The Dead Man

by Joel Goldman

  The remaining names—Milo Harper, Sherry Fritzshall, and Leonard Nagel—registered on a scale somewhere between interesting and baffling. It took a moment for me to realize that Leonard Nagel was my Leonard. Gentry identified his title as administrative assistant to director of security, adding a footnote that Leonard's access was not authorized and that Gentry was continuing to investigate how he had breached the system security. All three were regular visitors, having accessed the dream project files before and after the deaths of Delaney, Blair, and Enoch.

  Leonard's desk was across from my open office door. I watched him as he worked, tapping his Bluetooth earpiece as calls came in, flexing his irrepressible grin. He shuffled papers and scrolled through screens on his computer monitor, a combination pep squad leader and perpetual motion machine. He glanced my way, saw me watching, winked, and went back to work.

  I called Simon, gave him all twelve names, and told him to make those background checks a top priority.

  "Including Milo and Sherry?" he asked.

  "Including them. Nobody gets a pass."

  "You going to tell Milo that you're investigating him?"

  "Depends on what you come up with. I know he's your buddy. I need to know if you can do this."

  Simon hesitated. He was a loyal and devoted friend and I was putting him between those conflicting demands.

  "I don't like it," he said.

  "What do you think Milo would tell you to do?"

  This time, Simon didn't hesitate. "Whatever it takes."

  "Those are the words the man lives by."

  "Milo's a celebrity. Sherry gets some press but not nearly as much as he does. There will be a ton of stuff on both of them. This will take awhile."

  "Focus on what's not in People magazine. And don't forget about Leonard. He's my assistant. The dream project files are password protected and he wasn't supposed to have the password. Find out if he's a got a track record of snooping or peeping."

  I got to Anthony Corliss's office the same time he did. He was wearing a waist-cut down jacket, jeans, and hiking boots damp from the snow. His cheeks were red, his hair matted against his scalp. He was holding a knit cap and scarf in one hand and a backpack in the other.

  "Hey," he said. "Back for more?"

  "Just a few questions."

  "Damn, I'm sweating like a stuck pig," he said as he unlocked the door. "Walked to work. Seemed like a good idea at the time and it's either exercise or die. I hate exercise but I'm not ready to die."

  "Where do you live?"

  "Over in Crestwood, a couple of miles from here. Not a bad walk on a nice day but it was a bitch in this cold."

  I followed him into his office. He hung his coat, cap, and scarf on a hook on the back of his door, tossed the backpack on the couch, and dropped into his desk chair. I sat in a chair across from him.

  "That's a little north of me. I'm in Brookside."

  "Well, then, I guess we're neighbors. That mean we're gonna be friends?" he asked, leaning back in his chair, flashing a smile.

  "No reason we can't be. I need you to educate me."

  "About what?"

  "For starters, the girl at Wisconsin who drowned."

  His smile vanished. "You were a cop, right?"

  "FBI."

  "Like I said, a cop. You ever make a mistake? Arrest the wrong man? Ruin someone's life, maybe send them to death row?"

  "I did my best and trusted the system to get things right."

  "Well, bully for you, brother, because the system sucks. I had nothing to do with that girl's death. The university didn't ask my permission to settle that lawsuit. They gave away their money and my reputation. Now you want to talk about the dream project, I've got time. You want to dredge up what happened at Wisconsin and I'm busy."

  Ask any con on a cell block and he'll tell you he's innocent, that his lawyer screwed up his case or that the guy in the next cell confessed that he did it. Ask anyone who's ever paid big bucks to settle a lawsuit and they'll point you to the fine print that says the settlement is not an admission of liability, which liability is expressly denied, thank you very much, adding that they settled so that everyone could get on with their lives.

  Then there are the people who do terrible, inexplicable things and convince themselves they didn't because that's the only way they can look in the mirror. Mixed in with all of them are the ones who are innocent and blameless. Picking those hapless ones out of the crowd is dicey at best. I hadn't made up my mind about Corliss.

  "Walk me through the process your volunteers go through from how they are recruited until you're done with them."

  "It's pretty simple. We're not like research programs at universities. When I was teaching at Wisconsin, we got all the volunteers we needed from students who wanted extra credit for participating in psychology studies. They worked for free. Here, we have to pay people, just like the drug companies doing trials. We put ads in the local papers, things like that. They fill out a questionnaire, we do the brain scans, the EEGs, we make the video where they tell us about their dreams, and we teach them about lucid dreaming. That's the quick and dirty."

  "How much do you pay?"

  "Couple hundred bucks. Not enough to give up their day jobs. It's more to get their attention. The real hook is the chance to get past their nightmares. That's what these people are looking for. Some of them are flat out scared to go to sleep."

  "You recruit many people on your own, like you did Walter Enoch?"

  "Walter was the exception. He was too good a candidate to pass up."

  "Tell me about the videos. How does that work?"

  "We got a room here we use. My research assistants shoot most of them."

  "What about Maggie Brennan? Does she take any of the videos?"

  He shook his head. "Maggie isn't what you'd call a people person. Getting subjects to open up about their nightmares isn't in her skill set. She can read an fMRI or an EEG like nobody's business, tell you what part of the brain is lighting up and why, but that's where it begins and ends for her."

  "And you?"

  He laughed. "I am a psychologist. If I didn't like people, I'd have to find another line of work."

  "How many volunteers have you videoed?"

  "Not more than a few. I fill in if the research assistants aren't available or if they think the subject is particularly interesting."

  "Like with Walter Enoch?"

  "He was a mess, wasn't he? Can you imagine going through life with a face like that? People are afraid to look at you or can't stop staring. What a burden. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying he's better off dead. People can adapt to all kinds of things. But he wasn't exactly living the good life."

  "Can I get a look at the room where you and Walter made the video?"

  "Didn't do it here. Walter was real shy. Hard to blame him. It took me forever to talk him into volunteering. He didn't want to come down here, so I said we could do it at his house and he said okay."

  "I watched his video last night."

  "You always go to this much trouble just to trip someone up? If you watched that video you knew where it was made."

  "And I knew you lied to me yesterday when you acted like you didn't know that Enoch had stolen all that mail. You want to be friends? Friends don't lie to friends."

  "Course they do, all the time. Hell, lying is one of the necessities of friendship. Your friend asks how do I look and you say great even if you'd never leave the house looking like that. That's what friends are for. I promised Walter I wouldn't turn him in. That was the only way he'd talk to me. Maybe that was a mistake. If it was, I wasn't going to give myself up to you on our first date. I didn't know you from Adam when you walked in that door or what you were after."

  "I think you had a pretty good idea what I was after. The alert software on your computer told you that I had accessed your files."

  Corliss flattened his palms on his desk, looking first at the floor then at me. "You do your homework. I'll give you that."


  "Why did Enoch agree to do the video at his house? Having company would have been the last thing he wanted. It would have been safer to do the video at your house or the institute."

  "Doing it at his house was my idea. I wanted to know more about him. Best way was to see where he lived. Took me a while, but he finally trusted me enough to let me in. That was a big step for him."

  "How many times were you in Enoch's house?"

  He sat back in his chair, arms crossed. "Just the one time. When we made the video."

  "Did you take anything from the house?"

  "No. Why would I do that?"

  His phone rang. He answered and listened, his face turning pale. "Okay," he said and hung up. "Two FBI agents named Kent and Dolan are here. I wonder why they want to talk to me."

  I decided to let Kent and Dolan tell him, not wanting to step on their interrogation. He would tell them about our conversations and I didn't want to give them any more ammunition for obstruction of justice or witness tampering charges.

  "Don't worry," I said. "You look great."

  Chapter Thirty-two

  I could keep some parts of my investigation from Milo Harper but I couldn't let him be blindsided by the FBI. His door was open. He was standing behind his desk, rifling through papers, opening and slamming shut drawers, his hair disheveled, his eyes wild. I knocked and waited.

  He looked up, stared, and squinted as if to bring my face into focus, tapping one hand against his thigh. "What?"

  "We need to talk."

  He waved me in. "Sure, sure."

  He pursed his lips, squinted some more, and pounded his fist on his desk. "Damn it! I can't remember your fucking name!"

  People walking by his office slowed, rubber-necking like they were passing an accident on the freeway. I closed the door and met him at his desk.

  "It's Jack Davis. I'm the director of security."

  "I know what you do. I hired you for Christ's sake, but I lost your name. Frustrates the living daylights out of me. Same with this mess," he said, pointing to the papers scattered on his desk. "I write myself notes in a little spiral notebook—reminders of what I'm supposed to do, who I had lunch with today and who I'm having breakfast with tomorrow. I used to keep that stuff on my iPhone but I was making so many notes, it was just easier to write them down. I came in this morning and I can't find the damn spiral. I don't know what I did with it."

  I looked around his office. The spiral pad was sticking out from under a pile of papers that had fallen to the floor under his desk. I picked it up and handed it to him.

  "This what you're looking for?"

  He took the pad and let out a deep sigh, patting it against the palm of his hand. "Thanks. This is a thin reed to hold onto. Have a seat."

  It was the first time I'd seen any indication that he had early stage Alzheimer's. I understood his frustration and anxiety. They were side effects of losing control, knowing that his inability to remember my name or the things he wrote on the pad or what he'd done with it weren't minor outbreaks of the benign dementia called Can't Remember Shit. They were steps on the downhill slide and there was no getting back to the top of the hill.

  "You ever get used to the shaking?" he asked me.

  "By now, I feel like I've always been this way. My old life of going to work every day, chasing crooks, having a few pops with my squad, that was someone else. It doesn't seem real. This life does. Maybe that means I'm used to it."

  "Well, I'm not. I'll never accept it and I'll never get used to it. I'm going to fight it all the way."

  "I don't give advice, especially when I'm not asked, but I'll tell you this much. It's a lot harder to fight a secret war. I tried that. I was dumb enough to think that no one had noticed anything different about me. But people knew something was wrong. They were just afraid to ask. You can let people wonder and whisper or you can let them help you."

  "I want to do this on my own terms."

  "You may not get the chance. Same thing may be true for this investigation. Two FBI agents are downstairs right now interviewing Anthony Corliss about the murder of Walter Enoch."

  His eyes exploded, wild again, as he smacked the arms of his chair with both hands.

  "How could you let that happen? You should have told them to get lost unless they had a warrant. What the hell am I paying you for?"

  My father had Alzheimer's. It changed his personality more than his memory; it made him volatile, hostile, and so nasty at the end that he had to be drugged so that he'd stop taking swings at his caregivers. I didn't know whether Harper's outburst was the residual effect of the morning's frustration or the beginning of something more insidious. The more aggressive my father got, the calmer I got, making it easier for him to hear me. It worked with him. I hoped it worked with Harper.

  "They don't need a warrant to talk to someone. I know these guys. Their names are Kent and Dolan. If I ran interference for Corliss, they'd be back with a team of agents and cops and they'd spend the next two days carrying boxes out of here under the watchful eye of the media. You want to lose control of the situation, that's the best way to do it."

  He took a deep breath, hugged himself, and apologized with a weak smile.

  "You're right. You're right. Why do you think they're interested in Corliss?"

  "For starters, he recruited Walter Enoch for the dream project and convinced him to take the video at Enoch's house which means that Corliss knew about the stolen mail and didn't turn Enoch in. On top of that, there were no signs of forced entry and that suggests that Enoch knew his killer well enough to let him in the house. Given the stolen mail, Enoch wasn't likely to let many people in his house. Corliss may have been the only one. Toss in what happened with the girl at Wisconsin and I'm not surprised that the FBI is real interested in talking to him."

  "You're saying they think Corliss killed Walter Enoch?"

  "I'm saying they've got good reasons to talk to him and we've got no good reasons to make their job any harder."

  "Do you think he did it?"

  "I think I'd be doing what Kent and Dolan are doing."

  Harper settled back in his chair, looking past me, digesting what I had told him.

  "Do you think Corliss had anything to do with what happened to Tom Delaney and Regina Blair?"

  "There's too much we don't know to answer that question."

  "Like what?"

  "Like why you, your sister, and my assistant were logging onto the dream project files like it was your home page."

  He laughed. "We're all suspects, is that it?"

  "I don't have any suspects but I do have a lot of questions."

  "It's how I keep tabs on my projects. I don't have time to meet with everyone as often as I'd like and the project directors don't keep the hours I do."

  "Makes sense. Leonard wasn't authorized to have access to the dream project files. Frank Gentry is figuring out how he did it."

  "Fire Leonard. Today. Now."

  "I'd rather wait. I want to know how he did it and, since we know he's doing it, we can monitor him. We'll learn a lot more than if we kick his ass out of here. What about your sister? Why would she be poking around in these files?"

  "Let's ask her," he said, picking up his phone.

  The door to his office flew open as he dialed. It was Sherry, her arms clamped at her sides, her hands balled into fists, her mouth trembling.

  "Nancy Klemp called me from the front desk. One of the maintenance people found a body stuffed in a utility closet in the sub-basement."

  Chapter Thirty-three

  The institute had two sets of elevators. One serviced the floors above the lobby. The other was for the parking garage and the basement levels beneath the garage. There were no surveillance cameras in the elevators and I hadn't seen any on the floors except for the one behind the front desk in the lobby. I didn't know about the parking garage.

  "What kind of surveillance do you have in the building?" I asked Milo and Sherry as we got on the elevator o
n the eighth floor.

  "There's the camera at the front desk and we also have cameras on each level of the parking garage and inside the elevator lobbies at each level of the garage," Milo said.

  "What about the basement levels?"

  "None."

  "Does anyone monitor the garage cameras in real time?"

  "No," Milo said.

  "Why not?"

  Sherry answered. "It wasn't necessary. A key card is required for garage access. We trust the people who work for us."

  "Then why have the cameras in the first place?"

  "In case something happens," she said.

  "How long do you keep the video?"

  She swallowed hard. "The cameras record over the previous day's video beginning at midnight."

  "Who figured out that system?" I asked.

  "I did," Sherry said. "It was the most cost-effective way to do it. This is a research institute, not a police state."

  "It's also a security system without any security. If something is caught on camera, it's gone before anyone knows it happened," I said. "What about the key cards? Is a record kept of the dates and times people go in and out of the garage?"

  Milo looked at Sherry, waiting for her to answer. When she didn't, we both knew how deep the shit we were in was getting.

  "Well?" Milo asked her.

  Sherry crossed her arms, shooting daggers at her brother. "We used to keep those records. Frank Gentry sent me daily reports with all kinds of crap, including that. I had too much paperwork to get through and I couldn't get anything done. I finally told him to quit sending it to me. He asked me what to do with it and I told him to get rid of it at the end of every day. He said there's no point in tracking it if we're just going to get rid of it so I told him to quit tracking it."

  Milo stared at her like he was seeing her for the first time. She ignored him, her arms folded across her chest, her jaw clamped, and her eyes fixed on the descending floor numbers on the elevator display. I let it ride. She'd been in over her head and neither of them knew it. Making them both feel worse wouldn't make me feel any better.