Страница 42 из 83
“Knowing Mauchly, after having been sca
“Probably.”
Lash glanced at the clutch of emerald-green postcards. A question had formed in his mind — a question Tara could probably answer better than anybody.
He leaned toward the desk. “Tara, listen. Remember that drink we had at Sebastian’s? What you told me about your getting the nod?”
Immediately, he felt her grow more reserved.
“I need to know something. Is there any chance that an Eden candidate who gets turned down after testing might end up getting processed anyway? Go through data-gathering, surveillance — the works — and ultimately end up in the Tank? Getting matched?”
“You mean, like a mistake? Obsoletes somehow making their way through? Impossible.”
“Why?”
“There are redundant checks. It’s like everything else with the system. We don’t take any chance that a client, even a would-be client, could suffer embarrassment from sloppy data handling.”
“You’re sure?”
“It’s never happened.”
“It happened yesterday.” And in response to Tara’s disbelieving look, he handed her the letter he’d found waiting outside his front door.
She read it, paling visibly. “Tavern on the Green.”
“I was rejected as an applicant. And pretty definitively. So how could this have happened?”
“I have no idea.”
“Could somebody within Eden have doctored my forms, guiding them through instead of shunting them toward the discard pile?”
“Nobody here does anything without half a dozen others seeing it.”
“Nobody?”
Hearing the tone of his voice, Tara looked at him closely. “It would have to be somebody very highly placed, somebody with world-class access. Me, for example. Or a grunt like Handerling who’d somehow hacked the system.” She paused. “But why would anybody do such a thing?”
“That was my next question.”
There was a silence. Tara folded the letter and handed it back across the table.
“I don’t know how this happened. But I’m very, very sorry, Dr. Lash. We’ll investigate immediately, of course.”
“You’re sorry. Silver’s sorry. Why is everybody so sorry?”
Tara looked astonished. “You mean—?”
“That’s right. Tomorrow night, I’m stepping out.”
“But I don’t understand—” The flow of words stopped.
I know you don’t, Lash thought.
He didn’t exactly understand himself. If he’d worked at Eden, like Tara — if he’d been influenced by what insiders called the “Oz effect”—he might have torn up the letter.
But he had not torn up the letter. The peek behind the scenes, the rabid testimonials of Eden clients, had piqued his interest almost without his realizing it. And now he’d been told a perfect mate had been found for him — Christopher Lash, so expert at analyzing other relationships yet so unsuccessful in his own. It was simply too powerful a lure to resist. Even the knowledge of why he was here in the first place was no match for the curiosity of meeting — just perhaps — an ideal partner.
But that meeting would come tomorrow. Today, there was something else on his mind.
“It’s not a coincidence,” he said.
“Huh?”
“My application getting processed. It might be a mistake, but it’s no coincidence. Any more than the deaths of the two supercouples are coincidence.”
Tara frowned. “What are you saying, exactly?”
“I’m not sure. But there’s a pattern here somewhere. We’re just not seeing it.” Mentally, he returned to last night’s drive home, when he’d refused to listen to the voice in the back of his head. Now he tried to recall the voice.
You murdered the first two supercouples, in order, Mauchly had said to Handerling during the interrogation. Now you’ve been pla
In order…
“Mind if I borrow this?” he asked, taking a notepad from the desk. Pulling out a pen, he wrote two dates on the pad: 9/17/04. 9/24/04. The dates the Thorpes and the Wilners had died.
“Tara,” he said. “Can you pull up the dates that the Thorpes and the Wilners first submitted their applications?”
“Sure.” She turned toward one of the terminals, typed briefly. Almost immediately, the printer spat out a sheet:
Nothing.
“Could you widen the search, please? I want a printout of all relevant dates for the two couples. When they were tested, when they first met, when they were married, everything.”
Tara looked at him speculatively for a moment. Then she returned to the keyboard and resumed typing.
The second list ran to almost a dozen pages. Lash turned them over, one after another, ru
“Jesus,” he murmured.
“What is it?”
“These columns labeled ‘Nominal avatar removal.’ What do they stand for?”
“When the avatars were removed from the tank.”
“In other words, when the couples were matched.”
“Right.”
Lash handed her the sheet. “Look at the removal dates for the Thorpes and the Wilners.”
Tara glanced at the report. “My God. September 17, 2002. September 24, 2002.”
“That’s right. Not only were the Thorpes and the Wilners the first two supercouples to be matched. They also died precisely two years after they were matched. Two years to the day.”
Tara dropped the report on the desk. “What do you think it means?”
“That this dog’s been sniffing around the wrong fire hydrant. Here I’ve been digging into the psych tests and evaluations, assuming there might be some human flaw your examinations missed. Maybe instead of examining the people, I should have examined the process.”
“The process? What about the suspect match? Liza’s search?”
“That won’t be done until Monday. I don’t plan to spend the next seventy-odd hours sitting on my hands.” He stood up and turned toward the door. “Thanks for the help.”
As he opened the door, he heard Tara’s chair roll back. “Just a minute,” she said.
He turned.
“Where are you going?”
“Back to my office. I’ve got a lot of evidence lockers to search.”
When Tara came around the desk, there was no hesitation. “I’m coming along,” she said.
THIRTY
Seen my traveling kit, babe?” Kevin Co
“Beneath the vanity, second shelf. On the left.”
Co
“You’re a treasure,” he said.
“I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.”
He paused, crouching before the vanity, to look over at her. She was standing just within the closet, staring at a long rack of dresses. As he watched, she took down one, turned it around on its hanger, replaced it in favor of another. There was something in the way her limbs moved — lissome, unself-conscious — that even now quickened his pulse. He’d been deeply offended when, the other week, his mother had labeled her “cute.” Cute? She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
She left the closet and walked the newly selected dress over to the bed, where a large canvas suitcase lay open. With the same economy of motion, she folded the dress in half and placed it within the suitcase.
He’d taken the afternoon off to help his wife pack for Niagara Falls. It was a kind of guilty pleasure that, for some reason, he’d be embarrassed to confess to anybody. They always packed days in advance of a trip; somehow, it seemed to extend the vacation. He’d always been a premature packer, for the same reason he always liked to get to the airport early — yet as a bachelor it had been a hurried, slovenly affair. Ly