The Murder of Janessa Hennley (14 page)

36

Dr. Martin Boyack drove his Mercedes to Alaska Regional Hospital at six in the morning. He wanted to catch a colleague of his, a psychiatrist named of Collin Hopp, before he began his rounds.

As soon as he walked in
, an iPad under his arm, the scents of a hospital brought back all the years of rotations and his four-year stint as a resident in a hospital in Chicago. Originally from Anchorage, he had always wanted to get to a big city. Then when he actually did, all he could think about was coming back. Being a staff psychiatrist in one of the biggest hospitals in one of the largest cities in the country—not to mention one of the most violent—changed the way he viewed medicine and his place in it.

O
ften, he saw the same patients over and over again. Schizophrenics that fell off bridges, were struck by cars, or shot. Those out of work and between jobs were robbed and assaulted. One man, homeless and without a penny to his name, was beaten to within an inch of his life for his worn sneakers. The world, it seemed, had mercy for no one. With no space in the already overcrowded jails and prisons, the state routinely placed the mentally ill in a psychiatric unit for thirty or ninety days and then released them. Unsupervised, they stopped taking their medication and quickly fell back into a pattern of either the perpetrators or victims of crime.

Boyack genuinely thought he could help change that his first year as a resident. By his second year
in Chicago, he no longer believed it. So, as soon as he completed his residency, he moved back to Anchorage and began a private practice. Few psychiatrists lived here, and he quickly built a reputation for himself as one that catered to disorders not commonly understood. Paranoid schizophrenia, Stockholm syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder, and body dysmorphic disorders were common in his practice. But he had never seen anyone like David Shyam.

In many ways, David was the most mysterious and the most difficult
patient he’d ever had. Even with paranoid schizophrenics, the therapist delved into them in their moments of clarity, when they could speak rationally about their disorder. But David didn’t speak. He wondered if this was what veterinarians felt like in trying to diagnose a patient that couldn’t communicate what was wrong.

Boyack checked in at the front desk
of the psychiatric unit on the fifth floor and waited a few moments before Dr. Hopp gave him the okay to come back. Dr. Hopp’s office was as antiseptic as the rest of the hospital. His walls were bare except for degrees, and a fake plant sat in the corner as the only decoration. Medical texts took up two bookshelves, and his desk was spotless.

“Caught me just in time,” Hopp said. He shook his hand. “You look well, Martin.”

“You too. You’ve lost weight.”

“Bella has me on a low
-carb diet. Truth be told, I can hardly think sometimes, but the waist is going down.”

Boyack placed the iPad on the desk
and sat down.

“If you
r brain doesn’t get the glucose it needs from food, it’ll get it by breaking down your muscle tissue.”

He shrugged. “I know. But it makes Bella happy.” Hopp picked up a pen and placed the end on his lower lip. “What can I do for you?”

Martin flipped the cover off the iPad and opened a photo of David Shyam. He slid it across the desk.

“Who is this?”

“Thirty-two-year-old patient of mine. He’s a mystery to me, Collin. You can see he’s decrepit. He won’t eat or bathe. His mother told me at his first session that he doesn’t sleep for a week at a time. Then his body will just faint, and when he wakes up twenty or thirty hours later, he’ll go until he faints again. He’s got muscle on him from steroidal injections, but he’s extremely unwell.”

“What does he tell you?”

“Nothing. We’ve had two sessions, and he stared at my desk the entire time. His mother told me he hasn’t spoken a word for three years.”

“Leprosy?”

“I had him tested in the lab. Negative for mycobacterium.”

“Hm
m,” he said, considering the photo. “He looks like… a corpse.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it. He’
s being treated by a neurologist, Williams from up here, actually, and all the tests are coming back negative. Physically, there’s nothing wrong with him. But look at this.” He pulled up PET scan results. “Look at the brain function. It resembles someone who’s asleep or under anesthesia. He shouldn’t be awake.”

Hopp
considered the scans further and then handed the iPad back. He turned to the window and watched the sky for a long time. Boyack, when Hopp had been one of his professors in medical school, had seen this on plenty of occasions. Hopp would stop mid-lecture and hold up his hand, indicating no more questions until he finished his thought.

Boyack stared at the photo on the iPad.

“Have you contemplated Cotard’s syndrome?” Hopp said after nearly two minutes of silence.

“I’ve never even heard of it.”

“It’s extraordinarily rare. I myself have never seen it in person, but I did have an attending that did. He described a patient with the appearance of a zombie. They would lurk in cemeteries, and their family would have to go retrieve them frequently. The origin is unknown, but from what little research we have, it seems to involve some sort of misfiring in the limbic system. Though we’re not even sure of that. The brain is still a mystery to us, Martin.” He bit the end of the pen. “But it does have a more colloquial term you may have heard.”

“What’s that?”

“Walking Corpse Syndrome.”

37

Mark Gilbert pulled on Vanessa’s hand as th
ey walked through Kodiak Basin Cemetery. Late at night, there was nowhere in the town more secluded.

The cemetery sat on five
acres of rolling grasslands. Allegedly, video cameras monitored the four entrances, one on every side, the official ways to get in. But without fences, you could enter anywhere you wanted as long as you came in on foot.

Vanessa wore
a sundress that exposed her thighs. She was Brazilian, and he’d heard that once she got some pot or booze in her, she was wild.

“Can’t we just go back to your place?” she said.

“My folks are home. What about yours?”

“No, mine too.”

“This isn’t so bad, I promise.”

They walked down a slope among the graves, illuminated by the street lamps on the paved road that snaked around the property. Just off in the distance, maybe five hundred feet, cypress trees
surrounded a circle of headstones. From almost anywhere in the cemetery, nobody could see you there.

B
eer bottles and spent roaches littered the circle. Almost everyone from Kodiak Basin High School used this spot when they couldn’t find anywhere else to party. He kicked aside a few bottles and leaned against one of the headstones. Vanessa folded her arms.

“I’m cold.”

“Here,” he said. He slipped out the pipe and weed then took off his jacket and put it around her shoulders.

He lit up and took a few puffs before passing it to her. She did the same and almost instantly
seemed to relax. The cemetery really wasn’t that bad after all. The way the breeze blew the leaves underneath the street lamps was actually kind of pretty, and he was surprised he never noticed it before.

“You come here a lot?” she asked, handing the pipe back.

“I used to. No one bothers you here.”

“I can’t wait to get my own place.”

“When’s that happening?” he said, holding in his puff and letting it out slowly through his nose.

“Next year. I wanna go to UCLA
, but I don’t know if I can afford it.”

“I thought your
old man was loaded?”

“He is,” she said, taking the pipe back, “but he has this bullshit about paying your own way. I think I can get him to loan me the money
, though. Fucker’ll probably charge me interest.”

As she put the pipe to her lips
, she screamed.

A man stood before them
, his face darkened with the streetlights at his back.

“Hey man, you scared the
shit outta her.”

The
figure didn’t move.

“You want some
thin’, brother?”

The ma
n stood perfectly still, but the outline of his face in the light revealed why Vanessa had screamed. His skin looked like it was rotting, and deep, black circles clung to his eyes.

“Hey, man, if you don’t need nothin’
, why don’t you just get the fuck outta here?” Mark stepped out from the circle and faced the man squarely. The man was older and taller, but Mark had a good twenty pounds on him.

“Yo
, maybe you didn’t hear me?”

“Mark
, let’s just go.”

“No, why should we leave? Hey, I’m talkin’ to
you, asshole. You speak English?”

Th
e man neither moved nor spoke. He didn’t even blink, and his eyes passively held Mark in their gaze. Mark shook his head. “Fuck this guy, let’s go.”

As he turned away, he
felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked back, and the knife slashed across his throat. The more he tried to suck in air, the less he got. Vanessa screamed and ran.

Another swipe of the knife
, and another and another. Mark’s head came off from the neck, strands of wet cords and nerves dangling beneath it. The man tossed it into the road and raised his eyes to Vanessa.

Vanessa screamed all the way down the hill. She
spotted a shack across the cemetery, probably where the groundskeeper lived. A light shone from inside.

She ran as fast as she could
but tripped on the curb and hit the ground hard. Gravel cut up her hands and knees, but she picked herself up and darted forward.

The shack door was open
. She bolted inside and locked the door behind her, then backed away, sobbing, until she hit the opposite side of the shack. Shovels, hoes, and rakes hung from the walls. She took out her cell phone and dialed 911.

L
egs poked out from the door in the back. Cautiously, she stepped over to a pool of congealed blood on the dirty floor. The groundskeeper’s face was ripped all the way off, exposing red, stringy muscle underneath.

She screamed again as the window shattered and a hand
closed around her throat. Jagged glass burned into her as she clawed and kicked, trying to pull the hand off her neck. It dragged her outside, and the phone dropped from her hand.

38

Martin Boyack closed
the window in the front room and looked out at his neighbor’s home. She was a single mother of two, with blonde hair to her shoulders. Sometimes she undressed in the bedroom and didn’t realize she’d left the blinds open. He felt bad watching her but figured he was only human.

No neighbor tonight
. He closed the blinds and went to his desk in the office he’d set apart from the rest of the house. Meant to be a house that held a family, it contained five bedrooms, an office, and a pool. When he bought the house, he anticipated marriage by the age of thirty-seven; he was thirty-five now. No marriage prospects were on the horizon, and buyer’s remorse had settled in, considering how much he’d actually spent on this place.

He sat at his computer and began to read
the medical journal archives online. He sipped at a cup of tea and swore after burning his tongue slightly. After getting some ice, he continued reading.

A
French neurologist named Jules Cotard had identified Cotard’s syndrome as early as 1880. Though he didn’t call it such, of course. He called it “Negation Syndrome,” as a patient would negate some part of their existence.

Cotard laid out three distinct steps of the disease: the first was germination, in which
the patient had a psychotic break and displayed an unbelievable, crushing depression. The blooming stage then followed, where the patient believed a certain part of them no longer existed. The case histories noted that commonly a patient would believe an appendage didn’t exist. No amount of showing them that it did would change their minds.

The third
and chronic stage was a full-blown surrender to the syndrome. At this point, patients may completely negate themselves. In a word, Cotard surmised, the patient believed they were dead.

He thought that would explain the obsession with cemeteries in those patients that had crossed into the third stage. If you
supposed you were dead, where else would you go?

The path
ophysiology was just as interesting, and a line in the
Journal of Psychiatric Studies
struck him: “Patient’s PET scans may resemble those of patients under anesthesia.” That was exactly what Boyack saw when he looked at David Shyam’s brain scans. Someone who should be unconscious, not walking around.

It was thought that Cotard’s
might have been related to Capgras delusion, in which a patient believed that a close family member or friend had been replaced by an identical double. Both Cotard’s and Capgras sufferers possessed an interesting inability to recognize faces. Boyack wondered that if he were to look in a mirror and not see anyone looking back at him, would he imagine he was dead, too?

He read several more journals late into the night and then a few case studies before taking a quick, hot shower. Excitement tingled
in his belly, and he couldn’t wait for his next session with David. Cotard’s was rare enough that simply treating a sufferer, particularly one that had crossed into stage three and believed they were a walking corpse, was enough for him to get publication in one of the more prestigious journals. But he had bigger things planned.

No one with Cotard’s this severe had been thoroughly studied. If Boyack could convince the parents to commit him, he could become his treating physician and build an entire case study around him. The possibilities were endless.

As he drifted off to sleep, he wondered what considering yourself to be dead and an inability to see faces would do to you psychologically. What would it lead you to do if you did happen to recognize someone’s face?