Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy) (21 page)

“Where’d the dopamine go?” he said to no one in particular. “Probably where the vanillylmandelic acid went. Hmm . . .”

He read in silence for another minute, then asked Dani if the computer had unrestricted Internet access. When she said yes, he told her if she had anything else she needed to do today, now would be a good time, because he was going to need to look at all the numbers for the next hour or so, and he did his best thinking alone. Dani knew that once Quinn was lost in thought, it could be awhile before he found his way back, so she wrote her password on a Post-it, stuck it on the screen, and left.

She took the elevator up to the second floor and found Stuart Metz at his desk, working on his computer.

“Got a sec?”

“Sure,” he said as he hit Save and turned toward her.

“Anything on Abbie?”

Metz shook his head. “The LEOs want to call it an FDSTW and punt it back out the Sally port,” he said. “Or to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, ‘When you’ve eliminated the possible, just admit you’re too stupid to figure it out and give up.’”

Dani had heard enough cop slang to know that a LEO was a law
enforcement officer. The garage where they let prisoners out of the back of a squad car was the Sally port. FDSTW stood for
found dead, stayed that way
.

“Casey’s getting the okay today from Irene for a warrant to search the Gardener house,” Metz told her. “He’s afraid they’re going to find George in bed ART.”

“Stuart—”

“Assumed room temperature,” he said. “Last one, I promise. Casey thinks George might have assisted his mother’s suicide and then done himself in.”

“I must PMN,” Dani said, smiling, as she spun around. As she left she called over her shoulder, “Powder my nose.”

She wanted to ask Luisa, the receptionist, if she knew when Detective Casey was expected, but at the front desk she saw a note saying Luisa would be back in five. As she waited, Dani tried to read the cover of a Spanish-language edition of
People
, her attention drawn to a photograph of Cassandra Morton. She appeared to be doing nothing more than walking through an airport. The headline read, in a large red font,
SE LE ROMPIÚ CORAZÚN
, and beneath that, in a smaller font,
Su Lucha Valiente
. When Luisa returned, Dani asked for a translation.

“It says ‘He broke her heart.’” Luisa told her, “
‘Su lucha valiente
’ means ‘her brave struggle.’ That poor woman. She has such bad luck with men.”

“Poor Cassandra,” Dani said, “picking 999 bad men in a row. I mean, mathematically, what are the odds that that could possibly be true?”

She stopped when she saw the look on Luisa’s face—she couldn’t have been more hurt if Dani had told her her baby was ugly.

“I’m sorry,” Dani said, feeling like an idiot.

“That’s okay,” Luisa said. “I bet that’s the kind of thing you sometimes wish you could say to your therapy patients.”

Dani laughed. “Promise me that will be our little secret?”

The lights above the elevator indicated that someone was on the way up. She waited, hoping it was Tommy, though he didn’t know where she
was and she had no reason to expect him. When the doors opened she saw Detective Casey, wearing a tan windbreaker and a Boston Red Sox cap.

“You’re a brave man to wear that hat around here,” she said.

“If you’re brave enough to be seen with me,” he said, “we’re going up to the Gardener place in about an hour. I’ve got a locksmith meeting us there. What are you doing here, by the way?”

“I brought in a friend,” Dani said. “An expert, to consult on the Amos Kasden postmortem. Just in case there’s more where that came from.”

“More kids like Amos?” Casey said. “I certainly hope not. One was too many. Let me know if you learn anything. I’ll be in my office. You’ll be in the building?”

“Sure,” Dani said. “Do you mind if I bring Tommy?”

“He knew George, right? I mean, well enough to ID him, if it comes to that?”

“He did.”

“Yeah, bring him. And, Dani? If your friend figures anything out about Amos Kasden, I’d like to hear it.”

“You will.”

When she called Tommy’s cell, she was surprised that Carl answered.

He said Tommy was out in the chicken coop, getting eggs from the exotics he kept as a hobby. Dani told him about the warrant to get inside the Gardener house and asked him to have Tommy call her.

“My friend Quinn is going over the labs we got back on Amos Kasden,” Dani said. “Hopefully between that and the sample we got from whoever left it at Starbucks, we’ll know more soon.”

“What sample was that?”

“Are you getting forgetful in your senility?” Dani joked. “Anyway, I’ll let you know if we learn anything. If Quinn can’t figure it out, nobody can.”

“Where are you now?”

“At the DA’s, in Kisco. Can I ask you a question, Carl? And please don’t
tell Tommy I asked. But does he ever talk to you about Cassandra Morton? Just guy-to-guy stuff?”

“Guy to guy?” Carl paused, but in the silence, Dani had her answer. A simple no would not have taken any thought. He coughed. “Excuse me. Not since it happened. Why?”

“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 cerebellum,” 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.