The Puppet Master

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.

As usual, none of the exposures showed Tomasic. The first several were 'whities,' as if shot at the sun, but two were clear shots of the crime—the molestation and the murder. When compared to the garage where the crime had occurred, the pictures were an exact match, even to the '02 Plymouth sedan parked there, though Tomasic had never seen the place, apparently had never even been in Willmar.

I sat back and stared at the screen for a minute. The thing must have been kept quiet at the time, or the papers would have publicized hell out of it. I could see a rationale to that. Tabloid-type publicity would be bad for a research project, and reporters would have hounded poor Tomasic out of his skull.

Meanwhile though— I called Fred Hamilton's number. 'Do you have time to talk?' I asked him.

'Will ten minutes do?'

'How would you like to fly up to Christman's Hideaway that you told me about? In Oregon. We'll fly over it, and you can help me case the place. You said he had an observatory on a hill. That might be where he was most vulnerable to abduction. I want to size it up.'

He didn't answer for a moment. Then: 'When?'

'We could fly up Saturday afternoon, look it over Sunday morning, and fly back afterward.'

Then I told him what I really had in mind.

'Martti,' he said, 'if you'll cover the travel costs and lodging, you've got a taker. I'll pay for my meals.'