the camera so he could document the changes in Darlene.
He lit four more sticks of jasmine incense, placing them in ashtrays at the four corners of the bed.
This time, after he had left and closed the bedroom door, he laid a wet towel along the threshold, hoping it would prevent the odor from spreading into the area of the apartment where he was living. He still had two days to go.
33
I talked Greg Glenn into letting me write from Phoenix. For the rest of the morning I stayed in my room making calls, gathering comments from players in the story ranging from Wexler in Denver to Bledsoe in Baltimore. I wrote for five straight hours after that and the only disturbances I had all day were calls from Glenn himself, nervously asking how I was doing. An hour before the five o’clock deadline in Denver, I filed two stories to the metro desk.
My nerves were jangling by the time I shipped the stories and I had a headache that was almost off the scale. I had been through a pot and a half of room service coffee and a full pack of Marlboros—the most I had smoked in one sitting in years. Pacing the room and waiting for Greg Glenn’s callback, I made a quick call to room service again, explained that I couldn’t leave my room because I was expecting an important call, and ordered a bottle of aspirin from the hotel’s lobby shop.
After it arrived I downed three tablets with mineral water from the minibar and almost immediately started feeling better. Next I called my mother and Riley and alerted them that my stories would be in the next day’s paper. I also told them there was a chance that reporters from other media outlets might try to contact them now that the story was out and to be prepared. Both said they didn’t want to talk to any reporters and I said that was fine, not missing the irony that I was one myself.
Lastly, I realized I had forgotten to call Rachel to tell her I was still in town. I called the Phoenix field office of the FBI but was told by the agent who answered that she was gone.
“What do you mean ‘gone’? Is she still in Phoenix?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Can I speak with Agent Backus then?”
“He’s gone, too. Who may I ask is calling?”
I hung up and dialed the hotel’s front desk and asked for her room. I was told she had checked out. So had Backus. So had Thorson, Carter and Thompson.
“Son of a bitch,” I said after hanging up.
There had been a break. Had to be. For all of them to have checked out, there had to have been a major breakthrough in the investigation. And I realized I had been left behind, that my moment on the inside was surely over now. I got up and paced the room some more, wondering where they would have gone and what could have made them move so quickly. Then I remembered the card Rachel had given me. I dug it out of my pocket and punched the paging number into the phone.
Ten minutes surely seemed enough time to bounce my message off the satellite and then down to her, wherever she was. But ten minutes came and went and the phone didn’t ring. Another ten minutes passed and then a half hour. Not even Greg Glenn called. I even picked up the phone to make sure I hadn’t broken it.
Restless, but tired of pacing and waiting, I fired up the laptop and logged into the Rocky again. I called up my messages but there were none of any importance. I switched to my personal basket, scrolled the files and called up the one labeled HYPSTORIES. The file contained several stories on Horace Gomble, one after the other in chronological order. I began to read from the oldest story forward, my memory of the hypnotist coming back as I went.
It was a colorful history. A physician and researcher for the CIA in the early sixties, Gomble later was a practicing psychiatrist in Beverly Hills who specialized in hypnotherapy. He parlayed his skill and expertise in the hypnotic arts, as he called them, into a nightclub act as Horace the Hypnotist. First it was just appearances on open-mike nights at the clubs in Los Angeles but the act became immensely popular and he started taking it to Las Vegas for weeklong gigs on