Page 43 of Cadaver Lab: Mind Over Murder

Usually shy and demure, a product of her Victorian upbringing and early death, today Millie looked positively bubbling over with excitement.

She launched right into what she had to say. “I was watching a documentary about John Wayne Gacy.”

“The serial killer?” Natalie asked.

Millie nodded.

Gabe squeezed her hand. “Millie’s become quite a true crime fan.”

“The show said he requested that the psychiatrist he’d been working with be given his brain to study after his execution,” Millie said excitedly.

“Which raised the question, whose brain is it that you’ve got in your lab, big guy?” Gabe asked pointedly. “Because all this shit started the day that brain arrived.”

Natalie’s eyes widened at the theory.

“He’s right. It’s the brain,” she whispered, first to herself. Then she raised her gaze and the volume of her voice and said again, “Liam, it’s the new brain.”

The more she thought about it, the more clear it became, this thing had been orchestrating every bad thing that had happened in Mudville since… since the evening of that fateful Rotary meeting.

The certainty of it hit her as forcefully as if it were a physical blow. The knowledge clear as day, because what else had happened that day?

Liam got a new brain for the lab. She heard ominous threatening whispers in the lab. And, worst of all, Doug had died.

Gabe scowled. “I told you freaking Doctor Jekyll here and his damn experiments were trouble. He’s killing people now!”

Ignoring Gabe’s insults, Natalie turned to her boyfriend. “Liam, think about it. Everything started happening on the day that new brain was delivered to the lab. It had to have come attached to a spirit.”

“The spirit of a probable murderer,” Gabe added.

“The Murder Accountability Project estimates there are as many as two-thousand unidentified serial killers active in the United States today. Some experts say that number is low and it could be double,” Millie quoted, suddenly a surreally incongruous font of knowledge regarding modern day murder.

“See! You could easily have brought the brain and the ghost of a murderer here,” Gabe accused.

What if after a prisoner with no immediate family and no instructions for their burial died, their body was automatically donated to science? She didn’t know, but that New York State might be giving the bodies of inmates incarcerated for murder to the Albany Anatomical Gift Program suddenly seemed more and more like a distinct and horrifying possibility to her.

Natalie looked to Liam. “Can you find out whose brain it is?”

Liam shook his head. “You know the rules. Anatomical donations are completely anonymous.”

Gabe shook his head. “It wouldn’t help anyway. You heard Millie. Two-thousand unidentified and active serial killers, if not more. Nat, we could have the brain of a killer who just never got caught.”

Millie nodded. “The chance of getting caught for murder in this country is only fifty percent, down from between eighty to ninety percent in the nineteen-sixties.”

“See! You have to return that brain. Send it back to where it came from.” Gabe glared at Liam, who couldn’t see him so didn’t know it.

Liam scowled. “I’m not sending back a perfectly good specimen without proof. This could all be coincidence.”

“How many more attacks does there have to be before he’s convinced?” Gabe asked throwing up his hands and breaking the connection with Millie so Liam didn’t hear the question.

Natalie shook her head as she tried to wrap her mind around the possibility, make that a likely reality, that they had a psychopath’s brain next door in Liam’s freezer.

She shook her head. “We can’t return it.”

“Why the hell can’t we return it?” Gabe asked, back to holding Millie’s hand so he was audible to Liam again.

“Gabe. No. We’d be dooming the people of wherever the brain went. And they won’t have me there or any of you to figure it out and save them. We can’t protect Mudville at the expense of dooming the people of somewhere else,” Natalie said.

“So we just do nothing and brace for the next attack?” Gabe accused.