Falling Awake(17)
Author: Jayne Ann Krentz

“Just as well.” She picked up the small cup with both hands, holding it between her fingertips. “Because I’ll let you in on a little secret, Ellis. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since Belvedere let me go. I’ve decided that I don’t want to go back into a lab setting.”

He continued to concentrate on the surfers. “I know that the kind of Level Five dreams Lawson and I asked you to interpret were . . .” He hesitated and took a swallow of tea. “Disturbing.”

“True. But it wasn’t the dreams that disturbed me the most. It was the way both of you withheld information from me.”

That statement got his attention. He turned his head to look at her. “What do you mean? I can’t speak for Lawson, but I made my dream reports as complete as possible.”

“Oh, sure, you both gave me narratives of the dreams, but you didn’t give me any context. I was never told anything about what was going on in the lives of the dreamers and even less about the subjects of the dreams.”

His jaw tightened. “You must have figured out enough about the subjects to realize that they were extremely unpleasant.”

“Of course. But that just made it all the more frustrating.” She spread her hands. “Because I never got any feedback on the results, either. Do you have any idea just how maddening it was to work that way?”

He looked blank. “Feedback?”

“I’m not stupid, Ellis. I may have been stuck in an office on the third floor at the Belvedere Center for Sleep Research for the past year, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what you and the lab rats were doing.”

“Lab rats?”

She ignored that. “You and Lawson’s people are trying to use extreme dreams as investigative tools to solve crimes, aren’t you?”

Ellis stretched out his legs and stacked his ankles, one on top of the other. She got the impression that he was doing some fast thinking, deciding how much to tell her.

“In a sense,” he said cautiously.

“In a sense, my left toe. That is exactly what you’re doing. Well, I did what I was hired to do to the best of my ability this past year. But not once during that time did either of you ever have the common courtesy to inform me of the results of any of the investigations I worked on with you. When I think of all the rush jobs, all the nights I spent on a cot in my office analyzing dreams because you had to have the answers as soon as possible, I could just spit.”

He contemplated her for a long moment, comprehension building slowly in his expression.

“Well, hell,” he said softly.

“Time and again, I asked Dr. B. to request the results of those cases. Time and again he told me that my requests were denied.”

Ellis exhaled deeply. “Sorry about that. Lawson is real big on confidentiality. The requests I got from Belvedere all involved special cases that I handled for Lawson. The files were classified. You know how it is when you’re dealing with government types. They aren’t happy unless everything, including the instructions for operating the office vending machines, is stamped TOP SECRET.”

“All I wanted was some closure on a few of the really bad cases. Was that too much to ask?”

“No.”

“I didn’t even have enough context to identify the most likely news stories on the Internet.”

“Most of them weren’t big enough stories to hit the major papers. Even if you had found some of them, all you would have learned was that local law enforcement officials had made arrests. Lawson keeps a very low profile. He never has any direct contact with the cops.”

“So how does he get the cases that he assigns to you and the others?” she asked, eager for every scrap of information.

Again Ellis paused, evidently turning things over in his mind before deciding what to tell her. Then he shrugged.

“As far as outsiders are concerned, the cases are handled by a private investigation firm named Mapstone Investigations. The owner of the firm is very close to Lawson.”

“A friend?”

“His wife. They’ve been together for about thirty years. They argue a lot but even when they’re mad at each other, they still work together. Lawson trusts Beth Mapstone more than he trusts anyone else in the world.”

“Including you?”

He picked up the small teacup. “Including me.”

“I see.” She drummed her fingers on the table. “Do you know how I work, Ellis?”

“Belvedere said that, essentially, you study a dream report and then you create a Level Five lucid dream of your own that incorporates the details of the subject’s dream. You then analyze the subject’s dream using your own extreme dreaming capabilities.” He paused. “In other words, you walk through other people’s dreams.”

“Close enough. Now, given your personal, no doubt extensive experience with high-level lucid dreams, can you use a little imagination and figure out what never knowing the outcomes did to my own personal dreams? Did it ever occur to you that the lack of closure might give me a few Level Five nightmares?”

Grim understanding followed by something that looked a lot like genuine remorse drew his face into a stark mask.

“Shit.”

She cleared her throat. “Yes.”

“I figured analyzing the dreams wasn’t pleasant, but it never occurred to me that they might affect your own, personal dreamscapes. Belvedere sure as hell never said anything about that. I guess I just assumed that you took a detached, academic approach to the process.”

“I have a very vivid imagination, Ellis. Goes with the territory. Fragments of those nightmares hung around for weeks sometimes. And I had no context and no closure to help me get rid of them.”

“Trust me, if I had been free to do so, I would have been happy to fill you in on the results of my cases. But Lawson wouldn’t allow it.”

“In my opinion Lawson is a control freak.”

His mouth curved slightly. “You may be right.”

“And since you are willing to work for him on his terms, I have to wonder about you, too.”

He put down his cup, frowning. “You think I’m a control freak?”

She raised her chin and prepared to play what Gavin Hardy would have called her really big card.

“It doesn’t matter what I think of you personally,” she said smoothly. “What matters is that, as I mentioned, I have been doing a lot of thinking about my future in recent days and I have made a decision.”