Margaret Truman's Experiment in Murder

by Margaret Truman

  “I don’t think you’ll need one,” he said, “but if you do, just call.”

  He picked up Cindy at her apartment, and they headed for Sheila Klaus’s home in Rockville.

  “How did your morning go?” she asked as they drove out of the District.

  “Good. I had another client who said she couldn’t be hypnotized. She slipped into trance easily.”

  Cindy laughed. “Do you ever worry that a female patient will accuse you of making sexual advances while she’s under?”

  “Always a possibility, but since I don’t—make advances—I don’t think about it. But Mesmer had his problems, though.”

  “Who?”

  “Franz Anton Mesmer, the German physician who ended up in Paris in the late 1700s practicing what he called animal magnetism. It was hypnosis, actually, only Mesmer didn’t know it. It took until sixty years later before a Scotsman, James Braid, identified hypnosis as a medical specialty. Whatever Mesmer did, he became the darling of Paris, treating lots of wealthy patients, all of them women. He traveled in lofty circles, held musical evenings at his home and was actually one of Mozart’s patrons, used to sponsor recitals by him. Anyway, King Louis something or other decided that Mesmer was too popular, especially with the ladies, and convened a commission to investigate whether he was using this so-called animal magnetism to seduce unsuspecting young women. The king appointed a whole slew of doctors and scientists to the panel, including—and get this—Ben Franklin, ambassador to France. Imagine that, Ben Franklin, a devoted womanizer, deciding whether Mesmer was a lecher. Anyway, the committee ruled against Mesmer and he faded into obscurity. What’s left is the term ‘mesmerism.’”

  “Benjamin Franklin was a womanizer?” Cindy asked.

  “According to the historians. Look, when we see Sheila, I’ll just introduce you as a friend, okay?”

  “Whatever you say. Do you think this other personality of hers, this…”

  “Carla Rasmussen.”

  “Carla Rasmussen. Do you think she’ll make an appearance?”

  “I hope so. At least you’ll know I’m not crazy.”

  When they pulled up in front of the house, Tatum turned off the ignition and they looked for any sign of Sheila. They went to the front door and Tatum rang the bell. The last time he’d been there, the door had been open, with only the screen door in place, and he was surprised that it wasn’t that way again on this beautiful, mild, sunny day.

  “Let’s check the back,” he said. “She spends a lot of time there tending her garden.”

  They circumvented the house and looked in the yard. No sign of her. They returned to the front, where Tatum picked up one of two newspapers wrapped in protective plastic. He removed it and saw that it was yesterday’s paper. The second package contained that day’s edition.

  “She’s obviously not here,” Cindy said.

  “And it looks like she hasn’t been for two days,” Tatum said.

  “She probably got away for a few days. She’s been through an ordeal.”

  “Possible, but I had the feeling that she was so happy to be home and in her garden that she wouldn’t be going anywhere.”

  They drove back to Cindy’s apartment.

  “Coming up?” she asked.

  “No, I have some errands to run. Want to grab an early bite?”

  “I’m in the mood for Chinese.”

  “I’ll pick some up and be by around five.”

  Instead of returning home, he drove to police headquarters on Indiana Street and dropped in on Detective Joe Owens.

  “Nic, my man,” Owens said. “What brings my favorite shrink here today?”

  “I need a favor.”

  “I always get uptight when I hear that. Before you tell me this favor, you should know that at the urging of your buddy, Mackensie Smith, we ran down financials for Ms. Klaus. Seems she’s in pretty good shape, owns the house free and clear.”

  “How’d she manage that? She left her job with a disability. I can’t imagine that pays a hell of a lot.”

  “No, it doesn’t, but she paid off her mortgage in one shot. I sent a detective to the bank that held the mortgage. Seems Ms. Klaus came in with a check to cover what was left on it and told the bank that a relative had died in Bermuda and left her the money. We ran the check before the case was dropped.”

  “Lucky lady.”

  “I’d say so. Okay, Nic, what’s the favor?”

  “It’s not a big deal. I need to know if someone has flown from D.C. to San Francisco in the last couple of days.”

  “Who?”

  “Who else? Sheila Klaus.”

  “Shut the door.”

  “Look, Nic,” Owens said after Tatum had resumed his seat, “that’s old news, history.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why is it old news? You know as well as I do that she was released because somebody up top, way up top, put in the word.”

  Owens was mum.

  “All I want to know is whether she’s gone to San Francisco. My girlfriend and I stopped by her house earlier today, and there were newspapers sitting on the step.”

  Owens shrugged.

  “I just need to know, Joe. All it takes is a phone call. She always flew United when she traveled with Sedgwick and on her own. One call to the airline to see whether Sheila Klaus or Carla Rasmussen took a flight to the West Coast over the past two days.”

  Tatum waited.

  Owens said through a deep sigh, “All right, Nic. But forget that MPD had anything to do with this. I’ll be back.”

  Tatum knew that Owens had gone to the intelligence section from which official calls to airlines and other transportation entities were made, using a code agreed upon between the carriers and MPD. He returned ten minutes later carrying a slip of paper.

  “Well?” Tatum asked after Owens had settled behind his desk.

  “No Sheila Klaus on any flights to San Francisco for the past two days.”

  Tatum’s sigh rang of frustration.

  “But a Ms. Carla Rasmussen was on a flight.”

  “She was? That’s good to know.”

  Owens handed Tatum the slip of paper on which he’d jotted down the details of the flight. “What are you going to do with this, Nic?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Tatum replied. “Thanks for this, Joe, I appreciate it.”

  Tatum had been honest when he said that he didn’t know what he would do with the knowledge that Sheila (and Carla) had flown to San Francisco. But by the time he got in his car and started driving home, he had an idea. The minute he entered his apartment, he went online and booked a flight to San Francisco leaving that evening.

  CHAPTER

  34

  Presidential candidate George Mortinson and his staff and reporters flew back to Washington from San Francisco. It had been a successful appearance for the popular Democrat. As he quipped to Meg Whitson on the plane, “Maybe I should run for mayor of San Francisco. They love me there.”

  “They love you everywhere, Senator. Your poll numbers have jumped another two points.”

  “Swayze’s getting desperate,” Mortinson said. “Did you hear what he said in Wyoming yesterday, that if the voters go for me, they’d better get ready for another nine eleven?”

  “It plays to his dwindling core,” said Whitson. “Swayze knows he’s losing and doesn’t know what to do.”

  “Couldn’t happen to a better guy,” Mortinson said. “What’s on tap for tomorrow?”

  “A full day.”

  He moaned.

  “I left two hours day after tomorrow for tennis with Mac Smith. Thought you’d appreciate that.”

  “Thanks. How is the rally at the Reagan Building shaping up?”

  “Good. The Secret Service isn’t thrilled at how many people you’ll be greeting at the rope line, especially stopping to have pictures taken with them.”

  “Sorry to make their jobs harder,” he said. “They’re a good bunch. Wake me
in an hour.”

  * * *

  Jake Gibbons returned to the house, where Peter Puhlman and Iskander Itani were playing cards in the living room.

  “Hello, Jake,” Puhlman said. “How did it go?”

  “How did it … oh, yeah, Iskander will be licensed in a few days, a lot of paperwork to wade through.”

  “Who am I fighting?” Itani asked.

  “I’m, ah, working on that, kid. Should know in a coupla days.”

  Itani threw his cards on the table and went to his bedroom.

  “What’s with him?” Gibbons asked.

  “He’s uptight, that’s all. Had a headache. He used that imaginary helmet the doc taught him. Seemed to work. He talked on the phone today with Borger.”

  “That’s supposed to calm him down.”

  “It did, but he’s gotten antsy again. It’s only a few more days, Jake. Where did you go today?”

  “Around. I went to a museum.”

  Puhlman chuckled. “I’m impressed,” he said.

  “That airplane museum. Interesting.”

  “I’m sure it was. I spoke with Borger, too. He says all we have to do is keep Itani cool and collected, play along with him. Like I said, just a couple of more days.”

  “What happens then?”

  “Nothing. We leave him here and go back to Frisco.”

  Gibbons got himself a beer from the kitchen and rejoined Puhlman in the living room. “I’ve been thinking today about that girl Elena,” he said.

  “What about her?”

  “Jesus, Peter, the kid murdered her and we got rid a the body. That makes us accessories, right?”

  “Forget about it, Jake. It’s over and done with. Doc Borger knows what he’s doing.” He lowered his voice and became conspiratorial. “Borger has connections you can’t even imagine, way up high in the government. He’s one of those geniuses that the government pays a fortune to. We never have to worry about anything as long as he’s behind it.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, but what’s the deal with the kid in there? He moves into the doc’s house and they hole up three, four times a day in the doc’s office. Now we bring him here to D.C. and we sit in this house with him. For what? You say we’re leaving him here and we go back home? What’s he here for? What’s goin’ on?”

  Puhlman said, “I know that the kid gets on your nerves, Jake, but you’re starting to get on mine. You aren’t paid to ask questions. Just do what I tell you and everything will be fine.”

  Gibbons drank from his beer bottle, a scowl on his broad, lumpy face. “I just keep thinking about that girl, that’s all,” he said.

  “It’s a shame it happened,” Puhlman said, “but bad things happen to people. Forget about it. Let’s make some dinner. I’m hungry.”

  * * *

  Nic Tatum grabbed a Nathan’s hot dog and a soda at the airport before boarding his flight to San Francisco. When he’d called Cindy to tell her that he was leaving, she reacted as might be expected. “Just like that?” she said.

  “Yeah. I know it’s strange, but I have to do it. I found out that Sheila has flown to San Francisco. She would never have done that if Borger wasn’t pulling her strings like a goddamn marionette. I need to … well, I just need to convince myself that I’m right.”

  “You’re going to confront this Dr. Borger?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not. I’ll play it by ear.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “A day or two.”

  “Mac Smith called.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He’s invited us to a rally for Senator Mortinson three days from now. It’s at the Ronald Reagan Building, in the afternoon. He says he has an extra set of passes and wondered if we wanted to use them.”

  “I don’t know, I—”

  “I’d love to go, Nic.”

  “That’s right, I forgot, you have a crush on Mortinson.”

  “I do not and you know it.”

  “It’s okay with me provided I’m back in time.”

  “Please try to be. And Nic?”

  “Huh?”

  “Be careful. If everything you say about this Dr. Borger and the people he’s involved with is true, they won’t stop at anything to keep it a secret.”

  Tatum loved flying, any sort of flying, whether in his aerobatic aircraft or as a passenger on a jumbo jet. He considered sitting in a jetliner to be the ultimate getaway—no phones, no TV, just hours of solitude to think things out. It wasn’t that he enjoyed the process of boarding a commercial plane, or the lack of amenities once aboard. Like most air travelers, he gritted his teeth each time he had to suffer the indignities and hassle of navigating airports, and the disregard for passenger comfort that prevailed with most airlines. But he was able to cast all that aside once airborne, strapped in his seat in an aluminum cigar tube traveling six hundred miles an hour to his destination, and this trip was no exception.

  He didn’t consider himself an impetuous person. His life was structured, and he liked to think of himself as someone who gave careful consideration to his options before making a decision. For him life came down to a series of decisions. You made good ones and things went fairly well barring a natural calamity or an air conditioner falling on you while you walked down a street. Make bad decisions and, well …

  But here he was hopping on a plane to San Francisco two hours after he’d learned that Sheila Klaus had gone there, and he hadn’t the foggiest notion of what to do once he arrived. He hadn’t bothered to change clothes before the trip and had shoved an overnight’s amount of clothing, along with some reading material, into a small backpack.

  Once settled in his coach seat—and thankful that he was at the window with no one in the middle seat next to him—he tried to bring order to his thoughts about what he believed was Sheila’s programmed murder of Mark Sedgwick and the control that Dr. Sheldon Borger exerted over her.

  One of the things he’d stuffed into his backpack was his laptop, which contained, among other things, a file he’d gathered over the years on the CIA’s mind-control experimentation. He hadn’t collected the material with any purpose in mind. It was more a matter of intellectual curiosity and to remind him to not become ensnared in any government projects that he might be offered.

  The reports in the file documented not only mind-control experiments since the 1950s but also described other government medical experimentation on innocent victims as early as the 1930s.

  One of the most infamous occurred when the Public Health Service, with the blessing of the surgeon general and the American Heart Association, launched a project in which 399 poor rural black men from Tuskegee, Alabama, who had syphilis were recruited as subjects along with 201 control subjects who did not have the sexually transmitted disease. The 399 infected men never received treatment, nor were they or their families ever informed that they had the disease. “You have bad blood,” was the explanation given them. Although the cure for syphilis, penicillin, was introduced in the early 1940s, it was withheld from these men for thirty years. Lord knew how many wives were infected with the disease, and how many children were born with syphilis.

  He scrolled through other reports. Radiation experiments were conducted on six hundred American subjects in the 1940s and continued through the 1970s. People were injected with plutonium and exposed to other forms of radiation without their informed consent. Prisoners received $5 a month in return for having their testicles irradiated. Children weren’t spared these vile experiments. In 1961, scientists at Harvard Medical School and the Boston University School of Medicine gave radioactive iodine to retarded kids at a state school, and at another state school MIT added radioactive materials to food fed to children. Their parents signed consent forms in which the stated purpose of the experiments was “helping improve the nutrition of our children.”

  Although Nic was familiar with the file’s contents, his anger level rose as he continued to read. Until his involvement with Sheila Klaus, he h
adn’t bothered to review what he’d collected in his files on the government’s use of physicians, scientists, and many of the nation’s leading hospitals to carry out such experimentation. For him the reports had been nothing more than abstract reminders of what he knew to be true, pieces of sordid history that had little or no direct bearing on his life.

  But it was different now that he’d witnessed firsthand the damage to Sheila Klaus.

  According to a 1954 MK-ULTRA document, a female subject was placed into a deep trance. A second female was handed an unloaded gun and, under hypnosis, was told that she must awaken the first woman using every means possible. If she failed, she was told to shoot the sleeping subject. She carried out the instructions, including aiming the weapon at the sleeping woman’s head and pulling the trigger. When both were brought out of trance, they had total amnesia of everything having to do with the event.

  Another subject, a Canadian woman, was so destroyed by experiments on her that she was completely disoriented, and didn’t know her name, age, or her husband, and was unable to read, write, cook, or use the toilet. She eventually joined in a class action lawsuit against the CIA. But because the Canadian physician who had experimented on her had stopped taking CIA money before using her as a subject (the Canadian government began funding the doctor after the CIA money dried up), she sued the Canadian government and won $100,000 plus legal fees.

  “Damn them!” Tatum said loud enough to cause the passenger in the aisle seat to glance in his direction.

  Tatum read one final report from his file, a synopsis of the work G. H. Estabrooks had done in creating multiple personalities in order to create the perfect spy, courier, or assassin. The writer of the synopsis ended by quoting Estabrooks about the ethical aspect of his work: “The hand of the military must not be tied by any silly prejudices in the minds of the general public. War is the end of all law. In the last analysis any device is justifiable which enables us to protect ourselves from defeat.”