The Puppet Master

by John Dalmas

  I looked under psychic photographers. The best, according to the book, was a Charles Tomasic, originally of St. Cloud, Minnesota, and currently the ward of Dr. Clarence Hjelmgaard, Savants Project, Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine, University of Minnesota. I called up and read the hypertext on Tomasic. He was born in 1993, had an IQ of 64, etc. His photographs were more reliably clear than those of any other known psychic photographer.

  And his most notable performance had been to produce photos of a crime in progress, that had occurred ten months earlier. A vagrant in Willmar, Minnesota, had been accused of molesting a retarded, ten-year-old girl, then killing her. He'd been found guilty, and Tomasic had seen the sentencing on television. Even at the sentencing, the murderer had continued to insist he was innocent. Tomasic, then sixteen years old, had been angrily indignant at this, and insisted that Dr. Hjelmgaard expose a pack of Polaroid at him.

  As usual, none of the exposures showed Tomasic. The first several were "whities," as if shot at the sun, but two were clear shots of the crime—the molestation and the murder. When compared to the garage where the crime had occurred, the pictures were an exact match, even to the '02 Plymouth sedan parked there, though Tomasic had never seen the place, apparently had never even been in Willmar.

  I sat back and stared at the screen for a minute. The thing must have been kept quiet at the time, or the papers would have publicized hell out of it. I could see a rationale to that. Tabloid-type publicity would be bad for a research project, and reporters would have hounded poor Tomasic out of his skull.

  Meanwhile though— I called Fred Hamilton's number. "Do you have time to talk?" I asked him.

  "Will ten minutes do?"

  "How would you like to fly up to Christman's Hideaway that you told me about? In Oregon. We'll fly over it, and you can help me case the place. You said he had an observatory on a hill. That might be where he was most vulnerable to abduction. I want to size it up."

  He didn't answer for a moment. Then: "When?"

  "We could fly up Saturday afternoon, look it over Sunday morning, and fly back afterward."

  Then I told him what I really had in mind.

  "Martti," he said, "if you'll cover the travel costs and lodging, you've got a taker. I'll pay for my meals."

  I told him I'd cover the meals too, and pay him two hundred a day. It was the least I could do and be professional, and my client was responsible for expenses. I'd call him later regarding departure time, and where and when to pick him up.

  Then I looked in the catalog for the clairvoyant rated most reliable. His name was Seamus Waterford, and I was in luck; he lived just half an hour down the coast in San Diego. I called, got a sound-only connection, and five minutes later had an appointment for that afternoon. I had time for a tuna sandwich at Morey's, then drove to the Tamarind Station for an air shuttle to LAX. The hourly flight from LAX to Lindbergh Field at San Diego took twenty-eight minutes, and a cab to Waterford's address twelve more. I was there almost twenty minutes early, but I'd come prepared. I sat on the edge of a big planter across the street, and read my way into a pocket novel, one I'd read half a dozen times before: Poul Anderson's novelization of Hrolf Kraki's Saga.

  Then I went and rang Waterford's doorbell. He answered it wearing a heavy bathrobe, stocking cap down over his ears, and a scarf! I could hardly believe it! It was hot in his apartment—close to ninety, I'd guess.

  He waved me in, a tallish, skinny Irishman with red cheeks that made him look feverish, and tufted reddish blond eyebrows. There wasn't a drop of sweat on his face. I wondered if his disorder was mental or physical. I was almost afraid to go in, as if it was catching. "Come in! Come in!" he said with an Irish accent, and waved harder. "Before you let in the cold!"

  I went in. It must have been about 75 degrees outside, almost perfect shirtsleeve weather. Once I was in, he relaxed. "Would you like some lemonade?" he asked. There was a big pitcher of it, maybe three liters, half of it ice, on a table by stacks of books and papers.

  I told him no thanks. Somehow I didn't want to eat or drink anything there.

  He gestured at an ancient recliner upholstered with something leatherlike. It looked as if it might fold up and eat me, but I sat. After pouring himself a tall lemonade, he sat down across from me and swigged most of it noisily at one go, as if dying of thirst. Then he gestured back at the littered table. "I'm writing my book," he said genially. "Now. What can I do for you?"

  "Have you ever heard of Ray Christman?"

  For a moment he frowned in thought, then, "The cult leader!" he said. "I've known people he'd got in his clutches! What about him?"

  "He's disappeared. He may have gone into seclusion somewhere, or been abducted or murdered, or simply died. I hoped you could tell me."

  Waterford frowned slightly for a few seconds, then said, "The man's dead. I can tell you that much. Dead long enough, he's either reincarnated—become someone else, some infant—or he's absent from the material realm. Beyond that I get nothing at all.

  "Is that all you want?"

  I told him yes, and wrote a credit transfer on his PC, using my company card number and intersig. A minute later I was out the door, wondering if I'd just been had. Two hundred dollars for that! Plus the time and air fare. I was in the wrong business—had the wrong talent.

  20

  OVERFLIGHT

  Tuuli flew back to Arizona on Friday afternoon. On Saturday, Hamilton and I rode an AirWest express flight to Portland, then Oregon Air to Eugene. The office had already chartered an outfit at Eugene to fly us over the church's property in the mountains east of town.

  The pilot assigned to us knew about the Hideaway and where it was. When Hamilton asked about possible SAMs there, she looked at him as if he were crazy. If the Gnosties shot up an overflight, she said, even it couldn't hire enough lawyers to save its ass. Even given the near silence of modern skycraft, private property is protected from nuisance overflights—flights low enough or frequent enough to constitute harassment—but that protection was by law, not weapons.

  Twice in the past, a pilot had been accused by Christman and the church. The first time, the court threw the case out on the basis that the church's witnesses weren't credible, and this was upheld by the appeals court. A result, I suppose, of the church's reputation for public lying, and for using the threat of costly litigation to intimidate. The second time though, the evidence was electronic—radar and radar-directed video photography—as well as visual. The same court fined the same pilot, and told him another such instance would bring more than just a fine. It would confiscate his skyvan and operator's license, and lock him up.

  Our first overflight was 2,500 feet above the lodge, and we saw no sign of occupancy except for a surface bus—a crew bus—and what Hamilton said were the caretaker's house and the security barracks. The next pass was at 1000 feet. We didn't see any sign, IR or otherwise, that a security patrol was out. No radar was operating, either. In fact, there was no electronics at all operating on the ridge. It looked as if a skycar could land on it at night and never be noticed.

  And most important, what appeared to be the boundary fence ran along the ridge crest, which was about 100 feet wide. The fence was only about 30 feet from Christman's observatory. Yes, the pilot said, property lines sometimes ran along a ridge top. She called a topographic map onto her screen; the land on the other side belonged to the Willamette National Forest.

  Which meant we could land on the ridge without trespassing on church property.

  21

  A REVIEW FOR BUTZBURGER

  Butzburger came into my office on Monday morning just as I was getting ready to call Dr. Hjelmgaard at the University of Minnesota. "Mr. Seppanen—Martti," he said. "I'd like to stand you to lunch today and discuss some aspects of your investigation."

  Considering what it had already cost him, and how far I seemed to be from the information he wanted, that was understandable, but I didn't have to look forward to it. "Would it be all right to ta
lk about them now?" I asked. "My terminal gives me access to things I might want you to see, and you won't have to wait."

  He nodded, looking as if he preferred it that way himself. I guessed then that he was going to be critical, and the invitation had been to soften the criticism. "Yes, that would be fine, Martti. If you'll agree to have lunch with me afterward." He sat down in a chair beside my desk. "I'm concerned with the lack of progress thus far. Not that I'm criticizing you for it. You and Mr. Katagawa made clear at the beginning that progress was likely to be slow and uncertain, and I can understand why. But— Last Friday I found an expense statement for consultation with a psychic, a Mr. Waterford. And there'd been one earlier with a Mr. Sigurdsson. Under the best of circumstances, I'd feel uncomfortable about paying money to psychics. In a situation where progress has been so slow, it occurred to me that it might have been a matter of desperation." He shrugged slightly. "If things have gone that badly, it might be well to discontinue the investigation."

  "I understand," I said. "This morning Mr. Keneely told me to report to you today on a major—call it 'a happening'—last week. Beyond that, a new possibility occurred to me, and I spent the weekend in Oregon, checking its feasibility.

  "But let's talk about the psychics first, because frankly I'm surprised it bothers you. I thought the church considers psychic powers real, and teaches that a person can learn to use them."

  He nodded, looking slightly troubled. "But what it takes to become psychic," he said, "these gentlemen very likely have never experienced. I'm assuming that neither of them is a member of the church."

  "The church says that the only way to psychic power is through its training?"

  "To reliable psychic power, yes. First through its counseling services, which remove the deep spiritual traumas that foul the channels, so to speak. The individual parishioner may have sporadic psychic experiences even during early counseling, but only sporadic. The channels are opened further by advanced counseling, which prepares the parishioner for the training that programs and exercises those channels."

  Then he added, almost apologetically, "The procedures are still incomplete. As of now, the ability varies considerably between individuals."

  I was tempted—well, not tempted, but it crossed my mind—to ask him how advanced Lon Thomas was. Thomas showed all the perceptual sensitivity of a stone. Instead I said, "I have something here that may interest you." Then I rolled my chair to one side so he could move in beside me, and called up the WSU catalog of psychics. "When you've read the introduction," I said, "I'll show you what I have in mind."

  When he was done, I called up the material on Charles Tomasic, the psychic photographer. As he read, Butzburger commented that he'd read about a much earlier case, Ted Polemes, who'd been studied at the University of Nebraska. Polemes had produced remarkable pictures, but was very inconsistent, and showed little control of his talent. When Butzburger had finished, he looked at me. "And your plan is to . . . ?"

  "Information I've obtained indicates that Mr. Christman's greatest susceptibility to abduction was at his mountain hideaway in Oregon, and that he was usually there when solar storms promised to provide an auroral display. He loved the aurora.

  "This weekend I scouted the Hideaway from the air, visually and with infrared and electronic surveillance. It seems entirely practical to land on the ridge where he has a small observatory . . ."

  Butzburger interrupted. "I've been to his lodge. There are radar installations on the ridge, and some kind of defensive installation to repel possible aerial attacks."

  I remembered Hamilton saying that Christman hosted rich Gnosties at the Ranch when he wanted to pitch something to them. Apparently he'd used the Hideaway for the same purpose. "We looked into that," I said. "To date, the only response the church has made to overflights has been in the federal court at Salem, and our instruments showed no indication of even radar monitoring. As a matter of fact, the place seems nearly deserted. Inserting a rumor of radar and surface-to-air missiles could have been a useful fiction to discourage aerial snooping."

  I'd expected at least some sign of annoyance from Butzburger at that, but he simply looked thoughtful. I continued. "The fence that runs past the observatory is a boundary fence. The land on the other side belongs to the Forest Service. Because landing there looks feasible, I plan to call Dr. Hjelmgaard today and examine the possibility that we can fly Charles Tomasic in there with us. And maybe get a photograph of an abduction in progress."

  He shook his head, but before he said anything, I went on. "There is another aspect of the case that came to a head last week. An attempt was made to kill me. And there'd been an earlier occurrence, a bombing, that seemed to be aimed at me."

  If he'd intended to say anything, that stopped him. Then I told him of my interview with Thomas, when I'd posed as a freelance writer, and the events that led to the bombing that killed five people. That was enough to tighten his lips; he was waiting for me to accuse the church, something he wasn't about to accept.

  I forestalled that, too. As I'd finished describing the bombing, I'd called up the statements recorded by myself and Tuuli and Carlos, after my run through the tunnels. Now I had the computer play them back aloud, followed by my phone conversation with Thomas. When it was over, Butzburger was in shock.

  "Tuuli's recorded statement wasn't complete," I said. "Mr. Butzburger, my wife is a Laplander, and a professional psychic. She was born and grew up in Lapland, in a tough mining town in the Swedish arctic, till she was nine. After that they lived on a frontier farm in northern Finland. Her mother's lineage has a sequence of tribal shamans, and Tuuli has the talent. Mostly her clients are people in entertainment, but she's been used as a consultant on several cases by police agencies, defense attorneys, and private investigators; that's how I met her. She was in Arizona that evening, got a premonition that I was in danger, and tried to call me. I was gone. Then she called Carlos—Mr. Katagawa—and flew home. At no cost to you, I might add. At eleven that night, she showed Carlos where to park. The rest you know."

  If Butzburger had backed out then, Joe would not have been happy with me. An investigator is not supposed to try dealing with a client's uncertainties. That's Joe's hat. But Butzburger had been up front with me, and I wasn't willing to put him off.

  "So you think the church is . . . But assuming for some incredible reason that Lon Thomas or anyone else in the Church wanted to get rid of Ray . . ."

  "Exactly," I interrupted. "Why would they abduct him at the Hideaway? I don't think the church did abduct him. What I do believe is, they're afraid we'll get evidence that he's dead. That would have a powerful negative effect on the church. And there's the matter of who or what gets Christman's fortune."

  "Christman's fortune?"

  "Right." I stopped there. From the way he'd said it, there was more.

  "Ray Christman had no fortune."

  "Oh?"

  "He had no fortune. He lived in church facilities and accepted only a modest salary."

  I turned to my keyboard again, dumped the memory, and called up the summary article that the Times had published a few years earlier, moving to the part on Christman funneling most of the church's disposable income into personal accounts. Butzburger shook his head. "That's a lie," he said, "the sort of thing his enemies write about him." But he didn't sound confident. He was reciting Christman's PR line, and maybe, for the first time, wondering. I shrugged.

  "Could be it is." I called the backup data to the screen, where he could see it too. It looked convincing. "Meanwhile I'm using it as a working assumption. And if there's not any will—maybe even if there is one—the church would get none of the money. That could account for Thomas' concern. He may want Christman to show up alive somewhere."

  Butzburger was gnawing on his lower lip. "That doesn't entirely make sense. If Ray is simply in seclusion somewhere, the Church would . . ."

  "Get none of it anyway. True, as far as we know. We're short on information. What I've been doing i
s accumulating pieces of the puzzle. Some parts of the picture are beginning to take shape. Maybe some photographs from Oregon will give us a major key.

  "Now if you want, I can call Mr. Keneely. He's the man you need to tell if you want to drop the investigation." Butzburger had strong-looking hands. I was willing to bet that his early experience in construction hadn't been at a desk. Just now he was holding them in front of him, looking down at them as if searching for an answer there. "No, Mr. Seppanen," he said, "I'm not dropping out. Not now. I want to know what happened."

  "Thanks. Where are we going for lunch? And when?"

  I thought that might release any residual tension, and half expected him to laugh. He didn't.

  "Would you prefer noon?" he asked, "or one o'clock?"

  "Noon," I said. "I don't like to postpone eating."

  "Noon then." He got up. "Thank you, Mr. Seppanen. I appreciate frankness and honesty in the people I do business with."

  I'd recorded the meeting; it was standard practice. When Butzburger had gone, I wrote it to the case file and sent a flag to Joe's terminal so he'd know it was there.

  * * *

  Next I phoned Dr. Hjelmgaard: he was interested but leery, and wanted to talk to me in person. He also wanted time to investigate the firm; to see how "Charles" responded to me; and to be assured that his one-in-a-billion ward would not be endangered in any way. And he didn't want any publicity. None at all.

  * * *

  My lunch with Butzburger was nonbusiness. Despite being from upstate, he's a Dodgers fan, so we talked about them first, then the Raiders. Neither of us mentioned the church—we were both careful about that—and the matter of psychics never came up.

  Later that day, Joe said Butzburger had told him he was glad it was me on the case, so our talk had worked out even better than I'd thought.

  That afternoon, Hjelmgaard called back. He'd looked into Prudential's reputation, record, and financial condition, and been impressed. He'd also looked into my own record, came across the case of the twice-killed astronomer, and read my debrief and the prosecutor's summary report. And again had been impressed. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of that one. He ended up giving me an appointment for the next afternoon at 3:30—half-past one, Pacific Time—which meant catching a morning flight out of Hollywood-Burbank. So I left the office early and went to Gold's, where I worked out harder than a logger on piecework.