The Dream Machine: Book 6, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed) (16 page)

“Which dreams do you want to see?”

The grad student’s name was Greta. Her face was full and round no doubt in the image of her Germanic ancestors.

“All of them.”

She laughed like she thought I was kidding. “Alison has been here a long time.”

“I understand,” I said.

She stopped laughing. “You’re serious?”

“I am. Very serious.”

“That’s probably over…” She struggled with the mental math.

“It’s a lot, I know.”

“Uh…okay. I’ll have to get you linked into the server then. I can’t send all that data to you.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it.”

She lingered in the doorway. “Are you really going to watch all of that video?”

“I’ll probably start with the last couple of weeks.”

“I’ll save you the trouble. Whatever we haven’t shared with you and the agent is non-sensical dreaming.”

“Non-sensical maybe, but don’t we think there is meaning in all dreams?”

She shook her head. “Actually no. Most of the scientific community has moved off that position. The preferred theory these days is that dreams are just the brain’s way of interpreting its own signals and neurons firing while you’re asleep. It tries to create a meaningful sensory experience for the dreamer.”

I thought about what Betty had told me. “What about the interplay between dreams and memory?”

She smiled. “A+ for the layman. What you’re going to see is mostly that. Alison is like everybody else here for the most part. She dreams about her day or about things she’s done frequently in her life and inputs them into the dream sequence.”

“Give me an example,” I said.

She didn’t even have to think about it. “Like email. This week she dreamed about opening her emails. Over and over.”

I nodded. “Thanks, Greta. I’ll take a look.”

“We didn’t miss anything.” She grew defiant. “We’ve pored over this stuff.”

“I’m sure you did. But you also weren’t looking for what I’m looking for. So no knock on you if you didn’t see something I do.”

She seemed to accept this. “Okay. I’ll get your profile set up on our server.”

“Thanks again.”

Off she went. I sat back and tried to process everything I’d seen in the last twenty-four hours. It was too much to take in, really. Manetti came back to the office a few minutes later.

“Pater’s up to speed.”

“He have any ideas?” I asked, hopeful.

She shook her head. “We’re doing everything that we can. Any luck with Alison’s friends on Facebook?”

“She has about two thousand. I’m focusing on the women for now. If the profile pic resembles the woman in the video in the slightest, I do a deeper dive and go onto that person’s page.”

Manetti thought about that for a moment. “We have facial recognition software. God, why didn’t I think of this already?”

“Facial recognition software? You mean like the kind the casinos use to ID frequent gamblers that beat the house?”

“Yes, only better. What we need to do is program a spider to crawl through all these people’s pages of Facebook.”

“Can you do that?”

She shook her head. “No, but I can get help.”

“Why don’t we do that on the internet in general?”

“It would take forever and we wouldn’t get anywhere…unless we refined our search parameters.”

I had no idea if this would help, but it was more than we had. “Keep it local, in the Delaware Valley. So far Alison’s dreams have been local in nature. Even the hurricane ones, that was her predicting when they would impact this area.”

“Right. I’ll talk to the guy and see what he can do.”

“Do you have vitals on the shootout at the strip mall?”

She nodded at the tablet. “Check your email.”

Manetti got on the phone to talk about spiders. She told the guy to focus on Alison’s friends’ pages on Facebook first, then to expand the search parameters to local people.

Manetti said, “Once you pull the names run a cross-reference to see if any have filed DV or assault charges. Restraining orders are a bonus. Maybe we get lucky. Most of the time the vic knows the perp, it’s rare you get a freak that breaks into the house to rape a woman.”

Good ole-fashioned police work.

Manetti was still talking. “I know the search will return the phone book, let’s worry about that later. Right now we just need somewhere to start. Thanks.”

That was for damned sure. We needed
somewhere
to start. Otherwise I felt like we had nothing. We had a video of a man violating a woman in a non-descript, dark bedroom where very few details were discernible. We couldn’t really get a bead on the guy and even the woman’s face was blurry. Neither Alison nor her parents knew the people in the video. And I was literally out of ideas.

Manetti excused herself to make some more calls.

I opened my email to find the message from her. It contained links to the official police reports on the strip mall shootout. People dead, injured…but not too many. Thank the Universe for small favors, I guess.

Members of two rival gangs had arrived onsite simultaneously. This was no planned battle. One thing led to another. Because one guy had grown up in one neighborhood, and the other guy had grown up in another, this was apparently provocation enough to turn a Delaware strip mall into Iraq. So two asshats had taken out their illegally-obtained automatic weapons and opened fire. Their aim was about as poor as their ability to think rationally and consider alternatives to killing some guys “just because.” They opened fire and unleashed a hail of automatic gunfire in the middle of the afternoon at a busy locale.

There were no less than fifty witnesses to the shootout in various stores or in the parking lot itself. The closest business had been a convenience store situated at one end of the strip. The shooters had knocked out the storefront windows. I read over the names of the victims and witnesses…of course I didn’t know any of them. What I really needed was to get this list in front of Alison. And hopefully Greta would set up my profile on their server so I could tap into the dream of the shootout and show that to Alison.

I used the phone to call up to her room. I hoped the ringing wouldn’t exacerbate the migraine too much but justified the intrusion because I was trying to stop something horrible from happening.

Alison didn’t answer.

Tablet in hand, I went upstairs to her room. The door was shut and no light was coming out from under it. A nurse saw me about to knock and homed in on me like a guided missile. She didn’t allow me to explain why I was up there. She just herded me out.

I found a spot to sit and think. I emailed Manetti back rather than call her, asking if she could send the witness list to Ted and Karen. Maybe they knew somebody on there.

Then I went back to the rape video.

It was just as difficult to watch the fifth and sixth and seventh times as it had been the first. The woman struggled mightily but eventually relented, her body going slack under the heaving mass on top of her.

I wanted to retch. The feeling of nausea reminded me I hadn’t eaten. So I went downstairs to the cafeteria.

They were about to close. They’d long since put the hot meals away so I made due with soda, crackers, and chips. Dinner of champions. Then I found a cozy spot in the atrium with my back to a wall so nobody could see what I was watching on the laptop.

After I scarfed down about three thousand calories of absolute non-nutritious junk, I forced myself to watch the video again. I didn’t want to. It wasn’t getting easier and I wasn’t getting numb to it.

“Look for clues, dummy,” I said to myself and earned a few stares from some of the patients.

I hit PLAY and the video started from the beginning. The first couple of minutes was like watching a dog run unthinkingly across a highway. You knew something awful was going to happen and were powerless to stop it.

I focused on the bedroom but there was just nothing there that stood out. A bed, a nightstand, some pictures on the nightstand and some books. Maybe some dirty clothes just at the edge of the “screen.” The woman on the bed, sleeping on her back.

When the man came in I almost turned it off. I’d had enough. I couldn’t go another round with this nightmare. The soda and crackers and chips were not cooperating either. But I didn’t take my eyes away.

God I had to stop watching. But I didn’t.

He went to work on himself. And again, I thought it looked weird. Not that I watched other guys masturbating on a regular basis, but the way this guy did it was weird. Almost like it was his first time. His movements were awkward, like he still hadn’t figured out how to do it.

I chalked that up to his being a sexual pervert, of course. And then it got worse, the woman woke, and…

I tapped the screen and minimized the window. No more. I wasn’t going to watch that anymore. The woman’s face was a blur. All I got was a shot of the guy’s profile, which wouldn’t help me at all really. Somebody’s sideview was remarkably different than head-on. There was nothing in the bedroom that gave away the location of the house or the identity of the woman. I was totally aggravated and disgusted and disappointed in myself. Manetti had some techie running a spider across Facebook and looking to see if any of those women had filed charges in the past…was that really all we could do?

I stood. Paced. There had to be something else. Something. I couldn’t just sit here and—

“There you are.”

Manetti crossed the atrium and sat, putting one knee over the other.

“Deep breath, Eddie.”

“We’re not doing enough,” I said.

“Deep breath.”

“She can see into the future,” I said, for some reason absolutely sure now compared to earlier when I’d failed to commit to an answer in front of Alison. “She can see into the future. This—” I pointed at the laptop. “—this is going to happen. And we’re just sitting around, waiting for it to happen.”

“Eddie, we’re working all the angles.”

“It’s not good enough,” I said.

“I know.” Manetti nodded. “It never is. Believe me. You make the best of what you have.”

“Yeah.” I stopped in front of her. “But I can’t just sit here and do nothing.”

“So what do you want to do?”

I had no idea. “Did you email Ted and—”

She nodded.

“And?”

“They don’t recognize any of the names.”

“Fuck.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know—something.”

“So do something.”

“Okay.” I had no idea what I’d do once I got there, but I decided I had to go to the strip mall where the shootout had been. I told Manetti, and she nodded.

“I’ll go with you.”

Tomorrow night.

Alison didn’t know for sure it would be tomorrow night, but she had a feeling. It made sense. The hurricane was supposed to make landfall in the afternoon, they were saying. It was their perfect opportunity.

But could she do this? Could she really let him get away?

So far she hadn’t done anything
really
bad. She’d let him borrow her phone for a few days so he could talk to friends. That wasn’t horrible.

But tomorrow night would be different. If he got away and did something terrible, then that would be on her.

But terrible was a construct, wasn’t it? The concept of terrible depended on their being a right and wrong, and these days, Alison wasn’t so sure any such things existed.

There was no such thing as right and wrong, not really. There were only general ideas that people mostly agreed on, but just as often didn’t. So what if she let him go? Whatever happened after that would be his doing, not hers. And this had been part of the deal.

But there was a bigger problem, wasn’t there? Eddie and this federal agent didn’t believe her. She had gotten the warning about them, had dismissed it, but now having spoken with them a few times, she knew the warning was justified. Eddie wasn’t ready to believe in her abilities, even after he himself had almost died in that car accident.

No, she was sure of it: he would do everything in his power to discredit her. Having read up on him only confirmed her fear. He was a ghost hunter. This was what he did: investigated strange phenomena and debunked them with a rational explanation. He’d earned the respect of his mouth-breather community by discrediting a town-wide haunting in Pennsylvania a few years back.

He would do the same with her. He would debunk her sight. Even though she was pretty sure she had the sight. If she didn’t, why would Zane have kept her around this long?

She couldn’t let that happen.

And she also couldn’t let the other man get away.

Alison heard the knock at the door. Probably Eddie. She didn’t want to talk to him. She didn’t want to talk to him ever again. And maybe she wouldn’t have to.

Yes, this could work.