The Puppet Master

by John Dalmas

  "He was angry; psychotically angry. He'd controlled DeSmet, and Masters, and the one in charge of the hit team at the airport. And probably others. He'd taken them over." She glanced again at her husband. "You know who he was, of course."

  Martti nodded. "I think so. Leif Haller."

  It seemed to him there was no other explanation. If he was right about that, then in a way, Haller had been Christman's murderer, though it was beyond proof. He'd killed Christman and maybe Cloud Man, and all those people in the apartment house. Haller. So intelligent, so hard-working and charismatic, yet he'd failed. Pretty much all down the line, really.

  Or had he? Even before he'd taken up murder, he'd had an impact on a lot of lives. Apparently a good impact in many cases. Like Christman had. And provided a place for people who were looking for one.

  But that hadn't been much of a funeral procession. Back in '95, when his dad and mom had been buried, more than a thousand people had turned out, a sixth of Ojibwa County. The funeral service had been held on the courthouse lawn, because no church in Hemlock Harbor was nearly big enough. Even so, they'd spilled over into the parking lot. If his dad had known in advance, he'd have been embarrassed.

  Martti wondered how Leif Haller would have felt, in the heyday of his Institute, if he'd known his funeral procession would be only four cars and a hearse. Of course, almost everyone thought he'd died in Wisconsin a dozen years earlier.

  Ray Christman's memorial service drew thousands of the faithful, even though his dying, his murder, had broken his image and shown him fallibly human. They still thought of him as the inspired genius who'd given them the new gnosis. In the case report, Prudential hadn't included the role the Merlins had played in Christman's church. Martti had checked with them. Both had said no, and it wasn't actually pertinent to the case anyway.

  Who would know when Vic Merlin died? Who outside his circle of friends? Not many. And the Merlins' wouldn't care, he felt sure of that.

  Maybe, Martti thought, he should spend some time with the Merlins, or the Diaconos. They were obviously remarkable people with remarkable abilities. And good people. If he did spend some time with them, would he change the way Tuuli had changed? How changed was she, though? Now that he stopped to look at it, she wasn't basically changed. Just overhauled, tuned up. . . .

  Maybe someday he'd do it, spend a couple of weeks with the Diaconos. A weekend with Vic, anyway. But just now he'd live his own way. Maybe that's what he was supposed to be doing. Anyway he was good at what he did.

  Subliminal! Hmm!

  He looked at fame again. Actually, he thought, I'm kind of famous. Semi-famous. A semi-famous detective. Dad and mom would have been proud. When I die, it'll probably even get mentioned in the newsfax—maybe even on television—unless there's a major earthquake that week, or a revolution somewhere.

  He didn't give a damn about fame, though, he decided. Well, maybe a little bit; it was handy sometimes. He had friends—not a lot, but as many as he wanted—and an interesting job with lots of independence. And most of all, Tuuli loved him. She'd even killed for him, in a manner of speaking.

  Tuuli reached over and patted his knee.

  THE CASE OF THE

  DUPLICATE BEAUTIES

  a novelet

  Prolog

  The male presenter chuckled at a witticism, then announced: "And finally Elena Marquez, for her role as Lupe, in The Last Apache."

  Abruptly center stage disappeared, displaced by a holo of the Chihuahuan Desert. Half a dozen Apache warriors stood in a loose row, moccasins over their calves, thighs and torsoes bare, stoic faces painted for war. Their hands held lever-action Winchester carbines. A large white man stood facing them, hands on cocked hips, inches from low-slung pistols. Beside him, face smudged with ashes, was a lovely, black-haired young woman of mixed race, her eyes defiant as she stared at the Indians. Her deerskin shift was tattered and revealing.

  "Nana," the white man drawled, "there's only six of you left. The army's watching every waterhole from here to the Jornada del Muerto, and General Miles' Apache Scouts are hunting your tracks. The best thing for you to do is cross the border back into Mexico."

  Old Nana spoke without gesture, without head movement. "She goes with us," he answered. His broad face was lined, eyes hard, unyielding. "For her father's treachery."

  The white man opened his mouth as if to speak again, but the woman stilled him with a sharp gesture, and taking a step toward the chief, spoke in rapid, fluid Apache. Subtitles flowed across the base of the holo, but her imperious face, her expressive voice, her presence made them almost superfluous. When she finished, the scene froze on her for a moment, then the desert disappeared, the presenters applauding with the audience.

  The man picked an envelope from the podium and held it up. "And now for the winner," he said, handing it to the woman. Smiling she took it. "The winner," she began, tearing open an end, "is . . ." She drew out a sheet of paper, unfolded it, then looked up as if with delight. "The winner is Elena Marquez, for her role as Lupe, in The Last Apache!"

  The orchestra began to play the theme music from the film, and as heads turned and hands clapped, the cameras shifted to a gorgeous young woman rising to her feet in the audience. Smiling, sure of herself, she moved down the aisle, strides strong but feminine, and swept across the stage as the applause swelled.

  She'd almost reached the podium when she stopped. More than three thousand viewers watched from the seats, and some 500 million more on holovision and television worldwide. Abruptly her eyes widened, her hands flew to her temples. Her mouth squared to scream, and the sound of it erupted, shocking in its raw horror. She fell writhing and thrashing to the stage, as if in an epileptic seizure. Her screams were answered from here and there in the audience, and guards ran onto the stage from the wings, tried to corral her flailing limbs. Seconds later a doctor hurried out, bag in hand.

  Someone in the control booth had the presence of mind to key the curtains closed, and a moment later killed the backstage cameras. In a hundred million living rooms worldwide, the view switched to the stunned attendees in the auditorium, most with expressions of shock, horror, or fear.

  Someone else had the presence of mind not to switch to a commercial message.

  1

  I'll start by saying it's good to put this case to bed after seven years of being threatened by it. I'm Principal Investigator Martti Seppanen, and this is Cube One of the closing debriefs for Investigation 1832, Prudential Investigations and Security. The date is 17 April 2020, the time is 1320 hours, and the debrief officer is Carlos Katagawa, with company president Joe Keneely sitting in, which makes it old-timers' night.

  Excuse me. I don't ordinarily ramble, but this debrief is Veritas-assisted.

  We got involved with crucial evidence—information that led to the solution—months before the first of the crimes took place. That's happened to me before, which is why Joe calls me an evidence attractor. In an article he wrote on it for The Journal of Forensic Psychology, he even said I inspired the theory.

  I'm not sure how seriously he takes the idea. Joe's an image maestro. His conservative suit—even the eyeglasses on his nose—are promotional; he's had his eyes reconditioned to 20/15. And his occasional provocative articles in symposium proceedings or journals are good for the company image.

  Sorry. Back to the subject. On the evening of October 19, 2012, the LAPD got word that Tran Ngo, a wanted felon, had just gone into a porn theater near Hollywood and Bronson, so they sent a squad to pick him up. It turned out to be a mistaken identity, but there was a ruckus, and some of the customers ducked out the rear exits. And the police covering the rear let them pass, because none of them was a five-foot-three Oriental.

  One of them had left a torn Life-Tex mask in the theater, and when the cleaning crew cleaned up afterward, they found it and turned it in. The theater manager turned it over to the LAPD, but the department could see no reason to keep it; Tran Ngo hadn't been in the theater. It was a weird find,
though, and for whatever reason, they passed it on to us. The only information that came with it, and it seemed meaningless, was the circumstances surrounding it, and the name of the film: In Hiding.

  Having the mask, Joe asked for and got a contingency contract for the Ngo Case. You seldom get any money on a contingency contract unless you come up with evidence that leads to at least an indictment. But it doesn't cost anything either, and Joe operates on intuition at least as much as I do.

  A few weeks later, Ngo was arrested in Salt Lake, but Properties hates to throw anything away, so the mask went into a drawer in what we call "the limbo files."

  I never imagined it would mean anything to me, let alone how much.

  2

  Two days after Elena Marquez had her psychotic break at the Academy Awards ceremony, her husband, Bo Haugen, took her to the well-known psychic healer, Olaf Sigurdsson.

  Haugen's worth a lot of money, a lot of it earned, but his seed money was inherited. He's a low-profile Hollywood producer—actually San Fernando Valley—specializing in biographies and other historical series and miniseries. He's a very private man.

  Elena Marquez's doctor had her doped to the gills, but Ole got beneath the drug level and regressed her to the ceremonies. She told him that crossing the stage, she'd been struck by a crushing head pain. Which was followed instantly by what she called an assault of "memories," of things she said she'd never even dreamed, but were as real as life and unimaginably terrible. Along with the feeling that someone or something was taking over her body.

  That's when she'd passed out and gone into convulsions.

  Interestingly, she had bruises, lesions, abrasions, burns, that so far as anyone knew, had never actually been inflicted on her. Somatic hysteria, her doctor called them, which amounts more or less to saying she'd imagined them so strongly, they'd appeared on her body. Her blood also contained enzymes which metabolize a class of aphrodisiacs, but not the aphrodisiacs themselves, which was a chemical anomaly the lab couldn't explain.

  The intruding "memories" were of waking up naked in a place she'd never been before, having no idea how she'd gotten there. There'd been a dark-complexioned female nurse who spoke a little English, who'd given her a shot and then fed her. After that—

  After that she'd been a sex slave to someone she described as an oil sheikh. To Elena Marquez, any wealthy Arab who wears robes is an oil sheikh. She was injected with an aphrodisiac before each of his visits, and to intensify his kicks and keep himself going, he had a Harem Smoke fumer. He abused her pretty badly, and after a week or so had brought in other men. One she thought of as a general—he'd arrived wearing a uniform loaded with medals. The others she thought of as sheikhs. She had internal injuries from the abuse she took. Between times the nurse wept with her, and treated her with what were probably antibiotics.

  After a couple of weeks, the repeated drugging and abuse broke her sanity. She started hallucinating like a drunk drying out from a week-long binge, shaking so badly she couldn't feed herself, and what the nurse fed her, she vomited back out. She'd cry even under the aphrodisiac. Which annoyed the sheikh, who quit coming to see her, sending soldiers instead, several at a time. They were the ones who'd burned her with cigarettes. After several days of that, her memories of it suddenly stopped, and that second persona had "burst into her skull" in the middle of the awards ceremony, with a headache she wouldn't have believed possible.

  And to top it off, she knew—knew—she'd died in that bedroom. Knew it without any doubt at all.

  * * *

  Though Ole could get her into a trance, then locate the traumatic incidents and get her descriptions of them, he couldn't defuse them until the sedative was out of her body. So he'd called in a music therapist; the music was to function in place of the drug. After a few days of music and detoxifying, he defused the whole sequence of traumas; it took just one evening and the following afternoon. I got to talk with her the day after that, and she seemed as poised and matter-of-fact as you could want. Ole didn't doubt at all that what she'd described had somehow really happened, but I wasn't so sure, even after I talked with her. I couldn't even think of an unlikely explanation.

  Bo Haugen told me privately he'd have liked to believe it was all hallucination, but he acted on the assumption that it had somehow derived from a criminal act—perhaps before they'd met. Maybe after she'd finished an overseas film, and she'd suppressed the memories afterward.

  I couldn't buy that, although I didn't say so to Haugen. I know Ole, and with him helping, she'd have dredged up the rest of the story if there was one. He's a master at fishing up buried memories, and without hypnosis.

  At any rate, Haugen contracted with Prudential to find out what had happened and who was behind it. And because I'd solved "The Case of the Twice-killed Astronomer," and what my wife Tuuli and I thought of as "The Puppetmaster Case"—both of them damn tough—I got the assignment.

  * * *

  The first thing I did was create a time track for Marquez, going back to high school, and there was no unaccounted-for period long enough to accommodate the set of horrors she'd described. I told Haugen that, but he wanted me to stay with it, so Joe had Elena Marquez swear out a criminal complaint against a person or persons unknown, for her "covert drugging." That got me second-level access to the California State Data Center.

  The only approach I could think of was to treat the "memories" as if they really were—as if those things had actually happened—and try to place the events geographically. Judging from the few words she'd learned, that Ole fished from her subconscious, the language there was Arabic, probably the dialect spoken on the Arabian peninsula. And clearly the "sheikh" was someone important in government, perhaps a cabinet minister. Also it seemed to be one of the less secularized states, like Saudi Arabia, Ibadhan, or Yemen.

  But we had no proof at all that any of it was real, and in whatever country it was, we'd probably have no legal standing anyway. I asked Haugen what good it would do him to find out who it was. He said it would be worth it just to know. Which may have been true, as far as it went, but I have no doubt he had thoughts of something more. It seemed to me, though, that there wasn't a chance in hell of having a murder contract carried out on some middle-eastern government minister.

  * * *

  I had Marquez work with a computer artist, Jamal Lodi, who turned out an iterative series of computer drawings of her captor. Then I turned to the web and checked the lifelike final result against pictures of wealthy or prominent Arabs. It was a close match with one of Rashid ibn Muhammed, the uncle, one-time regent for, and currently financial advisor of the Sultan of Ibadhan.

  But Haugen also wanted to know how the crime had been committed, which promised to be a lot harder to learn. Impossible seemed more like it. Joe told him we'd go into fishing mode, and see what we found.

  I used a computer program we called a "weasel," a tailored cyberbot that would search the web for anything that might correlate with things Marquez had told us and what we'd deduced from them. I also tried trolling, posting a request for information about beautiful women who'd suffered a recent psychotic break, another for information about anyone who'd been assaulted by a duplicate set of memories, and a third for women who'd hallucinated being a sex slave.

  I hate trolling. It can bring a lot of useless replies, all of them requiring at least a little time.

  3

  For several days I got nothing worth more than a first look. Ironically, my first real lead was from Ole Sigurdsson, who'd just treated his gorgeous blond countrywoman, Ardis Halldórsdottir, the figure skater. Her experience was remarkably like Elena Marquez's, which of course she knew nothing about, even including the same villain, Rashid ibn Muhammed. The main differences were that her captivity had lasted only two days, until she'd kicked ibn Muhammed in the best possible place. His bodyguard had promptly shot her—killed her, she insisted—and she'd had her psychotic break in the privacy of the apartment she shared with her husband and skating
partner, Peter Golovkin. What she'd done tickled hell out of me, but she provided no useful information except to validate Marquez's story. Neither Carlos nor I doubted now; somehow those things had actually happened.

  * * *

  The other lead was a lot different: I got a report of a woman who'd had what seemed to be hallucinations of being a sex slave. Nothing was said of any psychotic break. To talk to her, I was to call a certain number. It sounded fishy, but I called—and got a receptionist at a talent agency, who connected me with one of the agents. He sounded unfriendly, suspicious, and gay, but after asking a few questions, he told me to meet him that evening at seven, and gave me an address.

  I said I'd be there, then called up the city directory. The occupant wasn't listed, so I used my access to the Data Center. It belonged to Misti Innocenza, Hollywood's most popular porn queen. I suspected some kind of PR hoax. Also I was chicken—I asked Carlos to go with me, and he said sure. I assumed she'd be built, but I was surprised how pretty she was, how sweetly innocent looking. Her real name, it turned out, was Lindi Hall. A girl friend had told her about my bulletin, and she'd had her agent follow up on it. Her story somewhat resembled the others, but her memories were of being held in what seemed to be a lodge, and her captor was someone she'd recognized: the prominent TV evangelist, Buddy Ballenger.

  For more than two days there'd been two of her—one in a Simi Valley porn studio, or at home, or restaurants, or with girl friends. While entirely unknown to that Misti, another had awakened naked and handcuffed in an unfamiliar place. After injections, she'd spent two days and nights on a big bed surrounded by mirrors, with Ballenger and his bodyguard, whom Ballenger called "Billy." The two men took turns, and with breaks for showers, naps, and snacks, and injecting her repeatedly with aphrodisiacs, they'd gone at her pretty much the whole time! Hard to believe; Harem Smoke is notoriously hard on the heart. On the other hand, the aphrodisiacs effective on women are hard on the nervous system, and she was afraid they were killing her. So after the second day, she begged Ballenger to let her go. He'd excused himself and left the bedroom, "for just a minute," to "arrange transportation." Then the bodyguard had grabbed her and given her another injection, this time with something that "burned like fire."