“Red, blue, blue, red…”
The guards wander closer to Josh’s video screen.
“Take them someplace, stab them in the eyes, keep them alive a couple days, rape them repeatedly, cut their throats, dump their bodies, pose them to shock people,” Benton is telling Dr. Lane matter-of-factly, in his clinical way. “The cases we know about. I’m suspicious he killed others. A number of women vanished inFloridaduring the same time frame. Presumed dead, bodies never found.”
“Take them where? A motel, his house?”
“Hold on a second,” Josh says to the guards as he selects the menu option 3D, then SSD, or Surface Shading Display. “This is really cool. We never show it to patients.”
“How come?”
“Totally freak them out.”
“We don’t know where,”Bentonis telling Dr. Lane as he keeps a check on Josh, ready to intervene if he gets too carried away. “But it’s interesting. The bodies he dumped. They all had microscopic particles of copper on them.”
“What on earth?”
“Mixed in with dirt and whatever else was adhering to blood, their skin, in their hair.”
“Blue, green, blue, red…”
“That’s very strange.”
She pushes the talk button. “Mr. Jenrette? How are we doing in there? You okay?”
“Ten-four.”
“Next, you’re going to see words printed in a different color from what they spell. I want you to name the color of the ink. Just name the color.”
“Ten-four.”
“Isn’t this awesome?” Josh says as what looks like a death mask fills his screen, a reconstruction of one-millimeter-thick high-resolution slices that make up the MRI scan of Basil Jenrette’s head, the image pale, hairless and eyeless, ending raggedly just below the jaw as if he has been decapitated.
Josh rotates the image so the guards can see it from different angles.
“Why’s his head look cut off?” one of them asks.
“That’s where the signal from the coil stopped.”
“His skin doesn’t look real.”
“Red uh green, blue I mean red, green…” Basil’s voice enters the room.
“It’s not really skin. How to explain… well, what the computer’s doing is volume reconstruction, a surface rendering.”
“Red, blue uh green, blue I mean green…”
“Only thing we really use it for is PowerPoints, mainly, to overlay structural with functional. Just an fMRI analysis package where you can put data together and look at it any way you want, have fun with it.”
“Man, he’s ugly.”
Bentonhas heard enough. The color naming has stopped. He gives Josh a sharp look.
“Josh? You ready?”
“Four, three, two, one, ready,” Josh says, and Dr. Lane begins the interference test.
“Blue, red I mean… shit, uh red I mean blue, green, red…” Basil’s voice violates the room as he gets all of them wrong.
“He ever tell you why?” Dr. Lane asksBenton.
“I’m sorry,” he says, distracted. “Why what?”
“Red, blue shit! Uh red, blue-green…”
“Why he gouged their eyes out.”
“He said he didn’t want them to see how small his penis is.”
“Blue, blue-red, red, green…”
“He didn’t do so well on this one,” she says. “In fact, he missed most of them. What police department did he work for, so I remember not to get pulled for speeding in that part of the world?” She pushes the talk button. “You okay in there?”
“Ten-four.”
“DadeCountyPD.”
“Too bad. I’ve always likedMiami. So that’s how you managed to conjure this one up. Because of yourSouth Floridaconnections,” she replies, pushing the talk button again.
“Not exactly.”Bentonstares through the glass at Basil’s head in the far end of the magnet, imagining the rest of him dressed like a normal person in jeans and a button-up white shirt.
The inmates are not allowed to wear prison fatigues on the hospital campus. It’s bad public relations.
“When we began querying state penitentiaries for study subjects,Floridathought he was just the guy for the job. He was bored. They were happy to get rid of him,”Bentonsays.
“Very good, Mr. Jenrette,” Dr. Lane says into the intercom. “Now, Dr. Wesley is going to come in and give you the mouse. You’re going to see some faces next.”
“Ten-four.”
Ordinarily, Dr. Lane would go into the MRI room and deal with the patient herself. But women doctors and scientists are not allowed physical contact with the subjects of PREDATOR. Male doctors and scientists have to be cautious, too, while inside the MRI suite. Outside of it, restraining research study subjects during interviews is up to the clinician.Bentonis accompanied by the two prison guards as he turns on the lights inside the MRI room and shuts the door. The guards hover near the magnet and pay attention as he plugs in the mouse and places it in Basil’s restrained hands.
He is nothing much to look at, a short, slight man with thinning blond hair and small gray eyes closely spaced. In the animal kingdom, lions, tigers and bears-the predators-have closely spaced eyes. Giraffes, rabbits, doves-the preyed upon-have eyes more widely spaced and oriented toward the sides of their heads, because they need their peripheral vision to survive.Bentonhas always wondered if the same evolutionary phenomenon applies to humans. That’s a research study nobody’s going to fund.
“You doing all right, Basil?”Bentonasks him.
“What kind of faces?” Basil’s head talks from the end of the magnet, bringing to mind an iron lung.
“Dr. Lane will explain it to you.”
“I’ve got a surprise,” Basil says. “I’ll tell you when we’re done.”
He has an odd gaze, as if a malignant creature is looking out through his eyes.
“Great. I love surprises. Just a few more minutes and you’re done,”Bentonsays with a smile. “Then we’ll have a follow-up chat.”
The guards accompanyBentonback outside the MRI room and return to the suite as Dr. Lane begins to explain over the intercom that all she wants Basil to do is click the left side of the mouse if the face is male and right if it is female.
“Nothing for you to do or say, just press the button,” she reiterates.
There are three tests, and the point of them is not the patient’s ability to distinguish between the two genders. What is actually measured in this series of functional scanning is affective processing. The male and female faces appearing on the screen are behind other faces that flash too quickly for the eye to detect, but the brain sees all. Jenrette’s brain sees the faces behind the masks, faces that are happy, angry or afraid, faces that are provocative.
After each set, Dr. Lane asks him what he saw, and if he had to attach an emotion to the faces, what was it. The male faces are more serious than the female, he answers. He says basically the same thing for each set. It means nothing yet. None of what has gone on in these rooms will mean anything until the thousands of neuroimages are analyzed. Then the scientists can visualize which areas of his brain were most active during the tests. The point is to see if his brain works differently from someone who supposedly is normal, and to learn something besides the fact that he has an incidental cyst that is completely unrelated to his predatory proclivities.
“Anything jump out at you?”Bentonasks Dr. Lane. “And by the way, thanks, as always, Susan. You’re a good sport.”
They try to schedule inmate scans late in the day or on the weekend, when few people are around.
“Just from the localizers, he looks okay-I don’t see any gross abnormalities. Except for his incessant chatting. His hyper fluency. He ever been diagnosed as bipolar?”
“His evaluations and history make me wonder. But no. Never diagnosed. Unmedicated for any psychiatric disorders, in prison only a year. A dream subject.”
“Well, your dream subject didn’t do well suppressing interfering stimuli, made a huge number of errors by commission on the interference test. My bet is he doesn’t stay in set, which is certainly consistent with bipolar disorder. We’ll know more later.”