Flashback

1.17 Denver—Saturday, Sept. 25

“Where are they?”

Nick was in the weapons-check airlock and Gunny G. was the only one behind the counter.

“Your son’s gone, Mr. B. And your father-in-law has had some sort of stroke or heart attack,” said the ex-Marine.

“Gone?” shouted Nick. “What do you mean Val’s gone? Where to?”

“We don’t know, Mr. B. He went up and out the skylight and down a rope. I’ll show you.”

“Is Leonard—my father-in-law—alive?”

“Yeah. I brought him to Dr. Tak.”

“Let me in, Gunny. Buzz the door open.”

“I can’t, Mr. B. Not ’til you surrender the two guns you checked out this morning. You know the rules.”

“I know the rules,” said Nick. He came back to the counter and slipped a $50 old-bucks bill across. He was nearing the last of his “advance” from Nakamura.

Gunny G. buzzed the heavy door open.

Dr. Tak’s real name was Sudaret Jatisripitak but everyone in the mall called him Dr. Tak. He’d fled from Thailand during their last “Thai Rak Thai—Thais Love Thais” revolution that had killed a fifth of the nation’s population and found that he could make a decent living, without ever being medically certified in the United States, simply by giving black-market medical care to the few thousand residents of the Cherry Creek Mall Condominiums. Accordingly, Dr. Tak’s cubie was one of the largest in the mall, half of the upstairs part of the former Macy’s department store, and Nick found Leonard asleep in one of the ER cubicles near the entrance to Dr. Tak’s lair.

Nick’s heart leaped in terror when he saw the IV drip and other tubes going into his father-in-law. No, he wouldn’t be forgetting NCAR any time soon.

Tak, a small man in his seventies but still with short jet-black hair, came into the cubicle, shook hands with Nick, and said, “He will live. Mr. Gunny G. found your father-in-law unconscious in your cubie and I directed he be brought here. I’ve done various diagnostic tests. Professor Fox regained consciousness briefly but he is currently sleeping.”

“What’s wrong with him?” asked Nick. Leonard looked much older to him than the old professor had five years earlier when he’d dropped Val off in L.A. in his care.

“I believe it was an attack of angina brought on by aortic stenosis,” said the old Thai doctor. “The syncopic episode was a result of the pain and lack of oxygen to the heart.”

“What does ‘syncopic episode’ mean, Doc?”

“Fainting. His loss of consciousness.”

“I think I know what angina is, but what’s the… aortic stenosis?”

“Correct, Mr. Bottom. Aortic stenosis is an abnormal narrowing of the aortic valve. At certain times—say, times of great exertion or tension—this narrowing can shut off blood from the left ventricle of the heart. His symptoms were the sudden onset of angina and the fainting.”

“Is it fixable?” Nick asked softly, staring at the sleeping old man’s face. Dara had loved her father. “Will he survive it?”

“Two quite different questions,” said Dr. Tak with a smile. “About four percent of the time, the initial symptom of aortic stenosis is sudden death. Your father-in-law was lucky that his symptoms were limited to angina and loss of consciousness. From my initial tests—and I have good diagnostic equipment here, Mr. Bottom—my first guess is that this was a form of the heart problem called senile calcific aortic stenosis…”

“Senile!” said Nick, shocked.

“Used only in the sense that it occurs naturally in people over sixty-five years of age,” said Dr. Tak. “As one ages, protein collagen of the valve leaflets is destroyed and calcium is deposited on the leaflets. Turbulence then increases, causing thickening and stenosis of the valve, even while mobility is reduced by calcification. Why this progresses to the point of causing aortic stenosis in some patients but not in others is not known. It has in Professor Fox’s case.”

“What about fixing it?” said Nick.

Dr. Tak turned away from his patient and spoke very softly. “Once the symptoms of shortage of breath, angina, or fainting occur, there’s little that can be done for a patient of Dr. Fox’s age short of the surgical procedure called aortic valve replacement.”

“Is that expensive?” asked Nick. “Can he get it on government coverage?”

Dr. Tak smiled grimly. “I am not a surgeon. Since the health care meltdown in your country, Mr. Bottom, the waiting time for the National Health Service Initiative–covered aortic valve replacement is a little over two years. Bioprosthetic valves taken from horses or cows are used in the procedure and that harvesting itself takes a long time and must be prioritized for patients. Also, all surgical recipients of mechanical prosthetic valves require immune-system drugs, including lifelong anticoagulation treatment with blood thinners such as warfarin—also known as Coumadin—to prevent clot formation on the valve surfaces. This is a very expensive drug and not covered under Medicare Two.”

“And, don’t tell me, let me guess,” grated Nick through his teeth, “most people suffering this… aortic stenosis… don’t live long enough to get to the government-subsidized surgery. And if they do, they can’t afford the blood thinner they’ll need.”

“That is correct,” said Dr. Tak. “Years ago, when I was a young physician in Bangkok, we all expected breakthroughs in genetic research to produce cloned human heart valves which would make such valve transplants not require immune-system and anticoagulant medications—since even the rare transplant of valves from human cadavers in this procedure had avoided the autoimmune problems—but, of course, with the crash of the great pharmaceutical companies in North America after your so-called health care reform, and in the absence of government-funded research in America and the post–EU countries, those hopes have disappeared.”

“So there’s nothing you can do for Leonard, Dr. Tak? Nothing we can do for him? Nothing I can do?”

“I will give him painkillers for when the angina returns,” said the old Thai. “And he must avoid all strenuous exercise. And, of course, any great excitement or tension.”

Nick couldn’t keep himself from laughing at that. When Dr. Tak frowned at him as only a doctor can frown, Nick said, “Leonard just escaped from Los Angeles and got my son out of that war zone, Doc. I don’t know how he did it, but I’ll be grateful to him for the rest of my life for saving my son. If I could give him my entire heart now in a transplant, I’d do it.”

“I accept,” came Professor Emeritus George Leonard Fox’s reedy voice from behind them. “Dr. Tak, please prep my son-in-law for an immediate heart transplant to me. And while you’re at it, take his kidneys and prostate. Mine keep me awake all night.”

Nick and the doctor turned, but only Nick blushed. He went to one knee by the bed. “How long have you been awake, Leonard?”

“Long enough to hear all the bad news,” said the old man. “Did I miss any good news about this condition?”

“Well,” said Nick, “four percent of those who have it show a first symptom of sudden death. You didn’t.”

Leonard smiled. “I’ve always enjoyed being in the bland majority. Actually, I feel sort of good for a doomed old fart who’s just had a near-death experience. Mellow. Did you give me something in this IV, Dr. Tak?”

“A mild tranquilizer.”

“Please give me a few hundred of those pills in a doggie bag when I leave,” said Leonard. He squeezed Nick’s hand. “And we will be leaving soon, won’t we?”

“I think we have to,” said Nick.

“Did Val return?” asked Leonard and his grip intensified.

Nick shook his head. “I have trouble believing he got out of the building.”

As if just remembering something, Leonard whispered, “The phone,” and released Nick’s hand, beckoning him to lean closer.

Nick put his ear almost to the old man’s mouth.

“Dara’s phone, Nick. It’s in your cubie. It’s double-password-protected. The first password is ‘dream’—d… r… e… a… m. The second-level password is ‘Kildare,’ the name of her pet parakeet. I just figured out that second-level password. ‘Kildare.’ That opens text files from the months before she died, Nick. The text I understand. It’s important. Very important. More important than finding Val. You need to go read it… see the videos. Her diary… or notes she made for you, I think… it changes everything.”

Nick blinked in response. More important than finding Val? What could be more important than that to Val’s grandfather? Or to Nick?

“Go now,” whispered Leonard. “Go look at the phone now.” More loudly, he said, “Dr. Tak will help me get dressed and ready to travel, won’t you, sir?”

Tak frowned again. “You should not travel for some time, Professor Fox. You need to rest. Days of rest.”

“Yes, yes,” said Leonard. “But you’ll help me get dressed, won’t you? While Nick goes to tend to some things? Not being part of the Really Surprised Four Percent, I need to get on with what’s left of my life.”

Dr. Tak continued frowning but nodded.

“I’ll be back for you in a few minutes, Leonard,” said Nick. He took Dr. Tak aside and squeezed all the remaining big bills he had from the Nakamura old-bucks advance into the old Thai doctor’s gnarled hand. It left him with about thirty bucks in small bills with none left on his NICC card, but that didn’t matter.

“This is too much money,” said Dr. Tak.

Nick shook his head. “You’ve helped me before when I couldn’t pay enough. And you can put it toward whatever pills Leonard needs for the immediate future. Anyway, if I keep this cash, I’ll just blow it on wine, women, and song.” He again squeezed the old medic’s hands shut around the little wad of bills.

“Thank you, Dr. Tak.”

Gunny G. was waiting in the hall and eager to show Nick Val’s escape route. Since it appeared to be on the way to his cubie, more or less, Nick followed along as the stocky ex-marine sprinted up the unmoving escalator like a boot at Parris Island. Nick followed more stiffly, favoring his tightly taped ribs.

“My kid did that?” said Nick as he stood on the mezzanine and looked out at the cable—beyond his own reach or jumping ability, he was sure—and then up at the shattered skylight glass forty feet above.

“He did,” said Gunny G., not hiding his own admiration. “With about twenty pounds of climbing rope, pitons, and carabiners hitched over his shoulder. When I showed him and the old man into the place earlier, I sorta thought that the boy was a bit of a runt for the sixteen-year-old described on the DHS all-points-bulletin.”

Nick was going to let that pass but heard himself saying, “Not a bad jump and climb for a runt.”

Gunny G. keyed in the access code and they went up the stairs to the roof. Once at the skylight, Nick paused for a second to look down through the missing glass pane at the long drop to the glass-shard-littered soil of the dirt-filled fountain far below. Then he followed spatters of blood to the southwest corner of the roof.

“I pulled the rope up and coiled it,” said Gunny, “but left it anchored here.”

Nick was disturbed by the amount of blood. It was obvious that his son had slashed himself pretty badly during the climb.

Gunny was pointing down the south wall of the parking garage. “The video cam down there caught just a blur when your son shinnied down past it, then picked him up when he walked over to the bridge there.”

“What did he do there?”

The security man shrugged. “My guess is that he had a weapon hidden there, but he was wearing a jacket so it was hard to say for sure. Your boy stayed over there on the other side of the bridge for a while and then walked off—limped off, really—to the west. I was busy getting your father-in-law to Dr. Tak, but when I had time later I went out and checked the bridge and saw where the kid had bled quite a bit.”

“Bad?” said Nick. He heard the concerned edge in his own voice. A little late to play the concerned daddy, isn’t it, asshole? demanded a more honest voice in his head.

“It’ll probably need some stitches and tending,” said Gunny. “But he’s not going to bleed out or anything. I’ve had Lennie and Dorrie watch the external cams extra close this afternoon, but there’s been no sign of Val watching from across the street or coming back to the bridge.”

“Okay,” said Nick. “Thanks.” He headed back to the stairway, trying not to stare at the blood trail. It was true that he’d seen much worse.

Suddenly there flowed in the unbidden memory of his youngest attacker, wounded and begging for his life in the predawn dimness of the Huntington Botanical Gardens the previous Monday. That young man had been three or four years older than Val, at least, and had almost certainly spent his night with his older pals shooting at unarmed civilians as if they were deer in the woods—it was just his bad luck that Nick hadn’t been unarmed—but who was going to be the merciless older man aiming the muzzle of his Glock at Val’s forehead and shielding his face from spatter if this crap kept up?

Knock it off, shithead. It doesn’t help.

“Whaddya wanta do with the climbing rope, Mr. B.?” called Gunny from the corner of the roof.

“I’ll get it later,” lied Nick.

His cubie was a total mess. Not only had it been tossed, clothes strewn everywhere, the contents of his dresser drawers dumped out and then the drawers themselves thrown around, but there was the usual paramedic mess of discarded plastic and paper wrappings from where Dr. Tak had done his initial work on Leonard.

Nick ignored the mess. All he could focus on was the scatter of colored dossiers.

Did Val read the grand jury stuff?

Of course he had.

Nick brushed the pile of folders off his desk with a furious sweep of his forearm. Would Val believe that I tried to kill his mother?

Of course he would. Nick was, after all, the same man who’d dumped his son with an elderly grandfather in Los Angeles and never come to visit him… who never found enough money to fly the son home to Denver for a visit… who only phoned a few times a year and who totally forgot that son’s sixteenth birthday. Why wouldn’t a so-called father like that conspire to kill a wife who’d been unfaithful to him?

Nick sat on the chair with his elbows on his knees, his hands gripping the sweaty sides of his head, and concentrated on trying to breathe.

For 4 percent of people with this problem, the first noticeable symptom is sudden death.

Yeah, and ain’t that a great practical joke on the 4 percent? Nick’s father had been careless to get himself killed when Nick was pretty young, but at least he’d paid attention to Nick when he was still alive and had the time. With no shade of melodrama whatsoever, Nick realized that he would never be able to make things up to Val, no matter how much time the two might have in the rest of their lives.

Almost certainly less than eight hours for me, thought Nick.

This flood of certainty washed over Nick again as a mere fact, no melodrama. If he couldn’t escape with Val and Leonard, if he couldn’t live in real life that lovely dream he’d had that morning just before waking, he was certain that the meeting with Mr. Nakamura would not end well for a certain ex-cop named Nick Bottom. It was as if he could already smell the decomposing stench of his own death…

“Shit,” said Nick. Slamming his cubie door shut, he stripped naked, throwing everything he’d been wearing, down to his boxer shorts, into the far corner of the room. Then he went into the bathroom and showered fast but hard, scrubbing until his skin almost bled. Even then, Nick could still detect the death stench of Denver Municipal Landfill Number Nine.

The remembered NCAR smell was more subtle—a faint hint of chlorine and other chemicals, as when lying near a well-tended swimming pool—but just as terrifying.

Nick dressed quickly and carelessly—clean underwear, clean socks, a blue-plaid flannel shirt washed so many times that it was almost obscenely soft, clean chinos that weren’t as tight on him as they’d been two weeks earlier. He clipped the holster and Glock on his belt on the left side and velcroed the little holster with its tiny .32 on his right ankle.

Then he looked for Dara’s phone. It wasn’t there on the desk or bed.

Someone’s stolen it. The neighbors or some other residents came in and took it while Gunny G. and Dr. Tak were parading back and forth, the place unlocked and unwatched. Or maybe Val had taken it with him or come back to get it…

Nick forced himself to calm down. He’d have to borrow some of Dr. Tak’s tranquilizers from Leonard’s doggie bag if he kept flirting with hysteria this way.

Getting down on his hands and knees, Nick looked under the bed and under the desk, pawing through the mess. He found the old phone between the faux wood and the wall baseboard where someone had knocked it off the back of his desk.

Please God, tell me it’s not broken.

As usual, God did not deign to tell Nick Bottom anything.

The phone’s scratched screen lit up, but only to inform him that the long-term battery was too weak to run the old phone.

Nick again looked through all the junk removed from his room’s various drawers until he found the charger-adapter for his own phone. Nick and Dara had bought their phones at the same time; the charger fit both.

The files had closed and reencrypted at the power-down so Nick had to reenter the dream password.

Eight-to-five odds that the password won’t work for me.

But it did.

Nick went to the massive video files, hoping to see Dara. Even though he’d visited her for hours every night and day of his life for the past five and a half years—this past week excepted—his heart pounded wildly at the thought of seeing new video of her.

She wasn’t there.

But Danny Oz was. And Delroy Nigger Brown. And Derek Dean. And Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev. And two dozen other talking heads, all familiar to Nick Bottom through the homicide investigation of Keigo Nakamura’s messy murder.

The missing last hours of Keigo’s documentary.

Nick didn’t even ask himself—yet—how Dara could have gotten a copy. Unless she was the murderer. He shut that problem out for now and flicked through the video-recorded interviews, too impatient to listen to them in their entirety, but jumping from interview subject to interview subject.

It was there. Something incredible was there.

Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev talking about the laboratories in Nara in Japan where flashback had really been invented and the larger, newer laboratories outside Wuhan and Shantou and Nanjing in China that would be producing the Flashback-two. Noukhaev smiling and talking about distribution networks flowing from Japan and reaching everywhere—just as they had for fifteen years now.

Nick jumped from person to person, hearing Keigo’s distant voice asking the questions—only the answers were to be in his documentary—and while most of the questions and answers were like the billionaire’s son’s earlier recorded footage, there were new parts—hints—clues—which began to come together for Nick, even hearing only fragments and unrelated snippets.

This footage alone might help him understand what Keigo Nakamura had been doing with his goddamned documentary—if not who murdered him for it—before Nick’s meeting with Nakamura later this afternoon or evening.

Of course, Nick realized, if he was still here when it came time for that meeting, he probably would have lost everything anyway. The trick was not to solve Keigo Nakamura’s murder after six years of both it and Nick being lost in the cold file, the idea was to get his son and father-in-law and to get away.

Even if, unlike in his dream that morning, there was no place to get away to. The Republic of Texas didn’t take in wanted felons—and he would be such by the time he got to any border—much less wanted felons and their sons and fathers-in-law.

Nick closed out the video and used the second password—Kildare—to open the text files.

The first ones, made about two months before Keigo’s murder, made Nick stop breathing.

It was not a long or thick text file, despite the fact that it covered the last seven months of his wife’s life. She’d made only a few notes for him (or for herself?) in the weeks before and after Keigo’s death, and then almost none through the winter months until just the days before her own death.

Nick didn’t skip through these files as he had through the videos. He read them straight through…

… participation of Homeland Security and the FBI, but Mannie Ortega is keeping it within his department…

… Harvey doesn’t want to lose the time with his family, but he sees it as a once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity…

… if I could only tell Nick, but I’ve sworn to both my boss and my boss’s boss, in writing, that this will stay quiet until…

… speculating on her motives won’t help, Harvey keeps saying, but those motives still seem important to me since we’re all taking such risks with…

… the DA thinks another week before we bring the witness home, or rather the Feebies or Homeland Security or the CIA does, but Harvey’s afraid that if they wait too long, even with all the video and audio recordings we have, it might be…

… Love? A sense of betrayal? How can someone who loves someone—two someones—so very much do such a thing to them? Ortega and Harvey aren’t interested, but the question consumes me. If I only could talk to Nick about…

… to love two men so much in such different ways is possible, but to be pulled between them the way she’s been is terrible…

… the murders would seem to me to change everything, but Ortega insists, and I think Harvey agrees, that they change nothing. It hurts me inside to watch Nick working so hard, not knowing what Harvey and I have been up to right under his nose…

… sometimes I just want to leave Nick a note—real name Kumiko Catherine Catton —and see what happens. But I can’t…

… just reading her transcripts makes me miss and love my own father more, as weird as he is. I have to give him a call tonight, wish him Happy New Year at least…

… what Ortega says just isn’t acceptable to me. Harvey’s going to go along with it. He tells me that all this sneaking around has almost cost him his marriage already and that his kids don’t recognize him when he come home, but down deep I think he agrees with me that we can’t end it like this. Not like this. I’m supposed to sneak away to spend time with Harvey tomorrow at the Denver motel where we keep the stuff and he insists it’s the last time for us there, but I won’t accept that. I’ve told him I won’t. I told him that I’d go to Nick with the whole sad, sick story unless we found a way to carry on…

Nick wiped tears from his eyes and read it through. To the last fragmented, incomplete entry, made by a woman who didn’t know she was going to die the next day.

How many of us do? wondered Nick. Know we’re going to die the next day.

Or this evening?

When his phone rang, Nick almost jumped out of his skin. He’d been watching the videos and reading Dara’s notes for forty-five minutes. Poor Leonard must think that he’d been forgotten down there at Dr. Tak’s.

“Nick Bottom,” he answered but there was no one there and the caller ID was blocked in that way that prepaid phones worked.

Well, realized Nick, setting his phone back in his jacket pocket, Leonard had been forgotten. This data on Dara’s old phone changed everything, all right. Nick felt the old gears begin to work the way they’d used to for him, in Major Crimes Unit and before… the pieces coming together, the full picture of the puzzle being assembled.

It was all there. He wiped away more tears and cursed himself for a blind fool.

It had always been there. All of it. Dara had tried to tell him without telling him. And he’d been too full of his own ambition and self-centered game of playing cop twenty-four hours a day to really listen to her, to really look at her.

The first thing he had to do, even before fetching Leonard, was to e-mail the full contents of Dara’s text notes and the video to all the people he trusted in this world.

After two minutes of thinking in the silence, he came up with five names. Then, after more hard thinking, two more, including CHP Chief Dale Ambrose. K.T. was on the list… but it also had to go to people with better connections, people beyond the reach of those who’d reached Nakamura and Harvey Cohen and Dara Fox Bottom and probably Delroy Nigger Brown by now.

The eighth name, incredibly, was that of West Coast Advisor Daichi Omura.

Do you let the murderer know, however indirectly, that you know he or she is the murderer? Nick had played that game before, for various reasons, and it had worked.

Sometimes.

But he wasn’t sure here if he’d be getting the word to…

His phone rang and vibrated again and Nick jumped again.

“Nick Bottom.”

There was a silence on the line but the connection was there. Again, no caller ID.

“Hello?”

“Come pick me up,” came a voice that it took Nick’s buzzing mind ten seconds to identify as his son’s.

“Val?”

“Come pick me up, as soon as you can.”

“Val, where are you? Are you all right? Val, your grandfather… Leonard’s had a sort of heart attack. He’s going to make it for now, but he needs to be taken care of. Do you need medical attention? Val?”

“Come pick me up.” There was something more than stress or pain in his son’s strangely aged and altered voice. Rage? Something beyond rage?

“I will,” said Nick. “Where are you?”

“You know Washington Park?”

“Sure, it’s only a few minutes from here.”

“Drive on Marion Parkway on the west side of the lake… the big lake, Smith Lake, I think it’s called… past the tent and shack village there.”

“All right,” said Nick. “Where will you be…”

“What will you be driving?”

“A rusty-looking G.M. gelding with bullet holes in it.”

“Can you be here in fifteen minutes?”

“Are you hurt badly, Val? Or in trouble with someone there? Just say ‘yeah’ if you can’t speak freely.”

“How soon can you be here?”

Nick took a breath. His phone and cubie Internet hookups might be tapped. Probably were. He’d use Gunny G.’s fancy encrypted computer set up in the security shack to e-mail the video and text diaries out to his eight people. That might take a few minutes to do right. Then he’d have to get Leonard into the car with whatever clothes, IV tubes, or other medical things he needed.

He could go to the Six Flags Over the Jews parking lot to get the getaway car before picking up Val, so they could head straight for I-70 and out of town, but it might be better to pick the boy up sooner rather than later. Val sounded weird.

“Give me an hour, Val. I’ll look on the west side of Smith Lake in Washington Park and we’ll…”

The line went dead. Val had broken the connection.