By A.R.Yngve
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I
A few kids defied their parents - or their parents failed to keep check or care - and played in the street. The October morning was cold and clear, and the children wore thick clothes in garish red, blue and yellow. A couple of little girls skipped rope while they sang a rhyme: "Sniper, viper, wears a diaper! Sniper, viper..." Homicide detective Innis Garris exited his apartment and walked up to the kids. They stopped playing and stared up at the stocky, grave figure in the worn overcoat. Maybe they think I'm the mad sniper, he thought briefly. "Kids, you'd better go indoors. It's not safe playing in the streets." "But you're here," said a little black girl with piercing eyes, and pointed her gloved hand at him. "You're a cop. We're safe when you're here." "I'm off to work now," he said, frowning. "I'll have to go catch the sniper, but he's still out there. If I have to worry about you playing outside, I can't concentrate on catching the sniper, okay? So please play indoors, and you'll help me catch him." The black girl regarded him suspiciously for a moment, and Garris thought: Please God, let them believe me. She nodded. "Okay." Turning to her friends, she said: "Let's go to my house and play Nintendo." "Good girl." The children retreated to the apartment block across the street; Garris waited until the last one had disappeared inside, and only then he dared to step into his car and drive away. He switched on the police radio and called his precinct station. "Tell the captain I'll be a bit late. Had to make sure the neighborhood kids stayed indoors." As he drove through the streets, he saw much fewer pedestrians walking around than usual. Automobile traffic was at normal levels or higher. Garris mumbled the children's rhyme to himself: "Sniper, viper, wears a diaper..." Downtown at the precinct station, the morning meeting had already started when Garris came in the room. Captain Collins threw him a quick angry glance and continued his briefing. Next to the chief stood a uniformed Air Force general who Garris hadn't seen before. "The military does not promise that their surveillance planes can find the sniper, but of course we appreciate all additions to our overstretched resources." The general harrumphed and added: "The spy drones are controlled from our mobile operating center on a twenty-four hour basis. Our analysts estimate a likelihood of nozzle-flame detection around fifty-six percent within -" "Excuse me, General," Garris said, loudly interrupting the man, "but couldn't you perform house searches instead? You have an entire army at your command, and you can't perform a simple house-to-house search for hidden sniper rifles?" Garris's colleagues looked to him, then to the general and to Collins - who was turning a shade red. "We're not in a state of martial law yet," the general said. A wry smile escaped him. "Ask the Mayor if you want to him to declare martial law." Collins stepped forth. "Garris, you shut up now or I'll have your badge. General Westmoreham's promised to cooperate with the police and we're going to cooperate with him. We do not dictate to the military and the military does not dictate to us, because this is America, not a police state! Is that understood?" His words were aimed at Garris, who sat immobile and sipped a mug of coffee. "Shoulda had your morning cup before you opened your mouth, eh?" a colleague whispered to his ear. Garris grunted. II After the briefing, Garris sat down at his desk and went over the sniper case on his computer. He had other ongoing cases to think of, as did the other detectives on Homicide, Precinct 20. But everyone in his department was focused on finding the sniper that had shot and killed fifteen people in the city area over the past three weeks. That the military had entered the investigation did nothing to help the detectives figuring out their leads. The military's theory, that the sniper was an Islamic terrorist, struck Garris as wholly unrealistic. Previous serial killers and mass murderers in the city had worked without any religious or political affiliations whatsoever. As Garris saw it then, serial killers had taken the "lone cowboy with a gun" ideal to its logical extreme. Their guiding light was Charles Manson, not Osama bin Laden. "Society made me do it," went the mantra of the captured serial killer. "I'm not responsible." And recently, more nakedly self-centered statements like: "I'm deprived of my entitlements." Would the police find the sniper? Garris had no idea, but he wanted to get his hand around that creep's neck before any criminal psychologist or slimy lawyer managed to declare the creep unfit for trial. He wanted to tell the killer to his eyes: You're not 'entitled' to anything, you sniveling little rat. No one is. You're obliged to behave like a human being and assume responsibility for your actions. The serial killers practically always turned out to be male. Were guys more inclined to do evil? Garris had brooded over that question too many times. The jails certainly contained many more male killers than female ones. His mother had used to say: Boys will be boys. Maybe, he thought as he flipped through page after page of crime scene photos, files and reports, maybe Mom was right. We never grow up. We keep playing childish games, and the games just keep getting more violent and nihilistic as we grow older... "Hello? Earth to Garris, come in?" He looked up and saw the lean, curious-looking Sergeant Bolland, thirty-four and prematurely balding, standing in front of Garris's desk. Bolland was holding a cup of coffee in one hand, and a handcuffed young man in the other. "Who's the punk, Sergeant?" "Just a pusher I ran into on my way here. I missed the briefing, too. Did the chief have anything interesting to say?" Garris saw the ink blots on the arrested punk's fingers - Bolland worked his routines swiftly. The detective picked up a printed file and urged Bolland to come along. "Put'im in the tank and I'll tell you. I have a lead I want to check over at Riverside Park. If you have no other pressing business today..." Bolland grinned. "Sure!" He pushed the handcuffed man before him. "The paperwork can always wait a few hours." Less than half an hour later, Bolland drove the squad car out onto the street; Garris rode shotgun. A man in a black coat and glasses waved at them from the sidewalk. They slid down alongside the excited man and Garris rolled down the side window, with one hand on the shoulder holster. "Officer!" gasped the stranger. "What's the matter, sir?" "Rob Ferment, National Surveillor. What's your comment to the rumors that the Invisible Sniper is a rogue FBI agent -" "No comment." He turned to Bolland. "Drive." "'Rogue FBI agent?'" Bolland chuckled as they left the reporter behind. "Is that the best they could cook up? When I was young, it would've been something more creative, like 'Aliens Brainwash Elvis Into Serial Sniper.'" Garris shook his head. "'The Invisible Sniper'... Jesus, I hate it when the media give the killers a nickname. The creeps really get off on that." "But it fits, doesn't it? The sniper seems capable of making himself invisible. The bullet trajectories, the way the bullets hit the victims, indicate that the killer consistently aims from high positions... rooftops and water towers. But with all the surveillance cameras in this city, we should've gotten at least one picture of the guy entering and leaving a building. So how did he get up there?" "If the sniper uses a helicopter to get up on the rooftops... or he parachuted in, I don't know... then the military are bound to find him. If he doesn't, the military are not going to find him. I was thinking, maybe he climbs up walls." Bolland's stomach burbled and groaned. "I'll stop for donuts. Want some?" "Sure." "Seriously. Could the sniper, carrying a high-powered rifle, scale the highest house on Bayliss Street after sunset on a Saturday night, shoot a man on the street, and disappear without a trace? That's twenty stories of almost perfectly smooth glass and concrete. Not even a monkey could do it." Garris felt a thought stir in his mind, a vague conceit that could grow into a hypothesis. Bolland had ignited it. A monkey... a trained monkey carried the rifle for the killer, climbed the building, then delivered the rifle to the man at the top floor... farfetched, but if no better theory appeared Garris was prepared to try it. They made a stop at Dunkin' Donuts, then continued along the river until they came to Riverside Park. III In the previous decade, Riverside Park had been a decaying area; the boom of the Nineties eventually caught up and turned it - briefly - into an upscale housing block with high-rise apartments. Now, with a recession going on, several of the apartments stood empty. Bolland parked the car behind a sign and helped himself to a jelly donut. He gazed out at the gleaming glass-and-steel apartments as he spilled crumbs on his uniform. "Ever been here before?" he asked Garris, who shook his head an inch. "So what's the lead, then?" "You know those 'I did it' morons who always call and confess whenever they hear about a murder in the news? One of them lives here, and she called me yesterday... I couldn't sleep all night, because of what she said. Listen." He picked up his phone and punched the buttons that played a recording of the conversation. "Homicide, Detective Garris speaking." "Mr. Garris? This is Hilda Rufus, Riverside Park West fourty-one, I have to confess a crime..." "Calm down, Mrs. Rufus, I remember you. So who have you killed this time?" "Mr. Garris, I saw the sniper today. I looked out my apartment window, and saw him poke his head out the window across the street. It was around seven o'clock in the morning, I think. He was holding a rifle with a long sight, and he... " "Take your time, Mrs. Rufus. Just tell me exactly what you think you saw." "He didn't stay there long, just a few seconds, I'm afraid he saw me and got scared." Bolland quipped: "She that ugly?" "So he went back inside. His curtains are always down, so I couldn't look in." "Could you please tell me what he looked like?" "He... was wearing a Halloween mask, like a gorilla or a... one of them long-armed, shaggy ones." "Orangutan mask?" "Yes. With dark fur -" The recording time ran out there. Bolland let out a whistle. "Media's going to have a field day with that nutty old woman. 'The Riverside Sniper Monkey!'" "I'm just telling you, Bolland, no monkeying around when we visit her, okay? She's a crank, but I'm willing to go out on a limb here. She may have seen the sniper with a mask on. Don't upset her. No 'good cop, bad cop' routine." Bolland rolled his eyes a little. "Riiight." The old woman pointed out between the thin flower curtains to the identical high-rise on the opposite side of the parking lot. Garris counted and determined that the other apartment lay on the fourteenth floor, almost at level with Mrs. Rufus. "Look down," Bolland mumbled. Garris did, and noticed Rob Ferment standing on the pavement below, pointing a zoom-lens camera up at their window. But Garris felt a little respect for the guy - at least he tried hard to do his job, instead of just quoting other reporters. "Ignore him. If he comes up to question Mrs. Rufus, she can serve him her old 'I did it' stories." "I can call for a search warrant for that apartment right now," Bolland said; his hand was on the radio. "Hold your horses, sergeant. We'll do this the slow way. Call the station and ask the captain to arrange for a stakeout, Riverside Park East, fourteenth floor. He can call in the military too, if he wants to. Make sure he takes all the credit. Tell him I'm not sure about this lead and need his decision." "Why?" "Because I want that sniper creep to get caught before he kills another kid or unsuspecting pedestrian. Give the captain a shot at getting all the glory, and at least we're sure he'll throw all available resources at this lead." "And what if he comes up empty? We don't even know the sniper lives there." "Then I guess the captain takes the blame," Garris said and shrugged. "Ain't that bad?" "Riiight," Bolland said with a flat expression. IV Captain Collins sounded very doubtful at first; Bolland told Garris this much later. Bolland conveniently forgot to tell the captain that Mrs. Rufus had a record of crank-call confessions. When a faxed exterior photo of the suspect apartment reached Collins, he made up his mind and and ordered a full stakeout operation. Garris had other cases to work on, so he stayed away from the Riverside Park stakeout and waited for it to bear fruit - or not. One thing the cop job taught you was that if you hit a dead end, you shrugged it off at once and pursued another direction. Only amateur detectives had time to concentrate on one case at a time. During the first few days, the Riverside stakeout team spotted nothing peculiar. The surveilled apartment was quiet: laser microphones picked up no sounds except the rustle of an air-conditioning unit. The lights were left on day and night, and the drapes stayed in place. Not even a toilet flush registered on the surveillance. Three days later, around one AM., a short male silhouette appeared on the balcony. It climbed onto the rail, hobbled to the door, slid it open and then closed it, as it vanished behind the curtains. "What was that on his back?" asked one of the stakeout officers, watching through the camera in Mrs. Rufus's apartment. "Looked like a rifle," said the other cop, and radioed headquarters. "Wake up the captain - we've got our man." The SWAT team stormed the apartment on Riverside East three minutes later. The heavily armed and armored officers screamed and aimed their rifles as they burst through the front door; there was a flutter of curtains from the balcony, and the only living occupant vanished into the night. The police searched the entire block but found no sign of the escaped suspect. However, they found other things in the apartment itself - dead things. Collins held a press conference in the afternoon the next day. "When the armed character was seen entering the balcony, I ordered my men to storm the apartment to try and take him. Unfortunately, the suspect escaped the way he came, and managed to elude the officers who guarded the park. Said apartment belonged to a Doctor Victoria Stone, who had no rap sheet. "This is a photo of Victoria Stone, a biology teacher at the local Antonioni University. She was on an extended leave from Antonioni when we found her." The picture of the woman alive showed a rather bland face: she had been blocky, in fact similar in build to Garris, with an expressionless face and head, and large eyes that just screamed: I don't like to have my picture taken. "And this is what she looked like when we found her in the apartment." The reporters gasped and murmured uneasily. The corpse of Dr. Stone on the next photo showed early signs of mummification. "The autopsy report isn't complete yet," the precinct captain explained, "but apparently the apartment's climate control was set to keep it hot and dry. This helped preserve the head and limbs, but not the abdomen, for an estimated two or three weeks." Rob Ferment could not keep quiet; he raised an arm and shouted. "Do you think the Invisible Sniper killed Dr. Stone and then took up living in her apartment?" Collins shrugged. "It's too early to say - the coroners haven't established her cause of death yet. But we have found bullets and shell casings in the apartment, that match those used in all previous sniper shootings." "Does this prove that the escaped suspect is the Invisible Sniper?" Garris stood in a corner of the room behind Sergeant Bolland, and waited for the captain to take the cue and attempt to deduct on his own. Come on, Captain - say something stupid. We know you can do it. "Uh," Collins said, "the manner in which the suspect escaped does not prove he is our man. It could have been a burglar, who found Dr. Stone's corpse and then fled the place." But you forget the apartment's front door was locked from inside, thought Garris. How did a "burglar" get inside from the fourteenth floor? The captain went on: "Night-camera images were taken of him entering the apartment. We're looking for a pale, strong man, about five feet tall, in dark clothes and a baseball cap, with long dark sideburns on his face. On his back he carries a rifle by a shoulder strap. He's agile, and considered very dangerous. The public should not apprehend him, but try to alert the police." After the reporters had been shuffled away, the captain called in Garris and Bolland to his office. V "Sir, why didn't you tell them about the other stuff we found in Stone's apartment?" Garris asked the captain. He sat on a worn wooden chair and held a plastic bag in his lap. Bolland served coffee. Collins gave the detective a peculiar, predatory smile from behind his desk, leaning his arms forward as if he were about to leap at Garris's throat. "For the sake of credibility. And I ain't telling the vultures more until the lab guys have figured out just what we found." He thumbed the photos on his desk and handed one to Garris. "What's this gizmo? Looks like those boxes with gloves they use in nuclear power plants?" "An incubator. For raising delicate or prematurely born infants. It contained animal hairs, same color as in the used animal cage we found in her bedroom. But it's the stuff in Dr. Stone's freezer that really worries me. I think the brains there come from human beings. And pieces of dried brains were found in the good doctor's kitchen mixer. Seems she used it to mash up brains." "So where'd she pick up all that gray matter?" asked Bolland, tasting the coffee. "Got any donuts?" "She could get fresh stiffs from the city morgue through the university research. Transporting brains from the morgue, packed in ice, that's much easier than putting whole corpses in her trunk." "Maybe..." Collins began, but halted himself. When Garris and Bolland looked at him, he smiled. "I just thought, maybe the sniper was working in cahoots with Dr. Stone. The sniper shot people in the street, and supplied the doctor with fresh brains for her... experiments." Garris pretended not to have heard the captain's hypothesis. "She was a sicko if you ask me," said Bolland. "I bet she caught mad-cow disease from eating some victim's infected brain." Garris wagged his index-finger at the sergeant. "Not so. I just checked the coroner's report on stomach content - the doctor had not eaten any brains whatsoever." "So what was she doing with a freezer full of brains?" asked the captain. "I called up the university early this morning and asked if any live animals had been reported stolen from the faculty where Stone worked. And the janitor said one male chimpanzee named Errol had been missing for three months. Errol was young, but he should grow fast at his age." "What's this got to do with anything?" the captain said as he produced anti-ulcer pills from his desk, and chewed them down. Detective Garris took a deep breath, looked into the captain's eyes and said with a straight face: "My theory is that the doctor kept the stolen chimp in her apartment, and that monkey is the Invisible Sniper." The precinct captain swallowed the mouthful of chewable pills, and his eyes went very wide. Garris wondered if they might actually pop out of their sockets. "Are you on something, Garris? A trained monkey with a rifle?" He put out the palms of his hands in a gesture of despair. "Look. Before the sniper started shooting people in the streets, I used to take my grandkids to the zoo every month. Once, one of the kids tossed a small firecracker at the monkey cage. The poor beasts screamed loud enough to make us all deaf, ran for cover and wouldn't stop screaming for half an hour. You can't train monkeys to use guns. It's physiologically and psychologically impossible." Sergeant Bolland asked: "You mean, because they don't have opposable thumbs?" "That, too." Garris offered them a box of fresh chocolate-glazed and pink-frosted donuts from his plastic bag. "Now bear with me a minute," he explained. "Suppose Dr. Stone had found a means of making a chimp smarter. I've been reading several scientific magazines recently. Geneticists have discovered a very simple method of reprogramming the genes of individual cells." He held up his coffee mug and a chocolate-glazed donut. "Picture this donut as a nerve cell. The nerve cell behaves in a very specific way - it receives and transmits impulses to other nerves, and reacts to stimuli. Now let's mash this cell up into its smallest proteins and active chemicals..." He crumbled the donut into the coffee and stirred the contents, until he had produced a soggy, dark-brown mush. The captain sneered. Garris picked up a pink-frosted donut. "Picture this one as a skin cell. It can only do certain things... like grow, divide and make goosebumps. When it dies, it dries up and turns into dandruff - there's no way a nerve cell could do that. Now you soak the skin cell in the mashed nerve-cell soup for an hour..." He lifted up the dripping donut from the cup after just two seconds. Its pink color had changed to a soggy brown. "Okay, so you turned it into a chocolate donut," said Collins. "Where's your Nobel Prize?" "What happens in the real test is, the soaked skin cell changes. It appears to soak up some of the properties of the mashed nerve cell, and after a while it starts to behave like a nerve cell too. The cell's been chemically reprogrammed. Because every cell type contains the latent DNA for any other cell type... the soaking acts as a kind of chemical trigger. And I figure, if you expose a monkey brain... you following me?" Collins pointed at his own wrinkled forehead. "This thing works, you know. So the scientist has soaked a chimp's brain in a soup of mashed human brain cells, and turned it into... what?" "That's what I'm not sure about. Let's say Dr. Stone injected mashed human brains into the chimp's head. Would the chimp's brain start to mutate into a more intelligent brain right away? I read that the change shows after just an hour of soaking. Maybe the chimp developed an improved skill for imitating human behavior, so that it could learn to use a rifle? Or it got less scared of the bang. Or its brain absorbed some human property we can't properly describe, like..." "A soul?" suggested the captain, tongue-in-cheek. "Let's not get all metaphysical here. I'll just hazard a guess that human brains are inherently better at learning than monkey brains. The monkey might get a little brighter and bolder from the process I described, but it'll still be a monkey." "Great," said Bolland. "Let's leave a trail of bananas leading to the police station and we'll get our chimp." "Even a smart monkey is going to return to his master sooner or later. Not just for the bananas. This chimp might have learned a few new tricks, but I have a gut feeling it still needs human assistance. So we have to keep watching the apartment until it returns." "I don't get it," Sergeant Bolland complained. He had dissolved a pink-frosted donut in his coffee, and regarded the sorry mess with disappointment. "Any monkey that's smart enough to climb a tall building, aim a sniper rifle and shoot people ought to figure out that apartment isn't safe anymore. How desperate would it have to be?" "Desperate enough. Whaddya say, captain?" "I say you're crazy, but the whole case is. Okay. We'll keep the stakeout going for a week." Garris visited the Antonioni University next day - alone - and searched Dr. Stone's workspace. The university morgue, where she had performed autopsies with students, contained several corpses with missing brains. All the corpses were male. Dr. Stone's computer files contained only a few cryptic notes - apparently, she had preferred to keep notes in her head - but one stored piece of text stuck in Garris's mind: A follow-up experiment with a female animal must use female tissue injections. Do not use female brain tissue on the current male test subject, for risk of hormone disturbances. He spent a few hours asking Stone's colleagues about her. They had little to say, but agreed that she was a very reserved, private character who lived for her work. The university dean assured Garris that no complaints had been raised over Dr. Stone's behavior. Her extended leave was due to health reasons: she had a heart problem and needed to relax. During lunch in the university restaurant, Garris called the coroners and got the final word on Dr. Stone's remains. It was established that she had died two to three weeks ago. The cause of death was a heart attack, caused by high blood pressure and colesterol levels. The same evening, the fugitive chimp returned to Riverside Park. The police was ready and waiting for the monkey - or whatever it had become - when it climbed back into Victoria Stone's apartment. It was evident from the way the creature moved, that it was suffering extreme discomfort in its hind regions. It wore clothes, which gave it a comical appearance. But a rifle was slung from its back and infrared camera images showed the rifle-barrel was hot and freshly used. Captain Collins, watching the apartment through a TV set on the precinct station, gave the order over the radio. "Okay, kill it." The police snipers shot the simian sniper as it climbed the balcony rail. It fell fourteen stories and landed on the pavement below. The dead chimpanzee proved a pitiful sight. It was unusually tall - for a monkey - and wore jacket, pants and a cap. The pants were extremely dirty and stank. When Sergeant Bolland came up to the corpse, he had to pinch his nose. Garris bent down over the lifeless chimp and examined its head with a flashlight and magnifying glass. "I see several surgical scars and needle marks. Let the lab guys examine the head, and I'm sure they'll find its brain cells are resembling human cells." "But how could a dumb monkey acquire such a taste for murder?" the captain asked, clasping a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. "A four-week rampage... sixteen people shot... why? Did Dr. Stone deliberately teach it to kill? Why?" Bolland spoke in a nasal tone, due to his pinched nose: "When Rob Ferment sees this, he's got to think we're kidding." "I have no idea who taught Errol to shoot the first time," Garris replied, "but chimps are naturally aggressive. On a level with humans, in fact." He seemed indifferent to the stench from the dead animal at their feet. "All that's missing is the intelligence and insight to use tools of murder. Wild chimps kill their rivals by bludgeoning them to death with their arms. They're pretty strong, but it takes a while. With a rifle and the skill to use it, this chimp could kill much faster and more often." "Can you imagine?" Bolland said. "Poor thing must have gone for days without having its diapers changed. A rash like that will turn anyone into a killer." The irony was not lost on Garris. Thanks to the "brain soup," this chimp had learned to shoot a rifle and open doors, and gained a great deal of confidence in the process. But the brain mash it absorbed had belonged to men. And those men were incapable of accomplishing what most grown women had done hundreds of times in their lives. Eventually, the monkey returned to its dead female master - if only because it remembered where it used to get its diapers changed. The captain had asked earlier, whether the scientist's treatment had given the chimp a soul. Garris very much doubted that was the case, but now he wondered if evil in humans could be scientifically transferred to monkeys. Or perhaps monkeys already possessed some evil quality in common with humans, that had only been concentrated further in Dr. Stone's "test subject." He picked up the chimp's grimy baseball cap from the ground and pointed the flashlight at the printed text on its front. It read: ELEPHANT MAN - COMIN' 4 U! Garris considered the worst possibility of all: no one had actively taught that animal to become the Invisible Sniper. It had simply soaked up an invisible sniper from the mashed-up thoughts of randomly selected dead men in a city full of guns... He put the cap down over the dead chimp's hairy, wrinkled face. "Boys will be boys."
Other Detective Garris stories:
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Other Detective Garris stories:
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