no sense.”
“But it does,” Alex insisted. “The school. That was one of your mistakes, but only a small one. I remembered the dean’s office being in the wrong place. But it wasn’t the wrong place—I was just twenty years too late. When you were at La Paloma High, the dean’s office was where the nurse’s office is now.”
“Which means nothing.”
“True. I could have seen the same pictures of the school in my mother’s yearbook that I saw in yours.”
Torres’s eyes flickered over the room, first to the bookshelf where his family tree rested, then to the notebook that still lay on top of his desk where Alex had left it.
Next to it, lying open, was the annual from his senior year at La Paloma High. It was open to a picture he had studied many times over the years. As he looked at it now, he felt once more the pain the people it depicted had caused him.
All four of them: Marty and Valerie and Cynthia and Ellen.
The Four Musketeers, who had inflicted wounds on him that he had nursed over the years—never allowing them to heal—until finally they had festered.
And as the wounds festered, the planning had begun, and then, when the opportunity finally came, he had executed his plan.
The memories had been carefully constructed in Alex—the memories of things he couldn’t possibly remember—so that when he finally got caught, as Torres knew he eventually would, all he would be able to do was talk of ancient wrongs and the spirit of a long-dead man who had taken possession of him.
The truth would be carefully shielded, for Torres had programmed no memories in Alex of the hatred he felt toward the four women who had looked down on him so many years ago, ignored him as if he didn’t exist.
Even now, he could hear his mother’s voice talking about them:
“You think they even look at you, Ramón? They are gringos who would spit on you. They are no different than the ones who killed our family, and they will kill you too. You wait, Ramón. Pretend all you want, but in the end you will know the truth. They hate you, Ramón, as you will hate them.”
And in the end, she had been right, and he had hated them as much as she did.
And now it was over. Because Raymond Torres had created Alex, he knew what Alex was going to do. Oddly, he could even accept it. “How did you figure it out?”
“With the tools you gave me,” Alex replied. “I processed data. The facts were simple. From the damage done to my brain, I should have died.
“But I wasn’t dead.
“The two facts didn’t match, until I realized that there was one way I could make them match. I could still be alive, if something had been done to keep my body functioning in spite of the damage to my brain. And the only thing capable of doing that was a system of microprocessors performing the functions of my brain.
“But then I had to fit the memories in.
“Alex Lonsdale has no memories. None at all, because he’s dead. But I was remembering things, and the answer had to be the same. What I was remembering had to have been programmed into me too, along with all the rest of the data. From there, it wasn’t hard to figure out who I really am.”
“My son,” Torres said softly. “The son I never had.”
“No,” Alex replied. “I am not your son, Dr. Torres. I am you. Inside my head are all the memories you grew up with. They’re not my memories, Dr. Torres. They’re yours. Don’t you understand?”
“It’s the same thing,” Torres said, but Alex shook his head.
“No. It’s not the same thing, because if it were, I would be about to kill my father. But I’m you, Dr. Torres, so I guess you are about to kill yourself.”
His hands steady, Alex raised the shotgun, leveled it at Raymond Torres, and squeezed the trigger. Alex watched as Raymond Torres’s head was nearly torn from his body by the force of the buckshot that exploded from the gun’s barrel.
As he left Torres’s house, the phone began ringing, but Alex ignored it.
Getting into Torres’s car—his own car, now—he started back toward La Paloma.
All of them were dead—Valerie Benson, Marty Lewis, and Cynthia Evans. All of them dead, except one.
Ellen Lonsdale was still alive.
Roscoe Finnerty carefully replaced the phone on its hook, and turned to face the Lonsdales once more.
Ellen, as she had