Remote Control

by Stephen White

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Is she still in danger?”

  “She may be, Casey. I don’t know what happened up there with this man who I thought I saw heading to her house. And I sure don’t know what might have been happening there after I left.”

  “Do the police know any of this?”

  “No, they can’t. They absolutely can’t know.”

  “Because it’s so complicated?”

  “That’s right. It’s not just her physical well-being, it’s her privacy that’s at stake. And I think her life is at risk, too.”

  “Emma Spire has no privacy. She’s been probed more times than a medical school cadaver.”

  “The police can’t know what I’m telling you, Casey. You’ll have to agree to that. I’ll tell you everything, but the police don’t know until I say so. When you learn more you’ll understand.”

  “This is bullshit, Lauren. Absolute bullshit. You’re facing a possible murder charge and you’re asking me to defend you with one hand tied behind my back because you want to protect someone’s reputation?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Then what’s so damn complicated?”

  “Let’s just say that if the police find out, if anyone finds out what’s going on, the consequences for Emma will be worse than being raped.”

  Casey’s imagination exploded with a Technicolor, wide-screen, Dolby THX–quality flashback of twenty minutes of hell spent trying to fight off a drunk cowboy inside a goddamn Winnebago in a campground outside West Yellowstone when she was twenty years old.

  “Tell me something that’s worse than being raped. Go ahead, try.”

  “Casey, the only thing I can think of that would be worse than being raped once is being raped over and over and over again.”

  Casey looked at her wristwatch and said, “Shit. I can’t argue with that. We have five minutes left, maybe. In those five minutes, I want you to figure out a way to bring me up to speed on this little conspiracy and let me know what the hell is going on.”

  “With Emma?”

  “With Emma. And with this multiple rape thing.” Casey watched Lauren squint at something across the room. “And I also want to know what the hell is going on with your vision.”

  “What?”

  “Alan told me, Lauren. About your illness. And about your problem with your vision. I don’t know why you feel you need to keep this a secret, but that’s another conversation. Are you okay? What on earth can I do to help?”

  Casey expected her client to look angry. Instead, Lauren looked relieved and, momentarily, fragile. “I think that I’m going blind, Casey. It’s happened before and…I’m so scared.”

  “Alan says you need medicine?”

  Lauren nodded. She started crying. “Probably. If I get an IV started I have a better chance of avoiding permanent damage to my optic nerves.” She wiped at her eyes. “At least the part of my eyes that makes tears is still working.”

  Scott Malloy knocked solidly at the door. “Time’s up for now, we need to transfer Ms. Crowder to the jail for booking. You can consult with her more when you get there, if you want. I’ll try to expedite it. Be a couple of hours, probably. Depends on how busy they are.”

  Through the door, Casey said, “She needs to pee—” then louder, “she needs to use the ladies’ room first, Detective.”

  “Okay. I’m coming in.” Malloy was holding a heavy jacket with Boulder County Jail markings for Lauren to wear and some canvas shoes for her feet.

  Lauren looked down to try to hide the fact that she was crying. “I need the bathroom, Scott.”

  “Oh. Before you get to the jail?”

  She nodded.

  “I’ll get Officer Lander. She’ll take you in.”

  Casey said, “I’m happy to take her, Detective. Just show me where the bathroom is.”

  “It’s right down here. You stay with her the whole time? We’ll just pretend it’s another interview room.”

  As Malloy guided Lauren down the hall, she looked back over her shoulder at Casey and said, “Thanks.”

  Handcuffs awaited Lauren when she was done in the bathroom. She had taken an extra minute to throw some cool water on her face.

  Casey asked Malloy if he had to handcuff Lauren. Casey knew that procedure would dictate that he did. She also knew there was no harm in asking.

  Scott Malloy responded with a curt “Yes.”

  Lauren held her wrists out obligingly.

  Malloy said, “No. Behind your back for the trip over to the jail. Sorry, regulations. I don’t have a choice about some of this.” She turned around and felt the heavy metal couple her wrists together.

  They stopped by the reception desk on the way out of the detective bureau. Malloy bent over to sign some logs and a transfer form.

  Casey decided that the time was right. With the clerk right in front of them, she had a witness. Lauren needed medical help. And she, Casey, needed some time to figure out what was going on with Emma Spire.

  “Is there a nurse at the jail full-time?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What about a doctor?”

  “On call at night. Has some regular hours occasionally during the day, I think they can tell you all about it when you get over there.” He glanced at her sideways. “If you’re hoping for tranqs or sleepers, don’t hold your breath. It’s not going to happen tonight.”

  Lauren was staring down at her borrowed shoes, not seeing anything but some faint colors and some blurry outlines.

  Casey pressed on. “Could you please call the doctor and arrange to have him meet my client at the jail tonight? Right away.”

  “What?” Malloy was beyond skeptical. He wasn’t interested in calling a doctor, all he was interested in was some gratitude for all the slack he had been cutting Lauren already.

  “I think we have a medical emergency in progress, Detective.”

  He looked at Lauren. She appeared forlorn and beaten, not ill. “And what the hell might that be?” God, how he hated defense attorney antics, especially when he was already doing back flips trying to be reasonable.

  “Your prisoner appears to be going blind, Detective Malloy.”

  “Don’t play with me, Ms. Sparrow.”

  “Check yourself, please.”

  Malloy stared first at Casey Sparrow to try to see evidence of the lie in her face. He couldn’t. He shifted his gaze to Lauren, who raised her head and looked toward him. Her left cornea was red, her pupils were different sizes, and she appeared to be trying to look him right back in the eye.

  But she was failing by about ten degrees.

  Suspicious of everything where prisoners and lawyers were concerned, Scott Malloy immediately wondered if Casey Sparrow had put some drops in her client’s eyes to obfuscate something. He looked again at Lauren’s face. She seemed to be scared, sad, and incredibly tired.

  But her eyes? Even to Malloy, whose training in examining vision functioning was limited to the curbside tests used in identifying drunks, it was clear that Lauren was failing to track.

  “Let me find Sergeant Pons,” he said.

  FOUR

  Tuesday, October 8. Early evening.

  55 Degrees, Partly Cloudy

  No, really, Lauren, Ethan’s expecting me. I’ll be fine. Kevin’s arranged for me to meet somebody tomorrow morning about personal protection until this thing…settles.” Emma widened her eyes and offered a reassuring smile.

  Lauren had pulled her car to a stop in the RTD bus cutout on the east end of the Downtown Boulder Mall.

  “You’re sure?”

  “See, it’s right there, only half a block. Don’t be so worried about me.” The Citizens National Bank Building was easy to spot, the largest and most architecturally interesting structure on the fourteen hundred block of the Mall.

  Lauren felt uneasy. “Maybe I’ll just wait here until you get inside. Look what happened the last time I turned my back on you.”

  “I’m fine,
Lauren.”

  “I’ll wait, anyway. Call me crazy. I have little sisters and brothers, I’m used to worrying. Call me if you need anything. Anything at all.”

  Emma assured her she would and said, “Thanks for everything. You’ve been great.” She tugged down her hat, returned her sunglasses to her face, and smiled once more at Lauren, before walking with assured strides up the brick paths of the Mall.

  Lauren waited, watching for two minutes until she saw Emma raise the bottom half of one of the big double-hung windows in Ethan’s front room. Emma leaned her upper body outside and waved toward Lauren, who thought for the tenth time, at least, that Emma looked like royalty.

  Emma wandered toward the rear of the flat and found Ethan sitting at a high stool in front of a keyboard. His eyes were intent on a twenty-inch screen, his hands were dancing over the keys as though whatever he was typing was coming straight from memory or was on a direct line from God. He wore a wireless telephone headset. He swiveled on his stool and waved a distracted hello to Emma without interrupting his conversation.

  She approached him warmly, appreciating his smooth skin and his smoother manner, loving his baggy cotton clothes and the intensity of the relationship he had with his machines. Ethan was as serious about his work as her father had been about his. She was wary of that dedication to work—her mother had taught her to be—but she respected it. She also knew it attracted and compelled her in ways that someday she needed to slow down and understand better.

  Tomorrow, she thought. She would do that tomorrow.

  She kissed him on the ear, sliding in her tongue and probing gently.

  He pulled away, pointing at the headset, indicating he was on the phone. Ethan wasn’t speaking; the other person had been doing all the talking.

  “You on hold?” she asked in a half-whisper.

  He shook his head.

  Emma studied Ethan’s face and decided that although he was currently distracted, he wasn’t uninterested.

  Her confidence building, she walked a few steps, and pulled a high stool up to another computer. She touched the mouse to dissolve the screen saver. A long pattern of meaningless numbers, letters, and symbols appeared instantly, stark white columns on a black background.

  Ethan screamed, “No. Emma, no. Don’t touch that.” She flinched as she looked at him, startled by his rebuke. He seemed to recognize that his reflexive command had been jagged and he quickly added, “Please.”

  He began to speak into the tiny microphone that dangled in front of his lips, his words the exotic singsongy dialect of his youth. Emma knew that the phone call she had interrupted was long distance to Hawaii.

  The first time she had eavesdropped on a call he was making to a friend in Hawaii, she had asked him about the speech pattern. He’d labeled it “pidgin,” explaining that the language had developed from native Hawaiian, English, and Asian roots and was cemented with colloquial island slang.

  Emma could decipher an occasional English word in the patois but the totality of the dialect was foreign enough to be unintelligible. She guessed he was talking to one of his siblings, given the frequent use of the word “bro.”

  Emma’s experience was that Ethan talked comfortably about only two things: his work and his family. He had two brothers and two sisters, all of whom still lived in the islands. His mother ran a dress shop in an upscale mall in Honolulu. His father had died of an aneurysm when Ethan, the youngest of the kids, was charging through his high school curriculum in two and a half years. The death of his father was the beginning of a litany of family tragedy that Ethan felt had yet to play its final notes.

  Before he arrived on the mainland for his first year of studies at UCLA, his oldest brother had lost a leg above the knee and an arm below the elbow in a freak accident involving heavy machinery in a sugar cane field, and one of his sisters had lost a baby to SIDS. Another had been sterilized by hemorrhage after an abortion.

  His brother’s plight struggling with dual prostheses sparked an interest in medicine that Ethan wasn’t aware he possessed when he left Hawaii for UCLA to study computer science. Before long he was hanging around with the engineers in medical technology more than he was studying in his field. After two years at UCLA he moved across town to Cal Tech and began to imagine the hardware and software that would lead to the products that eventually launched BiModal.

  Ethan Han didn’t see any reason that prosthetic devices could not be programmed to “feel” in much the same manner as human skin.

  The “technology” of human sensation is not particularly complicated. Sensors in the skin detect heat, pressure, light—whatever—and translate these sensations to electrical signals that are in turn carried up neural pathways to the brain for processing and decoding. Why couldn’t electronic components replace any of the natural components responsible for sensory data collection and transmission?

  Ethan’s goal became simple. He wanted to design a prosthetic hand and foot that would allow his older brother to feel hot and cold and to sense pressure and movement.

  By the time he began to develop his systems, improved battery devices had permitted major advances in myoelectric prosthetics. All Ethan had to do to improve upon them, he figured, was refine and miniaturize the existing sensory electronics and develop the computer hardware and software necessary to interpret and relay the signals to the intact neural pathways on his brother’s stumps. If he could combine this new technology with the advances that other scientists were making daily with myoelectrics, a whole new generation of “sensitive” prosthetics would be possible.

  When he was twenty-four years old, Ethan Han attended the fitting of his brother’s first temperature-sensing prosthetic arm and hand.

  And BiModal was born.

  Emma moved away from the keyboard she wasn’t supposed to touch and walked farther down the row of benches, parking herself at a Macintosh that wasn’t powered up. She booted it, clicked the mouse a few times to locate the word processor, and typed, “I think I’m going to take a bath.” She spooled the cryptic message to the printer, which came to life halfway down the bench toward Ethan. By the time she walked down there the message had been printed.

  She retrieved the note, placed it gingerly on the keyboard in front of Ethan, kissed him again on the ear, this time without her tongue, and walked toward the back of his flat. She hoped he was looking as she made her way out of the laboratory. Without turning to see if she had an audience, she crossed her arms and pulled her top over her head. She reached behind her back and released her bra with her right hand and let it fall down her arms. As she passed through the door the garment was dangling from her fingers.

  Although it was a role she occasionally enjoyed, she hadn’t played the temptress in a long time. Hadn’t desired to. She had never understood how public adulation could serve as such an aphrodisiac for Pico, her fiancé. For her, the pervasive attention deadened her, dumping novocaine on every erotic impulse she had.

  But tonight she felt alive. She wondered if her lust was stimulated by Ethan’s reticence. She decided she didn’t care.

  Odd, she thought, as she turned off the blow-dryer she had found in Ethan’s bathroom. The music that was filling the flat was classical, not something she remembered hearing before in Ethan’s home. When he was alone, he’d confessed to her, he almost always played the blues.

  Still naked from her bath, she brushed her teeth with a toothbrush she carried in her purse, then applied a thin ribbon of eyeliner and a little blush. She painted her lips with a great deal of care. The progression of the symphonic themes energized her. She had forgotten the horror of the garage incident for the first time all day.

  She grabbed a plaid bathrobe from the back of the bathroom door and crushed it to her face. The smell was Ethan’s. It was the smell of skin after a day in the sun. It was the smell of fresh sweet male sweat. She pulled it on and went to find him to see whether he wanted to go out for dinner.

  Dancing screen savers lit up the east wall of
the laboratory. But Ethan was no longer there. She backtracked and checked the tiny kitchen and solitary bedroom. He wasn’t there, either. The music beckoned from the front room but from where she stood it appeared that end of the flat was dark.

  She called, “Ethan?” Her voice cracked like a preadolescent boy’s, and hearing it, she realized that she was becoming frightened. Silently, she cursed the legacy of fear that Nelson Newell had bestowed upon her with those two bullets in the airport. Before her father’s murder, nothing ever really frightened her.

  “Ethan? Are you here?” She returned to the bench, scanning the surface for a note. Nothing. Briskly, she jogged down the length of the long workbench and slid every mouse from side to side, prodding the screen savers to disappear, hoping that a screen would pop up with a message from Ethan.

  Nothing but indecipherable code.

  “Ethan?”

  She was growing more frightened and didn’t like the feeling at all. “Calm down, Emma, calm down,” she admonished. She lifted the receiver of a telephone off the workbench. Listened. The drone of the dial tone was as reassuring as a heartbeat.

  He’s gone out for a minute. No big deal. Maybe he’s picking up some food for dinner.

  She returned to the phone, thought of calling Kevin. No. Lauren? No.

  “Ethan? Where are you?”

  Beethoven, not Ethan, answered. Deep bass shook the flat.

  The room was lit almost entirely by task lights, the screen savers constantly changing the ambient lighting in the lab. The windows on the west wall faced the rooftops of the adjoining building; to the east, Boulder’s sprawl and the prairie. To see people, Emma would have to move to the front room. The Mall would be full of foot traffic this time of night. She convinced herself that she would feel safer there, by the windows, waiting for Ethan to get back from his errand.

  The hallway was a dark tunnel, the door closed. Did I close that door earlier? She tried to remember, but couldn’t.

  “Ethan?”