Page 24

Jessie stepped out of the interrogation room.

She did her best to hide her frustration but sensed that it was coming through anyway.

She and Ryan had been “interviewing” the suspect for the last half hour. But the interview had largely consisted of them posing questions to the man, and him staring back at them in silence, while his eyes darted around like mad.

“Let’s give him time to stew,” Ryan said after following her out and closing the door. “Maybe Jamil and Beth have found something worthwhile that we can use when we go back in there.”

They walked down the hall to the research department, where they found the staff of two, as usual, hovering over their monitors.

“How’s it going in here?” Ryan asked.

Jamil didn’t look away from his screen, but Beth did.

“We were just about to check in with you,” she said. “We’ve got some updates.”

“We’ll take whatever you can offer,” Jessie said, “because the paisley man isn’t saying a word.”

“First of all, “ Jamil said, without looking up, “his name is Eric Sawyer, twenty-nine years old. As you discovered, he didn’t have any identification on him, but his fingerprints were in the system.”

“Because of the requirement to provide them to get a driver’s license?” Ryan assumed.

“Actually, no,” Beth volunteered. “He doesn't have a license or a car, apparently. But he did have to provide prints for a past job.”

“What was that?” Jessie asked.

“As a medical researcher for Prostanica Pharmaceuticals," Beth said. "They do research for the government. Apparently, he had to have a security clearance. Thus the required fingerprints, and likely a whole lot more."

“Do we have access to that ‘whole lot more?’” Jessie wondered.

“We’re working on getting it,” Jamil said, “but as you can imagine, the federal government doesn’t share that information without a fight. It might take a while.”

“Even without any of that, this is promising,” Ryan said. “If he did research for a pharma company, it’s not unreasonable to assume that he would know how to poison people in doses that would have delayed effects.”

“Yes,” Jessie agreed, “but I have to say, based on my interactions with Eric Sawyer so far, he doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who could even get a security clearance.”

“Probably not now,” Jamil agreed, “but he got his clearance four years ago. Things might have been very different for him back then.”

“Does he still work at Prostanica?” Ryan asked.

“No,” Beth said. “It looks like they let him go about a year ago.”

“Do we know why?” Jessie asked.

“The details are extremely limited,” Beth said. “All I can find so far is that it was ‘for cause.’ We can probably eventually sus it out, but these companies are pretty buttoned-up so it might take some doing.”

“I have my suspicions,” Jamil muttered, his attention on his computer monitor.

“Care to share with the class, Jamil?” Jessie asked.

“Right,” Jamil said, realizing everyone was waiting to hear what he’d discovered. “I’ve been going through Sawyer’s social media. It was pretty conventional stuff until about two years ago, when he started posting more regularly and more…outlandishly.”

“What does that mean?” Ryan wanted to know.

“Well, he went from posting about the movies he saw and how his workouts went to making more conspiratorial comments.”

“Like what?” Jessie pressed.

“Some of them were about Prostanica and what he believed was a plan by executives to cover up various suspicious drug trials, none of which he addresses with any specificity.”

“Could there be any merit to the allegations?” Jessie wondered.

“I haven’t found anything to support his claims, which are vague to the point of useless,” Jamil said, “though that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to them, I guess. But things didn’t end there.”

“How so?” Ryan asked.

“Soon after the Prostanica allegations, the comments become more generalized, about a larger plot by the government to secretly poison citizens to make them more docile. In addition, there’s a lot of surveillance state stuff. Some of it’s pretty out there.”

“Truthfully, it doesn’t sound all that different from what a lot of people post these days,” Ryan grumbled.

“Maybe not,” Jamil acknowledged, “but they are different in one important way. About six months ago, the tenor of some of his comments turned threatening, not just to others but to himself as well.”

“Was anything done? Beth asked.

“Yes,” Jamil said. “After a tip from a former co-worker and friend, authorities did a welfare check on him. He was combative and ended up being put on a 5150.”

“What’s that?” Beth asked.

"It's a 72-hour non-voluntary hold at a psychiatric facility," Ryan explained. "It sounds like he kind of spun out at some point," Ryan noted.

“Yes, after losing his job, he ended up working at a compounding pharmacy. That lasted six months before he was fired. And that appears to be when things really escalated. There’s the online rhetoric. And in addition to that first psychiatric hold, he’s had three more in the months since.”

“To me, Eric Sawyer doesn’t sound like another garden variety conspiracy theorist,” Jessie observed. “It seems like something chemical might be happening.”

“You appear to be correct, Ms. Hunt,” Jamil said somewhat sheepishly.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Please don’t ask me for the details of how I accessed this information,” he said, “but the last facility he was held at doesn’t do as great a job as the others at protecting patient confidentiality. It looks like Mr. Sawyer was diagnosed with symptoms of schizophrenia, including marked paranoia.”

“That makes a lot of sense,” Jessie said.

“So he’s got what sounds like some real mental instability,” Ryan said. “Has his behavior ever gone beyond threatening? Any violence or criminal activity?”

"Not yet," Jamil answered. "There's never been enough for an arrest. At one point, Prostanica filed suit against him for violating an NDA, but they withdrew it."

“Probably because they didn’t want their proprietary secrets litigated in open court,” Beth guessed.

“Regardless,” Jamil continued, “he has no record.”

“Maybe this is him moving on to the next phase,” Ryan suggested.

“Can we check his moments over the last few days?” Beth asked. “Obviously not a car GPS since he doesn’t have one, but maybe his phone?”

“He didn’t have one on him when we arrested him at the metro station,” Jessie said.

“That’s because he claims the government uses them to track us,” Jamil said. “It’s in several of his posts going back months.”

“Well, he’s not wrong on that one,” Ryan conceded. “We do it all the time.”

“Right,” Jamil said, “but he thinks the government uses them to track our brain signals and manipulate them.”

“Great,” Jessie sighed, setting that aside for the moment, “so we can’t confirm his movements. Ironically, his illness gives him an ironclad defense against most of the tools we use.”

“It’s like his paranoid concerns about how these tools might be used against him is working to his advantage now,” Beth noted meekly.

“A broken clock is right twice a day,” Ryan replied, unamused.

"There may be other ways to track him," Jamil said. "He ran into a metro station when he tried to escape from you. With no vehicle, we can assume he used a lot of public transportation. They all have cameras, which means we can use facial recognition to find his location at various times. It'll just take a lot longer than having his geolocation at our fingertips."

“We should definitely pursue that angle,” Jessie said, “though I have my doubts that it will pan out.”

“Why?” Ryan asked.

"Because I'm having trouble seeing how Sawyer could have followed the victims so closely," she said. "We know the killer snuck in soon after each couple got home, so he couldn't have been far behind them. But Sawyer couldn't have gotten a rideshare without a phone. And while the West Adams district where the Whitakers live is accessible by bus and the metro, the Vega's Hollywood Hills home is much harder to get to. In either case, how likely would he be to stay within range of them on a public bus?"

“What about a cab?” Ryan countered. “He could have paid for those in cash or with a credit card.”

"We can check that out," Jessie said, "But I'm not optimistic. The person who committed these crimes was in the restaurant with the Whitakers and in the movie theater with the Vegas. He had to be in order to poison the victims. What are the chances that he could get a cab in time to follow them home? He'd have to have one ready and waiting. That's not impossible, but it feels like a stretch."

“If he knew where they lived, he wouldn’t have to be in such a rush to follow them,” Beth ventured.

“But he’d have to get to their place fast,” Jessie said. “Both surviving spouses said the killer entered their home almost immediately after they arrived. Could he have secured taxis and gotten them there that fast?”

“Can’t hurt to run it down,” Ryan said. “At this point, that seems like our most realistic option. Beth can you send Sawyer’s picture to all the cab companies and see if any of their drivers recognize the guy? We can also run any credit card transactions he had, although I’m assuming he would use cash to avoid a record.”

“I’ll get right on it,” Beth said.

Jessie stood up, pretending to stretch. But it was really an excuse to step outside. She motioned for Ryan to join her in the hall.

“What’s wrong?” he asked once they were out of hearing range of the researchers.

“I know we have to run down all these leads,” she said, “and we should definitely hold Sawyer as long as we legally can. But I think our energy is better directed elsewhere. My impressions of Sawyer, based on what I saw and what Jamil told us, is that he’s a pretty scattered guy. I feel like the surviving spouses would have taken note of that over the hours the he was in their houses. Our killer is cruel and perhaps deranged, but he doesn’t come across as scattershot. He seems in control of his emotions and—to the extent possible for a double murderer—his faculties. It just doesn’t fit.”

“Then why was he staring at you at that press conference?” Ryan asked, “and why did he run?”

"I don't know," Jessie admitted. "Maybe he was just extremely curious? Maybe he thinks I'm part of the secret cabal tracking his brain signals? Or maybe he is somehow involved in all this. But with him not talking, it’s going to be hard to find out anytime soon and it’s already 12:06 P.M. Time is starting get short. If he’s not our guy, and if that Strangers on a Train theory involving Blackwell and Forrester doesn’t pan out, then our killer could be out there, planning his next kill right now. We have to keep pushing. Lives may depend on it.”