Gary Braver - Elixir

Laura sighed. Yes, she felt the temptation. More than her sister or any other woman alive, she heard the siren call every day. But she had made herself a promise long ago.

"How about when he's older?" He was still holding out hope that when Brett matured she would give in. "In seven years he'll be twenty-one."

"And I'll be sixty-three."

Already their sex was bordering on the bizarre. In seven years it would be sick. She'd feel like a cradle-robbing old hussy, and he'd have to fake it.

"But you'd retrogress to fifty or younger."

"You mean Laura would be as young as Wendy."

"If that's the way you want to look at it."

"Maybe I won't want to be."

"But maybe you will."

They were silent for a long spell, and Laura felt the old anger burn itself through the sadness. Roger had brought this upon them himself. In a monumentally stupid act he had injected the stuff into his veins thirteen years ago and forever infected the very fabric of their lives. While she understood all the forces that had driven him to that act, she could never forgive him. More than anyone else alive he was able to foresee the consequences but had chosen to disregard them instead. And while she felt pity and compassion for him, there were moments she hated him for what he had done.

"Laura, I need you. I don't want to go this alone."

Laura closed her eyes and remained silent. She knew the panic he was beginning to feel. Aside from Wally, who still remained on the sidelines of things, she was the only person in the world who knew who and what Roger was. She was his sole intimate. His life had come to a standstill, and the future appeared some vast and empty stretch. It might take another thirty years for her to die. Toward the end he might even care for her like an aged parent. But after she was gone, could he go on without her? Could he live alone with his secret? Would he take another lover?

With Brett in her life, these considerations were no longer priorities. She didn't say this, of course. Nor did she mention a third option that had crossed her mind: divorce.

Brett was still too young. He was crazy about his father and splitting up would scar him permanently. Nor could he comprehend the rationale: not for the lack of love, but time.

When he was older, she told herself. After they had explained all the other awful stuff.

"Laura, promise me just one thing," he pleaded. "That you'll keep open the option-okay? Maybe after Brett's off and on his own?"

She sighed. "I'm out of promises," she said and turned off the light.

And as she lay in the dark, she wondered at the extraordinary muddle of their lives.

God Almighty, how was it going to end?

Eileen Rice was only half-conscious at how the coffee had turned cold in her cup. She was too lost in what she had discovered on her computer monitor.

The image was of partial loops with a count of eleven ridges on a bias from the triradius to the core of the inner terminus. Her best guess was the right index, although that made no difference since the morphologies were identical across the digits.

What set off the alarm in her head was the nearly full loop found on the latent print coded "Mark (4)-137-left II."

On the split screen, she enlarged the image and clicked on the base print. With the pivot ball, she rotated the axes until they were in alignment. Then she tapped a few keys and brought the two images into superimposition.

A perfect match.

The image on the left was the print lifted from the Carleton, Massachusetts premises in 1988. It was the same print found on household objects including a coffee mug at the same premises. The image on the right had been lifted seven weeks ago from a flower pot in a shop in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

It had taken that long because it was an old case and no prints were on file in the database. That meant Eileen had to conduct a hand search of all the latent prints from door handles, clothing, and household items included in the evidence files. And because of their recent move to new headquarters, boxes of old cases had been misplaced. Eventually she found dozens of different prints, scanned and entered them into the database, then classified and compared them to the nine different latents found on the Eau Claire fern pot, wrapping paper, receipt, and business card which also had to be scanned and classified.

That meant running over three hundred comparisons, carefully tabulating each elimination. Also, of the 43 million individuals in the National Fingerprint File/Interstate Identification Index, none matched any prints in the case.

But identifying the prints was not Eileen Rice's problem. With the mouse, she clicked the terminal to print out the matching prints-one for her own files, and one to the terminal of the field office in Madison, Wisconsin. She then picked up the phone and dialed the number of Agent Eric Brown.

Wally didn't quite know how to ask her.

It had been so many years since he had last dated-twenty-five, counting two years of cohabitation, nineteen of marriage, and four of celibate divorce-he wasn't quite sure how it was done. This was their sixth formal date and they had not yet been sexual. How exactly did you word such a request to the Now Generation?

"Say, are you feeling romantic?"

Or: "Gee, Sheila, you know it's been a hundred and four days since we met, and we've exchanged six hello-and-good-night kisses. It's all been nice and innocent, but isn't it time we moved to Phase Two?"

Or: "So far this has cost me twelve hundred and thirty-nine dollars, and I still haven't scored yet. What about it?"

Or simply: "Want to fuck?"

They were driving back from a movie in Wally's Porsche with the top up because it was unseasonably cold. But the stars were out, the traffic was light, and the cotton was high.

And Wally Olafsson felt as happy as Tinkerbell.

It was especially momentous since that morning he had dropped below the 185-pound mark into territory he hadn't known since college. He was also down to a thirty-four-inch waist and 15 1/2 shirt. Even more remarkable, his hair had started growing back. Somehow the tabulone stuff had restimulated the follicles, producing a new golden growth that had covered a once-vast dead zone. It looked like fine silk, like that of a newborn's hair. Already an inch long, he had actually fashioned a part. He told Sheila that he was taking hair-growth stimulants.

"You look like a different person."

"The same Wonderful Wally, just less of him."

"You should patent that diet you're on. You could make millions."

"You can't put willpower in a bottle, lady," he said in his best John Wayne. In the mirror he patted his new hair, still in disbelief. God, it felt good to be alive!

"If I didn't know better, I'd say you were getting younger."

Gulp! he thought.

"I mean it. It's amazing."

"It's you, my dear. You bring out the boy in me." Then he broke into a few bars of "You Make Me Feel So Young."

"Bull! It's ninety minutes a day on the StairMaster and old Menudo tapes you've been hiding."

He laughed happily. "Aw, she saw through my cover."

"So, how old did you say you were?"

It had become a game: He, the coy older companion; she, the insistent young inquisitor.

"Why is knowing my age so important?"

"Just curious. Besides, it's women who don't tell how old they are, not guys."

"I'm liberated."

"I'd say forty-four."

"Forty-four!" He slapped his chest in mock horror.

She laughed. "Okay, forty… maybe thirty-nine."

"That's better," he sniffed.

"You're going to hate me, but when you first joined the club I thought you were about sixty."