Dead Wrong (41 page)

“I don’t think he’s a sheriff.”

“Was he wearing a gun?”

“No.”

“Indian?” The mall, on reservation land leased to the developer, employed a large number of tribal members.

“I believe so.”

“Hey, I’m talking to you.” The person was louder now.

McCarthy continued to ignore the person and turned into the lot, heading for the aisle with their rental car.

A hand grabbed his left arm as the person said, “Stop.”

McCarthy jerked free of the grip and continued on without looking.

“Sir, I’m with mall security and I order you to stop.”

McCarthy saw their car up ahead and already had the key in his hand. He said to Sarah, “I’ll drive.”

Sarah split away from him, going for the passenger side.

“Sir, if you don’t stop I’ll call the sheriff.”

McCarthy slipped in and started the engine, but the guard stood directly behind the car. Luckily the space opposite him was empty, so he drove straight ahead.

“What’s he doing?” he asked Sarah.

“Exactly what you’d expect. He’s on the radio.”

M
CCARTHY CUT DIAGONALLY through the south end of the parking lot, behind a Shell gas station, and blew past a yellow traffic light directly onto the southbound I-5 entrance ramp.

Sarah said, “Crap, look at that.”

But they were merging into heavy traffic so McCarthy had to devote all his attention to driving. “Can’t. What do you see?”

“A sheriff just took the northbound exit with all its roof lights flashing.”

McCarthy accelerated into the middle lane, moving between two semis, hoping they’d partially shield him from view. Sarah half turned in the seat to look out the back. “What do we do now?”

“We need to split up. We can’t afford to have you caught with me.” As he remembered it, there was a Park and Ride lot a couple miles south of Everett. He explained that if they could make it that far, he’d could drop Sarah there and meet up with her later.

Sarah said, “I know you’ve already thought of this, but the guard saw our license plate.”

McCarthy realized the ramifications immediately. “And once the sheriff runs it, they find out it’s a rental. They call Budget and find it’s been rented to Timothy Rush.” Then his false identification is either blown or they would figure it for a case of mistaken identity. Except for the fact they fled from the security guard. Might’ve been better to try to convince the security guard he’d made a mistake. “Okay, so where does that leave us?”

“Guess that all depends on how strongly the security guy believes you’re Tom McCarthy.”

Up ahead was the exit for the Park and Ride. McCarthy took it and turned into the lot. He found an empty space between two vehicles that would partially hide the car from the interstate. They got out, locked up, and walked to the small, covered bus stop. Being a holiday weekend there were no other commuters waiting. A schedule on the wall showed a bus due in five minutes.

T
HE BUS HAD only three other passengers so McCarthy and Sarah sat side by side in the back, as far from the others as possible. As the bus pulled away from the stop, McCarthy felt Sarah’s body relax, making him aware of his own tenseness.

Sarah whispered, “I’m not sure I followed all that conversation with Russell. I understand how one person may internalize another person’s memory but are you saying Russell had someone else’s actual memory in his brain? If that’s the case, I have a hard time understanding how that’s supposed to work.”

The explanation was so twisted Tom felt uncomfortable saying it. “I’m not entirely sure myself. I need to check more facts before I try to explain.”

“Okay, so next question: What’s with the camera?”

He wrapped and arm around her shoulder and drew her close. “Let me make a few calls first.”

He dialed Tony Cassera’s back line. The reporter answered with a simple, “Cassera.”

McCarthy held the phone so Sarah could hear also.

“Tony. Tom. I need you to run down something.”

“What? By the way, you’re going to be orgasmic when you learn what I dug up on your pal Wyse.”

“Before we get into that, the Green River Copycat murders, you remember them?”

“Remember them? Hell, I covered them.”

“They had a suspect, didn’t they?”

“Person of interest, Tom. That
S
-word will get you a libel suit. But yeah, the guy was looking pretty good for it too, until he got offed.”

“Refresh my memory. What happened?”

“He died. No a pretty death, either. Got into some sort of pissing match with a fat biker behind a trailer trash bar out on north Aurora. Story had it our guy just couldn’t keep his mouth shut and made a couple disparaging comments about the biker’s mother’s chastity and said biker—who thought nothing of sharing his squeeze with his buddies—took offense. Our guy tried to blow it off but just dug himself in deeper. End result was the biker’s friends followed him outside and smashed in his skull with a tire iron. The doer pled self-defense. And of course, with a hundred percent of his eyewitnesses blood brothers, he got off with a manslaughter charge.” Cassera gave a sarcastic grunt.

“The person of interest, you remember a name?”

“Yeah, how could I forget? George Pickett. Another one of your low-profile, average Joe citizens. Worked doing bids for a roofing company and came with all your usual serial killer trimmings: a wife, dog, two grown kids. Goddamn stereotype if there ever was one. The FBI didn’t even have to think more than two seconds to put
that
profile together.”

“You remember the approximate date of his death?”

“You bet. And the reason I do is I was at Lakeview covering the story at the time. April twelfth. Why?”

That would be three days before Charlie’s second operation.
“Because I think Wyse transplanted pieces of George Pickett’s brain into someone.”

Sarah shot him an astonished look.

Cassera said, “Holy jumping Jesus, you serious? Is that possible?”

“First, tell me what you dug up.”

“Give me a sec to grab my notes.” After a moment of papers shuffling in the background, Tony came back on the phone. “Okay, here we go. First, I assume you know what DARPA’s all about?”

“I do.”

“And you know Wyse has been doing work on posttraumatic stress disorder.”

“Yes.”

“Okay then, here’s the story. Apparently, when Wyse first started down that path he was funded by the VA. For all the obvious reasons. Apparently there’s no effective treatment for it, so the VA’s looking for answers.

“Your friend bounced along like this for several years until a Pentagon colonel, Clyde Cunningham, took an interest in his work. Next thing you know, Wyse drops his VA grants for a hundred percent DARPA funding. This lasts about two years until RegenBiologic is formed. It’s hard to tell exactly where all the company’s start-up money came from, but it looks like a sizable chunk is from Cunningham’s Beltway buddies.”

McCarthy didn’t remember much about RegenBiologic. Because of Wyse’s interest in PTSD, he assumed it focused on that. “Did you learn what the company’s mission is?”

“Uh-huh. They’re developing a surgery to cure PTSD. The rationale is pretty straightforward. Wyse believes that the flashbacks are the root of the problem and are triggered and fueled by memories of the trauma. So, if you can locate and remove the spot in the brain where these memories are stored, you can cure the disease. Sounds easy, but the trick, of course, is how to locate where the memories reside in the brain. They claim to be able to do this by using a proprietary MRI technique. Sophisticated, huh?”

“Shit.” Bobbie had claimed her second surgery was for PTSD, but at the time he heard this, McCarthy figured she had it confused with something else because there isn’t any surgery for it. At least, that’s what he thought at the time.

“What?”

“Is he presently running a clinical trial on it?”

Tony answered promptly. “Not that I could find. Why?”

McCarthy’s suspicions snapped into place. “Could you dig a little deeper on that? Make sure to check clinical trials dot gov.”

“Sure, but enlighten me—why’s it important?”

“Because I think he’s conducting one. It’s the only way to explain the symptoms of some patients I’ve seen recently.”

“So what? Medical companies do medical research every day.”

“At the moment, there’s nothing more I can tell you.”

“Look, Tom, there’s obviously a story here. If you want more from me, you need to tell me why it’s so important.”

For a brief moment, McCarthy weighed telling him his suspicion. “I think Wyse is transplanting brain matter from one set of patients to another.”

“For God’s sake why?”

“I don’t know yet, but I plan to find out. So, now that that’s settled I can count on you to do some more digging?”

“Yeah, but have you talked to anyone else about this? In the press, I mean.”

“No. It’s yours. But I need to get off the phone and call my lawyer. I’ll call you the moment I find out anything more.”

“It’s a deal. Just be careful.”

S
ARAH SAID, “THAT story you just told Cassera is … unbelievable.”

McCarthy was having a hard time believing it himself, but it was the only way to account for what they’d seen. “I know, but it’s the only way to explain Baker’s and Russell’s problems. Bobbie has Nora Young’s memory of delivering Jordan and Charlie remembers a murder George Pickett committed.”

“Okay, I agree that it makes everything work, but man, that’s a stretch. And tell me this: Why would Wyse want to implant brain tissue? Okay, sure, I see the logic in removing memories if, in fact, they trigger PTSD, but implanting them in someone else … that stumps me.” She shook her head.

They crossed the imaginary line between Snohomish and King Counties, marked by a simple green sign with white lettering: E
NTERING
K
ING
C
OUNTY
.

She asked, “You understand that thing he said about MRIs?”

“Yes, why?”

“I never understood how MRIs work, much less how you can use one to pinpoint a memory.”

McCarthy laughed, because as medical students the joke had been that the ones who chose psychiatry where either the ones who didn’t grasp hard sciences, like physics and chemistry, or were so fucked up they hoped the training would help them get their shit together. Sarah didn’t seem to fit the second category, so the question was, how to explain magnetic resonance imaging in a way she could grasp.

“You understand how an X-ray works, right?” McCarthy peered out the window again, afraid of seeing a police car approach with its lights flashing, ready to pull the bus to the side of the road. They wouldn’t find the car that soon, he reassured himself, but it didn’t relive the worry.

“Sure.”

“So, tell me.”

“You’re kidding.” She sounded incredulousness.

“No, I’m trying to find out where to start.”

She sighed. “An X-ray tube produces a beam of radiation that, when it hits a sensitive surface like photographic film, exposes it. Anything in its path, like a hand, blocks some of the rays from reaching the film. The denser the object, the more rays it blocks. That’s why X-rays are good for looking at dense material, like bone, but not very good at looking at soft tissues. How am I doing?”

“Very good. Now say you took ten X-rays of that same hand but each time moved the beam in an arc above it so they were all shot from a different angle. If you took all ten of those pictures and electronically added them together, you’d end up with a picture that would give much greater detail, right?”

“Guess so. I hadn’t really thought of it that way before.”

“Well, that’s how they make a CT scan—by combining a bunch of X-rays from different angles in a computer and recreating them as a single image on a screen.”

“I knew that. What I don’t understand is how an MRI works.”

“Think back to chemistry, to how electrons spin around a nucleus of an atom.”

“Okay.”

“Well, under normal circumstances those electrons stay away from each other as much as possible because they’re all a negative charge. But if you put those same atoms in a very strong magnetic field, those electrons are pulled away from their usual orbit and realign themselves along the magnetic field. Then, if you suddenly turn off the magnet, the electrons fly back to the way they were. And when they do, they give off a very weak radio signal. By looking at all those radio signals you can tell what kind of atoms released them.”

“Got it.”

“And if you did that over and over again, you could piece together a bigger picture, just like the difference between a single X-ray and a CT scan.”

“Yikes, I think I actually understood that. Just don’t give me a pop quiz on it.”

“It gets better, because magnetic resonance can not only make a picture of a structure, like an X-ray does, but it can be made to indicate where some brain functions are happening. It’s called functional magnetic imaging, or fMRI. That’s what Wyse is doing. When you move your right hand, the hand region of the brain works a little harder than when your hand is at rest. When it does, it requires more oxygen and sugar. Still with me?”