There was momentary silence on the other end of the line. “Murdered? Jesus. I didn’t expect that. I assumed you were calling because he’d done something . . . weird.”
Weird? “Why would you assume that, Mr. Holbrook?”
Another pause. “Well, to be honest, I hadn’t thought about Isaac for years, so I had to think back when I heard your message. But, he had grown increasingly . . . odd at the end here. I feel bad saying that now that he’s . . . dead. But, honestly, I was happy to see him go. He was always going on about war and how we were all going to die off because people were selfish and stupid and couldn’t think beyond their own needs. But most disturbing of all was he tried to convince me that we should start doing research on people, like, not just have them fill out questionnaires or surveys, but like, put them in real-life situations and see how they’d react. But, like everyone knows, that’s not how social science works. Or even psychological study. You can’t emotionally scar human beings for the sake of research.”
Mark nodded, a cold feeling settling in his bones. “Do you have any reason to believe he acted on any of this talk?”
“No. In fact, I thought that was the reason he retired early. He realized the job was causing him to entertain unhealthy ideas. But when I heard you mention his name in the message, I feared he might have gone back to work somewhere else and done something unethical, if not . . . immoral. I’m glad to hear that’s not the case, though I’m sorry to hear something so terrible happened to him.”
Mark’s mind was racing. “Mr. Holbrook, if I email you a couple of photographs, can you let me know if you’ve seen either of the people in them?”
“Of course. I have my email open now, if you’d like to send them over.”
“Okay, great. It’ll just take a second.” Mark drafted a quick email and attached the photographs of Jak and Emily Barton saved to his desktop and pressed send.”
“Got it,” Kyle Holbrook said a second later. There was a pause and then the man came back on the line. “No, I don’t know either of them. I don’t suppose you can tell me who they are?”
“The woman was murdered in Helena Springs in a similar manner to Dr. Driscoll.”
“Christ. Two murders?” He sounded genuinely shocked, but of course, Mark was only going by his voice. “This other photograph you sent me, is he a suspect?”
Mark hesitated to call Jak a person of interest, though in actuality he still was. He has secrets in his eyes. “He lived near Dr. Driscoll,” he answered with a non-answer.
“Ah. Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help.”
“No, you’ve been a great deal of help. If you think of anything else, please give me a call.”
“Absolutely. Good luck, Agent Gallagher.”
Mark hung up the phone and then sat staring, unseeing, at his computer for minutes.
He tried to convince me that we should start doing research on people.
Mark had a sinking feeling about what Isaac Driscoll’s research had focused on. Or rather, who.
To raise him until Mr. Driscoll is ready to train him.
Was Driscoll studying Jak? Or just “training” him? Both? To what end? He’d found the notes on the strange animal observations in Driscoll’s cabin, but nothing more. He’d go back and look under all the floorboards, in the rafters, he decided, before officially clearing it as a crime scene. There had to be more. If Jak wasn’t mistaken, the man had had cameras set up, for God’s sake.
Jak . . . he has secrets in his eyes.
“What secrets are you still keeping from me, Jak?” he murmured to himself. Did he know more about what Driscoll had been doing? Or had he himself done something he was ashamed of?
The picture of The Battle of Thermopylae that he’d printed was on his desk, half obscured under a pile of papers. He picked it up, gazing at it for a few moments, remembering what he’d read about the Spartans.
They’d trained their children to become soldiers, they’d made them endure harsh survival exercises to strengthen them, to discover their worth.
Children . . . not child.
He pictured the cabin where Jak lived, the unused beds. The dormitory setup that only housed one person. If Driscoll had set the place up like that, who else had he intended Jak share it with? And why hadn’t they?
Mark dug out the “map” that had been found in Is
aac Driscoll’s drawer, looking again at the one word printed at the bottom: Obedient.
Isaac Driscoll had been fascinated with the Spartans, had possibly been doing his own studies on children, somehow mixing up the ancient rituals with his current project, whatever that might have been. The possibility was almost too sick to consider, too demented to contemplate the details until Mark had more answers. He did another Google search, this time looking for phrases related to Thermopylae and the word obedient. After a few minutes, he found it, a monument that was erected to the soldiers who’d died at Thermopylae: Tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie.
A monument to the dead. Obedient soldiers. A map that marked the places they lay?