Mirror Image

moves were right on target and the subconscious mannerisms eerily reminiscent.
    He let the tape play out. Closing his eyes, Van pinched the bridge of his nose between two of his fingers until it hurt, as if wanting to force the notion out of his head, because what he was thinking was just too weird—“Twilight Zone” time. But the idea was fucking with his mind something fierce and he couldn’t get rid of it, crazy as it was.
    Several days ago he’d walked into Irish’s office. Dropping into one of the armchairs, he’d asked, “Get a chance to watch that tape I gave you?”
    Irish, as usual, was doing six different things at once. He ran his hand over his burred gray hair. “Tape? Oh, the one of Rutledge? Who’ve we got on that human bone pile they found in Comal County?” he had shouted through his office door to a passing reporter.
    “What’d you think about it?” Van asked, once Irish’s attention swung back to him.
    Irish had taken up smoking again since Avery wasn’t there to hound him about it. He seemed to want to make up for lost time. He lit a new cigarette from the smoldering butt of another and spoke through the plume of unfiltered smoke. “About what?”
    “The tape,” Van said testily.
    “Why? You moonlighting as a pollster?”
    “Jesus,” Van had muttered and made to rise. Irish cantankerously signaled him to sit back down. “What’d you want me to look at? Specifically, I mean.”
    “The broad.”
    Irish coughed. “You got the hots for her?”
    Van remembered being annoyed that Irish hadn’t noticed the similarities between Carole Rutledge and Avery Daniels. That should have been an indication of just how ridiculous his thinking was, because nobody knew Avery better than Irish. He had known her for two decades before Van had ever laid eyes on her. Mulishly, however, Irish’s flippancy compelled him to prove himself right.
    “I think she looks a lot like Avery.”
    Irish had been pouring himself a cup of viscous coffee from the hot plate on his littered credenza. He gave Van a sharp glance. “So, what else is new? Somebody remarked on that as soon as Rutledge got into politics and we started seeing him and his wife in the news.”
    “Guess I wasn’t around that day.”
    “Or you were too stoned to remember.”
    “Could be.”
    Irish returned to his desk and sat down heavily. He worked harder than ever, putting in unnecessarily long hours. Everybody in the newsroom talked about it. Work was a panacea for his bereavement. A Catholic, he wouldn’t commit suicide outright, but he would eventually kill himself through too much work, too much booze, too much smoking, too much stress—all the things about which Avery had affectionately berated him.
    “You ever figure out who sent you her jewelry?” Van asked. Irish had confided that bizarre incident to him, and he had thought it strange at the time, but had forgotten about it until he had stood eyeball to eyeball with Carole Rutledge.
    Irish thoughtfully shook his head. “No.”
    “Ever try?”
    “I made a few calls.”
    Obviously, he didn’t want to talk about it. Van was persistent. “And?”
    “I got some asshole on the phone who didn’t want to be bothered. He said that following the crash, things were so chaotic just about anything was possible.”
    Like mixing up bodies?
Van wondered.
    He wanted to ask that question, but didn’t. Irish was coping as best he could with Avery’s death, and he still wasn’t doing very well. He didn’t need to hear Van’s harebrained hypothesis. Besides, even if it were possible, it made no sense. If Avery were alive, she’d be living her life, not somebody else’s.
    So he hadn’t broached the possibility with Irish. His imagination had run amok, that’s all. He’d compiled a bunch of creepy coincidences and shaped them into an outlandish, illogical theory.
    Irish would probably have said that his brains were fried from doing too much dope, which was probably the truth. He was nothing but a bum—a washout. A reprobate. What the fuck did he know?
    But he loaded another of the Rutledge tapes into the VCR anyway.
    * * *
    The first scream woke her. The second registered. The third prompted her to throw off the covers and scramble out of bed.
    Avery grabbed a robe, flung open the door to her bedroom, and charged down the hall toward Mandy’s room. Within seconds of leaving her bed, she was bending over the child’s. Mandy was thrashing her limbs and screaming.
    “Mandy,