Angel Face (4 page)

She let out a sigh. This was not good. She was actually fantasizing about a brain. The SPECT, which was an acronym for single photon emission computed tomography, measured the brain’s blood flow and metabolic activity, and the EEG measured its electrical activity. But even with a diagnostic tool as sophisticated as the former, Angela couldn’t be certain the subject was actually licking ice cream or gazing at a woman. She didn’t even know for sure that he was a man, except that the size of his hypothalamic nucleus and the typically male way his brain processed information were pretty big clues.

She would love to have known how the study subjects were chosen, especially this one, but it was a double-blind, and that sort of information could cause bias. They’d probably taken IQ tests and personality inventories, but other than that, she could only guess what the selection critieria might be. What she did know was that
the subject was ingesting something and enjoying it thoroughly. And there’d been studies documenting that when males looked at sexually attractive women, their PC3 waves took a nosedive.

That bothered her. It bothered her a lot.

Now she was jealous of a brain?

She had to stop this daydreaming. She could feel herself becoming fixated, and she couldn’t let that happen. She really couldn’t. Not only was it bad for the study, it was bad for her. There were too many risks to getting involved with someone, even mentally, and not just for her, for them. It would be risky to admit having such thoughts. She knew how paranoid her fears would sound, even to someone like Peter Brandt, whom she trusted above everyone else at SmartTech, including Sammy. She was still trying to prove herself, and she owed it to Peter as much as she did herself to do well. He had given her a chance. He’d saved her life.

She hit the Sleep button on her computer screen and was relieved when the images went dark. If only it weren’t so lonely, the darkness might have soothed her for longer. It probably didn’t help that the small cubicle she’d been assigned to was severely plain, furnished only with the computer equipment she needed to do her work, filing cabinets, and bookcases weighed down with texts and reference material.

The books helped. She loved knowledge and had an unquenchable thirst for it. The more knowledge she gained, the more secure she felt in an unpredictable world. But the truth was, she was alone too much. There were no significant relationships in her life, and she was becoming attached to the mental life of her subjects. She actually worried about them. She knew Alpha Ten didn’t eat right.

Stop, Angela. Stop this nonsense. Control yourself. You must learn to control yourself.

Her response to the command was instant and automatic. She breathed deeply, drawing on the air in the pit of her belly, exhaling until she was empty, and inhaling to that same deep place.

“Rain, rain, go away,” she said under her breath. She chanted the phrase several more times. It was the mantra she’d used since childhood to force unwanted thoughts and images out of her mind.

Moments later, she was back to normal, alert and calmer. She checked her watch and saw that it was still relatively early. It wasn’t unusual for her to work around the clock for days on end, catching naps on the cot in her cubicle, but tonight she was going to do a little grocery shopping and go home. She had a sudden craving for ice cream.

T
HE
deli section had taken Angela captive. There was too much to choose from, and she wasn’t past the cheese yet. There were hefty wheels and wedges, nut-encrusted rolls, and tiny golden roundlets. The sheer volume filled an entire display case, and in the next case, the sliced and rolled meats were beckoning to her. Beyond that there were tiered platters of salads, some with ingredients that would have stumped a
Jeopardy
contestant.

She picked up wedges of Monterey Jack and Cheddar that would most likely end up in some kind of nachos, the mainstay of her diet lately. The bakery section wafted ambrosia-like, and Angela headed there next. She grabbed a loaf of poppy seed rye, tossed it in her cart, and wondered why she had. What an odd choice. She couldn’t remember ever having eaten poppy seed rye. Puzzled, she returned it to the shelf and found herself scrutinizing the English muffins. She didn’t eat those, either. It was bagels she liked. Wasn’t it?

A sense of uneasiness overtook her as she wheeled her
cart out of the section. She glanced over her shoulder and wondered what she was looking for and why her stomach was churning.

“Rain, rain,” she murmured.

Sometimes it felt as if her world would fly apart without those words, although she couldn’t easily have explained how they’d come to take on such significance . . . or even why she’d chosen them. All she knew was that they’d given her back some control, and for so much of her life, she’d had none. God,
less
than none. She’d been little more than a trained seal.

She would kill before she’d give up control again
. A strange sound hissed through her teeth, and her hands clamped tight on the cart handle. She felt nerves burn a jagged line up her arm and the intensity of it startled her. Angela barely understood the emotion she was feeling, except that she knew it was rage.

“Ma’am? Excuse me?”

People were trying to get by her, she realized. A man’s cart clanked up against hers, and somewhere in the store they announced a sale on creamed corn. Creamed corn? That wasn’t what she’d come to the store for. It was ice cream, wasn’t it? What aisle was that? The store had turned into a maze of bright lights and corridors.

A child’s cry broke through her confusion. It came at her from behind, but she couldn’t get her cart around. It was frozen. She was frozen.

For a moment, Angela lost track of everything but the lights burning into her field of vision and the sound hissing in her ears. She didn’t know how long it took to turn, but when she did, she saw a young girl, holding her face. The red blotches where the child had been struck could not be hidden. A man who was probably her father was jerking her arm and speaking to her sternly. Tears streamed down the girl’s face. She was more humiliated
than hurt, but the fury that surged through Angela was volcanic.

She didn’t want to kill the man, she wanted to rip him to pieces with her bare hands, tear off the offending parts—his head, his arms—and leave him with nothing but a bloody trunk. She wanted to maim and mutilate. The need to protect the child consumed her. No, to
avenge
, she realized. She wanted revenge on the monster who’d hurt her, on all of them!

“Could you move your cart, please? Ma’am? Could you—”

Angela looked up to see a teenage boy, trying to get her attention. She was still frozen in the same place. She’d never moved. There was no crying child, no enraged father. It hadn’t happened. She’d imagined it all, even the frightening need to mutilate and destroy.

“Are you okay?”

It was the boy again, but Angela couldn’t answer him.

They were coming back. Her fantasies were coming back.

A
NGELA
was still shaking when she closed the door of her studio apartment and locked it behind her. She hadn’t yet furnished the main room with anything but the basics, but plain as it was, she was glad to be inside. It felt safer here, although that was an illusion, too, she realized. There wasn’t any safe place when the danger was inside you.

The black linen jacket she wore didn’t offer much in the way of warmth, but she kept it on as she crossed the room to the maple dinette that was her work space. It and the chairs were constantly piled high with books and research. This was her refuge, this table. It was a place where she could happily get lost, whether searching
through a book or surfing the Web on the computer she never turned off.

The first thing she did was sit herself down, confident that once she got back to work, everything would be fine. Even her screen saver helped. She’d had it made from a photograph in a frame that had caught her eye in a department store. She’d loved the heart-shaped arrangement of silver flowers instantly and had grabbed it, even though she had nothing to put inside it.

The picture was one of those stock beach scenes of a man and woman roughhousing with a shiny black Labrador. Nothing special really, but it was always there when Angela needed a distraction.
His dog,
she’d decided.
His beach house. Her love of life
. She’d also decided they had probably just met that weekend. Something about the way the woman ran across the sand, barefoot and laughing, while the man caught her from behind, made Angela think they might be new lovers. The dog had dashed up to the man, a ball clamped in its jaws.

His dog,
she was certain.

She had daydreamed away more hours than she cared to think about, imagining each new step in the couple’s relationship. At least once they’d had a terrible fight and broken up, but the poor bewildered dog had had the worst of it, not knowing who to go to.

Angela had watched over her screen saver family every step of the way, a guardian angel, determined they were going to be happy, even if they didn’t know it. But for all her involvement, she had never been able to see herself in the picture on her screen. To most people it must have seemed a perfectly normal thing, loving, fighting, loving again. For her it was something to contemplate from a distance but too much to expect. A normal life was what other people lived.

You’ve got mail.

Angela responded automatically to the computer’s prompt. Along with the usual junk mail, there was another bad joke from Sammy. He sent her all kinds of corny stuff, trying to make her laugh. Maybe she was too serious, but it was Sammy himself who had her worried these days.

His obsession with Angel Face was beginning to alarm her. He talked about the program as if it were a real person, and he did it so convincingly, Angela found herself getting caught up in his fantasy, too—only Sammy seemed to enjoy it. The thought of trying to control and predict a serial killer was a disturbing prospect to Angela, and it concerned her that he seemed to thrive on it.

The program was supposed to be one of SmartTech’s most heavily guarded secrets, and Angela had the feeling only Sammy really knew what was going on from a technical standpoint. She often wondered if he should be revealing as much to her as he had about Angel Face. That worried her, too, but Sammy was the veteran. He knew the company’s ins and outs, and if he felt safe confiding in her, then maybe she should relax and take it as a compliment. But at the same time, she was going to keep her eye on him.

Angela’s screen was blinking at her now, ready to go. She positioned the arrow and clicked on Chat. Earlier that year she’d received an E-mail announcement of a chat room for runaways called girlgone, and she’d searched it out, thinking she might be of some help. Since then, she’d checked in almost daily and had become one of the room’s regulars.

Probably because of their extreme circumstances, the girlgone members tended to bond quickly but with a genuine warmth and caring that made Angela feel as if she’d found a family out there in cyberspace. Night after night she’d watched miracles performed on the screen, and it had made her realize that you could touch someone
profoundly, even if all you had to give were words of encouragement.

She’d made one friend in particular, a jaded, seen-it-all regular named runninwyld, who said little about herself but was the closest thing the room had to a referral service. No matter where you were, if you needed a place to stay, runninwyld could usually come up with something. Angela had once asked if she’d run a tourist bureau in another life, and runninwyld had come back with “More likely the travel agent from hell.” It was the start of a fast friendship.

Angela went by the screen name onlythelonely, mostly because she’d heard the Roy Orbison song on the car radio the day she opened her account. Tonight, the girlgone room was full, and runninwyld was telling everyone about the ultimate in ticketless travel. Apparently, the wealthy had terminals for their private jets and charters, and when the flights were empty or deadheading, they sometimes took on passengers for free. No ticketing lines, no security checks, no questions, just a damn fine ride to an exotic locale, according to runninwyld.

The service was called Million Air, and Angela made a note of it, even though she had no immediate plans to flee the country. She watched without joining in as the chat room talk turned to a discussion of hot lines and which ones were legitimate. Again, runninwyld was the go-to girl, and Angela became more and more curious about her on-line friend. She was about to send her a private message that would show up only on her screen, but her friend beat her to it.

runninwyld: quiet tonight. r u all right?

Angela typed her answer in the little dialogue box that had appeared in the upper left-hand corner of her screen.

onlythelonely: Tough day, but I’m fine. Can I ask a question?
runninwyld: u can ask, i may not answer. ;)
onlythelonely: I keep wondering why you’ve never told me your name or where you’re at. I don’t even know how old you are.
runninwyld: that just occurred to u?

i’m older than u might think, closer than u might want me to be . . . and names aren’t important.
onlythelonely: Why so mysterious? Are you in trouble? Don’t you trust me?
runninwyld: trust is overrated, lonely. trust me on this. stick with anger and suspicion, you’ll live longer.
onlythelonely: You wouldn’t tell me if you were in trouble, would you.
runninwyld: take my advice, lonely. trust no one. it’s not me who needs to worry about trouble. i can take care of myself, always have. nobody f***s with wyld.
onlythelonely: Have we ever met? Outside this room, I mean.