"Can you please for the record state your name?" Foggy says as he clicks on the recorder between us, and Cathleen. She swallows, I can hear her heart speed up from nervousness. "Cathleen O'Connor." She says, her voice husky and wavering. "What are you being charged with?" A pause.
"Attempted murder." I can hear the crack of her bones when she makes a fist.
"Can you please tell and myself what happened on the night of Wednesday, the second of September, twenty-fifteen?" "Yes," she breaths, "I was working late. At the lab… doing research. I'm a geneticist, I do important work on diseases, DNA, particularly with sensory information. Like Sensory Processing Disorder? Hyperosmia?" Cathleen takes a breath, she's breathing hard. Her heart is starting to slow, the beat more regular. "Hyperosmia?" I ask, although I know very well what it is. "A heightened sense of smell, ." She explains, and then continues. "Anyways, the work we do is important. The company I work for wanted everything very under wraps, very hush hush. Look, I have a PhD, I know when to keep my mouth shut and not question anything."
"But the thing is," she goes on, "is that things started to get a little weird."
"Define 'weird', Miss O'Connor." Foggy says, jotting down notes. "Weird as in, uncomfortable for me. My supervisor checked in a lot, I'm not even sure he's a real scientist. I was told I was developing something for people with SPD, kids who can't hold their pencils at school, who maybe are really sensitive to light, who hear everything. It's a tough life. But the process, the way we were researching, testing. It was one hundred percent backwards."
"I was told it was a new way of approaching a problem. 'Figure out the way to make the problem worse and you can figure out how to make it better!' is what my supervisor kept telling me." She mumbles, wringing her hands. "The supervisors name," I ask, "What is it?" "Joe," she says, "Joe Smith." Plain name, easily lost in the system, I note. "We were engineering a virus that would alter genes by going into the nucleus of sensory nerve cells and alter the DNA there. But not to try to correct corrupted genes, or even to combat SPD. We were altering genes to heighten them. To engineer genes that would duplicate, and the virus would spread throughout your body so that when it was done with you, your senses would be a hundred times better than before."
"So this is some sort of amazing breakthrough right? Look! We've figured out a way for every normal human being to be a superhero! Wrong. We've found a way to totally and inescapably incapacitate a human being by giving them sensory overload."
She breathing heavily again, her fists closed, I can hear her bones grinding. "We tested it on mice, which I kept thinking was ridiculous because this wasn't what we were supposed to be researching. This wasn't going to help anyone. But they paid me good money… and I was paying off my student loans from undergrad. So I went along with it. The mice, though, the tests. These mice, they didn't necessarily get sensory overload and have a heart attack like I thought they would. Evolution is a marvelous thing, and some of them adapted. Their bodies knew that for them to survive what was happening, they had to drop one of their senses. And you know what their bodies dropped seventy-five percent of the time? Sight." She stops talking for a moment to fumble for to take a sip of water. I can hear Foggy furiously writing, trying to catch up. She clears her throat and continues. "I overheard talking on the phone one night. I was there late running tests on the mice, trying to come up with a reversal of the process. Up until then, all the shady crap, everything that felt wrong… I'd been okay with it. But when I heard what he was talking about- her teeth ground together loudly- I couldn't keep quiet anymore." "He was talking about human trials. Human trials! For a solution that is almost guaranteed to render you blind forever, if it doesn't kill you. So I stepped up, I took a stand, I told him I was done, that this wasn't right."
"What happened next?" I ask, trying to level my breathing. She'd told me briefly all this, but I hadn't heard everything in detail. I couldn't help but clasp my hands under the table, trying to smother my anger like a flame. I can feel Foggy glancing at me worriedly, knowing this all must hit a sore spot.
"I started to leave. I don't know, must have hit a panic button or something. Next thing I know, there are two huge Japanese men blocking my way. I kept thinking, God this is ridiculous! I didn't think…" She trails off, swallowing painfully. Her heart rate monitor speeds up a little bit, but stays steady. "I didn't think," she finally says, "they would do what they did. I didn't think I would become a criminal, when I'm the victim."
"One of the men, he grabbed me, held my hands behind my back. I wanted to fight, I probably should have but it seemed starter to try to talk my way out than fight. came out, started speaking in Japanese. I don't know what they were saying, I studied French in college. I think he ordered them to kill me, because they started to drag me out… But then he stopped them. He had them make me kneel in front of him. I thought, it seemed like he was going to assault me. I was going to scream right then. I finally realized I was in real danger, you know? But they found some lab gloves and stuck a handful in my mouth."
"He left for a few minutes, and he came back with a needle, and a vial of solution. Of course, I knew what it was. I had been working on it for months. It was a solution that contained the virus, for the gene therapy technique. The ones we were giving the mice. He took the needle, he filled it with the solution, and had one man hold open my eyes. H-he stuck the needle in, right into my eye like we do with the mice. He put the solution into both eyes as I thrashed and screamed and cried. I've never felt such pain like that in my life."
She's crying softly now as she tells us, straining against her restraints. "I couldn't handle it, I passed out. When I woke up… I was in a puddle of blood. At first I thought it was my own, I thought they'd fucking gutted me. I started screaming. But I realized I was fine. But there was one of the Japanese men, specifically the one who'd held me down, his throat was… it was mangled. I was soaked in his blood. But, but he was breathing just slightly. He was breathing when the cops came in, but I was holding onto a piece of a broken test tube."
"It was then that a few things happened. First, three police officers burst in, guns raised, screaming. Then, I start screaming. I laid down, put my hands on my head. When I did that, when they started to handcuff me… I started seeing dots. Black dots, all over my vision. Through everything, that's what worried me most. I knew what this treatment could do. It took a few hours, but I lost my sight in the precinct. I don't know why I went blind, and didn't get hyper-senses or anything. All I know is, I'm blind, that guy is in a coma, and I've been in a hospital bed for two weeks with bandages over my eyes."
"Can you believe that, Matt? They fucking blinded her! And then set her up!" Foggy exclaims. I'm holding onto his arm as he leads me back to the office, my cane in the other hand. I'm angry, I'm pissed off beyond belief. I almost couldn't believe Cathleen's story myself, if I didn't already know what people were capable of. I was determined to get her out of this situation, but it would be hard. For once, the cops had done their jobs but there was no evidence of anything to corroborate her story that was concrete. Sure, it's kind of hard to believe she put the needle in her own eyes, but that could be used as motive to kill the Japanese dude.
"Foggy, she wasn't lying. She didn't try to kill that man. They're going to play it off in court like she did this to herself, and then killed him because he saw. God, maybe they'll start a case around the fact that she's a comic book fan and tried to make herself into a superhero or something. They'll get creative, and they'll nail her ass to the wall if we don't stop them." "Matt," he says, "You can.. you can find out who's doing this right? I wouldn't normally, uh, suggest using your 'methods' but we need a head start. We need a head to hang up on our wall." "I think it's the yakuza. Maybe this is their new 'Black Sky'. Maybe they're creating mutants almost, or trying. Can you imagine? Every criminal I fight being, well, like me? Hell's Kitchen would go down in flames." I say angrily. "Honestly, the whole damn city would." "We need to stop this." Foggy responds. "We need to bring her justice."
