Apex Predator (53 page)

“Now he knows Riche was nothing, just one predator in a much bigger jungle. When he killed him, Steven swatted a mosquito and then realized the mosquito was sitting on an elephant’s ass, and the son of a bitch woke up and charged after him.”

Meeks chuckled. He’d always enjoyed the old man’s way of putting things.

The General went on, “Now it’s our job to keep that elephant off his back until after the trial, then it’s his decision whether we go hunting or not.”

Thurman nodded, “Yeah, and I think you’re right, Steven’s not going to let this guy just disappear.”

They drove in silence all the way to Goodman’s building. He owned a penthouse on the Upper East Side.

Before he reached for the door handle, Thurman grabbed his arm, “General, I told you about this because I consider Steven a brother, but it still bothers me that I betrayed his confidence, it bothers the hell out of me.”

Goodman smiled, “Relax, son, you did the right thing. Sometimes we’re so far in, so deep, that we don’t realize when we need to call for cover. That’s where Steven is at, he’s looking at a murder charge and he’s got the world’s attention firmly planted on him. He’s a good executive and he was a good officer because he knows what he doesn’t know, that’s why he brought you in.

“Just so we’re clear, Thurman, we’re all a part of a brotherhood, like it or not, and right now one of our brothers needs our help, even if he doesn’t completely understand how much help he needs. You did good, Chief, trust me.”

Retired Chief Petty Officer Thurman Meeks smiled, the General was the only one who called him that. “Good enough. Have a good night, sir.”

The General stepped out of the car, patted the roof twice and turned to go into his building.

The next morning, Steven got up before Beth, before the sun came up actually, made coffee, had a cup himself and left the rest for Beth along with a note and some fresh-squeezed orange juice. The previous day he had arranged for a car to pick him up precisely at six, before the whole world woke up. As he walked out of his building, he saw that his security detail had already pushed the media early birds out of the way. He went straight to the car, and one of the men of his security team got in behind him. This was something that his lawyers had insisted on. They didn’t know about the SIG Sauer he had tucked in his lower back and he wanted to keep it that way. He didn’t know how they would feel about their client, a defendant accused of first-degree murder, carrying a concealed weapon, but he was pretty sure one or all of them might blow their top. He knew he might be violating a condition of his bail, but under the circumstances he didn’t care. The car drove straight to Queens College. The security guard got out first, scouted the nearby sidewalk and gave him a nod. He got out of the car and went straight into a building on his immediate right. He had been here twice before and knew the layout well. As he made his way through the building, he could sense the looks he was getting from the few people that were there that realized who he was. Most were students up before dawn cramming and others had been up all night studying, fueled by caffeine, so there really weren’t that many who took any real interest. The school had been on high alert, as there had been a constant stream of media coming through campus since the shooting. He had seen a couple of the interviews Dr. Leonard had given, so he knew the man could handle himself. He finally got to the right floor and walked up to the same student he had spoken to before.

“Mr. Loomis! I didn’t know you were coming, does Dr. Leonard know you’re coming this morning?”

Steven nodded, “Yes, he does. I called him yesterday. He said to come by this morning. Is he free?”

She smiled and stood up, “Yes, he is, please come back.”

When they were a few feet away from his office door she excused herself and went back up front. He knocked lightly on the open door as he stepped to the threshold.

Leonard turned toward him, a stack of blue test booklets balanced precariously on his desk, “Mr. Loomis! Come in, come in, please!”

He walked over to the small table in his office where there were even more booklets and moved a stack of books from the chair they were in to the floor. “I apologize for the mess. I keep meaning to get some of my graduate assistants to clean it out, but it seems I need everything here. I know it looks messy, but believe it or not I know where everything is, wouldn’t know what to do with myself if it were all clean.”

Loomis smiled and took the chair he had emptied. Leonard sat down across the table from him and with that beaming smile that seemed to always be parked on his face asked, “So, what can I do for you?”

Steven wasn’t sure where to start. There was so much he wanted to say to the man, but he knew that now was not the time to say it.

He started with the main reason he was there, “Dr. Leonard, first of all I want to apologize. I know how busy you are and I know how difficult the media can make things. It seems like they’re everywhere I turn these days and I know that it’s probably the same for you. I am sorry for that, it’s not what I intended and I wish I could change it, but I can’t. That’s the reason I asked to meet with you at this ungodly hour.”

The smile on Leonard’s face widened, “My dear sir, there’s nothing to be sorry for! Are you kidding?! I’ve been toiling in obscurity for over two decades, hoping that one day what we’ve accomplished, the work we’ve done, would see the light of day, but knowing all the while that it probably would not happen in my lifetime. Now not only is the world interested in the work I’ve been doing, they want to know what’s next! I’m scheduled to go on with Piers Morgan the day after tomorrow! No, Mr. Loomis, you don’t have a single thing to be sorry about. As for the hour, I am usually in here before six, so it was no problem.”

Steven smiled, honestly surprised by Leonard’s response, “I suppose I hadn’t thought about it that way. I’m glad, professor, the world needs to know about what you’ve done, the things you’ve discovered.”

Leonard’s face now took on a more serious expression, “I don’t know what you’ve gone through, I really can’t imagine, but I can assure you of one thing, Mr. Loomis, the world will know. I will make sure they know and so will all the other scientists that have dedicated their lives to this.”

Steven nodded and went on, “I’m also here because, as I am sure you’ve heard, my trial starts in a few weeks and my defense team is planning to call you as an expert witness, and I wanted to personally give you the heads up. I hope that won’t be a problem.”

Leonard shook his head, “Not at all. I am assuming they will be calling me to testify to the work I’ve done and to go over my findings.”

Steven nodded, “That’s right, that’s exactly what you’ll be called to testify about. My lawyers also want you to review Donald Riche’s file, you know, his history, his background and upbringing, and to provide your opinion.”

Leonard’s expression changed into one of concern, “Mr. Loomis, I can do a psychological autopsy and provide my point of view relative to it, but I hope you understand that there is simply no way for me to be able to determine whether Mr. Riche was in fact a
Homo sapiens predaer
. I just can’t make that determination. I wouldn’t feel right about doing that.”

Steven explained further, “I don’t think that’s what they’re looking for you to do, professor. I think the idea is that you do the psychological autopsy and then provide an opinion whether what you find might lead you to conclude that Riche
could have
been one of them. This whole thing professor is not about proving that Donald Riche
was
a
Homo predator
. I don’t think anybody believes that you can say unequivocally whether he was one or not.”

Leonard’s smile returned, “That I can do. I’ve done quite a bit of that over the years, actually. Unfortunately, we don’t always get to our subjects in time, and when that happens all we have is what’s left in their profile file.”

That settled, Steven debated whether to ask the scientist a question that had been bothering him for some time.

Leonard could see that the man was debating whether to ask something and decided to probe, “What’s on your mind, Mr. Loomis? I have a feeling that there something else you want to say.”

Steven smiled and shook his head slowly, “You got me. Yeah, you’re right, professor, I do have something I’ve been thinking about.”

Leonard just waited and Steven eventually broke down, “Alright, we’ve talked about this new species and you’ve explained that the reason you began to speculate that this was a new species in the first place was because they didn’t conform to the norms that you and your colleagues and others had set for extreme aberrant behavior, that you made the determination that these things are the way they are from the time they’re born, that they’re not a product of education or environment, but how do you know?

“I mean to make that determination you would really have to start studying them before they are old enough to be affected by their environment, and I can’t imagine that you’ve been able to conduct your experiments on newborn babies.”

Leonard’s expression lit up again. This was his field, what he’d dedicated a lifetime to, and it showed every time he was about to explain something. “Very perceptive, Mr. Loomis, very perceptive, but you see, while we can’t research newborns, we can research babies before they’re affected by any human norms or their surrounding environment. It’s relatively new research, pioneered by the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University. They’ve been researching babies as young as three months old, researching whether altruistic behavior and cooperative behavior is something human children are born with, something innate.”

Steven remembered the research Scoma had told him about, “Yeah, Dr. Scoma told me about some of it.”

Leonard stopped and, with a glint in his eye, stood up, “You know what? Come with me. I think you’ll find what I’m about to show you quite enlightening.”

Steven followed Leonard out of his office and down a short hallway. They went into a room with several flat-screen televisions and some DVD players attached to them. He sifted through a small stack of DVDs sitting on a television before finding what he was looking for. He walked over put the DVD into one of the players, turned the television on and motioned for Steven to sit down. Steven watched as the study utilizing the puppets that Scoma had described unfolded. It was clear that most babies shown chose the helpful puppet in the scenario. The same scenario was repeated several times with various babies.

Leonard turned the television off and turned to Steven, “We duplicated that experiment many, many times and just as you saw in that video, more than 90 percent of the babies chose the helpful puppet. The implications were astounding. This meant that human babies were basically predisposed to do good, to be helpful. Other experiments with other children found that roughly the same percentage were willing to share without being prompted to and they were willing to be helpful,
even at their own expense.

“All of this, Mr. Loomis, had led the researchers at Yale and at other similar institutions to conclude that human babies are basically born ‘good,’ that there is what we often call a moral compass that leads them to choose to do what we as a society have determined is the right thing. It is still a young science and there are many other experiments being conducted as we speak, but that’s the gist of it.”

Leonard, with a sparkle in his eye and back in his child-in-a-toy-store mode, went on, “So most of these researchers were testing the inherent goodness in humans, even at a very young age, but we were interested in the 10 percent that chose the ‘bad’ puppet. We retested them using different scenarios, and at first we found that for most it had nothing to do with good or bad, but rather a preference in color. They simply preferred one color versus another.”

Steven jumped in, “You said ‘most.’ What about the other....”

Leonard held up his index finger in triumph, “Exactly! What about those who chose the ‘bad’ puppet for some other reason? We conducted other similar experiments with those babies and found that those that selected the ‘bad’ puppet in one scenario selected the ‘bad’ puppet in every other scenario we devised. We began to get excited, but we had to make sure, so we kept track of those children and brought them back when they were older, 12 to 15 months to be precise. We eliminated all the children that had in any way been exposed to any form of psychological or physical trauma or whose parents seemed unstable or whose life situation was otherwise compromised.”

Leonard found another DVD and put it in. In the scene that started playing, an adult sat in a chair and there were two babies in the room playing with some toys. The adult then dropped a pen in such a way that the babies could see it. The adult attempted to reach the pen, stretching his arms and making gestures that showed he wanted the pen, but could not reach it. In the first group of toddlers, the two babies watched the adult struggle and after a short time, one walked over, picked up the pen and handed it to the adult. The same scenario was repeated with several children from the 90 percent group. In each situation, one or both of the babies tried to help the adult get the pen or they picked it up and handed it to the adult themselves. After repeating it several times, the experiment was conducted with one child from the 90 percent group and one child from the other group. Again, both toddlers watched the adult struggle and after some time the ‘good’ baby got up and got the pen while the other baby watched. The scenario was repeated several times with the same toddlers and each time the same thing happened.

Leonard whispered, “Now watch this.”

In the next scene, the same situation unfolded, except this time when the ‘good’ baby got up to go get the pen, the other child walked over and pushed the helpful child down, walked over to the pen, picked it up and walked back to where he’d been playing, pen sitting right beside him.

Leonard pushed pause, “That same situation was replayed with several iterations, and in every instance the same thing happened.”