Invisible Threads--Chapter 27

Writer's Note: Please read the previous chapters and prologue of Invisible Threads before reading this.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Jim Harriman sat on the bed in his hotel room and held in a cry of triumph. He was free! He had killed a person and spent the entire previous day rubbing shoulders with cops who never gave him a second glance. It was like a successful trick. He had gotten through it and the audience had only seen the illusion. They had missed the reality.

There clearly was no videotape - no evidence of any kind that he was even at the facility. No one was checking his alibi because he was never there in the first place. He didn't allow himself to believe that he was completely off the hook. The trap room remained off limits as the police lab techs gathered evidence and looked for his DNA. But his DNA could have been there from a reconnaissance in preparation for a performance. With each passing hour, the chances for him being caught were decreasing.

He had a name for his victim: Lacy Birkland. It didn't mean much to him. He had seen her picture on the 'in memory' posters some do-gooder had posted around the backstage area. And he vaguely remembered her from his stage walk. They had exchanged two or three sentences. He hadn't gotten a look at her face in the trap room - just saw the back of her head and the blood.

Every decision now was calculated. He had to keep selling the illusion. What would a person who did not know the woman well wear to her memorial service? He had not brought a huge wardrobe but did have a simple blue coat that he could wear with grey trousers and a white shirt. He considered wearing a tie and then changed his mind and then changed it back. He had brought three ties and they were all somewhat colorful. He chose the most subdued and put it on. He stood in front of the mirror. The ensemble showed an effort at respect without going out and spending money. It would have been what he would have chosen if he were truly uninvolved.

When he got there, he would be appropriately subdued but not overly emotional. He would nod and say the right things as the vapid theater types attempted to emote their way through the event. He would do what magicians did best--disappear.

***

Al felt like hell, looked like hell, and was ready to give hell to anybody who got in her way. Her need for sleep was reaching desperation levels but would have to be put off through the weekend. The doors were opening for the audience in 60 minutes and curtain was in 90.

One of the interns stuck his head into the booth. She could probably remember his name but right now didn't have the energy.

"Al?"

"Yes." Her effort at a smile fell short.

"Lacy's parents are here."

"Say what?"

"Lacy's parents are waiting."

"Who invited them?"

"I thought you did."

Yes. She did. God, she was tired. "They're here?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

"Down by the stage."

Al stood from her chair and looked through the window down to the main floor. A couple was standing there. The woman leaned against the man, and he had his arm around her shoulders.

"Okay. Thank you."

She got up with her mind in a whirl. What was she going to say? What could she say? She did not want to do this but had to bite the bullet. She headed to the main floor by the same route she always took but the walk down was different. Usually, she would be hearing all of the different conversations going on as she passed. Listening for nuance and tone that might indicate a problem. But she heard none. The voices were there but her mind was closed to everything other than the two people who waited for her at the stage.

They spotted her as she started down the long aisle. They didn't move but just looked at her expectantly as she made her way.

The seemingly eternal walk ended with Al standing in front of them. "Mr. and Mrs. Birkland, I'm Alyson Parker."

Mrs. Birkland was apparently the spokesperson of the couple. "May we call you Al? Lacy spoke so much about you that we feel we know you."

"She did?"

The father's eyes were red. He forced a small smile and spoke: "I wish she talked about me the way she would talk about you. She said she learned more from you in a day than everyone else she ever..." His voice broke and he choked back a sob.

His wife continued, "She said that she couldn't have hoped for a better mentor."

Al's iron constitution held for a few seconds before it broke and tears began streaming down her face. These people whom she had never before met held out their arms and she fell into them and the three of them hugged each other and cried.

Everything in the auditorium stopped. People had seen Al Parker frustrated, angry, concerned, yelling, storming, and as a force to be reckoned with. But nobody... NOBODY... had ever seen her cry. The crew as a body suddenly felt the loss of one of their own. All work stopped. Silence reigned.

Cherie and Gary were backstage and couldn't see out front but she reached out and placed her hand against Gary's chest, stopping him. He looked around. Everything was quieter than usual.

"What's going on?" Gary whispered.

Cherie matched the whisper: "I don't know. Let's just stay here for now."

Everything stopped.

Jim Harriman came in through the exterior stage door and found the rear of the cloister of people. He had to step sideways to make room as some more contestants came in behind him. Was this it? Were they holding people here to make the arrest?

They all waited, so he waited. Just one of the group. Nothing special. Maintain the illusion.

Al broke the embrace and stepped back. As she tried to retrieve her hands, Mrs. Birkland reached out and grabbed her left hand to held it for a few seconds longer. Al returned the grip and then relaxed it. Mrs. Birkland let go.

Al took a small step back. "The memorial will be the first thing on. It will be in about..." She checked her watch "...an hour and fifteen minutes. Please feel free to go where you want to go, see what you want to see, and speak with whoever you want to speak with. This was your daughter's place."

The wife retained her position as spokesman: "Thank you."

Al turned and began walking back up the aisle toward the booth. This was your daughter's place? What the hell did that mean? It felt right to say, but she had no clue. She looked around and saw all of the crew standing and waiting. She stopped at one of the electricians on the floor and leaned over to him as she passed.

"Get back to work."

He nodded and did so. Everyone else took the cue and within seconds the buzz of the room returned, and things were back to normal. There were a million things to do and seventy-five minutes in which to do them.

***

Detective Janus was muttering under his breath as he reviewed his notes. "This case is an amazing load of crap."

It had spent a full day as Category B Felony Battery which was not his problem and then, after the crime scene had been released and all of the witnesses given a chance to compare notes, it became a homicide and was dropped on his desk.

He was sitting in the coroner's office, they had briefly spoken on the phone earlier in the day but now that he had a preliminary autopsy in hand, it was time for a full interview. They were not standing out in the morgue next to the cadaver. There was no reason for such theatrics. Janus wouldn't know a kidney from a spleen. But the small, cramped office still smelled strongly of chemicals and stale breath. The coroner really needed to see a dentist.

Janus had a paper copy of the report in hand, but the doctor turned his computer monitor and was gesturing at the screen. "The cause of death was a post-traumatic intracranial aneurysm due to closed head injury."

Janus found the words on the paper. "I've heard the word aneurysm, but never had one as a cause of death before."

"It's pretty rare for it to happen this way."

"Lucky me."

The doctor scrolled to an X-ray and pointed at a white spot, "The head injury slightly shifted this section of her skull. That made an artery in her brain rub against a hard edge of bone. The wall of the artery was gradually weakened. When she stood up in the hospital, the pressure shifted in her brain just enough for the artery to burst and she died."

The detective shuffled between the five pages of the report. "Any evidence on the body which might lead me to the killer?"

The doctor shook his head, "I haven't found anything. Other than hitting her with the board, the assailant does not seem to have touched her."

"So, he hit her with a board and then left her to die."

"Those are lawyer words. The medical words are in the preliminary report. I will have the final in about two weeks after the labs come back."

Janus walked out and sat in his car. The temperature was in the seventies so he rolled down the window as he tucked the autopsy report into the woefully thin case file. The folks in Tourist Safety were undermanned and underfunded but the file he had been given had holes in it big enough to push an elephant through sideways.

To them, of course, it was a battery case, and their main concern was making sure that the tourists using the hotel were kept safe. They were looking for ways to shore up the security of the place more than ways to catch the attacker. That all changed when the victim died, and the case moved to Homicide. Now he needed to catch the killer and build a case to give the DA what they needed for a guilty verdict. With what he had in hand, that was unlikely to happen. And the unsolved case was going to be logged against him. That's all he needed with promotion boards coming up.

***

Jim Harriman had been distracted by the continued police presence when he had come for the memorial. He had forced himself to stay and watch the morning set. It included a string of various acts which he considered to be no competition.

He spent more of his energy watching the various police officers as they moved through the theater and occasionally picking someone and escorting them out toward the conference rooms. Sitting on the aisle in the balcony, he had deliberately made himself as visible as possible to test his theory that he was not a suspect. Not so much as a glance came his way.

***

After the memorial, the contestants scheduled for that morning went back to the green rooms. Some of the others made their way to empty seats in the balcony while the rest - Like Gary and Cherie - left the theater in order to put the day to the best use possible. It was Friday and Gary was scheduled for the afternoon set on Saturday which made the rest of the day free.

But, as the day wore on, it did not feel free at all.

They went over and over and over both of his remaining performances. And the flow charts. And then more on the performances. This was annoying, frustrating, and exhausting but not unusual. What wore down Gary the most was Cherie's demeanor. She was polite and professional with no foul language. No yelling. No exasperated sighs. No hitting. No storming out of the room. No mega-pouts. She was not herself.

He kept waiting for some chink in her armor. Something to break through and show him the Cherie he wanted back. He even deliberately flubbed lines and made specific mistakes which he knew to be her pet peeves. He moved away from the audience on his opening line. She hated that and it had always been good for an oath-laden outburst in the past.

But today she just said, "You know better than that. Please do it again."

At lunchtime, she said, "Okay. Let's take a one-hour break for lunch." And then she left him alone. The line at Wendy's was long but he did find a table available and sat and read a science fiction novel while he ate his food. He was a couple of minutes late getting back to the room and she was waiting for him.

She greeted him with: "Please be careful of your time, we have a lot to get accomplished."

***

Harriman left the theater to go to the airport and pick up the kid who was assisting him with his finale act in two days. The kid would need rehearsal so that would take up the rest of his day. His performance for tomorrow was ready. No need to risk over-rehearsal on it. Keep it fresh.

The kid had flown in alone. Harriman had provided just the one ticket and the mother couldn't afford to accompany him. If she could afford a plane ticket, she never would have agreed to her son taking the job. Her agreement included a promise to hunt Harriman down and kill him if anything happened to her son. She would make a hell of an agent.

Harriman couldn't afford a second hotel room in the show hotel, but he was not going to push his luck so far as to share a room with an underage boy. So, he had paid for a motel room a few blocks off The Strip and moved into it. The kid would get the fancy digs and he would slum it in the motel. That would play well in his bio.

He had only met the kid twice, so he took a placard with "Calvin Thomas" written on it to the airport. That turned out to be good since he didn't recognize the young man decked out in Philadelphia 76ers paraphernalia that walked up to him. He seemed to be taller than Harriman remembered. He probably was.

The rehearsal went better than expected. The kid remembered his lines and his parts to the illusion. A few refresher run-throughs and things were looking good. After dinner, he had walked the kid up to the hotel room. The kid went crazy.

"Look at how big the bed is!

"You can see everything from this window!

"There's a little safe in here! Can I put something into it?!"

And multiple other sentences that all ended in exclamation points.

He finally got the boy's attention and provided a stern list of directions: "Do not leave the room. Do not let anyone into the room. Do not break anything in the room. Be bathed, dressed, and ready by 6:00 AM." He called the boy's mother and handed the phone to him. The kid excitedly spewed words like a machine gun into the phone. After a few minutes, he said "Okay" And handed the phone back.

"My mom wants to speak with you."

"Yes, Jadonna?"

"It sounds like he's having the time of his life."

"He's a good guy." The kid was all right, but it never hurt to put on the 'good guy' act in case she was interviewed one day soon.

"Thank you. And you're going to call me tomorrow night?"

"Yes. Of course. Now, I've got to get back to my room and your son has got to make some attempt at getting some sleep."

She laughed a slightly nervous laugh. "Good luck with that." She hung up. Jim stuck the phone in his pocket.

"Hey Calvin. Try to get some sleep."

"Okay." Calvin returned to pressing his nose against the window.

His mother was right. Good luck with that.

***

At the end of the afternoon, Gary was tired, bored, and surly from the repetitive work. Cherie let his passive-aggressive barbs go unanswered and finally, at precisely six o'clock, she announced, "That's it. You're ready. The rest of the night is yours."

And again, she left.

After the door closed behind her, Gary sat on the bed and hugged a pillow against his chest. He was now sure that after Sunday, he would never see Cherie again. He went through another of the processes that his therapists had taught - naming his feelings. The first was sadness. But it wasn't just that. It was loss - losing something vital that he would never get back. Gary then felt a flashback from the dark times: depression. The soul-sucking abyss into which he had descended for three years after his father's death.

The familiar lethargy crept out from his subconscious and began to envelope him. And he wanted to crawl up into it, waiting for these feelings to pass. But he knew they wouldn't. Lethargy was not a warm embrace. It was an enemy trying to lure him in. Like it had last time until it took drugs and therapy to bring him back. He had fought that battle and thought it won. But the unconquered foe was back.

Cherie was not his father. She was a woman who he had met a few short weeks ago and now she was a significant part of his life. Cherie made no effort to understand him but, in her own way, she accepted him. She let him be who he was. And then she complained bitterly about it. He was losing her, but she was not dying. With her being alive, there was hope.

He didn't have time for therapy nor did he have access to drugs. The only weapon left to combat depression was activity. It would not hold up for very long. But maybe it would last long enough for him to come to terms with the fact that he had driven her away. If not, he would go to the clinic at the University and start the process again. But until then, he would keep moving.

He stood from the bed, left the hotel, and walked. He walked for hours. Thinking about his experiments and the math. Recording notes to himself when something seemed promising. He recited his lines from both of his remaining performances until there were no hesitations and no sense of rushing. Just a steady cadence with the punctuation at the correct, memorized points. He visualized the performances as Cherie had taught him. Picturing them in his mind.

The long walk accomplished one thing: when he returned to the hotel room, his tired mind and body fell asleep, and he slept dreamlessly.