Greg Iles: Dark Matter

She confided this because she believed my disturbing dreams were caused by the tragic loss of my family, and she wanted me to know she had felt the same kind of pain. Rachel, too, had lost more than her child. Unable to handle the devastating effects of his son’s illness, her lawyer husband had left her and returned to New York. Like me, Rachel had descended into a pit of depression from which she was lucky to emerge. Therapy and medication had been her salvation. But like my father, I’ve always been fiercely private, and I fought my way back to the land of the living alone. Not a day went by that I didn’t miss my wife and daughter, but my days of weeping as I replayed old videotapes were over.

“This isn’t about Karen and Zooey,” I told Rachel. “Please close the door.”

She remained in the open doorway, car keys in hand, clearly wanting to believe me but just as clearly skeptical. “What is it, then?”

“Work. Please close the door.”

Rachel hesitated, then shut the door and stared into my eyes. “Maybe it’s time you told me about your work.”

This had long been a point of contention between us. Rachel considered doctor/patient confidentiality as sacred as the confessional, and my lack of trust offended her. She believed my demands for secrecy and warnings of danger hinted at a delusional reality I had constructed to protect my psyche from scrutiny. I didn’t blame her. At the request of the NSA, I’d made my first appointment with her under a false name. But ten seconds after we shook hands, she recognized my face from the jacket photo of my book. She assumed my ruse was the paranoia of a medical celebrity, and I did nothing to disabuse her of that notion. But after a few weeks, my refusal to divulge anything about my work—and my obsession with “protecting” her—had pushed her to suspect that I might be schizophrenic.

What Rachel didn’t know was that I had only been allowed to see her after winning a brutal argument with John Skow, the director of Project Trinity. My narcolepsy had developed as a result of my work at Trinity, and I wanted professional help to try to understand the accompanying dreams.

First the NSA flew in a shrink from Fort Meade, a pharmacological psychiatrist whose main patient base was technicians trying to cope with chronic stress or depression. He wanted to fill me up with happy pills and find out how to become an internationally published physician like me. Next they brought in a woman, an expert in dealing with the neuroses that develop when people are forced to work for long periods in secrecy. Her knowledge of dream symbolism was limited to “a little historical reading” during her residency. Like her colleague, she wanted to start me on a regimen of antidepressants and antipsychotics. What I needed was a psychoanalyst experienced in dream analysis, and the NSA didn’t have one.

I called some friends at the UVA Medical School and discovered that Rachel Weiss, the country’s preeminent Jungian analyst, was based at the Duke University Medical School, less than fifteen miles from the Trinity building. Skow tried to stop me from seeing her, but in the end I told him he’d have to arrest me to do it, and before he tried that, he’d better call the president, who had appointed me to the project.

“Something’s happened,” Rachel said. “What is it? Have the hallucinations changed again?”

Hallucinations, I thought bitterly. Never dreams.

“Have they intensified? Become more personal? Are you afraid?”

“Andrew Fielding is dead,” I said in a flat voice.

Rachel blinked. “Who’s Andrew Fielding?”

“He was a physicist.”

Her eyes widened. “Andrew Fielding the physicist is dead?”

It was a measure of Fielding’s reputation that a medical doctor who knew little about quantum physics would know his name. But it didn’t surprise me. There were six-year-olds who’d heard of “the White Rabbit.” The man who had largely unraveled the enigma of the dark matter in the universe stood second only to his friend Stephen Hawking in the astrophysical firmament.

“He died of a stroke,” I said. “Or so they say.”

“So who says?”

“People at work.”

“You work with Andrew Fielding?”

“I did. For the past two years.”

Rachel shook her head in amazement. “You don’t think he died of a stroke?”

“No.”

“Did you examine him?”

“A cursory exam. He collapsed in his office. Another doctor got to him before he died. That doctor said Fielding exhibited left-side paralysis and had a blown left pupil, but …”

“What?”

“I don’t believe him. Fielding died too quickly for a stroke. Within four or five minutes.”

Rachel pursed her lips. “That happens sometimes. Especially with a severe hemorrhage.”

“Yes, but it’s comparatively rare, and you don’t usually see a blown pupil.” That was true enough, but it wasn’t what I was thinking. I was thinking that Rachel was a psychiatrist, and as good as she was, she hadn’t spent sixteen years practicing internal medicine, as I had. You got a feeling about certain cases, certain people. A sixth sense. Fielding had not been my patient, but he’d told me a lot about his health in two years, and a massive hemorrhage didn’t feel right to me. “Look, I don’t know where his body is, and I don’t think there’s going to be an autopsy, so—”

“Why no autopsy?” Rachel broke in.

“Because I think he was murdered.”

“I thought you said he died in his office.”

“He did.”

“You think he was murdered at work? Workplace violence?”

She still didn’t get it. “I mean premeditated murder. Carefully thought out, expertly executed murder.”

“But … why would someone murder Andrew Fielding? He was an old man, wasn’t he?”

“He was sixty-three.” Recalling Fielding’s body on his office floor, mouth agape, sightless eyes staring at the ceiling, I felt a sudden compulsion to tell Rachel everything. But one glance at the window killed the urge. A parabolic microphone could be trained on the glass.

“I can’t say anything beyond that. I’m sorry. You should go, Rachel.”

She took two steps toward me, her face set with purpose. “I’m not going anywhere yet. Look, if anyone died while not under a doctor’s supervision in this state, there has to be an autopsy. And especially in cases of possible foul play. It’s required by law.”

I laughed at her naiveté. “There won’t be an autopsy. Not a public one, anyway.”

“David—”

“I really can’t say more. I shouldn’t have said that much. I just wanted you to know … that it’s real.”

“Why can’t you say more?” She held up a small, graceful hand. “No, let me answer that. Because to tell me more would put me in danger. Right?”

“Yes.”

She rolled her eyes. “David, from the beginning you’ve made extraordinary demands about secrecy. And I’ve complied. I’ve told colleagues that the hours you spend in my office are research for your second book, rather than what they really are.”

“And you know I appreciate that. But if I’m right about Fielding, anything I tell you now could put your life at risk. Can’t you understand that?”

“No. I’ve never understood. What sort of work could possibly be so dangerous?”

I shook my head.

“This is like a bad joke.” She laughed strangely. “‘I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.’ It’s classic paranoid thinking.”

“Do you really believe I’m making all this up?”

Rachel answered with caution. “I believe that you believe everything you’ve told me.”

“So, I’m still delusional.”