Purity in Death (In Death #15)(48)

Eve wagged a thumb at the doorway, and Baker stepped out.

"Mr. Hippel?"

He lifted his head. His skin was a rich chocolate just now faintly tinged with the green of nausea.

"I've never seen . . . I've never . . . It's the first . . ."

"Do you want some water, Mr. Hippel?"

"No, I . . . The officer got me a glass. My insides are too shaky to drink."

"I need to ask you some questions. I'm Lieutenant Dallas."

"Yeah. I saw you on-screen doing that deal with Nadine Furst." He tried to get his lips to curve up, but they just trembled. "She's hot. I always try to catch her segments."

"She'll be thrilled to hear that." Eve sat down on a small, tufted chair. "Ms. George contacted you."

"Yeah. I hadn't heard from her in a couple weeks. We broke things off. Mutual," he said quickly. "We didn't fight or anything. Just time to move on, that's all. Okay, maybe she was a little steamed. Maybe I wanted to move on more than she did, but we didn't fight. Okay, maybe we had an argument."

He choked on his own guilt, spit out information while Eve sat in silence and let him run through it. "Maybe we yelled at each other some. Jesus, Jesus, she didn't do that because I dumped her, did she?"

"When did the dumping take place, Jay?"

"Maybe two weeks ago. It'd been coming on. I mean, hey, she's a fine-looking, sexy lady and all. Plenty of coin, too. But I'm twenty-four, and she's not. Guy needs a piece or two his own age once in a while, right? Only natural. And Mary Ellen, she was getting a little territorial. Crimping my style, got me?"

"Yeah. The last time you saw her, did you notice anything different about her?"

"Different? No. Same old Mary Ellen."

"She didn't complain of headaches or discomfort."

"She was feeling fine. We went out to a club, had some laughs, got ourselves a privacy room and banged. Came back out for a couple drinks, and she sees me scoping out some skirts and gets steamed. So we had a kind of argument and broke it off."

"And today, when she contacted you?"

"She looked bad. Man. Nose was bleeding, her eyes are all red. She's crying and yelling. I didn't know what the hell."

"What did she say to you?"

"Said I had to help her. 'Somebody's got to help me.' Said she couldn't stand it anymore. 'They're screaming in my head' is what she said. I tried to calm her down, but I don't even think she heard me. I thought she said: 'They're killing me.' But she was crying so hard, I'm not sure. I thought somebody must be hurting her, all that blood on her face. So I called emergency and got my ass over here. I work just around the corner at the Riverside Cafe. How I met her. I got here right before the cop, and I'm trying to get them to let me go up. Then the cop came, and we went up, came inside. There she was."

He lowered his head again, this time all the way down between his knees.

***

When she finished at the scene, she swung by the morgue. Morris already had Mary Ellen George's brain removed.

Even for a seasoned homicide cop, the sight of that pulpy mass of gray matter on a sterile scale was a little off-putting.

"Definitely expanded her mind," Morris said. "But it doesn't appear she managed it by reading the great works of literature or exploring other cultures."

"Har-de-har. Tell me you've isolated the cause."

"I can tell you this. Preliminary scan shows a healthy forty-two-year-old female. Broke her left tibia at one point, healed beautifully. She's had some minor face and body work. Excellent job all around. Have to wait on the tox reports to tell you if she considered her body a temple or believed in chemical enhancements."

"Her body's not a big concern of mine right now. Tell me about her brain."

"Massive swelling that would have resulted in death within hours. Irreversible, in my opinion after the initial spread of infection, which is confirmed on the other brains in question by the neurologist I've brought in. The brain contains no foreign matter, no tumor, no chemical or organic stimulant. The infection, for lack of a better word, remains unidentified."

"You're not making my day here, Morris."

He gave her a little come-ahead with his finger, rinsed his hands, then brought an image onto a monitor. "Here you've got a computerized cross-section of the brain of a normal, healthy fifty-year-old male. Here." He tapped a key. "You've got Cogburn's."

"Christ."

"In a word. You can see the increased mass, the bruising where it was squeezed as the pressure increased. The red areas indicate the infection."

"It spread through, what, more than fifty percent?"

"Fifty-eight. Notice that some of the red is darker than others. Older infection. This would seem to be the area where it began. This leads us to believe it was an initial optical attack, and here . . . audio."

"So, it's caused by something he saw, something he heard."

"He may not have been able to hear or see it-not with ears and eyes. But a bombardment on these two senses into the lobes of the brain that run them."

"Subliminal then."

"Possibly. I can tell you that what we found so far indicates that the infection can and does spread quickly, causing the swelling to increase, sector by sector. Whether it's self-generated or requires further stimuli, we haven't determined. I can tell you that the pain and suffering this process would cause is unspeakable."