Double Blind Page 7

  “I don’t know. Probably got your number mixed up with mine in their file.”

  “No, he meant to call me. He addressed me by name.”

  He did? Maybe it was Jerry Sterne, and Ice Queen was in on it. Maybe they were better actors than I thought.

  “This isn’t about a job interview, Lisa, and I know it. He sounded far too menacing. Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  If she only knew. “No.”

  “What does ‘don’t do it’ mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think you do.”

  “Mom.” My fingers tightened around the phone. “Forget it.”

  She sighed. “I’m terribly worried about you. So far away. Why don’t you move back home? There’s nothing to keep you there.”

  Except for distance from her—

  The black suitcase lay on the floor. The man unzipped it hurriedly. I saw his right hand, the dragon ring on his finger. He threw back the cover.

  I swayed. Held on to the counter for support.

  “Lisa, are you listening to me?”

  Where was my tongue? “Look, Mom, I need to go. Sorry they bothered you. I’ll tell them not to call you anymore.”

  I hung up.

  Through the man’s gaze I saw the dead woman, lying on his kitchen floor. Her eyes were open and fixed. Blood stained her silk blouse. The knife was not in sight.

  He dragged the suitcase next to her. Bent down and thrust an arm behind her neck. Raised her torso. He forced his other arm under her knees and lifted. Her ragdoll body folded in his grasp. The man dropped her into the suitcase with a heavy thump.

  I gasped and whirled around. That sound—it was right here.

  The woman’s shoulders fell out of the suitcase on one end, her feet out the other. The man used both hands to turn her on her side. He forced her knees up toward her face. Pushed her body down until her head rested inside the bag.

  He stood back and studied her. Then he closed the cover over the suitcase and zipped it.

  The whir of the zipper vibrated right through me. I sagged against the counter and hung on for life. Gritting my teeth, I fought to get hold of myself. He’d put her in the suitcase. How awful. How heartless.

  Would he bury her next? Would I have to see that, too?

  Come on, Lisa. Pull it together.

  For a long time I shivered over the counter. The fear heated, then melted like running wax. I was left to cool. Then harden.

  My unsteady gaze landed on Jerry Sterne’s business card. Maybe I couldn’t stop the visions, but I didn’t have to put up with threats from Cognoscenti. Before I lost my courage I jabbed in the digits. His voice mail picked up. I barely waited for the beep after his message.

  “It’s Lisa Newberry. Don’t you call my mother anymore with threats, you hear? And if you didn’t do it, some other man there did. You can send this message up your chain of command: Leave my mother out of this. Clearly you thought you could intimidate me by using her. Guess what—all you’ve done is made me madder.”

  I clacked the receiver hard into its base. A moment passed as I glared across the apartment, wondering what to do next.

  My stomach groaned with hunger, and tiredness hit. But I couldn’t eat or rest now. Anger still coursed through me, and I needed to channel it. I had to do something.

  That poor woman—dumped in a suitcase. And she’d fit so easily. She’d really have to be petite. Shorter than I thought.

  A realization surfaced. I raised my chin. These were details I could use. Black suitcase + woman + murder. Maybe I’d find something online . . .

  I headed into the second bedroom to fire up my computer.

  Chapter 11

  THE COMPUTER TOOK FOREVER TO BOOT UP. I RESTED MY forehead against my hand, trying to gather all the details of the murder in my mind. Then I pulled out a pad of paper. I needed to write down everything I knew so far. What the furniture in the room looked like, and the kitchen. The woman’s description and her clothes. The suitcase. Had I seen a brand name on it? I closed my eyes, trying to remember.

  Nothing.

  My Google home page came up on my monitor. I kept writing—everything I’d seen, and in the order the details had come. I looked over my notes, filling in blanks until I couldn’t think of a single thing I’d missed. Finally I turned to the computer.

  I typed in my search: black suitcase + woman + murder. Hit Enter.

  Over 4.5 million results.

  I gawked at the screen. How could I possibly look through all these cases?

  My eyes fell on the top one: “Former air steward arrested over murder of woman found in suitcase at Heathrow.” It was a murder in Britain in 2010. I clicked on the link. The victim was blonde. Not the woman in my visions. I returned to the search page.

  “Woman’s body found in Sydney park, teen charged with murder, sexual assault.”

  This case was from March 2011. Could the man’s hands that I’d seen belong to a nineteen-year-old? I doubted it. The murder was in Australia. No picture of the victim, but I’d seen nothing about sexual assault in my visions.

  “A woman suspect in the Sandra Cantu murder case.” This victim was only eight. Such a beautiful child. And a female did this? I clicked out of the link as fast as I could, sickened.

  “Police looking for murderer of woman stuffed in suitcase.” The victim was twenty-eight, no picture. The suitcase was found in Harlem. Had the dark-haired woman I’d seen been that young? I didn’t think so. Probably more in her later thirties. Besides, the victim in this case had been strangled to death—nothing about a stab in the chest.

  On down the list I went. Many of the other results covered the same crimes. For over an hour I read about murder and gore and bloody suitcases, but nothing fit the pictures in my head. Finally I couldn’t take any more. Nausea rose in my stomach. I hurried to the bathroom and slammed back the toilet lid to throw up. There wasn’t much in my stomach to part with. Afterward, weak and shaking, I curled up on my bed and hugged myself. The left side of my head around the stitches throbbed.

  Now what was I supposed to do? The murder I kept seeing apparently didn’t exist.

  Maybe the visions weren’t real at all. Maybe Jerry Sterne was right—they were panic attacks, my brain conjuring them up.

  But it wasn’t just what I felt in my brain. In my gut I knew those scenes had happened. They were just too real.

  Fine, Lisa. Prove it.

  I rolled on my back and stared at the ceiling.

  Maybe the woman’s body hadn’t been found yet. Maybe the man had buried it somewhere, and now her family was going crazy, wondering what happened to her. If that was true, I had to find her. For their sake.

  But where to look?

  I should change my online search for articles about a missing woman. But I didn’t know where she lived, or when. The hits would be astronomical.

  Wait. The dragon ring.

  I pushed myself off the bed. For the first few seconds I swayed. I still needed to eat. But later. First I dragged myself back to the computer. In Google Chrome I typed in “dragon ring.” Four hundred twenty-seven thousand results came up.

  My shoulders sagged.

  The ring I’d seen on the killer’s hand was big and ugly. Gold, with glittering emeralds for eyes. Looked like it was worth a lot of money. But the first links I followed showed rings made of pewter and silver. And they were cheap. Others included gems, but they didn’t look the same at all.

  Many of the links mentioned a fantasy story or some game associated with the rings. Could the man in my visions be part of that world? His house was big and expensive, so was the furniture. Didn’t fit with someone who sat around and played computer games. Maybe he owned a company that made them?

  I sat back in my chair and sighed. This wasn’t working.

  If I only knew who the woman was. I could picture her face so well. But how to look for one face in a world of people?

  And the biggest question of all: If these vis
ions really were memories from that killer, how did they get on my chip? Someone would have to transfer them over from his brain. Which was crazy. And probably impossible.

  Or was it?

  I could search that, too.

  My fingers typed in “brain chip” and hit Enter. I’d done this one before, out of curiosity when I first began interviewing for the Empowerment Chip trial. The same articles came up. Ones about chips that allowed people to move a robotic arm just by thought. Or enabled a monkey to reach for a banana via a mechanical arm merely by thinking about it. The computer chip maker Intel reportedly wanted to design a brain-sensing chip that its customers could use to operate a computer without a keyboard or mouse, using thoughts alone. (Undergo brain surgery, just for that?) There were chips the size of a grain of rice that could be implanted to track people. Or function as a smart code to allow them access into secure sites. And the chips I’d read about to treat Parkinson’s.

  I refined the search: “brain chip” + “memory transfer.” I didn’t expect much. But over 34,000 hits popped up.

  A vision surged into my head. The dead woman, folded into the suitcase. The man’s hand closing it. I could almost hear the bite of its zipper.

  No, go away! I shook it off and forced myself to concentrate on the search.

  The first page of hits were all about one research project, posted in June 2011: “Scientists successfully implant chip that controls the brain: allowing thoughts, memory and behavior to be transferred from one brain to another.”

  My nerves tingled. I clicked on one of the links.

  “Scientists working at the University of Southern California, home of the Department of Homeland Security’s National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events, have created an artificial memory system . . .”

  The research had been done on rats that learned to press one of two levers for water. Future plans called for research in monkeys. Human trials were far into the future. Dr. Theodore Berger and his team had worked with scientists from Wake Forest University, focusing on the brain’s hippocampus area, which converts short-term memory into long-term memory during the learning process . . .

  My brain swam. I dropped my head in my hands. This science was beyond me. All I knew was if this technology was possible, Cognoscenti had taken it to greater heights—and into humans.

  Into me.

  But it still sounded crazy.

  And even if they had, what could I do about it? Who was I to fight against them?

  I forced myself to click on another link. It talked about research similar to Dr. Berger’s, but more along the lines of knowledge transfer. In the future, the article said, it could be possible to download information from one person onto a chip and implant it into another person’s brain, allowing the recipient to have “instant knowledge” from the chip. Say someone wanted to learn French. No more needing to study for hours. Just pay for a chip loaded with the data of how to speak the language.

  This stuff sounded like science fiction.

  I read on. The research was based on the understanding that knowledge is actually memory, the article said. The cerebral cortex appeared to act as the major repository for long-term memory. And memories are formed through changes in the synapses between nerve cells. Once a data-loaded chip was implanted into a brain, the data would begin to release, fanning out over nerves and across synapses to re-create the memories in the recipient’s brain. The major hurdle to creating such a chip was learning how to translate brain waves into encodable data, sort of like the binary system of zeroes and ones for computers but far more complicated—

  The phone rang. I jerked toward the sound. My mother again?

  A second ring. And third. Sighing, I made my way to the kitchen counter. Why did I still use this landline, anyway? Ryan was the one who’d insisted on it. I could cancel it now, just use my cell phone.

  Not a bad idea.

  Look at me. Even fighting these horrible visions, I was thinking about my future. Planning things on my own terms. I couldn’t do that if I was still depressed.

  That chip was no placebo.

  I picked up the phone and checked the ID. My eyes widened.

  Clair Saxton.

  Chapter 12

  I STARED AT THE RECEIVER, STEELING MYSELF. WHATEVER this woman wanted, it couldn’t be good. And that ID showing up—was she calling from her cell?

  Just before my auto answer could click on, I picked up the phone. “Hello.” I didn’t even try to hide the suspicion in my tone.

  “Lisa? This is Clair Saxton.”

  I headed toward the couch. “Hi.”

  “A little while ago I heard the message you left on Jerry Sterne’s line. When he got it he called me into his office to ask if I knew anything about you getting a phone call. I didn’t.”

  I reached the sofa and sank into it.

  “I checked with Richard Price, our V.P. He knew nothing of the call either.”

  How convenient. “So you’re denying it happened?”

  She hesitated. “What exactly did the caller say?”

  “The caller was a man. He left a message with my mother for me. Three words. ‘Don’t do it.’”

  “‘Don’t do it?’” She sounded shocked.

  “Tell me something, Clair. Do you have my mother’s phone number in your file on me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I can tell you, you don’t. Because I never gave it to anyone. Which means someone at Cognoscenti had to go looking for it. When he could have just called me directly. Why do you suppose someone would do that?”

  “This is . . . I really can’t think why that would happen.”

  “Well, it did. And it sounds like quite a threat, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Lisa, hear me. I don’t know who would do that. No one here has any knowledge of this.”

  Uh-huh. “Why are you calling me? Why not Jerry?”

  “He’s tied up in meetings. He asked me to look into this.”

  “And so you have. Now what are you going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know what else I can do about it.” Her voice chilled. “Because that call did not originate from us. If it really happened at all, someone else placed it.”

  If it really happened at all? My jaw worked. “So now I’m making this up? Just like I made up the visions I’ve seen of a murder. Which I’m still seeing, by the way.”

  “We offered you help for that. You declined.”

  I pressed back against the couch. “What do you want from me?”

  “I called you to get to the bottom of this. You left no explanation in your message.”

  “I didn’t think I had to—seeing as how the threat came from your company.”

  “We are not threatening you, Ms. Newberry. We have not and never will threaten you.”

  “Then who called my mother? All the way in Denver.”

  “I have no idea. I can only tell you it wasn’t anyone at Cognoscenti.”

  “Right. Just like the chip you implanted in me was a placebo.”

  A disgusted sigh blew over the line. “Clearly you are nursing some sort of vendetta against Cognoscenti. I am very sorry for that. I called to set your mind at ease, but since you show no sign of listening, it’s time to end this conversation.”

  “Ever seen a dragon’s head ring?” It was a detail I hadn’t told her and Jerry.

  “What?”

  “Big gold thing with emeralds for eyes.”

  “Why are you asking me this?”

  “The man in the visions I’m seeing wears it. The murderer.”

  A beat passed. Her animosity pulsed over the line. “Ms. Newberry, you need help.”

  Tell me about it.

  Anger pushed me to my feet. “That chip you put in me is doing this. I have to get it taken out. And I’m going to find out how this terrible defect happened in the first place. And why. I can’t stand by and let you do this to other people.”

  “And I won’t stand by
and let you attempt to ruin the technology I know can save people’s lives!”

  I thrust a hand into my hair. Thing was—I agreed with her. The Empowerment Chip could help people. It had changed me. “I know it can.” The edge in my tone smoothed a little. “It’s just that something happened to mine. Something you all couldn’t have foreseen. A bug, a defect that needs to be fixed. If you’d just listen to me. We could work together, try to figure out—”

  “Do you know why I believe in the Empowerment Chip so strongly, Ms. Newberry? I’ll tell you why.” Ice Queen’s tone intensified. “I’ve seen it work in people who were emotionally crippled. In PTSD patients who couldn’t even hold a job. In men who’d come back from Iraq, utterly broken. My own father returned from the Korean War like that. My mother, brother, and I—we longed for my father’s return, only to see he’d never be the same again. Three years after coming back to us, he took his own life. If only he’d had the Empowerment Chip. His death, his funeral is burned into my memory. Our chip can keep that from happening. Can keep other fathers—and mothers—from giving up hope. No other child should have to go through what I did.”

  The words bit into me. So this was the reason behind Clair Saxton’s cold armor. As surely as my childhood had molded me, Ice Queen’s had molded her. In a strange way that united us. And we’d both lost our fathers at an early age. But childhood experiences ran deep. Because of her past, she could no more change her belief in the chip than I could deny the lingering effects of my mother. No matter what, Clair Saxton would cling to her narrow focus of protecting Cognoscenti, blind to any truth that its hot new product could be seriously defective.

  And that made her my enemy.

  My spine stiffened. “I’m very sorry for what you went through.” And I was. “Just don’t let it color your judgment.”

  Before she could reply, I hung up.

  I crossed to the counter to put down the phone—

  The man’s hand reached for the zipper. Pulled it shut around the suitcase. For a moment the hand paused, dragon ring shining in the light.

  He took hold of a handle at the left side of the bag. Raised it upright until the suitcase rested on its wheels. I heard the woman’s body shift toward the bottom.