If our copycat wanted to be famous, that’s exactly what he was going to be. But with fame came all the not-so-pleasant things that went along with it.
“He’s going to be pissed, boss,” Martinez said.
“Then we’d better get to work,” Jack said. “Plank, why don’t you head over to the news station and collect the evidence that was sent to Carrie. No telling how many people have touched it, but we’ll keep trying to get prints and DNA samples for comparison.”
“Yes, sir,” Plank said, heading out the door.
Jack continued. “Lily is doing the autopsy on Jody Burkett. He’s drowning us in information and not giving us time to investigate thoroughly before he hits us with the next crime scene. So while Lily is taking care of victim number four, we’re going to sift through the other three crime scenes. He’s been killing an average of every ten hours, give or take.”
“Which means he already has his next victim and is probably setting the stage for another,” I said. “Just like the BTK letter said.”
Jack nodded, his mouth a hard line. “Where’s Doug?” he asked.
“In the office,” Cole said. “He moved all of his stuff in there and growls if you don’t feed him on a regular basis. Kind of like a Gremlin.”
“Let’s see what he’s got,” Jack said.
“I’m going to make some fresh coffee,” I said, veering off into the kitchen.
There was old coffee sitting in the pot and I rinsed it out and started a new pot. I made Jack and myself fresh cups and added a generous amount of cream and sugar to both since it was so late in the afternoon. And because I’d made the coffee. I tended to make it on the strong side. I’d never gotten the hang of making good coffee like Jack did, even though he’d tried to teach me.
I hardly recognized the office when I walked back in with the others. Cole hadn’t been kidding when he said Doug had moved all his stuff in there. Doug had also rearranged the furniture and moved in a couple of extra tables from the storage room so it looked like a big space station console. Doug sat at the helm in Jack’s office chair.
“How’s it going?” I asked, handing the mug to Jack, and then I told the others, “Fresh coffee in the pot.”
“Doug was just about to get to that,” Jack said. “He spent the last five minutes talking about working conditions and that he gets woozy if he doesn’t get enough calories.”
“I use a lot of brain energy,” he said. “It’s no different than the Olympic athletes who consume twenty thousand calories a day.”
“Somehow that seems way different,” I said, and then I noticed the computer he was using. “Umm, Doug? Where did you get Magnolia?”
Doug grinned and looked at me mischievously over his shoulder. “Don’t tell Uncle Ben, but Martinez dropped me by his house so I could borrow her. Poor girl was feeling neglected. She told me so once I finally got her talking.”
Jack raised a brow and looked at Martinez, but he just gave a sheepish grin.
“Hey,” Martinez said. “The kid’s persuasive. And you did say we needed to use any and all means.”
“And how did you get in the house since I know for a fact your aunt and uncle are out of town?”
“I’ve got a key,” he said, completely unrepentant. “So technically it’s not breaking and entering. I mean, if he didn’t want me to make myself at home he wouldn’t have given me a key.”
“That’s a good one to tell the judge,” Cole said, making us all laugh.
Doug rolled his eyes. “Anyway, Uncle Ben added all these new passcodes and stuff to Magnolia so it’s taken me a little bit to untangle her. I mean like, super-advanced stuff. Sometimes Uncle Ben amazes me.”
“Maybe he put the extra security so people who aren’t supposed to be digging into government business can’t go snooping through his computer,” Jack said.
“No way,” Doug said. “This was way more than government safeguards. That stuff is a snap to get around. Magnolia is true AI. As close to the robots Jaye won’t let me create as possible. Magnolia thinks and talks for herself. And if I hadn’t been able to redirect her programming so she recognized me like before, then she probably would have self-destructed. It was kind of a close call.”
My eyes widened at that. Carver would’ve killed Doug if he’d made Magnolia self-destruct. The only person Carver loved more than Magnolia was his wife, and sometimes I wasn’t so sure about that.
“What I had to end up doing was making a familiarity pathway to let me back in,” Doug explained. “She and I have a history. And she also knows Mackenzie.” Mackenzie was Doug’s AI computer, similar to Magnolia in almost every way except she was civilianized. “Mackenzie is kind of like her daughter, more or less, so I opened up the pathways and got around all the safe walls and coding Uncle Ben constructed to keep anyone but him out. Believe me, no one else would’ve gotten into this baby.”
“I have a name,” Magnolia said in a disturbingly real human voice. “And it’s not baby.” Carver liked to say he’d created her to be a mixture of Scarlett O’Hara and Dixie Carter.
“Oh, good,” I said. “She’s a feminist now.”
“Hello, Dr. Graves. Always a pleasure to see you,” Magnolia said.
“This is why I insist on no robots,” I said, looking at Jack, but he just grinned. He thought it was cool.
“Unbelievably creepy,” Chen said from her place against the wall.
“Anyway,” Doug said. “As I was saying, whatever Uncle Ben is hiding on Magnolia made him create a security program so advanced I’ve never seen anything like it before. Fortunately, Uncle Ben is the one who trained me, so I got it.”
“I almost blew up,” Magnolia said. “I was very worried.”
“I got it, didn’t I?” Doug asked, exasperated. “You always find something to complain about.”
“You broke through with two seconds to spare,” Magnolia said. “I believe Jack would’ve been quite upset to have to remodel his living room again.”
“All right, all right,” Doug said. “What happened to keeping that information between just the two of us?”
“I find I’m still rather angry at you,” Magnolia said. “My apologies.”
“Just like a woman,” Doug whispered.
“Which you clearly know nothing about,” Cole said, tapping him lightly on the back of the head. “Always stop talking before you dig yourself deeper. That’s relationship 101.”
“Really?” Doug asked. “Cause Uncle Ben says it’s always best to keep digging because you’ll eventually get to the other side.”
“Have you made any progress on the background checks?” Jack asked.
“Like I said, it took me a while to get through it, so I got a late start. But I have everything up and running now. Between Magnolia and my own sweet Mackenzie I’ve been able to run full background checks on everyone, and I even included the IRS database in the reports.”
“Hmm,” Jack said. “Maybe let’s keep that to ourselves until we get warrants where needed. Is Magnolia still programmed to recognize my voice?”