Angel Face Read Free Page B

labs.
    “Believe what, Sammy?”
    Sammy tried to swallow, but he’d dried up like leftover toast. Angela Lowe had just spoken his name in her soft, dulcet tones. She was the lone exception to his research drone observation. Angela was neither pasty-faced nor bug-eyed. She had the dreamiest chocolate mocha gaze he’d ever seen.
    Kitten eyes, he called them. The way Sammy figured it, she must have been a cat in another life, because every once in a while he was struck with the notion that she was purring and making the delicate little throaty sounds cats made, at least mentally. “Love me, stroke me, feed me,” was what she seemed to be saying with her wide, wistful gaze. He couldn’t imagine why she was wastingaway her days in a tomblike biotech company, but he was damn glad of it.
    “Take a look.” He waved her over to the computer and beamed with pride as she peered at the screen.
    “Sammy? What does this mean?” Surprise radiated from her as she turned to him. She was clutching his earmuffs, which she’d picked up off the floor. They kept the temperature low in the lab because the clean rooms and many of the experiments required it, and his ears were already frosting over. But he kind of liked the way she was cuddling the lambswool cups.
    “Is that Angel Face?” she asked. “It looks like she’s going to . . . is she going to strike again?”
    Angela had that similarity to a kitten, too, Sammy realized. She was smart and quick, with a feline’s natural cunning but none of the cruelty.
    “Sure looks like it,” he said. “And soon, if the indicators are correct. We ran her through a heavy cycle of stress the last forty-eight hours, and now she’s immersed in violent fantasies. That’s how she reduces the stress, but they’re not just any violent fantasies, they’re revenge-intensive. Check out her deep limbic system. It’s on fire, and the focal intensity is on the left. She’s dredging up old wounds and wants to wound back. Look at the left temporal lobe; it’s way overactive.”
    “Paranoia,” Angela suggested, “uncontrollable impulses?”
    “Probably both. But now look at the basal ganglia. See here—” He pointed to another view, this one of the underside of the brain. It was a walnut-sized blue pool, again on the left side.
    “That looks normal,” Angela said, “maybe even under-active.”
    “Right! She knows she’s just fantasizing, but her brain doesn’t. It can’t distinguish the fantasies from reality. Just look at her pleasure center! She’s groovin’ on this stuff.It relaxes and energizes her at the same time. She could be having multiple orgasms. Oh, sorry—”
    Angela colored a little, and Sammy felt foolish. Not for the orgasm comment but for the apology. Biopsycholo-gists didn’t apologize to each other for using words like that. Bodily functions were all part of a day’s work in the lab and had about as much personal meaning as sneezing. But somehow he could never put her in the same category as his coworkers. She was just different.
    Sammy had often thought that she didn’t belong here, but he didn’t know where she did belong. Maybe another place in time. She could have stepped from the pages of a children’s storybook, but he had the feeling her story wasn’t entirely idyllic. There was a wicked witch involved somewhere.
    “You ran the correlations, of course,” she said.
    He nodded. “There’s a ninety-five percent probability she’ll take some kind of retaliatory action in the next seventy-two hours.”
    The program didn’t just spew out numbers. It attempted to predict when, where, and how the killer would strike again, based on the data that was fed into it. Sammy considered it the profiling technique of the millennium, and what set it apart was the real-time functionality of the brain imaging. The subject was prepped by drinking a radioisotopic mixture that looked and tasted like water. Once the substance was taken up by receptor sites in the