by Grilz, Jon
“No,” Lockhart said flatly.
“No? Are you sure? Even if I had information about the one you refer to as The Taker?”
Lockhart stopped in his tracks. The FBI had not released any information on the case files regarding the suspect known as The Taker, a child killer who had struck three times around New Jersey. He had been investigating leads on the case when he was pulled to work Mikey’s murder.
“That got your attention, huh? Well, I was just wondering if you were willing to let me go in exchange for him.”
Lockhart resumed his walk. He didn’t say anything, but he wasn’t considering any kind of a deal. He simply didn’t know what he could say. Everything that had happened had left him at a loss for words. Added to the fact that a man he had been chasing for over two years just mentioned possible information to another killer, Lockhart felt as though he were swimming in white water rapids. Things were getting too deep and too confusing for him to handle alone. So he answered instinctually. “No.”
“Even if I told you he won’t be caught for a very long time without my help?”
“No.”
“Not even if I told you murder isn’t necessarily the worst thing he does? You have only found the bodies of the ones he’s murdered. He actually kidnaps them two at a time. He kills one, and as for the other… well, the details get quite unpleasant.”
Lockhart was nearly overcome with a momentary flash of letting the deputy do whatever he wanted to do to the suspect. He wanted the man to stop talking. He wanted him to somehow break free of his restraints so Lockhart could justifiably shoot him and rid the world of whatever sickness was going on in his head. But it was all preposterous. He had let his emotions cloud the fact that he was bringing a serial killer to justice.
“I don’t care what you have to say.”
“You came for me, and you are going to take me in? Is that it?” the man prodded.
“That’s my job,” Lockhart said as he turned around and started to chew his lip.
“Good. There should be more people who are as dedicated. It will be very important soon.”
The man didn’t utter another word for the rest of the walk back to the precinct. It wasn’t until they had hauled him back to the detention cells that Lockhart really got a chance to look him in the face. He looked so familiar, but something just wasn’t right. There was something wrong about his face. It was smooth but worn, like old leather. He had blisters, and his skin was peeling, like he had been sunburned over and over again. He was Dr. Heath. But he wasn’t.
The man didn’t say a word as Lockhart called in to Agent Her requesting transportation to a federal holding facility. He didn’t say a word as he was strip-searched to check for weapons or other contraband. He had a scar on his chest that looked to be from a pacemaker. His only possession was a journal that was tucked into his waistband. The cover and pages looked like they had been caught in a fire. His shoes showed the same warping in the soles as Mikey’s had.
He didn’t say a word as Deputy Lind fingerprinted him and saw that his fingerprints barely had any distinguishable patterns; they were burnt as well. He just sat there in the cell, looking out at Lockhart and Deputy Lind, who sat in their own chairs, silently keeping an eye on the man who had already evaded custody at least once before.
Lockhart sat at the desk of the former police chief and leafed through the journal. He only paused for a moment on each of the dateless pages, as most seemed to be somewhat incoherent, just babble about what must have been dreams and hallucinations.
A few pages in particular stood out as they pertained to research:
“Journal Entry: I think Michael and I have finally solved the paradox. The equations were always the cornerstone, but there was so much more.
There is no time.
We had to teach ourselves to stop thinking as we always have to avoid our failure of always getting the same result. Time is our invented abstract and has always limited us. Einstein was right insofar as the constraints of the light-speed constant. However, it wasn’t until we actually took that out of our equations that it all worked. Michael’s equations solved our issues with the Ring Singularity, but it wasn’t until we view space at an angle that both Tipler’s Cylinder and Krasnikov’s Tube were realized. The answer was always there. We just never saw it. It was so simple…”
Lockhart looked up from the journal and turned his head to see the man in the cell staring back at him with a contented smile on his face. Lockhart stood up. “Let’s have a chat.”
Deputy Lind escorted the prisoner to the makeshift interrogation room and locked the door from the outside.
Once in the room, Lockhart didn’t waste any time. “Dr. Heath?” He paused and cocked his head down at the man. “I mean, you are Dr. Walter Heath, aren’t you?”
Dr. Heath nodded. Lockhart had trouble seeing it, but there was little to dissuade him that the man was, in fact, the same man he had shared a drink with just a few days prior. His hair was nearly gone and his skin was badly marred, but it was definitely Dr. Heath.
“Nothing personal, Doc, but you look like you’ve had a hard couple of days.”
“I was ten years younger when we first spoke, I think. Then again, it could be more than that; it’s kind of hard to keep track of these things.” There was a smugness about him that didn’t fit the man Lockhart knew.
“So,” Lockhart continued, “you really think you can time travel, huh?” He tossed the journal on the table.
Dr. Heath looked at it, then back at Lockhart. “If that journal doesn’t prove my work, I don’t know what will.”
Lockhart wandered around the room and pretended to mull it all over before he took a seat across the table from Heath. “Oh, I don’t know about that. How about a demonstration?”
Heath smirked again. “You already had a demonstration back in the forest when the chief passed away.” His face sank on the final words, as if he carried genuine remorse for the passing of Chief Donaldson.
It was his claim that his supposed time travel made Lockhart black out, but Lockhart didn’t want to hear it. “I passed out. Don’t try to pass it off as anything else, most certainly not time travel.”
Heath cocked his head. “You would rather testify that you passed out and let a suspected serial killer elude capture than admit to the possibility of time travel?”
He had a point, but the man didn’t understand Lockhart’s resolve and what this case—no, all of these cases–meant to him. “If it means keeping you from getting off on an insanity plea, you’re damn right.”
Heath lowered his head and stared at Lockhart through the tops of his eyes. “I’m not insane.”
“Oh really?”
Lockhart pulled the journal off the table and opened it. He casually leafed through the pages as he spoke. “On top of your time travel theories, you also claim that one of the greatest thrills of your life was shaking hands with former President Robert F. Kennedy. You also write about the power of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s live speech, which you heard live—immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.” Lockhart snapped the book closed. “All in an attempt to prove that you’re insane.”
“All that happened,” Heath murmured. His head was still down, but his eyes were averted to the table. “We’ve disrupted the time stream so much that history changes every time I go backward. It presents a lot of temptations, many of which Michael had difficulty resisting.”
Lockhart stood and slammed his hand down on top of the journal. “This is all just the ranting of a mad man, but I’m not saying you are insane. I’m saying you are so messed up in the head, rationalizing the killing of a young boy, that you will do anything to cover your tracks.” Lockhart looked down at the book. “And that seems to include spying on me.” Lockhart had seen the journal entry that noted his returning to the crime scene during his morning jog.
Dr. Heath smiled and pulled his handcuffed hands up from his lap. Then he gently set them on the table. “Do you remem
ber who you were ten years ago?”
Lockhart wasn’t a fan of people avoiding his questions. “Yeah,” Lockhart answered, “I was the same person I am today.”
Heath looked at Lockhart thoughtfully; his eyes slowly scanning across his face. “Yes, I believe you are. That’s good.”
“Why is that good?”
Heath didn’t answer, and the fact that he seemed to take some kind of sadistic pleasure from not answering ground against Lockhart’s very soul. The man was caught, yet he still insisted on playing games.
“You mentioned The Taker back in the woods. How do you know about him?”
“I read the newspapers.”
“No information about The Taker has been released to the press.”
“Not yet, but it will.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
He smiled again and shifted in his seat. “I think it’s time for my confession. Are you ready?”
Lockhart wasn’t sure what to expect and was annoyed that Heath had insisted on changing the subject away from The Taker, but if the man was willing to talk and there was even the slightest chance of a confession, he had no other option. He pulled out his phone and switched to the voice recording application. He set the phone in the middle of the table and sat back, forming a tent with his fingers as he looked at the man. “Okay, let’s do this. What is your full name?”
“Dr. Walter David Heath,” he said flatly.
“Dr. Heath, do you admit, under your own free will, that this confession that you are about to provide is the entire truth?”
“I would have it no other way.”
“Okay, Dr. Heath, please tell me your occupation?”
“I was a high school science teacher. Before that, I worked for several universities. Before that, I worked for the government on several energy experiments.”
“You said ‘was’. You were a school teacher, but what are you now?”
Dr. Heath’s eyes closed just slightly, squinting like a hawk considering a helpless field mouse as its next meal. His face drained of all emotion, and he straightened in his chair. “I’m the man responsible for more deaths than you are aware of—not to mention the more recent deaths of Michael Weber Sr., his son, Michael Weber Jr., and Professor Hubert Mendez.”
Lockhart’s jaw flexed hard and he repressed the grin that Heath’s confession had just brought. He had to stay on point without getting overly excited, or the whole thing could be thrown out on a technicality; he’s seen it happen before, and he wasn’t about to let it happen now. “How did you kill them?”
“I shot them,” the man responded flatly.
“That isn’t good enough. You need to provide more details, something you couldn’t have read in the newspaper or heard about from anyone. That is the only way to establish absolute proof that you are the one that committed the crimes.”
“Fine. I shot Michael Weber Jr. in the back of the head while he was on his knees. I stood approximately three feet from him. His father, Michael Weber Sr., was an accident. I made a crude bomb out of fertilizer and threw it in their basement window. I didn’t know he would be down there at the time. I killed Professor Mendez in his Duluth apartment with the same gun I used to kill Mikey. Then I stole his laptop and destroyed it.”
Lockhart grew tense. The details weren’t overly elaborate, but they were enough to show that he had inside information on the crimes. The lack of fingerprints, DNA, or other physical evidence at the scene was a problem, but not one Lockhart couldn’t overcome. “Fine. One by one, can you tell me why you killed each of them?”
The man lowered his eyes to the table and took a deep breath, as if he were trying to hold back tears. His words started to come out in jumbles. He spoke quickly, stammering almost to the point of speaking in tongues. He sounded exactly like the man Lockhart had interviewed earlier. He spoke in long, fast bursts, then paused, as if he hadn’t spoken in years and had a need to spill his pent-up words onto the table to be preserved—or at least heard—for the first time in a long time.
The man had killed Mikey because of the information that was contained on his flash drives. Mikey’s father had been killed, by accident. When he had killed Mikey, he thought the information was only in his head. When he realized the information was saved on the drives, he needed to destroy them. His bomb was intended only to destroy the drives. Heath didn’t realize Michael Weber Sr. was sleeping on Mikey’s bed at the time. He had killed Professor Hubert because, without Lockhart knowing it, Mendez had saved the information on his computer, but then he e-mailed the information to Dr. Heath. Hubert could have been responsible for the spreading of the information to hundreds of people and Heath could simply not allow it.
“I mean, he e-mailed them to me—me back then…or me last week, or…uh, I mean…” The man stammered and stuttered and finally grew silent.
Lockhart had closed his eyes early in the story. He held his head up by pinching the bridge of his nose. It was all just a muddle of information. The facts that could be used were rendered useless, buried beneath a bunch of useless ranting and lost amongst the ramblings of a lunatic.
“So, you stole the laptop from Professor Mendez after killing him, then you somehow stole the flash drives from a locked safe? How?”
Heath laughed to himself and shifted his weight from side to side in his seat. “Are you serious? Perhaps you would like to hear that it was some kind of mysticism, but unfortunately, when you know the answer to the trick, it is far less intriguing.”
It was a question that perplexed Lockhart. He had dealt with theft and burglary before, but unless the chief or deputy had assisted in the theft, he couldn’t figure out how the drives had been stolen. “Humor me.”
“I have all the time in the world. Besides, it’s just numbers, Special Agent. The world is run by them, and people are shaped by them. I bet if you gave me a little while, I could figure out your ATM PIN number, too. As unwise as it is, most people will use numbers or words that are familiar to them in order to remember codes. It was a dial, so the chance it was a word was minimal—far more likely on ATM pads. Sets of three numbers are most common in dial locks. Hence, important dates are at the top of the list. The police chief’s code was his wedding date, and the deputy’s was his fiancée’s birthday.”
He was right: The truth was far less interesting than what Lockhart had worked up in his head. “And how did you know those numbers?”
Dr. Heath rolled his eyes. “Please, Special Agent. The information is all around us. Engravings, files, written on the backs of pictures—as in the case of the framed picture of Chief Donaldson’s wife that he keeps on his desk. And as far as Lisa’s birthday, well, she was a student. Student records are far from top secret. There is far more valuable information out there…”
Heath’s voice trailed off, and he seemed to dwell on those words.
Lockhart knew he was referring to the information on the flash drives. “So you killed all those people because the information on those drives was equations that will indicate the possibility of time travel?” Lockhart looked down at the journal.
Dr. Heath’s face changed, lightening, and almost began to look happy again. A certain energy returned to his posture, and his handcuffs clattered as he shifted and sat up straight again. “Do you know what a morphogenetic field is?”
It sounded familiar, but still Lockhart let out a fake, forced laugh. “Something Kirk and Spock used to deflect photon torpedoes?”
“Special Agent, if you insist on talking to me like I’m insane, I will have to insist on speaking to you like you are a child.”
Lockhart nodded in concession. At the time, it all felt so preposterous that he couldn’t help but make light of it, but he needed the man to cooperate if he was going to get the conviction to stick.
“At one time in world history, there was no such thing as nuclear power. There wasn’t even such thing as a steam engine. In both cases, we went from a period of inexistence to an explosion of inventio
n in which the ideas and machinery was everywhere around the world. Even pre-internet, they managed to become shared ideas. You see, once an idea is realized, it is out there. It cannot be undone. It spreads like a virus to every receptive mind.”
Lockhart stood up and paced around the table. He could feel himself losing control because of what, in reality, sounded like little more than a murderer’s posturing. “Mikey and everyone else are dead because of an idea?” He stopped and slowly turned to face Heath, whose face was sullen, to the point of looking like he might actually show tears.
“You understand, don’t you?” Dr. Heath asked. “You were right from the start. Mikey, his father, Professor Hubert, a ten-year-old in Baltimore, a seventy-year-old in Los Angeles, a twenty-four-year-old in Las Vegas... Do I need to go on?”
“You are Jack,” Lockhart said in a low, angry voice.
Dr. Heath just stared back at him, unblinking for several moments before nodding. “Yes, I am.”
“You maniac.” His voice started as a whisper. He had never let himself get shaken by a suspect before, but he had been tracking the man for years and had been stopped at every turn. “You killed over thirty people because of your delusional fantasies about time travel?”
“I was wrong. You don’t understand. I had no choice.” The man’s face grew dark with sadness, and his fists balled on the table. “You don’t understand how hard this has been—if not mentally, then physically.” He opened his hands and turned them over and over. “I mean…look at me!”
Lockhart didn’t break his focus from Heath’s eyes. “Yeah, it looks like being caught in an explosion—that you set at your own house, mind you—doesn’t agree with your complexion,” Lockhart said mockingly.
Dr. Heath sneered. “Any fool can see my skin and burns aren’t the result of an explosion. My body shows damage from extreme heat and cold.”
“Uh-huh,” Lockhart said, nonchalantly and rather dismissively. “It gets pretty cold up here at night.”