The Key to Midnight (17 page)

Suddenly Alex said, “I’ll be damned!” He took a pair of eight-by-ten, black-and-white glossies from one of the folders. “Look at this. Photographic enlargements of Lisa Chelgrin’s thumbprints. We got one from her driver’s license application and lifted the other from the clock radio in her bedroom. I’d forgotten about them.”

“Hard proof,” Joanna said softly, half wishing that the prints did not exist.

“We’ll need an ink pad. And paper with a soft finish... but nothing too absorbent. We want a clear print, not a meaningless blot. And we’ve got to have a magnifying glass.”

“The paper I have,” she said. “And the ink pad. But not the magnifying glass... unless. There’s a paperweight that might do.”

She led him out of the living room, down the narrow stairs, and into her first-floor office.

The paperweight was a clear, two-inch-thick lens, four inches in diameter. It had no frame or handle, and it wasn’t optically flawless. But when Alex held it above the open accounts ledger that was filled with Joanna’s neat handwriting, the letters and figures appeared three to five times larger than they did to the unassisted eye.

“It’ll do,” he said.

Joanna got the ink and paper from the center drawer of her desk. After several tries, she managed to make two smudge-free thumbprints.

Alex placed them beside the photographs. While Joanna scrubbed her inky fingers with paper tissues and spit, he used the lens to compare the prints.

When Joanna had cleaned up as best she could without soap and hot water, Alex passed the magnifying glass to her.

“I don’t know what to look for,” she said.

“Here. I’ll show you.”

“Can we cut to the chase?” she asked impatiently.

“Sure.” He hesitated. “Your prints and Lisa’s are identical.”

When at last Mariko returned to the Moonglow Lounge from the hospital where she had been at the bedside of Wayne Kennedy, Joanna and Alex were waiting for her at the table in the kitchen. They had made hot tea and a stack of small sandwiches.

Mariko was exhausted, having slept less than three hours in the past thirty-six. Her face felt grimy, and her eyes burned. Her feet and legs were as leaden and swollen as those of an old woman.

Joanna and Alex wanted a report on Wayne Kennedy, but Mariko had little to tell, other than that she was impressed by his strength and vitality. Kennedy had come out of anesthesia at six forty-five, but he had not been fully coherent until nine o’clock, when he had complained about a dry mouth and gnawing hunger. The nurses gave him chips of ice to suck, but his dinner came from an intravenous-drip bottle even though he demanded eggs and bacon.

“Is he in a lot of pain?” Alex asked.

“A little. But drugs mask most of it.”

When Wayne had been told by Dr. Ito that he would be in the hospital for a month and might need additional surgery, he had not been depressed in the least but had predicted that he’d be out in a week and back at work in two. Mariko had been prepared for the hard job of cheering him up, but he had been in good spirits and, before he had finally fallen asleep, had told her a lot of funny stories about his work with the security agency in Chicago.

“Have the police questioned him?” Alex asked.

“Not yet,” Mariko said. “In the morning. I don’t envy them if they hope to get more out of Wayne than you told him to give, Alex-san. Even in a sickbed, with one leg in traction, he’ll be more than a match for them.”

As she’d told them about Wayne, Mariko had been content to sip tea. Now she was ravenous. She devoured her share of the sandwiches while Joanna and Alex told her about the Chelgrin file, the two calls to London, and the thumbprints.

Although their stunning revelations made Mariko forget her weariness, she was as intrigued by their demeanor as by what they told her. They were relaxed with each other. Joanna regarded Alex with obvious affection, trust—and a certain proprietary concern. For once, he was without his omnipresent jacket and tie, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up. He had even kicked off his shoes, although Joanna didn’t maintain the traditional shoeless Japanese house. Mariko didn’t think they’d been to bed together. Not yet. But soon. In their eyes and voices, she could see and hear that special, sweet anticipation.

She wondered how much longer Alex would argue that love did not actually exist.

She smiled, sipped her tea. “Now that you’ve matched the thumbprints, what will you do? Call the senator and tell him?”

“No. Not yet,” Alex said.

“Why not?”

“I have a hunch ... he’s somehow part of this whole thing.”

This was evidently a thought that he had not previously shared with Joanna, because she seemed surprised.

Alex said, “I think the senator knows you’re here in Kyoto, Joanna. I think he’s always known who kidnapped his daughter—and maybe even arranged the whole thing himself.”

“But for God’s sake, why?”

He took hold of Joanna’s hand, and Mariko smiled again. “It’s just a hunch,” he said, “but it explains a few things. Like where you got all that money to start a new life. We know now it didn’t come from the Rand estate or Robert Rand’s life insurance.”

Mariko put down her teacup and patted her lips with a napkin. “Let me get this straight. The senator had his own daughter kidnapped from the vacation house in Jamaica, brainwashed her, then arranged for her to be set up in a new life with an entirely new identity?”

Alex nodded. “I don’t pretend to know
why.
But where else would all the money come from—if not from Tom Chelgrin?”

Perplexed, Mariko said, “How could any father send his daughter away? How could he ever be happy if he could not see her any more?”

“Here in Japan,” Alex said, “you’re aware of the continuity of generations, you have a strong sense of family. It isn’t always like that where I come from. My own parents were alcoholics. They nearly destroyed me—emotionally and physically.”

“We have a few like that. Human animals.”

“Fewer than we do.”

“Even one is too many. But this thing you say Joanna’s father did... it’s still beyond my comprehension.”

Alex smiled so beautifully that for an instant Mariko wished that she had found him first, before Joanna had ever seen him and before he had seen Joanna.

He said, “It’s beyond your comprehension because you’re so exquisitely civilized, Mariko.”

She blushed and acknowledged the compliment with a slow bow of her head.

“There’s something you haven’t accounted for,” Joanna told Alex. “The senator hired you to find his daughter, spent a small fortune on the search. Why would he do that if he knew where she was?”

Pouring more tea for himself, Alex said, “Misdirection. He was playing the stricken father who’d stop at nothing, spend anything, to get his child back. Who could suspect him of involvement? And he could afford to play expensive games.”

Joanna was grim. “What he did to me—
if
he did it to me—was not a game. Since you first mentioned Tom Chelgrin on Wednesday, in the taxi, you’ve made it clear you don’t like him or trust him. But why not?”

“He manipulates people.”

“Don’t all politicians?”

“I don’t have to like them for it. And Chelgrin is smoother than most politicians. He’s oily.” Alex picked up another sandwich, hesitated, and put it down again without taking a bite. He seemed to have lost his appetite. “I was around Chelgrin a lot, and I finally figured he had only four facial expressions he put on for the public: a somber, attentive look when he pretended to be listening to the views of a constituent; a fatherly smile that crinkled his whole face but was maybe one micron deep; a stern frown when he wanted to be perceived as a hard-nosed negotiator; and grief for when his wife died, for when his daughter disappeared, for occasions when American soldiers were killed in one far place or another. Masks. He has all these masks. I think he enjoys manipulating people even more than the average politician. For him it’s almost a form of masturbation.”

“Whew!”
Joanna said.

“Sorry if I come on a bit strong about him,” Alex said. “But this is the first time I’ve had an opportunity to tell anyone what I really think of the man. He was an important client, so I always hid my true feelings. But in spite of the money he spent to find Lisa and all his weeping about his lost little girl, I never believed he was as devastated about her disappearance as everyone thought. He seemed... hollow. There was a coldness, a deep emptiness about him.”

“Then maybe we should just stop right here.”

“That’s not an option.”

Joanna frowned. “But if the senator is the kind of man you say, if he’s capable of anything... we might all be better off if we forget him. At least now I know a little bit about why I’ve made a loner of myself. Programmed. I don’t really have to know any more. I can live without knowing how it was done or who did it or why.”

Mariko glanced at Alex. He met her eyes, and he was clearly as dismayed as she herself was. “Joanna-san, maybe right now you feel that you can live without knowing, but later you’ll change your mind. You’ll be curious. It’ll eat at you like an acid. Everyone needs to know who he is, where he’s come from. Ignorance isn’t bliss.”

“Besides,” Alex said, taking a less philosophical approach, “it’s too late for us to walk away from this. They won’t let us. We’ve learned too much.”

Joanna looked skeptical. “You think they might try to kill us?”

“Or worse.”

“What’s worse?”

Alex got up, went to the small window, and stood with his back to them, staring at the Gion and the dark city beyond. “Maybe one day we’ll all wake up in other parts of the world with new names, new pasts, new sets of memories, troubled by nightmares but unaware that we were once Joanna Rand, Mariko Inamura, and Alex Hunter.”

Mariko saw Joanna turn sickly white, as if pale moonlight had pierced the window and lit nothing in the room but her face.

“Would they really do it again?” Mariko asked.

Alex turned from the window. “Why not? It’s an effective way of silencing us—without leaving behind any dead bodies to excite the police.”

“No,” Joanna said, and she looked haunted. “Everything that’s happened to me in Japan, everything I am and want to become—all of it wiped out of my mind? No.”

Mariko shuddered at the thought of being erased, remade, so utterly
controlled.

“But
why?”
Joanna demanded. In frustration she slammed one fist onto the table, rattling the teacups and saucers. “Why did all of this happen? It’s insane. It makes no sense.”

“It makes perfect sense to the people who did it,” Alex said.

“And it would make sense to us too, if we knew what they know,” Mariko added.

Alex nodded. “Right. And we won’t be safe until we
do
know what they know. As soon as we understand what motivated the Lisa-Joanna switch, we can go public, make headlines. When all the secrets are out in the open, the people behind this won’t have any reason either to kill us or brainwash us.”

“No reason except revenge,” Joanna said.

“There’s that,” he admitted. “But maybe it won’t matter to them once the game is over.”

“All right. Then what’s next?” Joanna asked.

Alex said, “Mariko-san, you have an uncle who’s a psychiatrist. Sometimes does he use hypnotic regression to help his patients?”

“Yes.” For years Mariko had tried to persuade Joanna to see Uncle Omi, but always without success.

To Joanna, Alex said, “He can pry open the memory block and help you recall things we need to know.”

Joanna was skeptical. “Yeah? Like what?”

“Like the name of the man with the mechanical hand.”

Joanna bit her lip, scowled. “Him? But what’s it matter. He’s just a man in a nightmare.”

“Oh? Don’t you remember what you said about him on Wednesday?”

Joanna shifted uneasily in her chair, glanced at Mariko, looked down at the table, and focused on her own pale, interlocked hands.

“At Nijo Castle?” Alex prompted.

“I was hysterical.”

“You said that you suddenly realized the man in your nightmare was someone you’d actually known, not just a figment of a dream.”

Reluctantly she said, “Yes. All right. But I’m not sure I want to find him.”

“Until you find him and know what he did to you and understand why, the dreams aren’t going to go away,” Alex said.

Joanna continued to stare at her hands, which were clasped so tightly that the knuckles were sharp and bone-white.

“When you meet this man with the mechanical hand,” Mariko said, “when you confront him face-to-face, you’ll discover he isn’t half as frightening in reality as he is in the nightmare.”

“I wish I could believe that,” Joanna said.

“The known,” Mariko said, “is never as terrifying as the unknown. Damn it, Joanna, you
must
talk to Uncle Omi.”

Joanna was clearly surprised to hear Mariko swear.

Mariko was a little surprised as well. She pressed on. “I’ll call him in the morning.”

Joanna hesitated, then nodded. “All right. But, Alex, you’ve got to go with me.”

“A psychiatrist might not want me looking over his shoulder.”

“If you can’t go with me, I won’t go.”

Mariko said, “I’m sure Uncle Omi won’t mind. After all, this is a very special case.”

Relieved, Joanna leaned back in her chair.

“It won’t be so bad, Joanna-san. My Uncle Omi isn’t as scary as Godzilla. No radioactive breath. No giant tail to knock over skyscrapers.”

Joanna found a smile. “You’re a good friend, Mariko-san.”

“Patients
are
sometimes spooked by his mechanical hand,” Mariko said, and she was rewarded with Joanna’s laughter like the music of silver bells, which reverberated in the windowpane that separated them from the cold, watchful face of the night.