She loved him. God, how she loved him.
He fixed her with his gentle, reassuring brown eyes. In a voice neither patronizing nor abrasively commanding but nevertheless full of authority and reason, a voice which brooked no debate — probably the tone he had learned to use in Vietnam, in crises, with soldiers of inferior rank — he said, “You'll take the Wildcard file out of here, get copies made, send some off to friends in widely separated places, and secrete a few others where you can get your hands on them with short notice. Then we won't have to worry about losing our only copy or having it taken away from us. We'll have real good insurance. Meanwhile, I'll thoroughly search the cabin here, see what I can turn up. If I find something that points us toward Eric, I'll meet up with you at a prearranged place, and we'll go after him together. If I don't get a lead on him, we'll meet up and hide out together, until we can decide what to do next.”
She did not want to split up and leave him alone here. Eric might still be around. Or the feds might show up. Either way Benny might be killed. But his arguments for splitting up were convincing; damn it, he was right.
Nevertheless, she said, “If I go alone and take the car, how will you get out of here?”
He glanced at his wristwatch not because he needed to know the time (she thought) but to impress upon her that time was running out. “You'll leave the rental Ford for me,” he said. “That's got to be ditched soon, anyway, because the cops might be onto it. You'll take this Mercedes, and I'll take the Ford just far enough to swap it for something else.”
“They'll be on the lookout for the Mercedes, too.”
“Oh, sure. But the APB will specify a black 560 SEL with this particular license number, driven by a man fitting Eric's description. You'll be driving, not Eric, and we'll switch license plates with one of those cars parked along the gravel road farther down the mountain, which ought to take care of things.”
“I'm not so sure.”
“I am.”
Hugging herself as if this were a day in November rather than a day in June, Rachael said, “But where would we meet up later?”
“Las Vegas,” he said.
The answer startled her. “Why there?”
“Southern California's too hot for us. I'm not confident we can hide out here. But if we hop over to Vegas, I have a place.”
“What place?”
“I own a motel on Tropicana Boulevard, west of the Strip.”
“You're a Vegas wheeler-dealer? Old-fashioned, conservative Benny Shadway is a Vegas wheeler-dealer?”
“My real-estate development company's been in and out of Vegas property several times, but I'm hardly a wheeler-dealer. It's small stuff by Vegas standards. In this case, it's an older motel with just twenty-eight rooms and a pool. And it's not in the best repair. In fact, it's closed up at the moment. I finished the purchase two weeks ago, and we're going to tear it down next month, put up a new place: sixty units, a restaurant. There's still electrical service. The manager's suite is pretty shabby, but it has a working bathroom, furniture, telephone — so we can hide out there if we have to, make plans. Or just wait for Eric to show up someplace very public and cause a sensation that the feds can't put a lid on. Anyway, if we can't get a lead on him, hiding out is all we can do.”
“I'm to drive to Vegas?” she asked.
“That' d be best. Depending on how badly the feds want us — and considering what's at stake, I think they want us real bad — they'll probably have men at the major airports. You can take the state route past Silverwood Lake, then pick up Interstate Fifteen, be in Vegas this evening. I'll follow in a couple of hours.”
“But if the cops show up—”
“Alone, without you to worry about, I can slip away from them.”
“You think they're going to be incompetent?” she asked sourly.
“No. I just know I'm more competent.”
“Because you were trained for this. But that was more than one and a half decades ago.”
He smiled thinly. “Seems like yesterday, that war.”
And he had kept in shape. She could not dispute that. What was it he'd said — that Nam had taught him to be prepared because the world had a way of turning dark and mean when you least expected it?
“Rachael?” he asked, looking at his watch again.
She realized that their best chance of surviving, of having a future together, was for her to do what he wanted.
“All right,” she said. “All right. We'll split. But it scares me, Benny. I guess I don't have the guts for this kind of thing, the right stuff. I'm sorry, but it really scares me.”
He came to her, kissed her. “Being scared isn't anything to be ashamed of. Only madmen have no fear.”
24
SPECIAL FEAR OF HELL
Dr. Easton Solberg had been more than fifteen minutes late for his one o'clock meeting with Julio Verdad and Reese Hagerstrom. They had stood outside his locked office, and he had finally come hurrying along the wide hall, clutching an armload of books and manila folders, looking harried, more like a twenty-year-old student late to class than a sixty-year-old professor overdue for an appointment.
He was wearing a rumpled brown suit one size too large for him, a blue shirt, and a green-and-orange-striped tie that looked, to Julio, as if it had been sold exclusively in novelty shops as a joke gift. Even by a generous appraisal, Solberg was not an attractive man, not even plain. He was short and stocky. His moonish face featured a small flat nose that would have been called pug on some men but that was simply porcine on him, small close-set gray eyes that looked watery and myopic behind his smudged glasses, a mouth that was strangely wide considering the scale on which the rest of his visage was constructed, and a receding chin.
In the hall outside his office, apologizing effusively, he had insisted on shaking hands with the two detectives, in spite of the load in his arms; therefore, he kept dropping books, which Julio and Reese stooped to pick up.
Solberg's office was chaos. Books and scientific journals filled every shelf, spilled onto the floor, rose in teetering stacks in the corners, were piled every which way on top of furniture. On his big desk, file folders, index cards, and yellow legal-size tablets were heaped in apparent disorder. The professor shifted mounds of papers off two chairs to give Julio and Reese places to sit.
“Look at that lovely view!” Solberg said, stopping suddenly and gaping at the windows as he rounded his desk, as if noticing for the first time what lay beyond the walls of his office.
The Irvine campus of the University of California was blessed with many trees, rolling green lawns, and flower beds, for it sprawled over a large tract of prime Orange County land. Below Dr. Solberg's second-floor office, a walkway curved across manicured grass, past impatiens blazing with thousands of bright blossoms — coral, red, pink, purple — and vanished under the branches of jacarandas and eucalyptus.
“Gentlemen, we are among the most fortunate people on earth: to be here, in this beautiful land, under these temperate skies, in a nation of plenty and tolerance.” He stepped to the window and opened his stubby arms, as if to embrace all of southern California. “And the trees, especially the trees. There are some wonderful specimens on this campus. I love trees, I really do. That's my hobby: trees, the study of trees, the cultivation of unusual specimens. It makes for a welcome change from human biology and genetics. Trees are so majestic, so noble. Trees give and give to us — fruit, nuts, beauty, shade, lumber, oxygen — and take nothing in return. If I believed in reincarnation, I'd pray to return as a tree.” He glanced at Julio and Reese. “What about you? Don't you think it'd be grand to come back as a tree, living the long majestic life of an oak or giant spruce, giving of yourself the way orange and apple trees give, growing great strong limbs in which children could climb?” He blinked, surprised by his own monologue. “But of course you're not here to talk about trees and reincarnation, are you? You'll have to forgive me… but, well, that view, don't you know? Just captured me for a moment
.”
In spite of his unfortunate porcine face, disheveled appearance, apparent disorganization, and evident tendency to be late, Dr. Easton Solberg had at least three things to recommend him: keen intelligence, enthusiasm for life, and optimism. In a world of doomsayers, where half the intelligentsia waited almost wistfully for Armageddon, Julio found Solberg refreshing. He liked the professor almost at once.
As Solberg went behind his desk, sat in a large leather chair, and half disappeared from view beyond his paperwork, Julio said, “On the phone you said there was a dark side to Eric Leben that you could discuss only in person—”
“And in strictest confidence,” Solberg said. “The information, if pertinent to your case, must go in a file somewhere, of course, but if it's not pertinent, I expect discretion.”
“I assure you of that,” Julio said. “But as I told you earlier, this is an extremely important investigation involving at least two murders and the possible leak of top-secret defense documents.”
“Do you mean Eric's death might not have been accidental?”
“No,” Julio said. “That was definitely an accident. But there are other deaths… the details of which I'm not at liberty to discuss. And more people may die before this case is closed. So Detective Hagerstrom and I hope you'll give us full and immediate cooperation.”
“Oh, of course, of course,” Easton Solberg said, waving one pudgy hand to dismiss the very idea that he might be uncooperative. “And although I don't know for a certainty that Eric's emotional problems are related to your case, I expect — and fear — that they may be. As I said… he had a dark side.”
However, before Solberg got around to telling them of Leben's dark side, he spent a quarter of an hour praising the dead geneticist, apparently unable to speak ill of the man until he had first spoken highly of him. Eric was a genius. Eric was a hard worker. Eric was generous in support of colleagues. Eric had a fine sense of humor, an appreciation for art, good taste in most things, and he liked dogs.
Julio was beginning to think they ought to form a committee and solicit contributions to build a statue of Leben for display under a fittingly imposing rotunda in a major public building. He glanced at Reese and saw his partner was plainly amused by the bubbly Solberg.
Finally the professor said, “But he was a troubled man, I'm sorry to say. Deeply, deeply troubled. He had been my student for a while, though I quickly realized the student was going to outdistance the teacher. When we were no longer student-teacher but colleagues, we remained friendly. We weren't friends, just friendly, because Eric did not allow any relationship to become close enough to qualify as friendship. So, close as we were professionally, it was years before I learned about his… obsession with young girls.”
“How young?” Reese asked.
Solberg hesitated. “I feel as if I'm… betraying him.”
“We may already know much of what you've got to tell us,” Julio said. “You'll probably only be confirming what we know.”
“Really? Well… I knew of one girl who was fourteen. At the time, Eric was thirty-one.”
“This was before Geneplan?”
“Yes. Eric was at UCLA then. Not rich yet, but we could all see he would one day leave academia and take the real world by storm.”
“A respected professor wouldn't go around bragging about bedding fourteen-year-old girls,” Julio said. “How'd you find out?”
“It happened on a weekend,” Dr. Solberg said, “when his lawyer was out of town and he needed someone to post bail. He trusted no one but me to keep quiet about the ugly details of the arrest. I sort of resented that, too. He knew I'd feel a moral obligation to endorse any censure movement against a colleague involved in such sordid business, but he also knew I'd feel obligated to keep any confidences he imparted, and he counted on the second obligation being stronger than the first. Maybe, to my discredit, it was.”
Easton Solberg gradually settled deeper in his chair while he talked, as if trying to hide behind the mounds of papers on his desk, embarrassed by the sleazy tale he had to tell. That Saturday, eleven years ago, after receiving Leben's call, Dr. Solberg had gone to a police precinct house in Hollywood, where he had found an Eric Leben far different from the man he knew: nervous, uncertain of himself, ashamed, lost. The previous night, Eric had been arrested in a vice-squad raid at a hot-bed motel where Hollywood streetwalkers, many of them young runaways with drug problems, took their Johns. He was caught with a fourteen-year-old girl and charged with statutory rape, a mandatory count even when an underage girl admittedly solicits sex for pay.
Initially Leben told Easton Solberg that the girl had looked considerably older than fourteen, that he'd had no way of knowing she was a juvenile. Later, however, perhaps disarmed by Solberg's kindness and concern, Leben broke down and talked at length of his obsession with young girls. Solberg had not really wanted to know any of it, but he could not refuse Eric a sympathetic ear. He sensed that Eric — who was a distant and self-possessed loner, unlikely ever to have unburdened himself to anyone — desperately needed to confide his intimate feelings and fears to someone at that bleak, low point in his life. So Easton Solberg listened, filled with both disgust and pity.
“His was not just a lust for young girls,” Solberg told Julio and Reese. “It was an obsession, a compulsion, a terrible gnawing need.”
Only thirty-one then, Leben was nevertheless deeply frightened of growing old and dying. Already longevity research was the center of his career. But he did not approach the problem of aging only in a scientific spirit; privately, in his personal life, he dealt with it in an emotional and irrational manner. For one thing, he felt that he somehow absorbed the vital energies of youth from the girls he bedded. Although he knew that notion was ridiculous, almost superstitious, he was still compelled to pursue those girls. He was not really a child molester in the classic sense, did not force himself on mere children. He only went after those girls who were willing to cooperate, usually teenage runaways reduced to prostitution.
“And sometimes,” Easton Solberg said with soft dismay, “he liked to… slap them around. Not really beat them but rough them up. When he explained it to me, I had the feeling that he was explaining it to himself for the first time. These girls were so young that they were full of the special arrogance of youth, that arrogance born of the certainty they'd live forever; and Eric felt that, by hurting them, he was knocking the arrogance out of them, teaching them the fear of death. He was, as he put it, 'stealing their innocence, the energy of their youthful innocence,' and he felt that somehow this made him younger, that the stolen innocence and youth became his own.”
“A psychic vampire,” Julio said uneasily.
“Yes!” Solberg said. “Exactly. A psychic vampire who could stay young forever by draining away the youth of these girls. Yet at the same time, he knew it was a fantasy, knew the girls could not keep him young, but knowing and acknowledging it did nothing to loosen the grip of the fantasy. And though he knew he was sick — even mocked himself, called himself a degenerate — he couldn't break free of his obsession.”
“What happened to the charge of statutory rape?” Reese asked. “I'm not aware he was tried or convicted. He had no police record.”
“The girl was remanded to juvenile authorities,” Solberg said, “and put in a minimum-security facility. She slipped away, skipped town. She'd been carrying no identification, and the name she gave them proved false, so they had no way of tracking her. Without the girl, they had no case against Eric, and the charges were dropped.”
“You urged him to seek psychiatric help?” Julio asked.
“Yes. But he wouldn't. He was an extremely intelligent man, introspective, and he had already analyzed himself. He knew — or at least believed that he knew — the cause of his mental condition.”
Julio leaned forward in his chair. “And the cause as he saw it?”
Solberg cleared his throat, started to speak, shook his head as if to say that he needed a moment
to decide how to proceed. He was obviously embarrassed by the conversation and was equally disturbed by his betrayal of Eric Leben's confidence even though Leben was now dead. The heaps of papers on the desk no longer provided adequate cover behind which to hide, so Solberg got up and went to the window because it afforded the opportunity to turn his back on Julio and Reese, thus concealing his face.
Solberg's dismay and self-reproach over revealing confidential information about a dead man — of whom he had been little more than an acquaintance — might have seemed excessive to some, yet Julio admired Solberg for it. In an age when few believed in moral absolutes, many would betray a friend without a qualm, and a moral dilemma of this nature would be beyond their understanding. Solberg's old-fashioned moral anguish seemed excessive only by current, decadent standards.
“Eric told me that, as a child, he was sexually molested by an uncle,” Solberg said to the window glass. “Hampstead was the man's name. The abuse started when Eric was four and continued till he was nine. He was terrified of this uncle but too ashamed to tell anyone what was happening. Ashamed because his family was so religious. That's important, as you'll see. The Leben family was devoutly, ardently religious. Nazarenes. Very strict. No music. No dancing. That cold, narrow religion that makes life a bleakness. Of course, Eric felt like a sinner because of what he'd done with his uncle, even though he was forced into it, and he was afraid to tell his parents.”
“It's a common pattern,” Julio said, “even in families that aren't religious. The child blames himself for the adult's crime.”
Solberg said, “His terror of Barry Hampstead — that was the first name, yes — grew greater month by month, week by week. And finally, when Eric was nine, he stabbed Hampstead to death.”
“Nine?” Reese said, appalled. “Good heavens.”
“Hampstead was asleep on the sofa,” Solberg continued, “and Eric killed him with a butcher's knife.”
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