Power of Suggestion Read online

  “Still, we need to come up with a motive that’s more than guesswork,” Nancy said. “Maybe Maury will have an answer for us in the morning when he finds out what’s on the mystery diskette.”

  • • •

  “How’s it going, Maury?” Nancy asked, popping into Maury Becker’s room.

  It was early Sunday morning. Ned and Bess had gone with Parker to the infirmary, where Dr. Cohen was going to start breaking through the hypnosis. “I didn’t see you at the party last night.”

  “That’s because I was right here,” he told her. “This is much more interesting. Pull up a chair.”

  Nancy sat next to Maury, and together they gazed at his computer screen. “Did you get through the block on the second disk?” Nancy asked.

  Maury pointed across the room to another computer. Sequences of letters and numbers were flashing on its screen too rapidly for her to make them out. “My other system is still working on it,” he told her. “I customized a program to test possible password sequences. The computer’s been running them since midnight. It’s tried a few million by now—we should be in soon. In the meantime, let me show you what’s on this disk.

  “Professor Edberg has been testing for statistically measurable learning improvement,” Maury continued. “Some of his students get subliminal messages on their tapes. Others listen to tapes without subliminals, and some don’t listen to tapes at all. But they all participate in the same study groups and take the same tests.”

  “So?” Nancy asked.

  Maury pointed to the screen. “So it says here that the subliminals work. Edberg is almost done with his study, and he’s had very good results.”

  Seeing the frown on Maury’s face, Nancy said, “It sounds as if you’re not so sure.”

  “Well, there’s a lot of statistical stuff here that I haven’t had a chance to examine, so I don’t know yet if he’s right or not,” Maury said. “I’ve been checking out the files on individual students to see how he interpreted their results. Some of the reasoning is still confusing to me. I have to sort it out.”

  Nancy was starting to feel discouraged. So far he wasn’t telling her anything that showed a motive for any of her suspects. “What about Parker’s file—have you accessed it?”

  “That’s interesting, too,” Maury said. “I haven’t been able to locate it yet. Maybe there are files I still haven’t accessed—”

  “Hey, how’s it going?” a new voice asked.

  Nancy and Maury turned to see Dave Webb standing in the doorway, munching on an apple.

  “They keep coming by,” Maury explained to Nancy. “The whole house seems to have taken Parker on as their personal cause.”

  “Brotherhood is powerful,” Dave agreed, ambling into the room. “Have you proved he’s innocent yet?”

  “I appreciate your faith in me, Dave,” Maury answered, “but these things take time. You see—” He began to explain everything all over again, but Dave held up his hands and started to laugh.

  “Whoa! I just need a simple answer.” He looked around at the papers scattered on Maury’s desk. Then his gaze fixed on the brochure Nancy had taken from Positive Tapes, half-buried among the pile of papers. She had pulled it out of her pocket when she gave Maury the diskettes and had forgotten it on his desk.

  “Nancy! You found him!” Dave said.

  Nancy gave him a puzzled glance. “What do you mean? Found who?” she asked, reaching for the brochure.

  Dave pointed to the color photo of Larry Boyd on the cover. “He must be wearing a wig here,” Dave answered. “But this is the bald guy I saw at the psych building the night Wayne was killed!”

  Chapter

  Twelve

  OKAY, SO WHAT’S the plan again?” Dave asked a short while later. He and Nancy were sitting in Nancy’s Mustang, which was parked outside a large split-level house in Emersonville’s wealthiest neighborhood.

  After checking the local phone book for Larry Boyd’s home address, Nancy and Dave had driven right over. Nancy wanted Dave to get a face-to-face look at Boyd, to be absolutely positive that it was the same person he’d seen the night of Wayne’s murder.

  “I guess the easiest thing to do is simply ring the doorbell,” Nancy said. “When we interviewed Boyd he insisted that he’d never been on campus. If you can identify him as the person who was in the psych building, then he was lying.”

  Dave nodded. “And the only reason he would lie is if he was up to no good—say, murdering Wayne Perkins.” Dave let out a whistle, then reached for the door handle. “I’ll try my best, Nancy.”

  They stepped out of the car. The morning air was crisp, but a hint of approaching spring hung in the air. Nancy and Dave were about to cross the street, when the front door of the house opened and a man stepped out. He was wearing a heavy robe and slippers. As he bent down to pick up the Sunday paper, Nancy saw that he had a fringe of hair around his temples, but the top of his head was completely bald. “That is Larry Boyd!” Nancy exclaimed. “But without hair.”

  “See? I told you it was him!” Dave declared excitedly. “I’m positive.”

  Larry Boyd must have heard Dave’s enthusiastic outcry. He looked up and saw the two young people, and his face suddenly paled. He spun around quickly and hurried back into the house, slamming the door behind him.

  Nancy and Dave stood on the sidewalk facing the house. “I didn’t expect that reaction from him,” Nancy confessed. “I wonder which one of us he’s so scared of?”

  “Beats me. What do we do now?” Dave asked.

  “I still think we should try to talk to him.” Squaring her shoulders, Nancy marched up the walk to Larry Boyd’s house and rang the doorbell.

  “Go away!” Boyd’s voice came from behind the door.

  “Mr. Boyd. I just want to talk to you,” Nancy called out.

  “I have nothing to say to you.”

  Nancy wasn’t going to give up that easily. “You lied to me the other day when you said you’d never been on campus,” she pressed.

  “Go away or I’ll call the police!”

  “That’s not a bad idea, Mr. Boyd. You have a lot to explain to them.”

  Nancy and Dave stayed on the front steps of the Boyd house, fruitlessly trying to get Larry Boyd to come out and talk with them. Soon a brown sedan pulled up to the curb, followed by a police car. Lieutenant Easterling climbed out of the sedan, and a pair of uniformed officers emerged from the patrol car. They stood by their car while Lieutenant Easterling approached the house.

  “Lieutenant Easterling, I’m glad to see you,” Nancy said.

  “Is Lieutenant Easterling out there?” Boyd’s voice came from behind the door. Then the door flew open, and Boyd rushed outside. “Lieutenant! This young woman is harassing me,” he accused. “Arrest her!”

  “What!” Nancy cried, astonished. “I am not!”

  Easterling held up a hand. “Hold it, both of you!” he ordered. He turned to Nancy. “Now, what’s this all about? It’s Sunday morning, and you’re disturbing the peace and quiet of this man’s home. What’s your problem?”

  “I’m investigating the Wayne Perkins murder, and I consider this man to be a prime suspect!”

  “You consider me a suspect!” Boyd sputtered, his face turning bright red. “How dare you!”

  “Let me ask the questions here, okay?” the lieutenant said. “But he’s got a good question, and I’ll ask it,” he went on, turning back to Nancy. “How dare you stick your nose in a police investigation? How dare you badger prominent citizens in my town?”

  “But I’m not—”

  “Oh, no? Didn’t you tell both Mr. Boyd and Dr. Edberg that you’re a reporter for the college newspaper? I got calls from both of them on Friday about you. You’re not even a student there.”

  “I can explain.”

  Lieutenant Easterling brushed Nancy’s explanation away. “Don’t bother, I’ve heard it. You’re an amateur detective, and you don’t think the college boy shot his tutor, so you’re
looking for somebody else to pin it on. You think you’ve got evidence linking Boyd and Edberg to the crime, so that gives you the right to stick your nose where it doesn’t belong?”

  Nancy had heard about all she could take. “Wait just a minute,” she said, glaring at him. “I have every right to try to get at the truth. And it so happens I do have several suspects besides Parker Wright, and I have found evidence linking others to the crime. If you’ll just give me a minute to tell you what I’ve found—”

  “Save it, kiddo. I don’t want to hear the fantasies of a teenager with an overactive imagination!” The lieutenant’s face was just inches from Nancy’s. “I’ve been a cop for twenty-two years and a detective for the past fifteen. The last thing I need in the middle of a murder case is some kid who’s supposed to be a hotshot detective telling me I don’t know how to do my job!”

  He took a deep breath, reining in his anger. “I’m going to say this just once: I’ve got a suspect, I’ve got motive, opportunity, and a murder weapon registered to the suspect’s daddy with the suspect’s prints all over it, and the suspect hasn’t been able to offer even the lamest alibi. It’s an open-and-shut case, and I want you to back off!”

  Nancy stood her ground, struggling to control her anger. Glancing at Larry Boyd, she saw that he was standing with his arms folded across his chest, a smirk on his face. At last Nancy said, “Lieutenant, I’m trying to help your investigation, not hinder it. But if you can’t see that—”

  Dave Webb finally spoke up. “Save your breath, Nancy, this guy’s not interested.” He turned to Easterling. “But I’ll tell you what, Lieutenant. I told you I saw a man in the psych building on Thursday night, and this is him.” He pointed at Larry Boyd, who responded with a look of injured innocence. “Mr. Boyd told Nancy he’d never been on the Emerson College campus,” Dave continued. “Maybe you’ve got the case pinned on Parker Wright, but if I were you I’d ask Mr. Boyd why he lied about that.”

  With that, Dave took Nancy’s arm and led her toward her car. “Come on, let’s let the police do their job.” As they walked away, Lieutenant Easterling was eyeing Larry Boyd speculatively.

  Nancy wished she and Dave could stay around to hear Boyd’s explanation, but she didn’t think Lieutenant Easterling would be crazy about the idea.

  “Thanks for sticking up for me,” Nancy said as she and Dave drove back toward the college.

  “Just because he’s a cop doesn’t mean he’s got a right to be rude,” Dave answered. “So what happens now? Do you quit the case?”

  “Absolutely not! I know we’re close to breaking this thing wide open. The more we learn, the closer we get. Let’s go back to the fraternity to see if Maury has broken into that second diskette.”

  “Do you think Boyd’s the killer?” Dave asked.

  Nancy shrugged. “It’s obvious that he has something to hide. But is he the murderer? It’s still too early to tell.”

  Dave wanted to work out, so Nancy dropped him off at the gym before returning to the fraternity house. When she went upstairs to Maury’s room, she was startled to find Diana DeMarco there, sitting next to him in front of his computer.

  “What are you doing here?” Nancy asked the brunette.

  “Oh, hi.” Diana looked embarrassed. “I’ve been trying to find you, Nancy. You weren’t in the dorm, so I tried here.”

  “Diana knows a lot about programming,” Maury explained. “I asked her if she wanted to give me a hand.” Suddenly he looked doubtful. “Is that okay?” He looked at Diana. “I mean, maybe you shouldn’t be looking at this stuff . . .” His voice trailed off.

  Nancy and Diana regarded each other. After a long silence Diana spoke up. “Look, I know you don’t trust me, and you have no reason to. But after our talk, I realized I couldn’t just run away. I really cared for Wayne, and I want to know who killed him and why.”

  “What about your job with Subliminal Suggestions?” Nancy asked.

  “I—I don’t know. I haven’t really given them anything about Edberg’s study yet,” Diana said. “Being with Wayne made me question the ethics of spying. I haven’t decided yet.” She straightened in her chair. “But after what Maury and I have seen on these diskettes, I know I have to stay here until this mystery is solved.”

  “Why?” asked Nancy, hurrying over to the computer. “What have you found?”

  “Well, I broke the code to get into the blocked diskette,” Maury told her.

  Nancy felt a rush of adrenaline. “And?”

  “Professor Edberg’s data seemed to prove that subliminal tapes worked really well,” he explained. “But I had trouble following his interpretation of the evidence. Apparently Wayne had the same problem, so he reevaluated all the data. The second disk has Wayne’s results. He worked through all the data, eliminated the statistical discrepancies, and when he was done—”

  “What did he find?” Nancy asked.

  “Wayne concluded that, while the study doesn’t disprove the effects of subliminal suggestion, it doesn’t prove it either. In each group some students improved, some stayed the same, and some even got worse.”

  Nancy thought about this for a moment. “So what you’re saying is—”

  Diana broke in. “What he’s saying is that Wayne discovered that Edberg was lying! Edberg falsified the data to support the conclusions he and Boyd were looking for.”

  Chapter

  Thirteen

  FOR A LONG moment, Nancy just stared at Maury and Diana. “Wow,” she said. “That certainly puts a new twist on things.”

  Her mind raced, trying to make sense of the case in light of this revelation. “If Edberg falsified his results and Wayne found out, Edberg’s entire career and reputation would be destroyed. He might have seen killing Wayne as the only way to protect everything he’d built for himself.”

  “What about that Boyd guy?” Maury asked. “The one Dave recognized.”

  That was another possibility, Nancy realized. “Maybe Boyd and Wayne were trying to dupe Edberg. If Wayne was working for Positive Tapes, he could have been feeding Edberg the false data and keeping a correct record for his own purposes.”

  “So you think Boyd knew from the start that they wouldn’t be able to prove that the tapes worked?” Diana asked.

  “It’s possible. He could have hired Wayne to make sure that Edberg would see student test results that seemed to confirm that they worked.” Nancy’s mind was working a mile a minute. “We know that Dave Webb saw Boyd near the psych building before Wayne was killed. The question is, what was he doing there? Maybe Wayne tried to blackmail Boyd. Maybe he threatened to tell Edberg, so Boyd decided to kill Wayne.”

  Diana shook her head adamantly. “That’s not the Wayne I knew! He was outraged by dishonesty and fraud!”

  “People sometimes aren’t what they seem to be,” Nancy responded. “But maybe you’re right. After all, you knew Wayne. I didn’t. The point is, we’ve got to find a way to determine whether Boyd or Edberg is our culprit. It might even turn out that they’re in it together.”

  Diana frowned. “It doesn’t sound like you have any hard evidence so far,” she pointed out.

  “There might be something that could help answer your questions in Parker’s file,” Maury suggested to Nancy. “Unfortunately, I still can’t find the file.”

  “That’s odd. Have you found the records for all the other students in the study?” Nancy asked.

  Maury nodded. “There was a master list of students who’ve participated. I’ve been able to find files on anyone I looked for—except Parker. At last I thought I’d finally found it.” He tapped a few keys to bring Parker’s file up on the computer screen. “This is what I got.”

  On the screen were the words File deleted.

  Letting out a sigh of disappointment, Nancy said, “Someone erased Parker’s file. This tells us something, at least. Someone had something to hide, so they deleted Parker’s file. But now we’ll never know what it was.”

  “Uh, Nancy, there�
��s something I haven’t told you.” Diana looked sheepish. She reached into her purse, which was sitting on the floor, and pulled out a third computer disk. “This was in Wayne’s computer. I had it in a different pocket from the others. I haven’t looked at it yet.”

  Nancy felt a thrill of excitement as Maury took the disk from Diana.

  “It’s unlabeled,” he remarked. He popped the disk into his computer, and his fingers danced over the keys. Letters and numbers flashed on the screen.

  “It has a blocking sequence similar to the one on Wayne’s other disk,” Maury murmured. “Shouldn’t be too hard to get into it now.”

  He tried several times as the two girls watched, and finally he said, “Voilá! ‘Wright, Parker, test subject.’ Am I the best, or what?”

  Nancy leaned forward excitedly. There on the screen was Edberg’s file on Parker. “So what are we looking for?” Maury asked Nancy.

  Nancy thought for a few moments as Maury flipped through the file, bringing up page after page of records. “Is there a list of the music they had Parker listen to?” she asked.

  “Yup! It’s one of the variables they were testing. Did the kind of music have any effect on the ability of the listener to pick up the subliminal message, that sort of thing. Here’s Parker’s music list. Anything particular you have in mind?”

  “Yes,” Nancy said, looking over his shoulder. She pointed to a title that had appeared on the screen. “That’s it!” Listed among the selections was Johnny Lightning’s “Cosmic Mind Control.” The date next to it indicated that the song was a new addition that Parker had started to listen to only a couple of weeks ago.

  “Something strange happens to Parker when he hears that song,” Nancy explained. “And I want to find out why. Ned and Bess are with Parker at the infirmary now. Maybe they’ve made some progress.”

  • • •

  Nancy arrived at the campus infirmary soon after her meeting with Maury and Diana. She still had misgivings about bringing Diana into the investigation, but she had to admit that Diana had been helpful. She and Maury had done terrific work on the computer diskettes. Now, if only Dr. Cohen was as successful.