Falling Awake

  Loners were dangerous, Dave thought. They went their own way and played by their own rules. Maybe this one had committed murder. Or maybe Ellis Cutler was pursuing some secret agenda on behalf of the mysterious Jack Lawson. Either way, Cutler was a for-real, genuine lead, the first one he’d been able to find. He had a name and the number of the rental car. This evening after the crowd of mourners left his parents’ house, he would power up his computer and see what he could do with the information he possessed.

  He was good with computers, just as Katherine had been good with them. It was one of the many talents they had had in common.

  He put the car in gear and drove away from the cemetery without looking back at Katherine’s grave. He knew he would not be able to return here to say farewell properly until he found the person who had ended his twin’s life.

  He had to get some justice for Katherine, he mused, not for her sake but for his own. They had shared that special closeness that only twins can know. She would be a part of him for the rest of his life. He would not be able to live with her memory if he failed to avenge her.

  The shrinks had a word for it. Closure.

  the following morning Ellis flashed his Mapstone Investigations ID at the manager of the apartment house on the outskirts of Raleigh where Katherine had lived and asked to borrow the key.

  “Place hasn’t been cleaned yet,” the manager warned.

  “No problem,” Ellis said.

  He let himself into the apartment, closed the door and took a moment to steep himself in the gloomy shadows. He was intensely conscious, as he always was on such occasions, of the respect owed to the memory of the dead.

  After a moment, he walked slowly through the apartment, examining every detail closely, storing up the images to be examined later in his dreams.

  The blood that had soaked the beige carpet had dried to a terrible, all-too-familiar shade of muddy brown. The killer had toppled the bookcase, emptied drawers and yanked pictures off the walls, no doubt in an attempt to create the impression of a wild, frantic burglary.

  When he finished the unpleasant tour he returned to the living room and stood for a while near the patch of dried blood.

  That was when he noticed the one object that did not look as if it belonged in the apartment. The crime scene tape had come down. The police had obviously not considered the item to be evidence. He picked it up and tucked it under his arm.

  At the door he paused one last time, allowing the dark, haunting atmosphere to flow over and around him.

  I’ll find him, Katherine, he vowed.

  2

  BELVEDERE CENTER FOR SLEEP RESEARCH, NEAR LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  i had this really weird dream last night,” Ken Payne said from the doorway of Isabel Wright’s tiny office.

  “Sorry, Ken, I don’t have time to talk about your dream right now.” Isabel picked up a stack of computer printouts that was only a little higher than Mount Rushmore. She started toward her desk. “I’ve got an appointment with the new director in a few minutes.”

  “This will only take a minute.” Ken lowered his voice and checked the hallway furtively. “In the dream I’m driving a car toward an intersection and I know I have to brake or there will be a crash but I can’t take my foot off the accelerator.”

  “Ken, please . . .” The toe of her shoe struck the heap of dream logs she had been forced to pile on the floor because every other surface in the cramped room was covered with books, journals and notebooks.

  She staggered under the impact. The stack of printouts in her arms wobbled ominously, affecting her balance. She felt herself start to topple to the side.

  “Oh, damn.”

  “Here, let me take those.” Ken moved out of the doorway and deftly plucked the printouts from her hands.

  “Thank you.” Relieved of her burden, she grabbed the back of her desk chair and managed to steady herself.

  Sphinx, Martin Belvedere’s large, ill-tempered tortoiseshell cat, glared from behind the steel grid door of his carrying cage. Isabel knew that excessive human commotion irritated him. Actually, there were a lot of things that irritated Sphinx. He was not in a good mood in the first place because life had changed drastically for him a few days earlier, when Martin Belvedere had dropped dead from a heart attack. Now he was fuming because she had stuffed him into the carrier.

  Ken peered around the stack of reports, searching the cluttered office. “Where do you want me to put them?”

  She pushed several annoying tendrils of hair out of her eyes, mentally cursing Mr. Nicholas, her new hairstylist.

  Mr. Nicholas was only the latest in a long series of stylists who had promised her the sun, moon and stars. More to the point, he had practically guaranteed that the new cut he had created for her, a style that curled just above her shoulders and framed her face with airy wisps of hair in various lengths, would give her instant sex appeal. The sucker had lied through his perfect white teeth. Her social life had not taken a great leap forward since the last trip to the salon. It had, in fact, slid backward a few notches.

  But deep down she knew that, even as she mentally heaped recrimination upon his handsome head, she could not really blame Mr. Nicholas. She had no one to blame for her wretched social life but herself.

  For as long as she could remember, the only thing men wanted to do to her or with her was tell her their dreams.

  Not that she was interested in dating Ken Payne, she thought. He was a cheerful, good-natured sort, always ready with a smile and a funny story; the kind of friend you could call when you needed someone to help you move. He had no doubt been the class clown back in elementary school. But he was in love with a woman named Susan. Isabel knew that the only thing stopping him from asking his girlfriend to marry him was his recurring dream.

  She motioned toward the corner of her desk. “You can set the printouts there.”

  “You sure? What about those old dream logs?”

  “Just put the printouts on top of them, please.”

  “Okay.” Ken cautiously set the stack down. He took a step back, eyeing the unstable-looking result with a dubious expression. “What the hell happened in here, anyway? Place looks like a cyclone hit it. Your office is always a little chaotic but this clutter is a lot worse than usual.”

  “The new Dr. Belvedere ordered all of his father’s papers cleared out of the executive office this morning when he took charge. The janitors were told to take everything to the trash bin out back. I barely managed to catch them in time to rescue this stuff. Five minutes later and I would have had to dig it all out of the garbage.”

  Ken grimaced and looked at Sphinx. “So, you not only wind up saving the old man’s cat from the pound, you also salvaged thirty or forty years’ worth of Belvedere’s crazy private research. You’re too soft-hearted, Isabel.”

  Sphinx flattened his ears. Isabel stiffened and pushed her new, black-framed glasses up on her nose. In addition to spending a fortune on hairstylists in the past few months, she had also invested heavily in expensive, fashionable optical wear in an attempt to find a look.

  The exotic, elegantly sculpted frames had been designed in Italy. The salesperson in the optical shop had assured her that they made a statement and brought out the green-gold color of her eyes but she had serious doubts. She had a nasty feeling that another trip to the optician’s shop was on the horizon.

  That was what came of finally obtaining a professional-level position with an excellent salary and benefits, she thought. The exhilaration of having a stable income at last had enabled her to splurge on a variety of long-delayed indulgences. Her former career as an operator on the Psychic Dreamer Hotline had not stretched to high-end salons and Italian spectacles.

  The new clothes and fashion accessories were the least of her major purchases in the past year. The really big investment had been the furniture, all of which had come from Europe and all of which was currently still in the original packing crates and sitting in a rented storage locker beca
use she had not yet found the Dream House.

  She frowned at Ken. “Just because no one would publish Dr. B.’s research does not mean that his theories were crazy. Oh, I know what the staff said about him behind his back but you and the others should keep in mind that Dr. B. was your employer and he paid all of us very generous salaries.”

  Ken winced. “You’re right. I suppose it would be more polite to call his theories ‘out of the mainstream.’ Anyhow, like I was saying, in my dream I’m in my car, heading toward the intersection. I can see another car, a red one, entering the intersection from the street on the left. I know that if I don’t stop, I’m going to smash right into the other vehicle. I can see people inside the other car. A woman and a kid. I want to yell at them to stop but I can’t—”

  “But you know they can’t hear you and you can’t get your foot off the accelerator and there will be a terrible disaster if you don’t find a way to stop the car,” Isabel concluded, opening a drawer to remove her new designer shoulder bag. “We’ve been over this a dozen times, Ken. You know what’s going on as well as I do.”

  Ken exhaled heavily and seemed to slump in on himself. The happy-go-lucky facade disintegrated. He rubbed his face in a weary gesture.

  “The heart thing?” he said.

  “Yes.” She straightened and met his eyes. Her own heart sank when she saw the veiled fear that lurked in his gaze. “The heart thing.”

  “Yeah, sure.” He tried for a wry smile. “I knew that. Hey, I’m an expert on sleep, right? Dr. Kenneth Payne, neuropsychologist and fellow here at the Belvedere Center for Sleep Research. I know an anxiety dream when I see one.”

  She walked toward him and came to a halt a step away. “I can only give you the same advice today that I gave you the first time you and I talked about the car dreams. Make the appointment with the doctor, Ken.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “You’re a doctor, yourself. What would you tell one of your patients if he was in your shoes?”

  “My doctorate is in psychology, not medicine.”

  “All the more reason you should realize that you can’t postpone this any longer. Make the appointment with the cardiologist. Give him your family medical history. Tell him that your father and your grandfather both dropped dead from heart attacks in their late forties. Get a thorough physical workup.”

  “What if it turns out I’ve got the same genetic heart defect that killed my dad and granddad?”

  “They died decades ago. You’re living in a different time and place. There are new therapies and treatments available for all kinds of heart problems these days. You know that as well as I do.”

  “And if it can’t be fixed?”

  She touched his shoulder. “The dreams aren’t going to stop until you know whether or not you inherited the genetic problem. That little kid you see in the car in the intersection? The one whose face you can’t quite make out? That’s the son you may or may not have someday; the one you’re afraid to have because you think you might pass along whatever it is that is killing the men in your family.”

  His face tightened. “You’re right. I know it. I’ve got to act. Susan is starting to get restless. I can feel it. Last night she asked me if there was something I wasn’t telling her.”

  “There is something you aren’t telling her. You’re afraid to tell her because you think it might scare her off.”

  “What woman in her right mind would want to risk starting a family with a man who has a serious genetic defect?”

  “Make the appointment. Find out whether or not you’ve got the defect. And if it turns out you do have it, find out if there is anything that can be done to fix it.”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll make the call.”

  She went back to her desk, found the phone beneath a jumble of papers and picked up the receiver. “Make it now.”

  Ken looked at the phone with the expression of a man who has just been invited to pick up a deadly snake. Then he glanced at his watch. “I’m a little busy this morning. Maybe after my next meeting.”

  “Make the call now, Ken, or don’t ever darken my doorway to ask for an analysis of any of your dreams again.” She held the receiver out to him, striving to sound as forceful and determined as possible. “I won’t listen to another one if you don’t call the doctor this minute. I mean it.”

  He looked surprised by her tone but he must have sensed that she was serious. Slowly he took the phone from her with one hand. With his other hand, he removed a small notebook from the pocket of his white lab coat.

  She looked at the notebook. “The doctor’s phone number?”

  “Yeah.” His mouth twisted sheepishly. “I wrote it down, just like you told me last week.”

  Relief lightened her spirits. “That was a good first step. Congratulations. Now, make the call.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He punched the number out with deliberate, methodical movements of one finger.

  Satisfied that this time he was going to go through with the call to the doctor, Isabel went quickly toward the door. “I’ll check back with you after my meeting with the new Dr. Belvedere.”

  “That reminds me, did you hear the latest rumors making the rounds this morning?”

  She paused and looked back at him. Ken had finished punching out the number and was now sitting in her chair. He reached for the teapot on the table behind the desk. People did things like that when they came into her office, she reflected. They had no professional respect for the work she performed here at the center but they felt quite free to make themselves at home while they drank her expensive green tea and told her about the dream they’d had the previous night.

  “What rumors?” she asked.

  “Word is that Randy, the Boy Wonder, is convinced that he can turn the center into a hot acquisition target that will attract one of the big pharmaceutical companies.”

  She had heard enough about the new director to know that “Randy, the Boy Wonder” was the nickname the staff had bestowed upon Dr. Randolph G. Belvedere, the old man’s sole heir.

  “The gossip just started this morning,” Ken continued. Then he broke off abruptly. He put down the teapot. “Yes, this is Dr. Kenneth Payne,” he said very formally into the phone. His eyes locked with Isabel’s. “I want to make an appointment with Dr. Richardson.”

  Isabel flashed him an approving smile, gave him a thumbs-up and hurried off down the corridor.

  The interior of the Belvedere Center for Sleep Research was a maze of white hallways and stairwells that connected three floors of offices and labs. She had a lengthy hike ahead of her because the small Department of Dream Analysis where she worked was located on the third floor in a wing of the building. Dr. B.’s old office was on the same floor but in another wing.

  She glanced at her watch again and stifled a groan. She was going to be late. Not the best way to start things off with a new boss.

  She rounded the first corner, her lab coat flapping wildly in her wake, and nearly collided with the good-looking man emerging from a stairwell.

  “What’s the rush, Izzy?” Ian Jarrow asked, chuckling.

  “Late for a meeting with the new director.” She did not pause. “See you later.”

  “Hey, you did something to your hair, didn’t you?” His eyes crinkled very nicely when he smiled.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s cute.” He reached out as she went past, evidently intending to snag some of the wispy tendrils. “I like it.”

  “Thanks.” She dodged his hand and hurried away, out of reach.

  Aaargh. Cute. That did it. The style definitely had to go. Mr. Nicholas had promised to make her look sexy, not cute. Cute was for little girls and poodles.

  Well, at least Ian had actually noticed her new cut, she thought, trying for a positive spin. That was better than having him not notice any change at all. But it was too late to make any difference in their relationship. They had stopped dating a month ago, right after Ian took her out to dinner and gently explai
ned that he considered her a good friend, someone he could really talk to, almost a sister. He added that he hoped the fact that they would no longer be seeing each other privately wouldn’t affect their friendship.

  She could have written the script for him. All of her relationships ended in a similar, disturbingly mundane fashion. Men started out wanting to tell her their dreams, proceeded to ask her for advice and ended up regarding her as a good friend; the sister they never had.

  If one more man told her he thought of her as a sister, she would be sorely tempted to strangle him with his tie.

  The worst part was that now, at thirty-three, she was pretty sure she was on borrowed time. By forty, the line about thinking of her as a sister would probably metamorphose into you’re like an aunt to me.

  Just once it would be interesting to have a man look at her and see a warning sign: CAUTION, DANGEROUS CURVES AHEAD. And know that he would keep on coming, regardless, like the exciting, mysterious man she fantasized about in her dreams.

  Maybe she should try something a little more radical in the fashion line, she mused. Maybe it was time to purchase a pair of stiletto heels and a leather bustier. She had a sudden vision of herself striding the halls of the Belvedere Center for Sleep Research dressed as a dominatrix.

  Ahead in the hallway, the door of the ladies’ room opened. A tall, striking woman garbed in a hand-tailored lab coat stepped out.

  “Isabel.”

  “Hello, Dr. Netley.”

  Amelia Netley’s stellar résumé listed a number of glowing degrees and achievements in the field of sleep research. But it was her red hair, cool blue eyes and long, elegant legs that kept everyone buzzing. Isabel thought of her as a sort of modern-day Boadicea. Like the ancient queen of the Iceni who led the famous rebellion against the Romans in the British Isles, there was something regal and dedicated about her.