Mind to Mind: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective

by Don Pendleton

  Meanwhile I have to struggle along with my own vague insights to theorize a possible state of consciousness in which we may focus upon two separate points in space at the same time and perceive the orange both resting at the bottom and hovering at the top of the basket in a larger view than that afforded under the common reality. And I take that as the fundamental axiom of a loose, working hypothesis that allows me to maintain a sense of sanity while confronting an obviously insane experience. All I need do now is supply the various terms that might explain the what, the how, and the why of the experience. It will require the rest of the story to do that, so be patient with me.

  For now, just understand that I was confused, scared, and exhilarated all at the same time. My sensory probes were somewhat disoriented. I began regaining "this-world" awareness within a pile of naked bodies. This pile was so confused that I could not immediately determine who I was connected to. I figured a fifty-fifty chance for either Alison or Jane Doe Senior, and I definitely recognized Alison’s soft little moans issuing from somewhere in the tangle. Even after I found her head I could not be sure.

  Awareness was apparently reorienting through-out that pile. I heard many confused comments and queries, a few groans of dismay.

  It is not that I did not remember, I remembered every soaring sensation, the whole mind-blowing range of quivering rapture. But there was the disorientation noted above, a feeling of unreality: you remembered, but you did not necessarily believe that what you remembered actually happened.

  I was hoping like hell some of it did not happen.

  Evidently some others were having the same problem.

  The pile was moving, disentangling. There were moans, sighs, groans. Someone withdrew a leg from the small of my back; someone else was trying to extricate an arm from between my legs. It was a hairy arm; I shivered and let it go.

  Alison, yeah, was connected at the hips. The rest of her found its way to me. She clasped her arms behind my back and sighed into my ear. I asked her, "You okay?"

  She moaned, "Oh, God."

  I persisted. "Does that mean okay?"

  She replied, small-voiced, "A thousand orgasms is okay enough, I guess. Is this what you call cosmic sex?"

  I told her, "I don't know what the hell to call it."

  "Just call me next time you're ready for it." She sighed.

  I said, "Hell," and raised to an elbow for a look around.

  It was rather dark on the mound. All the torches were extinguished. Looked like a carpet of bodies, stretching out in all directions. Alison and I were at mid-circle, or there. I was able to discern several familiar faces nearby, but I did not see Oom or the senior Jane Doe.

  I lay there wishing for a cigarette, too comfortable to go looking for one. I was still joined to Alison, and that was mainly the source of comfort, I guess. She was moving languidly against me—said, with a shy smile, "First time for me in public. How 'bout you?"

  I said, "Yeah," and slowly withdrew because it was becoming too damned comfortable, all over again, and there were other things requiring attention. Alison made a sorrowful little sound as I rolled away and got to my knees. I reminded her, "You said a thousand was okay enough. We have business here. Let's go find out what it is."

  I helped her to her feet and we carefully struggled off the mound, found and retrieved our clothing, which dangled from hooks conveniently placed on the torch stands.

  Two couples were ahead of us. I watched them make their way around the side of the house and disappear in the direction of the parking area out front. I heard Hiawatha greet them—or I guess I should start referring to the guy as Campbell. Anyway, that told me what I needed to know. I led Alison around to the back door and we entered the house through the kitchen. There was no sensing of presence inside that house.

  We found the bedrooms and invaded the closets, searching for effects. I found what I was looking for, all draped on the same hanger: the designer jeans and blouse I had seen on Cochran's companion at Sportsman's Lodge. I showed the outfit to Alison, told her, "Remember this. Fix it in the mind so you can describe it later."

  She took a clinical approach, examining the manufacturer's labels and sizes, told me, "Got it. But what is it?"

  I said, "Just remember it."

  "Poor girl has a very bare closet." She sniffed. "I would call this a severely limited wardrobe, if it's all there is."

  It was, at that. I probably would not have noticed it, not having that much experience in ladies' closets. A simple dress. Two blouses. Two pairs of jeans. One pair of spike-heel shoes, one pair of moccasin-style sneakers.

  There was only one other bedroom, obviously Campbell's domain. In his closet, several pairs of Western boots, couple of blazers, some silk shirts, two pairs of slacks.

  "They live simply," Alison observed.

  I said, "Well, what the hell, when you've got buckskin..."

  I heard movement, felt presence inside the house. I cautioned Alison with a finger to the lips, whispered to her, "How many people would you say live here?"

  "Looks like two to me," she whispered back. "What did you have in mind?"

  I had a senior Jane Doe in mind, of course, but there was no evidence of her here.

  I took Alison's hand and led her into the small hallway. Oom, in buckskins, was standing with arms folded across her chest and staring at the floor in the middle of the garden room. She looked up, startled by our sudden presence, said, "Oh! Yes?"

  I told her, "You're in big trouble, honey. Let me help."

  She did not ask but told me, "You enjoyed the service."

  "That what it was? I enjoyed it, yes, whatever. You're still in trouble. You know who I am, don't you."

  "Yes. I know you, who you are."

  Campbell, in loincloth, appeared in the doorway from the kitchen. He was pointing a shotgun at me.

  "So do I," he told me. "Just stay loose there, citizen. You're kinda confused, aren't you? You're the one in trouble."

  I was still in the little open hallway, to my left side, the living room, now dancing with blue lights from an approaching police beacon, to my right side, Hiawatha Campbell and his shotgun. And from upside or downside, some side beyond space-time, another mind directly counseled sensible behavior. Be good. Be patient. It shall be revealed.

  I gave Alison the keys to the Maserati and told her, "See you later, kid. Keep the faith."

  A few minutes later I was in handcuffs and headed toward the Ventura County jail. The common reality was once again in full sway.

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Jigsaw

  Incarceration can be a bit numbing to the mind. I found that it produces a sense of loss of the self, like becoming a nonperson. Never mind how gently or even respectfully it may all be accomplished, we are all wild beings beneath a thin layer of sophistication, so the whole gestalt of capture and confinement strikes some deep terror within these animal hearts, a terror not significantly unlike that of any wild thing that has been chased and caught and caged.

  So I spent a substantial part of the early going just trying to deal intellectually with the experience. Then, from the numbness I began to fashion a whole new view of the situation and my place within it. And I began to see where I had gone wrong. I had been working the thing from the wrong side of reality.

  I had to call back into use my real-world training of the past. There was a saying at the Office of Naval Intelligence: "We do not gather intelligence; we develop intelligence."

  The word is much overused and greatly misunderstood. In common, everyday usage it simply means the ability to understand. Spy novelists and newswriters have managed to convey the idea that intelligence work is largely a cloak- and-dagger game of stealing secrets from an enemy. That's a distortion. I have known a lot of "spies" who are not particularly intelligent. I have seen many "secrets" that also have no particular intelligence in and of themselves.

  The business of an intelligence agency is to develop intelligence—that is, understanding—of a particular situat
ion or event. We develop that understanding in pretty much the same way that any individual might approach the task of learning something new. We gather all the facts we can and study them. From that study we "develop" certain understandings. Often an understanding of fragments will not provide a coherent whole, so we have to "leap the mind," or synthesize connections between the fragments. As an intellectual exercise, this is the opposite of analysis, which involves breaking up a whole and examining the pieces. The first employs inductive reasoning; the second, deductive.

  Synthesis was one of my specialties at ONI. Say, for example, that we want to know when a certain vessel will depart from a certain port. We have several facts at hand. One-fourth of the ship's company have been granted ten-day leaves. An engine is under repairs that should be completed in about ten days. A rush order for provisions must be fulfilled within ten days. This is an over- simplification, of course, but with these few facts at hand we could reasonably surmise that this vessel will not be rejoining the fleet within the next ten days. The actual job of "intelligence gathering" (misuse—should be called "information gathering") may involve such commonplace items as a date for the captain's planned liaison with his mistress or a dental appointment ashore. That is synthesis.

  For the other side of the coin, say that it all begins with the fact that our crypto people have broken the enemy codes and they give us a radio message ordering the vessel to rejoin the fleet in ten days. We wish to confirm that this is not a dummy message, planted to deliberately mislead us. So we send people into the field to "develop" the confirming data; i.e., the particulars given above that established our synthesis, only now these particulars are part of a confirming analysis of a picture already formed.

  But, see, there is nothing really esoteric about any of this. It is merely an extension of the way the human mind functions, anyway. Every time you solve a problem for yourself you are examining, synthesizing, and analyzing in one combination or another, and this process develops understanding for you.

  I had been doing that, too, but I had been working the wrong side of the street. I'd become so fascinated by the otherworldly implications of the experience that I had neglected the this-world basics.

  That was my illumination, ensconced there in the Ventura County jail awaiting transport to the Los Angeles jurisdiction. The guys at Ventura treated me okay. I was not pushed around or insulted or otherwise abused in any way. Thank God, most law-enforcement agencies in this country today have distanced themselves from the dark-age practices of the past when any prisoner was fair game for any sadistic tendencies of his jailers. I got no feeling of personalities there, no judgment or condemnation; they were just guys doing their job, and I happened to be part of their job at the moment.

  I was deposited in a little holding cell that was comfortable enough, private—as good, I guess, as any cage could be for a free spirit. But it was very sobering, and it did induce me to think rationally about the case.

  Say that you have a sackful of facts. They are just tossed into the sack, disparate pieces of information that, in and of themselves, establish only that a certain event occurred at a certain time, each fact covering only a specific event. These are your "facts of the case." Each is undisputed. It happened. You need to know why and how it happened, by whom or through whom it happened, and how it is related to the other facts of the case.

  So now visualize your sack of facts as a jigsaw puzzle. You do not have all the pieces to the puzzle in the sack. But you wish to place each piece in its proper place—you need to lay them out in such a way that you might be able to guess at how the missing pieces would complete the picture if they were there. This can be a disheartening exercise, of course. But you do have certain clues to help you begin this exercise in frustration. If a certain piece has a straight edge, you might reasonably see it as a bordering piece. A piece with two straight edges should represent a corner of the picture. So you start pushing the pieces around, arranging and rearranging and trying for some coherence.

  That is what I was doing during those hours in Ventura. Valdiva's guys arrived to pick me up at eight o'clock and we were on our way back to L.A. by nine. Great guys—a Sergeant Thompson and a Patrolman Olivas. Olivas was driving. Soon as we pulled away from the jail, Thompson removed my cuffs and gave me a cigarette. We stopped at a Denny's at the edge of town and had coffee and pastries. Thompson told me that Valdiva had "rethought" the charges and was conferring with the D.A. about "reframing." See, these guys play with jigsaws too.

  It was a pleasant enough trip to L.A. It's only about thirty-five miles between the city limits of the two, then add another hour into the interior of Los Angeles; we were downtown by eleven. Valdiva was there waiting for us. I'll say this for the guy: He's not weak on follow-through; he commits himself. I could believe his earlier warning about tracking me down. Kind of guy who'd dog you to hell's doorstep. That's okay; he's my kind of guy.

  He must be forty-two or so. Big guy, impressive, carefully groomed, handsome. He took me aside and explained that they had to book me to preserve the "legalities" for the prosecutor, but I would be immediately released on my own recognizance. That took about twenty minutes. Thompson and Olivas hung around for the formalities then shook my hand and returned to their own turf in Hollywood.

  Valdiva suggested that we have lunch and discussion. I stopped at a public phone and tried to reach Alison. There was no answer at her place; I tried mine and scored. I assured her I was okay; she assured me she was okay; I checked with Valdiva and invited her to join us at Musso Frank's in Hollywood for lunch. She promised to meet us there at twelve-thirty.

  It's funny how you can slightly know a person and have no particular feeling one way or the other, then get just a little closer and either love them or hate them. I did not hate Frank Valdiva. One of the sharpest guys I'd been around. Obvious Latino background, streetwise and tough inside, but one who'd come through the fire with all the best metals dominant, scrupulously fair-minded, ethically superior.

  He wanted to know my entire sensing of the case. I was damned glad, then, that I'd recently played with my jigsaw puzzle, because this guy could make you feel very foolish very quickly if you came at him with faulty logic.

  I laid it all out for him, as I sensed it, during the twenty-minute run into Hollywood. "I believe we have to go back a few years to find the beginning of this case. At least ten years, maybe more. I believe Jim knew Vicky's mother."

  "You mean before..."

  "Before Vicky was born, yeah. I think there's at least a fifty-fifty chance that—"

  "Wait. Are you giving me facts or conjecture?"

  I wanted to tell him that a fact was no more than a particle in a field of conjecture, but I was trying to hew a straight narrative out of the jigsaw in my head, so I replied, "You asked for my sensing. Don't confuse me with what is factual and what is not. Just let me give you my sensing."

  He said, "Okay. Just don't get too loose."

  I told him, "There is at least an even chance, I think, that Jim is Vicky's natural father. If not that, then he was just a nice guy who befriended a girl in trouble and ended up taking her child as his child."

  "Just tell me this," Valdiva requested. "Are you basing this on something you know, or think you know, or is it just a wild hunch?"

  "Yes to all three of those," I replied. "But let's just leave it there for now and leap forward ten years. Vicky's mother is found beside the Hollywood Freeway with her skull bashed in. This is on Jim's turf. I need to ask: Did he request this case or was he assigned to it?"

  "I don't believe I will answer that right now," the captain replied.

  "That means I have to take the worst position," I told him. "Jim took the case on himself, even to the point of working it on his own time. He did that because he recognized the girl. Now, I don't know what he was thinking about, or why he chose not to identify the girl himself, but he had to have recognized her as Vicky's mother. He—"

  "I don't see how you arrive at
that. It's pure conjecture."

  "It's educated sensing," I corrected him. "Just remember, it's what you asked for. But I'll go you a step beyond, just to show you how far this could be extended. Maybe he took on the case and jealously kept it to himself, only to cover his own fanny. Jim could have been the assailant. The mother came for her kid. Whether in a panic or in cold situation- management, he beat her to death with a crowbar—or thought he did. Decorated the body for Halloween and dumped it. Must—"

  "That's ranging pretty far, isn't it?"

  "Maybe. Maybe not. We're looking at missing pieces to a puzzle...blanks. I can fill them in any damned way I want to. When the final picture comes together, we'll know just how distorted it is."

  "Okay. I'm not agreeing with any of this, mind you. But go on."

  "If he did that, then it must have been scary as hell to see her turn up alive and rapidly recovering. But he did get a break even then, because she was so severely damaged that it seemed highly unlikely that she would ever be able to finger her assailant. But it could also have been comforting from the standpoint that she also never would be able to cause a problem over Vicky. He—"

  "That's very weak, Ford. Jim and Georgia legally adopted the child. I would say they were on firm legal ground there."

  I said, "Not if the natural mother could show that the child had been illegally obtained from her in the first place. At the least, she could bring a lot of trouble. But let's not get too picky over technical points here. People do not always react rationally when confronted with an emotional issue, not even people like Jim Cochran—maybe especially not people like Jim. Cops live with a lot of stress. I don't have to tell you that. They sometimes come off flaky as hell over simple personal problems, simply because they're already overloaded. But I am not insisting on painting this piece of the jigsaw with Jim's face. It's enough for now to say that, for whatever reason, Jim's conduct in this case has been improper."