Amanda's Story (32 page)

Amanda couldn't remember ever being so uncomfortable in the presence of Michael's parents. Even when she first met them, the awkwardness began to fade immediately, but now, after a silent and tense dinner, no one seemed to know what to do or to say.

“I will clean up,” Lisa said, rising from her chair.

“I'll help,” Greg said sullenly.

“I don't want it,” she snapped at her husband. “Go watch TV or read something. I want to do this alone.” Her last sentence was directed equally at Greg and Amanda.

Greg pushed back from the table and stomped his way into the living room. The couch creaked as he dropped into it in obvious frustration. Amanda caught Lisa glancing at her, and they both looked away quickly. “I want to do this alone, Amanda,” she said in an injured voice.

Hours later, after unpacking her suitcase, Amanda was back to pacing her small bedroom, her mind warring with itself. She wanted to be free, to use the gifts that God or the Fates had given her, without any moral restraint. She felt like an eight-year-old screaming at her mother that “they were hers; why couldn't she use them like she wanted?” Why did Greg and Lisa have to interfere? After all she had been through, after all she had lost, it wasn't fair that she couldn't do what she wanted. She was being childish, and immature, and self-indulgent, and she really didn't care.

Of course you care.
Michael, her conscience, had returned.

Why? Why do I have to care? Why do I have to keep accepting things graciously?

I doubt Suzie Watts or her boyfriend would agree that you've been gr
a
cious.

“Very funny,” she whispered to her dead husband. She could imagine the broad smile on his face, so much like Greg's.

It's not really a question of control anymore, Amanda; it's a question of exercising that control
. He didn't have to read her mind—extrinsically or intrinsically, he was a part of it. Greg had implanted the fear that she could one day lose control and plow a row of death and destruction where ever she went. It was a hideous vision, and her regression into the petulant pre-teen state was simply her mind's way of coping with that terrible possibility. Only, she had gained some perspective on Mittens's and her blood lust, and with it a degree of control. What had once been an imperative would in time become a simple tool that she could take out and use, or lock away.

Maybe we don't need to do it, but you can't deny that it is the most e
x
citing thing we've ever done.
Mittens had to have her say.

“Amanda? Are you all right?” Lisa asked after a soft knock.

Amanda opened the door. “I guess no one in this house is going to get much sleep tonight,” she said, inviting her mother-in-law inside.

“I saw your light on.” Lisa stood for an awkward moment and then decided to sit in the rocking chair she had once nursed her son in. “It's a good excuse to talk.”

“I'm sorry I hurt the two of you,” Amanda began.

“I know,” Lisa answered. “Greg filled me in. I didn't want to believe it, but I guess he was right.” She stared at Amanda. “I knew something was wrong, but I didn't say anything. No don't …” Lisa cut off Amanda's response. “Just give me a moment and let me get through this. I don't ever want to know any of the details, okay?” Amanda nodded. “We move forward from here. We don't forget what's happened, but we don't dwell on it either. Agreed?” Amanda nodded again. Lisa began to gently rock. “Can you control this?” she asked, and Amanda's first thought was that Lisa had been talking to her son.

“Yes,” she answered—and admitted to herself.

“Do you want to control this?” Lisa followed up, and now Amanda was certain that she had been talking to her son.

“That's the real question.” Amanda sat at the edge of her bed.

“I don't think I have to tell you what's at risk here.” Lisa took Amanda's hand. “We can't follow you down this road.”

Amanda squeezed her surrogate mother's hand, and instead of the usual uncomfortable tingling that came with human touch, she felt a reassuring warmth. “I know, and in moments like this it's not a road I want to go down.” She released Lisa's hands. “But there are other moments when I realize that I have an opportunity to do or to be anything I want.” Lisa visibly reacted as something about Amanda changed. “Before this happened I was a timid, scared little girl, always doing and saying things because they were expected of me, avoiding confrontation at almost any cost. I could count on one hand all the times I had raised my voice in anger. Imagine living with Greg and never raising your voice.” Amanda couldn't help but sense Lisa's unease, and her natural reaction was to console her. “I can't live like I did before, and I know I can't live like I have been. I have to find a middle ground.”

“When Michael was around ten,” Lisa said after a protracted, uncomfortable silence, “we saw a film; I guess it was a documentary or something. In it was a brief clip of a tiny Japanese girl, probably four or five years old. She was half-naked and more than half-starved and was just sitting on a rock wall. I don't remember for sure but I think it might have been outside Hiroshima or Nagasaki, because all around her was absolute devastation. But she didn't have a scratch on her. She was all alone; everyone and everything she knew was gone in a blink of an eye, and she couldn't understand why. An American GI slowly approached her and tried to give her some food. When he was about ten feet away she started to shake with fear. The closer he got the more she shook. She stared at the GI as if he were Death himself, but never moved. Never made an attempt to run. Her eyes …” Lisa wiped a tear, then continued. “They were filled with fear and resignation. She wasn't even old enough to understand the concept of death, but instinctively she accepted it.” More tears fell. Amanda reached for a box of tissues. “Thanks, dear,” Lisa said and dabbed at her face again. “The image of that girl haunted Michael for years. He would have nightmares about her.” Lisa stood after a quiet moment and walked to the dark window, her back to Amanda.

“I'm about to break the last promise I ever made to my son,” Lisa said to the window, Amanda, and the ether. “Two months before he died Michael brought Josh over unexpectedly. School was out, so I was home alone. I can't remember where you were.” She snuffled loudly. “I played with Josh for a time, and he just silently watched us; it was almost as if he was reassuring himself about something. I finally asked him what was wrong. He had a lot of Greg in him, so it took some time to drag it out of him, and then only after he made me promise never to tell you.” Lisa turned and sat on the window sill with her head down, not willing to look up at Amanda. “He had the dream again, only Josh was the little girl and you were the GI, and you weren't trying to help.” She closed her eyes. “Maybe it was just a dream; maybe he saw something. I don't know. I do know it terrified him, and now I can understand why. The woman he loved, the mother of his child, had turned into something unrecognizable.”

Lisa looked up and Amanda looked down. Even before the Change, did her husband believe that she was capable of hurting their son, just as Suzie Watts had done? Could he look into her soul and see the evil that hid behind her accommodating nature? And if he looked into her now, what would he see? Would he recoil in terror? Would he take their son and escape, leaving her with the certainty that she had destroyed the one perfect thing in her life?

It was just a dream
, his voice said from a deep recess of her mind.
Everyone has them, and they mean nothing,
he tried to soothe her.

This was as close as the Michael-in-her-mind had ever come to lying. The reality was that, given the right circumstances, this version of Amanda Flynn could be the terrifying GI in Michael's dream. Maybe she had taken a step away from the abyss, but it still pulled at her. It was no longer a demand; it had become a seduction.

“I'm sorry, Amanda,” Lisa said from across the room. “I can only imagine how that must hurt.”

“No, you can't imagine it, Lisa. You've never betrayed their memory.” Tears fell into her lap as the shell around her soul cracked.

“No matter how you slice it, we don't know what killed this man. No drugs, no toxins, no radiation. That's my official and FINAL word on the matter.” For three weeks a steady parade of increasingly senior agents of the FBI had been hounding Dr. Parisi for something that would explain the death of Bong-hwa Son. His presumed murder had become the feared proverbial international incident. A South Korean national, with remote ties to the National Intelligence Service, had killed an FBI agent in broad daylight, only to die under as yet undetermined circumstances. Fingers were being pointed in both directions as the investigation worked its way through Washington, Denver, and Colorado Springs. No one knew if Ted Alam was a hero or a villain, but it was generally agreed that the Korean, who had liked to introduce himself as Mr. Chang, was not the innocent bystander his government claimed. “If you didn't have the video to the contrary, I would be forced to call this a natural death.” Parisi anxiously shifted his weight in the uncomfortable chair, hoping the Assistant Director of the FBI would take the hint and let him get back to work.

Tim Kerr ignored the coroner's obvious annoyance. “How does this fit with the cases from Colorado?”

“Do you guys bother talking to each other? I've answered this question twice before. Son's intracerebral hemorrhages were much worse than any of those cases. The one that came closest was in a hypertensive elderly male. Hypertensive elder males often die from bleeds in the brain. There's no connection.”

“Sorry to have kept you, Doctor. Thank you for coming in,” Kerr said with the required perfunctory civility. He stood, shook the older man's hand, and then walked him to the door.

“Well, he was loads of help,” Paul Lister said once the door had closed. “I don't care what he says, there has to be a connection. For months Alam worked in the Colorado Springs police department just as they experienced a handful of poorly explained deaths. Way too coincidental. ” Lister shook his head.

Kerr nodded his head in agreement. Unfortunately, their mutual gut feelings had no evidentiary support. He walked back to his desk and noted that Lister was comfortable enough to sit in one of the sofa chairs without being invited. He silently appraised the agent. Lister was what Ted Alam had been destined to become before alcohol addiction had its say. He was the oldest graduate of the FBI training class a year before Alam and had gone from local law enforcement over to the dark side of federal law enforcement. His maturity and experience allowed him to quickly outpace his fellow students, and like Alam he was tapped for the Washington Bureau and rapid advancement. “Nothing more from the ATM video?”

“Same story as last week. Female between five-four and five-six. Light hair. Beyond that all we get are bigger and blurrier pixels.”

“I thought that they had a program to clean up the image.”

“The camera was too far away.”

“Nothing to back up the airline manifests?” It was a routine part of every investigation to review and compare the incoming and outgoing flight manifests. Five minutes of computer work gave the agents the names of one hundred and fifty-six individuals who flew into the Washington area in the twenty-four hours prior to the shooting and then left within twelve hours following it. That was the easy part. The real work was tracking down those one hundred and fifty-six individuals. After three weeks only one name remained: Dalice Watkins, and no one seemed to belong to it. “Dalice flew to Dallas,” Kerr said idly. “You think this is our girl?”

“I'm betting she's the girl on the video, and I'll double down that she's the one who killed the Korean.”

“How?”

“When we find her we'll know.”

“Go to Colorado. Talk to the locals, but don't step on any toes.”

“There may be inconsistencies in the investigations, but there are no inconsistencies in the pathology results,” Phillip Rucker recited to Lister. The FBI agent had nothing to show for the week he spent in the Denver Field Office, so he drove the sixty miles to Colorado Springs. Another week's worth of work only managed to produce a very brief report detailing an investigation involving the same unit that Alam had been stationed with for weeks. The report was two pages long and closed within a day due to a lack of forensic support. It was unlikely in the extreme to lead anywhere, but Lister wanted a second take on the forensics. It was all he had left. Everything that connected Ted Alam with the Korean had vanished. No e-mails, phone calls, forensics, nothing. He promised himself that after he ran the traps in Colorado Springs one more time he would head home.

“All right, let's approach it from a different direction.” Rucker's reputation of inhuman precision and oddity fell far short of the mark. Lister would have no trouble believing that Rucker was proof that aliens lived among us. His autopsy reports were flawless: no typos, misspelt words, smudges, or imperfections of any kind. “Can you review the autopsy report of the victim in Washington and look for any similarities?” Rucker nodded his head. Lister had been warned earlier about avoiding direct physical contact with the pathologist, so instead of passing the thick folder directly to Rucker he placed it on his unnaturally clean desk.

Rucker waited for Lister to sit back into his seat before reaching for the file and carefully opening it. While waiting for Rucker's impressions, Lister assessed the man through the lens of an FBI profiler. Rucker never made eye contact; consistently used formal pronouns; even while sitting he remained rigid, his back never touching the chair. His office had no personal touches, no pictures on his desk or his walls, no vanity wall dedicated to diplomas and awards. Nothing to indicate that he even occupied this office, aside from the name stenciled to the door. He turned the pages mechanically and rapidly, too fast for any normal human to read, but Lister was certain Rucker read every word and missed not a single detail. If this man ever decided to become a serial killer, the FBI would have zero chance of ever proving it.