I changed the subject. “So again, what brings the two of you down to visit?”
“You, naturally,” Raritan said. “Your sting worked, even if it didn’t go down the way you planned. You brought SWK out of the woodwork. You’re making serious headway here. I felt it was time for Parkman and me to come down, help out directly.”
In that instant I finally appreciated why local police usually abominated the FBI, at least whenever we came to an investigation under the pretense of “helping out” toward the end. Even from my perspective as an agent within the Bureau, Raritan’s offer for the BAU to suddenly help out sounded a lot more like “take the credit at the last possible minute” to me.
But I betrayed no such thoughts. “That would be great,” I said, looking at Terry. “Have you gotten them up to speed on everything?”
“Doing that now. I was just about to go over why we’re sequencing the ripper gene in all the victims’ DNA samples.”
“So you think your pinprick isn’t an injection site for the mystery drug, but rather a blood sample that’s being taken from the victims in common?” Raritan asked.
“That’s the prevailing theory. I even think the killer somehow screens the samples for mutations in ripper.”
“You think SWK took the blood samples himself?” Parkman asked.
“Maybe, but not necessarily. He could just be screening a database or a blood bank rather than taking the blood samples himself.”
At that moment Woodson walked in. “Hello, boys,” she said, acting just a bit too casual with everyone.
“Agent Woodson,” Raritan said. “So good of you to join us. Thanks for taking care of our friend Lucas here last night.”
It was the same gauntlet they’d run me through, but Woodson shrugged it off like a pro. “Hey, all part of being a good partner, just like you told me when I had to give him a ride back from the hospital in Gulfport. Right?”
Raritan peered at her for a split second, then looked at me. “I suppose so.”
“So what were you guys talking about?” Woodson asked, pulling up a chair.
“We were talking about the pinpricks and what they might indicate,” I said. “I was just saying that it doesn’t mean the victims necessarily gave their blood directly to SWK. But I do believe he somehow had access to their blood samples after the blood was drawn.”
“Right. And you were saying you think the SWK is sequencing their DNA?” Raritan asked.
“Yes. For some reason, I think SWK is trying to eliminate women in the population carrying ripper mutations. I’m not sure why.”
“How can you prove it?” Parkman asked.
“I hope Terry’s proving it right now,” I answered. “If all the victims have ripper mutations, we’ll be able to figure out pretty quickly how unlikely it is that all the victims would carry such mutations in the same gene by random chance.”
“And if not?”
“Then we focus elsewhere.”
A knock on the door interrupted us. A lab technician poked her head inside.
“Agent Randall. The results are in.”
“What’s the verdict?” Terry asked. “Go on, tell us.”
The young woman looked from me to Woodson, then back toward Terry and Parkman, and finally to Jimmy. “It’s the rest of the women. The ripper sequence analyses we ran last night.”
“Yes?”
“Every single victim carries a mutation in the ripper gene.”
* * *
We reconvened in the laboratory downstairs and stared at the computer screen linked to the DNA sequencer. Just as the young lab tech had reported, every single sample harbored heterozygous mutations in the ripper gene.
An event which, a decade ago, I’d postulated would grant the unborn zygote a stronger odds ratio of one day becoming a violent offender or even a serial killer.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Parkman finally snorted in disbelief.
I tapped the computer screen. “Less than two percent of the Caucasian population carries mutations in ripper. The odds that all six women would have mutations in ripper by chance? Almost impossible. One in what? Three hundred million?”
“Pretty convincing,” Raritan said.
“This guy has gotten access to their blood. Or at least their DNA sequences. Somehow, he knew these women had mutations. And to find this many ripper women carrying mutations, he screened a lot of women.” I calculated it quickly in my head. “He probably had to have access to at least four or five hundred women’s DNA to find six women carrying ripper polymorphisms.”
“And that’s a conservative estimate,” Raritan added.
“So forget the why for a second,” Parkman said. “Let’s just focus on the how. Any ideas?”
Woodson spoke up. “We’ve already had a brainstorming session on that. Most likely venue would be a doctor’s office, or someplace where drug tests are mandatory, someplace where extra portions of a blood sample could be siphoned off for other purposes.”
“Any luck?” Raritan asked.
“No, nothing yet,” Terry replied. “We just came up with that possibility a day or so ago. We’ll keep looking.”
Woodson stood. “Well, I agree that all of this is very exciting, but I need to get down to the tox labs. They finally isolated the unknown mystery drug in the blood last night, and got a mass spectrum on the compound as well.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yep. Now that we have its mass spectral profile, we just need to screen it against as many databases as we can. It’s only a matter of time, now. Even as we speak the lab is accessing every chemical spectral database around. If this mystery drug is in any of those databases, we’ll find it. Unless SWK is cooking something off the shelf.” She opened the office door and turned to face us before leaving. “I’ll let you all know the minute we find anything.” She closed the door.
Raritan looked at Terry and me after she left. “Okay. Let’s reconvene at noon. You guys put all these leads together, it will be like Woodson says—only a matter of time before we catch this guy. Parkman and I can cancel our flight back to Quantico if things really heat up down here in the meantime.”
As the ad hoc meeting adjourned, I mentioned aloud that I’d forgotten to discuss a peculiar property in one of the peaks in the mystery drug chromatograms with Woodson, and made my way down the hall to her office.
In Woodson’s office I closed the door behind me. “I’m finding it hard to concentrate here.”
“Me too.” She craned her neck from her seated position and looked behind me, out her office window. “But we have to be careful, Lucas. One slip and I’ll be the one getting reassigned to Anchorage. Not you.”
“Don’t be so sure,” I said. “But you’re right. I’ll be careful.”
“Well, at least for now,” Woodson said, twirling her tongue across her lips for half a second before smiling at me.
I suddenly felt a lot better about coming to speak with her in private. “So,” I said, “you’re serious? You really isolated our mystery drug in the victims’ blood samples?”
“Yes. Well, Terry’s group did. Now we just have to screen the databases.”
I stared as she leaned over the computer keyboard and typed. My personal life was, for once, taking a turn for the better. I enjoyed the chill-bumps on my arms when I looked at her. I couldn’t tell if they were due to the long-forgotten embers of romance, the excitement of being this close to breaking a case, or some complex mixture of the two.
“I hate to ask this, Lucas, but I have to. How do you think Mara Bliss fits into all of this again?” Woodson asked. “With all her claims about talking to the killer, hearing the killer, seeing the killer’s victims? Is she just a loon?”
The question caught me off guard. We’d been following up so many bona fide physical forensic leads lately that I hadn’t thought about Mara’s claims from the interview, about how she dreamed she spoke to the killer and saw the dead girls.
“I don’t think they mean anything. I think she’s just disturbed, that’s all.”
“You don’t think she could have any link to the killer? Something you don’t know about?”
I glanced up at Woodson to get a read on her motives for asking the question. From the sincere look on her face, the question seemed to be posed without ulterior motives. Just an honest inquiry. “No, I don’t,” I answered. “Don’t forget, I’m the one who found her chained up in her grandmother’s basement, left there by the SWK.”
“Right, but one could ask whether she was put there or if she put herself there. Just to throw you off.”
I laughed. “I don’t think so. You’re grasping here, Woodson. What’s going on? Why are you asking about Mara again, all of a sudden?”
Woodson shook her head in the negative but didn’t immediately speak. She paused as if weighing whether she should speak again or not. “Remember the gallery where you found the ‘Ripper Exhibition’?”
“Sure,” I said.
“I’ll give you one guess as to who owns it.”
My mind reeled as I assimilated the question and its obvious answer. “Mara?”
“You win on your very first try.” She turned her computer screen around to face me.
I looked from Woodson to the computer and back again. “Have you told anyone yet?”
“No,” she sighed, “I wanted to tell you first. But it’s only a matter of hours before this will come out in the autopsy report. They always list owners of property involved in crime scenes.”
“I know,” I said, without really listening. I was too busy trying to understand how Mara could have anything to do with the Snow White Killer. And how that related to the centerpiece of the so-called Ripper Exhibition: my mother’s untimely death.
I thought back. Mara had been with me in the backseat of the car that night. She certainly never saw a close-up of my mother being led to her death in the woods. Nothing made sense anymore, and the more I thought about Mara, and my mother, the less I understood anything about the present-day Snow White Killer.
By all accounts, the evidence at this point was overwhelming that Mara and the SWK were somehow inextricably linked. I couldn’t deny it any longer. I just had no idea how.
“So what are you going to do, Lucas?” Woodson’s question shook me from my thoughts.
“I don’t know. I guess I’m going to find Mara again. I don’t have any idea how she’s related to this investigation anymore, but we have to bring her in. Too many coincidences ceases being coincidence at some point.”
Woodson came around her desk, but walked past me to turn down the blinds and lock her office door. She sat in the chair beside me and touched my arm. “Lucas. I’m telling you this as a friend, not as anyone else.” She paused. “I don’t think you should have any further contact with Mara. In fact, I don’t think you should have any further contact with this case at all. It’s all just hitting too close to home, all of a sudden.”
“What? So you don’t believe I should be on this case anymore, either?”
She leaned closer. “I believe in you, Lucas. I can’t trust you any more than I already do,” she said, lightly touching my face. “You’d be a lot better off in life if you knew that some people really do believe in you.”
“But what are you saying?”
“I’m saying I believe in you, but I also think you shouldn’t be dealing with this case anymore. But if you think it’s important, and correct procedure, for you to go get Mara yourself, then by all means, bring her in. I won’t say anything to Raritan or Parkman about where you’re going. But you better get moving and you better stay in touch with me.”
“Thanks, Woodson.”
She leaned forward to whisper in my ear as she stood. “And be careful,” she said, brushing her lips past my cheekbone ever so slightly.
With that, she stood, walked over and opened the blinds, unlocked the door, and returned to her seated position behind her desk. When she looked up at me again, it was with feigned surprise. “You’re still here?”
As I assimilated the question, a tremendous sense of gratitude welled up inside. Against her own better judgment, Woodson was letting me go deal with Mara on my own terms. I stood to leave, just as a knock on the office door sounded from the hall.
“Come in,” Woodson called. Another young technician poked his head into the doorway. “Dr. Woodson, Dr. Madden. We’ve chemically identified the compound in the victims’ blood. Terry told us to find you so you can come take a look.”
Woodson and I exchanged glances. Though I desperately wanted to find Mara, now that we knew she was the actual owner of the Ripper Gallery studio, I couldn’t leave the office just yet. Not with something that could break the case wide open—finally establishing the identity of the mystery drug in the victims’ blood—only a short distance away from us down the hall.
“By all means,” Woodson said to the young technician. “Lead the way.”
I followed them down the hall. Mara could wait another half hour until we found out what drug or chemical was floating around in the bloodstreams of all the Snow White Killer’s victims at the time of their deaths. It was a lead that was too good to pass up.
* * *
Downstairs a different technician sat on a stool and pointed to another computer screen in the laboratory, around which all of us had reconvened: Raritan, Parkman, Terry, Woodson, and myself. We peered over the seated man’s shoulder and regarded a split screen. The mass spectrum on the top panel was labeled “SWK Victim 3 Unknown,” while an identical spectrum on the bottom was labeled “Marihypnol.”
“Marihypnol?” Woodson asked as she read it. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“None of us had, either,” Terry said. “So we looked it up. It’s an investigational drug on file at the FDA. That’s why we didn’t find it when we initially searched the database of approved drugs. Marihypnol isn’t an approved therapeutic yet, so it’s not in the FDA database of known drugs. It’s still an exploratory drug. It’s undergoing a phase three trial for Arrow Pharmaceuticals.”
“What does it do?” I asked.
“It’s undergoing evaluation in clinical trials as a nonteratogenic antianxiety drug for women of childbearing years. If approved, it will be one of the few depression-related drugs that pregnant women could safely take. Could be a billion-dollar drug, for obvious reasons.”
Woodson cut her eyes toward me, but I didn’t speak.
Terry continued. “But that’s not the kicker. There’s a serious side effect—sedative hypnosis, as the ‘hypnol’ would imply. To the point of incapacitation, if the dose is too high, such that the subjects can’t respond to stimuli. Even painful stimuli.”