Murder Theory Read online

  “Mr. Clay? I need you to hold this.” I slide his wrists free, then place his hand over the wound and press. “Hold it tight. I’m going to call for help.”

  I set the light down and reach for my phone. The hair rises on the back of my neck again as a familiar sound rings through the air—Thomas’s dog collar.

  I can hear him run down the steps behind me, and then a cold nose touches my hand.

  “Looks like my helper is here, Mr. Clay.”

  Thomas walks over and sniffs the man. Clay makes an effort with his other hand to pat the dog but is too weak to complete the motion.

  Thomas doesn’t seem bothered. He sits and watches.

  My phone lights up, and I dial 911.

  “Nine-one-one Emergency Services. What area are you calling from?”

  “The house directly behind 4428 Worth Avenue. I have a man here who I believe has been stabbed. I need a paramedic at this location and a police unit to respond to 4428 Worth and apprehend Robert Pale.”

  “Hold on one moment . . . May I have your name, please?”

  “My name is . . .”

  I freeze.

  “I’m sorry, what was that again?”

  Someone’s walking down the basement stairs. Thomas didn’t get here by himself.

  I’ve been in too many scrapes at this point to make the same mistakes. The first time I had my ass kicked outside a diner in Montana, I realized that I was wholly unprepared for that kind of thing.

  I’ll never forget the pathetic face Jillian made at me when I stumbled into her restaurant, looking to her like some john who got rolled by a hooker and her pimp.

  That was a long time ago.

  Time to move.

  I roll away from Mr. Clay and shine my flashlight directly at the sound on the stairs.

  “Fucker!” screams Robert.

  No sight of the man, but I hear a hollow metal clang. He’s got a pipe or a metal bat.

  It doesn’t matter.

  I am already on my feet and closing the distance between us as quickly as possible, flashlight off. At the last moment, I put my arms in front of my face and launch myself at where I think his body should be.

  I make contact, and the two of us fall onto the basement stairs. A hand reaches up and grabs at my face, trying to claw at my skin.

  I unleash a barrage of punches at his head. Some of them hit the steps; some of them land. I clutch his hair in my left hand and start pounding my right fist into his left temple.

  The hand trying to claw me goes limp. I let up for a moment and check his pulse on his neck.

  He’s still alive.

  Now I’m faced with a dilemma. I don’t have any handcuffs.

  I need to check on Mr. Clay but can’t risk Robert attacking me.

  I grab him by his wrists and drag him off the stairs and drop him next to where the flashlight landed. Thomas comes over and inspects him but seems indifferent to what’s happened.

  I search Robert for a belt and come up short. I take mine off and cinch it around his wrists then hog-tie it around his ankles.

  It’s not the best binding, but if I keep my eye on him, it should be enough.

  I return to Mr. Clay. “You hanging in there?” Groan.

  His hand has fallen from his side. I put mine there and press hard. My other hand searches for my phone.

  “Hello?” I call into the phone.

  “Are you okay?” asks the dispatcher.

  I hide my sore knuckles in my armpit. “Yes. But we’re going to need two ambulances.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ECHO CHAMBER

  I’m sitting on the curb, rubbing my knuckles, as paramedics load Mr. Clay into one ambulance and Robert Pale into another.

  There are seven police cruisers in the street, and what few people who live in this neighborhood have gathered just outside the imaginary boundary to watch.

  Thomas is sitting on the curb next to me, watching Detective Duffy as she has an animated discussion with her superiors. Occasionally a finger is pointed in my direction. I simply stay seated and pet Thomas.

  Duffy breaks away and walks toward me. I can’t read her expression, but I don’t think she’s bringing me good news.

  She stands over me like a giant. “Holy crap, Dr. Cray. How hard would it have been to call me up and say, ‘Hey, I think there’s something weird going on—you should check it out’?”

  “You knew there was something going on,” I reply.

  “Yes . . . but . . . who gave you the authority to go into the other house?”

  “Authority.” I say the word as if it’s a foreign expression I’ve heard for the very first time. “What about me makes you think that’s a word I care for or yield to?”

  “We don’t get to write our own rules.”

  “Of course we do. We do it all the time. I could lead you down the sequence of events that led me to decide that someone was either dead or dying in that house, but there’s really no point. How is Mr. Clay?”

  “The paramedics say he’s going to make it. Robert Pale, too, if you care.”

  “I do,” I reply, massaging my swelling right hand.

  “From the look of his face, I’d say otherwise.”

  “I had a gun on me. I could have shot him.”

  “What? You didn’t tell me you were armed.”

  “I have DoD authorization. My point is I could have shot Pale as he walked down the steps.”

  “Instead you fractured his jaw and gave him a concussion.”

  “I’d put it another way: I risked bodily harm to myself to avoid killing him.”

  She shakes her head. “This is why I’m talking to you instead of Captain Schmidt interrogating you right now. When he comes over, you need to tell him that Robert Pale swung at you with the bat while you were helping Mr. Clay.”

  “I can say something to that effect.”

  “Something to that effect? Whatever.” She pats her leg. “Guess who’s coming home with me?”

  “That’s very kind of you,” I reply.

  She flips me off as Thomas comes running up to her. She pats the dog and leads him down the street to her car.

  I stand up and cross my arms, thinking things over. When Duffy’s captain approaches me, I’m still lost in thought, trying to put the details in order.

  “Dr. Cray? I hope I’m not disturbing you,” he says sarcastically.

  I resist the urge to say that he is. “Sorry. Crazy night.”

  “So, you heard moaning coming from the house?”

  This is new. I glance over at Detective Duffy as she puts Thomas into the back seat. She’s watching me.

  “There was moaning coming from inside the house.” This is true. Maybe not audible to a human, but true.

  “And that led you to go inside, where you found Mr. Clay?”

  “I was suspicious and went inside.”

  “And that’s when Robert Pale returned, probably to finish Mr. Clay off?”

  “Possibly.”

  “And you tried to pass him on the stairs?”

  “We collided. He seemed very agitated.”

  Schmidt nods. “Okay. Good enough for me.” He reaches out his hand. “I’d like to thank you for your help. I’m sorry your research took a dramatic turn, but I’m sure Mr. Clay’s family is grateful.”

  “What about Robert Pale?” I ask.

  Duffy returns without Thomas and listens to the conversation.

  “We’ll have Pale checked out and then take him to lockup. With any luck he’ll be in a cell next to his brother,” says the captain.

  “You need to have Robert get a full MRI. I’ll give you the name of a doctor in Atlanta. Send her the scans. She needs to have a look at them.”

  “For what?” asks Duffy.

  “I didn’t kill Robert because I think he may be just as much of a victim as Mr. Clay. The same as his brother.”

  “What kind of bullshit is that?” asks the captain.

  “The brothers may have been infec
ted with a pathogen that makes them prone to violence.” I think this over. “First Benjamin, then his brother. But why the delay?” I ask rhetorically.

  “Hold up, there,” says Duffy. “Are you saying they got infected with something that made them violent?”

  “It’s a theory.”

  “A bullshit theory,” says Schmidt.

  “Any theory without sufficient evidence is bullshit. True. That’s what I’m trying to find out. The curious thing is that neither Dunhill’s nor the Pale brothers’ environments were remotely like the one where Marcus may have been infected.”

  “What is he talking about?” Schmidt asks Duffy.

  “Hell if I know.”

  “Sorry,” I reply. “Just sorting things out aloud. I was expecting some kind of dank murder-dungeon hangout. In both cases I found neither.”

  “I’ll leave you two alone,” says Schmidt, walking away.

  “Do I need a paramedic for you?” asks Duffy.

  “No. I’m fine. This is me being very confused. I’ve been operating under some assumptions. They’ve turned out to be false, yet the signal is much stronger than I . . .”

  She cocks her head, waiting for me to finish. But the world is falling out from under me as the realization hits.

  “Holy shit,” I mutter.

  “Dr. Cray?”

  “Theo. Call me Theo. Excuse me. Holy crap,” I say. No.

  Damn it, no.

  I’m feeling cold, exhilarated, dizzy, focused. I’m high on endorphins as something clicks together and terrifies me.

  “No!”

  “Theo?”

  I take off running through the yard and vault the back fence. A group of uniformed cops stares at me in confusion as I bound up the stairs and into the Pale home. Far back in the distance, Detective Duffy is yelling at me.

  I race into the living room and dump the toolbox over at the base of the wall heating unit. I sort through the tools, searching for a Phillips head, and find one. As I start on the corner of the heating unit, I stop.

  Duffy comes running in. “What the hell?”

  I pull a bag of paper air masks from my pocket and hand one to her. “Wear this,” I command as I slide one over my head. “Don’t let anyone else come into the house.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Just do it!”

  “Do we need the bomb squad?”

  I stare at her. “No. Make sure nobody comes inside.”

  She rushes to the back to yell at the other cops, then returns to the living room as I’m unfastening the screws on the plate over the heater. I set them aside then pull the vent off the wall.

  There’s a spongelike material covering the heating coils.

  It’s dark black and has a porous texture.

  “Don’t touch anything!” I yell at Duffy as I run to the kitchen.

  I yank open drawers and search the cabinets until I find what I’m looking for, a large roll of plastic wrap. I race back to the living room and unroll a long sheet and wind it over and around the material and the entire wall unit.

  “Go to the fuse box and pull out the one that says central heating or something like that.”

  Duffy obliges while I add another layer of wrap to the unit, taking extra care to go around the edges. When I’m satisfied that I’ve contained the unit, I sit on the floor and stare up at it—amazed and terrified.

  “What’s going on?” asks Duffy.

  “Ask your captain to call whoever handles bioterrorism threats—whoever you’d call if you had anthrax or something like that—and have them send a containment crew.”

  “Oh shit,” she breathes, peering at the foam under the plastic wrap. “Is that the pathogen?”

  I nod, trying to figure out the implications of all this.

  “Are we safe?” she asks.

  “Probably. I think. Unless he decides to go after either of us.”

  “Who? Robert Pale?”

  I slowly shake my head. “No. The man who put this here. The Pale brothers, Dunhill, Marcus, the others in my files. They weren’t accidentally infected.” I measure my words, because I don’t like what I’m about to say. “They were targeted. Someone deliberately turned them into killers.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  MICROGRAPHIA

  The monitor in front of me displays a grayscale universe alien to my own experience. Fibers crisscross a plain so boundless that if I were to climb onto one of them and walk to the edge of the plain, it would be like trying to cross a continent.

  Veronica Woodley, the Penn State professor operating the electron microscope, is watching my expression. We’re literally on a fishing expedition and our search area is the size of an ocean.

  I talked the Raskin police into letting me take a few samples of the air filter in the wall heater from the Pale residence. I sent one to the FBI, another to my lab back in Austin, and brought the third to Veronica. Our paths have crossed at conferences, and we seem to share a maverick attitude when it comes to science.

  Trying to spot the pathogen with the electron microscope, not knowing anything about its kingdom, size, or appearance, is a foolhardy endeavor. But I had to see the real scene of the crime with my own eyes—albeit enhanced by an electron microscope.

  When you start to see the world through magnification, the deeper you go with more powerful tools, you begin to realize that the world we’re familiar with is just the thin skin on the outer surface of a metaphorical apple.

  Glass balls filled with water and other simple instruments were used to observe objects on a micro level, hundreds and even thousands of years ago, but it wasn’t until a few hundred years ago that we started making the great leaps forward as glass-making technology improved dramatically.

  Robert Hooke’s 1665 book Micrographia revolutionized the way we looked at common objects and life-forms. He made detailed anatomical illustrations of fleas, showed us what a fly’s eye looked like up close, and coined one of the most important terms in all of biology when he noticed the particular structure of plants and called the base unit a cell.

  Just a few years later, his secretive contemporary, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, shattered what we understood about the world around us when he looked through his specially designed microscope and discovered that there were entire kingdoms of organisms that couldn’t be seen with the naked eye.

  He was the first person ever to see an individual bacterium and prove once and for all that there were worlds beyond the one we knew. Belief in “humors,” spirits, and other supernatural components of our world faded quickly away as we realized that illness and life itself could be better explained on a microscopic scale.

  Veronica centers on a group of sharp-edged boulders. “That would be old-fashioned house dust.” She spins a dial, and the image flashes over to a different location. “Let’s zoom in to a fiber. You said this air filter was on a heater?”

  “Yeah. A gas heater. There was a small blower at the back. This was just stuck over it,” I explain.

  “Interesting. A heater would kill most things over time, or at least dry them out. I don’t see any dust mites.”

  A fiber grows larger until the surface fills the screen. “We can see some common fungi at this level.” She points to a fibrous mat at the edge of the image. “They can look like that. Of course, they can look like anything. What magnification do you want me to use?”

  “Good question. Try anything.”

  While we’re visually inspecting the material, my lab is running two other tests. One is a simple filtration assay. They soak the sample in purified water and then let it drip through a series of filters with increasingly smaller diameters.

  Big things like dust mites, which are large enough to be a house cat in Abraham Lincoln’s lap on the back side of a penny, get caught at the top layer.

  Heftier bacteria tend to get snared a few layers below, and so on, until the smallest layer, where we can collect viruses that aren’t too small.

  This process can be h
elpful when spotting known organisms and families, but nature plays by its own rules, and recently we’ve discovered bacteria as small as viruses and viruses as big as bacteria. And there are proteins like prions that behave a lot like viruses in some respects but are technically not life, because they don’t have DNA or RNA.

  While I have my suspicions about the pathogen, they’re only that. This could be a devious protein or some kind of brain amoeba with a complex genetic structure.

  The third process, and the most hopeful, is the genetic assay my lab is conducting. We’ve taken a sample of the foam and washed all of the beasties living and dead into a chemical bath, in which we’ll extract their DNA en masse, then feed it all into a sequencer.

  This is the equivalent of taking all the animals in a zoo, putting them into a blender, and then looking at the genes in the resulting soup.

  In theory, unless you were looking for a specific gene, you wouldn’t know if a particular sequence came from a parrot, a rhinoceros, or bacteria in the monkeys’ stomachs. In theory . . .

  I have an updated approach to whole-genome sequencing that uses some algorithms to speed up the computational requirements of sorting all the genes in the soup into different organisms by looking for certain markers that indicate genome length and frequency and making first-pass guesses based on a machine-learning model. It’s how I spend my Friday nights.

  The short of it is that I think we can get a good inventory of what the hell is in the filter—as long as it’s not something that doesn’t use DNA or RNA. Then I’m fucked.

  Stanley Prusiner spent years trying to convince people that prions were a real thing and the likely cause of mad cow disease. Although he won a Nobel Prize for his research, some people are still skeptical. This doesn’t give me much help if I can’t find a pathogen similar to one we understand.

  All of this has me anxious. I take out my phone and call Sheila.

  “Hey, boss man, what’s up?”

  “I wanted to check on the lab tests and see how they’re coming.”

  “Oh, one sec.” She puts me on hold for a moment. “Todd Pogue put those on hold. He told the lab to get back to whatever they were doing before.”