Murder Theory Read online

  “I don’t really think of it as a job. And, yes, I’ve had help from people.”

  “You certainly treat it as one. Anyone specific?”

  “Specific? How?”

  “A partner. Like your girlfriend?”

  “Jillian helped me with Joe Vik but wasn’t with me when I looked into Oyo’s case. The father of one of the victims provided some assistance there. He was the one that asked for my help.”

  “Do you think the father might have come to Atlanta after Oyo was killed?” asks Nicolson.

  “Was William asked to give statements here? I don’t know.”

  “What Nicolson means is, do you think he may have visited this crime scene?”

  “I have no idea. It would seem odd.”

  There’s a knock on the door, and a petite woman in a lab coat enters, pushing a metal cart. “Pardon me, gentlemen. You were just at the Oyo scene?”

  “Yes?” replies Gallard.

  “We need to get some postfield forensics. We’re trying to avoid cross-contamination,” she politely explains.

  “This is new,” Gallard groans. “Fine. What do you need?”

  “Just some swabs and prints. Sorry to be a pain.”

  Gallard rolls his eyes. “Whatever.”

  She slips on a pair of blue gloves and takes samples from his fingernails, has him swab a cheek, then uses a digital scanner to copy his fingerprints.

  “My turn,” says Nicolson.

  She takes out a new set of vials and swabs and starts to collect from him.

  “I’m going to use the bathroom.” I get up and walk out of the room and head to the men’s room down the hall.

  When I return, she’s putting Nicolson’s samples away.

  Gallard glances at me and replies, “You know this isn’t a drug test. If you were trying to flush it out, don’t bother.”

  “Now you tell me,” I reply as I sit down.

  The technician takes off her gloves and throws them away, then replaces them with a new pair. I let her scrape under my fingernails and print me. When she raises the cotton swab, I take it from her and wipe the inside of my cheek, then hand it back to her.

  She puts all the samples back onto her tray, then pushes the cart away. Gallard picks up the conversation where he’d left off.

  “So, you don’t think William would linger around a crime scene like this?”

  “No. But little surprises me about people.” I weigh the pros and cons of calling them out on the two big lies that are right in front of me. But then something else clicks into place and I feel the hair rise on the back of my neck. I turn to Gallard. “How is the profile coming?”

  “Which one?”

  “Mine. That’s really why you asked me here.”

  Nicolson has no reaction. Gallard chuckles. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Theo, but I’m not profiling you. You’re not a suspect.”

  “Then tell your lab tech that she should have changed her gloves before getting Nicolson’s sample and not just for mine. It looks kind of suspicious to someone like me.”

  Gallard raises a hand, but I push back the file and point at it. “This is bullshit.”

  “That’s all we have so far,” says Nicolson, defensively.

  I flip open to the page of genetic sequences with the name Marcus written in pen across the top. “Then you should really look into why an Irish American has the same East African haploid groups as Oyo. It’s like you just grabbed stuff from his file and shoved them in here to make it look thicker.”

  There’s an awkward pause as Nicolson exchanges a quick glance with Gallard. That’s exactly what they did. Something tells me that Nicolson wasn’t so sure about the idea and Gallard pushed for it.

  “I think your spy work has you a little paranoid,” Gallard finally responds.

  “Actually, it’s made me impatient with bullshit like this.” I get up and head for the door. Before leaving, I stop. “If you think I’m your guy on this, good luck.”

  “I’m sure you have a government-backed alibi,” says Gallard.

  “Actually, I was referring to the samples you took from me. Tell the lab they’re going to need to use a larger database.”

  “What does that mean?” asks Nicolson.

  I shut the door and leave them to figure out what I was telling them. It was a petty move on my part, but the moment they pushed the cart into the room and Gallard put on his little show about being frustrated, I knew something was up.

  The sad part was all they had to do was ask.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  PHANTOMS

  “Dr. Cray!” Nicolson shouts at me as I’m about to climb into my rental car. I’m angry at being jerked around, but I’m also sympathetic that he is in over his head and probably being given bad advice by Gallard.

  “What is it, Sean?” I say, key fob in hand.

  “I’m sorry. I’m real sorry. We’re at our wits’ end here. Gallard was brought in and I mentioned you and . . . Well, I can’t blame him. This is on me. It’s . . . There’s a lot going on here.”

  I unlock my car. “You’re not convincing me.”

  “I can show you the file . . .”

  “I have a lot of files waiting for me.”

  “Okay, then I can tell you why Gallard was interested in you.”

  I turn to face him. “Go on.”

  Nicolson glances over his shoulder, afraid that he might be overheard. “It’s a case he’s been following. Not really a case as much as . . . well, a suspicion.”

  “Me?”

  “No. Not directly. He wanted to meet you because he was curious about you, but I genuinely wanted you to look into what happened here. Well, one thing led to another . . .”

  “And you end up lying to me and clumsily trying to get forensic samples I would have gladly given you. Instead of fake ones.”

  “Fake ones?”

  “The cheek swab. I keep preserved samples on me. That was chimpanzee DNA.”

  Nicolson stares at me, momentarily speechless. “Again, I apologize. There’s a lot of weird stuff going on with this case. Gallard came down to see if it was connected to his thing.”

  “And what is his ‘thing’?” I ask.

  “He calls him the Phantom.”

  “Not exactly an original name for a serial killer,” I reply.

  “He’s not a serial killer—at least as far as we know. It’s hard to describe. Basically, the forensics lab at Quantico has noticed something peculiar in a handful of cases—many of them open-and-shut cases with airtight evidence,” Nicolson explains.

  “All right. You have my attention. What’s so peculiar?”

  “It might be a hair follicle in one case that we find in two others. Or a shoe print that matches multiple locations. Hair follicle A and shoe print B might be in one scene, and then shoe print B and a different hair follicle in another. And then that follicle with shoe print A. Do you get what I’m saying?”

  “Like someone took three boxes of puzzle pieces and planted them in crime scenes?”

  “Yes. Of course, we get tons of extraneous prints and follicles in crime scenes. It was an accident that the lab even noticed it. They were trying some AI matching software and it came up with connections to cases that were already closed.”

  “Are they reconsidering those cases?” I ask.

  “They’re looking into them, but the weird part is that a lot of these bits of evidence could have been left behind during various investigations. It could have come from someone who visited the crime scene after the fact. Or something else.”

  “You’re worried about another Woman Without a Face?” I ask.

  European detectives spent fifteen years searching for a killer whose DNA they found at more than fifty crime scenes and whom they believed guilty of six murders. Things took a weird turn when French police tried to ID the body of a burned male corpse and the DNA popped up again.

  The DNA belonged to a woman, all right. A German woman who worked for the laborator
y company that prepared the cotton swabs they used to collect DNA samples. She’d inadvertently been contaminating them with her own DNA.

  “Yeah, but we’ve ruled that out, I think. Too many different samples. This would be someone closer to the investigation. Maybe.”

  “Like a lab tech?”

  “Yes, except we don’t have any who were at all the locations, or even nearby. It’s like someone else has been visiting the crime scenes.”

  “A reporter? A serial-killer junkie?”

  Nicolson shrugs. “Maybe. When the techs were killed and Marcus disappeared . . . Well, we found more samples from the Phantom.”

  “Oh,” I say as it dawns on me. “Gallard thought I was the Phantom?”

  “In his defense, if you search the FBI database for known individuals with a propensity toward visiting crime scenes, your name’s at the top.”

  And all my government trips shrouded in secrecy make me hard for investigators to track down. “Rest easy, I’m not your phantom. It could be noise or a sampling problem.”

  I could also mention the fact that the FBI doesn’t exactly have the most sterling reputation when it comes to hair samples as forensic evidence. A review of their procedures found that FBI experts gave inaccurate testimony in hundreds of cases, overstating the confidence level in matches. Some people even went to death row based on the flawed testimony.

  When they realized their errors, they notified prosecutors but otherwise kept the matter as quiet as possible, fearing that it could lead to scores of retrials and suspects being exonerated.

  It’s a morally tricky area. Groups like the Innocence Project have helped free a lot of wrongfully convicted people, although some law-enforcement experts will insist that not all of the freed suspects were “innocent.” Just the same, it’s up to law enforcement to make sure that suspects get a fair trial based on evidence and not gut feelings.

  While I think the FBI felt it was within its legal bounds not to go out of its way to notify defendants about the evidence in question, I also suspect the ones in charge may have thought they were doing the moral thing by not telling them.

  The truth of the matter is that every large lab has its share of problems and procedures that need to be questioned. The Centers for Disease Control is rife with horrifying examples that raise questions about its labs’ competence. Because it’s a prominent government research facility, its mistakes are more visible than most.

  “Forensic stuff is above my level of understanding,” says Nicolson. “The main reason we asked Gallard to look into this is because of Marcus. There’s nothing, and I mean nothing, in his profile or history that suggests any propensity for violent behavior. Even Gallard said he’d never seen anyone so unlikely to commit a murder be implicated in one. It throws a lot of profiling out the window. Usually you see signs after the fact. But looking back at Marcus, there was nothing.”

  “Is there a connection between Marcus and the Phantom? Could he have been visiting crime scenes after hours?”

  “We thought about that. There are too many points where he was on the wrong side of the country. We’re not even really seriously considering the Phantom hypothesis. Although I’d like to believe that Marcus was framed.”

  Nicolson’s phone buzzes, and he checks it.

  “Well, damn.”

  “What is it?”

  “They found him.”

  “Marcus?”

  He nods.

  “Where are they bringing him?”

  “Here. He’s inbound in about twenty minutes.” He glances at my car. “Are you sure you want to leave us just yet?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  FUGUE

  The face of Daniel Marcus almost fills the screen on the wall of the dark conference room. Gallard is watching closely, occasionally asking the agent handling the video feed to switch to a wide view. Presumably so he can read Marcus’s body language.

  The main conference room where they’re monitoring the interview is upstairs. From here, the agents leading the investigation are watching and sending their questions to the agent in the room with Marcus. I’m sitting quietly in the corner with my visitor badge clipped to my jacket pocket. When Nicolson ushered me in, he referred to me as Dr. Cray to the special agent in charge.

  The interviewer, Agent Howe, a tall, dark-haired woman with a powerful presence, has a clinical approach to her questioning, not appearing too condescending or skeptical. I’m not sure how well I’d do if she were to grill me. There’s a measured patience in her demeanor. She’s quite comfortable letting unsettling silence make Marcus go into greater detail.

  “How much do you recall about Thursday the eighteenth?” she asks.

  Marcus gives a quick shake of his head. “Not much.”

  Nicolson leans in to whisper to me, “He volunteered to be interviewed. State police found him at a rest stop near the border.”

  “Do you recall getting up that morning?” Howe asks.

  Marcus thinks this over. “It would have been the afternoon. We had the night shift. Yes. I remember getting dressed and going to the location.”

  “Okay. What do you remember about that night?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” A pause as she’s probably getting questions sent to her. “Do you remember making any logs about the site?”

  “Yes. I remember that. I filled out some forms, then went back into the pit. I was there for a while. I was getting hungry, but I was afraid I might be coming down with something. Some of the other people on the site got the flu that was going around. It made things stressful.”

  His words are almost monotone, like he’s reciting a script.

  I look over at Nicolson to see how he’s reacting. His body language is easier to decipher than Marcus’s. He’s confused.

  “What’s the last thing you remember in the pit?” asks Howe.

  Marcus exhales. “I’m not sure. I . . . I remember a shadow . . . then . . . nothing. The next thing I know, the police found me.”

  “Has he been examined by a doctor?” I ask Nicolson.

  “There was a paramedic on the scene, and one of our people checked on him here. We wanted to talk to him before sending him to get examined at the hospital.”

  Marcus appears to be in shock, but it’s hard to tell whether he’s really just a bad actor. Gallard is stroking his chin and checking his computer from time to time. Something about Marcus isn’t sitting right with him.

  I’m not a behavioral psychologist. Arguably, I’m not even good at interpreting normal human behavior, let alone knowing if someone is lying. Some people have an intuition for this. It’s not magical; they’re simply more attuned to the changes in voice and mannerisms that indicate someone is being untruthful.

  People can be quite effective lie detectors. Subjects listening to voice recordings can predict whether someone cheats on their spouse more often than chance would dictate. Women are apparently even better at this than men.

  With the advent of thermal imaging like the kind used back in Moscow—millimeter radar and fMRI—we can measure thousands of data points to tell whether they’re being truthful.

  New research using AI has increased the accuracy to frightening levels. Double-blind studies have shown that machines are much better than humans at detecting deception, with far fewer false positives.

  The old adage that lie detection can only tell you whether someone believes something is true doesn’t really apply to the new forms of detection. We can see which parts of the brain are triggered when a subject is asked certain questions.

  If I asked you where you were last Thursday, and you’ve convinced yourself you were at home, when I ask what you ate that night, your brain would be forced to create an answer if you didn’t have a memory. While you may not be aware that your subconscious is inventing this on the fly, we can see a different section of your brain firing up, attempting to fill in the blank.

  We’re even at the point where we can ask you to remember to whom y
ou talked and a computer can create a fuzzy image of their face, distinct from if you were asked to make up an image.

  It’s both incredibly promising and equally terrifying. My friends involved in this area of research are cautious about their technology because of its potential for abuse by well-intentioned people. Something I deal with on a daily basis.

  That said, I’d love to be able to look into Daniel Marcus’s head and see what’s going on. I’m sure I could build some machine-learning models that would tell me much more than what we’re getting right now—which isn’t much.

  Nicolson’s and Gallard’s reactions are telling me much more.

  “You have no memory of the blackout period?” asks Howe.

  “Correct,” says Marcus.

  “Do you know where your car is?”

  Marcus contemplates this, then shakes his head.

  “You’re wearing a different set of clothes than what you wore to work. Do you know where you got these?”

  He shakes his head again.

  “Do you remember any physical pain? Like a headache?”

  A hospital examination will tell us whether he suffered a concussion, but if he’d been injected with anything, traces of the substance would likely be gone in twenty-four hours. There’s a chance they could find an injection point, but if his food or water had been drugged, we’d have no proof if we couldn’t find the original source.

  Marcus doesn’t take as long to respond to the last question. He nods. “I had a headache.”

  “After the blackout?” asks Howe.

  “Maybe . . . but I know I had one before. There was the flu thing going around.”

  Gallard squints as if he’s trying to process this bit of information. Clearly, Marcus had him following a certain train of thought. I’m dying to ask him what he’s thinking.

  To my mind, Marcus’s responses are hesitant and incomplete. It’s hard for me to tell whether this is intentional omission or because he really doesn’t recall what happened.

  “I think I’d like to go to the hospital now,” Marcus says.

  “Okay. We have an ambulance coming. Is there anything else you can remember?”

  “No. What do the others say?”