Ed Gorman - Voodoo Moon

I was just getting a start on the faxed pages inside when I saw her across the street. On her trusty bicycle. She was sliding a letter beneath the driver's-side windshield wiper on my rental car.

Emily Cunningham. The cousin of the girl Rick Hennessy had supposedly killed.

I just watched her. She didn't see me. Didn't even look around, really. Just shoved the letter between blade and windshield and took off pedaling fast. As if moving fast and not looking around at all somehow made her invisible.

I gave her a few minutes and then got up and walked over to the rental car and picked up the envelope.

It was business-sized, white, a number ten.

PAYNEwas written on the front of it in blue ballpoint.

It was not only sealed, it was also Scotch-taped.

I carried the envelope back to the park bench where I'd been sitting. The two squirrels were still busy digging up what proved to be acorns.

I was just about to slit open the envelope when somebody said, "Hello, Robert. I snuck out the back door."

Tandy, looking young and revitalized in a way I would have thought impossible a few hours before, sat down next to me.

"Wow. All these papers. Studying for a big test?"

She was jaunty, as she could sometimes be. The media attention had been good for her.

"Kibbe left these behind at a copy shop."

"You looked through them yet."

"Just started."

"You take half, I'll take half."

They divided ten, ten evenly.

The faxes I had dealt with one Dr. Wayne DeVries. His medical degree had come from the University of Washington, he'd interned in New York City, and he'd spent his first thirteen working years at St. Judith's, on whose letterhead this was written. In 1981, while on a fishing vacation, he drowned. There were no witnesses to the drowning. The body was found washed up downriver three days later. An autopsy confirmed drowning as the cause of death. There were several bruises on the doctor's throat, face, and upper arms, but the meaning of these was inconclusive.

There were other letters citing his brilliant psychiatric career. He'd twice received special awards from the American Medical Association. And once received a presidential citation for his work in dealing with posttraumatic disorders, notably those of Vietnam veterans.

"How you doing?" I said.

"I don't understand why all this stuff about this Dr. Williams is here."

"Neither do I. Not yet." I took several pages from Tandy to compare with my pages.

Three pages later, I began to see the connection between DeVries and Mentor, the psychiatric hospital here in Brenner.

When you put the records of Dr. DeVries and Dr. Aaron Williams side by side, you saw remarkable similarities. They'd had virtually identical careers, right down to receiving presidential citations for their work in posttraumatic stress disorders.

In fact, with only a few minor derivations, DeVries could have been a clone of Williams. Or, more properly, Williams could have been a clone of DeVries.

"Look at this," I said, and handed her the pages I'd been examining.

She looked them over. "Wow."

"No kidding."

"How could two people have the same identical record like this?"

"The short answer is, they couldn't. Not this close, anyway."

"So what does it mean?"

I told her Noah Chandler's theory about Paul Renard still being alive.

"Then Dr. Williams is Renard?"

"It's possible. Plastic surgery. Faked credentials, using this DeVries history as his own."

She smiled. "The inmates running the asylum."

"The most psychotic inmate of them all. The cannibal?"

"And now he's in charge of the whole hospital."

The sunlight seemed to dim suddenly, the way it does when a cloud passes chilly and gray across a summer afternoon. A portent, a symbol. I kept remembering the journals Renard had left behind. The prospect of his being alive-and even worse, disguising himself as Williams-both amused and sickened me. All the degrading filth he'd subjected others to. And he was still alive.

"So now what?"

"I drive out and see Williams."

"Just confront him?"

"At least make him explain the similarities."

"But how would that prove that he was Renard?"

And then Kibbe's approach finally made sense to me. The papers and the paperweights he'd stolen from Williams's desk. "Renard had been in the Army briefly."

"So?"

"So his fingerprints would be on record somewhere."

"I'm still not following you."

"Remember when I told you that Kibbe snuck into Williams's office one day and took some stuff?"

"Right."

"That's what he was doing. Looking for something with Williams's fingerprints on it. Then he could send the things in and have them checked. He could tell right away if Williams was Renard."

"Can't we do that?"

"We can. But it'll take longer than we have. And anyway, I want to see how Williams responds to this in person. That'll tell me a lot right there."

"He can always refuse to talk to you."

"He can. But I don't think he will when I tell him what I've got. At the very least, he'll be curious and want to know everything I know."

She touched her head. Her entire body spasmed.

"You all right?"

She didn't say anything for a moment. Another spasm. A couple walking by looked at her. Junkie, they probably thought. I slid closer, put my arm around her.

"What's going on?"

Still silent. A final body jerk then.

A deep sigh. A whimper caught in her throat. She touched fingers to her head again.

"It started right after breakfast."

"What did?"

"You know how I used to make drawings sometimes?"

"Sure. That's how we found where the second body was buried."

"There's a face-a shape of a face, actually. Ever since breakfast. It's kind of spooky. Like a ghost, I mean. I can see it but I can't see it. It needs to come clearer."

"You think it's the killer."

"I honestly don't know, Robert." She took my hand in hers and then raised it to her cheek. "I'm sure glad you're here."

"You want to give me your sorority pin?"

She laughed. "Asshole."

She sat back on the park bench. Looked around. "Norman Rockwell. You remember his paintings?"

"Sure."

"He was before my time, but my folks had this big book of his cover paintings for the Saturday Evening Post . And that's what this park is like. 1948. Everything's just so peaceful and laid back. Not all the city bullshit. I'd love to live in a town like this again."

"Then why don't you?"

She laughed again, but this laugh was a sad one. "Because for right now I'd rather have the fast lane. I'm really starting to enjoy it. The cable people have called me three times this morning. They wanted me to know that they're picking up fifteen more episodes and increasing the production budget at least twenty-five percent. I can't resist that, Robert."

"Sure you can. What you're saying is you don't want to resist that."

"Yeah, I guess you're right. I don't want to resist it."

I stood up. "I'd better go see about setting up an appointment with Dr. Williams."

"You're not scared?"

"Of what?"

"Of just confronting him, I guess."

"No. Not really. I'm more curious than anything. I want to find out if Paul Renard is alive."

"God, if he is," she said, "this is going to be some show."

I tried hard not to notice that she hadn't mentioned Laura as yet today. Maybe she was temporarily cried out. We all get that way around death. But she had changed. Subtly, true. But unmistakably.

She was going away. And I guess I understood it, how the celebrity had hooked her and all, but I felt lonely nonetheless. I missed the troubled but relatively simple young woman she'd once been. Maybe I wanted her to remain part child so I could remain part child, too, the oddly protective but youthful part of me-the silly part-she'd always brought out in me in our first affair. Maybe she was growing up and I resented it.