“Wanna go get some coffee?” Cliff said.
“You don’t have to attend to this crime scene?”
“Ah, it’ll wait,” Cliff said dismissively, reaching for a cigarette. “According to you, I could spend the next ten years going over this site and not get any closer to the killer. He’s too good. So what’s say we get a little closer?”
“You hitting on me?”
“No,” Cliff said without humor or emotion.
“Pity. I could use a break from all the women.”
Cliff laughed. “Yeah, that’s what I figured.”
He agreed to coffee.
As they were walking off the site, Cliff paused to throw a glance into the back of the arson team’s truck.
Piper angled himself into a better position to glance over his shoulder. “Let me guess, analysts.”
“You say that word around me again, and it’ll be your last.” Cliff came out of the fugue, exhaled on his cigarette. “Sorry, I’m not usually so melodramatic.”
***
PRESENT DAY
“We gotta stop meeting like this.” Cliff handed Piper a stick of Doublemint Gum.
“Don’t look at me,” Piper said, opening the gum wrapper. “I just go where the men in black go.”
Cliff smirked. They both studied the burn site. Whoever did this was really good at hiding evidence. Now, who knew how to kill and hide evidence equally well? Piper mused.
“Coffee?” Cliff said.
“Versus a mystery I’ll never solve?” He wadded the gum wrapper, tossed it. “Sure.”
***
Cliff laughed at Piper’s latest joke, somewhat politely, Piper thought, and then sank into silence. He stared auspiciously at the stains on the table as if administering a Rorschach test to himself. But the expression on his face was too vacant for that; he was cliff-diving into himself, screaming all the way down.
“So spill,” Piper said. “The sooner you get it off your chest, the sooner we can get back to the spry repartee.”
Cliff laughed nervously, loosening up and stiffening at the same time, squirmed in his seat. “I guess I’m looking for a sidekick. Getting tired mulling over these crime scenes in my head, no one to talk them out with. The longer I spend turning them over and over, looking at them from every angle—”.
“The quicker they get under your skin,” Piper said, finishing the thought for him. “And as they say, two heads are better than one.”
“You think you could go for it?” Cliff said, not sounding particularly hopeful.
Piper watched the small twin-engine Cessna come in for a landing out the airport café window. He allowed the pilot’s cautious landing to guide his own thinking. “Under one very special condition.”
Cliff leaned forward in his chair, circled both his hands around his coffee cup, even though it had to be scalding, waiting for the next shoe to drop.
“We ditch our jobs as arson investigator and investigative journalist,” Piper said. “And we go after these guys, ourselves.”
Cliff whistled the way a tea kettle lets off steam, and slouched back into his chair. “You’re crazy. What makes you think we have the skills for that?”
Piper reflected on how easy it was to get inside the victims’ heads following the Barroom Butcher and the Conflicts Diamonds Avenger, as the media had nicknamed them. “It’s all I can do to keep myself from turning into one of these guys on a good day,” he said. “Who better to get inside their heads? And you, I did my homework on you, wanted to know if you were going to be a help or a hindrance. You’re pretty good yourself with munitions, explosives, and setting fires. But then, your father was one of the most successful arsonists of all time, who wasn’t beyond using explosives and killing people, making him, however secondarily, one of the most successful mass murderers ever. Tell me you don’t have a big part of you that wants to get to know what makes these people tick, before you turn into one of them yourself.”
“So that’s your pitch? Chase them to avoid becoming one of them?”
“In part. I’d also like to save them from themselves. They’re just acting out like teenagers, reeling from all the pain in their lives, mad at the world, consequences be damned, because they’re in so much pain, retribution, death is the only way out. They’re just a little further along in their character arcs than we are. If we can save them, maybe we can save ourselves.”
“Keep talking.” Cliff sipped his drink. Piper took it as the invitation it was to nudge him over the precipice of his reservations.
“It’d be nice to be the best at what we do, as opposed to merely good,” Piper said.
“Tell me about it.” Cliff reached for the electronic cigarette that he kept solely as a backup. “The kids coming down the pike these days— shit.” Cliff pried the cigarette out from between Piper’s lips, lit his cigarette off it, took a drag on the Marlboro, and handed Piper his cigarette back. “By the time they’re done inputting their data in their computer programs, and hitting the crime scene with their analytics, there’s nothing I can say to touch that. I can be ninety-five percent dead on, and they still end up making a fool of me by showing how much impact that five percent error has to the guy writing the check on the insurance, or the mayor looking to make a name for himself.
“And most of the time I don’t score ninety-five percent against them, trust me, not even close.” He paused to accommodate the scream of a private jet taking off. “Forget intuition, and flying by the seat of your pants, anymore, or good old detective work. It’s all in the hands of the computer analysts now.”
“Journalism is no less under siege.” Piper warmed himself like a dragon on his own fiery breath, exhaling the cigarette smoke finally. “The analysts tell us which stories to feature on the front page, for how long, even what questions to ask during the interviews. All based on algorithms that can keep track of what every other newspaper in the world is doing, the sales they’re garnering on account of it. They can even factor in for their target audiences and regional dynamics, versus our target audiences, and the unique variables of our constituencies.”
Cliff chuckled. “Like that IBM commercial.” He added in a campy voice, “We found out when it rains, people eat more cake. And when the sun comes out, panini sales go up.’”
“Yeah, that’s right, you glib prick,” Piper snapped. “I was thinking more of the movie Moneyball with Brad Pitt, but, same difference.”
“I guess that just leaves soft skills. You a people person, Piper?”
Piper laughed like a man standing with a noose around his neck, watching the false bottom beneath his feet.
“Yeah, me neither.” Cliff laughed, demonstrating his own capacity for gallows humor. Then he sobered watching the plane coming in for a landing out the airport café window. It was all small planes and ultra-lights at the private airport, some of them retired bush-planes probably picked up for a song.
Piper said, “So, I ask myself, if we are to play the continuous improvement game, what’s our core competency, exactly?”
Cliff watched the single propeller Harmon Rocket II kit plane take off without a hitch, thinking in silence before saying, “It’s a fool’s quest.”
“So is everything worthwhile.” Piper sighed. “Besides, we suck at our current jobs. Finding a better way to serve the greater good seems like a worthwhile calling in End Times. With the economic equivalent of Armageddon unfolding around us, someone has to have their sights on clearing the way to the Promised Land.” Suddenly he was sounding like the evangelist.
Cliff chuckled, and sucked on his coffee, which was finally at a drinkable temperature. “Poisoning yourself with that Oklahoma crude isn’t going to help you think any better,” Piper joked in relation to Cliff’s preferred mixture, an Oklahoma coffee blend.
“Who says?” He set down the cup. “Okay, I’m in. Who first?”
“Let’s leave this latest crime scene alone. Like the one we met at, has men in black written all over it. A little out of our
weight class. We need to grow into that. I’m rather partial to the barroom-killing-spree-guy.”
Cliff whistled his, “Phew, don’t know about that,” as he shook his head. “Brimley Barkly? SWAT team veteran, over two dozen missions to his belt. Please tell me there’s someone lower down the food chain.”
“That just leaves the conflict-diamonds crazy.”
“Fine. A maniac with an agenda and a shotgun I suppose is as good as we’re going to get.” Cliff guzzled his coffee until it was gone. “He stole some emeralds on his way out the store, according to the owner’s business partner. Figure he took one for every five he allegedly stole, and that still gives him the cash flow to go global.”
“You object to a little travel?”
Cliff thought about it, watching the 1970 Barracuda, another kit plane, tanking up at the gas pump. “Hate leaving the wife behind. But we’ve gotten pretty good at video-chat sex. She says I reek after a fire, and all the showers in the world can’t wash it out. She prefers the long-distance intimacy, actually.”
“And still you cling to her when you’ve got women falling all over you?” Piper realized it was unfair to sound so incredulous. Still, Cliff had been bouncing his eyes off the women hitting on them all this time, as if keeping count.
“It’s hard to explain.”
“Maybe, if she’s causing the heartache, and not you, then your conscience is clear,” Piper coaxed.
Cliff laughed. “Maybe it’s not so hard to explain.”
“You won’t smell of fires, anymore, when you’re back in town. So both versions of your sex life stand to improve.”
“The minute I met you, I said, ‘Cliff, here’s the gateway to the life you really want.’ Why is that?”
“I am you, you narcissistic prick. Only better, or maybe that’s the other way around, considering you’re the loyal one. Leastways, the longer we study one another, the easier it will be to get some distance on ourselves.”
“You think we need distance that bad, huh?”
Piper guzzled his beer, not at all sorry he’d passed on the coffee idea, set the bottle down. “Evidently.”
They both laughed heartily. Maybe it was a good sign that some joy was finally returning to their lives, Piper thought. Nothing like finding your place in the world. Except maybe for finding your doppelganger.
SIXTY-TWO
Mrs. Willis pressed the balls of her palms into the lions’ heads at the edges of the chair’s armrests, sliding her hands over and over the same spots. Robin doubted she realized she was applying force to the pressure points in an effort to rebalance her energies, anesthetize certain regions of her brain, while stimulating others.
Forcing the back of her head against the headrest of the wingback chair, Mrs. Willis applied tension to the pressure point joining the brainstem to her brain, again without realizing consciously the assistance she was drawing down from the universal energy field in an effort to get more chi to flow through her.
Robin smiled at the wisdom of the deep unconscious mind, operating well below the Freudian world of unconscious repressions. It was the world of Jungian archetypes, of group mind psychic fields, where we sensed the movement of history, and where we tapped the templates of heroes and saints, the gods within, to draw on whatever power we needed to transform our reality.
With some training, Mrs. Willis’s efforts to ameliorate her suffering could be greatly boosted. Robin, too, was tapping spiritual reserves to get her through the same psychic pain this woman was living through.
Robin had shown Mrs. Willis her shield, and she must have figured this was one more follow-up interview. She had robotically escorted Robin to where they were now seated. “Mrs. Willis, could you tell me about Spence?” Robin asked.
“Why do you care? You were supposed to keep him alive and you couldn’t even do that,” she said, more disconsolate, than pointedly hateful. Evidently, Mrs. Willis had kept up with the newspapers and realized who Robin was—sex change or no sex change.
“I intend to help him live on,” Robin said.
The woman’s eyes lit. For a while she looked feral, mad possibly, then she broke down in tears, and buried her face in her hands. “Leave me with my memories. I must rehearse them before I lose him entirely. Each second you distract me, he slips further from me.”
“I plan to do more than hold on to him in memory,” Robin said.
Mrs. Willis regarded her, confused, yet hopeful, angry and resentful, not sure exactly which emotion to queue up in response to the mystifying words. Finally, she said, “What do you mean?”
“If you can give me some mementos, an old photograph, a hairbrush, anything he may have touched or held dear…” Robin said. “I can reach out to him psychically.”
“You’re a psychic? You can communicate with the dead?” She sounded a little too hopeful.
“I can do more than reach out to him with the right props. I can create the people, places, and things in my mind that will allow him to continue to evolve his soul through one drama after another. So that he doesn’t have to reincarnate to continue to grow spiritually. He doesn’t have to remain in stasis for hundreds of years awaiting another body, ahead of all the other souls clamoring for the opportunity to evolve themselves on this plane. I can give him back what the murderer took from him, a chance to fulfill his destiny.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
Robin sighed. “Nor have I.” She took another deep breath. “Most healers are not both psychic and blessed with the imagination of an artist. The intersection of aptitudes should allow me to do something special for him. For both of us. This will help me to heal, as much as him. I have my own survivor’s guilt to work out; you aren’t the only one who thinks I should have done more.”
“If you could do this—”.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’ve read more books by more Zen masters, saints, and sages than there are law journals. And I’ve never heard of anyone doing this. The closest thing to it I’ve come across is Gurdjieff’s idea of re-membering, applying Herculean pressures to first break the individual down, and then put him back together, remaking him better than before, more human, even, dare I say, more trans-human. Efforts along these lines continue in the real world. But as far as I know, no one has tried this transdimensionally, working across the barrier separating the spiritual world from the physical world.”
“What makes you think you can do this?”
“I’ve been a shaman in many lifetimes, perhaps in all of them. It’s my job to go into the spirit world and do my healings there, to rescue souls trapped in purgatory and hell, or at the very least, to shorten their stay.”
“How do you remember what you did in prior lives?”
“I didn’t until the recent shock to my psyche. Amazing things are happening to me. I don’t yet know where it’s all leading. I must confess, Mrs. Willis, I’m no longer entirely sane. I must find a way to make constructive use of this break from reality to remake myself better than before, in the spirit of the Gurdjieff experiment. But we can only uplift ourselves by uplifting others, Mrs. Willis. That’s why I need your involvement, to reach out to Spence.”
“This is so fantastic.”
“Yes, I know.” Robin found the lions rearing their ugly heads at her when Mrs. Willis took her hands off the chair.
“You will give me reports on how it’s going?”
Robin nodded.
“I will get you what you asked for.” She reached into Spence’s box of possessions which the police had recently returned to her, pulled out a wallet-sized image of him. She had plenty more, many better ones lining her mantle, but it still had to be hard for her, to let go of even the smallest piece of him in the state she was in.
She went into the downstairs bathroom and retrieved his hairbrush. She also brought back a childhood memento, a water pistol, which was still on active duty in the bathroom, dispensing mouthwash. Apparently, Spence had a playful side.
Taking
the items and treating them respectfully, Robin asked, “Is there anything you can tell me that might help? I’m new to this psychic stuff. Maybe one day soon, I won’t have to ask such things.”
“He loved a woman greatly. She was run over by a car. He blamed himself for it. Nearly as bad, he never got on well with her, never got to make things right with her. I don’t know how much of their inability to get along was his fault, and how much of it hers, or if they were both just forcing something that wasn’t meant to be.”
“Her name?”
“Victoria.”
“I’ll look into it,” Robin said solemnly.
“God bless you, child. And good luck with your own healing.”
Robin bowed to her and took her leave, feeling more like a thief in the night than someone noble. She was afraid she was promising to deliver something she couldn’t. This was all just a wild idea, so far. For all she knew, there was a good reason she’d never read about any such thing in any of her spiritual books. Maybe, once the soul was out of the body, they were best guided by those who had a bigger-picture view than she could have incarnate, limited by the brain’s neural processing speeds, and other restraints of this stage of human evolution.
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 84
