The Ripper Gene (35 page)
I hadn’t been inside these cemetery gates since I was twelve years old, yet I knew exactly where he was headed. I assumed he believed he could muster some psychological advantage by leading us to my mother’s grave.
I somehow found an extra reserve of energy and cut a diagonal path through the graveyard, dodging tombstones and grave markers in an attempt to cut Kinsey off before he could reach his destination.
The rain pounded down all around, and I caught glimpses of Kinsey as he ambled along the far side of a row of mausoleums between us in the middle of the cemetery. His head jerked back and forth as he walked, and I realized he was searching.
“It’s over, Kinsey,” I yelled above the howling wind, rounding the corner of the final mausoleum to face him. “Give up. The police are already on their way.”
Though caught off guard initially, he recovered quickly. He glared at me, then smiled and pointed over my left shoulder. “There she is.”
He said it so convincingly I turned to look, and my eyes fell upon the very place I’d avoided since I was twelve years old. The face of a modest tombstone glowed white in a lightning flash, and the engraved black lettering was plainly visible in the light of the storm.
HERE LIES MARY MADDEN
LOVING WIFE OF JONATHAN MADDEN
ADORING MOTHER OF LUCAS, TYLER, AND KATIE
The words registered within a second, but a second was all Kinsey needed.
I turned back around to find him barreling toward me. I saw the glistening steel of the hunting knife in his right hand, reflected by a brief flash of lightning.
I clutched his right wrist with both hands, but he carried us both crashing backwards toward the ground. I lifted my foot to keep him from falling on top of me, driving it into his chest. The entire encounter took place without sound, save for the elements around us. As I fell backwards, locked in a deathly embrace, I realized no more words would be exchanged between us. One of us would die tonight. As I landed in a puddle on the wet ground, I kept my foot in Kinsey’s bloody chest and used his own momentum to flip him over me.
As he flew through the air, I was startled by the look on his face as he passed above me, a blatant expression twisted with hatred.
Only then did I realize that I felt the same fuming hatred toward him, and probably cast the same expression upward to him.
I rolled over as a loud thud sounded behind me, and a single groan slid from Kinsey’s throat. I gained my footing and stood to face him, only to find my attacker lying still in the wet mud. A great gaping gash covered half his forehead and blood flowed freely from it. He lay upon the muddy earth without moving, staring up into the night sky as rain fell all around, his head resting crookedly against the base of my mother’s gravestone.
He wasn’t saying anything, just staring into space. He was looking past me. I’d seen people die before, and I knew it was finally over.
* * *
When I heard the sirens in the background I looked up and saw the shadowy shapes of Woodson and my father illuminated in the blue and red lights, making their way toward me in the cemetery, calling my name. I had no idea how long I’d been standing there above Kinsey.
I turned away and left him there, then staggered back through the cemetery to embrace the motley pair of people approaching me, people in my life who, I suddenly realized, meant more to me than anything else in the world, and whom I loved very deeply.
I fell into their arms, and we sank into the mud as the police ran around us, guns drawn, carefully approaching the Snow White Killer’s lifeless body in the distance.
Three days later my father, brother, sister, and I stood at the edge of the murky waters of Old Moss Pond. We watched in silence as the recovery crew worked steadily in the afternoon sun.
I glanced behind us, wincing as I turned. The doctors were amazed that neither my neck nor my father’s was broken during Kinsey’s final play. There’d been just enough tension in the line to constrict my airway, but enough slack to keep our spinal columns intact. Divine intervention seemed the most likely explanation, along with Woodson’s rapid response. To this day, she couldn’t explain how she’d found the strength to lift my body with one arm and undo the noose with the other. My father claimed that he knew, and no one argued with him.
In the distance, Raritan and Parkman stood in the trampled-down grass of the pasture, talking to members of the local search and rescue unit.
Woodson stood to the side, playing with my nieces as Mara looked on. Mara seemed a lot better already, now that Kinsey had been exposed for who he truly was. She still needed more therapy—much more therapy, after what he’d put her through—but it was clear she was seeing a light at the end of a tunnel that had been dark for many years until recently.
When Woodson saw me looking, she waved in a single, slow gesture.
I waved back with the slightest motion of my hand, my thoughts drifting to Kinsey.
* * *
In the days after Kinsey was killed, a team of computer forensics experts and other FBI analysts had reconstructed his life and motives, thanks in large part to a manifesto he himself had prepared. Apparently Kinsey had killed my mother and those two boys and then, just as abruptly, returned to a normal existence and continued as a normal contributor to society for almost twenty-five years, living with a dark secret that only he knew.
Six months after my article about the ripper gene was published, however, Kinsey quit his psychiatry practice in Atlanta and moved back to set up a hometown practice in Mississippi. Within six months both Flora McKinsey and Jim McKinsey had passed away—his mother of an accidental overdose, his father by a violent suicide.
Kinsey had snapped. He originally planned to kill my father and then kill me right after he killed my father, but he stumbled across Mara while trailing me, and realized Mara provided a perfect cover. Mara’s psychiatrist committed suicide under suspicious circumstances soon thereafter, and at the funeral Dr. James Kinsey introduced himself to Mara as a dear friend of her deceased therapist. He offered to begin seeing her, free of charge, and she became his patient.
His plan then became to kill all of us—my father, Mara, and me—but Mara and I went our separate ways. Soon after our breakup, Mara became attached to Tyler, and Kinsey, through his psychiatric sessions with Mara, became aware of Tyler’s clinical trials of the wonder drug Marihypnol.
On one of his tapes he actually described the young women in the Marihypnol trials as the perfect “object lessons” to throw into my face and my father’s. To draw me into the investigation, he decided to select the victims based upon their DNA and then leave the genetic code for the ripper gene on the foreheads of his victims, knowing that at some point I would figure out the code. He also made sure that the victims were left at crime scenes in counties and parishes to which I’d be summoned in my role as the profile coordinator of the New Orleans field office. The game began in earnest when he kidnapped Mara, his own patient, and pretended to be me while she was blindfolded, telling her to kill him when he (actually I) returned.
When that didn’t work, Kinsey devised a scheme to kill us both and pin the blame on Tyler. Tyler told interviewers later that Kinsey had once insisted on taking a vial of Tyler’s own blood to run as a negative control. Tyler had found it strange, but had chalked it up to the eccentricities of a quirky psychiatrist–research scientist. Little had Tyler known that Kinsey would smear that blood sample of his all over the final female victim at the Magnolia Mansion in an attempt to frame him for the murders of all those poor women, and eventually, for the killings of our father and me.
Upon hearing everything, I didn’t know if it was the profiler in me who was able to identify with a serial killer’s distorted logic, but some small part of me empathized with the tortured question James Allan Kinsey had ultimately been asking—why bad things happen to good people, and vice versa.
I’d been asking it all my life. I didn’t have the answers, but I realized with great regret that I’d willingly followed Kinsey into the devil’s orchard that night. My father, brother, and sister had all moved on and
lived,
but I’d lost some small part of my soul the day I’d decided to never permit myself to believe in something—God, love, anything—ever again.
All at once, I was struck by how incredibly lonely that belief system had made me feel all those years.
And just as suddenly, it didn’t feel right anymore. It felt like an absurd grudge against the universe, rather than a bona fide belief system, to deny the existence of something or someone greater than myself. The final understanding of my mother’s demise had sprung some dark lock inside me. I found myself considering the possibility that we were more than just piles of DNA stumbling around a random, chance rock in orbit after billions of years of evolution. I couldn’t shake the feeling that my mother already knew the truth, and was inexplicably comforted by knowing that I would know, someday, too.
Whatever the answer.
* * *
Down in the pond one of the men in hip waders pulled on the rusty chain leading from the crane into the water and gave a shout, snapping me to the present. He gave the operator the thumbs-up signal and stepped away.
The engine sputtered to life, the chain went taut, and the entire mechanism began moving slowly backwards. The surface of the pond roiled and bubbled as the weight on the end of the chain moved to the surface.
I put my arm around my father and sister, and I felt my father place his hand across his chest to hold on to mine. A few seconds later, rusted and covered in branches and mud, the handlebars of an old dirt motorcycle appeared above the water.
When the gas tank emerged, I shut my eyes and Katie moaned beside me. Beneath the mud and leaves, I caught sight of an emerald-green plastic fender.
My mother’s favorite color.
* * *
We stayed until the motorcycle was completely extricated and the officers ran the twenty-five-year-old license plates against the database.
It took a few phone calls, but eventually Raritan and Parkman came over with the news, told us, and left us to our thoughts. Registered twenty-seven years ago to a Mr. Jim McKinsey. Otherwise known as Mean Jim McKinsey.
Katie cried, and Tyler did, too. My father and I, however, were all cried out.
He turned to me. “We finally can lay her to rest, Lucas. Now we can all let her rest in peace.”
I nodded, but my mind was elsewhere. I realized that my clearest memory of my mother was the one of her kissing my father in the church parking lot as the three of us stared up at them from our childhood perspectives, backlit by an intense sunrise above the church itself.
It was a masterpiece painting in my mind, a scene of perfection, a momentary utopia … and I would never relinquish it.
I missed her still.
And yet, now, having understood exactly what happened to her that night … somehow her memory was more lucid, more real—and easier on the heart. I hugged Katie and my father once more, then turned to Tyler.
“I’m sorry, little brother. I’m sorry for every—”
Tyler put his hand on my shoulder and shook his head. “No more regrets, Lucas. No more.”
I nodded without words and hugged my brother for what felt like the first time in eons.
As we embraced, I found that I still had tears left inside. Through tearstained eyes, I caught sight of Woodson in the distance, still staring in my direction like a watchful guardian. She’d never looked more beautiful, almost angelic in the dusky haze. The woman who’d saved my life more times than I cared to remember, the woman who had made tremendous breakthroughs throughout this case, and the woman who’d believed in me when no one else had. I kissed my brother’s cheek, patted his back, and made my way over to her.
I couldn’t wait to pull her into my arms, thank her, ask her to come with me, and go home.
Michael Ransom
is a molecular pharmacologist and a recognized expert in the fields of toxicogenomics and pharmacogenetics. He is widely published in scientific journals and has edited multiple textbooks in biomedical research. He is currently a pharmaceutical executive and an adjunct professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Raised in rural Mississippi, he now makes his home in northern New Jersey.
The Ripper Gene
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