He was still staring haggardly at my image on his screen. "I'll tell you something else," I said. "Yesterday we were a little afraid of you people. Now we've got you by the balls. But we don't particularly want you scared of us; we just want you to act rationally, and cooperate.
"I'm going to ask you a question now. But I'll preface it by reminding you of your rights: you don't have to talk. Anything you say may be held against you in a court of law. So. What do you know about the disappearance of Ray Christman?"
There was a long pause; when he spoke, his voice was husky. "Nothing," he said at last. "If I did, I'd probably tell you. But I really honest to God don't know."
"All right, Mr. Thomas, I'll let it go for now. Where have you taken the two goons who were going to murder me?"
Another long pause. "Presbyterian Hospital."
"What names are they under? I'll be checking with Presbyterian."
"Their own names: Collins and Miller."
"What first names?"
"Miller is—Clark Miller, I think. And James Collins."
"Thank you, Mr. Thomas. We'll be getting in touch with you from time to time. Make sure your people put us through. And Mr. Thomas—I am not a vengeful person. Only one with a professional responsibility."
I broke the connection then and sat back, feeling I'd handled an awful lot awfully well. Carlos shook his head. "My what marvels our radio people have come up with! A shirt-transmitter! And ultrawave yet!"
"Make you a bet," I said. "I'll bet he doesn't check it out to see if it's possible."
* * *
After she and Carlos had recorded their statements, Tuuli and I drove home. Actually she drove; we used her car. An investigative assistant would pick mine up at Canter's. We felt pretty confident that Thomas wouldn't try to hit any of us now. That had been a major purpose in calling him and saying what I'd said. Meanwhile, Carlos had told me to take the day off, and the next day if I wanted to.
At that hour, Tuuli and I had Laurel Canyon Boulevard almost to ourselves. Dawn was graying the sky, and a cool green smell blew in on us through my open window.
"What was it like, your premonition?" I asked.
"Just a realization. A realization that you were in danger."
"No voice? No vision?"
She shook her head. "Would you still like to spend a week in Arizona?"
"I would, but it can wait a couple of days. Or longer if you want."
"Not today?"
"You and I are going to spend today alone," she purred, and put her hand on my leg. "I suppose you're so tired, you'll want to go straight to sleep when we get home."
I laughed. "Not to sleep. Only to bed. After a hot shower."
"Good," she said. "That shower is going to be crowded though."
19
SHOPPING PSYCHICS
Needless to say, we were both asleep an hour after we got home. Tuuli woke up first, not long after noon, and it was the nicest day, I think, of my whole life. We'd never been so relaxed around each other, or talked so much. And we didn't cross swords even once.
The coffee took a beating, but we drank hers. Tuuli always drinks decaf at home, but I'd never thought it was anything for me. As a young kid I'd drink coffee with my dad. He liked his sweet and strong, so strong the spoon would stand straight up in it—not really—and mom made it the way he liked. He was easygoing, never bossy to her, but she liked to please him, make him happy. He was sixty-one and she was twenty-five when they got married, a strange but happy story, right up to the bloody end.
Huh! Look at that! I can actually talk about it now.
Me, on the other hand—I'd been, if not actually bossy, at least judgemental, and Tuuli had . . . But I'm getting off the subject.
Like I said, we loafed around and talked a lot that day, and I asked her way more about psychics and being psychic than I ever had before. I'd always felt uncomfortable about it, a little edgy maybe, but that day I was really relaxed. Like Winifred Sproule, she mentioned idiot savants, and said that some of the more capable psychics had been either neurotic or more or less retarded. Ole Sigurdsson, she said, had supposedly been kicked in the head by a horse when he was a child, and it had left him both feebleminded and psychic. Then, when he was pretty much grown, he'd come to America with relatives, and en route had somehow lost his feeblemindedness.
I told her it was hard to think of Ole as having been feebleminded. She agreed, but said she'd read it in his biography, written by his wife Laura, before they were married.
Anyway, for some reason the conversation reminded me of the psychic photographers Winifred Sproule had mentioned, and when I went to work the day after that, it was on my mind. I didn't know why. And not only psychic photographers, but psychics in general. I still didn't have a real lead on what had happened to Christman. Could a psychic help me?
I hadn't asked Tuuli: She knew the problem, and nothing had come to her or she'd have told me. I'd asked Vic, and he'd seemed to dodge it, while Ole'd said he "didn't get anything" on it.
I knew there was a compendium of psychics put out some years ago by a university. It had added respectability to the field, and boomed the growing post-plague interest. So, from the office, I phoned Winifred Sproule. I figured she might be able to discuss and evaluate it better than an electronic or even a human reference librarian.
It turned out she had it on her shelves in hard copy: A Catalog of Significant Confirmed Psychics in North America, compiled by a Dr. Norman J. Gustafson and Dr. Lisabet V. Mitchell, and published by Washington State University Press. She said I could come in and borrow it if I'd like. I told her I'd just call it up on my computer, from the L.A. Library tank. The truth was, I was a little afraid of Dr. Sproule.
The title page read "Copyright 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011," so it was updated regularly. I read the Introduction first. There was, it said, a companion publication, in three volumes, on exposed fraudulent psychics. Three volumes of case histories! And those were only "a representative sample."
The "confirmed psychics" volume, on the other hand, was thin, 115 pages exclusive of the stuff up front. Even that length was due partly to multiple listings and even more to extensive appendices—hypertext in the computer edition—that summarized briefly the more important studies made of the individual psychics.
It didn't include those idiot savants whose only known talent was calendar computations. There was disagreement as to whether or not calendar computation was actually psychic.
The first list was alphabetical, and I checked to see if Tuuli was included. She was. So was Ole. The Merlins weren't, or Bhiksu, or Mikki Diacono. Maybe they hadn't come to the compilers' attention. After each name on the alphabetical list was a list of talents verified for that person, and reference codes to appendix material. Cross lists were by talents, and state or province. Under any particular talent, the people were listed in a consensus order of reliability: a 1 rating was highest, and according to the introduction, no one had rated a 1 except some idiot savants.
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.