Chapter 18
Eighteen
Rapid-fire keystrokes and mumbled voices penetrated the fog that had settled over Lincoln since last night, that had grown heavier as hopelessness had ballooned by the hour.
After calling in to Beverley and Kirk and finding Carter’s phone stashed in Lincoln’s guitar case of all places, they’d left the house for ERT to process—a crime scene now—and retreated to their temporary command at the hospital.
Lincoln hadn’t wanted to be there, hadn’t wanted to be at the library or lab either.
By two in the morning, his snapping and pacing had led Jo to threaten him with handcuffs if he “didn’t sit his scrawny ass down in a chair and sleep for an hour.
” Judging by the crusties he was fighting to open his eyes, he’d been out for more than just one.
He shifted in the chair, vaguely aware of the other agents moving around him, more aware of the one who was missing.
He forced his eyelids open, blinking rapidly to clear the fog.
Jo stood across the room next to O’Shea, who was breathing down the neck of some poor agent behind a computer.
“What time is it?” he asked, and half a dozen pairs of eyes swung to him.
“Almost six,” O’Shea answered.
Jo picked something up off the desk—coffee, thank fuck—and brought it over to him. The bitter taste sent fresh misery tumbling through him, missing Carter’s perfectly brewed coffee from home, missing the biscuits and muffins that Carter brought him with Ginger’s bitter coffee.
“Any news?” he asked.
“ERT finished up around three.”
“Anything? Gray hairs? DNA on the mug?”
She shook her head. “Nothing on the mug. Just dark brown for the hair.”
“Probably Carter’s. Fuck.” He gulped another swallow and slumped in the chair. He wanted to rocket out of it, but if he did that, he’d start pacing afresh, and Jo would threaten to handcuff him again.
“We’re testing to be sure,” she said.
“And the phone?”
“Cyber’s about to crack it.” She tilted her head toward where O’Shea now knelt beside Agent Reyes at the computer. “Or maybe she already did.” Jo stretched out a hand for Lincoln. “Upsy-daisy.”
He slid his hand into hers and let her haul him up, back to the world of the living. “Did you bring in Larry?”
Beverley had made that call; Lincoln had agreed. Larry was their prime suspect. An agent’s life—Carter’s life—was on the line, as well as Barry’s and Trudy’s. Lincoln would do anything to get them all back alive.
“We can’t find him.”
“Which means Carter was right.” He’d disappeared hours after confronting Larry. That couldn’t be ignored, couldn’t be a coincidence.
“I can see it all, the way you laid out the evidence, but I’m not sure I buy it.”
“The way Carter laid it out to me.” Carter had put it together, and Lincoln hadn’t listened. As much as Carter had been trying to find evidence to prove his case, Lincoln had been unconsciously looking for evidence to disprove him. “And you said he fit the profile.”
“The evidence, plus Carter’s disappearance, and yes, the profile, tell a compelling story, but I also know Larry.” She paused a couple feet from her husband. “I’ve known him my entire life, and whatever differences we may have, I just can’t see him as the killer, no matter how hard I try.”
“The Golden State Killer and BTK lived in their communities for years undetected.”
“Do you think it’s Larry?”
“Carter put it all out there for Larry, and Larry took the bait.”
Jo raised a brow. “That’s not an answer.”
Because something in the back of Lincoln’s brain still tickled.
He had no doubt Larry was involved—the blind eye to the missing persons cases plus taking Carter’s bait were irrefutable.
But other puzzle pieces didn’t fit—the pictures of Larry in town during Dr. Fear’s cycles, the sunny disposition in all his photos, the warm welcome they’d received in town, including from Barry and Larry.
“We unlocked?” Jo asked, refocusing Lincoln’s attention.
“Just now,” O’Shea confirmed.
“He’s got two files labeled Apex,” Reyes said. “This one’s tagged 1988.”
“Not it,” Lincoln said. “That’s private.” He suspected he knew what that one was, and it was none of the FBI’s business. “Go to the 2020 one.”
Reyes clicked on the folder and a directory of files appeared. “Doesn’t look like anything since the night before last,” she said. “His last report was dated and uploaded to the FBI server after he interrogated Baxter.”
“Search the other apps for items from yesterday,” Lincoln said. “Pictures, audio, emails, search history. He questioned the prime suspect. Maybe he recorded it, took pictures while he was there, or looked something up.”
Reyes opened the photo app. “Bingo. We’ve got a handful of pictures from yesterday. Midmorning. Looks like a bathroom.” An array of pictures filled the screen.
“That’s the bathroom in the chancellor’s mansion,” Jo said. “I used it the other day when I met with Larry there. Plumbing in his separate unit wasn’t working.”
Lincoln zeroed in on the last picture, the one in the bottom right-hand corner. A pill bottle. He reached over Reyes’s shoulder and tapped the screen. “Blow this one up.”
Reyes moved the picture to the middle and zoomed in. “It’s a prescription for adalimumab for Ryan McCullough.”
“It’s his house,” O’Shea said. “Makes sense.”
Lincoln wasn’t hung up on whose it was so much as what it was. “Why does that drug sound familiar?”
“You watch TV at all?” Jo asked.
“What does—” At her arched brow demanding a simple yes or no answer, he answered, “Yes.”
“It’s the generic name for Humira. The commercials for it are everywhere.”
The minute she said it, Lincoln saw it in his head, heard the list of conditions it was prescribed for, including Crohn’s disease.
He wobbled where he stood, hands gripping the back of Reyes’s chair to stay upright. The puzzle pieces rearranged and finally—finally—snapped into place. A complete picture.
“Lincoln?” Jo said, voice worried, hand around his biceps.
“You were right,” he said. “And so was I, and so was Carter.”
“I don’t follow.”
He just needed the final confirmation. He turned to O’Shea. “That hair sample from the house, do we have the preliminary screen back yet?”
“Just got it!” Drake said, barreling through the door. “It’s dyed.”
“Not Carter’s, then, and definitely not mine.” He scanned down the panel, looking for the founder variant and the frameshift variant.
They were both there—the gray hair and the increased susceptibility for Crohn’s disease.
Fucking hell. The person who knew who they were from the very beginning. The person who rejected who he was, who covered up his gray hair and covered up his need to escape, until those times when the latter was too much to bear.
“We need to get back to the library,” Lincoln said.
“Why?” Jo asked.
Because he needed to look again for a certain dark-haired man in the photos with Jeff Baxter. With Larry. The man who found out what Baxter was doing in those meth houses, went in to stop him, and when an altercation ensued, called his best friend for help.
A slight shift in their frame of reference and it all made sense. “Larry’s not Dr. Fear. It’s his best friend, Chancellor McCullough, and I have the evidence to prove it.”
Lincoln barreled around the corner into the library elevator lobby and just missed colliding with Jeremiah.
“Whoa, where’s the fire?” Jeremiah said, stumbling backward. “Jo? Mark? What are y’all doing here?”
Lincoln flung out a hand, grabbed Jeremiah by a suspender, and punched the elevator call button. The elevator doors opened, and Lincoln dragged him inside. “They’re on the case with us.”
“Kline knows?” O’Shea asked as he ushered Jo into the cab.
“Some of it,” Lincoln said, hitting the down button. “I needed help going through the archives. Jeremiah knows them better than anyone.”
Jeremiah’s eyes grew wider. “Thank you, I think. But what’s going on?”
“You have Crohn’s.”
His jaw dropped—surprise—slammed shut—anger—then dropped again—outrage. “That’s personal!” he shrieked.
“We took a sample of your hair.”
“You did what?” he shrieked louder. “I didn’t give permission—”
Lincoln grasped his shoulders, forcing down his flailing arms. “I’m sorry, Jeremiah, but Carter is missing. Dr. Fear has him.”
All the fight, all the color, drained from the younger man’s face. “And me having Crohn’s has something to do with it?”
“Dr. Fear also has Crohn’s.”
Paler still, but as the elevator doors slid open, steel infused his spine and he marched out of the cab toward the archives. “What do you need to know? What do I need to find?”
Lincoln hustled to catch up. “Do you get treatment at the county hospital?”
He nodded.
“Is there a support group? Like a weekly or monthly meeting? I had a friend in grad school—”
He continued to nod. “Yeah, yeah we do, meets once a month.”
“Is Chancellor McCullough in that group?”
Jeremiah stopped dead in his tracks, his eyes impossibly wider. “He leads it.”
“Fuck.” Lincoln ran ahead to their workroom and promptly cursed himself for anger-straightening everything after the blowup with Carter. “Where did I put the Baxter photos?”
Jeremiah zoomed past him to the other table. “Over here.”
“Not those. That’s the stack with the gray-haired men. We’re looking for the ones we tossed out of that stack.”
“I put them on the cart to refile. Just a second.” He raced out into the general archives room and down an aisle.
Lincoln moved to run after him, but O’Shea’s hand on his shoulder stopped him. “Explain, Agent Monroe.”
“Carter and I noticed a high incidence of premature gray hair, particularly among people whose families go back generations here in Apex.”
“Jeremiah included,” Jo said.
Lincoln nodded. “Given the isolated nature of the core group of residents here, we posited it was a founder variant.”
“And the Crohn’s connection?” O’Shea asked.
“When we ran Jeremiah’s hair sample, we noticed a frameshift variant in his DNA that’s associated with a higher susceptibility for Crohn’s disease. That frameshift variant, like the premature gray hair, can be multiplied by the founder effect. There’s a higher incidence of both here in Apex.”
“But McCullough has dark hair.”
“Dr. Fear’s hair is dyed, according to that sample from the house.
The true color is gray. Baxter told Carter that Dr. Fear rejected himself.
” Lincoln flicked his bangs. “McCullough dyed his hair, tried to blend in, climbed higher in the university hierarchy, kept pushing down his fear of being trapped and stretching out the time between cycles, denying himself victims even as he was in the hospital monthly. The place he’d identified each of his first victims in each cycle. Fuck, can you—”
O’Shea was already on his phone. “Drake, pull the hospital records again. Check for Ryan McCullough instead of the Petticoats.”
He almost collided again with Jeremiah, who was rushing back into the workroom, a bucket folder in one hand, a stack of papers in the other.
He held the papers out to Lincoln first. “This is the cross-check of Apex U employees who were here during each of Dr. Fear’s cycles and when Baxter was here. ”
Lincoln passed the papers to Jo. “Check for Ryan.”
Jeremiah thrust the folder at Lincoln next. “These are the photos. I think I already spotted one.”
Lincoln stepped to the nearest table and dumped the photos out. “Before, we were looking for a gray-haired man with Baxter. We tossed these out without carefully—”
“Right there.” Jeremiah had his finger on one of the photos, on the dark-haired man next to Jeff Baxter. “That’s Chancellor McCullough.”
Lincoln found a second and third. He pulled the three pictures directly in front of him and pushed the other photos aside.
He focused on the middle of the two pictures, the one in which McCullough and Baxter looked colder and stiffer toward each other than in the other two photos.
Behind and around them in the shot, items were knocked over and displaced, like there’d been an altercation before someone had told them to smile for the camera.
“He knew what Baxter was doing,” Lincoln said, tying it back to his earlier theory. “Ryan wasn’t a meth addict. He knew what Baxter was doing, or planning, and he was in that meth house to haul him out. And when it got out of hand, he called Larry.”
“Who has been covering up ever since,” Jo said. “Ryan’s on this list. And those binges he was supposedly on correspond with these dates.”
“How did you know they were binges?”
“I confronted Larry about it. He didn’t deny it.” She lifted a hand to cover her mouth. “It was a cover. He knew about both of them.”
“I did.”
Everyone spun toward the voice in the doorway, and before Lincoln could blink, O’Shea and Jo were in front of him and Jeremiah, shoulder to shoulder, weapons drawn.
Larry raised his hands. Defensive cuts bisected his palms and forearms, and the chief moved like every bone in his body hurt. Lincoln bet there were bruises, maybe more cuts, beneath his dark uniform.
“I tried to stop him,” Larry said. “Then and last night. I thought it was over. I thought seeing what Baxter did would be enough to stop him.” Shoulders shaking, Larry covered his face with his hands and fell against the doorframe.
“I never could. And now he has my family.” He looked up at Lincoln, tears pooling in his eyes. “And yours. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”