Blindspots Read online

  Why did I run?

  That question had been plaguing him for the past half hour. His only answer: he thought he had a chance. It was as simple as that. All the guards had been chatting near the bus while he and five other convicts were working the east side of I-5, picking up trash, beautifying the roads before the imminent plague of old folks arrived, descending on southern Florida like a horde of locusts.

  Why did I run? Only another year and he would have been up for parole. And it wasn't as if he'd killed someone or robbed a bank or anything. He'd just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. On the beach, of all places. Selling a dime bag to someone he thought was a rich college kid on Spring Break. Instead, he had the bad luck to meet Joe Pearson of the State Police. Nice little sting operation they had going, and it nabbed poor Jake – during only his second week in the business.

  Just his bad luck. Par for the course.

  Why did I run? If not for that chopper, he might have had a chance, he could have been blending in with vacationers on Cocoa Beach right now, scraping together enough cash to strike out for South America – maybe Belize, which to Jake always seemed like a great out of the way place to start a new life. It wasn't like he'd miss the one here. And it wasn't like anyone would miss him.

  He could have been well on his way, if not for that helicopter. Why the hell would they have a helicopter on hand just for a half-dozen harmless convicts out picking up trash? Probably just more of his signature luck – maybe a speed enforcement chopper that just happened to be in the neighborhood. It had found him in just under five minutes. He hadn't even had a chance to change, and in his adrenaline-fueled sprint across the poplar forests and bug-infested swamps, he had all but broadcasted his position in his bright orange jumpsuit.

  Like a starved bloodhound, the helicopter had picked up his scent, and for the past twenty minutes it tracked him mercilessly across the back roads of Cocoa Beach and now into Port Canaveral. The pilots must have called in the motorcycles as well – those Hell's Angels cops capable of going anywhere he could.

  Except maybe the ocean. That one thought kept him going. It was his only chance. Dive in and submerge. Then swim, swim for dear life and let the waves and the tide and the night save his ass.

  He dared a backwards glance, and in the murky, palm-shrouded twilight three bouncing headlights danced upon the backs of hills.

  All those hours in the prison gym were paying off now, but he was almost at the end of his race. Running on exhausted legs, his muscles screaming for rest, he seriously contemplated just giving himself up. Right after this one last try, he thought as he headed toward the crashing surf. In seconds, he cleared the brush and came upon a beach strewn with clumps of seaweed, empty Budweiser cans and a few scraggly-looking gulls feasting on a washed-up, eyeless grouper.

  The bikes were still gaining, their motors howling. Ahead, the Atlantic stretched out into a violet-raspberry horizon while two freighters and a casino cruise ship lazily drifted off to sea. Toward the north stood the flickering red lights of Kennedy's launch platform, and Jake had a twinge of despair thinking of all the launches he had witnessed in the past, all the miraculous ascensions – how he loved just gazing at the rising vessels, wishing he could be among the crew, escaping the shackles of this world, escaping his bad luck and all its tragic consequences…

  Bright headlights, bouncing from his right, stabbed at his eyes just as the helicopter's spotlight ensnared him from above. A jeep roared to a stop in front of him, skidding into the tide and blocking off his escape.

  He slid, staggered, and then fell to his knees, trapped in the concentration of beams as the tide crashed into his weary legs and stung his face.

  So close!

  Behind him, the three cycles leapt over the dunes, bounded onto the beach and dug into the sand. He imagined laughter from under the helmets. They drove in circles around him as the tide pulled back, then cut their engines and leapt off their bikes, approaching in a semi-circle. The doors to the jeep opened and two more men in blue burst out.

  Rooted in the helicopter's spotlight, Jake involuntarily raised his hands. He closed his eyes and imagined he had just set foot back on Earth, stepping off the Space Shuttle to cheers, flashbulbs and raining confetti.

  He almost couldn't hear the voice yelling at him, but couldn't make out the words until the chopper ascended and flew off into the night, its work done.

  "…in deep shit now, son! Knew you were nothin' but a fuckin' loser."

  Jake opened his eyes. Five guns were pointed at him. Three men still had their helmets on, and Jake focused on their shiny faceplates, the stabbing moon-like reflections beaming off their visors; he stared at those lights rather than glance at the faces of the two men from the jeeps.

  "And to think, you almost made it to parole."

  He recognized the voice of Officer Thomas Fenrik, his chief tormentor back at the Cocoa Community Correctional Facility. The hulking guard took immense delight in reminding Jake daily of his lot in life, and acted as if it was his sacred privilege to psychologically abuse him whenever possible. Although lately, his taunts were having less than the intended effect.

  "Sorry," Jake said, and paused to catch his breath. "Just thought you guys needed a little exercise."

  "Oh," said Fenrik, "we'll be getting our exercise when you're back in detention. Away from the cameras, you'll wish you were never born."

  Maybe I already do, Jake thought, and then winced, recalling a houseboat in the Everglades, a series of nightly beatings, abuse… and worse. Nothing could top what I've already been through, asshole.

  The winds died and another surge of the Atlantic pounded his legs, almost protectively – as if trying to nudge away the men coming with handcuffs. Jake put his hands behind his back and tried not to look, but in the end, as always, he couldn't resist. Had to glimpse at each one in turn, like he did with everyone he met, every time. Search their faces, look at the out-of-focus features and try to force those obtuse elements to resolve, to associate with something, anything from his memory.

  But he failed, just like he had failed at everything in his life.

  When he looked now at their faces, it was the same as every other time. There was nothing there, nothing recognizable. The bikers had taken off their helmets, and he was surrounded by faceless outsiders, strangers coming for him in the night.

  3.

  The Daedalus Institute, Northern Vermont – November 25

  Dr. Gabriel Sterling was furious. For the third time in two days Alexa Pearl had ignored his demands that she stay away from his patients. But this was the last straw. She was in with Franklin Baynes, subjecting the poor man to more of her pointless experiments.

  When she had first arrived, Gabriel had humored Alexa. She was, after all, the acting head of the Daedalus Institute – a fact he still couldn't accept, even after all these years. Eight years ago, to his utter astonishment, she had shown up out of the blue. Only twenty-one years old at the time, Alexa arrived with the deed, the papers, and the key to a basement vault that had been locked before the passing of Gabriel's late father – Atticus Sterling, the initial founder of the Daedalus Institute.

  The fact that Alexa Pearl had neither prior psychological training nor degrees of any kind was not Gabriel's major problem with his new boss. The fact that she was blind since birth wasn't the issue. What he couldn't tolerate was her complete lack of respect for his position, for his thirty-plus years of schooling and experience, for the two decades he had struggled after his father's passing to not only maintain the Daedalus Institute but to restore its badly-maligned reputation.

  Only to lose it all to her. A final slap in the face from a father who had never showed him an ounce of respect. Gabriel had always wondered if his father maybe had another family somewhere, and since Alexa's arrival he had given serious thought to the possibility that she might be his own half-sister or something. At times, it felt like the only thing that made sense.

  How else did she wind u
p with that damned key? The vault in the basement had been sealed tight; its titanium bank-style door had defied Gabriel's every attempt at entrance, forcing him to wait and act merely as caretaker all those years until the eventual claimholder would come. Would that he had dynamited the damn thing.

  Gabriel had brought up the subject when he had visited his mother in her nursing home last Christmas; but Darcy Sterling, nearly eighty now and no longer quite with it, wasn't in the mood to talk, especially about her late husband's potential infidelities. She had her own issues with Atticus, Gabriel knew. But that still left him with the mysterious Alexa Pearl.

  His career, hell, his whole life, was in Alexa's dangerously inexperienced hands. Gabriel's staff didn't know what to make of her either, this blind woman and her hand-picked team of associates: three men and two women, each of them with disturbing snake tattoos on their necks – as if branded, part of a brotherhood. Her perennial favorites were Lance Critchwell, a bald-headed man built like a tugboat, and Ursula Markoff, a blonde with the body of a showgirl and the warmth of an ice trawler; these two followed Alexa everywhere, and lately they had taken to wearing all black: cotton sweaters or wool turtlenecks, black khakis and shoes – going monotone as if deferring to their boss's lack of sight.

  The other staff members – the orderlies and nurses Gabriel liked to consider his own, those who had been here through the years – were just as baffled by Alexa; and surely they felt just as betrayed.

  Now, he took the central stairs two at a time, winding around above the lobby until reaching the second floor. The Daedalus Institute was a renovated nineteenth-century gothic mansion built with red sandstone blocks. Slate rooftops were adorned with pinnacles, peaks and awnings; Notre Dame-like spires reigned over each corner, towers complete with stone gargoyles. Inside, the floors were checkerboard marble, the windows crossed with wrought-iron frames. Walls and shelves were made of thick African mahogany.

  It was more like the House of Usher than a house of solace, but still, it had become something like home for the current residents, many of them originally seeking only temporary help but finding the fresh mountain air and the scintillating views too comforting to leave. They came for therapy, to be among others like themselves, to learn new techniques for coping. On the five levels, thirty once spacious rooms had been converted into eighty-four smaller living areas, little more than monastic dorm rooms. They were comfortable, yet retained little of their previous luxury.

  But the views out of every window were magnificent – white-crested peaks, dazzling seas of lush evergreen forests. In the winter, when the snow piled up, the grounds sparkled in the sun and shimmered under the star-streaked moonlight.

  Gabriel rushed into a wide, sun-lit central hallway. His tweed sports jacket flapped behind him as he passed a nurse's station without looking at the two orderlies. In front of the door to Franklin's room, Ursula Markoff stood, arms crossed under her firm breasts which strained against her V-neck sweater.

  Gabriel slowed. "Is Alexa still in there with him?"

  "Yes," Ursula said coyly, her blue eyes refusing to blink, exuding a chill like a distant, implacable glacier. She made no move to get out of his way. "Since one-thirty."

  Shit. Gabriel glanced at his watch. Two hours.

  He hoped he wasn't too late.

  Shoving Ursula aside, Gabriel barged in, making sure he banged the door hard against the inside wall.

  He took in the scene in one glance, but already knew what he would find. Franklin Baynes sat hunched over in his chair, his head lolling to the side. Electrodes were hooked to the raw patches around his temples, clinging like flypaper to his skin while he mutely stared at the images projected on the white wall.

  A sequence of photographs – pictures of faces, one after another; each remaining for about five seconds before switching to another face.

  Thick curtains were drawn, the room drenched in shadows that fled as Gabriel opened the door. A monitor was hooked up to a terminal operated by Lance Critchwell, whose bulk obscured the projector and most of the patient's body. Franklin's brainwave patterns scrolled across the black monitor: violet and green lines zigzagging over the screen.

  The shadows fled, then returned as the image on the wall turned all white, then shifted to another wall-sized face.

  Alexa sat in a chair on the other side of Critchwell, in front of an open laptop. Her cane lay across her lap. At first, she presented an air of frailty and sympathy, but upon further study that gave way to the sense that a great inner strength lay coiled up inside her like a spring waiting to be released. She wore small rectangular black glasses, too-tight cotton slacks and a nondescript gray sweater. She presented herself as one absolutely unconcerned for her appearance, and yet Gabriel had seen her appear radiant on more than one occasion – when she needed to impress or to cater to government inspectors, health advisors and politicians.

  He raised his fists. "What the hell are you doing?"

  "Dr. Sterling." Alexa spoke in a subdued tone. "What do you think we're doing? Kindly remove yourself – or stand quietly in the corner until we're finished."

  For all her apparent frailty, she still displayed an unmistakable sense of control, confidence and power, something she exuded whenever she set foot into a room, like an exiled queen returning in triumph

  Gabriel held himself back, keenly aware of Critchwell tensing as if ready to spring to Alexa’s defense; something in his eyes seemed to say: Try it, asshole. Regardless, Gabriel steeled himself and took another step into the room. He’d been pushed around long enough. "Mr. Baynes is my patient, and I didn't authorize more of these tests."

  "I don't need your authorization, Dr. Sterling. Or did you forget who's paying your salary?"

  "What's this going to accomplish? Franklin's mind is a mess. The drugs he's been on--"

  "--Won't interfere with this experiment." Alexa calmly nodded toward Critchwell, who wiped some perspiration off his bald head, tapped some keys, and started the pictures moving again. A face appeared for a few seconds, then another, speeding up now, switching from one to the next as Franklin stared at them, open-mouthed, without reacting. Meanwhile, Critchwell leaned forward and carefully monitored the readout of Franklin's brainwaves.

  Gabriel fumed. Franklin Baynes had come to him ten years ago, a remarkable individual before his condition got the better of him. A renowned Napa Valley winemaker, Baynes was a solitary man who had quietly expanded his family's vineyards and created several award-winning blends of Pinot Noir that had become the talk of the industry. But his success had caught up with him, dragging him out of seclusion, forcing him to mingle, to accept awards, to make speeches.

  It was too much for him. In 1999, on the night he won a gold medal in the West Coast Wine Competition, he looked out over the crowded hall and saw a veritable army of faceless, shifting creatures – subtle, leering monstrosities. He collapsed in a panic attack, his mind seizing up, and when concerned colleagues tried to help, he broke someone's nose and smashed a bottle over a woman's head.

  Gabriel had read about Franklin's case several days later. He immediately flew out to the psychiatric hospital outside of Malibu, where he diagnosed Baynes with Type I Prosopagnosia, commonly called 'Face Blindness' – a condition marked by the inability to recognize faces. Prosopagnosiacs suffered a lack of facial perception, and were unable to resolve varying degrees of facial details and features – regardless of how long they studied the person, and regardless of who that person was. Friends, relatives – their own parents – no one was exempt. Most patients with Franklin's level of the condition described only seeing a blur – a blur of nothingness where a person's face should have been.

  Some developed Prosopagnosia after traumatic head injuries or illness, but Franklin had been afflicted with the condition since birth. The Malibu doctors were only too happy to remand Franklin into Gabriel's care, and he had been at Daedalus ever since.

  But then Alexa came, and it was like she was magnetically drawn to F
ranklin. She never showed such a high level of interest in any of the other patients. At least, not after the first few sessions. Gabriel was always puzzled by the patients Alexa seemed to favor as worthy of her attention, the worst-case Prosopagnosiacs, all of them close to her own age, as if maybe she related better to the younger patients. But whatever it was that Alexa was searching for, she hadn't found evidence of it yet – in anyone other than Franklin.

  And it was clearly frustrating her.

  Watching Franklin's brainwave output, Gabriel spoke through his teeth. "There's no response. There's never been a response. You keep showing him faces of other Prosopagnosiacs. Why? Why this test? His pulse, his blood pressure, all normal. You've never had any hits, not a single change in these readings, not with Franklin or anyone else. Not for eight damn years!"

  "Not yet," she said, turning toward him and lowering her sunglasses until her white, clouded eyes seemed to seek him out.

  Gabriel refused to be intimidated. "Why are you wasting everyone's time with this bullshit? Can't we give the other treatments time to work? Let me continue with therapy. Drugs and counseling, I can bring him back, and --"

  Alexa waved her hand as if shooing off an unseen gnat. "This is more important."

  "What is? Subjecting him to images we know he'll never react to? He has Prosopagnosia, and unless you've been treating him with some new drug I don't about, this is useless. He'll never show a response to any of those faces!"

  Gabriel pointed at the screen, but then realized the futility; Alexa obviously couldn't see his gestures. He had to put a stop to this, to take a stand now, as he should have done years ago... Regain control of his institute. What could Alexa do? She couldn't run this place without him.

  As Gabriel started moving toward Franklin, the door opened, letting in a sea of brightness which everyone reacted to except Alexa, who only tilted her chin in the door's direction.