The Chemistry of Death

Chapter 11

Joe checked again, but the files were gone. He’d hacked into the Grand Central Terminal surveillance video database for nothing. It looked like they wiped it every three (red) months, and Sandra Haines had died almost a year ago. He heaved a frustrated sigh. He should’ve known.

He’d already clicked through her friends and their friends and the people they were tagged in photos with. He assembled pictures of a group of young people in designer clothes with practiced smiles eating carefully arranged food and drinking liquids of various colors. He’d hoped it would be touching, but Sandra’s life was mostly banal.

What he didn’t find was as interesting as what he did. She had no family members on Facebook — no parents or grandparents or siblings. She didn’t even have friends from junior high or high school. For a woman in her early twenties (blue, black), that was practically unthinkable these days. It seemed she’d appeared at New York University out of nowhere. She was either a spy, in witness protection, or homeschooled. He was leaning toward homeschooled. If she were a spy, the government would have made her an identity that went back more than seven (slate) years, and if she were in witness protection, she would have been told to keep off the Internet.

Regardless of her life before New York, she hadn’t been linked with anyone suspicious after she appeared online. None of her friends had committed suicide, been murdered, or been accused of crimes more serious than drunk and disorderly. If any of them were killers, they were playing a long, careful game.

Edison nudged his knee, reminding him that everything was fine, and that he probably ought to do some work. Or maybe he was reading a little too much into the nudge.

He pulled up five (brown) scans of his brain. The first (cyan) was him playing an innocuous video game. His axons fired, but it looked pretty calm. The second (blue) was him walking down that damn virtual hallway and looking out the door at the ocean. His heart beat a little faster thinking about it, and Edison nudged him again.

“Right you are,” Joe said. “Look at the data instead of freaking myself out.”

Edison flopped down in the doggie bed that Joe kept next to his desk. The crisp smell of cedar chips drifted up from the bed’s stuffing.

The data said that Joe’s amygdala had gone nuts when he looked out that door. It had started firing before he even got to the door, when he first saw the light falling through onto the floor, and it got worse all the way up until the moment he’d turned away. Outside scared the hell out of his brain.

His pre-frontal cortex was firing back, but it had clearly lost the battle. The pre-frontal cortex was supposed to control emotional impulses, and had apparently been trying to tell his amygdala to chill out. The message wasn’t getting through.

It was exactly the same pattern he’d seen in a patient with post-traumatic stress syndrome when he was confronted with images from his nightmares — the view from the dusty window of a Hummer, a shadow, an explosion, and blood and shrapnel everywhere. That made sense. That poor man had watched his friend die and lost his own legs in that environment. Those experiences were enough to terrify anyone.

Joe had never been traumatized by light on the ocean or the breeze on his face. So why did his brain act as if he had?

He’d spent a lot of time trying to figure that out, consulting doctors, psychiatrists, and others with agoraphobia. Initially, he’d been told to settle for the reality that most adult onset agoraphobia had no specific cause, but he’d dug deeper. After extensive blood tests, doctors had found a substance similar to scopolamine in his blood, a substance that he had never knowingly consumed. No one knew how this particular substance worked or how it came to be in his body, but the drug might have flipped a switch in his brain and caused all his troubles.

All he had to do was flip that switch back, and he and Edison would be jogging in Central Park. But he hadn’t yet found that switch.

Still, he and Edison could still get across town to see Celeste. She’d have to forgive him once she met Edison — Edison had that effect on people. Celeste didn’t like animals, hadn’t had pets since childhood. But Edison would probably win her over anyway.

Joe glanced at his cell phone. He’d placed it next to his keyboard, out of its Faraday bag, so he could pick it up the second it rang. It had stayed stubbornly silent all day.

His apology roses should have arrived hours ago. He’d sent yellow ones, because Celeste had always loved bright yellow things. Bright yellow set Joe’s teeth on edge. He wasn’t sure why, but he was glad that no number in his lexicon corresponded to that shade.

On a whim, he looked up Celeste on Facebook. She hadn’t posted anything in over a year, although she’d been a frequent poster before that. If she died, would Leandro post an announcement on her page and trigger a wave of condolence messages like those for Sandra?

Joe found Leandro’s page. Unlike his sister, Leandro posted all the time. His latest posts were from Key West — Leandro dressed as a pirate in a bar full of pirates, standing next to women wearing bizarre bikinis, a sunny beach. He was certainly enjoying Fantasy Fest, but Joe couldn’t begrudge him that. It wasn’t Leandro’s fault that Joe was stuck inside.

He tabbed back to the window displaying his brain. The colored lines flashing across his onscreen brain kept him from Celeste. He had seen a beach similar to the one on Leandro’s Facebook page, and his brain had gone nuts. Had Sandra’s brain looked like that before the train hit her — frantic with terror? Or had she sought out the train and the oblivion it would bring? Had that moment been like looking out at a calm, starry night?