Fatal Tide

by Lis Wiehl

  “You said you thought the boy might have suffered from dissociative personality disorder?” the ME said, swivelling in his chair to look at the flat-screen monitor and reaching behind him to use the mouse to call up the file on Amos Kasden.

  “Dissociative identity disorder,” Dani corrected him, watching the screen. “DSM-IV code 300.14.”

  “Which means what again?”

  “A person detaches from their body,” Dani said. “You sometimes see it in cases of extreme abuse or suffering. The person finds a way to say, ‘This is happening to my body but not to me.’ It serves as a coping mechanism, but if it happens frequently enough, the detachment remains, even after the abuse stops. People feel like they’re already dead.”

  Banerjee turned back to face her. “Related to multiple personalities?”

  “In a way,” Dani said. “Some researchers think that in the absence or abdication of the original personality, an alter can form. A second personality. Or multiples. Why?”

  He leaned back, steepling his fingers. “Do you remember David Berkowitz?”

  “The serial killer who terrorized New York? Son of Sam?” Dani said. “It was before I was born, but I’ve read about him.”

  “I’ve written about him,” Banerjee said. “He’s still in prison, you know. They did a battery of tests on him, and a group of us had a look, just to see what we could see. Group of medical examiners who get together to go over famous cases. Sort of a hobby.”

  “Sounds like a fun leisure activity,” Dani said, using a finger to place a strand of hair behind her ear.

  Banerjee smiled. “Do you remember why Berkowitz did what he did? Not why he did it, but why he said he did it?”

  “I don’t.”

  “He said Satan made him.” Banerjee threw his hands open, fingers spread. “Claimed a demon had possessed his neighbor’s dog, and the dog spoke to him. The dog’s name was Sam. That’s where ‘Son of Sam’ came from. People found it quite comical at the time, but as criminologists we take such statements seriously because it goes to cause or volition—if he thought it was why he did what he did, then it was why he did what he did. It’s like the old joke, ‘I can’t tell if my girlfriend is pretty or if she just looks pretty.’ Anyway, it rang a bell with me because my parents had friends we used to vacation with from the town of Ossett. Do you know it? Little village in West Yorkshire, near Leeds?”

  “Afraid I don’t.” She gave him a weak smile.

  “No reason you should. But here’s the connection.” Banerjee stood and crossed the room to a water cooler, filling a small paper cup and offering it to Dani, who declined. He downed it like a shot of whiskey, crumpled the cup, and threw it in the wastebasket.

  “When I was a boy, I read in the paper about a man they called the Madman of Ossett. His name was Michael Taylor. In 1974, he murdered his wife, in a way too brutal for the newspapers to describe—which, given the state of British newspapers at the time, or now, must have been truly unspeakable. Strangled the family dog too. Police found him walking starkers in the street, covered in blood. Know why he said he did it?”

  “The dog told him to?”

  “Not quite,” Banerjee said, “but close. Another case of what the books call demonomania. Only this time, the night before, some clergymen had brought him into St. James Church in Barnsley for an exorcism. They stayed up all night and said they’d managed to cast out forty demons, but they were exhausted by the morning and couldn’t go on. They claimed there were three demons they hadn’t gotten to, one for murder, one for violence, and one for insanity. So they sent Taylor home, and that night he offed the missus and the pooch.”

  “I don’t want to interrupt your story,” Dani said, “but how does this relate to Carl Thorstein?”

  “Or Amos Kasden?” Banerjee said. “Or David Berkowitz? Here’s how. Michael Taylor willed his body to science. He hoped somebody would be able to use it to figure out what happened to him.”

  “And did they?” Dani asked.

  Banerjee smiled and held up the index finger of his right hand. “One more brief digression. George Lukins. Somerset, 1778. A hundred miles west of London, give or take. Another man who claimed to have been possessed by demons. Lukins also donated his body to the Oxford College of Physicians. Threw out the bits they couldn’t use, but they’ve had the poor chap’s brain in a jar of formaldehyde for the last 235 years. So what we have, in David Berkowitz, Michael Taylor, and George Lukins, are the brains of three men who may be said to have suffered from demonomania. And we have MRIs of all three brains, which, thanks to modern technology and the Internet, I am able to access from my own very comfortable and very private office. And as you may recall—”

  “You did a postmortem MRI of Amos Kasden’s brain,” Dani remembered. “You thought catecholamine-secreting tumors on the adrenal medulla could explain the absence of vanillylmandelic acid in Kasden’s urine. But you didn’t find any tumors.”

  “I did not,” Banerjee said. “But what I did find … what these four men have in common … here. Let me show you.”

  He exited the screen they were looking at and called up four MRIs, each filling a quarter of the screen, each brain in profile, and pointed with his finger at each, moving clockwise from the upper left.

  “Lukins, Taylor, Berkowitz, and Kasden,” he said. “This part here, in particular …” With a finger, he circled the upper front quarter of Amos Kasden’s brain.

  “The frontal lobe,” Dani said.

  “Exactly.” Banerjee nodded. “And what’s the frontal lobe responsible for, primarily?”

  “Judgment,” Dani said. “Executive function. Calculating the consequences of your actions. Distinguishing between right and wrong or good and bad. Impulse control. Inhibition. Suppressing antisocial behaviors.”

  “And this area here?” Banerjee said, hovering the mouse icon over the anterior section of the frontal lobe.

  “The prefrontal cortex,” Dani said.

  “The seat of personality—do I have that correct?” When Dani nodded, Banerjee clicked the mouse on each of the images. “Now look what happens when we magnify this area.”

  As each image grew larger on the screen, revealing more and more detail, Dani saw an array of what appeared to be holes. The images were three-dimensional. Banerjee moved down through the tissue, revealing more and more perforations.

  “You’ve heard of BSE?” he asked. “Bovine spongiform encephalopathy?”

  Dani’s eyes widened. “This is mad cow?”

  “Similar but more localized,” Banerjee said. “It’s present in all four men. I thought Creutzfeldt-Jakob at first, but I ruled that out. Now—let’s look at the histology for your friend. From the same region.” Banerjee cleared the screen, then called up a microscopic view taken of tissue from Carl’s brain.

  “I see what you mean,” Dani said.

  “Yes,” Banerjee said. “Spongiform perforations, though less articulated.”

  Dani studied the screen as if looking at a maze. The prefrontal cortex was the moral center of a person, the part that empathized with others and, as such, the part that cemented the social bond between humans. If the Ten Commandments were written or encoded anywhere within the human consciousness, it was here. Without it, there was nothing to stop someone from killing the first person who made them angry or stealing the first bright shiny object that caught their fancy, regardless of who it belonged to.

  Dani thought of the boys she’d worked with in Africa who’d been turned into child soldiers. The leader of the Children’s Army had been a man named Daniel Kaimba who had given the boys some kind of drug made from native plants. He robbed them of their identities and left them controllable and almost robotic. Voodoo doctors in Haiti were believed to possess similar personality-robbing concoctions. Had St. Adrian’s given their boys something similar? Had the demons given something to Carl? But it couldn’t account for Berkowitz or Lukins or Taylor. From the Dark Ages up to the age of modern psychology, mad men, and ma
d women, had been diagnosed as possessed by demons. Was it possible that, at least in some cases, and perhaps more than science had ever acknowledged, the diagnosis was correct?

  “I have a call in to Atlanta. If this is anything like mad cow, the CDC should know about it. They have prion tests they can do with lasers and fluorescent dyes that I can’t do. If there’s any danger—”

  “There’s no danger,” Dani said. “It’s not epidemiological.”

  “Dani—”

  “It’s not contagious,” she said.

  He looked at her, waiting for an explanation she couldn’t give him.

  “They have a truck in Atlanta,” Banerjee said, “containing a mobile tissue digester. Tufts has a digester, but it’s not mobile. It uses alkaline hydrolysis, at temperature and under pressure, to safely dispose of BSE tissues. I think at the very least, Carl should—”

  “No,” Dani said. Carl had been able, somehow, to fight the demon inside him. Tommy had been present when Carl died, and the angel Charlie had been there too and proclaimed that the demon was gone. Whatever had happened inside Carl’s brain, it was over. There was no risk from the body, the vessel that had once, temporarily, housed his soul. “He’s okay.”

  “Can you tell me how you know this?”

  “I can’t tell you,” Dani said. “But I know it.”

  Banerjee bit his lip for a moment, thinking. “All right,” he said. “I’ve had the body sealed for cold storage. I hope that’s enough.”

  “Thank you,” Dani said, rising and taking her coat from the coat rack where he’d hung it. “Thank you for trusting me.”

  “Can you at least tell me where in the ocean the body was found?” Banerjee said. “So we know where to look. If there’s a second case, I won’t be able to sit on this.”

  “There won’t be,” Dani said. “And he didn’t drown in the ocean. He drowned in Lake Atticus.”

  “In fresh water?” Banerjee said, his brow furrowed. “I don’t see how that’s possible. He was hypernatremic.”

  “Elevated sodium?”

  “I assumed he’d ingested saltwater.”

  “No. I don’t think he did.” Dani frowned. Saltwater? Elevated sodium? She had no idea what that meant.

  “Is there any way to go back and look for hypernatremia in Amos’s workup?” she asked, thinking. Carl had, to an extent, beaten or defied the demon inside of him. Amos had not. “Or maybe the opposite? Hyponatremia? What’s normal for blood sodium?”

  “Normal is anywhere from 135 to 145 millimoles,” Banerjee said. “People who drink too much fresh water can become hyponatremic and seem intoxicated. Let me look.”

  He returned to his computer screen. Dani was looking over his shoulder when she saw a window pop open on his screen, announcing: File not available; error code 8463903bn987.

  “What?” Banerjee said. “Hang on while I check my backup files.”

  A moment later Banerjee’s computer told him none of the files he named could be found. He told Dani that fortunately for the last year he’d been backing up everything in “the cloud,” just in case he ever suffered a system-wide data loss, as appeared to be the case. Yet when he searched the cloud, he was again told no such files existed. All the work he’d done on Amos and Carl, and his comparisons to Son of Sam and Lukins and Taylor, were gone.

  “Well, that’s just extremely strange,” he said. “It’s still here somewhere, but it looks like it may take me awhile to find it.”

  “Can you call me or send me an e-mail when you do?” Dani asked.

  Dani drove north on the Sawmill parkway, but the lost files had set her on edge. She tried to calm her fears, telling herself she was just being silly, but she found herself checking her rearview mirror, worried that she was being followed. The car behind her was a red Mini Cooper. It seemed like it was too conspicuous a car to use to follow somebody, but the car behind the Cooper was a gray sedan. Just to be sure, she got off at the first Pleasantville exit and watched in her rearview mirror as the Mini sped north—but the gray sedan took the same exit she did. It could be a coincidence. She drove through the center of town, the gray sedan staying well back but following, and then she got back on the Sawmill. The gray sedan did too. Now she knew she was being followed.

  But if she knew that, the odds were good that whoever was in the gray sedan knew she knew, and they certainly did this sort of thing a lot more than she did. She tried to think calmly and clearly. Her car, a black BMW 335i coupe she’d inherited from her father, was probably faster than the sedan, but she knew better than to try to outrun whoever was following her.

  Think!

  She was safer in public than she would be on any deserted back road. When she saw the top floors of Northern Westchester Hospital looming above the trees ahead, she had an idea. The regional district attorney’s office was across the street from the hospital. She exited the Sawmill. The gray sedan did too. When she reached the DA’s office, she turned into the drive to enter the parking garage behind and beneath the building and stopped, waiting for the transponder on her dash to open the gate. The garage served as a sally port where uniformed officers could safely off-load prisoners from their squad cars—there would be cops with guns there, men she knew and trusted.

  When the gate opened, she drove through and stopped, looking in her rearview mirror. She saw the gate close, and then she saw the gray sedan roll slowly past. There were two men in it. One was wearing a baseball style cap. She couldn’t make out their faces, but they were clearly looking in her direction.

  She parked and rode the elevator up to the second floor, where she went to the conference room, with windows overlooking the street. She surveyed the street below. The gray sedan was gone, but there was always a chance they had a backup car.

  “What are you doing here?” a voice behind her said. It was Stuart Metz, the assistant DA. “I thought you were on leave.”

  “Oh, hi, Stuart,” she said, smiling. “I am, but a crazy patient of mine saw me and followed me here. I just don’t want to talk to her right now. Can you give me a ride?”

  “Sure,” Metz said. “Where to?”

  Metz mocked her as she ducked down out of sight from the passenger seat of his car. When he saw an old woman walking a dog, he described her to Dani, and Dani said, “Yes, that’s her.”

  On the Sawmill, headed north again, Dani sat up and thanked her friend.

  “You okay?” he asked her. “You’re acting weird.”

  “Yes, I’m good, thanks,” she told him, straightening out her coat. “You know how crazy it gets before the holidays.”

  10.

  December 21

  4:51 p.m. EST

  When she got back to the house, Dani poured herself a cup of tea and sat down in the kitchen to mull over what Banerjee had told her, and what that meant for the plan that was being hatched at St. Adrian’s. She had no doubt that the lost files and the gray sedan were connected. Yet computer hacking and being followed by men in gray sedans did not seem consistent with what she thought of as, for lack of a better term, demonic style. No one was safe, and it was only going to get worse.

  Tommy could cope, and so, she hoped, could she, but the others … Cassandra was planning on walking right into the lion’s den. And Quinn—for as long as she’d known him, he’d never been one to take care of himself. When they were both in Africa, working in a region where famine was endemic, he’d failed to eat, even though doctors and relief workers had their own rations, and he had to be briefly hospitalized. He’d never gotten enough sleep, his mind always racing. His headaches were getting worse. She’d seen him wince from them all too often lately, but when she asked him how he was, all he said was, “Hunky-dory.” He’d been reluctant to tell anyone about his brain tumor because he didn’t want people feeling sorry for him, but Dani knew how hard it was for him to live with the diagnosis.

  In the courtyard, Tommy and Reese practiced flying the drone. The boy was almost as tall as Tommy, but lean and gangly, and he was
dwarfed by the winter coat Tommy had loaned him. He looked, Dani thought, a bit like a member of the British boy band One Direction, whose posters papered the walls of her nieces’ bedrooms. At one point Tommy gave the controller to Reese, then stood back and watched from the open garage bay, arms folded across his chest—showing, quite literally, the hands-off trust he’d spoken of.

  She was glad when he finally came in from the garage, stomping his boots before kicking them off and hanging his coat on a hook in the mudroom. Reese was right behind him.

  “You boys getting the hang of it?” she asked.

  “This guy was doing loop-de-loops,” Tommy told her, setting the controller down on the table. “He’s a natural. But then he’s had a lot more time on the Xbox than I have.”

  “What’s an Xbox?” Dani asked.

  Tommy and Reese looked at each other in disbelief, and then Tommy reached out and put his hand on Reese’s shoulder, lowering his voice in a tone of mock gravity.

  “Her ways are different from ours, my son,” Tommy told him. “She’s new to our world, but she will learn. Now go and get cleaned up for supper, for soon we will eat.”

  Reese laughed and then left them alone.

  She filled Tommy in on what she’d learned, and seen, at the medical examiner’s office, and how they lost the files, and how she’d been followed. Tommy agreed that it didn’t sound like something Ghieri or Wharton would do, but said they shouldn’t underestimate the enemy. He wasn’t sure what to make of Banerjee’s findings either—particularly the last one.

  “Saltwater?” he said. “How is that possible?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “There’s something else I don’t get. And I could write a book full of stuff I don’t get,” he said, moving to the computer monitor. “Take a look at this.”

  He sat her down in front of the computer and directed her attention to the screen. “These are pictures I just downloaded from the drone. I might have to order another one because it’s pretty inconvenient to have to keep bringing it home to switch cameras …”