The Memory Detective Read online

  The nurse looked at the monitor. He nodded. “That looks right to me.” Even before the nurse was done speaking, a small suction noise came from inside the woman’s skull and barely more than a teaspoon of liquid was sucked into the vial at the end of the vacuum.

  The benefit of working with dead bodies was that the surgeon’s team had no pressure to close anything up immediately. Instead, they moved quickly to Cole. One of the nurses unscrewed the vial and handed it to the surgeon, who took it and moved toward Cole’s body. She screwed the vial onto the back of the syringe still connected to Cole’s brain and took one last glance at the two machines monitoring his heart rate and brain activity. The doctor paused before pushing the plunger that would inject the dead woman’s memories into Cole’s brain. She knew that physically, Cole could handle this; from a physical perspective nothing about his brain would change at all, at least not at first. Everything on the monitors looked perfect. Still, the doctor wondered how much more of this Cole could take. There was still so much about these memory transfers that nobody understood. Then she dropped her thumb on the plunger. She was in charge of making sure the memories made it into Cole’s head, not assessing his mental health.

  The new memories seeped into Cole’s brain tissue as the surgeon and the nurse slowly removed the camera and syringe from the base of his skull. They used a dab of medical glue to reseal the incisions. Then a separate group of nurses came to wheel Cole back to his room. The machines and the anesthesiologist went with him. Cole had requested that he remain fully sedated for eight hours after the procedure, after which he would wake up and begin searching his brain for his new memories. “Good job, team,” the doctor said as Cole’s body was wheeled away. “Nice. Quick and clean.” Then she walked out of the operating room to go wash up before heading home to her family. Bill and one of the other nurses were left to clean up the dead woman’s body and to see that it was tagged and stored appropriately.

  Bill, without any more care than was necessary, pulled the instruments back out of the woman’s skull. “Do you think her memories were damaged?” one of the other nurses asked Bill. Bill had assisted on a number of these procedures before. In fact, he’d assisted on a few of Cole’s.

  Bill looked down at the woman’s shattered skull. Then he looked toward the door through which they had wheeled Cole’s body. The nurse knew Cole’s track record. “Well,” Bill answered, “whoever did this better hope so.”

  Chapter 3

  Even before opening his eyes, Cole Jones tried to remember being murdered. Everything else could wait—Cole’s fix could wait. All the woman’s other memories could wait. It didn’t matter whether they were going to be useful in solving the woman’s murder or not. They could wait. It was essential to remember the murder first, to come at that memory at least once as something entirely pure, before the other memories running amok in Cole’s brain began to bleed into it and alter it. After that first clean pull, every time he recalled a memory, Cole ran the risk that he would contaminate it with other thoughts and other memories. And Cole had lots of memories.

  Cole squeezed his eyes closed and focused, girding himself for the oncoming memory. It wasn’t going to be pleasant. He understood that. It would hurt. It would be scary and sad. It would change him. The memories always changed him, at least a little bit.

  Then, after only a few moments of concentration, Cole was in it. Sometimes new memories would hit him like a fleeting thought. This wasn’t that. This was the beginning of a full immersion. Cole always had trouble describing immersion because it was so much more than remembering your own memories, more than any virtual reality machine ever built. The closest Cole could come was telling people that it was like being a child again, lost inside a daydream so powerful that it swallowed up the reality around you. When Cole was fully immersed in someone else’s memory, it was like he was bathing in it. It overtook him. He forgot himself and the memory became real. Full immersion usually only happened the first time Cole experienced a memory. On a couple of occasions, with particularly powerful memories, it had happened twice. It had never happened more than that.

  Once immersed, Cole could feel the rope burning into his wrists, digging into his skin. He could feel tiny fibers scratching him as he wriggled his hands, trying feverishly to loosen the knot pinning his wrists together. But whoever had tied the rope knew what they were doing. The more he struggled, the tighter the knot became. Cole remembered the thoughts running through the woman’s head during that moment. She’d thought that if only she could see the knot, she might be able to free herself, but her hands were tied behind her back. She could barely move them, let alone see them. Cole focused, trying not to get lost in the woman’s thoughts. The thoughts were a distraction. He needed to remember details. The details were what mattered. He was lying on his stomach on a cold hardwood surface, like some sort of carpenter’s workbench. He wasn’t alone. A man was in the room with him. Cole could hear the man humming quietly to himself, as if the girl weren’t even there. It was the man who had tied her up. He knew it because she had known it. The man was humming a song that Cole didn’t immediately recognize, a slow, melancholy tune. The woman looked up toward the man. His face, Cole thought as she looked up, look at his face. But Cole couldn’t control what happened inside the memory. He could hope, but he had to be careful. If he hoped too much, his brain might change the memory, and a changed memory is ruined forever. Once a memory is changed in your head, it’s nearly impossible to get the original version back. Cole needed to remember what happened, not what he wanted to have happened. If he was going to catch the girl’s killer, he needed to remember the truth.

  The man was facing the wall, working on something with his hands. His back was turned to the woman. She couldn’t see his face. Not yet, Cole reminded himself, staying alert. The woman’s eyes traced the curve of the man’s arm down to a table. A hammer lay next to the man’s hands. The hammer didn’t mean much to the woman. She felt nothing as her eyes fell upon it. The hammer meant more to Cole. Unlike the poor woman, Cole knew what the man was going to do with that hammer. Cole hated that hammer, hated knowing that this poor woman’s life was on a collision course with that horrid, blunt tool. The police had found the hammer in the same Dumpster where they’d found her body. As her eyes drifted over the hammer, Cole wanted to stop. He had an urge to pull himself out of that memory. He wanted to skip this part and go right to swimming in the woman’s other memories, but he couldn’t. Not yet. He had to stay present, to focus on what happened next, to follow it through to the end. As horrid as it was, he had to focus on the hammer. He’d seen that hammer bagged in evidence, chunks of dried blood still covering its face and matted blond hair still tangled up in its claw. The hammer lying on the table was clean; no blood, no tangled hair. Not yet. The blood was still pumping through the woman’s body. The hair was still on her head. Cole thought about trying to slow the memory down so that he wouldn’t miss any details, so that he could take everything in. Even that was risky. If he wanted the memory to be true, he had to let it come naturally. Cole knew how to do this. According to all the records, he’d done it more times than anyone else in the world.

  The ability to recall a specific memory so shortly after the transfer is a learned skill. One that, based on the numbers alone, Cole thought was likely unique to him. For most people, it took time—weeks, even months—to get accustomed to having another person’s memories running around inside their brain. For most people, it took time to learn to locate new memories inside the complex maze of their own minds. Cole was an anomaly, unlikely, he and the other experts thought, ever to be matched. This was his fourteenth transfer, the fourteenth murder victim whose memory Cole had agreed to have injected into his brain when no one else was either willing or able. When someone dies, the neurotrophic factor proteins in their brain stay stable for roughly forty-eight to seventy-two hours, then start to break down. So far, nobody had been able to develop a method for storing a person’s memories outside o
f a human body. So, when a body came in, the cops had forty-eight hours to decide whether or not to call Cole. If they couldn’t locate the victim’s family and didn’t have any strong leads, or if nobody in the family wanted the victim’s memories, or if the family simply wanted the murder solved more than they wanted the memories, that was where Cole came in. So far, his record was perfect. He’d closed all thirteen of his prior cases using the murder victims’ memories.

  The state of New York put a legal limit on the number of memory transfers a person could receive: two. Every state had a limit; Florida’s was the highest at three. Doctors were worried about what inheriting more memories than that might do to someone’s brain. Cole was the singular exception. He got special dispensation from that law because he was “performing an invaluable public service.” That’s what the certificate from the governor said anyway, and Cole wasn’t about to argue with official paperwork.

  Details. Cole tried to stay focused on the details. He didn’t notice anything special about the hammer. It was a standard carpenter’s hammer with a rounded face in the front and a curved, split claw in the back. It had a wooden handle and the head, while clean in the memory, was a bit rusty. Cole craved even a glimpse of the man’s face. If he could just glimpse the man’s face, the job would essentially be over. All he would have to do is match the face to a photo, and then he could go away and begin exploring the rest of the woman’s memories. Just keep watching him, Cole thought. But, even as he thought the words, he could remember how much the woman wanted to look away, how much she wanted to close her eyes and pretend that none of this was happening. Fight it, Cole thought, knowing full well that his thoughts were powerless, that speaking to the woman’s memories served no more purpose than talking to your television set during a horror movie. She would either see the killer’s face in this memory or she wouldn’t. Until then, Cole had to look for other clues, clues that might give him an idea about where the woman was or how she got there or what the man with the hammer wanted from her. Cole had read the medical report. The woman had not been raped. The motive for the murder was unclear from the details that the police had collected about the crime. Stay calm, Cole reminded himself again. What else did she see?

  The man kept whistling that same melancholy song over and over again. “What do you want?” the woman asked as she continued to try to work her hands free, to no avail. “I’ll do whatever you want.” Tears began to pool in her eyes. “I won’t tell anyone. If you let me go, I won’t tell anyone,” she promised. It was a lie. She knew it was a lie. Cole knew it was a lie. The killer must have known it was a lie too. He didn’t answer her. He simply kept on whistling. The woman’s eyes raced around the room. They were in a basement of some sort. The room wasn’t too large, maybe fifteen by fifteen. The walls were all red brick. The floor was concrete. There were no windows. The ceiling was low, maybe eight feet. The killer was tall and thin. He was at least six three, with a slender neck leading down to deeply sloped shoulders. He had brown hair, cropped thin in the back. He was wearing a red-and-black flannel shirt tucked into a pair of jeans that were held up by a tightly cinched belt. The clothes hung on the killer’s body as if they had been purchased for a much heavier man. “Please,” the woman begged. The man’s whistling grew louder, as if he was trying to drown out her voice. “Please,” she repeated, yelling now, finally believing that she might be getting through to him. The whistling stopped. “Please,” she said, one last time, this time in little more than a whisper. Cole’s own heart began to race in sync with the heartbeat of the woman in the memory.

  “There is no sense in pleading,” the man spoke without turning toward her. His voice was thin and reedy. “There is nothing you can say. There is nothing you can offer me. I’m going to do what I’m going to do.” The man’s hand moved toward the hammer.

  “But why?” the woman asked, the fear inside her so strong now that Cole could almost taste it, like a sour metal taste that could never be washed away.

  The man’s hand gripped the handle of the hammer, his fingers tightening around it. “Because I have to,” he answered, and Cole almost believed that he could hear pity in his voice. Then the man lifted the hammer off the table and turned toward the woman.

  Before she could see his face, she closed her eyes. “No,” she said. “No. No. No.” She was trying to wish it all away, to make it stop, but even over her own words she could hear the man’s footsteps draw closer. She opened her eyes one last time after she heard the footsteps stop. When she did, she still didn’t see the man’s face. All she saw was the glint of metal as the hammer came down toward her head with blazing speed. Then darkness. Pain was always difficult to remember, but Cole remembered it then. The pain was intense but mercifully quick. Then it was over.

  Chapter 4

  “It’s not a lot to work with,” Ed said after Cole described the memory over lunch. Ed had been assigned as Cole’s partner on this case. Cole changed partners with almost every case he took. Nobody wanted to get stuck with him long-term, because everything about being his partner was too strange. One of Cole’s early partners said that it felt like working with a dead person trying to solve their own murder. Cole even looked a bit like a ghost with his messy white hair, angular features, and dark, deep-set eyes. Looking at Cole was like staring at a living, breathing film negative. Besides, there wasn’t much glory to be had in these cases. The victims were usually the down-and-out, people living on the fringes of society, unidentified, with no leads and cold trails. That’s why no one else stepped forward to take their memories. Cole made the news for a while after he started working these cases. The tabloids dubbed him the Memory Detective and the Saint of Lost Souls, but the fame faded once the novelty of how he solved the murders wore off. Even then, Cole’s partners rarely got to share in what little glory there was to go around. How could they? All the clues were inside Cole’s head. Nobody could have guessed at the time that this Jane Doe’s memories would hold clues to things far beyond her own murder.

  “No,” Cole admitted without much concern. “It’s not.” Cole stared at Ed for an uncomfortably long stretch of time. Cole knew he made people uneasy when he did this, but he couldn’t help it. He stared at Ed’s face, searching his mind to see what, if anything, he could remember about Ed. He had so many memories in his head now that it was hard to distinguish which he’d made and which he’d inherited. He flashed through them as if flipping through an old photo album, trying to find that one picture that meant something. It took time. He should have been able to find something about Ed. They’d worked for years in the same department. Still, he couldn’t find anything, so he let it go. “Do we have any more facts about the case?” Cole asked, finally averting his eyes from Ed’s face.

  “Still no ID on the body,” Ed told Cole. “We know that she was about nineteen years old. There was no trauma on any part of her body except her wrists and her head.”

  “So there was no struggle getting her into that basement?” Cole said out loud, half asking a question and half making a mental note.

  Ed shook his head. “It doesn’t look like it.”

  “So she probably knew the guy,” Cole said to Ed. “But she couldn’t have known him too well.”

  “How do you know that?” Ed asked.

  “If she knew the guy better, the memory would have been different.”

  “How so?” Ed asked.

  “There would have been more baggage attached,” Cole said. “Even staring at the back of his neck would have triggered more memories. If you really know the person who’s about to kill you, you start running through all the shared memories you have with that person so you can try to understand what’s happening and why. She didn’t do that.”

  “How do you know people do that?”

  Without meaning to, Cole gave Ed a look that sent a chill down Ed’s spine. It only lasted a split second, but it was enough. “I’m sorry,” Ed mumbled. Cole waved it off with a quick nod. “So what do we do now?” Ed aske
d, nervously taking a bite out of his sandwich. Cole had barely touched the food in front of him.

  “We should canvass the neighborhood where we found the body.”

  “We already did that,” Ed replied.

  “Yeah, but now we have a partial description of the killer.”

  “A tall, skinny white guy who wears clothes a few sizes too big for him?”

  “It’s something,” Cole said. What he didn’t tell Ed was that he wasn’t really looking for the killer. He was merely looking for anything that might trigger more memories. He only knew one way to do his job, and this was it. There were no eyewitnesses, no forensics, no labs, just memories. He’d started with less before.

  “Okay,” Ed agreed. “I can ask around the neighborhood to see if anyone knows someone that fits that description.”

  “Good,” Cole said. “If you hear anything, let me know right away and I’ll come by. Anything.”

  “Okay,” Ed said, somewhat relieved that he and Cole were splitting up. “And what are you going to do?”

  “There are more memories,” Cole answered. “I just need to find them.”

  Chapter 5

  Fergus waited until the jet was in the air before making the call. They rarely ran into issues with the private jet, but he’d hate to have to interrupt a call with a client because of a security problem. After all, they were still putting a living, incapacitated body on an airplane to fly it a quarter of the way around the world. The truth is, there isn’t much that you can’t get onto a private jet. This jet had a special room in the back for their special cargo. It had a bed equipped with straps to keep the body stable, as well as equipment to administer sedatives and monitor vital signs and brain activity. In the beginning, they had relied on their partners—the talent, the merchandise, whatever you want to call them—to come back when they were summoned. When their time was up and the Company had lined up a customer, they would get a message telling them where to go and when. It worked for the most part; most people honored their deals and kept their end of the bargain. Some, like Pierce, tried to run. The problem was that the runners were often the more valuable properties. Most of the ones who ran were caught, but a few got away. The jet was Fergus’s idea. It was expensive, and the customizations cost about as much as the plane itself. Everything was worth it, though. It only took three or four people like Pierce, valuable talent that might have otherwise gotten away, to pay for the whole thing.