The Chemistry of Death

Chapter 42

Joe jumped when someone knocked at his door, and a blade of pain arced up his cast. He bit back a curse and gingerly shifted his foot. His foot responded by throbbing at him. Damn foot.

“It’s Parker, sir,” said a familiar voice. “You have a visitor.”

“Marnie cancelled my appointments.” Joe didn’t say the next three nasty things that came into his head. None of this was Parker’s fault. “Who is it?”

“He says he’s a friend. A Mr. Gallo.”

“Bring him in.”

Parker opened the door, and Leandro sauntered in. Edison sat up.

Leandro wore a trench coat and a Mets cap, and he twirled a black umbrella in one hand. It must be raining outside. How long had it been since Joe had felt rain on his skin? He pushed the thought away. He had no time for self-pitying and melancholy. Being in pain always depressed him, and he had to fight it.

Parker came in after Leandro, a question on his face.

“It’s OK,” Joe said. “I’ve known Leandro for years. He’s not dangerous.”

Parker patted Leandro down, and Leandro grinned at him. “Aren’t you going to buy me a drink first, sailor?”

“He’s clean.” Parker said.

“After a fashion.” Leandro dropped his cap on Joe’s desk and slung himself into Joe’s extra chair. He hadn’t gotten tanner in Florida, which was kind of surprising. He picked at a bandage stuck on one pale hand, then looked pointedly at the wheelchair. “What happened to you?”

“It’s temporary,” Joe answered. Celeste would probably tell her brother all the details, since she never seemed to keep anything from him, but Joe had no intention of telling him anything. “How was Florida?”

“Not as good as last year. The homemade bikini contest is always good, though.” Leandro raised his eyebrows suggestively.

“Did Celeste send you here?”

“You called me.” Leandro laughed. “Left a practically incoherent message, reminding me that I agreed to let you scan my brain. Even when drunk dialing, you are such a nerd.”

Joe vaguely remembered calling him after they set his foot. He hoped that he hadn’t called anyone else in that state, especially not Celeste. He’d have to check his call log as soon as Leandro left.

Joe came out from behind the desk, hands moving the wheelchair forward. “Let’s get a peek into that brain of yours.”

“How long are you going to be in that chair?” Leandro asked.

“Just a few days,” Joe said. Dr. Stauss had insisted on it, saying he should be confined to bed, plus some other more dire stuff that Joe couldn’t remember. Dr. Stauss had been angry, that part he remembered clearly.

Parker opened the door. Edison crossed to Joe’s left side, which was odd. Maybe he was leaving room for Leandro on the right.

Joe wheeled to the game room with Leandro walking next to him. “We’ll do an EEG today. You just have to sit with a cap on your head and watch videos in the best 3-D you’ve ever seen. Easy stuff.”

“Got any porn?” Leandro looked around at the darkened game room and the giant picture of a translucent brain rotating on the screen in front of him.

“It’s more like video game scenarios.”

“You can make anything boring.” Leandro sat in the chair and pulled on the neoprene cap.

Parker checked his watch.

“Don’t you go off shift soon?” Joe asked him.

“Fifteen minutes,” he said.

Fifteen (cyan, brown). “Would you mind taking Edison for a walk before you go?”

Parker looked between him and Leandro.

“I’m perfectly safe here on my own for a few minutes,” Joe said. “Leandro’s an old friend. Marnie’s at her desk. And the concourse is full of cops. I probably have better security than the president.”

Parker smiled and scratched Edison behind the ear. “Yes, sir.”

Edison paused at the doorway and looked back, as if asking Joe if he was really sure. Joe smiled at him, and the dog trotted out with Parker.

Joe started Leandro with the walk to the beach, the one that had so terrified Joe. Predictably, Leandro’s brain was calm and relaxed when he watched the sun and the waves from his 3-D helmet. It was the opposite of Joe’s own reactions, and he envied him.

“Amazing graphics,” Leandro said. “All I need is rum. And a naked chick. Or two.”

Joe moved on to the next clip, watching Leandro’s brain react to a battle scenario that had devastated the soldiers with PTSD. He expected Leandro’s amygdala to respond strongly to the battlefield — the amygdala was the area that fired in response to fear, rage, and aggression — and it did. It was more muted than the soldiers’ responses, a little more muted than Joe’d expected actually, but it still made sense since Leandro had never been on a battlefield.

“You’re a good control brain,” Joe said. “Normal and healthy.”

“This has to be the worst use I can imagine for this cool gear.”

“I’ll throw you a bone.” Joe pulled up a clip designed to measure sexual arousal. A brunette in a black bikini strolled up from a beach.

“I like where this is headed,” Leandro said. “Can you give a guy some privacy?”

Joe studied the onscreen reactions in Leandro’s brain. The parts that were lighting up caught him off guard. Joe had observed enough tests to know which parts of the brain should be lighting up — inferior temporal cortex for visual associations, the right insula was probably also involved in sexual arousal, among others. He saw activity in those regions, but it was strangely muted, just as Leandro’s response to the battle scenario. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe the brunette wasn’t his type.

What was more interesting was Leandro’s amygdala. It was going haywire. Joe expected some activity in the amygdala when dealing with sexual arousal, but not this much. Leandro’s brain was reacting as if he were terrified. Or furious.

His neo-cortex tamped the responses down, but it wasn’t working as well as it should have either. The brains of people with PTSD had that kind of reaction to their triggers, and so did the brains of one other kind of person.

A sick dread grew in Joe, and he froze in his chair, staring at the neurons flashing onscreen, trying to make them mean something else. Otherwise, it was too awful to contemplate. He must be wrong. He wasn’t a neurologist. He’d have to ask Dr. Plantec later. She’d have an explanation.

But he knew the explanation. His ears rang, and his eyes teared up, as if he didn’t want to take in what he was seeing and hearing.

He’d seen this pattern before in scans that Dr. Plantec procured from a different study. They were different from the scans that Joe wanted, but she’d said they’d provide an interesting control group. He’d never thought he’d see scans like this in real life, especially not in a friend.

Leandro was exhibiting the brain patterns found in many serial killers.

Why had he called Leandro in his drugged state and told him to come here? Could it be the painkillers had lowered his defenses enough for him to process something that he had been denying since he’d compiled the list of people who had access to his drinks that fateful night? A list he’d run through a thousand times. A list from which he’d always discounted a single name.

Leandro Gallo.

But it couldn’t be. Not Leandro. Joe had known him for years. He would have sensed something. Celeste would have sensed something. Celeste loved Leandro, and she couldn’t love someone like that, not if she thought that he could be capable of such evil. She would be stronger than that. She was always stronger than that.

The pets. Joe remembered a visit to Celeste and Leandro’s house in the Hamptons.

Wind whipped Celeste’s blond hair across her face, and she pushed it back with one paint-stained hand, a hand that had left paint smears down Joe’s back not an hour before.

They were next to a stand of trees.

“Bumble Wood.” She pointed to the trees. “Leandro called it that because of the bees.”

“Did you guys play there when you were kids? Build a tree house?” Joe only knew what normal children did from books. He’d never stayed in one place long enough to have secret hideouts or tree houses.

He’d gone several steps into the woods before he realized that she’d stopped. Cool shade enveloped him. She stood on the lawn with the sun kissing her hair.

“Come away.” Her voice sounded strained. “There’s nothing there to see.”

He looked around. Green leaves blotted out the sun, and a mat of old leaves covered the ground. It was quiet here. He heard a quiet buzzing and guessed it must be the bumble bees that gave the tiny patch of woods their name.

A line of gray sticks poked out of the ground at regular intervals, like fence posts.

“I’ll race you to the beach!” She turned and darted away, running hard.

He looked back at the line of sticks, wondering what had happened to the rest of the fence. In front of each post was a rounded mound of earth, smaller mounds for the far away posts, larger ones for the closer ones.

He dashed back out into the sunshine after Celeste.

With trembling fingers, Joe switched to the next clip. A redhead with deep blue eyes was on Leandro’s viewer, taking off a sheer white blouse. Leandro’s reaction didn’t ebb. If anything, it intensified.

“Marnie, could you come in for a second?” Joe called. Marnie looked like Leandro’s victims. She even wore the lipstick they did. If Joe was right, and he hoped that he wasn’t, then she would trigger the strongest reaction of all.

“Way to kill the buzz,” Leandro said. “Can’t you keep quiet so I can concentrate?”

Marnie opened the door. She wore a conservative business suit, nothing provocative. She didn’t exude sexuality like the redhead on screen, just quiet professionalism. She shouldn’t provoke much of a sexual response in Leandro, particularly with his eyes covered by the 3-D viewer.

She put one expensive shoe onto the carpet. Everything slowed down for Joe, like a film playing at half speed. Her red lips smiled at him, and her head tilted questioningly, wondering why he had asked her to come in.

Leandro’s brain activity went haywire, as did his amygdala. Colors flashed across the screen so quickly that Joe couldn’t follow them. Marnie had provoked a strong response of arousal and anger.

She crossed the room to Joe, steps so silent that she seemed to be floating like a ghost. She moved so slowly. Time was out of synch.

Her words were perfectly ordinary. “I was going to leave for lunch soon. Would you like anything?”

Joe smelled the floral scent of her lipstick. She was wearing 999. Joe stared at her, unable to speak.

Despair overwhelmed him. His foot and head throbbed with pain, and he wanted to sleep. He blinked, but nothing had changed when he opened his eyes again.

He couldn’t deny what was playing out on the screen in front of him. Leandro had the brain of a killer. Leandro’s brain had gone crazy when Marnie appeared, probably because he smelled her lipstick. It was his trigger. The lipsticks hidden in the forgotten room made sense now.

He had taken those women down into the subway tunnels, and he hadn’t left until they were dead. Then he had taken their belongings as trophies.

Only the lower part of Leandro’s face was visible under the 3-D helmet, and his mouth quirked in a half grin. Joe had first seen that grin as a lonely college student. He’d followed that grin to parties. The man with that grin had dragged Joe out of the kitchen to dance and talk to people, showed him that his entire life didn’t have to be about mathematics.

Leandro had introduced Joe to Celeste. Celeste. Celeste must know. She couldn’t know everything, but she must know something. She must have known her brother wasn’t normal. She had been afraid of the woods. She had known what those gray pieces of driftwood were marking.

Celeste hadn’t had pets since childhood — she’d told him that once. Their first kitten had died because of some kind of disease in the building, the second one had an accident, and then their parents hadn’t let them keep any more pets. She’d only brought it up once, years before. She’d been drunk at the time, and she’d never spoken of it again. At the time, he hadn’t thought it important, but he did now.

Killers like Leandro practiced on animals, torturing and killing them, before they moved on to larger prey. Celeste must have known about the kittens.

Genetics loads the gun, and environment pulls the trigger. That’s what Alan Wright always said. But Celeste had similar genetics. Celeste had to live in that environment. She must have seen it.

What had she known? About the kittens? About the women? Had she known that Leandro poisoned Joe? Had she wanted him to?

What did it say about Joe himself that these were his closest friends?

“Excuse me.” Marnie’s voice came from far away, from a place of innocence.

Joe stared at Leandro’s brain floating on his monitor.

“Are you all right?” Marnie asked. “Should I call Dr. Stauss?”

“I’m fine,” Joe said. “Fine.”

“Do you want me to get you lunch?”

“I’m not hungry.” Joe needed to warn her.

Marnie tilted her head. She looked between Joe and Leandro, and Joe could see she sensed something weird was going on. She shook her head a tiny fraction, giving up. “I’ll be back in an hour, unless I get seduced by a shoe store.”

Joe wanted to call out to her as she turned away, but he didn’t. He wanted to get her as far away from Leandro as possible. He would let her get clear, distract Leandro, then call the police. The police would sort it out.

“You OK?” Leandro had pulled off the 3-D viewer and the cap that read his brain responses.

“Bumped my ankle,” Joe lied. “Hurts like hell.”

Leandro reached to put the EEG cap on the desk, but at the last instant, he pivoted his wrist, and an object appeared in his fingers. Joe felt a quick sting in his shoulder. Had Leandro seen right through him, or had he come into the office with the intention of hurting Joe? Not that it mattered now.

His hands fell from the computer mouse and into his lap. He slumped sideways in his chair. Light glittered against a syringe in Leandro’s hand.

Joe should have looked deeper, should have recognized the unpleasant truths. Leandro had the keys to the underground. Leandro knew the tunnels. Leandro knew about facial recognition, about gait recognition, about Joe’s security underground system. Joe had given Leandro all the tools he needed to defeat him.

“Chemistry.” Joe’s voice faded at the end of the word. Leandro had majored in chemistry in college. “You made the drug.”

“You’re the only one who ever remembers that I studied chemistry,” Leandro said. “And it’s the secret key to every single thing.”

Leandro fished a white zip tie from his umbrella. It had been taped up next to the ribs, the syringe too probably. He pulled up Joe’s shirt sleeve. Joe tried to move, but his muscles wouldn’t respond.

Leandro lifted Joe’s wrist and held it against the wheelchair’s cold metal armrest. He zip tied it to the wheelchair, then pulled Joe’s sleeve back down to cover the tie. He let the other hand rest in Joe’s lap. Leandro was posing Joe’s body like a manikin.

Celeste. Would Leandro kill her? Ten (cyan, black) women with her face had died in the tunnels. Was Leandro killing her over and over? Or was Leandro killing his mother, not his sister? They looked so much alike. Maybe he wouldn’t harm Celeste. Joe knew better than that.

Leandro pushed him deeper into the wheelchair’s seat, then dropped his baseball cap on Joe’s head, angling the brim low enough that no one could see Joe’s eyes, which were rolling around, looking for something, anything, to help him get out of this.

Leandro’s sleeve had ridden up, and Joe saw the top of the palm tree that had adorned the wrist of the woman on the tracks. Calypso Club. Not Florida. He’d never gone to Florida. It was a lie, an electronic fakery. The Facebook posts. The phone call.

“You look pale and sickly,” Leandro said. “But you’ll feel better later when you look better.”

He laughed. His laugh sounded high-pitched and wrong, nothing like his regular baritone.

He tilted Joe’s head back and grabbed his jaw, forcing his mouth open. Joe couldn’t resist him.

A glass vial clinked against his front teeth. A warm liquid dripped onto his tongue. It tasted like hay.

Sadness engulfed him. He had failed. More women would die, and their blood would be on his hands. He would miss Edison and his mother. His friends, too. He’d hoped to join them in the outside world one day, but he wouldn’t. He would never feel rain on his face, never see Celeste, never kiss her.

His head drooped forward. Tears fell into his lap.

The wheelchair moved across the room, banging into the door on the way out. Pain flared in his foot, but it felt as if it didn’t really belong to him.

His eyelids settled heavily. All was dark, and he fell deep into his own head as he skated across the noisy concourse. People talked and walked and moved around him, but he couldn’t see them.

Then, the darkness lightened a shade, and water droplets hit the backs of his hands.

Rain on his skin.