Act of Betrayal (5 page)

“Okay, so the owner’s not a fountain of information,” Anita said. “What about the other tenants? I’d at least say hello to Ginger on the stairs, you know, offer to carry strange packages.”

Dave raised his eyebrows. “Obviously, the rest of the world isn’t like you, Miss Congeniality. Tenants saw no evil, heard no evil, spoke no evil. Most of them look like monkeys, too. Except for that really nice woman in 1B. She’s a looker.”

Anita poked him in the arm. “Hey, I thought you were spoken for. You’re not supposed to be looking at other women.”

“A guy always looks. Anyway, she’s got baggage.”

“Baggage?” PJ said.

“A six-month-old baby. That’s not my scene.”

“Melissa know about that?” Anita said. “I thought she came from a big family. Seems like she’d want kids.”

“Yeah, but not yet. We want a few carefree years before getting those little ankle weights. Not that I dislike kids. But I figure when I’m forty or so, I’ll be ready for the dull life.” He glanced sideways at PJ. “Uh, no offense, Boss.”

“None taken. But you’ll find that life with kids is hardly dull.” PJ thought about the challenge of raising a teenage son as a single mother. Just when she thought she had a good handle on things, Thomas would come up with something new that required creative parenting. She knew from recent experience that her son wasn’t immune to bad influences. A case she’d worked on provided her with ample evidence that evil could take root in her own family, right under her nose. She was more watchful of her son as a result, just at the time in his life when he was pulling away to become his own person.

“So we have a man or a woman that nobody saw,” PJ said. “Or any combination or multiple thereof. I don’t suppose Ginger Miller is a real name, anyway.”

“Phone company has two Ginger Millers,” Dave said. “Motor Vehicles has one more who doesn’t have a phone. We’ll check those out this afternoon. No record at the post office of Ginger Miller at that address, so there was no mail delivered there except to Occupant. The mail slot in the front hall was cleaned out regularly, though.”

Anita perked up. “No fingerprints on the mail slot?”

“One set. The postman’s.”

PJ was a trifle embarrassed that Dave and Anita had been so productive while she had been chowing down on buttered sweet rolls at Millie’s. Then she reminded herself that it had been necessary to get Schultz away from the scene, and she was the best one to do it.

She thought of the look on Schultz’s face when he got up from the counter to phone Julia. She had wanted to accompany him to the phone, hold his hand, lean her head against his shoulder while he made the most difficult phone call of his life. But she’d done none of that.

Am I so afraid of committing myself to the man that I can’t let him lean on me when he needs me the most? Or am I afraid it isn’t me he needs?

“The owner lives there and never saw the person?” Anita said. “How’d she pick up the key the first time?”

“The owner lives in a basement apartment with an entrance around the back of the building. He can’t keep tabs on anybody from there. The tenants go in and out of the building using the front entrance. The key was mailed to a post office box, and he doesn’t remember the address. It was months ago.”

Wall grunted. “A little sloppy on his record-keeping, wouldn’t you say? Maybe we should ask the IRS to drop in on him. Might jog his memory.”

“Couldn’t hurt,” PJ said. “I’d like Dave and Anita back in that building talking to the other tenants again. Hit the neighboring buildings, too. Someone may have seen something. Make sure you touch base with the new officers first, and get them going on the chemicals and the various Gingers. Let me hear from you by seven at the latest. I’ll be at Schultz’s by then.”

The two young investigators gathered up their notebooks and left. Wall seemed reluctant to go. PJ refilled her coffee cup from the machine on a table squeezed into the corner of her office, and offered him some. He declined, which turned out to be a good thing because she remembered that Schultz had made off with her spare coffee mug last Friday.

His son was already dead then, but no one knew about it. Except the murderer.

“Lieutenant, I’d like to ask you something,” she said.

“Shoot.”

Something had been on PJ’s mind, and it looked as if Howard Wall would be her best source of information. She knew he had kids, four of them in fact, the oldest being about Thomas’s age.

“I know this is way out of line, but I need someone to stay with Thomas tonight when I go to visit Schultz. Do you have a regular baby-sitter I could call? Someone… mature? I’ll call Thomas and tell him I don’t know when I’ll be home, but I hate to leave him alone for a possible all-nighter. A few hours he can certainly handle, but I don’t feel right about all night. I’m almost sure he’ll be able to stay at his friend Winston’s house for a few days, but I want to talk to Winston’s dad about it first and not just spring it on him. I can get it set up by tomorrow.”

Lieutenant Wall nodded. “You call Thomas and tell him to expect Al Baker. He’s a young officer, but he’s very reliable. Works in public relations, and he’s great with kids. Given the circumstances, I’m sure he’d be happy to volunteer his time. Don’t let his appearance fool you either. He’s under thirty and looks like a surfer, but he’s all class.”

PJ was relieved. She had been reluctant to ask, but she didn’t have any advance plans for overnight care for Thomas. While she had been in the hospital after an encounter with a killer who marked her with a knife, Thomas had moved in with Schultz. She didn’t have a large circle of friends in St. Louis, as she had in Denver. Her work didn’t lend itself to meeting new people and socializing. One friend of hers, Helen Boxwood, would respond to an urgent request, but she was a nurse who worked nights and couldn’t rearrange her schedule at a moment’s notice. Bill Lakeland, Winston’s father, was the type who planned ahead, having never mastered the flexibility that parenthood entailed. Impromptu requests put him into a tizzy. Her other close friend, Mike Wolf, was out of consideration, also, since his wife had just died, and he was in no condition to take on extra responsibility. He needed time with his own teenage daughters.

It seemed a long time since PJ had sat commiserating with Mike, yet it was only twelve hours ago. No wonder her head was throbbing. She’d had only three hours sleep, and twice that many glasses of wine.

When PJ first became a single mother, she was very sensitive about being self-sufficient in caring for Thomas. She had to prove to herself and to all the imagined critics out there that she could handle it alone before she was willing to reach out for help at difficult times. On her first day on the job as head of CHIP, she never would have guessed that she’d be secure enough as a single person, a parent, and a professional months later to ask her boss for a recommendation for a baby-sitter.

“Thanks,” PJ said. “That’s a load off my mind.” Wall didn’t get up to leave. “Something else?”

Wall cleared his throat. “Something you should know about Schultz, and I doubt if anyone’s told you. Especially Schultz himself.”

She waited as he ordered his thoughts and selected his words. Wall rarely spoke hastily.

“Years ago Schultz had a problem with binge drinking. Not that he was a regular, an alcoholic or anything. It only happened when something went bad at work. He’d get really drunk, and it lasted three or four days. He would do that maybe once a year. Then he’d be back on the job, and nobody ever talked about it. As far as I know, he quit it over ten years ago. He got through his entire divorce and didn’t let himself go like that. But with what he saw today, I just don’t know.”

“I appreciate the warning. Maybe I’d better not wait until this evening to get over to his place as I’d planned.”

“Nah, he’ll be fine. It won’t hit him until later tonight.”

PJ thought that he spoke with the certainty of experience. She wondered if Wall had been the one to coax Schultz from his earlier retreats from reality, and if he’d had anything to do with putting a stop to them ten years ago. She wasn’t even sure it was a good idea to stop. As a psychologist, she realized the value of the safety valve in situations where the pressure could be overwhelming. If sitting at home getting stone drunk once a year was Schultz’s safety valve, why mess with it? Then she realized that maybe he didn’t drink just at home. An inebriated law enforcement officer would be a community concern, a danger to himself and others.

Wall walked out, and she was left alone with her thoughts. Everyone else was out doing the field work they’d been trained to do. As a civilian, she began her work on a case right at her desk. Later on she might join the others, but her first task was to develop a computer simulation of the crime scene.

She opened the slim homicide file. There wasn’t much in it yet, but it would grow in thickness almost by the hour. It was identified by a case number only, not with a name, until the ME’s office provided the official positive ID based on a combination of dental records and the tattoo. But it might as well have been emblazoned
Schultz, Richard William
in neon-bright colors.

She flipped open the case file and paged through until she found the sketches Dave had made of the apartment. Those plus the Polaroid photos would allow her to re-create the scene in the computer. Using customized software, she began the lengthy process of building the apartment, and the victim, in virtual reality.

The CHIP team had come into existence as a result of a federal grant to investigate the use of computers as crime-solving tools. The grant arrived in the form of a powerful Silicon Graphics workstation and limited cash for salaries. The St. Louis Police Department, unwilling to let the grant money slip away and the computer equipment sit idle, advertised for a computer expert to undertake criminology research. The ad appeared in the
Denver Post
just as PJ was scanning the classifieds looking for a way out of the city. Her husband Steven had just left her to move in with his lover, Caria. PJ couldn’t stand to stay in the same city with the two of them. Among the nearly half a million other residents of the city of Denver, she felt their presence acutely.

Taking her son and a few possessions that predated her marriage to Steven, she took a pay cut and moved to St. Louis to begin her new career. She had envisioned herself as a desk-bound researcher, spending her days quietly developing virtual reality simulations and generally fiddling around with a high-end computer she couldn’t afford on her own. Instead, she was the head of a dynamic team of homicide investigators who challenged her skills, her professionalism, her commitment, and from the very first day, her composure.

And she didn’t regret it for a moment.

PJ entered the diagram of the apartment into the computer, using the sketches and measurements Dave had made. Her software would take it from two dimensions to a three-dimensional wire-frame rendering; then she would work to fill in surfaces, textures, and shading, extrapolating what the back sides of objects looked like. She was creating a world in the computer, one that she could manipulate and control.

It was an artificial world she created, but the more detail she added to it the more it seemed to take on a substance of its own. Eventually, her virtual world became so real that it was a meaningful investigative tool. She could enter that world, fooling her senses, immersing herself totally in a space that existed only in a computer’s memory and storage. She could be right on the scene of the crime and watch it committed, or put herself in the terrifying situation of becoming the victim of a homicide. Or, if she had the stomach for it, play the role of the killer. By doing so, she hoped to reach a better understanding not only of the physical facts of the crime but the behavior of the criminal. It was behavioral profiling elevated to the next step.

And she could do it repeatedly, trying out variations, using a combination of guidance from the computer, her training as a psychologist, and her intuition to come closer and closer to what she hoped were the actual detailed circumstances of the killing. Details that, without the use of virtual reality to portray them vividly, might be locked irretrievably in the mind of one person—the killer. Her groundbreaking software made use of artificial intelligence, or AI, to help the computer fill in missing information by making a series of best guesses.

She scanned in a photo of Rick, not one of the crime scene photos but the one taken at the time of his arrest for selling drugs. In a process she had developed that she called scanimation, her program would take a scanned image and animate it, bringing it to life within the computer’s memory. Facial expressions and realistic body movements added greatly to the believability of the people who populated her virtual world.

She started with the premise that there were two killers, a man and a woman, just because she had to have a starting point. It seemed logical to her that Ginger Miller had an accomplice, perhaps a man to help subdue young strong Rick Schultz in case an amorous approach didn’t work. For those figures, she had to rely on generic images of an adult male and female, characters she called Genman and Genfem. If necessary, she also had a Genkid available, a child about six years old that she hoped she’d never have to use. In a previous case she’d needed an adolescent, so she had modified Genman for the purpose. She’d saved the model and dubbed it Genteen. After a few years at this job, she figured, she’d have a stable of generic creations to call upon as needed.

Genman and Genfem were as nondescript as she could get them: less than middle aged but not young, average height and weight, forgettable facial features, Caucasian but with adjustable racial characteristics if needed, dressed in jeans and plain T-shirts. She inserted them into the simulation and, on a whim, named them Bonnie and Clyde.

PJ outlined the action of the simulation briefly. She didn’t provide too much information, because she wanted the computer to draw upon AI to fill in some of the details. Seeing what the computer could come up with when it used its own “imagination” sometimes led to startling insights. And sometimes it led to utterly ridiculous conclusions, much to the amusement of the rest of the CHIP team. Her computer drew upon a large encyclopedia of information to help in decision making, but didn’t interpret that information with the full range of human experience. She was still trying to live down the time her program needed a way to get a Genfem out of a building without being seen. The computer, which had the Bible to draw on in its reference database, had created an angel who clasped the Genfem firmly under the arms and flew her out a window, along with PJ’s credibility.