Angel Face

by Suzanne Forster

  “Are you saying that she saw me as a savior, then discovered a flaw and now she wants to kill me?”

  The agent ignored the question. “Angel Face knew everything there was to know about evil doctors. They maimed, tortured, and killed the innocent. So when her saviors suddenly turned into her father, she had to stop them.”

  He turned to Jordan. “You see how it works?”

  Jordan saw more than he wanted to.

  “Now someone has to stop her,” the other man stressed. “You see that, don’t you?”

  “Isn’t that what they pay you to do? They pay me to operate on people. Big difference.”

  “That depends on whose life you want to save, Doctor. Someone else’s or your own.”

  “Maybe that’s your reality. Mine is patients on waiting lists, dying before I can get to them to operate.”

  “What about your colleagues? What about the doctors who’ve died?”

  “What doctors?” Jordan asked. “Who are they?” The agent pushed, and he pushed back. It was becoming a shoving match.

  “I’m not at liberty to say, unfortunately. I came here to talk about you. And about her, Angel Face. She’s an escape artist. She’s eluded everybody we’ve put on her, our best people. We need something she wants, something that will bring her out in the open. That’s where you come into it.”

  The man’s frustration was obvious. Jordan turned and contemplated the sunrise as if he was making a decision, but in fact he already had.

  “I’m sorry,” he told his uninvited guest. “I’ve got a surgery schedule that’s piled high through Christmas. I can’t find time for the mundane things like sleeping and eating, and even if I could, paranoid delusions and death lists are way out of my line.”

  The expanding silence finally brought Jordan around. The other man’s face showed no expression. It was held fast by the scarring, which gave him a creepy, reptilian look. Maybe that was why he exposed only the burned side, Jordan thought. It was his poker face.

  When the agent made no move to leave, Jordan added with faint irony, “It’s too bad you had to come all this way. If you’d called—”

  “I don’t call, Dr. Carpenter. And it was no trouble, believe me.”

  He lifted his head and studied Jordan, his stare unnaturally bright.

  “You’re an interesting man,” he said. “Not too many high school dropouts go on to become world-famous surgeons. Still, you left a few skeletons behind, didn’t you—one by the name of Cathy Crosby?”

  Jordan’s hand came up. He was reaching for the man. His heart rate was thunderous. “What is this? Some kind of cheap attempt at blackmail?”

  The crooked mouth almost smiled. “I thought I’d ask how she’s doing, that’s all.”

  “Cathy Crosby is dead, and you know it.” Jordan came across the porch, his voice a terrible whisper.

  The agent stepped back. “Yes, I do know it, Dr. Carpenter . . . and so does she, Angel Face.”

  “I’m telling you once to get off my property. Once, and then I’m going to throw you from here to the picket fence.”

  The other man shrugged as if to say, No problem. Halfway down the steps, he glanced over his shoulder. “Just a friendly word of advice about Angel Face, if you’ll permit me?”

  Jordan finally nodded.

  “She’s an escape artist, but she’s also a quick-change artist, and what changes is her face. You won’t see the same woman twice.”

  “That must keep things interesting.”

  “Her father was obsessed with her because of her beauty, and he punished her because he couldn’t have her. Angel Face grew up desperate to be someone else, anyone else. She tried to make herself into someone her father wouldn’t want so she could escape the abuse. She’s still trying.”

  He drew a legal-size envelope from inside his coat and tossed it onto the porch. “In case you change your mind.”

  With that, he was on his way, moving swiftly down the steps, across the street, and out of eyeshot.

  Jordan stepped out onto the porch and picked up the packet. He didn’t want it lying on the porch, but he wasn’t changing his mind. And no blackmailing CIA agent with a story about an abused female serial killer was changing it for him. As soon as he got his bearings, he was going to call the CIA and follow up—or have his attorney do it. In fact, he might just call a former patient of his who was once highly placed in the intelligence community, Mitch Ryder had retired because of his health and turned to detective work. Yeah, maybe he’d give Mitch a call.

  Jordan came through the door with more force than usual, and Birdy’s feathers ruffled in surprise. The packet landed in the wastebasket, unopened. He had a quadruple bypass and three angioplasties today. There were people whose lives depended on him to be sane and focused. He didn’t have time for such nonsense.

  “Where the hell’s my pager?” he muttered.

  “Fooled you, fooled you!” Birdy squawked.

  When did that bird learn to talk?

  CHAPTER 2

  SAMMY Tran pulled the earmuffs off his head and tossed them into the nippy air like a mortarboard on graduation day. He would have let out a whoop of joy but was afraid it might wake the dead, as he referred to the other research drones who worked in the Cognitive Studies lab. Too many of his coworkers were pasty-faced, bug-eyed zombies who labored around the clock and never saw the sun. Their idea of fun was beating the computer at a breakneck game of solitaire.

  Sammy’s idea of fun was brain-tapping serial killers, and he’d just broken the bank. Brain-tapping was the catchphrase he’d come up with to describe a revolutionary new software program he was debugging for SmartTech, the biotech company where he’d been on staff since graduating from MIT a few years back.

  The program combined the biology of the latest brain-mapping techniques with the psychology of FBI profiling by continuously compiling both kinds of data on a study subject and then reducing the input to linear correlations that could predict the subject’s violent or antisocial behavior with a surprising degree of accuracy. So far, only prison inmates in controlled situations had been tested, but the program was intended for much broader applications. There was hope it would one day be used as routinely as drug testing.

  “Suuh-weet,” Sammy murmured, imagining the newspaper headlines when the story broke: “Software Reads Killers’ Minds! Predicts Homicide Before It Happens.”

  He watched the activity on the computer monitor with the reverence of a NASA engineer watching a Mars probe. “Wait till it gets out that we can do sophisticated brain imaging with the equivalent of wireless components and cell sites. The old farts will never believe it.”

  His gleeful chuckle had an F-you quality to it. He’d been ridiculed since he was a kid for his strange and morbid visions of the future. At a conservative institution like MIT, the rejection had been savage. Only here at SmartTech had his ideas been embraced and—much more importantly—funded. He was grateful and loyal. The researchers here even had their own cubicles, a perk reserved for the section chiefs in most labs.

  “Believe what, Sammy?”

  Sammy tried to swallow, but he’d dried up like leftover toast. Angela Lowe had just spoken his name in her soft, dulcet tones. She was the lone exception to his research drone observation. Angela was neither pasty-faced nor bug-eyed. She had the dreamiest chocolate mocha gaze he’d ever seen.

  Kitten eyes, he called them. The way Sammy figured it, she must have been a cat in another life, because every once in a while he was struck with the notion that she was purring and making the delicate little throaty sounds cats made, at least mentally. “Love me, stroke me, feed me,” was what she seemed to be saying with her wide, wistful gaze. He couldn’t imagine why she was wasting away her days in a tomblike biotech company, but he was damn glad of it.

  “Take a look.” He waved her over to the computer and beamed with pride as she peered at the screen.

  “Sammy? What does this mean?” Surprise radiated from her as she turne
d to him. She was clutching his earmuffs, which she’d picked up off the floor. They kept the temperature low in the lab because the clean rooms and many of the experiments required it, and his ears were already frosting over. But he kind of liked the way she was cuddling the lambswool cups.

  “Is that Angel Face?” she asked. “It looks like she’s going to . . . is she going to strike again?”

  Angela had that similarity to a kitten, too, Sammy realized. She was smart and quick, with a feline’s natural cunning but none of the cruelty.

  “Sure looks like it,” he said. “And soon, if the indicators are correct. We ran her through a heavy cycle of stress the last forty-eight hours, and now she’s immersed in violent fantasies. That’s how she reduces the stress, but they’re not just any violent fantasies, they’re revenge-intensive. Check out her deep limbic system. It’s on fire, and the focal intensity is on the left. She’s dredging up old wounds and wants to wound back. Look at the left temporal lobe; it’s way overactive.”

  “Paranoia,” Angela suggested, “uncontrollable impulses?”

  “Probably both. But now look at the basal ganglia. See here—” He pointed to another view, this one of the underside of the brain. It was a walnut-sized blue pool, again on the left side.

  “That looks normal,” Angela said, “maybe even under-active.”

  “Right! She knows she’s just fantasizing, but her brain doesn’t. It can’t distinguish the fantasies from reality. Just look at her pleasure center! She’s groovin’ on this stuff. It relaxes and energizes her at the same time. She could be having multiple orgasms. Oh, sorry—”

  Angela colored a little, and Sammy felt foolish. Not for the orgasm comment but for the apology. Biopsycholo-gists didn’t apologize to each other for using words like that. Bodily functions were all part of a day’s work in the lab and had about as much personal meaning as sneezing. But somehow he could never put her in the same category as his coworkers. She was just different.

  Sammy had often thought that she didn’t belong here, but he didn’t know where she did belong. Maybe another place in time. She could have stepped from the pages of a children’s storybook, but he had the feeling her story wasn’t entirely idyllic. There was a wicked witch involved somewhere.

  “You ran the correlations, of course,” she said.

  He nodded. “There’s a ninety-five percent probability she’ll take some kind of retaliatory action in the next seventy-two hours.”

  The program didn’t just spew out numbers. It attempted to predict when, where, and how the killer would strike again, based on the data that was fed into it. Sammy considered it the profiling technique of the millennium, and what set it apart was the real-time functionality of the brain imaging. The subject was prepped by drinking a radioisotopic mixture that looked and tasted like water. Once the substance was taken up by receptor sites in the brain, cerebral blood flow, as well as metabolic and brain-wave activity, could be monitored in real time by wireless connections that transmitted signals back to the lab’s monitoring equipment. And if necessary, the entire procedure could be accomplished without the subject’s knowledge.

  Of course, medical ethics required that subjects be informed, but SmartTech was a biotechnology company with customers like the Pentagon and the CIA, and Sammy had discovered that different rules applied, depending on the contractor and the level of secrecy. With Angel Face, which was what he called the software program, as well as the simulated serial killer, the security had been ratcheted up as the work progressed, and there were probably some measures in force that he knew nothing about.

  “But that doesn’t necessarily mean another strike, right?”

  Angela’s voice had an agitated quality. She peered at the screen, and her forefinger flicked near her temple. He’d caught her brushing imaginary hair from her eyes before and teased her about having an overactive cingulate, which was the seat of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Not that he seriously believed she had OCD, but something about the nature of his work seemed to distress her. Maybe he’d become too detached. Deeply disturbed brains shouldn’t thrill anyone the way they did him. That was the dark side of medical research. It wasn’t long before you lived for the abnormalities.

  “No, not necessarily,” he explained. “She may get enough psychic reward from planning the strike. Serial killers often torment the target with verbal threats and acts of psychological terrorism. Most of them have a whole repertoire of fantasies and rituals they indulge in, and Angel Face is no exception. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens.”

  “But meanwhile you’ll report this to someone, right?” She tore herself from the screen to ask him that question.

  “I’m going straight to the man,” Sammy said. “This is Dr. Laird’s baby. He designed the program. Now that it’s up and running, he calls the shots.”

  Dr. Ron Laird was one of the founding partners of SmartTech and the software’s creator. He was an intense, brilliant, and highly inaccessible individual, whom Sammy had never met. Their relationship was limited to the phone, but they’d stayed in close contact as Sammy’s work progressed, and once Sammy was sure this wasn’t a fluke, he would call Laird and give him the news.

  “Congratulations.” Angela handed him his earmuffs and graced him with one of her brown-eyed smiles. “This should mean good things for you,” she said.

  Sammy nearly fumbled the muffs and then couldn’t find his ears. He wondered if she had this effect on all mankind. “It will mean good things for SmartTech,” he said modestly. “For me, it’s on to the next project. Speaking of which, how’s your study coming?”

  Her hands were now in the pockets of her white lab coat, which forced her to discipline any imaginary tendrils of hair with a toss of her head. In fact, her blackberry brandy tresses were loosely coiled at the nape of her neck and not a strand had yet pulled free.

  “Not nearly as exciting as yours,” she said. “I get to stare at the brains of geniuses and madmen and try to figure out which is which. So far, it’s a toss-up.”

  They both laughed, but Sammy could relate. He’d been a guinea pig in a brain-imaging study as an undergrad, and one of the research team had only half-jokingly told him that he had the impulse control of a Jerry Springer talk show guest. Maybe that’s why he had such an affinity for Angel Face’s deep limbic system.

  “I’m enjoying it, though,” Angela said. She’d settled herself on the edge of the long Formica countertop that served as Sammy’s desk and was gazing through his cubicle door with a faraway expression.

  “Probably too much,” she admitted. “I can get so engrossed I forget where I am. Sometimes it feels as if I’ve drifted into the subject’s mind. Isn’t that weird?”

  “Well, the idea is to be objective,” Sammy reminded her dryly.

  Angela was a research assistant on a small double-blind experiment in which half the subjects had genius IQs, and the other half suffered mild psychopathy. They’d all consented to participate but weren’t aware of the study’s actual purpose, which was normal procedure and well within the bounds of ethical experimentation. Angela was equally naive so as not to bias the outcome in any way. She knew the subjects only by their ID numbers and the workings of their brains. The one thing she’d been told was that she was running essentially the same brain-imaging program that Sammy was.

  “I’m betting Tango Twenty-five is manic-depressive,” she said, “based on the anterior cingulate activity, and Alpha Ten is either hyperactive or Einstein. I’ve never seen such a busy brain. And yes, I know I’m supposed to be a human EEG—a totally objective repository of data—but how can you not be curious about these people?”

  Sammy settled back in his chair to more fully appreciate his visitor. “Too bad you’ll never get to meet more than their brains.”

  “Not true,” she informed him. “I start field interviews next week.”

  “You’re interviewing the subjects? How’d that happen?” He was surprised. In a typical double-blind, in
terviewers had minimal knowledge of the experiment and no contact with the subjects other than the interview itself. Usually they were premed or science majors, plucked from the nearest university. Angela had already formed opinions about the subjects, and it was going to be tough not to convey them during the interview. Even her body language could signal the answer she expected and influence the subject.

  “I was surprised, too,” she admitted, “but Peter pretty much insisted.”

  “Peter Brandt? Isn’t he out of the office on travel?”

  “Yes, but he sent me an E-mail saying we were short-staffed, and I needed to take up the slack. How do you like my poker face? Think it’ll work?”

  Her sudden blank expression made him smile.

  “Maybe our fearless leader thinks you don’t get out enough,” Sammy concluded. Peter Brandt was the company’s other founder, and he was also Angela’s mentor. Actually, guardian and protector were better words, in Sammy’s opinion, but no one asked him what he thought about such things. Peter had brought her on board and given her a job in Cognitive Studies, which he personally ran. He’d also assigned her the genius study, which in Sammy’s opinion, was poorly designed and probably wouldn’t hold up under scrutiny, but maybe that wasn’t the point. Maybe the point was to keep her busy. Many things about Peter and Angela’s relationship baffled Sammy. It wasn’t romantic as far as he knew, but he was virtually certain Peter was in love with her. And it wasn’t fatherly, either. It was strange.

  “That would be the truth,” she said. “I don’t get out at all.”

  Her smile turned rueful, and Sammy wondered, as he had for the zillionth time, where she went when she left the facility, what kind of life she led, and why he kept thinking that no one knew who Angela Lowe really was, not him, not Peter, and maybe not Angela herself.