AMNESIA
PROLOGUE
The two armed sheriff’s deputies standing guard in the hospital hallway were bored. You could see it on their faces and in their posture. Probably it was because the crimes committed by the man they were assigned to watch had occurred many years ago and in a different state, making it all an abstraction to them. They hadn’t lived through the seventeen months of horror themselves, so it was old and yellowed news.
In the control room, the first color photo that was about to be shown to the patient in the MRI machine flashed up on the laptop controlling the display program.
“Jesus, I never saw anything like that before,” the MRI tech said. “I may lose my breakfast.”
On the screen was a dreadful array of bone and blood, sinew and skin. Through the gore, a displaced eye could be seen dangling like a spent flower.
“He did that?” the tech said, jerking his head toward the window that allowed them to see the lower third of the patient waiting for his brain to be scanned. The rest of his body was inside the putty-colored machine.
“With a hammer,” the gaunt man supervising the test said. “He likes hammers. As nearly as they can figure it, she was his second victim.”
“How many were there?”
“Fifteen, they think. Could we get started? I’ve got other things to do.”
“Sure,” the tech replied, working the MRI keyboard.
“How long does a run take with this model?”
“Ninety seconds. I’ll get ten baseline images, then I’ll show him your photo series as we acquire ten more images. We’ll finish the run with a final ten taken as his brain returns to baseline after he’s seen the final picture.”
“I’m particularly interested in his prefrontal cortex and the amygdala.”
“No problem. We’ll be doing sixteen different planes of section simultaneously, so you’ll get a good sampling of the area you want.” He flipped a switch that turned on the mike communicating with the scan room.
“Mr. Odessa, we’re going to start now. We’ll need you to hold your head perfectly still for about a minute and a half.” The tech flipped off the mike and looked at the man with him. “Why is he cooperating so well?”
“We have an understanding.”
The tech began the run. In a few seconds, ghostly slices of Vernon Odessa’s brain began to appear on the imaging screen.
The gaunt man’s question about the length of the run had caused the tech to wrongly believe he didn’t know much about this type of analysis. “Those are purely structural images,” the tech explained. “After we get the functional series, a computer will calculate the difference in blood flow stimulated by the photos you’ve brought. The integrated images will appear on that monitor behind me.”
The gaunt man’s eyes flicked upward to the patient beyond the window as the run commenced. He was excited, but it wasn’t obvious because he was a master at hiding his feelings. Observe and learn, but never let others learn about you. His patient, Vernon Odessa, was a prize, a psychopath of his very own, like a pet he could control and study whenever he felt like it.
The seconds struggled by.
“Moving into functional mode,” the tech said finally. He flipped the mike switch. “Mr. Odessa, you should now be seeing the first photo in the mirror directly above you.”
To control his anticipation, the gaunt man tried to imagine what was going on in Odessa’s brain.
The photos flicked by on the laptop at six-second intervals until the tech said, “Tasking finished and returning to baseline.” He looked up at the man beside him. “We should see the integrated results in about forty seconds.”
His hands perspiring, the gaunt man turned to the monitor behind him.
Time in the control room now began to pass like a frozen river.
Waiting… waiting…
Then there they were, morphing onto the screen in succession from the front of Odessa’s brain to the back.
Incredible… the deep-brain EEGs he’d done earlier were correct, for the frontal cortex and the amygdala on the functional MRI images were both glowing red with activity, like a normal brain… not dead like the brain of other psychopaths.
What then made this man kill?
It was puzzling, but so exciting.
The logical next step in his research slowly unfolded in his mind like the birth of something hideously deformed. And he found it appalling. But even as he stood there, marshaling all the reasons it couldn’t… shouldn’t be done, he knew that it was only a matter of time before he gave in.
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