people I know. He could pretty much read your emotions, even if you were good at hiding them. By things like slight eye movements, pupil dilation, subtle color changes in your skin and the white of your eyes. Along with more obvious things like facial expression, fidgeting, and sweat. He taught me some of it. If someone around him was hostile toward him, or was trying to conceal things from him, he'd know it, Sweetbuns, he'd know it.'
I knew some of those techniques. My dad taught them to me when I was still a preadolescent. They were part of what made him such a good lawman. But I couldn't do the sort of thing with them that Molly Cadigan was claiming for Ray Christman, not reliably, and I doubted that Christman could either.
'Incidentally,' she said, 'if you want to know what he saw in me, that's me over there. And that's Ray's Corvette behind me.' She pointed at a framed photo on the cluttered wall, showing a long-legged, shapely young woman in shorts, with a pretty face and hair like red gold. The car was an old gas-driven machine from before geogravitic power converters. And scarlet! Tuuli would love it.
Molly kept talking. 'He used that talent to play people. It helped make him such a great salesman. And cocksman. Like I said, he loved the ladies, but he didn't waste his time or cause upsets by making passes at someone who wasn't already interested. Or at married women. He isn't—wasn't a bastard, just self-indulgent. And most of the people around him, including Lonnie Thomas, damn near worshiped the man.
'So no, I don't think someone inside killed him. Not unless they'd been PDHed, and killed him without any advance awareness themselves of what they'd been programed to do.' She paused. 'You know what PDH stands for, don't you?'
I nodded; I'd had a period of reading spy thrillers. PDH meant treatment by
'It wouldn't be easy,' she went on. 'It may not even be possible to PDH someone that precisely, not without leaving them visibly strange, anyway. Maybe, just maybe, some outfit like the OSS could, but I can't see them taking Ray Christman or the church that seriously. I think they got over that sort of bullshit with Leif Haller and his Institute of Noetic Technology.'
Which reminded me: Hamilton had said Molly'd been a Noetie first. 'Could the Noeties have had someone kill Christman?' I asked.
She frowned. 'Maybe, but I doubt it. Like I said, lots of things are possible, some of them things neither of us has thought of and probably won't.
'I was a Noetie once myself, but back in Rochester, New York, where things were different than here. And I'm way out of date on them. Matter of fact, I don't know who isn't. But I know a couple of people who may have kept some attention on them. They might have some insights for you.'
She gave me two names, with addresses and phone numbers. One was a Dr. Winifred Landau Sproule—Molly gave me all three names plus the title, as if that was how the woman was referred to. She'd not only been a member of the Noetie's board of directors. Later she'd been on the board of directors of the Church of the New Gnosis, and a math professor at LACC. Now she was a research associate at the Hypernumbers Institute—the so- called 'Beverly Glen Church by the Numbers.' She'd also known Ray Christman 'as well as anyone had,' according to Molly. The other name was Olaf Sigurdsson, whom I'd heard of, a well-known psychic. Like Winifred Sproule, Sigurdsson had worked directly with the Noetie founder, Leif Haller, and eventually became estranged from him.
'They may not be any help to you,' she added, 'but they're interesting as hell, both of them. And who knows?'
'Just a minute.'
I paused.
'Do you think you might try to interview anyone in the church? Lon Thomas maybe?'
'It's crossed my mind.' I used her line then. 'Who knows?'
'Sit down, Sweetbuns.' When I had, she went on. 'What do you know about church staff? And the Campus? The actual physical property?'
'The property's four square blocks, six or seven buildings, and some parking lots. And the staff? There's a lot of them, and they aren't very smart.'
She snorted. 'Don't underrate them. They work incredibly hard, and do what they're told. More than a few of them are even bright; they just have a blind side. They're also loyal as hell. If Lonnie Thomas tells them a cow turd is cheesecake, they ask for seconds. Otherwise most of them wouldn't be there. They'd have seen through it and blown.' I found my hands breaking another doughnut. My third? Fourth? I dunked it and took a bite, remembering the things Fred Hamilton and Eric Fuentes had told me about being on church staff. Molly opened a drawer of hanging files in her desk and handed me what looked like a folded-up road map. 'The latest table of organization of the church,' she said. 'Of the Central Chancery—the central management organization that is. Could be useful to you, and I've got a couple others.'
I started to open it. 'Don't look at it now,' she told me. 'It'll take too long, and I've got to get some phone calls made this morning. Besides, you're not going to understand a lot of it. I just want you to have an idea of how big and complicated an outfit we're talking about.
'Meanwhile, Sweetbuns, if you decide to talk to Lonnie Thomas, and if by some quirk he agrees to see you, be careful.'
'I'd probably do better to talk to someone lower on the totem pole,' I said. 'High enough that they might know something, but not that high.'
She shook her head. 'Nobody's going to talk to you about anything except registering for church services or joining staff. Except Lonnie. Even Ray never gave interviews; not since the early days. Said he was consistently misquoted, and his facts altered or used out of context. Which was true. If an outsider wants an interview with someone in the church, it's Lonnie or no one. Usually no one.'
She cocked an eye at me. 'And if you plan to join staff and snoop from inside, forget it. Anyone who wants to join staff gets grilled on a sort of lie detector first, a psychogalvanometer. You'd never pass.
