Murder Theory Read online

  Lev texts me back: On it.

  “Who knows?” I tell Gallard. “We might know who this is real soon.”

  “Your guy can ‘read’ the DNA? Just like that?”

  “Yup. But that doesn’t mean it’ll contain anything worth reading. Our Jekyll may want to send a message, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to give up that easily.”

  Lev texts me back: Took the sequences and converted it to binary. Ran a search . . .

  I reply: And?

  Lev: I hate this fucker.

  Me: What???

  Lev: It’s Unicode. For an emoji . . .

  Me: Which one?

  Lev: You’re not going to like it . . .

  I hate Dr. Jekyll. I hate him with the white-hot fury of a thousand suns. The lives he’s ruined, the people who have died—he doesn’t care. It’s all a game to him.

  Fine, asshole. Play your game. Then ask yourself how the game ended for Oyo and Vik.

  “Now what?” asks Gallard.

  “We’re going to find him. But it’s not going to be pretty.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  FURY

  Half a century ago, a collection of bones was unearthed in Yorkshire, England, launching a debate that has yet to be settled. The bones, dating back to medieval times, had been chopped into fragments and resembled something out of a massacre.

  Some speculated it was cannibalism. Others weren’t convinced. As scientists found other unusual burial sites across Europe, a theory began to emerge.

  These adults and children may have been mutilated posthumously. The reason for doing so was to keep them from coming back from the dead.

  In Bulgaria, several skeletons have been found with stakes through their chest cavities—precisely how ancient lore says you kill a vampire.

  While I don’t think these people were actually besieged by the undead, I’m actually sympathetic to their conclusions. In the absence of modern science, a supernatural explanation is at least an explanation.

  As I sit in my hotel room looking at the video projection on the wall, trying to make sense of the red dots associated with Dr. Jekyll, I’m at a loss for a rational explanation.

  How did he choose his victims?

  Right now, all I have for certain is the virus itself and the cases involving people infected by it. I’ve made a number of unproven assumptions but have little else to go on.

  Jekyll could be a man or a woman. He could even be a group of people. For his part, Gallard tells me that his nascent profile suggests that Jekyll is a single person. Possibly with a high degree of academic experience but teaching at a small college or a place with less prestige. He could also be a lab technician with experience in virology who never went on to pursue a formal degree.

  Gallard also believes that there’s a nonzero chance this man (most likely a man) may have come from another country, with Russia and Ukraine leading candidates.

  That narrows it down to several hundred thousand possibilities.

  That’s why I’m staring at a map thinking about vampires. All of the crimes we’ve connected have been on the East Coast, but that may have more to do with the way the crime lab was collecting data. I see no reason why Dr. Jekyll couldn’t hop on a plane to Tempe, Arizona, and wreak a little havoc.

  Gallard speculated that Jekyll might be limited by where he could drive, as he might not want to leave a record with the TSA of where he’s been.

  For the sake of making my life easier, I’ve decided to put the cases into two categories. One category is Dunhill and the Pale brothers. These are people I believe may have been test subjects for Jekyll.

  In the other category I have Marcus.

  Although I can’t prove that the Oyo residence contained the disease vector, I strongly believe that Jekyll was at that crime scene. I think that’s where he infected Marcus and the other techs by spraying their masks with his virus.

  When I ask myself why, I don’t have any good answers. Did Marcus piss him off? Was Jekyll getting bolder, trying to taunt the FBI directly? Maybe.

  There’s also the question of why he chose that site.

  Gallard suggests that Jekyll may be a lurker, someone who gets a thrill out of visiting crime scenes.

  While I don’t dispute that, I think there’s something more to it. I keep going back to my earlier hypothesis that perhaps Jekyll was there to gather research material.

  Could he have been looking for killer viruses?

  A viral component to violent behavior might be too convenient a scapegoat for our murderous past, but it’s not impossible. Stranger things have happened.

  While struggling to figure out what the life cycle is for Hyde, or how it could emerge, I’ve come up with another hypothesis for an imaginary pathogen that follows along the same logic as Ophiocordyceps unilateralis—the zombie-ant fungus.

  I had been thinking about a pathogen that affected humans in literally the same way, but what if I took a higher-level approach and looked at the pathogen from that perspective?

  Ophiocordyceps unilateralis makes ants climb until they’re in a strategic position to distribute the fungus: in this case, by killing the host, bursting out of its brain, and dropping spores all over the unsuspecting ants that wander by.

  A virus wants to spread. That is, viruses that have the genetic tools for spreading are more likely to survive and propagate.

  I keep thinking about Hyde in a modern context. But what about Hyde in the context of the majority of human history, when we lived primarily in small tribes of a few hundred people?

  It was much harder for a virus to spread back then. Our immune systems were vulnerable, maybe more so than today, to viruses (and maybe less so to bacteria); rare interactions with outside pathogens could easily be fatal.

  European diseases wiped out millions of Native Americans. The ancient Greeks may have been pushed to near collapse from early forms of Ebola that made it all the way up to Athens from Africa.

  So, in an age when viruses didn’t have airplanes or even established trading routes, how did they spread? Or did they?

  Plagues may have been an extreme rarity in Neolithic times, unlike their regular frequency from the Bronze Age forward.

  There are other vectors for spreading pathogens—including atmospheric air currents that can send them around the world, which would only work for the heartier kind of bugs that can handle the UV exposure.

  But for a virus like Hyde, which may not survive long in the open air, how could it get from place to place?

  My scary theory is that a virus like Hyde may have been more common in hunter-gatherer populations. When it was time to spread, Hyde would cause an increased amount of aggression, which would lead to intertribal conflict, possibly victimizing women and children first, and ultimately causing the tribe to venture away from their locale to attack another tribe and deliver Hyde to that population.

  It’s a harebrained theory for which I have no supporting proof, but it’s a starting point. I now have one idea on how Hyde could find it advantageous to turn the hosts homicidal.

  The weak evidence I have to support this is the extremely high homicide rate of hunter-gatherer societies, even to this day.

  There’s even the notion that weak infection with Hyde could make you slightly more aggressive, and if enough of your population acts slightly aggressively, it would still result in higher rates of homicide and a greater chance of belligerence.

  I can see how Hyde’s becoming a dangerous catchall theory. I can also think of a million different ways I’d try to test for it. I’m sure Dr. Jekyll has, too . . .

  Do you even know what you’ve found, Jekyll? Why have you done this with it instead of telling the world?

  In case he did try, I’ve looked for research papers in hopes of finding Dr. Jekyll but have come up blank. Nothing I’ve found describes Hyde. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t try to publish.

  It’s a morbid thought to think that he caused all this mayhem because some research jour
nal rejected him.

  Find him and you can ask him all the questions you want . . .

  But how to find this man?

  I’m at a dead end. I need to step outside and get a breath of fresh air . . .

  Vectors. Vectors. What are his vectors? Try to connect the dots of Dunhill, Pale, and Oyo . . . What do they all have in common?

  What is the persistent thought at the back of my mind? Yes, I’d like to talk to him. He’s a student of death, just like me. What else do he and I have in common?

  We’ve both been in the same places. Three at least. While I visited the Pale house and Dunhill’s beach because of what Jekyll did, I found Oyo because of what Oyo did. Or rather, what I did to uncover him . . .

  Am I a vector?

  I check my watch. It’s still early in Montana. I call Bill McDougall, the attorney who is handling Joe Vik’s estate.

  Currently the families of Vik’s victims are suing the estate for damages. Vik left behind a large amount of money and no heirs because he murdered them all.

  “Hello?” says McDougall.

  “Hello, I was wondering, was there a posthumous MRI done of Joe Vik?”

  “You again? How come I never heard back? I could have used that in the pretrial hearing.”

  Oops. I was afraid of this, as I’m not exactly McDougall’s favorite person.

  “I’m sorry . . . I’ve been swamped.”

  “You can’t even pick up the phone? Yeah, I had the MRI done and sent the files and blood samples like you asked. But you never responded. Oh, and another thing? Nobody even heard of you. What are you, some kind of quack trying to write a book? I’ll sue your ass if you use those scans.”

  Oh my. McDougall thinks I’m someone else—someone who asked for MRI scans and blood samples from Joe Vik’s corpse.

  I have to tread carefully.

  “I’m terribly sorry. Can you tell me what address you sent them to?”

  “Ugh. Hold on. Let me have you talk to my assistant.” I’m embarrassed by my own excitement.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  VECTOR

  The Beaman Pack & Ship hasn’t had a visitor since it closed at 6:00 p.m. I’ve been waiting for three days outside this small North Carolina shipping store in the hopes that Dr. Jekyll will come pay a visit to his post office box. So far he hasn’t reared his head, as far as I can tell.

  PO Box 44 is the address he gave McDougall. The name he gave was Watson Franklin Crick—the three last names of the codiscoverers of DNA. Ha ha.

  I placed a small camera above the door, disguised as an old alarm unit. The owners, an elderly couple, haven’t noticed it yet. It helped me find Oyo—it’d be stupid not to try it again.

  The camera transmits a signal that I can pick up on my computer, showing every face that walks inside the shop. I can then compare each person to a database of faces pulled from social media and DMV records. It’s fairly comprehensive.

  The owners of the store drew a complete blank regarding who rented the post office box. They had a hazy recollection of a young black teenager bringing in a certified check and prefilled paperwork.

  No doubt an intermediary for Jekyll, someone hired from TaskRabbit or a service like that.

  That said, I’ve been keeping an eye out for the kid as well. Who knows? He could be some angry young genius.

  If Jekyll’s smart—and not just about biology—he has probably decided only to use this mailbox sparingly. He asked for Vik’s records months ago, so it might’ve been a onetime-use situation.

  Back in DC, Gallard’s trying to find out if a similar ruse was used for the other murders.

  My phone vibrates. It’s Jillian. I was supposed to call her an hour ago.

  “Hey, babe,” I answer into my Bluetooth.

  “When you’re dating a mad genius, at what point do you decide he’s more mad than genius? Asking for a friend.”

  I sigh. “I wish I knew.”

  Jillian knows the broad strokes of what I’m up to. I’m not sure if she’s truly distressed or has simply resigned herself to the fact I’m going to vanish on a whim.

  “I guess you wouldn’t. You’d be the last to know, right?”

  “Probably. My internal compass is no guide to what’s normal.”

  She laughs. “We went hunting for corpses on our first date.”

  I watch a homeless man in camo pants and a thick black peacoat shamble down the street. He’s got a leathery face and sun-bleached hair. I’d guess his age as midfifties.

  He stops at a trash can in front of an old movie theater and reaches inside. His hand comes up empty, and he curses aloud.

  “You there?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. I’m just watching someone suspicious.”

  “You looked in a mirror lately?”

  “Har, har. How’s the bakery?”

  “Fine. How’s the serial-killer hunt?”

  “Uneventful.”

  I crouch down in my seat as the homeless man gets closer to the shipping store. Although I’m parked in an alley down and out of direct view, I’m the only one here right now and must look a little suspicious.

  “That doesn’t sound very inspiring.”

  “It’s not,” I whisper.

  The homeless man checks the door of the store, looks over his shoulder, then enters.

  “Theo?”

  “Gotta go.”

  I climb out of my car, carefully closing the door without slamming it. When I’m sure the homeless guy can’t see me, I cross the street and hide behind the small brick divider between the shipping store and the real-estate office next to it.

  I peer around the corner but can’t see what the man is up to because of some stupid signs placed on the windows. And my video feed is only visible on my laptop.

  I could get a closer look, but if I spook him, that would be game over.

  Instead I have to wait.

  I spend an eternity waiting for the sound of the door to open again. Too afraid to check my phone, I can only listen and count my breaths.

  Finally, the door opens again.

  I push myself flat in case he walks this way. The steps go back the way he came.

  I peer around the corner and spot the man halfway down the strip mall. I start following, keeping enough of a distance that my footsteps don’t alarm him.

  He reaches the corner of the structure and walks around it. Damn. Did he see me?

  I pick up my pace and race to the corner. When I reach the end of the walkway and turn toward the parking lot, the man is getting ready to climb a chain-link fence.

  Now what?

  “Wait!” I yell to him.

  The man sees me and then starts to pull himself up faster.

  I reach him right as he’s about to throw a leg over the top. “Stop!” I grab at his ankle.

  He kicks at me, hitting me in the nose. I stumble backward but catch myself before he climbs over.

  With my right hand, I grab the fabric of his pants. With my left hand, I pull the stun gun from my pocket and send a crippling charge into his leg.

  “Fuck!” he screams.

  I yank him down. He crashes into me, and I shove him to the ground.

  Terrified eyes look up at me. “I just . . . I just wanted something to wipe my ass with!” He pulls the corner of a FedEx envelope out of his pocket.

  “Who are you?” I demand.

  “D-D . . . Don Spilling,” he stutters.

  “Prove it.”

  He fumbles in his pocket and pulls out a leather wallet attached to a chain. “H-h-here.”

  I glance down at a driver’s license. It could be real, but that doesn’t prove anything. For all I know, he could have checked the mailbox, then grabbed the envelope as a ruse.

  “Get up,” I order him.

  “Who—who are you?”

  I activate the stun gun, triggering hissing blue sparks. “Follow me.”

  I lead him over to my rented SUV and make him sit on the curb while I watch the video replay of
my camera aimed inside the store.

  True to his word, Don walked inside the store and started riffling through the mailing displays, looking for something to do his business with. He never even glanced at the boxes.

  “You a cop?” asks Don.

  “No.” I pull my wallet from my pocket and take out all the bills. About two hundred dollars. I hand them all to Don.

  “What’s this?”

  “My penalty for being an asshole. I’m sorry. I’m real sorry.”

  Don counts the bills. “I’ve had worse happen.”

  “You live around here?” I ask.

  “No. Just making my way through to Tampa.”

  “You need anything? Like a phone or something?”

  Don pulls out an older Android phone. “My sister got this for me.”

  “I’m sorry again. How long you been in Beaman?”

  “About a week.”

  I look across the street at the shipping store. “Want to stick around a little longer and make a thousand bucks?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  RUSH

  “Halsey, Virginia,” says Gallard over the phone. “A week ago. A guy flipped out and killed the parking-patrol officer who was writing a ticket.”

  “What makes you think this is related?” I ask.

  “They found his wife and kids dead at the house. I know someone in the police department there. I’ll see if we can get a blood sample, but it sounds a lot like your Hyde virus.”

  “Maybe,” I reply. “But people have been freaking out long before this. When did it happen?”

  “Five days ago.”

  I feel gut punched. I was hunting Jekyll by then. If it was him, then these deaths happened on my watch. “Damn it! We can’t watch ’em stack up like this.”

  “I know, kid. But what can we do? You spent how many days watching that mailbox? I’m working my end. I even have some guys doing some after-hours digging. I owe some big favors.”

  “We need to do more.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I sometimes imagine what I’d do if I had every resource in the world. Even that doesn’t help. I don’t know what this guy looks like. I don’t know anything about him other than he has a science background. You know more than I do.”