Despite his father’s volatility, Jeremy looked forward to his arrival home from work every day. They didn’t do much together, but that’s what he appreciated. After spending all day with his mother, he would relish the comfortable silence hanging between them as they watched something on television before bed. His days were mostly filled with a heavy dose of neglect sprinkled with some overly attentive moments from his mother, as if she couldn’t regulate her affection. She was always far too much or far too little.
A steady respite from the unpredictable whims of his parents, books always held Jeremy’s focus. By age seven, he hadn’t entered school yet. As neglectful as she could be, every few days, his mother would bring him to a library off St. Charles Avenue. They always went on weekdays, while his father was working. Jeremy didn’t understand at the time that his mother was dragging her only child to a library so she could carry on an affair with one of the librarians, but he did absorb the lessons in deception that these trips afforded. He learned early on to never tell his father that his mother left him alone to wander the stacks while she retreated to a back room with Mr. Carraway. More importantly, he taught himself to steal. He brought home books in his coat or backpack, never relying on his mother to check them out. Jeremy is fairly certain now that the employees had simply looked the other way out of pity, but at the time he felt like he was pulling off a weekly heist.
Now and then, Miss Knox, one of the librarians, would attempt conversation with him. One day, daring to ask directly if everything was okay at home, her voice trembled with concern. He hadn’t responded and instead asked her for a book about lobotomies. He had recently become entranced with this archaic medical procedure and its most ardent practitioner, Dr. Walter Freeman. Over the weekend, his father had been watching a rerun episode of Frontline called “Broken Minds.” It was a brutal look into the mental health system and highlighted a method of lobotomizing patients diagnosed with any number of ailments, especially schizophrenia, by severing the presumed circuit or network of circuits that they believed to be responsible for the patient’s atypical behavior.
Dr. Freeman’s prefrontal lobotomy captivated him the most. The nickname “ice pick lobotomy” was an exceptionally provocative moniker. It conjured up images of an immaculate surgeon, twisted with the desire to explore the mentally ill mind. Later in 1992, when he heard the term carelessly tossed around in the news as a method serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was using to subdue his victims, he was disgusted. Dahmer was so feebleminded that he thought he could make his own zombies by injecting cleaning products and acids into his victim’s brains. He was imbecilic. To call what he was doing a “lobotomy” is like calling what Ted Bundy was doing “dating.” Jeremy could practically hear Dr. Freeman rolling over in his grave.
Jeremy was a kid who craved knowledge. And chronically understimulated, he fed his own hunger by experimentation. His father’s early advice echoed in his mind over the years.
“You want to learn about something, son? You have to open it up.”
CHAPTER 2
THE LOUISIANA AIR FEELS IMPENETRABLE, even at this early hour. Forensic pathologist Dr. Wren Muller is still blinking the sleep from her eyes as she steps out of her car and into the muggy night. She checks her watch and cringes, thinking how great it would be if criminals could take their nefarious dealings out of the two a.m. hour for a couple of months at least.
She steps over some thick, soggy vegetation, steadying herself on the exposed roots of a nearby bald cypress tree. The grooves of the trunk feel as if they could swallow her up, like the crumbling hands of some ancient, folkloric bayou creature. She stops, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the artificial light ahead. The flashlights of three police officers point downward at something on the banks of the water. Their beams of light cut through the darkness, casting everything around them in an even thicker layer of black. The contrast is welcome. It helps the scene come into better focus.
The dead woman’s seminude body is crumpled beneath a substantial amount of tall grass that lines the water’s edge. Her head and shoulders are completely submerged in the murky black water. The rest of her body is lying faceup, curled in the grass. The woman is tall and of average weight. As Wren glances over her shoulder, she can see the deputy coroners trailing behind with a stretcher between them. Even between the three of them, it will still be a struggle to get her out of this foreboding bayou.