Detective Jack Stratton Box Set Read online

  He hesitated as Franklin walked around the podium and approached him. “Some theorize, and I concur, that, according to—” He stopped speaking as Franklin came to a stop directly in front of his desk.

  “You concur? Mr…?”

  “Ross.”

  “Mr. Ross concurs.” Franklin held his hands out to the class, and nervous laughter flitted around the room. “And may I assume that you’re taking The Effects of Trauma on the Brain this semester?”

  Ross gulped and nodded.

  Franklin exhaled and walked the length of the room. “For those not privileged to be taking Dr. Hahn’s class, please enlighten us with a brief synopsis.”

  The girl who sat next to Ross reached out and squeezed his arm.

  He puffed out his chest, and addressed the class. “We’ve been discussing how the nucleus accumbens produces pleasure and how it works in the reward pathway. In this process, the neurotransmitter dopamine is released, and I think there may be a link between that and the right frontal lobe—”

  “Eureka!” Franklin shouted so loudly that everybody jumped in their seats and turned to look at him. “Mr. Ross has done it. He has accomplished what countless before him have strived for. He has discovered”—he dramatically raised his hands above his head—“the God Spot.”

  Franklin clapped and walked back toward the shrinking student.

  “Mr. Ross, the problem with your conclusion is—it’s wrong.” He leaned forward and flipped Ross’s closed notebook back open. “Perhaps you should write this down.”

  Franklin smiled at the girl next to Ross. She shifted uncomfortably.

  “For years, scientists have been looking for a certain part of the brain. The God Spot, as it’s sometimes called, is supposedly the area of the brain that’s responsible for spirituality. I have the highest regard for Dr. Hahn, but he’s spent twenty years looking for that one spot, and he has been digging in the wrong place.”

  Franklin looked around the room, but most students peered down instead of meeting his eyes.

  “Others, like myself and Dr. Melding, believe that it isn’t one, but many spots. There have been many studies. Several have been performed in this very university.” He paced and strutted back and forth, and the sleepy-eyed students pivoted their necks as if at a one-man tennis match.

  “Various methods have been employed to locate it—romantic love, philanthropic love, meditation, happiness, fear. None of them worked.” He sauntered back to the ill-fated student, who was trying to sink through his seat to be immolated in the earth’s fiery core.

  “I myself researched this exact topic you have selected for your paper. My study came to the opposite conclusion from the one with which you concur. In my humble opinion, it should be relatively easy to prove, through mapping dopamine release, that it isn’t one spot but many spots.”

  Franklin spun on his heel and strutted back to the podium.

  Ross glanced at the girl next to him and seemed to muster some courage. “Easy? Then why haven’t you proved it?”

  Kid, you should have stayed down.

  “Why?” Franklin’s hand crashed down on the podium. Half the class jumped in their seats. Jack was somewhat amused by the theatrics, but deep down he was appalled by the man’s ego and demeaning antics. What kind of environment would this have been for Michelle?

  “Knowing and proving are totally separate. If they—” The professor seized the sides of the podium and inhaled. Jack could see his knuckles turn white as his hands clutched the wood. “I digress.” When Franklin continued, his voice was dripping with sarcasm. “I await reading and grading your paper with bated breath.”

  The door on the opposite side of the reception desk opened and Dr. Hahn came in, followed by his assistant. Jack remembered the kid from his earlier visit. Brendan.

  Hahn leaned on the dark wooden cane in his left hand, but he had an innate grace and elegance that his colleague Franklin could never hope to achieve. He flashed a courtly smile at the receptionist and became more somber as he approached Jack with an outstretched hand.

  “Officer Stratton. It’s certainly a pleasure that you accepted my offer so swiftly.”

  “I appreciate the invitation. I really wanted to see the work Michelle has done.”

  “If it’s all right with you, I have asked Brendan here to begin the tour while I conclude a previously scheduled appointment.”

  “Certainly, Doctor. I apologize for the short notice.”

  “No trouble at all. I won’t be long. If you’ll excuse me.” The professor turned away, efficient but unhurried.

  “Officer Stratton. Good to see you again.” Brendan pumped his hand. And then the squeeze tightened just a little. “I think we should start with the computer room.”

  Jack followed him across the lobby. “So, Brendan, what do you do as Dr. Hahn’s assistant?”

  “I teach some of Dr. Hahn’s introductory courses and I work here in the lab. Technically I’m still working on my doctorate in neuropsychology. Once I graduate I hope to be full-time.”

  “I’d have pegged you for a football player.”

  “I was, in high school. Quarterback—but I tore my rotator cuff. Someone thought a change from my typical classes would do me some good. I took a theory class with Dr. Hahn, changed my major, and never looked back.”

  “Will we see the lab?”

  “Yes, but some other areas first. It’s on the lower level.”

  “What do you do there?”

  “Mostly brain scans—brain imaging.”

  “Imaging? Like creating a picture of what people are thinking?”

  “No, that technology is still years away. We use an fMRI to perform scans and see patterns. Images of how different stimuli affect the brain.”

  As they headed downstairs, Jack noticed the many warning and danger signs posted throughout the building. He pointed at the Volatile Materials—Extreme Caution sign and quipped, “I thought the most you might have to worry about in the psychology center was falling off the shrink’s couch.”

  Brendan laughed. “That’s a good one, but you do need to be careful. This is a fully functional laboratory environment. It’s world-renowned.”

  Jack tried to backpedal. “I’m sure it is. I just had different expectations.”

  Brendan continued with the tour. The whole center appeared to have been recently remodeled; that faint chemical odor of newness hung in the air. Everything seemed to have a plaque attached to it, indicating who had donated the money for it. Jack nodded his head at the appropriate times and looked for any opportunity to get in some questions.

  “What was Michelle’s role here?” he asked at last.

  “I’ll show you on the second floor. That’s where the new computer lab is. Michelle oversaw the backup generators, updated the servers, and showed us how to increase our data storage capacity. More and more, we’re moving to video, and that takes a lot of space.”

  And a lot of dedication. She must have been here all the time.

  Brendan paused outside a large glass wall. On the other side, computer lights flashed and flickered in three separate rows. Jack noticed all the security cameras around the computer room and the card reader attached to the door.

  “You have a lot of security here.”

  “A lot of it is new. That was the last part Michelle was working on. I have one of the first new cards.” He pulled out a blue card with his picture on it and scanned it through the card reader beside the door at the end of the hallway.

  Jack followed Brendan into a large open area. Windows along the entire wall at the far end gave a panoramic view of the woods. To one side, a solid white wall with a large double door split the floor in half.

  Brendan gestured to the breathtaking view of the woods. “The university purchased the building five years ago. The makeover has been going on since then. This way.”

  He motioned Jack toward a staircase leading to the lowest level. At the bottom of the staircase were two closed metal doors. T
he door on the right had a CAUTION—NO ENTRY sign.

  Brendan opened it but didn’t step through to the cement hallway stretching out into darkness. “Utility corridors run throughout the building. I can’t tell you how much cable and fiber optics Michelle ran. She’d wear this little hat with a light on it.”

  Jack smiled at the thought in spite of the pang in his chest. Everything seemed to point to the adult Michelle—the Michelle Jack had never gotten to know—being extremely proud of her work, vested in it, and appreciated for it. Would she leave suddenly, without giving notice, jeopardizing her whole career? Or did it creep her out and she had to run? Or…

  Brendan closed the CAUTION door and opened the door on the left. Jack followed him down a corridor to a set of double doors. Brendan swiped his card in yet another card reader, and the doors silently swung open.

  A short hallway split left and right with doors at the ends. Here everything was cold and sterile; that horrible hospital feel.

  “This way to the lab.” Brendan led the way down the hallway, which was lined with cabinets. He pulled a small plastic tray from one cabinet. “Do you have any ferromagnetic materials?”

  “What?”

  “Metal?” Brendan pointed to a sign: No Metal Beyond This Point.

  Jack unholstered his Glock .40 caliber, dropped the magazine into his hand, and pulled the slide back to remove the round in the chamber. “Do you have a secure location for this?”

  “Certainly. We get all sorts of visitors.” Brendan walked over and opened a safe. “It will be secure in here.”

  Jack took his time placing his gun inside. He closed the door himself and tried the handle to make sure it locked. “What would happen if I went inside with it?”

  “It would be bad. They made us watch safety videos where people got careless and brought wheelchairs, gurneys, and even floor polishers too close. They all got jammed deep inside the machine. And as for the gun, that actually happened one time. Some police officer had his pistol fly right out of his holster. It went off when it hit the magnet and shot a hole in the wall.”

  Jack raised an eyebrow. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. Google it. It was in the New York Times. And that was only a regular MRI. The fMRI is twenty times more powerful.”

  “What about the metal in this?” Jack pointed to a fire extinguisher. “Why doesn’t it get sucked up?”

  Brendan patted the wall. “Shielding. It was part of the biggest expense, but it’s built into the walls, ceiling, and floor that surround the machine. It’s like a cage and the machine is the beast.” He moved over to a door. Another swipe and it opened.

  Jack followed into some kind of control booth. A young man—Brendan introduced him as Pete—sat at the console and video monitors on either side of him flashed graphs and charts. A large window looked out onto a room that was bare except for a large cylindrical machine, centered over a stretcher. The space age looking equipment reflected off the gleaming black-tiled floor. On one of the monitors, Jack saw a smiling girl lying on the stretcher, inside the long tube.

  Brendan beamed. “Impressive, isn’t it? It’s one of the most powerful fMRIs in the world, a modified experimental design, 9.4 Tesla. The University of Illinois at Chicago has been experimenting with a similar design for years with excellent results. The detailed brain scans can pinpoint reactions in nanoseconds.”

  “How does it work?”

  “It detects the changes in blood oxygenation and flow that occur in response to neural activity. In this control booth the experimenter can control and monitor the machine and the supermagnet inside, as well as get data, both in real time and analyzed in different ways.”

  Jack felt as if he was in a technical infomercial. Wait, there’s more! But does it chop a tomato in just seconds?

  “It takes almost a full day to power down,” Pete chimed in.

  “Turn up the volume.” Brendan tapped the young man’s shoulder, and Pete flicked a switch.

  Jack heard girlish laughter, and each time she laughed, the charts on the monitors in the control room jumped and changed. Jack looked again at the girl in the machine below and saw she was watching a monitor.

  “We’re almost ready to kill the TV and let her pray,” Pete said as he slowly turned a dial.

  Jack looked at Brendan. “Pray?”

  Brendan nodded. “We’re monitoring data for Dr. Hahn.”

  “The God Spot?”

  Brendan looked surprised that Jack had done his homework. “So, you know about the theory that there is one centralized spot in the brain responsible for religious thought.”

  “I just heard Dr. Franklin ripping a kid apart about it,” Jack said.

  Brendan exchanged a sideways frown with Pete, who blurted out, “I think that’s all Dr. Franklin talks about. That and which girl he’s currently—”

  Brendan bumped his chair and went on primly, “We can use the fMRI to see what areas of the brain are utilized for different functions.”

  Pete shrugged. “Whatever. Truth hurts. The guy’s a—”

  Brendan gave Pete a shut-up-I’m-on-a-tour glare.

  Pete turned back to the monitors, while Jack made a note to go to Pete if he was in need of gossip about this joint.

  “Excellent, you’re here.” Dr. Hahn eased into the small room and shook Jack’s hand. “I trust that Brendan is explaining everything?”

  Jack nodded. “Very impressive, Doctor.”

  “It represents countless hours and sacrifice by so many, including Michelle,” Hahn said.

  “How many students work here?”

  “Several dozen. We’re at full staff, and a number of students volunteer, too. Don’t you wish that you had been able to get college credit for watching TV?” Hahn indicated the girl on the gurney, one gray eyebrow raised.

  “I didn’t realize you had so much high-tech equipment in here. And Michelle was getting it all locked down?”

  “She did wonderful work. It’s probably excessive for a university psychology laboratory, but still, Michelle made it possible for us to upgrade and satisfy all the security protocols,” Dr. Hahn said.

  “How late are people here, typically?” Jack asked.

  “Typically?” Dr. Hahn paused. “Our hours are nine to seven. However, in academia, working hours are often atypical.”

  “And how would you describe your function here, Dr. Hahn?”

  “I am just a figurehead. I like to say the center runs itself.” Silvery laugh. “They bring me out for fundraisers and to teach a class or two.”

  Brendan stepped forward. “He’s being modest. Dr. Hahn is director of the Neuropsychology Department. This whole center is really his work. He’s a pioneer in fMRI research.”

  Dr. Hahn’s hand rested on Brendan’s shoulder. “My student’s flattery is sure to positively affect his grades.” He laughed again and patted Brendan’s arm. “I’m actually co-director. Dr. Franklin runs the other side.”

  “I listened in on part of his lecture while I waited.”

  “Today?” Dr. Hahn sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “Don’t let the corduroy and glasses fool you: academia is a contact sport. Dr. Franklin was just… explaining his platform. I heard about… the incident already from my student.”

  “He shouldn’t go off in class—” Pete started to protest, but Dr. Hahn held up a hand.

  “Dr. Franklin can speak about anything he wants to in his class,” Dr. Hahn clarified. “Conversation isn’t the issue. I’ll remind the both of you”—he looked back and forth between Pete and Brendan—“if you are going to defend a position, be prepared to defend it vigorously.” He clenched a fist. “And if you get knocked down, get a pint and go back to the drawing board in the morning.” He smiled convincingly, but Jack was wondering why he referred to it as an incident. Had there been others?

  Brendan tapped his watch.

  Dr. Hahn nodded and gave Jack a little European bow. “I do apologize for leaving you yet again, but I have a class.”

/>   “Of course.” Jack shook his hand, American-style. “Thank you for the tour.”

  “It was the least I could do for all of Michelle’s work. Brendan will see you out.” He turned to go.

  “Dr. Hahn, I have a rather odd request to make of you.”

  Dr. Hahn raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Yes?”

  “After seeing all of this, I just wish… I wish I could have been a fly on the wall and seen Michelle at work. Do you know what I mean?” Jack asked.

  “Actually, I do. Maybe it’s the researcher in me, but wanting to be an observer is a frequent wish of mine, too.”

  “Do you think it would be possible for me to look at some of the video footage of Michelle working? I know it’s not a typical request, but I think it would help me with closure.”

  Hahn shook his head. “Sadly, that wouldn’t be possible…”

  “I’d be happy to come back.” Jack turned his hands out.

  “Unfortunately, it isn’t a matter of time. The security cameras were one of the last things Michelle was working on, and right now they don’t record anything. They only serve as a deterrent.”

  “That’s too bad,” Jack said, not hiding his disappointment.

  Hahn seemed relieved, now that his obligation to Jack had been fulfilled. “Michelle would have been very happy you came out here today. I hope you can find some closure in the fact that her work here was meaningful and will continue.”

  I’ll get closure when I find out what happened to Michelle.

  Dr. Hahn departed, and Brendan led Jack through the antiseptic maze and back to the front desk. Through the glass Jack saw it had begun to rain, and students were hurrying down the main sidewalk in large herds. He didn’t change his pace or even react to the cold sting as he took long strides toward the parking lot, mulling over the glimpse he’d just had into Michelle’s life—and realizing how far he was from understanding her death.

  “Afternoon, Jack.” Neil Waters stepped out of the crowd and held his large umbrella over Jack.