by David Archer
However, in the larger sense, Carl hadn't even been there. The man who was Carl Morris had been sent into some dimension where he had no connection to reality, while some creature that had not existed before that morning took control of his body and committed the most horrendous of crimes. Orville, because he'd felt all along that there was something about the case that just wasn’t right, had no problem accepting this fact.
However, the existence of that creature meant that there was a creator that had brought it into existence, and after listening to what he'd heard from Carl under the skilled direction of the hypnotist, he had no doubt that the creator was Alexander Connors.
He'd called Carl's lawyer to ask if there was any other evidence of Connors' culpability, and she had forwarded to him a set of reports and depositions that detailed dozens of arrests that were likely the direct result of Connors' manipulations. The more he read, the more he was appalled and shocked and enraged.
There were cases of women who were apparently “programmed”—he couldn't think of a better word—to meet Connors for sex, and many of the women were quite young. There were people who did incredibly bizarre things after their own treatments by Connors, and many of them had done things that were illegal and dangerous. Some of them had done things so devastating to their own psyches that they had ended up taking their own lives.
Orville had dealt with many evil people throughout his long career, and he had put many of them away in prison, even seen a couple go to death row. Sitting in his chair that night, he couldn't think of one of them who was more deserving of justice than Alex Connors.
The last report he read was from the psychiatrist, and detailed the hypnotic debriefing of a woman who had actually volunteered to go and see the dentist. She was an attractive woman who did not look her age, according to the report and the attached photos, and Connors had taken the bait. She had been programmed to meet him for sex that night, and might have done so, but her daughter had taken precautions and chained her to a pipe so she couldn't get away. She had also been instructed to make sure no one stopped her from coming, but somehow, the daughter had managed to keep her from hurting herself or anyone else, and the two of them were prepared to testify against Connors if charges could be brought against him.
Orville was worried that the bastard was going to get away with it.
It was terribly hard, he knew, to prove that anyone might be able to cause you to commit a crime by using hypnosis. There had been a few such cases, most of them long ago, but the general consensus today was that a person would not do anything under hypnotic induction that he or she would not do in the waking state.
Orville was convinced that the general consensus would have to be revisited, because there was no doubt in his mind that Connors had found the way to do it. The drug in this case was already known to cause people to do things that were not normal for them, and that normal inhibitions should have prevented, but didn't; by giving people instructions under hypnosis that literally directed the things they would do and the inhibitions they would ignore, he could actually program them to commit any act he chose. Several of the women who had been his victims, even though they could not prove it at the time, had found themselves involved in sexual practices that left them scarred for life, and some had committed suicide after learning what they had done.
Connors had tried to program Carl Morris to kill his wife, and Orville had no doubt that if he had gotten out without his family seeing him, he almost certainly would have done exactly as he had been told to do—ripped Juliette Connors' head from her body.
Orville picked up the other report he'd gotten from the lawyer, the report on the toxicology scan of the private eye's blood. The drug that was found in his system meant that there was literally no way he could have gone to Mrs. Connors' house and killed her. He would not have been conscious enough to even walk, let alone carry out a complex plot. There was no doubt, based on that report alone, that Sam Prichard was set up, that he'd been carried to that house and left there beside the body, but that someone else had used his gun and fired the shot that killed the woman. Orville considered who could possibly have a motive for wanting Mrs. Connors dead, and the only suspect would be Dr. Connors.
Orville had been a cop for a long time, and one of the things he'd learned was that prosecutors didn't always see things the way cops did. The current prosecutor was one of those that Orville had butted heads with pretty often, and there were people walking around the streets in the county who, in Orville's opinion, should be serving long prison terms. Some of them had been up on much simpler charges, with far more concrete evidence against them, and yet, because “we might not get a conviction,” those charges had been dismissed, or never brought at all.
The lawyer was going to talk to Will Burton, a deputy prosecutor who had some actual cojones, but he would have to go to his boss before any charges could be filed. If the only evidence he had to work with was what was in these reports, Orville was afraid the head prosecutor would be afraid of failure and refuse to go after Connors. In order to give Burton what it would take, more evidence was needed, and the most powerful kind of evidence would be a statement by the perpetrator himself.
Orville had faced other such cases, before, where he needed at least a partial confession in order to make the charge stick. He'd gotten confessions, more than once, but he'd been warned that any further confessions that were obtained under the same methods could get him forced into retirement, no matter how well it worked in putting a perp behind bars.
He felt that bringing Alex Connors to justice would be worth being retired. He sat there for a few more minutes and thought that over, made sure that he really felt that way, and then he got up out of his chair and went to the bedroom. Jeanie was sitting up on the bed, reading as she did most nights. He kissed her and said, “Goin' out for a bit. Got something I need to take care of.”
She smiled up at him. “All right, honey,” she said. “I'm probably gonna go to sleep, pretty soon.”
He smiled back. “I'll try not to wake you when I come in.” He kissed her once more and walked out of the bedroom and out of the house. He got into his Ford Expedition and backed out of the driveway.
He knew Connors' address, from all of the things he'd read that day and evening. Each one had contained details of Connors home and office locations, as well as the apartment building he owned, which was where he'd been staying since moving out of the house he had shared with his wife. He drove straight there, expecting to find him at home since it was after eleven.
Sure enough, Connors' Jaguar was in the parking space for his apartment. There weren't any empty spaces, so Orville drove down to the next intersection and turned around, planning to park on the street out front. He had just pulled back onto the street when he saw the Jag's lights come on, and it backed out of its space and started down the street away from him.
Orville followed, using every trick in his long book to avoid being spotted. He let other cars get between them, counting on the Expedition's high stature to let him keep the Jag in view, and switched lanes periodically, just to make things look different in Connors' rear view mirror. He turned on his low-mounted fog lights once, when Connors turned a corner, then turned them off again at the next turn; all of these tricks were designed to keep a subject from realizing that a single vehicle was staying on his tail.
Connors seemed to have a destination in mind, Orville thought. At one point, when he was only the second car behind him, it looked like the dentist was on his cell phone, but Orville couldn't be sure. He just stayed on the Jag's trail, and waited to find out where the man was headed.
The Jag finally pulled into a parking lot at a bar. Orville thought it was a little odd that a man whose wife had just been murdered would be going out for a drink, but then he remembered that he'd tried to program that PI's mother-in-law to meet him for sex only the day after the murder, so maybe he shouldn't be so surprised.
He parked his car at the edge of the lot, the
n watched until Connors went inside. When he'd been in for a minute, Orville got out and sauntered toward the door, trying not to be noticeable. He went in, stood near the bar as his eyes adjusted, then scanned the bar in the big mirror until he spotted Connors.
The dentist was sitting near the back wall, at a table by himself. He seemed to be waiting for someone, and when a young woman entered a few moments later and immediately sat down at his table, he suspected that he was witnessing the beginning of one of Connors' drug-fueled rapes.
The girl seemed enchanted by Connors, smiling and reaching out to touch him. She didn't object when he grabbed her by her hair and pulled her into a kiss, and when it became obvious that he was touching her breast, she only giggled happily. Orville guessed the girl at being in her late teens or really early twenties, and just watching was making him angry and sickened.
Orville couldn't let it go on. He rose from where he'd been nursing a Coke at the bar, and walked straight to Connors' table and sat down opposite him.
Connors looked at him, surprised. “Is there something I can do for you?” he asked.
Orville nodded, and then took out his shield case and held it so Connors could see it. “Yeah, you can let this little girl go home.”
Connors smiled. He turned to the girl and asked, “Penny, do you want to go home?”
Penny laughed, a sultry laugh that shouldn't come from one so young. “Huh-uh, I wanna have fun! Let's go have fun!” She had her arms around Connors' neck, and was acting like a lovesick schoolgirl.
Orville leaned forward. “Look, you sick son-of-a-bitch,” he said. “Your game's over. We know it all, now, Connors, all about how you program people to do what you want with your hypnotism and the drugs you use, and we've got all the evidence we need. Tomorrow sometime, you're gonna be arrested, and when the Grand Jury gets done indicting you, I figure you're looking at a few hundred years in prison. Send the girl on her way, and then go home and stay there till we come for you.”
Connors stared at him, and Orville could see the man's mind racing like made. He started to speak a couple of times, but closed his mouth, and then it looked like some kind of resignation came over his face, like he was accepting that something he'd dreaded had finally come true.
“How?” he asked. “I've always covered my tracks. How did you figure it out?”
Orville snorted. “We didn't,” he said. “Some private eye did, and then his wife and her momma set you up for the big fall! Remember that little hottie you tried to set up for last night? She was the PI's mother-in-law, and they got her blood samples to prove you doped her up. And that little bottle of happy juice you gave her? Well, they tested that, too, and your ass is cooked once the prosecutor sees it all tomorrow morning.”
Connors stared at him. “They set me up?” he asked, incredulous. “They actually tried to set me up? How did they keep her from coming to me last night, did they keep her locked up all night?”
“Her daughter did, yeah, and then today they went to a real hypnotist, and got everything out of her. How she was supposed to meet you for sex, how she wasn't supposed to let anything stop her. And guess what they did after that? They got Carl Morris out of his cell, and took him down to that same doctor, and he told them all about how you wanted him to kill your wife, and how you told him not to let anyone know what he was doing. You son of a bitch, you made that poor man kill his own wife and kids with that crap, and if it's the last thing I ever do, I'm gonna see that you go down for that, instead of him!”
Connors sighed, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Do you really think it's that easy?” he asked. “Do you really think I wouldn't have plans for when this might happen?” He turned to the girl. “Penny, this man is trying to rape you, and you don't want that. You need to scream for help.”
Penny leapt from her chair, and before Orville could react, she began to scream. “Help!” she screamed, pointing at Orville, “Help, he's trying to rape me! Help!”
A half-dozen men grabbed at Orville, and nobody even heard him trying to identify himself as a cop. He was thrown to the floor, and he heard Connors yell that someone should call the police, and he turned his head to look at the dentist, just in time to see him hand something to Penny and whisper into her ear. She nodded, and looked at Orville with a rage in her face, and then she screamed and launched herself at him, her hand raised, and Orville saw the long knife in her hand as she brought it down into his chest. The men who were holding him began to scream, then, but the knife went up and down, over and over, and the last thing Orville Kennedy saw before the blackness descended was that Connors was no longer there.
* * * * *
Connors wasn't as surprised as Orville had thought he would be. When you've created a way to become like a god on earth, there will always be those who want to destroy you, who want to stop you, and he knew that. It had been the same way back in college twenty years ago, when he'd first begun developing his techniques. He'd been given Adivol by a friend, who said it was awesome at making girls more cooperative, and when he'd seen just how effective it was in turning normally prudish girls, even the Jesus-freak girls, into raving nymphomaniacs, he realized that it had some sort of inhibition-deactivation effect. That had prompted him to do some research, which he originally planned to lead to his doctoral dissertation in psychology; however, his dissertation adviser had pushed him to move into other areas, and since his adviser was chair of the dissertation committee, he had decided to do as he was told.
His decision to go into dentistry had been fueled, in part, by his research. He wanted to go into a field that would allow him access to patients who would be amenable to both hypnosis and medication, and when an audited seminar on hypnosis promoted it as a leading form of anesthesia in dentistry, he'd been sold! That only required him to find ways to get the initial dose of Adivol into them, and he solved that by adding it to the Novocaine that he injected into the gums. By injecting it into the mouth, the zolpidem solution went almost instantly to the bloodstream.
Since the patient was already under hypnotic induction, he could bypass the sleep inducing function of the drug, and the patient would remain awake, though some of them seemed drowsy. They always blamed that on the effects of the Novocaine itself, so it never caused a problem. For almost twenty years, he'd used this technique to seduce the most beautiful women, milk wealthy clients for millions of dollars in fees for services they believed he'd rendered, though he often hadn't, and he'd even developed his techniques to the point that he could make people do literally anything he wanted them to do.
His first experiments with that had been incredible; he'd been attacked and beaten by a man who had followed his wife and found her meeting Connors at a motel room. He'd been enraged, but he was no match, physically, for his attacker, and so he seethed for weeks, planning an appropriate revenge.
The man ran a construction company, and had several projects going around the area, and Connors made it his business to learn all he could about them. His opportunity came almost two months later, when a man who worked with the attacker came in for a root canal. Connors had given him the drug, and carefully programmed him to take the additional dose the following morning at work, then follow his boss up onto the roof of the eight-story building they were working on. The attacker fell to his death, and there were apparently no witnesses.
Connors had realized then that he was almost a god and that he could do anything and get away with it. He had stepped up his experiments, then, adding in other things that he knew would increase his feeling of omnipotence. When a friend had come to him complaining that his business partner was about to reveal some things he had done that would probably lead to jail time, Connors programmed an older patient to go and shoot the partner dead. The killer was caught, sleeping in his car just outside the scene of the crime, and swore that he had no idea what had happened. Police could find no connection between the two, and when a psychiatrist had testified that the man honestly had no memory of what had happened, i
t had resulted in the killer being sent to a mental institution instead of standing trial.
Connors was invincible. He could eliminate any problem for anyone, and it wasn't long before he let a few trusted people know that he could do so. Over the past ten years, he had caused witnesses to disappear completely, made evidence vanish, and arranged for certain women to suddenly find a man who desired them irresistible. His fees were high, but he almost always delivered.
Sure, there were occasional problems, but he took care of them. When a couple of the women he'd chosen for himself woke up too soon and realized they were in bed with him, they had protested and even accused him of somehow forcing them, but that was why he always met them in public places. Witnesses and security tapes would show that they were not only willing to leave with him, but insistent. When they realized that, they dropped everything, and all he'd had to do was use his talents to make his wife let it go.
Juliette had been one of his most successful experiments. Beautiful, young and fairly rich, she had married him while he was still in college working on his psych degree, and then she had paid for his dental schooling. She had been one of the girls he had programmed to date him back in school, but when her money had come to light, he had continued programming her every time they met until she was certain that she was in love with him. Her family had never understood why she chose him, but once they were married, they had accepted him.
Unfortunately, she had slowly become less susceptible to his control. After the first few times he was caught with other women, she had stopped being as forgiving as he'd liked, and eventually they began to fight over his affairs. For a long time, she had almost ignored him, and it finally hit him that it was because he was finally wealthier than she was; that was when he began setting up his offshore accounts. He pretended to be a tax protester, but the truth was that he always paid the taxes on his income, then hid it so she couldn't get to it.