A triple homicide in Maryland last month. Two police officers had been killed as well as a female civilian, apparently as the result of a domestic dispute. Anderson seemed to think that the proximity to DC, a crime scene that appeared staged, and a possible discrepancy between the arrival time of the husband at the house and the time of death of the officers made it a crime to look into.
However, Philip Styles, the woman’s husband, had pled guilty, presumably to avoid the death penalty, and was now in jail awaiting his sentencing trial. A connection seemed unlikely to me.
Still, we had four separate crimes that might be linked to the killings this week. And despite my initial impressions, I needed to have a closer look at them.
Taking a bite of my Snickers, I clicked to the first crime listed to try to eliminate, rather than corroborate, its relationship to this week’s crime spree.
88
8 hours left…
1:29 p.m.
Brad used his fake ID to gain entrance to the police headquarters’ parking garage.
“I’m a National Academy student,” he explained to the officer by the gate. “I was asked to help with the Fischer case’s task force.”
The officer called Quantico and verified Mr. Collins’s name and license plate against the NA student roster, and let him through.
As Brad searched for a parking place, he thought about his plan.
Q. How best to destroy someone?
A. Kill the person he loves the most.
And of course, where most killers get it wrong is that they assume there’s only one kind of death.
Killing someone psychologically, slaughtering his reason for living, destroying his hope-these are at least as satisfying endeavors as just slitting his throat.
Q. What is a fate worse than death?
A. Wanting to die but not being able to.
Q. So, hell.
A. Yes. Or being buried alive.
And again, you could be buried alive in more ways than one. Some pain is even more suffocating than the lack of air.
He found a parking spot surprisingly near the car he was looking for. He left his vehicle, walked toward it.
After this week, the world would know who was behind these crimes.
And Bowers would come after him.
He had no doubt about that.
But the secret to defeating your enemy isn’t by letting him focus all of his energies on you, it’s by making sure that he can’t.
Take the life of your subject’s loved one, and you will indeed suffer the consequences; destroy her psychologically, and you make him spend time and energy taking care of her rather than searching for you.
Split his loyalties, his priorities, use his love to divert him.
Don’t let him concentrate wholeheartedly on the hunt.
Brad picked the car’s lock and left the surprise behind.
Ever since arriving at the Library of Congress three hours ago, Tessa had been trying to figure out what it means to be human.
And it was not as easy as it might seem to find the answer.
And that was really starting to annoy her.
She glanced at the pile of reference books around her and the notes she’d typed into her computer.
Okay, so first you had the religious party-line answer: created in the image of God.
But there was no real consensus, even among religious people, on what that meant-creativity, imagination, love, curiosity, dignity, freedom, responsibility… The list went on and on depending on which author you chose and on what he or she, a priori, seemed to feel was distinctive about Homo sapiens. So, circular reasoning.
Besides, it hadn’t taken her long to find out that the Bible never says humans are the only animals with consciousness or intelligence or emotions or politics or self-awareness or even the only creatures with a spirit.
That last one had surprised her.
She pulled up the verse she’d stumbled across while reading a church treatise from the nineteenth century-Ecclesiastes 3:20-21: “All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?”
The spirit of man.
The spirit of the beast.
She’d wondered if “the beast” was like Satan or something, so she’d checked a couple other translations; most rendered the phrases “the spirits of man” and “the spirits of animals” or something very close.
People could interpret those verses however they wanted, but she figured that for now she would just take them at face value.
Animals have spirits.
People have spirits.
So, putting the whole “who has a spirit/soul” question aside, from a naturalistic point of view, humans are simply highly evolved apes who, at some point, acquired abstract thinking that facilitated language use and the eventual development of the societal expectations and behaviors we have today. So humans would not be essentially different from animals at all.
Different only by degree.
Not kind.
In fact, over the last hour she’d discovered that a growing number of bioethicists were abandoning the whole idea of “human,” arguing that it’s an artifice based on anthropocentrism and our vanity as a species. But anyone could see that as soon as you erase the uniqueness of humanity, you take away the basis for moral responsibility.
After all, chimpanzees aren’t held accountable for murdering their weak. Why should we be? Especially since, in the long run, it would only serve to help natural selection create a more vibrant and successful species?
But most of the atheists she was reading weren’t advocating murdering the weak.
Most.
She looked at the notes she’d scribbled.
Through the years, evolutionist thinkers like Hobbes, Huxley, Freud, who all held unflinchingly to natural selection, had inexplicably encouraged people to rise above their natural instincts, a view shared by atheist proselytizer Richard Dawkins: “In our political and social life we are entitled to throw out Darwinism, to say we don’t want to live in a Darwinian world.”
Okay, but how, if we’re the result of our genes, can we “throw out” being the result of our genes?
Talk about being illogical.
You can’t have it both ways-either we’re determined to be as we are by natural selection, or we’re not. And only if we’re not can we act in ways that are contrary to instinct. An animal constrained by instinct can’t suddenly decide to become something that instinct doesn’t allow it to be.
So, if natural selection really was natural and not somehow guided by God, the entire spectrum of human behavior would be natural. Instinctual. The good stuff and the bad stuff. All just part of being a highly evolved primate.
A species being true to itself.
People being true to their hearts.
To the fractures.
And the whole idea of “man’s inhumanity to man” would be a logical contradiction, because it would be impossible for a human to act in a nonhuman, or inhuman, way.
Chilling.
Bestiality, infanticide-just part of human nature.
Greed, cowardice, slavery-well, they must have had a beneficial role in survival or reproduction, or else natural selection would have weeded them out.
And from there things just got worse.
The entire field of medicine-the practice of keeping the sick and genetically deficient (whatever that might mean) alive as long as possible, is actually counterproductive to natural selection and the advancement of the species-especially considering the earth’s diminishing natural resources.
So why do it?
After all, natural selection requires the death of the weak for the good of the species, so why fight it?
What is good for the species is good.
What is bad for the species is bad.
Letting AIDS victims or starving children in Africa die would be moral. So would euthanizing the mentally or terminally ill. And since teenage girls are the most likely to reproduce, selective breeding and forced copulation with adolescent girls exhibiting genetically desirable traits would be acceptable, even desirable for the species.