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.It had hair on its chest. Chocolate s myfavorite, I told her. CHOCOLATE, KATEY! She looked at me again and sat down, picked up her own mug, and sipped thestrong brew straight.Her eyes were interesting.Redheads most often have blueeyes, or green.Hers were chestnut brown, almost the color ofGerald Williams. So you re interested in what might have happened to Ray Christman. I almostmissed what she said.I wasPage 53 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmltrying to picture what she might have looked like maybe twenty-five yearsearlier, to attract the sexual interest of the young guru.He was still agood-looking guy in news pictures as recently as a year ago. Uh, yeah.I m accumulating a lot of information, but none of it pointsanywhere yet.One informant saysChristman may simply have blown with a ton of money, and be living somewhereas an anonymous richAmerican. She snorted. Not likely.Ray was broad-spectrum greedy.He wanted a lot ofthings in life, and one of them was admiration or ad ation.He wanted to besomething very special, and be appreciated for it. orShe pursed her lips thoughtfully. Try this one for size.Ray liked to livewell good food, good booze, good-looking women, and he smoked like a fireplace with a dead buzzard in the flue.He stayed in halfway decent shape with steam baths, vitamins, massage,occasional dieting, and periodic fits of riding an exercise bike whilereading. He may have just dropped dead.Stroke, heart attack, something like that.Ifhe did, and it wasn t in public, Lonnie and Evanson would sure as hell try tohide it.Ray Christman, dying of a physical illness? It would ruin hismystique! The church would have to cover it smuggle the body out, dispose ofit, and release some kind of cover story. Katey came in with the doughnuts, each about five inches across and loadedwith chocolate frosting, a whole damn platter of them, about a thousandcalories each, mostly fat.She set them down between Molly and me, then left.I eyed them carefully, then took one, broke it, and dunked.I was pretty sureMolly Cadigan wouldn t mind my dunking.It tasted as good as I d known itwould. What do you think of the theory that someone inside the church killed him? Iasked. Hell, honey, anything s possible, but that s one of the less likely.I knewRay when he was still young.Knew him well; you could even say we were closefriends.People were already claiming he was psychic, but that was bullshit.He ran a bunch of interesting procedures on himself after that, but I ll betyou dollars against rabbit turds he wasn t any more psychic a year ago than hewas in 1990. What he was was damned observant.He noticed things that even I didn t, andI m one of the most observant people I know.He could pretty much read youremotions, even if you were good at hiding them.By things like slight eyemovements, pupil dilation, subtle color changes in your skin and the white ofyour eyes.Along with more obvious things like facial expression, fidgeting,and sweat.He taught me some of it.If someone around him was hostile towardhim, or was trying to conceal things from him, he d know it, Sweetbuns, he dknow it. I knew some of those techniques.My dad taught them to me when I was still apreadolescent.They were part of what made him such a good lawman.But Icouldn t do the sort of thing with them that Molly Cadigan was claiming forRay Christman, not reliably, and I doubted that Christman could either. Incidentally, she said, if you want to know what he saw in me, that s meover there.And that s Ray sCorvette behind me. She pointed at a framed photo on the cluttered wall,showing a long-legged, shapely young woman in shorts, with a pretty face andhair like red gold.The car was an old gas-driven machine from beforegeogravitic power converters.And scarlet! Tuuli would love it.Molly kept talking. He used that talent to play people.It helped make himsuch a great salesman.And cocksman.Like I said, he loved the ladies, but hedidn t waste his time or cause upsets by making passes at someone who wasn tPage 54 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmlalready interested.Or at married women.He isn t wasn t a bastard, justself-indulgent.And most of the people around him, including Lonnie Thomas, damn nearworshiped the man. So no, I don t think someone inside killed him.Not unless they d been PDHed,and killed him without any advance awareness themselves of what they d beenprogramed to do. She paused. You know what PDH stands for, don t you? I nodded; I d had a period of reading spy thrillers.PDH meant treatment byain, rugs, and ypnosis.ToPDHcondition someone to do something, usually murder someone, when triggered bysome word, or maybe music, or something that happened.I didn t know whethersuch things were possible, except in theory. It wouldn t be easy, she went on. It may not even be possible to PDHsomeone that precisely, not without leaving them visibly strange, anyway.Maybe, just maybe, some outfit like the OSS could, but I can t see them takingRay Christman or the church that seriously.I think they got over that sort ofbullshit with Leif Haller and his Institute of Noetic Technology. Which reminded me: Hamilton had said Molly d been a Noetie first. Could theNoeties have had someone kill Christman? I asked.She frowned. Maybe, but I doubt it.Like I said, lots of things are possible,some of them things neither of us has thought of and probably won t. I was a Noetie once myself, but back in Rochester, New York, where thingswere different than here.AndI m way out of date on them.Matter of fact, I don t know who isn t.But Iknow a couple of people who may have kept some attention on them.They mighthave some insights for you. She gave me two names, with addresses and phone numbers.One was a Dr.Winifred Landau SprouleMolly gave me all three names plus the title, as if that was how the woman wasreferred to.She d not only been a member of the Noetie s board of directors.Later she d been on the board of directors of the Church of the NewGnosis, and a math professor at LACC
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