"I will speak daggers . . . but use none."
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
***
"Miami woman found beaten to death in home. Rosalind Caine, age 38, of Miami was found dead in her home yesterday afternoon by her 17-year-old son, Horatio."
Speed's eyes, glazed from hours of scanning the microfilm reader, suddenly froze, caught by the name. He scanned the rest of the story quickly, then looked up to check the date. April 4, making the murder April 3. Monday of last week. The anniversary. "Eric," he said urgently. "I've got it."
Eric left the microfilm reader next door and slouched over, as tired of this as Speed was. Curiosity had stopped being an adequate motive long since. Only thinking of Horatio had kept him here. "What is it?"
Speed couldn't find words big enough. "Read it." He pointed at the correct story on the reader. Eric leaned over his shoulder, reading the story, then looked back at his friend, whose expression mirrored his own. Shocked sympathy.
"He found his mother murdered?" Somehow Eric wanted confirmation, even after seeing it in print.
Speed nodded. "Beaten to death, it says. Not just shot or whatever. Can you imagine coming home one day and walking in on that? He was 17."
"Wonder if they caught the perp?" They both turned back to the reader and scanned forward several days eagerly, but there was no mention of it. Only her death had merited a brief notice. Justice, if it happened, had received no public recognition. They both felt the familiar rage from their CSI work, with a personal flavor this time.
"CSI has archives," Speed remembered. "It was a murder case. I bet we can find the file, since we've got the date."
"Why wouldn't he ever say anything?" Eric wondered. "Why shut everybody out?"
Speed understood that part perfectly. "What I want to know is why he and Calleigh would have dinner catered and celebrate his mother's death?" Their eyes met, exchanging only questions, not answers.
"Let's go," Eric said suddenly. It was the middle of the night, but they left the newspaper office and headed for CSI.
***
Calleigh handed Horatio his third cup of coffee. She was almost vibrating like a drum this morning with repressed information, and he picked up on it, even when his mind was still partly spanned with cobwebs. "What is it?" he asked.
She studied his eyes. They were still only half focused. "In a little while. Drink that."
He gulped it down and passed the cup back for a refill. "Did something happen last night?"
"I'll tell you after breakfast." She put another cup of coffee in front of him and worked busily around the kitchen, trying to steady her mind by pushing her body to match its speed. It didn't work. She hadn't felt so intense even accidentally high on cocaine after dispo day. Was this what he felt all the times he knew the solution and couldn't prove it?
Horatio was watching her, puzzled. "Slow down, Cal. You'll hurt yourself."
A doctor without a conscience was stalking his sanity, and he was worried about her hurting herself. Calleigh shook her head again in exasperation and plunked a plate down in front of him. "Eat." She poured him another cup of coffee too, the fifth. He was still looking at her. "Come on, eat."
"Not until you do." She'd totally forgotten to fix herself a plate. She got it and sat down across from him, attacking her eggs like they had committed some crime. Horatio gave up and took the path of least resistance, working on his own breakfast. She finished way before he did, of course. He still wasn't operating at full speed. Finally he was done, and she took his plate and refilled his coffee cup again.
"That's six. Good thing for you that this doesn't happen every day."
"It won't. We'll catch him. Sit down, Calleigh. What's wrong?"
She put her hand under his chin, lifting it to study his eyes again, gauging his lucidity. They still didn't look quite normal, but she could see the gears lurching into action behind them.
"I'm here, or close enough," he said peevishly. "What's wrong?"
She sat down and pulled the yellow pages over. "I got back up last night, after you were asleep. I was going through the phone book trying to match names." She pushed the book under his nose, pointing to the relevant entry. Watching his still slightly drugged brain make one of its sudden leaps was almost funny. He might not be 100% there yet, but he did instantly get the implications.
"Harwood. Christopher Harwood. Our sniper."
"Right. This is probably an older brother. Some relative anyway. If he had a brother anything like him, and that brother became a psychiatrist, it's terrifying to think of."
"That explains the motive. And Aster's reaction. When the tone switched. That had to be a hypnotic suggestion."
"He committed the murder, at Harwood's direction. But Harwood told him to deny ever meeting him. Why do you suppose he didn't tell Marcella to deny meeting him?"
"Karen already knew. It didn't come up right away when she started seeing him." He finished his coffee. "Get me another cup." He was getting annoyed at himself now, trying to chase out the details faster than his body wanted him to. Calleigh poured him another cup and sat back down. "He must have told her to leave his name out of her address book, though. That's the only reason she wouldn't have it there. Or told her to rewrite her address book into a new one, since she probably wrote the name down when she first started seeing him. That address book was all done with the same pen. Probably all at the same time."
Calleigh was impressed. "I didn't notice that."
"It also explains how he got her to tell him about last week. I knew she wouldn't have just mentioned it. She might not have wanted to stay with me, but she did respect privacy." He abruptly hit the wall Calleigh was already nose to nose with. "But how are we going to prove it?"
She sighed. "Exactly. Being related to a felon isn't a crime. He hasn't done anything himself."
Horatio's head tilted slightly. "I wonder. Aster committed the murder, with the gun, but I'll bet Harwood put her in the grave and used the acid." His mind promptly jumped from there to his mother's death, and this time, he jerked himself back almost savagely to the task at hand. She saw the anger burning in his clearing eyes. "I am not a rat, damn it, that he can train to respond to a stimulus."
"Why do you think he did that himself?"
"Two reasons. The lack of fingerprints on the plastic and the note. Speed had to really work at developing those latent prints. They weren't left the night of the crime. He probably got the plastic from Aster, so it would have earlier prints. But if he's setting up Aster as a back up, in case I fall through, and Aster arranged the body, why was Aster wearing gloves? He would tell him to leave them off, leave obvious prints. So he was wearing gloves there because he wasn't Aster."
Calleigh nodded. "What's the second reason?"
"I think I read somewhere once that you can't make someone commit an action that totally violates their character, even by hypnotic suggestion. Aster would kill, under the right conditions. He already has. But he isn't vicious to that extent. He would kill from a distance, with a gun. I don't think he'd even use a knife. He certainly wouldn't use acid, even after death." Again he thought of Rosalind and took a few seconds to reimage it, thinking of her alive. And suddenly something else clicked in his mind, a lot more efficiently than a few minutes ago. The well-oiled engine was starting to run smoothly again. He shivered slightly.
"What is it?" asked Calleigh.
"Iago."
"What?" He had totally lost her. Maybe the drug wasn't wearing off.
"I was just thinking of Mom alive, and I remembered a conversation we had once. She always loved Shakespeare, and about a week before she died, she took us to see Othello on stage. Have you ever read it?"
"It's been a while. Iago is the criminal, right?"
"Right. But he doesn't actually do anything himself. Every crime in that play is plotted by Iago, and he manipulates other people into doing them for him, just for the power trip. The man who played Iago that night was brilliant. It gave me chills watching him. So the next morning, I was talking to Mom - we always talked half an hour in the mornings - and we got to discussing criminals and motives. She said that was a special kind of evil, to enjoy manipulating people, just because you could. Even for people who never took it to the lengths Iago did. That's exactly what this man is, Calleigh. He's Iago come to life. Do you remember how precise everything about Christopher Harwood was, how he was trying to control his world, to give himself a sense of power? Mark Harwood is doing the same thing using people's minds."
Calleigh shivered herself. "You're right. If I had any doubt there's a relationship, I don't now. What do you suppose the parents were like? Evil too?"
He shook his head. "Probably weak. The kids probably wanted to control things because they felt like the world was out of control when they were kids."
She could certainly identify with that herself. "That's no excuse for crimes, though."
"Absolutely not. Environment and upbringing forms us, but it doesn't dictate who we must be. There's still a personal choice. I knew a man in college who was the first nonalcoholic in his family in four generations. Four complete generations, men and women, and all of them were alcoholics until him. Someone was trying to tell him once alcoholism was caused by environment and genetics, and he said, 'It may have an effect, but all the environment and genetics in the world won't pick up the glass. That's something I do, or don't do, myself.'" He looked up at her, and his eyes were lasers again. "But this man taking advantage of people from his professional position is unforgivable. I don't care what his motives or his background are. He will pay for this." He wasn't thinking of himself, she knew, but all the others, probably years worth of victims.
"I agree, Horatio. But how do we get him? Is there any direct evidence tying him to the crime?"
"If there is, we haven't found it yet. And we can't get a search warrant based on a name."
"So what are we going to do?"
"I'm going to confront him myself." He mowed straight over Calleigh's protest. "This has gone far enough. It ends today."
"You can't take the law into your own hands, Horatio."
He gave her a humorless grin. "I'm not going to kill him. I'm going to break him, his style. Find his mental keys and use them, and get him to confess."
Calleigh stared at him. "Horatio, look at what he can do from a distance. You can't let him get at you face to face."
"It'll be better face to face. All the advantage goes to me now. I know exactly what I'm fighting, and none of his other victims ever had that knowledge. And he probably thinks I'm incapacitated by now. Open revelation was the only thing that finally stopped Iago. I'm going to march straight into his office and take him apart, piece by mental piece, like working a puzzle in reverse."
Calleigh's heart felt like ice in her chest. She had never been so afraid in her life, but what could she do? Even from her terror, she was proud of him. He was right. There really was no other way. "I'm going with you." He nodded, never assuming otherwise. "But please, be careful, Horatio. This man is a professional."
He stood up briskly with all of his old confidence. "So am I."
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
***
"Miami woman found beaten to death in home. Rosalind Caine, age 38, of Miami was found dead in her home yesterday afternoon by her 17-year-old son, Horatio."
Speed's eyes, glazed from hours of scanning the microfilm reader, suddenly froze, caught by the name. He scanned the rest of the story quickly, then looked up to check the date. April 4, making the murder April 3. Monday of last week. The anniversary. "Eric," he said urgently. "I've got it."
Eric left the microfilm reader next door and slouched over, as tired of this as Speed was. Curiosity had stopped being an adequate motive long since. Only thinking of Horatio had kept him here. "What is it?"
Speed couldn't find words big enough. "Read it." He pointed at the correct story on the reader. Eric leaned over his shoulder, reading the story, then looked back at his friend, whose expression mirrored his own. Shocked sympathy.
"He found his mother murdered?" Somehow Eric wanted confirmation, even after seeing it in print.
Speed nodded. "Beaten to death, it says. Not just shot or whatever. Can you imagine coming home one day and walking in on that? He was 17."
"Wonder if they caught the perp?" They both turned back to the reader and scanned forward several days eagerly, but there was no mention of it. Only her death had merited a brief notice. Justice, if it happened, had received no public recognition. They both felt the familiar rage from their CSI work, with a personal flavor this time.
"CSI has archives," Speed remembered. "It was a murder case. I bet we can find the file, since we've got the date."
"Why wouldn't he ever say anything?" Eric wondered. "Why shut everybody out?"
Speed understood that part perfectly. "What I want to know is why he and Calleigh would have dinner catered and celebrate his mother's death?" Their eyes met, exchanging only questions, not answers.
"Let's go," Eric said suddenly. It was the middle of the night, but they left the newspaper office and headed for CSI.
***
Calleigh handed Horatio his third cup of coffee. She was almost vibrating like a drum this morning with repressed information, and he picked up on it, even when his mind was still partly spanned with cobwebs. "What is it?" he asked.
She studied his eyes. They were still only half focused. "In a little while. Drink that."
He gulped it down and passed the cup back for a refill. "Did something happen last night?"
"I'll tell you after breakfast." She put another cup of coffee in front of him and worked busily around the kitchen, trying to steady her mind by pushing her body to match its speed. It didn't work. She hadn't felt so intense even accidentally high on cocaine after dispo day. Was this what he felt all the times he knew the solution and couldn't prove it?
Horatio was watching her, puzzled. "Slow down, Cal. You'll hurt yourself."
A doctor without a conscience was stalking his sanity, and he was worried about her hurting herself. Calleigh shook her head again in exasperation and plunked a plate down in front of him. "Eat." She poured him another cup of coffee too, the fifth. He was still looking at her. "Come on, eat."
"Not until you do." She'd totally forgotten to fix herself a plate. She got it and sat down across from him, attacking her eggs like they had committed some crime. Horatio gave up and took the path of least resistance, working on his own breakfast. She finished way before he did, of course. He still wasn't operating at full speed. Finally he was done, and she took his plate and refilled his coffee cup again.
"That's six. Good thing for you that this doesn't happen every day."
"It won't. We'll catch him. Sit down, Calleigh. What's wrong?"
She put her hand under his chin, lifting it to study his eyes again, gauging his lucidity. They still didn't look quite normal, but she could see the gears lurching into action behind them.
"I'm here, or close enough," he said peevishly. "What's wrong?"
She sat down and pulled the yellow pages over. "I got back up last night, after you were asleep. I was going through the phone book trying to match names." She pushed the book under his nose, pointing to the relevant entry. Watching his still slightly drugged brain make one of its sudden leaps was almost funny. He might not be 100% there yet, but he did instantly get the implications.
"Harwood. Christopher Harwood. Our sniper."
"Right. This is probably an older brother. Some relative anyway. If he had a brother anything like him, and that brother became a psychiatrist, it's terrifying to think of."
"That explains the motive. And Aster's reaction. When the tone switched. That had to be a hypnotic suggestion."
"He committed the murder, at Harwood's direction. But Harwood told him to deny ever meeting him. Why do you suppose he didn't tell Marcella to deny meeting him?"
"Karen already knew. It didn't come up right away when she started seeing him." He finished his coffee. "Get me another cup." He was getting annoyed at himself now, trying to chase out the details faster than his body wanted him to. Calleigh poured him another cup and sat back down. "He must have told her to leave his name out of her address book, though. That's the only reason she wouldn't have it there. Or told her to rewrite her address book into a new one, since she probably wrote the name down when she first started seeing him. That address book was all done with the same pen. Probably all at the same time."
Calleigh was impressed. "I didn't notice that."
"It also explains how he got her to tell him about last week. I knew she wouldn't have just mentioned it. She might not have wanted to stay with me, but she did respect privacy." He abruptly hit the wall Calleigh was already nose to nose with. "But how are we going to prove it?"
She sighed. "Exactly. Being related to a felon isn't a crime. He hasn't done anything himself."
Horatio's head tilted slightly. "I wonder. Aster committed the murder, with the gun, but I'll bet Harwood put her in the grave and used the acid." His mind promptly jumped from there to his mother's death, and this time, he jerked himself back almost savagely to the task at hand. She saw the anger burning in his clearing eyes. "I am not a rat, damn it, that he can train to respond to a stimulus."
"Why do you think he did that himself?"
"Two reasons. The lack of fingerprints on the plastic and the note. Speed had to really work at developing those latent prints. They weren't left the night of the crime. He probably got the plastic from Aster, so it would have earlier prints. But if he's setting up Aster as a back up, in case I fall through, and Aster arranged the body, why was Aster wearing gloves? He would tell him to leave them off, leave obvious prints. So he was wearing gloves there because he wasn't Aster."
Calleigh nodded. "What's the second reason?"
"I think I read somewhere once that you can't make someone commit an action that totally violates their character, even by hypnotic suggestion. Aster would kill, under the right conditions. He already has. But he isn't vicious to that extent. He would kill from a distance, with a gun. I don't think he'd even use a knife. He certainly wouldn't use acid, even after death." Again he thought of Rosalind and took a few seconds to reimage it, thinking of her alive. And suddenly something else clicked in his mind, a lot more efficiently than a few minutes ago. The well-oiled engine was starting to run smoothly again. He shivered slightly.
"What is it?" asked Calleigh.
"Iago."
"What?" He had totally lost her. Maybe the drug wasn't wearing off.
"I was just thinking of Mom alive, and I remembered a conversation we had once. She always loved Shakespeare, and about a week before she died, she took us to see Othello on stage. Have you ever read it?"
"It's been a while. Iago is the criminal, right?"
"Right. But he doesn't actually do anything himself. Every crime in that play is plotted by Iago, and he manipulates other people into doing them for him, just for the power trip. The man who played Iago that night was brilliant. It gave me chills watching him. So the next morning, I was talking to Mom - we always talked half an hour in the mornings - and we got to discussing criminals and motives. She said that was a special kind of evil, to enjoy manipulating people, just because you could. Even for people who never took it to the lengths Iago did. That's exactly what this man is, Calleigh. He's Iago come to life. Do you remember how precise everything about Christopher Harwood was, how he was trying to control his world, to give himself a sense of power? Mark Harwood is doing the same thing using people's minds."
Calleigh shivered herself. "You're right. If I had any doubt there's a relationship, I don't now. What do you suppose the parents were like? Evil too?"
He shook his head. "Probably weak. The kids probably wanted to control things because they felt like the world was out of control when they were kids."
She could certainly identify with that herself. "That's no excuse for crimes, though."
"Absolutely not. Environment and upbringing forms us, but it doesn't dictate who we must be. There's still a personal choice. I knew a man in college who was the first nonalcoholic in his family in four generations. Four complete generations, men and women, and all of them were alcoholics until him. Someone was trying to tell him once alcoholism was caused by environment and genetics, and he said, 'It may have an effect, but all the environment and genetics in the world won't pick up the glass. That's something I do, or don't do, myself.'" He looked up at her, and his eyes were lasers again. "But this man taking advantage of people from his professional position is unforgivable. I don't care what his motives or his background are. He will pay for this." He wasn't thinking of himself, she knew, but all the others, probably years worth of victims.
"I agree, Horatio. But how do we get him? Is there any direct evidence tying him to the crime?"
"If there is, we haven't found it yet. And we can't get a search warrant based on a name."
"So what are we going to do?"
"I'm going to confront him myself." He mowed straight over Calleigh's protest. "This has gone far enough. It ends today."
"You can't take the law into your own hands, Horatio."
He gave her a humorless grin. "I'm not going to kill him. I'm going to break him, his style. Find his mental keys and use them, and get him to confess."
Calleigh stared at him. "Horatio, look at what he can do from a distance. You can't let him get at you face to face."
"It'll be better face to face. All the advantage goes to me now. I know exactly what I'm fighting, and none of his other victims ever had that knowledge. And he probably thinks I'm incapacitated by now. Open revelation was the only thing that finally stopped Iago. I'm going to march straight into his office and take him apart, piece by mental piece, like working a puzzle in reverse."
Calleigh's heart felt like ice in her chest. She had never been so afraid in her life, but what could she do? Even from her terror, she was proud of him. He was right. There really was no other way. "I'm going with you." He nodded, never assuming otherwise. "But please, be careful, Horatio. This man is a professional."
He stood up briskly with all of his old confidence. "So am I."