Crime Spells

Angelina Jolie.

What?

Before I could figure out what my brain was trying to tell me, she rolled on: “Time index is plus thirty minutes. Where the waves are faster, closer together? That’s called beta rhythm. You see beta in REM sleep, when we dream. But she wasn’t asleep at the time. This rhythm just appeared.”

“Was she having a seizure?”

“No. If she’d been asleep and then awakened, I would’ve said sleep paralysis. In REM sleep, we’re all partially paralyzed. It’s called REM atonia. Perfectly normal. In sleep paralysis, the subject awakens, but the paralysis persists. Many subjects experience quite vivid hallucinations. In some cases, sleep paralysis will transition to what we call lucid dreaming. For all intents and purposes, the person is conscious, but the brain is still in REM sleep. If you listen to Lily, she was in deep sleep, and then she awakened, convinced there was someone else in her mind. This EEG records REM breakthrough into the conscious state, which you might interpret as a lucid dream. But I don’t think so. Here, it’s as if there are two brains. Two people. One’s Ms. Hopkins,” she indicated a set of tracings, “and the other’s not. Like a split brain: two completely independent patterns, but her CT is stone-cold normal.”

“Was she aware of it when this happened?”

“Yes. She said someone else came in.” Wylde paused. “Not-Lily was how she put it.”

“Is she…?”

“Crazy? No.”

I said nothing. My eyes dropped to the EEG again, those two independent brains occupying the same space at the same time. Then my eyes snagged on the initials on the front sheet. One set was P.G.: Phillip Gerber.

The other: S.W.

She said someone else came in.

I said, “When did you come into the EEG suite, Doctor?”

Rollins said, “What?”

Her expression was unreadable, though I saw her pulse bounding in her neck. She opened her mouth to reply, but Rollins’s pager chirped. “Computer guy,” he said, heading for the exit. “I’ll let him know we’re on our way.”

I waited until Rollins had gone and then looked back at Wylde. Just came out with it. “You’re Preston Wylde’s daughter.”

“It is an uncommon last name. My father’s always tried to maintain a distance between his professional life and home, but…” She shook her head. “Things have a way of coming to roost.”

An odd statement. I let it hang.

She said, “Is the fact that my father works for the FBI a problem?”

“No. But I can’t imagine it’s easy being the daughter of a famous profiler, especially given the men your father tracks down.”

“Demon hunter is what the press prefers.”

“I don’t get anything near that sexy when the press talks about me.”

“Maybe you need to get sexier then.” She checked her watch. “I have to go. Was there anything else?”

“Yes. What was that, Doctor? With Dickert? And don’t tell me nothing. I know what I saw, damn it.”

Her face was still as smooth glass. “What do you believe happened, Detective? What do you think you saw?”

Not what, who . And I believe you stopped him somehow. I believe you command things the rest of us only have nightmares about.

And does it have anything to do with what’s happening to me ?

When I still said nothing, only then did her expression shift: a tiny blur, as if she were a projection going briefly out of focus, the pixels scattering, then coalescing around the edges until she was sharp edged, like something scissored out of black paper and superimposed upon a perfectly white background. She was almost too real.

“I’ve got work.” She turned to leave.

For no reason I could think of, I said, “Dr. Wylde, how is the old man? Mr. Choun?”

Her back stiffened just the tiniest bit, and when she turned her face was midway to rearranging itself into something close to neutrality. But I saw the emotions chase through-and there was grief, most of all.

“He’s about to give up the ghost,” she said.

“That’s an odd way of putting it, Doctor.”

“I guess it depends on your point of view. One thing, Detective, about my father? What they call him?”

This was not what I expected. “Yes?”

“Sometimes, a name isn’t all about sex. Sometimes, Detective, the truth is right under your nose.”

V

“I’ve been able to clean up the image pretty good,” said the computer guy. “Best I can tell, this is old stock film transferred to three-quarter inch and then to disk. A lot of degradation in the transfer. Black and white, silent. Almost looks like newsreel footage, you know what I’m saying?”

Black and white? I could’ve sworn I saw colors: the dirty brown of that bedspread, that girl’s black hair. The blood where she’d bitten her tongue. That green and white thing on the bed. “Let’s see it.”

The thing was no easier to watch the second time around. But the computer guy had been right: black and white.

Hunh. “Can you tell us anything about where and when?”

“Yup.” The computer guy tapped keys. “I’ve isolated a couple items in the room, did freeze-frame, blew ’em up.”

What he brought up were two stills of objects on the bed: one, a triangle protruding into the frame from the right, and the packet alongside the pillow, only black and white now instead of green and white. He zoomed in on the latter with a couple of mouse clicks.

I stared for a few seconds. “Chiclets?”

“Chewing gum?” said Rollins.

“But a very special pack of chewing gum. It’s only two pieces, and what store sells that? Then this other thing.” He did the zoom thing again, and I now could see that the triangle was the bottom third of a box.

I said, “Does that say what I think it does?”

“It does indeed.”

First line: Marl

Second line: 4 CLASS A CIGARE

“Who sells cigarettes with only four smokes a pack?” Rollins asked.

I thought I knew.

The computer guy looked smug. “Before I get to that, there’s one more thing. This is from the guy. That splotch there?”

“Yeah, I thought that was a mole,” I said.

“Not a mole. Let me just enlarge it here… clean it up… there.”

My whole insides went still.

Not a mole. A tattoo. One I recognized.

An ace of spades with a Jolly Roger in the center.

The computer guy said, “The gum and the cigarettes were standard C rations for American soldiers. That tattoo is a copy of a death card, what PsyOps developed during Vietnam and which some soldiers used to leave on the bodies of dead Viet Cong. Here.” More mouse clicks, and this time a webpage came up with a screen, the kind on YouTube. “This is actual footage of something called Operation Baker. Happened in 1967.”

About ten minutes long, the film was silent and consisted mainly of soldiers on patrol, burning a village. Then, at the end, footage of American soldiers putting cards in the mouths of dead Vietnamese.

“Ace of spades,” Rollins said. “Looks like a regular card from a Bicycle pack.”

The computer guy nodded. “Some lieutenant got wind that the ace of spades was some kind of bad luck symbol to the Vietnamese or something. He was wrong, but he contacted Bicycle, and they sent over thousands of packs. Said Secret Weapon right on the pack. Not all units used the same cards, though, and some designs were more popular than others.”

“You know what company that was?” I asked. “In the film?”

“Yeah. Third Brigade. Twenty-fifth Infantry Division.”

“Dickert,” said Rollins.

“And MacAndrews.” Opening my phone, pressing speed dial.

When I got Kay on the line, I said, “MacAndrews… did he have any identifying marks?”

He did.

Thirty minutes later, Rollins was still tapping keys and frowning. “Can’t you go any faster?” I asked.