Cain's Blood: A Novel

by Girard, Geoffrey

  And the boy talks to the camera. And the man holding the camera talks back. And the boy says, “Dad, give me a break.”

  Castillo recognizes the boy in the video some. His features.

  He recognizes the house in the video completely.

  Easy enough. It’s this house.

  Jacobson’s house.

  OUR BASEST TRAITS

  JUNE 04, SATURDAY—HADDONFIELD, NJ

  [From the journals of Dr. Gregory Jacobson]

  12 Oct— . . . psychopathic subjects rated “H” or greater remain among the lowest asymmetry scores for monitored offenders. During interview, subject continues to illustrate classic psychopath criteria: superficially charming, unmotivated, manipulative, inadequate sense of shame, paucity of emotion. I asked the subject how he would feel if I put a gun to his face and robbed him. He said he’d find a way to escape, give me the money, or fight me to take the gun. When I pressed him on the issue of how he would “ feel,” not what he would think or do, subject had no response. None. MMPI scheduled for next session. C-Subject’s custodian contacted to increase maternal neglect by 2.0 degrees, fm abuse by 1.0.

  9 Nov—Lunch with Dr. Carla Bayliff (Tulane), who is heading a symposium next spring and asked if I would be interested in being guest of honor. Perhaps. Reviewed impact of common functional polymorphism in MAOA on brain structure and function. Low expression variants found on subject’s MRIs. Erdman maintains reservations on limited test group. Recorded pronounced limbic volume reductions and hyperresponsive amygdale during emotional arousal. Marked diminished reactivity of regulatory prefrontal regions compared with the high expression allele. The clearest link between genetic variation and aggression is located on the chromosome XP11.23. This is the true mark of Cain. XP11 is the new number of the beast.

  22 Nov— . . . subject’s MAOA levels remain identical to DNA patron. Latest blood tests confirm sustained low serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine levels. Dogs bark as they are bred. Note to visit John and Albert at secondary environments. Voxel-based morphometry prescribed to canvass subject’s brain for regional volume changes related to genotype.

  He requested his room be painted tan. A genuine emotional preference or mimicry of conventional exchange? He asked again about his mother today. Falsehood has a perennial spring. Perhaps I should never have brought him here.

  6 April—Dreams should remain banished to the night. In the sun, they become vile trespassers. The Triazolam shots abridge REM sleep, but now they have somehow found me in the day. I could not see her face again. The warmth spilling from her insides was like a mother’s blanket enfolding me. I awoke at my desk, drenched in sweat, my belly warm and wet with semen. I heard from Rochester today and everything is now arranged. Mankind remains ceaselessly motivated by genetic characteristics inherited from ancestors long buried. Individual experiences of childhood can modify, inhibit, or augment these, but can never truly erase. I shall be there when he is lifted again from the earth.

  04 May—Tumblety’s DNA is a match, and I am filled with abundant joy. It is, as I’d always hoped it would be, comforting to find our basest traits in our forebears. It absolves us.

  Castillo tossed Jacobson’s journal back inside a box with the rest. Mostly technical jargon and arbitrary fortune-cookieish dictums on violence and heredity.

  A stack of clinical studies on various known serial killers (Castillo hadn’t heard of any of them). A partial aerial shot of Afghanistan (likely) someone had marked with a series of colored circles growing out from the small village at its center, and the word “SharDhara” scrawled across the top (familiar almost, but not enough). Papers on Supermale Syndrome, XYY children, and something called Klinefelter’s syndrome. PCR printouts from a machine Jacobson kept in the same room, which mapped double helix pairings Castillo couldn’t understand in the slightest, though he remembered the significance of “MAOA levels” from Erdman. Some graphs comparing oxytocin and vasopressin levels for several subjects made even less sense. But there were also color photos of mutilated victims. Sliced and broken. These Castillo understood perfectly. Crimes, from the clothing and photo qualities, from the early 1900s through present day. There were maps of East London from the nineteenth century. Old photos of someone named Francis Tumblety, and an old pamphlet written by this same guy entitled The Kidnapping of Dr. Tumblety.

  He’d gathered from Jacobson’s journals that Francis Tumblety was the withered stiff he’d spent the bulk of the night with. A quick Google search revealed Tumblety was a Jack the Ripper suspect who’d died in 1903. Jacobson, according to the journals and film, had collected this guy’s DNA six months ago.

  “Tumblety’s DNA is a match, and I am filled with abundant joy.”

  But a match with what? Castillo wondered. The journals were vague. With Jacobson? With some other clone? Castillo didn’t think on it too long, because the dead guy wasn’t the most puzzling, most twisted part.

  That was reserved entirely for the other CDs.

  The footage of Test Group #2.

  Children being beaten and worse. Jacobson’s journals and reports confirming that the various forms of abuse had been methodically ordered, prescribed, in the name of science.

  Castillo leaned into his hands and rested against the desk. It had been a long day. He’d grown too numb to think. The whole thing was fucking insane. He thought of prayer, but his only thoughts for God right now were angry thoughts. The colonel had been right. There was no going back.

  “If any god has marked me out again for shipwreck, my tough heart can undergo it.” Another favorite Homeric passage came to mind. “What hardship have I not long since endured at sea, in battle! Let the trial come.”

  He checked his cellphone. 0614 hours. He called the number they’d given.

  Who am I trying to convince?

  “It’s Castillo,” he said and could hear the anger in his own voice. Knew already it had been stupid to call.

  “Yes?” Dr. Erdman replied at the other end. His voice sounded strained. It’d been a long day and night for everyone. Castillo wondered how the cleanup was coming along. “I was informed by Stanforth you’d found something and instructed to leave you alone until you were finished. Are you?” Erdman tried to sound bored, but Castillo could tell the bioengineer was terrified about what Castillo might have discovered. With good cause.

  “Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft,” Castillo replied.

  “Go on.”

  “Something Nietzsche pointed out. ‘Who fights with monsters should—’ ”

  “ ‘—beware that he, himself, does not become a monster.’ ” Erdman finished the quote. “Profound. Cliché. How does it relate to the immediate matter at hand?”

  Castillo’s laughter was harsh. “What do you see when you look in the mirror, Erdman?” I shouldn’t have called. It was confrontational, unnecessary. The kind of call he would have made a year ago. Merely spoiling for a fight. Any fight. Wanting to lash out at someone for the shit he’d been forced to watch all night. An emotional reaction that had no place in the operation. Damn it. Why did I call him?

  “What most men see, I imagine.” Erdman’s reply brought Castillo back. “I hope you’ve acquired meaningful information of some kind to assist in the prompt resolution of this matter. Stanforth assured us you would.”

  “Meaningful information.” Castillo stopped any impending threats from bursting forth. Slowed his speech. “One, Dr. Gregory Jacobson—your boss—is undeniably insane. His personal journals are filled with violent disjointed fantasies and a connection to some Victorian murderer named Francis Tumblety, an Englishman who died a hundred years ago. There’s video of Jacobson and some other folk digging up this man’s grave. In fact, I’m standing over, I believe, what’s left of Mr. Tumblety’s corpse.”

  “Yes?”

  “Not surprised yet, I see. Two, for the sake of marketable pharmaceuticals, bioengineering prospects, and potential military applications—otherwise why would I be involved?—DSTI, a highly f
inanced but little-known genetics lab, purposely breeds monsters. Testing clones of humans known to possess violent behavior. Sponsors the abuse of children . . . No wait, my bad, sponsors the abuse of only half of them for the sake of nature/nurture environmental testing.”

  “Those tests were discontinued years ago and, officially, never happened.”

  Deny. Deny. The videos had been time stamped years ago and so might have been discontinued. And the public disavowal of some wrongdoing was not unfamiliar to Castillo. It sometimes went with the job. However, this . . .

  “Understood,” Castillo pressed. “How familiar are you with the full environmental testings, ‘subject insertions,’ of Phase Three, Doctor?”

  Erdman paused on the other end. “Jacobson had plans, but we never . . . DSTI rejected his proposal. If anything was done, he did it on his own.”

  Deny. Deny.

  “Well.” Castillo rubbed his eyes. “His notes indicate that’s exactly what he did. Adopting out infant genetic psychopaths to unknowing parents to see how the ‘killer gene’ would play out. Paid for it himself when you wouldn’t.”

  “DSTI rejected the proposal, as it tendered virtually zero benefit to our primary objectives.”

  “So you’ve now noted twice. Guess he had motive to become disgruntled after all, huh? His records also indicate that he, himself, was one of the adoptive parents.”

  “Did you find . . . ?”

  “A stolen clone? Nope. Not yet, Doctor.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. Then Erdman spoke again. “Jacobson practically launched DSTI himself and is one of the preeminent bioengineers in the world. He was permitted many freedoms.”

  “Clearly. Did you know he had a son?”

  “Of course.”

  “And that the boy is a clone from your lab?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many more could there be then? How many families have these children been placed with? Jacobson’s notes are iffy. Coded.”

  “We don’t know for sure. A dozen, perhaps. All other embryos have been accounted for. We’ll need to see his notes.”

  “Good, he wanted you to see them. He left the key for a reason. I’ve made my copies and will leave the originals for you. Pick ’em up here in an hour. You can send me e-copies of what, if anything, you found earlier when you tried to clear this place out. But it looks like I’ve got what I really need here already. Your six missing students was barely the beginning. Jacobson’s going to find these other adopted kids, and then he’s going to set them free, too.”

  “Why do you think so?”

  “It’s in the journals. He clearly wants the cages emptied. So, if I have this right, by week’s end, there could be as many as eighteen of these kids loose in the world?”

  Erdman returned absolute silence.

  “Perfect,” Castillo said. “You guys need to start understanding I’m on your team and I can’t do my job when I’m being lied to. On that note, any idea what ‘SharDhara’ is? Person? Place? Something to do with Afghanistan?”

  “No.”

  “No? He’s got a map of a region in Afghanistan, a blast radius and what look like mortality numbers here. Estimates. Figures. Readings of some kind I can’t make heads or tails of.”

  “Doesn’t mean a thing to me. How did you find the room?”

  “I’ll be in touch.” Castillo hung up and tapped his chin with the phone, thinking. The fight with Erdman had already become one more reason to call her. Practically as if he’d done it for that purpose.

  So many reasons to call. A dozen more not to.

  “Damn it,” he cursed quietly in the empty room.

  He tapped in the number from memory.

  0630. Might not even be at work yet. Would I call back if she wasn’t?

  She answered on the first ring, “Kristin Romano.”

  Her name alone, or even the sound of her voice, would have been enough. Combined, it felt like he’d been shoved out the back of an HC-130 into a six-mile HALO-style free fall.

  Kristin Romano.

  When he’d returned from Iran, he’d spent another year recovering at the Walter Reed Medical Center in D.C. There, Colonel Stanforth made sure he’d gotten the very best treatment available for the physical damage he’d endured. Psychological healing had come harder. The biggest hindrance, he’d always known, had been himself. But the assembly-line treatment of Veterans Affairs hadn’t helped much either. The first two psychologists he’d worked with kept piling on the pills. Had figured if they’d kept him a zombie another forty years, he’d get over the torture and the fact that the Army had decided he should be pinned with a bouquet of shiny medals and then retired at age thirty-three as swiftly and quietly as possible. It hadn’t gone well. He’d even punched out one of the guys during a session.

  Then came Doctor Kristin Romano. Captain Romano. Kristin.

  She’d stopped his prescriptions immediately, her methods more connected to activities like journaling, art therapy, meditation, and even, eventually, more woo-woo exercises in things like astral projection and channeling.

  To start, however, she’d simply invited him to spend the week camping with nine other vets somewhere in the Adirondacks for a bunch of touchy-feely Oprah bullshit. Sit around the campfire and talk about your feelings like a gaggle of pussies. He’d said six words the first two days, and none of the other guys had been much better. The third night, she’d set up an actual sweat lodge miles from their cabins and left the ten men completely alone for the rest of the night. He couldn’t remember who’d started it, but they’d started. Talking. First one guy, then the next. Things they’d seen, done. Most of it was things they should have done. They took turns crying and screaming and laughing. It had been midmorning the next day before anyone realized they were cold and there was no more firewood. Ten brothers now. Ten singular experiences had become only one. Group talks continued the rest of the week. At the end, she’d given each man a copy of The Odyssey and said, “It took Greece’s greatest soldier ten years to finally make his way home after the Trojan War. Give yourselves a fucking break.”

  He’d read the book religiously ever since, meditated on and memorized passages each night, Odysseus’s adventures suddenly a very real allegory for every returning soldier. Each week, he and Dr. Romano had discussed what he’d read. They’d discussed more easily than ever before what he’d done and witnessed in the Army. His kills. His capture. The torture. Some of the boy, of Shaya. They’d eventually gotten to his childhood and future plans. Then hers. And then love. Or lust. Or both. But it had happened. And the fact that she’d been married and had a young daughter made the eventual ending even worse. When he’d vanished on her, it had been quick and clean. Like an execution, as if the whole affair had been nothing but ten months of fucking to pass the time. Hell, he half remembered implying that. Maybe to make her hate him, make it easier. But in the end, he’d left for one reason: He loved her.

  Worse: She knew it.

  “It’s Castillo,” he said.

  Silence.

  “Been a while, I know.” He could feel himself scrambling, like a man desperate to deploy a parachute in the last few thousand feet. “How . . . how are things?”

  “What can I do for you, Captain?”

  It was the voice of a total stranger. Fine. That’s what he needed to hear. He was safely on the ground again. Almost. “Not a captain anymore,” he said. Doubtless, she’d already heard that. As far as he knew, her notes on him had been applied as part of the procedure. “Discharged ten months ago. I need your help.”

  Her voice changed. “Have you had—”

  “No, no. Nothing like that. I’m fine. You cured me, remember?”

  She laughed softly. It sounded forced but was still familiar enough. He thought he’d somehow already forgotten it. “You were never ‘sick,’ ” she said, and he heard a more genuine smile. “What can I do for you?” The stranger’s voice returning some.

  “Nothing,” he
said. Waited. Thought again of hanging up. “I don’t know.”

  “Articulate as always.”

  Castillo absently straightened some of the papers on Jacobson’s desk. Thinking. Thinking, Why the hell did I call her? Saying, “I need your help, Kristin.”

  “ ‘Kristin’? Wow . . . what’s the—”

  “I’m in something now that’s . . .” Castillo breathed more deeply, memories clouting him. “OK, here’s the thing: I’ve got a couple psychological reports to figure out for a case I’m working on. But it’s all just a bunch of numbers and bullshit shrink jargon I can’t decipher.”

  “OK . . .”

  “I’m gonna need a little help figuring some of this shit out. And maybe, I guess, I also need someone I can trust.” And maybe someone who can help hold me together through this first assignment back. Just once . . .

  “You were never a ‘maybe’ guy.” Her end of the line grew muffled. Probably shutting her office door. “Not a minute ago, you told me you were finally out. What the hell they got you working on now?”

  “I can’t tell you. You know that.”

  “Yes,” she said, her turn to sigh. “I know that.”

  “Will you help me?”

  Pause.

  “Kris?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I’d just need you to look at the files and maybe give me personality profiles. Who these guys are, how they think. Six subjects. You have time?”

  “Do I have . . . You know, this is fucking nuts. Whatever. Send me the files. I’ll get to them as soon as I can.”

  “Also, if you could, any generic profile data you can pull together on sociopaths would be good. It’ll all arrive by courier later today.”

  “OK.” More confusion in her voice. “Not a problem.”

  “Thanks. Means a lot.”

  “Was there anything else?”

  Castillo thought. Maybe he’d try something like I’m sorry I left the way I did. What the hell have you been up to the last ten months? How’s Allie? How’s that damned husband of yours doing? Or maybe . . . “No,” he said. “I better go anyway. Whenever you can get to it . . .”