Dugger kept his eyes on me for several moments. “Lauren worked as an experimental confederate. But. . .” He shook his head. Still white.
“But what, sir?”
“I was going to say her job couldn’t be relevant. But I’m sure my saying so means nothing to you.”Milo smiled and took out his notepad. “What’s a confederate, sir?”
Dugger touched the chain of his eyeglasses. “What psychologists call a plant.”
“I’m not a psychologist, sir.”
“She role-played.”
“Acting?”
“In a sense,” said Dugger. “Lauren pretended to be an experimental subject.”
“But she was really in on the game?”
“Not a game, a study. Limited deception. It’s standard operating procedure in social psychology.”
“Limited?”
“When the studies are over, we always debrief the subjects.”
“You tell them they’ve been fooled.”
“We—Yes.”
“How do people react to being fooled, Doctor?”
“It’s no problem,” said Dugger. “We pay them well and they’re good-natured.”
“No one gets irate?” said Milo. “No one who might want to take it out on Lauren?”
“No, of course not,” said Dugger. “You can’t be serious. . . . Yes, I suppose you are. No, Detective, we’ve never had that kind of problem. We pretest our subjects, take only psychologically balanced people.”
“No weirdos even though it’s a psychology experiment.”
“I don’t deal with abnormal psychology.”
Milo said, “The client doesn’t want nutcases.”
Dugger scooted forward. “We’re not talking about anything strange here, Detective. This is quantitative marketing research.”
“Nothing sexy,” said Milo.
Dugger colored. “Nothing controversial. That’s the point, in marketing research one tries to establish norms, to define the typical. Deviance is our enemy. Nothing Lauren did for us could possibly have led to her death. Besides, her identity was always kept confidential.”
“But the subjects found out she’d fooled them.”
“Yes, but Lauren’s name and personal information were always kept confidential.” His chin quaked. “I can’t believe she’s . . . gone.”
“Tell me more about the study, sir.”
“Nothing about it could possibly be important to you.”
“Sir, this is a homicide investigation, and I need to know about the victim’s activities.”
The word victim made Dugger wince. His forehead was sweating, and he wiped it with his sleeve.
“Lauren,” he said. “It’s so … This is horrible, this is just horrible.” He shifted in his chair, played with his glasses. Stared at me and his eyes slitted. “The study Lauren’s been working on involves the geometry of personal space. How people configure themselves in various interpersonal situations. For example, if the client was a cosmetics company, they might want to know about the geometry of comfort zones.”
“How close people get to each other,” said Milo.
“How close people get to each other when they’re in varying social situations. How people approach each other.”
“Men and women?”
“Men and women, women and women, men and men, the influences of age, culture, distraction, physical attractiveness. That’s where Lauren fit in. She was very beautiful, and she served as our attractiveness confederate.”
“You wanted to know if guys got closer to good-looking as opposed to ugly women?”
“It’s not that simple.” Dugger smiled weakly. “Yes, I suppose that’s basically it.”
“How’d you come to hire Lauren, sir?”
“She answered an ad in the campus paper at the university. The ad was actually soliciting subjects—we were going to use a modeling agency to get confederates—but when we saw Lauren, we realized she might fit.”
“We?”
“My staff and I.” Dugger looked pained. The sky behind him dimmed, turning the ocean black, graying his face.
“Because of her looks,” said Milo.
“Not just her looks,” said Dugger. “It was also her bearing and her intelligence. She was—so bright. The experiment involves following complex sets of instructions that change from situation to situation.”
“Instructions about what?”
“Where to position oneself in a room, duration of pose, what to say, what not to say, nonverbal cues. There’s some scripting involved—ifthe subject says one thing, you say another. When not to talk. We use a special room with grid sensors in the floor that are tied in with our computers, so we can track placement and movement directly—” Dugger stopped. “You don’t want to hear this.”
“Actually, we do,” said Milo.
“That’s it, really. Lauren was attractive, extremely bright, able to follow directions, motivated, punctual.” Dugger’s glance wandered to the ceiling, then lowered. His right hand slid over its mate, and both his knees began bouncing.