Gray Matter (27 page)

“When I gave you that first demonstration of the crime scene simulation, I mentioned that there were two ways virtual reality could work. You can watch from the outside, or put yourself right in the action. This gadget,” she said, picking up the headset, “puts you in the world. The gloves I’m wearing allow you to manipulate objects in that world.”

“So what’s the dilemma? Did you rip these off from a video arcade? Officer, I’ve never stolen anything before, I just don’t know what came over me?’ ”

PJ laughed. It felt good to laugh, so she did it again. “These aren’t in your run-of-the-mill arcade, although they probably will be in a few years. No, the problem is worse than that. I’ve created a monster.”

“This is getting interesting. Go on.”

“My simulation turned out to be so real looking, it scared me.”

“Not for the squeamish, huh?”

PJ nodded. “Plus there’s a question that just occurred to me this morning. If I can act out what the killer does, doesn’t that make me, on some level, just like the killer?”

“Shit, no. Re-enactment is part of every detective’s method, or it should be. I act out a crime on paper, in my head, and at the original scene. Sometimes I get an obliging fellow cop to play the victim. Anita and I have already been out to Armor’s place, and we’ll probably go back. I had her sit in the chair the Armor woman was in, but she would have bopped me one if I’d tried to tie her to it.”

“And it doesn’t give you the creeps?”

“No. It’s my job.”

PJ felt that there was more to it than that. It had to do with what she had sensed before about Schultz, that he connected to the killer in some way. As a psychologist, she had heard terrible things from her patients. She had experienced a whole range of vicarious emotions: fear and hatred and lust. But she was detached. She never opened herself to fully experiencing what her patients did. She knew that Schultz was willing to do that, willing to set up that vulnerability in himself, to risk understanding on a visceral basis. Again, that connection.

“So would you like to try it?” PJ asked.

“Said the spider to the fly. Why not?”

S
CHULTZ CLEARED HIS MIND.
He wanted to give PJ’s creation his full attention. After three murders, he was willing to look at just about anything.

At her direction, he pulled on the gloves. They felt like steel mesh, although they didn’t seem to limit the movement of his fingers. He made sure the office door was closed before putting on the headset. He didn’t want anyone else to see him wearing the contraption.

“I’m going to run a little demo before we get into the crime scene. Have you ever been skiing, Detective?”

“Do I look like the type to risk my neck going down a hill on a couple of match sticks?”

“Well, this should be quite an experience, then. It works better if you’re standing up. There you go. The demo’s automatic, so you don’t have to do anything with the gloves. Just watch.”

Abruptly an image formed in front of Schultz’s eyes. It was all-encompassing; the headset blocked input from outside, both visual and auditory, and replaced it with a computer-generated world. The first thing that registered was whiteness; then it resolved itself into a snowy scene, a pine forest. Straight ahead was a narrow path through the trees. For a few seconds everything was frozen in place, like a 3D still picture. Given that time to study the scene, he could tell that it wasn’t real: a tree had jagged edges, a mound of snow was too circular, the colors were a little too true, not the blended shades of the natural world. Everything had a diamond-like sharpness, a clarity that didn’t exist in reality or in the human mind.

In front of him on the path was a rear view of a person in ski clothing. There was a moment of disorientation as the scene was set in motion. The skier in front moved arms and legs rhythmically. Trees approached, grew even with Schultz, and passed by, falling beyond the range of his peripheral vision. He became aware of a swishing sound, the sound of skis moving over snow in a quiet forest. He turned his head to the left to see what happened to the trees as they passed behind him. The scene changed smoothly with his head motion, and he could see trees behind him.

Then he looked down, and got a terrific shock. He saw the front of his body, clothed in a winter outfit, arms pumping, feet encased in ski boots, gliding along in a double track in the snow laid down by the skier ahead. His body sense, his muscles, told him that he was not moving.

His eyes and ears told him otherwise.

Looking ahead, he saw the skier in front of him vanish over a rise. Soon he reached the same rise, topped it, and found himself looking down a long hill. In the distance, the other skier was moving fast, crouched, poles tucked under his arms, easily swooping around widely spaced trees. Now Schultz felt his muscles tense, his legs brace themselves. He didn’t want to go down that hill. But he moved relentlessly forward, picking up speed. When the first tree approached, he flung his arms out to prevent the crash that seemed certain. Instead, he swung smoothly around the tree, and headed for another. By the time he got to the bottom of the slope his heart was racing. He was barely aware of the headset being lifted off.

“What did you think?”

The glare of the snow was gone. He was standing in PJ’s office, just outside the bright cone of light from her desk lamp. “That was amazing,” he said.

“Draws you in, doesn’t it? That was a promotional program from a company that’s developing exercise equipment linked with VR scenery. You get on your cross-country ski machine in your basement, pop on the headset, and poof, you’re on a scenic trail. This one is considerably slicker than my simulations. They’ve got some big money interested. Mine aren’t quite as convincing, but unfortunately my imagination filled in what was lacking.”

“Amazing,” Schultz said.

“I noticed you turning your head. They have good peripheral flow, better than mine, and an excellent sense of virtual presence. You really feel like you’re in that pine forest, don’t you? I understand they’re looking into adding a pine smell and a fan to blow air over your face like the wind. The production version will respond to your motion on the exercise equipment. If you move your legs faster, you speed up on the trail.”

“I was more concerned about stopping than speeding up.”

“You did look a little…anxious. Trust me, you never left the office. Are you ready to try being a killer?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be.”

“Let me explain how to use the gloves first. If you look down, you’ll see a simulation of your own hands, minus the gloves. If you want to pick something up, just do what comes naturally. If you want to move around, first look in the direction you want to go, then tap your left palm with the fingers of your right hand, like this.” She demonstrated a clapping motion. “You’ll move forward into the scene one step for each tap. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as moving backward yet. You have to turn completely around, facing where you came from, and move forward. There’s another method in the works, a kind of treadmill on which you stand and actually move your feet in the direction you want to move in the virtual world. But that’s really cutting-edge, and I consider myself lucky to get these gloves.”

Schultz nodded, and she helped him put the headset back on. The dual miniature monitors showed only a pleasant blue null screen. He heard some clicks as PJ started up the crime scene simulation, and then the image formed.

He was at the bottom of the stairs that led to Burton’s apartment from the rear alley. Looking down, he saw the front of his body—a Genman body that didn’t have his bulk—and his arms and hands. Floating in front of his hands was the box of roses. He reached out and picked it up with both hands. For a moment he thought how ludicrous he must look to PJ, pawing thin air. Then he let himself become immersed. Looking up at the stairs, he wondered how he was supposed to tap his right fingers to his left palm if he was holding the box of roses. PJ’s directions hadn’t been clear. So he just did it—tapped one time while looking up the staircase. The scene changed slightly; he had climbed the first step. Looking down, he saw his hands still grasping the box. He climbed the rest of the stairs and rang the doorbell.

It didn’t take him long to get the hang of moving around in the world the computer spread out in front of him. He was aware that PJ’s simulation was not as good as the commercial one with the skiers, but it was certainly convincing. He acted out the rest of the scene as he had done several times in his mind. It was eerie and deeply disturbing to see everything from the killer’s viewpoint, but he did not have the same qualms about it that PJ seemed to have. Schultz was accustomed to putting himself in a criminal’s place, trying to fathom the actions of those on the edge of humanity. He was fascinated in spite of his distrust of computers.

At one point during the simulation he went over to the ornate mirror that was right inside Burton’s door. It topped a small table, the kind that would be used for keys or the mail. When he stood in front of the mirror, he saw a startling reflection: Genman’s face, smeared with blood, features stilled into a primitive mask. He wondered if the killer had glimpsed himself like this, as a heart-stopping vision of savagery, the bounds of civilized behavior loosened and then cast off.

When he finally removed the headset, he discovered that he wasn’t in the same position in the room. He had moved several feet, to the limit of the cables connecting him to PJ’s desktop computer, and was facing a different direction. At some point during the simulation, he must have actually been moving rather than just looking and tapping. When he turned around, he saw that PJ had fallen asleep at her desk, head down on her folded arms. Glancing at the Mickey Mouse clock on her desk, he was startled to see than an hour had elapsed. He put the headset and gloves on her desk. As he was tiptoeing out, she woke up.

“Got the case solved now?” she said. She stretched her arms above her head and arched her back. “I should bring in a pillow. For my back, that is, not to sleep on.”

“I have to admit there could be some potential in this.”

“High praise from the Sultan of Skepticism.” She rotated her neck, trying to stretch the tired muscles. “I added some information to the simulations based on finding out that the brain was missing from the recovered head. Would you like to go over it with me?”

She said the words in a straightforward manner, but Schultz heard the emotion underneath.

“Just a minute. Would you mind if I invited Dave and Anita to sit in on this? The truth is,” he looked down at his hands on the desk, “I’ve been getting some flak over not involving them more in the computer stuff.”

“From Anita?”

“From both of them. I told them about the original simulation, the one you showed me a few days into the investigation. I think they were jealous. They’re just kids, after all.”

“Kids? Dave is over thirty, isn’t he? Go ahead, see if they’re available. I’ve been meaning to spend more time with them anyway.”

“I should warn you that they’re a little intimidated by you. Unlike myself, of course.”

“Fetch, Detective.”

Schultz was back a few minutes later with his two assistants. Dave had pushed a chair down the hall from his own desk. Schultz and Anita settled in the two folding chairs. Dave slouched in his chair, his six-foot frame draped in it with the careless flexibility of the under-forty crowd. Anita sat up straight, her pixie-like appearance delineated by the light of PJ’s desk lamp. They made an odd pair, but worked well together. Each filled in the other’s weak points, plus Anita added that spark of independent thinking, so that together they made a pretty good detective. Schultz thought that he was probably being too critical. There had been a time when he had eagerly hung on every word of his superiors. He also thought, cynically, that maybe they were just being careful not to outshine their boss.

PJ put the two newcomers at ease with small talk. He admired that; it was smoothly done. With so many people jammed into PJ’s tiny office, Schultz felt his personal space getting cramped, shriveling up like his scrotum in a cold shower. He liked to keep people not just at arm’s reach, but beyond. The small white fan was giving its all, but the temperature began to rise almost as soon as he closed the door. He wondered if PJ knew that her office, which she had fixed up as nicely as possible, used to be a utility closet.

“Say, Doc, did you paint this place?” he said, gesturing around the room.

“Thomas and I did it late one night,” she said with obvious pride.

“Looks nice,” said Dave. “You’d never know this used to be a utility room.”

Schultz winced, but the comment didn’t seem to faze PJ. He made a note to talk to Dave about tact, subtlety, chain of command, and his lowly position therein.

He sat back and observed as PJ went through her spiel on virtual reality again, watching the reactions of those who were watching the computer screen during a simulation of the Armor murder.

“That’s basically it,” she said. ‘There’s some additional equipment which gives you much more of a feeling of being inside the virtual world rather than just looking at it on the screen.” She pointed at the headset and gloves, which had migrated to a narrow table shoved up against the wall. “Schultz and I have just gotten to that point today. You’re welcome to try it out individually. Right now I’d like to go over a newly-added portion of the simulation you just saw.”

She punched some keys and the screen showed the killer leaving Armor’s apartment and loading the carrying case into the passenger seat of a car. Then the images faded entirely and were replaced by a mirror-image action: the killer unloaded the case and carried it inside a generic-looking house. In the kitchen, he removed the head, long hair trailing, soiled with blood. Genman put the head on a wooden cutting board and chipped at it with a hammer and chisel. Schultz again took inventory of the faces watching the screen. PJ and Anita were impassive. Dave looked a little green. The figure on the screen used a large spoon to scoop the brain out into a bowl. Dave now looked more than a little green.