Angel Face Read Free Page A

word of advice about Angel Face, if you’ll permit me?”
    Jordan finally nodded.
    “She’s an escape artist, but she’s also a quick-change artist, and what changes is her face. You won’t see the same woman twice.”
    “That must keep things interesting.”
    “Her father was obsessed with her because of her beauty, and he punished her because he couldn’t have her. Angel Face grew up desperate to be someone else, anyone else. She tried to make herself into someone her father wouldn’t want so she could escape the abuse. She’s still trying.”
    He drew a legal-size envelope from inside his coat and tossed it onto the porch. “In case you change your mind.”
    With that, he was on his way, moving swiftly down the steps, across the street, and out of eyeshot.
    Jordan stepped out onto the porch and picked up the packet. He didn’t want it lying on the porch, but he wasn’t changing his mind. And no blackmailing CIA agent with a story about an abused female serial killer was changing it for him. As soon as he got his bearings, he was going to call the CIA and follow up—or have his attorney do it. In fact, he might just call a former patient of his who was once highly placed in the intelligence community, Mitch Ryder had retired because of his health and turned to detective work. Yeah, maybe he’d give Mitch a call.
    Jordan came through the door with more force than usual, and Birdy’s feathers ruffled in surprise. The packet landed in the wastebasket, unopened. He had a quadruple bypass and three angioplasties today. There were people whose lives depended on him to be sane and focused. He didn’t have time for such nonsense.
    “Where the hell’s my pager?” he muttered.
    “Fooled you, fooled you!” Birdy squawked.
    When did that bird learn to talk?

CHAPTER 2

    S AMMY Tran pulled the earmuffs off his head and tossed them into the nippy air like a mortarboard on graduation day. He would have let out a whoop of joy but was afraid it might wake the dead, as he referred to the other research drones who worked in the Cognitive Studies lab. Too many of his coworkers were pasty-faced, bug-eyed zombies who labored around the clock and never saw the sun. Their idea of fun was beating the computer at a breakneck game of solitaire.
    Sammy’s idea of fun was brain-tapping serial killers, and he’d just broken the bank. Brain-tapping was the catchphrase he’d come up with to describe a revolutionary new software program he was debugging for SmartTech, the biotech company where he’d been on staff since graduating from MIT a few years back.
    The program combined the biology of the latest brain-mapping techniques with the psychology of FBI profiling by continuously compiling both kinds of data on a study subject and then reducing the input to linear correlations that could predict the subject’s violent or antisocialbehavior with a surprising degree of accuracy. So far, only prison inmates in controlled situations had been tested, but the program was intended for much broader applications. There was hope it would one day be used as routinely as drug testing.
    “Suuh-weet,” Sammy murmured, imagining the newspaper headlines when the story broke: “Software Reads Killers’ Minds! Predicts Homicide Before It Happens.”
    He watched the activity on the computer monitor with the reverence of a NASA engineer watching a Mars probe. “Wait till it gets out that we can do sophisticated brain imaging with the equivalent of wireless components and cell sites. The old farts will never believe it.”
    His gleeful chuckle had an F-you quality to it. He’d been ridiculed since he was a kid for his strange and morbid visions of the future. At a conservative institution like MIT, the rejection had been savage. Only here at SmartTech had his ideas been embraced and—much more importantly—funded. He was grateful and loyal. The researchers here even had their own cubicles, a perk reserved for the section chiefs in most