kitchen.
The old man shuffled out before Salazar could give him the dollar. He melted into the night with his dog, leaving Salazar with his thoughts, his guilt, and his desire. He really wanted to solve this case. Not just for his career, or because he had been working on it for so long, but because there was the matter of the dead teenage girl who had been found in the second batch of dead homeless men two years ago. Her discovery was a shock for everyone working that day. As they pulled the pile of bodies apart, there she was, like the dramatic reveal of a magic trick gone wrong. Salazar could still see it clearly in his mindâs eye. The near emerald-green dress in the midst of all that dirt and gray; an orange high-heeled pump on one foot, the other bare. A shock of red hair and a face twisted in agony. Everything about her was incongruous, not in keeping with the scene. There was no ID on her and even now, no one had come forward to claim her. Putting her to rest was what really drove him. The department therapist told him that his desire had nothing to do with putting her to rest. That it was really all about him.
Fuck you, heâd said then. Fuck you, he thought now. Even if she was right, there was still the fact of the dead girl. Buying a coffee to go, the size of a Big Gulp, heâd driven out to the lake.
All night he sat in the dark trying to figure it out, to get into the killerâs head as he liked to call it. Was it the twins? Why would they do it? How did they do it? The truth was, gruff and tactless as he was, Salazar was no criminal. He couldnât really understand why people did the things they did, much less how. It was a severe limitation for a detective and he compensated for it by obsessively working his cases, going over the same ground again and again until something broke open for him.
So he sat in his car in the soft light waiting for that break, that crack in time.
Twenty
I n the kitchen Sunil filled the kettle and set it on the range. The burner was the only illumination as he opened the cupboards and reached for a teapot, which he then filled with loose-leaf Black Dragon tea. He liked this tactile relationship with the world and had consciously cultivated itâif he could find everything in the dark then there was still order in his world.
He thought about the body dumps from two years earlier. About the testing of his serum that had led to them. All those homeless men recruited from the streets of Vegas with offers of money and sometimes drugs were housed in seclusion in the basement of the institute.
And then when they had enough viable and anonymous subjects, theyâd put them into rooms in batches of ten, administered doses of the serum and a placebo to the control group, and then waited for the results. The drug and its antidote were delivered via an implant in the menâs heads that could be controlled from a distance.
Every test had proved disastrous. Not from the perspective of inducing psychotic breaks. That was easy enough. In fact, 50 percent of the placebo group was able to match the ferocity of the medicated. What proved abortive was the ability to control the behavior. The antidote hadnât worked, and neither had electric collars, subdermal shock implants, or even tear gas. The rage just couldnât be harnessed. And in the end, in every test, no matter what variations they made to the serum and antidote, all the subjects died. They simply beat one another to death. In any other clinical trial of a drug, adverse events were expectedâside effects, some more drastic than others, escalating from a skin rash to a clinical trial subject dying. But the numbers here were beyond belief.
The body dumps that followed had been Brewsterâs idea. Sunil hadnât known any of the details. Brewster had simply drafted him to help the investigation as forensic expert with the intent to steer any possible connection away from the institute. Not that the
The old man shuffled out before Salazar could give him the dollar. He melted into the night with his dog, leaving Salazar with his thoughts, his guilt, and his desire. He really wanted to solve this case. Not just for his career, or because he had been working on it for so long, but because there was the matter of the dead teenage girl who had been found in the second batch of dead homeless men two years ago. Her discovery was a shock for everyone working that day. As they pulled the pile of bodies apart, there she was, like the dramatic reveal of a magic trick gone wrong. Salazar could still see it clearly in his mindâs eye. The near emerald-green dress in the midst of all that dirt and gray; an orange high-heeled pump on one foot, the other bare. A shock of red hair and a face twisted in agony. Everything about her was incongruous, not in keeping with the scene. There was no ID on her and even now, no one had come forward to claim her. Putting her to rest was what really drove him. The department therapist told him that his desire had nothing to do with putting her to rest. That it was really all about him.
Fuck you, heâd said then. Fuck you, he thought now. Even if she was right, there was still the fact of the dead girl. Buying a coffee to go, the size of a Big Gulp, heâd driven out to the lake.
All night he sat in the dark trying to figure it out, to get into the killerâs head as he liked to call it. Was it the twins? Why would they do it? How did they do it? The truth was, gruff and tactless as he was, Salazar was no criminal. He couldnât really understand why people did the things they did, much less how. It was a severe limitation for a detective and he compensated for it by obsessively working his cases, going over the same ground again and again until something broke open for him.
So he sat in his car in the soft light waiting for that break, that crack in time.
Twenty
I n the kitchen Sunil filled the kettle and set it on the range. The burner was the only illumination as he opened the cupboards and reached for a teapot, which he then filled with loose-leaf Black Dragon tea. He liked this tactile relationship with the world and had consciously cultivated itâif he could find everything in the dark then there was still order in his world.
He thought about the body dumps from two years earlier. About the testing of his serum that had led to them. All those homeless men recruited from the streets of Vegas with offers of money and sometimes drugs were housed in seclusion in the basement of the institute.
And then when they had enough viable and anonymous subjects, theyâd put them into rooms in batches of ten, administered doses of the serum and a placebo to the control group, and then waited for the results. The drug and its antidote were delivered via an implant in the menâs heads that could be controlled from a distance.
Every test had proved disastrous. Not from the perspective of inducing psychotic breaks. That was easy enough. In fact, 50 percent of the placebo group was able to match the ferocity of the medicated. What proved abortive was the ability to control the behavior. The antidote hadnât worked, and neither had electric collars, subdermal shock implants, or even tear gas. The rage just couldnât be harnessed. And in the end, in every test, no matter what variations they made to the serum and antidote, all the subjects died. They simply beat one another to death. In any other clinical trial of a drug, adverse events were expectedâside effects, some more drastic than others, escalating from a skin rash to a clinical trial subject dying. But the numbers here were beyond belief.
The body dumps that followed had been Brewsterâs idea. Sunil hadnât known any of the details. Brewster had simply drafted him to help the investigation as forensic expert with the intent to steer any possible connection away from the institute. Not that the
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