But why the razor? And what about the tan cat?
It was noon, and I’d been working for four hours in an empty office. I heard a door close down the hall and decided to check it out.
When I walked up behind him, Terry turned and did a double take. “What are you doing in here on a Saturday morning? Don’t you have a hawk to feed or squirrels to eat or some crazy shit like that?”
“I do, but couldn’t stay away. What are you doing here?”
“I went ahead and checked out your note from the game last night. It’s on the document examiner downstairs. You want to see what I’ve found so far?”
It took a moment to follow what he was talking about, but then it dawned on me: the letter left for me at the stadium’s ticket window. Oh, I was definitely interested in anything he’d found on that note.
“Lead the way, man.”
* * *
Down on the lower level of our office building, I followed Terry into a small, dimly lit room. A tiny area had been set aside for document examination. Terry had taken a monthlong training course in Quantico, and he was our point person for the small number of ransom letter and fraudulent deeds we dealt with over the course of any given year in New Orleans.
A lighted box in the corner illuminated the now-familiar letter from the Snow White Killer on its top. Terry moved a separately mounted lens piece slightly downward, and peered through it. “I think we have a lead here.”
He scooted back in his stool and invited me to look.
“Is that a watermark?” I asked.
“Yes, and I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“Really?” I scooted back on my stool and waited for him to explain.
“Yeah. For one thing, it’s a lot smaller than most other watermarks. And it reads T-A-K. I looked online today and couldn’t find any TAK presses, so I think there’s a chance that it’s a unique watermark from an extremely small paper producer or printing press.”
“Nice, Terry. Sometimes it’s the littlest thing. What’s next?”
“I’m sending it up to the department in Quantico. They’ll run it against our watermark database. If one exists, there’s a good chance they’ll come up with a hit.”
I glanced back down at the message. “A TAN CAT CANT WHAT, MADDEN?” challenged me to decipher its meaning. “Fantastic, Terry. Let me know what happens. I’m going to head back upstairs and try to research this message a bit more.”
“Will do,” Terry called after me.
* * *
Back upstairs in my office I walked over to the whiteboard and uncapped a red Magic Marker from the eraser tray.
I wrote out the message left on the foreheads of the five victims, in all caps, in the order they’d been killed, just as the SWK had listed them in his letter.
A TAN CAT CAN’T ATTACK
I studied several of the most recent victims’ autopsy photos. I recalled that CAN’T hadn’t included an apostrophe on the body, and also remembered that ATTACK hadn’t included a
K.
Rather, ATTAC had actually sat perfectly centered on her forehead, just like every other message left behind on the victims’ foreheads. I was also struck by how straight the bloody lines of the letters were on each victim. That symmetry convinced me that this perfectionist killer had wanted to write five letters—ATTAC—and not ATTACK, at all. I rewrote it more faithfully to the killer’s original messages.
A TAN CAT CANT ATTAC
If CANT didn’t merit an apostrophe and the perfectly centered ATTAC hadn’t been the word
attack
in the first place, then perhaps these weren’t words at all. Perhaps they were simply letters. I next considered this possibility and performed the simple experiment of running the letters together. I erased the board again and rewrote the message anew.
ATANCATCANTATTAC
I sat back down at my desk as an idea slammed into me like a rogue wave. It didn’t seem possible, and yet, perhaps this was the key.
I typed the address for the NCBI—the National Center for Biotechnological Information—with trembling fingers and found the website. Once there, I selected the hyperlink to the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool, entered the string of letters from the victims’ foreheads carefully into BLAST, and pressed Enter.
And in the next few moments, I couldn’t believe my eyes.
This kind of breakthrough needed an audience, so I went to find Terry and invite him to my own private exhibition, much the same as he’d done with his watermark breakthrough for me a few hours before.
He wasn’t downstairs or in his office. I found him in Woodson’s office, where they were discussing the watermark. She’d come in on a Saturday, too.
Woodson smiled as I entered. “Nice lead this watermark, huh? What do you think?” she asked.
They both regarded me strangely and I realized I must have had quite the silly smirk on my face. I didn’t care. “I think,” I began, pausing for dramatic effect, “that both of you might want to come down to my office and see what I just found. Right away.”
* * *
One minute later, I faced the two agents who were clearly exasperated by my refusal to give them any more details during the walk down to my office. I turned the computer screen in their direction and walked around to the other side of my desk. After a moment the NCBI genome Web browser shimmered into view.
They both stared at the screen, their eyes going back and forth between the letters on the victims’ foreheads on the right-hand side and the short DNA sequence inside the ripper gene that I’d highlighted, projected on the left.
“Oh my god,” Woodson finally said beside me, and then Terry gasped too.
ATANCATCANTATTAC.
I watched their faces pass through identical stages of puzzlement, incredulity, excitement, and back to bafflement.
After a sufficient period of time had passed, I spoke. “Guys, I don’t know how to break this, but the message being left behind on the victims is a portion of the exact DNA sequence from the ripper gene.”
They both stayed silent, still digesting the implications of what I was saying, so I continued.
“In other words, the message being left on the victims is from a portion of DNA sequence from a gene related to dopamine signaling in the amygdala, which I showed many years ago to be frequently mutated in serial killers. The very first gene ever included in what is now affectionately called the Damnation Algorithm.”
Woodson sat down heavily in a chair and exhaled, for a moment sounding like she’d just run a marathon. “Unbelievable,” she finally announced.
“Yeah, it is,” Terry said, but then frowned. “But wait, Lucas. If this is a DNA sequence, then it should only contain
A, C, T,
or
G.
Why are there
N
s in the ripper gene?”
I leaned back against my desk. “Yeah, good point. I had forgotten that, back when I sequenced ripper, long before the next-generation sequencing of the human genome, a lot of the time you had no idea which of the four letters—
A, C, T
or
G
—sat in certain positions in any given gene sequence. Whenever that happened, the universal symbol to indicate an unknown nucleotide was
N.
”
“So you really aren’t shitting us, huh?”
“Definitely not shitting you, Terry. This guy’s been spelling out a region in the ripper gene on the foreheads of these poor young girls.”
“So everything actually
is
about you, then?” Woodson asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m looking at this screen, guys, seeing it in black and white. We’ve finally broken SWK’s code. But I still don’t know what it means.”
“At least it’s safe to say the killer is acquainted with your theories on the genetic basis of serial killer behavior,” Woodson observed.
“So does that make him a scientist?” Terry asked.
“Not necessarily,” I said. “For better or worse, there have been a lot of lay articles on the link between ripper mutations and serial killers. A lot of nonscientists have heard about this gene and its link to violent behavior. It could be anyone.”
I paused, suddenly remembering the puncture wound on the last two young girls’ hands. “You know, these girls probably all had pinpricks in their fingers,” I said.
“Right,” Woodson said. “Which we think is an injection site for our mystery drug, right?”
“Maybe, but maybe not,” I said. “It’s as obvious as the noses on our faces, but I’m just realizing that our mystery drug doesn’t have to be an injectable.”
Woodson frowned, but then her face relaxed just as quickly. “I guess not. We had just put two and two together—unknown chemical in the blood, pinpricks on fingers—and assumed we were dealing with an IV-injectable drug. But you’re right … it may be faulty logic.”
“So it’s possible, once you figure out the chemical structure, that it’s in a tablet form, right?” Terry asked.
“Possible? Honestly, it’s more like highly probable. Now that I think about it, a fingertip would be a strange way to inject a drug. Much more likely in the arm, or in the rear,” Woodson said.
“Exactly. So what if your mystery chemical turns out to be a tablet or some other type of drug that doesn’t require an injection?” I offered.
“Then I’d ask why the hell did these girls have pinpricks in their fingers.”
“Maybe the question we should be asking about those pinpricks isn’t whether they are sites of injection, but whether they’re sites of blood samples taken for some kind of analysis,” I said.
The room went silent as both Terry and Woodson considered the possibility and followed my logic.
* * *
Within minutes we’d enumerated the most logical possibilities: a doctor’s office, a safety office, a biohazard lab, and a few others. We concluded that the victims most likely had blood samples taken somewhere, but the key question was why.
“In this case,” said Woodson, “knowing the why will definitely help us figure out the who.” She broke into a smile. “Hey, just like you said in your lecture at Quantico.”
“Seems like eons ago,” I said, “but you’re right: the why should definitely help lead us to the who in this case.”
“So let’s go back to what we know. Or at least, what we think we know,” Woodson said. “We’re dealing with a killer who sees these women as being somehow at fault, as if they harbor something sick or deadly inside them. Why do they need samples?”
It was silent for a long time, and then it hit me.
“Holy shit,” I said aloud.
“What? What is it?”
“He’s taking blood to find his victims,” I proclaimed. “So he must have access to samples of their DNA.”
“Why?” The two queried in unison.
“He’s been telling us all along. Our killer is obsessed with ripper, and he’s chosen these women because they fit into his plan.”
“And what exactly is that?” Terry asked.
“Actually, I’m hoping you can tell us,” I said, rising from my chair. “We need one of your best people to do some real fast sequencing of those victims’ blood samples.”
“Sorry not to follow you, but why?”
“Because I’m willing to bet that the Snow White Killer is sampling women’s DNA, and unless I’m way off the mark, I believe he’s killing them because he’s somehow discovered that they carry mutations in their ripper genes.”
Terry and Woodson stayed silent as we all considered the possibility.
I sighed and stared at the photographs of the five young victims, still lying on my desk. If I was right, then the SWK had killed these women because they carried, at the genetic level, something I had once labeled as a genetic predisposition for creating a killer.
My skin turned to gooseflesh as I made the analogy in my mind: just like a lethal razor hidden in the soft flesh of an unblemished fruit.
The New Orleans branch contained an impressive forensics lab, complete with a next-generation DNA sequencing center. In relatively short order Terry assembled a team to isolate DNA from the five victims and sequence their ripper genes.
In the meantime I placed a call to my friend Gary Turner, at Tulane, one of the leading researchers in the field of ripper-gene research. Since my initial discovery, he’d established an entire NIH-funded program on the ripper gene’s product, a dopamine receptor subtype in the amygdala. Just as I’d hoped, he possessed many sequencing primers for ripper and agreed to provide them with no questions asked, which would make a targeted sequencing approach a lot easier.
Within two hours the hypothesis that the SWK had selected his victims because each woman had harbored mutations in her ripper genes was being tested as the technicians in the FBI lab created the sequencing libraries. We’d have the genetic data for each of the victims by that night.
After the flurry of activity in the preceding days, there was nothing to do but wait.
While waiting, I called Faraday for a check-in and he assured me that everyone was fine. In fact, Katie had cooked everyone breakfast, agents included. He and Tucker were probably in for the best surveillance duty they’d ever receive.
Satisfied that Katie and the girls remained safe, I sat back down at my desk and stared at the ripper sequence still depicted on my computer screen. If I was right, the next letters the SWK intended to leave on a victim would finally be completely nonsensical: GCGAT or such. I wondered if we could stop him before we would find those letters on the forehead of another victim.
I also realized that if this really was his motivation, then we might be able to draw the Snow White Killer to me. If he was obsessed with the ripper gene, then perhaps we could lure him to focus on me and distract him from going after any other victims.
I called Woodson, who immediately picked up. “What’s up?” she asked.
“I was just thinking. There has to be some commonality in the victims. Have you heard anything from Harmon or St. Clair?”
“No. You want me to give them a call?”
“Yeah, go ahead. Then swing down here. I want to run an idea by you. If you buy into it, then we’ll call Raritan and see if we can get him to approve some special investigation funds for this case, now that we have a real lead.”