Brady remembers a poster he had in his room when he was a boy: If life hands you lemons, make lemonade! Words to live by, especially when you kept in mind that the only way to make them into lemonade was to squeeze the hell out of them.
He grabs Z-Boy’s old but serviceable flip phone and once again dials Freddi’s number from memory.
14
Freddi gives a small scream when “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” starts tootling away from somewhere in the apartment. Holly puts a gentling hand on her shoulder and looks a question at Hodges. He nods and follows the sound, with Jerome on his heels. Her phone is on top of her dresser, amid a clutter of hand cream, Zig-Zag rolling papers, roach clips, and not one but two good-sized bags of pot.
The screen says Z-BOY, but Z-Boy, once known as Library Al Brooks, is currently in police custody and not likely to be making any calls.
“Hello?” Hodges says. “Is that you, Dr. Babineau?”
Nothing . . . or almost. Hodges can hear breathing.
“Or should I call you Dr. Z?”
Nothing.
“How about Brady, will that work?” He still can’t quite believe this in spite of everything Freddi has told them, but he can believe that Babineau has gone schizo, and actually thinks that’s who he is. “Is it you, asshole?”
The sound of the breathing continues for another two or three seconds, then it’s gone. The connection has been broken.
15
“It’s possible, you know,” Holly says. She has joined them in Freddi’s cluttered bedroom. “That it really could be Brady, I mean. Personality projection is well documented. In fact, it’s the second-most-common cause of so-called demonic possession. The most common being schizophrenia. I saw a documentary about it on—”
“No,” Hodges says. “Not possible. Not.”
“Don’t blind yourself to the idea. Don’t be like Miss Pretty Gray Eyes.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Oh God, now the tendrils of pain are reaching all the way down to his balls.
“That you shouldn’t turn away from the evidence just because it points in a direction you don’t want to go. You know Brady was different when he regained consciousness. He came back with certain abilities most people don’t have. Telekinesis may only have been one of them.”
“I never saw him actually moving shit around.”
“But you believe the nurses who did. Don’t you?”
Hodges is silent, head lowered, thinking.
“Answer her,” Jerome says. His tone is mild, but Hodges can hear impatience underneath.
“Yeah. I believed at least some of them. The levelheaded ones like Becky Helmington. Their stories matched up too well to be fabrications.”
“Look at me, Bill.”
This request—no, this command—coming from Holly Gibney is so unusual that he raises his head.
“Do you really believe Babineau reconfigured the Zappits and set up that website?”
“I don’t have to believe it. He got Freddi to do those things.”
“Not the website,” a tired voice says.
They look around. Freddi is standing in the doorway.
“If I’d set it up, I could shut it down. I just got a thumb drive with all the website goodies on it from Dr. Z. Plugged it in and uploaded it. But once he was gone, I did a little investigating.”
“Started with a DNS lookup, right?” Holly says.
Freddi nods. “Girl’s got some skills.”
To Hodges, Holly says, “DNS stands for Domain Name Server. It hops from one server to the next, like using stepping-stones to cross a creek, asking ‘Do you know this site?’ It keeps going and keeps asking until it finds the right server.” Then, to Freddi: “But once you found the IP address, you still couldn’t get in?”
“Nope.”
Holly says, “I’m sure Babineau knows a lot about human brains, but I doubt very much if he has the computer smarts to lock up a website like that.”
“I was just hired help,” Freddi says. “It was Z-Boy who brought me the program for retooling the Zappits, written down like a recipe for coffee cake, or something, and I’d bet you a thousand dollars that all he knows about computers is how to turn them on—assuming he can find the button in back—and navigate to his favorite porn sites.”
Hodges believes her about that much. He’s not sure the police will when they finally catch hold of this thing, but Hodges does. And . . . Don’t be like Miss Pretty Gray Eyes.
That stung. It stung like hell.
“Also,” Freddi says, “there was a double dot after each step in the program directions. Brady used to do that. I think he learned it when he was taking computer classes in high school.”
Holly grabs Hodges’s wrists. There’s blood on one of her hands, from patching Freddi’s wound. Along with her other bells and whistles, Holly is a clean-freak, and that she’s neglected to wash the blood off says all that needs to be said about how fiercely she’s working this.
“Babineau was giving Hartsfield experimental drugs, which was unethical, but that’s all he was doing, because bringing Brady back was all he was interested in.”