After the Golden Age

SIX

SEVERAL mornings after Sito’s preliminary hearing, Celia entered the maddeningly serene lobby of the Greenbriar Convalescent Home, a long-term mental health care facility. The carpet was plush, sound-absorbing, and the walls were a calming shade of blue. Soft, inoffensive music played. The place was aggressively calm. She hurried to the receptionist’s desk.

“Hi, I’m Celia West. I have an appointment with Ian Miller in accounting.”

The receptionist was a young woman with a gentle demeanor and a voice that could talk people down from rooftops. “Yes, he’s expecting you. His office is just around the corner.”

Celia followed the directions and soon found herself seated before the desk of Ian Miller, Greenbriar’s head of accounts receivable. He sat rigid in his chair, leaning toward the desk, picking up one item after another and rearranging them: stapler, pencil, file folder.

“You’re here about the Sito case?” he said.

She considered him a moment, then nodded.

“You know our records don’t go back that far. Not the accounting records, at any rate.”

One might think she was investigating him directly.

Before donning his criminal persona as the Destructor and beginning his reign of terror, Simon Sito had spent over a decade at the Greenbriar mental hospital. By all accounts he had suffered a severe nervous breakdown as a result of his job as a research scientist. The records during this time were hazy, as if he suddenly appeared at the hospital one day. All her leads into his past ended there. The rest had been lost, or buried.

“I’m trying to find out how he paid for his stay here,” she said. “Did he have insurance? Who was the insurance with? Is there anyone alive from that time who might be able to help me?”

“I really don’t know. Our personnel files don’t even go back that far.”

“Do you have anything that does go back that far?”

He nodded, quick and birdlike. “The medical records. Our doctors use them for research data. Anonymously, of course.”

It was something. “Could I take a look at those, do you think?”

“Do you have a warrant?”

The people who asked that watched too much television.

She pulled a business-size envelope from her attaché case and handed it over. DA Bronson had written it up and had it approved especially for her.

Most of the trails she followed in her line of work were very well hidden, but recent. Phony bank accounts, fraudulent expense reports, laundered income—the records showing the truth about where the money came from and where it went still existed.

Thirty years was a long time for such records to stick around. She couldn’t hope to be lucky enough to find a canceled check showing the account number that held Sito’s original fortune. But if she was lucky, she’d find some thread to follow, however tenuous.

Miller let her into a musty basement room that held the hospital’s archives: rows and rows of shelves crammed with medical records in brown pasteboard folders. The place was lit by bare bulbs clipped to the ceiling’s naked boards, and smelled of fermented dust.

After fifteen minutes of searching the Ss, Miller pulled Sito’s thick and yellowed file off the shelf. He left her alone with it at a desk in a cubbyhole of a room off the main accounting office.

Nothing to do but start at the front and work her way back.

Sito had been released from the hospital, declared fully recovered and capable of resuming a place as a productive member of society. An experimental treatment involving electroshock therapy had been declared a resounding success. On the contrary, it had been what pushed Sito over the edge—unhinged the part of his mind that held any sort of conscience or moral scruples. He’d fooled them all, told the doctors what they wanted to hear, and behaved how they needed him to behave in order to declare him sane. Who could tell? Maybe he really had been sane when he left. Maybe he hadn’t been planning his campaign of destruction while still under the care of the hospital’s psychiatrists. No one would ever know. The doctor who signed his release had died in the first onslaught, the inelegant but effective firebombing of a medical conference at the university.

Every page under that top one was a catalog of treatments, medications, lengthy reports, and professional musings about this man and what had triggered his debilitating depression. Sito became something of a pet project among the hospital’s doctors. The nurses and orderlies reported that he never gave them any trouble.

With growing anticipation, Celia neared the beginning of the file, the pages that would, she hoped, tell her why Sito had ended up here in the first place, who had admitted him, and how the bills got paid. An insurance ID number, that was all she wanted.

A knock sounded on the frame of the door, which Celia had left open. Startled, she looked up and avoided heaving a frustrated sigh.

A young man in a white lab coat leaned on the door frame. He wore a vaguely predatory expression, staring at her like he might leap at her. She contemplated retreating into a corner.

“Are you Celia West?” he said. His eyes gleamed.

“Yes. And you are—”

He took that as his invitation to rush in, hand extended for her to shake. She did so, confusedly. “I’m Gerald Ivers. Doctor Gerald Ivers. Miller told me you were here.”

Great, she thought. The question was, Why had Miller told anyone she was here? “Can I help you with something?”

He pulled a spare chair from a corner over to her desk and sat on it, right at the edge, leaning forward eagerly. He could strangle her if he wanted. Or she could strangle him.

“I just—well, this is going to sound crazy. But you’re the Celia West? The daughter of Captain Olympus and Spark?”

Just shoot me now … She managed a thin smile. “I’m Warren and Suzanne West’s daughter, yes.”

“Can I ask you a few questions? Let me back up a little. I’m very interested in the psychology of superhuman crime fighters. I’ve written several articles on the subject—I could get copies for you, if you’re interested. You might have a particular insight into this area of study. Purely anecdotal, of course.”

He regarded her, brow raised like he expected her to launch into a personal chat about her parents then and there.

“I’m probably not the best person to ask,” she said. “I’m a little too close to the joke, as it were.”

“You think what your parents do is a joke?”

The last thing she wanted was to have herself psychoanalyzed. “No, of course not. But you should know that I left home on not very good terms when I was seventeen. It wasn’t the best environment to grow up in.”

If he’d whipped out a notepad and started writing, as he looked like he wanted to do, she’d have snatched it out of his hands and beat him with it. But he just stared attentively.

“No, I suppose not. But your perspective on the topic is unique, you have to admit. Why do you think your parents do what they do? Why do any of the city’s crime fighters don costumes and risk their lives?”

He probably wouldn’t go away if she just told him to. If she did that, he’d probably get all kinds of warped ideas about her bitter attitude being a defense mechanism that stemmed from the trauma of growing up in the uncertainty of a household of superhuman vigilantes.

Not that she’d ever thought about this before or anything.

She said, “I think most of them believe their powers are a gift. That because of it they have some kind of destiny, a responsibility to protect those weaker than themselves. It’s a calling.”

“I can’t help but wonder if there’s more to it than that. Look at the Hawk—I’ve studied his case extensively, and he wasn’t superhuman. He had no powers. What drove him to fight crime? Especially under the guise of a costumed persona?”

The Hawk. The original vigilante. He appeared on the scene in Commerce City forty years ago, disappeared twenty years later—after secretly placing a note on the then mayor’s desk that read, “I retire.” Every five years or so a new book came out discussing his case, speculating on his psychology, and guessing who he might have been, really. Worse than the debate about who wrote Shakespeare’s plays. The evidence was just as sketchy. What intrigued people most about him: he’d had no powers. Perfectly normal, mortal. Everyman.

“Maybe some of them get a rush out of it.”

“But if that were the case, why did the Hawk just retire? In studies of people who participate in extreme sports, their activities come to resemble an addiction. They rarely stop until they’re incapacitated or killed. I have an idea that it’s the same with the vigilante crime fighters.”

She might worry about her father getting killed, except he was the indestructible Captain Olympus and the point seemed moot. He looked after her mother and the others. They’d all had scrapes, sure. But they’d come through, every time.

He continued. “Do your parents ever talk about retiring? Do they show any sign of it?”

None at all. But she didn’t think that was Ivers’s business.

“Doctor, have you ever talked to any of the city’s superhumans?”

His lips pressed into a line. “I’m treating Barry Quinn currently.”

Barry Quinn, also known as Plasma. His affinity for electricity made him immune to electric shock. In fact, when he absorbed enough of a charge, he could throw back bolts of lightning at any chosen target. A human capacitor. He’d spent a couple of years as a celebrated hero, made the front pages of the papers. He was also a paranoid schizophrenic who believed his medication dampened his powers. It had only been a matter of time before he ended up here. Mentis had consulted on the case originally. He’d passed along a summary, and an unhopeful prognosis.

“How is that going?”

He started to say something, then shook his head. “Doctor-patient confidentiality. I really can’t say. On the other hand, there’s your father. Successful, healthy—he’s been at this for a quarter of a century.”

Her father, healthy? To her credit, she didn’t laugh. “You should talk to him yourself.”

His eyes went round; he looked stricken. “But how would I find him? How would I contact him? Vigilante crime fighters don’t exactly have phone numbers.”

“His identity’s been known for years. The number for West Corp’s central offices is listed. You could set up an appointment with my dad’s secretary.”

“I suppose … I hadn’t really considered … I can see you’re busy, Ms. West. I ought to leave you to it. Thanks for your time.” He retreated, backing out of the room as he stammered his excuses.

If she wanted to give the guy a heart attack, she could ask Arthur Mentis or Analise to give him a call.

She finally reached the first entry in Simon Sito’s medical file. This was a five-page report detailing a laboratory accident that had precipitated Sito’s nervous breakdown. At least, Celia assumed the report detailed the accident. Great swaths of it were blacked out, censored by government order. Sito had been working on government research. None of this was new information. She might be inclined to assume that Sito had been cared for by a government or military pension. But that wouldn’t have paid for a stay at a place like Greenbriar. He’d have been placed at Elroy or some other public or military hospital.

According to the report, or what was left of it, Sito hadn’t been physically injured. The project wasn’t of a kind that could cause physical injury. Instead, the failure of the project had unbalanced him. That was why he’d been placed in a psychiatric ward. The hospital bills had been paid by a trust fund set up on his behalf—the source of the fund wasn’t listed.

The information that had been blacked out involved the substance of the experiment—what exactly Sito and the research team had been trying to accomplish—and the other parties involved. There was another party involved. Sito was working for a private lab, and that lab was under contract to the government. That lab had probably provided Sito’s trust fund.

The censors had left her one scrap of information. They had been most concerned with people, with the research, anything that could be used to figure out what Sito had been working on. But they’d left her the name of the building where the lab had been located: Leyden Industrial Park. That was enough of a scrap to keep her moving.

In the meantime, she had a date to get ready for.