Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief (16 page)

“The Easter Bunny,” Bernal said. “Right?”

“I forgot about your little chat with our friend Jord. Maybe. Warren might have been looking for drugs, but not in there. He had been sedated and put in there by someone else. A transfusion from him would have knocked out a bull. He wasn’t even conscious when he died.”

“Oh,” Bernal said.

“Don’t worry. More support for that particular theory coming right up, with the next victim. But first, there was a gap. Almost a year. Damon dies in January, Warren in June. Then a whole year where everyone’s heads stayed on their shoulders, and we figured whatever conflict there had been in the local drug world had kind of run its course.

“Then Christopher Gambino’s head turned up in a bloody bowling bag at Memory Lanes. His body was found a day or so later, dumped in a patch of woods just over the border in New Hampshire. He’d been beheaded by a single swing of a sword. Some long blade anyway, with a bit of a curve to it. The ME went crazy with that one too, and it turned into an antique Samurai sword. He talked crystal structure, folded metal, all sorts of crap.

“Gambino was, no surprise, tied into drugs too. Just as a consumer. He was a smart guy, a professional, electronics and software when he could focus, and he had a whole spiel about souping up inadequate neurotransmitters, leveling the brain with hallucinogens. Saw himself as a kind of home garage mechanic, pimping his mind. Sometimes it seems that the only point to getting smarter is to have better explanations for why you’re doing something stupid. He could hold a job, and was good, when he’d leveled out. And here’s a piece of info for you: he did a bit of work for Hess Tech.”

“What? Did he work on Hesketh?”

“No way of telling. All we really have are some 1099s from the company—which, I don’t have to remind you, went bankrupt..But he had skills that would have made sense. He might have worked on some of those stepper motors up there.” She waved her arm at Hesketh’s dangling limbs.

“And Hess Tech was right next to Long Voyage.” Bernal found himself excited. “This was the connection. That was what put Muriel onto the Bowler in the first place. Gambino. She’d been trying to figure out what Ungaro was really up to and started checking out that connection.” He looked at Charis who stared back at him impassively. “What, you think it’s just coincidence or something?”

She wiggled her coffee cup until he refilled it. “No, I think they’re pretty clearly connected, just that the chain of causation runs opposite to what you want.”

‘“Chain of causation’?”

“What, I don’t have a graduate degree, so I can’t talk fancy?”

“I don’t have a graduate degree,” he said quietly.

She briefly put her big hand over his. “I’m sorry, honey. Someday you’ll get over it. But I can still say ‘chain of causation’ if I feel like it. The connection is 
Muriel.
 Now you’re making me do what I said I wouldn’t do, which is wander off a clear presentation of the facts—”

“All right,” he said. “All right. Park it. Put Gambino’s connection to Hess Tech, and to Muriel, aside, and we’ll get back to it.”

“You won’t forget?” she said.

“I won’t forget.”

“Gambino worked around, took his drugs, lived pretty clean aside from that. Had friends, though none of them knew where he lived, which was in an apartment over west. Old woodframes over there, mill housing, plastic factory housing, shoe factory housing. None of that’s there anymore, but the buildings still are, so the rent’s cheap. He had a little room there. Just a room, nothing much in it when we looked. He didn’t talk to anyone, he didn’t have a blog, he didn’t leave a diary, and he didn’t have a psychiatrist or confessor or spiritual leader he would spill his guts to. So no one knows what the hell he was up to or where he was when this happened. Blood spatter must have been something to see. No other damage to his body at all, so that was the one and only act of violence committed against him. No drugs in his blood that you wouldn’t expect. Meaning he had enough in there to knock any regular person out, but it probably just made him bubbly and attentive.

“That bowling bag thing made everybody go crazy for a while. Very popular image. And attention really got hot when Aurora Lipsius was murdered only two weeks later. She was a prostitute, from Gardner. Thirty-three years old, been in the business a long time, didn’t know any other. A couple of kids found her rear end sticking out of the trunk of an abandoned car over on Farthingale Road. Beheaded. Tight skirt, fishnets, high heels—her ass was in the newspaper, on TV, Everywhere. I’d been a cop for a while. It still disgusted me. Murdered prostitutes are just a decorative item now. Like cherubs used to be in old paintings. They don’t really have to have anything to do with the story.

“Her father left home before she was born. Mom raised her and her siblings alone . .. well, not alone, of course. Succession of boyfriends, even one more husband, looks like. Two of the kids had one dad, one another. To be frank, I don’t remember which group Aurora fell into. Now, it’s not like we investigated her whole spiritual biography. She made it through the junior year at Gardner High. Started having sex for drugs pretty early on. Suspended once her freshman year for dealing coke in the gym locker room. Typical story? Not really, but I see things like that often enough. It was the drugs, really, on top of everything else. She loved them, it seems. Could never get enough. I’m not sure this knowledge of her biography helped in any way, but I thought I owed it to her. For most people, the way they die has nothing to do with the way they lived. It’s not a natural consequence. It’s not something to be expected. People say that, afterward, but almost always, if that person had not been in the wrong place at the wrong time, they could have gone on living a whole lot longer.

“Anyway, Farthingale’s a common place for abandoned cars. People often torch the things, just to get something out of having their vehicle die on them. The thing’s usually traded hands a few times unofficially, lacks registration, and it’s not worth trying to stick someone with disposal fees. People trade drugs in the ones that don’t serve as bonfires, low-end pros work some of the ones with better upholstery in the back, so we do our best to keep them cleaned up. The car Lipsius died in had been there two or three days. Since it was directly involved in a murder, they did considerably more work tracing it. Not easy. Vehicle identification numbers had been burned off, even ones no one knows are there. And a fair number of the parts had been switched with other cars. Some of them were even from other model years. There was some doubt whether the car would actually have run, in the configuration that we found it. Near as we could tell, the chassis, at least, was from a car that had been stolen in Yakima, Washington, a few months before. How it got to a side road near Cheriton, Massachusetts, no one has ever figured out.

“Her death obviously occurred right, there. Blood spatter. All pretty clear. She hadn’t been taken there and dumped. She had half-climbed into the goddam trunk. Why? Had someone forced her? Gunpoint? Who knows? What it really looks like is, she went looking for something and, instead, found something that took her head clean off. From the scratches on the vertebrae and the impact effect, the guess was something like a spring-loaded guillotine, similar to the one that had taken out Warren St Amant. Then, without the weight of her head, she slid back, until she was halfway out of the trunk again, feet resting on the ground.”

“So the guillotine wasn’t in the car when you found it.”

“No. Someone, whoever, came and took the head and the spring-loaded guillotine. We found it, later, or at least the spring part of it, in a stack of fence hardware at Home Depot. The blade never turned up. The soil under the car was soaked with her blood.”

“Did they ever find her head?”

“Nope. But here’s where we talk—”

“About the Easter Bunny. Someone who hides drugs in concealed locations. Jord was furious, saw it as some kind of unfair competition.”

“It’s a reasonable explanation: the Bowler, or whoever, puts drugs into hidden locations, suggests that people look for them, and then kills them when they find them.”

“You don’t believe it?” Bernal said. “It explains why anyone’s giving out free drugs in the first place and why at least St Amant and Lipsius ended up where they did.” 

“Oh, no, I don’t think it’s a bad explanation at all. Fits into a nice progression, if you throw Gambino out as someone who just ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time: Damon Fry as the accidental first case, Warren St Amant as a kind of test of the concept, and Aurora Lipsius as the first successful use of an automatic death device of some sort. Everything’s getting automated now, can’t get any living being to answer the phone when you call to complain, so, sure.”

Bernal picked up on her subtext. “Gambino doesn’t fit, though the drug connection is certainly there. You think Muriel doesn’t fit either.”

She sighed. “Part of my fight. Oh, it’s not like my suspicions that there was more than one person who ended up under the label ‘The Bowler’ was what made me leave the force. But it was part of it. Just the groupthink, the way people settle on an idea and hold on to it, no matter what. You detected it yourself. Cops decide someone’s guilty. Prosecutors sign on. They pressure the lab techs to make sure that the evidence supports that theory. Witnesses are coached, consciously or unconsciously, all the way from identification to court testimony. There’s a story, and nothing that doesn’t fit makes it in. Any attempt to put checks in, to try to make sure that you’ve looked at all the possibilities, is regarded as .. . treason. Not just not going along, not just being a pain in the ass, but as genuinely being an enemy of everything that is good and true. And cops, as we all know, are good and true. My last year there was hell. And that was one year too long. I had other dominant paradigms to subvert, so I left. There were still years left before I would be able to pull a decent pension, the reason most folks hang in there. So I decided to go for the big bucks in AI surveillance.”

“All right. Let me subvert your paradigm,” Bernal said.

“Lay it on me, brother.”

“You think that Muriel was investigating Hess Tech, found a connection to the Long Voyage cryobank, and came up with a crazy theory about Madeline Ungaro stealing heads as a way of jumpstarting her project. When Christopher Gambino, for his own personal reasons, went out to buy drugs and got himself killed by the Bowler, she tied that into her thinking and started researching the Bowler. But the Bowler had nothing to do with Hess Tech, with Madeline Ungaro, or with Hesketh. She linked everything backwards into one theory, but they were really only linked through Gambino, and he was just coincidental. Right?”

“Close enough.”

“But there’s another connection. We’re sitting in it. Just yesterday, we backtracked Hesketh from here, all the way down to the Black River, to a car that had had something taken out of it. . . .” Now that he said it out loud, none of that seemed particularly persuasive. “Did the police check the scene?”

“They will,” Charis said. “I’ll be surprised if they find anything. It was pretty clean. No blood, no hair, nothing visible. But they may find the connection. Muriel might have died there that night, tying it right back to Hesketh and Madeline Ungaro. But you’re thinking something more, aren’t you? I mean, the connection isn’t just that Ungaro, Muriel, Hesketh, and the Bowler were all there at the same time, right? That’s just some kind of weird-ass jamboree. So tell Auntie Charis what insane theory you’re operating under.”

“Muriel is communicating with me. It looks like her usual signs-and-symbols stuff. But it’s gotten way beyond that. She sent me the flowers that took me to watch Hesketh. Then, the next morning, she sent a fax to your machine, the one you gave to me. Neither of those things is so weird. But then she somehow got a musical Easter Bunny into my car, with a voice message from her. All of that happened after she was beheaded. I had taken it as evidence that she was alive. Until I found her dead. But, somehow, she is not dead. Somewhere, she is conscious, and trying to communicate.”

There, he’d said it.

Charis’s ponderous shape looked carved out of a particularly smooth, honey-colored wood. Rings, bracelets, earrings glittered in the dim light from the clerestory windows.

“Muriel got her head cut off,” she said. “Just as with Aurora Lipsius, we have not found her head, just her body. You think that head is—what?—frozen and incorporated into Hesketh somehow.”

“Hesketh is made out of brains stolen from Long Voyage—”

“But that’s not enough for you.” She was almost yelling now. “Frozen brains turned into a homicidal AI, lumbering around Cheriton at night seeking brainssss .. . that’s not enough to ring your bell. Muriel is still conscious, somehow, inside this .. . thin. She thinks, she wills, and she tries to communicate with you, using coded messages the way she always has. Do I have that about right?”

“I know her,” Bernal said. “I know what she would know, how she would do things. What can I say? I have a sense of her personality still there. This isn’t just denial, Charis. This isn’t just a refusal to acknowledge her death, anything like that. This is something I see, out there.”

“I know why you think she’s alive. But our brains don’t always work so well. We think we can detect a liar, we think we know the truth. But we don’t. This contact with Muriel, it persuaded you that she’s alive?”

“Yes.”

“You want her to be alive. But she’s 
not alive.
 You, of all people, should understand that. Someone out there ... or something .. . knows what you want to be true. Psychopaths are often uniquely attuned to the needs and wants of other human beings. They don’t share those needs and wants. Theirs are simpler and more elemental. So they can perceive our weaknesses much better than we can and exploit them.”

And that, Bernal realized, was as clear a vision of how an artificial intelligence was going to perceive us as anyone was likely to come up with.

“There’s someone out there that’s killing people. Can’t you understand that? It’s not some kind of intellectual puzzle, something to entertain your brain with. Whoever that is lured Muriel Inglis out to a place where she could be killed. Muriel was an intelligent person. So are you. If someone as intelligent as Muriel can be tricked and killed, so can you.”