The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries (46 page)

Murex entered. “Turned up something unusual on that hotel fatality, sir.”

“What is it?”

Instead of answering, Murex set down the black binder, the eye shade and a color printout of the TIRV site home page.

“What the holy hell?” Hurley growled. “You have a nice flair for the dramatic, laying it out for me like this.”

“I figure you can do the math faster than I could explain it.”

“Much obliged,” Hurley said dryly. He read the TIRV mission statement aloud: “‘Remote Viewing is the acquisition and description, by mental means, of information blocked from ordinary perception by distance, shielding or time. TIRV is dedicated to placing this powerful mind technology in peaceful hands.’” He leaned back. “Is this for real?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. According to this website, Captain Grandmaison is ex-Army Intelligence. He trains people to do this stuff. John Doom was apparently trying to remotely view whatever these numbers represent when he expired.”

“Why don’t you take a run up to New Hampshire and see this guy, Grandmaison?”

“I’ll do that.”

As Murex started out, Hurley called after him, “I got a feeling about this one, Ray.”

Former Captain Trey Grandmaison lived in a converted farmhouse just over the Massachusetts border. It was a sprawling structure painted Colonial white, edged with stark black trim. A big barn lay behind it, as colorless and weathered as a Cape Cod fishing shack. The drive leading back to the barn had been plowed clean of snow.

A vaguely European woman with intensely black hair answered the door. Dark circles under her eyes marred a natural beauty.

Murex flashed his shield. “Detective Ray Murex. Boston Homicide. Could I have a word with Mr Grandmaison?”

“I’m sorry. But he’s in the gray room. He can’t be disturbed right now.”

“Gray room?”

“His private viewing room. He’s working a practice target.”

“I should have called first, but I need to ask him about one of his students.”

The door fell open. “Perhaps I can help you. I run the registration side of TIRV.”

“Then I would like to talk with you, Mrs Grandmaison.”

“Call me Effie, please.”

The living room was decorated in the Mission style. Murex searched for signs of a military past and found none. No medals. Not even an American flag on display.

Murex took a chair. “What can you tell me about a John Doom?”

Effie Grandmaison looked blank. “I don’t place that name. Are you sure he was a TIRV student?”

“He was found dead in bed last night wearing one of your sleep masks, a TIRV binder at his bedside. According to a microcassette recorder found on his person, he was actively remote viewing a number in your binder.”

“We call them coordinates. Do you know the cause of death?”

“Not as yet.”

“What were the coordinates?”

Murex recited the numbers from memory.

Effie frowned. “I don’t recognize them, but of course we create new targets all the time. What were his perceptions?”

“Excuse me?”

“Of the target, I mean.”

“I’d like to stick with John Doom for the moment,” Murex said impatiently. “Do you have a class registry?”

“Why is this important? Do you think he was murdered?”

“Right now, it looks like he died of fright.”

Effie Grandmaison abruptly stood up. “I think this is important enough to disturb Trey. Please follow me.”

Rising, Murex followed the woman outside to a cellar door.

“The basement can’t be accessed from inside the house,” she said, throwing up the bulkhead door. She led him down into a work area, past an oil furnace, to the far end. It was very cold. Murex could see his breath. A cobwebby corner was paneled off in pine. The hard-carved sign on the door read:

DO NOT DISTURB! SESSION IN PROGRESS!

Effie Grandmaison pressed a white button. No sound came back.

“Soundproof?” Murex asked, blowing into his hands.

“And lightproof. A bell would freak him out if it went off in the middle of a session. This simply activates a green light. He’ll be a minute or so coming out of session.”

It was two minutes before Trey Grandmaison emerged, looking upset.

“What the hell, Effie?”

“I’m sorry, Trey. But this is Detective Murex from Boston. He’s here about a man who died while working a target from one of our class binders.”

Trey Grandmaison didn’t look very surprised. If anything he seemed spacey. He was a compact individual with hair so brown it verged on black. His smoke-gray eyes had trouble focusing.

“Let’s take this upstairs,” he said at last.

Trey Grandmaison looked up from the computer screen. “There’s no record of a John Doom ever taking one of my classes.”

They were in the den. It too was Spartan. The only photos showed Grandmaison in civilian clothes.

Murex asked, “How would he have gotten hold of one of your binders then?”

Effie inserted, “They are part of our course package of materials. There’s nothing to stop one of our students from loaning or selling one to anyone they want.”

Grandmaison added, “We put a copyright notice on all practice target packs, but many of our target feedback photos are things you can find in any encylopedia – Seattle’s Space Needle, Mount Rushmore, the
Titanic—”

Murex interrupted, “Is there anything about doing this work that might induce someone to have a heart attack?”

“No!” Effie said suddenly.

Trey Grandmaison said, “I teach two types of RV, detective. Coordinate Remote Viewing and Extended RV. If he was lying down with an eye shield, he was doing ERV. It’s pretty safe. Half the time, my students drift off into a Delta state.”

Murex looked up from his notebook. “I don’t follow.”

“We RV in different brainwave states, detective. Alpha for CRV. Theta for ERV. Theta is the gateway to the Delta sleep state. If you go too deep, you simply click off like a light.”

“It’s perfectly safe,” Effie reiterated.

“I did hear about a candidate viewer who died of fright while working a target,” Grandmaison said slowly.

“Is that so?”

“It was back in ’87, just after I joined the unit. In between working operational targets, they would run us against practice coordinates to keep us in our viewing zone. The duty monitor came in one day and claimed he had worked up a really challenging target. The viewer who worked that one was never seen again. Rumor was he’d had a heart attack. But there was talk he’d died of fright.”

“Fright?”

“Whatever he was viewing scared him so badly his heart gave out.”

Effie said, “But, Trey, that was just a rumor.”

“Well, we never saw that viewer again. So I suppose it’s possible whatever your guy was viewing scared him literally to death.”

Murex asked, “Do you recognize this set of coordinates?”

Grandmaison took the offered notebook. “I don’t know these. I use a date system of notation. That way, if another RV instructor steals my targets, I can tell just by looking at the coords.”

“Is that a problem for you – theft?”

“My students don’t pay upwards of two thousand dollars just to remotely experience the summit of Pike’s Peak. My specialty is non-validation targets – UFOS, other planets, historical mysteries. Most were first worked back in Project Stargate. I’ve developed others. Anyone taking my class can teach others using my target packs, so I have to protect my business.”

“Is there any way of determining what these numbers mean?” asked Murex.

“They don’t mean anything.”

Murex looked his question.

“These look like randomly-generated target coordinates,” Grandmaison explained. “That’s how we worked back in the Stargate era. A computer would spit out a set of these and a tasker would assign them to the target. We RV off the coords so we’re not frontloaded as to the nature of the target. Think of the numbers as a metaphysical longitude and latitude.”

“Then how do—?”

“How do they work? Monitor’s intention. Once I assign the number to a target, my intention drives the session.”

Murex tried to keep his face straight.

“Tell you what, detective,” Grandmaison offered. “I have a small ERV class coming in shortly. Why don’t we run the group against this one?”

“I don’t see how that would—”

“Otherwise, I’m afraid I can’t help you,” he said suddenly.

Murex stood up. “I’ll keep your offer in mind.”

On the way out, Trey Grandmaison handed Murex a business card.

“In case TIRV can help in any way, all my contact numbers are on this card. Call me anytime.”

“Thanks for your cooperation,” Murex told him.

The ME’s preliminary report had come in by the time Ray Murex had returned to his desk. He skimmed it, then took it in to his CO.

“According to this, John Doom hadn’t eaten in four days before he was found. No signs of poison or foul play. Cause of death appears to be heart failure. But the ME thinks the pinpoint eyeball hemorrhages strongly indicate he was lying face down when he died, and for a period of up to six hours afterward.”

“But he was found lying face up, right?”

“Right. With a microcassette recorder carefully nestled in his neatly folded hands.”

“You mean, placed there,” Hurley said. “Looks like we have an attempt at a perfect crime with locked-room overtones. Let’s take it from the top, guy checks in about 9 p.m. Monday night. By which time according to the ME, he could have been dead three or four days. Anyone at the hotel ID the body?”

“Desk clerk who checked him in, but he was a little shaky. However, the driver’s license photo fits the deceased.”

“So if John Doom couldn’t have checked in Monday night, who did? And how did Doom’s corpse get there?”

“There’s another problem,” Murex said. “The body showed no outward indications of decomposition.”

“So he couldn’t have died in the hotel room.”

“Not according to the ME. Wherever he was, Doom was on ice over the weekend. But someone had to flip the body over after those post-mortem pinpoint hemorrhages appeared.”

“Hmmm. What did you get in New Hampshire?”

“I found Grandmaison and his wife. They seem to take this Remote Viewing stuff dead serious. If they’re running a scam, I didn’t detect it in their manner. They claim never to have heard of John Doom. Otherwise, they made absolutely no sense to me. According to them, the coordinates the dead man were working when he died were randomly assigned. Common sense says if they’re random, they can’t possibly do what he claims they can.”

“Go at this from the angle of Doom’s last four or five days. I’m going to put you with Knuckles on this.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see. He’s already been informed.”

Detective First Grade Robert Knuckles had been on the job a dozen years longer than Ray Murex and acted it.

“Another day, another stiff,” he sighed.

“This one is complicated. Let me bring you up to speed.”

Knuckles listened with head tilted back and his pale blue eyes gazing off into space, his expression bored. When Murex got to the part about Remote Viewing, Knuckles took his feet off his desk and began to look interested.

“This is a new one,” he said. “I could get to like it. Let me see Grandmaison’s card.”

Murex gave it up. Knuckles read it over, then flipped it. “Whoa. What is this?”

Knuckles showed him the obverse side. Two sets of four digits were marked in blue ink: 2006/0075.

“Look like remote coordinates to you?” Knuckles asked.

“Pretty much,” Murex admitted. “Unless the first one is the year.”

Knuckles frowned deeply. “You say Grandmaison takes this stuff pretty seriously. I wonder . . .”

“Wonder what?”

“Well, maybe he just happened to give you a card on which he scribbled some stray coordinates. But try this on for size: maybe these coordinates are
you.”

“Me?”

“Could be he’s tagged you for remote surveillance.”

Ray Murex exploded into uncontrolled laughter.

“You ever work with psychics?” Knuckles asked.

“Never!”

“You know the unwritten rule.”

“Sure. If you’re stuck, you can consult one, you just can’t use what they tell you in a court of law.”

Bob Knuckles grinned wisely. “I’ve invoked that rule a time or two. Never mind the details. Take it from someone who’s been at this longer than you. Take this stuff seriously, but treat it skeptically.”

“Always.” Murex pocketed the card and asked, “What’s your take on this?”

“Obviously someone sneaked a corpse into the Park Plaza, pretending to be the deceased. I think we had better find out more about dead Mr Doom. I took the liberty of starting that ball rolling. He’s single, 44 and lived waaay out of town. Mission Hill.”