Blinded

by Stephen White

  But I’d barely shifted my weight from one foot to the other before I thought:Sam.

  Rhymes withdamn.

  FORTY-THREE

  It was surprisingly easy to find someone to sweep my office for bugs. I called a couple of lawyers I knew through Lauren, who put me in touch with the private investigators they used, and the two investigators both pointed me toward the same company: West Security.

  The electronic security specialist I talked to at West was a woman named Tayisha Rosenthal. She explained that I had my choice between a cursory sweep of my office for about half of my practice’s daily earnings, and a thorough sweep, which would cost me twice what my practice typically generated in a day. If I chose the thorough examination, she would give me a 99.99 percent assurance that my office was not being monitored by listening devices.

  I said I would take the deluxe package.

  She asked when.

  “As soon as possible.”

  “Can you do noon?” she said. “I can squeeze you in at noon.”

  I looked at my calendar. It would mean canceling a patient, maybe two. I said yes and I gave her the address.

  I’d made a bad error in judgment when I’d asked Gibbs for freedom to consult with Sam about her suspicions about Sterling. That was certain. And it was clear that Sam had gone too far when he’d approached Gibbs himself and decided to take off on some ill-thought-out quest in Georgia.

  But bugging my office?

  He’d gone too far.

  Way too far.

  I picked up my address book and began looking for the phone numbers of the two patients whose appointments would have to be rescheduled.

  Like neighbors everywhere, Diane and I kept keys to each other’s office. Highly doubtful that what might be said in my own office would ultimately remain confidential, I took advantage of Diane’s tour in jury duty limbo and saw the rest of my morning’s appointments in her hopefully uncorrupted space. When my patients asked me about the change, I explained that my office was being fumigated. It was as close to the truth as I was willing to get.

  Right at twelve o’clock I paced out to my waiting room where I spied an unfamiliar woman reading a copy ofSports Illustrated. She was a young African American with close-cropped hair and soft features. When she looked up, I saw that her dark eyes were brilliant, like fire and onyx.

  “Tayisha Rosenthal?” I said. “Alan Gregory.”

  I invited her back to my office. She grabbed a fat metal aluminum briefcase, and I allowed her to precede me down the hall. “It’s not this whole place, right?”

  “No, not unless you find something in my office. Then I suppose you’ll have to search the whole building.”

  She tapped her watch. “Won’t be today.”

  “I understand.”

  She stood in my office for a moment reconnoitering the place, then took long strides across the room to my desk, opened her case like a giant clamshell, and started fishing out equipment.

  I waved her back into the hallway and pulled the door closed. “Let’s talk out here. Just in case.”

  “You sticking around? You want to watch me work?” she asked.

  “Why? Is that extra?” It was a lame attempt on my part to find humor in the experience.

  She laughed. “Nah. I’ll give you a running commentary of what I’m doing if you want.”

  “That would be great.”

  “Good. But the commentary is extra. Make it fifty, cash.” She held out her hand. “Up front.”

  “Excuse me?”

  She laughed again. “Kidding. You’re a shrink, right? I thought you people were supposed to treat paranoids, not become one yourself. And here you are thinking that people are listening to your every word, just like some nutcase. Aren’t you supposed to be the healthy one?”

  “Yeah, that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

  “There’s some irony there, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” I admitted, “there is.” I was eager to change the subject. “How does someone end up doing this-what you do-for a living? Sweeping buildings for bugs?”

  “Army intelligence. I did this same kind of thing for Uncle Sam’s Army of One for four years.”

  She looked too young to have completed four years in the army. Apparently, she could tell that’s what I was thinking.

  “I’m twenty-four,” she said. “Old enough. Do the math.”

  She stepped back inside the office and went to work.

  The equipment she’d pulled out of foam rubber compartments in her metal case seemed to have been cobbled together from the detritus of a few visits to Radio Shack. Microphones, earphones, and a little machine that looked like what I thought a modern Geiger counter would look like. Gauges with long, jumpy needles. Digital scoreboards. A few knobs and switches that required some fiddling.

  After about ten minutes of poking around and setting and resetting her electronics, opening drawers, and moving my furniture around, she said, “Hot-cha!”

  By then I’d settled into a place on the floor by the office door, leaning against the wall reading the sameSports IllustratedTayisha had been perusing in the waiting room. Tiger Woods was apparently still winning golf tournaments.

  Tayisha’s exclamation startled me. I looked up at the mess she’d made of my office and said, “What?”

  She pointed toward the hallway, but she didn’t look my way; she was totally focused on one of her little digital gadgets.

  We stepped out of the office.

  “Yo, Doctor? You paying attention? Good. On these private gigs, like this-by private, I mean I’m not out doing one of my routine sweeps for corporate security purposes, just a one-time for somebody who thinks somebody’s listening in on him-on these private gigs I meet some of the craziest human beings ever. Nutsos. People with tin-foil all over their apartments. Husbands sure their wives are listening to them over the radio in their cars. Those guys always have mistresses, by the way. They’re always getting something on the side. It’s the guilt that makes them whacked; that’s what I think. But crazy? You bet. I do a couple, three of those a month. Most of the time I feel like I should keep a syringe of Thorazine in my briefcase, you know, just in case?” She smiled. “And-and-you want to know what? I’ve never found a device on one of those jobs. Not one.”

  “Good, I’m glad to hear that.” Maybe Tayisha’s track record of ubiquitous failure boded well for me. Right at that moment I would rather have been judged crazy than discover that I’d been right about the bug.

  “Until today,” she said.

  “What?”

  She pointed at the equipment she held in her left hand. “This says that there’s a device in there sending out a signal. Mmm-hmmm. Something’s generating a fairly healthy signal that’s going out of that room. It appears to be voice activated.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t worry, now that I’ve detected it, I’ll locate it in a minute or two. You be real quiet while I finish up, okay? I’m concentrating.”

  Although in my fantasies I was already raising Sam by his thumbs, via pulleys, to some very high ceiling, the truth was that I had thought that I was being overly paranoid, too. I really hadn’t expected that Tayisha Rosenthal would discover any devices in my office.

  Locating the bug took another five minutes. Ninety-nine-plus percent of the device was inside one of the throw pillows on the sofa where my patients often sat. The electronics were buried deep in the batting.

  “That’s the transmitter. I just turned it off.” Zipping open the pillow, she pointed at a tiny box about the size of a pack of gum. “And this here”-she pulled the batting apart and revealed a braided wire-“is the antenna. Like little strands of hair.

  “And this little baby-can you see that, right there?” She used the tip of a pencil as a pointer. “See how tiny that is? That’s the microphone. Good stuff. Quality equipment.”

  The lead of the pencil was pointing directly at a small gray dot about the size of a lentil that exten
ded out at the edge of the pillow, near the zipper. If you weren’t looking for it, you would never notice it.

  “Really, that’s the microphone? What’s the range? How far can… a device like this transmit?”

  “We could test it if you want, but I’d say not too far. I would guess that whoever’s listening has a car parked nearby with a good receiving antenna and a digital recorder for the output.”

  The “output” was my therapy sessions. I waved at the pillow. “Who has stuff like this?”

  “Lots of people. You can buy listening devices over the Internet these days. Easy. Equipment this good is pricey, though. Somebody invested some serious money going after whatever it is you have to say in here. The battery in the transmitter alone costs some serious bucks.”

  “What do I do now?” I asked.

  “How about what do I do now? What I do is I document this-what I found and where-and I take some good pictures of the equipment in place. You’ll get a fair-size stack of glossies for your photo album. Here’s your part: Then you authorize me to remove the device. After I do, I screen one more time to be absolutely positively certain that there isn’t a second device. Don’t worry, there isn’t. I’m ninety-eight percent sure already. Then you call the police to report the intrusion. There’ve been some laws broken in this room. Mmmm-hmm.”

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  “Then you sit down and have a long, hard conversation with yourself about who might do this to you.”

  “And why,” I added.

  “Yeah. That, too.” She glanced at her watch. “I’ll be out of here in ten minutes max. But hey, we’re going to have to find a time to do a sweep of the rest of the building now, too.”

  She watched me swallow. The act was involuntary.

  Tayisha was reassuring. “I’ll give you a good rate, don’t worry. This has been fun.”

  I wasn’t having such a good time.

  After punching in Sam’s pager number, I listened for the beep before I dialed 911 and my cell phone number. Then I sat on Diane’s desk and waited for my phone to vibrate. I used the dead time to try to compute the number of secrets from the number of patients that might have been intercepted by the jumble of sophisticated electronics that was stuffed in my sofa pillow. I quickly realized that I was missing an essential variable: I didn’t know how long the bug had been in place.

  The earliest accusation I’d received from one of my patients was the one from my attorney client, Jim Zebid, the previous Sunday accusing me of leaking the story about Judge Heller’s husband selling cocaine. He’d told me that story the previous Tuesday, so the bug had been in place for at least eight days. Maybe longer.

  I was seeing thirty-six patients a week. Which meant thirty-six unique sets of secrets were at risk of having been revealed.

  After cursing silently for half a minute, I took Tayisha Rosenthal’s advice and began to have that long, hard conversation with myself about who might do this to me.

  And why.

  FORTY-FOUR

  SAM

  Nashville was one of those legendary American cities that I’d always wanted to visit, but when I finally got there at a quarter after one in the morning on a dark, misty night a couple of days before Thanksgiving, all I wanted to see was the lumpy synthetic pillow waiting for me on a Nashville motel room bed. I begged a Mountain Dew-distracted clerk for a five-thirty wake-up call and was in bed three minutes after I slid the plastic card into the lock on the door.

  DO NOT DISTURBsign on the door. Strip, pee, meds, bed.

  I slept like a dead man.

  By the time five-thirty came, my car was chilly, Dixie dew coated the windshield, and preholiday Nashville was still as sleepy as I was. I walked a couple of blocks to a little convenience store to try to scrape together some breakfast. Satisfaction wasn’t in the cards. I was learning that one of the places where post-heart attack patients can’t conveniently dine is a convenience store. Breakfast choices at the gas station were limited to doughnuts-a pretty good variety, actually-or Danish, or a sad-looking egg-and-sausage thing on a croissant. I settled for a dry bagel, burnt decaf, yogurt, and a carton of orange juice and walked back to the motel with every intention of eating my ascetic meal, climbing into the Jeep, and pointing it vaguely north toward Indianapolis.

  It didn’t happen.

  I woke up later on only because I had to pee. The light outside my room said dusk. I used the bathroom, took off my clothes, killed my cell phone and pager, and fell back into bed. “Tired” didn’t come close to describing my fatigue. “Exhausted” wasn’t enough of a superlative.

  The next change in light that registered in my consciousness was the wink of dawn. After a long shower I felt quasi-alive. In a fashion that reminded me, sadly, of Bill Murray inGroundhog Day,I retraced my steps to the convenience store of the morning before, bought the same food, and returned to the motel with the same intentions.

  Practice makes perfect. The second time I pulled it off. Before Nashville was awake, and certainly before I’d had a chance to taste any of her charms, I was on my way out of town in the Cherokee.

  Later on I stopped for some real food at a roadside café near someplace called Orlinda and lingered there for a while considering whether I was driving to Indianapolis, Indiana, to be a detective or to Rochester, Minnesota, to be a father. I climbed back in my car unaware that I ever quite reached a decision.

  After my late breakfast some truckers and I convoyed together up into Kentucky. I figured that the long-haul drivers were hurrying to get home to their families for Thanksgiving supper, so they were maintaining a speed that was far enough over the speed limit to make me reasonably content.

  The countryside south of Louisville was as pretty as a calendar. The whole thing was much better than rehab for me and my injured heart. A day asleep, peaceful landscape, uncrowded roads, strange accents on funny radio stations, and problems that seemed a thousand miles away.

  Or at least five hundred.

  If you look at a road map of Indiana, Indianapolis looks like the spot where an award-winning sharpshooter left his first and only pop at an imaginary bull’s-eye that had been pinned on top of the map. The state’s largest city is almost perfectly centered north to south and east to west. As you approach Indiana from any direction, you feel a sublime confidence that you couldn’t miss Indianapolis even if you fell sound asleep at the wheel. All roads may not actually lead to Rome, but in this part of the United States it sure seemed like they all led to Indianapolis.

  The convoy of truckers and I were making good time as we cleared the northern boundary of Columbus. Out in front of us, Highway 65 was gleaming in the November sun like the Yellow Brick Road that was going to carry us nowhere but to Oz.

  A while later my beeper vibrated on my hip, and I fumbled to find my Kmart reading glasses so I could read the little screen. I saw the 911 before the phone number and felt my heart rate jump. I reached down and shushed the volume on Faith Hill’s lament, and signaled to pull the Jeep into a rest stop. Two of the truckers blasted a good-bye with their air horns, and I honked my reply. After I exited the highway, I settled into a parking place beside a big recreational vehicle full of gray-haired women. For some reason they made me think about Sherry, which caused a twang in my heart over Simon, and I let my mind wander in that neighborhood while I allowed myself a minute or two to decide whether to return the call.

  I punched in the number.

  Lucy said, “Is that you?”

  “Yeah, what’s up?”

  “Where are you? Don’t you ever answer your phone?”

  “Just south of Indianapolis somewhere. A rest stop full of strangers.”

  “Don’t bother going any farther, Sammy. Get back on 70 and keep an eye out for the mountains. Just before you run into them, that’s home. The Julie Franconia mystery is solved. We got that one cold, I think. There’s nothing for you to do in Indiana.”

  “Yeah?”

  “A body was found in some woods outside
Martinsville-that’s just south of Indianapolis-three or four days after our Ms. Franconia disappeared. It was hers. The local police had originally cleared the thing by attaching the homicide to a serial killer who was traveling about that time from Chicago to Texas. He was one of those guys who maintained he’d killed scores of people since he was, like, eleven. You know the ones. Cops and reporters fromDatelinefollow him around the country with shovels and backhoes as he points out all the places he left bodies. I have his name somewhere; you want it?”

  “Not unless it’s relevant.”

  “It’s not. A close comparison of the VICAP reports on the serial killer’s known victims-there are six or seven; the guy was a killer for real even if he’s a little boastful about the numbers-shows that our girl doesn’t belong in his group. MO of her death wasn’t really anywhere close to his known MO. Circumstances of her disappearance aren’t right, either. Personally I think somebody around Martinsville was looking for a cheap clear. They got it. Anyway, that body was found. They’re going to reopen now.”

  “Cause?”

  “Single gunshot to the base of the skull.”

  “Front or back?”

  “Back. They think a nine-millimeter.”

  “Mutilation?”

  “No.”

  I grumbled at the news. That wasn’t the work of any garden-variety serial killer. The feds would be working overtime to tie the case back to Sterling Storey. I had been hoping to do something useful in Indianapolis. As soon as I heard Lucy’s news, I knew that wasn’t going to happen.

  Lucy said, “You can come home, Sammy. Start now, and you’ll be here in time for Thanksgiving dinner.”

  “What about Augusta?”

  “No body discovered down there yet. But it turns out that some clothing that might belong to that victim-the locals have soft ID on a shoe from a girlfriend of hers-was found dumped outside town in a place called the Phinizy Swamp around the time of her disappearance. Police still have the clothing, fortunately. They’re revisiting the forensics.”