Programmed for Peril

eight-to-one men-to-women up there. Never mind that Alaskan women said, “The odds are good, but the goods are odd.” The third ticket was for Carole Sieber, the fourth for daughter “Annie,” both one-way to Chicago. There she would book a flight the rest of the way east.
    She got a surprise from Eileen. “You can forget about the wig and sunglasses, Trish,” she said. “I figured out who you are. You’re the one lives with that weirdo inventor out in Spires Canyon in that house from another planet.”
    Trish’s face twisted with alarm. “You musn’t say—”
    “Hey, I dunno nothing. You want to get away from Carson Thomas, that’s cool with me. You oughta tell me sometime why you decided to have his kid.”
    “I won’t be seeing you again. I’m going... away.”
    “Good. Just the same, you need anything, call me,” Eileen said. “I won’t be in Alaska forever—unless I get lucky. And I never been lucky.”
    Just before her plane left, Trish went to a pay phone. While Melody hugged her knees she lifted the receiver with a shaking hand. She had to enter the number sequence three times before she got it right. The call went through. The voice she hadn’t heard in eight years spoke with the inescapability of history.
    Trish’s words burst from her throat in the desperate rush she had so hoped to avoid. “Mother... Mother, I’m coming home!”
     

12
     
    TRISH, CARSON, AND MELODY—TOGETHER FOREVER!
    She let the photograph slide from her fingers, it swooped down to the floor, again falling face up, as though to add to her torment. She had never suspected that Carson was behind all that had happened. Carson! Her heart sank at that prospect, at his... inevitability.
    Over the last three years when, despite herself, her mind swung toward him she had hoped that the increasing mental instability in which she had left him had led to incapacitating madness. Time and distance, though comforting, failed to guarantee her safety as much as would word of his institutionalization or violent death. She was certain that he bad been in major decline. Where had that dangerous current ultimately carried him?
    She glanced at her watch. It was still a reasonable hour— in California. Through information she found Eileen’s number. So she hadn’t gotten lucky in Alaska. A man answered. Maybe California was treating her better now. Eileen squealed at hearing Trish’s voice. They raced straight into pleasantries, brought each other up to date on their lives. Eileen had spent more than two years in Alaska. “I had a ball! But, hey, you can’t really live there.” When old news had been covered Trish could contain herself no longer.
    “Important question, Eileen,” she said. “What do you hear about Carson Thomas?”
    Instead of replying Eileen shouted at her companion that she needed a few minutes of privacy. Several moments later she resumed talking. Three women physicians and their young daughters had been murdered. The same method had been used to kill the doctors—smothering. “Dead wasn’t good enough for him,” Eileen said. “He finished up by cutting off toes, fingers, ears, nipples—you name it—and piling them on their bellies. They think he used heavy shears. He killed the little girls by somehow tearing their guts wide open.”
    Trish shuddered. “Why are you telling me this?”
    “They’re calling him ‘The Doctor and Daughter Destroyer.’ ”
    “What’s this have to do with Carson?”
    “I’ll get to that.”
    “Were they all the same kind of doctor? Maybe psychiatrists?”
    “Huh-uh. First one was a nose and throat surgeon. The second, the paper said, was a tummy and tit tucker. Third one was a gynecologist. He got her maybe six months ago. Three isn’t many the way these serial guys go. But he got doctors. So the whole California AMA is jumping around. And the papers love writing about it. ‘Was the DDD Overcharged?’ Stuff like that.”
    “Carson? What about Carson?" Couldn’t Eileen hear her urgency?
    “You didn’t tell me he wasted a guy the day we left.”
    So he had shot Jethro DuMont down in cold blood. “1 didn’t hang around to find out, Eileen,” Trish said. “Did they catch him?”
    “Nope. I called my mom to tell her I was in Alaska, and she got talking about it, ’cause it was in the local paper.”
    “What’s Carson have to do with the Doctor and Daughter Destroyer?”
    Eileen lowered her voice. “Look, Trish, the guy I’m living with is a