The Placebo Effect (21 page)

“Warning me?”

“Think for a second. If, as you think, they weren't trying to kill you—they could have, Mr. Roberts. In many ways it makes more sense than sending such an elaborate message.”

“A message about what?”

“I don't know about what, but I'm willing to start with the who, as in who have you pissed off of late? Because whoever it is, is evidently anxious to show you what damage he can do to you if you fuck with him.”

Decker touched the USB keys in his pocket and felt the once, comforting feel of the digital tape recorder beside them. “What concern is all this to you—this is my problem, not yours. I don't even know who the hell you are or what the hell you're doing here with me.”

“Okay. I work for the NSA,” she said as she put her elaborate ID cards on the table for him to see. Then she laid out Ted Knight's and Mr. T's. She handed him a phone number and his cell phone. “Call. They can verify who I am.”

Decker took the phone but didn't call.

“I have responsibility for the synaesthetes file at the NSA. It's my job to keep you and yours safe.”

“Why?”

“Don't play at this. Surely it's clear that a person with your particular talent could be a great asset to the NSA—to the safety of this country.”

Decker looked at his hands—he had a momentary flash of Seth's hand in his as they left the cemetery. “What's your name?”

“As it says on my ID, Special Agent Yslan Hicks.”

Decker nodded.

“What, Mr. Roberts?”

“And you've decided to help me?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. It's my job to help you, Mr. Roberts.”

“So you thought that you could catch Mr. Charendoff lying about knowing the Irwin family and then you'd know that he had the boy in Stanstead killed?”

“Or he killed him himself.”

Yslan shook her head.

“What?”

“Rich people hire out.”

Decker nodded.

“And you think he did it because the kid impregnated his daughter?”

“No, because his daughter loved that boy…”

“…and was contemplating throwing away all the advantages her father had worked so hard to give her, yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“Well, yes.”

“Mr. Roberts, the girl's getting married in Paris in six weeks.” She checked her watch, “Five weeks and four days, and if there was a baby, it is no more.”

“And Robert Irwin's death in Stanstead?”

“Could have been murder. Could have been suicide. Tough call.”

“That's not how the local cop saw it.”

“Ah, the fabulous Officer Matthews.”

“You met him?”

“Don't you get it—we've met everyone you've met. Everywhere you've gone, we've gone. You've cost us a fortune following you all over the country.” Seeing Decker's stunned look she added, “Hopping in and out of cabs and using basement exits isn't exactly the sophisticated way to throw off a tail—and you'd better believe that we have the best tails in the world working for us.”

Decker seemed to get his composure back and said, “Yes, but Officer Matthews was certain—”

“I'm sure he was. But he's a local cop. He sees the world through his eyes—local eyes. Girls from rich families invade his town every summer, sometimes have romances with his young
men. He was certainly telling the truth from his point of view—but it's not necessarily
the
truth.”

“How much did Charendoff know about this?”

“He's had investigators up there, so he knew that what evidence existed wasn't very compelling. Look, he's a lawyer, Mr. Roberts, if he did it he's not going to compound his problem by going after you.”

“But I knew things. I was privy to—”

“Privy to? Let's be honest. You guessed, but guessing doesn't count. You don't know enough to make yourself a target, although that little stunt with Josh Near at the restaurant could well have gotten you into Mr. Charendoff's sights.”

“So you don't know that Charendoff didn't have Robert Irwin killed?”

“It's impossible to prove a negative. But my guess—I guess sometimes too, and I'm pretty good at guessing—is that he did what rich people who get into trouble always do.”

“And what's that?”

“They buy their way out, Mr. Roberts. A Paris abortion. A Paris boyfriend. A Paris wedding—not cheap.”

“But effective in getting a rich girl to forget about a poor boy in Stanstead, Quebec?”

“You can answer that question yourself.”

“So it's not Charendoff who's after me?”

“I don't think so.” A long pause settled between the two of them. Decker filed it away under To Be Understood. There was something about Charendoff and Stanstead and the dead boy encased in ice in the river that was important to all this—but he couldn't figure out exactly what.

“So how did someone like Charendoff find you?”

“I'm an urban legend.”

“Like alligators in the sewers?”

“There are alligators in the sewers.”

“And men who can tell when other people are telling the truth?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. Not men, man—me.”

“So you're gifted?”

Decker wanted to say “And burdened,” but kept his mouth shut until finally he said, “Charendoff contacted me through this.” Decker flipped her a card: www.whatthefucksthetruth.com.

“Catchy.”

Decker shrugged.

“They contact you, you get back to them if you want?”

Decker nodded.

“A dead-letter drop.”

“Nope.”

Yslan looked at him.

“An electronic dead-letter drop. This is the twenty-first century, isn't it, Ms. Hicks?”

SETH STRIPPED THE PLASTIC FROM THE CATHETER AS HE
glanced at the BCG medication on the table. Bacille Calmette-Guérin vaccine, originally developed to prevent tuberculosis, was the only thing keeping his cancer at bay.

His chemotherapy treatments had gone reasonably well this time round, but he knew there was a limit to the miracles that the pharmaceutical industry could offer. But he was grateful for those miracles.

As the nurse practitioner entered the small room he inserted the catheter, slowing just briefly as it passed his prostate.

“You prefer to do that yourself?” she asked.

“I do,” he said.

She opened the opaque brown wrapper and removed the delicate vial containing the even more delicate BCG. She inserted the 50 ml of live vaccine into the open catheter valve and pushed the plunger.

It didn't feel like much of anything, but Seth had to keep his corrosively active imagination in check. When he first contracted bladder cancer he'd made the mistake of going to a cancer site on the Net. The first thing to catch his eye was the word “stoma.” The word entered his mind and grew there—like a cancer. The only way to deal with it was to rearrange the letters to form other things. So the terrifying “stoma” first became “atoms,” then “stoma” became “stomach,” then “stomach” became “stew pot,” then “stew pot” became “Studebaker.” And him sitting on his father's knee naming cars as they drove by. And him pointing,
then yelling, “Studebaker, Daddy, a Studebaker.” And it had been. The only one they ever saw. A pleasant memory—so much better than a harbinger that life as he knew it was over.

“You can take it out now,” the nurse said as she handed him two sanitized wipes.

He took a breath, and as he had done so many times before pinched the neck then removed the lengthy rubber tube in one swift motion.

Leaving the urology clinic Seth didn't bother looking at the other men sitting in the waiting room or listening to the
Sesame Street
puppets sing “One of These Things is Not Like the Others” on the wall-mounted monitor. If he had he would have been surprised that there was a man there who was as out of place in this old man's world as he was. He would also have been surprised that the man walked up to the front counter and, when the receptionist was busy explaining to a patient the procedure to remove a stent, had reached over and taken Seth's medical chart.

The rest of the day after a BCG treatment was always a crap shoot. Some days he had no reaction, others fever, chills and so little energy that he couldn't write. He guided his beat-up Volvo out of town and headed toward the ocean—and a quiet place to sit it out. He sensed the nausea would be coming up soon; it was going to be one of those days.

It was not hard for the man who stole Seth's chart to follow the Volvo despite the fact that on Canada's west coast there were a lot of beat-up old Volvos. But the young man drove slowly and soon it became clear that he was headed toward the same beach as before.

Seth stood well back and watched three surfers squiggle into their almost inch-thick wet suits, pull on their hoods, and head into the always-cold Pacific water.

Surfing was his refuge—the rhythm of the ocean beneath his
board brought him far away from his illness and his “talent” that he was, over the years, more and more sure was related to his cancer. The sun pierced the almost omnipresent cloud cover—a rarity but much appreciated. This wasn't California after all—this was Vancouver Island.

Seth took out a writing pad and leaned against a naked maple tree that bent toward the ocean. He liked the strength of the thing. No leaves but its roots held onto the rocks refusing to fall. Refusing to give up its life. He often came to this spot, and wrote leaning against what he thought of as “my bent tree.” He opened his notebook and allowed his dreams to the page. This day the dreams were filled with rage—nineteen and already so sick that he could sense the approach of the end.

For a moment he had a chilling vision of his mother—cobwebs pinning her arms to the side of her wheelchair, tent caterpillars enmeshing her head, growing out of her mouth. And heard her final words to his father: “What have you done, Decker? What have you done?”

His cell phone chirped at his side. He looked at the number on the scratched screen—he just couldn't keep his electronic stuff in good working order. It was Eddie. The only one from home he cared about. But he looked at the surfers a second time and wondered if he was up to hearing from his past. He took a deep breath and, keeping his eyes firmly on the ocean's horizon, said, “Hey Eddie.”

“Wassup, Seth?”

Seth didn't answer—he never answered open-ended questions.

“Right. Okay. You figured out how to store a number on that phone of yours yet?”

“Yes,” Seth lied—he'd never figured out anything about the cell phone except how to receive a call and make one. “Whose number?”

“Your dad's.”

Seth took the phone from his ear. Not a good time for this. He wasn't feeling strong—and he needed to be strong to deal with
anything from or about his father. He walked down to the waterline, the hard dark sand chilling his feet. He heard a muffled squawk from the phone and put it to his ear.

“You still there?”

“Yes, Eddie. Shoot.”

Eddie gave him the number of Decker's new cell phone, and Seth wrote it with his toe in the sand. “Got it.”

There was a pause. Seth asked, “Any progress on the legal front with your daughter?”

“Some.”

Seth didn't need to see Eddie or close his eyes—a lie.

“You need anything, Seth?”

Just a bit more life
, he thought, but he said, “No. I'm good. Look after yourself, Eddie.” And before Eddie could respond Seth hung up the phone and stuffed it into his backpack. He constantly forgot to recharge the thing so he was surprised that it actually worked this time.

The call wasn't long but long enough for Mac's man to get a fix on the caller—Eddie. The man quickly BlackBerried that information and what he'd learned from Seth's chart to Mac. Then he lit a cigarette and watched.

Seth went back to his bending tree and leaned against its reassuring strength. He tore out the page of his ranting then started a story about a cell phone that only worked when trouble was approaching. Halfway through the BCG kicked in seriously, and he moved quickly into the brush and relieved his stomach of its contents. Then, for the hundredth time, he cursed the gift he'd inherited from his dad.

Returning to his perch he saw a young surfer take a wave and reach her head up into the clear jet stream—and in her own way fly. And as she did, a wave that started its life all the way in Japan roared ashore and erased the phone number Seth had etched with his big toe in the sand.

HENRY-CLAY ALMOST CLAPPED HIS CHUBBY LITTLE HANDS.
A gift from the gods
, he thought. Decker has a son. Mac's guy finds the boy. The kid has bladder cancer and his lifeline is BCG—that happens to be a drug with no profit margin whatsoever.

It took Henry-Clay three phone calls and less than two hours to secure the exclusive Western Hemisphere rights to both make and distribute the thing. The company he bought it from was so grateful to get out of the racket that they almost gave it away for free—almost.

BCG
, he thought.
Insurance.
Henry-Clay believed in insurance as most people believed in motherhood and apple pie.

“The ropes that bind,” he said aloud as he looked out his office window.

The phone on his desk rang. It was his private line—for emergencies only. “What?”

“Sorry boss, thought you'd like to hear—we just got approval for the new antidepressant.”

Henry-Clay smiled—five years and eleven months, record time—money well spent to speed up the process. “How long until we can go into production?”

There was a pause on the other end.

“What?” Henry-Clay demanded.