Lock In (Lock In, #1)(34)

“All right,” I said. “But why is that?”

“Johnny was slow,” Janis said. “We had a doctor test him when he was thirteen. He said his IQ was seventy-nine or eighty. Johnny could figure things out if he worked at it, but it took him a long time. We kept him in school as long as we could so he could have friends, but he couldn’t keep up. He stopped going and we stopped making him go.”

“He wasn’t always that way,” May said. “He was a smart baby. A smart little boy. When he was five he got sick. He wasn’t the same after that.”

“Was it Haden’s?” I asked.

“No!” May said. “He wasn’t crippled.” She stopped and considered what she had said. “Sorry.”

I held a hand up. “It’s perfectly all right,” I said. “Sometimes people get sick with Haden’s but they don’t get locked in. But it can still do damage. When you say he got sick, did he have a fever? And then meningitis?”

“His brain swelled up,” May said.

“That’s meningitis,” I said. “We scanned his brain after he died and we saw the brain structure there that was consistent with Haden’s. But we found something else, too. We found that he had something we call a neural network in there too.”

Janis looked up at Redhouse for this. “It’s like a machine in his head, Janis,” he said. “It let him send and receive information.”

“I have one in my head back home,” I said, and tapped my head. “It lets me control this machine here so I can be here in the room with you.”

Janis and May both looked confused. “Johnny didn’t have anything in his head,” May said, finally.

“I apologize for asking, but are you completely sure?” I asked. “A neural network isn’t something that’s accidentally put into someone’s head. It’s there to either send brain signals or to receive them.”

“He lived with me his entire life,” May said. “He lived here with his mother and Janis, and then when his mother died I looked after him. No way this could happen to him here.”

“So it would have to have been put in after he left,” Redhouse said.

“About that,” I said. “Why would Johnny decide to leave here if he’d never gone anywhere in his life?”

“He got a job,” Janis said.

“What kind of job?” I asked.

“He said he was an executive assistant,” Janis said.

“For whom?”

“I don’t know,” Janis said.

“Johnny got a friend to take him down to that computer building in Window Rock,” May said. “He’d heard they had an opening for a janitor, and that was something he could do. He wanted to be able to help me out. He went down and asked about the job and then the next day they asked him to come down again. And then when he came back that night, he gave me a thousand dollars and told me it was half of his first paycheck from his new job.”

“The janitorial position,” Redhouse said.

“No, the other one,” May said. “He said when he got there they asked him if he would like a different job that would pay better and let him travel. All he’d have to do is help his boss do things. He said it was like being a butler.”

“So he left,” I said. “What then?”

“Every week I’d get a money order from Johnny, and he would call sometimes,” May said. “He told me to move someplace nice and get new things, so I moved here. Then a few months ago he stopped calling but the money orders still arrived, so I didn’t worry too much.”

“When did the last money order arrive?”

“It came two days ago,” Janis said. “I picked up my grandmother’s mail for her.”

“Do you mind if I look at it?” I asked.

They both looked dubious at this.

“Agent Shane isn’t going to take it as evidence,” Redhouse said. “But it might have something on it that’s important.”

Janis got up to get the money order.

“Johnny never said anything about who he worked for?” I asked May.

“He said that his boss liked to be private,” May said. “I didn’t want Johnny to lose his job, so I never asked more than that.”

“Did he like his job?” I asked. By this time Janis had walked over to me with the money order. I scanned it quickly on one side, flipped it over, and did the same to the other side, then handed it back to her. “Thank you,” I said.

“He seemed to like it,” May said. “He never said anything bad about it.”

“He was excited to travel,” Janis said, sitting down again. “The first couple of times he called he mentioned that he was in California and in Washington.”

“The state or the District?” Redhouse asked.

“The District,” Janis said. “I think.”

“But then he said his boss didn’t like him talking about where he’d been, so he didn’t say anymore.”

“The last time he called, did he say anything unusual or tell you anything unusual?” I asked.

“No,” May said. “He said he hadn’t been feeling well … no. He said he was worried about something.”