The Shadowed Mind

by Julie Cave

  "What about a part-time nurse to help me care for Dad?" suggested Ella, when the quiet had dragged on for too long.

  "That's not a bad idea," said Micah enthusiastically. "Then Dad could stay at home and you could get a break."

  "I need you to organize that for me," said Ella, surprising herself by her firm tone. "I have my hands full, and I frankly don't have the energy."

  Surprisingly, Micah didn't argue. "Okay, sis, leave it up to me," he said. There was a lengthy pause, then he asked, "How much time do you think Dad has left?"

  "It's hard to say," she said. "He could have as much as five years, or as little as one year. I suppose it depends on how badly he goes downhill."

  "Okay. I'm trying to get some time off work to visit you guys," said Micah. "I'll try to make it as soon as possible."

  Ella suddenly thought of something she wanted to ask her brother. "Do you know anyone Dad might have known named Peter or Henry?"

  "Peter or Henry? Nothing comes to mind immediately. Why?"

  "It would have been from a long time ago," explained Ella. "He seems to have regressed back to a time just after he and Mom got married, before you or I were born."

  "I'm still stumped, Sis. Is it a problem?"

  "I guess not," said Ella tiredly. "It's just that he gets really fixated on those names to the point of hysteria. He's even harassed people at the grocery store. It's like he's trying to find two people called Peter and Henry."

  "Who are you talking to?" Her father's querulous voice startled Ella and almost sent her rocketing off her chair. "Is that Peter? Is it Henry?"

  "Bye, Micah," Ella said hurriedly, then hung up. "Hi, Dad. I was talking to Micah, my brother, your son."

  The old man, clad in his pajamas, frowned. "My son? I don't have a son. Why would you lie about that? Were you talking to Peter or Henry?"

  "No, it wasn't Peter or Henry," said Ella with a sigh. "Come on, let's get you back to bed."

  "I want to talk to them, if you find them," insisted her father. "I must talk to them. I need to apologize."

  At least while he was talking, he allowed Ella to lead him back toward his bedroom.

  "Apologize for what?" she asked curiously.

  He looked at her sideways as they entered his room. "I'm not telling you!" he scoffed. "Just tell me when you find them, okay?"

  "Sure thing," she said, patting the bed. "Time for sleep now."

  This time, she waited by his bed until his eyes started to close. She thought of the times he'd sat beside her bed after she'd had a nightmare or had been convinced there were monsters in the closet. He'd stroked her hair and sung softly to her, comforting her with his presence. As a child, she'd firmly believed that nothing could go wrong if her father was nearby. She had believed he could fix anything.

  In truth, he could almost fix anything — her bike, the dishwasher, a scraped knee, her hurt at the betrayal of a school friend. Yet he was powerless to fix the decline in his own mind, watching from an unfamiliar place as his world shrunk around him to include only the prison bars through which he watched strangers doing things he could no longer master.

  ****

  Dr. Nelson Sharp didn't appear to mind Detective Cage and Dinah appearing at his office door uninvited the following morning. Neither Cage nor Dinah had gotten much sleep — yet Cage showed no ill effects while Dinah felt like she'd scratched steel wool over her eyes and her head felt full of sand. Her pale blue blouse was creased despite a haphazard attempt to iron it, while Cage's yellow shirt was ironed with starched precision. Dinah resolved to ask him how he did it.

  "Hello, Detective," said Dr. Sharp, letting them into his office. He wore a different pair of glasses today — they were horn-rimmed, which would have looked ridiculous on anyone else. Instead, the professor simply looked casually cool. "What can I do for you?"

  "Sorry to drop by unannounced," said Cage, again trying to fit his large frame into the trendy chair. "We have another murder that seems to be linked to our eugenics discussions, and we're desperate to learn all we can."

  "No problem," the university professor said. "As I said, it's summer, so my hours are pretty flexible."

  Cage pulled out his notebook and gave Dr. Sharp the latest quote, found on the body of Ashleigh Colter.

  Dr Sharp read it with a wrinkled forehead. "It sounds vaguely familiar. Could you bear with me while I look it up?"

  Cage and Dinah sat uncomfortably while Dr. Sharp consulted his laptop, then rifled through several textbooks in his bookcase. Dinah hated sitting still and waiting. She shifted left and right, chewing on her fingernails and noting that Cage's shoes were spit-polished to a high sheen. The big man sat stiffly but calmly and still, the only indication he was even awake given away by his eyes, which scanned the room over and over.

  Finally, Dr. Sharp said, "Okay, I've got it."

  "What does it mean?" Cage asked curiously.

  "It's a quote from a 19th-century German ethnologist named Hellwald," explained Dr. Sharp. "It comes from a book he wrote called The History of Culture in Its Natural Evolution published in 1875. I haven't read his book, but my hasty research would seem to indicate that the theme of the book revolves around the development of human society replacing ethical considerations."

  Dr. Sharp consulted his laptop. "Let's see." His eyes moved quickly, absorbing information. "Hellwald insists that science has banished morality, since in the struggle for existence the ends justify the means. Additionally, he construes war as a necessary part of the Darwinian struggle. He considers war to be an important factor in cultural progress, and he uses the Spanish conquest of the Americas as an example. He glosses over the atrocities and bloodshed of the conquest and describes it as an inexpressible blessing to humanity."

  He looked up at Cage and Dinah who stared back at him. "That seems like a pretty radical view," said Dinah finally.

  "He was one of the more drastic social thinkers," agreed Dr. Sharp. "Yet it would appear that his views were held in high esteem by his peers. Furthermore, his views weren't that different from most of the social Darwinist eugenicists of the day."

  "Is it any wonder that the Nazis could do what they did, if this is the type of thinking going on in Germany," commented Dinah.

  "It was certainly the events of the Holocaust that brought about an end to the popularization of eugenics," said Dr. Sharp. "Once the world saw the horror that could be wrought in the name of eugenics and racial hygiene, it quickly fell out of favor. Of course, Germany was relatively unique. Some have said the reason for World War I was the result of social Darwinism. There was a professor at Stanford University named Vernon Kellogg who had a conversation with a German army officer who'd been a biology teacher before the war. Kellogg said afterward that the creed of a natural selection based on violent and fatal competitive struggle is the gospel of German intellectuals. It affected Kellogg to the point of renouncing pacifism and supporting the war against them. So you can see how entrenched the concept of militant social Darwinism was within the German culture."

  "And this was during the First World War?" Dinah asked.

  "Right. So there was plenty of time for the idea to fester, particularly after the humiliation of their defeat," agreed Dr. Sharp. "Of course there were an equal number of pacifist social Darwinists who objected to warfare. But when you study their writings, it emerges that opposition to warfare came because they believed the wrong people were being killed as a result. They believed war killed the healthy and strong, rather than the weak and sickly. In short, they thought war hindered evolutionary progress.

  "However, even before the First World War, most intellectuals in Europe and many here in America considered war to be biologically determined, and therefore that no moral considerations were to be applied. How can you argue against war if it is simply a product of natural laws?"

  "As opposed to what? The ability of humans to wreck everything they touch?" Dinah asked caustically.

  Dr. Sharp laughed. "That's one way of p
utting it …or you could say, as opposed to free choice. In any event, this militant Darwinism continued apace during the late 19th century. Intellectuals such as Fredriche Rolle stated that the right of the stronger was not subject to morality; while Gustav Jaeger believed that the war of annihilation is natural law without which the organic world could not continue to exist. Then along came your fellow, Hellwald, who thought along the same lines and probably had a more radical approach than his contemporaries, but was popular nonetheless."

  Dinah digested this information. What did a warmongering Darwinist from the 19th century have in common with a present-day serial killer?

  Again the interview was cut short by the shrill ring of Cage's cell phone. This time it was the crime scene lab, which had made some discoveries from the alley where Ashleigh Colter had been found.

  Dr. Sharp good-naturedly agreed to continue the interview at a later stage. The two investigators drove straight to the crime lab.

  ****

  Zach, the crime scene lab technician, sported a bright-green stripe in his otherwise platinum mohawk, and had accessorized with a green eyebrow ring and nose stud. He called a greeting out to them from his brilliantly lit workstation and waved them over. "Hey Dinah, Detective," he said, shaking their respective hands. "How's things?"

  "We're hoping you'll make our day a little brighter," said Dinah. "All I've been thinking about for the past few days is inferior humans, war, and the plan to eradicate the weak and sick."

  "Oh, yeah? Just another day at the office?" Zach chuckled. "In any case, I think I can make your day somewhat brighter."

  "What have you got?" Cage asked.

  "The good news is that we got something from the crime scene, as opposed to your other crime scenes where we got zilch," explained Zach. "The bad news is that it's still not much."

  "At this point we'll take what we can get," said Cage.

  "Okay. We found no fingerprints or DNA other than from the victim," began Zach. "And we had to sort through all the rubbish that accumulates on the street. So please take this information with a grain of salt — what we found doesn't belong there, but there could also be another innocent explanation. Okay?"

  "We get it," said Cage, displaying a tiny trace of impatience. "Do you have a point?"

  Zach raised his eyebrows. "Man, I think you've been hanging out with Dinah for too long. You're starting to pick up her prickly vibes, know what I mean?"

  Cage just stared at him, his face impassive while Dinah suppressed a smile. Eventually, even Zach wilted under the big man's gaze. "Okay, so what we found were some chips," he said. "Polyurethane chips, to be precise."

  "How big are we talking?"

  "Tiny, about the size of a pinhead," said Zach. "Almost like flakes, I guess."

  "And what is the significance of this?"

  "Polyurethane is a plastic with a wide variety of uses," explained Zach. "It's used in industry all the time, from foam to insulation to automotive suspension to hard plastic parts. It's pretty common. It's hard and durable, yet flexible. Its presence in the street isn't really that unusual. It could've been transported there by a laborer or a truck or any number of ways. But it's where we found it that raises the most questions."

  He beckoned them to his computer, where he'd constructed a 3-D model of the area. A 3-D version of Ashleigh Colter's body lay where it had been found, and the van remained parked at the curb. "If there is a reasonably innocent explanation, you'd expect to find these flakes of polyurethane up and down the street or in the alley in a random pattern. You certainly might find a concentration of them here or there for whatever reason, but in our case you find them in two specific places." Zach demonstrated on his model. "One set you find on the street directly at the back of the van, the other set virtually underneath the body. There were no chips found anywhere else."

  "That is unusual," admitted Dinah. "What's your theory?"

  "Polyurethane is pretty dense," said Zach. "It's not prone to flying along on the wind, for example. So it would require some level of force to dislodge it. After studying the video surveillance footage, we see that the man driving the van hangs around the back of the van for a fair period of time, seemingly searching for something. He seems to get quite agitated. Then, presumably he takes Colter into the alley and kills her there. So my theory is that he is the transporter of polyurethane chips, which became dislodged once when he was vigorously searching through the van, and once when he killed Colter. That would explain the absence of the chips anywhere else in the area."

  "So by your theory, we would also find chips in the van itself?" mused Dinah.

  "I would tend to think so," agreed Zach. "I know it's not much, but it could be useful, particularly if you managed to find the van."

  "Did you get any distinguishing marks from the man on the video?" Cage asked.

  "No, all we have is a headless body that's fully clothed," said Zach. "There's not much I can do with it. I'm not on CSI: Miami, you know. I can't magically change the camera angle or re-pixellate the footage or whatever it is they do."

  Dinah laughed as they bade Zach farewell and walked out onto the steps of the lab into the warm summer sunshine. Dinah turned her face upward so that a few rays fell on her skin.

  "So what do you make of this so far?" Cage asked. "What would a profiler say?"

  Dinah considered the question in silence for several minutes. Finally, she said, "We're looking for a male, acting alone, aged in his mid-thirties to mid-forties. He's extremely organized and intelligent, and his crimes are well-planned, cool, and methodical. He is able to gain the trust of his victims in a variety of ways — his first victim thought he was a harmless do-gooder, his second victim thought he was a respectable journalist, and his third victim thought he was a charity volunteer. He is probably gainfully employed and might even be in a reasonably senior job, though his resume will probably show a long list of jobs from which is was fired or resigned. He could be married, although this will likely be a dysfunctional relationship. By leaving the messages behind on the bodies, he shows that he has a specific agenda and that he wants this message to be broadcast. He is atypical in that his victims cover both sexes, varying ages, and ethnicities. I think that'll become more obvious once we work out what is behind his motive."

  "What do you think his motive is?" Cage asked, as they climbed back into the car.

  "Judging from all we've learned in the past few days, he seems to be bent on making a statement about what he thinks of inferior people," said Dinah. "His first victim was a street kid and drug addict, his second had a mental illness, and his third was homeless. It would appear to me that he is getting rid of people he considers to be worthless."

  "Cleaning up, so to speak," said Cage, carefully easing his way through the traffic. "So who is next on his list?"

  Dinah voiced the disquiet she'd been feeling since the case began. "I suppose I could be next on the list. I'm one of those worthless alcoholics they keep talking about."

  Cage glanced at her and gave her an uncharacteristic smile. "Or maybe I'll be next. I'm one of those half-evolved apes."

  Dinah smiled back, and they shared a moment in which despite the attitudes around them that sought to displace or discredit them, they stood together in silent solidarity.

  ****

  Early afternoon fell upon them as Cage parked in the near-empty lot outside the headquarters of the Drug Response Team. Black clouds banked up in the sky, signaling an imminent thunderstorm. The building was small and ancient, as was often the case for non-profit organizations which eked out enough funds to cover their activities but left precious little spare to cover the cosmetic.

  A secretary on her way out of the building paused long enough to show them down a long corridor featuring cracked and peeling paint to the office of the vice-president, Celia Baylor. She welcomed them into the tiny space and offered them a pair of mismatched chairs on which to sit. Her desk was piled with stacks of paper, files, and books. Celia Baylor was a
woman in her early fifties with long, gray-streaked hair piled crazily on top of her head, tortoise shell-framed glasses, and bright, blood-red lipstick.

  "Hi, sorry about the mess," she said, smiling at them. "I live in a state of perpetual chaos."

  Dinah wondered what the mess was doing to Cage's head and fought back a smile. He glanced around, clearly a little unsettled, before trying to concentrate on the task at hand.

  "No problem, Ms. Baylor," he said, folding his hands tightly in his lap. "We're here to ask about a van of yours seen near a crime last night."

  Celia Baylor frowned. "Oh, dear! I haven't heard about that and it certainly hasn't appeared in our log books. Whereabouts did this happen?"

  "In Hyattsville," said Cage.

  Celia Baylor's frown deepened. "We didn't have any vans in that area last night." She tapped away at her computer and pulled up a log book. "We had three vans out — one at Capitol Hill, one in Ford DuPont Park, and one at Saint Elizabeths. No van near the Hyattsville area at all."

  Cage matched her frown. "Are you sure?"

  "Positive," said Baylor. "Our van crews have to log everything and the vans have a GPS tracking device in them, so that we know where they are. They call in every four hours, so we know they're okay. They work in some pretty rough and dangerous areas."

  "Could someone have stolen one of your vans?" Dinah asked.

  Celia Baylor smiled. "I don't think so. We only have three, and they were all out serving last night."

  Cage and Dinah glanced at each other. "Do you have any ex-staff who might use the name of your charity for their own purposes?"

  Baylor tapped away at her computer again. "No one comes to mind immediately," she said. "You should probably know that most of our van crews are volunteers, rather than paid staff. We give them free training but that's about it. They come and go, and there's not much we can do about it."

  "So were there any volunteers that struck you as being a bit odd?" asked Cage. "Any who didn't make it through basic training, for example?"

  Baylor drummed her fingers on her desk while she pulled up the training records. "Let's see," she mused. "Oh, here's one. His name was Leonard Marks. He made it through training and went out on several van crews. Bear with me while I reacquaint myself with his file."