so that he couldn’t accidentally disturb the labyrinth of wires that were attached to his skull.
He heard the door open, and a few seconds later the doctor was gazing down at him. “How do you feel?”
“Okay,” Alex replied. Then, as Torres began detaching him from the machinery: “Did you find out anything?”
“Not yet,” Torres replied. “I’ll have to spend some time analyzing the data. But there’s something I want you to do. I want you to start wandering around La Paloma, just looking at things.”
“I’ve done that,” Alex said. As the last of the wires came free, Torres released the restraints, and Alex sat up, stretching. “I’ve done that a lot with Lisa Cochran.”
Torres shook his head. “I want you to do it alone,” he said. “I want you just to wander around, and let your eyes take things in. Don’t study things, don’t look for anything in particular. Just let your eyes see, and your mind react. Do you think you can do that?”
“I guess so. But why?”
“Call it an experiment,” Torres replied. “Let’s just see what happens, shall we? Something, somewhere in La Paloma, might trigger another memory, and maybe a pattern will emerge.”
As his mother drove him home, Alex tried to figure out what kind of pattern Torres might be looking for, but could think of nothing.
All he could do, he realized, was follow Torres’s instructions and see what happened.
After Alex and Ellen left, Raymond Torres sat at his desk for a long time, studying the results of the tests Alex had just taken. Today, for the first time, the tests had been only that, and nothing more.
No new data had been fed into Alex’s mind, no new attempts had been made to fill his empty memory.
Instead, the electrical impulses that had been sent racing through his brain had been searching for something that Torres knew had to be there.
Somewhere, deep in the recesses of Alex’s brain, there had to be a misconnection.
It was, as far as Torres could see, the only explanation for what had happened to Alex in San Francisco: somehow, during the long hours of the surgery, a mistake had been made, and the result was that Alex had had an emotional response.
He had cried.
Raymond Torres had never intended that Alex have an emotional response again.
Emotions—feelings—were not part of his plan.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Well, I don’t give a damn what Ellen Lonsdale and Carol Cochran say, I say that Kate’s grounded for the next two weeks!” Alan Lewis rose shakily to his feet, an empty glass in his hand, and started toward the cupboard where he kept his liquor. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” Marty Lewis asked, carefully keeping her voice level. “It’s not even noon yet.”
“Not even noon yet,” Alan sneered in the mocking singsong voice he always took on when his drinking was becoming serious. “For Christ’s sake, Mart, it’s Sunday. Even you don’t have to go to work today.”
“At least I go to work all week,” Marty replied, and then immediately wished she could retrieve her words. But it was too late.
“Oh, back to that, are we?” Alan asked, wheeling around to fix her with eyes bleary from too much liquor and not enough sleep. “Well, for your information, it just happens that the kind of job I’m qualified for doesn’t grow on trees. I’m not like you—I can’t just wander out someday and come home with a job. ’Course, when I do come home with a job, it pays about ten times what yours does, but that doesn’t count, does it?”
Marty took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “Alan, I’m sorry I said that. It wasn’t fair. And we’re not talking about jobs anyway. We’re talking about Kate.”
“Thass what I was talking about,” Alan agreed, his voice starting to slur. “You’re the one who changed the subject.” He grinned inanely, and poured several shots of bourbon into his glass, then maneuvered back to the kitchen table. “But I don’t give a damn what we talk about. The subject of our darling daughter is closed. She’s grounded, and thass that.”
“No,” Marty said, “that is not that. As long as you’re drunk, any decisions about Kate will be made by me.”
“Oh, ho, ho! My, aren’t we the high-and-mighty one? Well, let me tell you something, wife of mine! As long as I’m in this house, I’ll decide what’s best for my daughter.”
Marty dropped any effort to cover her anger. “At the rate you’re going, you won’t be in this house in