7 Sykos

by Marsheila Rockwell

  “I suppose I don’t have any say in the matter,” he said dryly, clearly amused.

  No more than your victims had, Fallon thought, but didn’t say. Light was a psychopath and a master manipulator. She’d already given him too much ammunition by letting him see her distaste; that had been a mistake. She didn’t intend to compound it.

  “Not really, no,” she said, and the guard behind him jabbed him in the back with his rifle for emphasis, eliciting a pained oof.

  “Look at it this way, Light,” she added. “It’ll be good practice for the next time you’re strapped down.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked, suddenly wary.

  Fallon smiled again, and despite her best intentions, she couldn’t keep just a trace of smugness out of it.

  “Well, isn’t it obvious? When they give you the needle.”

  The hard part was that Light had to keep his head still for the scan. Most psychopaths she had worked with were volunteers, willing to cooperate because they had been promised privileges of some kind at whatever maximum-­security prison they’d been sentenced to. Light was no volunteer, and he let Fallon know it by pretending to comply, then jerking his head around at key moments, spoiling the scans. She was eating up data storage space on nothing.

  After his third such stunt, Fallon brought him out and spoke to Romero, where Light could hear them. “I was told that the prisoner could be more . . . comprehensively restrained, if need be. Can you handle that?”

  “I can truss him up like a Thanksgiving turkey, Doctor. That what you want?”

  “That would probably do. As long as you can get his head into some kind of nonmetallic brace that’ll hold it absolutely motionless.”

  Unfortunately, his hands had to remain free. Because this was a functional MRI, he would have a series of tasks to perform, which would require use of a device he could hold but not lift to where he could see it or do anything else with it.

  “It wouldn’t hurt,” she added, “if you left him that way for several hours after I’m finished, too. Just in case.”

  “In case of what?” Light wanted to know.

  “Just . . . in case.”

  His voice took on a menacing tone. Psychopaths could be charmers, but they could also be bluntly threatening. Sometimes in the same sentence. “You really don’t want to do that. You already told me I have something you—­or they—­want. You tie me up, you’re not going to get it.”

  Fallon decided that honesty was the way to approach him—­as long as that honesty met threat with threat. “Well, here’s the thing, Light. I won’t actually know if you do have it until I run these scans. Maybe then you’ll be in a position to bargain. Right now, you’re not. I don’t necessarily want to strap you down like a mummy, but I will. In fact, I’ll leave you wrapped up for forty-­eight hours straight and not lose a minute’s sleep over it. Is that what you want? To be lashed to a cot for two days and nights, lying in your own waste, without food or water?”

  “You can’t—­”

  “The hell I can’t,” she interrupted. “You haven’t forgotten the most basic fact of your life already, have you? You have no rights. None. I can do whatever I want with you. If I want to put a bullet in your skull and leave you in the desert for carrion eaters, I can.”

  The start of a smile snaked across his lips. “You couldn’t kill anyone.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” she said. “Whether I’d pull the trigger is irrelevant. There are plenty of soldiers here with plenty of experience killing ­people. And nobody here would shed a tear for you.”

  “Just say the word, Doctor,” Romero said. “I’d be happy to do the deed.”

  Light’s smile faded. His eyes were wide, fixed. No doubt thinking, trying to find some other angle to play. But he was strapped prone on a high platform, and two armed soldiers were standing just far enough away to shoot him before he could reach them.

  She could see the moment resignation set in. His eyelids closed the slightest bit, his jaw relaxed. “Okay, I’ll play your game. This time. What do you need me to do, again?”

  She repeated the instructions she had given him the first time . . . and the second. First he would see a high-­resolution video of a peaceful scene—­prairie grasses undulating in a gentle breeze. That would not only help with any sense of claustrophobia but would focus his eyes on the screen, where she needed them. After a ­couple of minutes, the testing would start. First he’d view a variety of images and catalogue them according to how immoral the scenes they showed were, then he’d try to memorize a long list of words—­the ones he could remember would tell Fallon a lot about him. But the cameras recording eye movement and the fMRI scanners measuring blood flow to the different parts of his brain would tell her so much more.

  When he indicated that he understood, Fallon and the soldiers left the MRI room for the fourth time, moving into the control room so they could see and hear everything Light did. The door to the MRI room locked with a loud thunk that reminded most psychopaths she’d scanned of prison doors. So far, Light had never spent time in prison.

  That, she was sure, would soon change.

  The guards left with Light, and Fallon made some observations while the scan was in progress, but comprehensive analysis would have to wait until high-­powered computers had crunched the data from the thousands of images the machine had amassed. While she perused what she could, her mind raced down different avenues, working toward a destination of its own design.

  Finally, she left the computers to do their thing. She wanted to check in on Randy Wayne Warga. By now, if he was going to show signs of infection, they should have manifested. Davidson escorted her to the building where the murderer was held—­not the garage where she’d first observed Light, but yet another of the new buildings popping up in the infield like weeds after a monsoon. He had a bunk and combination sink and toilet, and that was all. There were other cells, too, on either side of him. They were empty, but there were others farther down she couldn’t see into; she imagined that Light was now residing in one of those, but didn’t care enough to ask.

  Warga was dressed in prison orange, but in spite of that sartorial disadvantage, he was a good-­looking man. His blue eyes were clear and bright, his jaw was square, his brown hair cut short and as neatly finger-­combed as he could manage in here, with no mirror. He had a muscular build, broad-­shouldered and deep-­chested. His prison tats had been kept to a minimum—­a snake coiled out from under his collar and wrapped partway around his neck, and he had a series of eleven black dots on his right temple that Fallon didn’t want to speculate about. Those looks, she knew, were part of how he earned the trust of his victims . . . right before he brutalized them, raped them, and strangled the life from them with his powerful hands. She took a good look, focusing particularly on his cheeks and eyes, but saw no signs of illness. His hand was still bandaged, but the scratches and bruises he’d received fighting the Infected seemed to be healing quickly.

  “Didn’t get enough yesterday, Doc? I can take my shirt off, you want to see more? Hell, why stop there?”

  “I’m not here to admire you, Randy.”

  “You always say that. But you always come back for more.”

  “Scientific curiosity,” Fallon said. “About your twisted brain, not your physique or any imagined sexual prowess.”

  “You’d have to have a pretty wild imagination,” he said. “Or you’d sell me short.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Live and learn.”

  “I intend to. But not about that.”

  “What, then? I can tell by lookin’ at you, you ain’t getting enough at home.”

  That stung, but she kept her expression flat. Having plenty of experience with psychopaths, she ignored most of what they said—­in her line of work, it was crucial. Sure, maybe he could tell, but more likely he was just fishing.
<
br />   She wasn’t biting.

  “I’m doing just fine. Thanks for your concern.”

  “You know I’ve always thought you were a looker, Doc. I’d give you a good pounding.”

  “Pass,” Fallon said. “I just wanted to see if you’re infected yet.”

  “With what?”

  “You don’t remember being attacked by three ­people who wanted to eat your brain yesterday?”

  Warga chuckled. “I just figured that was another of your crazy tests. You’re always showin’ up, wantin’ to probe something or other. About the only thing you ain’t done is hook electrodes up to my junk.”

  “Anyway, you appear to be fine.”

  “Damn straight. Better than fine.”

  Fallon turned her back on him and headed for the door. He wouldn’t quit—­never had, in her experience. She had learned that a summary dismissal was the best way to deal with him.

  Halfway back to her lab, she could still hear him shouting after her, rattling off a series of suggestions so lewd she would have blushed if she hadn’t spent time with him before.

  “That one’s got quite a mouth on him,” Davidson said.

  “He lives for sex. His idea of it, anyway, which is different from most ­people’s.”

  “Different how?”

  “Ever heard about the mating habits of praying mantises?”

  “The bugs? Can’t say I have.”

  “During copulation, or right after, the female typically bites the head off the male. Warga’s a little like that, only he can’t finish unless he’s got his hands around the woman’s throat. If he climaxes while she’s dying, that’s fine with him, but he likes it better if she’s already dead.”

  Davidson stopped in his tracks and stared at her. “Really? That guy you just talked to does that?”

  “Whenever he can.”

  “Doctor, you sure know some strange characters.”

  “That I do, Davidson. That I do.”

  CHAPTER 14

  68 hours

  Fallon and Davidson were almost back to the lab when she heard someone call her name. She turned and saw Special Agent in Charge Ramirez walking toward her across the track. Heat radiated from the pavement in waves, making the agent’s approach resemble some kind of apparition.

  “A moment, Fallon?” she asked when she was near enough. The glance she shot Davidson wasn’t hard to interpret.

  “I’ll be close by, Doctor, if you need me.”

  “Thanks, Davidson,” Fallon said. “What is it, Soledad?”

  Soledad matched Fallon’s stride as they continued toward the lab. “You saw Mr. Warga?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What’s your take?”

  “Well, he’s obviously not infected.”

  “And you’re sure he’s a psychopath?”

  “Textbook. I’ve scanned him a ­couple of times, once with a standard MRI, once with a functional.”

  “What does that show you?” Ramirez asked, curious.

  “The most notable aspect of a classic psychopathic brain is a significant lack of grey matter in the paralimbic region. That’s the orbitofrontal cortex, the amygdala, the posterior cingulate cortex. The fMRI shows reduced blood flow in that region, too. It’s like it’s atrophied down to almost nothing.”

  “Which results in what?”

  “I assume you want the capsule version and not the Neuroscience 101 lecture?”

  “Capsule is fine.”

  “The paralimbic system regulates things like impulse control, empathy, emotional learning, motivation. The amygdala is particularly affected in these brains—­that’s the center of perceiving and processing emotions.”

  “So somebody with a damaged amygdala—­”

  Fallon didn’t wait for the rest of the question. “Might never feel emotions the way most ­people do. In psychopaths, emotional response tends to be flat. They don’t understand—­can’t even grasp—­why the rest of us feel things. To them, emotions are useful tools only in that knowing what they are, what our emotional responses might be, allows them to manipulate us. But they’re not feeling them in the same way. They’re much more basic. What’s love? Sex. What’s fear? Kill or be killed.”

  “So basically what you’re saying is that all men are psychopaths.”

  Fallon glanced at her, looking for a hint of a smile, a twinkle in the eye. Didn’t see it. “I guess that depends on your experience with men.” Elliott’s face flashed through her mind, and she chased it away. “Whatever it is, magnify by a factor of a thousand, and you get somebody like Warga. He’s shaped like a human being, but that’s about the only area of commonality.”

  They reached the lab. The guard outside, whose name Fallon still hadn’t caught, opened the door and waved her and Ramirez through. The agent looked around and gave a low whistle. “Nice setup.”

  “They did good,” Fallon admitted.

  “You scanned Light earlier this morning, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  Fallon’s gaze was drawn to the bank of computers near her desk. “Data’s processing,” she said. “Initial scans, though, indicated that his paralimbic cortex was nearly as lacking as Warga’s.”

  “So he has a psychopathic brain structure.”

  “Pending further analysis, I would say yes. He does.”

  Ramirez eyed a rolling office chair that Fallon had pushed up against a wall. “Mind if I sit?”

  “Go for it.” Fallon pulled her own desk chair back, swiveled it to face the SAC, and lowered herself into it. “What’s up?”

  Ramirez waved a nail-­bitten hand in the general direction of downtown Phoenix. “My city’s being destroyed from the inside out. I’ve put a lot of sweat and blood and time into protecting it, and now I feel . . . so helpless. Like I can’t do anything but stand back and watch it happen. I hate that.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “I want answers. I want action. I’m tired of waiting. I want to do something.”

  “I know how you feel, Soledad. But even if we determine with absolute certainty that psychopaths are immune, it’ll take time to figure out why. More time to turn that knowledge into something like a vaccine. Months. Years, maybe.”

  “There won’t be anything left in there in months or years. We have days, at best.”

  “Before the nukes.”

  It wasn’t really a question, but Ramirez answered anyway. “Right.” She put her hands behind her back, stretched. “Before this—­your research. You’ve been working on technology that could detect psychopathic brain structure and maybe do something to dial back psychopathic impulses.”

  Fallon didn’t answer. Only a few ­people in the federal government were supposed to know the details of her research. Soledad Ramirez wasn’t one of them.

  The agent went on. “Could you maybe reverse the process? Make psychopaths?”

  “For study subjects?”

  “Well, for starters. Wouldn’t more subjects make the research go faster?”

  Fallon wasn’t surprised by the SAC’s lack of ethics—­she figured you didn’t reach a high position in the FBI without a certain degree of larceny in your soul. But it bothered her that the woman seemed to know so much about her work, and she said so.

  “We were all briefed on you before they brought you in,” Ramirez said. “Special Agent Barksdale is one of mine, and I wasn’t going to send her to collect you without knowing what she was in for.”

  Which meant Thurman had briefed them, since he was the only one here—­that she knew of—­who was aware of what the lab’s research was all about. She’d thought she could trust him. He’d bear watching from here on out.

  Of course, she had to admit these were exceptional circumstances. If ­people like Light had surrendered their human rights, ha
ving her professional secrets revealed to a group of ­people trying to defend the human race probably wasn’t so bad.

  Still, there was a limit to how much she would spill. She didn’t want to admit that there was a working prototype—­or, more importantly, that she didn’t know where it was.

  “We never even considered that possibility. It’s really outside the realm of our work,” she said. “We’re still trying to figure out what makes them tick, and with luck, how to beef up the damaged portions of the brain, to help with self-­control and the processing of emotions. Reversing course would be a big jump—­not something that could be done quickly.”

  “So you couldn’t just turn the population of Phoenix into psychopaths long enough to stop the spread of the disease?”

  “I can’t imagine that would be possible, let alone ethical. And it might cause more problems than it solved.”

  “I had to ask.”

  “Of course,” Fallon said. She hadn’t been entirely honest. There might be a way to do what Ramirez had suggested, at least on a small scale. She’d have to have the prototype, of course, and some time to work with it, but she didn’t think creating psychopaths was impossible. Still, it wasn’t the avenue her thoughts had begun to travel down.

  “I do have the beginnings of an idea, maybe,” she said. “It’s not fully formed—­not even enough to articulate. But I promise, if and when I work out the details, I’ll bring it to you. Okay?”

  “Whatever you come up with, Fallon, I’ll look at with an open mind.”

  “That’s all I can ask.”

  The agent excused herself, and Fallon started in on Light’s fMRI scans.

  As she’d thought, he showed the classic structure. His orbitofrontal cortex was underdeveloped, his amygdala dysfunctional—­his whole paralimbic system was a mess. That in itself didn’t turn someone into a serial killer, but it was a good start. Nature went so far, then nurture took over. Early life experience wrought epigenetic changes, which could push someone who had poor impulse control and an inadequate emotional regulatory system over the edge. Add in an introduction to violent behavior somewhere along the way, and it became almost impossible to expect a normally functioning human being. Someone would have to map Light’s genome, but she already suspected that many of the genetic traits common to psychopaths would show up.