The Ripper Gene (31 page)
“Are you kidding me? I’m not pulling over.”
“Woodson, please. I’m begging you. It’ll take two minutes, I swear. No more. Please, Woodson.”
She looked at me again, and this time her annoyance was clearly conveyed.
“Please, Woodson. Just hear me out. One last time.”
I felt the car decelerate and heard the gravel on the roadside begin to crunch. I knew I had less than two minutes to make my case.
* * *
Ten minutes later we were driving up I-10 as quickly as possible. I started to call Raritan, but Woodson touched my arm.
“Don’t call Jimmy. He won’t believe you. The idea that it’s a cuff link impression on that note, rather than a watermark? It just isn’t going to cut it for him. The circumstantial evidence against your brother is still enormous. If you call him, Jimmy’s just going to be pissed at both of us and tell us to turn around and go back to the field office and wait.”
I was all too happy to oblige. “Thank you, Woodson.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” she said. “I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think you really are on to something there.” She paused. “The least we can do is check it out.”
I would have kissed her if I could. After we’d pulled over, I’d taken her through the letter, shown her the watermark, shared my theory about a cuff link impression, and then relayed how I remembered the expensive cuff links that Dr. Kinsey, Dr. James Allen Kinsey, had worn on the day we interviewed Mara. Although initially skeptical, she ultimately couldn’t dismiss the JAK as sheer coincidence. She had agreed to stop in Slidell, on our way to Jackson, to speak to Dr. Kinsey before resuming our trip. It was all I could ask for.
* * *
Fifteen minutes later we found ourselves once again winding through the lush landscape of Memorial Oaks. After parking in the same parking lot as before, we ran through the rain, up the sidewalk to the front entryway. Inside the marble-floored foyer we shook the water from our clothes and flashed our badges to the security guard at the desk. We explained we were with the FBI and needed to speak with Kinsey.
“And no calls ahead,” I said. “You don’t need any obstruction of justice charges ruining your life at this point. It’s not worth it.”
The old guy only nodded. “No problem, sir.”
Woodson and I took the elevators to the third floor and walked down the red-carpeted hall until we came to Kinsey’s door. I pulled my Luger out, silently signaled one, two, three to Woodson, then we walked quickly inside.
Dr. Kinsey’s secretary stood behind her desk when we entered. “Excuse me?” she said, but fell silent as I brought my finger to my lips and she saw our guns.
I swept around, stood beside the closed door to Kinsey’s office, and again gave Woodson the one, two, three signal. In the background I saw Kinsey’s secretary motion toward me, but I ignored her. The element of surprise was still on our side.
On the silent count of three, I burst through the door, only to find an empty room sitting before me.
Behind us, his secretary finally spoke. “The doctor’s not in today. He left earlier and said he wouldn’t be back today. Could you please tell me what’s the matter here? And could you please put those guns away?”
Woodson stepped forward. “Did Dr. Kinsey say where he was going?”
As Woodson questioned the secretary I stepped back into Kinsey’s office and my eyes swept up toward one of his hanging paintings,
The Creation of Adam
by Michelangelo, the one where Adam twists and touches the hand of God.
A torso, twisting, pointing … something wasn’t right. Then I realized it.
A cruel gash severed the middle of the painting, where the finger of Adam grasped toward the hand of God.
At that moment, Kinsey’s secretary’s voice became audible in the outer office as she spoke with Woodson. “He was going to the fertility clinic in Hattiesburg. For the genetic study he’s coordinating over there.”
I heard Woodson ask the secretary to repeat herself, even as I turned toward them, my own amazement causing me instant vertigo. But I stopped as another painting, hidden behind the half-closed office door, caught my eye. I closed the door to the office to get a better look.
The painting on the wall bore the same color-splashed style as the portraits in the Ripper Gallery. It was a portrait of Kinsey himself.
The bronze tag on the frame beneath the portrait bore a caption: “Dr. James Allan Kinsey II: Self-Portrait, 2012.”
An odd mixture of horror, joy, exultation, and fear gushed through my veins all at once. He’d been right under our noses the whole time.
Beside me, Woodson entered the office and stood momentarily speechless as she took in the painting and recognized its style from the paintings in the gallery.
I pointed. “Meet the Snow White Killer.”
Woodson shook her head in disbelief. “His secretary just told me he’s out of the office because he’s in Hattiesburg of all places.”
I started to suggest that we go there immediately, but Woodson continued.
“He’s in Hattiesburg collecting samples for a trial his laboratory is analyzing here.”
“Okay, so let’s go.”
“Don’t you want to hear the punch line?”
“What’s the punch line?” I asked.
“The trial he’s supporting is for something called Marihypnol, according to his admin. She says his laboratory here is screening every single blood sample from every woman enrolled in the Marihypnol trials that your brother is overseeing.”
* * *
A few minutes later Woodson and I were driving—or flying, would be a better description—up the highway on our way to a certain fertility clinic at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. Armed with nearly irrefutable evidence that James Allan Kinsey, not Tyler Madden, was the Snow White Killer, I tried to raise Raritan and Parkman on the phone, but couldn’t. Nobody at the office knew their whereabouts. I explained everything we’d found out about Kinsey to Terry in the New Orleans field office, then Woodson called the Jackson field office and did the same.
As Woodson relayed the breaking evidence to one of her colleagues there, I went over everything in my mind.
Kinsey was the Snow White Killer. While we didn’t know the location of Kinsey’s residence, his place of work, Slidell, fit with the geography of the kill sites, according to Terry’s jeopardy surface. And the modus operandi I’d proposed, that the killer selected his victims by screening for women carrying mutations in the ripper gene, suddenly seemed perfectly plausible, since Kinsey’s lab was screening the DNA of all patients enrolling into the Marihypnol drug trials.
Ironically, the Arrow Pharmaceuticals link, based on Woodson’s discover of the mystery drug, had taken us in the right direction, just to the wrong suspect. Before we left his office, Kinsey’s secretary had showed us the clinical protocols for the Marihypnol trials. Kinsey was listed as the genetics consultant, not a principal investigator, which is why his name didn’t show up when they’d searched the databases for investigators running clinical trials of Marihypnol. Kinsey was supposed to be screening patients for certain polymorphisms in the serotonin receptor that might be linked to adverse reactions to the sedative hypnotic.
But for some reason that was still unclear to me, Kinsey had also undoubtedly been screening the women’s DNA samples with his own genetic test, searching for women carrying mutations in a certain dopamine transporter in the amygdala as well.
The ripper gene.
But the most important question still remained: Why? Why was Dr. James Kinsey a murderer? Even more specifically, why was Mara’s psychiatrist, of all people in the world, the infamous Snow White Killer?
A ring of my cell phone made me jump. I snatched it. “Hello?”
“Lucas? It’s Harmon. I’m sitting here with the computer forensics team at Memorial Oaks and you need to know something.”
“What’s that?”
“The CSIs have already done a quick forensic search of Kinsey’s computer.”
“And?”
“They found some MapQuest directions.”
“To where?”
“824 Birch Street, Crossroads, Mississippi. Your father’s—”
I hung up.
* * *
Ten minutes later, following my frenetic directions to my father’s house, Woodson had exited onto Highway 43 and headed east, averaging nearly eighty miles an hour despite the conditions outside. The rain had let up momentarily to a steady drizzle, and Woodson took advantage of being able to see in the remaining gray light as we barreled toward the small town of Crossroads.
Less than a half hour later, we pulled to a screeching stop in front of my father’s house. His car still sat in the driveway.
I withdrew my gun as we emerged into sheets of rain, and ran up to the porch. My stomach dropped when I found the front door slightly open.
Woodson touched me on the shoulder. “You want me to go in first?” she asked over the downpour on the roof.
“No. I’m okay,” I yelled. “Cover me to the right.”
I pushed the door open to find the foyer in order. To the left, the living room was also well kept, except for a lamp lying broken on the floor. I glanced backwards at Woodson and signaled to her. We walked through the living room quickly and turned the corner into the next room.
My father’s study, as opposed to the rest of the house, was in complete shambles. The chair at the desk lay tipped over on its back, and papers from his desk and filing cabinets were scattered all over the floor.
No sign of my father.
We walked back through the rest of the house, checking every closet, underneath every bed, behind the shower curtains and inside the bathtubs. I didn’t have time to think about questions like why Kinsey was the Snow White Killer. Instead I was just trying to keep up with him, trying to keep him from hurting the people closest to me.
With each pull of a curtain, with each creaking door, I felt my heart give way, the blood ringing in my ears as I feared what we would find.
But after a complete search of the house, we never found my father. Or his body.
One thing was certain, however: there’d been a struggle. We returned to the office to investigate the site of the altercation, and Woodson gestured toward the floor. “These papers. They’re all outlines of some sort.”
“I recognize them. They’re my father’s sermons.”
Woodson held one up. “This one’s from 1983.”
I shrugged, glancing about, desperately trying to think of our next move. “Maybe he was just looking through old sermons, trying to get some ideas for his next one.”
“They’re
all
from 1983, Lucas.”
“All of them?”
“Yeah. Check for yourself.”
I glanced at the papers on my father’s desk and shuffled through them. “What the hell?” Underneath a Christmas paperweight full of fallen snowflakes, I noticed that one of the sermons had some scribbled pencil writing on it, which was odd. From what I remembered as a child, once my father typed a sermon, it was finished. He would place the typed sermon like a printed poem in his Bible on Sunday morning, preach from it, then file it away, forever preserved in pristine, unmarked form.
I peered at the pencil writing and did a double take.
“Captain Courageous” sat scribbled in the upper margin.
The words took me rapidly back through time.
A long time ago, when my mother was still alive, our entire family came up with a code word one night at the dinner table. My mother and father had just finished watching a CBS News special about John Wayne Gacy. That night we’d decided that our family needed a code word, in case anything ever happened, a code word that would let us know that something was wrong. Or, if a stranger ever claimed that he’d been sent by our parents to pick us up and he didn’t know the code word, we were supposed to “scream bloody murder,” as my mother always used to say, and run away as fast as we could.
The code word was
Captain Courageous.
A scraggly arrow pointed from our family code word to the top of the sermon outline, to the title. My father titled every sermon.
And the title of this particular sermon, one from 1983, literally took my breath away for several seconds: “The Devil’s Orchard.”
I noticed additional penciling at the bottom of the page, in big block letters.
LUCAS, DO YOU BEGIN TO SEE? COME TO THE CHURCH OF OUR YOUTH AND YOU WILL FINALLY UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING. COME ALONE IF YOU EVER WANT TO SEE HIM ALIVE AGAIN.
YOURS, SWK
When Woodson looked over my shoulder, she gasped. “Oh my God. That’s where SWK got the name for his exhibition in the gallery? One of your father’s old sermons?”
“I guess so. I don’t remember it, though.”
I scanned the rest of the outline. A tiny, barely visible penciled check mark sat next to the name of the church at the top of the outline. My father always listed the title, date, and location of every sermon.
The checkmark was next to Farview Baptist Church, my father’s second church, where my mother was buried.
I stared down at the paper in my hand—a sermon, “The Devil’s Orchard,” dated 1983. The code,
Captain Courageous
. A check mark beside Farview.
And then I realized: my father was trying to tell me where Kinsey had taken him, before Kinsey left his own note on the sermon outline title page.
I grabbed Woodson’s arm. “Let’s go. I know where they are.” We rushed out of the messy room, but at the last second I stopped. “Wait. Do you have a cassette deck in your car?”
Woodson frowned momentarily. “No,” she answered, without understanding.
“Let me see if there’s one inside.” I led her back to an old dresser in the corner that I recognized from my childhood and pulled open the top drawer.
“Wow. That’s a lot of tapes. And a tape recorder.”
I started scanning through the ordered rows of audiocassette tapes as I lifted the recorder out of the drawer. The tapes were arranged chronologically, one for each Sunday, just as I remembered. “When I was young, my father started taping his sermons to keep an ongoing audio library.”
