He sleeps well and deeply, but he does not dream.
His considered belief is that men dream primarily for two reasons. First, in life they are routinely frustrated and tormented, with the consequence that all their angers and anxieties are shaped into nightmares while they are unconscious. Second, if their dreams are pleasant, it is obviously because they yearn for a perfection of experience that they cannot hope to find in life, and so they dream of it.
Shenneck rarely dreams, because he has full command of his world and is never frustrated or tormented. And as for a perfection of experience, he intends to fashion the utopia that humankind has long pursued and failed to establish, and to live in the perfection that he has created.
1
* * *
DR. EMILY JO ROSSMAN, formerly a forensic pathologist, worked now as a veterinary technician in her sister’s animal hospital.
Jane was waiting as employees came to work at seven o’clock Saturday morning. She recognized Dr. Rossman from her Facebook photo: freckled face; bobbed auburn hair; bangs almost to her eyes.
The woman appeared younger than thirty-eight and had a tomboy air. Her hazel eyes were so lively, her smile so quick, it was difficult to believe that she had ever wanted a career in a morgue.
When shown Jane’s FBI credentials, Emily responded as if it were still the age of Norman Rockwell, when trust in government had been well deserved. “My sister’s off today. We can use her office.”
The office walls were hung not with the expected portraits of animals, but with prints of the fashion—rather than fine—art of Kandinsky, elaborately decorated amoeba forms. Jane suspected that she would not have found much common ground with the absent sister.
Instead of sitting behind the desk, Emily took one of the two client chairs and angled it toward the one in which Jane sat. “I hope I know what this is about, I really hope I do.”
“What do you think it’s about?”
“Benedetta Ashcroft.”
Jane said, “Killed herself in a hotel suite, last July.”
Thumping the side of her fist twice into the arm of her chair, Emily said, “Yes. About time somebody took this seriously. It damn well wasn’t what it seemed.”
“But didn’t your autopsy report confirm suicide?”
“A massive overdose of a tricyclic antidepressant—desipramine. With vodka. A lethal combination. She’d swallowed more than forty one-hundred-milligram capsules. That takes determination. And another thirty-six capsules were on the nightstand.”
“That’s more than one prescription. So she was saving them up?”
“No. No way.” Emily pushed her thick bangs off her forehead, and they at once fell back into place. “No prescription. The pills weren’t in pharmacy bottles. Just a Ziploc bag on the nightstand.”
Jane said, “Street purchase.”
Emily shook her head adamantly. “Benedetta wouldn’t have known how to make a street purchase. She was a Mormon. She didn’t drink. Didn’t do drugs. Twenty-seven years old, with a devoted husband. Two children. She was a counselor for kids with severe disabilities, and she loved her work.”
Jane thought of Eileen Root in Chicago, who’d been an advocate for people with disabilities. In Shenneck’s new world, designed by a computer model, there evidently would be no place for paraplegics, quadriplegics, the blind, the deaf, the infirm of any kind.
“Dr. Rossman, is it fair to say that in the absence of severe trauma to the skull, if an obvious other cause of death is present, the coroner’s office would not conduct an examination of the brain?”
Emily leaned forward and spoke more quickly, as if defending her autopsy procedures. “I had a case where a young man fell off a ladder, twenty-two feet to the ground. Dead at the scene. No cranial fracture, no contusion, no laceration of the scalp. But examination of the brain revealed diffuse axonal injury. Small perivascular hemorrhages in the brain stem. Death was caused by the sudden acceleration-deceleration of the head, not by an impact fracture.”
“All right. But in that case, no anatomic injuries supported the determination of accidental blunt-force trauma. So you had to look at the brain. But with Benedetta Ashcroft, the cause of death was obvious. And the security cameras in the hotel corridors proved no one entered her room until the maid found her body the next day.”
Emily’s mouth set in a tight grim line, and then she said, “The family couldn’t believe she killed herself. Simply couldn’t believe it. They wondered—could her suicide be explained by a brain tumor?”
“Does the coroner’s office conduct more extensive autopsies than its protocols require if the family insists?”
“There was a time it did. No more.” She hesitated, holding her hands above her lap, frowning at them as if she didn’t recognize them as her own. “The public story is I grew tired of forensic pathology and quit. But if I hadn’t quit, I’d have been fired.”
“On what grounds?”
“I’m Benedetta Ashcroft’s aunt. I should have recused myself from performing the autopsy. Instead, I aggressively maneuvered to have it assigned to me, and I didn’t reveal my relationship to her.”
“A misdemeanor. Or at least a reason for justified dismissal.”
Emily’s stare was direct and unwavering as a laser beam. “The family was in shock. They needed to know. This lovely woman, always so happy, this devoted mother, checking into a hotel suite to kill herself…A brain tumor would have explained everything.”
“The family could have paid for a private autopsy when the coroner’s office was finished with the body.”
Emily nodded, but did not look away from Jane. “That would take time—days, a week, or longer. Her husband, her sister, her mom and dad were in such grief, such anguish. I did what I did, and I’d do it again…but, God, I wish I hadn’t.”
Here it was. If there could be any doubt that something new and terrible had entered the world, what Dr. Rossman saw when she opened her niece’s skull was about to banish any remaining skepticism.
“I didn’t fully understand this part of your autopsy report,” Jane said. “Anyway, phrases and even sentences were redacted.”
The pathologist took a deep breath. “When I looked down on the forebrain, the two hemispheres of the cerebrum, for just a moment, I thought I was looking at gliomatosis cerebri, a particularly vicious cancer that doesn’t produce a localized tumor. It spreads like a spiderweb across all four lobes of the cerebrum.”
“But it wasn’t gliomatosis cerebri.”
Jane’s sustained eye contact clearly suggested to Emily that they already shared the knowledge that she was about to reveal. “My God, you know. You know…what I found.”
“Maybe. Tell me.”
“It wasn’t organic. Not the chaos of cancer. I was looking at geometric, intricately designed circuits…a system, apparatus. I don’t know what to call it. It netted all four lobes, disappearing into various sulci, those fissures in the gray matter between the folded forms, between the gyri. It didn’t have a lot of mass, almost a fairylike structure, though there was a heavy concentration on the corpus callosum. Looking at it, I felt…I knew I’d never seen anything so evil. What was it? What was that thing?”
“You could call it a control mechanism,” Jane said.
Emily broke eye contact, looked at her hands, which tightened into fists. She shivered. “Who? Why? For God’s sake, how?”
Instead of answering those questions, Jane said, “You had a camera running throughout the autopsy.”
“Yes. But it didn’t capture that damn thing to the extent I would have liked. Shortly after I opened the skull, maybe as a reaction to contact with the air, I don’t know, this thing—this control mechanism, as you call it—began to come apart.”
“Come apart how?”