by Steven James
And came up empty.
Not surprisingly, almost all of the newsreels had been shot with stationary cameras rather than handheld ones, like Rusty’s death had been.
In my searches I found that Chelsea had done a special in April on the Gunderson facility’s primate research, but so had three other local stations over the last year. She covered most major crimes in the Metro area and had done a controversial piece recently on the movement to legalize prostitution in the District of Columbia. Other than that, nothing jumped out at me.
When I searched for any previous criminal offenses or mis-demeanors, I didn’t find anything for Chelsea and only a few speeding tickets and a marijuana possession charge against Nick from three years ago.
No red flags in the location of Nick and Chelsea’s work or home addresses, nothing suspicious about the arrival times at the scenes.
In frustration, I slid my laptop aside.
Tunnel vision.
Try to disprove your theories, don’t try to confirm them or you’ll be blinded by your desire to prove yourself right!
I needed to clear my head.
I made a trip to the snack machine at the end of the hall, grabbed a three-course mini meal of Snickers, Cheetos, and a hermetically sealed cinnamon roll that might have been left over from the days of the Cold War, and returned to my work station.
C’mon, Pat, think this through.
How are this week’s crimes connected to the assassination attempt on Vice President Fischer?
Why did the killers choose Mollie Fischer?
Brush off conjecture with the facts until only the truth remains.
Cheetos in hand, I pulled up the active screen for the case file updates and saw that Anderson, who’d been working the ViCAP linkage analysis, had posted a list of three homicides in the northeast that could potentially be linked to this week’s crimes.
(1) A dismembered body in New York City three months ago. The body hadn’t been found in suitcases but rather in three large boxes. Apparently, the killer had been planning to mail them to an ex-employer.
(2) In April a twenty-two-year-old male Baltimore native was found in his bathtub with his wrists slit, but there were lingering questions about whether or not it was homicide or suicide. His phone was beside the tub and had been used to record his death.
Hmm.
A possibility.
(3) A homicide in Vienna, Virginia, last month. The killers had left a text message on the female victim’s laptop, taunting the authorities.
Because of its proximity to DC, the Vienna crime had been covered by Chelsea Traye and the WXTN News team, and I’d seen the footage just a few minutes ago, but from what I could tell by glancing over the case files, there weren’t any obvious links to the crimes this week.
As far as being related cases, none of the three looked especially promising, and none of them had anything to do with license plates-which might have just been a red herring anyhow.
A quick check of the time: 1:22.
I rubbed my head. I had less than forty minutes before I needed to pick up Tessa.
With a growing sense of apprehension about the 3:30 custody meeting and a tightening sense of disappointment from my lack of progress on the case, I turned my attention to the active screen and saw one more crime appear.
A triple homicide in Maryland last month. Two police officers had been killed as well as a female civilian, apparently as the result of a domestic dispute. Anderson seemed to think that the proximity to DC, a crime scene that appeared staged, and a possible discrepancy between the arrival time of the husband at the house and the time of death of the officers made it a crime to look into.
However, Philip Styles, the woman’s husband, had pled guilty, presumably to avoid the death penalty, and was now in jail awaiting his sentencing trial. A connection seemed unlikely to me.
Still, we had four separate crimes that might be linked to the killings this week. And despite my initial impressions, I needed to have a closer look at them.
Taking a bite of my Snickers, I clicked to the first crime listed to try to eliminate, rather than corroborate, its relationship to this week’s crime spree.
88
8 hours left…
1:29 p.m.
Brad used his fake ID to gain entrance to the police headquarters’ parking garage.
“I’m a National Academy student,” he explained to the officer by the gate. “I was asked to help with the Fischer case’s task force.”
The officer called Quantico and verified Mr. Collins’s name and license plate against the NA student roster, and let him through.
As Brad searched for a parking place, he thought about his plan.
Q. How best to destroy someone?
A. Kill the person he loves the most.
And of course, where most killers get it wrong is that they assume there’s only one kind of death.
Killing someone psychologically, slaughtering his reason for living, destroying his hope-these are at least as satisfying endeavors as just slitting his throat.
Q. What is a fate worse than death?
A. Wanting to die but not being able to.
Q. So, hell.
A. Yes. Or being buried alive.
And again, you could be buried alive in more ways than one. Some pain is even more suffocating than the lack of air.
He found a parking spot surprisingly near the car he was looking for. He left his vehicle, walked toward it.
After this week, the world would know who was behind these crimes.
And Bowers would come after him.
He had no doubt about that.
But the secret to defeating your enemy isn’t by letting him focus all of his energies on you, it’s by making sure that he can’t.
Take the life of your subject’s loved one, and you will indeed suffer the consequences; destroy her psychologically, and you make him spend time and energy taking care of her rather than searching for you.
Split his loyalties, his priorities, use his love to divert him.
Don’t let him concentrate wholeheartedly on the hunt.
Brad picked the car’s lock and left the surprise behind.
Ever since arriving at the Library of Congress three hours ago, Tessa had been trying to figure out what it means to be human.
And it was not as easy as it might seem to find the answer.
And that was really starting to annoy her.
She glanced at the pile of reference books around her and the notes she’d typed into her computer.
Okay, so first you had the religious party-line answer: created in the image of God.
But there was no real consensus, even among religious people, on what that meant-creativity, imagination, love, curiosity, dignity, freedom, responsibility… The list went on and on depending on which author you chose and on what he or she, a priori, seemed to feel was distinctive about Homo sapiens. So, circular reasoning.
Besides, it hadn’t taken her long to find out that the Bible never says humans are the only animals with consciousness or intelligence or emotions or politics or self-awareness or even the only creatures with a spirit.
That last one had surprised her.
She pulled up the verse she’d stumbled across while reading a church treatise from the nineteenth century-Ecclesiastes 3:20-21: “All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?”
The spirit of man.
The spirit of the beast.
She’d wondered if “the beast” was like Satan or something, so she’d checked a couple other translations; most rendered the phrases “the spirits of man” and “the spirits of animals” or something very close.
People could interpret those verses however they wanted, but she figured that for now she would just take them at face value.
Animals have spirits.
People have spirits.
So, putting the whole “who has a spirit/soul” question aside, from a naturalistic point of view, humans are simply highly evolved apes who, at some point, acquired abstract thinking that facilitated language use and the eventual development of the societal expectations and behaviors we have today. So humans would not be essentially different from animals at all.
Different only by degree.
Not kind.
In fact, over the last hour she’d discovered that a growing number of bioethicists were abandoning the whole idea of “human,” arguing that it’s an artifice based on anthropocentrism and our vanity as a species. But anyone could see that as soon as you erase the uniqueness of humanity, you take away the basis for moral responsibility.
After all, chimpanzees aren’t held accountable for murdering their weak. Why should we be? Especially since, in the long run, it would only serve to help natural selection create a more vibrant and successful species?
But most of the atheists she was reading weren’t advocating murdering the weak.
Most.
She looked at the notes she’d scribbled.
Through the years, evolutionist thinkers like Hobbes, Huxley, Freud, who all held unflinchingly to natural selection, had inexplicably encouraged people to rise above their natural instincts, a view shared by atheist proselytizer Richard Dawkins: “In our political and social life we are entitled to throw out Darwinism, to say we don’t want to live in a Darwinian world.”
Okay, but how, if we’re the result of our genes, can we “throw out” being the result of our genes?
Talk about being illogical.
You can’t have it both ways-either we’re determined to be as we are by natural selection, or we’re not. And only if we’re not can we act in ways that are contrary to instinct. An animal constrained by instinct can’t suddenly decide to become something that instinct doesn’t allow it to be.
So, if natural selection really was natural and not somehow guided by God, the entire spectrum of human behavior would be natural. Instinctual. The good stuff and the bad stuff. All just part of being a highly evolved primate.
A species being true to itself.
People being true to their hearts.
To the fractures.
And the whole idea of “man’s inhumanity to man” would be a logical contradiction, because it would be impossible for a human to act in a nonhuman, or inhuman, way.
Chilling.
Bestiality, infanticide-just part of human nature.
Greed, cowardice, slavery-well, they must have had a beneficial role in survival or reproduction, or else natural selection would have weeded them out.
And from there things just got worse.
The entire field of medicine-the practice of keeping the sick and genetically deficient (whatever that might mean) alive as long as possible, is actually counterproductive to natural selection and the advancement of the species-especially considering the earth’s diminishing natural resources.
So why do it?
After all, natural selection requires the death of the weak for the good of the species, so why fight it?
What is good for the species is good.
What is bad for the species is bad.
Letting AIDS victims or starving children in Africa die would be moral. So would euthanizing the mentally or terminally ill. And since teenage girls are the most likely to reproduce, selective breeding and forced copulation with adolescent girls exhibiting genetically desirable traits would be acceptable, even desirable for the species.
Rape the gifted girls so the species might flourish.
It didn’t take much of a leap at all to conclude with Nietzsche: “Whoever must be a creator in good and evil, verily, he must first be an annihilator and break values. Thus the highest evil belongs to the highest goodness: but this is creative.”
Compulsory sterilization for mental patients, a la Woodrow Wilson’s polices in 1907. Genocide. Aborting kids with Down syndrome or cystic fibrosis. Physician-assisted suicide. Eugenics.
Why not?
Given the assertions of naturalism, all of this was logical, of course, but even most of the ardent naturalistic evolutionists she came across were reticent to go all the way down the eugenics road.
In fact, most of them were, ironically, strong advocates for social justice and medical advances, which, considering their assumptions about human origins, didn’t really make any sense.
But she actually gave those authors a lot of credit though, because even if they weren’t intellectually honest to their premises about human nature, they were honest to their hearts.
To the shell of good.
Because they knew what all people know-what even Hobbes, Huxley, Freud, and Dawkins knew-that some things are right and some are wrong, regardless of how beneficial or detrimental those things might be to our evolution as a species. Compassion trumps torture because compassion is good and torture is bad. Period.
But not everyone would be courageous enough to be that honest.
Nietzsche for example.
Or Hitler.
And that was the thing.
All it would take was the right person wielding the argument to the right people-She noticed the time.
1:56.
Dang.
Patrick was picking her up, like, any minute.
As much as she wanted to read more, she totally needed to get going.
She returned the books to the research librarian’s desk and hurried outside.
89
Tessa was waiting for me when I pulled up to the steps of the Library of Congress.
“How was your day?” I asked as she climbed into the car.
“I didn’t find what I was looking for. You?”
“No. Not yet.”
“How about that? We actually have something in common.”
Changing the subject, she told me she was starved, and since we still had a few minutes before we needed to be at Missy Schuel’s office, I drove toward food.
Up until then I hadn’t told Tessa about the meeting at 3:30, but now I explained that after we grabbed something to eat we were going to meet with the lawyer and then head over to a custody meeting with Paul Lansing’s lawyers.
She listened with uncharacteristic silence. When I was done and she finally spoke, her voice was edged with anger. “Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”
I’d anticipated her question. “I knew that if I told you, you’d worry about it all morning. I couldn’t come up with any good reason to ruin your day, so I waited. Trust me, I wasn’t playing games with you, I was just trying to keep you from being upset.”
She was quiet. “But you actually want me to come along?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“You deserve to be present. It’s your future we’re talking about.”
A pause. “It’s yours too.”
I wasn’t sure how to reply to that. “Yes. It is.”
It was a long time before she responded. “Thanks.” After a The Bishop moment she sighed. “This whole thing with Paul, I gotta say, I’m kind of annoyed at you.”
“Because I didn’t tell you?”
“No, because you took me to see him in Wyoming in the first place.”
“Hang on, you’re the one who wanted to meet him. I just agreed that you had a right to know who-”
“I know. I changed my mind. That’s why it’s your fault.”
“You changed your mind and that’s why it’s my fault.”
“Yes. It’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind and then blame someone else if things don’t work out.” She’d lent a lightness to her tone that told me she wasn’t really angry after all.
“I don’t think that’s exactly how the saying goes.”
“It’s the twenty-first-century version.”
“You just made that up.”
“Maybe.”
A moment passed, and her tone turned serious again. “You’re a good dad, Patr
ick. Seriously. I mean that.”
“Don’t worry. Things will work out.”
“No, I mean, whatever happens-” she began, but I didn’t want to hear her say anything more.
“Don’t worry,” I repeated.
She didn’t reply.
We grabbed a quick, very late lunch, and headed to Missy Schuel’s office.
90
7 hours left…
2:29 p.m. She had no idea how long she’d been straining against her bonds, yanking, yanking, trying to get free, but slowly, over time, more and more dirt had tipped from her back and loosened around her limbs. And now, as she wrenched her arm to the side as hard as she could, Riah’s arm nudged a little bit to the left. She yanked again. It moved more. Then she jerked her whole body as hard as she could, back and forth, again and again, and all at once, with a thick, solid squish, Riah Everson’s rotting left arm broke free from her body. For a moment she lay in stunned disbelief. Maybe God had given her an answer after all. Maybe. Maybe. Awkwardly, frantically, she smacked the corpse’s limb against the ground until the horrible thing cracked at the wrist and fell from the leather strap. And her right arm was free. Though the angle was working against her, she grabbed the arm and tried to fling it to the side. It took three tries, but at last she got it out of the shallow grave, giving her own arm more room to move. Then she got rid of the corpse’s hand. From the position her betrayer had left her in, it wasn’t easy to undo the gag, but at last she managed. Immediately, she gulped in a mouthful of sour air. The Dotracaine had worn off, and she vomited as she gasped for breath, but still, with the gag gone, she felt a rush of hope. She twisted her arm toward her head, reaching for the strap around her neck.
We arrived at Missy’s office.
Considering her hesitancy to have me attend the custody meeting, I’d expected her to be reluctant to have Tessa there as well, but if she didn’t like the idea, she hid it well. As soon as I introduced Tessa to her, Missy returned the diary. “I can only imagine how special this must be to you.”
“Yes, it is,” Tessa replied.
Missy took some time explaining that reading the diary had helped her better formulate the things she wanted to emphasize in the meeting today.