Stephen White - Blinded

“Yes,” I agreed.

“Then you sit down and have a long, hard conversation with yourself about who might do this to you.”

“And why,” I added.

“Yeah. That, too.” She glanced at her watch. “I’ll be out of here in ten minutes max. But hey, we’re going to have to find a time to do a sweep of the rest of the building now, too.”

She watched me swallow. The act was involuntary.

Tayisha was reassuring. “I’ll give you a good rate, don’t worry. This has been fun.”

I wasn’t having such a good time.

After punching in Sam’s pager number, I listened for the beep before I dialed 911 and my cell phone number. Then I sat on Diane’s desk and waited for my phone to vibrate. I used the dead time to try to compute the number of secrets from the number of patients that might have been intercepted by the jumble of sophisticated electronics that was stuffed in my sofa pillow. I quickly realized that I was missing an essential variable: I didn’t know how long the bug had been in place.

The earliest accusation I’d received from one of my patients was the one from my attorney client, Jim Zebid, the previous Sunday accusing me of leaking the story about Judge Heller’s husband selling cocaine. He’d told me that story the previous Tuesday, so the bug had been in place for at least eight days. Maybe longer.

I was seeing thirty-six patients a week. Which meant thirty-six unique sets of secrets were at risk of having been revealed.

After cursing silently for half a minute, I took Tayisha Rosenthal’s advice and began to have that long, hard conversation with myself about who might do this to me.

And why.

Nashville was one of those legendary American cities that I’d always wanted to visit, but when I finally got there at a quarter after one in the morning on a dark, misty night a couple of days before Thanksgiving, all I wanted to see was the lumpy synthetic pillow waiting for me on a Nashville motel room bed. I begged a Mountain Dew-distracted clerk for a five-thirty wake-up call and was in bed three minutes after I slid the plastic card into the lock on the door.

DO NOT DISTURBsign on the door. Strip, pee, meds, bed.

I slept like a dead man.

By the time five-thirty came, my car was chilly, Dixie dew coated the windshield, and preholiday Nashville was still as sleepy as I was. I walked a couple of blocks to a little convenience store to try to scrape together some breakfast. Satisfaction wasn’t in the cards. I was learning that one of the places where post-heart attack patients can’t conveniently dine is a convenience store. Breakfast choices at the gas station were limited to doughnuts-a pretty good variety, actually-or Danish, or a sad-looking egg-and-sausage thing on a croissant. I settled for a dry bagel, burnt decaf, yogurt, and a carton of orange juice and walked back to the motel with every intention of eating my ascetic meal, climbing into the Jeep, and pointing it vaguely north toward Indianapolis.

It didn’t happen.

I woke up later on only because I had to pee. The light outside my room said dusk. I used the bathroom, took off my clothes, killed my cell phone and pager, and fell back into bed. “Tired” didn’t come close to describing my fatigue. “Exhausted” wasn’t enough of a superlative.

The next change in light that registered in my consciousness was the wink of dawn. After a long shower I felt quasi-alive. In a fashion that reminded me, sadly, of Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, I retraced my steps to the convenience store of the morning before, bought the same food, and returned to the motel with the same intentions.

Practice makes perfect. The second time I pulled it off. Before Nashville was awake, and certainly before I’d had a chance to taste any of her charms, I was on my way out of town in the Cherokee.

Later on I stopped for some real food at a roadside café near someplace called Orlinda and lingered there for a while considering whether I was driving to Indianapolis, Indiana, to be a detective or to Rochester, Minnesota, to be a father. I climbed back in my car unaware that I ever quite reached a decision.

After my late breakfast some truckers and I convoyed together up into Kentucky. I figured that the long-haul drivers were hurrying to get home to their families for Thanksgiving supper, so they were maintaining a speed that was far enough over the speed limit to make me reasonably content.

The countryside south of Louisville was as pretty as a calendar. The whole thing was much better than rehab for me and my injured heart. A day asleep, peaceful landscape, uncrowded roads, strange accents on funny radio stations, and problems that seemed a thousand miles away.

Or at least five hundred.

If you look at a road map of Indiana, Indianapolis looks like the spot where an award-winning sharpshooter left his first and only pop at an imaginary bull’s-eye that had been pinned on top of the map. The state’s largest city is almost perfectly centered north to south and east to west. As you approach Indiana from any direction, you feel a sublime confidence that you couldn’t miss Indianapolis even if you fell sound asleep at the wheel. All roads may not actually lead to Rome, but in this part of the United States it sure seemed like they all led to Indianapolis.

The convoy of truckers and I were making good time as we cleared the northern boundary of Columbus. Out in front of us, Highway 65 was gleaming in the November sun like the Yellow Brick Road that was going to carry us nowhere but to Oz.

A while later my beeper vibrated on my hip, and I fumbled to find my Kmart reading glasses so I could read the little screen. I saw the 911 before the phone number and felt my heart rate jump. I reached down and shushed the volume on Faith Hill’s lament, and signaled to pull the Jeep into a rest stop. Two of the truckers blasted a good-bye with their air horns, and I honked my reply. After I exited the highway, I settled into a parking place beside a big recreational vehicle full of gray-haired women. For some reason they made me think about Sherry, which caused a twang in my heart over Simon, and I let my mind wander in that neighborhood while I allowed myself a minute or two to decide whether to return the call.

I punched in the number.

Lucy said, “Is that you?”

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“Where are you? Don’t you ever answer your phone?”

“Just south of Indianapolis somewhere. A rest stop full of strangers.”

“Don’t bother going any farther, Sammy. Get back on 70 and keep an eye out for the mountains. Just before you run into them, that’s home. The Julie Franconia mystery is solved. We got that one cold, I think. There’s nothing for you to do in Indiana.”

“Yeah?”

“A body was found in some woods outside Martinsville-that’s just south of Indianapolis-three or four days after our Ms. Franconia disappeared. It was hers. The local police had originally cleared the thing by attaching the homicide to a serial killer who was traveling about that time from Chicago to Texas. He was one of those guys who maintained he’d killed scores of people since he was, like, eleven. You know the ones. Cops and reporters from Dateline follow him around the country with shovels and backhoes as he points out all the places he left bodies. I have his name somewhere; you want it?”

“Not unless it’s relevant.”

“It’s not. A close comparison of the VICAP reports on the serial killer’s known victims-there are six or seven; the guy was a killer for real even if he’s a little boastful about the numbers-shows that our girl doesn’t belong in his group. MO of her death wasn’t really anywhere close to his known MO. Circumstances of her disappearance aren’t right, either. Personally I think somebody around Martinsville was looking for a cheap clear. They got it. Anyway, that body was found. They’re going to reopen now.”