The Syndrome

by John Case

  He was waiting for her in his car, in the courtyard outside Harbor Place, where Slough, Hawley was headquartered. The car was a battered Camaro with a pair of Rubik’s Cubes hanging from the rearview mirror, and vanity plates that read SNUPER. Adrienne climbed in. Eddie gunned the engine and shot out into traffic.

  She sat back, and closed her eyes. On the whole, she liked being a passenger. It reminded her of the car trips that she took as a kid. She and Nikki. Who used to breathe on the glass so that she could draw on it and they could play tic-tac-toe. It made her think of all those long vacation rides to Lake Sherando, where they went five years in a row, camping out. Deck and Marlena up front, she and Nikki (and all the stuff that wouldn’t fit in the trunk) jammed into the back—along with Cupcake, the cat, in her cat carrier.

  As they passed the Washington Monument, Adrienne recalled the time Nikki fed Cupcake the remains of her Fishwich—which had been sitting in the sun for hours. The cat got sick, and God how it smelled! They’d pinched their nostrils together, and made noises like ewwwwww! and rolled down the windows, and stuck their heads out, pretending to gag. There were a lot of trips like that, and they were always the same: long and boring—and lots of fun. Sometimes, they sang songs, or played word games like the one that went: I packed my bag and in it I put…

  “A gun.”

  “What?” Bonilla was frowning at her.

  She looked around. They were passing the Library of Congress, heading east on Pennsylvania. She hadn’t realized she’d been thinking aloud. “My sister had a gun,” she said. “A rifle.”

  Bonilla shrugged. “Lotsa people do. Got one myself. Got a couple, in fact.”

  Adrienne wasn’t surprised. Bonilla struck her as the kind of person who’d have an arsenal. Which made her think that maybe she should show him her sister’s gun. Ask him about the silencer—and what she should do with it. She was pretty sure it was illegal to have one. But what she asked instead was: “Where are we going?”

  “Mangialardo’s. Great subs.”

  At 9th and Pennsylvania, they got stuck behind a delivery van and didn’t make the light. Bonilla let out a string of curses, drummed his fingertips on the steering wheel, then gunned the engine a couple of times, just out of habit. She looked out the window. They were driving past a kind of demilitarized zone, a down-at-the-heels buffer between black and yuppie ghettos, when she remembered to ask him about “the assets search.”

  “Oh yeah. I forgot to tell you.” He tilted his head from side to side, not quite shaking it. “There’s a guy in Florida—‘information broker.’ You give him a name or a Social, he’ll run it through every bank, brokerage, and insurance company in the country.”

  “Sounds illegal.”

  Bonilla shrugged. “Not for me—‘cause I don’t know how he does it. None of my business. But the point is: he runs your sister—everywhere—and what he comes up with is… the same accounts you gave me.”

  “The ones at Riggs—”

  Bonilla nodded. “Checking and savings. Maybe twenty grand, tops, just like you said.”

  “So he struck out.”

  “I don’t think so. I think the guy found whatever there was to find. I think that’s it.”

  Adrienne shook her head. “It can’t be. She had a settlement—”

  “That’s what you said. So I went through her accounts—all the way back to when she opened them.”

  “And?” There were half a dozen police cars up ahead, double-parked outside a small store. Bonilla pulled up behind them into a space marked: NO STANDING.

  He shrugged. “She opened the Riggs’ accounts a couple of years ago. Ever since, she gets a check each month—like a salary—five grand—exactly. Except, sometimes there’s more. Like she’s got expenses on top of her base.”

  Adrienne nodded, her eyes on the police cars. “And these checks—where are they from?”

  “Jersey.”

  “New Jersey? Why would she—”

  “Not New Jersey. Just… Jersey! It’s an island in the English Channel. Whole lotta banking goin’ on.”

  Adrienne nodded. “Well, that makes sense. It’s in Europe. So it’s probably the account her settlement was paid into.”

  “Yeah,” Bonilla replied. “That’s what I think, too—though I gotta tell ya, if she was banking in the Channel Islands, there might be some tax issues you don’t know about. Anyway, I’ll fax the address to your office, and you can send the bank a letter. If you show ‘em a death certificate, and tell ‘em you’re the executor… they oughta cooperate.” He opened his door. “You like subs, right? You mind waiting here?” he asked. He didn’t wait for her answer.

  He came out a few minutes later with a couple of Oranginas and two sandwiches wrapped in waxy white paper. It was just possible to eat in the car, a pile of napkins between them, without having to change clothes afterwards.

  “I meant to ask you,” Bonilla said as they headed back toward Slough. “How’d your sister get hooked up with this quack, anyway? She get referred, or what?”

  “I don’t know,” Adrienne replied. “It never came up.” When she saw his eyebrows lift toward his hairline, she added, “Nikki wasn’t exactly forthcoming.”

  “The reason I ask,” Bonilla said, “if I didn’t know better, I’d say this guy, Duran, was really knocked on his ass by that death certificate. I mean, it looks to me like he’s gonna pass out when he sees it. Now, I grant you, your conman’s a guy who can talk the talk, but this—this was like, I don’t know, John Travolta or somethin’! So, I think: you take this guy to court, you got your work cut out for you.”

  “I don’t have any choice,” she said. “We both know the police aren’t going to do anything. They’ve got five hundred unsolved homicides on the books. So they’re not going to get excited about a misdemeanor that carries a thousand-dollar fine and a one-year sentence—max! That’s why I filed the civil suit—which, by the way, took me about an hour to knock out. So it’s not like I’m spending all my time on it.”

  Bonilla shrugged. “Whatever.”

  Adrienne shook her head. “Don’t you get it? This guy, Duran, is supposed to be a shrink. Think about that. He uses his credentials to attract people who are—what? Sick. People who don’t have anywhere else to turn. And they tell him all their secrets and sins, all their hopes and fears—and what do they get out of it? If they’re lucky, nothing. And if they’re not? An obituary in the Metro section of the Post.”

  They were quiet for a long while as they drove past the Washington Monument and the Tidal Basin, heading back to Georgetown. Finally, Adrienne asked, “So what’s this ‘bright idea’ you had?”

  “Oh yeah. I was thinking, maybe you ought to call the guy, and ask him, will he take a polygraph?”

  The idea surprised her, and she cocked her head, thinking about it.

  “Friend of mine’s got a shop in Springfield,” Bonilla went on. “I don’t know what he charges, but—”

  “That’s not the point,” Adrienne told him. “Duran wouldn’t take a polygraph!”

  “That is the point. ‘Cuz he’s damned if he does (which he won’t), and he’s damned if he doesn’t. Whattaya think?”

  She called Duran from her office, half an hour later, having decided that as a pretext for the call, she’d ask him if he’d gotten a lawyer to represent him in the action. The truth was, she half expected to get a recording, saying that the number was no longer in service. Instead, he answered on the first ring.

  “H-hello?”

  The tone in his voice surprised her. He sounded stuttery and lost. “It’s Adrienne Cope,” she told him. “I was calling to see if you’d gotten representation, yet. I have some papers… “ Silence. “Mr. Duran?” (She was on her best behavior.) “Are you still there?”

  More silence, and then: “I went to the cemetery” he said, his voice trailing off.

  Adrienne wasn’t sure what to say. “Yes… ?”

  “And I saw the headstone.”

  “Oh.”
Where was he going with this?

  “The only thing I can think is—it’s some kind of coincidence.”

  She couldn’t help herself. “Right,” she said, “and your parents and his parents just happened to have the same names. And the registrar at Brown is mistaken, the registrar at Wisconsin is confused, and—is that about right? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not trying to tell you anything. Except… well, that I am who I am.”

  “Then prove it,” she told him.

  A rueful chuckle. “How?”

  “Take a polygraph.” Adrienne held her breath for what seemed like a long time, waiting for him to reply.

  Finally, Duran cleared his throat. “Okay,” he said. “Sure. How soon can you set it up?”

  Chapter 15

  Maybe this whole thing is a mistake, Duran thought as he handed the driver a twenty dollar bill. Maybe he should tell the cabbie he’d forgotten something, and ask to be taken home. No skin off the driver’s nose—he’d double his fare.

  But… no.

  “Keep the change,” Duran told him, as he stepped from the taxi in front of a nondescript office building in the Springfield shopping center.

  While Adrienne Cope did not have his best interests at heart, they had agreed on the questions he’d be asked (or the relevant ones, at least), and he knew that he could answer each of them truthfully and in the affirmative. He had nothing to hide. And he’d done nothing wrong.

  Once she saw that he was telling the truth, she might not be so eager to proceed with the civil suit. As it was, he didn’t really blame her for suing him. Her sister was dead, and no matter how you looked at it, this business with the death certificate was disturbing. Even he wasn’t sure what it meant—though he did have a theory.

  Either he was the victim of an astonishing set of coincidences, or…

  His parents had stolen the identities of Frank and Rose Duran—then given him the child’s name. That would explain everything (or almost everything: the problem with his university records was in no way explained by his theory, but that, he felt sure, was some kind of database glitch).

  Of the two possibilities, coincidence or conspiracy, the latter seemed a lot more likely. Of course, it raised an intriguing question: why would his parents hijack another family’s identity? There wasn’t any way for Duran to answer that—he wasn’t the FBI—but the time frame might be a clue.

  When the Durans died, America had been fighting three wars: the Cold War, the war in Vietnam, and “the war at home” (against the war in Vietnam). Any one of those conflicts could have been the source of the predicament in which he now found himself. As crazy as it sounded, his parents might have been Soviet agents—It happens, Duran told himself—or, even more likely, antiwar activists on the run. That would explain their adoption of another family’s identity. Except…

  Duran couldn’t recall either of his parents ever making a political statement of any kind. Or even hinting at one. Still, Sherlock Holmes’s dictum was unassailable: once the impossible has been eliminated, whatever explanation remains—no matter how improbable—must be the truth. Even so… he couldn’t imagine his mother firebombing the draft board, or his father slinking through Checkpoint Charlie with a false passport and—

  Me, Duran thought, as he watched the cab pull away.

  On the other hand, look at these women who’d recently surfaced after twenty years underground. To look at newspaper photos of the middle-aged Kathy Soliah, her plain face behind ordinary glasses, you couldn’t imagine her driving a getaway car. And yet, she did—she had.

  Putting these thoughts from his mind, or as far from his mind as he could, Duran entered the lobby, and seeing the building directory, checked for Sutton & Castle, PLC. The polygraph firm was on the fourth floor.

  Crossing to the elevator, he pressed the call button and began to wait—until, with a sinking feeling, he realized that he’d begun to hyperventilate. It was impossible to predict when it would happen—except that it never happened at home, in his apartment.

  Nearby, a woman in a blue dress was looking at him oddly. She sensed that something was wrong with him and, whatever it was, she didn’t want any part of it. He saw her eyes richochet around the lobby, looking for help without calling for it—and finding none, in any case.

  It was then that the elevator arrived with a ding! The doors pulled back, and the woman in blue quickly stepped inside. Duran took a step after her, but stopped in his tracks when she held out her hand, palm first, signaling him to stay where he was, as if he were a dog. Then the chrome doors drew closed, and she was gone.

  By now, the adrenaline was surging through him, and standing still was impossible. Finding the emergency stairwell, he took the stairs two at a time, footsteps thundering on the cold cement. When he arrived at the fourth floor, he was hyperventilating and out of breath—which he knew was a perfect recipe for fainting dead away.

  Sutton & Castle’s door was the old-fashioned kind, with a mesh of wire between the layers of glass, and the name stenciled in gold upon it. He knocked, breathless, and when Eddie Bonilla opened the door, he stepped inside, a little too quickly.

  “Well,” Bonilla said, “look who’s here!” Adrienne Cope got to her feet from a nearby couch, and a third person came over to introduce himself.

  “Paul Sutton,” he said, extending his hand.

  Duran took the hand in his own, and shook it. Then he started to say something—because that’s what you did in these situations—but nothing came out.

  “You okay?” Sutton asked.

  Duran nodded. “Took the stairs,” he gasped. “I’m just… a little out of breath.” The speech took all of the air that was left in his lungs, and when it was gone, the world began to tremble—or perhaps it was his knees. He felt the need to say something—everyone was looking at him anxiously, but nothing came out. The urge to bolt rose within him, but he resisted it—somehow, and barely. Instead, he made his way to a chair next to the window, where he sat down and tried to slow his breathing.

  “I think he’s having a panic attack,” Bonilla said in a voice that was more bemused than sympathetic.

  “Oh Jeez,” Sutton muttered. “You didn’t tell me the guy’s a wacko.”

  “Do you have a paper bag?” Adrienne asked. “He’s hyperventilating.”

  It took a moment, and then a bag was placed over his mouth and nose. Inhaling the woody smell, Duran took his breaths one at a time, listening to Adrienne’s encouragement. “That’s it… just like that. You’re going to be okay.”

  It only took a minute or two for the attack to subside, and when it had, Duran felt mortified. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said, looking from Adrienne to Sutton, and then to Bonilla. “I seem to suffer from agoraphobia. Sometimes, when I go out… it comes and goes.”

  Paul Sutton was a short man with a shaved head, a luxuriant mustache and a Boston accent. He regarded Duran with a skeptical eye. “You sure you’re all right with this? You sure you want to go on?”

  Duran nodded. “Yeah,” he said, getting to his feet. “I’m okay. Let’s do it.”

  The polygrapher led him into an adjacent room, where two chairs sat opposite each other across a conference table. On the table was a nineteen-inch monitor, a device that looked like an expensive amplifier—the lie detector, Duran guessed—and an array of attachments that were obviously meant for him. A cable ran from the lie detector to a computer that sat on the floor.

  After seating Duran in one of the chairs, the polygrapher instructed him to unbutton his shirt and roll up his sleeve, which he did. Then he fastened a pneumograph tube to his subject’s chest, strapped a blood pressure pulse cuff to his right arm, and placed an electrode assembly on Duran’s left index finger. Bonilla and Adrienne stood just inside the doorway, watching.

  “You know how this works, right?”

  Duran shrugged. “I’ve seen it on television.”

  “But you’re suppos
ed to be a psychiatrist, or something, right?”

  “A clinical psychologist,” Duran confirmed.

  “Then you’ll know what I’m talking about when I tell you the machine can’t be beat. What we’re doing is, we’re measuring how your autonomic nervous system responds to the questions we ask and the answers you give. We’re talking blood pressure, pulse, respiration, and GSR. Things you can’t control.”

  “What’s that last one?” Adrienne asked.

  “Galvanic Skin Response,” Bonilla volunteered.

  Seeing the blank look on Adrienne’s face, Sutton explained: “The skin’s resistance to electrical currents in the body.”

  “And what does that tell us?” Adrienne inquired.

  “It’s an indirect measure,” the polygrapher replied, “of cortical arousal. The skin becomes more conductive when the subject tells a lie, so the GSR changes.”

  “Why is the skin more conductive?” Duran asked.

  “Because lying’s stressful,” Sutton said. “It excites the cortex. And you can measure that.”

  Then Sutton got to his feet, smiled and ushered Bonilla and Adrienne into the other room.

  “What?” Bonilla protested. “We don’t get to watch?”

  “No, you don’t,” Sutton told him. “This guy’s strung out enough as it is. With you in the room, it’s like having a junkyard dog—”

  “You’re afraid I might give the guy’s cortex a hard-on, right?”

  Adrienne rolled her eyes.

  “Yeah,” Sutton replied sarcastically, “that’s what I’m afraid of.” Then he turned to Adrienne. “I have to tell you: a subject this jumpy? I don’t know what we’re going to get.”

  “Oh, fahcrissake, that’s what he always says!” Bonilla exclaimed. “Just ask him the questions, would ya?”

  Sutton returned to the testing room, and closed the door behind him. Adrienne went over to the window, and looked out. Bonilla ran a hand through his hair and shook his head. “Man,” he said, “did you see that guy? I swear, he could hardly breathe.”