Cole Perriman's Terminal Games (41 page)

Nolan and Gusfield both laughed.

“So what about what I just told you?” Nolan asked. “Do archetypes turn up in connection with dissociative disorders?”

“Well, sure. In MPD cases, the personalities often take archetypal forms. There’s usually the Innocent—the inner child in need of protection. And then there’s the Warrior, whose duty it is to protect the Innocent. And you also get a fair share of Orphans, Wanderers, Wise Old Men or Wise Old Women, that sort of thing.”

“Tricksters, too?”

“Sure.”

“Tricksters who think they’re God?”

Gusfield smiled broadly. He was looking quite stoned now—stoned and happy. Nolan more than half wished for a good swig of Gusfield’s tea.

“I don’t think it’s quite precise to say that Auggie
thinks
he’s God,” Gusfield said. “It’s more like Auggie is the consummation and incarnation of humankind’s most ancient and primeval dreams and visions of God.”

“Meaning?” Nolan asked.

“Meaning,” Gusfield said, raising his cup in a gleeful toast, “that Auggie may
know
he’s God.”

During the long plane flight, Gusfield downed about five cups of marijuana tea, not stopping at the Rocky Mountains, after all. Then, just before the plane landed at LAX, Gusfield went to the toilet. Nolan assumed that Gusfield was flushing the rest of his tea, if he still had any left. At least Nolan
hoped
that was what Gusfield was doing. Nolan didn’t particularly want to disembark in L.A. accompanied by a walking stash of pot.

Gusfield was still quite chatty as Nolan drove them down Century Boulevard away from the airport.

“Hey, aren’t the Watts Towers around here somewhere?” Gusfield asked.

“We’re not going there.”

“Why not?”

“They’re closed off.”

“But you’re a cop. Can’t you get us in?”

“It’s not on the way to the division.”

“Aw, come on, Grobowski. What’s the point in my coming here if I don’t get to see the sights? What about Griffith Observatory, Universal Studios, Catalina, Century Towers, Dodger Stadium, the Marlboro Man on Sunset Strip, that dopey mechanical Lincoln at Disneyland?”

“What about them?”

“Well, aren’t I going to get to see them?”

“Sure, after you’ve solved all our Auggie killings.”

“That could take forever.”

“It’d better not take forever. You told me I’d learn more by tonight. Look, you’ve got two choices. You can work for us, or you can go to the slammer for drug possession.”

“What are you gonna do, plant some weed on me?”

“I can take a urine sample from you right here and now.”

“Like hell you can.”

“I’m an L.A. cop. I’ve got ways of making you piss. You’re not in Kansas anymore, buster.”

“You mean Nebraska.”

“Same difference.”

When Nolan and Gusfield finally strolled into the division squad room, Clayton shot up out of his chair.

“Hey, pal,” Clayton said, clapping Nolan on the shoulder. “Get any laughs in Omaha?”

“Naw, the audiences there are murder. I didn’t come back empty-handed, though.”

“No?”

“Not at all. I brought back a shrink.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Figured the staff needs better counseling than we’re getting, so I picked up a spanking new, state-of-the-art Omaha psychiatrist.”

Nolan gestured grandly toward Gusfield, who stood beside Clayton’s desk, grinning rather weirdly.

Clayton examined Gusfield’s dilated pupils.

“A psychiatrist, huh?” Clayton said with playful skepticism.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know, Nol. He don’t look quite right to me.”

“What’re you saying? Think he’s got hoof and mouth disease?”

“No. I’m saying he’s stoned.”

“Oh, that,” Nolan said solemnly. “He’s just been doing a little too much of that famous Nebraska ditch weed. He’ll get over it in a little while.”

Gusfield broke down in a fit of giggles.

Clayton laughed, too. “What the fuck’s going on?” he asked.

“Gusfield just needed a little medicinal help getting out of the Midwest,” Nolan replied cheerfully. “Gusfield, you’re safely out of the Great Plains now. I’d really appreciate it if you’d straighten out. You are in a police station.”

Gusfield became more and more lucid as he and Nolan filled Clayton in on the previous day’s events in Omaha. They described Stalnaker’s statements under hypnosis, his apparently paradoxical complicity in the Cronin killing, his dissociative identification with Auggie, and his comments that seemed to describe the two L.A. murders. But by the end of their story, Clayton looked thoroughly dissatisfied.

“That’s it?” Clayton complained. “We’ve discovered some new form of psychiatric disorder but we don’t know what it is or what to call it—and we still don’t know who whacked Judson or Gauld?”

“Maybe you’d like to get a ticket for the next flight to Omaha and see if you can do any better,” Nolan said. “Better brush up on your hypnotism first, though.”

“I’m just saying I’m glad it’s
you
who’s gonna have to go in and tell all this non-news to Coffey,” Clayton said.

“Coffey doesn’t even know I’m back in L.A. yet,” Nolan said. “And he doesn’t need to know until I’ve got some actual information.”

“And when’s that going to be?” Clayton asked.

“Soon. Gusfield promises to shed light on this case before nightfall.”

“And how do you plan to do that, Gusfield?” Clayton asked.

“First of all, I want to talk to your hacker friend, Zoomer.”

Clayton laughed.

“Now that I’ve got to see,” Clayton said.

Clayton and Nolan described their difficulty getting Zoomer to talk in the first place. They explained how Zoomer had admitted to creating Auggie and the Snuff Room, and how the hacker insisted that Auggie had been mysteriously taken away from him.

“So the little Frankenstein’s monster escaped the laboratory, huh?” Gusfield observed. “Wow, I’ve really got to talk to this guy.”

“You’ll have to do it by phone,” Clayton said. “He doesn’t go for face to face communication.”

“Are you going to try to hypnotize him?” Nolan asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Gusfield said.

“Can you hypnotize somebody on the phone?”

“Only if he wants to be hypnotized,” Gusfield said. “Nobody can be hypnotized under any circumstances if they don’t want to be.”

“He won’t want to be,” Clayton said. “You can count on that.”

“Well, let’s give the guy a call,” Gusfield said. “I’m going to need your help though, Saunders. You’ve already established a rapport with him. We’ll both need to be on the line.”

“Sure,” Clayton said. “In the conference room.”

“Okay,” Gusfield said. “You loosen him up a little, then introduce me to him. I’ll take it from there.”

“You want to join us, Nol?” Clayton asked.

“Naw,” Nolan said. “I’ve got a few other things to take care of. Good luck, though.”

Clayton gave Nolan a brief, puzzled look, then escorted Gusfield to the conference room.

Nolan sat down at his desk, his head sagging tiredly. He knew he really ought to sit in on the conference call with Zoomer, even if only as a silent participant, but he felt saturated with the case—saturated and exhausted.

Zoomer, Stalnaker, dissociative states, murder by computer …

It’s all too much. Just too damned much.

He needed to get his mind off the whole thing or he’d go as crazy as those Midwestern pioneers Gusfield had told him about. More than anything else, he needed to hear Marianne’s voice. Nolan reached for his desk phone and dialed her number.

Message left by Nolan Grobowski on Marianne Hedison’s home answering machine, Sunday, February 13, 1:25
p.m
.:

Hi, it’s me. Listen, you’ll never believe what happened. I caught the first flight out of Omaha to Santa Barbara, right? But the goddamn plane got hijacked and taken to LAX, so I wound up in Los Angeles and not in Santa Barbara, can you believe it?

(pause)

I miss you.

(pause)

Think you can come down to L.A. soon?

(pause)

I’d really love to come up there, but this case gets zanier by the minute and I’m going to be stuck in this hellhole for a good long while, so could you come to L.A.?

(pause)

Could you, please?

(pause)

Because I really want to talk to you. I want to talk about what the two of us are doing with the rest of our lives.

(pause)

Call me, okay? I’ll either be at my desk or at home or someplace else in Los Angeles, so just sort of call all the numbers in the phone book until you get me. I’ll be around somewhere.

Portion of a recorded telephone conversation between Dr. Harvey Gusfield and Michael Ramos, a.k.a. Zoomer, Sunday, February 13, 1:35
p.m
.:

HG: So you’re saying that Auggie actually “broke free” from you.

MR: Yes, that’s a good way to put it.

HG: And he wasn’t stolen from you by another hacker.

MR: I don’t believe so, no.

HG: How did he leave you, then?

MR: I told you. He just broke free.

HG: How did it make you feel when it happened?

MR: Well, I was dismayed at Auggie’s disobedience. But I was also intrigued. I rather enjoyed the idea—the fantasy, if you will—that Auggie had gained his independence.

HG: The idea that you had created an artificial intelligence?

MR: (laughter) Oh, Dr. Gusfield, you do me too much honor. I’m not vain enough to suppose I accomplished something on my little computer that the world’s best computationalists with their monster mainframes have so far failed to do. No, there’s nothing artificial about Auggie. You can’t be artificial if you’ve created yourself.

HG: In what sense did Auggie “create himself”?

MR: If I knew, I’d surely tell you. Perhaps in much the same way that you created
your
self from a fertilized egg in your mother’s womb. But Auggie is certainly intelligent, even if he’s not artificial. He knows everything that I know—and everything a lot of other people know, too, I imagine.

HG: So you still watch Auggie.

MR: With considerable interest, yes.

HG: Do you still feel any real
connection
with Auggie?

MR: Do you mean as if I were his master again?

HG: Something like that, yes.

MR: No.

HG: Do you ever dream about Auggie?

MR: How so?

HG: Let me put it this way. Do you ever dream that you are Auggie?

MR: (laughter) That’s a very interesting question, Dr. Gusfield. It makes me think of a great uncle of mine who drank himself to death on tequila. During his last days, when his liver was drowning in alcohol, I asked him why he’d done it to himself. And he said to me, “Tequila is the only way I have of telling dreams and waking apart.”

HG: The point being?

MR: There is no point, Dr. Gusfield. The truth is, I don’t dream at all these days. I haven’t dreamed for quite some time. The answer to your question is “no.”

Nolan sat drumming his fingers nervously. He had nothing to do at the moment but wait for Clayton and Gusfield to come out of the conference room and tell him how their chat with Zoomer had gone.

Hurry up and wait.

That was the story of his life these days. He did his job as well as he could—followed clues, did research, checked all possible leads. And in the end, he waited. He waited for a break. He waited for something to happen or not to happen. That was what being a cop was all about.

Hurry up and wait.

Nolan leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Little lights floated around inside his eyelids. He knew they were caused by exhaustion—by exhaustion and
waiting.

How did things get this way?

His life hadn’t always been about waiting. Certainly, police work had always involved waiting. But other things in his life hadn’t. Those wonderful years he’d spent with Louise—those weren’t about waiting. And those glorious days watching Molly and Jack grow up—those weren’t about waiting, either. They were about
being.
When was the last time Nolan had so simply and beautifully
been?

It took a fraction of a second for him to answer that question. It had been last Tuesday on the Santa Monica pier with Marianne. And Tuesday night, their last wonderful night of talking and lovemaking.

Those times had been all about being, not waiting.

Marianne was the one respite Nolan had from waiting.

He wanted more of her.

He wanted all of her.

“I want to talk about what the two of us are doing with the rest of our lives.”

What would they decide? Would he take that job in Oregon? Would she come with him? Would they get married? Just what did he expect to happen?

He smiled wryly.

Guess I’ll have to wait and see.

At that moment, Gusfield and Clayton reemerged from the conference room.

“So how did things work out?” Nolan asked.

“You guys were right,” Gusfield said. “He’s a tough nut to crack.”

“Not susceptible to hypnosis, huh?” Nolan said.

“Oh, I get the feeling he’s susceptible, all right,” Gusfield said. “So susceptible that he resists it like crazy. He meanders and misleads all over the place, never letting you pin him down, never letting you get to him.”

“Sounds like the Zoomer we’ve all grown to know and love, huh?” Clayton put in.

“So did you learn anything at all?” Nolan asked.

“Well, Zoomer’s an evasive character,” Gusfield said. “But as crazy as it sounds, I get the feeling he’s telling the truth. Zoomer hasn’t been directly involved with Auggie for a long time—maybe not since Auggie left him.”

“So where the hell does that leave us?” Clayton asked irritably. “Who
is
controlling this clown?”

“I think I’m just about ready to present my theory,” Gusfield said. “But first, I want to talk to your friends at Insomnimania. Are they open on Sunday?”

“Open on Sunday?” Nolan said with a laugh. “Hell, those jokers
live
down there.”

*

Marianne had just come in from a long walk on the beach when she heard Nolan’s phone message.

She collapsed onto her couch at the sound of the words. She was feeling weak and tired and a little feverish from fasting and sleeplessness, and Nolan’s words completely overwhelmed her with confusion.

She had hated lying to him the last couple of times she’d talked to him—had hated denying that she was searching every night for Auggie. But what else could she do? How could she expect Nolan to understand why it was crucial that
she
find Renee’s killer, that
she
grasp Auggie’s murderous purpose? How could she expect him to understand something she couldn’t even understand herself?

She remembered Renee’s words from the night before …

“Auggie is Auggie.”

Those words had confirmed her deepest intuitions about Auggie—that his very existence was far more mysterious and inscrutable than the police could ever realize. But where was the Basement where Auggie lurked?