Title: Gazzaniga Author: nevdull (nevdull@mailcity.com) Rating: R (for violence and language) Category: X Keywords: M/S UST Spoilers: None. Archive: Yes, anywhere. Thanks: Jesemie, for the nits, the feed, and the virtual lemon sorbet. Notes: At the end of the story. The complete work is archived at http://members.tripod.com/nevdull/gazzaniga.txt Summary: The mind is a terrible thing to split. Nature does not "know" the difference between left and right. - Observer 13 Apr. 2/6 (1969) FENBORO, MASSACHUSETTS SEPTEMBER 10 9:30 PM "Oh man, I can just _not_ look at this screen any longer." Gopher-like, a head appeared from the cubicle maze and turned in the direction of the voice. "John, that you?" John Amis stood up, wrapped his arm around his head, and pulled. The resulting crack echoed in the deserted office. "Yeah. I'm fucking wiped. You need a ride home? I'm outta here." The other man squinted and rubbed his eyes under his glasses. "Nah. I wanna finish this module first -- it's supposed to go to Q&A tomorrow and I'd rather do it now than come back at the crack of dawn." He blinked and glanced at his computer clock. "I'll catch the 10:30 train." "Heh. Sucks to be you." "Tell me about it." Amis slid into his jacket. "Well, I offered. Later, Pat." "'Night." With a casual wave, Amis started towards the door, then hesitated near another island of light in the otherwise dark office. "G'night, Dan," he said reluctantly. Dan Lynx was, as usual, bent over his computer terminal, typing furiously. He neither looked up to Amis nor responded to him. Amis shrugged and clapped Dan on the back. "Charmer as always." Pat Warner watched the exchange with an ironic grin, finally turning back to his monitor when Amis disappeared down the hall. He rubbed his eyes again, sighed, and tried to remember what this function was supposed to do. Wait, this was entirely the wrong function call. "You motherfucker," he whispered, and checked the time again. At 9:46, he was never going to fix this and make the train in time. "Shit! I should've taken the ride from--" He heard then the terrible screams from outside, and a cool, distant part of himself thought that no, he wouldn't be taking the train tonight either. WASHINGTON, D.C. SEPTEMBER 14 10:25 AM "Came to bring you a present and you weren't even here." Mulder breezed into the office, dropping his coat on an extra chair. "My birthday's not for another month so I took my time coming in. What'd you get me?" Scully crossed over to the desk and sat on a corner of it. She tossed a file in front of him as he leaned back in his seat. "A corpse." Mulder glanced at the file, but didn't open it. "Straight from a pathologist's heart. I'm touched." "Specifically," she continued, "an X-File." He sat up. "Now you're talking the talk. Lay it on me." Scully sat down across from him, reading from her own copy of the file. "While you were busy doing who-knows-what, a call came in from the Fenboro, Massachusetts PD about the murder last Thursday of a Mr. John Amis --" "I'll have you know I was having the apartment repainted this morning, but the painters were late." Scully lowered her file briefly and gazed at him. "Congratulations on your recent flurry of redecorating. May I continue?" Mulder gestured grandly. "A Mr. John Amis, 25, computer programmer for TPJ Consulting located in Fenboro. At exactly 9:46 Thursday evening, Mr. Amis was fatally stabbed outside the TPJ office on his way home from work. The weapon, a jagged piece of metal, was recovered at the scene." She looked up briefly. Mulder's file was still unopened, but he at least appeared to be listening. "Prints were found on the weapon," she continued, "most of which were clearly marked in the victim's blood. A positive match was found almost immediately, because the perp was local -- Ben Suskind, convicted in 1962 of assault at the age of 17." Scully paused again. Mulder was flipping through the file himself. "But it says here Ben Suskind dropped off the face of the earth in 1969." "Suskind was convicted but was also clearly insane. His victim was a random stranger on the street whom he believed 'knew everything about him' and was plotting 'to take away his life force'. He was given a psych eval and his psychosis was found to have an biological cause -- temporal lobe epilepsy." Mulder shuffled pages around for a minute, frowned, and then finally tossed the file onto his desk. "Bring it on home, Scully." She smiled faintly. "Temporal lobe epilepsy is a difficult diagnosis. It involves seizures, but is characterized by 'silent seizures' which have no outward motor symptoms but instead produce vivid hallucinations and mood swings. The only way to know for sure is to take readings of electrical brain activity, and I've got copies of his EEGs that look like they were scribbled by a hyperactive four-year old. "Now here's where it gets interesting. Suskind's condition was so severe that he was given a 'commissurotomy', often called split-brain surgery. It effectively separates the right half of the brain from the left and reduces the severity of epileptic seizures. The procedure had its height of popularity in the 1960's but has declined in use since then because of its invasiveness." Mulder was twirling a pencil. "Ouch. What effects does it have on the patient?" Scully put the file on her lap and lectured from memory. "Surprisingly few. In fact, conventional wisdom for many years was that there were no side effects at all -- hence the frequent use of the procedure. Eventually, more advanced neurological tests demonstrated that in many ways the brain no longer operated as a single mind, but instead was split into independent entities, neither privy to the experiences of the other." Scully paused and stared at him. "You're wondering what this has to do with anything." "Oh, I'm interested. But yes." She looked back at the file. "Suskind underwent the procedure and several years of rehabilitation, until in 1969 he simply walked out of the institution and vanished." "Until..." "Until last Thursday when a TPJ manager positively identified a photo of Suskind as one of his own employees -- now called Dan Lynx." "Glad Mom didn't marry into that family." Scully closed the file and stared passively at him. "What, that's it? Where's the X-File?" he said. "I thought you'd never ask. The X-File is that Dan Lynx couldn't have committed the murder -- he was in the office the entire time, as verified by the same employee who discovered the body. The cleaning crew, which arrived seconds later, also confirm that Lynx was safely inside. Yet his prints were on the weapon, over the blood of the victim." Mulder put his hands behind the back of his head. "A twin, then." "What do you think I've been doing with my morning? While you were sniffing paint fumes I was going through the birth records for our Mr. Suskind -- that was the reason the Fenboro PD contacted us in the first place. They were looking for a twin." "Lemmie guess -- there was no twin." "There was no twin." "Huh," he said. "And even if there were, identical twins don't have identical fingerprints, although they're often similar." They gazed at each other in companionable silence for a moment. Then Mulder stood up. "So there's no choice but to --" "Go to Boston right away." Scully slapped an envelope full of plane tickets on the desk. He reached for his coat. "Looks like my birthday came early this year." FENBORO POLICE DEPARTMENT SEPTEMBER 14 3:40PM "And Mr. Warner, you're certain that Dan Lynx was in the office from the time that John Amis left the room to the time you heard his scream?" Pat Warner nodded. He had the haunted look of a man who'd recently seen violence, and the slight unease anyone felt spending time in a police station, but he was answering their questions clearly and calmly. "It was only a matter of a few seconds. And if he had gotten up and run for the door, I absolutely would've heard him." Mulder thought for a moment and changed direction. "Tell us more about him. About Lynx." "Dan's the kind of guy who gives computer people a bad reputation. In the three years I've been at TPJ, I never once heard him make more than a few words of small talk. He never looks people in the eye, never laughs at any jokes, never wanted to really get to know anyone else in the office. "But as an employee, he's a dream. Comes in on time, stays late, never complains, does meticulous work. He's not like an idiot savant or anything -- he _can_ express himself, even fluently. But only about work -- never about anything personal." The agents nodded, and looked at each other. Mulder jerked his head to one side, and they moved to the other end of the interrogation room. "Scully, does this sound like temporal lobe epilepsy to you?" She shook her head. "Not at all. If his symptoms were re-occurring, it's likely they would've shown up on his personnel records. Or the police records -- people with severe temporal lobe epilepsy are notoriously unstable. Mulder, look at what he did to that man in 1962." Mulder took the evidence photograph from her and stared at it. The victim's face had been pulverized. "And you're sure he wasn't convicted of murder?" "Even if the seizures had returned, this wouldn't help to explain how he stabbed John Amis." Mulder was looking at her. "Or you think it would," she said sourly. He blinked. "No. I mean, I don't know." "Really? No theory at all? You remember to open the windows while you were painting?" He smirked and opened his mouth, but Warner interrupted. "Do you need anything else from me? I've already given my full statement to the police." Mulder handed him a business card. "No, Mr. Warner, but we may need to call you again with further questions." Warner shrugged. "Sure. I'm usually at the office until late." He assessed the two of them and smiled. "The computer industry is pretty unforgiving compared to government jobs. Most people can't believe the hours I work." Mulder smiled ruefully. "You'd be surprised." NEW ENGLAND INSTITUTE FOR MENTAL HEALTH WORCESTER, MASSACHUSETTS 5:20PM In the hospital lobby, Mulder flipped the cell phone closed. "Fenboro PD say we won't get to interview Lynx until tomorrow -- they're backed up all day and weren't expecting us until then anyway." Checking her watch and yawning simultaneously, Scully said, "That's fine -- after this I'm dead to the world." The nurse who approached them looked about twice as exhausted. "Agent Mulder, Agent Scully, Dr. Flannery will see you now." The agents rose and followed her from the lobby through the low-ceilinged corridors. Some time in the building's history a few more windows had been knocked out, rooms had been enlarged, the walls repainted with soothing, modern colors, but it nevertheless retained its oppressive, institutional character. Rocking or mumbling patients passing through the halls only reinforced its undeniably tragic atmosphere. The nurse stopped at the end of one of the hallways and gestured. "Here you go." She smiled unexpectedly and added, "Good luck." Mulder entered, leaving Scully to mutter, "Thanks." Then she blinked in surprise. The office was a mess, as if a particularly unruly patient had gone off his meds at the wrong time of the lunar calendar. Papers, files, and books were piled on the floor, cascading from the shelves, nearly spilling out into the hallway. A tower of charts had even been thrown on top of a unlucky (and quite yellow) potted plant. Yet when she studied the arrangement more carefully, Scully decided that her initial impression of disaster was unfair. There was an order to it all: in one pile of books, "The Cognitive Neurosciences", "Foundations of Cellular Neurophysiology", "Large-Scale Neuronal Theories of the Brain"; in another, "Issues in Clinical Psychology", "Case Studies in Abnormal Psychology", "Clinical Neuropsychology: A Handbook for Assessment". Amusingly, a sagging pile of well-worn mystery novels dominated one corner. Dr. Flannery was seated in front of an aging computer, hunting-and-pecking with admirable speed. She did not turn to greet them or even acknowledge their presence. "Dr. Jackie Flannery," Mulder said hesitantly. "Wait just one second. Mmm. Okay... there!" A brief email icon appeared on the screen, and then disappeared. Dr. Flannery turned, at last, to face them. Although she was seated, she was clearly a small woman. Scully imagined she might look down on her, even without heels. "Isn't email just wonderful!" Flannery enthused. "I just sent some to my husband, and he's in Africa -- can you imagine? They don't even have toilets, but he can send me email. Amazing." Wearing a faded tank top and non-matching slacks, she was dressed more casually than the average fifty year-old doctor, and her exaggerated arm movements similarly belied her age and position. Scully started to say something, but had been completely derailed. Instead she looked for somewhere to sit; every surface was covered in books and papers. Dr. Flannery stood up and began shoving piles carelessly. "I'm so sorry - I need an office about eight times as big and it'd probably still end up like this. And I've only been here a few weeks. Please sit down." They did. "I've never met FBI agents before. I understand one of you is a doctor, too?" Her eyes flicked to Mulder. Scully said, "I'm a medical doctor with a specialization in forensic medicine." She shifted uncomfortably on the hard seat. "Good, then you can translate for the other one -- sometimes I forget to speak like a normal person. So, what can I--" The phone rang, and Flannery held up one finger. On the phone, her voice softened. "Dr. Flannery." She began speaking in a low, soothing voice, as if to a child. Mulder looked at Scully with his eyebrows raised. Scully shrugged and then frowned to herself. Her chair was really quite unpleasant. Flannery hung up and turned back to them. "Evan's a darling, but he never gives me a moment's peace." Scully assumed she referred to a patient. "So what was I saying?" Mulder said, a bit harshly, "_We_ were saying that we were here to discuss com... split-brain patients." "We understand you're considered an expert on the subject in the neuropsychological community," Scully added. She jumped up briefly to discover the source of her discomfort -- a necklace made from macaroni. "Ah, commissurotomy," Dr. Flannery began. She leaned back, with one hand idly scratching her short, curly hair. Scully's eyes fluttered and looked down in embarrassment; the neuropsychologist was flashing her armpit in a disturbing but unself-conscious way, and Scully was now burdened with the knowledge that the other woman used a copious amount of deoderant. Even Mulder glanced away. Flannery was continuing, oblivious to the effect she had on the agents. "Whole careers have been forged from that little procedure," she mused. "Mine included." Scully said, "I know what's covered in standard medical texts, but it's really outside my area of expertise. Can you give us a quick overview, in layman's terms?" She surreptiously slid the necklace to the floor, where it disappeared into the debris. Dr. Flannery sighed and put down her arm, much to Scully's relief. Flannery turned to Mulder. "You know that the brain has two halves, or hemispheres -- a right and a left." He nodded. "Then you probably also know that they specialize in different tasks. For most people, language and logic is located in the left hemisphere, and non-verbal tasks like art or music or spatial skills or recognition of emotion are located in the right hemisphere. These hemispheres are connected by a large, fibrous tract of neurons -- the corpus callosum. "In the 1920's it was discovered that severing the corpus callosum relieved or eliminated the symptoms of severe epilepsy, but the procedure didn't pick up until the 1960's." Dr. Flannery's eyes began to sparkle. "But the really _sexy_ work wasn't done until Sperry's group. They proved that disconnecting the brain actually disconnected the mind. Sperry won the Nobel Prize. Extraordinary stuff." Mulder absorbed this. "I understand there are no obvious side effects to the procedure?" Flannery shook her head. "None that you or I, well, you or anyone else would notice. But in controlled conditions, the effects are remarkable." Scully asked, "Could you describe them?" "Actually, it'd be a lot better to show you." Without getting up, Flannery began digging through a seemingly random pile of videotapes, computer disks (including several ancient black floppies), and papers. "I know it's here somewhere... I have a film of some of my patients..." Braving a hail of scientific deitrus, Scully leaned forward to stop her. "Perhaps you could send it to us later. Could I leave something for you to look over?" Flannery kicked ineffectually at the pile. "Yes, of course." "We're investigating an individual who underwent a commissurotomy in the 1960's. Unfortunately, our records are incomplete, but I've got a brief case history and some EEGs performed around that time. Can I leave you with the file? Understand that the identity of the individual needs to be kept in the strictest of confidence." "Absolutely, Dr. Scully." She took the file and stared at the blank cover. "This is so exciting, really. I'm so pleased you called." Scully smiled tightly and stood. "I'm very sorry to drop this on you and leave, but we're quite exhausted. Would tomorrow morning be okay to come back?" "Mmm," Flannery replied in assent. She had already placed the file on her desk, shoving aside other papers to make room. "Thank you again, Doctor," Mulder said, moving towards the door. When they were out of earshot he added, "Nutty professor, hmm?" Scully bowed her head and smiled. She whispered back, "I can barely keep my eyes open." They were a few steps down hall when Flannery sprung out of her office. "Wait, wait please. How did you get this data on a patient of mine?" The agents turned. "What?" Mulder said. Flannery held up the file photo of Dan Lynx. "He lives here." Scully echoed, "What?" "This photo. This is Alan Rhect, and he's been under my care for the last 15 years." The whole body separates into two similar and symmetrical parts, the right and left halves called counterparts, or antimera. - Ernst Haeckel, _The Evolution of Man_ 257 (1879) FENBORO POLICE DEPARTMENT 6:05 PM Officer Billy Barber glanced one last time at the prisoner in cell 4A before gathering his keys and coat. In one way, 4A had been a model inmate -- quiet, well-behaved, not anything like the rest of the fuckheads he had to babysit. Still, there was something comforting about their protests of innocence, the illiterate, pornographic scribblings on the walls, the creative comments about the other prisoners' genitals. It was all part of a ritual. They were guilty -- you knew it, they knew it, it was just a big fucking game that everyone played. The guy in 4A didn't want to play. He'd been held for two days and hadn't said shit except when asked. It was okay that he wasn't pissing his pants every five minutes, but there was something just not right about the way he acted. He wasn't even crazy calm, like the real psychos they got once in awhile. He was normal calm, like he was lying on his couch watching TV instead of sitting on a bunk staring out the 2-by-2 barred window at nothing. Shit's just not right, Barber thought. Unconsciously, he stepped away as he walked by the cell. Thank fucking God I'm off 'till Thursday, and thank fucking God Barb and the kids are gone until next week. He passed by other cells in relative silence -- even the criminals couldn't be bothered to harass him tonight. Yeah, he thought, a couple of night alone. This had been a wicked lousy month and he needed time to do nothing but sit in his own goddamned house and scratch his fucking balls in peace. "Hey Williams," Barber called as he passed around the metal detector at the department entrance. The security guard was getting off shift, too. "Barber. Hear I won't have to see your ugly fucking face for a few days. How'd I get so lucky?" "You didn't get nearly as lucky as I did with your mother last night." "My mother's in Florida, asshole. You fucked my dog." "Huh. Couldn't tell the difference." Williams conceded defeat by laughing. "Alright, tough guy. Take care of yourself." "You too." Another ritual among many. Barber pushed open the doors of the station, with a smile that quickly faded. Goddamned New England, he thought. 6pm and it's already dark. Most of the other guys had already headed out, and the new shift hadn't come in yet, so it was easy to spot his car even though the city couldn't spring for a simple street lamp near the parking lot. Wait, that's not my car, he thought. That's O'Conner's. Where the fuck did I park? He remembered driving in a few minutes late, and shit, the lot had been full. "Oh man, it's all the way down near the Pike," he said aloud. Glenville Road was nearly as dark as the parking lot, sloping down towards the highway onramp. There were only a few houses here, none visible from the street as the ground rose up sharply on either side. Only faint lights above and the odor of a burning fireplace suggested occupation. The air was cooling rapidly -- New England autumn getting into full swing -- but Barber's physiology and sheer bulk ensured that he overheated during any exercise, even a short walk. He took off his jacket and let it swing beside him as he headed in the direction of his car. And stopped. "What the fuck?" he muttered. Leaves and other debris were trickling down the slope and gathering at his feet. He craned his head up, expecting a deer. Instead, at the top of the hill, a man was silhouetted in the sallow porch light of an unseen home. He was edging forward slowly, disturbing the fall underbrush and sending it cascading down the hill. "Is there a problem, sir?" Barber called up. Was it some kid trying to fuck with his head? There was no reply. Instead, the figured crouched down, only barely visible set against the wooded hill. It began moving back and forth slowly, as if gauging something. "I said," Barber growled, in his best law enforcement voice, "is there a problem?" The figure waited. Never taking his eyes from it, Barber stepped towards his car. The figure moved. Impossibly fast, it came down the hill in a series of short jumps, dancing through the trees and underbrush effortlessly. Not once did it hesitate or lose footing. It would have taken Barber ten minutes to clamber down the slope, and probably would've earned a few hundred scrapes along the way. The dark figure did in it seconds. When it emerged from the underbrush at the bottom, something in its hand glinted in the moonlight. Billy Barber, a 220-pound armed police offer, ran. NEW ENGLAND INSTITUTE FOR MENTAL HEALTH 6:10PM Flannery pressed the elevator button repeatedly. "I don't see how this could be possible," she said curtly. "I have been working with Alan for fifteen years and he has never exhibited any type of violent behavior. Not to mention that he's never left the grounds of the Institute in all that time. How could he make his way to Fenboro?" Scully glanced at Mulder, and said, "Perhaps it would help if you told us more about him." Flannery stabbed the lit button again, and then sighed. "Fifteen years ago I was working in a clinic in Amherst, several hours west of here. The local police picked up a transient they found wandering through a park, and when they found his behavior to be somewhat... erratic, and that he would not speak, they brought him to me." "Erratic how?" asked Mulder. "His humming, for one thing. He hums all the time, both lines of music that he's heard, and music that he's created in his mind. And then there's his drawing. He'll grab at objects he can use for art -- pencils, pens, paint, coffee, anything that can produce a mark. And he'll draw indiscriminately. The police left him alone for ten minutes while booking him for vagrancy, and he covered a lieutenant's desk in paisley swirls made entirely out of the condiment packets left over from the man's lunch." Flannery laughed to herself. "Eventually he was sent to my clinic for evaluation. My initial thought upon reading the case file was autism, but that changed the moment I met him." "Why?" Scully asked. "The hallmark of autism is an inability to relate socially or to want to relate socially. Alan exhibits none of the social dysfunctions characteristic of the disorder, other than his lack of discrimination about where to express his creativity. He likes physical contact. He laughs at jokes, albeit slapstick ones. He enjoys being among people. No, no, he was clearly not autistic." Finally, the elevator arrived. The three stepped inside, Flannery pressing the third floor button over and over. Mulder tried not to look annoyed. The doctor was continuing, "After eliminating the obvious diagnosis, I gave him a cursory physical exam to look for my next step. That's when I found the scar." The agents looked at her sharply, until realization crossed Scully's face. "The scar from the surgery. On his head." "Exactly. We didn't know what it was, but we knew he'd had some kind of invasive brain surgery. Through a combination of CT scans and neuropsychological tests I was able to conclude that he'd had a commissurotomy performed some time in his life. But without a real name or any relatives, we've never known exactly why the procedure was performed, or by whom, or when." The elevator opened. Mulder was frowning. "But you do have a name for him." The three stepped into the hall. Flannery made a kind of sneezing sound and waved her arm at him. "That's not his real name. Alan is the name I made up, but Rhect is his own contribution. He's managed to speak about a half-dozen words in those fifteen years -- that what he said when I asked about his background once. I don't know how it's supposed to be spelled, or if it's even his name." Mulder hummed thoughtfully. "Why was he never taught sign language?" Flannery smiled. "Why would you ask?" "Sign language is a visual-spatial task, is it not?" "Sign language is a _language_, and language, in whatever form it takes, is mediated by the left hemisphere. There have been many, many studies on the deaf to prove this." They were passing down the hall of what appeared to be private rooms. All of the doors were closed; some were decorated with artwork. The majority of the drawings were childlike, but a few were meticulous and strange. Mulder stared at them with interest; Scully, whose attention was flagging due to fatigue, continually suppressed a yawn. "What's puzzling is that we don't know _why_ the commisurotomy was performed," Flannery continued. "He exhibits no seizure-like behavior, although that's to be expected if the operation was a success. But I doubt any doctor would have recommended the procedure if his present language difficulties and idiosynchricies were present. I've often wondered if the surgery were botched, whether it caused him to lose his language faculties, but that really gives me nightmares. One of these days I've got to get him in an MRI. Oh, we're here." They rounded a corner and Flannery began gently knocking on an unmarked door. Scully said, "Well, it's possible we can shed some light on why the procedure might have been performed." There was no answer; Flannery fished for keys and unlocked the door. "Although we still don't know how Dan Lynx fits into this." "Well, I don't either, but I can assure you that Alan could not have left the Institute, run the ten miles out to Fenboro, and come back again on Thursday night without my knowing it--" She stopped when she swung open the door. "Oh dear," Flannery said. Alan Rhect was gone. FENBORO POLICE DEPARTMENT 6:32PM The sound of pants and a shirt dropping from the barred window went completely unnoticed amid the other sounds of evening in the wooded area. The rustle of feet in dried leaves was lost in the similar noises of foot traffic from the parking lot. The absence of these sounds was equally unremarked-upon, as a shadowy figure clad in a prisoner's clothing crouched silently and waited for the last of the evening shift to enter the police station. "Evening, Andy." From his seat next to the metal detector, the night shift guard waved casually. "Good to see ya, Jimmy." It was true. Jimmy was a good guy, and a damn fine officer. But it was especially good to see him because Jimmy's locker had some really nice pictures in it. Jimmy took his set of the cell block keys from his locker, and folded up his jacket to hang inside. Andy tried to look around him to catch a glimpse at the door. "Jimmy, is that a new one?" The officer turned and smiled, stepping aside and gesturing to the magazine page he'd taped up. "Nice, isn't she?" The guard leaned forward on his desk, peering. "Yeah," he answered, almost breathlessly. Jimmy laughed and shut the door. "Now don't tell your mom I showed it to you." "Course not." "Later. You know where I am if you need me." Jimmy disappeared down the corridor. Andy, thinking of the photo one last time, sighed, and reached for his magazine. Just before picking it up, movement outside the station caught his eye. "What the hell?" he whispered. Standing clear as day, just outside the glass doors, was the prisoner from 4A. He wasn't doing anything -- just standing there -- although Andy thought he could hear a faint humming. The guard slammed his palm on the station-wide intercom, and began yelling in a voice much older than his 19 years: "All officers report to the station entrance. A prisoner has escaped. I repeat -- a prisoner has escaped." Alan Rhect passed unnoticed through the crisscrossed beams of light surrounding the police station. Harried officers shouted orders and reports through the woods, but no one commented on the unknown man moving with determination towards the station entrance. Perhaps it was the police uniform he wore, but more likely his success was in his ability to step just out of gaze before drawing attention. A pair of eyes would focus on him and in seconds he would pass behind a tree, into shrubs, into darkness. Andy Christiansen, the sole man left behind (as it was highly improbable that the escapee would return to the station), barely had time to register the unfamiliarity of the new officer before his throat was cut. Upon hearing the scream of the guard, the rattle of the locker, the jingling of keys, Dan Lynx knew it was safe to come out from under his pile of sheets. Not a perfect hi