Hayford Peirce: Innocent Until Scanned Guilty

Martinez flushed angrily. He glanced at the two attorneys that flanked Sam, one from Santa Fe, the other from Albuquerque, and seemed to be keeping himself from an indignant retort only with difficulty. Finally he nodded curtly. “It may be there were some mistakes that were made in the initial investigation. That’s why I’ve obtained this order—this court order, Senator Ferron—to ask a few questions of your daughter.” Once again his eyes flicked across Sam’s attorneys. “I hope you appreciate that my permitting you to sit in at the interrogation is highly irregular. If it weren’t for—”

“I do appreciate your kindness in permitting that, Mr. District Attorney, I surely do, and I promise you I shall be nothing but a silent and most interested spectator.” Sam’s smile was noticeably warmer—and just as transparently insincere.

“And,” murmured the attorney from Albuquerque to Martinez, “you will, of course, scrupulously observe the limits as stated in the court order regarding your range of questioning. You may interrogate Ms. Ferron about the events involving the death of Ms. Rawlings-Bantry and about her direct knowledge of those events. And absolutely nothing else. This is no fishing expedition, Mr. District Attorney, no fishing expedition at all.”

There, thought Sam with satisfaction as Martinez turned brusquely away, now that we’ve got the Fighting Bobcat up against the ropes, let’s see what we can do to pound on him a little…

Emily Ferron, formerly Emily Ferron-Bantry, had the same fair skin and clear blue eyes of her father but was finer-boned and half a head taller. Her hair was a deep golden brown, and in spite of her forty-five years her face was nearly as unlined and lovely as it had been two decades before. As she was led into the interrogation room her eyes found Sam and—perhaps because of the tranquilizers she had already been given—she smiled radiantly. Then, with a faint shrug of indifference, she let herself be seated beneath the large silver helmet that had always seemed to Sam unsettlingly like the mysterious apparatuses occasionally glimpsed in beauty salons.

It was ironic, he reflected as he watched the sensors and flow tubes being attached to his daughter, that all this was so akin to what Emily herself used in the O-CLIP room of her clinic. But, of course, many of the experimental techniques that Emily had successfully developed to help victims of otherwise hopeless traumas had originated in the battle to eradicate both the common criminals and the fiendish cults of painlusters that had spread so appallingly across the world in the twenties and thirties.

Perceptualization enhancement, backed by a Constitutional amendment revoking the ancient prohibition against self-incrimination, had worked just as its backers promised it would: professional organized crime had been wiped out, while the last known member of an American pain cult had been executed nearly twenty years before. The only criminal acts these days were impulsive and unpremeditated, uncontrollable crimes of passion or of sudden rage. The statistics showed that 98 percent of the hapless perpetrators were arrested within twenty-four hours—and most of the remaining 2 percent within the week.

Once they were taken to court, the conviction rate for prosecutors was 100 percent.

And now perceptualization enhancement was to be used on Emily.

Sam’s lips tightened as he watched the insertion of the thin tubes that would carry computer-dispensed psychoactives to Emily’s brain. Who would have thought when he had helped to lead the fight for the legalization of PE thirty-five years earlier that he would live to see it used upon his own daughter? It had been in everyday use for so many years that he had long since forgotten how it was supposed to work, certainly he had forgotten all the needles involved…

He did recall vaguely that the intimidating silver helmet was nothing more than the receptor by which the computer would determine which brain cells were resisting questions. With the help of minutely dosed quantities of psychoactives a feedback loop would be established between Emily’s brain and the computer. The loop would then automatically regulate the flow of drugs to specific parts of the brain so that eventually all resistance was neutralized and the truth would be revealed.

Infallibly and always. Thousands of people interrogated under PE had quickly proved themselves innocent and had been released. But no one whose crime had been brought to light by perceptualization enhancement had ever walked free. The nation’s prisons had quickly filled with criminals who were undeniably and indisputably guilty. And crime had vanished as a national concern.

The glaring drawback with perceptualization enhancement, of course, was that first you had to have a subject to interrogate. And in the case of Linda Rawling’s murder there had been none—until now, apparently, a full two months later.

Now there were two.

And one of them was Emily Ferron.

How on earth, Sam wondered, had this dolt Martinez ever been able to talk some even more doltish judge into issuing an order for PE on the basis of what could only be the wildest speculation? There was no conceivable way Emily could be connected with such a crime. All of this almost certainly had to be part of some dark game of politics aimed at him. Sam grinned wolfishly. As soon as this grotesque farce involving his daughter was over, it was a game he would take a profound pleasure in looking into. And then Fighting Bob Martinez had better look for ways to cover his ass…

Three hours later the farce was over. Emily lay slumped, still half-groggy from tranquilizers and psychoactives, in a deep, upholstered chair in the recovery room. A male nurse hovered over her, monitoring her reactions to the drug neutralizes he had given her. District Attorney Martinez stood in a doorway of the interrogation room speaking in soft but strident tones to a fellow prosecutor who had just arrived from Santa Fe.

His back turned as he pretended to consult with his own attorneys, Sam eavesdropped shamelessly.

“Nothing,” muttered Martinez bitterly, “absolutely nothing!”

“There was no connection at all with the crime?”

“Nothing that we could find. But because of that damn court order I couldn’t look very far.”

“I’m not surprised you didn’t get anything. And frankly, Bob, I just can’t believe that you went out on a limb the way you have with this Ferron woman. You’re just asking to get your head handed to you by the old man.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Particularly not if I can tie his daughter to this murder.”

“I don’t believe this! You mean you still haven’t given up? Not even after she’s been cleared by PE? Are you nuts?”

“Look, Alice, none of you people seem to understand what I’ve been trying to tell you, none of you have even bothered to look at the stuff I’ve sent you.” Martinez’s voice grew even more intense. “If any of you would just read this article the Ferron woman has just published in The Journal of Electroneurological Medicine you’d see what I’m talking about! And you’d wake up sweating at night!”

Alice sighed. “Give it to me in fifty words or less, Bob, I’ve gotta be in court in five minutes. And make them simple words.”

The district attorney dropped his voice and Sam strained to hear. “Look, the Ferron woman has run a clinic for head cases for twenty years now, out on Eagle Nest Lake, her and some other big-time doctors. They’ve got all the latest equipment, including an O-CLIP computer which her old man somehow wrangled for her when practically no one else in the world had one. They specialize in treating people who are in comas or blind or just plain crazy because of traumatic injuries they’ve suffered, like victims of painlusters.”