The Syndrome (45 page)

“And did you?”

“Yes. I started in this hemisphere and …” McBride’s voice trailed off.

“What?”

Suddenly, he felt as if a small bird was doing barrel rolls in his stomach. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I get distracted.”

Shaw’s brow furrowed. “So what did you do?”

“I was in South America a lot, and the Caribbean. I wrote pieces on everything. Faith healing, Santería, one on ultramarathoning as a form of flagellation and meditation. Two of the articles I wrote were reprinted in the
Times.”

“What were they about?” Shaw asked.

“One was about the spiritual aspects of video gaming—the quest, you know. The other was about communal drinking games as a way of relieving seasonal affective disorder.”

“And how did
that
work?”

McBride laughed. “I went up to the Yukon in February, and got drunk with the Inuits.”

“And then what?”

“I stopped caring about the weather.”

Shaw chuckled. “You mentioned the Caribbean.”

“Right. I was in Haiti for a while. Studying cadence and tempo cues in posthypnotic suggestions.”

“Sounds fascinating.”

“It was, actually,” McBride said. He rapped out a rhythm on the table with his fingertips.
Tippety tip tip!
Five taps. “Something as abbreviated as that could do the trick.”

“Really. Well, not so surprising, I guess. Aural memory tends to be sequential so that once you initiate a progression of sounds, the mind tends to complete the sequence. So, where else did you go?”

“I was supposed to go on to Jamaica.”

Shaw waited for McBride to continue. When he did not, the psychiatrist broke the silence. “Yes?”

Suddenly, Duran couldn’t speak. There was an ache in the back of his throat that had to do with flying back to San Francisco from Port-Au-Prince, bringing home his tapes and photographs and notes. It was expensive, flying back, but his apartment was a good place to write and, what was even more to the point, it gave him a chance to spend time with Judy and Josh. They could be a family—if only for a few days each month.

The news of Judy’s pregnancy had come hard on the heels of the news that he’d won the fellowship, and they’d agreed that he couldn’t pass up the chance it represented—that they’d just make the best of it. He would come home, as often as possible, and that would be that.

And that’s exactly the way it was. In the months before Josh was born, Judy had come to join him for a week here and a few days there—whenever she was able to take time off from her own career as a graphic designer. But that stopped when Josh arrived because … well, for one thing, they couldn’t afford it and, even if they had been able to, the places he was going were no place for a baby.

“Lew?” Doctor Shaw leaned forward, his forehead wrinkling with concern.

McBride could hear a helicopter outside and, down the street, a siren moving closer, with its fluctuating wail. Sunlight poured through the slats of the venetian blinds, striping the bloodred, oriental carpet.

No place for a baby.

“Lew?”

He had the sensation that the pattern of light and shadow
had risen up from the floor, and shone through his brain. And that the wail of the siren was the inconsolable bawl of an infant.

A baby.

He heard Shaw’s voice, but it was very faint, and muffled, as if it were traveling a long distance, or moving through layers and layers of insulation.

“Jeff? What’s going on? Are you all right?”

He didn’t reply. He was in the ochre room. The nursery. The abattoir. He had the bat in his hand, the Louisville Slugger that Judy kept in the umbrella stand by the door. He could feel it cracking bone, then sinking into the soft melon-flesh of, first, his son, and then his wife. The blood was flying, misting the air. He was skating in it, slipping and swinging until there was nothing left of Joshua and Judy but pulp.

Finding out about Calvin Crane was about as easy as taking a cab to the New York Public Library. Walking past the magnificent stone lions that guard its entrance, Adrienne climbed the stairs to the third floor reading room, where she found a much-thumbed copy of
Who’s Who
among a shelf of reference books. Taking the burgundy tome to a mahogany conference table, she sat down beside an elderly man with a nimbus of flyaway hair, and searched for Crane’s entry. Finding it, she began to read:

Adrienne sat back in her chair, and drummed her fingertips on the open page. As she did, the old man to her right gave her a sidelong glance, then returned to the book he was reading:
Secrets of the Great Pyramid.

The
Who’s Who
entry required a certain amount of deconstruction, Adrienne thought. Harvard and Yale suggested money. Then a job at some law firm, interrupted by the war. OSS. That was spy stuff. Then back to the law firm. Then a spy again, and then a job with State—in Switzerland where, she noticed, he’d been before. After that, the foundation job. For forty years. Prestigious clubs and honors, capped by a Florida retirement.

Prematurely ended by her crazy sister.

There had to be more. Getting up from her chair, she went to the reference desk and asked directions to the periodicals reading room, which turned out to be just down the corridor. With a librarian’s help, she selected microfiche spools from the
New York Times, Miami Daily News
, and the
Sarasota Star-Tribune.
Each of the spools covered the same period in October when Crane had been killed.

Sitting down at one of the readers, she went from obit to obit until she had a sense of the man—if not an understanding of her sister’s relationship to him.

The references to the OSS were especially interesting. From what she read, the organization had been formed under
the influence of British intelligence at the outset of World War II. Like its European counterpart, it had recruited from the country’s upper classes, drawing as much as possible from the best schools and most prestigious firms on Wall Street. According to the
Times
, the OSS was “at once the principal precursor of the CIA, and a transatlantic Old Boys network
par excellence.”

As if to emphasize the point, there was a page of photographs—billed as “a visual tribute”—in the
Star-Tribune
, showing Crane at different ages. As a young man, he’d been almost movie-star handsome, with bold eyebrows, a strong chin, and a shock of thick dark hair that fell, Kennedyesque, over his forehead. He was shown shaking the hand of Franklin Roosevelt; posing on the slopes around Gstaad with Allen Dulles; clinking champagne flutes with de Gaulle; and escorting Audrey Hepburn through the front doors of the Esplanade Hotel in Zagreb. Forty years in Switzerland, give or take a day. Lawyer, spy, foundation head. How do you make that transition, Adrienne wondered. And then Florida. Where he supported a slew of good causes, including the Sarasota Symphony Orchestra, the Conch-House Preservation Society, and Native Ground, an ecological group dedicated to combating the overthrow of native flora by invasive species. Before his confinement in a wheelchair, those causes and the game of golf seemed to constitute the major parameters of the old man’s life.

It was all very interesting, Adrienne decided, but it didn’t tell her anything about why her sister took a train to Florida and shot him. It occurred to her that Nikki might have imagined Crane to have been one of the men who’d “abused” her, but it seemed a stretch. In fact, if his
Who’s Who
entry was accurate, Crane had been living in Switzerland all during the time that Nikki had been growing up.

Returning to her hotel, Adrienne found the red diode blinking on the telephone next to the bed. Retrieving the message—
Call ASAP, any hour—Ray Shaw
—she phoned him at his home.

“We’ve had a breakthrough,” Shaw told her.

“Fantastic! So …” She cleared her throat. “So come on, who is he?”

“Well, he’s a very troubled man.”

“Doc …”

“His name is Lew McBride—Lewis with an ‘e.’ That’s the good news. The bad news is: he beat his wife and son to death with a baseball bat.”

“What!?”

“I think you heard me, though whether this is another fantasy of his—or something else—we can’t be sure.”

Adrienne let her head fall back against the wall behind the bed. “Where did this happen?” she asked.

“San Francisco.” Shaw filled her in on McBride’s background, from Bethel to Bowdoin to Stanford, including his parents’ deaths. “Bright young man—no question. Magna cum laude. Doctorate in psychology, prestigious fellowships—it was all ahead of him. Until …”

“What?”

“He went off the deep end. Suffered a psychotic break, of some kind. Beat his family to death. Swears he wasn’t on drugs, though you have to wonder if angel dust wasn’t involved.”

“He killed his wife?” Adrienne couldn’t believe it.
Didn’t
believe it.

“And
his infant son. Three months old.”

They fell silent for a moment. Then she asked: “Was he arrested, or … what?”

“‘Or what,’ indeed!” the psychiatrist exclaimed. “According to the patient, everything slips into soft focus at that point. He remembers the murders, but that’s it. The next thing he knows, he’s in Washington, and he’s Jeffrey Duran, therapist.”

“So … where is he now?”

“In restraints. I have him on A-4. Security ward.”

Adrienne couldn’t imagine it. “You think he’ll try to escape?”

“No. I think he’ll try to kill himself. In fact, I’m sure of it.”

“Then …” Adrienne was at a loss for words, and running short on ideas, as well. Finally, she asked, “What about … that thing?”

“The implant?”

“Yes.”

“That could have been a part of the problem, but I really can’t tell you anything. I’m having a helluva time finding out about it,” Shaw complained. “I’ve called the lab three times and … nothing.”

“So—”

“I’ll deal with the lab,” Shaw promised. “But, I have to say that if Mr. McBride’s recollection of himself as a murderer is accurate, it would explain a lot—the dissociation he experienced, the hysterical amnesia—even the sublimation of his personality into an alternate identity.”

“‘If’…”

“Pardon me?” the psychiatrist asked.

“You said, ‘if’ his memory is accurate.”

“So I did.”

Adrienne was quiet for a moment. Then she picked up the complimentary pen beside the telephone, and asked, “When is this supposed to have happened?”

“Five years ago—in San Francisco.”

“Let me look into it,” she suggested. “And if I find out it’s true …?”

“I don’t think either of us would have any choice. We’d have to notify the police.”

She knew he was right. But she also knew there was room for doubt—and that any call to the police at this time would be premature. Until the day before, the recently-confessed murderer had been someone else entirely. “I just can’t believe it,” she said.

“Neither can I,” Shaw replied. “I really can’t. But I’ll tell you one thing.”

“What?”

“He
does.”

The next morning, Ray Shaw sat behind the wheel of his Mercedes, going nowhere on his way to work. Unmoving, the car was stranded in the middle lane of the George Washington Bridge, immersed in a cacophony of horns. Irritated, Shaw removed the Star TAC from his briefcase, punched in a number that he knew as well as his own, and laid the cellphone against his right ear.

The thing was
, Raymond C. Shaw was not a man who asked favors of other people. Not often, anyway, and on the rare occasions that he did, he expected the favors to be granted—especially when, as now, the prospective grantor was someone with whom he’d played squash, twice a week, for years.

Charley Dorgan was 1) his best friend and 2) the senior research physicist at Columbia University’s Laboratory of Engineering and Applied Materials. Shaw had sent him the implant for analysis within an hour of removing it from Lew McBride’s hippocampus, and only three hours after losing to Dorgan in straight sets at the Manhattan Sports Club.

That Dorgan had not yet gotten back to him was only mildly surprising: the physicist was a very busy man, juggling his teaching responsibilities while presiding over a department that had lucrative and complex relationships to a number of private firms and government agencies. So Shaw wasn’t really shocked that Dorgan should need prodding. But he
was
surprised to find that his calls were not getting returned.

And it pissed him off.

Charley was an old friend. When he pulled the Dorgan string, he expected it to
hum.

So he called him—again. This time, at home. At seven in the morning. “Guess who?”

Dorgan grunted.

“Charley, it’s—”

“I know who it is.”

“Well?”
Shaw asked, his voice larded with as much irony as he could manage.

“Well, what?”

“I’m calling about … about the
object
I sent you.”

Dorgan’s reply consisted of a long silence.

“Hello?” This, from Shaw.

“I’m here,” Dorgan replied.

“Good, because—”

“I really can’t talk about it, Ray.”

Shaw thought he’d misheard him. “You can’t
what?”

“I said I can’t talk about it. Neither of us should.”

“I don’t believe I’m hearing this,” Shaw replied. “What are you—”

“Look—I gotta go,” Dorgan told him. “I’m late. I’ll talk to you later.” And with that, he hung up, leaving his squash partner sputtering into his Star TAC.