Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy)

by Lis Wiehl

“Her picture was on the cover of a Spanish edition of People,” Dani said. “Some soccer player just dumped her. I must be a lot more jealous than I’m willing to admit. Jealousy is never really about the other person, you know. It’s about your own feelings of inadequacy.”

  “Well,” Carl said, “I suppose it’s only human. See you soon.”

  As Dani pocketed her phone, she was struck by the way Carl had pronounced the word human, detecting—though she was probably mistaken—a note approaching scorn. Weird day.

  She was passing Detective Casey’s office when she heard him call her name. He gestured for her to come in, and when she did, he pointed at his computer monitor.

  “Who’s this nut job?” He pointed at the video feed from Interview 2 and then clicked to unmute the sound.

  “This just . . . well, there you have it,” Quinn was saying, leaning forward to stare at the numbers on his screen. “It’s ridiculous, but Bob’s your uncle. I certainly wouldn’t cross the street . . . I don’t see . . . Wait a minute . . . No . . .”

  “That’s the guy I was telling you about,” Dani said. “Analyzing the postmortem for Amos Kasden.”

  From the looks of it, Quinn had already filled multiple pages of a legal pad with notes and scribblings and molecular diagrams.

  “Who’s he talking to?”

  “I’m never sure,” Dani said, smiling. “Either himself, or he hasn’t realized yet that I left the room an hour ago.” On the monitor they saw Quinn push away from the desk and then throw his pen down. “Looks like he’s finished.”

  “Shall we?” Casey said, rising from his desk.

  When they reached the hall leading to the interview rooms, they heard a fierce pounding on the door from the inside. Dani rushed forward and opened it. Quinn looked panicked.

  “Sorry,” she said. “They lock automatically.”

  “You could have told me,” he said, calming down. “I was about ready to confess to something just to get out of there.” Only then did he notice the surly-looking man standing beside her.

  “Quinn, this is Detective Phillip Casey. We could see you on the monitor. It looked like you’d figured something out.”

  “May have,” he said. “Liquid chromatography has its limitations, even with electrochemical detection. I started looking at kynurenine, glutamate, and GABAergic metabolites—”

  “Hold on,” Casey said. “If you don’t mind, believe it or not, I’m not quite as smart as I look. Can you repeat that using high school English?”

  Quinn pointed at the computer screen where the numbers giving the quantitation of isolated bioactive molecules awaited decoding. He sat in the rolling chair and turned the monitor toward Casey and Dani.

  “How shall I put this?” Quinn said, nodding in deference to the detective. “Okay. Keeping it simple. Catecholamines are neurotransmitting hormones synthesized from phenylalanine and tyrosine, and they share the same dihydroxybenzene group—”

  Casey jerked his head back as if he’d just caught a whiff of something unpleasant. Quinn stopped to regroup.

  “Simpler still. In your car’s engine,” Quinn said, starting over, “you have a variety of fluids that the engine needs to work. You have gasoline and oil and brake fluid and water and antifreeze and power steering fluid and transmission fluid—”

  “Not in the engine,” Casey said.

  “Whatever,” Quinn said. “My point is, in a car, each of these fluids has its own system of tubes and reservoirs, and they don’t mix. So if your brakes don’t work, you know you’re out of brake fluid. If the engine stops, you know you’re out of gas. All right?”

  “With you so far,” Casey said.

  “Suppose you take all the fluids and mix them in one big tank,” Quinn continued. “It isn’t a particularly good analogy, but this is something like the fluids in the brain. They’re all mixed together, but they all go to specific neurological receptors in the brain.”

  “Gotcha,” Casey said.

  “These tests on—what was his name?”

  “Amos Kasden,” Dani said.

  “The tests I did on the cerebrospinal fluids found in Amos Kasden’s brain sorted them out and measured how much of each was present, to compare to what we might expect in a normal brain. And sometimes we can say that if you find X amount of this, you can expect to find Y amount of that. Or that when the brain uses substance A, it divides it into B and C, so B plus C should equal A. Or that it divides A into B and C and uses B but not C, so you should find lots of metabolized B but no metabolized C. Okay?”

  Casey nodded. Dani could see Quinn was growing frustrated at having to move so slowly.

  “Maybe we should get into the details later,” she told him. “What’s the takeaway?”

  “Trying to get there,” Quinn said. “It’s complicated. Catecholamines, meaning epinephrine, norepinephrine, and dopamine, are the chemicals produced by the adrenal glands that sit atop the kidneys, but what they do is help the body respond to stress. You’ve heard of epinephrine, which is also called adrenaline.”

  “It gives people superhuman strength,” Casey said. “This would be a lot easier to understand if everything didn’t have two names, you know.”

  “I agree,” Quinn said. “Anyway, adrenaline almost instantaneously speeds the heart rate, makes enormous stores of energy available to the muscles, and fine-tunes the senses. That’s what makes it so valuable to us in stress situations, sometimes providing the superhuman strength you mentioned.”

  “What does dopamine do?” Casey said. “In a stress situation? I know from working narcotics that drugs like cocaine or methamphetamine flood the brain with it, and that’s why those things are so addicting.”

  “Yes,” Quinn said. “Dopamine is, in a sense, a kind of natural painkiller because it gives pleasure. Dopamine reduces sensitivity to pain by binding the opioid receptors, but it’s also how the brain rewards itself. Food can release it. Sex. Narcotics, but also aggression. People who experience an adrenaline rush, rescuing someone from a burning building, feel a very natural and very intoxicating high afterward from the dopamine. It can take hours for it to wear off.”

  “Which is why guys get addicted to skydiving or rock climbing.”

  “Yes, and it’s also why some people get addicted to violence. What’s interesting is that sometimes these people don’t really care if they come out on the right or wrong side of that violence. They can kick the stuffing out of somebody, or get the stuffing kicked out of them, and it’s all the same, as long as they get the adrenaline rush. These people actually enjoy getting beat up.”

  Casey leaned back in his chair. “That makes more sense than I wish it did,” he said.

  Dani slid her chair toward Quinn’s to get a better view of the screen. “So how was Amos’s brain different from normal brains?”

  “If you can bear with me a bit longer,” Quinn said, turning again to Casey. “My specialty, at least right now, has been looking at how catecholamines, which also strongly affect mood, function in autistic people. More specifically, what happens to autistics when they reach puberty and become flooded with testosterone and estrogen. I presume you know what happens to normal kids when they hit puberty.”

  “I used to work juvenile crime,” Casey said. “I understand the sudden sex drive, but what I never got is how their IQs go down 50 percent.”

  “Not quite fifty,” Quinn said. “But that has more to do with the disinhibition of impulse control in the forebrain.” He tapped himself on the forehead, then pointed to the lower back part of his skull. “My work involves the cerebellum, back here. Which is where we find something called the Purkinje cells. Dani?”

  “I remember the name,” she said. “Aren’t they the largest neurons in the brain?”

  “Second largest,” Quinn said. “But yes, they’re quite large. Purkinje cells are also very flat, and they line up in a row like dominos on a twodimensional X/Y axis, and other cells pass through them on the Z axis.”

  “In the cerebel
lum,” Casey said.

  “Yes,” Quinn said. “A part of the brain that hasn’t changed much in the last few million years. And we find a significantly reduced number of Purkinje cells in the cerebellums of autistic children. We know that prenatal estrogen promotes the growth of Purkinje cells, so the thinking is that this explains why the vast majority of autistic children are male. The cerebellum also plays a strong role in regulating pleasure or fear. Autistic children have trouble identifying emotions, in themselves and in others. They don’t know when to be afraid, and they feel very little pleasure. Now, getting back to our friend Amos here—” Quinn put his hand on the back of his neck and winced briefly from what appeared to be a sudden sharp pain.

  “Are you all right?” Dani asked.

  “Something I ate,” Quinn said, waving off the pain as a minor inconvenience. “Dani told me Amos was taking part in a drug trial and gave me a sample of the drug she thinks he may have been taking.”

  “Oh, did she?” Casey said, looking at Dani with surprise.

  “I was going to tell you about it once we had the results.”

  “Which we do,” Quinn said. “I got an e-mail from my friend at Columbia, who did a fine job, I must say. I think she stayed up all night.”

  “I didn’t know it was a she,” Dani teased.

  “Illena,” Quinn said. “She’s the reason I had to dump Otto on you. She’s allergic to dogs. Anyway, the medication Amos was on appears to be an SSRI. That’s a selective serotonin—”

  “Reuptake inhibitor. I know what an SSRI is,” Casey said. “It’s an antidepressant.”

  “It’s a class of antidepressants,” Quinn said. “Including Prozac and Zoloft and Celexa and the like. The drug Amos was testing seems to have been sort of a one-pill-fits-all designer antidepressant. If I had any money and knew what company invented this thing, I’d buy as much stock as I could. Amos should have been flooded with good feelings.”

  “But he wasn’t,” Casey said.

  “No,” Quinn agreed. “His adrenaline and noradrenaline weren’t being utilized, and his dopamine levels were nonexistent, except, I suspect, from what Dani told me about his psychopathic behaviors, when he could self-medicate with violence. Remember that catecholamines regulate the fight-flight response. I think the drug he was taking created a craving for that sort of behavior. The fight. Not the flight.”

  “Well, that ain’t good,” Casey said.

  “It gets worse,” Quinn said. “I could be wrong, but here’s what I think. If this medication were given to children, or if it were taken by pregnant women, it would create a large population of boys, and some girls too, who would seem to be very happy and content, and they would seem like perfect students and get straight As.”

  “You could sell a lot of something like that,” Dani said.

  “Yes, you certainly could,” Quinn said.

  “Is this the Provivilan everyone is talking about?”

  “No,” Quinn said. “It’s something else. Maybe a beta version. I don’t know.”

  “So what’s the problem?” Casey asked.

  “The problem is that in that population of boys and girls, the medication would both induce an artificial case of autism and mask it. By inhibiting the Purkinje cells. The kids would seem sweet and slightly robotic.”

  “Stepford children,” Dani said.

  Quinn looked puzzled.

  “It’s an old horror movie,” Dani said. “Which I gather you never saw.” “I didn’t,” Quinn said. “Anyway, for a while you wouldn’t know there was a problem.”

  “Until?” Casey asked.

  “Until they hit puberty,” Quinn said.

  “What would happen then?” Casey said.

  “Well, in autistic children, the onset of puberty and the hormonal influx that that involves often result in outbursts of uncontrollable anger.”

  “What would happen in normal children who take the drug?” Dani said. “Or whose mothers took it when they were pregnant?”

  “The girls would be the lucky ones, relatively speaking. They’d have all the usual problems with sexual maturation, multiplied by a factor of maybe ten. Maybe more. The boys would fare much worse.”

  “How so?” Casey asked.

  “It’s hard to predict.”

  “Try.”

  “I’d say,” Quinn said, taking a deep breath, “with a fair amount of certainty, that they would become, rather quickly, emotionally overstimulated beyond their ability to cope.”

  “Uh-oh,” Casey said.

  “And then,” Quinn continued, “they would become physically and emotionally addicted to the pleasure-giving dopamine released by angry outbursts and violent behavior, without caring about whether or not what they did was self-destructive.”

  Quinn paused to let his words sink in.

  “Assisted by the release of adrenaline and noradrenaline, producing feats of superhuman strength,” he concluded. “I, for one, would not want to be around when it happens. I thought of a name for the compound in Amos’s brain. Sort of catchy.”

  “What?” Dani asked.

  “I might call it the ‘Doomsday Molecule,’” Quinn said.

  18.

  “Was that my phone?” Tommy said as he set a stainless steel colander with a half dozen large fresh eggs the color of mahogany on the kitchen counter.

  “It was Dani,” Carl said. “She said they’re going over to the Gardener farm with a warrant. She was hoping we could join her.”

  “How’d she sound?”

  “A little tired. She’s going over the lab results on Amos Kasden with her ex-fiancé, Quinn Whatshisname.”

  “Technically, they weren’t officially engaged,” Tommy said.

  “These days, who knows what’s official?” Carl said. “Whatever happened to the rock you got Cassandra?”

  “It’s parked in the garage.”

  Carl looked confused.

  “When she gave the engagement ring back, I sold it on eBay and bought the V-Rod.”

  “I have to say, I was looking forward to officiating at that wedding.”

  Tommy was placing the eggs in a tray in his refrigerator.

  “You ever think about her?” Carl said.

  “Who?”

  “Cassandra.”

  “Not really. I guess when I see her picture in the supermarket checkout line, sometimes I think, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’”

  “You dodged a bullet.”

  “I wouldn’t say that, exactly, but it all worked out for the best. And if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have met Dani. Everything happens for a reason. Why do you ask?”

  “I guess she’s on some magazine cover again,” Carl said. “Some soccer player broke her heart.”

  Tommy shrugged. “It’s always something. Or someone. I told her she could call me if she ever needed to,” he said. “I think we’d just seen Toy Story. Whichever one had the song ‘You’ve Got a Home in Me.’ That’s what I told her. I actually misquoted it. The line is ‘You’ve got a friend in me.’ I’m glad she hasn’t called. She was a lot of work. Hey, I gotta go fill the feed bins.”

  Once Tommy had returned to the coop, Carl checked out the window to make sure he was busy, then picked up Tommy’s cell phone and searched his contacts list. Carl’s body ached, a throbbing in his muscles and joints, as if he were coming down with a fever. He tried to tell his hands not to do what they were doing, but the more he tried to resist, the more they hurt. When he found the listing for Cassandra Morton, he scrolled down until he located a mobile number marked as private. He opened the screen to send a text message, tapped in the words REMEMBER—YOU’VE GOT A HOME IN ME. XO, and then put the phone back where he found it. The part of him that was still Carl felt guilty for betraying his friend, but when he thought he needed to warn Tommy, a louder voice in his head said, You will not! as an electric charge shot through him and left a sizzling sound in his ears. That is just a small taste of the pain I can give you—my power over you is complete!


  When his cell phone rang an hour later, Tommy picked up and, sounding surprised, said, “Oh, hey—we were just talking about you . . . All right. See you then.”

  “Who was that?” Carl asked.

  “Dani. Just letting us know she’s headed for the farm.”

  “I wonder if she’s bringing Quinn,” Carl said. “I’d love to meet him. She tells me he’s an absolute genius.”

  Tommy drove the Jeep, pausing momentarily a mile from his house to move aside a deer carcass lying in the middle of the road, a stag with a full set of antlers and what Tommy took for a frightened look on its face, mouth frozen open, eyes wide. Tommy knew he was probably projecting. It was, after all, rutting season, and deer were everywhere. He used his phone to call a nearby wolf sanctuary where a nonprofit conservancy was trying to raise and eventually restore to the wild endangered populations of Mexican gray and red wolves. He told the director where she could find the carcass, as local roadkill made up a large part of the wolves’ diet. Carl stayed in the car while Tommy dragged the buck to the side of the road. Tommy didn’t mind, but it was unlike Carl not to volunteer his assistance.

  He saw Dani’s car parked in front of the Gardener farmhouse, next to a police cruiser and a white panel van with a large gold key painted on the side. Beyond the house the water of Lake Atticus was gray and choppy, waves driven by a cold wind from the north. One of the cops waiting by the car was Tommy’s friend, Frank DeGidio, who had his hands deep in the pockets of his uniform jacket for warmth.

  “Tomaso!” DeGidio called out. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “Dr. Harris called and asked us to come by,” Tommy said.

  “I got a guy says you and her were homecoming king and queen back in the day.”

  “Don’t hold it against me. Or her.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it. I know how tough it can be to be popular.”

  “No, ya don’t, Frank,” Tommy said, patting his friend on the shoulder.

  Frank saw Tommy pull something out of his jacket pocket. “What’s that?”

  “Infrared camera,” Tommy said, showing it to him. He pointed it at the house, which registered the same temperature as the air around it. He pointed it at the second cop. “Did you know your partner has chemical hand warmers in his pockets?”