Memory Hole

by Douglas Jern

  “I’m taking her to the station. Secure the scene in the meantime and get those bodies out of here. Ah, Detective Hudson! Perfect timing!”

  Leo had made his way to the van, staring wide-eyed at the carnage. He made no indication of having heard Zachary’s greeting. Zachary snapped his fingers.

  “Hey, eyes here, kid.”

  Leo snapped out of it. He looked away from the bodies.

  “Sorry, sir. I’m all right now.”

  “Good,” said Zachary and pointed at the woman. “Check her for weapons and read her rights.”

  Zachary watched as Leo read the woman her rights, patted her down and cuffed her. Nice and smooth, by the book. That was Leo for you; with clear instructions and a predetermined protocol, he worked like a well-oiled machine.

  With the suspect cuffed, Zachary and Leo walked her to the car. She was quiet, passive, and made no attempts to resist arrest. Zachary opened the back door and helped her to get in. Just when he was about to close the door, their eyes met. The woman spoke a single sentence:

  “I didn’t do it.”

  Zachary closed the door without a word. He had a fair measure of respect for criminals who owned up to their crimes when apprehended. Sure, they were still scum, but at least they were scum with integrity. The ones who recognized their own guilt also tended to act respectfully towards the police, which saved a lot of trouble. But then there were the desperate ones, the ones who swore they were innocent even while wiping their bloody hands on their victims’ clothes, the ones who couldn’t conceive of a world in which they would be made to take responsibility for their actions. Such a flat-out denial of guilt was the reserve of the deluded, the arrogant, the insane…

  And the wrongfully accused.

  He shook his head, as if trying to dislodge the thought from his brain. It was ridiculous. There were several eyewitnesses to the event, and he was willing to bet a year’s pay that when the knife got back from forensics, they would’ve found the woman’s fingerprints all over it. Tough luck, girl. He got in the driver’s seat and headed for the station.

  As he pulled over at a traffic light, he thought about what would happen next. Things weren’t looking good. Most of all, the two dead officers, Doe and Chavez, weighed on his conscience. He hadn’t known Chavez and had always considered Doe as somewhat of an imbecile, albeit a useful one. He’d had nothing personal against them, and neither of them had deserved to die like this. But in a way, their blood was on his hands. If he hadn’t ordered that Greenwood be transferred to the Bunker, the van would never have been on Lester Street today at all.

  He tried to shake this feeling off too, reminding himself that no one could’ve predicted this disaster. There were too many random factors involved.

  For one, the man who had allegedly thrown himself in front of the van. Had that been a random act? If not, who on earth was so dedicated that they would give their life just to kill two cops and a man suspected of murder? It must’ve been an accident or a random suicide attempt.

  For two, how could anyone know that Greenwood was being transferred? More to the point, who’d want to kill him? Unless Greenwood really had been connected to the mob in some way that even Joey was unaware of, Zachary could see no reason why anyone would put out a hit on him, let alone one so urgent and risky.

  For three, if the woman were the killer, why would she sit around next to her victim for the police to nab her? That seemed like it would defeat the whole purpose of a cleanup job, if that’s what it was.

  What if that wasn’t what it was? Fair enough, but what was it then? What if you’re not seeing the big picture? Damn right he wasn’t seeing the big picture. Right now, he was down on the ground, as Maxwell would say, and couldn’t see anything above his own head.

  What if the woman is innocent? Weren’t you just thinking of how unlikely it would be for a killer to sit around on the crime scene? What if she just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?

  He thought about this, but it didn’t seem likely. The evidence at the crime scene was too incriminating. Not to mention the eyewitnesses.

  Witnesses can be deceived. As for the evidence, keep in mind that things are not necessarily what they seem.

  True, evidence could be misleading, and this scene hadn’t been thoroughly investigated yet. It was too early to make a judgment. A closer inspection of the evidence might show that the culprit was in fact someone completely different. But how probable was that, really?

  When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

  The words of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Zachary conceded that, however improbable, it was at least possible that the woman was innocent, and he imagined old Sherlock taking one brief look at the crime scene, puffing at his pipe, then asking to see the woman’s shoes or fingernails or something before announcing that the killer was actually that bald guy who snuck away into the crowd. What bald guy? No one said anything about a bald gu—

  “Sir? It’s green.”

  Leo’s voice was drowned out by a car horn from behind them. Zachary drove past the green light, cursing the impatient driver under his breath. Now he’d completely lost his train of thought.

  Things are not what they seem.

  He cast one last glance at the woman in the rear-view mirror. Her eyes were closed. For all Zachary knew, she might be asleep. But one small detail refuted that possibility. Before turning his eyes back to the street, Zachary noticed a single teardrop rolling down the woman’s cheek, and he realized that he was no longer so sure that she’d done it after all.

  13:13 – Laura

  The floor of the holding cell was gray. The whole world looked gray to Laura now, but she was pretty sure the floor was truly gray. The hard bunk bolted to the wall was made of stainless steel, also gray. The walls were white, or at least a lighter shade of gray. The monotony was broken up only by the black surveillance camera in one corner of the ceiling. The cell was one of four, which were laid out in a row on one side of a concrete-walled corridor and partitioned from it by iron bars. The corridor was empty save for a fire extinguisher attached to the far wall and another security camera above a brown metal door which led to a larger corridor, which in turn connected to the offices and reception on the ground floor, and to the stairwell.

  Laura was alone, lying on the bunk resting her head on her hands. She’d been locked up in the cell some ten minutes earlier. They’d offered her a phone call and she’d said no. No one she could reach by phone would be able to help her now.

  Jeffrey was dead. The weight of that realization had stunned her, rendered her a lifeless husk, overwhelmed by the loss.

  But already during the few minutes in Detective Zimmerman’s car, the darkness inside had withdrawn, driven away by a growing anger. The anger was like a tiny ember smoldering under a pile of dry leaves. As Laura relived the moments after Jeffrey’s death again and again, she felt the tiny flame flit and flicker, felt it grow. Anger was energy, fuel for the fire. She would nurture it, focus it, concentrate it into a white-hot pinpoint. And then, Jeffrey’s killer would burn.

  Alone in the cell, with nothing to do but lie and wait, nothing to look at but featureless walls, Laura scrutinized the fragmentary images she’d picked up from the killer’s mind. She saw an old and tattered baseball soaring through the air towards a closed window. She saw a watch with golden hands, pointing to 12 and 3, the second hand ticking backwards. She saw a peculiar building, a gigantic pyramid of white concrete, looming against a steely sky. The immaculate white walls of the pyramid dissolved and became the killer’s eyes staring at her, into her. She heard a faint echo, a ghost, of that one word.

  Switch

  The sensation of the world twisting around her was something she had never felt before. The killer had done something to her. Whoever he was, he possessed some strange power. Precisely what it did and how it worked was still a mystery to her. After the shock had worn off, she had been standing in front
of Jeffrey with the killer’s knife in her hand. Worse still, she could remember things that she shouldn’t be able to. In these new memories, she had killed Jeffrey rather than tried to save him. Meanwhile, the killer had slipped away, blending into the crowd. Laura wished she had acted faster, pursued the killer before he could get away. She had to track him down. The killer must die, and she would be the one to kill him. For Jeffrey.

  But to do that, she first had to get out of the police station, which would be easier said than done. The police had caught her at the scene of the crime, and there were eyewitnesses pointing her out as guilty. Whatever trick the killer had played on her, it had affected not only her mind, but the minds of nearby people as well. And she’d been holding the knife with Jeffrey’s blood on it, which meant that it now also carried her fingerprints. For all intents and purposes, she was the killer, and no one but she herself knew that she was not. She had no way to prove her innocence.

  She would have to break out, then. But how? She had no means to unlock the cell door, and even if she had, the police station was unfamiliar territory. Even if she somehow made it out of the cell, she wouldn’t know where to go. She would just stumble into a dead end, get caught, and end up back inside.

  She needed help, and she could only think of one person who might be able to offer it: Detective Zimmerman. He was not like the others. When she had reached into his mind during the ride here, she had seen the same pattern of confusion that had mired Jeffrey’s mind, and which also marked her own. Whatever the killer had done to Jeffrey and Laura, he must have done to Zimmerman as well. She had tried to reach out to Zimmerman in the car, but his mind wasn’t quite like Jeffrey’s. Although she could read his thoughts with some effort, the two-way communication she had shared with her brother seemed beyond reach.

  Even so, she wasn’t entirely surprised when the big metal door swung open and Zimmerman walked in.

  “I don’t have much time, so I’ll be brief,” said Zimmerman as he approached her cell. “Back at the scene, you told me you didn’t do it. Was that true?”

  “Yes, it’s true.”

  Zimmerman crossed his arms and peered at her.

  “You know, it’s funny. All the evidence, all the eyewitness reports, everything tells me you’re guilty.” He shook his head with a wry smile. “And yet, there’s this little voice in my head that keeps saying you’re not.”

  Laura’s heart was racing. He was telling the truth—he couldn’t lie to her. She saw the thoughts floating around his head like balloons, and they were full of doubt. But what had her so excited her was that some of the balloons looked different. Every mind is like a fingerprint, unique to its owner, and right now she saw her own prints in Zimmerman’s mind. Her message had reached him, or at least part of it had. The realization made her head spin, possibilities zipping through her brain like bolts of lightning. If she had influenced his thoughts that much almost unconsciously, imagine what she could do if she really set her mind to it.

  There was no time to waste. She focused her mind on Zimmerman’s, aiming for the part of his thoughts that doubted her guilt, and thrust her message into it like a crowbar.

  I am innocent. Please help me. Get me out of here. Help me find the real killer.

  “Jeffrey Greenwood’s sister…” said Zimmerman. “I don’t know what kind of motive you could have for killing your own brother, but I’ve seen some screwed-up families in my day. Not to mention the eyewitnesses and physical evidence…”

  The killer is still out there. You must set me free!

  “…but for some reason, I actually think you might be innocent.”

  “If you do,” said Laura, struggling to keep her voice from shaking with excitement, “then please help me.”

  Zimmerman shook his head.

  “I… can’t do that.” He backed away from the cell with a look of confusion. “Don’t know why I even came down here, to be honest. I should get going.”

  A new thought had risen to the surface of his mind. An image of a cell phone, its screen showing a list of calls. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the list itself, yet she got a strong sense that something was missing from it. The cell phone morphed into a man’s face, which Laura recognized, to her horror, as the huge police officer she had killed on Lester Street.

  It wasn’t me, she reminded herself.

  The transformation repeated itself, over and over, the officer’s face turning into different kinds of phones. This continuous transformation was accompanied by the confusion she had sensed earlier. Zimmerman could remember calling the officer, who Laura now knew was John Doe, but he wasn’t sure how he had done it or why. He sensed that something was wrong. Laura had found her opening.

  “I can read minds!” she shouted after him.

  He stopped one step short of the door and looked over his shoulder at her.

  “Right, and I can bend spoons. Bye, Ms. Greenwood.”

  “I know you, Zachary Zimmerman,” said Laura. “I know that you’re forty-seven years old; that you’re allergic to peanuts; that you’re an alcoholic who’s managed to stay sober for eight months, even though you started way too late to save your marriage—your ex-wife’s name is Ulrike, by the way—and that you could kill for a rum and coke right about now.”

  Zimmerman stared at her, his mouth hanging open. She continued, cutting straight to the heart of the matter.

  “You didn’t make that phone call. You’re not the reason Doe and Chavez died. You’ve been manipulated, just like me!”

  Without warning, Zimmerman lunged forward, grabbing the bars of the cell with both hands.

  “How do you know all this? Who told you?” he yelled, eyes bulging.

  “Nobody told me. I saw it all in your mind.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “I know it’s hard to believe, but I swear it’s true.”

  “Oh yeah?” Zimmerman crossed his arms and smirked at her. “Then tell me what animal I’m thinking of right now.”

  “An aardvark.”

  The smirk froze on Zimmerman’s face. “…Lucky guess!”

  “Seriously?”

  Zimmerman cracked his knuckles. He was becoming uncertain. Laura could see the veil surrounding his mind, the veil everyone wraps around themselves for comfort in the face of the unfamiliar and unexplained. The security blanket called common sense. She had to break through it.

  “You expect me to believe,” he said, “that you’re telekinetic or something?”

  “Telepathic, actually,” Laura corrected him without thinking. “And you know I’m telling the truth. The real killer is still out there, and he can do… something. I don’t know exactly what it is, but he made it seem like I killed Jeffrey, and I bet he made it seem like you made that phone call too. He’s been controlling us like puppets.”

  Zimmerman said nothing. He was all but hyperventilating, his nostrils whistling with each breath like a tortured bicycle pump. He stared at her, eyes unblinking, his jaws working frenetically, like he was chewing on something gristly and hard, something he wanted to but couldn’t bring himself to swallow. Tiny little rips began appearing in the veil. Laura wriggled through one of them, making her way inside.

  Splinters of thoughts whirled through Zimmerman’s mind, disjointed fragments of memories orbiting the ever-changing phone and face. She saw a weasel-faced man sitting at a table munching on what looked like a tortilla. He spoke, his voice muffled and distorted through Zimmerman’s memory, but she could pick up a few words.

  Homer Moley… He’s a demon. You want anyone dead, he can kill them for you.

  As the weasel-faced man spoke, a shadowy image flickered behind him. A pair of cold, green eyes. She realized that she was seeing a ghost of the weasel-faced man’s memories inside Zimmerman’s mind, like a second-hand vision. This had only happened once or twice in her whole life, and only when strong, primal emotions were involved. What she sensed here was fear, and she immediately knew why.

  She had seen those ey
es herself.

  “Please,” said Laura again, with doubled intensity. She knew now that Detective Zimmerman was her only hope. “You have to get me out of here.”

  Zimmerman drew in breath, opened his mouth as if to speak, then stopped. He took a few steps back, then turned and walked away at speed. The sound of his thoughts faded away as the distance between them grew.

  Too tired to call out to him, Laura sank down onto the bunk with a thud, watching the heavy door close. She had summoned all her strength to get through to him and was exhausted. Her breathing was rapid, as if she had ridden her bike up a steep hill. All she could do now was wait and hope that Zimmerman would believe her.

  She lay down on the bunk and closed her eyes. The image of the killer’s face appeared as if printed on the inside of her eyelids. The satisfied smile on his lips stoked the fire in her heart.

  He was going to burn, all right.

  13:20 – Zachary

  Mullin closed the door to Captain Caulfield’s office and drew the blinds. He gave Zachary the old stink-eye as he strode past him and took his place next to the captain behind the big oak desk. Gloria was sitting on a couch near the left wall of the room, looking at Zachary with sad eyes. This was going to suck.

  “Well, Zimmerman, I’m at a loss for words,” said Caulfield, spreading his hands on the desk, palms up, as if begging for a sensible answer. “Your interference with an ongoing investigation was not only a breach of protocol and an undermining of Detective Mullin’s authority, but it also caused the death of two officers and a suspect. This is a bit much even for you. What do you have to say for yourself?”

  Zachary racked his brain for a good answer. He still had a hard time believing everything Laura Greenwood had told him about her supposed ability to read minds and the so-called real killer still at large. If he himself didn’t buy it, Caulfield and Mullin would never believe it.