The case of Captain Robert Snow

Indianapolis police homicide commander Snow offers a dryly nonplused account of his discovery of his "past life" as 19th-century portrait painter Carroll Beckwith. Snow participated in (and taped) a therapeutic "recovered memory" session as a lark, and, once hypnotized, was jolted by a series of clear images and recollections that seemed even then strangely plausible, despite his cop's hard-nosed, empirical perspective. Later, when he walked into a New Orleans gallery at random and confronted a painting that had appeared to him in his vision, he determined to put his detective's investigative skills to work and research congruencies between his "memories" and the artist's life. Surprisingly, the evidence that he painstakingly assembled through retrieving Beckwith's journals and work from obscurity seemed fully to confirm that Snow's "recollections" were authentic.