More Deaths Than One

by Pat Bertram

Pimples froze, then all at once he dived for the knife. His fingers closed over the handle. He sprang at Bob. Bob kicked him in the face. Pimples’s head snapped back. He collapsed on the ground.

  Bob seized the switchblade. Without looking at the two young men, who twitched and moaned and muttered curses, he walked away.

  Back on the street, he tossed the knife into the second trash receptacle he passed.

  Chapter 17

  Bob entered the skin flick theater, intending to remain out of sight until eleven o’clock when Kerry’s shift started, but he fell asleep and didn’t wake until after her shift had ended.

  He stepped out of the dark theater into the bright of day. He felt disoriented, as if the world had continued without him, and now he had to scramble to catch up.

  The thought of seeing Kerry helped steady him.

  ***

  “I hoped it was you,” Kerry exclaimed, opening the door of the house. She pulled him inside, locked the door, and threw herself into his arms.

  Bob hugged her closely, inhaling her clean, fresh scent and letting her warmth seep into his soul. An invisible hand seemed to close around his heart at the thought of having to leave her yet again.

  He leaned back and gently brushed her hair away from her face. “I came to say goodbye.”

  “No,” she said swiftly, without equivocation. “You can’t.”

  “It’s for a few days. I need to see a doctor in Omaha.”

  She sucked in a short breath. “Are you okay? I mean, outside of the obvious.”

  “I’m fine. He’s a psychologist who might have some information for me.”

  “How are you getting there?”

  “Bus or train, whichever works out.”

  A brilliant smile lit her face. “Then it’s not goodbye. I’ll drive you.” She held up a hand to keep him from answering. “If I don’t come, who’s going to check out the motel room for you?”

  He stroked his chin, but it was a parody of deliberation; he could refuse her nothing, especially when she smiled at him like that.

  She pointed to his empty hands. “Where’s your gym bag?”

  “I left it at ISI. I had a meeting with the young woman I told you about, and since I didn’t know whether she was friend or foe, I wanted to be unencumbered.”

  “Was she friend or foe?”

  “Yes.”

  He could feel her gaze, a kind of heat on his skin.

  “You’re teasing me,” she said, smiling.

  “A little.”

  Her eyebrows shot up. “Well?”

  “Friend.”

  “Why did she want to see you? Was she pretty?”

  He laughed. “I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to the way your mind works. Yes, she was pretty, in an intense sort of way. And it’s a long story. I’ll explain on the way to Omaha.”

  She gave a business-like nod. “When do you want to leave?”

  “As soon as possible. I called the doctor before I came here and made an appointment for tomorrow evening at five. There’s plenty of time, but the way my life’s going, I don’t want to take any chances.”

  “We’ll have to stop somewhere to get you some clothes. You left a few things here, but I don’t know if there’s anything presentable to wear to your appointment.”

  He sighed. “I feel fractured, always having to leave bits and pieces behind.”

  “Did you have anything important in the gym bag?”

  “No.”

  “Then, why are we standing around talking? We should either go or . . .” She pressed against him, her mouth sweet and firm on his.

  Desire swept through him in a warm rush.

  Well, perhaps he didn’t have to leave right this minute.

  ***

  Kerry trailed her hand through Bob’s chest hairs, tracing his scars. Her touch felt like drops of summer rain.

  She lifted her head to look at him. “Where did you get the scars?”

  “A hunting accident in my youth.” He spoke the words by rote, as if they had no connection to him.

  She didn’t seem to notice. Giving a delighted laugh, she said, “Do the deer come armed with knives now?”

  “No. Jackson shot me.”

  The amusement died out of her eyes. “Your brother shot you? By accident, I hope.”

  He shook his head. “When I was ten, my father took us to the prairie east of Denver to hunt quail. I didn’t want to go, but he insisted, saying I needed to learn how to be a man. I hated the idea of killing and refused to fire the shotgun, but Jackson fired at anything he could.

  “In the late afternoon, not content with merely killing defenseless animals, he deliberately took aim at me. I was looking at a flock of geese flying overhead and happened to glance at him as he pulled the trigger, which is how I knew it was no accident. Luckily, I stood far enough away the shot didn’t kill me, but the pellets blasted the front of my chest.

  “My father blamed me for getting in Jackson’s way.” A memory popped into Bob’s head; something he’d forgotten until that very moment. “My father always called Jackson ‘son,’ but he called me ‘kid.’”

  “When we were at the cemetery, I noticed that your father passed away a long time ago.”

  “I was fifteen. He died in a bar fight. The last words he ever spoke to me were, ‘Why can’t you be more like Jackson? You’re such a cold son of a bitch.’ But I wasn’t cold. Just empty.”

  “What was your mother like?”

  “Aloof. She’d been a beauty queen and never forgave me for my terrible sin of being average.”

  Kerry frowned. “Why would someone so pretty marry a cop?”

  “He played professional football when they met, but two years in he destroyed a knee. Why the interest in my family?”

  “Not them. You. I was curious why you took so long to return to Denver. Now I know.”

  She jumped out of bed. “Weren’t you anxious to get to Omaha? Well, what are we waiting for?”

  ***

  “I wish we could go someplace far away and forget all your problems,” Kerry said. They’d left Denver behind and were driving through open country. “I can get us fake IDs, even passports if we needed them.”

  Bob smiled at her. “You’re an amazing woman, Kerry Casillas.”

  Her eyes laughed at him. “You’re just now noticing?” She swung out from behind a semi. “The guy I know used to work at the restaurant, and now that he’s off parole, he’s back in business. Nobody can tell his paper is fake because he gets it input into the proper computers, like it’s for real.”

  “If he’s so good, how did he get caught?”

  “He didn’t. He went to jail for possession of drugs.” She passed the truck and moved back into the right lane. “He charges a lot. Too bad you’re not rich.”

  “How much does a person need before you con-sider them to be rich?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a half million. I don’t suppose other people think that’s much, but it sure would make me feel rich. I’d be able to travel and then settle down in a nice little house somewhere.”

  “Then I’m rich.”

  She swerved into the left lane. When she had the car under control again, she glanced at him. Her eyes appeared to be all pupil.

  “You have a half million dollars?”

  “More, actually.”

  “Where . . . how . . .”

  “From Hsiang-li. He was always giving me money. He paid me a handsome salary, and at the end of each year he gave me a bonus—a percentage of his considerable profits. And, of course, the money for my paintings. Since my expenses were minimal—Madame Butterfly’s was my one extravagance—I saved most of it. Also, when Hsiang-li left, he gave me an envelope containing a check that doubled what I had.”

  “But the boardinghouse, the cheap clothes, the junky car . . .”

  “Things don’t mean much to me. I’ve always been more interested in being at peace.”

  She made an exasperated sound. “You want peace? I
’ll give you peace. A piece of my mind.”

  He smiled. “At least it won’t be anything weighty.”

  There was a moment of stunned silence, then she burst out laughing. Wiping her eyes with one hand, she said, “It always takes me awhile to recognize when you’re being facetious. You were being facetious, weren’t you?”

  “Of course. I think you’re exceptionally smart.”

  “Yeah, well, if I’m so smart, how come I’m out of a job?”

  Bob jerked his head toward her. “What!”

  “My boss wouldn’t let me take tonight off, so I quit.” She gave him a sidelong glance. “You can hire me to be your agent.”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “What I want is . . .” She drove in silence for a mile or two. “You don’t have any more surprises for me, do you? I mean, every time I get to figuring I know who you are, you throw another surprise in the works.”

  “No more surprises. You know everything about me I know.”

  “Okay. Now tell me about your meeting with the girl. What was she wearing?”

  Chapter 18

  “How can I help?” Dr. James Willet rested his chin on his steepled fingers. The backs of his hands were crepey and mottled with age spots, but he seemed only about ten years older than Bob.

  “I’m doing research for a book,” Bob said. “A friend told me you specialize in the problems of soldiers who had been abused or interfered with.”

  Dr. Willet nodded. “That is correct.”

  For a moment Bob thought he caught a glimpse of buried sadness, then the look of patent interest re-appeared in the bluish-gray eyes.

  “This friend has been plagued with recurring nightmares,” Bob said. “He was a conscientious objector during Vietnam, and he dreams that several times he grabbed a weapon and fired on the enemy, though it goes against everything he believes. He now thinks he really did do it.”

  “Does your friend have a name?”

  “I’d prefer not to say.”

  “What does your . . . friend think happened to him?”

  Noting the slight hesitation, Bob realized the doctor assumed he was the friend. He thought of correcting the assumption, then decided it didn’t matter.

  “He has a vague idea someone programmed him, possibly during a visit to a hospital after receiving a flesh wound.”

  Dr. Willet tapped the tips of his fingers together. “I see.”

  “It’s as if someone tried to turn a less than ideal soldier into a perfect cog in the military machine, and I became curious about what went on back then. I think there might be a book in it.”

  Dr. Willet’s lips twisted in a sardonic smile. “So do I. I’ve been working on it for twenty years, but since I don’t have anything more than circumstantial evidence and hearsay, editors aren’t interested. Also, patriotism is big right now, so an exposé of military malfeasance isn’t in hot demand.”

  “Malfeasance? Is that what you call it?”

  He gave a bitter laugh. “No. That’s what my agent calls it. I call it criminal behavior. I call it murder.”

  His hands fluttered in an agitated manner. He set them flat on the desk, took a deep breath, and exhaled slowly.

  “Sometimes it seems to me as if the prevailing American attitude is ‘I want mine and I don’t care what happens to anyone else as long as I get it.’ And always, throughout history, the combat soldier got screwed first. In the 1800s, the Chicago meatpackers sold their tainted meat to the army. Many soldiers died on the frontlines not from bullets but from beef. In this century, soldiers have been forced to use leech repellents that didn’t repel leeches, shark repellents that actually attracted sharks. They’ve been supplied with weapons that sometimes failed to fire and weapons that blew up in their hands. And they’ve been experimented on, like lab rats or guinea pigs.”

  “It makes a certain sense,” Bob said. “The military, particularly the infantry, is a captive population that can be easily controlled and, unlike prison populations, they have little recourse to lawyers since basically they have no rights.”

  Dr. Willet nodded. “Exactly. And if they ever mentioned that something had been done to them, chalk it up to battle fatigue. If they got injured or killed, that’s easily explained too, even if the country isn’t at war. If any serious questions are ever asked, all that’s necessary is to call it a snafu, and everyone understands because people have come to accept incompetence from the military.”

  “I heard about a scientific test,” Bob said, “where they sent some soldiers to the tropics equipped with winter gear, and posted other to sub-arctic areas with tropical clothes. The soldiers sent to the tropical areas had it easy. They took off their clothes. But those sent to the cold regions could not put on winter gear they didn’t have. Most got frostbite. The military laughed it off as another snafu.”

  Dr. Willet leaned back in his chair; the brown leather groaned. The look of professional interest in his eyes became more personal.

  “You’ve been doing your homework, I see.”

  Bob nodded, taking the credit, though Harrison had once mentioned it to him. Thinking about Harrison, Bob realized that despite Harrison’s expansive ways and the doctor’s air of self-containment, the two men were alike in their concern for the plight of the common soldier.

  “They deserved better from their government,” Dr. Willet said, as if he had heard Bob’s thoughts. “Besides the experimentation, some of the most reprehensible measures concerned POWs. After Korea, the government changed the status of the remaining POWs to KIA. They assured the country they left no American POWs in North Korea, but those were just words. The POWs had been moved to China and the Soviet Union.”

  “Why did they get listed as killed in action if they were still alive?” Bob asked.

  Dr. Willet rubbed a thumb over his fingers in the universal sign for money.

  Bob’s eyebrows drew together. “Who makes money off POWs?”

  “The American military. By removing someone from MIA status and placing them on the KIA list, there is a one-time insurance payment. This saves the government a fortune in monthly service pay—which includes promotions and pay raises—over the life of the POW. And it saves a great deal of embarrassment for military officers and politicians who do nothing to secure the release of their men.

  “They did the same thing to the POWs after Vietnam, but in that case they had a reason to keep the POWs from coming home. Many had been sent to northern Laos and were held among the poppy fields, where they couldn’t help but learn of the American involvement in the drug trade. The U.S. government certainly did not want those soldiers to return home and talk about what they had learned. In fact, one man did manage to escape and make his way back to America. When he tried to tell what he saw, they court-martialed him for being a deserter.”

  Not knowing what to say, Bob remained silent. He glanced around the office with its homey touches designed to put patients at ease: the restful blues and greens of the landscapes on the walls, the comfortable couches and chairs, the simple wooden desk. The only incongruous note in the room was the table shoved in a corner and piled with stacks of paper. Underneath the table lay cardboard boxes overflowing with more paper.

  “My research,” Dr. Willet said. “None of those interviews or snippets of information mean much by themselves, but the preponderance of material has proven to me, if no one else, that American soldiers have, in fact, been experimented on.”

  Bob related what Tracy had told him about the secret agent from the Korean War who was so secret even he didn’t know he was an agent.

  Dr. Willet nodded. “They began using such agents during World War Two and continued right on through Vietnam, but more than simple hypnotism was usually involved. I don’t know what procedures they’re using now. Light, sound, and color, perhaps. I do know there are several drugs that help overcome the mental and moral blocks we all have, and make us more susceptible to suggestion.

  “In nineteen fifty-three, the
director of the CIA said they had to find effective and practical techniques to render an individual subservient to an imposed will or control. The CIA created pain, produced headaches, used drugs, did anything they could to make the subject open to manipulation. They strove to induce amnesia, a way of gaining control over people’s memories by wiping out certain areas of experience and leaving intact only what the agency wanted them to remember.”

  Bob felt a chill on the back of his neck. “Have you ever heard of a project called Cerberus?”

  “I don’t believe I have.”

  “According to my informant, it originated to help amputees overcome the discomfort in their phantom limbs by removing the memory of it.”

  Dr. Willet froze. There was a crack in the calm façade at that moment, a lowering of the guard, and Bob saw the extent of his pain.

  The doctor’s voice shook when he spoke. “What do you know about the memory removal?”

  “Only that ISI—Information Services, Incorp-orated—funded it and that they experimented on amputees during the Korean War.”

  “Cerberus,” the doctor said, as if to himself. “An apt name. Similar to cerebrum. And, like the three-headed hound, the brain has three parts—hindbrain, midbrain, forebrain. It too sometimes guards the gates of hell, an internal hell composed of terrible and unbearable memories.”

  “I’d appreciate anything you can tell me about ISI,” Bob said.

  Dr. Willet sounded abstracted. “I don’t know much.”

  “Will it help if I promise not to use anything you tell me?”

  “No. I don’t know much. I’ve come across the name a couple of times in the course of my research, but that’s all. And if I did know, I wouldn’t care if you used it. I’m more interested in getting the information exposed than in getting credit.”

  “How did you get involved in this research in the first place?”

  Dr. Willet studied him a moment, but didn’t respond.

  Bob returned his look.

  “My brother,” Dr. Willet said at last. “Daryl was eight years older than me, and my idol. We grew up in a farming community here in Nebraska, and life seemed perfect.