Murder Theory Read online

  Mackenzie turns right. “This way. We’re in the funding proposal section going all the way back to around 1975.” We come to the end of a shelf, where a broad red line on the floor separates it from the shelves beyond. “See that line? Don’t cross it. If you do, then that’s a felony. They’ll not only escort you out of here, they’ll take you straight to wherever they take people who cross that line.”

  I stare at the shelves on the other side of the red line. “What’s there?” I ask.

  “What’s where? I don’t see anything beyond the line. Neither do you.” He turns around and points to the stacks we just walked through. “That’s your territory. Understand?”

  “Yep,” I reply.

  Mackenzie leads me back to the corridor and through the door he said leads to the reading room. Inside is a smaller storage room filled with boxes. I walk down the narrow passage then stop when I realize that Mackenzie is still at the door.

  “This way to the reading room?” I ask.

  Mackenzie laughs. “Dr. Cray, my friend, this is the reading room.”

  “Where are . . . ?” I stare at the boxes piled all around me. “Oh.”

  He winks at me. “You ask and you shall receive. If you want bad coffee, there’s a break room at the end of the hall with some vending machines. If you want the almost good kind, let me know and we’ll call an escort to take you to the food court. I’ll be in my office across the hall. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  Mackenzie gives a maniacal laugh as he shuts the door behind me. A moment later I hear the sound of a key turning in a lock, like a jailer.

  I stride toward the door and turn the knob. Mackenzie is standing there checking his watch. “Need something?”

  “Hilarious,” I reply.

  “Think of it as my chance to torture all you folks who keep sending files down here.”

  “Fair enough.” I return to the mountain of files and contemplate a nervous breakdown, but then pass on it because I don’t think I could actually find a spot on the floor large enough to collapse on.

  There are at least a hundred boxes here. I’d asked them to pull any records they could on human rabies research, encephalitis-related behavior studies, and a few other areas I thought DARPA wouldn’t have too much research on. Joke’s on me.

  I grab a box at random to see if they really did pull what I asked for instead of just throwing whatever they could into a cart.

  The first file I open is titled A Computer Model of the Impact of an Enemy-Weaponized Hantavirus. The summary of the report makes it very clear this study is about what would happen if the Russkies decided to use hanta as a biological weapon. But reading between the lines, the research could also be applied to how we could use said virus. But stating it that way would violate a number of laws.

  This proposal is exactly the kind of thing I asked for.

  It’s not what I’m looking for, but well within the parameters of my search.

  Another file has a proposal for studying ways to improve the health of horses and prevent viral infections using aggressive antiviral treatment. Curiously, none of the researchers is a veterinarian, which makes me wonder if horses is code for humans, like how bodybuilders on message boards about steroid dosing talk about experimenting on their “rat”—which is really their self.

  Searching through all of this would be so much easier if the files were on a computer. Unfortunately, if said computer exists, they’re not going to let me anywhere near it. The Pentagon is understandably uncomfortable with private contractors having access to large swaths of data. At least they are nowadays.

  I decide my only option is to settle in and start digging through the files, focusing on the ones that involve humans.

  There are way too many boxes containing research into bats, horses, and other animals that don’t appear directly related to Hyde.

  I’m lost in a proposal that wants to fund research for a rabies vaccine that could be delivered in one shot and use time-delayed medication to release the follow-up doses—something that would make for a practical battlefield solution to be sure, but I can’t understand why the Pentagon would be that concerned with bat rabies. There are maybe two or three deadly human cases a year. Is the military planning an assault on Dracula’s castle?

  I look around the room and realize where I am. The problem they’re trying to prevent is if the enemy were to weaponize rabies. They’re not worried about invading armies of feral raccoons so much as some new form of the virus that’s more easily transmitted.

  The research here runs the gamut from intriguing and worthwhile, in my opinion, to some crazy shit someone decided to try to get funded.

  At the rate I’m going, I’ll finish going through these files by the time the sun cools. Not that I would know down here.

  I need to take a different approach to narrow my search. I decide to get into Jekyll’s head a little. There are two kinds of research I should be looking to find him involved with. The most obvious would be the cultivation of a virus that influences violent behavior. The second would be some tangentially related study that would encounter a virus or pathogen with that violence-causing characteristic, possibly a study trying to explain something.

  Now that I’ve had a chance to read through the language of these proposals and between the lines, I can see how the wording would be a little different than I originally anticipated. As with bodybuilders’ code word rat or the DoD’s use of the word enemy, I have to think of how a homicidal maniac would ask for money to find a virus that turned people into killers without actually sounding like a homicidal maniac trying to find a virus to turn people into killers.

  While it’s possible that Jekyll may have randomly discovered the virus, I now think that’s highly unlikely. That would be like the Unabomber being randomly put in charge of nuclear weapons security.

  Jekyll was looking for this virus or a pathogen like this.

  So how would that start?

  How did I start? Zombie ants.

  I poke my head into the office across the hallway.

  Mackenzie is still at his desk. He looks up from a computer. “I was about to go home. You need something?”

  “Yes. Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. Can you find me anything on that?”

  “Yeah. Once you tell me how to spell it. Come write it down.”

  I take a seat in front of his desk and write Ophiocordyceps unilateralis on a piece of scrap paper. Mackenzie takes the slip from me.

  Instead of getting up and going into the archive, he starts typing into his computer.

  “Wait? How can you do that?” I blurt out.

  “With my fingers, thanks to Mavis Beacon, bless her heart.”

  “First, she’s not a real person; she was a model hired to pose for the cover. Second, are the files really in the computer?”

  “Yep. And in answer to your question, if you touch this keyboard or even have a squint at this screen, I’ll have the marine outside shoot you. This entire system is air-gapped. It also has the benefit of being made before Wi-Fi was even a word.”

  “This place,” I grumble.

  “Tell me about it,” says Mackenzie. “Here. Aisle 222, section 5. Just go into the archive. It’s on the other side of the red zone.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Just go through the red zone and into the orange area on the other side,” he explains.

  “I thought I’d get arrested.”

  “Yes. It’s a federal offense to go in there. I commit it at least five times a day when I go through there to use the bathroom. We have an official-unofficial waiver to pass through the red area.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t understand this place.”

  Mackenzie opens his arms wide. “Welcome to Wonderland, Alice.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CONGLOMERATE

  I’m staring at the image of a cartoon teddy bear holding a machine gun as he sprays the air with jelly-bean bullets. A life-size model of Sergeant Grizzly H
avoc, the star of the apparently wildly popular mobile game Bearers of Arms, is the first thing to greet you when you enter the fifth-floor lobby of West Star Games in Tysons Corner, Virginia.

  A young man, barely out of his teens with a Disney Channel face, greets me from the desk. “Dr. Cray? Let me take you to meet Hailey.”

  He walks me through what could nominally be called an office. There are scattered standing workstations where coders type away and beanbag chairs where reclining millennials, or whatever they are now, tap and swipe away on mobile phones.

  Not to sound like an old fogey, but I guess this is called working. While I like my share of whimsy—really, I do—this feels like a kindergarten with 401(k)s. But I’m not the one who had my app downloaded fifteen million times in the last six months.

  I’m at West Star Games meeting with their CEO because I reached a dead end in the Pentagon basement. Or rather, I made a very exciting breakthrough that led nowhere.

  My search for Ophiocordyceps unilateralis led me to some interesting research proposals. The most eye-catching was one titled A Comprehensive Analysis of Potential Behavior-Altering Pathogens.

  Right there in the abstract was the mention of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, followed by the question of whether or not there were similar pathogens that affected humans.

  The main thrust of the study was to find out if regions of the brain that were prone to violent outbursts might be subtly influenced by certain diseases. Said diseases weren’t specifically named, but from the aim of the study, it was clear that the researchers were trying to find something like a proto-Hyde.

  Another study by the same group proposed An Analysis of Neurotropic Infection: Neural Tissue Damage and Behavioral Effect. Which sounds a lot to me like they found Hyde and wanted to infect some animals with it. The study mentions an entire zoo’s worth of creatures, notably rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees.

  The thought of a chimp infected with Hyde will keep me up at night for years.

  All of this was promising, if not disturbing, with the exception of one major catch—there were no researchers mentioned in the proposal. All the related projects were under the aegis of the Advanced Biological Research Institute—an impressive-sounding organization if it wasn’t for the fact that it brings up zero, zed, naught, nil results on Google. I’ve spilled coffee on my keyboard, accidentally hitting random keys, and found more results.

  I’m not paranoid enough to believe that there’s a secret government conspiracy between the government and Google to block those results—although they do block other things. The maps we use in my lab provided by the Pentagon have different features than the ones on Google Maps, where access roads to military bases and theme parks, among other things, are altered.

  I am, however, convinced that the Advanced Biological Research Institute only existed as a funding apparatus. My own company name, Integrated Bioinformatics, was chosen in three minutes and only exists in fund requisitions and checks I sign.

  I asked Rosen over email about the company last night after I left the Pentagon. I still haven’t received a response.

  The only clue was on one page of a proposal where a photocopied chart had an address along the bottom edge. That address is the current headquarters of West Star Games.

  “Dr. Cray! I’m Hailey,” squeals a pixie-faced young woman taller than me wearing a green army jacket, a ripped SpaceX T-shirt, rolled-up jeans, and striped socks last seen on the Wicked Witch of the East.

  Hailey’s got short-cropped hair, deeply intelligent eyes, and a smile as wide as her face. She would have been in middle school when the last Advanced Biological Research Institute report was written, so I can probably rule her out as a suspect. In fact, I’m sure ABRI was long gone before they moved their beanbags in here.

  “Let’s have a bounce in my office,” she says, grabbing me by the hand and pulling me into a glass-walled room covered in giant versions of the stickers I used to put on my Trapper Keeper.

  I have no idea what “a bounce” means until I see the large inflatable balls serving as furniture. Hailey sits on one and gestures to another across from her.

  I sit down, feeling like I’m about to do a workout session.

  I glance around her office. There are plenty of shelves but nothing resembling a desk. I spot a MacBook on the floor in the corner.

  “I was so excited that you wanted to come and visit,” says Hailey.

  I emailed first thing in the morning, claiming to be a fan of the game and asking if I could visit. Hailey emailed me twenty minutes later.

  “Thanks,” I reply. “Of course, it’s more of an accident than anything else. Not something I’m proud of.”

  She looks at me funny. “You’re not proud of your research in bioinformatics? I listened to your lectures when I was in high school. They were amazing. My first game was a simulated ecotone of grass and snails. Your paper on using game engines to do research helped me come up with Bellyland and how it would work.”

  Bellyland is where Sergeant Grizzly Havoc lives. I learned this from Wikipedia.

  “Oh, thanks,” I reply, genuinely flattered. For a brief moment, I feel a bit of melancholy over not being able to teach anymore. What would I have learned from someone like Hailey asking me questions and pulling me into the twenty-first century?

  My heart tugs at the thought of another bright young mind, not unlike Hailey’s. That person was too shy to ask me questions but was more brilliant than I ever realized—until it was too late.

  “We’d love to be able to work with you,” she says. “On anything.”

  I can’t tell if she’s flirting with me or just schoolgirl crushing. “That would be interesting. Actually . . .” In that moment, I decide to tell her most of the truth. “I’m trying to find out about a company that was here before you, I think. Advanced Biological Research Institute. Have you heard of them?”

  “Yeah. They were the previous tenants. We’ve got a room in back we call The Lab because it had rows of lab counters and stuff. There’s still a crazy-big freezer and a huge safe. Want to see?”

  She bounces into the air and grabs my hand again, pulling me along like Peter Pan.

  We enter another room that looks like the first, but it also has a massive, double-paned window looking into another room filled with neon-colored walls and black lights.

  Hailey leads me into that room. Her lipstick glows blue and her makeup makes her look like a video-game character.

  “We were wondering what exactly they did in here,” she says. “We figured maybe some secret government stuff.”

  “That’s actually exactly what they did,” I reply. “Did you ever meet the previous tenants?”

  “No. They were gone months before. The curious thing was that in the rental agreement, there was some kind of government inspection certificate. I thought it was because they had to sterilize the lab.”

  “That’s what it was.” I glance around the room and suspiciously eye the air vent. “You’ve been here how long?”

  “Four years. It flies fast.”

  Funny to hear that from a twenty-three-year-old who started her first company at fifteen. “It sure does. Do you know anyone who talked to the people here?”

  She shakes her head. “We have the whole floor, just like they did. Some of the other offices are covert government stuff, like think tanks. They keep to themselves.”

  “Hmm. That’s unfortunate. I’m trying to figure out who worked here.”

  “Is that because of your other passion?” she asks, standing a little too close to me.

  “You’re too smart, Hailey,” I say, crossing my arms.

  “Well, I can tell you who the big bosses were here. Neeve, Grehan, Hall, and Forrester.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because those were the names on the four reserved parking spaces we inherited. My cofounders and I used to refer to each other by those names, pretending we were big-shot businessmen.”

  “What happened
to them?” I ask of her cofounders, making casual conversation while containing my excitement.

  “I bought the little bitches out when they couldn’t take the pressure. But I bet you could. Want to give up saving the world and come play with me?”

  There is something utterly fearless about her that I admire. While I’ve been fretting about how to put my skills to better use for humanity and almost dying or getting imprisoned in the process, here’s a free spirit who’s decided to let the world figure its own shit out while she has a blast making a fortune’s worth of fuck-you money.

  Part of me very much wants to stay in this romper room and play with Hailey, whatever that means. But it’s not just my fear/respect for Jillian or my sense that I may be misinterpreting Hailey’s attention that tells me I have to leave. It’s the knowledge that you can run from the world, but it will eventually find you in the end.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  COLLABORATION

  Neeve, Grehan, Hall, and Forrester. Those are my four suspects, if for no other reason than their names were painted onto parking spaces at a defunct company that the Department of Defense was funding for something that sounds suspiciously like proto-Hyde research.

  It’s the thinnest of thin leads, only nanometers thick, but this is how science works. You search for a causal connection—even a tenuous one is better than none at all—then you test it. Lots of causal connections don’t prove a thing. Even testing a theory and reaching an expected conclusion doesn’t really “prove” it in the sense that people think. It only changes the degree of certainty.

  Neeve, Grehan, Hall, and Forrester are uncommon names. I find a few hundred examples of each one. LinkedIn shows me at least a dozen or more PhDs for the three oddest surnames. Thousands for Forrester.

  Rather than chase them down individually, I enter “Neeve, Grehan, Hall, and Forrester” into Google and see what dark magic it reveals.

  Six hundred and thirty-two results. Almost all of them references to scientific papers. I think I’ve found the right ones.