Deadly Cross (Alex Cross #28)(32)

“Of course. Have you heard from John?”

“No,” I said. “Maybe I should stop by before dinner?”

“I think he’d like that.”





CHAPTER 35





WHEN I REACHED SAMPSON’S HOME, the front door was ajar. I knocked but got no answer, so I pushed open the door and called out, “John?”

“Kitchen,” he called back.

I found him drying pots and pans. “I was going to invite you to our house to eat.”

He shrugged, kept drying. “Andrew and Kari came in hungry, so we ate early.”

“They here?”

“With Willow. They took her out for ice cream.”

“How are you doing?”

“I have the feeling I’m going to get sick of that question awful fast.”

“Understandable,” I said. “Take a walk?”

Sampson thought about that for a moment and then nodded.

It was a warm night, perfect for walking, which we did in silence for ten minutes, moving side by side, me trying to keep up, trying to subtly mirror his every motion so he felt comfortable enough to open up.

“This was a good idea,” Sampson said at last. “Before you suggested it, my chest hurt and it felt like I wasn’t breathing right.”

“You’ve probably been breathing shallow because of everything,” I said. “And when your breathing deviated from its natural depth and rhythm, you got out of what neuropsychologists call heart coherence. Because of that, you felt the pain.”

John stopped, looked at me. “Heart coherence? For real, Alex?”

“For real what?”

“Nothing,” he said and started walking again.

I jogged to catch up. “What was that about?”

Sampson shook his head, got teary. “It was like she was preparing me, man.” Over the next ten minutes, John reminded me of Billie’s long-standing interest in meditation, a practice she’d begun after her first husband was unjustly executed. Billie’s interest had led to a retreat in the Poconos, which was most likely where she’d been bitten by the tick.

“Anyway,” Sampson said. “That’s what the entire retreat was about — heart coherence — using your breath to get your heart, I don’t know, beating in sync with its natural rhythm or something? Honestly, I thought it was a bunch of woo-woo — heart coherence—but it made her happy to think it was real. I’ll say this — even though she was sick, she wasn’t beat down by it.”

“That’s because heart coherence is real,” I said. “It’s scientifically measurable. I’ve seen it achieved. On the screen of a sensitive electronic-monitoring system, anyway. But if you can learn to find it, there are all sorts of health benefits, mental as well as physical.”

I explained that neuropsychologists at Michigan State had developed a way to measure a person’s depth and pattern of breathing at the same time they were tracking the heart through a finger sensor that monitored not only the pulse but the quality of the pulse.

Sampson frowned. “I didn’t know pulse had a quality.”

“Well, it’s the quality of the electrical impulse given off by the heart beating, but the point is that when people start out, especially when they’re under stress, their breathing is usually shallow and ragged. And their hearts react in kind, throwing off the sharp spikes you see on cardiac monitors on medical dramas on TV.”

Sampson’s jaw tightened, and I realized that in his mind he might be seeing the monitor in the room where Billie died.

“John,” I said, touching him on the elbow. “Stay with me.”

He blinked, looked at me oddly, said, “I’m with you.”

I said that the scientists taught their subjects first how to breathe deeply from the abdomen in order to create a pattern on a monitor that looked like one perfect bell curve after another. Within minutes, the heart responds to this breathing pattern by sending out a different electrical signal.

“The tracing on the cardiac monitor looks entirely different,” I said. “Not jagged at all. More like a series of curves that stack up to a peak and then step down, forming a soft pyramid of sorts. But what’s remarkable is when you see people who are good at it. On the monitors, their heartbeats shift and get inside their breath curves and they, as Billie told you, sync up.”

“And that’s good, huh?”

“Supposedly the best thing you can do for yourself.”

“Billie was onto something, then.”

“From a different angle, but yes.”

“She was trying to teach me something, like she could sense it.”

“I’m not going to deny it.”

We’d come by a roundabout route back to his house. His stepchildren and his daughter were already home. We could hear a television droning inside.

“Maybe I’ll have to look into it,” Sampson said. “Heart coherence, I mean.”

I nodded. “It will help. And it will honor Billie.”

He nodded sadly, then gestured with his head toward the house. “I just wish I understood it well enough right now so I could go in and teach it to three other people with busted hearts.”