Project Cain (5 page)

Castillo then showed me another list.

This next list was about to become my whole world.

Albert Young. Jeffrey Williford. Henry Roberts. Dennis Uliase. Ted Thompson. David Spanelli.

These were the six students who were missing. Six who’d been at the school that night that no one could find now. They probably, Castillo explained, had
something
to do with the murders. That’s all he’d say at this point.

These were not their real names. These were their adopted names.

Their real names (their ORIGINAL names) were:

Albert Fish. Jeffrey Dahmer. Henry Lee Lucas.Dennis Rader. Ted Bundy. David Berkowitz.

How many of these names do you recognize?

Except for one, which I’d learned only the day before, I’d never heard of any of them.

They happen to be six of the most famous serial killers ever.

That’s why they were chosen. Why they were born again. Manufactured.

An Olympic Dream Team if the Olympics murdered and raped
people. All added up, they’d killed almost two hundred people. Though “killed” doesn’t quite capture the specifics, but it will have to do.

My dad wanted only the best. So he went out and got their DNA and made clones of the best.

Now the “BEST” were all teenagers again.

And they’d apparently restarted their KILL COUNT at twelve.

•  •  •

Castillo asked if I knew these guys. He’d not yet brought up the clone thing at all. He was still speaking about these six boys like they were just Albert Young, David Spanelli, Henry Roberts, and so on, etc. But something in his voice, his look, made me realize he knew
exactly
what they were.

He’d just come to my house directly from DSTI, just spent hours in my father’s secret room while I’d cowered in the closet. Yes, I imagined, he knew the New Truth all too well.

Castillo shook me from my ever-darkening thoughts, asked again: Do you know these guys?

I admitted I knew three of them. I’d met Henry and Ted. And David. Various events and programs at the Massey school my dad had brought me to. David had always seemed like a pretty cool kid. Funny. And I told Castillo that. He wrote it down like it mattered somehow.

He asked specifically about Henry and Ted.

I shook my head. Explained what I thought of them. Told Castillo they, to me, seemed like “BAD KIDS.” (Not knowing how much my silly notions of such classifications would be challenged and changed over the next two weeks.) When pressed for more specifics, I told him they just seemed to be like people who might be involved in something, well, “BAD.”

Maybe that was unfair. I mean, guys like my father and Mr. Eble had always seemed “GOOD,” and this was clearly no longer a given.

Part of the New Truth.

Castillo asked me a bunch more questions about Henry, Ted, and David.

What they liked to do. Places they talked about? Girls? Etc.

I told Castillo everything I could think of. It wasn’t much.

I mean, how much do you really know about people you’ve met only a couple of times?

As to the other three guys he was looking for . . .

I told Castillo honestly I’d never met them.

I’d certainly have remembered meeting Jeffrey Williford.

Meeting another copy of myself.

•  •  •

Castillo had told DSTI about finding my dad’s secret room and about all the materials and documents within. He projected DSTI would return in about thirty minutes to pick it all up, and then he made it pretty clear that wasn’t ideal for me. Turns out he had the exact same assessments of DSTI my dad did: I probably should keep as far away as possible. It occurred to me briefly that his warning and concern were some kind of cruel trick and that he was just gonna drive me straight to them anyway.

But Castillo didn’t work
for
DSTI. Just
with
. (At least that’s what he was telling me.) And that small difference made ALL the difference in the world, I think. Castillo was working for the government. The Department of Defense, ultimately. For some guy named Colonel Stanforth. And the gang at DSTI hadn’t told Castillo (or this Stanforth guy) they were
coming to clean out my father’s office before Castillo got there.

And they sure as heck hadn’t told Castillo anything about me. That I even
existed
.

Castillo’d had to figure that part out on his own after a night in my dad’s secret room reading his journals. Watching videos of various patient interviews and of top-secret tests conducted.

Turns out there were a lot of things DSTI hadn’t told Castillo about.

And I think it kinda pissed him off.

So he didn’t plan to take me to DSTI.

Instead he asked me to help.

•  •  •

Castillo told me he wanted to help these six kids. And my dad, too.

He didn’t know yet if they’d all scattered in different directions or were still together somewhere.

And he didn’t know if my dad was a hostage of some kind or—he suspected—more “involved.”

But he said he didn’t care about any of that right now because he wanted to do more than capture these guys. He said they were in a real bad place and needed real help. He said they
might
be murderers and my dad
might
be helping them somehow but that he was only interested in making sure things didn’t get worse.

And I believed him. Even if he was lying, it didn’t matter.

I had to believe in
something
.

Maybe I should have just said no. I didn’t.

I said yes.

He asked if I needed anything.

They already took everything, I said.

He nodded.

I’m Castillo, he said and held out his hand.

Hi. I shook his hand. I’m Jeffrey Dahmer.

•  •  •

It was a shitty thing to say. But I wanted this guy to know that
I knew
exactly what I was. What these other guys were too. He didn’t have to pretend anymore.

Maybe I also wanted Castillo to feel as sucky and revolted as I did.

I think it worked.

•  •  •

Science types always write things down. Always. They collect data, make notes. Repeat.

Think about biology class again. No one there EVER asks you what you think or feel. (One of the great failings of all Science, I think.) It’s all about Observe and Record. Almost as if something wasn’t really REAL or TRUE until it was logged officially in black and white.

If you had a big secret, you’d probably just keep it to yourself. Somewhere in the back of your mind. Safe. Private. But to science geeks like my dad, it wouldn’t yet be REAL that way.

So even for his darkest and wildest secrets, he took notes.

These were some of the “notes” Castillo showed me on his smartphone.

We was driving in his car to God knows where. It was, like, seven in the morning.

The pictures he was showing me were ones he’d taken of my dad’s journals the night before. Pictures from the secret journals
in the secret room. The ones I hadn’t wanted to look at.

And the big secret?

Squiggles and cartoon chickens.

Ridiculous.

But it wasn’t just ridiculous. It was something else.

Because Castillo had spent most of the night doing what I couldn’t/wouldn’t do: reading my dad’s journals and notes. Looking at the files on his hidden laptops. And according to my father’s notes, the six missing students were just the tip of the iceberg. A tip already sharp and dark with blood. And the iceberg lurking scarcely beneath was a hundred miles long.

According to my father’s journals the clones schooled at the Massey Institute weren’t the only ones. According to my father’s journals there’d been some special testing—tests done by him against DSTI’s will but with their half knowledge. He’d managed to adopt out another twenty clones into the world. Babies made from the DNA of famous serial killers, then given out to specific families.

Some of the families had no idea what their sons were.

Some did. Some were even paid to raise their sons in specific ways.

Bad specific ways.

•  •  •

According to my father’s journals, it was time to free all of them.

To tell these clones who they truly were and release them out into the world.

Like he was letting loose a wild animal.

Or a disease.

Like he’d freed me.

•  •  •

Castillo asked me what these were.

I had no idea.

McCarty?
M. Carty.
Didn’t know.

Al Baum?
Didn’t know.

He was totally convinced there was someone, some kid, named “Al.” Maybe the Albert in the missing six from DSTI/Massey but probably, he suspected,
another
Albert altogether. One of those other secret kids adopted out by my father. The clone of some old serial killer named Albert Fish, or even—Castillo suspected from my father’s cryptic scribbles—another notorious killer named Albert DeSalvo.

At the time, Castillo figured the family’s name was Baum (“Al Baum,” taking away the squiggle thing), but he’d done a search and there were, like,
20,000
Baums in the United States.

He said it’d be impossible to find the right one because, he figured, the kid would be totally “off the grid.” And by “off the grid” he meant there’d be no official record of the adoption (just like me). Probably homeschooled (just like me). No Social Security number (just like me).

Castillo pointed to the squiggle between “Al” and “Baum” and asked me if I thought it was some kind of scientific notation or even a weird musical symbol. At this point, I could barely understand a word this guy was saying. I was exhausted and confused and scared and really wanted to just crawl into a ball on the floor mat and maybe die.

I didn’t know. To say something, anything, I told him I played the bass. He didn’t care at all, then asked me about the bird
thing. I had no clue there either and told him so.

I’m surprised he didn’t just throw me out of the car.

•  •  •

We’d been driving for an hour. I think north toward New York. I wasn’t sure. I was so exhausted. To be honest, I might have cried some. Call me a pussy if you want. I don’t care. Castillo said: Anyone thinks you’re a pussy for crying, just means nothing bad’s ever really happened to them. So, there’s that. Please try to keep that in mind as we go forward.

He asked me a bunch more questions about my dad. Like what he drove and the places he went. Business trips, vacations and stuff. Friends he had. I didn’t know anything. And I sure as heck had no clue what the chicken was or squiggle or the castle or birds or any of the other notes Castillo showed me. They weren’t the notations of a curious scientist. They were the scribblings of a total raving lunatic. They meant nothing to me. They had nothing to do with me.

But that was just another lie. The total raving lunatic was MY father. Adoptive, fake, whatever. It didn’t matter. As far as the world was concerned, as far as Castillo was—as far as me, too, I guess—Dr. Jacobson WAS my father. And I couldn’t change that fact any more than I could change the DNA apparently coursing throughout my entire body.