You and I, Me and You (10 page)

Paul laughed, a sudden cheery sound that startled all of us. I had never heard him laugh, not even when George called him Rain Man and then tripped over the punch bowl filled with carrots Michaela had set behind him. “You would you would but you wouldn't need to. You're a doctor now, you didn't need to, you likely smelled red back then, too.”

“Tell that to my med school profs,” Gallo replied dryly.

“Well, this is all super fun and sweet, but maybe we could solve a murder? Or something?” George was either deeply committed to public safety, deeply pissed at the killer, or deeply interested in getting a win for BOFFO and saving his neck. Hmm, which could it be? “If it's not too much trouble, girls?”

The smile never left Max's face, but now his dark eyes were scrutinizing George as they'd abruptly sized up Paul. You had the feeling he knew exactly what George was, as he'd known about Paul, and wasn't especially worried. “A harsh taskmaster, but I obey. How can I help the FBI this evening?”

“You can start,” George said as Paul began pacing the perimeter of the living room, taking everything in behind big eyes magnified by his glasses, “by telling us how you knew the victim.”

“Oh, sure,” Max replied easily. “We both thought about killing ourselves. That's how I knew him.”

 

chapter twenty-one

“I told you
I told you Dr. Gallo smelled red!” Paul cried, then went back to pacing the living room and mumbling.

A word about synesthetes: they are people who have a neurologic condition that allows them to see numbers as colors. Sevens are red, tens are yellow, twos are black … like that. But it goes beyond that: they also feel numbers. To Paul, a brilliant man whose mind I would never understand, numbers had shapes and textures and smells. He could interact with them; he had relationships with them. Numbers were literally his friends, whereas most people saw them as squiggles on a piece of paper or a computer screen. Synesthetes could do high math, design computer programs, speak multiple languages (Paul spoke Japanese, German, Mandarin, Spanish, Italian, and French—“Weirdly,” George would say, “but fluently.”) and many had near-photographic memories. They could do these things in a way no one,
no one else on the planet,
could. Paul was bitterly brilliant and deeply weird and BOFFO thanked God (or the equivalent) for Paul pretty much every week.

So when he said Dr. Gallo smelled red, I paid attention.

“I had a turbulent childhood.” Max said this with a cynical smile, doubtless because he knew he was in a room full of people who'd also had turbulent childhoods. “Which I decided to make even more exciting via substance abuse and a half-assed suicide attempt. Then I left home. After med school and my residency, I helped a colleague run some T-groups. Wayne Seben was in my group for people prone to suicidal ideation.”

(“Suicidal ideation”
=
medical term meaning thoughts about suicide, which sometimes manifests as coming up with a detailed plan for suicide without actually committing suicide. Suicidal ideation
=
“Maybe you should be talking to somebody.”)

Max went on to explain that it wasn't a formal therapy group—he wasn't their physician; he didn't prescribe antidepressants; he didn't prescribe anything. (“I can't; it'd be ethically shitty. I'm not their doctor.”) The group didn't meet at a hospital or a clinic; they met at the Baker's Square in Burnsville. (“Sometimes, no matter what kind of crap day you have, French silk pie makes it better.”) He listened to their woes and shared his own experiences. (“Once, I got home and the old man was passed out cold on the kitchen tile, and I couldn't decide if I should kill him or myself, so I went to the local Barnes and Noble and read graphic novels for three hours.”) Those in the group who expressed interest in discussing their inclinations with a professional would sometimes ask for a friendly recommendation. That was it.

“Basically we're a group of people who get together once a week and talk about (a) how shitty our lives have been but how they seem to be getting better, or (b) how our lives were pretty great but are getting progressively shittier. And sometimes we get French fries to go with our pie,” he added thoughtfully.

French fries. Red velvet cake. When had I eaten last? My stomach growled, which was embarrassing but broke the tension. Emma Jan giggled while George rolled his eyes; Paul didn't notice, but Max's bitter smile widened and became more natural.

“So your killer killed someone who was thinking about suicide,” Max finished. “This time at least. I don't know any deets from the other scenes. Since BOFFO's in it, I'm guessing he's done this at least twice.”

Since he was here as some weird amalgam of suspect and consultant, I hoped the truth wouldn't bite me in the behind: “Two other that we know of, yeah. All in the Metro Area in the last eight months.”

“You had your hands full with JBJ,” Max guessed. “But once
that
old bastard was put down”—he didn't consider Luanne, the woman who had killed his nephew, the true JBJ killer—“you could deal with this?”

“Our computer didn't spit it out as a serial until the second one, three months back. The third one, today … that's when you came along. Again,” George added pointedly. I had no idea if George truly wondered if Max was the killer; I only knew that he didn't care, except as to how it impacted Max's ability to be his wingman. I could almost hear him: “He can't be my wingman from Stillwater prison! So he needs to make sure he doesn't get caught killing these guys. Or it'd be good if he wasn't the killer, I guess.”

“That's why it's all wrong,” Paul added. “I told you I told you: it's someone who smells orange but is blue.”

“Yeah, you did tell us. And weirdly, it didn't make any more sense this time.”

“If it's okay to tell me, how did the others die?”

“If you're the killer, you already know. And if you're not the killer, it won't hurt to tell you.” Sometimes George's logic fascinated me. “We had a white female, forty-seven, drowned in her bathtub. And we had an African-American female, twenty-four, hung in her kitchen.”

“Oh.” Max frowned. “
Oh
.” He knew, as we did, that serial killers had a type. Ted Bundy liked white teenage girls with long brown hair parted in the middle. (His last victim, poor dear Kimberly Leach, twelve, was picked in frenzy or desperation.) Aileen Wuornos killed white men she solicited on Florida highways, men aged forty to sixty-five. Albert Fish liked killing children. Martha Ann Johnson liked killing her
own
children. Jeffrey Dahmer liked teenage boys and young men.

These varied individuals had one thing in common—well, several wretched disgusting terrible things in common, but they all had a type. Some criminologists believe that means the killers are murdering the same person over and over and over.

So who was Sussudio killing over and over?

If we knew who, we'd know who.

“It's like JBJ,” George continued. “It was only after we knew who the killers were that we could see what the vics all had in common.”

“Were the other scenes like this?” Max asked, pointing to the living room, which, though it was covered in fingerprint powder and crime-scene tape, was still neater than, say, mine.

“Yeah.”

“So how's he killing them without making a mess?”

“That's
just
what we've been asking ourselves!” George cried. “When we catch him, we'll make sure and ask him.”

“I've fed the other two, the other two are in HOAP.2,” Paul said. “Now HOAP.2 can eat this one and then we'll know we'll know what color it is.”

“Did you say eat?” Emma Jan asked.

“HOAP.2 can taste colors HOAP and HOAP.1 could not.”

“That doesn't reassure me at all.”

“Is HOAP a friend of yours?” Max asked politely.

No. Paul explained in Paul-isms exactly what HOAP was (that would learn Max Gallo to ask questions at crime scenes he was invited to!).

In the beginning there was nothing, and it was really really really hard to catch serial killers. Nobody even knew what a serial killer was until the twentieth century (though they've been around since we were painting on cave walls).

And then God created ViCAP. God
=
Pierce Brooks. Pierce Brooks
=
legendary crime-fighter and lead investigator of the Onion Field murder. ViCAP
=
the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.

ViCAP is a system designed to track and correlate the deets of (violent) crimes. It collects info on homicides, sexual assault cases, kidnappings, etc., and can kick out possible connections to same, including serial killer “signatures.” It does that by analyzing crime scenes, personality traits, patterns of behavior … like that.

So in the beginning there was nothing, and then there was ViCAP. And then Paul Torn was born. Fast-forward thirty years, and then there was HOAP (Homicide Apprehension and Prevention, or as we refer to it, “the great white HOAP”).

Paul used ViCAP as a jumping-off point for his own research and software design. Because that's what brilliant people do: they take an innovative, incredible invention that took mankind millennia of murders to come up with and used it as a
jumping-off point.
Thus, the great white HOAP.

ViCAP, like Wikipedia, is stupid: it only knows what people tell it. If an Operations Captain in Southern Pines, North Carolina, decided to enter the violent deaths of several circus clowns at the hand of an avenging lion tamer, ViCAP will accept those murders at face value and cough up a signature for a killer who doesn't exist.

HOAP actually thinks about the data it gets. It imagines probabilities. It can tell itself to pull data resembling
anything
for a series of murders, from anywhere. It can figure out which departments to query, even if it's looking for data compiled before computers. Before
typewriters.
Because it's a program and not a person, it's better at spotting patterns than a person could be. A huge downside to other programs was, if the info we needed predated computers, we'd be stuck. Paul designed HOAP specifically to get around that. And also possibly to take over the world. Because HOAP (except by then it was HOAP.1) was, I'm not too proud to say, the main reason we caught JBJ a few weeks back. We did the footwork, but HOAP.1 did the thinking. Perhaps there won't be much need for law enforcement soon; the computers will instantly analyze everything and know who the bad guy is. It'll give us the command to arrest, and off we'll go. More efficient, but less satisfying. At least on my end.

Max nodded politely while Paul explained allllll that to him in Paul-speak. Then he turned to George with what is best described as a helpless expression. “Just take his word for it,” George suggested in a rare demonstration of pity. “HOAP is—”

“HOAP.2 HOAP.2 you have to say the right color.”

“—is gonna eat the data and then tell us who the bad guy is. Paul's been feeding it lesser local crimes for a few weeks now. Rapes and robberies are HOAP's amuse-bouche.”

“No no no no no no wrong color that's wrong it might still have the wrong color!” (Paul disliked it when colleagues had high expectations. Which was weird, because he not only always met them, he exceeded them.) “That's why it took so long with JBJ, the pattern was wrong but then HOAP.1 was able to smell blue could finally smell blue. Then I saw the body. So it could.”

“See?” George said. “Perfectly understandable explanation.”

“Don't be afraid,” Paul told Max, who
was
looking a little terrified.

“I'll try, but trying to follow your thinking is scary for me.”

I liked how he said that. Very matter-of-fact, not scared to admit being scared.

“For me, too.” Paul smiled a little. “I remember toilet training. Toilet training is black. Like George.”

“Oh, Kuh-rist,” black-as-toilet-training George replied, appalled. I might have tried to come up with something comforting, but I was laughing so hard it was all I could do not to fall into fingerprint powder.

 

chapter twenty-two

There was more
to do, but it was late and we were all exhausted. And while we were reasonably sure Dr. Gallo wasn't the killer, knowing what we knew about the late Mr. Seben meant we had more research ahead of us. It was interesting that the killer had murdered at least one person who'd contemplated murdering himself. Could that be the key to the others? It was almost too sick and twisted to contemplate; too bad my job was to do exactly that.

Was I thinking about that? Man's inhumanity to man and the like? Was I planning ahead to tomorrow's investigation? Making a mental note to check in on Paul first thing in the morning because we still had to ease him into the news about BOFFO's funding loss?

No. I was thinking how dreeeeamy Max Gallo was. And I was thinking that because I was in Max Gallo's car. And I was in Max Gallo's car because he was giving me a ride home.

Right about the time we all decided to quit for the night, I remembered George's awful car had swallowed me, brought me here, then spit me out on the sidewalk. Max rightly interpreted the look of dismay on my face and quickly offered to give me a ride. And I quickly took him up on it. Because when I'm not an FBI agent, I'm apparently a great big ninny.

“It's just down along here,” I said, giving him directions to the house. “Maybe five more miles.”

“No problem.”

“I really appreciate this.”

“No problem.”

Was it out of his way? Did I want it to be? Maybe he lived across the street; I hadn't met any of our neighbors yet. Maybe he lived in South Dakota and had a killer commute. Did I care? I cared. I definitely should not care.