“What you said to me at the time sounded inane, but subsequently I realized you were providing me with a very subtle message that you really knew more than you were admitting. The very simple words, the almost childlike words, that you used to expose your thinking about that very complex formula were, in fact, all clues, weren’t they?”
“Geez,” said Donna, “I never expected a dumb cop would have been exposed to quantum physics. You startled me when you came into the office. I realized that you were looking at what I had written. I was completing the formula when you appeared at my desk. That forced me to pretend that I had no idea what was in front of me.
“I have always enjoyed the purity of physics,” she continued. “It offers measurements which are accurate and reproducible yet at the same time it’s often paradoxical. It’s so much cleaner than the real world. I couldn’t help but pass off some subtle clues with the expectation that you would just consider me some type of dumb blonde full of innocuous remarks. I was careless in not realizing you might figure out my clues. I have always been a bit of a risk taker, but normally once people perceive me as being stupid, they never consider me anything else. It usually gives me a great advantage.”
“There was one other thing,” said Fred. “I used the term Cerberus to describe the three headed dog on the outside of your building. You pretended you didn’t know what I was talking about but then you mentioned your dog’s name—Kerber. It turns out my heritage is Greek. A few days after our first meeting, it hit me that Cerberus is Latin from the Greek word Kerberos. I thought that was too much of a coincidence that you named your dog that way; but I was still not convinced I was reading you correctly. So three days ago I went back to your high school and spoke to your teachers. Interestingly enough, that was the same school that Mr. Ford had attended.”
“I don’t understand, I consciously got low marks throughout my high school tenure. What would my high school records prove?”
“It was not your grades that I was curious about, but the more subjective evaluation of you by your teachers. One of your former teachers mentioned to me how smart she thought you were when you took her freshman English course. She said you got into a debate in class and she was astonished at your knowledge and how you verbally demolished one of the brightest students in school. She couldn’t understand why you were so poor in test taking.”
“I remember, I got angry during the debate and didn’t realize what I was saying. I thought when I played stupid again, no one would remember. It was easy to intentionally flunk my exams; but altering positive impressions by the teaching staff was apparently not that easy.”
“Yes,” said Fred. “I understand, sometimes brilliance is hard to suppress. Later on, though, when I was in your apartment I didn’t see any sign of a dog. There was no food dish, no cage and no dog hair. Scotties are notorious shedders so I would have found some indication of its one time presence, even if the dog was no longer with you. It came to me that when you threw out the name Kerber during our first meeting, you were simply playing games with me.
“One other thing, when I was interviewing personnel in your conference room you provided me with hot water and an assortment of tea bags, but nothing else.”
“And that is supposed to mean?” asked Donna.
“Most people would have provided coffee. I hate coffee, but I never told you that, or anyone else in your company. It has always been my secret. When I thought back on that, I realized you must have been capable of searching my mind.
Lieutenant Harris continued, “I also noticed some comic books in your house when I investigated your alleged intruder. But I knew you worked the Times Crossword Puzzle, which I know is quite incompatible with a comic book reader.”
“Yes, Lieutenant, I knew you would be coming to search my house, so those comic books were of course a plant. But I told you that I always looked up the answers to the crossword puzzles.”
“You told me that at one of our meetings, Donna, but at the time you were working Friday’s New York Times puzzle, which is by the way very difficult. It was early morning but you were already three quarters of the way through it. Additionally, the answers would not have been available to you until a day later; so I knew that the solution had to be entirely your effort.
“By the way, Donna, I hope you are a good shot; you are still quite a distance from me.”
“Oh, don’t worry, Fred. And I hope I can call you Fred, since we have gotten to know each other so well. When the bullet enters your brain it will be from a distance of only a couple of inches. We do want remnants of gunpowder on your face when the medical examiner conducts his examination. After all, you couldn’t have committed your impending suicide from a gun fired from a distance of a few feet. Of course the bullet will enter from the left side of your head to be consistent with your left-handedness.”
“Donna, or do you want to be called The Marvel; may I ask you a few questions before that distasteful event occurs?”
“Donna is fine, Fred, I actually like you. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that you cannot find it in your tenacious nature to let up on your investigation, we could have become friends. I should also tell you that no one will be here for the entire day. I reserved the time for us to speak privately and openly to each other. I have respected you from a distance, as I suspect you have me, so we have much to talk about. I at least owe you that. I, of course, realize that the video cameras, which are positioned outside the building, will be scoured thoroughly by your personnel for clues. They will have no recorded record of my arrival; unfortunately only your arrival will be on display. As far as Monday’s papers are concerned, you made a solo drive up here and ended your life on your own terms and of your own free will.”
“Why did you let me live as long as I have?”
“As I said, Fred, I like you. But you give yourself too little credit. I tried to have you killed, but you seem to have some sort of extreme luck or a sixth sense that I don’t even possess. You somehow managed to escape each time. But I suspect that I did wind up giving you a few headaches. Even in cases where I cannot fully get into someone’s mind, they always seemed to wind up with powerful headaches.”
Fred at first felt relieved. He thought, great, now I know why I had those headaches and I don’t have some type of terminal disease. But then he realized, what the hell, I will be dead anyway in a couple of minutes. Regardless, he still needed his curiosity satisfied. “Why did you commit the murders?”
“That’s a long story. When I applied for the job at AU, I was seeking something other than being a secretary. How many men are given secretarial jobs? Virtually none, but it’s okay for a male to perceive that is all that a women can do. From the inception, Mr. Schultz only saw me fitting into one servile role. That same day, I swore I would get revenge but at the time I didn’t know how.”
“So the falling of the chandelier, and Mr. Schultz’s strange illness, they were all your doing?”
“Of course, I have enjoyed rattling his cage at times and fracturing his expanded ego. Also, I didn’t want him giving you too much information; and I had hoped that would scare him off.”
“But why didn’t you kill him?”
“Because he’s in a position of power; I needed to use his authority to obtain my ultimate promotion to division head and I know what I can use to get that promotion from him when I want it.”
“So you killed the male division heads to get their jobs.”
“Yes, partly, but they were all male chauvinists, they deserved to die, with or without a promotion in the offering. Look, when I first walked into the company, I was treated like low life by all the male division heads. Mr. Flynn was the only exception; but, unfortunately, he had to be eliminated.
“Prior to my taking any action against the division directors,” Donna went on, “I checked out the investigative department of your station. I wanted to find out what capability existed and who would be assigned to investigate the deaths. I certainly didn’t w
ant to get caught, and this process of people elimination was all new to me. I went out with your colleague Paul Lewis, in order to get the lay of the land. Actually, he got the lay of the land, but I won’t go there. From him I learned a lot about you and I knew immediately that you would become a problem. I had counted on Paul being promoted to the position that you ultimately advanced to. I wasn’t happy when I found that you were to be the investigating officer.
“By the way, whenever I went out with him I wore a dark wig, and used a false name; and of course I never disclosed to Paul where I worked. He was married, so we always met on neutral territory where no one would see us.”
“Was Paul outside the bank when the killings took place?”
“The act, Lieutenant. Please use the word act, the word killings is so crude. And, yes, he was there, but that was purely by accident. He, of course, enjoyed watching your befuddlement in trying to make some sense out of the crimes; but he didn’t play any role in the situation in the bank.”
“And you were the reason he tried to kill me?”
“No, not entirely. I had to make him angry at you to get more information out of him. I wanted to know how you thought, what your weaknesses were, but his anger had already been fueled by your getting the promotion over him. He is really no more than a petulant child. I didn’t anticipate that he would try to kill you, but I guess his anger reached the boiling point. And as you must know, above all, he is a man of very little self control.”
“How did you get Slivers and Shepard to commit the murders?”
“Their selection was purely a function of randomness and exposure. One day I happened to drop in to talk to Mr. Slivers in his office to ask him about insurance. When I was able to screen his mind with total ease, I felt he would be a good subject. You may not understand this, but in order to get him to do what he did, I overlaid my mind on his. It was in layman’s terms a type of mind switch. The problem was that Slivers was my first experiment; and he experienced total amnesia during, and for a significant period after, my numerous entries into his mind. It was so severe that, for a short period I felt his wife might have him committed and he never would reach a point where he would consummate my plan. But, eventually, I was able to control him.
“And, by the way, Slivers never eliminated those people; I did!”
“Am I correct, though, “Fred asked, “that you spared the women in the bank?”
“Of course, I had to eliminate more than just my immediate target in order to confuse the police; but I never expected you to be so mentally adroit as to figure that out. I didn’t mind eliminating a few extra men from this good earth in order to cloak my objective; but I certainly didn’t want to add any women to the process.”
“Is that the reason you didn’t kill Miss Jones, the Reading Division head?”
“Yes, I decided to eliminate a few of the Division heads who were absolute bastards, but there was no need to kill them all. I could only ascend to one of the positions, so what would have been the point.”
“And what about the women who were wounded in the shooting at the bank; how do you account for that?”
“Simple, I was using Slivers’ kinetic and muscular capabilities, but at a higher mental level I was pulling the strings. At that point I had become his functioning brain; Slivers was the energy, the body, if you will, responding at my command. Unfortunately, I’m not the best shot in the world, Fred; so the women in the bank became unfortunate collateral victims. I am sorry about that, I really am. In fact, under disguise, I checked their conditions in the hospital and I am happy to report they all made a full recovery; so I have no residual guilt, none whatsoever.”
“So the reason that Slivers did not confess to the crime was that he had no idea whatsoever that he did it?”
“Of course, he didn’t; the intellectual and reasoning component of his brain told him he must have done it. All the evidence was on display, but his memory would not support that conclusion.”
“Now I have to ask you about the theater killings.” Fred was stalling for time with his barrage of questions, although he had no idea how additional time would allow him a way out.
She replied, “I worked on Mr. Shepard for a much longer period. I constantly invaded his mind. Of course, I was the one who provided him with the mail order weapon. By the way, I hope you enjoyed my little wordplay on the Marv L. Saperstein signature at the Ft Myers post office.”
“But the clerk in the post office said it was a man who picked up the weapon.”
“Oh, that wasn’t hard—a wig, a deeper voice, and a fake beard and she was totally taken in. I knew that would throw you off.”
She continued, “Mr. Shepard was of course totally under my control when he entered the theater. Unfortunately, in the darkened theater some females were killed but it was never by intent; but all one could see once the movie was playing was silhouettes. I knew generally where my target would be sitting, so it was no problem to insure that he would never again re-enter the doors of AU.”
“How did you know your victims would be where they were at the time of the killings?”
“Simply habit, Lieutenant; both of my subjects were entirely repetitive and predictable in their actions; and that’s partly why I selected them for extinction. I had traced their movements for months before I decided how and when to act. They tended to do the same things over and over again. Originality was not their strength in life. In fact, you also displayed limited repetitive patterns. That’s how I was able to hire a Ford look-alike and know the area where you would be at the time he arrived on Main Street.”
“But, Donna, that was my day off and I just happened to take the same route downtown.”
“Habit, plus a few subtle mental suggestions made you take that route, Lieutenant.”
“Why did Shepard run away after he killed all those people? He didn’t know he had killed people, so why would he try to escape?”
“That was easy. He was a jogger and I simply placed in his mind a detailed picture that he was competing in a marathon race. He raced all the way home from the theater, and changed to a business suit, without knowing that minutes before he had eliminated several strangers. It was great comedy. I wish I had been a mouse in his pocket when he explained to his wife why he was out of breath and sweating profusely in his good suit.”
“Why couldn’t you have found a way to kill the division heads without all the…collateral killings?”
“Then I would not have had a chance to play the game, Lieutenant. You must know by now, it’s all about the game.”
“What about Flynn’s ‘suicide’?”
“Well, that was different. I liked Mr. Flynn; he always treated me with respect. But one day he saw me when I was out with Paul. I was quite sure he recognized me, even in my disguise. I knew there was the strong possibility that he might eventually talk to you about seeing me, and you would be able to start putting the pieces together. Therefore, I had to get rid of him quickly. I knew you would see through the suicide in a short time, but it didn’t matter, I had no time to waste and no workable alternative.
Donna continued, “You see, I was invited to his party at his house last year; I subsequently recalled the strange sturdy large hook he had in his den, although I never did understand its purpose. I calculated how long the length of the rope would have to be so that he would hang from the rope without having his feet touch the floor. I knew that he would have to complete his actions quickly, or someone in his household might come to his rescue. He told me one day when we were shooting the breeze, that he had been a Boy Scout during his teenage years. I knew that with such a background he would be proficient at tying knots. That became my method of choice. Actually, I wish that he had been the one to tie the knot to Mr. Ford when he was deposited in the quarry; then it wouldn’t have come loose.”
“As I was planning Mr. Flynn’s demise, I decided it would be a good opportunity to—literally—kill two birds with one stone, so I stole a car and waited f
or you about a block from the Flynn home.”
“How did you know I would be on the case?”
“If it had anything to do with AU, I knew you would be around. At any rate, when you left his house, and started to walk across the street, it became an opportune time to run you down. Unfortunately, you survived. And, by the way, I’m sorry about your car, I know how much you loved it.”
Tears started forming in Fred’s eyes. Here he was about to be killed and he couldn’t stop thinking about that great little car. Why the hell did she remind him of it? Then he thought, hell, I am almost dead and I still have strong residual emotions for my little car. Damn her!
“What about Harry Ford?”
“I found out from Paul that you believed he was responsible for all my acts. Ford was great bait, a better diversion than I could have asked for. Since I learned about his jewelry thefts from Paul, it was obvious to me that Ford would try to keep an abnormally low profile, which in turn would raise your investigative antenna.
“The other fortunate thing was that Ford was in touch with many of the people who were also associated with your case. That was pure luck; he was a decent hypnotist, and his success spread by word of mouth. I had nothing to do with it, including the lucky coincidence that your wife hired into his services as well as Schultz. Of course, he never met with either Long or Jackson. I made that up just to help point the finger at him. I decided to eliminate Ford because if he was caught, and that was going to be just a matter of time, I knew you would quickly eliminate him as a suspect. However, as long as he was missing, he would continue to remain your prime suspect. The problem is that I didn’t secure him adequately to the rock, so the rope that was holding him in the quarry came loose. I was never good at tying knots.”
Fred asked, “The security guard called me about some important information that he had, and then he couldn’t remember, was that of your making?”
Mind Switch Page 37
