“Just a hundred feet ahead there is a cluster of trees. Midway is a cement drinking trough for the cattle. There haven’t been any livestock here for years, but the field is still cut up from their trails.”
Sherry looked ahead. “Take me to the trees, Edward.”
“The grass is high, Miss Moore. Your feet will be soaked.”
“It’s all right.” She took a step forward and he jumped to catch up with her, grabbing her arm for fear she would fall on the uneven ground. The going was awkward at times, the tip of her walking stick collecting chunks of sod, her boots becoming covered with grass and hayseed.
“What does the house look like now?” she asked. “You said it hadn’t been cared for?”
“It looks like they stopped living five years ago. That’s about the time he quit the hospital and sold off the animals. They had become recluses, according to the neighbors. Not even the postman had seen them for months. There is dust and trash in every room. The roof could use new shingles; they get lots of wind up here. There is grass growing through cracks in the patio and pool.”
A stiff breeze pelted them with icy flakes of snow. She stopped for a moment to turn from the wind. Then she started out again, her hands thankful for the gloves as she continued toward the grove.
“Take me under them,” she said. “I’d like to stand there for a minute alone, if you don’t mind.”
“Pretty woman,” Torlino said. He’d come around the gate to join his partner.
“Beautiful, actually,” Karpovich responded. He was standing by the gate, breathing hard from the walk uphill. His hands were cold, and he buried them in his pockets.
“Shame, good piece like that. Know what happened to her?”
Karpovich looked at him. “I didn’t ask.”
They could see her tapping her walking stick and stamping her feet to get the layout of the ground. At last, she put her back to a tree and seemed to be staring in their direction. Then suddenly her body started to sink down and Karpovich leaped, too late realizing that she was only crouching with her back against the tree.
He looked to his partner in embarrassment, but the younger man pretended not to notice.
“So what happened in there?” Torlino asked.
“She held his hand,” Karpovich said distantly.
Torlino looked at him. “You’re kidding.”
Karpovich shook his head.
“That’s it? She didn’t say anything?”
“Not yet.”
Torlino looked at her and pointed. “What’s she doing now?”
“She wanted to be alone under the trees,” Karpovich said. The snow continued to blow off the slopes of Laurel Mountain to their east; it lay for a moment on their heads and shoulders before it melted. “Please get us the umbrellas, Mike.”
Torlino rolled his eyes and turned for the car.
Sherry crouched and felt her heart beating. She felt the moisture of her breath around her nose. She smelled the man’s rotting body all the way into her sinuses, tasted it in her mouth. She removed her hand from the glove and traced the roots of the oak behind her. This was the frustrating part of what she did. Trying to interpret the images she had just seen.
Karpovich had said the tank was for watering cattle, not sheep. But she distinctly saw and smelled sheep at her feet as she was holding the doctor’s hand. Why were sheep so important to his last seconds of life?
She grabbed the trunk for support and managed to get herself back on her feet.
One leg had cramped and her fingers were cold. She bent them back and forth, pulling the glove on as she heard Karpovich’s labored breathing. “Here,” he said as he took her arm. She could sense the umbrella above her head and huddled closer to him for warmth.
“Could we walk by the water trough?” she asked.
He led her to it and she leaned forward, the front of her thighs against the cold, rough concrete.
“It’s rather high,” she said. “Too high for sheep to drink from, is it not?”
“Yes.” He looked at her oddly. “I would think it would be.”
She stood there, eyes straight ahead, staring toward the Blue Mountains as if she could actually see them.
“I know where she is,” she said at last.
The airport was crowded for March; the booths were filled in the small TGI Friday’s next to the C-gate walking tram. Torlino had ordered a beer and Karpovich a ginger ale. Sherry ran her finger around the salty rim of a margarita.
“You really don’t have to wait with me,” she said. “I’m boarding just across the corridor.”
“There is no place I’d rather be, Miss Moore,” Karpovich said. “I can only thank you again for taking the trouble to do what you did for us.”
“Very well, but please don’t give me any credit,” she warned. “Not yet. It doesn’t always work out the way I imagine. You could dig for a week and not find anything.”
Karpovich smiled. “It will still have been my pleasure,” he said warmly.
“I read something about your role in the Norwich case,” Torlino said.
Karpovich, who had observed a thousand interrogations over the years, caught the faintest tic at the corner of her mouth. She was uncomfortable with the subject.
“Can you tell us how you do what you do?” Torlino asked.
The older man was about to cut him off, but Sherry leaned forward, seeming to welcome the change in subject.
“I’ll tell you what the doctors tell me.” She folded her hands in front of her. “I suffered brain damage as a child, a head injury followed by cerebral blindness, which means that my optical nerves are intact but something in my cortex prevents them from working. I also suffer retrograde amnesia, meaning I have no memory of the injury or anything prior to it. Damage to the cortex imitates the electrical anomaly of an epileptic. My brain has electrical storms, though I don’t have the seizures.”
Her smile was disarming, Karpovich thought. She had none of the inanimate characteristics associated with the blind. Her eyes were light sensitive and looked quite normal behind her tinted glasses. She followed conversation with her face and used her hands as she spoke.
“One day when I was quite young I took the hand of a dead girl in a funeral home and saw images that were not my own. When it happened again years later, I saw a crime taking place. The police got involved and more or less verified what I had told them. One thing led to another and people started asking me for help.
“Scientifically speaking, I’m told I’m tapping into the short-term memory of the deceased.”
“Uh-huh,” Torlino said, stuffing a pretzel into his mouth.
“The frontal cortex of the brain houses short-term memory. Every time you compare cereal box labels in the grocery store you draw information from your memory reserves and bring them into short-term memory to assist you in making a decision. STM holds only what you are thinking about at the moment, about eighteen seconds’ worth, so if you had a heart attack while comparing cereal box labels, there might be glimpses of what you were reading along with people running or kneeling over you trying to help. You might even retrieve the image of someone dear to you or someone like your family doctor. If you were shot instead of having a heart attack, you might focus on the face of the shooter. If you pull anything into the eighteen seconds of memory, like the face of someone you loved, you push something else out.”
She took a drink and dabbed her lips with her napkin.
“Okay,” Torlino said. “So it’s like the RAM memory in a computer.”
Sherry nodded. “Essentially.”
“But what exactly is it that your body is doing to reach it?”
“In a sense, I am completing an electrical connection.” She wiggled her fingers. “I am electrically charged, just as you are electrically charged. We are all wired with millions of receptors from our fingertips to our toes. Brush against something and the receptors stimulate neurons. Neurons send signals to the brain, retrieving interpretations. Your b
rain tells you if the object is hot, cold, dull, sharp, whatever. Everything we touch, just like the Braille I read, is interpreted by various parts of our brain in short-term, or working, memory for real-time evaluation.”
She took a breath.
“When my skin receptors touch a dead person’s skin receptors, my live electrical system—which is to say my central nervous system—makes contact with the circuitry of the deceased person’s central nervous system. I am hot-wiring myself through their central nervous system to their brain.”
A woman sitting at another table turned to look at them.
Torlino lowered his voice an octave and leaned toward her. “What does another person’s memory look like, Miss Moore?”
She shrugged and tilted her head to one side. “It’s like a homemade movie, but every one is so very different. I once saw nothing but words on the pages of a book—the whole last eighteen seconds of that person’s life were immersed in a novel. Most often, when people are under stress, they move from one thing to the next without warning, although you can tell pretty much what is real time and what is not. Sometimes, though, the memory of something or someone in the past may be so vivid that the thing seems to be standing right there in front of you. The tricky part is trying to interpret the difference, to understand real time versus the recollections of a dying human being.”
She put her hands palm-down on the table. “In any event, the images come and go, a second here, two seconds there, until the whole eighteen seconds is exhausted. Eighteen seconds is a lot of time.” She turned a thumb toward the corridor behind them. “Consider what you have been thinking for the last eighteen seconds and what it might look like on film. You would undoubtedly be thinking about what I am saying right now, my face might be there, but what else would be on your mind?” She smiled. “You might also be thinking of a flight attendant who just walked by, and so her face or some part of her body comes to mind.”
Torlino smiled and tried to roll his eyes.
“If your thoughts strayed to tomorrow’s dental appointment, you might envision your dentist’s chair or his face, or maybe your mind is on the date you had last night. I must tell you that not all of what I see is PG-13. Can you imagine trying to interpret those images out of context? Let’s say you were shot in the back. I could see the women I just mentioned, but without the benefit of your specific knowledge of who they were, I couldn’t know if one was your wife or your sister or your murderer unless I actually saw her kill you. And those are the easy ones. When death comes slowly, there are a great many images of unknown relevance in a person’s last few seconds. The dying often forget about the present and start to recall old friends, family, lost loves—it all comes to mind, sometimes things that no one else ever knew about the person.”
“You mention images. You can’t read thoughts, you just see images?”
She nodded and smiled. “Ironic, wouldn’t you say? A blind woman who can see images.”
Torlino smiled and looked up at the ceiling. Then he shook his head back and forth, as if to unclog it. “No,” he said, “more like unbelievable.”
Sherry picked up her glass, pressed one finger against it, and lifted it up for them to see. “Who would have believed two hundred years ago that a man could be identified by leaving his fingerprint on the side of a glass? Who would have believed fifty years ago that the blueprint of our existence would be found in the oil that makes up that fingerprint?”
She put the glass down and folded her hands. “If the brain is more sophisticated than any computer we ever hope to devise—and I daresay we don’t use a tenth of its capacity—then given the right conditions, couldn’t it tap into other human systems and read the data? That’s a pretty simple task to ask of a computer.”
“So you’re saying your mind is acting like an EEG or whatever, but you’re reading images, not electrical waves?”
“I don’t even know if it’s that sophisticated, but yes.” She nodded. “Something along those lines.”
She tapped the table. “I believe that the aggregate of all we’ve ever experienced is etched into the cerebrum when we die. Picture our brains as saturated with data just like the hard drives we throw into the trash when we outgrow them. That I am able to see a few seconds of it surprises me not at all.”
“Then why wouldn’t you be seeing images every time you shook hands with someone?” Torlino asked.
“Think about it,” she said as she shook her head. “If a living neurological system were exposed to outside stimuli, it would be compelled to reject it. Its primary function is toward self-preservation, and it does that by maintaining a closed system. In other words, nature itself wouldn’t permit it.” She wagged a finger. “But turn off the power and the wiring’s open to invasion.”
“Any side effects? I mean, how do they end?” Torlino asked.
Sherry’s fingers curled into a ball. She smiled, and crossed and uncrossed her calves.
Another question she didn’t like, Karpovich thought.
“Side effects?” Sherry repeated. She put her elbows on the table and folded her hands, seeming to contemplate the question.
How did they end? A very good question indeed. How did you ever forget the sound of earth being tossed on your grave as you’re being buried alive? How could you ever forget the taste of a plastic tube taped in your mouth, the plane going down, or the muzzle flash when a gun is pointed straight at you? Could you ever forget making a mistake that cost a life?
“No effects, really,” she said.
Even now she was defying her doctor’s orders. “Your little horror shows are catching up with you, Sherry, aren’t they?” The doctor never liked what she did and thought it caused her harm in ways that no one could comprehend. She’d been told that her work was at variance with nature and that just because she was already blind didn’t mean that worse couldn’t befall her.
She knew what the doctor was thinking—the nervous tic that sometimes appeared at the corner of her mouth, the nightmares and obsessions.
“Post-traumatic stress disorder can lead to dozens of forms of psychosis, Sherry. You must consider the side effects.”
But people managed to cope with complex emotions all the time. Cops, emergency workers, soldiers—they all took on horrible memories. The fact that she was seeing it through the victim’s eyes hardly seemed relevant. It was still only a memory, and no one ever died of a memory.
Besides, the thought of not doing it terrified her even more.
As a child in the orphanage, she had dreamed of becoming someone important, some extraordinary woman that other people looked up to, a woman like the doctors and politicians and astronauts in her textbooks. She wanted to go to a university to discover new theories and ideas; she wanted to contribute to society in some distinctive, meaningful way.
But the dream had only been a dream. She was, in reality, a penniless orphan. Not only was she an orphan, but a blind orphan with no past. It quickly became apparent to her, as other children came and went, that no one was going to adopt a blind girl with no history. She knew that without the kind of financial help that only parents could give, she would never realize her dream.
It was ironic that only now, after Sherry had become a minor celebrity with more than enough money for college, that universities were throwing themselves at her feet, that doctors and scientists rallied to study or educate or even save her from herself.
No. She had made it this far on her own. She had fulfilled the dream on her own and she had no intention of going back, no desire to live in darkness or go through life afraid. She would take life head-on, even at the risk of her sanity.
Torlino continued to nod, seemingly impressed by the expression on her face.
“No dreams?” Karpovich asked. His voice was so soft, so gentle that the question barely registered.
She turned her smile away from them. “We all have dreams, Edward; you dream about what you see at work, I dream about what I see. Even our victims have dreams. Dr.
Donovan was thinking about that concrete trough in the last moments of his life because he must have thought about it most every day for the last thirty years. And sheep. I know you mentioned it was a cattle farm, Edward, but I saw sheep beneath my feet.”
“Sheep?” Torlino repeated.
She finished her drink. “What if the whole purpose of the cattle was to justify the trough and the whole purpose of the trough was to cover a grave? According to the inventory, there was more than adequate machinery to set the tank there by himself.”
“But why go to the trouble?” Torlino asked. “Why not just bury her at the edge of the forest?”
Karpovich put a hand on the younger man’s arm, feeling foolish for not thinking of it himself. “Because he didn’t know when the police were going to show up, and the last thing he wanted them to discover was broken ground.”
“Exactly,” Sherry said. “The tank looked natural because water slops out and the earth around it got trampled as a matter of course. Can’t you just imagine those officers walking around those buildings and fields, and right there in front of them, just fifty feet from the house, was a herd of cattle, ankle-deep in the muck around a trough, as if they had all been there for years? Who would have thought otherwise?”
“So what’s with the sheep?” Torlino asked.
“My guess,” Sherry said, “is that there were sheep in the field prior to the murder. I think he was remembering a time right after the killing. He was standing among the sheep and trying to decide what to do with her. Finally he decided to drop a concrete trough on top of the grave, a trough so large and so heavy that nobody could move it without machinery. The sheep were too small to drink from such a tank, so he sold them and surrounded it with cattle.”
2
SUNDAY, APRIL 10
TEXHOMA PANHANDLE, OKLAHOMA
Dirt devils danced on a sea of brome, jagged shards of lightning intermittently blazing on the charcoal sky. The storm front stretched across the Oklahoma horizon, clouds twisting, merging, rising from an untold fountain of energy, feeding the violent thunderheads that grew larger and darker with each passing minute.
18 Seconds Page 2
