The Perception of Murder. Excerpt #1

Chapter 2. Tatiana Returns

"Do you come to this part of the city often?"
asks the strange dark man at your right
standing in the shadow of a great sycamore.
He lights a thin cigarette, exhaling its
pungent smoke in your face, his eyes
travel over your slim figure, your beautiful face,
his thin smile becomes a frozen sneer. His
finger glides smoothly across you cheek;

His touch is rough, like the coarse feel of gypsies;
his hand stinks of day old petrol and nicotine.
His hand drifts down your throat, his palm
flat and quivering, slides downward
until he is lying on the wet sidewalk,
gasping for breath, dark pools blooming
on his dirty white shirt.

The echoes of a soft thud, thud fades
in the night. A faint smell of cordite lingers
over the cracked sidewalk but is soon lost
as a late evening shower rolls over you
on its way down Ninth Avenue.

With the toe of your polished red shoe,
you push him on his back,
The red and yellow neon lights of Joe’s Bar
flicker in his empty eyes.
You feel the cold metal of the semi-automatic
back once more against your naked thigh,
the gun’s grip is briefly visible
as the slit in your long cotton dress ripples
in an evening breeze.
"Vot beez’ness iz dat uv urs?"
you ask, stepping over the body,
opening the door to Mickey’s Garden Room Bar,
and disappearing as usual into the
sour smelling room, the grumble of voices
lost to the tinny squeal of Mickey’s jazz quartet.

"Tanya," a deep southern voice whispers
into your damp hair, close to your right ear.

"Dat iz Tatiana, to you" you answer,
pulling his drink from the bar; warm whiskey
and stale soda. Perfect. You take a drink,
a trickle runs over your lips, drops form on your chin,
and plummet into the deep chasm of your cleavage.

"ver iz Derek?"

"Dead."

"Good." You take another drink. "So iz Viktor."

"Nice to have you back Tanya."

"Tatiana," you say softly, pressing your back against
his chest. His arms slide around your waist. He is
whispering again but the night is the night,
and the music is in the smoke, and his hand
is sliding over your automatic.

"You have returned," he continues, but he does not know,
and he will never know. You lean into his arms,
but he is just another man, another one to make
the cold go away.

The Perception of Murder. Excerpt #2

Chapter 5. Damien's Journey

There are times, Damien thought, when he would rather meet her in the morning and let her struggle through the day, not always aware of how she affects him, not ready to understand his other world, waiting for him in the cinder block basement behind an oil heater covered in dirt and sticky grease, in a janitor’s alcove commandeered last week when they arrived, in the silent hours of the night, tired and grumpy and disoriented. He stood in the recess of the bay window of their second story rental, on a tidy residential street, three blocks north of Santa Monica Boulevard, the clean sidewalk visible in irregular fragments behind a colonnade of Egyptian palms, old twisted sycamores, and bushes of yellow flowers for which he had no name.

Behind him, their opened suitcases lay scattered across the hardwood floor; through a crack in a far door, reflected in the window, he could see Tanya still dressed in her white slacks and a blue pullover, asleep on the wrought iron bed. Her well traveled shoes kicked carelessly by the door. Damien turned back to the window, drawn by the sound of regular clacks, as a young boy sped past on a homemade skateboard. She was waiting. He promised that he would go to her every night. He had tried to keep that promise, but there was always Tanya; beautiful warm Tanya, unsuspecting, trusting Tanya. But he promised Tatiana, deadly seductive Tatiana who might be angry with him. There was really no other decision. He pulled the door shut. The lock made a soft click.

The basement was cold. A faint hum filled the room. A soft blue light crept up the wall behind the oil burner. He hoped Tanya, his Tatiana, would stay asleep. This wasn’t being unfaithful exactly, he wondered if he had been lying for so long that he had forgotten what was true. The Tatiana waiting for him, waiting to come alive when he fastened the electrodes seemed, at that moment, truer and more continuously real than the one upstairs asleep on their bed. Damien stripped out of his slacks and shirt. Naked and cold and shivering he turned on the machine. The wire mesh of the chair etched into him with a cold inelastic pain. The electrodes, giving him the look of a bearded Medusa, drilled their tiny, thin needles into his neck and chest. His hand felt for the soft plastic switch. An intense dizziness. A sense of suffocation. An ice cold pain deep in his groin. Emptiness.

****

Night comes reluctantly to the city.
It’s darkness held back by incandescent street lamps,
The yellow glow from second story apartment windows,
the migraine inducing flash of a thousand neon signs,
pale blue florescent lamps stacked like porcupine quills
beneath the crumbling awnings of seedy shops,
and the stark brilliance of naked 200 watt bulbs,
their waves of rolling light
spelling No Cover, Triple X, and Girls, Girls,
up and down the long parabolic stretch of Ninth Street.
Old men in worn overcoats shuffled down the littered
sidewalk, peering into dark open doors guarded
by muscular young thugs with no thought of the future.
The smell of ozone was in the air,
a grimy orange taxi screeches to a stop in front of Ozzie’s,
delivering another generation of middle-aged men
with their young women with too little clothes and
too much rouge. Another evening,
down on the street, far away from
my one room apartment,
on the roof above Maxime’s,
just off Tucson Street,
around the corner from Ninth Avenue.

A cold October rain drummed against the greasy skylight,
adding a kind of tropical beat to the faint remains of soft jazz
drifting up from Ozzie’s Chicago Land bar.
Tatiana, dressed simply in chocolate nylons and a black bra,
the left strap dangling off her shoulder,
tapped out another Chesterfield and fell back
into the cot’s rumpled sheets; a match flared a bright orange,
followed by the smell of sulfur and burnt paper.
She drew a deep breath and exhaled a cloud of grey smoke.
I hate the smell of cigarette smoke; she knows it;
absently pulling the bra strap back over her shoulder,
she leans against the wall, her attention
momentarily gone to the kitchen window,
dirty and smeared with rivulets of rain.
We are alone and a thousand parsecs apart,
for awhile I listen to her soft steady breathing,
interrupted only by the air brakes on the Fifteenth Street bus,
splashing to a stop under the Alleghany bridge.

Old Levi jeans and a dirty t-shirt,
the only clothes I could find afterwards,
I sit cross-legged on a hard wooden stool
of polished yellow oak, under a blue tinged light,
I casually rub the dark bruise of her bite
on my right arm, studying her,
the smell of this evening’s Thai food
and my wet clothes linger in the empty apartment.
She remains curled on our surplus Army cot,
the rumbled white sheet now pulled up across
her legs, just to keep them warm, she leaves her smooth belly
and wonderfully pointed breasts purposefully uncovered.
She draws on her cigarette, for a moment, the glowing red tip
illuminates her hard, cruel face. She is once more buried in shadow.
I know she is watching me and I know she is waiting.
Just a few minutes ago, out of breath, I rolled off her ...
I could hear her steady, relaxed breathing,
always the same afterwards,
she never loses control.
But tonight there is something different.

"Where have you been?" she asked me.
Her pale face expressionless, her body still.
I tell her once more about Tanya.

"You will not keep me waiting again,"
she says without any emotion.

She leaned into me, her firm body
sticky with a cold perspiration,
pressed close against my chest,
"If you could know how and when
you were going to die," she whispered.
I felt her warm, damp breath curling over my neck,
"would you want to know?"

"No," I said.

"I’m glad," she said. There was a thin smile
on her lips.

Strange Days in the City of Seven Elevens

By
Earl Cox
©1999


Carl stood in the room’s gentle darkness. Time slowed. The ticking of his cheap Timex followed an exponential decay curve fading away as his attention moved almost physically into the gloom.  Dust motes floated down through a narrow shaft of yellow light streaming from a broken kitchen window. Something in the air, he thought. An aroma of fresh cinnamon rolls warmed by the heat of grandmother Chevulas’ cast iron oven flowed into the apartment from the tiny Estonian bakery situated, a block away, at the bottom of Jefferson Street. Here and there along the kitchen wall flickered tiny black imperfections in the plaster as insectivorous lizards prowled through the remains of abandoned spider webs, stalking hard-shelled water beetles as they scurried beneath improperly nailed ceiling cornices. That was Howard’s idea, Carl recalled. Howard loved lizards. And there was poor Howard, stretched out back there on the library rug with his face ripped apart, his tie undone and only his California-bred geckos to keep the cockroaches, house flies, and the dust mites from feeding on his naked hands. These were strange days, he thought, in the City of Seven-Elevens.

The gun’s grip felt cold and wet in his hand. Soft salty droplets of perspiration ran along his nose dripping into his slightly opened mouth while still other beads of sweat fell from his clenched fist, splattering in tiny black blobs on the hardwood planks. Everywhere he found only silence. Grey smoke moved toward him through the silent apartment, oozing around him like a battalion of thin, silent ghosts. Stay focused, Carl told himself, shaking off the damp touch of the darkness as it swept past him. Howard warned me, he thought. Reluctantly in his own fucked up way, but he finally warned me. That chilly San Francisco night when the fringe of a late season Alaskan storm slid down from Badaga Bay splattering the streets with a fine mist.

On the jammed cross town bus with his dead dog on his lap and the street lights blinking through the grimy windows while the air had the smell of burnt oil and an old woman with a toothless grin stood over him breathing on this scalp with a breath that smelled of garlic and peppermint, Howard Charles Gregory, recollected in a precise algebraic way the random events leading to the discovery. The bus rattled down Culvert Street, across the rusting railroad tracks that lead eastward along a deserted freight right of way to an abandoned granary. There were no stops in this long stretch of industrial warehouses where squat brick buildings bathed in tiny yellow lights lined both sides of the narrow two lane road. Howard sat with Carl in comfortable silence as they curled downward out of Daly City, through the wreckage of San Bruno, and under the rumbling 101 Freeway, threading northward toward Mission Street and the nastier parts of the ruined city. In the dirty, half opened window across the aisle he took a moment to study his bi-laterally reversed doppelganger, amazed at the perfect replication of his features down to the oily hair and thick rectangular glasses stuck over a fat nose. Howard wiped his sticky hands on his already stained denim shirt, crossed his legs revealing a pair of green and yellow argyle socks above grey, tattered tennis shoes, and settled back, his hands stoking the cold, stiff body of Larry, his Springer Spaniel.

"Man, I keep tell’in ya," Howard said softly, without looking at Carl, "she was here ‘bout a year ago, but I aint seen her, and I aint heard from her in all this time. I didn’t even know she was dead ‘till you show’d up on my door."

Carl was studying his face in the window’s reflection. Carl always did that, he was a great student of faces. Especially faces he didn’t like or didn’t trust. "Didn’t you begin to wonder what happened to her?" Carl asked casually.

"At first. But then, you know, like I had other things on my mind."

"Like?"

"Like other things, man. Like hang’in out in Union Square, taking from the tourists. They reopened the city you know, so they’re all over the place. And I owed big time, big time, Carl." Howard pulled up his shirt exposing the mass of tiny thread-like scars across his belly. "Pinchers."

At the sound of the word pinchers, the old woman, who still swayed back forth over Howard’s head, her tiny left hand holding onto a greasy leather strap, gave Howard a careful look and backed away, plopping her frail yet ample body down into a seat beside the rear door. Her arms pulled a green felt purse with frayed fabric and a worn silver lock tightly against her chest. Pinchers could be, and usually were, mean thieves.

Howard waited for Carl’s reaction. But Carl sat back against the rattling seat, his empty grey eyes reflecting only the bright amber pulse of goose neck lights over the Ninth Street bridge. Carl took a deep breath and remained silent.

"I wanted to find her, man, I really did. But I couldn’t leave."

"Bull shit, Howard, you knew she was probably next."

"Hey, don’t lay that on me, Carl. How the fuck was I supposed to know? Huh? How the fuck? You didn’t even know. Now you come around here and expect me to tell you that I just let her go out there and get killed. Well, it didn’t happen that way. You weren’t the only one who gave a shit."

"Well it sure seems that way," Carl said still not taking his eyes off the far window.

"And by that time," Howard took a deep breath, "I was already infected."

"Why pinchers, Howard?" Carl turned to look Howard in the face.

"Rachel got me started. Oh you don’t know her, she used to live downstairs in the basement. A real community kid. Used to raffle off her mattress. Winner took all." Howard leaned forward over the dog’s carcass, supporting himself with his elbows on his knees. "I think she got hooked by her boyfriend. He was a real sleaze, lived mostly on the benches down by the Embarcadaro, where a community of pincher freaks trade injectors and pick through the garbage bins over by the old ferry dock. One night she was alone and I like knocked on her door and she said come on in. So I did and we fucked but then she pushed me off of her. She said she always came better when they were active." Howard laughed. "I didn’t even know what they were, Carl. I thought she meant some friend of hers.

"Howard," Carl interrupted, "I don’t"

"You asked," Howard said softly. "You asked because you think I just let Donna go without trying to help her. You gotta understand, Carl, for god’s sake, I couldn’t go after her. I was infected. You hear me? Fuck’in infected." The bus came to a sudden stop in front of an all night grocery store with ads for discount beer and a special on homemade taco mixes. The old toothless woman, reluctantly edged from her seat and, holding tightly to the rails, wobbled out into the cold drizzle. The rear door hushed close and the bus shuddered on its way its tires making a steady squealing sound on the wet pavement.

"She rolled on top of me, Carl, pulled an already hot injector from her night table and jabbed it right here," Howard continued, pulling up his shirt once more, his finger tracing a thin circular scar just above his naval. "Shit, man, you get such a rush. And you know, she was right. You come like a nest of fire ants are burrowing in your ass."

Carl nodded. "When did you see her last?"

"Rachel died about a year ago. She got hooked up with some damn Burner."

"Not Rachel," Carl snapped, "Donna."

Howard sat back. The dog’s stiff body rolled off his lap hitting the floor with a loud thud. "Three. Four years ago, like it was a long time ago. And things have been a blur for me, Carl, I can’t even see her face anymore." Howard picked up his dog. "You sure she’s dead?"

Carl nodded.

"I’m fuckin sorry," Howard said quietly.

"You could have called me," Carl said.

"Man," Howard said shaking his head, "I was too far gone." He stoked the inert hard belly of his dog and turned to Carl. He was crying, his hands shaking, and he found himself telling it all, all about why he didn’t help Donna. Only, he realized, he wasn’t talking about Donna. "Jesus Carl, I killed her. I did. Poor Rachel."

"Tell me." Carl said suddenly understanding.

But now Howard wanted to leave - ask me about the previous millennium, Carl, anything but this. He regretted bringing her memory to the surface, but the die was cast. He felt compelled, impelled, to move forward. Howard rose tentatively from his seat as the bus rocked to another stop in front of an old style shelter whose front edge dripped with a curtain of cold rain water. But, in the end, he knew he would answer, he would answer because Carl was all he had left. Carl was the best friend he had, the only one who understood. And that was why he’d come today. In the end, he knew, Carl would understand.
 

"She was a cutter and I threw her out." Howard laughed a laugh that was almost a cough. "Imagine that. Look at me now."

Burners and cutters, Howard roamed back through his memory for a moment. Michael, the little jerk who ran his errands - past tense, Howard corrected himself - was a burner. He remained motionless for a moment, one knee pulled up onto the bus seat, wedging the dog’s face with is hideous grin of yellow teeth against his chest. In his mind he traced the events as precisely as photoengravers trace molecular circuits. He opened he door. There she was on the bed, her pastel blue dress crumbled beside her. Rachel wore her amber-blond hair in a Japanese-style bun, a fashion that gave her thin freckled face with its small blunt nose a pasty, sallow look. He watched without a word as the silver fishing knife, moving in a slow beautiful arc across her breast, cut downward, a foam of bright scarlet blood following in its wake. Above the red froth, a hundred tiny tracks of soft scar tissue like embossed vines threaded their way around her chest.

"Rachel!"

"Howard!" She jumped to her feet, a fine spray of blood peppering her belly, the bed sheets and her gown.

"Jesus, Rachel, what are you doing?" But he knew of course.

The knife dropped from her hand and bounced with a shower of red droplets on the thick yellow carpet. Shaking, Rachel quickly cupped her sliced breast, and as he watched, little rivulets of purple blood oozed through her fingers. She looked scared, then embarrassed, then taunt, ready for fight or flight. Suddenly she was angry. "Just leave me alone. I’m fine. Shit! Look at my dress. Shit!"

Howard remained in the doorway watching her toss the dress into the hamper, slip on a pair of soiled jeans, a moderately translucent white blouse, and run from her room. Distantly he heard the front door open and then slam. Next to his face, where her hand had pushed open the bedroom door, a perfect ocher imprint of her palm was dissolving into a forest of dull dripping tendrils. Howard knew he had stood there motionless for a very long time, so long that his knees wobbled and finally gave way. He woke the next morning on the floor and Annie had still not returned.

"Carl," he said finally, "I really don’t want to talk about Rachel." Of all the strangeness, Howard reflected, that came from the synthetics that scrubbed our blood vessels, ate our cancers, and rebuilt our failing nervous system, the supplemental immune system was the strangest. Absently he pulled a pocket knife from his jacket. Without looking, he pulled out its short silver blade, and ran it down his wrist, cutting the skin. He knew that a hundred thousand mechanical T-cells would be converging on the cut, artificial leukocytes, phagocytes, and lymphocytes, mixed with their real biological counterparts, would be streaming from little replicating factories scattered around his body. He felt a tingling sensation and watched as the blood turned to a clear viscous liquid and the cut, made only a few moments ago, dissolved back into a sheet of semi-organic skin. Cutters. Immune system addicts, like Rachel, who spent their time cutting themselves. Or burners like Michael, sitting in his car with a soldering iron. Michael would have been sixteen next year. Burners, he thought, often go first.

"I’m sorry for you, Howard," Carl spoke without turning.

"Yeah, you sound it," Carl snapped.

"Why did you throw her out?"

Howard shifted on his left foot, leaning over Carl’s immobile form. "We did everything together, man, you know, like scavenging, shooting, bundling, we even grew our own pinchers."

"That was smart," Carl snapped.

"Like I said, Carl, we weren’t thinking."

"So what happened?" Carl asked impatiently.

"She was a cutter I said." Howard wobbled to his feet, "I did everything I could for her. I took away her knives. Even the fucking bread knife. Then she meets this asshole at some trip down to the east bay.and comes home with burn rivulets on her thighs. She was burning. And," He steadied himself against the rattling movement of the bus, "she burning and didn’t wanna do no more Pinchers. You can’t mix’em Carl. That’s bad news on OK street. And I don’t want..."

"Donna never mentioned Pinchers."

"Shit, no, that was later. After she left. You wouldn’t know, would you?" Howard said, almost to himself.

"Tell me about it." Carl’s voice had gradually lost any inflections, sounding more and more mechanical.

Howard felt the cramps easing in his lower legs. Tuesday evening. June or July, the weather was warm. The dark little apartment was cool, smelling of burnt hemp and cheap incense. He headed into the kitchen. The scream echoed through the building, he stopped and his body broke into a cold sweat. He stumbled up the back stairs, three at a time and pushed open the bathroom door only to find Rachel curled up on the floor screaming.

"Rachel, for god’s sake, what’s the matter.?" He drove a hair brush between her teeth watching the pink saliva foam over her lips. Her eyes blinked unsteadily and she coughed violently, spitting the brush across the room.

"Lemme go!" She cried, beating her head against the wall. Carl caught her again as she slumped into his arms. Epileptic seizures. Very Rare, he thought, but sometimes the brain wave abnormals are shielded by the immune factory enzymes. "Get away from me!" she kicked him and spun away, bouncing off the door and falling with a hard crack into the enamel tub.

"Rachel, I’ll get a doctor."

"No! Jesus, Howard, get me a fuckin’ field controller! I gotta turn them off! Oh Jesus, I’ve got Pinchers. But they won’t stop, Howard. They’re suppose to stop. Benny said they’d stop in an hour. In an Hour. Why won’t they stop?" Her nose was bleeding and a dark greenish black bruise had slowly formed above her left eye.

Howard sat on the toilet seat watching Rachel shivering in the tub. "I aint got no field stabilizer babe." Inside her head swarms of illicit nanomachine stimulators were fastening themselves on her nervous system. The little thumb-tack like machines, multiplying like aphids, drove their acetylcholine exciters into the neural myelin sheaths. Pinchers, he rolled the word silently in his mouth tasting its weird phonemes. He carried her back downstairs to her bedroom and stood there watching her shake hour after hour.

Two days later he came home from panhandling and found her curled in a corner with a dirty young man who smelled of vomit and rose water perfume. An active injector buzzed on the rug  at her feet, and the boy was sliding a hot, cracking flat iron down her right breast. Howard kicked the iron into the kitchen and threw them both out the door. Rachel beat on the door, crying and cursing until her sobs faded away, he heard their foot steps shuffling down the steps and she was gone forever from his life.

Howard sat down. "Then the other day I got this in the mail." He handed Carl the crumbled letter and slumped forward, resting his elbows on the dead dog, his eyes fixed on the wet grit and rubber mats that lined the bus’ floor.

Carl took the letter and held it to the bus’ wobbly lights so he could study the thin, flowing handwriting. A handwriting that was very familiar. "Why were you keeping this, Howard?"

"Fuck you."

"Shit, I’ve been traveling around with you for two days, and this is what I get? The letter in the middle of the damn night. What the hell’s the matter with you?"

Howard shook his head.

Carl opened the envelope and pulled out the letter. He unfolded the sheet of crisp white paper. In a dark metal topped pen, the writer had scratched

I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost,
Who died before the god of love was born

"Have you checked?" Carl asked without looking up.

"Yes. It’s John Donne."

"And you weren’t going to let me see this?"

"Hey, man, it’s been two years."

"That puts it," Carl said, handing the letter back, "right on schedule."

Howard folded the letter in half and pushed it into his front pocket. "Come’on with me, Carl. We can hitch up the coast. No one’ll find us. I know it. Please, don’t do this."

"I thought you couldn’t run, you piece of shit," Carl said lightly. "But thanks for the warning. And thanks for the letter. You know I’ve got to stay. This has been going on far too long." Carl swiveled around and sat facing Howard. "But I want you out of the city. Tonight is already too late. I saw the post mark on that envelope, Howard and it was Baltimore, three weeks ago. The Executioner is already here."

With the darkness whistling past him, Carl reflected on the first letter. Not a letter, exactly. A post card one late June from St. Paul, Minnesota. Twenty seven years ago. In the very same handwriting, written with a fine felt-tipped pen. But I do nothing upon my self, and yet I am mine own Executioner. An odd little card with a picture of a stern wheeled river boat on the Mississippi River. A year or two passed, he remembered, before he discovered that the words came from Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. Only years later, after the third death, when he was exploring the contents of a box filled with history, memories, and the tangled flotsam and jetsam of his early life did he rediscover, stuck between the pages of Cassell’s New Latin Dictionary, this same postcard. From that moment on his unknown nemesis became The Executioner. A chill ran down Carl’s back at the name. He felt a pain deep in his stomach. And suddenly there he was, standing in the entrance way with his automatic pistol. Feeling the silence. Waiting.

Whispers of Uncertainty

Chapter 4. Narrowing the Suspects

"We’ll need much more proof than coincidence," Oliver declared.

"Three dead people who knew each other," Nate interjected.

"And?" Oliver asked.

"Doesn’t that mean something, At least statistically?"

Oliver shook his head. "Not really Nate. They’re only related because we’ve identified them; otherwise they’re just points in the zone’s mortality rate. Any time you get a group of people together, there’ll be sets of strangers and friends. In fact, given a large enough group – and the size can be surprisingly small, as little as six -- its mathematically certain that the group will contain a people who know each other or people who do not know each other."

Nate laughed. "A clever tautology."

"Fancy words for a backwoods school teacher," Oliver said. He chuckled quieting Nate’s ruffled feathers. "As a matter of fact that’s a principle established a few hundred years ago by Frank Plimpton Ramsey. And the collection size necessary to insure a minimum strings of strangers or friends is called its Ramsey Number."

Nate drank some more coffee, his interest definitely waning. "And this means what?"

Oliver poured the last of the coffee. But before he could explain, Sandy Myrus stormed back into the room. "Nate, I thought we discussed this." Her voice was a slick hiss. Wrinkles rippled across her forehead. "I don’t want this man in my house another minute. What if they come back? What if they’ve been watching? We don’t have any idea who these people are. I tell you Nate, you have your job to protect."

Oliver put down his coffee cup. "I won’t be long. But this is more important than Nate’s job."

"Bull shit!" Sandy snapped.

"A friend of yours is dead. I believe she’s been killed."

"She wasn’t our friend." Sandy nearly stammered.

Oliver heard Sandy’s words but it took a full second or two before they registered in his conscious belief system. He addressed himself to Nate.

"If you are not friends, what are you? Collaborators? Associates? Drinking buddies?" He growled, "or lovers?"

Sandy screamed across the room, "Get out!"

"I need an answer, Nate," Oliver demanded.

"Tell him to leave, Nate. You don’t owe him an answer." There was a cruel flatness in Sandy’s voice.

"Sandy’s right, Oliver, this has gone too far. It’s one thing to fill in the voids around Judith’s life, another to put my family in danger."

"You don’t know if anyone is in danger. Not even me."

"I sure the hell don’t want to find out," Sandy snapped.

Nate walked over to Sandy. They spoke furiously, their faces red with anger, Sandy’s hands clenched at her sides. Oliver picked up his empty coffee cup feeling its solid weight in his hand. He wondered if it would crack Sandy Myrus’ skull. She was becoming an implacable obstacle, a loud and mean spirited antagonist in his linear drive to connect the dots in this glacially cohering puzzle. Connecting dots, however would bring him back to Nate who, he speculated, might not react well to the outright murder of his wife. In either case, Oliver realized, he stood to loose Nate’s willing cooperation. Maybe just a swift punch in the head. Maybe not. Nate and Sandy wandered back down the hallway their forms blending with the sharp angular shadows of the distant living room until they became disjointed whispers floating in the house unaligned with physical bodies. For what may have been ten minutes Oliver sat by the kitchen table, listening to the steady thrum of their acoustic food store. A faint pink light flickered on the kitchen’s portable communications station. A pending data link transfer. Who was Nate linked with? Who was Sandy linked to was more like it.

Nate and Sandy wandered back into the kitchen. Sandy’s eyes were red and swollen, her hair limp, her face lined. "I tried to tell you yesterday."

Oliver’s memory sliced like a bullet through their conversation. You were her friend. As much as anyone. He should have paid more attention. God is in the details.

"Judith wasn’t a friend, Oliver," Nate said, "She was a malicious force."

Sandy looked steadily at Oliver. He read hatred in unmistakable lines etched across the corners of her mouth. But he also saw the will of a tough woman crumbling under the weight of self-doubt. Or was it pity. Oliver didn’t want her pity.

"Judith had two faces, Oliver, one for the town and one for the miserable feudal underlings that labored under her constant scrutiny," Nate said sternly, "she wasn’t an ordinary administrator at the school, she was a keeper of every private vice and mischief ever committed or thought by any poor instructor, full teacher, or student."

"Including yours?"

Nate didn’t answer.

Oliver had a vision of Judith Mespeth floating over the town of Oxford like a latter day Janus, one benign face turned toward the village the other malignant mask peering into the minds of her unwelcome charges. If there were missing pieces, he suddenly realized, they might be standing in this room. Murders have been committed throughout history – before history   for lesser aggravations – barging a queue, whistling in the shower, driving too slow. Oliver wondered what secrets Judith Mespeth held over the Myrus family but now was not the time. "Then why did you keep up her marker site? Why were you so concerned about a scavenger desecrating her property?"

"Had to," Nate replied crisply.

Oliver waited.

Nate looked at Sandy for a moment. "The school made us executors of her estate. Some estate," Nate sneered, "one house and a weedy plot. But the Mespeth property is the last tax free patch of  open land in this district. She didn’t leave any family, Oliver, so the school claimed her assets."

"Just like that?" Oliver asked quietly.

"Gavin McDowell runs the school system. He’s also the deputy mayor of the Oxford council government."

"When he’s sober," Sandy said quickly.

Nate scowled at his wife. "Either way, he wins."

"And we loose," Sandy growled.

Oliver suddenly understood. "Whoever came to see you last night wasn’t from the council government. I’ll admit, they might be upset at an investigation into Judith’s death. Too many possibilities. But look, if this was McDowell or his henchmen, you’d most likely know them. He’d have no reason to disguise either his people or the reason for his visit."

Sandy seemed to visibly relax. "Who were they Detective?" She asked him in a quiet restrained voice edged with a faint whisper of uncertainty.
"They were looking for me?"

Sandy appeared lost in thought for a moment. "They were looking for Nate, actually. Could you tell me, Mrs. Myrus where can find your husband. Official business. No, nothing serious, but we need to ask him a few questions. Do you have someone staying with you? No? Well, thank you. Goodnight. And that was it."

Nate took over. "When I got home, Sandy was waiting for me."

"And," Oliver suggested, "you put two and two together and got trouble with the council government."

"Sandy still believes it’s the council," Nate said cautiously. "I agree with you Oliver, they were not local. Not outsiders, of course, but not Oxford locals. What ever is happening, its already in motion. Sandy’s worried about Patty, our daughter, and, naturally, about me." Nate glanced at his wife. "I think she’s more concerned about my job. Gavin can be a nasty son-of-a-bitch." He smiled at Sandy and all three of them sensed a sudden lessening of the tension.

Nate pulled up a chair to the central table. "You do have to leave Oliver. You know they’ll be back."
Sandy wandered over to her husband, wheeled a short metal stool next to his chair and took a seat. "Please go," she pleaded weakly, leaning on Nate’s shoulder.

In Oliver’s mind the force of his decision making moved back and forth between fight and flight in a precise beat, more regular than a pendulum. He doubted whether the local police would find him if he stayed tucked away in Nate’s house. Unless Sandy Myrus ran out of courage and patience. But hiding was not his goal. He came to the zone for a specific purpose: uncover the cause of Joseph McNeil’s death. In a labyrinthine trail of ill-understood evidence – if he could call any of it evidence – he had placed one or two facts on his shaky markov chain. Von Saaz was his best hope of discovering what actually happened. Assuming, of course, that any of this meant anything. There was the real possibility that his intuition was nothing more than a wish and all this minor particles of support was an illusion. Oliver looked at Sandy. "I’m going. Nate, you’re going with me." He wasn’t asking a question.

Nate asked Sandy to make some more coffee. "You’re still not positive about any of this are you? Even if we find that Von Saaz died the same way as Judith Mespeth."

"It’s not a matter of certainty, Nate. At least not in the sense that you or Sandy mean. I’m a forensics investigator, at least I used to be. When some event seems out of kilter or in some other way unusual we try to find a set of facts which explain the death and point back to the root cause. You could say that we are experimental scientists seeking verification of our hypothesis about the cause of death. Not just a single theory, actually, but a whole string of them. The funny thing about hypothesis testing is that you can be mislead in a whole shit load of ways. Let’s see," Oliver held up his hand and started counting on his fingers, "One. You can take supposition for evidence. Two. You can take facts as evidence. Not everything that happens is evidence for your theory, Nate. Three. You can believe eye witnesses. And Four, you can take coincidence as fact."

"This is where Ramsey comes in?" Nate asked.

*****************

"Sort of," Oliver said. Sandy in a surprising act of kindness, poured fresh coffee in his cup. Oliver was grateful that Sandy’s boiling hostility seemed contained for a moment, bounded, he supposed, between curiosity and fear for her husband. He took a deep drink of the hot coffee feeling the heat in his belly. "Ramsey Theory is god’s way of letting forensic behaviorists know that analytical hubris is a sure way into perdition."

He had a knack, some told him, for casual pedantry.

Nate was unappreciative.

"Detectives look for patterns. We try to find regularities in the way people act, the way events occur, even in the way that the patterns themselves are discovered or arranged. But, we also have to be careful, Nate. Ramsey Theory predicts the emergence of many highly regular patterns in random collections or populations. Hell, you se it in action each time you look at the night sky. There they are, the ancient constellations. Stars are scattered randomly across the sky, yet we find lots of patterns in their arrangements."

A look of recognition flashed on Nate’s face. "The Skinner PTA asessment." Isolation Zone culture is not completely outside commonwealth influence. A relic of the Plague Years’ global madness, each nine year old child must undergo a critical battery of psychometric examinations. Nine years, Nate recalled, was the phase transition age or PTA, when the brain’s neural patterns settled into their life-long mode of reasoning. Better to find the irrational child now, Nate agreed with the conventional wisdom, then wait until he or she disrupts a well ordered, peaceful society. A crucial, and to Nate’s mind unpredictable, part of the test was the Ninagawa Faucher stereogram. Three egg-white one by one meter cards filled with random dots. Tell me, Tom, they called him Tom as a child, what do you see in this picture? Ants, he said brightly. Indeed, an old woman with a lackluster face said slowly noting something on her observations pad. Next image. More Ants, he insisted. The last. Dirt, Miss Ostraka, a page full of little bits of dirt. He wasn’t insane, he was, they told him a year later, simply dull.

"Exactly," Oliver said.

***********************

"How do you find an actual pattern?" Nate asked. Sandy poured them both some more coffee before sitting next to her husband. She had been standing next to the door waiting for the dog to finish its business in their neatly trimmed back yard. "Or do you just pick one at random and hope its right?"

Oliver laughed. "Hardly, Nate. "That’s the reason you have to come with me to Georgetown. I need to find out more about Von Saaz’s death. It’s not the fact that he died, it how he died, who knew about it, when he died in relation to other events."
"What other events," Nate asked.
"I won’t know that until I get there," Oliver said honestly. What Oliver didn’t tell Nate was the simple truth of the matter: patterns are notoriously difficult to explain. Easy to find, but amazingly hard to explain, especially a pattern that is more than random chance. He knew, even if Nate didn’t, that Ramsey theory implies a disconcerting principle of the cosmos: complete randomness or disorder is impossible. Structure eventually emerges no matter how complex or chaotic the system appears. Oliver knew instinctively, even without support from Ramsey, that conspicuous regularities appear even in a universe without physical laws.

"You’re not actually going?" Sandy asked with remarkable calmness.

"I think so, Sandy."

"For god’s sake why?"

"Damn if I know," Nate said. He finished his coffee. "It’s a coward’s way out. As I see it, if I don’ go with Oliver, we’ll never know what happened out there on Avon knoll. Also," he put his hand on his wife’s knee, "we’re part of this now. Maybe you were right, I should have thought this through. I never should have helped Oliver yesterday. But I did, and someone knows I did."

"Now’s the time to stop it," Sandy insisted.

Nate shook his head slowly. "I want to know is Oliver is right."

"It’s not your business."

"It is now," Oliver said quietly.

"Because you’ve made it his business," Sandy barked.

"Perhaps. I can’t undo the past."

Sandy leaned forward. "But you can change the future."

"Not my future," Oliver said firmly.

"Well, I don’t give a shit about your future." Sandy stood up. She was restless. After a moment she began pacing around the room.

"Obviously," Oliver said.


"I’m going," Nate said flatly. In his mind the options dwindled down until just two remained: abandon Oliver to his own resources in the zone which meant forever sacrificing his knowledge of what happened three years ago, let alone the possibility of uncovering a serious of murders or go within him to Georgetown with the slim chance that he might learn a greater truth. That I might learn the truth, the thought rolled around his conscious mind for a few seconds. When did he become interested in Judith Mespeth’s death? She was a mean spirited witch who lived a solitary life away from those whose life she manipulated. And like all the rest of her Oxford Inn comrades, he sat imprisoned beneath her reflected glory, unsure of when she might use her detailed knowledge of Vici Magnus to bring about his complete ruin. When? At ten thirty last night. At the very moment he suspected Sandy might have been responsible. When he realized the bitter truth: he could never ask his wife if she murdered Judith Mespeth.

Sandy slapped her husband hard across his right cheek leaving a bright red welt below his eye. She had tears in her eyes as she spun around and ran from the kitchen.

Oliver sat passively watching Nate. "I think we should leave right away. It’ll be day light in another hour. We’ll have to take your car, mine’s buried twenty kilometers from here under manure and last spring’s fermented hay. Anyway, by now they’ve canceled my resource permit." Nate had a sudden, very unpleasant thought. He pulled out his identification chit. His active status indicator no longer glowed a bright yellow. Instead it burned a deep ember-red. "That certainly didn’t take long," he said more or less to himself. He expected the decommission. But it still came as a shock to realize he was no longer connected with the official apparatus of the commonwealth. Oliver replaced the ID chit with a last gratifying thought. Detectives third grade were low level officials. Unlike mainline officers in homicide or burglary, his identification chit did not carry a homing beacon. Unless they stumbled on him accidentally, no one could know his precise location. I wonder, he thought briefly, who "they" are?

From Oliver's Adventures in Fuzzy Logic,

Tales of Murder and Revenge from the World of Possibilities

By
Earl Cox
©1996