Falling Awake(58)
Author: Jayne Ann Krentz

“Some enterprising soul could probably make a fortune selling Belvedere’s papers as a cure for insomnia,” she announced. “I think he was so determined to be taken seriously that he deliberately wrote the dullest, most boring, most academic-sounding prose possible.”

“That was my impression when I was reading those files earlier.” Ellis studied the computer screen, looking impatient.

“Got anything?” she asked.

“Maybe. I told you all of these guys did time at various jails and prisons.”

“Yes.”

“Turns out that at least three of them spent some time in a place called the Brackleton Correctional Facility back in the Midwest. I’m checking to see if any of the others did stretches there, too. It’s going to take a while.”

“I thought you said Scargill used people who lived in various places around the country. They didn’t all come from the same region or even the same state.”

“That’s true. But it’s not unusual for overcrowded or under-funded prison systems in one state to ship prisoners off to another state to serve out their time.” He punched a key. “It’s possible these guys all went through the same facility.”

“Would they have been there at the same time?”

“No.” His mouth hardened. “That’s the bad news. All of them did time in recent years but none of them did it at precisely the same time. I checked that out a few weeks ago. There’s no way they would have been behind bars together, unfortunately. That would have been too easy. Still, if I can link them all to the same prison, I might be able to find other connections.”

She studied the intense, focused lines of his body. It was getting late and he had made no mention of returning to the Seacrest Inn to sleep. Was he planning to spend the night here? If so, he had not mentioned it. She was pretty sure she would have remembered a comment like that.

Idly, she continued to pet Sphinx. “Is this how you always work?” she asked. “Fill your head with as much information as you can get about the crime and then go into a Level Five dream state to try to get some insights?”

“Yeah.” He hit another key and then got to his feet, rotating his right shoulder in a familiar way. “Never figured out a more efficient method. What about you?”

“Same process. That’s why it was so frustrating working with Dr. Belvedere’s mystery clients.” She made a face. “I could never get all the information I needed to give a really good interpretation. I had to wing it on several occasions.”

“Your work is brilliant, even when you don’t have a lot of context,” Ellis said. “It’s no wonder Lawson wants to bring you into Frey-Salter.”

She smiled slightly. “Not going to happen. Think he’ll sign a contract with me once he’s convinced that I’m serious about going independent?”

Ellis was amused. “I don’t think he’s got any choice. You can name your own terms. My advice is to make him pay top dollar for your services. That’s what Beth does.”

She rubbed the spot directly behind Sphinx’s ears. The cat purred louder and seemed to grow heavier and warmer on her lap. “I like the sound of that.”

Ellis studied Sphinx. “Think cats dream?”

“Who knows? If you accept the traditional Freudian view that dreams are a form of wish-fulfillment, a way of living out the sort of fantasies that we repress when we’re awake, it doesn’t seem likely. After all, cats pretty much do what they want to do. They don’t have a lot of problem with repressed fantasies.”

“They do seem to act on their Inner Cat urges whenever they feel like it, don’t they?”

She nodded, looking down at Sphinx. “The same thinking would apply to the classic Jungian theory, too. Jung held that dreams are a product of some collective unconsciousness featuring various archetypes and metaphors.”

Ellis studied Sphinx. “Can’t see a cat bothering with archetypes and metaphors.”

“Then, of course, you’ve got your modern neuropsychologists. Some of them think animals do dream but others are convinced that dreaming is a cognitive function that develops as the brain grows and develops. They point to the fact that there’s little evidence to suggest that babies dream, and they claim that the dreams of very young children are generally quite bland. They think that dreaming gets more intense and more coherent as children mature. That idea leads to the speculation that animal brains probably lack the cognitive capacity to dream.” She stroked Sphinx. “At least in a way that we would recognize as true dreaming.”

Ellis smiled. “Dreaming may be a human thing, huh?”

Sphinx flicked his tail in an annoyed fashion but he did not bother to open his eyes.

“Maybe.” Isabel scratched Sphinx’s back at the base of his tail. “Then you’ve got another group of neuropsychologists who are very big on the activation-synthesis theory. It holds that dreams are merely the result of random signals sent from the most primitive part of the brain stem during sleep. The brain is designed to organize whatever data it receives so, even in sleep, it tries to connect what are essentially dots of meaningless static into coherent images, no matter how strange or bizarre.”

Ellis shook his head. “I’m not buying that theory.”

She chuckled. “Me either.”

“So, bottom line here is that we still don’t know if animals dream.”

“Nope. More to the point, there’s a great deal that we don’t know yet about the nature of our own dreams.” She wrinkled her nose. “Take lucid dreamers, for example.”

“Funny you should say that.” Ellis reached out to turn down the lamp beside the sofa. “I was just thinking that there is one lucid dreamer that I would very much like to take right now.”

Energy shimmered invisibly in the room. Isabel caught her breath. Her hand stopped moving on Sphinx. The world seemed to go into slow motion, taking on an all-too-familiar dreamlike quality.

“I thought we were supposed to be working,” she managed.

“I think we both need a break.” Ellis lifted Sphinx off the sofa. “Take a walk, cat.”

Sphinx gave him an evil look, hoisted his tail into the air and stalked off toward the kitchen.

Isabel smiled, her insides warming under the heat in Ellis’s eyes.

He lowered himself onto the sofa beside her, removed her glasses and set them on top of the report she had been reading. She blinked a couple of times, refocused and touched the side of his face.