Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief (4 page)

Her weight sprang off him, and she jumped to the ground. Newly energized, she moved lightly to look into the open loading dock and then back at the two of them.

“What happened here?” Her voice was quiet.

“Damn thing won’t start,” Charis said. “I need to get it out of here, now.”

The woman, Patricia, walked around the Hummer. She knelt and glanced underneath. “What seems to be the problem?”

“Started up fine, then died.”

“Okay. I’ll haul it over to the yard. Someone there can look at it.”

“No. I need it back at my office.”

“It won’t take more than a few minutes. You’ll be on your way in no time.”

“Sorry. I don’t want it anywhere but back at my place.” 

“I have to tell you. Ten dollars per mile extra if we don’t go to Ignacio’s.”

“That’s fine. I’ll cover it.” Charis glared at Bernal as if the whole thing was his fault. “I actually get some jobs that pay the bills.” Patricia hesitated, as if wanting to argue again, then pulled out chains.

Another tow truck, this one from Frank’s Tow, rolled off the road. “Hey!” The driver leaned out of his window. “What you doing here?”

Patricia didn’t even acknowledge his presence, but attached the chains.

“I got a call. A Triple-A call. From here.”

“I’ve got it under control.” She pulled her truck back and raised the Hummer’s front. Then she stepped out and checked the chains. She never looked at the other driver.

“How much extra can you guys get, anyway? For God’s sake, we all got to make a living. Right? That’s all.”

“Talk to Ignacio, if you want,” she said. “I don’t make these decisions.”

“Ignacio . . .” The other tow-truck driver shook his head in disgust. “Sure. Sure thing. I love talking to that guy. This ain’t going to end well, miss. You know that, right?”

“I know that neither of us is earning anything if we stand around arguing.”

He didn’t say anything else, but backed with a screech and took off.

“A long time since I’ve been fought over.”

Charis hopped into the tow truck’s cab, moving surprisingly easily for a big woman. “Good luck, Bernal. If you’re smart you’ll forget all about Muriel and her stupid projects. That’s sure my plan. I doubt we’ll be seeing each other again.”

He raised a hand to Charis and Patricia as they drove off, but neither of them looked back.

Bernal had an innate sense of privacy. He’d never snooped in his sister’s diary growing up, despite the fact that she left it neatly centered on her desk, and his worst girlfriend hadn’t even bothered to come up with a strong password to hide all the meticulously kept records, written and photographic, of her cheating on him. She knew he would never try to break into her account, no matter how suspicious he became. He’d found it all when he cleaned up the hard drive before getting rid of the thing, over a year later, long after he broke up with her because he couldn’t stand her. So, even if he’d had a better chance, he might not have dug into Charis’s purse. That might have been regarded as a weakness, a refusal to stoop down to pick up information lying out in the open, but he was just as glad he’d never read Marcy’s erotic messages to her economics professor, her boss at the copy shop, or her downstairs neighbor, the lawyer, while it was all going on. He didn’t read much of it then either, but let it vanish along with the other files on the hard drive as he destroyed it.

But as far as Madeline Ungaro was concerned, he thought he had more reason to pry. Muriel had headed over here, saying something significant was up. Chances were that Muriel had picked Madeline up in the stolen Mercedes last night and gone elsewhere. But that was just a guess. In any event, there had to be something here that would give him a clue as to where he should look next. It still made him uncomfortable.

Behind the office with the SQUID, past a tiny modular bathroom, was Ungaro’s private living area. A ridged sleeping pad, rolled and tied with multicolored nylon webbing, a deflated air pillow, and a folding sling chair were all the furniture. Folded sweaters, slacks, and shirts, sensible but high-quality, were stacked on metal shelving next to canned goods and ramen packets. There were three pairs of shoes on the bottom shelf: white sneakers, sensible black pumps, and loafers. A gap between sneakers and pumps marked where whatever shoes Ungaro was wearing now had been. Given the person and the airrangement, Bernal guessed hiking boots or maybe trail runners.

A total of four pairs of footwear? Bernal thought of Muriel’s hundreds of shoes, each stranger looking than the next. It seemed odd that these two would have gotten along.

The kitchen was a stainless-steel sink and two burners with a propane tank. A copper-bottomed Revereware saucepan stood upside down on the grooved drainboard. It was completely dry.

The one piece of visible luxury was a lacquer case with ornate handles that looked like a China-trade antique. The case was locked. He pulled out the multitool on his keychain, opened the tiny pliers, and delicately manipulated the keyhole. In a moment, he had it open. He looked closely to make sure he hadn’t scratched anything. Inside was a bundle of high-end cosmetics and other grooming equipment. He found a silver-framed hand mirror that showed a slight bloom in the backing, and a hairbrush that looked like it was really made of tortoiseshell. It was worn, the bristles well used, but there wasn’t a single hair in it.

In the bottom drawer was a piece of Belgian extra bittersweet chocolate, 80 percent, one-third finished and carefully wrapped back up in its foil. Bernal looked for bite marks, but each piece had been snapped off neatly by hand. He thought about that chocolate. It looked rationed. She’d been so precise about her fractions that she hadn’t even finished a row, leaving two squares sticking out, despite the fact that that made it harder to rewrap. I

There were other gaps on the shelves, he saw now: next to an old tent, next to a headlamp, a few other places among her impressive collection of camping gear. He glanced to see if something had been shoved back and saw a couple of framed photographs. One showed a group of smiling people in white lab coats sitting around a table in front of some vending machines. The other showed another group of people, this one on a mountain trail, all with expensive-looking boots, aluminum trekking poles, and internal frame backpacks. The only person in common between the two groups was a beautiful woman with chin-length blond hair. In neither photograph did she look directly at the camera, and in both she was with the group and not of it, giving the impression of having been Photoshopped in later. Madeline Ungaro. His guess was that each member of both of those groups had received the same photo as a souvenir. From the dust on them, Bernal wondered if Ungaro had even remembered that she had them. They had been stuffed behind whatever had been here on the shelf.

Something lay on the floor by the shelf. Bernal knelt and tugged it out.

It was the pink sash from Muriel’s nightgown. Wherever else she had gone the previous night, she had definitely come here.

A horn beeped outside.

_______

A Fleurs du
Mall delivery van had pulled up next to his red Ram. A slender black man in a white uniform stood, one foot in the open front door, looking at a tablet PC. “You Bernal Haydon-Rumi?”

“I am.”

“Finally! I don’t usually deliver to vehicles, but I had to make an exception. . . . Wait a minute.”

He climbed into the van and came out with a huge bouquet. “Get this in water as soon as possible. We’ve done our best—ball-peened the lilac, charred the monkshood stems—but there’s a lot of stuff in here that requires contradictory care—”

The mass of flowers was almost intimidating. Lilac, tulips, Peruvian lilies, Bernal recognized those, but there were metallic, spiky blue ones, and ones with hoods, and a variety of fleshy orchids. The thick scent was halfway between funeral home and unmade bed.

“People used to say to drop half an aspirin in the water,” the delivery man said. “Doesn’t really work, but for this stuff, a Prozac would be more appropriate.” He handled the bouquet carefully. “The greens are acanthus. These are the leaves on Corinthian columns. Not many places carry it, mostly because no one wants the damn fleshy things. That’s why Muriel uses us.”

“Muriel Inglis sent this?”

The delivery man checked his tablet. “One of our best customers. And most demanding. She’s real specific about what she wants.” He shook his head. “Between us, I think she should let us do the arranging, but often she has some . .. notion. And, by the way, she hasn’t paid for this.”

Bernal peeled off a couple of bills, tipping him generously in his happiness at getting a message from Muriel.

But wait. “When did you get the instructions to deliver?” It could have been before Bernal even came to Cheriton.

“Some time this morning . . . yep. Six thirty. They got it done quick for her.”

So, quite a while after he had seen Muriel run off. She was okay. Nothing bad had happened to her. The sense of relief was overwhelming.

The van drove off. Bernal opened his van’s rear and wedged the flowers into a space against the wall. He pulled off the card.

On it was a late-evening time, a GPS location, and a note: “A crew called Enigmatic Ascent will be here. Tell them you are a local. They don’t know me directly. I will be along a bit later, and all will be explained.” It wasn’t signed, but it didn’t need to be.

His happiness faded. Muriel was alive, but she was still running around, making him miserable without good reason. She’d hired him because he was smart and because he knew how to figure things out. Maybe she’d been sorry for him too, but that had to have faded as he proved his value. In fact, lately he’d gotten the sense that she was getting a little competitive with him. This was a sign of it.

So he’d be damned if he was going to show up at that rendezvous to be spoon-fed some information.

She’d learned something the previous day. It had been significant enough for her to blow off her gallery opening and decide to go out and play DAR ninja. She had come here, scooped up Madeline Inglis, and vanished into thin air. What had she learned?

When he saw her that night, he would know. He felt the pleasure of an unsolved puzzle. He would find out what she had learned and be able to explain to her why she should have waited for him.

Boxes of shoes were piled up on the daybed in her bedroom. Shoes she had bought that day. He remembered the receipt.

Given Muriel, it made sense that he would start with shoes.

'There’s a spiritual dimension to your feet.” The clerk reverently pulled a huge shoe out of a box. “Standard sizes don’t speak to it.”

“I like my shoes to fit.” Bernal felt like an old fogy. 

“Of course, of course! You want to get at least within screaming distance of those physical specs, sure. But, think about it, the lines of
qi
, the pressure points, the chakras, everything that focuses through those poor stressed metatarsals. Your feet are the most specialized part of your anatomy, did you know that? An evolutionary kludge, something we came up with on the fly when God flicked us out of the trees for getting too good at picking apples. We’re stuck with these smushed-up hack jobs, fallen arches, bunions, and all. Believe me, you don’t find many creationists working in shoe stores. So, of necessity, post-somatic evolution happens through
these
. The iridescent niobium shoes dangling from his finger by their transparent laces did indeed look like some piece of orbital gear. The human race had lost space. All it had left were the shoes. “That’s why we here at DEEP leave the size for last. I mean, I can give you the length of every tendon in your foot down to the millimeter, and it still won’t let me grok the fullness of your needs.”

He slipped the shoe onto Bernal’s foot. It hung there loosely. He had to curl his toes to keep it from falling off. 

“See what I’m saying?”

“Uh, I’m beginning to. Should I walk around in it?” 

“Oh, no, no, no. No. Not yet. That’s the problem, isn’t it? People look at a foot as something to slap against the ground, and that’s it. But they’re knots of spiritual energy. Too much pressure against Mother Earth’s face, and they get karmic overload. And when that happens, everything else gets constipated. Kind of a chain reaction. Your liver gets hard, you start seeing yellow. Foot reflexology evolved to take care of those issues, but it’s better to hit the problem up front, with shoes, don’t you think? Just sit for a minute, let the energies reflect inside the shoe, and you’ll see what I mean. Here, here’s the other one. Balance the pair.”

A pale girl slouched past with acromegalic basketball shoes hanging from her thin ankles. Along with the shoes, she carried a bowling bag stained with red.

“Feeling it? ” The clerk was back, with a stack of boxes. 

Bernal recognized the bag. The head of the third victim of Cheriton’s own serial killer had turned up in a bag just like that one, in the locker room at Memory Lanes, a local alley. Now they did photorealistic knockoffs of it in Indonesia. Bernal watched that element of fashion go by again. He understood that the victim’s sister had sued to recover some of the earnings from sales of the bag.

The receipt on the pile of shoes in Muriel’s bedroom had been from this store.

“Yesterday, I think this woman came into your store.” Bernal flashed a photograph of Muriel. “Did you see her in here?”

The clerk smiled at the photograph. “Muriel? Let me think. . .”

“You know her?”

“Sure. She’s, like, a bit out of our demographic, you know? But the girl knows shoes. I think we’re part of her regular cycle. Sometimes it’s us, sometimes it’s a Manolo Blahnik, sometimes it’s a high top Chuck Taylor. I’m okay with that. What’s up with her?”

“I’m checking up on something for her. She’s away, some kind of business, didn’t really tell me, left me some kind of vague instructions I can’t really understand. Wants me to talk to someone she met yesterday ... so I was down here at the mall and thought I’d see if I could figure it out. If I can’t, she’s just going to have to wait.”