banks back to the center. He needs to have those EMTs take a look at that contusion on his head.” Then he addresses me again. “And Mr. Banks . . .”

Okay. Here we go.

“Yes?”

“Looks like you saved us some trouble here, saved the taxpayers a lot of money. I'm sure as questions arise, we'll be in touch.” Without another word, he puts away the notepad, turns back to the body, and Deputy Jacobs motions for me to return with him up the hill.

It takes a moment for the facts of the situation to settle in, but then it strikes me that although there'll undoubtedly be more questions to answer and probably sheaves of paperwork to fill out, for now it looks like the officers aren't going to give me a hard time about Banner's death.

Instead the tall officer had essentially thanked me for getting Banner off their hands.

I'm a bit surprised by my initial thought, but in the end I agree with it:
Actually, you know what, Deputy? It was my pleasure.

Jacobs trudges beside me as we ascend the muddy hill. “They'll probably want to take you to the hospital. Check you over.”

Actually, that wouldn't be bad. It would give me a chance to see how Tanbyrn is doing.

And get your ribs X-rayed. A fractured one could puncture your lung.

Yeah, that would ruin my day.

You can't do the kind of stunts I've done over the years and not
come away with your share of broken bones, and I've cracked ribs before but never seriously broken one. Either way, deep breathing or coughing was not going to be fun for the next couple weeks, but it would be good to find out the severity of the damage.

“Also,” I tell him, “there's a woman who needs to come along. That guy cut her last night. Sliced her arm. She's back at the center.”

“Alright.” He pulls out his walkie-talkie. “Let's get you two an ambulance.”

Riah presented herself at Cyrus's office, and the receptionist, Caitlyn Vaughn, led her grudgingly through the door.

She entered and found Cyrus alone, studying the aquariums containing the wasps. Without even mentioning their meeting with the twins last night, he invited her to join him. “Come here, Riah. There's something I want you to see. She's building her nest around the roach. I think you'll like this part.”

On the way to the hospital, I call Xavier and tell him to meet us there, then I contact Fionna and give her the phone numbers I'd pulled from Banner's cell and the alphanumeric code I'd gotten from the sheet of paper in his pocket. I also mention Project Alpha, the name of the research program Dr. Tanbyrn had started to tell us about just before the fire. “Look into it. See what you can find out. And see if you can find any reference to someone named Akinsanya.”

When we were in his office, right after we smelled the gasoline, Charlene had taken Tanbyrn's folder of notes and his iPad and stuffed them into her shirt to save them from the fire. Now, in the ambulance, she has the iPad on her lap, but we find that it's password protected and we can't access the files. The algorithms on the sheets of paper are still as unintelligible to me as they were earlier when I was sitting at Tanbyrn's desk.

I ask Charlene how she's holding up.

“I don't know . . . I mean, what happened to Abina . . .” A deep sadness pervades her words. “It's so senseless. She seemed really nice and I can't believe that guy just . . .” She shudders. “I'm worried about Tanbyrn too. And about you—about your head.” I'm a little glad I hadn't told her about my ribs.

The paramedic had given me an ice pack and I'm holding it tenderly against my swollen temple. I take a shot at trying to lighten the mood: “You didn't see that branch. It got the worse end of the deal.”

She smiles faintly at that.

I reach over and take her hand.

For a moment she's quiet, then speaks softly: “The test is over, Jevin. We don't need to pretend anymore.”

I don't always know the right thing to say to her, but this time I do. “I'm not pretending.”

And instead of pulling away, she repositions her hand to hold more tightly onto mine.

Things at the hospital proceed quickly.

Xavier is waiting for us and, despite the objections of the nurses, hovers while they fret over the contusion on my head and while a doctor takes a careful look at Charlene's arm. I overhear the doc tell her that she's still in the window to get stitches, but that it was good she came in now.

Tanbyrn is still unconscious, and because of the amount of smoke inhalation, his age, and his apparently frail health, he's listed in critical condition. The doctors say it's possible he may slip into a coma.

I take some Advil for my mild concussion, the nurses leave me alone while they order an X-ray for my ribs, Charlene heads down the hall to get her stitches, and I start bringing Xavier up to speed, but I'm distracted by the furry-looking bologna and cheese sandwich he's eating. “Where did you get that thing, anyway?”

“A vending machine.”

“A vending machine.”

“Yup.”

“Looks like it's been there a month.”

“Tastes like it too.” But that doesn't stop him from taking another bite. “But I've had worse.”

“I'm not sure I needed to know that.”

He listens carefully as I go on with my summary of what happened
at the center, and in between bites of his sandwich, he interrupts to make observations about the heat flux of the fire, the likelihood of full-room involvement—flashover—in the doctor's office. “The paneled walls lined with books—man, you wouldn't have had much time.”

“Let's just hope we got out soon enough for Tanbyrn.”

“Yeah.” A pause. “You did good back there, bro.”

“Thanks.”

“I bet it felt good too.” Talking with his mouth full.

“You mean helping Tanbyrn?”

He polishes off the sandwich, licks the grease off his fingers. “Yeah, that and escaping—getting out of the office, through the fire, picking that lock to get out of the building. I bet it felt good to be back in the zone again.”

“The zone?”

“Who you are, Jev. What you do. You're an escape artist.”

“I'm a filmmaker.”

“No. You're an escape artist.”

No, you're not. Not anymore.

I leave the topic alone. “Hopefully, Tanbyrn will pull through.”

“Yeah.” A moment passes. “So you got the footage with the button camera?”

“It's at the cabin back at the center.”

“And the test didn't appear to be faked?”

“Not that I could tell, no.”

“So that means if the entanglement stuff is for real—that means you and Charlene are—”

“Friends.”

“Friends.”

“Right.”

He winks at me knowingly. “Gotcha.”

“No, no. Don't do that, Xav.”

“What?”

“That whole innocent ‘gotcha' routine. We're just friends.”

“Who are entangled.”

I open my mouth to respond, change my mind. “Never mind.”

He produces a pen from his pocket and flips open his leather-bound journal. Actual paper. Very old-school. “You mentioned that Tanbyrn told you about something called Project Alpha.”

“He said it involved two men, twins. He just called them ‘L' and ‘N.' Said they'd fly in . . .” Something else the doctor mentioned comes to mind, distracts me.

Right before you smelled the gasoline, what did he say?

Negative?

Negative what?

Xavier waits. “You alright?”

“Yeah, I'm just . . .” My thoughts scurry off in a hundred directions.

“So they'd fly the twins in . . . and . . . ?”

“Sorry. Right. He mentioned that the studies involved communication and physiology, alpha brain waves, that identical twins are more capable of . . . well, he didn't clarify. I assume that he was studying the negative effects of something concerning the mind-to-mind communication. He never had the chance to explain.”

Xavier writes in his journal while I verbally try to sort through what we know: “RixoTray is funding research on mind-to-mind communication. According to Fionna's research—wait . . .” This was high-stakes conspiracy stuff, right up his alley. “Dr. Tanbyrn was studying the phenomenon of one person's loving thoughts nonlocally affecting the physiology of the person he or she loved.”

“Uh-huh. And your results with Charlene bore that out.”

Not this again. “I told you we're—”

“Friends.”

“Right.”

“Gotcha.”

“Stop that. And don't say ‘gotcha.'”

“See, you really can read minds.” He crumples up the wrapper from his sandwich. Sets it aside.

“Xav, my point is, it's two people who genuinely care about each other. I'm not certain they would need to be lovers exactly.”

He sees where I'm going with this. “So, you're thinking family members in this case? These two twins?”

I stand. Pace. Weave the 1895 Morgan Dollar through my fingers to help clear my head. “Right. Tanbyrn mentioned they were special. Well, what if they have a really close emotional connection like my boys did? Drew and Tony. You remember that. At times they seemed to almost read each other's minds.”

Even though Xavier wasn't related to the boys, he'd fulfilled the role of the cool uncle every kid wishes to have, and I know he misses them acutely.

“Yeah, I do remember. There were times when they would finish each other's sentences. Like they were connected in a way no one else is.”

For a moment I'm quiet. “I don't think I ever told you about what happened one day with Drew. When his side started hurting.”

“What was it?”

“I was playing with him outside. T-ball. I was behind him holding his arms, helping him with his swing, when suddenly he dropped the bat and turned and clung to me, hugged me. ‘What's wrong?' I asked him. And he started crying. I knelt and held him. ‘What is it?' And he said, ‘It hurts, Daddy!' He was holding his right side. That's when I heard Rachel calling for us from inside the house. It was Tony. His appendix had burst.”

“You're kidding.”

“No. Drew's pain went away while we were driving to the hospital, but still, I wracked my brain trying to figure out how it had happened. It couldn't have been a coincidence—but if it wasn't, then what was it? What caused Drew to feel Tony's pain?”

Xavier taps his pen against the page. “You hear stories like that sometimes. People waking up in the middle of the night with chest pains and finding out later that their mom or dad had a heart attack at that very moment, or having a gut feeling not to walk down a certain street and
then finding out there was a mugger who was caught down there. Once when my sister and I were in high school, she had the sense one night that she was being watched, and when she turned off the light to her bedroom, she saw a face of one of the boys from her class outside her window.”

“That's disturbing.”

“You should have seen what I did to him when I caught up with him the next day. Anyway, all this stuff, these gut feelings, déjà vu, premonitions, UFO sightings, stigmata appearing on people—I know you don't like to hear this, but there's a lot that happens out there that just can't be easily explained.”

Discounting his reference to UFO sightings, he's right that there are a lot of things out there that can't be explained, at least not in the typical ways, and since I've spent the last year trying to prove that those things can be explained, the fact that he's right annoys me.

He goes on, “Do you think there might be senses that some people have that others don't?”

“You mean a sixth sense?” I don't even try to hide my skepticism at that. “No. I don't buy that.”

“Step away from the idea of psychic powers for a minute.”

“And aliens.”

“Okay, and aliens. Think about it, what if there are senses that we're supposed to have, that aren't breaking any physical laws or depending on any divine or malevolent forces—only gifts, skills, talents that aren't any more supernatural than twins sharing behavioral traits that genetics can't explain. Nobody calls autistic savants who can perform complex quadratic equations in seconds ‘psychics.'”

“You mean even though they haven't studied math.”

“Yes. Or Down syndrome children who can hear a tune once on the piano and can perform it flawlessly—”

“Okay, I see what you're saying.”

“In the past those people, or maybe child prodigies, might've been considered psychic or witches or demon-possessed, but modern science—although it can't always explain the behavior—has, for some
reason, grown to accept them as unusual, outside of the realm of normal experience, but not paranormal.”

He pauses, then out of nowhere he waves his hand through the air as if to erase our conversation, and I'm not sure why; he seemed to make a good point. “Anyway, I don't want to lose my train of thought. You were telling me that these twins, ‘L' and ‘N,' they flew in, Tanbyrn did some sort of tests, they'd fly out. We don't know what the tests are about, but we do know that RixoTray has been funding them.”

I'm more than happy to leave the topics of psychics and UFOs behind as well. “Last night Charlene was reading over the notes that Fionna drew up on RixoTray, and she came across the name of a doctor in Philadelphia. Riah something.”

Negative.

The doctor said he was studying the negative effects—

Oh.

Flipping the coin faster. “Xav, what if it's not just loving thoughts that affect people?”

“You mean negative thoughts? That's what Tanbyrn was looking into with these two guys?”

“I don't know, but—”

Negative.

Why would the Pentagon be involved with this?

Xavier waits. “But?”

“But what about this.” I stop finger-flipping the coin. Stare at him. “If one person can affect the heart rate of another person—even slightly—just by his thoughts, could he learn to do more than that?”

He straightens up. “Are you saying what I think you're saying?”

“Yes, affect his heart rate to a greater degree—possibly give it an uneven rhythm, cause it to beat faster, or—”

“Stop it.”

“Yes, exactly. Or stop it.”