Ever since leaving the meeting with Margaret nearly half an hour ago, I’d been sitting in a secluded, vacant cubicle watching women die.
I’d requested copies of the seven DVDs, and, using one of the police station’s computers, I accessed my laptop. Then I uploaded the videos of the women into CIFER and used it to play them simultaneously on the screen, just as I’d done with the trolley depot videos the day before.
Any one of these videos might give Lien-hua some tangible evidence to use in the interrogation, so I forced myself to watch even though it was gut-wrenching and deeply troubling.
The shortest of the death videos was about three minutes in length, the longest was over an hour, so I knew I wouldn’t have time to watch all of them through to the end, but by playing the videos at twice their normal speed, I could look for similarities in how they were filmed, in the camera angles, in the responses of the women.
I found that all of the women were dressed in the same style dress.
All were chained to the bottom of the tank, although the chains appeared shorter than the one used on Cassandra. All were barefoot. All were terrified. Lewis didn’t move the cameras around the warehouse, but preferred filming from the same location. Some of the videos had been edited in numerous places, just like Cassandra’s, and some included fast-forward footage to get to the final ghastly conclusion, but what struck me the most was the resiliency of the women. All of them stood with their bodies turned sideways to the camera, in the direction of the warehouse doors, facing freedom.
Always looking toward freedom. And of course at the end of each of these videos, the women all died.
The whole time I watched, I was wrestling with a deep swirl of anger and frustration with Margaret, with Tessa, with myself. After all, no matter what anybody is doing, there’s always a lot going on beneath the surface of our lives. Maybe it’s better that we can’t shut off our feelings and our dreams and our regrets in one area of life when we’re trying to concentrate in another, but it would certainly make life easier if we could.
Finally, with only fifteen minutes left before the interrogation, I realized I was overlooking the obvious: the tank hadn’t been constructed just for Cassandra but had been used in at least seven murders. That meant it’d been there since November. So whoever owned that warehouse would be a good person to talk to.
I pulled up an Internet browser and began going through plat books and city registries.
But as time ticked away, I ran into yet another series of dead ends.
The property was owned by Richardson and Kirk, Inc., a company based in Austin, Texas.
Which was a subsidiary of Briesen Industries, located in Detroit, Michigan.
Which was owned by a multinational manufacturing conglomer-ate based in Germany.
Which didn’t seem to help us one bit.
At least I did find out that Richardson and Kirk Inc. bought the warehouse on November 2-seven months after the arsons started, and nine days before the first woman disappeared.
At last, with only five minutes left until the interrogation, I was gathering up my notes when I heard Ralph’s heavy footsteps pounding down the hall. His form shadowed the doorway. “Margaret found something on our guy,” he said. “Looks huge.
C’mon.”
We found Lien-hua, Margaret, and Lieutenant Graysmith all gathered in the lieutenant’s office, and Margaret got right to it. “I don’t want to hold up the interrogation, but we have some new information that I believe will be helpful.”
We waited. She looked us each in the eye, savoring the power her long pause had over the conversation. “I followed up on Agent Jiang’s suggestion about a possible connection between our suspect and the witness protection program. No connection-I wasn’t surprised. However, I did have the cybercrime division do an Internet facial search using Mr. Neville’s mug shots from last night, and fifteen minutes ago we found out his name is not Neville Lewis.
His real name is Creighton Melice-history of battery, assault with a deadly weapon.”
She slid a file folder to Lien-hua, who started paging through it.
Margaret continued, “After posting bail in November for a second-degree murder charge in DC, he failed to show up for trial, and the only eyewitness was later found dead in the backseat of a car, tied up, gagged, and strangled. The ME concluded she’d been tortured prior to her death. No suspects.”
I noticed Lien-hua place her digital audio recorder on the table and press “record.”
“Our man, Creighton Melice, has a condition,” Margaret said.
“That will be important to monitor throughout the interrogation.”
“What condition is that?” Lieutenant Graysmith asked.
“He doesn’t feel pain.”
Ralph leaned forward. “What?
“Is that even possible?” asked Graysmith.
She pointed to the folder. “It’s extremely rare, but yes. It’s possible. He has congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis, or CIPA. The sensory neurons that register pain never developed. It’s so rare there’ve only been ninety-eight cases ever diagnosed in the United States. Creighton Melice is number fifty-four. Apparently, it’s almost unheard of for someone with CIPA to survive until adulthood. And the ones who do rarely make it unscathed-bone fractures, burns, infections that all go untreated.”
She consulted her notes again. “Last year a teething baby in South Dakota chewed off two fingers before her mother noticed.
Three years ago, an eight-year-old boy in Pakistan tried washing his face with boiling water. Recently, a thirteen-month-old boy from Scotland broke his ankle and ran around the emergency room with his foot flopping sideways on the floor, giggling, as he was waiting to be seen by a doctor-”
“OK, that’s enough,” Graysmith said. “We get the picture.”
I was amazed that Margaret and her team had been able to pull up all of this information on Melice and his condition in less than twenty minutes.
She went on, “No one really understands what causes it, but the gene responsible for it has been identified as…” She looked down one more time. “TrkA1. Apparently mutations of that gene block the growth of certain nerve endings.”
“Can he feel anything at all?” Graysmith asked. “Or was he born with only four senses?”
Margaret flipped to the third page of her notes. “It seems people with CIPA can feel different textures and pressure on their skin, but that’s all. And they show no change in blood pressure, heart rate, or respiration when exposed to painful stimuli. They can undergo surgery, including amputations, without anesthetic.”
“Congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis,” I mumbled.
“It’s congenital, so people are born with it, and it would tend to run in certain families.”
“And anhidrosis means you can’t sweat,” Lien-hua added. “So, the condition must disable the body’s ability to feel temperature.” “That is correct, Agent Jiang,” said Margaret. It looked like it pained her to say it, to actually affirm Lien-hua. “People with CIPA don’t feel either hot or cold stimuli. So, not that you would do this anyway…” She paused… paused… paused… finally concluded, “But it would do no good to threaten Mr. Melice during your interrogation. The man you’re about to interview has never felt pain in his entire life.”
“Only caused it,” Ralph muttered.
“And that means he didn’t feel anything when Lien-hua kicked him,” I said. As I was considering what, if any, significance that might have, the door opened, and Dunn leaned into the room.
“He’s ready.”
Lien-hua grabbed her notepad and her digital voice recorder.
“So am I.”