The Mind Virus

Chapter 15 - Part 1

The itch was maddening. Being unable to scratch his fingers under the cast was becoming worse than the pain he endured as they healed at a snail's pace. It was tempting to get a tool from the garage and cut the casts off entirely, but then his fingers would never be right again. Does it really matter? he thought. Having heard the news that he's at death's door with no cure for the virus in sight, it felt like nothing long-term mattered anymore. If Terry Howell was right about the virus, and going by the histories of the suicide victims whose loved ones Jim had spoken to, he'd probably be dead before his fingers could heal anyway.

A part of him wanted to be optimistic. It wanted to believe that he would expose this organization and that federal agents would swoop in on them, look at their research, and find some sort of cure. It wanted to believe that the only reason a cure didn't already exist was because the organization had no need for one, and not because they couldn't create one. It wanted to believe that Terry Howell could use whatever he had to break through to someone in the organization and learn some important secret that could save them.

They were all long shots, of course. Jim was trapped in a real-life David and Goliath battle, except there were not happy endings here. Jim's David would get positively flattened by this Goliath. Nevertheless, there was no point in abandoning the investigation now. The worst had already happened. He'd already accidentally infected himself, and that run-in with Old Shiny Head was over... or was he lurking right around the corner waiting for Jim to break their begrudging agreement?

Taking in a deep breath, Jim began toiling over the evidence he'd collected – the diary, the laptop, the phone. He'd only been to the homes of two of the people that had committed suicide. There were many more, of course, and Jim would be visiting them in due course, preferably sooner rather than later, but before he'd do that, he would go through all of the evidence he had already collected in the vain hope of finding something that could aid him in the future – some common threads, perhaps, that could direct his future lines of questioning and searches.

Minutes turned into hours and hours turned into days. None of the two girls' diary entries, computer logs or messages contained anything about the picture of the lighthouse. And why would they? They couldn't have known it was a weapon, and there was nothing spectacular about it other than its ugliness. Still, Jim couldn't help but feel frustrated. He felt like he was being taunted by the Fates themselves. He now knew exactly what the cause of the suicides was – he even had it in his possession, for all the good that did him – but he couldn't track it down because none of its victims knew of its significance.

After trawling through every last word that the two girls had written and coming up with nothing new (although still curious about these men – or possibly one man – that the girls were seeing), the next step was to read the reports on all the other victims. Detective Miller and Officer Spaulding had both written their bits on the cases, and there was no doubt that there were other reports from responding officers early on that couldn't recognize the significance of the suicides. Jim had already scanned through a few of them before – gleaned the important bits – but it was now time to really study them hard.

Getting dressed was a hassle. The wifebeaters and boxer shorts that Jim had been wearing since losing control of his fingers had been easy to put on and remove, but he couldn't show up at the police station dressed like that. Unfortunately, putting on a dress shirt wasn't an option either – there was no way to do up his buttons. In the end he settled for a tee shirt with an unzipped jacket over it and, much to his chagrin, an old pair of tracksuit bottoms he had lying around. Shoes were out of the question too, so he left wearing a loose pair of sandals.

The looks he got at the police station were embarrassing to the point that they looped right back around and became funny again. They started with a pair of officers standing in the parking lot of the station, watching Jim struggle to turn his car into a parking space while handling the steering wheel with only his thumbs. They didn't get much better when he got out of the car dressed like a homeless man who had just become the recipient of a box of donated clothes.

Snickers and muted laughs followed Jim as he walked through the station, but he had grown adept at ignoring them over the years, and this had been no different. Well, that wasn't entirely true. Now he was not only the pathetic intern, but also sauntering around looking like a child that had been dressed by his eccentric, blind mother. No matter. Jim had far worse to worry about.

He sat down at a free computer and logged in. Locating all the reports he needed was an easy enough task, and burning them to a CD was no more difficult. Normally he would sit and read them at the station like he did when he'd scanned through a few of them the first time around, but he just felt far too silly to hang around any longer with the way he was dressed, so he snatched up the CD between his thumbs, slid it into his jacket pocket, and took off.