by Keith Thomas
“One last thing,” Tamiko said, standing. “If the Morris hypothesis is correct and memory can be inherited alongside genes, then how is it that Ashanique can remember the last moments of George Edwin Ellison’s life? She claims to have seen his death but he never handed down those specific memories. He died with them.”
“I experienced it,” Ashanique said. “I felt it.”
“And I don’t know how that’d be possible, honestly. Even if we accept that memory can be transferred and, for whatever reason, Ashanique has been able to activate them, she’s talking about memories she can’t have. We can’t know for sure, of course. But these inherited memories should only go up to the birth of the next generation, when the genes bifurcated. So Ashanique should only have her mother’s memory up until her own birth.”
Ashanique said, “I don’t know how it works. But I know what I see.”
“Well then,” Tamiko said, grabbing her purse. “Let’s go to the lab.”
37
9:39 A.M.
NOVEMBER 15, 2018
WEST GARFIELD PARK
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
“TELL ME THE STORY of the girl again.”
Brandon sat at the kitchen island and kicked the cabinet underneath.
When Kojo first remodeled the kitchen, Brandon would sit there and kick the newly painted wood with his shoes, scuffing the paint within seconds. Even though Kojo realized that few, if any, people would be looking at the cabinet doors beneath the island, the thought of those scuff marks drove him crazy. He couldn’t convince Brandon to stop the kicking either—Dr. Landau, the boy’s doctor, suggested it might be a repetitive behavior, an unconscious way to cope—so Kojo got his son some soft slippers, the kind with little stuffed animal heads on the front. His were teddy bears.
So Brandon’s feet brushed against the cabinet doors.
The sound was soft, like wind rustling leaves.
Kojo actually liked the sound of it.
He was making eggs and toast, Brandon’s favorite. Kojo tore a hole in the center of the bread and cracked the egg inside. He cooked them over easy. Brandon loved cutting into the egg and seeing the yoke soak into the bread.
He watched Kojo cook, legs pumping madly under the island.
“Story time,” Brandon said. “The one with the octopus.”
Kojo frequently told Brandon stories. It wasn’t his thing; his tales were stilted and amateurish. Constance had been great at coming up with stories when Brandon was little. She’d just make them up off the top of her head: the one about a giant who uses a tree as a toothbrush, the one about the little girl who finds a hidden world inside a gleaming white cube—but Kojo couldn’t.
When Kojo winged it, his stream-of-consciousness stories automatically became work stories. They’d end right there. Cut off before they became too unnerving. Like the one about the veinless junkie who got pregnant so she could shoot up in the veins in her engorged breasts or the one about the pimp who put out a cigarette on one of his girls’ eyes. Not stories a child, or anyone for that matter, needs to hear.
So instead, Kojo told Brandon about Ashanique.
“Her special power is her memory,” he said as he flipped the egg and toast. “She has this crazy ability to remember the lives of all sorts of interesting people. People from history, like kings and queens and soldiers.”
“Like she’s got all the books in her head.”
“Exactly.” Kojo nodded. “That’s actually totally right.”
“She’s a special person. Like me.”
Kojo looked up from the stovetop. Brandon gave his infectious smile, the smile he used on everyone he could. The woman who packed their groceries at the corner store called it the smile of a flirt. Ophelia said it was Brandon’s purest expression.
“You certainly are,” Kojo said. “You’re why I get up in the morning. I want to make the world a better place for you. I want everyone out there to see you the same way I see you: a strong, beautiful, brilliant boy who believes he can accomplish anything.”
Kojo glanced at the clock over at the fridge.
Ophelia’s running late. Fifteen minutes behind already.
He walked through the various things he needed to take care of, the pending cases, the open investigations (all those lost souls, the bodies on ice). He needed to hit the grocery store too (they’d been out of milk for three days and there was one roll of toilet paper between two bathrooms). And now, again, Ophelia was late.
Couldn’t she at least pick up one thing on her way over? Does she notice we’re running low on milk and toilet paper? Good Lord . . .
“Ophelia will be here soon,” Kojo said. “I need to finish getting ready.”
“We should have another mommy.”
“What?”
“Another mommy would help you.”
Kojo’s cell phone rattled the counter just as the front door unlocked and opened. Ophelia walked into the house with a grocery bag.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said, closing the door. “I just stopped by the market to grab some milk. I noticed you were running low. A few supplies as well.”
Brandon jumped down from his chair and ran over to see her.
Ophelia laughed as she put down the bag and they hugged.
Kojo smiled to her and waved as he answered his cell.
His boss, Chief Wittkower, was on the other end.
“You coming in today?”
“Yeah, just a late start.”
Ophelia walked into the kitchen beside Brandon. He was holding her hand. Cell at his ear, Kojo mouthed Thank you to Ophelia as she started putting away the groceries.
She could have been Brandon’s grandmother. In her midsixties, Ophelia wore a long, colorful skirt and a short-sleeved top. Though she’d been in the States a few years, she dressed as though she were going to work in Accra.
Chief Wittkower cleared his throat.
“Feds are here.”
“Why?”
“Janice Walters case,” Wittkower said.
“That doesn’t make any—”
“It does when you find out who Mrs. Walters really is.”
38
10:27 A.M.
NOVEMBER 15, 2018
CHICAGO POLICE DEPARTMENT HOMICIDE DIVISION
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
“IS NOW GOOD?”
Kojo rapped on the open door to Chief Toby Wittkower’s office.
The chief was short and dense-boned. But despite outward appearances, the red cheeks, the straining eyes behind thick glasses, he was not volcanic. Wittkower was a pragmatic man, a balanced man. He had a finely tuned eye for organization, the kind of person who walked into a dinner party and rearranged the books and straightened the foot rugs.
“Come on in, Detective. Shut the door.”
Chief Wittkower sat behind his immaculate desk, glasses perched on his nose, as he read through a rookie officer’s report. “How is it possible,” he said, “for one person to get ‘its’ and ‘it’s’ confused in every single instance?”
Kojo sat across from Chief Wittkower.
“Probably just didn’t care enough.”
“Exactly what’s wrong with the world today, no pride in people’s work.”
“You said the Feds are here.”
Ready to rumble, always ready, this one. Chief Wittkower used to think Kojo’s eagerness was due to being fresh, suffering from a bad case of rookie-itis. He quickly realized that Detective Omaboe wasn’t trying to please anyone but himself. The eagerness was mistaken impatience; Kojo operated at another speed from the rest of the department, hell, from the rest of humanity. Everyone else was playing catch-up. Kojo exemplified the sort of behavior that gets a homicide detective a commendation. And a knife in the back.
Chief Wittkower wasn’t going to be the one to put it there.
He figured he wouldn’t likely remove it either.
“It’s the case from the university. The Walters girl and her mother.”
Kojo was confused.
; “Mom’s in on something?”
“Janice isn’t Janice. She’s Janet. Or Jill. Who the fuck knows who she really is? But her prints tell us she’s been linked with some domestic terrorist incidents going back about twenty years. We’re not talking anything with links to the Middle East or black nationalism groups; this is more cultlike, loony shit. Call themselves the Null Cohort. These cats don’t leave calling cards or post manifestos. They’re not out recruiting new members. From what I’ve been told, they target scientists, bureaucrats, and military doctors.”
“Null Cohort? What the fuck’s that mean?”
“I had no idea. So I used something called a dictionary. Amazing what you’ll find inside an actual book. Null means ‘nothing.’ But in scientific talk, it means having zero value or producing no signal. It is what the researchers are trying to disprove. Or something— It gets complicated. Cohort is another fancy term, most of the time used in research. It means a group of people treated together. Like at the same time, in an experiment. Put them together and you get Null Cohort, a group of similar people who represented the opposite of what a research experiment would try to prove. But don’t quote me on any of that, I barely understand it myself.”
“So these domestic terrorists are what? Rejects from a study?”
“Got me. Feds ran the connections. All the best data people at Quantico can’t find a link between the targets. Could be that’s the point. Could be it’s just a major fuck-you to the Man. Thing is, that sort of agenda almost requires posting manifestos or uploading videos. These guys? Mum. Maybe their name is a joke. Or a distraction.”
“But we do know their name. That’s something.”
“Maybe. . . .”
Kojo asked, “What have they done?”
Chief Wittkower rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. He hadn’t had any coffee in three hours. The single-serve coffeemaker in the hall outside his office was shit. One minute it overfilled the mug with watery coffee, the next it was spitting and dripping sludge. Still, he’d take it.
Hell is crowded with the ungrateful.
“It all started in the late 1980s. Their modus operandi consists of mail bombs and shootings. Only five casualties. Some injuries, one doc was blinded, and a woman scientist lost a hand. Not exactly top-tier stuff, but considering how long it’s been going on, the Feds sniff out any and all associations.”
“And Ashanique Walters’s mom is part of this?”
“That is what I’ve been told. We’ve been asked to gather up everything we have on her, going back at least ten years under five different aliases. It ain’t much, tell the truth. Outstanding warrants for trespassing, breaking and entering, and shoplifting. But whoever Janice is, she’s excellent at getting out of trouble. And fast.”
Kojo nodded, he seemed to be getting it.
Of course, Wittkower thought, if anyone got it, it’d be him.
“How about the girl? Anything on her?”
Chief Wittkower thumbed through a neat stack of papers on his left. Pulled out one and skimmed it over briefly before turning back to Kojo.
“You probably already know more than me. She’s in middle school, gets decent grades but nothing spectacular. Misses a lot of class due to some sort of illness. A lot of notes from the school nurse about pain here and there. A lot of calls from the mom letting the school know she’s out sick.”
“So you going to show me what you have on Janice?”
“Time’s tight. You can take the stack here but . . .” Chief Wittkower opened a desk drawer and pulled out a videocassette and file folder.
He handed both to Kojo.
“There’s a TV with a built-in tape player in the back office. In the folder you’re going to find a note from Dr. Shapiro, the police shrink who interviewed her. Half the shit he says isn’t important, but you’ll want to read it anyway.”
• • •
Kojo located the TV/VCR in a storage room near the showers.
It hadn’t been touched in at least ten years.
He grabbed a towel from the locker room to wipe the thick film of dust from the screen. Kojo plugged the TV in and dragged over a stool with a warped leg.
Before he popped in the videocassette, he opened the folder to read Dr. Shapiro’s note. The ducts overhead came on, and cobwebs, blown free by the ensuing breeze, drifted lazily onto the pages.
39
6-17-2005
Note from Dr. M. Shapiro
I wanted to include a personal note with this file. I’ll admit at the outset that I might have let this case get to me a little. Excuse the informality; this is primarily for my own benefit, as Mrs. Olander’s case is complicated.
Much of this is summary of the interview tapes, but it provides an excellent background on Mrs. Olander’s paranoid delusions—perhaps enough material for a case study (?) or white paper (?).
Mrs. Janet Olander (a suspected pseudonym) was apprehended during a sweep of a suspected drug-manufacturing lab in Pullman. The owner of the lab, Mr. Datlow, is also suspected of being involved with an obscure anarchist group called, variously, NULL or NULL COHORT. Though both, of course, deny any and all involvement. While Mrs. Olander was caught in the sweep alongside two other women, Mr. Datlow was not. As of the time of this note, all four are suspected of having fled the state. The files have been turned over to the FBI.
Those are the facts. What I found most fascinating about Mrs. Olander’s case was everything else: she talked of conspiracies inside conspiracies—really detailed stuff that, honestly, I had not encountered outside of some of the major literature (Dagnall, Parker, Van der Linden). So I jumped at the chance to go deep on it. If anything, it makes for some stirring reading.
NOTE: It should be mentioned that Mrs. Olander only volunteered this information because she thought I might be able to help her and she claimed to be suffering from a medical ailment that was impairing her judgment (more to come). She was hesitant at first and suggested there would be “deadly” repercussions but eventually relented. She was evaluated for intoxication—labs were run—but proved negative for any recreational or prescription drugs that might have affected her. Oddly, we did detect the presence of a cancer treatment medication, new to the market, but it was found in only faint traces.
Here are the bare bones as far as I can work them out:
Janet claimed to be tangentially involved with a group called NULL or NULL COHORT. She was evasive about the mission of this group and her involvement. From what I can glean—interviews and FBI insiders—this group, classified as anarchist, has been targeting scientists, military officers, and psychologists with mail bombs. As far as I can determine (and I’m not alone), there is no correlation between those people targeted—no common places of work (as listed) and no common interests.
• There were seven victims of Null over the past twenty-odd years. They are below, with notes when available. All of the victims suffered burns and/or lost a hand, fingers, or eyes/eyesight. There were two fatalities.
Dr. Owen Wendt—Tallahassee, FL. 1987
Retired primatologist, formerly at Fort Detrick
Adm. Frederick Cook—Silver Springs, MD. 1989
Retired chief of naval research, stationed in the Western Pacific
Dr. Joseph Curwen—Joplin, MO. 1989 (fatally injured)
Former Duke professor; author of “The Lupine Papers,” a ’60s-era study into altering consciousness via light deprivation
Dr. Lisa Kubie—Seattle, WA. 1991
Research scientist associated with Dr. Curwen
Dr. Carolyn Barnes Speer—Taos, NM. 1994
Physician at Taos’ Addiction Control Center
Stanley Bennett—Washington, DC. 1998 (fatally injured)
Retired engineer, developed medical imaging technology
Sgt. Julian Marchetti—Dallas, TX. 2000
Former associate of deceased bacteriologist Frank Olson
Though there is no documentation to support Janet’s accusations, she claims all of these p
eople were involved in a covert CIA mind-control program similar in nature to the infamous MK-ULTRA. In fact, Janet claims that this project—she would not give its name—was an offspring of ULTRA itself. So, in her mind, the Null are getting payback—punishing scientists and military personnel involved in a clandestine experiment. One that I can find no evidence of.
• Here’s where things get interesting. According to Janet, the purpose of this experiment was to take the lessons learned in the “Magic Room” and apply them in a new, more technologically advanced setting.
What is the Magic Room? Good question. It took me several weeks to track the information down. Below is an excerpt from a letter I received from Dr. Franklin Gross, a history professor at Wash U. A good summary.
“What you have to know is that our world came within seconds of Armageddon in the 1950s. A nuclear holocaust seemed inevitable. The only thing keeping it at bay was knowledge. If we knew what our enemy knew, then we could be one step ahead of them. We could get our finger on the launch key before they did. But, of course, the knowledge we needed was inside the heads of people who didn’t want to divulge it. We had to make them talk; we had to bring them over to our side. It was the same on the other side too.
We toyed with truth serums, LSD, electroconvulsive therapy, none of it worked as efficiently as we’d liked. Some scientists, particularly in Eastern Bloc countries, explored the outer limits of pain as a means to gain mental control. That was effective up to a point but the results were short-lived. But in 1954, we learned of a new technique.
The Magic Room.
It was the invention of some very enterprising psychiatrists in Hungary—in particular, a Dr. László Németh. The room itself was in a prison. It was unusual in every facet of its design. Twelve feet by fifteen feet in dimensions, however, it was not rectangular but oval shaped. The walls curved outward. There was a bed. Easy chairs. A desk. A toilet and sink. All told, the Magic Room looked quite comfortable for any political prisoner who was used to being shoved into a room the size of a sardine can with ten other inmates.
But that deception was core to the purpose of the room. The bed was sloped, it touched the ground at the end. Nearly impossible to sleep in. All the furniture was likewise uncomfortable. Built at odd angles or with exceptionally rough materials. And all of it was covered in a highly reflective material. This is because of the lights. All the lights in the Magic Room had rotating lampshades. They were painted in bizarre clashing colors, and as the lampshades turned, they produced bizarre—you could say, psychedelic—patterns on the walls. Well, on every surface of the room. It was like being in an ever-shifting, red-hued underwater grotto. Enough to drive anyone to madness within a few days. But Dr. Németh wasn’t after madness, he was after truth. He wanted to control his patients’ minds. To do that, he used the silver beam. What was the silver beam? Possibly just a bright light but it might also have been something more. . . .”