Before I Wake by Anne Frasier Page B

Listen to me. You heard the doctor. You need to rest.”
    The mask he wore slipped a little, and his expression seemed to show real concern. Part of the act.
    She imagined herself as an Olympic judge, holding up her number. She gave him a ten.
    “Let it go,” he said. “You’ve had a head injury. You’re confused. It was dark. You’re looking for things that aren’t there. Looking for things that don’t exist.”
    She would forget it. The choice seemed both right and wrong. It brought relief, but also a nagging unease.
    The air around them smelled like the disinfectant the young doctor had used to scrub her scalp. Her arm felt tingly and hot from the tetanus shot. It would be sore as hell tomorrow.
    Fury was watching her. Very closely.
    Blue, blue windows behind the stars.
    Who had said that? Neil Young?
    Yes . Along with other things she could no longer remember.
    She had the sudden, strange notion that Fury wanted to touch her. She stepped back.
    She had to be careful. She had to watch what she said. And who she said it to. She even had to watch what she was thinking. Especially around Fury. He was reading her mind right now. He was in her brain, strolling around, whistling.
    I should leave. I should get my stuff and get the hell out of here.
    She smiled at him.
    He smiled back.
    Don’t trust anybody.
    Not even herself. Especially herself. • “Give this a little time,” Fury said. “You just got here. What do you have to go back to?”
    “Why do you keep saying that? I had a life.”
    “You were running.”
    “I wasn’t running. I was trying to endure . There’s a big difference.” She examined his face closely. “You’re afraid of them.”
    His brows drew together in puzzlement. “What are you talking about?”
    “The tanks. I saw it in your face when I said I wanted to see them.”
    “That’s nonsense.”
    But he was suddenly nervous. It wasn’t blatantly obvious, but she was still good at reading people, and Fury was nervous. “You’ve been in one, haven’t you?” she probed.
    He rubbed a hand across the back of his neck. He stared down at his feet.
    After a few moments his head came up and he looked directly at her. It suddenly seemed as if the doors between them had blown wide open. She could see all the way to his soul. And what she saw was fear. Raw fear.
    She suddenly knew where he’d gotten the gray hair. Not from a cadaver’s hand, but from an isolation tank. He’d done time just like she had.
    The doors slammed shut.
    “The tanks are relics of the past,” he said with conviction. “They don’t use them anymore. Nobody uses them.”

 
Chapter 10
    Framed covers of Time and Newsweek hung on the wall of Dr. Harris’s office.
    Dr. Phillip Harris, Ph.D. and Head of Psychiatric Research at the Webber Institute, Wins Nobel Prize for Medicine.
    Arden leaned close to check the dates on the magazines. Three years ago. The recognition had been for his studies in isolation therapy. Which was why the FBI had looked him up in the first place. They’d wanted the best.
    But then, the guy who’d invented the lobotomy had also won a Nobel Prize.
    It was a widespread belief that psychiatrists became psychiatrists because they themselves had wounded psyches in need of repair. Arden believed that to be true, but there were also the researchers, the doctors whose egos told them they were the sanest people on the planet. Those guys were after something other than an answer to their own phobias and anxieties. That’s where Harris fit in. He was looking for acclaim from his peers and the world.
    She’d been waiting fifteen minutes.
    She sat back down in the leather chair across from a massive mahogany desk. Two minutes later she got up again to examine a photo on the wall.
    The photo was of Harris’s research team, dwarfed by the old hospital behind them. Most of them wore white lab coats. What looked to be Harris’s wife and two daughters stood nearby.
    The office door opened.
    Arden’s