Murder Theory Read online

  “Too bad you cut him off,” says the second detective.

  “Are you serious?” asks the first.

  “What were his last words to you?” asks Gallard.

  I think for a moment. “I think he said, ‘Theo thinks he has all the answers, when the fun’s only just begun.’”

  The first Travis detective, whom I think of as John, takes a phone call and steps out of the room. Gallard looks as if he’s in deep concentration. As much as I hate to admit it, I think he’s right. Forrester is an extremely intelligent man on a number of levels. This did seem kind of . . . half-assed.

  John returns to the room. “Ready for this? An hour before you were found on the road, someone called 911 from Forrester’s phone and confessed to being the Butcher Creek Butcher. They thought it was a crank. The best part? He identified himself as Edward Forrester. He even said he had evidence from the crime scene.”

  “What the hell?” I glance at Gallard.

  “Well, that’s a relief,” says Spike. “We’ll forward that on to the Kentucky office.”

  “Why would he . . . do such a thing?” I stop myself from saying the word admit. As far as I’m concerned, nobody in the room knows I’m the Butcher Creek Butcher. Gallard suspects it, but the others have no clue.

  Is this some final trick from Forrester? But how could taking the pressure off me serve some bigger plan of his?

  “This is a dick-measuring contest,” says Gallard. “Pardon the expression.”

  “What?” asks Spike.

  “Forrester might admire Theo, but he’s arrogant. What do arrogant people want to do to their idols? Surpass them. Beat them. Show that they’re better than they are.”

  “By offing yourself in front of them?” asks John.

  “If that’s what he was intending. Forrester may have wanted it to look like that. I don’t know. But if he was suicidal and at the end of his rope, it was kind of like tying one hand behind his back, to really show you up.”

  “How?”

  “Maybe by denying you the opportunity to kill him? He pointed out how it didn’t turn out so well for Vik and Oyo. Maybe he assumed you were going to murder him,” replies Gallard.

  “While strapped to a wheelchair?”

  “I don’t know. He thought you were special. He said he was afraid of you. It could have been his way of getting the upper hand. That and taking Butcher Creek away from you.”

  “Taking Butcher Creek away?” asks Spike.

  Gallard realizes his mistake. “Solving the crime before Theo could. He probably assumed Theo was on the hunt for whoever did that.”

  “Oh,” replies Spike. “I’ve been hearing things don’t add up about that. We caught a tissue broker who may be connected, but nothing has been announced yet. Interesting angle.” He turns to me. “You have any insight on that?”

  “All right,” Gallard cuts in. “We can speculate later. Let’s let Dr. Cray get some rest.” He turns to me. “Maybe Forrester will waive his right to an attorney and tell us everything he knows.”

  They leave my bedside and a nurse comes in, checks on me, and turns down the lights. I respond to a good-night text from Jillian. I neglect to mention I’m in a hospital.

  I try to sleep but can’t. Forrester’s motivations keep going through my head. Why did I shut him down like I did?

  Was it because it was going to save my life? Hardly. Was I really that bored by him?

  No.

  Then why?

  Because I wanted to show him I was superior. I shut him down because I wanted to let him know I thought he was beneath me.

  I shut him up because I was arrogant.

  What did Detective Glenn do back in Montana when he first questioned me?

  He let me talk and talk.

  At first it implicated me, but then he saw who I was. Glenn knew I was an intelligent man, so he did the smartest thing he could—let me tell him exactly what I was thinking.

  I didn’t do that with Forrester. It was as much of an ego contest for me as it was for him.

  And then he shot himself? Why?

  Because he already knew he’d won. Not the cat-and-mouse game between the two of us . . . but something else.

  I bolt upright, and a thunderbolt of pain shoots through my shoulder. I focus on the pain to wake myself up.

  Forrester is up to something bigger, much, much bigger. All the victims were merely lab rats for something else.

  Damn it! Why didn’t I let him go on? Maybe there would have been a clue there.

  Maybe . . . maybe I can still find out.

  I get to my feet. I’m steady as long as I don’t do anything too crazy with my arm. Forrester was right, he did miss the nerve. Intentional? I can’t see how, but who knows?

  Nothing makes sense. But he’s in the same hospital as me, and maybe I can get some answers.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  VISITING HOURS

  Forrester’s face is taped up, and his jaw appears to be wired closed. His left eye is puffy and peers out over a bandage as he watches me enter the room. He makes a sound that I can’t tell is a cough or a stifled laugh as he takes in my garb: a doctor’s scrubs and white coat.

  While I couldn’t get into a locker room without a key card, I was able to make it to the loading dock and find some dirty-laundry bags. The hardest part was pulling the shirt over my arm. I had to settle for an XXL outfit in order to avoid calling attention to myself with my screams.

  The Travis County police officer waved me through the outer door when I nodded to him. His concern was Forrester escaping, not some amateur version of the Godfather hospital hit playing out under his watch.

  I slide a chair over to Forrester’s bedside so I can keep my voice low. His one working eye watches me closely as I grab the chart by his bed and start to flip through it.

  “Let’s see . . . we have the bullet traversing the lower palate, passing both the lower and upper molars, and exiting near the sinus cavity. Interesting. You managed to avoid hitting any bone until the bullet exited your skull, and you missed all major arteries.” I put the chart back. “They’d call that a one-in-a-million shot, but I have a feeling it wasn’t.” I tilt my head toward my shoulder. “Like that.” I raise my right arm a few inches. “Lucky shot again.”

  Despite the fact that Forrester’s bullet to the head did the least amount of damage I could imagine, he can’t speak. I take my phone out of my waistband and open it to the Notes app, then place it in his hands.

  “My guess is that it was a kind of Russian roulette. You took the shot thinking you had better-than-even odds you’d survive. Am I right?”

  Forrester watches me for a long moment, then he types without even looking at the keyboard. I can tell he’s working through pain, but he has amazing hand-eye coordination.

  Good guess

  “Yeah. Well, it worked. Now if you get tried for everything, it’ll be even easier to claim you had serious mental health problems.”

  Can’t hurt

  “Well, I think it did. What I don’t understand is why? Was that your plan? It seems kind of dumb. No offense.”

  Not dumb. Didn’t want to run.

  Now that makes sense. Forrester didn’t want to be on the run, and he also knew that no matter how hard it would be for the FBI to build a case against him, he’d still be a person of interest and his life would never be the same.

  I think he is suicidal, but the calculating part of his brain decided to play a wild card. And it worked. Sort of.

  “You were telling me something, but I wouldn’t listen. What was that?”

  Doesn’t matter now.

  “It matters to me.” I try to play to his ego. “I didn’t listen because you had the upper hand on me and I was angry. Real angry. I should have paid more attention. Showed you more respect.”

  Theo. Theo. Theo. Don’t insult us both with flattery. It doesn’t work on me the way it does on you.

  “Okay. Fine. What were you trying to tell me?”

/>   Forrester doesn’t move. He’s either considering his answer or losing consciousness.

  “What were you trying to tell me?”

  Show. Not tell.

  “Okay, what were you going to show me?”

  The barn.

  “You showed me the barn,” I reply.

  You didn’t see.

  “I was kind of in a hurry.”

  He takes his time typing out his next response.

  That’s your problem. You miss things. You could have caught Joe Vik much faster, but you had to do it your way. You could have found out who Oyo was if you’d talked to more parents. But you have to do your clever little tricks to show everyone how smart you are. That’s your flaw. That’s why people will die.

  “Will die? How many more people have you infected with Hyde?”

  He taps a quick response and I want to strangle him in his hospital bed.

  ;)

  “Fuck you. This isn’t a game. Did you find it funny when your wife killed your son because of your little project?”

  Forrester doesn’t say anything. He just glares at me with his one good eye.

  “Tell me something. Give me a clue.” He taps again on my phone.

  “A tractor, a cow, a horse, and a house? What are you trying to say? The barn?”

  I sigh. “Anything else?”

  Don’t be so hard on yourself when you can’t save them. You never knew what you were up against.

  “What do you mean?”

  He lets go of my phone, and it slides down onto the bed.

  His eye is glassy and stares at the ceiling, then closes.

  “What does that mean?”

  He ignores me.

  I hear voices down the hall. If I persist here, I’ll get caught and have my own cop guarding my door. I leave his room in a hurry and head for the stairs.

  While I could probably catch an Uber, I might need more help, especially if I rip my stitches and pass out again.

  I dial the number of the one person in Virginia I know who is crazy enough to come help me out at this time of night.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  RECOLLECT

  Right after I get out of my Uber, Hailey bounces out of her Tesla 3 and runs up to me in Forrester’s driveway. “Dr. Cray! This is the craziest, coolest thing anyone has ever asked me to do. And I get some cra-zy shit asked of me.”

  I glance behind her. “You didn’t drive through the police tape, did you?”

  “No, Mylo’s fixing it. Nice scrubs, by the way.”

  “What’s a Mylo?”

  “She was hanging out when you called. She was worried that you might want to murder me. I can ask her to bounce if this is about something else.” She leans in and whispers, “Is it?”

  “Uh, no.” I take out some masks from my jacket pocket.

  A young woman with Amerasian features and even shorter hair than Hailey’s comes walking up the driveway dressed in ripped jeans and a “Mr. Rogers Is My Homie” T-shirt. She seems completely unbothered by the cold air.

  “Mylo, this is Dr. Theo Cray,” says Hailey.

  “Great,” I reply, cutting short introductions. “Time is important or people will die. Here, take these masks. There’s a better-than-average chance that a sociopathic virus researcher sprayed everything with a pathogen that could make you want to kill anyone you meet. Got it?”

  “Fuck, yes,” says Hailey. “Uh, shouldn’t there be cops everywhere?”

  I sigh. “In the real world, they need search warrants, probable cause, and normal working hours unless it’s an extenuating situation.”

  “This sounds pretty damn extenuating to me,” she replies.

  “Me too. And yet here we are, just us. From what they were saying, they’ll be searching here tomorrow, but for the next few hours it’s ours.”

  “Cool. Our own murder scene,” says Mylo.

  I turn to walk to the barn in the back. “This is super serious,” I tell them over my shoulder. “Okay? I asked you here, Hailey, because I’m probably not seeing the whole picture. Mylo, um, are you smart?”

  “When I’m not high. Which I’m not right now, thanks to you.”

  “Great. Anything to keep you kids off drugs.”

  “He called us kids,” says Hailey. “That’s adorable.”

  “Old people love doing that,” replies Mylo.

  “Don’t call old people old,” Hailey whispers back to her.

  I spin around. “Okay, I get that this is very dramatic and exciting, but it’s also real.” I raise my shirt high enough to show the bandage. “I got shot earlier tonight and held captive. Right in that barn, where the man who shot me tried to put a bullet through his own head. And by the way, this is a crime scene and we’re breaking the law. Understand? This is not a game. When I say people will die, I don’t mean in some abstract way like if we don’t recycle our bottles and cans we’ll die in a horrible, far-off doomsday scenario. I mean like, there might be people right now who are about to die. And these masks probably won’t work. If you get a headache or feel like you’re coming down with something, tell me. We’ll have to get rabies shots.”

  “Does our worker’s comp cover that?” Mylo asks Hailey.

  “Yep. You good?” she asks her friend.

  “I’m good.”

  “Last chance.” I pull open the barn door, revealing the lit-up interior. Tape covers the bench where Forrester shot himself. Everything else is exactly where it was before.

  Because there wasn’t a death and his wound looked clearly self-inflicted, the police didn’t spend too much time securing the scene. The jars filled with horrific memorabilia apparently didn’t attract their attention.

  “One more thing.” I take out some rubber gloves I stole from the hospital. “Wear these. Now, here’s our mission. All these jars are filled with weird stuff that Jekyll . . . er, Forrester says he took from crime scenes. I don’t know if any of that is true, but he really wanted me to look around here. Maybe it was so I could get infected. Maybe because he has an accomplice who is going to come back and kill me. Anything goes.”

  “An accomplice?” asks Mylo.

  “Anything goes,” I repeat. “Look at the jars. Don’t open them. They could contain brain-damaging pathogens.”

  “Is this guy real?” Mylo says under her breath.

  “Very,” I reply.

  We start taking jars down from the shelves, inspecting them, and then putting them back into place. Most of them contain odd things like cotton fibers or bits of bloodstained clothing. On the bottom of each one, etched into the glass, are two numbers. One is a very low digit, usually a single-digit number. The other is five digits long.

  “You guys noticing the numbers?” asks Hailey.

  “Yeah. Does it mean anything to you?”

  “Me? No. Mylo?”

  She looks up from her phone. “I can’t find anything useful.”

  “What about in the jars?” I ask.

  “Mostly clothing or fibrous material,” says Hailey.

  “Me too. Although I did see a letter addressed to a politician,” replies Mylo.

  I look up from my jar. “What was the number underneath?”

  “Five and then 00389,” she replies without looking.

  “Was the postmark early 2001?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s from the anthrax attacks. Five people died.” I go back to the other jars. The first jar he showed me has a numeral one next to 00001.

  “Okay, the smaller number is probably the number of people that were killed. The second is more than likely some kind of cataloging system.” I glance around the barn. But where are the catalogs? “Look for anything like a journal.”

  We start poking behind jars and deeper into the shelves. I assume that Forrester would keep it close by; the question is how close?

  “What about a book?” asks Mylo. She’s holding on to a jar.

  “What’s inside it?”

  “A Japanese edition of Isaac Asimov�
�s Foundation.”

  “Is the number thirteen under the jar?” I ask.

  She lifts it up to have a look. “Yes. How’d you know?”

  “That was the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack from 1995. A cult called Aum Shinrikyo killed thirteen and almost a lot more. They were big Asimov fans.”

  “Hey! I like Isaac Asimov,” says Hailey.

  “Me too. He had a wide appeal.”

  “Want me to start taking photos?” asks Mylo.

  “Yes. That’s a great idea.” And what I should have been doing from the start.

  We sort through hundreds of bottles, the vast majority of them inexplicable. Most contain cloth or something else bloodstained. Others contain objects like the book.

  “Think we’ll find OJ’s glove in here?” asks Mylo.

  “Maybe, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we found his ski mask,” replies Hailey. “Right? He wanted something that made contact with the killer?”

  “Anything is possible.”

  After an hour of searching through the jars and checking what everybody else looked at, I step back into the door of the barn and simply stare at the interior. We still have no sign of a cataloging system matching the jars.

  “Should we look for secret panels?” asks Hailey.

  “Not yet. We could try his study, but I think he wanted me to look here.”

  “Who cleans this up?” asks Mylo, pointing to the bloody workbench.

  “They have private contractors. I wouldn’t be surprised if he disguised himself as one of them to get samples from other cases.”

  Hailey steps over to the workbench and stares at a pool of blood that has seeped through a crack in its surface. She kneels and aims her flashlight at the floor beneath, where the blood should have pooled.

  It’s spotless.

  “Where did all the blood go?” she asks.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CODEX

  We’re sitting on the back deck of Forrester’s house, reading his journals while lounging on his patio furniture. It’s an odd sight. We all have on our gloves and masks. I had to chastise Mylo and Hailey several times, explaining how anthrax could be transmitted through contact with paper or even the furniture.