Dream Park

O'Brien squinted. "Haven't you already searched Rice's place?"

"Not thoroughly. Just photographed."

"Well, somebody searched it."

"True. And maybe they didn't get what they were looking for. There are a lot of ways to hide things in a CMC apartment, that

an outsider might miss." *

"A place large enough to hide a statue?"

"No, no, only enough to hide what someone thought was in it. Rice was a sculptor, you know. It wouldn't have been hard for him to rig a fake brick for his fireplace. A holo projection of a book could cover a hole in his shelf... I don't really know." Alex glanced at the cuff of a fresh shirt. "Bobbick must be almost there by now. If there's anything there, we'll find it."

Skip snapped his briefcase shut. "Whew. This sounds pretty bad. I'd better go and check the dates on that cabinet. If you'll ex­cuse me-"

Alex thought a wordless curse.

Harmony patted the air with his hand. "That can wait, Skip. I need to know about the formula we recovered. How familiar with it are you? Enough to be sure it's the real thing?"

"I-it's hard to say. I, uh, I could check with Sacramento, but if the leak's there, the real formula could be switched already. And if it isn't, we can't compare them over an open line." He sat down, reluctantly, then popped up again. "Listen. I may have some notes on this in my lab. If I match them up... ?"

Harmony looked at Griffin, then back again. He hadn't liked this when Griffin broached the subject earlier, when it was still hy­pothetical. Now he hated it, and it showed in his face. "Why don't you just get them on the phone. Have your office check. We'll have a courier bring it over if necessary."

"I-we can't, uh... There's been too much trouble already. It's too valuable."

"You're too valuable to us here, Skip," Griffin said gently. He turned to Harmony. "There's only one person in Sacramento whose name turned up in Albert Rice's telephone book. Lady named Prentice, Sonja Prentice."

Harmony nodded grimly.

The blood was draining from O'Brien's cheeks. His eyes flicked from Harmony to Griffin to Harmony... "What the hell is this about?" He could barely speak, the breath whistling weakly in his throat.

"It's about getting to the truth, Skip."

O'Brien's mouth worked wordlessly. "You can't-"

"Yes, we can," Griffin said. "We know about Sonja and we know about you and Rice."

"Jesus..." O'Brien whispered. Then his eyes blazed and his lips set in a taut pale line. "I'm not saying a goddamned thing until I talk to my lawyer."

Harmony spoke now, and his voice, cultured and precise, was an ugly thing to hear. "I'm not sure you appreciate our position, O'Brien. Alex and I talked this over before you arrived. We can't have you prosecuted. Unfortunately."

Skip's eyes narrowed. "What do you mean?"

"What do you think would happen if it was known that Cowles Industries' chief psychiatrist, the man who has headed up our child research division for six years, is a cold-blooded murderer?"

"You did it, Skip," Griffin said hollowly. "You were in a posi­tion to alter Rice's computer records. You could ‘discover' the forgery later, after Rice was dead. You were working in R&D the night he was killed." He leaned close to Skip, whose eyes were closed now, his breathing heavy. "We just need to know the truth, Skip, all of It. Either we get it from you, or the police come in and drag it out for us; and the papers get everything."

Again, O'Brien's mouth worked without sound, then a long, arid sigh. "It was the girl. Prentice. My god, it was so long ago. .

He lit a cigarette with a shaking hand. Griffin watched the smoke haze around Skip in a cloud until Harmony whisked it into the ceiling. "Rice was my student at Sulphur University. Bright. Promising. We became friends. My wife found it so damn easy to get into the swing of being a University wife~ The entertaining, the

parties...lbert could talk sense, and he4...e listened to me. Looked up to me."

He gestured aimlessly with the cigarette, the smoke making spi­rals in the air. "We bad a thing. It didn't last for that long, but it was pretty intense. More of a crush, maybe. When I tried to back off, he grn crazy. Just nuts. Swore to tell the University. Said I was abandoning him, that I didn't give a damn about him. I tried to show him that I did."

Griffin waited for him to continue, then started to prod gently, but Skip continued by himself. "Sonja was a girl who had taken a class from me the semester before. She was lonely, I knew that, and I thought that maybe... maybe there was enough common ground to form a bond between them."

"Had you had a ‘thing' with her too?" Alex's voice was dan­gerously quiet. O'Brien nodded miserably. Good old Skip. Giving his all for the youth of America.

"For a while, it worked. Maybe only to spite me, to prove he wasn't the emotional cripple he accused me of making him, Albert and Sonja starting relating. It was during this time that she mod­eled for his statue. Sometimes... sometimes the three of us would... play together." He closed his eyes and swallowed. "By damn," he whispered, "as an officer of this municipality, Alex, you had better know that none of this is admissible in court."

"I know," Griffin said, flatly. "Finish it. What was supposed to be in the statue?"

"Albert was... into drugs. That was why he made the hollow statue. He had made some freebase cocaine in the lab. One night we all got incredibly high smoking it. Sonja got too high, too damn high. I don't know why Albert kept feeding it to her, but be seemed to enjoy watching her literally lose her mind."

"And she lost more than that."

He nodded, "We were all zonked out, and finally I noticed that Sonja was having trouble breathing. I was stoned, and scared, and I tried to apply some kind of resuscitation. She just stopped breathing, that's all. I couldn't believe it. I was too scared to call the ambulance. Christ. My job, my wife. • ."

"So she died."

Skip couldn't face them. "She died. Honestly-please believe me

-I did try to call the police, then. But Albert pleaded with me. Begged me not to. Said that we could get her back into the dormi­

tory without getting caught. I was still high. I didn't know what to do."

Harmony was pitiless. "So you let him talk you into it."

"Yes. Albert went out to dispose of the smoking kit, and the drugs in his apartment. Then, at three in the morning, we carried Sonja into her dormitory, got her into her room, and left her undressed in bed. I remember reading the papers, hearing them talk about ‘the suicide..." He buried his face in his hands. "I stopped seeing Rice, and that was the end of it, until two years ago. He called me at home, the bastardl He said he knew I worked at Cowles Industries and he needed a job. He didn't make any threats, but it was there, hanging. I should have gotten rid of him somehow... I got him the job."

"Then the demands started, right? A better job... Manipu­late his psych proffie... Just a little twist of the arm, a little blackmail that grows-" Griffin left it open.

But O'Brien was shaking his head. "It wasn't like that, really. It was do a favor for a friend. Then it was make sure you stay my, friend. He kept pushing and I kept trying to draw the line. Finally he told me that he still had the smoking kit, and that all those sets of fingerprints were on it. His. Mine. Hers. If I didn't do as he said, the police would get it. He told me I had more to lose than he did. He was right.

"So I broke into his apartment and ripped it apart looking for the kit. I broke the statue open but there wasn't anything in it. The next day he told me I had twenty-five hours to falsify his records, or he would go to the police. I did it. The night that the R&D center was broken into, I went to meet him, to tell him that now he had as much to lose as I did, and that all bets were off."