David frowned. “What thing?”
“Like a recess, very shallow, like a sixteenth-inch deep. You could hardly detect it, except it was perfectly round, which felt really weird. Creepy. I bent her head farther forward, pulled her hair out of the way, and there was this shiny metal cap, like the size of a quarter, in her skull.”
“Cap?”
“A cap or maybe the flat end of something that was like plugged into a socket.”
“A socket in the back of her skull? I’m supposed to believe that? How many weed brownies did you eat today?”
“Hey, save a bullet, I’m only telling you what I saw, what I thought it might be. It might’ve been something else. How would I know? It was weird shit, whatever it was. Maybe some totally out-there medical condition. All kinds of crazy shit is happening in biotech these days. I watch them science shows, they got stuff going on Frankenstein never would’ve thought of.”
“So what happened when you found this thing in the back of her head?”
“Not what I wanted, for damn sure. I’m fingering the cap or socket, whatever it is, suddenly the bitch comes out of her trance, raises her head, looks me straight in the eyes, coming to life like some cyborg just got its battery charged. Scares the bejesus out of me. She shouts, ‘Who are you? What’re you doing here? Get out, get out.’ I run into the hallway, which was when it tweaks. It bent, dude, like I told you about before.”
“Did she follow you?”
“Only into the hall, not when I ran downstairs to get out.”
“And that’s everything?”
As if chilled, Mathers tucked his legs farther under himself and wrapped his arms around his torso. He looked far younger than he was, like a dissolute twelve-year-old. “Isn’t that enough for you? It was enough weird shit for me.”
David lowered the pistol. “Don’t even think about following me, Richie.”
Mathers’s boyish face crimped with self-pity. “That’s it? I’m bleeding, got no TV no more, a hole in my ottoman, door lock busted, more water damage by the minute, and you just walk out with no offer of compensation?”
“That’s it,” David agreed and left the trailer.
If Mathers considered getting his revolver and following, he thought better of it.
| 86 |
David parked in the viewpoint lot, facing the Pacific.
He didn’t know what to make of what Richard Mathers told him. The stoner wasn’t the most reliable witness; the freak might have misunderstood what he’d seen. David had thought Mathers must be withholding something that would help unravel the truth of Rock Point Lane, but his revelation had only tied more knots in the mystery.
In two nights of intimacy with Maddison, David had not felt the indentation that Mathers claimed to have seen. However, perhaps he had never touched the right place on the back of her head.
Maybe she’d suffered a blow to the skull, damaged bone that required a metal plate. A head injury would explain why she might sometimes lose focus, drift away. But wouldn’t skin have been grafted over it?
Life was getting weirder year by year, but was the world really sliding into an extended episode of Stranger Things? He didn’t think so. He didn’t want to think so.
Richard Mathers’s voice came back to David: All kinds of crazy shit is happening in biotech these days. I watch them science shows, they got stuff going on Frankenstein never would’ve thought of.
Those words stirred from memory something that Gilbert Gurion, the attorney handling the estate of Ephraim and Renata Zabdi, had said in that mansion in Montecito on Monday: Bioprinting . . . recellularize . . . Some people think certain biotech developments, like those related to AI, are a little Frankenstein.
Was that coincidence or something more, that kind of meaningful coincidence called synchronicity?
From his wallet, he extracted the card that Gurion had given him. It provided the attorney’s phone numbers, including his cell.
Ten years earlier, on the night when Emily vanished, there had been poor cell service along this sparsely populated section of the coast. Now, service was immediate, and Gilbert Gurion took the call.
“I’m sorry to bother you after hours, Gil. I’ve been thinking about something you said that is of importance to me as I consider this project.”
“No problem at all. What was it I said?”
“You were talking about bioprinting, recellularization, about the revolutionary applications of biotech, how fast everything is moving.”
“Faster and faster.”