Murder Theory Read online

  “Hear me out,” I implore. “The deterioration in his prefrontal lobe is unlike almost anything seen before.”

  “And that makes him all the guiltier. What’s your point? His lawyer can argue this in court. We have our man. Why are you still here?”

  “Just bear with me, please. Because there was no evidence of overt physical trauma, I tried to find another potential cause that naturally occurred. That got me thinking of toxoplasmosis . . .”

  “The thing in cat crap?” asks Van Owen.

  “Yes,” I reply. “It’s in the soil, us, everywhere. In high concentrations, it may cause schizophrenia. Maybe. But we know it affects the behavior of mice, making them lose their fear of cats. Which leads them to getting eaten and the cats spreading the protist in the feces across a wider range. It may also affect humans, making them collect more cats.”

  “Great. The ‘cat-litter’ defense,” says Weltz. “I’m sure Marcus’s lawyer will love you for that. Can I go now?”

  “I didn’t say it was toxoplasmosis or anything related to Toxoplasma gondii. I think the carrier cycle’s too short for that.”

  “Thank goodness. And I appreciate the fact that you’re keeping the talk nontechnical,” Weltz mugs to the room.

  I take a deep breath and try to control myself . . . and fail. “Would you shut the fuck up for a moment? Seriously. Where was your sharp wit when I was hunting Joe Vik? What were you doing when Oyo Diallo was murdering children in your own backyard? Right. Here. Conner Brown, one of his first victims, was picked up off a street corner five blocks from here. His mom called this office eighty times. Eighty fucking times! Did you pick up the phone? Did you bother stopping by the church camp he was at a week before?” My voice starts to falter. “When they found his skull, it was fractured—fractured because I goddamn stepped on it when I was crawling through that nightmare of a backyard. His skull! I found a sliver of bone in my shoes days later.” I take a deep breath. “Just give me a moment to finish what I’m saying.”

  The room has fallen deathly silent. I see aghast faces and realize that I’m on the verge of tears.

  “My apologies.” Weltz sounds contrite, although I suspect he’s only humoring me until I leave.

  Fine. Whatever.

  “My point is that we have numerous examples of parasites that can influence behavior. Our own gut microbes do this all the time. Besides Toxoplasma gondii, there’s Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. That’s the fungus that turns ants into zombies, making them wander away from their colony until they find a more suitable place for the fungus to grow, then latch on to a stalk and slowly rot while they’re still alive.

  “And Ophiocordyceps unilateralis is far from a unique pathogen. There are scores of entomopathogenic organisms, from fungi to nematodes. We’ve only discovered the ones we have because they cause such visibly bizarre behavior. Who knows how many of them cause more subtle ones like shifting the migration patterns of birds or even apex predators like sharks . . . or people.”

  “Are you suggesting that some kind of parasite caused Marcus to lose his inhibition against violence?” asks Gallard.

  “It’s worse than that. He reported headaches, correct? Other people on the team also were affected by something. But nobody missed work for as long as someone suffering from the flu. This sounds different. Marcus’s description is consistent with something fungal. But that’s just a guess. We should get a respiratory analysis done and see if there are still spores present. We also need to test the point of infection.”

  “The point of infection?” asks Weltz. “Was this something growing under his fridge?”

  “We should check there, but no. Aren’t you following along?” I look around the room. “Aren’t you getting it? There was another violent incident associated with the team working the Oyo property. They all might’ve been infected.”

  “Infected with what?” asks Gallard. “This spore? Why there?”

  “I don’t know. But you have a half acre of decomposing bodies and brain tissue. Although the techs used normal precautions, they might not be enough for an airborne spore. Especially one in high quantity.”

  “Are you saying this came from Oyo?” asks Van Owen. “That he was a carrier?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t reconcile his restraint with Marcus’s complete lack of it. Maybe it affects people differently. Maybe he had a kind of resistance. Maybe he had nothing to do with this.”

  “Dr. Cray, with all due respect. This is quite a lot to handle,” says Weltz. “We’ll ask that Marcus get some lab tests done. We’ll also have the other team members do it if they volunteer. That’s the best we can do.”

  I stare at him. “Are you kidding me? You don’t find this with a routine blood test.”

  “Our hospital is pretty good here.”

  “Do they know how to screen for things they don’t even have tests for? How does that work? You need to go down the road and call in the Centers for Disease Control. You need to quarantine the entire Oyo property. You need to decontaminate everyone who’s been there. Me, you. Everyone.”

  I’ve lost them. I’ve seen this look in people’s eyes before. This was how they looked at me when I said a man killed Juniper Parsons, not a bear. This was the look they gave me when I said the Toy Man was real.

  Ironically, my track record doesn’t give me the benefit of the doubt. It only makes them more skeptical. I was lucky twice, and now I’m believing my own press. That’s what they’re thinking. In a moment, one of them is going to suggest something proactive and then I’m going to be ushered from the room. They’ll agree to look into it and then delegate it to someone without the ability to see it through.

  “You know what?” I tell the group. “I’m done. I’ve lived this movie too many times. I can’t go chasing down every monster.” I head for the door and leave them with a parting comment. “Good luck.”

  I wish Marcus were the only one, but sooner or later they’re going to realize that the agent’s wife in the coma was beaten by her own husband. All the other acts of aggression will start to add up. More lives may be lost, but I did what I could.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  WHIRLPOOL

  Gallard stares at the ripples in his coffee. I reluctantly agreed to meet with him at this doughnut shop off Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta after he frantically called me. I only agreed because nothing about the man struck me as frantic.

  He’s been staring at his cup since I sat down, either trying to find the right words or using this as some kind of manipulation tactic. Possibly both.

  “For a seemingly coldhearted son of a bitch, you can be a passionate man,” he finally says.

  “Well, this was worth the detour from my trip to the airport.”

  “Hold on. I’m going somewhere with this.” Gallard reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a wallet. He slides a small white rectangle out and stares at it for a moment. “Have a look.”

  It’s a photograph of a woman. Her hair has a 1990s teased look to it, and the background reminds me of the kind you find in a mall photo studio. She has a pleasant smile, but there’s something sad in her eyes.

  “Who is this?” I ask, handing him back the photograph.

  “Colleen Vincelli. In my case file, she’s victim number six. She was murdered March 12, 1999, by Kevin C. Downes. I was looking for Downes. We didn’t have a name. Just a series of victims in the Pennsylvania area. All female. All roughly Colleen’s age.

  “Witness who saw a man leaving the scene of the crime gave us a rough sketch. It seemed pretty generic, but we ran it in a few newspapers.

  “My partner, who had been working the case with me, had some medical problems and was going through a divorce, so everything kind of fell upon me. We were getting leads, but our real focus was on the forensic data. We were pretty sure he’d slip up and we’d get some blood or semen that we could match to a database.” He pauses, then adds, “That was my first problem.”

  “He didn’t slip up?” />
  “Counting on him to. Now, whenever I hear that phrase, ‘slip up,’ in a serial-killer case, I wince. That means that what we’re really waiting for is someone else to die. It doesn’t mean we don’t lack urgency, but it does mean that resourcefulness is often in short supply.”

  I nod my understanding.

  “Downes slipped up. One of his victims bit him on the hand and drew some blood. This gave us DNA and an injury to look for when we started rounding up the usual sexual predators. This was two murders after Colleen. Victim number eight.

  “We patted ourselves on the back and congratulated each other for stopping the next murder and the one after. The case was pretty solid, and the prosecution was able to get a quick conviction.” Gallard makes a little shake of his head, his face a range of emotions. “The reason I carry Colleen’s photo . . . the reason I have it with me . . .” He trails off and sighs. “When I was going back through the case files and the notes, I found a stack of messages—calls I needed to return. There were three or four of them from people who saw the artist’s sketch in the paper.

  “One of the callers was Colleen. Downes worked for a moving company. He’d done a move for a young woman in the apartment next door to Colleen and tried to strike up a conversation with her. She thought he was creepy. She saw the sketch in the newspaper and managed to get ahold of my office. She had his name. The company he worked for. Everything. She tried to tell me. I’d like to say I was too overworked to return the call, but the truth was I was confident that he’d ‘slip up’ and we’d get that forensic data. He did and we got it. But Colleen would be alive if I hadn’t been so full of myself and stuck to basics.

  “Nobody knows this. That memo was pulled from the files. But I can’t tell you how often that kind of thing happens.” He pauses for a long moment. “Anyway, what you said to Weltz back there struck home. I just wanted to say that.”

  I sit quietly for a moment, trying to tease out the message to his story. “I don’t get it,” I say after some thought.

  “There’s nothing to get.”

  “Am I your confessor?” I ask.

  “No, asshole. I’m just trying to explain to you the state of the world. What I’m saying is that they’ll look into your claim. They’ll even call in the CDC to cover their ass. Maybe they’ll find something, but don’t expect a herculean effort.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “But as far as this murder virus or whatever, how serious do you expect the CDC to take it?”

  I ponder this for a moment. The best infectious-disease researchers in the world work there. But they also wait for “slipups” in their own way. For them it’s more data points. Nobody is going to comprehensively test the FBI team without clear evidence of an infection. Their toxicology panels aren’t going to show signs of the infection. At best, they’ll do some MRIs. If Marcus is the only one with the thinning of the region, which he may well be, then it’ll end there.

  “Damn,” I reply after thinking about it.

  “You’re like a time traveler trying to explain forensics to a bunch of medieval monks who still think in terms of humors and vital essences.”

  It’s nowhere near that extreme, but I get the point.

  There’s also been so much abuse of statistics and science in the courtroom that cops are distrustful of anyone with a PhD telling them they have a better way to do things.

  “Okay. Suppose you’re me. What would you do?”

  “I don’t know,” says Gallard. “You have a lab? You work for the government? Maybe you can get them interested in this?”

  “That could be complicated.” I’m also not so sure I want to turn over to the government a pathogen that can make people into killing machines—assuming that it exists.

  “I can get you access to the crime scene. Let you get samples. If that helps. Logs. Whatever.”

  I cross my arms and stare at the ceiling. How should I proceed—assuming I’m going to?

  Who am I kidding? Of course I’m not going to let this go.

  But what next?

  “If there is a pathogen, then why haven’t we seen it before?”

  “You mean people killing people?” asks Gallard.

  “No. It’s not like that. I mean, this may be attributable to a tiny portion of violent behavior, but in no way is it causing an epidemic . . . or is it?” I think for a moment more. “What we need is some kind of filter—a way to narrow down the several thousand murders to ones that may be attributable to this pathogen. And then maybe I can look for a vector. It’s what you’d call a big-data problem. But solvable. I think. The filter.”

  I start to think about how I can take all the murders in the last several years and compare them to similar environmental conditions, suspect behavior, times of year, and a few other factors, and keep on going until I get some kind of match. It’ll be something that looks like statistical noise but isn’t.

  “Dr. Cray . . . ?” says Gallard.

  “Yes. It’s doable. Not a quick thing, but I might be able to find a pattern and then proceed from there. Maybe I can create some kind of environmental assay that lets me compare soil and other factors to a control group.”

  “Theo . . . ,” Gallard tries again.

  “Sorry. Just trying to figure out how to approach the problem.”

  “I have your test group,” he replies.

  “Pardon me?”

  “You’re looking for a small group of murders that share some statistical connection, correct?”

  “Yes. That’s how I can start looking.”

  “I have them. Nine of them. Nine cases that have a connection we can see but can’t quite understand.”

  “Wait? You do?”

  “Yes. I think Nicolson already mentioned them to you. The Phantom?”

  “The cross-contamination of crime scenes?” To be honest, I’d dismissed that as . . . well, statistical noise.

  “What if there’s a connection? Listening to you has me thinking. Some of our equipment is sent from office to office when we have a major investigation. We have a handful of people who visit the crimes. None of them have been to all of them. But they’re from the same center. Is it possible . . . ?” He hesitates as he considers the implications of what he’s about to say. “Is it possible we’ve actually spread this?”

  We both sit there in silence. While I can discount a number of things about that scenario, I can’t eliminate it entirely.

  “Bats and frogs,” I reply.

  “Pardon me?”

  “If you visit certain bat sanctuaries, they ask that you make sure your shoes have been decontaminated and haven’t been in other caverns. This is because there’s a parasite that can be spread on the bottom of your shoes.”

  He raises his eyebrows. So?

  “The more disturbing implication, and one that doesn’t get as much attention because the people who may be aware of this problem could be the partial cause of the problem, is amphibian die-off. While there’s ample evidence that pollution has been killing frogs and other amphibians in some locations, the rate at which some of these populations collapse doesn’t track with gradual environmental damage. It’s more like what you see when there’s a viral outbreak like Ebola.

  “When a particular group of frogs suddenly dies off from what appears to be a pathogen in a remote section of the Appalachians, you have to ask what introduced the pathogen to the area. Unfortunately, the answer in some cases may be the researchers investigating the frogs. There’s reason to believe that their shoes and equipment act as delivery mechanisms when they go from one location to another. Basically, they take a parasite that one group of frogs has adapted to and introduce it into a different region where there is no resistance.”

  Gallard nods that he understands.

  “It’s a controversial theory, because it implicates the scientists investigating the very problem they’re trying to solve. This could be the same situation.”

  “We can’t tell anyone,” says Gallard.

>   “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, tell your lawyer or anyone you need to. But if we go back to the bureau with this, it’ll cause problems.”

  “Problems are unavoidable,” I reply.

  “Okay, genius, think this through. Let’s say we take this directly to the director. What’s he going to do? He’s going to call the head of the field lab and ask what the hell we’re talking about.

  “The lab chief will tell him it’s bullshit, while quietly making sure all their equipment gets sterilized—if they take it that far. But what they’ll definitely do is tell him that you’re the pathogen. While the lab chief denies there’s any problem that he helped create, you’ll have the FBI after you for assailing their reputation. It has to be you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yep.” He touches the photograph of Colleen on the table. “Assuming that you’re right, then this will happen again. If it isn’t happening right now.” He stirs his coffee with his spoon. “Crazy thing, the idea of that pathogen getting spread around.”

  I watch the whirlpool and get an unsettled feeling. “Fuck.”

  “What.”

  “Fungi. Viruses. Bacteria. They don’t stay the same. Fungi and bacteria in particular, they exchange DNA haphazardly. This could be something made by cross-contaminating crime scenes.”

  “Damn. That’s even worse.”

  “No. Way worse. The others may have been gradual. Marcus was affected pretty quickly.” I find it hard to breathe. “This thing may have mutated. It could be even more virulent. More dangerous. This could become a real epidemic.”

  “An epidemic of violent behavior? Like more spree killers?”

  “Precisely.”

  Gallard pushes his coffee away, unable to finish it. I’ve lost all trace of appetite myself. There’s no way I can drop this now.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  KELP

  The sky and the sea are all the shades of gray blending into a dark foreboding where the ocean curves into the horizon. In the distance, a black figure is walking toward me. He waves to me, and I wave back, then try to imagine my Viking ancestors looking into the hostile waves and telling themselves this was a good day to set sail for different shores.