The Memory Killer (13 page)

He rolled back from the desk and took a final look at the equipment. He shut the computers down, and began removing the connecting cables, reflecting on his life since beating it from Manhattan with the police on his heels.

After moving to the backwoods of Kentucky, he’d been so fiercely bored he cataloged all flora on his ten-acre property, simultaneous teaching himself French to fit with his new guise (and to read Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Valéry without a translator’s intervention). He’d also taken to watching business news in the afternoon while preparing dinner. He’d had no prior knowledge of business, a quotidian endeavor practiced by a financio-merchant class that seemed devoid of scruples, though tended to dress rather well.

While he watched the pot simmer with a rabbit ragout or whisked his
sauce hollandaise
, he flicked between Bloomberg and CNBC. At first it was gibberish, numbers and symbols and icons and a never-ending procession of men and women with second-tier minds (though conducting themselves as though they were first-tier) spouting conclusions about the markets that were immediately contravened by the next series of talking heads. Bond merchants said one thing, stockbrokers another, sellers of precious metals had their own spin.

But as he watched and whisked, listened and ladled, Ridgecliff discerned one vital trait: though comprised of thousands of interwoven parts too complex and ever-shifting to create an over-arching analysis, the market – as a whole; as an
entity
– had a personality. And because it was comprised of humans, it was a human personality, subject not to logic, but trends and phobias and false confidence and insecurities and idiot worship and self-aggrandizement and the need to see itself as the exact center of the universe
.

Ridgecliff had arrived at his moment of enlightenment just as the roux in a chicken-okra gumbo had come to the boil, meaning absolutely nothing, but something many people would take as a sign that gumbo was his lucky food.
Which was the whole point: the market did not make mathematical sense, but humanized sense.

The market had a personality and it was neurotic.

Even better, this neurotic personality was moronically simple, with only two true states: blustering drunkard and scared child. Anything else was just transition. When the drunkard was ramping into a screaming, self-centered bender, Jeremy Ridgecliff played the bull. When conditions changed and the scared child began mewling and simpering, he played the bear. When the market was in transition, he put his winnings elsewhere, like real estate, hedges, or venture-capital funds.

It was so simple he wondered why no one had figured it out before. But then realized that a decade in an institution for the criminally insane was excellent backgrounding in analyzing the patterns of greed, dysfunction and insecurity.

Ridgecliff was setting a small monitor into a packing crate when his desk phone rang. He leaned over the screen on the console, saw
CARSON
listed as the caller. He sighed and shook his head as the words spread from the speaker into the room.

“JEREMY! CALL ME, GODDAMMIT! I’M WORRIED ABOUT YOU!”

The caller paused as if to add more, but clicked off. Ridgecliff rolled the chair to the phone’s connection to the wall and pulled it out. “If you’re worried now, Brother,” he chuckled, “I’m afraid things are going to get even tougher.”

He padded the phone with bubble wrap and set it in one of the large boxes provided by the moving company, then went to the door and turned to see the entirety of his office in three packing crates sitting beside his chair, desk, and lamp. The moving company had taken the rest of the contents of his home, his office all that was left.

He started to turn off the light, but paused to take a final look at the room where his fortunes had begun and were daily changing for the better. He felt an odd quiver somewhere near his heart: a sense without analog or precedent.

My God,
he thought. Is that
wistfulness
? He flicked off the light.

She was right. It could happen.

When it came time to take Morningstar to dinner, I first wondered if I’d made a mistake – a night of escape in the midst of a horrendous case seemed irresponsible – but I justified it with the realization that I’d been averaging fourteen-hours days for over a week. I headed home early, changed into fancier threads, made one angry and pointless call to my idiot brother, then headed back to Miami to take the simple-black-dressed Madame Morningstar to dinner. My blackened grouper, fried platanas and hearts-of-palm salad were superb. Morningstar opted for shrimp marinated in lime, peppers, and garlic over arroz con frijoles negros, and a mango-coconut salad. Being more a beer and bourbon fancier, I let her pick the dinner wine, a California Riesling she pronounced to be “bodaciously good”.

When the plates were cleared we declined dessert in favor of rum drinks, daiquiri for her, collins for me. The orchestra, which had been playing a kind of Latin swing for the first set, ratcheted up several notches, like the musicians were waking up from naps. Chairs crunched back as diners took to the dance floor. Act two had begun, heralded by flourishes of conga.

We watched for several numbers. Actually, I was watching Morningstar watching the dancers, her shoulders bobbing and toes tapping. Our dining conversation had been relaxed and delightful and without a single reference to workaday hassles. We’d spoken at length about her decision to leave pathology, and she seemed buoyed by the prospect of the intensive study and work required to enter a different field of medicine. But that had been blown away by the new volume of the band, the music now trembling with energy and intensity.

The music continued. Morningstar tapped my hand and leaned across the table. “Do you samba?” she asked, speaking loudly over the music.

“I’m a dance illiterate. I Dougie’d once.” I illustrated the point by gyrating my legs and waving my hands across my hair.

She laughed. “The Dougie’s not a dance, it’s a series of spasms.”

“Then perhaps samba is beyond my ability.”

She stood and offered her hand. “The samba is about passion and fluidity. Let’s see how you score in those areas.”

Morningstar stripped the motions to a minimum and within minutes I had traded self-conscious caution for an immersion in blaring trumpets and frenetic congas. The moves arrived as if borne by music and for the first time in my life I knew what dancing was all about. We kept it up song after song, returning to our table only to finish old drinks and call for new ones.

“Are your legs tiring?” she asked as the musicians started the third set.

“I think they’re finally waking up,” I said.

Somehow, the hours passed in minutes and the orchestra was packing away their instruments. “Could I get you to do this again?” Morningstar said.

“I’m ready for Carnevale,” I said, stealing from Gary Ocampo.

When I pulled in front of her home, the moon was rising through the palms like a beacon. The Rover’s windows were open and the breeze was sweetened by dream scents rising from sleeping flowers. Her hand touched mine.

“Would you like to come in and have a nightcap?”

I opted for brandy, she for Chardonnay. Her home was light and open, the cream walls hung with bright-hued paintings by local artists. We retreated to a screened-in veranda to stand side by side and study a wild garden strung with vines and bleached by moonglow. Backyard palms swayed against an indigo sky.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“My own little paradise in the heart of the city.”

She turned to me and we kissed, tentative at first, then deep and searching, our hands sliding along one another’s contours. When we parted her eyes were low-lidded and her voice husky. “What do you think about making love?” she said, her hands gliding to my hips and pulling them close.

“It’s like a samba, right?” I suggested. “Passion and fluidity?”

“Exactly,” she smiled. “But a bit like the Dougie, too.”

“How’s that?”

She put her lips beside my head. Her whisper was a warm breeze in my ear.

“Correctly done, it ends in a series of spasms.”

I was awakened with a hand on my shoulder and a voice at my ear. I blinked my eyes open and saw the luscious Vivian Morningstar looming above me with her cell phone in hand.

“It’s your understudy,” she said, holding out the phone. “Why did Gershwin call me?”

“My phone is turned off.”

A raised eyebrow. “I mean, how did he know you’d be here?”

“I swear I only told him we were going to dinner.”

A sly smile. “He has a lot of faith in you.”

I took the phone. “What is it, Zigs?”

“Donnie’s claimed another victim, sahib. Maybe.”

“Why maybe?”

“There’s something different. I’m at the hospital and you better come and look.”

I arrived a half-hour later. Gershwin was in the lobby and had just received the latest news from Dr Costa. Ziggy had had assembled the information, scant as it was, one page in his notepad.

“Where was he found?” I asked as we rode up in the elevator.

“On a road beside the Wildlife Management Area just across the Palm Beach County line. He was lying in the center of the lane.”

We went to the room to find the victim’s eyes blackened and a gauze compress on the crown of his head. I knew he was Harold Brighton, having gone through the Missing-Person files so often the young male faces were imprinted in my mind. Brighton was the radiant, clean-cut visage with close-cropped blond hair and teeth no orthodontist would make a nickel from. He was smiling as if his life knew no bounds.

Dr Costa was writing on a clipboard; he turned and saw me looking at the head compress. “He was hit with something,” Costa said. “Blunt object. Two stitches required. No major trauma indicated, although the blow probably induced unconsciousness.”

“Is his back scratched with—”

“The infinity sign? Yes.”

I turned to Gershwin. “So what’s different?”

“Can I see the victim’s leg again, Doc?” Gershwin asked.

When Costa lifted the sheet covering Brighton’s legs, I sucked in a breath. The legs were swathed in thick wrapping discolored by seeping blood and body fluids. A tube emerged from the wrapping, dripping pink juice into a plastic bag under the bed. Two purple-black toes peeked out from the dressings on the near leg.

“It seems Donnie-boy went ballistic on the knees and ankles with something hard and heavy,” Gershwin said. “Ball bat, truncheon, pipe. The soft tissue and bone were basically pulped.”

Costa stepped close. “The left leg will have to be amputated,” he said. “The specialist doesn’t think there’s much left to save.”

“Brighton’s the dancer,” I said, staring at the ruination until Costa lowered the cover.

“Was the dancer, Big Ryde,” Gershwin corrected. “He’s had his last waltz.”

Gershwin and I went to Brighton’s street-level apartment, one of a dozen in a stucco building just north of the U of M. The landlord supplied a key and I pushed open the wooden door, stepping in with Gershwin on my heels.

“Uh-oh,” he said. “I think Donnie’s been by.”

The walls had been covered with posters from the Dance Theater of Harlem, Joffrey Ballet and the like. They were now in tatters on the floor, taped corners still sticking to the wall in places. The same had happened in the kitchen and the bedroom, anything representative of dance stripped from the wall to the floor.

“Disarray,” Gershwin said. “Like in Caswell’s place.”

“The disarray at Caswell’s seemed from a struggle,” I corrected, “things unintentionally knocked over. This is intentional, and probably very angry.”

“Like, I’m taking dancing out of your life?” Gershwin mused, staring at a floor filled with torn images of flying legs, whirling arms, and faces alight with joy.

I nodded. “Though Donnie might not even have known it yet himself.”

I called for an evidence unit to swing by, though I suspected the apartment would yield nothing usable. We knew the perpetrator’s name, height, eye color, skin tone … everything. Sheets with his photo were at every regional law enforcement entity. Our secondary team along with the police auxiliary had recently dropped off sheets at every gay bar between Orlando and Homestead. We had everything covered.

We just couldn’t find him.

Back at HQ we met up with Roy in his office, frowning into a newly purchased box of cigars as if wondering should he take the elevator down twenty-three floors to go outside and grab a few succulent puffs. When we entered he sighed and slipped them back into a drawer as we filled him in on the latest.

“Why the change in attack?” he asked. “The added physicality?”

“Two thoughts, Roy: this was more personal because maybe Donnie knew Brighton, had a history with him. Or …”

Roy lowered his head into his hands and massaged his temples. “Let me guess. You’re about to tell me the perp’s no longer happy just to shut off their voices and fill their heads with ugly visions, he now needs broken bones?”

“He may have intended to break a knee and just kept beating, Roy.”

“You’re saying …”

I thought back to the thick dressings covering what had once been a man’s legs. In the span of three victims Donnie had moved from sexual torment to explosive physical destruction. I recalled my brother’s words from a long-ago case, describing a perp as being on a reverse diet: “
The more you eat, Carson, the hungrier you get
.”

“I think he liked it, Roy,” I said. “I think he liked it a lot.”

“Can you stop him fast, Carson? Can you get this invisible SOB?”

I went to the window and looked out for a full minute. It was not a decision to be taken lightly.

“I want to talk to a specialist,” I finally said, turning. “A guy I know who’s the best at this kind of thing.”

Roy showed puzzlement. “Better than you?”

“I learned the Masters-degree material on my own, Roy. But this guy gave me my PhD in Freakology.”

I jogged back to my office and closed the door. The case was going nowhere. Even though we knew what the perp looked like and every cop in Miami-Dade and surrounding jurisdictions had a copy of his facial composite image, not to mention private security firms, university security, shopping-mall security and even – Gershwin handing out flyers at intersections – school crossing guards, we’d not had a single solid lead, and about seven hundred mushy ones.