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“Did you sleep well last night?”
“I’m not tired, if that’s what you mean.”
“Do you remember if you dreamed?”
Bishop gave it some thought and then shook his head.
“Can’t remember any dreams.”
“That’s fine. You don’t have to worry about that, because soon you’ll be in a deep dream state. Then we’ll try to find your memories for you. Are you ready?”
The cadence and modulation of Sears’s voice had changed. She was now talking slowly and gently and spacing her words. Bosch knew that trance induction had begun.
“Is there a man sitting over there?” Bishop asked.
“Yes, that’s Harry. He’s going to be observing today.”
“Observing…”
“Our techniques for memory recovery.”
“Whose memory? Mine or his?”
“Yours, Vernon.”
“If you say so.”
Bosch noticed that one of Bishop’s front teeth had yellowed. He guessed it was a replacement for one of the teeth knocked out during the incident in 1965.
“Let’s begin,” Sears said. “Let’s close our eyes now, Vernon. I’m going to tilt you a little farther back so you’re more comfortable.”
Sears picked up a remote from a table next to her chair and pushed a button that shifted the incline on Bishop’s chair another six inches back. His head was now fully supported by the padded headrest.
“Vernon, I want you to completely relax now and clear your mind. Like a blackboard when you were in school. Erase the board, Vernon.”
She paused for a moment. There was no response from Bishop. Bosch recognized “Walk on By” coming from the speaker. He studied Bishop’s face and saw that the muscles of his jaw were relaxing. His mouth fell slightly open.
“Now I want you to imagine you are in a beautiful house,” Sears said. “There are blue skies seen through the windows, and as you walk through the house, you see wonderful works of art on every wall. Portraits and landscapes and still-life paintings. It’s like a museum with one gallery after another. When you walk into the next room, there is a very large painting on the wall, and you walk up to it and you walk right into it. Now you are in another house, a beautiful house, and there are more paintings. Paintings of people you know and places you’ve been…”
Bosch understood that Sears was looping, a technique that moved the subject into deep trance by taking him through worlds within worlds. She went through two more permutations of walking Bishop through paintings before arriving at the intended destination. An easy-listening version of the Beatles song “Yesterday,” apparently a standard in regression hypnotherapy, was coming from the speakers.
“And now you’ve reached a new painting,” Sears said. “It’s a large building. On the wall outside it says ‘MacLaren Children’s Center.’ There’s a door here and you enter. What do you see, Vernon?”
There was a long pause, then Bishop croaked out a single word:
“Kids.”
He was in trance. Deeply under. The eye movement under his thin lids was rapid. Sears glanced over at Bosch and nodded.
“What are the children doing?” Sears asked.
“They’re lining up for school,” Bishop said.
“Is there a calendar, Vernon? What day is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s the day you got hurt, Vernon. You remember that day?”
