Astrid watched him pause slightly as he noticed Brad’s scars. He looked away, but only after staring a moment too long.
He studied the licenses. “From Houston, huh?”
“Yes,” she said. “We’re here for the National Academy.”
“We’re staying in Washington Dormitory,” Brad added.
The Marine didn’t look at him again, just compared their names to those on his list. Made note of the car’s license plates. “Have a good night, Ms. Larotte. Mr. Collins.” He returned their fake IDs to them.
“Thank you,” she said.
And he waved them through.
No trouble. Just as Astrid had anticipated.
Brad had printed a map of the Academy grounds that afternoon. So now, as they passed out of sight of the checkpoint, he pulled it out and studied it under a flashlight. “Turn left,” he said.
He directed her past the FBI Forensics Lab, past Hogan’s Alley to a gravel lot at the end of the road.
She parked beside a trail disappearing into the mist-filled woods.
The entrance to the body farm.
She left the wig between the seats, grabbed a flashlight of her own, and climbed out of the car.
74
Astrid heard her story unfolding in her head. Fog had fingered its way between the trees and intertwined in the dense, thorny underbrush beside the path. For a moment it made her think of the fairy tale where the misty hedge encircles the castle imprisoning the sleeping princess-the girl who is oblivious to all the princes who’ve failed to find her; the princes whose bodies hang in the deep, secret heart of the thicket.
She paused to look at a body lying face-down in a stream about twenty feet to her left.
Brad stopped walking. Stood beside her.
He’d suggested that they find the location first, then return to the car to get everything they needed, rather than “dragging ’em through the woods.”
It might have been a waste of time, but Astrid had put up with the idea. Honestly, at this point she was thinking more about the news she was going to share with him than about the young man they’d come here to bury.
The uncomfortable odor of death drifted through the forest.
Brad consulted his map. “Okay. I’m thinking we head west about two hundred yards or so. No class is scheduled to visit that area until Monday.”
“How do you know that?”
“Research,” he said simply.
“Let me see that.”
He handed her the map, and she tipped her flashlight beam across it. He stood beside her. “No,” she said, “we should just do it here.”
“I was thinking it might be better over-”
“No.”
After a moment. “All right.”
“Let’s go get the-”
The deep, sharp prick on the side of her neck startled her; shocked her, made her jerk backward. “What the-” Her hand flew instinctively to her neck, found the needle still protruding from it. She would have yanked it out, but it was embedded deeply and she was already feeling dizzy.
Her hands dropped to her sides.
Brad had his arms out to catch her. “Easy.” She was aware, but somehow unaware, of the map and flashlight she’d been holding spinning to the ground. She must have let go of them. Must have… Now her legs were giving way and Brad was supporting her. “Don’t fight it, Astrid,” he said. “Don’t worry, it’s what we used on the guard the other night, what I used on Mollie. It won’t kill you.” “What are you
…” The words felt thick and raw in her mouth. He was lowering her to the ground. “Shh. Stay calm. All will be well.” She was on her back now and he was removing the needle from her neck. “Just relax,” she heard him say, or thought she did. Nothing was certain anymore. Time rippled forward and backward. She moved her mouth, tried to speak, but nothing came out. A fairy tale. The thick fog seemed to enter her, become part of her. And the last thing she saw before the world disappeared was her lover brushing a stray tendril of hair from her face, kneeling beside her in the veiled moonlight, telling her softly, softly, to go to sleep.
75
I lay propped in bed, my computer on my lap, exploring one of the as-of-yet unmapped caverns of this case.
Several of the neuroscience articles Rodale had sent me cited the Nobel-prize-winning research of Benjamin Libet, who’d done experiments in the late twentieth-century on initiation of action, intention, volitional acts, and consciousness.
Now I was scouring the Internet, reading about his work.
Apparently, Dr. Libet would record unconscious neural impulses while research participants anticipated and then performed simple tasks such as tapping a button or squeezing a ball. For example he might tell them, “As soon as you are aware of which button you wish to press, do so.”
By noting on a cathode ray oscilloscope the millisecond at which the participant was first aware of the urge to act and then measuring that against the brain’s electrical activity (and taking into account the time it took for their muscles to respond), he would compare the timing of the unconscious neural activity to that of the participant’s awareness of their intention to act.
And he found something surprising.
In almost every case, unconscious neural synapses preceded the conscious choice, or volitional act, that the person made-usually by about half a second.
Some skeptics have pointed out that the simple act of being observed or of rehearsing in your mind how you will respond during the experiment could be partially responsible for the precognitive neural responses. However, if you took the research findings at face value, you’d be forced to conclude that the unconscious mind determined the action or, to put it bluntly, a decision was made, and then five hundred milliseconds later, the test subject believed that she was making it.
The conscious mind took credit for a course of action that the unconscious had already determined.
And that’s where things got interesting.
Scientists have long known that some spinal reflexes, such as pulling your hand away from a flame, happen without a decision or any rational thought processes. But now, in the wake of Dr. Libet’s experiments and the recent discoveries in neuroscience, many scientists were apparently becoming convinced that complex decision-making also happens unconsciously, as a result of genetic coding being influenced by an individual’s environment and the context of a person’s experience and conditioning.
An uneasy thought began to squirm around inside of me.
This line of thinking-that our response to stimuli is shaped solely by natural processes: genetic makeup, brain chemistry, and neural synapses that are triggered by certain environmental cues-would mean that in all practicality, we are not free to consciously choose our actions. And if we are not free to choose, we are not at liberty to chart the course of our lives.
The inevitable conclusion, of course, was that “free will” would be an illusion.
And consequently, people would not be morally responsible for their behavior, because, in a sense, they would simply be acting out of instinct. After all, it would be unjust to hold someone accountable for something over which he had no control.
A few online searches confirmed what I feared: some killers had already called on neuroscientists to testify that their behavior was, in essence, hard-wired into their brains and that, given the environmental cues to which they were exposed, they had no choice but to act in the manner that they had. Thus, they could not be held responsible for the crime.
Because they were acting out of instinct…
An instinct for evil.
And astonishingly, this defense had been successful in at least half a dozen capital murder cases since October of last year; and now that the precedent had been set, it would undoubtedly become a more and more popular defense.
Science meets justice.
And justice loses.