False Memory

could be undone, the game resumed and played to its end.
    He had their cell-phone number but they knew he had it, and they were unlikely to answer it in their current paranoid state of mind. And he could activate only one at a time by phone, thereby immediately alerting the one who was listening. Too risky.
    Finding them was the trick. They were running, alert and wary, and they would stay well hidden until they boarded the flight to New Mexico in the morning.
    Approaching them in the airport, at the boarding gate, was out of the question. Even if they didn’t flee, he couldn’t activate, quiz, and instruct them in public.
    Once in New Mexico, they were as good as dead.
    When the audiotape began to burn, issuing a noxious stink, the doctor switched on the fireplace gas. Whoosh, and in two minutes, nothing was left of the tape but a sticky residue on the topmost of the ceramic logs.
    He was in a mood, the doctor, and sadness was not the greater component of his mood.
    All the fun had gone out of this game. He had put so much effort into it, so much strategy, but now it would most likely not be played out above the beaches of Malibu, as he had planned.
    He wanted to burn down this house.
    Spite was not his sole motivation, nor was his distaste for the decor. Without spending the better part of a day searching the place inch by inch, he couldn’t be sure that the microcassette with Susan’s accusations was the only evidence against him that Martie and Dusty had accumulated. He didn’t have a day to waste, and burning the house to the ground was the surest way to protect himself.
    Granted, Susan’s message on the tape was insufficient to convict him, not even damning enough to get him indicted. He was, however, a man who never made bargains with the god of chance.
    Torching the house himself was far too risky. Once the fire was set, someone might see him leaving—and be able to identify him one day in court.
    He shut off the fireplace gas.
    Room by room, as he left the house, he extinguished the lights.
    On the back porch, he slipped his spare key under the doormat, where the next visitor would be instructed to look for it.
    Before morning, he would torch the house, but by proxy rather than with his own hands. He had a candidate, programmed and easily reached by phone, who would commit this bit of arson when told to do so, but who would never remember striking the match.
    The night remained wind-rattled.
    On the walk to his car, which was parked three blocks away, the doctor tried to compose a wind haiku, without success.
    Driving past the Rhodeses’ quaint Victorian, he imagined it in flames, and he searched his mind for a seventeen-syllable verse about fire, but the words eluded him.
    Instead, he recalled the lines he had composed extemporaneously and so fluently when, on entering Martie’s office, he had seen the work piled on her desk.
    Busy blue-eyed girl. Busy making Hobbit games. Death waits in Mordor.
    He edited the work, updating it to reflect recent developments:
    Busy blue-eyed girl. Busy playing detective. Death in Santa Fe.

63
    Larger than San Quentin quarters, far different from the drab gray of prison decor, the colorful and overly patterned hotel room felt nonetheless like a cell. In the bath, the tub reminded Martie of Susan soaking in crimson water, though she had been spared the sight of her dead friend. All the windows were permanently sealed, and the pumped-in warm air, even with the thermostat dialed down to the lowest comfort zone, was suffocating. She felt isolated, hunted, all but cornered. Autophobia, which had been simmering at extremely low heat since nine o’clock, seemed about to be reborn as full-blown claustrophobia.
    Action. Action, shaped by intelligence and a moral perspective, is the answer to most problems. So it is written on page 1 of the philosophy of Smilin’ Bob.
    They were taking action, too, although only time would reveal if there was enough intelligence shaping it.
    First, they pored through Roy Closterman’s file on Mark Ahriman, paying special attention to the information dealing with the Pastore murders and with the preschool case in New Mexico. From the Xeroxes of newspaper articles, they extracted names and made a list of those who had suffered and in whose suffering there might be both clues and damning testimony.
    Finished with Closterman’s file, Dusty used Raymond Shaw and the leaf haiku to access Martie and return her to her mind chapel—though first he made a