"Levinson, Paul - Dr Phil D'Amato 02 - The Consciousness Plague 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Levinson Paul)

I turned to her, and she kissed me, full on the lips.
"I won't say I'm sorry I ever doubted you," she eventually said, "because I'm sure I didn't, and I don't remember if I did."
I had already told Jenna about Dugan and his memory recovery and new loss, so she was prepared for what might happen to her. I waited for my own missing memories to come back I wanted every bit of my lost conversation with McNair, especially given his fuzzy rendition of what he later told me we had talked about.
I also worried about valuable subsequent insights I might lose. What should I do? Write down everything I knew or thought I knew about this memory puzzle? I had already been doing that. I had told Jenna exactly where my computer files and index cards were stored three copies, in three different places, for safety's sake. But there were some threads of thought, parts of ideas, quick bits of insight that had half occurred to me when I was nowhere near a computer or an index card, and I never wrote them down....
And what about new connections I was entertaining for the first time in my head? What would happen to those live trains of thought if segments suddenly went missing? Would the trains be knocked completely off-track?
Well, they weren't exactly racing anywhere brilliant as yet, anyway, so maybe I shouldn't worry too much about their derailment.
And I had to give at least some thought to the damn Riverside homicides. Unlike murdered memories, murdered people never came back to life. They deserved my first attention.

ED MONTI, DUGAN, and I were in Dugan's office for the third meeting in a week. Since our procedure was a meeting per murder, the mood was worse than grim. Some of the media were now calling the killer "the Grandson of Sam." Others, aware of the distaff angle, were braying about "the Daughter of Sam." Two different takes on the Son of Sam David Berkowitz, also known as "the .44-Caliber Killer" who had held the city hostage with a series of lovers' lane-like murders in the summer of 1977, dramatized in Spike Lee's movie Summer of Sam in the 1990sЕ.
Count on the media to whip the city up into a new frenzy. Though I suppose it was good that people were scared to death of Riverside Park. Better being frightened than found dead there.
"It's good that Gonzales got her memory back." Ed grasped for a bright spot.
Dugan shifted uncomfortably. He preferred not talking about anyone's memory loss or recovery if he could help it. He forced himself. "Won't help much at this point," he said. "Enough people were witness to her memory lapse that anything she recalls now is suspect. And she didn't really see a lot in the first place. Rubin was just aggravated because losing her testimony about the conditions of that first murder the position of the body, and all of that seemed like a blow then, when there was just one murder. Not a good way to begin to gather evidence for a case. Little did we know..."
That one homicide would turn into five now, with no suspects or leads at all, except that botched job with Carol Michosky and the spring soon to turn into summer.... Dugan had a quarter of the detective force assigned to this now, carefully sifting through evidence, interviewing any witnesses they could find, and they hadn't come up with a single worthwhile lead.
"Phil, am I boring you with all of this?" Dugan asked, irritated.
"No, sorry," I replied. "I was just thinking that now that school is almost out, maybe we'll get a temporary pause, at least, in the killings." Ed's idea of accentuating the minutely positive seemed the best I could do in these circumstances.
"Wonderful," Dugan said. "And then what? They'll start up again in the middle of September?"
"Actually, most colleges begin at the end of August these days," Ed supplied. "My daughter hates it."
Not the news Dugan wanted to hear. He practically spat at us. "The mayor's furious about this did I tell you that?"
"Don't take this the wrong way, Jack, but there's only so much Forensics can do here," Ed said. "You we've got a problem in Detection, if we can't come up with any suspects. I'm not trying to beg off, believe me, but "
Dugan scowled. "We're on Detection's ass about this, every day, don't you worry. I'm not asking you guys for corroborative evidence I know we have no suspects or even decent leads to corroborate. But anything you could give us to get us started, to point us in a direction, would be very appreciated at this point."
I nodded, sympathetically. Ed was technically right. We could examine corpses all we wanted, but unless our detectives gave us some leads and angles to play against, our evidence usually amounted to very little. We couldn't make things up that weren't there. Still, it wasn't in my nature to draw sharp lines between "your work" and "my work." The real world isn't like that. Life and death were stubbornly non-Euclidean.
"Well, the later murders support what we thought about the earlier ones," I said, "though we still have no real proof. The bodies are all naked, which suggests some kind of sexual motive, but they're not raped or even molested in any way that we can see. The strangulations are quick no apparent struggle which is another reason why the Michosky attack is the oddball. But the speed and efficiency suggest a surety of purpose these aren't spur-of-the-moment crimes and some physical strength in the murderer, and likely some knowledge of human anatomy."
"We were thinking maybe a nurse," Ed said.
Dugan nodded. This was old ground, but he appreciated the recitation. "A goddamn female Jack the Ripper...."
"Well, at the very least, a strong, intelligent, driven woman," I said. "Assuming we're right about the attacker being a woman. Could be a gay man. Hell, the victims being undressed might have nothing to do with sex after all which would mean the attacker could be anyone."
"But Michosky saw a woman," Dugan said.
"I wouldn't build a case on that," I said. "Lots of things don't add up in that episode."
Dugan sighed. "See, that's why I called you back for that one," he said to me. "I had a feeling this memory thing would rear its head again in this ugly case." He stopped, then laughed suddenly, briefly, without humor. "Who knows, maybe the murderer fell out with her lover because one of them forgot something important, personal, and that's what started this whole thing going."
"So you do, what, another canvass of lesbian bars to see if you can find any word of a shattered relationship?" Ed interjected. "That was one of the first things you did, and it turned up empty."
"So maybe we do it again," Dugan said. "I don't know. We reexamine all the evidence, go over whatever few leads we have. There's got to be something there something that we overlooked. Probably someone involved in this, one of the people we talked to, was lying that's usually the best place to start again."
I agreed. Someone probably was lying. That, or forgetting. Funny, but that was just the conclusion I had come to in my memory investigation.

"LINDISFARNE" WAS THE first thing that came back to me the first piece of the missing conversation I had had on the phone with McNair. It also came back to me how sick and feverish I had felt then. I wondered if that would get in the way of my remembering anything more.
I put a call in to McNair. I had tried to get in touch with him a few times since my chat with Andy on Cape Cod, but Rhonda had told me he was "on retreat," someplace up in the mountains in Colorado.
I was glad to hear him answer the phone.
"What can you tell me about Lindisfarne?" I asked, after a quick exchange of pleasantries.
"Lindisfarne?"
"Yeah," I replied. "I just recalled your saying something about it in the conversation we had when I was sick."
He started coughing. I realized that he had been clearing his throat and coughing on and off since he'd picked up the phone.
"Still got that cough?" I added, unhelpfully.
"These things take time," he said, and coughed again. "Anyway, Lindisfarne, yes, I may have mentioned that in our conversation."
"Well, can you tell me its possible relevance to this memory problem I've been investigating?"
"Hmmm ... tough one," McNair said. "Couldn't say, precisely. It was considered a holy island in the Dark Ages a learned colony of monks and scribes lived there, and it was one of the cutting edges of Christianity on the British Isles at that time. Right off the coast of Northumberland, in northeast England. But I can't see exactly what that might have to with the amnesia you're ... Oh wait, yes, yes..."
"Yes?"
"Well, you were raving on a bit about antibiotics when you were sick I mean, totally understandable, I detest them myself, please don't take offense."
"Absolutely none taken," I assured him.
"Well, yes, I think I mentioned to you that the monks on Lindisfarne may have discovered antibiotics there was a report a few years ago that they used them in their hospital people went there to be cured in those days."
"Really.... What kind of antibiotics?" I asked.
"I'm not sure," McNair responded. "I gather they had some kind of mold farms, or something of the sort."
"Any reports of memory loss at Lindisfarne?" That would have been too good to be true.