Gray Matter

by Shirley Kennett

  It was Schultz, and he looked for all the world like a downtrodden peasant from fifteenth-century Europe. All he needed to complete the picture was a change of clothes and a bow slung over his back. His ebullience and semi-camaraderie of three days ago had leached away. She was about to remark on his appearance when she remembered that a Schultz who wasn’t gleeful was a Schultz who had made no progress.

  The killer could be closing in on his next victim right now, tonight. PJ could practically feel the killer’s breath hot on her neck, and she knew that Schultz felt it too. Her work was more than an intellectual exercise.

  “Sit down, Detective, and I’ll put on a fresh pot of coffee. You look like you could use some.”

  Schultz sat down heavily and stretched his legs out in front of him. PJ went through the mechanics of measuring and pouring, letting him get settled. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him pop two or three small pills into his mouth and swallow them dry. As the warm, reassuring smell of coffee began to fill the office, she sat down and faced him.

  “Nobody saw anything,” he said. “Nobody heard anything. Everybody must have had their heads up their asses not only during the murder but for two days before and after.”

  “Nothing turned up in the interviews?”

  “Is there an echo in here?” He accepted a cup of coffee and sipped it noisily. “We talked to all the other tenants in Burton’s building and a few on either side. Dave and Anita make a good team. I sent them around together. Dave’s not real high wattage, if you get my meaning. I can’t picture him as anything but a patrol officer, a good solid cop who knows his job and does it day in and day out. Anita, though, she’ll make a good detective, in ten, twenty years. God, they’re young. Anita looks like a little elf who should be helping Santa out at the North Pole.”

  PJ saw some animation in his face as he talked about his assistants.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “no suspicious freaks hanging around, no unusual noises, nobody seen entering or leaving the apartment. Got any more doughnuts?” He was rummaging around in the bag on PJ’s desk as he asked the question, and was rewarded with a chocolate long john. “Christ, Doc, you’ve got lousy taste in doughnuts. Nothing beats those sugared jellies.”

  “I’ll have to remember that the next time I buy doughnuts for you. After all, I did pick these out for myself,” PJ said. “Burton’s apartment faces the rear of the building and the steps lead up from the alley. Are you surprised that no one witnessed anything?”

  “Shit no. I’d be surprised if any of those tenants witnessed their own turds.”

  “Well, there you are.”

  “There I am and there you are, too, Doc. Or did you forget you’re running this show? Speaking of shows, how’d the dog and pony one go?”

  “It went great. In fact, if you have a few minutes, I’d like to give you the same demo Howard got.”

  “Yeah, I got some time. I just came in to look over the photos again, see if I missed anything. Besides, the sooner I go home, the sooner my wife can put my balls in the vise she keeps on the night stand. Then my shit-for-brains son can come along and tighten the screw.”

  PJ didn’t know whether she was expected to laugh or not. Wall had not briefed her on Schultz’s home life. Presumably they would learn things about each other the more they worked together. For the moment, she assumed his home life left something to be desired.

  Well so does mine. We’ve got a little something in common, Detective.

  She cleared her throat and turned to the computer.

  She closed the simulation she had been working on and made selections to start over, using manual intervention again. She had been using manual mode all evening, so that she could examine the shapes of the furniture in the apartment. She had been trying to rotate an item or combine two or more items to make the pattern of indentations in the carpet.

  Schultz seemed to be daydreaming, so she swiveled the monitor more in his direction and tapped it with her fingernail. He had a terrific ability to tune out when computers were involved, an ability she wished she had to apply to other things, such as her son’s favorite CD.

  “Let me give you a little background first,” she said. He focused on her with a dutiful but glazed look on his face. “Really, Detective, someone of your intelligence should be able to follow this easily.” She was rewarded with a scowl, but he did seem more alert.

  “Virtual Reality refers to a customized environment created within a computer’s memory. It could be the interior of a star-ship, Alice’s Wonderland, or a murder scene. There are two ways to experience it. You can simply watch the world on the computer screen, where all the people are three inches high and you’re seeing them as an outside observer. Or you can enter the world using an HMD. A Head-Mounted Display, or headset, is worn like a helmet. Inside are two small computer screens which project images to each eye separately so that the mind interprets three-dimensional vision. Remember those old View-Masters that kids use?”

  Schultz nodded. “My son had one of those a long time ago. Kept breaking the little picture wheels.”

  “Same idea. You see only the world that the computer puts right in your face, and it looks real. Advanced HMD’s have motion sensors. As you turn your head, the view the computer gives you changes accordingly. So you can look around. You can also move in any direction, using a joystick to control direction and speed. Sophisticated systems replace the joystick with a glove that detects finger and hand movement and translates it into movement through the virtual world, and also allows you to manipulate virtual objects. In the future there might be entire body suits or special treadmills so you can simply walk in the direction you want to go.”

  PJ gestured at the computer setup in front of her. “We don’t have an HMD to use, although my software can handle it. I’d like to get my hands on one, but for now all we can do is observe the two-dimensional Virtual Reality, or VR. I’ll step through this in manual, so we can follow it closely. There is an automated mode, where the computer tries to put together all the known parameters in a smooth run-through, making logical extrapolations. Unlike most Virtual Reality simulations, mine has a smidgen of artificial intelligence. More than a smidgen, actually.”

  She pointed at the screen. “Here’s the outside of the door. There wasn’t any sign of forced entry, so we have to assume that Burton opened the door voluntarily.” The large screen showed a 3D view of the porch and the stairs leading up from the alley. A male figure dressed in jeans and a work shirt began to climb the stairs. He wasn’t a stick figure or a flat paper doll type, but a rounded, shaded miniature person. Even though he was only three inches high, you could practically reach out and pinch his arm and expect him to say ouch. PJ was justifiably proud of the people who inhabited her virtual worlds. The man on the screen was carrying a long, thin package. He moved in a generally lifelike fashion, but was a little jerky moving up the stairs. His legs left blurs of motion on the screen, and his arms pumped out of cadence with his legs. PJ winced.

  That should be fixed by now, she thought.

  Then she glanced at Schultz. His eyes were open wide, and he was staring fixedly at the screen.

  “What is this?” he said. “Some kind of video game?”

  She should have found his comment exasperating, but somehow it did not bother her. It was too sincere. She paused the simulation, and the figure halted, one foot raised to climb the next stair. “No, it’s a representation of the crime scene and the sequence of events that happened there. It also gives us a chance to look at things from different perspectives and try out different ways the crime could have happened.”

  “Who’s that guy on the stairs?”

  “He’s the killer, a composite figure I call Genman, for generic man. I’ve also got a Genfem and a Genkid. In this case, I entered some parameters about the suspect based on a psychological profile I’m working up. Until we have more to go on, the killer is male, white, thirty-plus years old, slim, height about five-nine, average features
, the blend into the crowd type.”

  Schultz shrugged. PJ restarted the action. Genman knocked on the door. A voice behind the door asked who it was, and Genman responded that he had flowers to deliver. As the door began to open, PJ stole another look at Schultz. He was nodding slightly; evidently he agreed with her theory that the killer got inside the apartment by claiming to be a delivery man from a florist. The red rosebuds that were in Burton’s apartment had not been delivered by any local florist. PJ believed that they were left behind by the killer, even arranged using gloved fingers in a vase that belonged to Burton, to taunt the police.

  When the door opened, Genman pushed his way into the room, shoving Burton back into the area just to the right of the door, where there was a sofa and a couple of chairs. There were a couple more glitches in the simulation during which the figures swayed in lazy arcs. The long thin box Genman had been carrying was carelessly tossed on the floor, spilling red rose buds onto the plush blue-gray carpet. PJ heard Schultz grunt as he noticed that the Burton figure actually looked like Burton.

  “What the hell? That guy…”

  “Yes, he looks like the victim. I scanned a photo into the computer and superimposed it on another Genman. Once I do that, the customized Genman is fully operational with Burton’s features—eyes open and close, lips move, and so on. Not that it’s perfect. Sometimes it looks a little like one of those dubbed Japanese monster movies. I can do the same kind of thing with the furniture, scanning in the shots of the apartment so that the sofa really is Burton’s sofa rather than an approximation generated from the information we recorded. But I haven’t had time yet.”

  On the screen, an eerily lifelike Burton stumbled back over an end table, knocking it over and himself to the floor. While he was down, Genman stood over him, drew a small pry bar from his waistband, and struck him on the head. Burton closed his eyes—rather melodramatically, PJ thought, making a note to herself to review the routine that controlled movement of the facial features—and slipped into unconsciousness. Since the victim’s head was not recovered, PJ postulated that the killer got control of the situation by a blow to the head. Burton was a substantial man, and wouldn’t have been easy to tie up while he was struggling.

  Then the computer simulation followed his movement into the kitchen, switching rooms so that the kitchen was now displayed in 3D. Genman paused, inexplicably with his head on backward for a few seconds, and looked around the kitchen while donning gloves, the thin latex kind used in thousands of medical offices. Schultz had told her that the killer had been smart enough—or lucky enough—to choose gloves that weren’t too thin. Most people didn’t realize that fingerprints could actually be left through ultra thin gloves if the wearer had well-defined ridges on the tips of his fingers.

  In the kitchen, Genman encountered the cat, which was sitting on the countertop. As he approached, the cat flattened itself, skipping the arched-back bluff posture and going directly to a fearful, all-out defense. Genman veered toward the cat, which struck out viciously with its front paws as soon as he was close enough. A bloody gash appeared on Genman’s arm, and the cat took advantage of the distraction to disappear in the boxes under the kitchen table. Genman snatched up the kitchen towel—missing from the apartment—and wrapped it around his forearm.

  Schultz scowled as Genman, now with his head facing properly forward, picked up a kitchen chair and carried it back into the living room. Then he returned to the kitchen and rooted through the drawers, coming up with a heavy cleaver and a paring knife that glittered on the screen as he held it up. PJ knew that Schultz was scowling because he didn’t agree with her reasoning that the killer obtained the weapons from Burton’s kitchen.

  Back in the living room, the killer placed the chair a few feet from the sofa, dragged Burton into it, and secured Burton’s arms and legs with two lengths of clothesline, the old-fashioned white rope kind, from his pockets. At that point, PJ halted the simulation.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out what happened next. I have a strong feeling that those indentations in the carpet are important, but I just can’t figure out the how or why of it.”

  Schultz looked thoughtful. She expected some sort of compliment, but it wasn’t forthcoming.

  “Doc, I’m trying and trying, but I just can’t see how this cartoon stuff is going to help us get that creep off the street. It’s not telling me anything I didn’t know already. And it is telling me a few things I think are wrong.”

  PJ recognized his reference to the killer getting the weapons from the kitchen. She sighed. “I think it’s valuable. Howard thinks it’s valuable, and so does the captain, or I wouldn’t be sitting here. You just don’t have an open mind about it.”

  She met his gaze. There was more than defiance there, more than a bad mood, more than aching joints. There was something she never expected to see in Schultz’s eyes: fear of the unknown. It dawned on her suddenly that his attitude was a cover-up for an insecurity about technological advances. All around him, police work was moving into areas that he had no experience with and that younger members of the Department took to like kittens to yarn.

  He’s worried about being left behind. He’s worried about being seen as a dinosaur. Maybe he’s right to be worried.

  She closed her eyes for a moment. “Detective, I know this approach must seem strange to you. I assure you that the kind of work you do is not just valuable but essential. Maybe no one’s ever told you that straight out. What we’re trying to do here is develop a tool to help you and others like you, not replace you.”

  She saw a flicker of reassurance in his eyes, but it died immediately.

  “That would be like replacing Sherlock Holmes with a toaster,” he said. “Not that I figure I’m in the same league as old Sherlock, but then again, that computer can’t make breakfast either.”

  “Actually it could, by controlling…Never mind. Detective, don’t you have something else to do? Or at least somewhere else to go?”

  “Yeah, I do. You’re the one who asked me if I had a few minutes. I’ll be at my desk,” he said, pointedly looking around at her office, “going over some photos of the scene. Give me a holler if you need anything.” He rose, leaning on the desk and favoring his left knee. He paused in the doorway and turned for a parting remark.

  “Speaking of somewhere else to go, Doc, don’t you have a home life?”

  PJ pointed grimly at the door, like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, and Schultz ambled through.

  Life in the Department was routinely unusual, an oxymoron that people in Schultz’s line of work would nod at and accept, and he had weathered stranger happenings. In spite of his bluster about the computer, he had been amazed at what he had seen, not that he would let on to Doc. It made him feel excited about the future of police work and sad that he was not really going to be a part of that future—he was winding down to retirement, betrayed both by his arthritic knees and an accumulation of the poison that society had been injecting into his veins for decades.

  But here he was, doing field work again, sensing that shining thread that led out into the darkness to the mind and heart of the killer, to a man who was not really human even though he certainly wasn’t unique in the human experience.

  Maybe the old man wasn’t ready for the scrap heap yet.

  Schultz sighed and lowered himself into his chair, which squealed in protest under his weight like a skittish horse. His knees ached, and he opened the second desk drawer on the left and took out an unmarked brown pill bottle. After checking to see if anyone was watching—stupid shit, nobody’s around down here but me and Doc, and that’s because neither of us have the sense to go home—he nestled four Ibuprofen tablets in his large palm and swallowed them with coffee.

  It wasn’t unusual for Schultz to be in the building at this time, when the night shift alternately dozed and worked in frantic bursts of activity. He and Julia had lost the intimacy of their earlier married life. They lived together now as a practical arrangement,
although sometimes even that seemed precarious to Schultz. His twenty-five-year-old son, Rick, seemed to have no career prospects other than petty thievery.

  Schultz would never openly acknowledge the loneliness he felt to PJ or anyone else, or the secret dream he had that there should be something more to life, even for a man in his mid-fifties who had seen more pain than anyone should.

  This case had high personal stakes for Schultz, not only because he wanted to bring the killer to justice, but because he wanted to prove that he could still do field work. He sensed, behind PJ’s defensive posture, that the stakes were high for her also—she had a great deal to prove about herself and to herself. He understood and respected that.

  But he didn’t plan to make it easy.

  He removed a large brown envelope from his desk drawer and laid out the contents across his desk. It was a copy of the file set of photos of Burton’s apartment and its depressing contents, including Burton himself. He went over them in detail, trying to reconstruct the murder, trying to inch his way down the thread. After fifteen minutes or so, the Ibuprofen started working on his knees and he felt more relaxed. He crossed his arms on his desk, lowered his head, and slept.

  A hand on his shoulder woke him. It was PJ, and she was clearly excited about something. Glancing at the clock on the wall, he saw that it was only nine-fifteen, less than an hour after he had left her.

  He went with her back to her office. She flitted down the hall while he plodded along behind. The office still smelled of coffee and doughnuts, and the cone of light from her desk lamp drew him away from the edges of the room, which were gloomy and ill-defined. Once again she swiveled the computer screen so that it faced in his direction.

  “Remember I said that my software had an automatic mode that was boosted by AI?”

  “Say that again, Doc, and pretend you’re talking to a human being this time, OK?”