Lost Era 05_ Deny thy Father - Jeff Mariotte [124]
Owen shot him a smile, the first Kyle had seen on him since he’d arrived at the wharf to see his long-since vanished friend. “Did you spend your time thinking, or playing cards?” he asked. He put a friendly hand on Kyle’s shoulder. “I don’t necessarily agree with your plan, but I’ll go along with it. You deal the hands; I’ll back your play as best I can. And I’ll make sure my friends in security do the same.”
“I appreciate that, Owen,” Kyle said. “That’s the best I can ask for.”
Lieutenant Commander Dugan glanced up from the computer screen, sleepy-eyed but alert. “There’s no record of any arrest warrant for Kyle Riker, Admiral,” he said. “Not two years ago in June, not ever.”
“I didn’t think so,” Owen Paris said. Kyle had left him at the wharf a couple of hours before, promising to get in touch when he’d found a place to stay in the city. His apartment had long since been occupied; his belongings put into storage. “But I had to check. What about the other thing?”
“That’s a strange one,” Dugan said. He’d been promoted a little more than a year ago, and Owen had absolute faith in his trustworthiness. “A security officer named Romesh McNally was on duty that night. He was approached, he said, by a fellow officer, Carson Cook, to help serve a warrant on Riker. McNally never saw the actual warrant, it turns out. Cook had it, he said, and McNally was just along as backup. They went to the infirmary to serve it. McNally says Cook was acting strangely-fixated on this one task, serving this warrant, and unable or uninterested in engaging in any conversation or activity that was not directly related to the job. It was, McNally says, like he was obsessed with it. McNally describes him as tense, too, as if he expected trouble.”
“Isn’t there always the possibility of trouble when a warrant is being served?” Owen asked him.
Dugan touched his silver hair, smoothing it down even though it wasn’t out of place. “Sure,” he said. “You never know what might happen, what the response might be. You’re tense, ready to go for your sidearm if necessary. But at the same time, in spite of that tension it’s kind of a routine thing. You joke around, you talk about sports, women, whatever. You don’t focus on it like it’s the only thing in the world. Cook was an experienced officer; he had been through it plenty of times. I knew him-not well, but a little. He was a good man.”
“Was?” Owen asked. “Clarify, Commander.”
“Yes, sir,” Dugan said, and Owen realized that he had slipped into admiral mode without even realizing it. “I had only a vague memory of this, but I checked the records. And McNally, of course, remembered it all fairly well, when I interviewed him about it. Both officers showed up for their next shift, after failing to serve the warrant, and McNally had asked Cook what had happened. He assumed that someone else had taken over the warrant, maybe serving Riker at his home or office the next day, or, failing that, if an investigation into Riker’s whereabouts had been launched. But Cook couldn’t remember what he was talking about. He claimed not to know who Kyle Riker was, didn’t recall the trip to the infirmary. It was like the whole event, the whole shift that night, was gone from his memory.”
“That must have been disturbing.”
“I’m sure it was. Nobody’s quite sure if that set off what happened next, or if it was just symptomatic. But Cook’s mind seemed to deteriorate rapidly. Not quite overnight, but according to the records, within weeks his memory was completely gone. Every known therapy was used to try to restore it. Counseling, hypnosis, holotherapy, data extraction. Nothing helped. His mind, again according to the records, had been wiped clean. He couldn’t remember how to pull on a pair of boots. He didn’t know his own name, or recognize his immediate family.”
“I remember the case,” Owen said. “I just didn’t realize it was the same person. Of course, I didn