The Dead Man

Chapter Twenty

The personnel directory Leonard gave me listed Anthony Corliss's office on the fourth floor and Maggie Brennan's on the third. I tried Corliss first. He answered on the first knock.

"Door's unlocked."

The lights were turned off, the blinds drawn, the only illumination coming from a desk lamp and a flat panel television mounted on one wall. Corliss was leaning back in his chair, feet on his desk.

Two people, a woman and a man, their backs to me, occupied chairs in front of his desk. I stepped to one side, giving me a view of their profiles. Both looked to be in their midtwenties, the guy wandering from the screen to his iPhone to the books on the wall. The woman leaned forward, arms across her middle, eyes narrowed on the television, a legal pad in her lap filled with notes.

I recognized Maggie Brennan from the photograph in her bio. She was sitting on a small sofa and turned toward me, her brows rising, her eyes flaring like I'd snuck up on her in the dark. She shifted her weight, giving me her back and facing the screen.

Corliss held a finger to his mouth, telling me not to speak. They were wrapped in the shadows, watching the television.

I put Corliss in his early forties, enough mileage in the wrinkles and folds on his face to separate him from his youth but not enough that it was all in his rearview mirror. Though he was Milo Harper's contemporary, he had an easy energy about him in contrast to Milo's urgency, the difference no doubt owing to the distance on their horizons. His sandy brown hair was cut short, framing a full face. He was shorter than me, creeping past stocky with a black sweatshirt bunching over his belly.

He'd frozen the image on the television when I opened the door, now waving the remote at the screen where a young man, maybe twenty, sat in a chair, the camera in tight, his face locked in a blank stare, the soul patch beneath his chin more like a mud smear. Corliss clicked the remote and the image jerked to life. The man rocked back and forth, palms on his knees, then squared up to the camera.

"Go on," an off-camera female voice said, the tone anxious and encouraging. The young woman with the legal pad was mouthing the words that I assumed were hers.

"Man it was crazy. Scared the shit out of me," the man on the screen said. "I had to get home but it didn't matter which way I went, it was wrong. The streets didn't go where they were supposed to go and then the road disappeared and I was falling."

"What happened next, Quentin?"

"I stopped falling but I never hit the ground. Then I was running, trying to get to class to take a final but it was too late and I flunked out of school. I tried to find the professor, but this giant snake jumped up and the next thing I knew I was sucking my own dick. That's when I woke up," he said, biting his lip to stop from laughing.

"Thanks, Quentin, that's all for today," the woman's voice said and the screen went blank.

"Janet," Corliss said to the woman with the legal pad, "you think that boy is for real?"

Corliss spoke with a soft Ozark twang though his good-old-boy manner stiffened Janet rather than put her at ease.

"His dream had some of the features we're looking for," she said to her pad, not meeting his gaze.

"What do you think, Gary?" Corliss said, swinging his feet to the floor and his attention to the man sitting next to her.

Gary raised his head, glancing first at Janet then at Corliss like he'd been woken from a nap. "I don't know. The guy seemed legit."

"Children," Corliss said, "that boy is why you all got to do a better job screening these subjects before you sign them up. We're paying these people good money and I don't want to throw it away on some kid's jack-off fantasy. Now, get out of my office and find me some nightmares that are worth a damn."

Janet and Gary nodded, rose, and brushed past me, Janet turning on the lights as they left. Maggie watched them leave. She sighed, folded her hands in her lap and looked at Corliss.

"I'm Jack Davis, new director of security for the institute."

Corliss pointed to one of the empty chairs. "Take a load off, Jack, and say hello to my partner in crime, Maggie Brennan. Milo said you'd be coming around to see us. What can we do for you?"

I ignored his offer. His chair was raised higher than either of the other chairs or the sofa, giving him the visual advantage of looking down on his guests, an edge I preferred to keep since I couldn't pee in the corner to let him know I was the new sheriff in town.

"Milo tell you why he hired me?"

"Yep. He said you're going to protect our intellectual property."

"You have any that needs protecting?"

"Matter of fact, we don't. We do pure research, trying to get a handle on nightmares and posttraumatic stress disorder. We've got nothing to patent or trademark and the stuff we publish is copyrighted as soon as the ink is dry."

"Well, then, is there anything else you think we should talk about?"

He leaned back in his chair, putting his feet on his desk again, his hands banded across his belly.

"Can't think what it would be."

Cops categorize people caught up in a murder investigation as victims, witnesses, and suspects. The dead are known, while witnesses may be eager and helpful or scarce and reluctant.

Suspects are labeled as much by circumstance, bias, and behavior as the facts. Some liked to dance, flirting with the facts and playing hard to get, confident that they are too clever to be caught. Others liked to wrestle, flexing their muscles and taking their shots, certain they were too tough to be taken down.

Corliss knew I had accessed his project files and that whatever I'd seen had brought me to his door. That was enough to make him suspicious and wait for me to tell him why I was there rather than offer his conjecture. It didn't make him guilty of anything, but it did make him dance and I liked to make dancers wrestle.

"You know the funny thing about bullshit?" I asked him.

He gave me an ear-to-ear grin. "I don't but I got a feeling you're gonna tell me."

"Everyone thinks theirs doesn't stink."

He laughed, but there was no joy in the sound. "You are right about that. I'm guessing that you're catching my scent."

"Like a feedlot on a hot day. Is your Nashville act for real?"

"I'm not the first one of my people to come down out of the hills but I am the only one with a PhD. They'd be proud of me too if they had any idea what it is I do."

"Try explaining it to me."

He put his feet on the floor and pulled up to his desk.

"Like a lot of science, it's easier to describe than it is to explain. Bad things happen to people all the time and, by the way, it doesn't matter a bit if you're good or bad, shit happens and forgive and forget is overrated. The bad memories take root in the brain and poison our dreams. Digging them out is harder than yanking out a tree stump with a pair of tweezers. Isn't that right, Maggie."

She nodded. "We fill our dreams with the things we can't cope with when we're awake," she said. "The things we are afraid of, ashamed of. The things we want but believe we don't deserve. The things we'd like to say and do that we lack the strength to make real and the things we've said and done that could bring us down. All those things run wild in our dreams. They are beneath the surface but not so far that we can't learn to control them so they don't control us, so we can make peace with them."

"And you can teach people how to do that?"

"We're trying real hard," Corliss said. "Our brains have to process and manage traumatic memories so we can live with them without beating our kids, robbing banks, or just plain going nuts. A lot of that work is done in our dreams. Maggie and I are studying how that work gets done and how we can learn to do it better. We think that if people can learn to recognize when they're dreaming, they can learn to control their dreams and flush out their bad memories. If we're right, a lot of shrinks will have to find another line of work."

"Any side effects from what you do?"

"Like what?"

"Like people shooting themselves in the head or falling off buildings."

Maggie Brennan flinched, her chin snapping down to her chest, then up to the ceiling. If tics were contagious, I'd have thought she had caught it from me. Corliss shot her a hot glance; his eyes and mouth narrow darts.

"The police," she said, her voice so soft I wasn't certain she'd spoken until she said it again. "The police looked into what happened to Tom and Regina. It had nothing to do with our project."

"What Maggie means," Corliss said, "is that Tom Delaney committed suicide and Regina Blair slipped and fell. It's a sad coincidence that both of them were volunteers, but that's all it is."

"You're not troubled by the fact that both of them died in the same way they dreamed they would die, dreams that you were teaching them to control?"

"Hell, yes, it bothers me. It bothers me more when people like you come around trying to blame it on us. Look, every volunteer signs a waiver acknowledging that we are not treating them for any mental or physical condition and that they should consult their own doctor, whether psychologist or psychiatrist or podiatrist, before participating in the project. We are not responsible for their choices or their carelessness," Corliss said.

"Delaney's and Blair's families have hired a lawyer named Jason Bolt. He's got both of your names on a lawsuit. And he's got an expert witness who will testify that you are responsible."

"Lawyers and lawsuits don't intimidate me, Jack. That's what insurance is for and I'm betting Milo Harper has a shit-bucket full of insurance."

"Insurance will buy you a lawyer and pay a claim but it won't keep your name out of the paper. How do you feel about that, Dr. Brennan?"

She looked at me without feeling or expression. "When you've seen the things I've seen, the things people do to one another, it numbs you to something so trivial as a lawsuit. No one knows my name. If it's in the paper, it will be forgotten soon enough."

"If neither of you are impressed by Jason Bolt's lawsuit, why did you erase Delaney's and Blair's records from your project files?"

Maggie Brennan repeated her head bob, facing me. "We didn't do that."

"Who did?"

"Sherry Fritzshall," she said.

There was another label I left out-person of interest. It was reserved for people who hadn't earned the suspect label but had demonstrated great potential to make the jump. Sherry Fritzshall had moved to the top of that short list.

"When did she do that?"

"Right after the police finished looking into everything," Corliss said.

"Why did she do that?"

Corliss shrugged. "You'd have to ask her. My guess is she was afraid Delaney's or Blair's family would sue the institute, waiver or no waiver."

"What about Walter Enoch?"

Maggie Brennan fixed her eyes on her lap. Corliss shook his head.

"Wasn't he something? I about fell out of my chair when I read about him in the paper," Corliss said. "Squirreling away all that mail. Damn!"

"You keep losing volunteers, you're going to have to start drafting them."

"Hey, Walter was my mailman," Corliss said. "I talked him into volunteering. He went through the intake process, did the video, the initial EEG and fMRI testing, and then he quit before he ever did any of the lucid dreaming training."

"What did he dream about?"

"Walter had nightmares, not dreams. Nightmares are bad dreams that wake you up screaming at the demons," Corliss said.

"Suffocation," Maggie Brennan whispered. "He couldn't breathe. That's what he dreamed about. He was terrified to go to sleep."

"That boy was something else," Corliss said. "I wonder if he stole any of my mail."

Corliss thought he was a better dancer than I was a wrestler. He was trying to slip away before I could get a grip, let alone win the best two out of three falls.

"I imagine the FBI will want to know too."

Corliss's eyes popped. "The newspaper said that the postal service was responsible for returning the stolen mail. What's the FBI got to do with it?"

"Walter Enoch was murdered. You be sure to hold on to his file."