“I see them,” she said. “I’m looking at the audience, but without my contact lenses, I can’t see faces.”
I threw my head back in dismay. The kid had never mentioned not wearing her contact lenses. We had five hours before she was supposed to show up at Reliant Stadium to perform at the rodeo, and suddenly my only plan to ID Argus was hopeless. Sometimes life just doesn’t play fair. It’s like it leads me down a path and then, bam, it’s over, my only accomplishment wasting time.
“So you can’t see any of the faces of any of the men, any strangers, anyone who doesn’t look as if he belongs there?” Dorin asked.
“No,” the kid said. “No faces at all, just bodies and arms, and a kind of blurriness where the faces are. And I can hear the crowd shouting my name.”
“Wrap it up,” I whispered in Dorin’s ear.
“Cassidy,” the physician said. “I want you to remember what we’ve talked about here, about your mother and your not being at fault for her death.”
“The kids are loud, screaming,” she said. “I wish they’d stop.”
“Cassidy, I need you to concentrate on my voice, now, it’s time to end this—”
“I wonder who that sleaze is,” the teenager suddenly remarked. “I haven’t seen him before.”
I put my hand on the doc’s shoulder and squeezed.
“Who are you talking about?” she asked, pulling free of my grasp. “Tell me about him. Can you see a man’s face in the audience?”
“No, I told you. I can’t see any of the faces in the audience. But this guy’s not in the audience. He’s in the wings. Staring at me, with a really sick smile,” she said, sounding puzzled. “The guys are reeling me back in, onto the stage, and they’ve got me stage right, ten feet from Jake. This guy’s standing next to the sound mixer, so close I can see his face and that weird smile.”
“Who is he?” Dorin asked.
“I don’t know, but he looks familiar. He looks like someone I should know.”
“Who does he look like?” Dorin asked.
“I don’t know,” the kid repeated. “He just looks like someone I should know or something. He just seems familiar.”
“What’s he doing?” I asked, and Cassidy jerked.
David put his hand on my leg and his finger to his lips, shushing me. Before the session started, Dorin had explained that David and I needed to be silent, that even the slightest interruption could disrupt, even end the session. He reached over and nudged me back in my chair. I was so drawn into what was happening, without realizing it I’d stood up and leaned over Cassidy in the bed.
“What is the man doing?” Dorin asked. “The stranger.”
“He’s standing next to the mixer, talking to Jake, but he keeps staring at me. He’s smiling but he looks, he looks angry. Angry at me,” she said, sounding puzzled. She paused, moments passed, and
then she visibly relaxed. “Oh, it’s nothing, I guess. Jake’s talking to him.”
“What’s he doing now?” Dorin asked.
“He took something out of a bag. He’s bending down, looking under the equipment. It looks like he’s fixing the mixer. Funny they’d do that during the show, but Jake’s showing him something, and the guy looks like he’s brought a part. Jake’s hardly paying any attention to him. Everything’s okay. He looks familiar. Maybe I’ve seen him before?”
“Ask her to describe him,” I wrote on the top sheet of my sketchpad with a charcoal pencil. Dr. Dorin and I had talked about this earlier, but I wasn’t taking the chance that she’d forget. Along with sculpting clay faces on the skulls of unidentified victims, in a pinch, I sometimes use my art training to draw composites of suspects. That’s what I intended to do now, with Cassidy, to draw a picture of the man she saw in Atlanta, only Dr. Dorin had to ask the questions.
“Tell me about the shape of this man’s face, the stranger’s,” Dr. Dorin instructed, reading off my list of questions. “Describe this man, as you look at him.”
“He’s a big guy, not old, pretty young. His hair is a mess, thick and dark. Really stupid looking. Bushy. And his face is wide, like he has big cheeks,” she said.
“Go on, Cassidy,” Dorin said. “Tell me in detail what this man looks like.”
“His eyes are dark and pushed back in his head kind of, or they look like it because his eyebrows are heavy.”
As she talked, I drew, trying to keep up with everything she said. Beside me, David had a tape recorder running. Dorin said that depending on how the session went, we might play it for Cassidy later, to see if she remembered even more. But as the teenager described
the man, the details came though remarkably clear. It sounded as if she were still in the Atlanta concert hall, as if she were at that very moment looking at his face, not resurrecting a memory.
“Is there anything remarkable about this man, a tattoo or anything that sets him apart?” Dorin asked. On my pad, the face of a young, heavyset man with dark brooding eyes took shape.
“He has a scar,” Cassie said. “There’s a scar on his face.”
“Where?” Dorin asked.
“On the right side. It’s running up and down, ending just above his lip,” she said, tracing the path with her right index finger. In my mind, I saw the face of a man I’d met less than a week earlier, who had just such a scar. The man I remembered sat at a piano, composing a song.
“Do you know this man?” Dorin asked again. “Why does he look so familiar?”
Cassidy didn’t answer the doctor’s question.
“I know who this is,” I wrote. “Wake her up.”
Dorin nodded. “Cassie, I’m going to clap now, and when I do, I want you to open your eyes. You’ll remember everything we’ve talked about, and you’ll feel refreshed and happy, not at all frightened. I’m going to count now then clap on three. One. Two. Three.”
Dorin clapped, but on the bed, Cassie remained silent.
“Do you hear me, Cassie?” the therapist asked. “I’m going to clap and you’re going to open your eyes. The session is over.”
“I feel like I know him,” Cassie whispered. “Why do I feel like I know him?”
“Listen to me, Cassie,” the therapist instructed. “I’m going to count to three.”
“Maybe I saw him once, someplace?” Cassie mused. “Maybe I saw him before the concert sometime?”
“One, two, three,” Dorin said again, then clapped her hands.
Cassidy lay still, as if waiting. “You can open your eyes now,” the therapist said, and slowly the kid did. She rubbed her face with her hands, and then focused her wide green eyes on me.
“Did I do okay?” she asked. “Do you have enough?”
M
y sketch of the man Cassidy saw in Atlanta looked convincingly similar to Justin Peterson’s driver’s license photo. It was a formality, a comparison pulled together for the captain and David, who hadn’t had the privilege, as I had, of meeting our prime suspect in person. We’d ruled Peterson out because he hadn’t physically gone to Cassidy’s concerts, believing the experts who told us he had no other way to infiltrate the sound systems. No one considered the option of bugging Cassidy’s own sound equipment. I called Jake, and he confirmed that a guy in Atlanta passed himself off as a factory rep there to fix a recalled computer circuit. Whatever Peterson installed, it appeared, gave the young genius the power to hijack the mixer’s output at will.
Now that we knew Peterson was our stalker, David had the FBI pulling every record they could find on the pianist, rounding up all the information they could lay their hands on.
Meanwhile, Dr. Dorin watched over Cassidy, who rested upstairs in my bed, while more troopers arrived to guard the ranch. David, the captain, and I had another job: serving a search warrant
on Justin Peterson’s apartment. With a little luck, we would find evidence that proved Peterson was Argus and, at the same time, take him in for questioning, hours before Cassidy walked onstage. But the clock kept ticking, and all we had left were four hours before we transported the kid to the rodeo. Meanwhile, a cobbled-together squad of two hundred officers was scheduled to descend on the stadium. No matter how this went down, we needed to be ready.
“Let’s go,” the captain called out. “We’re rolling.”
Early on a Monday afternoon, traffic was light, and we soon stood outside Justin Peterson’s apartment near the Rice University campus, search warrant in hand. The captain knocked, once then again.
“Police,” he shouted. “Open up, Mr. Peterson.” We’d been unable to find a manager with a key. When no one answered, the captain stepped to the side, and four officers manning a battering ram pummeled the oak door with number 35 stenciled on it. The lock gave way, and the door snapped open. I’d wanted to enter Peterson’s apartment the day I’d met him on the campus. Now I found nearly every wall covered by posters of Cas-sidy Collins. My body felt a sudden chill, as I scanned the walls and saw what Peterson had done. In some he’d “X”ed out Cassidy’s face, in others just her eyes. Over others, he’d painted red, horror-movie lips dripping blood.
“Hell of a tribute to his favorite recording artist,” David said, sarcasm overflowing. “Wonder what the guy does if he doesn’t like someone?”
“Lieutenant, over here,” Gilberto Torres, the computer expert, called out from another room. David and I found Torres hunched over a keyboard in what was little more than a closet, a kind of hidden bedroom desk unit. The shelves held three computers, and all the screens flashed rotating images of Cassidy, many with the symbol of one Web site or TV program or another stamped in the
corner. In some, she performed onstage, but most were candid shots, taken in restaurants, at parties, and clubs. Video streamed on one, rotating footage from street sightings, on a Web site called “Cassidy Collins in Real Time.”
Underneath the video display, a banner read:
WHERE’S CASSIDY? JOIN THE SEARCH. FIND THE SUPERSTAR AND POST YOUR VIDEO HERE.
“Does real time mean
real time
?” I asked. “Are we talking about live images of events as they happen?”
“Yeah. I think so. My guess is that these are private feeds, where viewers pay a fee to gain access,” Torres said. “Looks like this particular one is a Web site where fans share cell phone video of Collins twenty-four/seven, from concerts to sightings on the street. They score a photo or video and immediately post it via PDA or cell phone.” Torres clicked a few keys and images of Cassidy on the stage in Vegas popped up. Torres scouted around more and a cell phone photo showed the kid on the day of another of Argus’s e-mails, this time meeting with her agent over lunch.
Perhaps the most disturbing Web site was one run by an unidentified agency that called itself “Hollywood Eye,” where paparazzi photos were displayed within moments of shooting. An entire section featured photos of Collins, doing everything from shopping at Chanel to working out with her trainer on the patio of her L.A. mansion, a shot that appeared to have been taken by helicopter.
“Well, now that explains the Argus name,” David said.
“What?” I asked, stunned at the extent of the cottage industry around Cassidy, the fans and paparazzi that recorded her every move. One site scanned the kid’s estate with a live feed from a camera that appeared to be housed in a neighbor’s window or a tree.
“Argus is the creature with a hundred eyes,” David explained. “Peterson only needed two. The paparazzi and Cassie’s fans supplied the other ninety-eight, and they were Argus-eyed, ever vigilant and focused on that poor kid morning to night. She didn’t
even have privacy in her own home. Except for his trip to Atlanta to install the chip, Peterson stalked her without ever leaving his apartment.”
How sad it seemed that in the end Argus wasn’t just a mythical reference by a single deluded individual but Justin Peterson bragging about being aided by a celebrity-obsessed culture.
It was then that I noticed a photo in a frame on the top shelf between two of the computers. I picked it up and held it. It was nothing special, just one of those department store portraits, this one of a young couple with two children, the oldest a dark-haired kid, maybe five or six, a boy. He sat on the father’s knee, uneasy. They looked alike, thick-boned and sullen. In her arms, the woman held a small infant dressed in pink. A girl. Like the boy, the woman’s body language appeared apprehensive, unsure. She was thin, blond, and pale-skinned, with delicate features.
“This is all interesting, but the important thing is that Peterson is nowhere to be found,” the captain said. “Doesn’t look like he’s been here for at least a couple of days. His newspaper from yesterday is still outside, and the neighbors haven’t seen him. The campus police tracked down his graduate advisor, and she says Peterson missed today’s work session and yesterday’s. He hasn’t checked in at the campus clinic or the hospital where he was treated last year. No sign of him anywhere.”
“So, we finally have enough to get an arrest warrant, and he’s disappeared?” I said. “Anyone disagree that he’s gone underground, preparing to make his move?”
N
ow, you understand the plan?” I asked Cassidy. “You know how we want this to come down?”
In Emma Lou’s shed, the kid knelt next to the tiny foal, brushing Warrior for what must have been the third time in a single day. Maggie wouldn’t have anything to complain about when she and Mom got home. Expending nervous energy, Cassidy had groomed both momma and baby horses until they looked polished enough to be competing at the rodeo. In the driveway, a caravan was assembling for the drive to Reliant Stadium. It was nearly time to leave.
“Yeah, I know the drill,” Cassidy said, brushing her cheek lightly against Warrior’s long, thin face. “You told me everything. I’ll remember. No problem. Just get that guy. Lock him up and throw away the key.”
Cassidy stood up, and I frowned at the kid, wondering what to tell her. Did she need to hear it all, see it all, or could it wait? Did she deserve the truth? The captain, David, and I had been arguing about it ever since we’d figured it out. No one was sure what to do.
Damn,
I thought.
“Cassie, David and I had a hunch, based what you said while under hypnosis, about why Peterson seemed familiar.”