Warren Murphy: Death Check

The alarm light flashed in Remo's mind. Prison? What did Boyle know... what could he know... about Repast? He forced himself into calmness. "Prison?" he asked casually. "What made you think I'd been in prison?"

"It's been my experience," Boyle said, his cool blue eyes looking guilelessly into Remo's hard face, "that peowho are so quick tempered and so efficiently violent usually have seen the inside of a cage. At least in this country. In mine, we make them prime ministers."

"Well, that's one against you," Remo answered. "Never been in prison. At least, not in this life." Which was technically true.

Boyle made a note on a yellow pad with a stub of a pencil held in his big pink bricklayer's hands. He looked up again. "Shall we go on?"

"Can you give me a reason why we should?"

Boyle walked to a small refrigerator in a corner of his office. Remo declined a drink and Boyle poured himself a water tumbler full of Irish whisky. Alcohol abstinence was not one of his vows.

"Sure. It'll keep me on the job here and off the parish bingo circuit for another year."

"Fair enough."

By the time the tumbler of whisky was drained, Remo had learned that bio-cycle analysis was the study of rhythms in men's lives. Boyle contended that there were unconscious rhythms that determined behaviour.

"If we can isolate those individual rhythms, we can understand behaviour. Maybe even predict or control it."

Boyle showed Remo a bar chart. "See this line?" he asked pointing to a vertical bar. "Accidents per 10,000 driving hours in a Tokyo cab company."

"Now this line," he said, pointing to a shorter bar. "Accidents per 10,000 hours six months later. Why the difference?"

"They probably hired German hackies. You ever see Japs drive?"

An honest laugh fractured Boyle's tomatoed face. "No. Same drivers. But the company analyzed their body cycles and notified them to be careful on days that we call 'critical.' Just that, and the accident rate's cut in half. Follow me?"

"Maybe. What kind of cycles are there? Do they really control people? Do you really believe in this horseshit?"

Boyle went on to explain that after a half-century of study, scientists had isolated three cycles: a 23-day emotional cycle, a 28-day physical rhythm and a 33-day intellectual cycle. But now, with computers, science could absorb vast amounts of data on enormous numbers of people. "If we feed enough facts into the machinery, we may be able to detect totally new cycles and rhythms. Rhythms of love. Or hate."

"Why'd you want to talk to me?"

"Our basic study around here is violence. You're the first violent man we've had here in years. A rarity. Someone who doesn't intellectualize everything to death."

"Did you study McCarthy? The man I replaced?"

"Yes, I did. You know he was murdered, don't you."

Boyle was the second man to tell Remo that McCarthy had been murdered. He looked blankly at the priest. "No, I didn't know. I thought he committed suicide."

"Horseshit, to borrow your word. On the day he was killed, McCarthy was experiencing a very rare phenomenon. His emotional, physical and intellectual cycles all happened to coincide at a peak. It should have been the brightest day of his life. Men don't commit suicide on days like that."

"Who'd want to kill him?" Remo asked, watching Boyle's face carefully. "As far as I could find out, he wasn't mixed up in anything. Not like blackmail... or a porno ring."

Boyle showed no reaction at all. "Damned if I know who did him in. But I hope you find out who it was. McCarthy was a decent sort."

Boyle began to ask Remo a string of long, generally harmless questions about his life. Remo stuck to the fake biography of the fake Remo Pelham. Whenever Boyle got close to Remo's true past, to CURE, to his mission, Remo lied. It took over an hour.

Remo found he was in the fourth day of his emotional cycle, 18th day of his intellectual cycle and 15th day of his physical cycle. "That explains yesterday," Boyle said. "It was a day of physical crisis for you. Mid-cycle. You were passing from an up period to a down and were edgy. If the whole thing had happened tomorrow, you would have turned your back and walked away. Unfortunate for those poor hooligans."

"For them? I might have been hurt."

"I rather doubt it," Boyle said.

Walking out into the courtyard from Boyle's cottage office, Remo was puzzled. So they were studying violence at the Forum. Big deal. Maybe Brewster's little plan to conquer the world involved talking your enemy to death. They sure as hell weren't going to figure out everybody's cycle and only fight when the rhythms were on our side.

And the pornographic pictures. That was another riddle - Boyle's blue eyes hadn't wavered when Remo mentioned blackmail or dirty photos. Remo was convinced Boyle knew nothing about the pictures. Yet he had obviously posed for them. Really posed, because the pictures were professionally lighted and shot from a number of different angles. And now he knew nothing about it.

If the word came, Boyle would have to be killed one-on-one. By hand. He had no repetitious habits, few hobbies, and rarely left his cottage. It would have to be an accident in the house. Something with an electric cord perhaps. If the word came. Remo hoped it wouldn't.

CHAPTER TWELVE

When Remo was a boy, he had a fantasy of growing up to become the great white hunter. Whatever was left of the fantasy vanished when the rhinoceros charged and crushed the chained jackal under his 3,000 pounds of weight. The jackal left hardly a smear.

Remo continued to watch the film in fascination as the camera lens was changed and the rhino receded in the distance. Then, stepping into the film came Dr. Abram Schulter, his long, sparse black hair stringing down from a pith helmet. He carried a small black box, but it looked large in his birdlike hands.

He began to walk toward the rhino, shouting as he went. Occasionally he stopped and waved his helmet to try to attract the near-sighted beast's attention. When he was no more than thirty yards away, he stopped and began yelling again.

Finally, the rhinoceros charged. His hooves made the ground beneath the camera vibrate as he thundered from the right side of the screen toward the puny figure of Schulter standing defenceless on the left side of the screen. Schulter looked up, seemed to watch the rhino for a split second, then flicked a switch on top of the box. The rhino stopped as if he'd run into an invisible wall.

He stopped dead and stood there, ten yards away from Schulter. Not moving. The film faded; the next frames showed the rhino lying down eating grass and Schulter sitting on its back. The beast couldn't have cared less.

Remo was impressed, but he couldn't resist a grin and the thought, this screwball will mount anything, toy giraffes, rhinoceroses, anything. Mothers in the neighbourhood lock up their rubber duckies.

The lights came on. Wearing a doctor's gown, Abram Schulter, M.D., Ph. D., Fellow of, Diplomate of, pioneer of this and that and everything else, came paddling toward Remo on ripple-soled shoes and began lifting the blinds to let sunlight into the darkened office.

"And so that's what we do," he said, as if the film explained everything.

"You mean, you're a rhinoceros trainer?"

"A rhinoceros trainer? No, why should I be? Oh yes, I see. A little joke. Yes, yes. Very good. Very good in

He went on: "No, no. Electronic brain stimulation. The box in my hand was a radio. It sent a signal that stimulates alpha waves in the brain of the rhino. Such a brain as it has, that is. Alpha rhythms bring inner peace. Don't suppose you'd be interested?"

Schulter walked from the window and sat down on the other side of the coffee table facing Remo. He took .a cigarette from a wooden box on the table and lit it. His hands were deeply nicotine stained, and like all compulsive smokers, he didn't offer Remo one.