Crime Zero (aka the Crime Code) (1999)

by Cordy, Michael

  "Mandy James. April 7, 1979. Sausalito."

  Decker could hardly breathe, his chest was so tight and the smell so noxious. He remembered the girl's name from the Axelman case files. She had been one of his earliest victims, and her belongings had been found in a box at his house in San Jose. On autopilot Decker moved the flashlight upward, its beam shining through the glass into the greenish, clear liquid beyond.

  The first thing he saw in the ghostly green light was Mandy James's foot, a rope attached to her right ankle, anchoring her to a heavy rock on the base of the tank. Moving the light farther upward, he saw the rest of her naked body, floating perfectly preserved in the formaldehyde.

  Pressing a hand to his mouth, he switched the light off; he couldn't bear to see the girl's face. He turned away and stood in the dark, leaning with his forehead pressed against the opposite wall, forcing down the rising bile in his throat. Gradually he regained control and straightened up. Not daring to turn around, he switched the flashlight back on.

  In that instant his blood ran cold. Staring out at him was a face so heartbreakingly beautiful and so wide-eyed with terror that he could only scream and run. Disoriented in his panic, he ran as fast as he could down the dark corridor. As he ran, the beam of his flashlight flailed wildly, cutting through the darkness, to reveal the horrific tableaux on both sides of him. An avenue of glass formaldehyde tanks, each containing the perfectly preserved body of a young woman. Typed names and contorted faces, names and faces he remembered from the files, were intermittently thrown up in the beams of light.

  Only when he reached a tiled wall on his left did he realize that he had run the wrong way. Standing panting in the dark, focusing on the tiles, he capped a hand over his mouth and took deep breaths of his own exhaled carbon dioxide. Gradually his heart slowed. To find the exit, he would again have to run the grisly gauntlet of bodies in the dark. He looked around for an alternative.

  Turning slowly to the opposite wall of the corridor, he saw that it was also tiled. A red kerosene can sat on the floor, and halfway up the wall he noticed a box with a red button and lever protruding from the front. Calming himself, he steadied the flashlight and read the bold red letters above the top. FUEL-POWERED GENERATOR. TO START: PUSH BUTTON AND HOLD FOR TEN SECONDS BEFORE PULLING LEVER. Taking a deep breath, he followed the instructions and after two attempts heard a motor starting up. Suddenly the protective darkness was gone, and the full horror of his surroundings was illuminated by a row of lamps along the ceiling of the corridor, a light shining out from each tank. But at least in the light he could prepare himself for the sights around him.

  He was in the middle of Axelman's horrific collection. To his right, toward the exit, there were ten tanks, five on each side. Each contained one of the abducted girls, in chronological order of abduction. To his left there were a further ten tanks, but only three were full. The other seven were no doubt reserved for subsequent acquisitions. Keeping his eyes straight ahead, he walked past the last pair of victims to the final occupied tank. On the tiled floor in front of it was a cardboard box similar to those found in Axelman's house, and in it were a set of moldy clothes, some sneakers, and a pair of thick eyeglasses. There was also an audiotape with a name scribbled on it. He now knew why Karl Axelman had never been a suspect for Libby Prince's abduction. All her personal effects were here.

  With terrifying clarity Decker could see what had happened.

  Unlike the others in this macabre gallery, Libby Prince's abduction hadn't been planned. Visiting his trophies one fateful day, Karl Axelman had probably seen her wandering one of the nearby lanes and abducted her on impulse. Eventually he planned to take her effects to his house in San Jose but had been caught before he had been able to do so.

  Bending to his knees, Decker studied the pitiful personal effects laid out neatly in the box, finding them as hard to look at as the body suspended in liquid to his left. Ever since he could remember, Decker believed that each man made his own choices, that a man's life should be judged at its end, by what he had done. Not at its beginning, by what he had been born with. To Decker, free will was everything; without it there was no point in living.

  But now, as he willed himself to look at Libby Prince, he felt less sure. He had steeled himself against seeing the remains of his father's victims, preparing to view them as bones or body parts, not as the humans they once were. But seeing this innocent girl floating suspended in the tank made that impossible. Seeing her beautiful face frozen into a silent scream, forever young and forever in pain, he couldn't help feeling the sins of his father crushing down on him. Whatever he did he was tainted forever. Anything he did could never remove that stain from his soul. His career had been based on the premise that a man's capacity for good or evil was shaped by a host of influences throughout his life. But he didn't know anymore.

  Perhaps his knack for tracking down evil in others stemmed from some genetic "gift" he had received from his biological father. Perhaps it did take a thief to catch a thief.

  He was lost in his thoughts when the sound of echoing footsteps made him suddenly turn his head. Then he heard the scream.

  Chapter 16.

  When Kathy Kerr awoke, any sense of time and place had been taken from her. Her mind kept somersaulting, playing tricks on itself as if all sanity had fled. She could see a man's dark face coming toward her with a gun and a needle, yet she knew her eyes were still closed. There was a pumping in her ears, which she slowly recognized as the sound of her own racing heart. Her mouth was tinder dry.

  What had happened to her? What was happening to her? Why couldn't she think straight or remember anything?

  And why couldn't she move her arms?

  She opened her eyes and stared up at a bare bulb of head-splitting brightness. Groaning, she closed her eyelids again, desperately trying to orient herself. She recognized a smell from her past. An underlying tang of human sweat masked by disinfectant and fresh paint: the smell of hospitals or prisons.

  Trying to move her hands again, she realized her arms were strapped to her body, as if hugging herself. But when she peered down her body and saw the straitjacket, she drew no comfort from its embrace.

  Kathy was breathing more quickly, close to panic. She had no idea at all where she was or how long she had been here. She had never felt more alone or abandoned in her entire life.

  Rolling away from the bright light above her, she gradually forced her eyelids open and waited for her blurred sight to focus on the surrounding area. She saw that she was lying in a featureless cube, every surface--wall, ceiling, and floor--an identical off-white. Pushing her head against the floor, she felt it give beneath her. This was a nightmare. She was in a padded cell.

  Inhaling deeply, she slowly tried to order her fractured thoughts. She remembered her angry conversation with Madeline Naylor about the unauthorized criminal trials, the terrifying revelation of Karl Axelman's lethal gene therapy, the missing files, and the shock of opening her apartment door to be confronted by the man with the gun and syringe.

  Calming herself, she told herself that she must have been drugged and then brought here to keep her out of the way and discredit her. No doubt Madeline Naylor and Alice Prince and whoever else was involved had already prepared a credible story to explain that their brilliant young scientist had been taken to the hospital for the sake of her mental health.

  She tried to remember what her kidnapper had said before injecting her, something about taking her somewhere quiet to recover for a few days. Did that mean until the election, so she couldn't jeopardize Pamela Weiss's precious announcement? Kathy took momentary solace from regaining her memory, but as her awareness increased, so did the realization that her predicament was hopeless.

  She thought of shouting for help, but her mouth was dry, and the cell would undoubtedly be soundproofed. She was lying stranded on the soft floor, and a suffocating heaviness and helplessness descended on her.

  As she lay there, her mind questioned why she had sta
rted working on curing violent crime in the first place.

  It was during her early teens at school in England that her study of Cesare Lombroso, a nineteenth-century Italian physician, had first put the idea into her head that a person's violent nature could be explained scientifically. From his research on criminals Lombroso believed that certain primitive instincts resurfaced from time to time in "modern" humans and could be identified in the structures of their facial features. For example, sexual offenders could be identified by their full lips, and murderers by their sloping foreheads.

  Even then Kathy had known Lombroso's theory of phrenology was nonsense. But as simplistic as Lombroso's ideas were, they opened her mind to the possibility that violent crime was caused and that guilt was in our natural makeup. To her way of thinking, there had to be a reason for everything.

  It was when her younger brother, Mark, suddenly committed suicide in her last year at school that her curiosity developed into a crusade. Unknown to anyone, he had been suffering since childhood from the mental illness called obsessive-compulsive disorder. In his mind he was convinced that he had murdered people even though he had done nothing of the kind. He secretly wandered the streets at night in search of his mutilated victims. He was convinced he would find them if he only looked hard enough, checking repeatedly, even though he knew at a rational level that his anxiety and guilt were ridiculous.

  If she'd known, she could have helped him. Drugs existed to moderate the serotonin in his brain and treat his symptoms. After his death the whole concept of guilt obsessed her. Why did some people have too much and others have none? She was convinced it was genetic. And if these genes could be identified and eventually modified, then senseless violence and senseless guilt could become a thing of the past.

  Now her dream had become a nightmare.

  Suddenly she heard the lock turn, and as the door opened, she saw a pair of black shoes enter and walk toward her. Looking up, squinting against the bright light, she saw a tall man in a white coat.

  "How are we feeling?" he asked, not unkindly.

  "Who are you? Where am I?"

  He stooped down toward her, and she could see he had gray, curly hair and round glasses. "Come, come. So many questions."

  "I shouldn't be here. You must let me out."

  "On the contrary, we can't possibly let you out. Although I must say you must have done something very wrong for me to have to give you this."

  She looked up and saw that he was holding a syringe and tried to roll away. "No, no more drugs. Just let me talk to someone."

  But the man was smiling now, humoring her. "Oh, we can't allow that. That's why you're here. Let me just give you this, and it'll help take all your unpleasant memories away." He held the stainless steel syringe up to the light and tapped it twice. She could see a bead of liquid form at the tip of the hypodermic needle and dribble down the side. "Don't worry, the first few injections don't do any lasting damage." He spoke in a calm, helpful voice as if informing her of the weather forecast. "They merely prepare you for the fourth one, which I'm afraid does have more long-term effects. I understand you have a history of mental illness in your family. Your brother, I believe?"

  "But why?" she screamed. "Why?"

  "I'm afraid I don't know that. But whatever you did or saw, I'm afraid that the time for regrets is over. I think you should sleep now. Everything always seems less confusing after a little sleep."

  She panicked now, screaming for help as loud as she could. When he knelt beside her, she tried to struggle, but the straitjacket was too tight.

  "Relax, there's nothing you can do about it. So, try not to worry yourself," he said, easily holding her still and injecting her arm.

  But she refused to stop struggling. Awake, she could at least think, but as she felt the drug work on her, she knew that even this freedom was being denied her.

  In her despair, fighting to maintain consciousness, one fragile thought, like the flicker of a distant flame in the darkness, gave her hope: that Luke Decker had somehow heard her improvised phone message and would know how to do something about it.

  Alice Prince screamed only when she saw the other girls. As soon as she saw Libby, she stopped.

  She had waited as long as she could before following Decker down here. She had always thought that nothing could be worse than the nightmares in which she had witnessed Libby endure every conceivable horror. But now, as Alice stared at the glass tank two feet ahead of her, she realized that she had been wrong. No nightmare could be as bad as this. Raising her hand, she placed it against her daughter's palm, pressed flat against the cold glass.

  Decker's voice was gentle when he spoke. "Dr. Prince, you shouldn't be here. Come, let me take you out of this place."

  Pushing him away, she walked closer to the glass, both hands flat against the glazed wall of Libby's grave. "Of course I should be here. I should have been here years ago. I should have been here to save my daughter from a monster."

  "Come," he said softly, directing her away from the cold glass, carefully guiding her down the avenue of grisly exhibits to the exit.

  "But why?" she demanded, her voice brittle. "Just tell me that."

  "I can't. I don't know."

  But she wasn't asking about what happened to Libby. "Tell me, Special Agent Decker, why did Karl Axelman tell you about this? Why did the killer tell you?"

  His green eyes were pained when he turned and met her gaze. Pale and tired, he looked like a broken man. "Because he was my father," he said.

  Chapter 17.

  FBI Field Office, San Francisco. Thursday, October 30, 8:12 P.M.

  Director Naylor didn't know what enraged her more, the fact that she hadn't been informed about Axelman's revelations to Decker or that Decker had let Alice Prince into the chamber of horrors.

  Naylor was supposed to have been in Los Angeles with Alice Prince attending the campaign dinner for President Bob Burbank and candidate Pamela Weiss on the eve of the Project Conscience announcement tomorrow. But just as the bureau jet was about to take off for LAX, the call had come through from George Raoul, the special agent in charge of the San Francisco office, telling her that Decker had found Axelman's stash of bodies. Raoul had told her because Dr. Prince was involved and had asked for her.

  After rushing back to see Alice Prince, who was now sedated at home, she had viewed the chilling exhibits and then commandeered the SAC's office in the San Francisco field office.

  She sat at Raoul's desk, looking at Special Agent Luke Decker. To her left, on the video conferencing screen, Deputy Director Bill McCloud looked on tiredly. His craggy face frowned as he scratched his hair. It was midnight in Washington.

  "Why the hell didn't you pass on what Axelman told you?" she interrogated Decker. "On my instructions Deputy Director McCloud expressly asked if you had received any new information before Axelman's execution. Yet you said nothing. Axelman may have claimed to be your father, but that's no excuse. You're the head of a major unit and should know better. That's why we have procedures, damnit: to avoid the complications of personal involvement. Did Axel-man tell you anything else?"

  She waited, but Decker said nothing. He looked beat: dark rings under his green eyes, his blond hair spattered with mud, and his face pale. She pressed on. "Decker, are you going to talk to me, or am I just going to have to suspend you on the spot? Alice Prince, a very good friend of mine, is now sedated after seeing her daughter's corpse. For that alone I would happily kick you out of the bureau. But for some reason, McCloud here's been begging me to save your sorry soul. He says that we need you, but frankly I don't believe him. Your record's good, but if you can't fit in with my bureau, then you're out of here. Do you understand that?"

  Again she waited, and again Decker remained silent. She was as surprised as she was annoyed. On the occasions in the past when they had met, they had always sparred. She didn't like him and thought the psychological mumbo jumbo he practiced in the behavioral sciences unit was obsolete. But she had al
ways grudgingly admired Decker's independence of spirit and the fact that he got results. Now he looked drained of all passion or care. She wanted to know what else Axelman might have told him or if Decker's famed powers of observation had gleaned something suspicious about Axelman's behavior before he died. But any concerns that Decker's mind might expose Crime Zero seemed groundless.

  As if to prove her right, Decker slowly reached into his mud-encrusted jacket and pulled out his badge. "You don't need to suspend me. I resign." He said it with no anger or emotion, as if he were reading lines.

  McCloud spoke then. He shook his head on the video screen. "Hey, Spook, don't be so hasty. Just go home. Get some rest. And think it over. OK?"

  McCloud turned to her. "Director, surely it would be better to discuss this later when everything's calmed down somewhat. We can get everything into perspective then. Decide things away from the heat of the moment." McCloud looked at her, pleading. Decker didn't seem to care either way.

  Naylor stared at Decker. He stared back. "You're fired," she said. "Now get out."

  As soon as Decker and McCloud had gone, the phone rang. "I have Governor Weiss for you," said a voice.

  "How is Ali?" was the first question Pamela asked.

  "She's back home now, sedated, but she's bearing up better than might be expected. In a perverse way she says it's helped. At least she can now bury Libby and grieve for her, knowing she's finally at peace. And you know Ali; she's stronger than she looks. She even made me tell you to use this as added ammunition in your announcement. I doubt she'll make it tomorrow, but I'll still be there."