by Steven James
“Why not just steal her car?”
“Because, that she would notice.”
She’d given him permission to do it.
She finished with the wig. “I’ll take the wheel.”
“Okay.”
He got out of the car, and she slid into the driver’s seat. When he’d climbed in again, she asked him, “Do you have him? Is he in the—”
“Yes.”
“And the dog?”
“It’s all taken care of.”
“And you have the shovel?”
“Yes.”
Then Astrid aimed the car toward the entrance to the FBI Academy.
Tonight, the greatest taunt, the greatest thrill of all—an extra body in the FBI Academy’s body farm. And as she and her man buried it, she would tell him about their child.
Predator.
Prey.
Death and life.
The climax of their game. The cycle of all things.
People see what they expect to see.
With the actual license plates and the same model car, with the driver’s license, wig, and similar outfit, she did not expect that the sentry would give her any trouble. After all, why hassle two National Academy students returning to their dorm?
But just in case the Marine did, her partner had his Walther P99 hidden beneath the jacket lying on his lap. And more than one body would be left behind at the farm.
Predator. Prey. Death and life.
Their child.
The cycle of all things.
“When we get there,” she told him, “I’ve got a surprise for you. Something I need to tell you.”
As I watched Lien-hua drive away, I tried to sort out my feelings.
Holding her, kissing her, had brought everything back.
The hope.
The electric desire.
The confusion.
As well as the struggles to make things work and the biting pain I’d felt when we parted ways last month.
Maybe she was right about me, maybe I hadn’t been able to open up the deep parts of my heart since Christie’s death and that’s what had caused me to drift away from the people I loved.
All because of a lingering hue of grief still crawling around inside me.
The lights of her car flickered into and out of the trees. Fog was circling into the night and made the taillights look like blurred brushstrokes from a watercolor painting.
Few can decipher even fragments of their meaning . . .
Finally, the night mist swallowed the car’s lights, and I returned to the living room, where I found Tessa lounging on the couch channel surfing.
Click.
Click. Through the stations.
The Sherlock Holmes book and a copy of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde sat next to her on a pillow.
“You said good night to her?” she asked.
“I did.”
Click.
I took a seat on the couch. “I’m not sure if I should thank you or be mad at you for inviting those two over here without asking me first.”
“Let’s go with the thanking me one.” She landed on the news. A gas station nearby had exploded, and the authorities were speculating that it had been caused by a gas leak from an underground storage tank.
“From now on, keep me in the loop,” I said.
“Right on.” Click.
Click. A baseball game in extra innings.
“Did it help?” she asked. “Having them both here?”
Honestly, it seemed to make them simpler and more complicated at the same time, but I just said, “Go back.”
“To what?”
“The fire.”
Click. Click. She found it.
A young man who’d been working at the station was missing, and it was feared he’d been trapped inside. Gas lines were fueling the fire so the fire crews were having a hard time suppressing it.
The gas station was located on a road that ran along the outer perimeter of the Quantico Marine Corps Base.
“So,” she said. “More confusing.”
“Yes.” My attention was on the news.
Timing.
Location.
It’s random, Pat. Forget it.
Tessa waved her hand in front of my face. “Hey. You still there?”
“Sorry. What were you saying?”
“No, you were: that things are more confusing now that you made out with Agent Jiang.”
I blinked. “I wasn’t going to say that.”
“You were thinking it.”
“No, I—you were spying on us.”
She shook her head. “Not this time, but thanks for confirming my suspicions.”
Man, I hate it when she does that.
I took the remote from her, turned off the television, and tried to sound stern and parental. “Go to bed, young lady.”
“All right, Dad.”
A few minutes later as I was getting ready for bed myself, I realized that the St. Francis of Assisi pendant Cheyenne had given me was still in my pocket.
I pulled it out, hesitated for a moment, then set it in my dresser drawer and slowly eased it shut.
The Marine standing guard at the front gate to Quantico leaned toward the car window. “Good evening, ma’am.”
“Hello.”
He accepted their driver’s licenses and shone his light toward Brad. “Sir.”
“Good evening, Sergeant.”
Astrid watched him pause slightly as he noticed Brad’s scars. He looked away, but only after staring a moment too long.
He studied the licenses. “From Houston, huh?”
“Yes,” she said. “We’re here for the National Academy.”
“We’re staying in Washington Dormitory,” Brad added.
The Marine didn’t look at him again, just compared their names to those on his list. Made note of the car’s license plates. “Have a good night, Ms. Larotte. Mr. Collins.” He returned their fake IDs to them.
“Thank you,” she said.
And he waved them through.
No trouble. Just as Astrid had anticipated.
Brad had printed a map of the Academy grounds that afternoon. So now, as they passed out of sight of the checkpoint, he pulled it out and studied it under a flashlight. “Turn left,” he said.
He directed her past the FBI Forensics Lab, past Hogan’s Alley to a gravel lot at the end of the road.
She parked beside a trail disappearing into the mist-filled woods.
The entrance to the body farm.
She left the wig between the seats, grabbed a flashlight of her own, and climbed out of the car.
74
Astrid heard her story unfolding in her head.
Fog had fingered its way between the trees and intertwined in the dense, thorny underbrush beside the path.
For a moment it made her think of the fairy tale where the misty hedge encircles the castle imprisoning the sleeping princess—the girl who is oblivious to all the princes who’ve failed to find her; the princes whose bodies hang in the deep, secret heart of the thicket.
She paused to look at a body lying face-down in a stream about twenty feet to her left.
Brad stopped walking. Stood beside her.
He’d suggested that they find the location first, then return to the car to get everything they needed, rather than “dragging ’em through the woods.”
It might have been a waste of time, but Astrid had put up with the idea. Honestly, at this point she was thinking more about the news she was going to share with him than about the young man they’d come here to bury.
The uncomfortable odor of death drifted through the forest.
Brad consulted his map. “Okay. I’m thinking we head west about two hundred yards or so. No class is scheduled to visit that area until Monday.”
“How do you know that?”
“Research,” he said simply.
“Let me see that.”
He handed her the map, and she t
ipped her flashlight beam across it. He stood beside her. “No,” she said, “we should just do it here.”
“I was thinking it might be better over—”
“No.”
After a moment. “All right.”
“Let’s go get the—”
The deep, sharp prick on the side of her neck startled her; shocked her, made her jerk backward. “What the—” Her hand flew instinctively to her neck, found the needle still protruding from it. She would have yanked it out, but it was embedded deeply and she was already feeling dizzy.
Her hands dropped to her sides.
Brad had his arms out to catch her. “Easy.”
She was aware, but somehow unaware, of the map and flashlight she’d been holding spinning to the ground. She must have let go of them.
Must have . . .
Now her legs were giving way and Brad was supporting her. “Don’t fight it, Astrid,” he said. “Don’t worry, it’s what we used on the guard the other night, what I used on Mollie. It won’t kill you.”
“What are you . . .” The words felt thick and raw in her mouth.
He was lowering her to the ground. “Shh. Stay calm. All will be well.”
She was on her back now and he was removing the needle from her neck. “Just relax,” she heard him say, or thought she did. Nothing was certain anymore.
Time rippled forward and backward. She moved her mouth, tried to speak, but nothing came out. A fairy tale. The thick fog seemed to enter her, become part of her.
And the last thing she saw before the world disappeared was her lover brushing a stray tendril of hair from her face, kneeling beside her in the veiled moonlight, telling her softly, softly, to go to sleep.
75
I lay propped in bed, my computer on my lap, exploring one of the as-of-yet unmapped caverns of this case.
Several of the neuroscience articles Rodale had sent me cited the Nobel-prize-winning research of Benjamin Libet, who’d done experiments in the late twentieth-century on initiation of action, intention, volitional acts, and consciousness.
Now I was scouring the Internet, reading about his work.
Apparently, Dr. Libet would record unconscious neural impulses while research participants anticipated and then performed simple tasks such as tapping a button or squeezing a ball. For example he might tell them, “As soon as you are aware of which button you wish to press, do so.”
By noting on a cathode ray oscilloscope the millisecond at which the participant was first aware of the urge to act and then measuring that against the brain’s electrical activity (and taking into account the time it took for their muscles to respond), he would compare the timing of the unconscious neural activity to that of the participant’s awareness of their intention to act.
And he found something surprising.
In almost every case, unconscious neural synapses preceded the conscious choice, or volitional act, that the person made—usually by about half a second.
Some skeptics have pointed out that the simple act of being observed or of rehearsing in your mind how you will respond during the experiment could be partially responsible for the precognitive neural responses. However, if you took the research findings at face value, you’d be forced to conclude that the unconscious mind determined the action or, to put it bluntly, a decision was made, and then five hundred milliseconds later, the test subject believed that she was making it.
The conscious mind took credit for a course of action that the unconscious had already determined.
And that’s where things got interesting.
Scientists have long known that some spinal reflexes, such as pulling your hand away from a flame, happen without a decision or any rational thought processes. But now, in the wake of Dr. Libet’s experiments and the recent discoveries in neuroscience, many scientists were apparently becoming convinced that complex decision-making also happens unconsciously, as a result of genetic coding being influenced by an individual’s environment and the context of a person’s experience and conditioning.
An uneasy thought began to squirm around inside of me.
This line of thinking—that our response to stimuli is shaped solely by natural processes: genetic makeup, brain chemistry, and neural synapses that are triggered by certain environmental cues—would mean that in all practicality, we are not free to consciously choose our actions. And if we are not free to choose, we are not at liberty to chart the course of our lives.
The inevitable conclusion, of course, was that “free will” would be an illusion.
And consequently, people would not be morally responsible for their behavior, because, in a sense, they would simply be acting out of instinct. After all, it would be unjust to hold someone accountable for something over which he had no control.
A few online searches confirmed what I feared: some killers had already called on neuroscientists to testify that their behavior was, in essence, hard-wired into their brains and that, given the environmental cues to which they were exposed, they had no choice but to act in the manner that they had. Thus, they could not be held responsible for the crime.
Because they were acting out of instinct . . .
An instinct for evil.
And astonishingly, this defense had been successful in at least half a dozen capital murder cases since October of last year; and now that the precedent had been set, it would undoubtedly become a more and more popular defense.
Science meets justice.
And justice loses.
But of course it wasn’t science itself that was battling justice, but rather the interpretation of one specific set of scientific experiments.
Yet it appeared that in this case, that was all it took.
The implications that this could have on criminal investigation and justice systems throughout the world was staggering.
Rapists, pedophiles, human rights violators could argue that they weren’t able to refrain from their actions because they were genetically determined to act the way they had, given the environmental cues present at the time of the crime. Therefore they should not be held accountable for their natural, instinctual response.
Cavern after cavern appeared before me . . . the Gunderson Foundation’s metacognition research . . . Dr. Libet’s intentionality experiments . . . the Project Rukh neurological findings . . . Congressman Fischer’s commitment to “a more progressive approach to curbing criminal behavior . . .”
For nearly an hour I considered the relationships between all of the dark tunnels of the case, and saw a number of possible directions they might be leading, but I ended up mired in conjecture rather than leaning on conclusions buttressed by solid evidence.
In time, the emotional toll of the day began to wear on me. I felt my concentration ebbing and exhaustion taking over.
At last, I set the computer aside and closed my eyes, but sleep did not come easily as I found myself drifting into and out of dreams of dead chimps and bloody luggage and black rain slanting around me and splashing like bleeding shadows on the ground.
While nearby, gorillas smashed mirrors into angular shards that reflected a splintered, skewed reality.
That I had become an intimate part of.
76
She woke up slowly.
Back to the world. Back to herself.
She was lying on the ground. She could tell that much, lying on her back. Her eyes were closed and her eyelids felt oppressively heavy, too heavy to open. She tried to move, but her body didn’t respond.
Everything within her, around her, was a thick, vague dream. She smelled the moist, piney scent of a forest, laced with the harsh stench of death.
The body farm.
She heard a damp, crunching sound nearby, in a small rhythm with itself. Grating, pausing. Grating again.
But all the smells, all the sounds were contained in a warm, liquid darkness that curled around, slowly, inside her head.
And though her eyes were still closed, worms of color skirted in
front of her, floated through the strange visions we all have while passing from sleep into the waking world.
Time passed.
With every moment the foul smell of decay grew worse.
More of the rough scraping sound beside her.
Scrape and crunch.
Until finally, and with much effort, she opened her eyes and managed to tilt her head toward the sound.
And in the diaphanous, mist-drenched moonlight, she saw a man nearby.
Digging.
Brad must have noticed the movement as she turned her head toward him because he stopped what he was doing, drove the shovel’s blade into the ground, and rested one arm against the handle.
“It’s good to see you awake,” he said. “I was concerned I might have used too much Propotol, that your heart might have stopped. I’m really glad it didn’t. If you would have died, it would have completely ruined my surprise.”
“What?” she mumbled. “No . . .” Not because she didn’t understand, but because she was just beginning to.
“I’ll explain everything in a few minutes.” He raised the shovel again. “Let me just finish up here first.”
He scooped out a few more shovelfuls of dirt, and a sharp, rancid smell crawled across the ground.
The stench of rotten flesh was overwhelming, and Astrid felt like throwing up, but for some reason her body did not let her. Her throat clenched, but she didn’t vomit. And Brad didn’t appear bothered at all by the smell.
She had no idea how that could be.
He knelt and began alternating using a small brush and a gardening trowel to remove dirt from the hole.
Astrid’s eyes were starting to adjust to the night now, and she could tell by his movements that the hole wasn’t deep.