Murder Theory

by Andrew Mayne

  “I checked his record and noticed that he’d worked as an electrician and his last job was as a handyman at an apartment complex. When I spoke to the superintendent of the building, he told me that the last day he saw Emerson before the murders, he’d found him slumped behind a washing machine where he’d been repairing the outlet.

  “He said it looked like Emerson had electrocuted himself. Probably had a seizure. He asked Emerson what happened, but he had no memory and just wanted to go home. He refused an ambulance. Two weeks later, he killed his family.

  “I know what you’re all asking: Did that jolt of electricity turn him into a killer? I don’t know. We could draw connections and speculate, but that’s all we could do. Maybe he was a psychopath all along, waiting for the right moment. That happens.

  “But the difference between Emerson and your guy is that if I looked at Emerson’s brain, I’d bet anything I’d see the damage on the prefrontal or temporal lobe. Your guy? No dice. Not unless he was moonlighting as a clumsy electrician.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Leed,” says Gallard as she leaves us with her observation. “I don’t know what else there is to do.”

  “Fuck,” Nicolson mutters as he looks up from his computer.

  “Marcus got his attorney?” says Van Owen, looking up from hers.

  “No. Not that. Did you see the last performance report?”

  “How did you get a copy?” she asks.

  “That’s not important. Marcus got severely reprimanded by Novak. She came down hard on him for some mislabeling that could have cost a case.”

  “There’s your motive,” says Gallard. “The prosecutors will make a case that he was under a lot of stress and then snapped. They’ll probably go for manslaughter. Going for the death penalty would be too tricky. Maybe over time they can get him into a mental hospital.”

  “Why not ask Marcus to do another MRI?” I suggest.

  “Too risky,” says Gallard. “If it comes back with nothing, like the others, he’ll have a harder time claiming some kind of physical trauma, if that’s the route they want to go. And without any incident to point to, there’s no point. His best bet is to get some court psychologist to claim psychological issues—assuming they’re not going to try to claim innocence.”

  “Thanks, Dr. Cray,” says Nicolson. “Sorry I dragged you into this.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more of a help.” I check my phone. I might be able to catch a red-eye back to Austin. “Let me know if anything turns up.”

  “Will do.”

  I leave the conference room feeling as though there’s something unfinished there. That we’re still missing something.

  I try to put it out of my head and worry about getting the office back on track and undoing any damage that Todd may have done in my absence.

  Damn it . . . what is it about Leed’s story that’s sticking in the back of my mind?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CATNIP

  As I walk past the empty rows of seats in the airport terminal, I keep thinking about Marcus and Emerson. In particular how one freak event could have caused damage to Emerson’s brain, turning an otherwise fine human being into a monster. This wasn’t a gradual slide, but a sudden snap that made him into a different person entirely—or at least unleashed that part of all of us that wants to react violently to the slightest provocation.

  That’s not what made Joe Vik or Oyo Diallo. They both had excellent impulse control. That’s what allowed them to function for so long. Emerson and now apparently Marcus acted impulsively and were apprehended soon after their first kills—as far as we know.

  It’s dangerous to give too much credence to simple pop-psychology answers. In the 1990s, as violent crime was hitting an uptick, we were warned by both conservatives and liberals about a new type of criminal. These so-called superpredators were the new generation of children that were joining gangs, selling drugs, and committing violence like never before. Or that’s what the narrative said. It was also thinly veiled code for “black teenagers.”

  Despite the direst predictions of their elders, this so-called violent generation became the least violent since the 1960s. Our superpredators turned out to be less violent than the generation that was ready to criminalize them from birth. As a child of that generation, I’m still waiting for my apology.

  Despite the failure of superpredators to prey properly and the zombie generation of crack babies we were told would soon follow, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t environmental and cultural trends that can influence violent behavior.

  I’ve seen persuasive studies that show that the generation before the so-called superpredators was exposed to excessively high amounts of lead in the air, water, and their home environments, supposedly leading to higher incidences of violence in affected communities. Causation and correlation are not the same thing, but it’s not something I’d discount immediately out of hand.

  That’s why I can’t discount the idea that there could be an environmental factor affecting Marcus. But it’s so hard to prove. Some factors are too subtle to detect.

  Right now, my stomach is telling me that I’m hungry and that I’m craving a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup from the now-closed gift shop. I don’t know if the craving is coming from my brain or the trillions of bacteria in my stomach that have learned to trip my nervous system by producing their own dopamine triggers.

  They’re really that clever. There’s frightening research that some cases of obesity could be caused not by a fault in your genes, but by your gut microbes clamoring for the kinds of foods you shouldn’t be eating.

  I’m wary of too-convenient explanations or mental boogeymen that exonerate us from being lazy and making bad choices, but I can’t deny that the evidence is growing that a number of behaviors and diseases may not be due to defects in our genes, but to the survival mechanisms of the biome within us.

  That the human body or any other animal is a system comprised of millions of smaller systems, some of them completely separate from us genetically, shouldn’t be an earthshaking revelation. We’ve suspected for more than a century that the mitochondria in our cells were originally a foreign organism that we developed a symbiotic relationship with. This eukaryote-mitochondrial matchup worked out pretty well and gave us everything from sponges to velociraptors, proving that evolution doesn’t care where a good idea comes from, as long as it improves a species’ odds of survival.

  Further evidence of cross-species intermingling can be found in all the funky DNA that shouldn’t be there if evolution followed clean and orderly rules. We humans have genes free-riding in our genome that were left behind by viruses that somehow managed to get their code written into the master program. That’s why I don’t worry too much about artificial intelligence wiping us out. We’ll still survive somewhere—even if it’s in a file marked “Delete when found.”

  I take a seat across from a girl wearing a University of Texas hoodie and playing with a kitten in her lap. The cat has a tortoiseshell coloring, and I watch and see if I can detect any of the so-called tortitude behavior that tortoiseshell owners insist is a real thing.

  I give the girl a smile, trying not to look like a creep. She smiles back. The kitten, frustrated by the interruption in attention, swipes at her chin.

  What does the cat make of her human? Is the girl a mama cat? A bigger playmate? Or some other thing that she’s created her own mental model for?

  We don’t have to fit into ready classifications. While nature has helped us evolve these distinctions and they’re hardwired into us, we can develop our own strange relationships with simple patterns—a washing machine that makes a child fall asleep or a song that energizes us. While we use words to describe these interactions, at some level certain things simply make a few of our neurons fire off in a particular pattern—like my gut bacteria telling me to break into the gift shop and snag a Peanut Butter Cup . . .

  The cat pulls at the girl’s hoodie with a claw, and the girl admonishes her pet. �
�Settle down, Elon.”

  This captures my attention. Male tortoiseshells are extremely rare. “Is your cat a boy?” I ask.

  “No,” says the girl. “I found her at South by Southwest after Elon Musk spoke. It seemed like a good name.”

  Watching the mischievous little Elon and trying to fight back the trillion-strong army of bacteria ordering me to smash down the glass window of the gift shop and consume every Peanut Butter Cup I can find, a thought strikes me.

  It’s a wild-card notion, but something in the back of my mind feels as if a piece of the upside-down puzzle I’ve been trying to solve got flipped over.

  I call Nicolson.

  “Dr. Cray? What’s up?”

  The words pour out of my mouth. “Can you give me the number for Marcus’s attorney?”

  “Yeah. Let me text someone. What’s going on?”

  “We need to get him another MRI as soon as possible,” I reply.

  “What’s going on?” he asks again.

  “It’s a long shot. But if I’m right, we need to know now, not later. Other people could be in danger.”

  “But Marcus is in custody. He turned himself in.”

  “I know. It’s not him I’m concerned about. I need to know everyone else who was at the Oyo property. Everyone who was sick with Marcus’s flu.”

  I stand up so fast that Elon almost jumps out of the girl’s lap. This could be bad. Real bad. I hope I’m wrong. I’ve never hoped I was more wrong in my life.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  MEMBRANE

  Mike Jessup, Daniel Marcus’s attorney, eyes me suspiciously from the chair next to me and across from Henrietta Leed’s desk at Georgia Tech. He’s an overweight man with a pink complexion who looks like he slept in his clothes, except the bloodshot look in his eyes tells me that he probably hasn’t had any sleep since he got the call from his client’s friends.

  Outside the professor’s window, students cross the quad toward their morning classes under a canopy of trees that have already lost their leaves.

  “Can anyone tell me why I’m sitting here in the office of the physician the FBI may use in court against my client?” asks the lawyer.

  “I’ve already told them I can’t participate,” says Leed. She gives me a subtle glance. “I’ve already been compromised, so to speak.”

  “Did you have the MRI done?” I ask.

  “Do you know how hard it is to get an MRI done at that time of night?” Jessup shoots back. “Much less get the results back so quickly?”

  “You’re the legal adviser for the hospital. I thought you might be able to call in a favor.”

  “I did. I just want you to know that it wasn’t something you just conjure up out of thin air. Now please tell me why I’m here. I showed up because I looked up your name. But why did you ask me in here when I should be getting ready to file a motion in the event the FBI decides to press charges against my client?”

  “I have a theory.”

  “Ooh, a theory,” he mocks. “I can rest easy. Let me tell the boys at the US attorney’s office that they should stand down because you got a theory. Unless you’re about to confess to the crime, your theory is a crock of nothing at this point and a waste of my time.”

  “Mr. Jessup, more lives than just your client’s could be at stake right now. If I’m right, and I hope I’m not, it’s way worse than I imagined.”

  “And how is this good for my client?” he replies.

  “They’re going to need his full cooperation. Possibly to stop other murders.”

  “By who?” he asks.

  “I’ll get to that. Like I said, chances are I’m wrong. But if I’m not, it’ll be a bargaining chip to get your client help.”

  He turns to Professor Leed. “Does he ever get to the point?”

  “Do you have the MRI scans?” I ask.

  Jessup takes a thumb drive from his pocket. “I have MRI scans made under the name of John Doe. Does that satisfy you?”

  That’s a good trick on Jessup’s behalf. If the records aren’t under Marcus’s name and they’re inconclusive, the prosecution will have a hard time calling them in as exhibits if Jessup decides to plead insanity due to physical trauma.

  Leed takes the thumb drive and plugs it into her computer. “Would you mind lowering the screen over my bookcase and turning down the lights?” she asks me.

  I do as she requests, then sit again, turning my chair so I can see the projection. The wall fills with the image of her desktop, followed by an MRI scan similar to the ones we looked at last night.

  The data points seem too chaotic for me to make sense of. I want to rip the thumb drive out and plug it in to my computer, but I wait for Leed to make her analysis.

  She gets up from behind her desk and walks over to the screen. She could simply blow the image up on her own monitor, but I guess making it extralarge is part of the process. My mind wanders for a moment as I try to imagine what virtual reality will be like when we can step inside a 3-D human brain and examine each individual neuron.

  She takes her ruler from her pocket and starts comparing areas. From my research, it appears she’s measuring the thickness of a specific region in the frontal lobe. The red and white dots tell her about blood supply. More white than red is an indicator that the area isn’t functioning.

  “Does this mean anything to you?” Jessup asks me.

  “Not at the macro level. I’d have to look at it on a mathematical level.”

  “Thanks for clearing that up.”

  I realize I gave him a confusing answer. “I’d have to compare it to a bunch of other brains to see how they’re different. Dr. Leed’s seen thousands, so she can spot the difference on sight.”

  “I wish it was that easy,” she replies. “Mike, mind if I let computer boy have a look, using his whatever?”

  “Fine. But you’re now officially an unpaid adviser to the defense team.”

  “Uh, okay.” I take the drive from Leed’s desk and plug it in to my MacBook. After I drag the images over to my little application, it only takes a moment for it to give me an answer.

  “Dr. Cray?” asks Leed. “What does it say?”

  I close my computer. “You first. All I have is a number.” Impulsively, I want to test her. She made me go first last time, and for all I know she could be conning me.

  “Fine. I’ll show you mine.” She points to a portion of the image toward the front of the skull. “See this? All that white? It’s like there’s no wall there. To create this kind of deterioration, you’d have to use surgery or some kind of particle beam.” She turns to Jessup. “Hand it over.”

  “Hand what over?” he asks.

  “Marcus’s real MRIs. This little courtroom trick doesn’t fly around here.”

  “Henrietta, as God is my witness, that’s the drive the doctor gave me.”

  “No trick?” She seems genuinely surprised.

  “No trick.”

  She sits on the edge of her desk between us. “Holy shit. Holy fucking shit. Pardon my language, gentlemen. But I wasn’t kidding. The only way I know to get this kind of damage is like I said. Surgery or some kind of medical proton beam. No trick?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Leed turns to me. “All right, computer boy, what does your magic box say?”

  I call out the confidence level to her. “A point-nine-two certainty. Again, my model isn’t that well trained. But it’s been dead-on so far.”

  “Holy shit,” she says again.

  “Could someone tell me what this means? Did my client do it or didn’t he?” asks Jessup.

  “Oh, he did it,” she says. “According to what I’m seeing, if he didn’t do it, it was only a matter of time before he snapped and did something. See that area? That’s what stops you from hitting the guy that looked at you funny. When you’re drunk or high, it doesn’t function so well. On your client, it’s like it got completely stripped away. He was a ticking time bomb.”

  Jessup nods, the defense’s ar
gument already forming in his mind.

  “I’ll testify he’s no guiltier than someone who unknowingly infects someone else with a deadly cold,” says Leed. “It was physically—structurally—impossible for him to restrain himself. He’s like a man who gets pushed off a building and lands on a pedestrian.”

  Jessup ponders this. “But if we plead insanity, he’ll be hospitalized for the rest of his life.”

  Leed stares at him. “Your client needs to be institutionalized. Now. He could go off again at any moment. I’ve seen this before,” she says, no doubt thinking about Emerson. “We need to get him help.”

  “Is it reversible?”

  “Not presently. But who knows? I don’t know if they’ve tried stem-cell therapy for this kind of thing. It’d make a great candidate.” She shakes her head. “Still, how the hell did this happen?”

  “I think I know,” I reply, “and it terrifies me.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  TOXIC

  “Bullshit,” says Special Agent Weltz, who’s in charge of the current investigation. “Save this prime-time crime-show bullshit for the courtroom and the dumb-ass jury willing to go for this crap.”

  I’m in yet another FBI conference room, making me wonder if there’s an endless number of them in this building, each appearing like some kind of magical Harry Potter chamber whenever summoned.

  Gallard, Nicolson, Van Owen, and a handful of others are seated around the table. My reputation was enough to get a thirty-minute meeting with them.

  Ten minutes in, it appears the meeting may not make it another five. Weltz is prepared to formally announce charges against Marcus and declare the case closed. He’s not too happy about me jumping up and saying that his suspect is crazy before he even gets the chance to point the finger. Unfortunately, there’s so much more at stake here.