Flashback

It took less than a minute at the adjoining administrative building to get the information on Dean’s former teacher from a rather attractive bald young woman at the main desk. Evidently she hadn’t yet been alerted that Nick had just threatened to kill one of their paying Total Immersion students. Yes, she confirmed, Shantarakshita Padmasambhava had indeed been one of the outstanding teachers at the Naropa Institute. Eighty-four years old when he had accepted Mr. Derek Dean as an applicant for the Path of Total Immersion, the beloved Sensei Shantarakshita Padmasambhava had shuffled off this mortal coil three years ago. His ashes had been scattered from the top of Flagstaff Mountain looming above the Chautauqua campus.

Nick thanked the young woman with the shapely skull and healthy, tanned scalp and—for some reason he couldn’t explain even to himself—asked for her phone number. She showed a wide, white, sincere, perfect smile and put her palms together and said, “Namaste.”

They waited until they were out of the pedicab, in Sato’s car, out of Boulder, through and beyond the exit customs checkpoints, and over the ridge to where the People’s Republic was no longer in the rearview mirror before talking about things.

“Well, Sato-san,” said Nick, “did we just buy the biggest load of pure, unfiltered, overacted bullshit in the history of total bullshit answers, or is suspect Mr. Derek Dean well and truly too nuts to keep on our list of suspects?”

“If he is not too crazy now, Bottom-san,” said Sato, “he certainly will be by the time he enters… what do you call it here… sixth grade.”

Nick grunted. He hadn’t told the security chief about his final, brief interaction with Dean back at the totally immersed asshole’s auditorium bed.

“There is always the question of motive,” added Sato. “Mr. Dean appears to have had none.”

“No one we have on our suspect list appears to have had one,” said Nick, settling back in the car seat and closing his eyes. He had a headache that was pounding spikes of pain deeper with every beat of his heart.

“Someone had a motive,” Sato said sharply. “But I fail to see it with Mr. Dean. Our own investigations showed absolutely no cross-referencing between Dean and Keigo or Mr. Nakamura.”

“Dean was a corporate bigwig in the last days of a world empire of a corporation,” said Nick without opening his eyes. “Professional competition? Trade jealousies? Google made a lot of enemies before it was broken up and flushed.”

“No,” said Sato. “There is no record of any interactions—hostile or otherwise—between Mr. Dean when he was a relatively minor corporate officer and any of Mr. Nakamura’s interests. Should there have been some sort of corporate animosity, it is very unlikely that it would have extended as far down as Mr. Dean’s level. He was a player but, in all senses of the word, a very, very minor player.”

“Maybe he just took a dislike to Keigo when the boy interviewed him,” said Nick. Sato’s armored Honda had good shocks, but every bump on the worn, potholed, and poorly maintained highway sent more hard-driven nails of pain into his skull.

“Disliked him enough on first sight to kill him?” said Sato.

Nick shrugged. “It happens. I know the feeling myself. But in this case, perhaps Derek Dean did it for precisely the same reason that these roving flashgangs do—to give him something powerful, almost climactic and orgasmic, to flash on during his fucking Total Immersion therapy.”

“To flash on in forty-four years plus as many years added on due to the six hours a day out of flashback…,” began Sato.

“Eleven years extra,” said Nick. “He spends eighteen hours a day under the flash, six out… more or less. So, if he keeps with the chronological real-time flashing the way he’s going now, it would be fifty-five years until the murder would roll around again. He’d be ninety-seven years old.”

Sato grunted. “The odds then are low that there will be an orgasm involved if Mr. Dean makes it to that age. But Bottom-san, let us consider the possibility that Mr. Dean is flashing on the murder every day and that all that ‘Mrs. Howe is letting us do the Alamo mural’ was pure misdirection. The Naropa Total Immersion program would then serve as a wonderful alibi for a murderer who has to hide from the world.”

“Good point,” said Nick. “But although Derek might have been capable of faking the overdosing flashbacker’s idiocy, he wasn’t faking the physical decline. He was a dead man walking.” He opened his eyes and took the pain the light added, grateful that the low clouds hid the full hammerstroke of the sun.

“Shall we go straight to Coors Field?” asked Sato. He sounded eager.

“This afternoon?” said Nick. “No way. Take me home, please. You have the flashback vials for my preparation for the next interviews, don’t you?”

“In my briefcase,” said Sato. “But it is still relatively early. We could…”