Project Cain (14 page)

The mystery was solved only when my father handed me that folder. Inside, remember, were pictures of all of Jeffrey Dahmer’s known victims. Pictures with names.

I’d looked only at the top sheet. Hadn’t known any of the names.

Their faces, however . . .

I’d recognized every one.

•  •  •

So now Richard Guerrero’s face was in the stadium directly across from me.

One of the few names I’d recently learned, but a face I’d seen more than a dozen times in my life.

A cotton candy vendor here, a couple of empty blue seats there. Some white shirts, an aisle of concrete steps. A massive collage of colors and shapes forming into a single distinguishable
something
. Ordinarily I would just look away. Not allow the face to form any more than it already had. But this time I would not (or could not) look away. I saw everything.

The long thin face and extended chin, the big sad puppy-dog eyes, stuffed lips, the hint of a thin mustache even.

A memory of mine. A killing memory.

•  •  •

Richard Guerrero was murdered on March 24, 1988. That day, he was given a drink laced with sleeping pills and then strangled. His remains were removed in pieces in the garbage for the next several weeks. This all happened in the house of Catherine Dahmer. One of three murders
there. Eventually Catherine Dahmer got tired of the chemical smells and the noises from her basement and she kicked her grandson, Jeffrey, out of her house.

•  •  •

Castillo asked where I was going. I’d lurched up from my chair. I was stammering back some sort of reply. Who knows what I said, but I finally claimed to need to go to the bathroom. Castillo eyed me suspiciously per usual. There was sweat on my forehead, trickling down my back. I think my whole body was shaking. But he nodded. Told me to hurry up.

There was no one sitting next to either one of us, so it was pretty easy to get up and out to the steps and down to the bathrooms. I didn’t really need to go, of course, but I sure needed to change the scenery. I knew I hadn’t killed Richard Guerrero. He’d been dead twenty years before I’d been born. And yet . . . I
had
killed Richard Guerrero.

The skin and bones and hair and heart I was walking around Harrisburg with were the exact same that had been in that Milwaukee room in 1988. Like one of those Russian nesting dolls that you keep opening up and finding another smaller one just like it within. That was me, a “smaller” Jeffrey Dahmer. I could not deny this, as much as I tried while shuffling, half-dazed, to the nearest bathroom.

I tried peeing just for something to do, but it took, like, five minutes for a couple of drops. I washed my hands and caught myself staring at the mirror again. I reset my glasses, studied my own face like I was looking at it for the very first time.

The last face Richard Guerrero had ever seen.

I guess it was only fair I had to look at
his
face now.

Marvelous night for baseball, a deep voice said beside me.

I turned. Fully expected to find Richard Guerrero standing there. His swollen neck bruised all purple and black. Or even a woman in a black dress. Why not? I was fully prepared to go downright insane at this point. Embrace it, you know?

Instead at the next sink was a black man who nodded hello to me. Not a hallucination. About my size, gold rounded glasses, a slender goatee, and a shaved head beneath a red Senators baseball cap. He wore a burgundy silk suit, a pair of large Chinese-style goldfish embroidered in crimson across his button-down shirt.

Sorry? I said.

A glorious night for a baseball game, he said again.

Yeah, I replied dreamily, I guess so.

Go, Senators, he said, and grinned hugely and turned back to his own sink and mirror.

I lumbered slowly from him and the bathrooms, the memory of Richard Guerrero’s face waning at last. When I took my seat, Castillo didn’t say anything at first. We just sat there in silence as usual and watched the next couple of batters. I’m not even sure I knew which team was which anymore. I made a point of trying to refocus on that. On something—
anything
—real.

I stole a quick look at where the face had been and saw only people.

Castillo asked me if everything was good.

I turned. Thought about it.

I didn’t know the answer. I didn’t know much of anything anymore.

I for sure didn’t know that I’d just met Ox.

H
e arrived an inning later. The black guy in silk. I was kinda shocked when he first entered our row, but then Castillo stood to greet him and I figured out who it was. Ox hugged Castillo warmly, then shook my hand. Marvelous night for baseball, he said, and winked at me.

Castillo sat down again, sarcastically thanked Ox for dressing so “covertly,” and Ox grinned back, taking the empty seat next to Castillo. Covert enough, Ox said. (I loved that smile already. His was a smile that said,
No matter how shitty things had been or were or would be, things were really all right in the grand scheme of things.
It was a much-needed attitude during all of this.)

Right away Castillo asked about Shardhara.

No messing around here. He’d called Ox for one thing, and he’d waste no time getting to it.

If Ox knew what Shardhara really was, maybe some of my father’s other notes and plans would start to fall into place. It was a puzzle piece that could maybe pull so much more of the picture together. At least enough for Castillo to find my father. Maybe the others. Maybe enough to end all of this.

Ox tilted his head, said: Never heard of it.

•  •  •

About Ox.

He was raised in Nashville.

His father was a minister with the Church of Christ Holiness USA who’d hosted a lecture by Martin Luther King the day before King was shot. His mother had died a couple of months after Ox was born. He’d been raised by his grandmother, who was the daughter of former slaves and had been a famed psychic and healer in Nashville until her death at age 105.

He’d done ROTC in college and learned computer programming and software development. He’d been in the military for almost twenty years and had lived in seven different countries. In the Army he’d been a cook, a demolition expert, or a lieutenant who’d trained Special Forces for Afghanistan. His story changed depending on who he was talking to. In all cases, the job he gave was a cover for his real role: working with the CIA to recruit and nurture relationships with dozens of tribal leaders and factions during the war.

It was in this time that he’d met and befriended Castillo.

He has no doubt that the Loch Ness Monster is real. Bigfoot, too. His favorite movies are
Escape from New York
and
The Magnificent Seven
. His favorite singers are named George Jones and Prince. (I don’t much care, despite his best efforts, for either.)

He’d been in jail for six months in Kentucky on weapons charges. He has a very young wife and two young sons. He is bald by choice only, and every other year grows a thick Afro to “confound The Man.”

He likes to play the card game Magic. He makes his own beer and ice cream. He says things like “The lion takes no counsel from the
warthog” and “When you’re roasting two potatoes, one of them is bound to get charred.”

He believes that the government isn’t worried about giving everyone false answers all the time because it has successfully gotten everyone to ask the wrong questions.

•  •  •

Castillo doubted that Ox had just driven nine hundred miles just to say he didn’t know anything. Or to watch the SeaWolves play baseball.

Ox retorted he might have driven
eleven
hundred miles to see an old friend, and then raised his hand for the beer vendor. What’d you contact
me
for anyway? he asked.

You know something about everything, Castillo replied.

Ox’s face had gone blank in thought. No emotion, no response as he focused only on the game below.

That bad? Castillo asked.

But before saying anything more, Ox first wanted to know more about what Castillo was involved in. They both spoke in hushed voices beneath the game’s noise. I could hardly hear them myself.

Castillo had just apologized, said he couldn’t get too specific. Ox’s eyes had narrowed some, a trace of irritation. He requested a “taste,” just to make sure he and Castillo were on the same page. Said he didn’t want any “unspecified nastiness” coming upon him and his family.

So Castillo told him the basics: that a private company was doing shitty things for his and Ox’s former bosses. Horrible shitty. Involved experiments. Kids. Civilian deaths. And someplace or someone named Shardhara. Their bosses had said they had no clue what that meant, but Castillo could tell when people were bullshitting him, which they
were on this topic. He also noted how quickly Ox had gotten back in touch.

Ox kept looking only at me now.

You one of the kids? he asked.

I glanced nervously at Castillo, who nodded that it was OK to reply.

Yes, sir, I said.

For the first time, Ox stopped smiling.

•  •  •

Castillo noted that Ox didn’t seem too surprised by any of this, and Ox replied that nothing had surprised him since he was four, and then he teased Castillo for still being puzzled by such things.

Castillo leaned back in his seat and admitted that he had been surprised by some of what he’d seen this week.

And that’s why I love you. Ox’s smile had returned, and he looked directly at me again. You working with a man who still believes in GOOD GUYS and BAD GUYS, he told me.

(My first thought:
Thank God
.)

Ox was trying to get a rise out of Castillo, and it had worked. Castillo argued he’d worked some “morally questionable” operations in his day. That he wasn’t a “child.” That he knew the US military had to “cross the line” sometimes.

Cross the line.
Ox snickered at that phrase, then sipped his beer.

He asked: You know your history, boy? He’d asked me, technically, but had been totally looking at Castillo when he did. I figured he was using me to make some kind of point to Castillo. I was a prop. Then he asked me if I knew about the Nazis.

Sure, I replied. He must have thought I was four years old or something. (Which, I suppose, is technically closer to the truth than
sixteen, but Ox did not know that then. He was just making his point. And so I looked at him like it was a stupid question, accordingly.)

Ox said: The Nazis were famous for killing millions and conducting lethal experiments on humans, right? Famous for being evil? And these United States of America got rid of the evil Nazis. Yes? Only problem is, at the exact same time, the USA was
also
conducting lethal experiments on humans.

I looked straight at Castillo, who was looking back at me. We were both thinking the same thing. Ox still had no clue how bad it’d gotten at DSTI. Castillo’d admitted to the experiments, but not the specifics yet. And as horrifying as those specifics were, I admit: It was nice sharing a secret with someone like Castillo. It was the only real connection we had, I guess.

The government
still
is, I said.

Ox winked.

Well, of course, he said.

•  •  •

He told us a story about this guy named Cornelius Rhoads, an American scientist who purposely put cancer cells into a bunch of people. They all died. The United States had recently invaded Puerto Rico, and this guy began using underprivileged Puerto Ricans for his tests, so no one really paid much attention to what was going on. A local politician named Campos got ahold of some letters where this American scientist was bragging about killing all these Puerto Rican people, and Campos went to the American newspapers with the letters. His reward? This Campos guy was arrested for being a “terrorist” and spent the next
twenty years
in a Puerto Rican jail, where he was declared insane and Dr. Rhoads used
him
as a subject for radiation experiments. Can you believe that? Dr. Rhoads
was soon promoted to run the US Army Biological Warfare department.

Ox said: Research it yourself sometime online. Some days it’s almost funny.

Ox then said: Before you can truly appreciate Shardhara, you gotta know your history.

•  •  •

Ox talked for, like, two hours. It was probably only ten minutes, but it was definitely a monologue and one he’d clearly given before. I tried to follow as much of it as I could. Castillo, I saw, was doing the same. Listening like a kid with a test the next day and really trying to learn the material.

Here’s what I can remember:

1. The Department of Defense recently admitted, despite a dozen different treaties banning research and development of biological agents, that it
still
operated biological-agent research facilities in more than
one hundred
institutions and universities across the nation. One hundred illegal projects! And that’s just what they’d been forced to admit.

2. When the Manhattan Project scientists finished the world’s first atomic bomb, they started a second project: injecting plutonium directly into hundreds of American men, women, and children. Their mission was to study the effects of exposure to atomic weapons. Their very first test subject was a civilian who’d
simply had a car accident near the lab
. One of their last tests was giving irradiated milk to disabled orphans.