“You aren’t obligated to tell me anything, Eric.”
“Ethically obligated.” He stops, shakes his head. “No, that’s still the wrong phrasing. Ethically, I can tell you, because I uncovered it myself so it’s become my secret to share. But there are things I uncover that aren’t in that book. Just stuff I stumble over and file away here.” He taps his forehead.
“You can’t be expected to share all of that.” I put down my fork. “I know we’re circling the theoretical, slowly approaching a specific.”
“Just get to the damned specific?” He puts his plate down. “Yeah, I’m still feeling this shit out. I’m used to being in charge. Sheriff and detective, the only person who needed to know anything until I was damned well ready to share. I wasn’t deliberately withholding. I just never considered telling you this until I realized, fuck, I should have said something and now—”
“Absolution comes after confession, Eric.”
“It’s about Mathias. I told you and Will why he’s here. There’s more. Something I found a couple years back while double-checking his story.”
“A hole in it.”
“Hell, no. I’d have shared that right away. This is just additional information that didn’t seem pertinent until I thought about who could have killed Roger.”
“Mathias fits. I’ve been thinking that myself. He had access to Roger. He has the medical know-how to pierce that lung and crank up the morphine drip. A practicing doctor would know we’d see through it, but he’s never practiced medicine.”
He nods. “When I was researching Mathias’s story, I came across one of those … what’s the word? When someone writes online about a subject they’re interested in? Essays and such?”
“Blogs?”
“Right. I found this blog by a guy who liked weird crime. He covered Mathias’s story about the patient who emasculated himself, and he linked it to another of Mathias’s patients.”
“Another guy who—?”
“No, not that. This guy was convicted of cannibalism. Fucking psycho. Hunted and killed people on the streets, homeless ones no one would miss. Cooked and ate them. The court found a shrink who got him committed. When Mathias studied the guy, he argued he wasn’t insane at all. Just a sick bastard. Mathias wanted him retried on some loophole. Court refused. A month later, the guy disemboweled himself with a homemade shiv.”
“And he claimed Mathias made him do it?”
Dalton shakes his head. “He died from his injuries. Never implicated Mathias. But this blog guy tied the two cases together as incidences of vigilante justice. He said Mathias brainwashed his patients into committing acts of self-mutilation befitting their crime.”
“The cannibal slicing open his own stomach and the rapist cutting off his own genitals.”
“Yep. Which is crazy. Unless…”
“Unless it’s not.” I finish my toast and then say, “I’d believe it if the victims claimed Mathias physically forced them to mutilate themselves. Hell, I’d even buy drugs as the answer. It’s the brainwashing part that bothers me.”
“Can’t be done,” Dalton says. “Mind control doesn’t exist. The CIA sunk a shitload of time and money into chasing that pipe dream.”
When I raise my brows, he says, “It’s a matter of public record. I don’t trade in Brent’s crazy conspiracy theories. The CIA admitted to it. They were trying to build the perfect assassin, someone they could order to kill, who would then forget it, allowing full deniability. They couldn’t do it even with drugs.”
“So this is impossible.”
Dalton takes the whistling kettle off for fresh coffee. “That is impossible—forcing someone to do something and then forget it. Which isn’t what we’re talking about. The guy who survived remembered. He fingered Mathias.”
“So it’s possible to control behavior? Just not reliably erase memory?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t study those CIA files. Just found a reference in a book so I chased it down. Satisfying my curiosity. There are ways to influence behavior. The power of suggestion and shit like that.”
“Hypnosis,” I say, remembering Anders’s joke about Mathias. “In university, I went to a demonstration. I was curious, like you. It seemed more like people letting themselves be put into a suggestible state and then playing along. Which I guess is the power of suggestion. And I have seen shrinks pull up repressed memories with hypnosis so … I don’t know.”
“Neither do I. But is it possible? Put a guy with Mathias’s training in a situation where he has total control over his subject, where no one’s going to question his methods or drugs or whatever. Could he make a guy slice open his own guts, thinking he was butchering a deer?”
“I won’t say it’s impossible.”