Shadowfires (39 page)

“Really? Well . . . I knew of one girl who was fourteen. At the time, Eric was thirty-one.”

“This was before Geneplan?”

“Yes. Eric was at UCLA then. Not rich yet, but we could all see he would one day leave academia and take the real world by storm.”

“A respected professor wouldn’t go around bragging about bedding fourteen-year-old girls,” Julio said. “How’d you find out?”

“It happened on a weekend,” Dr. Solberg said, “when his lawyer was out of town and he needed someone to post bail. He trusted no one but me to keep quiet about the ugly details of the arrest. I sort of resented that, too. He knew I’d feel a moral obligation to endorse any censure movement against a colleague involved in such sordid business, but he also knew I’d feel obligated to keep any confidences he imparted, and he counted on the second obligation being stronger than the first. Maybe, to my discredit, it was.”

Easton Solberg gradually settled deeper in his chair while he talked, as if trying to hide behind the mounds of papers on his desk, embarrassed by the sleazy tale he had to tell. That Saturday, eleven years ago, after receiving Leben’s call, Dr. Solberg had gone to a police precinct house in Hollywood, where he had found an Eric Leben far different from the man he knew: nervous, uncertain of himself, ashamed, lost. The previous night, Eric had been arrested in a vice-squad raid at a hot-bed motel where Hollywood streetwalkers, many of them young runaways with drug problems, took their johns. He was caught with a fourteen-year-old girl and charged with statutory rape, a mandatory count even when an underage girl admittedly solicits sex for pay.

Initially Leben told Easton Solberg that the girl had looked considerably older than fourteen, that he’d had no way of knowing she was a juvenile. Later, however, perhaps disarmed by Solberg’s kindness and concern, Leben broke down and talked at length of his obsession with young girls. Solberg had not really wanted to know any of it, but he could not refuse Eric a sympathetic ear. He sensed that Eric—who was a distant and self-possessed loner, unlikely ever to have unburdened himself to anyone—desperately needed to confide his intimate feelings and fears to someone at that bleak, low point in his life. So Easton Solberg listened, filled with both disgust and pity.

“His was not just a lust for young girls,” Solberg told Julio and Reese. “It was an obsession, a compulsion, a terrible gnawing
need
.”

Only thirty-one then, Leben was nevertheless deeply frightened of growing old and dying. Already longevity research was the center of his career. But he did not approach the problem of aging
only
in a scientific spirit; privately, in his personal life, he dealt with it in an emotional and irrational manner. For one thing, he felt that he somehow absorbed the vital energies of youth from the girls he bedded. Although he knew that notion was ridiculous, almost superstitious, he was still compelled to pursue those girls. He was not really a child molester in the classic sense, did not force himself on mere children. He only went after those girls who were willing to cooperate, usually teenage runaways reduced to prostitution.

“And sometimes,” Easton Solberg said with soft dismay, “he liked to . . . slap them around. Not really beat them but rough them up. When he explained it to me, I had the feeling that he was explaining it to himself for the first time. These girls were so young that they were full of the special arrogance of youth, that arrogance born of the certainty they’d live forever; and Eric felt that, by hurting them, he was knocking the arrogance out of them, teaching them the fear of death. He was, as he put it, ‘stealing their innocence, the energy of their youthful innocence,’ and he felt that somehow this made him younger, that the stolen innocence and youth became his own.”

“A psychic vampire,” Julio said uneasily.

“Yes!” Solberg said. “Exactly. A psychic vampire who could stay young forever by draining away the youth of these girls. Yet at the same time, he knew it was a fantasy, knew the girls could not keep him young, but knowing and acknowledging it did nothing to loosen the grip of the fantasy. And though he knew he was sick—even mocked himself, called himself a degenerate—he couldn’t break free of his obsession.”

“What happened to the charge of statutory rape?” Reese asked. “I’m not aware he was tried or convicted. He had no police record.”

“The girl was remanded to juvenile authorities,” Solberg said, “and put in a minimum-security facility. She slipped away, skipped town. She’d been carrying no identification, and the name she gave them proved false, so they had no way of tracking her. Without the girl, they had no case against Eric, and the charges were dropped.”

“You urged him to seek psychiatric help?” Julio asked.

“Yes. But he wouldn’t. He was an extremely intelligent man, introspective, and he had already analyzed himself. He knew—or at least believed that he knew—the cause of his mental condition.”

Julio leaned forward in his chair. “And the cause as he saw it?”

Solberg cleared his throat, started to speak, shook his head as if to say that he needed a moment to decide how to proceed. He was obviously embarrassed by the conversation and was equally disturbed by his betrayal of Eric Leben’s confidence even though Leben was now dead. The heaps of papers on the desk no longer provided adequate cover behind which to hide, so Solberg got up and went to the window because it afforded the opportunity to turn his back on Julio and Reese, thus concealing his face.

Solberg’s dismay and self-reproach over revealing confidential information about a dead man—of whom he had been little more than an acquaintance—might have seemed excessive to some, yet Julio admired Solberg for it. In an age when few believed in moral absolutes, many would betray a friend without a qualm, and a moral dilemma of this nature would be beyond their understanding. Solberg’s old-fashioned moral anguish seemed excessive only by current, decadent standards.

“Eric told me that, as a child, he was sexually molested by an uncle,” Solberg said to the window glass. “Hampstead was the man’s name. The abuse started when Eric was four and continued till he was nine. He was terrified of this uncle but too ashamed to tell anyone what was happening. Ashamed because his family was so religious. That’s important, as you’ll see. The Leben family was devoutly, ardently religious. Nazarenes. Very strict. No music. No dancing. That cold, narrow religion that makes life a bleakness. Of course, Eric felt like a sinner because of what he’d done with his uncle, even though he was forced into it, and he was afraid to tell his parents.”

“It’s a common pattern,” Julio said, “even in families that aren’t religious. The child blames himself for the adult’s crime.”

Solberg said, “His terror of Barry Hampstead—that was the first name, yes—grew greater month by month, week by week. And finally, when Eric was nine, he stabbed Hampstead to death.”

“Nine?” Reese said, appalled. “Good heavens.”

“Hampstead was asleep on the sofa,” Solberg continued, “and Eric killed him with a butcher’s knife.”

Julio considered the effects of that trauma on a nine-year-old boy who was already emotionally disturbed from the ordeal of long-term physical abuse. In his mind’s eye, he saw the knife clutched in the child’s small hand, rising and falling, blood flying off the shining blade, and the boy’s eyes fixed in horror upon his grisly handiwork, repelled by what he was doing, yet compelled to finish it.

Julio shivered.

“Though everyone then learned what had been going on,” Solberg said, “Eric’s parents somehow, in their twisted way, saw him as both a fornicator and a murderer, and they began a fevered and very psychologically damaging campaign to save his soul from hell, praying over him day and night, disciplining him, forcing him to read and reread passages of the Bible aloud until his throat cracked and his voice faded to a hoarse whisper. Even after he got out of that dark and hateful house and got through college by working part-time jobs and winning scholarships, even after he’d piled up a mountain of academic achievements and had become a respected man of science, Eric continued to half believe in hell and in his own certain damnation. Maybe he even more than
half
believed.”

Suddenly Julio saw what was coming, and a chill as cold as any he had ever felt sneaked up the small of his back. He glanced at his partner and saw, in Reese’s face, a look of horror that mirrored Julio’s feelings.

Still staring out at the verdant campus, which was as thoroughly sun-splashed as before but which seemed to have grown darker, Easton Solberg said, “You already know of Eric’s deep and abiding commitment to longevity research and his dream of immortality achieved through genetic engineering. But now perhaps you see why he was so obsessed with achieving that unrealistic—some would call it irrational and impossible—goal. In spite of all his education, in spite of his ability to reason, he was illogical about this one thing: in his heart he believed that he would go to hell when he died, not merely because he had sinned with his uncle but because he had killed his uncle as well, and was both a fornicator and a murderer. He told me once that he was afraid he’d meet his uncle again in hell and that eternity would be, for him, total submission to Barry Hampstead’s lust.”

“Dear God,” Julio said shakily, and he unconsciously made the sign of the cross, something he had not done outside of church since he was a child.

Turning away from the window and facing the detectives at last, the professor said, “So for Eric Leben, immortality on earth was a goal sought not only out of a love of life but out of a special fear of hell. I imagine you can see how, with such motivation, he was destined to be a driven man, obsessed.”

“Inevitably,” Julio said.

“Driven to young girls, driven to seek ways to extend the human life span, driven to cheat the devil,” Solberg said. “Year by year it became worse. We drifted apart after that weekend when he made his confessions, probably because he regretted that he’d told me his secrets. I doubt he even told his wife about his uncle and his childhood when he married her a few years later. I was probably the only one. But in spite of the growing distance between us, I heard from poor Eric often enough to know his fear of death and damnation became worse as he grew older. In fact, after forty, he was downright frantic. I’m sorry he died yesterday; he was a brilliant man, and he had the power to contribute so much to humanity. On the other hand, his was not a happy life. And perhaps his death was even a blessing in disguise because . . .”

“Yes?” Julio said.

Solberg sighed and wiped one hand over his moonish face, which had sagged somewhat with weariness. “Well, sometimes I worried about what Eric might do if he ever achieved a breakthrough in the kind of research he was pursuing. If he thought he had a means of editing his genetic structure to dramatically extend his life span, he might have been just foolish enough to experiment on himself with an unproven process. He would know the terrible risks of tampering with his own genetic makeup, but compared to his unrelenting dread of death and the afterlife, those risks might seem minor. And God knows what might have happened to him if he had used himself as a guinea pig.”

What would you say if you knew that his body disappeared from the morgue last night? Julio wondered.

They did not attempt to put the Xerox of the Wildcard file in order, but scooped up all the loose papers from the cabin’s living-room floor and dropped them in a plastic Hefty garbage bag that Benny got from a box in one of the kitchen drawers. He twisted the top of the bag and secured it with a plastic-coated wire tie, then placed it on the rear floor of the Mercedes, behind the driver’s seat.

They drove down the dirt road to the gate, on the other side of which they had parked the Ford. As they had hoped, on the same ring with the car keys, they found a key that fit the padlock on the gate.

Benny brought the Ford inside, and as he edged past her, Rachael drove the Mercedes out through the gate and parked just beyond.

She waited nervously with the 560 SEL, her thirty-two in one hand and her gaze sweeping the surrounding forest.

Benny went down the road on foot, out of sight, to the three vehicles that were parked on the lay-by near one of the driveway entrances they had passed earlier on their way up the mountainside. He carried with him the two license plates from the Mercedes—plus a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. When he returned, he had the plates from one of the Dodge Chargers, which he attached to the Mercedes.

He got in the car with her and said, “When you get to Vegas, go to a public phone, look up the number for a guy named Whitney Gavis.”

“Who’s he?”

“An old friend. And he works for me. He’s watching over that rundown motel I told you about—the Golden Sand Inn. In fact, he found the property and turned me on to its potential. He’s got keys. He can let you in. Tell him you need to stay in the manager’s suite and that I’ll be joining you tonight. Tell him as much as you want to tell him; he can keep his mouth shut, and if he’s going to be dragged into it, he should know how serious this is.”

“What if he’s heard about us on the radio or TV?”

“Won’t matter to Whitney. He won’t believe we’re killers or Russian agents. He’s got a good head on him, an excellent bullshit detector, and nobody has a better sense of loyalty than Whit. You can trust him.”

“If you say so.”

“There’s a two-car garage behind the motel office. Make sure you put the Mercedes in there, out of sight, soon as you arrive.”

“I don’t like this.”

“I’m not crazy about it, either,” Benny said. “But it’s the right plan. We’ve already discussed it.” He leaned over and put one hand against her face, then kissed her.

The kiss was sweet, and when it ended she said, “As soon as you’ve searched the cabin, you’ll leave? Whether or not you’ve found any clue to where Eric might’ve gone?”