Michael Koryta - Last Words

Julianne closed the door slowly. “I reached out to her when I heard about Sarah. I didn’t hear back, but that wasn’t surprising, because everyone was reaching out to her then. I offered to help her in any way that I could. I never heard from her again. When she died, though, it was from an overdose of sleeping pills.”

“Maybe she didn’t think your techniques would work again.”

“Maybe she didn’t know if she’d find any peace in her dreams.” Julianne Grossman stepped away from the closet and looked Mark in the eye. “When Ridley came to me, I considered refusing. I suppose I should have. But my theoretical conflict of interest was dead, and, frankly, I was curious. I wanted to know what he would say. That’s the truth of everyone in this town — we all want to know what he would say if he’d talk. Well, I got to be the lucky one.” She turned away and took a deep breath. “Then I learned what is being done on her case: nothing. Nothing. Investigation has ceased. If he was honest in that confession, and I believe that he was... ” She turned back to Mark. “I can’t be the only one who knows. If he wants to bring me to the place where he killed her and tell me how he did it, I’m willing to take that walk. But I need help. I need someone who believes in what you just saw, someone who won’t roll his eyes and say that confession was coerced, someone who understands that you can tell the truth without ever being aware of doing it. I need you.”

“My only concern is my job,” Mark said. “You’ve threatened my career. My life. The rest of this, the story you just told? It doesn’t matter to me, Julianne. As much as I hate to say it, Sarah Martin doesn’t matter to me, either. Let me be absolutely clear: I don’t care. I just want out of this town with my life intact. That’s all.”

She crossed the room and stopped close to him, nearly touching him. The force of her stare seemed to hold his feet to the floor, making movement impossible. He struggled to keep the eye contact.

“Somewhere in the world,” she said, “someone knows the truth about your wife. I wonder if they care.”

He didn’t answer. She pressed the digital recorder into his palm.

“There’s your career,” she said. “There’s the truth you came back to Garrison to find. Do what you’d like with it.”

Mark turned the wrong way out of Julianne Grossman’s house and drove through the rain down an unfamiliar road until he reached a dead end and realized his mistake. Instead of turning around, he put the car in park and wiped sweat from his brow with trembling hands and then shook his head, as if he could clear his thoughts from inside it. Turned the AC on and cranked the fan up in hopes the cold air would sharpen his thinking. The digital recorder that Julianne Grossman had used to threaten his career was now in his jacket pocket. He pulled it out and stared at it for a few seconds, considering this supposed goodwill gesture. She could have made copies of the recording. She could be e-mailing them to his board of directors right now, and the sheriff, and anyone else who was interested; she could be burning CDs to distribute far and wide.

He pressed play and turned the volume up so he could hear the conversation clearly, and for the next twenty minutes he didn’t move, just sat there with the air-conditioning blasting on him even though it was thirty-some degrees outside and listened to his own voice telling Julianne all of the things she had wanted to hear. He listened to the way she’d asked him, in a casual but still direct fashion, for his own permission before various points of questioning. The permission was always granted.

There’s the truth you came back to Garrison to find.

He punched the power button and shut the recorder off.

If he shared the recording, people would know the reason he’d lied, supposing that they believed in hypnosis, but if he shared it, people would also know that he’d planned to murder a man. He could pull select clips, but sooner or later someone was going to want to hear the whole thing.

Some gift she’d bestowed upon him. Some peace offering.

He took out his cell phone and called Jeff London.

“Any progress up there, Markus?”

“Some.” Mark had the recorder in his free hand and was looking at it as if it were a snake. “But not all good.”

“I don’t follow.”

“You’re not going to like where I go with this.” Mark took a breath and said, “Jeff, do you believe in hypnotism?”

“What do you mean, do I believe in it? As in, does it exist? Of course.”

“I mean...” He wanted to ask whether Jeff believed that someone could be hypnotized and never remember that it had occurred, but he couldn’t bring himself to say the words. “If I told you I put any confidence in a confession a man gave under hypnosis, you’d tell me I was crazy, wouldn’t you?”

“Not at all. I’d tell you that we likely couldn’t get it into court, but I wouldn’t tell you to discount it.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely. I’ve got friends who worked with the old units at NYPD and LAPD. Some of those guys swear by them. There was that famous kidnapping case in California, the one where the bus driver accurately recalled most of a license-plate number under hypnosis. Another one, this was crazy, they were interviewing a victim who said she couldn’t recall any information about the car she’d been abducted in, right? All she said, over and over, was that she didn’t know anything about cars, so she couldn’t help. Well, she was an artist. They hypnotized her and asked her to sketch the car. She drew it so accurately they got a make and model, located the car, and then found forensic evidence connecting the car not only to her but to other victims. That story really piqued my interest. You ought to see the sketches compared to what she said in the initial interviews. Her mind recorded so much detail, but somehow, because she didn’t know cars, she had convinced herself that she wasn’t capable of remembering it. Who gave you a hypnotized confession?”

“Ridley Barnes. But I never figured you’d put any credibility in things like that.”

“Hell, I’ve consulted hypnotists,” Jeff said. “Now, I lead with skepticism. Always. But you have to try any tactic in a dead-end case, and I’ll listen to anybody once. If the facts stand up, I’ll keep listening. Most times, with those types, they don’t. But every now and then, something I’m hard-pressed to believe in will bear some fruit. I mean, I didn’t send Lauren to Cassadaga on what I thought was a fool’s errand.”

Mark forgot the question he had been prepared to ask about Julianne Grossman’s techniques. Forgot about Ridley Barnes and the cave and the Indiana rain that was turning to ice. He was on a sidewalk now, standing on concrete baked by a harsh sun, saying, Don’t embarrass me with this shit.

“ You sent her?”

“Of course. You knew that. We spoke to the police together.”

“I knew that you understood where she was going. I just thought that it was her idea.”

“What the hell does that matter? It was an assignment. She was on the job.”

“But I thought it was her idea,” Mark repeated, and he wanted Jeff to say that it had been, he wanted that even more desperately than he’d wanted Jeff to believe him about what had happened in Garrison.

“It wasn’t her idea, it was her instruction, ” Jeff said. “But I don’t see the difference. She was working for me. You want to blame me, then—”

“No,” Mark said. “You don’t understand. I didn’t want her to go, because I thought you wouldn’t have approved of her consulting a psychic. I thought it would have been... embarrassing. That last day, I was trying to talk her out of it to shield her from that. From your response.”