The Prophet Motive (28 page)

“What?” Ezra said.

“There it is, I think,” Bourne said, focusing on a spot on John’s head. “C’mon, John. We’re going for a little walk.” The inspector assisted John to his feet. Doctor Jones helped her patient to slip into a white terrycloth bathrobe.

“Take a CAT-scan?” Ezra said. “Whatever for?”

Inspector Bourne craned his neck to look at Ezra. “We think there’s an electrode implanted in his brain, and that’s why he killed Captain Switzer.”

Ezra found himself speechless. Inspector Bourne led John out the door. Doctor Jones joined the pair. Ezra switched off the television and followed, calling after them in the corridor.

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard! You people simply don’t understand the power of cult mind control!”

Ezra wasn’t about to squander what little progress he’d made using that old video of the so-called Wizard. “Is L. Rob Piper a cult leader?” he said straight into his new client’s ear.

No response. The group reached the end of the corridor, halting in front of a thick steel door leading out of the secure unit. “Is he?”

“No,” John said this time. “I thought so at first, but then . . .”

“Then what?” Ezra said. “If he’s not a cult leader, then why does he use every trick in the book? Certainly, you remember all those mind persuasion techniques Doctor Michaelsen taught you. Piper used most of them on you, John. Don’t you remember?”

A guard, dressed in a maroon sports jacket and brown slacks so as not to intimidate the patients, unlocked the steel door. A pistol in a shoulder holster peeped out from beneath his jacket.

“Let’s start from the beginning,” Ezra said. “Remember the campsite up in Marin County? They used a cheap trick to develop rapport with you, didn’t they?” John didn’t answer. The guard held the door open while the group, led by Dr. Jones, passed into a non-secure corridor. “You’ll remember,” Ezra continued, “it’s called ‘mirroring.’ They mirrored you constantly. Every move you made, they made. Everything you had to say, they agreed with completely. No matter how ludicrous.”

Doctor Jones halted the group in front of the elevators and pushed the
down
button. As they waited for the compartment to arrive, Ezra noticed Inspector Bourne eyeing him suspiciously, as if ready at any moment to leap in and protect John. Ezra ignored him.

“You know the game,” he said to John. “It’s the same one a man plays when he picks up a floozy in a bar, only this time you were the floozy.” The elevator doors opened. The group huddled inside. “And they love-bombed you too. Didn’t they, John? You remember what love-bombing means, don’t you? Of course you do. Every time you fart, they tell you it’s Louis Armstrong. Right?”

But John wasn’t listening anymore, his eyes told Ezra. His mind had wandered off somewhere. As the elevator descended, Ezra examined John’s scalp, standing on tiptoes.

“That’s no surgical incision, people. That’s a simple laceration. John told me he’d fractured his skull.”

“If I was a mad doctor,” Inspector Bourne said, “secretly operating on people’s brains, I’d make a jagged scalp incision on purpose, to make it look like a simple laceration, an accident.”

“Who came up with this brilliant idea?” Ezra said.

“Doctor Michaelsen,” Inspector Bourne said.

“Who
is
brilliant, by the way,” Doctor Jones said.

“She’s grown attached to John,” Ezra said. “Or else she feels guilty about what happened to him. Her theory’s an attempt to justify what he did. As if having his brain washed wasn’t enough justification.”

“John Richetti’s no murderer,” Inspector Bourne said. “I think Marilyn’s right.”

The elevator doors opened. “Gentlemen,” Doctor Jones said, “I suggest we let science decide.”

They were met mid corridor by a black man in a white coat. He was young, goateed, and slender. Doctor Jones introduced him as Maurice McRae, one of the lab technicians.

“You sure you want a CAT-scan?” Maurice asked Doctor Jones.

She nodded. “Yes, because we can’t use MRI. The patient may have depth-electrodes in his brain, as well as a transmitter with metal bits.”

“May have?” Maurice said.

“It’s a long story.”

“A ridiculous story,” Ezra said.

Maurice led them into a small room, where a giant steel donut stood on end, almost touching the ceiling. Inside the donut hole and jutting out in front of it was a slender patient couch that could glide back and forth upon horizontal rails.

Maurice slid the patient couch all the way out of the hole, assisted John to lie down on it, and then slid it back inside, leaving John’s head in the middle of the donut.

“Can John and I talk during this?” Ezra asked Maurice.

“So long as he keeps his head still, and you don’t mind a small dose of X-ray beams.”

A row of thick safety glass set in one wall of the room revealed a control booth on the other side. Inspector Bourne followed Maurice and Doctor Jones out of the room and into the booth. Ezra remained, bent at the waist beside the giant donut and leaning toward John’s face.

“Okay, John, now we’re at the farm. Once they had you in their clutches, they cut off your contact with the outside world, didn’t they? You couldn’t get to a telephone, remember? The one you tried was busted, cell phones were outlawed, and you were denied access to any of the business phones, isn’t that right? They isolated you from every message but their own.

“Now why would they do that, John? Why? I’ll tell you why. Cult leaders know if they control what goes into your brain, they soon control what comes out. They control your beliefs. Your actions. You.”

“Go away,” John said as whirring sounds began from inside the steel donut, and an X-ray tube affixed to the rim of the donut hole above his head began scanning, rotating along a track, capturing images from different angles and depths of what lay beneath his cranium.

“Doesn’t sound like there was much freedom in The Wizard’s society,” Ezra said. “Maybe no freedom at all.”

“It’s The Wizard’s way,” John said. “Just accept it. Because you won’t always understand what he says or does.”

“I think I understand plenty, and so do you. For example, we both understand why Piper lectured to his followers using guided imagery, don’t we? It was to put his listeners into a trance state, wasn’t it? In a trance, people are more open to suggestions, isn’t that so?”

John’s jaw clenched and his eyes squinted in anger, struggling to form a response. That was a promising sign. And it was about time.

“Isn’t that so?” Ezra repeated.

“Go away. Just go away.”

Suddenly, the voice of Maurice McRae boomed through a loudspeaker. “John, please turn your head to the right.” John complied. “That’s it. A little more. Good. Hold it there.”

The donut began whirring again. Ezra said, “Now let’s talk about the confessions. You know what I’m referring to. There were lots of sharing sessions, weren’t there? Every participant was required to tell his or her life’s story, remember? Do you remember or not?”

Slowly, reluctantly, John nodded. Through the loudspeaker, Maurice reminded John to keep his head as still as possible.

“Certainly, you must’ve noticed,” Ezra said, “that the telling of these life stories changed dramatically in short order. People soon realized that the more they trashed their own parents and relatives and friends—and maybe even their family pets—the more pleased the cult leaders became. Why? Because the cult was trying to alienate its new members from their former lives. That’s why. The new followers came to interpret their previous lives—and then the outside world in general—as horrible and meaningless. Isn’t that right, John?”

Ezra recognized that John had suddenly slipped into an altered state. He wasn’t listening anymore at all.

“John!” Ezra slapped his patient’s thigh. “What about the lack of sleep? And the inadequate nutrition? What about that, John? Earthbound kept hurting your body. Intentionally. Because a depleted body makes it easy to mold the mind, isn’t that right? Isn’t that what Marilyn taught you?”

But it was no use. John was now far, far away. Running scared from reality . . .

“Ezra, could you come in here, please?” It was Doctor Jones coming over the loudspeaker. Her voice sounded quavery.

Ezra strode out of the room and into the booth. He noticed young Inspector Bourne beaming at him.

“Come look at this,” Doctor Jones said, pointing to a horizontal bank of visual monitors directly above the control booth window. Inspector Bourne shuffled out of the way for Ezra.

The first monitor showed a white skull against a black background. Doctor Jones pointed to it. “This is a lateral head localizer image. See this small dark circle?” Her index finger slid beneath a tiny black dot on the skull.

“Yes,” Ezra said. “Is that the fracture?”

“That’s no fracture. That’s a surgeon’s burr hole. Marilyn was right.”

Through the thick glass, Ezra peered at John’s motionless form on the patient’s couch, head hidden inside the donut.

“Dear God!”

“Now look at this,” she said with a pat to the adjacent monitor. It displayed a murky, complex image. “This is a computed tomography image of John’s brain. A midsagittal slice. The image is displayed on a gray scale with regions of high signal intensity appearing white and regions of low signal intensity appearing black. In other words, fluids, fats, and soft tissue should be uniformly white, while bone and other solid objects should be black.

“As you can see, there’s a black circle overlapping the top of the burr hole just below the skin. It’s paper thin, and it has the circumference of a coin, somewhere between the size of a nickel and a quarter. That, I feel quite certain in saying, is the transmitter needed to deliver signals from a neurostimulator into the electrodes, buried deep in the brain.”

“So you’ve found electrodes too?” Ezra asked.

“We’ve found one already, because we knew where to look, based on John’s recent violent behavior. Look here, in the soft tissue of the amygdala, the rage center. There’s a strange black dot. That’s an electrode.”

“The rage center,” Ezra repeated. “So someone stood nearby John—although I imagine not too close—and, through that electrode there, sent an electrical signal into the part of John’s brain that controls anger, compelling him into a state of rage, driving him to murder?”

Doctor Jones nodded. “With sufficient stimulation intensity,” she said, “you could turn the Pope himself into a bloodthirsty maniacal killer.”

Ezra crossed himself. “ ‘Hail Mary, full of grace . . .’ ”

L. Rob Piper smeared a liberal dollop of marmalade on his hot croissant. He felt as giddy as the morning sun outside his breakfast nook. He was in his favorite silk pajamas, sitting at a beech wood table opposite Doctor Martin Lipset. He told his enthralled new protégé, “After my prison release, I found myself a pariah in the neuroscience community—Nay, the entire scientific community!—as you might well imagine.”

“Of course,” Lipset said.

“The best I could do was land a research appointment at a small neurophysiology lab in Los Angeles. Measly salary. A hundred and twenty K. My job was to develop a better probe for use in pallidotomies.”

“Not much of a future there.”

“No,” he said, “all I could do was bide my time. Wait for the next opportunity to present itself. And soon it did. I was home alone one evening, channel surfing the TV, and I came upon a documentary. It was on the Waco, Texas standoff between the FBI and the Branch Davidians. It showed some film footage of the cult leader, David Koresh, lecturing to his people at some point before the crisis, and I soon recognized him for what he was—a fellow psychopath. Later on, when a psychologist described the scope and extent of Koresh’s power over his followers . . . well, I became extremely jealous.”

“He was fucking every woman in the compound, wasn’t he?” Lipset’s eyes hungered. “Mothers and their daughters. Little girls barely into their teens.”

Piper bit into his croissant and nodded. “What’s more,” he said after swallowing, “he denied the men sex entirely. Even married men weren’t allowed to fuck their own wives.”

“Ooh, that’s rich.”

“Back to my story. I went to bed that night fantasizing that I too had that kind of power over so many people. It soon dawned on me that if people think of you as some sort of god, you can squeeze a fortune out of them. And fuck them in the ass at the same time. By the next morning, the notion of becoming a cult leader had ceased to be a pleasant fantasy, and had instead become my primary goal. I knew I possessed the same gifts as David Koresh, the same level of pathological glibness. I knew I had what it took to become the leader of my own cult.”

Piper rang a small, sterling silver bell. His comely maid appeared by his side. He’d picked out her new black and white servant’s uniform himself. It flaunted her buxom body, flattered her olive skin and raven hair.

“More coffee, Arianna,” he said.