by Oliver Stark
‘If it’s the same killer, he clearly isn’t able to take the women home. That suggests he’s got someone at home that he needs to hide this from. Your unsub is probably in a long-term relationship, Captain. Not a good sign if he’s used to hiding his activities from a family and a job, because he’s going to be good at this. He’s in it for the long haul and wants to keep clean. He might have brought her here because of the water. The press reports mentioned fibres found on Mary-Jane’s body, so maybe he’s just making sure he doesn’t make the same mistake twice. Maybe he knows about police procedure.’
‘You think he’s cleaned her?’
‘I think it’s possible, yeah. Possibly more than that. I don’t know yet. He’s also carrying something. Not sure what, but my guess is that it’s a camera and tripod. He’s playing games, deep inside his head, and he’s working up to something. The posing is getting more explicit. I think the killer is getting to like this.’
‘You got more in fifteen minutes than Williamson had in a week.’
‘You’re trying all the tricks, aren’t you?’ said Harper. ‘I said I’d take a look, I took a look. Am I free to go now?’
‘Is that what you want? A dismissal, criminal charges and a job with a security firm?’ Harper stared out of the car in silence. ‘I can make the charges go away, Harper, but . . .’
‘But what?’
‘But, Harper, you’re also considered unstable. You agree to come back on the team, I’ll make it happen, but you gotta see someone to help you through the stuff in your head. Don’t be a tough guy: you need help. I can smell the drink on your breath and read the signs and it’s not a path you want to take. See someone - see a shrink, someone to talk to.’
Harper’s hand clenched involuntarily. He held his breath for a moment, looking down into the footwell of the car. ‘I don’t think I can, sorry. I’ll take my chances.’
Lafayette reached across and put his hand on Harper’s shoulder. ‘Don’t let her kill you, Tom. It’s her life, she made her choices - don’t be a fucking reaction the rest of your days.’
Harper got out of the car. He leaned down and looked in at the captain. ‘One more thing.’ He held up a small pink petal. ‘This is cherry blossom. Ask the question - where the hell did he get cherry blossom in November?’
Chapter Five
Barnard College
November 16, 2.59 p.m.
Dr Denise Levene walked up the steps to the small podium in Held Lecture Hall at Barnard College, right across the street from Columbia University. She didn’t often do public lectures since taking up a position with the NYPD, where she offered CBT to disturbed cops.
The audience of 150 was a mix of students and anyone who cared to drop in. They applauded the arrival of the research scientist with dutiful enthusiasm. Dr Levene looked out at the expectant faces. The glare of the stage lights blanked out their features. She never really enjoyed public speaking. She was happiest in the security of her lab working with her taciturn research students. Still, that didn’t mean she didn’t know how to put on a good show.
Denise smiled at her host, then raised her hand, and the audience hushed. ‘Thank you. Thanks for coming.’ Her hand moved to the control on her podium. She set her DVD in motion.
In the audience, a striking-looking man in a black suit and a beige mac, his neck low in his collar, was staring intently at Dr Levene. He was bored of waiting. He was often bored. He cursed under his breath and then, under the bench, he took a two-inch pocket knife and pushed it through his pocket lining and about a quarter of an inch into his thigh. Denise Levene was supposed to be an expert on the causes of violence. What would she make of him? He was eager to know.
All the man in the black suit wanted answered was why - he wasn’t after a cure, for Christ’s sake, just a little bit of an indication of what he was. An idea. A notion. He twisted the knife in his thigh, opening the wound. He watched his own body’s reaction to the pain. It was just a phenomenon in his head. No need to react, no need to give way to the urgency of biology. He had always felt more than that - more than merely human. He was sanctioned by his own pain to hurt anything and anyone.
What was pain, anyway? Just a neurological electro-chemical pulse, not a real thing at all. A chimera, like love, like happiness, like life. Like goodness. He looked across at the audience. Scientists were so slow. He yawned and tapped his fingers in agitation.
‘What you are about to see, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Dr Levene, ‘is a journey to the cause of human intraspecies violence.’
‘About time,’ murmured the man in the black suit.
The audience looked up at a large brain scan. The two great hemispheres of a single brain were projected on to a forty-foot-high screen.
‘The following sequence is a brain scan of a child who is in the process of learning.’
On the screen, the brain danced with colour in different areas - reds, blues, golds. Connections sparking and fading at incredible speed. It was like a New Year light show.
‘The brain is a learning tool,’ she continued. ‘It is the one thing in which we excel over other species - the capacity to learn: we are the pre-eminent learning animal. For a long time, scientists presumed that the brain came pre-packaged at birth, like a computer preloaded with software that you just had to switch on. We now know that the brain comes pre-packed but very empty. No software installed, just the bare components. Life is our software, ladies and gentlemen; we write the code as we walk, eat and breathe. And each of us writes a different code.’
She clicked her mouse button and the next video streamed in. ‘What you can see here is the growth of a single brain neuron. At birth, we have all of our billions of neural cells. But the brain is not the function of these cells alone. The brain - what we know as our consciousness - is formed out of life’s experience, out of the experiences that make up every second of our life. Watch this single neuron get to work.’
The image of the small elongated cell began to shake slightly and small branches started to reach out from its sides and from both ends. Soon these branches were branching in their turn and suddenly, out of the darkness of the screen, they were connecting with branches from other nearby cells that became illuminated.
‘You are watching human thought in action, ladies and gentlemen. The single neuron has the capacity to make a million connections. You have a billion neurons. That’s a lot of connections. And these connections are made through experience and thought. But today I want to tell you about my research into “non-thought” - the experience of the “unlit” zone.’
She clicked again and the single neuron returned to its pre-thinking state, a single isolated cell in the middle of a field of darkness.
‘See this cell: it knows nothing of what’s around it. Its relationship to the world is non-existent. It does not know what’s out there. How do we, as human beings, experience this darkness in our own minds? Why do these dark areas matter?’
Denise thought it was going reasonably well. Some faces seemed genuinely interested. She clicked again. ‘This is the brain scan of a child who has suffered serious neglect between the ages of zero and three. I think that you’ll find it quite interesting.’
The slide came up. A gasp of fascination rippled through the assembled crowd. The scan showed a neural network with a dark hole in the centre.
‘In circumstances of serious abuse and neglect, the brain does not form correctly, and vast areas remain unconnected - like unexplored regions. What this means is that for some abused or neglected individuals, there is simply no connection between the parts of the brain that create normal behaviour. Some people do not have the mental capacity for empathy, control of impulse or fear of consequence - the roads simply don’t go there.’
She leaned closer to the microphone. ‘Of course, behaviour can be learned. An individual can observe what empathy looks like and appear to display it. But it is not necessarily genuine. It is merely mimicry of external signs. It is shadow play, like a
painting. There are people out there who have set up a whole ghost personality to allow them to cope and act within society. Many of our violent criminals have these black holes and my conjecture is that it is these unconnected parts of the mind that make their behaviour so abhorrent, so alien, and make treating them so difficult. In very real terms, ladies and gentlemen, they know not what they do.’
The final slide came up. It showed five brain scans, each with at least one very noticeable area of darkness. ‘Here are five brains. You know who they belong to? These five brains belong to five different serial killers.’
The faces of the killers themselves came up on the screen one after the other.
‘Killers or brain damage victims? These are the pattern killers - ghosts with darkness at their centre who try to gain meaning by repeated sensation. Sensation as an attempt to fulfil a hole left by a lack of capacity to feel emotion, empathy or concern.’ Denise took a drink of water. The man in the black suit sat impassively, his eyes picking out the single diamond hanging in the dip of Denise’s neck.
‘We have often tried to imagine the mind of a killer,’ continued Dr Levene, ‘and I can think of no better image than a brain that seeks but can’t feel emotion - it is like a hand without nerve endings reaching into a fire. It does not feel the heat but it is burned none the less. But there are many of these brain types amongst us. Our contention is that they are like sleeper cells, indicating potential violence. And our next steps will be to look at how to reactivate these black holes. With science, to pour light into the heart of darkness. My apologies to Conrad.’
There was a murmur of laughter. Dr Levene looked out at the crowd. She was pleased. She summed up with a flourish of her right arm.
‘For want of better language, what we have found here is a place of neural silence, of isolation - of darkness. What we have found, ladies and gentlemen, is that there really is a dark heart at the centre of violent men and women. Violence is not caused by an experience of pain, but by the lack of an experience of human empathy. An absence, my friends, of love. Violence is neurologically the negative image of love, ladies and gentlemen. An unloved brain is only ever half formed.’
The man in the black suit smiled and stood up. He was love’s shadow, that was it. Love’s fucking shadow. That felt just about right. He would have liked to stay to talk to Dr Levene about his own theories, but instead he rose and started to make his way along the row of seats.
In the restroom of the lecture block, the man turned the handle of the glistening chrome faucet and washed his hands. He was pleased that he could feel the sting of the hot water. No problem there, he thought. He leaned forward and carefully splashed water over his face and then looked at himself in the mirror. Denise Levene was not half as clever as she thought she was. She had no idea about the true causes of violence. Only he did. Him and others like him. The causes of violence were very simple. So simple that killers never told anyone about them. Reasons were private, outcomes were public. He wanted to give Dr Levene an opportunity to see the truth. One day, he would.
He looked in the mirror and smiled broadly.
He picked up his black briefcase and put it on the vanity unit. He had another thirty minutes before the lecture would end and the inspired academics would stream into the lavatory with their vomit-inducing praise for what was, in his mind, a rudimentary and facile account. He opened his case and looked down with a smile.
He had liked the part about the ghost personality. Of course, most actors had the capacity to feign emotion. It was not a feature of some kind of sociological brain damage. He looked down at the make-up, wigs, prosthetics, hair colourings and various other items in the case. He had been in touch with a good theatrical warehouse in Boston. They had supplied everything he needed.
He looked at himself. Not a big change required, he thought. A bit of ageing, that was all.
He took out a bottle of latex, pulled the skin around his left eye taut, spread it over the stretched skin. He repeated the operation for the other eye and then around the corners of his mouth, and his forehead.
As the latex dried, his skin wrinkled up. He took out a brown-grey wig and placed it on his head. He looked up; the effect was immediate. Ten years older, at least.
He put in brown contact lenses and with a small tube of tooth colour he tinted his teeth a deeper shade of ivory.
All in all, his transformation took less than twenty minutes. It was not a perfect job, but he didn’t need perfection at the moment. The key to success, he knew, was in costume. People read your clothes quicker than anything. He took out a folded green jacket and a pair of trousers, both with gold braiding. He put them on and closed his case. He looked in the mirror at his assumed identity, smiled broadly and looked at his watch. Time was short.
He had things to do, deadlines to meet, people to kill.
Chapter Six
Barnard College
November 16, 5.10 p.m.
After her lecture, Denise Levene spent the rest of the day doing the rounds of the department, catching up with her former colleagues, and then drinking a good Sancerre with them well into the evening. The general consensus was that Denise had been a great colleague and she was sorely missed. She was a profoundly good communicator, but at thirty-two she was still young enough for the science community to patronize her. A woman had to produce twice as many papers and work twice as hard to get the recognition of a man with half her talent, but that was the way of the world.
It wasn’t right, but it was true, like many things in life.
It was partly the endless pats on the head while the glass ceiling was closing over it that had motivated her to move out of research and try to get direct law enforcement experience with the police or the Feds. She’d found a position as psychotherapist for the NYPD almost at once. Those jobs didn’t usually attract people as well qualified as Denise and they bit her hand off at the first interview. They offered her a nice office and enough bad cops to keep her interested, and they’d even let her continue her research and maybe find a way to fund it. She’d taken the job on the spot. The head of department at Columbia called her a ‘reactionary masochist’. She’d known then that she’d made the right decision. She wanted to be close to the real thing, not hiding away in the safety of academia her whole life.
Her dad would’ve approved too, to a degree. He was a practical man, a man who liked to get right in. She didn’t know how he’d feel about her working for the police, though. That would’ve been an interesting conversation if he’d still been alive.
The truth was that the NYPD offered her access to men and women who had seen these violent criminals first hand. They offered her access to the behavioural science unit at Quantico. She was excited, no doubt about it. It wasn’t the same, interviewing the convicted criminals in prison. Everyone thought it was, but she knew that these killers changed when they got caught. A murderer sitting in a cell, devoid of any targets, was not the same guy as the man still free in the world and open to the temptation of his desires.
Denise was interested in the time before they were caught. It was behaviour prediction that really excited her. She wanted to know if it could be modelled. That was the most interesting thing of all. How these people managed their own minds when they were out there in the world. Was there something predictable in these unpredictable killers? It was understanding how they operated out there that would lead to real developments in profiling. And that would mean more guys like them getting caught.
Denise smiled across the room at someone she didn’t recognize. She was tired now and wanted to get off home. As the party was slowing down, Denise managed to find an office off the reception room in which to call her partner, who was out somewhere on the campaign trail. Daniel was a fitness-obsessed, carrot-juice-loving liberal but he was hers. They’d been together five years. He worked long hours as an adviser on environmental issues to a Democrat senator. He was one of the good guys looking after the planet. Denise listened to the ringing.
She could see him sitting on a lazy chair in his vest and shorts, a running magazine on his knees, the news on in the background. He picked up.
‘How did it go, darling?’ Daniel asked in his slow West Coast tones. He’d been unable to attend her lecture and had sent her flowers by way of an apology. The senator always came first, but Daniel made sure it never felt that way to Denise and she appreciated those little touches.
‘That’s my last one for a while,’ she said. ‘It felt hard seeing everyone again. But it went well. How was Fahrenheit when you left?’
‘He was missing you, but he’s got your sister with him now, so he’ll be in doggy heaven with chocolate biscuits at every meal.’
Denise loved her dog and her partner in that order. Daniel was wonderful when he had the time but her spaniel offered her the unconditional, uncomplicated affection that she remembered from her childhood.
‘I might not stay long,’ Denise said. ‘I want to go home, get out of this suit and eat a tub of Ben and Jerry’s watching Angels with Dirty Faces.’