Mastermind: A Theo Cray and Jessica Blackwood Thriller Page 19

  The landfill foreperson is walking toward us. I need to explain what we’re doing, but I really need to hear the rest of Theo’s story.

  “What happened?”

  “It was rabies. I contacted animal control and the public health agencies. They put out a warning and told my mother I needed counseling.”

  “How did she handle that?”

  “She’d already given up hope. My stepdad, on the other hand, was okay with it. He’d grown up in the woods and skinned animals as a kid. He understood.”

  “Can I help you?” asks the foreperson, a stocky man with a neck tattoo of a dragon visible above his blue jumpsuit.

  I show him my badge. “We need to do a little searching, if it’s not an inconvenience.”

  He shouts over to the man by the bulldozer. “Hey, Sergio! Do you have anything to hide? No dead hookers, right?”

  “Not this week,” Sergio replies.

  “Have at it,” says the foreperson. He glances down at my shoes. “Looks like you came prepared. You’re doing this at your own risk, yada yada yada, and so forth. Now if you’ll excuse me, Sergio and I are going to go take a smoke break so we don’t have to testify in case you find something.” With that, he leaves Theo and me alone with the garbage.

  Theo starts down the small cliff first, walking sideways until he reaches the first bags of trash. He looks up at me. “You don’t have to come down here.”

  “Legally speaking, you shouldn’t be down there at all.” I make the hike to the bottom of the ridge and pull out my phone with the app we’re using to track his phone. “This way,” I say, indicating a pile about ten feet from us.

  Theo steps over the garbage bags and makes his way to the spot. What looks like the shadow of a cloud passes over him, but when I look up I see a flock of gulls circling overhead, waiting to swoop down and get at the contents of the dump. He glances at the sky, then starts sorting through trash.

  “If I were a biologist looking for new antibiotics,” he says as he paws through the trash, “I’d be checking the stomachs of those birds and all the rats around us. They’ve spent so much time eating our infected garbage, you’d have to imagine they have evolved some new coping mechanisms.”

  “I know you miss teaching,” I say. “Do you miss doing research as well?”

  “In a way, yes. But in another way, no. The problem with pure research is that you make a discovery, if you’re lucky, and then move on to something else. The real work is figuring out how to apply that knowledge and make it useful. I think I’m more useful now. At least I hope so.” Theo pulls aside a mound of fresh trash and stares at a large green lawn bag. “You look familiar.”

  “Weir’s?” I ask.

  Theo points to a tear in the side of the bag. “This would appear to be where I shoved my phone.” He pulls the bag out of the pile and hands it to me. “Ah, we found your friend.” He lifts another bag of the same color.

  “Is that it?” I ask.

  “I only saw that one in the can. But I think it’s safe to assume the other is from the second can.”

  “Okay. Let’s bring them back up to the car and have a look.”

  We haul the bags to the car trunk to have a look inside. First, I open the one Theo ripped and extract the coffee cup with his phone inside. “I guess that answers that question. This is definitely Weir’s trash.”

  I take two unused garbage bags from the trunk and slide Weir’s trash bags inside them so nothing falls out as I dig through.

  I reach in, start sorting through the trash, and feel a smaller bag inside.

  Theo can read the expression on my face. “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s a good news/bad news situation. The good news is I think I found what Weir was hiding. The bad news is it took a trip through a paper shredder.”

  “Strips or confetti?” asks Theo.

  “Strips, from what it feels like. Thin ones.”

  “Then it’s all good news,” he replies.

  “Okay . . . explain.”

  “First, we need to take these someplace safe to examine them.”

  Obviously we can’t take them back to FBI headquarters or Quantico, because there are too many eyes there. Even Gerald was paranoid. “Will a hotel room work?”

  “Yes. Ideally one with a walk-in shower,” says Theo.

  “You don’t smell that bad.”

  “What? No. I’m going to show you how to make a dinosaur,” he says with a straight face.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  THEOSAURUS REX

  Weir’s shredded documents are sitting on the hotel room table like a pile of twisted paper ribbons. An airplane flies overhead, rattling the windows as it comes in for a landing at the nearby Richmond airport. Theo is seated, looking at a single shred from the pile.

  “If that’s your plan, I’m going to get another room and take a thirty-day nap,” I tell him from my position sitting on the bed.

  “What? Oh no. Just checking them and doing some math,” he replies.

  “Okay. But you promised me a dinosaur,” I remind him.

  “I promised to tell you how to build a dinosaur. There’s a difference. So, there’s the relevant part to what we’re doing and the irrelevant part. I’ll just give you the thumbnail version of that. DNA degrades over time. There’s a kind of half-life we use to determine how long a strand of DNA will last before it loses fifty percent of its information from the molecular bonds breaking down. But unlike the half-life of a radioactive element, this isn’t a law of physics. DNA’s half-life has more to do with the environment DNA is preserved in and how it deteriorates over time.

  “I can put uranium in a freezer and come back in a thousand years and it will have lost just as much radioactivity as if it had sat on a counter, more or less. That DNA in that same freezer—okay, maybe not the same freezer next to the radioactive uranium—won’t have degraded at all if kept in the right solution and temperature. The problem is, with nature, you never get those kinds of ideal conditions, except when an animal gets frozen after getting stuck in the mud or a snowdrift. Even then, its own body chemistry can break down and cause the DNA to deteriorate. That’s why we don’t have museum refrigerators filled with dinosaur DNA. And if a mosquito trapped in amber were to have a stomach full of dinosaur DNA, the stomach acids and breakdown of the insect’s body would lead to the DNA deteriorating.”

  “So Jurassic Park is a lie. Got it.”

  “Actually, not quite. When I was a kid reading that book, it got me to thinking about how you could restore dinosaur DNA from small fragments without having to insert segments from other animals. Also, about how you could know what was dino DNA and what wasn’t.

  “The hard part is to find that DNA, because it’s not meant as a long-term storage solution. Well, technically it is, in that DNA replicates and carries genes through time. Some for over a billion years, so it’s actually highly efficient for small bits of information. Not so much for whole animals. But that’s another discussion.”

  “Oh, this is a discussion? I thought it was a TED talk,” I reply.

  “Sorry. I guess I’m way off on a tangent here.” Theo picks up a handful of shredded paper. “Let me go work on this.”

  “Finish your point about dinosaurs. You can’t leave a girl who dreamed about having a pet velociraptor in suspense.”

  “Velociraptors? Even the small ones were terrifying. Why would you ever have wanted one of those?”

  “Revenge.”

  “Ah. Good point. So, anyway, the idea of getting dinosaur DNA, let alone resurrecting one, was considered a lost cause. And probably still is for right now, but not from an informational point of view. A velociraptor’s whole genome might be more useful than a living velociraptor.”

  “You clearly never had your heart broken in the eighth grade,” I reply.

  “Tenth-grade science camp, actually,” says Theo.

  “What happened?”

  “She fell for another kid in my cabin who was into physics. T
hat’s what motivated me to learn computer science as well as biology. I was tired of those hard-science guys getting all the girls.”

  “Every time,” I reply, shaking my head. “So, dinosaur DNA . . .”

  “Biologists, like other scientists, tend to like hard rules. We want to know exactly the parameters to work within, because otherwise it can drive you crazy. This kind of thinking was why you’d hear the term junk DNA when we encountered a sequence we didn’t think was a gene. Or that DNA is the only way information is inherited. We now know things are much more complicated. Proteins on the surface of DNA contain information. Your mother’s body can activate certain genes while you’re in the womb. Even the bacteria in our stomach helps determine how our genes express themselves.”

  Theo picks up a handful of paper shreds, walks into the bathroom, and wets them briefly in the sink. I follow him to the doorway to watch.

  “Anyway, we had some pretty specific ideas about how DNA degrades and just accepted the idea of a DNA half-life, which dictated that we’d never recover any DNA that was more than a few hundred thousand years old. That was until scientists started discovering that DNA might leave fossils, too. When scientists started cracking open the bones of sixty-five-million-year-old dinosaurs—something that had been ingrained in them not to do—they started to make interesting discoveries: fossilized cells, collagen, and in some cases, tiny balls of iron that appeared to be bound to a molecule . . . DNA. Not long strands. Only tiny pieces. By themselves, not very useful.” Theo holds up a wet strip of paper and shows me the print. “But you can make out certain parts, like letters and parts of words.” He places the strand on the glass of the shower door, where it sticks, then places another next to it. “These two sequences aren’t immediately related to each other, but they might be from the same document. Or they might deal with the same topic.”

  He starts putting more strands on the shower glass, some upside down. He doesn’t examine them individually, he simply flattens them on the glass like linguine noodles.

  “All the information is here, but it’s scrambled. With the dinosaur DNA, the problem is that little ball of DNA probably only has a fraction of the whole genome. Unlike our shredded documents, which we can assume contain everything. However, unlike our pile of shredded documents, inside the dinosaur bone that we grind down to look for balls of DNA, there could be millions and millions of copies, each one broken at a different place. It’d be like a thousand boxes of the same jigsaw puzzle, each one randomly missing different pieces. Mathematically, I can tell you how many boxes we need before we can fill in the rest. It would be a lot. Nobody has figured out how to extract enough remnant DNA. It might be there aren’t enough bones on the planet to make that happen. But I don’t think that’s the case. Too many people were saying none of it could be done while others slowly chipped away at the problem.

  “Here it’s a different problem. We don’t have two different strands with the same sentence split in different places telling us how to overlap them. We only have one copy, but presumably the whole copy.”

  Theo has covered the upper half of the shower door with strands. I can’t see any rhyme or reason to them. It just looks like he pasted a bunch of shredded paper to the glass.

  “We could try to match each piece to another. That’s what the Iranian government did with all the shredded documents from the US embassy when it fell. But that took thousands of people working nonstop forever.”

  “We don’t have that much time.”

  “Correct.” Theo takes out his phone. “What we do have is computers and the same AI tools I’ve been playing around with for the dinosaur problem.”

  “Wait? You were trying to build a dinosaur?”

  “Not quite. I was trying to tackle the problem to see what solutions I could come up with. I play with the problem every now and then to develop better tools. When I started, nobody knew you could find bits of DNA in tiny balls inside of fossils. And admittedly, there’s some question that that’s really what it is. But from a mental-exercise point of view, imagining that one impossible idea is no longer impossible can help you imagine several other things that are possible.”

  Theo takes a photo with his phone and uploads it via his browser. A moment later, he shows me the screen. There’s an image of several of the strands from the glass window now next to each other, forming words. It’s at best ten percent of one document. But that’s one hundred percent more than we had before.

  Theo points to the shreds of paper in the sink. “It’s all there. We just have to take photos and let the computer do the rest, matching sections to each other.”

  “And the velociraptor you promised me?”

  “Let’s find out what Weir wanted to hide. Then you can help me break into a few museums to steal bones and we might just get somewhere.”

  Nothing about his body language or tone of voice indicates that he’s lying or joking. Either he’s not as crazy as I think, or it’s contagious.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  PAPER TRAIL

  While Theo pasted the shredded documents to the shower and started assembling them back together using whatever black-magic computer program he has hidden away in the cloud, I went to the office supply store across the street and got a printer and a ream of paper so we could print out all the documents Weir thought had been destroyed.

  I only have a handful of them so far, and no smoking gun, but a curious picture is beginning to emerge. Most of the documents he destroyed are financial statements relating to stock holdings in about six different companies.

  When I looked them up, having never heard of any of them, I learned that they were either technology or biotech companies. The total value of the stocks is approximately six million dollars. It’s not a small sum, but what’s interesting is that most of the companies are penny stocks with wildly fluctuating values.

  Theo walks into the room and grabs another pizza crust from the box lying open on the bed next to me and my spread of papers. He sits on the opposite bed. “What have you got so far?” he asks, reaching for my leftover crust on the plate by the nightstand.

  I glance at the half pizza still sitting in the box. “Don’t you like pizza?”

  “I love it,” he replies between bites of the crust.

  “Then why don’t you try eating some?”

  Theo glances down at the two crusts in his hands. “Oh. I didn’t realize . . . When I was after N2—Angelica Covel, the serial killer nurse—I spent some time on the streets.” He looks at me for a moment, perhaps realizing that I don’t know most of that story. “Living on the streets, I kind of adapted.”

  I put a slice on a napkin and hand it to him. “It sounded like you went a little crazy.”

  “After a fashion. What I was trying to do was to find her pattern. Sometimes I can tell how to find a serial killer by looking at their history of crimes and finding tells. With Joe Vik it was how he buried them. This allowed me to go back to his earliest murders, when he wasn’t as careful. With Covel, for decades she was so good at covering her tracks, I couldn’t trace her back to when she made mistakes. She also knew all the weaknesses in hospital systems and nurses’ lifestyles. She could assume identities and keep moving, burying her past. Although I didn’t quite understand it at the time, I had to catch her by becoming a victim. I had to fall into the same kind of situation that her next mark would. In this case, she was murdering homeless people in a city she hadn’t been to before.” Theo takes a small bite of the pepperoni pizza. “I forgot how much flavor there is.”

  “So, there was a method to your madness,” I reply.

  “Yes. The method was madness. Coming out of it was hard. I lost a dear friend who’d been my mentor while I was away. I also made some bad choices, hurting people around me,” he says somberly. “I don’t know how you manage it.”

  “Does it look like I’m managing things?” I ask.

  “I don’t think you were living off scraps in trash cans.”

  �
��No. But I still feel alone. I’m closer to my family than before and . . . other people. But the circumstances have changed. I keep moving forward because I don’t know how to stop. If I look like I’m holding it together, it’s because I’ve been faking it for so long, I don’t know how to not pretend. Speaking of faking it . . .” I hold up the printout nearest me. “Weir is up to something. But I don’t get it. I found a name associated with all the investment portfolio statements. It’s Joshua Scanlon. Scanlon is his wife’s maiden name.”

  “Interesting,” says Theo. “That’s not a very good alias.”

  I finish doing the internet search I’d started. “Oh. This is interesting. Joshua Scanlon is her brother.”

  “So Weir is helping him manage his investment portfolio?” asks Theo.

  “It would appear so, but according to this, Joshua died eight years ago in a motorcycle accident when he was twenty-two. Three years before Weir married his wife,” I reply.

  “Clever way to hide his assets,” says Theo. “Do you think his wife knows?”

  “I was tempted to call her until I saw this.” I hand Theo the printout of the envelope he resurrected.

  “This is addressed to Scanlon, but at a PO box,” Theo replies.

  “Yep. A box that’s on the route between his house and the detention center. The odd part is that Weir’s portfolio seems pretty unbalanced.” I hand Theo a printout with the stock holdings.

  “Interesting. I’ve never heard of any of them. It looks like they’re pretty volatile, too,” he replies.

  “You think that Heywood might have told him to buy those stocks because he was going to try to influence the market?”

  “You know Heywood better than I do. That seems almost beneath his skills. If a company like one of these has a suspicious increase or decrease in value and the SEC is curious, they start looking at who holds large stakes. That would lead to a dead man and more questions. You have anyone you trust at the FBI who knows more about this?”

  “Hmm. Maybe Mandy Umbra. I worked with her years ago when I was chasing crooks through bookkeeping. I think I trust her. Also, I want to tread carefully, given Weir’s wife’s condition.”