Leaving no stone unturned Merriwhether pressed on with the transformation in great detail. With equal vigor, the body of Dombrowski was reconstructed. The featureless face with the blunt nose was given high cheekbones and an aquiline profile, specially constructed synthetic fibers covered the baldhead with a lush growth of hair. Permanent contact lenses fused to his irises, reflected soulful but sensitive blue eyes. A complete dental overhaul assured them, Jonathan would never be identified as Dombrowski through dental records. A macrobiotic diet trimmed away much of the brutish muscle mass. While still stocky, as the powerful skeletal frame could not be changed, Jonathan Carter with his gentle demeanor and hawkish features, bore little resemblance to the man who had murdered women on first Fridays in Denver.
As an amateur artist and poet, Jonathan Carter was quite content at feeding the passion of his soul with his art and verse. Handy with his hands he managed to find work as a jack of all trades, doing a bit of carpentry and such at a group home for the disabled, which coincidentally was owned by MemoryLock. For two years he was a model citizen. He worked, he made some casual friends. He seldom drank and he didn’t do drugs. His interest in women was plutonic in the workplace with an occasional date, as he being a sensitive and respectful person did not want to seem sexist. They knew he had on occasion found an outlet for his natural desires, but he was discreet and it was found to be within acceptable boundaries. MemoryLock had cast him with a natural shyness that set well with the residual personality of Dombrowski. Well adjusted, he lived his life in peace. A peace dictated by his programming.
All the while in which Jonathan enjoyed the idyllic life of a good soul, MemoryLock monitored his every move. Oona indicated that they had implanted a transponder into his dental work which allowed them to monitor his whereabouts on an around the clock basis. Owning his place of work, permitted Merriwhether, Oona and their right hand man Oliver Harcourt to manage direct but discreet observation and interviews with Jonathan. As they neared the two-year anniversary of his 'coming out', the trio had made preparations to launch their findings on the scientific community. Everything was working better than planned.
“At least until the damn transponder failed,” Oona snapped in exasperation. “Nothing changed immediately. He was doing so well. He came and went without incident.”
Carly couldn't help notice the almost maternal air Oona assumed when talking about Jonathan. Without ever having children, maybe Jonathan had become a surrogate for a void she might have felt. The pathos in that discovery allowed him to have some sympathy for a woman he had always despised.
Continuing, Oona described the break in the experiment. “We didn't want to alarm him by snatching him off the street to fix the transponder, so we arranged for him to get a routine dental checkup under the health insurance coverage we provided. We would find the problem and sedate him to correct it. At the time we felt we could make repairs and run a few other tests like an EEG just to see how he was doing mentally, without eliciting any alarm in him, after all Jonathan was not the brightest person. He was smarter than Dombrowski as he had a better education, but his fundamental grasp of intellectual thought could not be changed. However, shortly before he came into the dental office, he disappeared.”
Oona reached for another cigarette and took a long draw as she lit it, the blue smoke swirling about her head as she lapsed into silence thinking about what had happened.
Before she needed prodding to continued she resumed her story. “Out of the blue, he simply vanished! He got off work on a Friday night and we never saw him again. We had even brought Damien in when the homing device initially failed, just to follow Jonathan until the device was fixed, but that damned Damien lost him in traffic.” Her ire was not concealed. Considering Damien’s recent lapse of proficiency, her anger was not misplaced either.
Snidely, Carly shot back at her, “Brother Damien isn't too good is he? After losing Dombrowski, I wouldn't have put him back on as Hasan's bird dog.”
“Jonathan,” the woman blurted out, as if a loved one had just been defamed. “He lost JONATHAN!” The exasperation and anger in her rising voice was evident.
She was actually protective of Jonathan. “Dombrowski was, for all intents and purposes, gone. Locked away in the deepest recesses of Jonathan's mind. At least that's what we thought.”
“We searched for him for days. We even hired private detectives, as we couldn't really go to the police, as we didn't what to bring any undue attention to MemoryLock. The private detective managed to track Jonathan's whereabouts to a poetry reading in the city the Friday night he had disappeared. It was something he did regularly. He liked L.A. and spent a lot of time there, we had given him a sense of the urbane so it was a natural affinity. Occasionally he'd stop in a club and have a beer and listen to music, there was nothing really unusual about his activities, at least until the Friday night he disappeared.”
“Police reports indicated he had been picked up late Friday night for driving while impaired on his way back to Rosemead where he lived. He was held overnight, then released, as he was to appear in court on Monday. His was barely over the limit for driving while impaired, so he was no legal threat and hadn’t needed bond. He had no reason to run as he had the money for a fine, as we had arranged a small inheritance for him from the deaths of his parents. At the jail they said he barely spoke. After his release, no one saw him again. He didn't go home, he didn't go to work. It was like the earth swallowed him whole.”
“Didn't you put two and two together when the first Cross Killing occurred?” Diane spoke up, the tenseness in her voice, sharp and bitter.
“We knew it was Jonathan right away. Who else could it be? We kept searching for him hoping to get to him before the authorities.” Oona was speaking in clipped tones, her haughtiness had given way to fear as she realized what she had done.
“What about his arrest? Surely he was finger printed. Why didn't they know he was Dombrowski?” Diane didn’t let up in her interrogation. She wanted answers for herself and for her sister. Carly could see her seething through the normally calm demeanor.
Trying to stay calm but exasperated by the effort, Oona forced herself to continue. “Harcourt, our programming expert, had broken into the national law enforcement data bank and changed Dombrowski's file. His original fingerprints were no longer listed as we had inserted those of the man whose body we substituted for Dombrowski’s after the supposed execution. The same with the DNA. We had thought it was better to do it that way just in case the fake Dombrowski was ever exhumed for some reason. When Jonathan was arrested it was as if those prints had been taken for the first time.”
Carly looked at Diane, the nervousness, the anger and the stress registered on her face. He felt she was going to crack. The last thing they needed was for either of them to do something, which would let Oona’s lawyer cry foul.
He knew Diane needed a breather. “Let's take a break. You and your lawyer can talk things over if you need to, then we can go back at it. “
With an air of resignation, Oona said quietly, “I don't care. I can continue.”
“We can't,” Carly barked, as he strode out into the hallway with Diane in tow, the door slamming behind them.
After a much needed respite and fresh coffee, Diane appeared more composed and able to continue listening to the circumstances that ultimately led to her sister's death. It was hard but she found reassurance in Carly's calm demeanor. The steady probing of Oona was productive, as for the first time in any of the cases they were getting solid faces on motive and opportunity.
After the recess, they were joined in the interrogation room by the two assistant district attorneys who had drawn up the confessional deal for Oona. They were friendly to Diane and were willing to give her the latitude she needed in getting information out of the stern woman across the table.
Diane explained the situation to the newcomers. “Ms. Erickson has, as part of the plea bargain arrangement with your office and with the full knowledge
of her legal counsel, confessed to her involvement with a Petr Dombrowski also known as Jonathan Carter. We now believe Carter née Dombrowski is the Crucifixion killer. Mr. Dombrowski is also fugitive from justice having been convicted of multiple murders in Colorado, as you know. We are wrapping up her interrogation now.”
The attorneys did not speak. They were almost aghast at the magnitude of what was transpiring.
Demurely Oona looked at Carly, “It's all gone, isn't it? It worked, it really did. For two years, it worked. Now we'll lose everything. Scientifically it could be acceptable, if only I knew why it failed. What happened? What went wrong?”
With a venom that startled everyone in the room, Carly spat the words at her as though each syllable was a sniper’s bullet, “You know damn well what happened. You and your damn quick fixes! High tech mumbo-jumbo! You took a merciless killer driven by rage and pain, and thought you could scour away years and years of agony with drug treatments and VRT. Dombrowski never left. He was there all the time. Just because he lay dormant didn't mean that everything that made him exist originally, went away. The motivations, the urges from the deepest recesses of his mind, the power to commit unspeakable acts never went away. Even the sins of a lessor beast could not be hidden away. You've got to confront these terrors of the mind, expose them and then treat them. It's the same argument we have had over the last decade. You can't suppress the symptoms and assume that the illness goes away. It just doesn't work. Something happened to Jonathan that awakened Petr. Whatever it was, it loosed upon this city a very real nightmare.”
He loathed the woman before him. The rage spilled from his as watched her feeling remorse not for the carnage she had caused but for a theory despoiled in application. Carly stormed from the room sickened. He wandered down the hall enraged at the arrogance of those who would be God, and the futility of those who actually tried to be. Merriwhether and Oona fit both descriptions.
By the time Diane found him, his ire was spent. She found him staring out the window wishing he still smoked. Gently she slid an arm around his shoulder and the two came together in tears. Holding each other, she found the solace to grieve and he found the support necessary not to despair. As they turned back towards the interrogation room, they knew that from the object of their scorn, Oona, they needed to extract all the detail and minutiae that could be mustered regarding Dombrowski and Jonathan.
They entered the room and watched Oona recoil from their presence. Superficial as she was, she began to understand the passion in which she aroused in them.
“Why do think he's killing hookers and prostitutes?” Diane asked calm of voice as they returned to the questioning.
“Harcourt, our chief programmer didn't follow the VR programming as prescribed. It seems that Dr. Harcourt has been doing a bit of research on his own using our subjects. Essentially, Harcourt had been providing increased sexual programming to everyone we worked with. He was trying to conduct research on the effect of VR programming as a therapeutic tool for sexual dysfunction. We believe that Dombrowski, or rather Jonathan's past, the one we programmed, included an unhealthy dose of wanton sex, unrelated to sex within a relationship.”
“The type of sex someone gets from hookers, strippers and the like?”
“We didn't know what Harcourt was doing, really we didn't. He assumed in Dombrowski's case that as long as the sexual activity implanted into Jonathan's memory wasn't homosexual it would be okay. Apparently, Jonathan indulged in some of these procured tastes when he went into the city. We don't know how much, but once or twice we were aware of him going to nude bars, and once he picked up a prostitute. At first we were alarmed but then we thought that with the anti-sexist attitudes we had in the original program, Jonathan was venting a biological urge in the most socially acceptable manner possible. After all we wanted a NORMAL man, not a saint. He had to be believable if we were to succeed on the level we anticipated. He had been discreet and nothing else had come of it.”
Carly ignored her last remarks. He was trying to find the motivation for the resurrection of Dombrowski, he could only guess what Merriwhether and Oona had expected as an outcome. Pressing towards the matter at hand he asked, “What triggered him to disappear?”
“We don't know, but the same event probably negated the Proma regimen and awaken Dombrowski.
It wasn't planned. He never went back for his belongings, he never touched the money we arranged for him. He just walked away.”
They stayed with Oona well into the night. By dawn they joined Sully and a few others from the squad who had incredulously observed the questioning from behind the one-way mirror.
Chapter Fifteen
Exhausted from one more long night, Diane excused the detectives, telling them to meet back in her office by noon. With a laugh she added that all of them should get a nap, a shower, and a change of clothes, with the shower taking priority. Sully and Hernandez scurried away, mumbling their preference to nap in the shower, rather than waste any precious sleep time. Diane and Carly took a moment as they looked at each other, spent beyond the total of their energies. Wordlessly, the pair mustered up the reserves of energy necessary to head back to her apartment. They made a short stop at a twenty-four hour discount store for a replenishment of his dwindling supply of clean clothes and toiletries, since he had been operating on a slim overnight bag since leaving Denver three days earlier. At her apartment, a languid but desperately needed nap followed a passionate and equally needed shower. By eleven, the two of them awoke refreshed and ready for what lay ahead.
At the office everyone was assembled waiting for Diane to exercise her leadership. “What's next Inspector?” Sully asked displaying a nervous eagerness for action, once the squad had assembled in Diane's office shortly after noon sandwiches and snacks accompanying the ubiquitous mugs of coffee.
Clearing her voice and standing tall, Diane took charge feeling like she should for the first time since Le’s disappearance. “First we have to brief the Chief and Deputy Chief Chapman. That's going to be an interesting session, I would imagine Sully and I will need to do that alone, although bringing in the DA might be of use. While we're doing that, I'd like Hernandez and Professor Thompson to map out strategies for finding Jonathan Carter. Carly and I have talked a bit and we've got a couple of ways to go. But first I've got to clear the way with the brass, after all we haven't had the chance to breathe without first getting a request to do so approved by Chapman.”
As she strode from the room Diane cut a stately figure as she wove through the maze of desks, her short sidekick Sully, trailing behind her, two computer drives carried casually behind his back. “Loaded for bear,” Carly smiled to himself.
Hernandez turned towards Carly his hand extended in friendship, “Well Professor, I've got to admit I thought you were a little farfetched the last time you were here, but after listening to that damn dragon queen last night, I'd believe you if you said vampire and werewolves were doing these killings.”
The dark muscular man shuddered, “It's high tech witchcraft if you ask me. How in the hell will we ever be able to put these bad guys out to pasture if guys like Merriwhether can bring 'em back?”
Carly tried to suppress a laugh, but failed. “Sounds like we've got to put away the Merriwhethers' of the world too. But first we've got to snag us a real bad guy...a freaking monster, a thousand-fold worse than vampires and things that go bump in the night. “
Hernandez shrugged, looking for direction, “So where to from here?”
“After talking with the Inspector, our first move is to put out an all-points bulletin for Jonathan Carter. We can get Oona to give us a photo and a vital statistic layout. It's absolutely critical we keep Dombrowski out of this for now. We don't want a panic or a media circus. Besides for all intents and purposes we aren't looking for Dombrowski, not even someone who resembles him. Those ghouls did a complete make-over on him, so Jonathan Carter is our man.”
There was a sense of frustration in his voice as he thou
ght of the difficulty he had tracking Dombrowski down the first time, now he was out there again but not really.
“I would imagine that we could concentrate on the Rosemead area first off. The other place to look would be anywhere there are horses or construction labor. Remember this, Carter walked away without any money, clothes or anything else so he's got to be working somewhere. Carter has a van, so he must have gas money. He's got the tools of his murderous trade, as they didn't appear out of thin air. Dombrowski was a practical man, he uses what's at hand, let's assume Carter is the same way. He went to work somewhere. Maybe he went back to blacksmithing, or something similar. Maybe Jonathan is using his carpentry skills, who knows?”
Lassiter, a dour and dowdy looking veteran of twenty years spoke up, “Maybe we should try the horse connection, or even iron-working. The way I figure it, this guy is going full circle back to Dombrowski.”
“Good point,” Carly commended the shrewd insight, she offered. “Remember how the first murders seemed similar but yet confused, while the later murders were exact replicas? I don't think Dombrowski came back full force at the point the memory trigger was enacted. Whatever happened set him in motion, but it has taken time to fight the effects of the Proma and two years of VR therapy. After all this guy has lived two complete lifetimes at least in his own mind's eye. There had to be a lot to sort out, what was real and what wasn't. The strongest emotions are the ones coming back with the most fervent expression...the murders. That explains his taste in easy women, he still lives with some of Jonathan's memories. Keep in mind, some techno geek actually programmed him for whores.”
“The second thing,” he continued, “is a complete investigation of the drunk driving arrest. What happened? Jonathan went to jail and out walked Dombrowski. We need to know the triggering event. It's going to tell us how complete this metamorphosis really is.”
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