The roast beef was adequate if a bit stringy, Rod thought, but the gravy was particularly good tonight. He cleaned the serving dish, using forkfuls of mashed potatoes to sop up the last of the gravy. He was halfway through his slice of pie when the pain began: a severe pounding at the back of his head, and an excruciating sensation, as though spikes were being driven into his eyes. He felt his heart fluttering. His forehead was slick with sweat and he thought for a moment he was going to vomit. A hot flash came over him. He rose to his feet, in hopes of getting to the telephone and calling for help, but suddenly there was a moment of unbearable pain, and he toppled backward, knocking his chair over, and fell to the carpeted floor, stone-cold dead.
Peter and Cathy had already gone to bed, but their Hobson Monitor knew that neither of them was yet asleep, and so it allowed the phone to ring.
There was no videophone in the bedroom, of course. In the darkness, Peter groped for the audio handset on his night table.
“Hello?” he said.
A crying woman. “Oh, Peter! Peter!”
“Bunny?”
Hearing her mother’s name, Cathy sat up in bed at once. “Lights!” she called out. The household computer turned on the two floor lamps in the room.
“Peter — Rod is dead.”
“Oh my God,” said Peter.
“What is it?” said Cathy, concerned. “What’s wrong?”
“What happened?” said Peter, heart pounding.
“I just got back from my course, and I found him lying on the floor in the dining room.”
“Have you called an ambulance?” asked Peter.
“What is it?” Cathy said again, horrified.
Bunny had been crying so much, she had to pause to blow her nose. “Yes. Yes, it’s on its way.”
“So are we,” said Peter. “We’ll be there as soon as we can.”
“Thank you,” said Bunny, terrified. “Thank you. Thank you.”
“Just hold on,” said Peter. “We’re coming.” He hung up.
“What’s happening?” said Cathy.
Peter looked at his wife, her giant eyes wide in terror. My God, how to tell her? “That was your mother,” he said. He knew she knew that, but he was buying time, composing his thoughts. “Your father — she thinks your father is dead.”
Horror danced across Cathy’s face. Her mouth hung open and she shook her head slightly from left to right.
“Get dressed,” said Peter gently. “We’ve got to get going.”
Gallup’s ongoing “Religion in America” survey showed church attendance this week was up 13.75% over the same week last year.
Christiaan Barnard Hospital in Mandelaville, Azania, announced today that it had formally adopted the departure of the soulwave from the body as the determining moment of death.
Schlockmeister Jon Tchobanian has begun production on his latest computer-generated flick, Soul Catcher. This one’s about a mad hospital worker who imprisons people’s souls in magnetic bottles and holds them for ransom. “Appropriately for a film about life after death,” says Tchobanian. “I’m casting the movie entirely with computer reconstructions of dead actors.” Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre will star.
Life Unlimited of San Rafael, California, reported today its best-ever month of sales for its patented nanotechnology immortality process. Analyst Gudrun Mungay of Merrill Lynch suggested that the record sales were a direct response to the discovery of the soulwave. “Some people,” she said, “definitely do not want to meet their maker.”
Trial news: Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Accused serial rapist Gordon Spitz today entered a plea of not guilty by reason of special insanity. Spitz, who claims to have had out-of-body experiences since the age of twelve, contends that his soul was absent from his body on each occasion that he committed rape, and therefore he is not responsible for the crimes.
CHAPTER 33
Sometimes there was nothing like a good, old-fashioned keyboard. For entering or massaging data, it was still the best tool yet invented. Sandra Philo pulled out the keyboard drawer of her desk and began typing in all the proper nouns she’d turned up in relation to the Hans Larsen murder, including the street he lived on, the name of the company he worked for, where he’d taken his vacation last year, and the names of neighbors, family, friends, and coworkers. She also entered a variety of terms related to the mutilation Larsen had suffered.
By the time she was finished, she had a list of over two hundred words. She then asked the computer to search the records of all homicides in Greater Toronto Region for the last year to see if any of the same terms showed up in the reports filed for them. As it processed the search, the computer drew a little line of dots on the screen to show that it was working. It only took a few seconds to complete the search. Nothing significant.
Sandra nodded to herself; she figured she’d have remembered a similar MO. After all, it’s not every day a corpse is found with its penis lopped off. The computer presented her with suggestions for broader queries: all Ontario murders, all Canadian murders, all North American murders. It also suggested a series of time frames, from one month to ten years.
If she chose the broadest-based one, all North American killings for the last ten years, the search would take hours to run. She was about to select “all Ontario murders,” but at the last moment changed her mind and typed her own query in the dialog box: “all deaths GTR ›20110601,” meaning all deaths — not just murders — in the Greater Toronto Region after June of this year.
The little line of dots grew across the screen as the computer searched. After a few moments, the display cleared and this appeared:
Name: Larsen, Hans
Date of Death: 14 Nov 2011
Cause of Death: homicide
Search term correlated: Hobson, Catherine R. (coworker)
Name: Churchill, Roderick B.
Date of Death: 30 Nov 2011
Cause of Death: natural causes
Search term correlated: Hobson, Cathy (daughter)
Philo’s eyebrows went up. Catherine Hobson — that slim, intelligent brunette Toby Bailey had identified as having been involved with Hans Larsen. Her father had died just two days ago.
It probably didn’t mean a thing. Still … Sandra accessed the city registry. There was only one Catherine Hobson in GTR, and her record was indeed annotated “nee Churchill.” And — good God! She was listed as living with Peter G. Hobson, a biomedical engineer. The soulwave guy — Sandra had seen him on Donahue and read about him in Maclean’s. They must be rolling in money … enough for either of them to hire a hit man.
Sandra switched back to the reports database and asked for full details on the Roderick Churchill death, Churchill, a high-school gym teacher, had died alone while eating dinner. Cause of death was recorded by medical examiner Warren Chen as “aneurysm(?).” That question mark was intriguing. Sandra turned on her videophone and dialed. “Hello, Warren,” she said, once Chen’s round, middle-aged face had appeared on the screen.