The touch of murder, p.28
The Touch of Murder, page 28
The gun fired.
The lack of light had sensitized Court’s other senses. The sound was nearly deafening and the flash from the muzzle was blinding.
Still, even with his ears feeling like they were plugged with water, he heard a guttural sound as something huge and heavy fell to the floor. This was followed by a wet, slapping noise.
“It’s me! It’s Court!” he cried out as he tried to will his senses back to full function. “It’s Court!”
He was worried that Veronica would turn, think that he was an accomplice of some sort, and fire blindly in his direction.
“I’m Court!” He groped around blindly, blinking like a man having a seizure, and felt what he thought was the back of a chair. “Don’t shoot!”
There was no second shot and after several seconds, maybe a minute, Court realized that he could see again.
Veronica, who was either less susceptible to the effects of the gunshot in the confined space, or had recovered more quickly than he, was hovering over a fallen form. Worried that she was readying to shoot again, even though Court could no longer see the gun, he scrambled to his feet.
“Veronica?” The detective appeared frozen and hurried to her side. “Veron—” —ica stuck in Court’s throat.
The detective was still holding her gun, but it was pressed against the side of her thigh. Beneath her was a monster.
It was also Dave Taylor… sort of. In some bizarre way, the monster reminded Court of a caricature that an artist at a local fair might draw. It exaggerated all of the unique characteristics of Dave’s face. Only, in the worst possible way. Everything was out of proportion—it was a haunted house version of a portrait.
“What’s—what’s wrong with him?” Court asked in a breathy whisper.
There was a golf ball-sized dot of blood on the man’s shoulder, one that was growing as they watched. But this change was the least worrisome.
David Taylor’s face was… deflating. Within seconds it started to look almost normal. This was so disturbing that Court felt his stomach lurch and he was forced to look away.
“What’s wrong with him?” Veronica repeated absently. Court tried to meet her eyes, but unlike him, she refused to take her gaze away from the monster. “He’s a murderer. That’s what’s wrong with him.”
Silence.
Even the sound of David’s breathing, which had been labored and wheezy, constricted as if he’d been on the verge of anaphylaxis, had regressed to something inaudible.
Then there was a familiar voice.
“Uhh, guys?” Freddie said. “Can one of you please untie these fucking ropes? Please?”
Chapter 63
None of the three officers understood what was happening. All they knew was that David Taylor was dangerous. After tying his wrists while he was lying down and unconscious, wrists that had shrunk considerably in size since even moments earlier, they used a set of scissors from the kitchen to cut away his sweatshirt. When they pulled off his shirt, they found a pair of thick, hand-held bolt cutters in the center pocket.
Bolt cutters that had been used to cut Jake’s, Cooper’s, and Frank’s ribs, allowing access to their lungs.
Veronica’s bullet had embedded itself in the fleshy part of David’s shoulder. The wound wasn’t serious and most of the bleeding had already stopped. The blood that had leaked from the hole was a deep crimson and stained David’s blotchy skin, which was normal and therefore unexpected. With the transformation they’d all witnessed, Veronica thought that dark green or black fluid, perhaps the consistency of thick paste and maybe even roiling with bubbles, would have been more appropriate.
She was still trying to understand what had happened to David and if the change was actually real. The idea that they’d all been drugged was still niggling at the back of her mind. They’d all taken different routes to get to Taylors’, making it unlikely that they’d been poisoned before arriving. But what about the house itself? Could there be something in the air? Some aerosolized hallucinogen?
Veronica looked at David. His face continued to deflate and if she hadn’t seen him minutes before, she might have concluded that he was just having an allergic reaction of some sort.
Were the drugs wearing off?
The scenario seemed unlikely, but the alternative was even more absurd. The fact that neither Court nor Freddie had said anything suggested that they were having a hard time understanding what had happened, as well.
“He’s… he’s still breathing,” Court remarked.
Was that relief in the cop’s voice? Or disappointment?
“What do you think—” Freddie was interrupted by the sound of someone approaching.
Veronica turned, her hand reaching for her holstered gun.
It wasn’t one person, but two. The person in the lead was large and Veronica briefly, very briefly, thought that it was another monster.
The other was small, diminutive, partially hidden by the much bigger man.
“Who—”
Veronica stepped toward the door.
“It’s okay,” she told her partner, who was primed for action. “I’ll take care of this.”
She made her way outside, careful not to move too quickly.
“Safe… safe… safe…” Mark informed her.
“Yeah, you did a great job. You kept Max safe,” Veronica said. “Now, I need—”
She heard a siren and then saw blue and red lights reflect off clouds in the distance.
“Cops… cops… cops…”
“That’s right, the cops are coming. You should probably go.”
Mark nodded and Max squeezed the man tightly.
“Thank you,” the boy said.
“Go… go… go…” The word trailed behind Mark as he scuttled away.
When Veronica turned her eyes back to Max, she saw that he was looking by her and into his house.
“It was my dad, wasn’t it? He was the monster?”
Veronica did a double inhale, but when she tried to force all the air out of her lungs, her chest rattled, and she sputtered.
She was exhausted. Fully and thoroughly exhausted.
There was something horribly familiar about standing on the porch of a child’s house while inside the body of a serial killer lay on the floor. With Beverly Tramell, her mother had been killed. Max Taylor’s father was still alive—they had Court to thank for that.
Once a killer, always a killer.
If the police officer hadn’t hit her shoulder, she would have put a bullet in David’s head. Wouldn’t she have?
The truth was no one would have blamed her. But no one had blamed her for shooting Gloria Tramell, either. That didn’t make it okay.
That didn’t make it right.
“Come with me.” Veronica put her arm over Max’s shoulder and guided him away from the front door. “I want to show you something.” She pulled out her wallet and removed the picture of her brother and Dante. “This is my brother,” she said, pointing at the shirtless, unsmiling boy. “I didn’t know him well, but he had a… well, he had a rough life. A hard life.” It was a struggle to get the words out. “It wasn’t his fault and…”
She wanted to tell Max that no matter what his father did, he didn’t have to follow in his footsteps. He could choose to be different.
But she cracked.
Tears welled and spilled over.
Veronica expected Court to comfort her, or perhaps Freddie, but it was Max who wrapped his arms around her shoulders.
The first officer arrived, a nameless foot soldier, and Veronica continued to cry until he was standing right beside them, wondering what in the fuck was going on.
A tear dropped onto the photo, landing next to Benny’s head, and Veronica wiped it away.
“He’s in there,” Veronica said, her voice hoarse.
“The call was for medical, too—is the suspect still alive?”
Veronica cringed at the word ‘suspect’. At least he hadn’t said ‘monster’.
“He’s alive.”
Now Max started to cry, and it was Veronica’s turn to hold the boy.
Chapter 64
During the remainder of the night, David Taylor experienced three episodes. Veronica, who had chosen to sleep in the same room as the man handcuffed to the bed, witnessed the first and third such events.
After transporting him to the hospital, David was sedated and immediately prepped for surgery to remove the bullet from his shoulder. During the time between Veronica shooting him and surgery prep, David’s appearance continued to improve until he looked exactly the same as he had during their interview.
Perhaps because of the chaotic circumstances—someone in the media had caught wind of them bringing in a serial killer—Veronica hadn’t been able to find anyone to provide her with answers. The media circus had also forced the hospital into lockdown mode, which meant only one of them was permitted to stay in David’s room. Her phone had also been confiscated, effectively cutting her off from communicating with Court or Freddie. That was fine by her—Freddie had always been better at paperwork, anyway.
The good news was that others had seen David’s transformation—the EMT who had treated him at the scene, for instance, although he only witnessed the tail end of it—suggesting that they hadn’t been drugged.
Or maybe that wasn’t good news.
Veronica would have to wait to pass judgment on that one.
Following successful surgery, and while David was still sedated, one of the doctors had attempted to subject him to an MRI.
This turned out to be a mistake.
Since no metal was allowed in the MRI room, David couldn’t be handcuffed to anything. Chest straps held him in place, but they didn’t look nearly strong enough to contain what Veronica had seen down the sights of her barrel. Shortly after the machine started its characteristic thuck, thuck, thuck noise as it worked to see inside David’s head, he began to change. Unlike the transition from monster to David, the transformation from David to monster was horrifyingly quick. Veronica, who watched through protective glass, could actually see it happening, even though David’s face was hidden inside the machine.
His hands were a dead giveaway. David’s fingers started to swell and twitch. It was like watching someone inflate latex gloves under a faucet until nearly bursting.
Veronica alerted a tech to this change, and they immediately shut off the machine. With a trio of security guards, they rushed into the room.
David was confused and while the chest straps would have been easy enough for him to break free of, he was too disoriented to do anything but thrash and thrust.
He was sedated and the change—which still nobody could explain—quickly reverted.
The second time David became a monster, Veronica was so exhausted that she slept through the entire ordeal. When she woke to use the bathroom, the doctors informed her about it.
The third time, Veronica was pretty sure she induced the change. As morning approached, David started calling out for his son. Veronica, roused from her slumber, looked over at the man. And then she thought of her and Max, holding each other and crying.
The doctors had warned against upsetting David, thinking that this might be a trigger for what they were unprofessionally referring to as ‘the change’, but Veronica couldn’t help herself.
Despite Veronica showing David the mounting evidence, the photographs of the victims, the knife he’d been holding, the bolt cutters he’d had in his possession, David didn’t believe a word of it.
He thought she was lying—according to him, she had to be lying, because he had never hurt anyone.
The entire time, during every denial, Veronica failed to detect even the faintest of gasoline smells.
When Veronica told David about how Max had seen him as a monster trying to shove a bloody sweatshirt in the trash the man got angry.
First, David’s face flushed. Then his cheeks puffed like a kid who was trying to hold their breath underwater. Only, this puffiness soon spread to his brow and around his eyes.
Veronica, legitimately terrified even though she’d seen this show before, scrambled toward the door. She was afraid that the man’s wrists would swell so badly that the handcuff would snap.
Thankfully, a nurse appeared and called in reinforcements.
Sedation calmed David’s appearance and mind but Veronica, still not feeling one-hundred percent safe, elected to stay outside the room for the next little while.
As she waited, Veronica realized that she recognized one of David’s doctors: Dr. Kincaid, the same man who had treated Sheriff Steve Burns, who was, as far as she knew, still in this hospital, albeit on a different floor.
Steve… she hadn’t thought about Steve in a while.
“Dr. Kinkaid? Any idea what’s wrong with him?” Veronica asked when the doctor, head down, left the room.
Dr. Kinkaid looked at her with eyes surrounded by dark circles that rivaled her own.
“I’m Detective Shade, I was the one—”
“I know who you are.”
“Right, of course you do.” Veronica had forgotten all about their interactions while in Steve’s room. There was a strange parallel to sleeping in the hospital next to the sheriff and then David, but she didn’t want to consider this now. “Any update?” She gestured toward David who was now sleeping peacefully. The dichotomy from the man’s rage just moments ago was nearly enough to give her vertigo.
“Can’t make a conclusive diagnosis yet,” Dr. Kinkaid began. “But we did get some results back.”
“And?”
“Well, Mr. Taylor had massive levels of IGF-I in his blood—I’m talking a hundred times what we would normally find. Even stranger is that the first blood test was near normal. I didn’t think it possible for levels to fluctuate so quickly, or so dramatically, but—”
“I’m sorry,” Veronica interrupted. “IGF-I?”
“Insulin-like growth factor. That, coupled with a dramatic increase in growth hormone, is what we think might be responsible for his dramatic change in appearance.”
Veronica had heard of growth hormone before—she’d encountered it in a case a while back in which a bodybuilder had bludgeoned someone to death with a dumbbell at a commercial gym. They discovered he was injecting growth hormone in addition to other steroids. The doctors then had been hesitant about blaming the man’s behavior on the injections and had settled on naming them as ‘non-insignificant contributors’.
Not enough for a diminished capacity defense, anyway.
But this didn’t make sense. David Taylor was thin, drawn, perhaps the furthest thing from a bodybuilder.
“You’re telling me that he was injecting growth hormone?”
“No, not injecting.”
Dr. Kinkaid opened the folder in his hands and withdrew a series of images. Veronica immediately recognized them as MRI scans—as a child, Dr. Jane Bernard had subjected her to many when they were still trying to figure out the origins of her sensory hallucinations. One of the images showed a colorful overlay indicating strong activity in a region—reds, oranges, and yellows—smack dab in the middle of David’s brain.
This reminded Veronica of her synesthesia and the fact that on none of the occasions that David Taylor had become violent had she seen any colors at all.
“We didn’t manage to complete the MRI because of the, uhh, transformation,” Dr. Kincaid said, “but based on the IGF and GH levels, along with this abnormality here in the pituitary, I think we might have narrowed down the root cause.”
Veronica still didn’t understand.
“What is it?”
“Again, without pathology, we can’t confirm—”
“Doc, I’m too exhausted for this. Please, just tell me why this seemingly normal man transforms into a… into a… into a monster.”
Freed from her sins.
The thought came from nowhere and made Veronica shudder.
“A rare pituitary gland tumor. Best guess is that David Taylor is suffering from a tumor that pumps out abnormal levels of IGF-1 and growth hormone in concert. This is what’s causing him to change.”
Veronica pursed her lips.
Surely, the doctor was pulling her leg.
“A tumor? A tumor is what turns him into a monster?” She looked at David through the glass and remembered Jake Thompson sitting on a chair, blood on his chest and thighs, lungs pulled out his back. “A tumor made him do this?” Veronica shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.”
“I’ve seen something like this before, but usually these changes are more permanent,” Dr. Kinkaid admitted. “I’ll have to review the literature, but the transient nature of his transformation might have something to do with him becoming prone. David Taylor lying down could trigger the tumor to pump out abnormally high levels of GH and IGF-1, causing transient acromegaly, and the redistribution of body fluid to his face and hands. Again, just a hypothesis and more tests need to be done, but…” the doctor shrugged and let his sentence trail off.
Veronica struggled to wrap her mind around what the man was saying. She wanted to reject this theory but what else could explain the way that David Taylor had changed before her eyes?
“Okay, well, how come when he stood up and started to walk around and murder these people he didn’t change back?” She was trying, and failing, not to sound petulant.
“Well, it could take time. I suppose it depends on how long he was on his feet during the day and how long he was lying down before the pressure inside his head woke him up.” Dr. Kinkaid didn’t quite sigh but came close. “The truth is, Detective Shade, I’m only giving you a hypothesis of the most likely scenario here. There is still much to learn.”
Veronica was weary of being duped—not by the doctor but by David Taylor. Everyone who was even tangentially related to law enforcement knew the legend of the man who was charged with murder and pled insanity. Against the advice of his lawyers, he decided to take the stand in his own defense. Then he proceeded to put his hand down the back of his pants, scroop out a handful of what looked to be shit, and then licked his palm clean.
