by Steven James
And yet, there was that person in the living room behind the camera.
It was hard to get a good feel for the route someone would’ve needed to take through the mansion to avoid appearing in any of the CCTV footage and yet also be present there by that poolside door when Jon died.
The best way for me to figure out the route would be walking through the house myself.
A few phone calls later, I had the assistant director’s approval and the senator’s invitation: “My son wasn’t suicidal,” he told me. “I have no idea why he did this to himself. Anything I can do to figure out what happened here, I’m glad to do it.”
“Thank you, Senator. I’d like to have a look around tonight, if possible.”
“Of course.”
I gave him a time, and he gave me the address.
“I’ll be here,” he said.
So that was all earlier today before I managed to slip away to work with Tessa on her driving. Now, I paused at the gated entrance to the senator’s estate, showed my credentials to the guard posted out front, and then pulled forward onto the circular drive that terminated beside the residence’s grand and sweeping front porch.
4
Senator Murray was waiting for me.
Despite the time of day, he still had on a tie, now loosened around his neck. Though lean and good-looking, he had the weary eyes of an old man. They seemed foreign and out of place on his forty-eight-year-old face. Grief might not scar the skin, but it leaves its marks all the same. And it doesn’t always take its time doing so.
Some people recover; many never do, and their eyes are changed forever.
Senator Murray shook my hand firmly. “What can I do to help you, Agent Bowers?”
“First of all, let me say how sorry I am about your loss. My sincerest condolences.”
“Thank you.”
I wasn’t exactly sure how to follow up on that—I never am—and a moment passed before he led us out of the silence. “So tonight, what do you have in mind?”
“Yes. If I can have access to the footage from the security cameras, that would be most helpful. In fact, if you could walk through the house using different routes while I watch the feed, that might work out even better.”
A brisk nod. “Follow me. We can pull up the footage from the television in my office.”
Jon had been the senator’s only child and the house already felt lonely and way too vacant.
The office was a study in mahogany—from the matching bookshelves lined with thick law volumes to the broad desk and elegant end table. On his desk, the inbox had only four or five sheets of paper in it. The pencil holder, desk calendar, family photograph, and iMac were all positioned with careful precision, forming a semicircle that kept everything within easy reach.
Nothing in the office was out of place, except the conspicuously missing executive chair that’d been replaced with a kitchen chair that now sat behind his desk.
I briefly wondered how long he would go before replacing the rolling chair. Maybe never—it might be too emotionally difficult. We often act inexplicably in our grief, and survivor’s guilt, if that was at play at all here, can make us do strange things for penance.
When he turned on the wall-mounted television, it was preset to Cable Broadcast News. I recognized the anchors from the instances when they brought on my mentor, Dr. Calvin Werjonic, as a guest criminology expert. He was in the city now, as a matter of fact, lecturing at Columbia University, and we were planning to meet for lunch on Monday.
The network mostly interviewed him during high-profile serial crime sprees—rape, arson, murder—to analyze the geospatial aspects of the crimes. Dr. Werjonic was nearly twice my age, and although he was still going strong, he’d recommended my name to the producers to replace him. However, I wasn’t interested in a job like that. To put it mildly, working with the media did not thrill me. More often than not, they just get in the way and make it harder for law enforcement to do its job. I’d seen it happen all too often.
Senator Murray clicked through a password prompt and brought up his home security system’s feed.
The live footage from eight surveillance cameras appeared in a grid on the television screen.
Five of them covered the estate’s periphery. The first of the three monitoring the house was positioned at the front door above the porch and targeted the circular drive. On the footage from the night of Jon’s death, there hadn’t been any indication that another car had been on the drive or that anyone had left the house. The guard saw no one and hadn’t opened the gate for any cars, except for Jon’s.
The second residential camera covered most of the elegantly furnished living room and part of the kitchen.
The third was located out back and actually rotated to span both the pool area and the entrance to the guest house. From studying its footage earlier, I knew that from its vantage point you could see Jon positioning the chair, but no one else was visible outside, and the camera rotated before we could see exactly how Jon died.
“Senator,” I said, “may I ask why you only have three cameras on the house itself and five around the edge of the property?”
“My wife’s idea, before she passed. She didn’t like cameras in the home and figured that if there was an intruder, he’d be picked up on the other footage before getting to the house, and the home’s security system would take over from there.”
“Tell me more about that. The security system.”
He gave me the rundown—upon intrusion, the alarm would go off, the guard out front would be notified, and a 911 call would automatically be placed.
“And you know that it’s functioning properly?” I asked.
“Yes. We had it checked just last month, and then I rechecked it yesterday after . . . well . . . just to make sure.”
“And Jon would have known the password?”
A slight pause. “Yes.”
“Senator, who do you think Jon was talking about when he said, ‘This is for you’?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he have a girlfriend?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“Any grudges with anyone? Any enemies?”
“No, of course not. Do you think it was a message for the viewers? The people watching online?”
“Perhaps. Or maybe the person most likely to find the phone?”
“Me?”
“I’m just wondering.”
“No. That doesn’t make any sense. He would never have killed himself for me. He was a vibrant, optimistic young man. I’m no perfect father, but we had a strong, loving relationship.”
“Okay.”
“Pete told me that you suspect someone else was here when Jon died. What makes you think that?”
It was unusual for me to hear someone refer to Assistant Director DeYoung by his first name, but there was no reason to think it odd that his friend would do so.
“There was an image reflected back in the guest house’s window,” I said.
“I watched that video. I didn’t see anything.”
“It’s more visible when the resolution is enhanced. I’ll show you.”
Using my phone, I logged into my account on the Federal Digital Database and then pulled up the zoomed-in, digitally enhanced version of the video and showed it to him.
The senator watched the footage quietly.
When it was finished, I asked, “Do you have any idea who that might be?”
“No. No, I don’t.”
Since the person in question didn’t appear in any of the CCTV footage either before or after Jon’s death, he evidently knew the placement of the cameras. So, as I walked through the house and then directed the senator to take different pathways himself while I studied the feeds, I tried to discern the most likely path that the observer might have used to enter or exit the
residence while avoiding detection.
After twenty minutes of trial and error, I came up with two possible routes.
One ended in the garage, the other at a window west of the front porch. Upon closer inspection, I found that the window was unlocked, something no one had noticed up until now, because no one was looking.
I called for the Bureau’s Evidence Response Team to send someone over to check for prints and DNA near the window, then I returned to the pool, placed my phone where Jon’s had been, and began recording.
Wearing gloves to avoid leaving prints, I tapped the garage door opener. Since both the click of the handcuffs and the splash of the chair into the pool were audible on Jon’s video, I anticipated that we would be able to hear the sound of the garage door as well—if it was used while the young man’s camera was filming.
When I checked, however, the rattle of it opening was clearly audible on my phone. The video Jon had recorded contained no sound of the door.
The garage’s side door was wired to the alarm, so, for now, I went with the most likely scenario of the observer using the window to exit the premises and perhaps enter it as well.
The storms earlier this week would have left the soil outside the window damp, and I believed it was possible that we would find sole impressions.
Further scrutiny revealed a couple of partials near the flower bed. The lab could run them against our database and see if anything came up. I photographed them and sent the pictures to the online case file I’d started earlier today when I first identified the image of the person in the house.
Often in an investigation, you end up engaged in triaging evidence. You don’t know what a clue is until you see that it’s tied to the rest of the case. And sometimes what you think is a clue ends up being only a distraction.
The solution?
You keep your eyes and your options open as you move forward.
I made sure that the same combination of lights was on in the pool area, then stood where the chair had been when Jon tipped it backward into the water.
Based on the perspective, the person behind the sliding glass doors that led to the pool area would’ve been easily visible to Jon Murray while he sat there in front of the camera. Maybe that’s what he was looking at right before he killed himself.
I faced the pool and stared at it. I wanted answers even though they touched on motives: What would drive a person to such an extreme act? Why was someone watching? Who was the “you” Jon had referred to when he said his final words?
Maybe he was speaking to the observer when he said, “This is for you.”
And maybe not.
It’s natural, I suppose, this curiosity regarding the why, but that’s not what I was here for. I was here to figure out the truth, not guess what someone else may or may not have been thinking.
Who would know the precise placement of those three cameras? All three were positioned unobtrusively so if you weren’t aware of their location, you wouldn’t likely be able to find them—and you almost certainly wouldn’t know with such accuracy exactly where they were aimed.
A family member? Someone from the senator’s security team? The company that installed the cameras?
We would look into all of those possibilities.
Sometimes the most obvious answer isn’t the first one you come up with because it’s too self-evident, but certainly the senator would have known about the angles of the cameras.
Could he have been the person behind the glass?
That seemed incomprehensible to me. However, I wasn’t going to count anything out at this point.
Also, Jon would’ve likely known the cameras’ locations. He could have told the person who watched him die. He could’ve also been the one who unlocked the window so the observer could enter the residence.
Why didn’t the observer help the young man?
Where did he go when he left?
The more I thought about the whole scenario, the more chilling it became to me, this idea of just standing by and watching someone kill himself. I’ve tracked some cold and remorseless killers over the years—first as a homicide detective in Milwaukee and more recently as an FBI agent—but there was a callousness to this act that unsettled me, even after all the things I’ve seen.
You can’t work in a job like this and not ask questions about the evil we are capable of as a species, which, of course, means the evil we are capable of as individuals.
From all indications, people are born with the desire to do good but the penchant to do evil. This is part of the dichotomy at the heart of human nature. Psychologists studying children as young as three years old have found this—the child will refuse to push other children down when he’s told to, but he’ll do so when the other child has a toy that he wants.
In other words, he knows right from wrong but will go against his conscience when he wants something for himself.
And that’s what happens when we grow up too. It’s just that adults have different toys we’re after.
And more permanent ways of pushing people down.
5
They told Timothy that the drugs would help, that they would make the bugs go away.
But that had not worked.
No, it had not.
The meds just made his thinking fuzzy and the nightmares more real, more vivid, more troubling. And so he’d stopped taking the drugs after he was released from Grand Haven two months ago.
It made things both easier and harder at the same time.
Now, as he sat in the restaurant finishing his dessert, the server was staring at him, and Timothy was certain that he must have been scratching his arm or his stomach without realizing it. Otherwise, why would the man be looking at him like that?
Get out and get home. Then you can take care of things. Then you can get rid of the bugs, and no one will know.
He laid a credit card on the table to signal that he was ready for his check.
When the server picked up the card, however, he paused, glanced at it somewhat nervously, and then said, “Excuse me, I don’t know how to say this. I was wondering if it was you when I saw you earlier.”
“If it was me?”
“Timothy Sabian.”
“Yes. I’m Timothy.”
You did something. Something wrong. He’s not going to take your credit card. Maybe he’s—
“I’ve read all your books, Mr. Sabian. I’m a huge fan. I loved The Nesting Dolls. Thought it was amazing.”
Timothy heard the words, but they were distant. Fuzzy. Staticky. AM instead of FM. Coming from somewhere beyond where he was.
Do not scratch your arm. Don’t do it. Not here. Not in front of him.
“Thank you,” Timothy heard himself say.
Go. Get moving.
“I especially liked how, in that last scene, everything gets turned on its head and we find out the villain wasn’t the person we thought it was all along.” The man shook his head in sycophantic admiration. “I love twists like that.”
“Okay.”
“Do you ever do book signings?”
“I’m signing at the Mystorium on Monday night. It’s a bookstore over in Manhattan.”
“Wow. Yes. Of course. I’ll be there. Um . . . Do you mind if I get a selfie with you?”
The bugs wouldn’t leave him alone.
Would not.
Leave him.
Alone.
“No photographs, please. I was just on my way out.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” The man already had his phone out. “I didn’t mean to—”
Timothy pulled cash out of his wallet. The meal with drinks and dessert had been less than forty dollars, but he laid down three twenties, retrieved his credit card, told the server to keep the change, and hustled out of the restaurant.
He didn’t see the man snap
the photo of him as he was hurrying out the door.
* * *
+++
Rather than ride the A train, which would have taken as long as forty-five minutes depending on how the lines were running, Timothy flagged down a taxi to take him back to his place in Ozone Park.
Get home.
Just get home.
No one knew exactly what Morgellons syndrome was, and the first record of it was tough to pin down. Some epidemiologists believed it was first identified in France in 1674 when Sir Thomas Browne noticed inexplicable clumps of hair protruding from children. He described them as “endemial distemper of little children in Languedoc, called the morgellons, wherein they critically break out with harsh hairs on their backs.”
Morgellons meant “black hairs.”
Timothy knew all of this, had researched it years ago when he first started feeling the bugs crawling across his stomach and when the fibers first started protruding from the tender sores on his arm.
It wasn’t clear if this was the same condition that Mary Leitao, a lab technician in Pennsylvania, came across in 2001, but she chose to use the same word as Dr. Browne to describe the odd, unidentifiable fibers growing from her two-year-old son’s back when he complained of bugs crawling on him.
It certainly seemed to be the same condition.
Condition—was that even the right word for it?
Disease? Disorder?
The doctors weren’t even sure how to classify it.
Was it bacterial? Viral? Fungal? Parasitic? Genetic?
Psychologists said it was dermatological, some sort of infection.
Dermatologists said it was psychosomatic, all in the patient’s head.
Over the last decade, the CDC, four separate research universities, and the FBI lab had all studied the fibers, and no one had been able to identify them or understand exactly how they formed.
In the end, the CDC just indirectly acknowledged that they had no clue what they were dealing with, and rather than label it Morgellons, they’d started calling it “unexplained dermopathy.” According to them, it was a cluster of symptoms, including sores, that resembled those from spider bites or chronic excoriations, delusional infestation, fatigue, depression, memory loss, muscle twitches, mental deterioration, and cognitive impairment.
