Predator Read Free

from her couch and sits down. The nickel-plated shotgun is heavy in her lap, and she inserts a small key in the lock. She turns the key to the right and pulls the lock free from the trigger guard. She racks the pump back to make sure there are no cartridges in the magazine.

    Chapter 3

         “We’re going to do word reading now,” Dr. Lane is telling Basil over the intercom. “Just read the words from left to right. Okay? And remember, don’t move. You’re doing great.”
         “Ten-four.”
         “Hey, want to see what he really looks like?” the MRI technician says to the guards.
         His name is Josh. He majored in physics at MIT, is working as a tech while working on his next degree, is bright but eccentric with a twisted sense of humor.
         “I already know what he looks like. I got to escort him to the showers earlier today,” one of the guards says.
         “Then what?” Dr. Lane asks Benton. “What would he do to them after he got them into his car?”
         “Red, blue, blue, red…”
         The guards wander closer to Josh’s video screen.
         “Take them someplace, stab them in the eyes, keep them alive a couple days, rape them repeatedly, cut their throats, dump their bodies, pose them to shock people,” Benton is telling Dr. Lane matter-of-factly, in his clinical way. “The cases we know about. I’m suspicious he killed others. A number of women vanished in Florida during the same time frame. Presumed dead, bodies never found.”
         “Take them where? A motel, his house?”
         “Hold on a second,” Josh says to the guards as he selects the menu option 3D, then SSD, or Surface Shading Display. “This is really cool. We never show it to patients.”
         “How come?”
         “Totally freak them out.”
         “We don’t know where,” Benton is telling Dr. Lane as he keeps a check on Josh, ready to intervene if he gets too carried away. “But it’s interesting. The bodies he dumped. They all had microscopic particles of copper on them.”
         “What on earth?”
         “Mixed in with dirt and whatever else was adhering to blood, their skin, in their hair.”
         “Blue, green, blue, red…”
         “That’s very strange.”
         She pushes the talk button. “Mr. Jenrette? How are we doing in there? You okay?”
         “Ten-four.”
         “Next, you’re going to see words printed in a different color from what they spell. I want you to name the color of the ink. Just name the color.”
         “Ten-four.”
         “Isn’t this awesome?” Josh says as what looks like a death mask fills his screen, a reconstruction of one-millimeter-thick high-resolution slices that make up the MRI scan of Basil Jenrette’s head, the image pale, hairless and eyeless, ending raggedly just below the jaw as if he has been decapitated.
         Josh rotates the image so the guards can see it from different angles.
         “Why’s his head look cut off?” one of them asks.
         “That’s where the signal from the coil stopped.”
         “His skin doesn’t look real.”
         “Red uh green, blue I mean red, green…” Basil’s voice enters the room.
         “It’s not really skin. How to explain… well, what the computer’s doing is volume reconstruction, a surface rendering.”
         “Red, blue uh green, blue I mean green…”
         “Only thing we really use it for is Power Points, mainly, to overlay structural with functional. Just an MRI analysis package where you can put data together and look at it any way you want, have fun with it.”
         “Man, he’s ugly.”
         Benton has heard enough. The color naming has stopped. He gives Josh a sharp look.
         “Josh? You ready?”
         “Four, three, two, one, ready,” Josh says, and Dr. Lane begins the interference test.
         “Blue, red I mean… shit, uh