She went back to the book. “I’m not ready.”
“Okay.”
I tried to figure out how best to balance my obligations as a dad with my duties as an FBI agent for the rest of the night, but in the end I decided that until Tessa was ready, I’d let her be and get back to seeing what I could dig up on Lansing’s amorphous past.
I took my laptop to the back porch, out of Tessa’s sight.
From the notes Christie had left in her diary, I knew that Lansing hadn’t changed his name since they met, so I logged onto the Federal Digital Database and typed it in. Both Angela Knight and I had looked into his past when I first found out he was Tessa’s father, but I hadn’t explored a Secret Service angle and I doubted she had either.
To begin, I targeted my search on the Secret Service’s discharges and transfers.
Electronic trails like this are rarely conclusive, but when the government decides to erase your identity, the cover-up is also rarely airtight, so although there were gaps in what I found, there was evidence that one of the agents had moved to Wyoming shortly after the shooting. I worked for nearly an hour, and in time I uncovered enough hints, references, and inconsistencies to convince myself that Lansing’s story was true.
In addition, I found that steps had been taken to remove the identity of one of the agents present the day of the assassination attempt.
Yes, Lansing had been an agent and he had been there that day, but I noticed one major discrepancy between his story and the information I found: it appeared that the agent who’d used lethal force on the gunman was the one who had moved out West, not an agent who’d run for cover.
Which in a way made sense, since it did seem odd that Vice President Fischer would remain friends with a disparaged Secret Service Agent whose failure to respond appropriately during an exchange of fire might have cost him his life.
After a few more minutes of looking through the files, I realized I wasn’t going to make any more headway here. I would have to ask Lansing about it when I saw him tomorrow at the custody meeting. Deal with it then.
For the moment I had what I needed, and there were a few other things that I needed to check into.
I clicked to my email and found that Director Rodale had sent eight pdf files containing the research articles he’d promised me. In addition, Congressman Fischer had kept his word and forwarded his phone records and the accounts of his Gunderson Foundation financial contributions.
Before reading through any of those files, though, I emailed the congressman expressing my sincere sorrow over what had happened to his daughter.
Finding the right words to say in a situation like that is one of the toughest things to do, and it took me awhile to find ones that were not mere platitudes.
At last when I was done, I cross-referenced the timing of his contributions against the list of potential suspects’ bank accounts, credit card statements, and bank deposit records, but found no correlation.
I studied the financial records themselves, but honestly they looked innocuous enough, although his contributions were surprisingly generous.
Nothing striking in the phone records, either, apart from a substantial number of calls to and from Director Rodale since March.
After I was satisfied, I perused the Project Rukh research from Rodale, most of which contained equations about the temporal and spatial correlation of hemodynamic and electrophysiological signals in brain imaging, and although much of it was indecipherable to me, I did recognize that the research centered around the neural impulses that relate to different areas of cognition.
Metacognition?
Theory of mind?
More caverns to the case.
Last February when I was working the case in San Diego in which we’d stumbled across Project Rukh, I’d met a neuropathologist named Dr. Osbourne. He’d mentioned this type of research to me, and I gathered from what I read here that some of his work had survived. I would have contacted him now, but he’d died in a head-on collision in March.
I wondered if there were any unusual circumstances surrounding his death, and I emailed Detective Dunn, a homicide detective in San Diego, to have him look into it for me.
As I was sending the email, I saw Tessa approaching the deck. She leaned her head out the door to speak to me. “I made supper plans.”
I glanced at my watch and realized it was almost 7:30. She must have been starving. “Right on.”
“Please don’t say ‘right on.’”
“Aren’t kids saying that again?”
“Yes. Kids are. Adults are not.”
“Gotcha. What’s for dinner?”
“Chinese. Delivery.”
A taste for Chinese food was one of the few things Tessa and I had in common. “Groovy,” I said.
She looked at me incredulously. “I hope I just misheard you.”
I smiled. “Come here.”
She pulled up one of the deck chairs. “It should be here in like twenty minutes or so.”
“Okay.”
It had been a hard day, and I wanted to comfort her but had no idea what the right words might be. I said, “This afternoon. The primate place, I know it upset you, and then the hotel, that was horrible-believe me, if I’d had any idea that either place-”
“I know, I know-you wouldn’t have taken me. Don’t worry, I’m just
…” She shrugged again. “Anyway…”
“If you decide you want to talk, I promise to listen and not say ‘right on’ the whole time.”
“Or groovy.”
“Or groovy.”
It was a long time before she finally spoke, and when she did, she was staring intently into the twilight-enshrouded woods rather than at me. “Patrick, do you believe some people are born pure evil?”
Her words struck me deeply but did not surprise me.
Considering everything that had happened over the past few days, it seemed like a pretty natural question to ask.
I couldn’t help but think of psychopaths like Richard Basque, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Sevren Adkins, Gary Ridgeway, and of course, the killers from this week and their grisly, shocking crimes.
You can’t work in law enforcement for any amount of time without the question of evil coming up, and over the years I’d thought about it frequently and eventually formulated an opinion, even if it wasn’t a complete answer.
“I guess I think of it more like we’re all born with a shell of good around us, but it’s fractured-for everyone it is. We all know what’s right-even psychopaths who lack empathy are aware of their lack of compassion. I think all people know what’s good, even though, all too often, we’re attracted to what is not.”
“To the fractures.”
“Yes.”
She thought for a moment. “Are you saying we have an instinct for evil?”
“I wouldn’t put it like that. But we definitely have a weakness for it. I guess I’d maybe even say an inclination toward it.”
She peered at the forest. “Because sometimes we enjoy doing it.”
“Yes.” It was troubling to admit. “Sometimes we do.”
“And if we’re good, then we seal up the fractures? Is that what you’re saying?”
This is where things got a little sticky. “Actually, I don’t think we can seal them, Tessa. I don’t think anyone ever has. That’s why we have to be aware of-”
“Dr. Werjonic.”
“What?”
“What he said: ‘The road to the unthinkable is not paved by slight departures from your heart, but by tentative forays into it.’”
“Yes.” I was reminded that I wasn’t the only one who was still mourning his death. “He did used to say that.”
We were both quiet.
I wasn’t quite sure I agreed with Calvin’s statement, but knowing that Tessa was familiar with Shakespeare, I said, “I know it sort of flies in the face of that old ‘to thine own self be true’ quote.”
She shook her head softly. “No, it’s the same.”