The Karma Booth. Jeff Pearce

view that they’ll use it for terrorists—same rationale as the British, who, incidentally, are keeping their Booth in Wapping or some godforsaken place, can’t remember. But we have a new headache in Paris.”

      He handed Tim another couple of photos. They were surveillance shots from CCTV cameras, ones looking down on a young woman who couldn’t be more than thirty years old. She had an ethereal beauty, with long black hair and pale skin, her lips full and her blue eyes inquisitive. And there was something else about her.

      “How did she come back?” he asked. But he sensed he already knew the answer. It was about to be confirmed.

      Her clothes. That was the first tip-off. The woman was wearing a green cotton dress and a broad-brimmed straw hat with a bow, almost as if the legendary Madeleine had grown up and left the old house in Paris covered with vines…

      “The French claim there’s only been limited use of the Booth, and no executions of prisoners are held at night,” said Benson. “We have to take that on faith, but they seem genuinely stunned. After seven o’clock, there are no researchers in the facility wing containing the machine, so there’s no need for any guards to be in the actual room. But closed circuit cameras stay on in there just like everywhere else—”

      New photos. Tim flipped through them and stared at the flare of white light in the grainy shot, the Karma Booth impossibly turned on, functioning with no scientists in attendance—and no condemned inmate to be executed. In the next shot, the woman appeared. She was nude, stunningly beautiful, but clearly disoriented as she staggered out of the second chamber. More photo stills of the surveillance. Snap…snap… snap, and she walked out of camera view. Tim looked up at Benson, who saw his new question forming.

      “They haven’t determined how she got out.”

      “It’s a prison,” said Tim. “She shouldn’t be able to get out at all.”

      “We know. So do they. There’s no footage of her in the entire complex beyond that room. Then the street cameras pick her up from the Rue de Sèvres—how and where she got the clothes is also a mystery. She went into a Métro station and disappeared—no footage of her inside. Anywhere. But the Police Nationale had the presence of mind to lift fingerprints from where she touched that bench.”

      “She doesn’t have a criminal record,” said Tim flatly. “She was a victim.”

      “Okay, you’re so clever,” replied Benson. “If you’ve guessed that then maybe you’ve guessed the rest.”

      Tim skipped back to the first shots of the woman walking along the street. Wearing the green cotton dress that was simple, stylish. No, this woman wouldn’t be in the regular database of unsolved murders. He could see it now, a subtle difference in the line of her jaw and in the oval of her face. People really did once look different thanks to diet and environment. Benson handed him a photocopy of a newspaper clipping, and he looked at the same beautiful woman in a posed photo and saw that the story had been printed in 1928.

      The dress wasn’t signature flapper apparel, but similar enough to be from that era.

      “Her name was—is—Emily Derosier,” explained Benson. “The last name is French, but she had a British father. She was a socialite and painter—or so the article says. I’ve never heard of her. She hung out with the celebs. Got stabbed to death in her Paris apartment, and the killer was never found.”

      Tim scanned through the article. It was mostly a bio that recapped the highlights of the victim’s life. He would have to read it more thoroughly later.

      “Great. So I’ve got to find Orlando Braithewaite, and it looks like I got to locate her as well. And I better find her fast.”

      “Maybe ‘fast’ is overstating it,” said Benson. “Hell, she may rattle off the same gibberish as Mary Ash.”

      Tim shook his head. “I don’t think so. Weintraub’s crew pulled Mary Ash from the other side. This woman is different. She walked back into our world of her own accord, after more than eighty years. She must have come back for a reason.”

       CHAPTER FIVE

      Tim had Matilda book a transatlantic flight for him in three days. Before that, he wanted to go and visit Geoff Shackleton, curious to see if the schoolteacher was “different,” as he had warned Weintraub and Miller.

      It was raining as he drove back out to the White Plains facility, the sky a strange twilight blue behind the dark charcoal clouds. On his car stereo, he played Kind of Blue, the signature Miles Davis album. Tim’s father had heavily influenced his jazz tastes. Piano, bass, drums—that’s all you need, Dad said. Tim had found him to be right, and small 1960s combos were always the best musical sedative for him. Lee Morgan, Davis, Bird—yes, he had been right about music even though his father had never learned to play a note. But he had been wrong about so many other things.

      His father was an electronics engineer, a man who believed in the firmly tangible and who spent the decades of his life at a workbench in front of an oscilloscope and a spot welder over circuit boards. His work was unfathomable to his son. It wasn’t until his twenties that Tim realized his father’s world view was almost entirely shaped by the evening news. Maybe that was what drove Tim to learn French and to grapple with Hindi, to pursue a career in exotic locales.

      His father had died of pancreatic cancer last year, refusing to see his son in his final emaciated stages, and Tim had never told him about India. It was not something they could talk about: intrusive concepts of otherworldly realities or of life after death. His father was an intelligent man, but not an intellectual. He had been one of that last generation of superman dads; the kind who kept three saws in the basement and who could fix his own car, a man who could easily sail Lake Michigan when they took the family’s tiny boat out. Tim wouldn’t be able to find the carburetor in his BMW if he tried.

      Tim’s mother had died ten years before from multiple sclerosis. Frightened and confused near the end, she had asked for a minister. Dad refused to get her one. Tim wasn’t religious and didn’t even consider himself spiritual—he was no seeker. But he had hated the old man for a long time over that denial of comfort for his mom. More than that, he hated how his father had easily accepted the doctors’ diagnosis of his own fate—that cruel sentence of three months left—and just obediently, quietly, died by their schedule.

      He didn’t think about his father much afterwards. Theirs had been a distant relationship once Tim had grown up. The Karma Booth stirred up all this old business.

      On the stereo, the Davis album ended and he heard Dexter Gordon play “Cry Me a River.” Serves you right, thought Tim, smiling at the irony. It was fitting on this drive for another reason. The music had come from Gary Weintraub; his friend had found a rare live performance by Gordon in a Berlin jazz club and had the old vinyl converted to digital for Tim. A wonderful Christmas present three years ago.

      Tim parked across the street from the federal building and held his valise over his head, trying not to get soaked as the security man in the navy blazer held the door open for him. After his postings in Asia, rain was always a time-travel mechanism for him, making him recall the monsoon seasons in Delhi and Mumbai and the way drops hit the tin roofs of squalid huts and formed instant lakes out of the cracked alleys.

      He thought fleetingly of the night in the remote village, pushed it from his mind.

      “It’s really coming down,” said the security guard.

      “Yeah.”

      “Everything quiet here?”

      The security guard nodded, knowing what he meant. He had been staffed to the project even before the Booth had been shipped out for its first use at the prison, and he had watched the mushrooming of publicity, protests and curiosity seekers since Mary Ash’s resurrection. He had also become Tim’s first antenna for when Weintraub and