Murder Theory Read online

  Damn it. Rayner squealed. Why? Did he have some deal with them? Was he already under investigation?

  It doesn’t matter. The FBI has a suspect, and they’re going to come knocking on my door any day now . . . literally.

  I feel my lungs start to tighten. Everything is collapsing around me. Hubris. Pure hubris.

  You thought you were smarter than them, Theo. But did you really think you were smarter than all of them?

  To be sure, I thought I had the advantage of being a loner.

  While they wasted cognitive overhead trying to decide among themselves what to do, I could act nimbly and outsmart them—until they turned their focus on me.

  I should call Mary Karlin in Los Angeles. She’s sharp.

  I’m about to tell Gallard I need to go, then realize that I don’t want to call Karlin just yet. If I’m already lawyered up by the time the FBI arrives, it’ll only make them more suspicious. It’s better if I let them take me in, then call her, then try to preempt any questioning.

  I think.

  Questions . . . that’s how it will start. They’ll have questions for me. They’ll want to know why I was in North Carolina buying tissue from Rayner.

  If I don’t tell them anything, that will delay them. All they have, I think, is Rayner’s word against mine.

  Wait a second . . . what if he’s their suspect? I’m sure Gallard’s being straight with me, but what if he’s jumping to conclusions? There’s no doubt I’d be a person of interest if my name came up . . . especially if Rayner pointed my face out. But I am a semipublic person. Rayner’s a more natural suspect.

  There’s also another angle I can exploit. Maybe.

  I talk myself off the ledge a little, but only a fraction of an inch.

  “What else have you got?” I ask.

  “What else? I just told you that they’re about to charge you with a felony!”

  “I didn’t do what they think I did. What about the photos? The seven men? What happened with that?”

  “We identified six of them. The seventh, there wasn’t a lot to go on. We don’t have a name. Nobody remembered him being around for more than a few minutes.”

  The paramedic. He had on a hat and shaded glasses and kept to the outer edges of the crime scene. I remember he went over to assist one of the forensic people who’d accidentally cut himself.

  “It was the paramedic? Right?”

  “Yeah. We’re trying to figure out which ambulance service he worked for.”

  “He doesn’t,” I reply. “That’s Jekyll. That’s the man we’ve been looking for.”

  Gallard takes his time to respond. “What makes you so sure?”

  “What’s the one person you’ll let into any building without question? A paramedic. A fireman makes you wonder where’s the fire. A cop arouses too much attention. Nobody wants to stop a man on the way to save a life.” I should know. I was a paramedic for a short period of time. An uncomfortable new connection between Jekyll and me. “He probably calls in the incident himself sometimes. Plenty of ambulances show up, and he fits right in.”

  “He . . . uh, treated someone,” says Gallard.

  “I know. Have you talked to the tech and asked them what happened? Maybe the paramedic created an opportunity to talk to them. Maybe he spotted a preexisting injury and offered to change the bandage.”

  “Damn.” Gallard is thinking this over.

  “We need to check the 911 calls around the other crime scenes. Want to bet that they had someone calling an ambulance there, too?”

  “I know it makes sense, Theo. But I don’t know if we have anything else to go on . . . especially because of the chaos you created at Butcher Creek.”

  “Do I have to remind you that the only reason we know what he looks like is because of the chaos I may or may not have created?”

  I take his silence as assent.

  Finally, he speaks. “What are you going to do now?”

  “Make sure my girlfriend knows how to reach my attorney.”

  I crawl into bed with Jillian and stare up at the ceiling.

  My mind is pulled in a lot of different directions. At this point there’s no point worrying about all the possibilities. They’re endless.

  I tell Alexa to play my audiobook for ten minutes until I fall asleep.

  A moment later I’m wrapped in the comforting arms of John Lee’s narration as he tells the story of the lives affected by the construction of a fictional medieval cathedral in Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth.

  My mind begins to forget my earthly troubles a few minutes before the audiobook fades out and I drift off to sleep.

  I wake up as Jillian is getting back into bed and crawling underneath my arm. She places her head on my shoulder and holds me tightly. The sun is just starting to appear as a glow through the blinds.

  “You okay?” I ask. I have a vague memory of a dream where there was someone knocking on the door.

  “Yeah. I sent them away.”

  It wasn’t a dream. “Who?”

  “The FBI agents. They wanted to talk to you. I told them you were sleeping.” She yawns.

  “Oh,” I reply. “You don’t seem too surprised.”

  “I’m not anymore. Now shut up and sleep or play your audiobook. I have to bake sixty pies tomorrow.” Then she adds, “And possibly a metal file inside a cake.”

  I hold her tightly, afraid to let go.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  PERSON OF INTEREST

  “Dr. Cray, can you tell us what you were doing in Kentucky last week?” asks the sandy-haired FBI agent who looks young enough to get stopped for truancy.

  I glance at my attorney. Ron Holman nods to me. “I was there on business.” I reply with the answer he gave me.

  “And what exactly is the nature of your business?” asks Agent Lyford.

  Lyford is sitting in the conference room next to Agent Llewellyn, who looks barely older than he does, although the wedding ring implies she’s at least of the legal age to marry in Texas.

  I look at my attorney again. He nods.

  “I can’t divulge the nature of my work,” I reply.

  “For god’s sake, can you answer a question like an adult without having to turn to your attorney every time?” grumbles Agent Boyd Gordon, their immediate supervisor in the Austin field office.

  “Sure,” says Ron Holman. “If you want to turn off the recorders and grant my client complete immunity. No? Then as long as we’re voluntarily cooperating, please allow my client to answer each question in his own time.”

  Holman warned me about Gordon’s explosive temper—that he’d try to bully me into faster responses and get me to trip up.

  I don’t plan to let Gordon push me around. Underneath the table I am holding a pen. I won’t let myself answer a question until I’ve uncapped it and recapped it. It’s a silly little trick I’m using to avoid implicating myself—which I have a habit of doing.

  “All right. Can you explain to me why you can’t tell us the nature of your business?” asks Gordon.

  Holman explains, “As we told you, Dr. Cray runs a top-secret research lab funded by the Department of Defense. I can’t even ask him what he does, because attorney-client privilege doesn’t cover state secrets of this level. You’ll have to get a federal court order to allow him to explain—and even then, the DoD will want the right to clear any statements. And if you continue to badger him on that, I’ll have to ask that they send an attorney here as well.”

  Gordon’s face flickers with frustration. The last thing he wants is me sitting here with two attorneys—one of them a government lawyer.

  “For crying out loud. Can you at least tell me they know what you were up to?”

  “Yes,” replies Holman. “I spoke to General Figueroa. He authorized me to say that he was fully aware of Dr. Cray’s whereabouts.”

  “And he was sanctioned by the government?” asks Gordon.

  “As it was explained to me,” says Holman.

 
He’s exaggerating considerably, but he made it a point to tell me not to give him anything other than the barest amount of information about what I did, so that he could spin it however he felt necessary.

  “So . . . Dr. Cray was in North Carolina on government business that may or may not have involved buying human tissue from a body-part dealer?”

  “I can’t speak to any of that,” says Holman. “But I can assure you that Dr. Cray fully understands the laws concerning human body parts, and if he were ever to acquire them for research, he’d only pay the legally allowed fees for preparation and transportation.”

  “And the cameras in the woods by the Butcher Creek crime scene? He had nothing to do with them?”

  “We’ll need to contact the Department of Defense if you have any more questions about Dr. Cray’s purpose for his visit to North Carolina.”

  Gordon rolls his eyes in frustration. This isn’t his office’s case. He was asked by the Kentucky FBI field office to interview me here in Texas. He wasn’t expecting I’d show up with a lawyer and start hinting that if I was involved in this, it might be some hush-hush, secret government research.

  That, of course, could still lead to an FBI investigation, but if there’s no murder, no stolen money, and no secrets going to the Russians, their degree of enthusiasm in pursuing this will drop dramatically.

  Even the mention of a Defense Department lawyer defending me has Gordon deciding that he’d rather be doing something else instead of grilling me.

  Gordon turns his wrath upon his own agents. “So, we got a witness in North Carolina who says Cray bought a bunch of dead bodies off him and then they show up in a national park all hacked to pieces like one of those awful movies my daughter watches? Is that it?”

  “Yes,” says Lyford. “There are a number of statutes involving human-tissue trafficking, disposal, and probably a dozen others.”

  “And how many of them happened in Austin?”

  “Just his lab,” says Llewellyn. “We don’t know what goes on there.”

  “Nor should we,” says Gordon. He turns to me. “Maybe you’re a weirdo and in between interfering with investigations you like to play serial-killer pretend. Right now, I don’t care. If I get asked to arrest you so the Kentucky office can pick you up, I will. Other than that”—he shrugs—“I find it hard to make myself give a damn. If those idiots out there couldn’t tell an autopsied body from a murder victim, then that’s their problem.” Gordon nods to my lawyer. “Take your client and leave.”

  “We’re letting him go?” asks Llewellyn.

  “Kentucky wanted us to interview him. We did,” says Gordon.

  “We’ve still got more questions from them.”

  “They’re not going to tell you anything.”

  “Thank you,” says Holman as he takes my elbow and begins to usher me away.

  “You’re welcome,” growls Gordon. “Llewellyn will see you out.”

  She stands up and gives me a scowl. “This way.”

  I keep my mouth shut until Holman and I are outside the building and sitting in a coffee shop five blocks away.

  “You got lucky,” says Holman as we sit down with our drinks.

  “How do you figure?”

  “Gordon sized you up on the spot. He thinks you’re a weirdo, which I have to agree with, but he figures you’re a government weirdo and more trouble than it’s worth.”

  “Well, then, I guess it’s good, then.”

  “I don’t know. Here’s the thing: it might have been better if we got your DoD lawyer in there and answered all their questions. If Kentucky sets its sights on you, they’re not going to go easy. They’ll dig up whatever evidence they can, get their witness to swear up and down that you’re Jack the Ripper, and get a federal judge who won’t be intimidated by the Department of Defense.

  “As your attorney speaking, let’s pretend you did the things they think you might have done. Your only way out of it will be to plea bargain, and that still means hard time.

  “Otherwise, they’ll have you tied up in federal court for years. If the DoD decides that it’s easier to cut you loose than answer a bunch of questions, you’ll be doubly, pardon the expression, fucked.

  “This Butcher Creek incident is hugely embarrassing to them. They’re going to want to blame somebody. If the body dealer says it’s you, then the FBI’s not going to let it go. They need a fall guy. Who better than Theo Cray?”

  No good deed involving pseudo–mass murder and cannibalism goes unpunished.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  INTERFERENCE

  I’m sitting across from Jillian at a bistro table next to the window inside her bakery. Cars drive past in the parking lot while the aroma of baked apple pie fills the air. She has her hands around a coffee cup.

  “I’ve been thinking about getting a commercial-grade machine. Maybe a Keurig or something easy to maintain.” She looks around the small dining area of three tables and a counter. “I don’t want to turn this into a Starbucks, but it might be nice if people could get a cup of good coffee when they’re here.”

  I nod and reply half-absentmindedly, “Coffee is so subjective.”

  “True. I’ve been paying attention to the different coffee shops around here.” She opens her blue spiral notebook. “Petite Café is pretty decent in the early-morning rush, but then the quality goes down. I think they don’t change the filters or clean out the grounds. The Velvet Donut is pretty mediocre all day long, but I estimate they make just as much from coffee as food. If I use a pod system, the cost per cup goes way up, but it’s easier to maintain. I did the math, and one person could run the shop, serve five times the coffee, and still make it work.”

  I look at her handwritten tables. “Impressive. I didn’t know baking was so math intensive.”

  “It is after living with you. I could do a special, like coffee and a muffin or something, and have a bunch of muffins ready-made. With three coffee machines, I think I’d be fine. It’s real easy to increase. Why are you smiling?” she asks.

  “I love this.”

  “The idea?” she asks.

  “Well, yes. But sitting here and having a conversation about muffins and coffee instead . . . of, well, you know.”

  “I do, too. But . . .”

  She knows me too well. “How much do you want to know?” I ask.

  “Everything you need me to know. Do I have to worry about you going to jail?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. That’s not what has me worried,” I reply.

  “Uh, okay. So, what does have you worried?”

  “He’s out there. And, yes, I should move on from this hobby and do something more impactful.”

  “I didn’t tell you to drop this. I said you need to think about why you keep getting pulled into this sort of thing,” she explains.

  “Right, right. Well, he’s out there and probably killing right now. I gave the FBI my images.”

  “And then they came after you,” she replies.

  “I meant well . . .” Although it’s a far cry to call what I did at Butcher Creek well. “They focused on me instead of Jekyll. They should be plastering his photo everywhere.”

  Jillian takes a sip of her coffee and looks out the window. “I’m not sure they’ve connected the dots as easily as you have.”

  “Gallard gets it.” I’ve told Jillian about the FBI profiler.

  “Yeah, but I think he’s more enamored with you than the others,” she replies.

  “Enamored?”

  “He studies behavior, right? Extreme personality types? Sound familiar? You’re his favorite subject. Which makes him . . . less than subjective.”

  “Maybe so.” I start to take a bite of my caramel crumb cake, then set it back down.

  “You have to commit, Theo. Either you’re all in or you’re not.”

  “Yeah. It’s the only way we’re going to catch him,” I reply.

  “I was talking about my crumb cake. If you’re going to eat it, eat it, damn it.�
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  “Sorry.” I start to take a wolfish bite, then remember how Jillian frowns on that. Her desserts are meant to be savored slowly, not used as meal substitutes—although there’s about a week’s worth of fruit in a slice of her pie.

  “What’s stopping you from catching this guy?” she asks.

  “He knows he’s being hunted, or at least planned for that. His victims are probably random . . . although some of them may not be. It’s a possible area to explore, but without police and FBI assistance, it’ll come down to more shoe leather on my part, and interviewing people.”

  “Which is not one of your strengths,” she reminds me.

  “Yeah. I could try a bunch of data analysis on the victims, but I’m afraid Jekyll will have expected that. He could have chosen some random factor, like they’re all into model railroads, solely to get investigators chasing a false lead.”

  “You think he’s that devious?”

  I vigorously nod my head. “Oh, hell yeah. I’m also afraid that any forensic data could be another false lead.”

  “Sounds like this guy knows just as much about this kind of thing as you do.”

  “Jillian, he knows more than I do. He’s also a skilled virologist and experimentalist. He’s brilliant.”

  “An evil Theo,” says Jillian with a smirk. “Maybe he’s off in some evil government lab, just like you, but plotting death.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” My mind follows that train of thought.

  “Wait. Do you think he really could be?” asks Jillian.

  “It’s not as crazy as it sounds. You might be onto something.”

  “An evil lab?”

  “No. Well, not exactly. I keep thinking about this guy operating out of some dark basement—and maybe that’s what he’s doing now, but the more I think about it, the more unlikely it is that it started there. This could have been legitimate research at one point that he took underground.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s a sociopath. The reasons could be anything from making money to his delight in watching people die. The point is that Hyde may have started as legit research. Maybe it wasn’t even his idea. He could have been just one of the researchers . . .” I pause to think.