Adrienne managed a smile. “I know I’m not being fair,” she told him. “You’ve been incredible. But… I’m just not sure… what to do now.” She pushed her hair back from her forehead.
“I have a name for you,” Shaw said, patting his pockets. Finding what he was looking for, he removed a yellow Post-it from his shirt, and handed it to her.
Adrienne saw that it was imprinted with the word HealthSource and, below that, Shaw had scribbled a name:
“Sidney Shapiro… “ She looked up. “Who’s he?”
Shaw thought about it. “He’s a man who knows about these things.”
“What? You mean—memory?”
A funny little look came over Shaw’s face. “No. I mean about your sister—and Lewis.”
She still didn’t understand. “He knows what happened to them?”
Shaw shook his head, and got to his feet. “He knows about implants,” he told her. “The ways they’re used and misused. He knows more about that than anyone in the world.” The psychiatrist hesitated for a moment, as something occurred to him. “Or maybe not.”
Adrienne studied the name on the Post-it. “But who is he?”
Shaw thought about it. “He’s… a retired civil servant.” Then he chuckled. Ruefully.
“And you think he’ll talk to us?”
Shaw shook his head. “I don’t know. If you show him that file, he might.”
“Okay, but… do you have a number for him?”
The psychiatrist shook his head for the second time. “He lives in West Virginia, near Harpers Ferry. I suspect he’s in the book.”
“All right,” Adrienne said. “Sid Shapiro. We’ll give it a shot.” She got to her feet, and put out her hand to shake.
He took her hand in his own, then covered it with his other hand. “If he asks where you got his name…”
“What should I tell him?”
Tight little smile from the nice shrink. “Well, don’t mention me. Just tell him you heard about him in a documentary on A&E.”
“Which one?” she asked.
“I think it was about ‘mind control.’”
McBride was waiting for them in the lobby, and it was obvious that the two men had already said their good-byes, because Shaw gave him a little salute, then hurried off down the corridor.
Maybe it was her imagination, but Lew McBride looked different somehow. He looked taller, his posture at once more athletic and relaxed. He smiled at her as she walked toward him and the smile seemed different too—less guarded. Happier. And there was something in his eyes. Maybe he is all right now, she thought.
“Can I buy you lunch?” he asked. “We can talk about our future.”
They walked out into the cold and sunny day.
She had to ask: “Do you have any money? I’m getting low.”
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I do. The hospital gave me some walking-around money. Officially, I’m part of a research project. Had to sign a bunch of releases. I think Ray Shaw suggested I was going to sue.” The sidewalks were crowded, full of purposeful pedestrians. He took her arm as they approached the curb and held it as they crossed the intersection. “Especially,” he continued, “since I’m known to hang around with my own legal advocate.”
“Your unemployed advocate,” she corrected.
“We’re both unemployed,” he told her. “It’s something we share.”
She looked at him. He was different. This conversation was different from any she’d had with him. Maybe you couldn’t joke around, she thought, maybe irony didn’t work—if you didn’t know who you were.
“So where are we going?”
“There’s a piña colada stand across the street from Needle Park. Seventy-second and Broadway.”
“Sounds perfect,” she said. “The hotel’s only a few blocks away.”
“They have hot dogs, too. The natural kind, with crunchy casings.”
“Grilled, not boiled!”
“Right! And real mustard—not that yellow stuff.”
“So, I take it, this means you know New York?”
He shrugged. “I know where to get a good hot dog.”
They walked on, looking for a cab. After a while, she said, “You’re right about one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know about the hospital being spooked, but Shaw was. Spooked, I mean.”
“Yeah, I got that feeling, too. Probably just his department, leaning on him. He took a chance, doing what he did.”
“I know. If you’d gone out the window… “ Her voice trailed away and she felt like an idiot, talking about suicide. Just a little while earlier, the man next to her had been tied to his bed in a pysch ward.
“That’s gone, by the way,” he said. “Along with the baseball bat and the blood. It’s so gone, it’s hard to believe I bought it. Bought it right down to knowing what it would feel like to… “ He shook his head.
“But you did,” she said.
“What?”
“Buy it.”
They were at another intersection. He took her arm again, restrained her as a Step-Van hurtled through the red light. “Yeah I did,” he admitted. “And one thing’s for sure.”
They stepped off the curb. He didn’t release her arm. “What’s that?” she asked.
“I’m going to find out who sold it to me.”
Chapter 33
She was looking for the name of the man in West Virginia, the name Shaw had written on a Post-it in McBride’s medical file, when the snapshot fell to the floor. McBride was in the kitchen, emptying a can of lentil soup into a pan, when she stooped to pick up the picture—and hesitated.
It was a 3 by 5 Polaroid photograph of… what? She picked up the picture from the floor, set it down on the desk, and cocked her head. Some kind of… thing. Unfamiliar, and yet—she’d seen it before. Where? It took a moment—then it hit her. She’d seen it on the floor of her apartment, spilled by whoever it was who’d trashed the place. Lying there in Nikki’s ashes, that tiny transparent thing. Which she thought was a contaminant of some kind, an artifact of the cremation process. And yet, Doctor Shaw had taken a picture of it. How?
She turned the photograph over, and found a notation scribbled on the back under the date stamp:
Object X, 64mm × 6mm,
removed from hippocampus
of J. Duran
S/ Dr. N. Allalin
Her chest began to tighten with the realization that this wasn’t the artifact she’d found in her apartment. Or, rather, it was the same kind of thing—a translucent tube of glass shot through with gold and silver wires—about as long and thick as a grain of rice. Different, but the same.
An implant.
Which meant that what had been done to Lew McBride had also been done to her sister. The tightening in her chest fused, turned into anger, and gave way to despair.
“Oh, Jesus!” she cried.
McBride looked up from the soup that he was stirring. “What’s the matter?”
She just shook her head, tears flying.
Seeing her unhappiness, he rushed to her side. And saw that she was looking at a photo of the implant. “Hey,” he said, giving her shoulder a squeeze, “take it easy. It’s gone. It’s out.”
“It’s on the floor of my apartment!”
Her outburst caught him by surprise. “What?”
“One of those! In Nikki’s ashes—just like that!”
He started to ask how it got there, but caught himself in time.
“It was in the urn from the funeral parlor,” she said, dragging a sleeve across her eyes. Then she giggled through her tears. “All that… bullshit!”
“What bullshit?” (He was trying to be encouraging.)
“About the Riedles. And ‘her overdose’! And the settlement they gave her. That’s why Eddie’s asset search went nowhere. None of it happened. It was all a lie—like what they did to you.” Suddenly, she wanted to kill someone. Specifically, she wanted to kill the person who’d turned her sister into the robot she’d met in the Nine West store, the girl who’d fried herself in the bathtub. Forget closure. “I’m going to crucify the son of a bitch who did this,” she swore.