بخش 03 - فصل 20

20

“Jerome?” Holly asks. “Can you still hear me?”

“Yes.”

“I want you to turn off the Zappit and put it on Bill’s desk.” And then, because she’s always been a belt-and-suspenders kind of girl, she adds: “Facedown.”

A frown creases his broad brow. “Do I have to?”

“Yes. Right now. And without looking at the damn thing.”

Before Jerome can follow this order, Hodges catches one final glimpse of the fish swimming, and one more bright blue flash. A momentary dizziness—perhaps caused by his pain pills, perhaps not—sweeps through him. Then Jerome pushes the button on top of the console, and the fish disappear.

What Hodges feels isn’t relief but disappointment. Maybe that’s crazy, but given his current medical problem, maybe it’s not. He’s seen hypnosis used from time to time to help witnesses achieve better recall, but has never grasped its full power until now. He has an idea, probably blasphemous in this situation, that the Zappit fish might be better medicine for pain than the stuff Dr. Stamos prescribed.

Holly says, “I’m going to count down from ten to one, Jerome. Each time you hear a number, you’ll be a little more awake. Okay?”

For several seconds Jerome says nothing. He sits calmly, peacefully, touring some other reality and perhaps trying to decide if he would like to live there permanently. Holly, on the other hand, is vibrating like a tuning fork, and Hodges can feel his fingernails biting into his palms as he clenches his fists.

At last Jerome says, “Okay, I guess. Since it’s you, Hollyberry.”

“Here we go. Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . you’re coming back . . . seven . . . six . . . five . . . waking up . . .”

Jerome raises his head. His eyes are aimed at Hodges, but Hodges isn’t sure the boy is seeing him.

“Four . . . three . . . almost there . . . two . . . one . . . wake up!” She claps her hands together.

Jerome gives a hard jerk. One hand brushes Dinah’s Zappit and knocks it to the floor. Jerome looks at Holly with an expression of surprise so exaggerated it would be funny under other circumstances.

“What just happened? Did I go to sleep?”

Holly collapses into the chair ordinarily reserved for clients. She takes a deep breath and wipes her cheeks, which are damp with sweat.

“In a way,” Hodges says. “The game hypnotized you. Like it hypnotized your sister.”

“Are you sure?” Jerome asks, then looks at his watch. “I guess you are. I just lost fifteen minutes.”

“Closer to twenty. What do you remember?”

“Tapping the pink fish and turning them into numbers. It’s surprisingly hard to do. You have to watch closely, really concentrate, and the blue flashes don’t help.”

Hodges picks the Zappit up off the floor.

“I wouldn’t turn that on,” Holly says sharply.

“Not going to. But I did last night, and I can tell you there were no blue flashes, and you could tap pink fish until your finger went numb without getting any numbers. Also, the tune is different now. Not much, but a little.”

Holly sings, pitch perfect: “‘By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea, you and me, you and me, oh how happy we’ll be.’ My mother used to sing it to me when I was little.”

Jerome is staring at her with more intensity than she can deal with, and she looks away, flustered. “What? What is it?”

“There were words,” he says, “but not those.”

Hodges heard no words, only the tune, but doesn’t say so. Holly asks Jerome if he can remember them.

His pitch isn’t as good as hers, but it’s close enough for them to be sure that yes, it’s the tune they heard. “‘You can sleep, you can sleep, it’s a beautiful sleep . . . ’” He stops. “That’s all I can remember. If I’m not just making it up, that is.”

Holly says, “Now we know for sure. Someone amped the Fishin’ Hole screen.”

“Shot it full of ’roids,” Jerome adds.

“What does that even mean?” Hodges asks.

Jerome nods to Holly and she says, “Someone loaded a stealth program into the demo, which is mildly hypnotic to begin with. The program was dormant when Dinah had the Zappit, and still dormant when you looked at it last night, Bill—which was lucky for you—but someone turned it on after that.”

“Babineau?”

“Him or someone else, if the police are right and Babineau is dead.”

“It could have been a preset,” Jerome says to Holly. Then, to Hodges: “You know, like an alarm clock.”

“Let me get this straight,” Hodges says. “The program was in there all along, and only became active once Dinah’s Zappit was turned on today?”

“Yes,” Holly says. “There’s probably a repeater at work, don’t you think, Jerome?”

“Yeah. A computer program that pumps out the update constantly, waiting for some schlub—me, in this case—to turn on a Zappit and activate the WiFi.”

“This could happen with all of them?”

“If the stealth program is in all of them, sure,” Jerome says.

“Brady set this up.” Hodges begins to pace, hand going to his side as if to contain the pain and hold it in. “Brady fucking Hartsfield.”

“How?” Holly asks.

“I don’t know, but it’s the only thing that fits. He tries to blow up the Mingo during that concert. We stop him. The audience, most of them young girls, is saved.”

“By you, Holly,” Jerome says.

“Be quiet, Jerome. Let him tell it.” Her eyes suggest she knows where Hodges is going.

“Six years pass. Those young girls, most of them in elementary or middle school in 2010, are in high school. Maybe in college. ’Round Here is long gone and the girls are young women now, they’ve moved on to other kinds of music, but then they get an offer they can’t refuse. A free game console, and all they have to do is be able to prove they were at the ’Round Here show that night. The console probably looks as out-of-date to them as a black-and-white TV, but what the hell, it’s free.”

“Yes!” Holly says. “Brady was still after them. This is his revenge, but not just on them. It’s his revenge on you, Bill.”

Which makes me responsible, Hodges thinks bleakly. Except what else could I do? What else could any of us do? He was going to bomb the place.

“Babineau, going under the name of Myron Zakim, bought eight hundred of those consoles. It had to be him, because he’s loaded. Brady was broke and I doubt Library Al could have fronted even twenty thousand dollars from his retirement savings. Those consoles are out there now. And if they all get this amped-up program once they’re turned on . . .”

“Hold it, go back,” Jerome says. “Are you really saying that a respected neurosurgeon got involved in this shit?”

“That’s what I’m saying, yeah. Your sister ID’d him, and we already know the respected neurosurgeon was using Brady Hartsfield as a lab rat.”

“But now Hartsfield’s dead,” Holly says. “Which leaves Babineau, who may also be dead.”

“Or not,” Hodges says. “There was blood in his car, but no body. Wouldn’t be the first time some doer tried to fake his own death.”

“I’ve got to check something on my computer,” Holly says. “If those free Zappits are getting a new program as of today, then maybe . . .” She hurries out.

Jerome begins, “I don’t understand how any of this can be, but—”

“Babineau will be able to tell us,” Hodges says. “If he’s still alive.”

“Yes, but wait a minute. Barb talked about hearing a voice, telling her all sorts of awful things. I didn’t hear any voice, and I sure don’t feel like offing myself.”

“Maybe you’re immune.”

“I’m not. That screen got me, Bill, I mean I was gone. I heard words in the little tune, and I think there were words in the blue flashes, too. Like subliminal messages. But . . . no voice.”

There could be all sorts of reasons for that, Hodges thinks, and just because Jerome didn’t hear the suicide voice, it doesn’t mean that most of the kids who got those free games won’t.

“Let’s say this repeater gadget was only turned on during the last fourteen hours,” Hodges says. “We know it can’t have been earlier than when I tried out Dinah’s game, or I would have seen the number-fish and the blue flashes. So here’s a question: can those demo screens be amped up even if the gadgets are off?”

“No way,” Jerome says. “They have to be turned on. But once they are . . .”

“It’s active!” Holly shouts. “That fracking zeetheend site is active!”

Jerome rushes to her desk in the outer office. Hodges follows more slowly.

Holly turns up the volume on her computer, and music fills the offices of Finders Keepers. Not “By the Beautiful Sea” this time, but “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” As it spools out—forty thousand men and women every day, another forty thousand coming every day—Hodges sees a candlelit funeral parlor and a coffin buried in flowers. Above it, smiling young men and women come and go, moving side to side, crisscrossing, fading, reappearing. Some of them wave; some flash the peace sign. Below the coffin is a series of messages in letters that swell and contract like a slowly beating heart.

AN END TO PAIN

AN END TO FEAR

NO MORE ANGER

NO MORE DOUBT

NO MORE STRUGGLE

PEACE

PEACE

PEACE

Then a stuttering series of blue flashes. Embedded in them are words. Or call them what they really are, Hodges thinks. Drops of poison.

“Turn it off, Holly.” Hodges doesn’t like the way she’s looking at the screen—that wide-eyed stare, so much like Jerome’s a few minutes ago.

She moves too slowly to suit Jerome. He reaches over her shoulder and crashes her computer.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she says reproachfully. “I could lose data.”

“That’s exactly what the fucking website is for,” Jerome says. “To make you lose data. To make you lose your shit. I could read the last one, Bill. In the blue flash. It said do it now.”

Holly nods. “There was another one that said tell your friends.”

“Does the Zappit direct them to that . . . that thing?” Hodges asks.

“It doesn’t have to,” Jerome says. “Because the ones who find it—and plenty will, including kids who never got a free ­Zappit—will spread the word on Facebook and all the rest.”

“He wanted a suicide epidemic,” Holly says. “He set it in motion somehow, then killed himself.”

“Probably to get there ahead of them,” Jerome says. “So he can meet them at the door.”

Hodges says, “Am I supposed to believe a rock song and a picture of a funeral is going to get kids to kill themselves? The Zappits, I can accept that. I’ve seen how they work. But this?”

Holly and Jerome exchange a glance, one that Hodges can read easily: How do we explain this to him? How do you explain a robin to someone who’s never seen a bird? The glance alone is almost enough to convince him.

“Teenagers are vulnerable to stuff like this,” Holly says. “Not all of them, no, but plenty. I would have been when I was seventeen.”

“And it’s catching,” Jerome says. “Once it starts . . . if it starts . . .” He finishes with a shrug.

“We need to find that repeater gadget and turn it off,” Hodges says. “Limit the damage.”

“Maybe it’s at Babineau’s house,” Holly says. “Call Pete. Find out if there’s any computer stuff there. If there is, make him pull all the plugs.”

“If he’s with Izzy, he’ll let it go to voicemail,” Hodges says, but he makes the call and Pete picks up on the first ring. He tells Hodges that Izzy has gone back to the station with the SKIDs to await the first forensics reports. Library Al Brooks is already gone, taken into custody by the first responding cops, who will get partial credit for the bust.

Pete sounds tired.

“We had a blow-up. Me and Izzy. Big one. I tried to tell her what you told me when we started working together—how the case is the boss, and you go where it leads you. No ducking, no handing it off, just pick it up and follow the red thread all the way home. She stood there listening with her arms folded, nodding her head every now and then. I actually thought I was getting through to her. Then you know what she asked me? If I knew the last time there was a woman in the top echelon of the city police. I said I didn’t, and she said that was because the answer was never. She said the first one was going to be her. Man, I thought I knew her.” Pete utters what may be the most humorless laugh Hodges has ever heard. “I thought she was police.”

Hodges will commiserate later, if he gets a chance. Right now there’s no time. He asks about the computer gear.

“We found nothing except an iPad with a dead battery,” Pete says. “Everly, the housekeeper, says he had a laptop in his study, almost brand new, but it’s gone.”

“Like Babineau,” Hodges says. “Maybe it’s with him.”

“Maybe. Remember, if I can help, Kermit—”

“I’ll call, believe me.”

Right now he’ll take all the help he can get.