Mental State Read online

  MENTAL STATE

  M. Todd Henderson

  PRAISE FOR MENTAL STATE

  “When his brother dies of an apparent suicide, FBI agent Royce Johnson is the only investigator who knows it’s murder. Thus begins a taught, spellbinding journey through the dark, dank corridors of his family’s past and a shocking criminal enterprise. A well-written, fast-paced, rollercoaster of a ride you won’t put down until the last paragraph.” —Jack Getze, author of the award-winning Austin Carr Mystery Series

  “Right on time, Todd Henderson delivers a punch to the zeitgeist with this political thriller that posits the unthinkable: corruption in the White House. Fasten your life jacket for a tour of the rot from sea to shining sea. Sinister, engrossing and devilishly finessed.” —Les Edgerton, author of Adrenaline Junkie, The Genuine, Imitation, Plastic Kidnapping, The Rapist and others.

  “Exciting and compulsively readable, Mental State marks the entrance of a striking new talent on the thriller scene. Todd Henderson’s confident debut draws the reader into the unfamiliar worlds of academia, the law, and backroom politics, while providing a fresh take on more familiar thriller ground like the world of law enforcement. The Professor’s murder mystery delivers the rough and tumble goods, and it will leave readers wanting more.” —Kurt Schlichter, lawyer and bestselling author

  “Mental State is fascinating, detailed, and a pure page-turner. It's a must-read if you love the country, the Supreme Court, or just a book that will keep you up at night.” —Ben Shapiro, public intellectual, talk-show host, and bestselling author

  “Try as I might, I could not put Mental State down. It’s terrific. At times hilarious, always interesting, and in parts truly disturbing. I loved it.” —Michael Seidman, Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center

  “John Grisham and James Patterson have had a love-child and his name is Todd Henderson. Even if you gave up biting your nails in 7th grade, Mental State will bring you back to your nubs. Henderson’s debut novel had me white-knuckling it from chapter to chapter in this heady, emotional, suspenseful and expertly-crafted page-turner. Royce Johnson is a man on a mission, filled with rage and a hunger for the truth—Ethan Hunt ain’t got nothing on him!” —Mark Feuerstein, film and television actor

  Copyright © 2018 by M. Todd Henderson

  All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Down & Out Books

  3959 Van Dyke Road, Suite 265

  Lutz, FL 33558

  DownAndOutBooks.com

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Edited by Chris Rhatigan

  Cover design by Chuck Regan

  Visit the Down & Out Books website to sign up for our monthly newsletter and we’ll deliver the latest news on our upcoming titles, sale books, Down & Out authors on the net, and more!

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Mental State

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Preview from Boise Longpig Hunting Club by Nick Kolakowski

  Preview from Breaking Glass by Alec Cizak

  Preview from The Spying Moon by Sandra Ruttan

  For TFO

  Actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea.

  (An act does make the person guilty unless the mind be guilty.)

  —Edward Coke, The Institutes of the Laws of England (1628)

  “Yes, for our task is to stamp this provisional,

  perishing earth into ourselves so deeply,

  so painfully and passionately,

  that its being may rise again, ‘invisibly,’ in us.”

  —Rainer Maria Rilke

  CHAPTER 1

  April 2015

  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

  The phone on his government-issued desk shimmied and shrieked, red light flashing. Royce kept his feet up on the desk, ignoring it, and turned back to an x-ray he was holding up against the light. The bullet sat there in the lung’s right lobe, taunting him. After two decades of doing this, the last few years on a narcotics squad, he didn’t need a ballistics report to tell him it was clearly a .38. But who put it there?

  Blink, blink, blink. The phone insisted, throwing flares over his dingy steel desk. When it went solid red, he knew the secretary had answered.

  He peered through the blinds that gave some privacy from the agents scurrying along the corridors of the FBI’s Pittsburgh Field Office. Ms. Rachelle had the phone lodged between her head and shoulder, holding newly polished nails out at an angle—Steelers colors, of course—while she waited for him to pick up.

  The red light died when he stabbed it with a finger.

  “Special Agent Johnson.”

  “This is Officer Dziewulski of the Rockefeller University Police Department. I’m afraid there’s been an incident involving your brother.”

  Royce jerked his feet off the desk. No good conversation started with the word “incident.”

  “What did Alex do now?”

  There was a pause, and through the muffled phone line a door opened and closed. “We’re working on it. Chicago PD is sending detectives.”

  On a far wall of the office, a picture caught his eye. Officer Dziewulski’s voice droned into white noise for a moment. He and Alex were on the Salmon River in Idaho together, running a two-man kayak down class-five rapids. Royce could taste the beer on his lips and hear the icy water racing past them in an endless rush to the sea.

  The university cop’s voice intruded again. “Forensics just arrived…”

  Forensics? Royce felt his stomach go into free fall.

  “I’m really sorry, sir. I can send you information to claim the body. There’ll be a post mortem. When a firearm is involved, you know…”

  “Wait a minute.” Royce’s tone was steady but his hands had developed a tremor. “Which Alex Johnson? There must be more than one. This one teaches—”

  “It’s him, sir. It’s your brother. The body is on route to the morgue.”

  An image of Alex, with his pale skin against the cold metal of the embalmer’s table, overwhelmed his ability to speak. He’d been in that room. It was always someone’s brother, someone’s father, someone’s son. Now it was his.

  “Can you hear me okay, Agent Johnson?”

  “I can hear you. Tell me what happened.”

  “I’m really not supposed to go into—”

  “Please.” The word gasped out.

  Dziewulski mulled it over for a moment.

  “A neighbor called us a little before eleven this morning. Heard a strange noise at your brother’s residence. The door was unlocked, we went inside, there he was. Single gunshot…to the temple.”

  “Suicide?” He felt his voice break on the last syllable.

  “Seems like it.”

  “He got divorced last year. Maybe six months ago.” Conversations with Alex were like Facebook posts of family, sports, and kids—little happy glimpses and moments, but incomplete. His brother had tenure. Wasn’t that a pretty stress-free life, damn it?

  He choked out another question to Dziewulski. “Weapon?”

  “Glock. Nine mil. By the body.”

  “Was it his?”

  “Don’t know yet. Serial number wasn’t clear, maybe filed off; it’ll take a little longer.”

  The conversation stalled. Royce couldn’t muster a word.

  “We talked to the dean over at the law school.” Dziewulski leafed throug
h a notepad. “She said…uh…Professor Johnson didn’t seem himself recently. She forwarded an email exchange from a mutual friend in the psychiatry department.”

  Royce snapped back from brother to agent.

  “How did you get all this? I thought Homicide wasn’t even there. The crime scene hasn’t even—”

  “She reached out to us. The dean, that is. I guess she heard from, well, I’m not sure how word spread across campus so quickly.”

  He wrote “Dean” on his desk blotter, and circled it, followed by a big question mark. “Any note?”

  “None yet. We’re still looking. He has a lot of papers in his home office. A lot. We usually find notes close to the body. So maybe there isn’t one. I probably shouldn’t be, er, guessing either…”

  Dziewulski droned into white noise again as the investigator’s rush came on—skin tingling, mind racing, mouth dry. Royce sat up in the chair and breathed deeply. Picked up his badge and rubbed it like a genie’s lamp.

  No way his brother owned that handgun. Claire would never have allowed a gun in the house with a bunch of little kids running around. For all Alex’s conservative politics, he wasn’t a gun guy—especially with a black-market Glock. Plus, if he’d planned his own death, he would have written goodbye. The farewell note would have taken up forty pages in the Harvard Law Review.

  It wasn’t suicide.

  “I should probably go now,” Officer Dziewulski’s insectile voice chirped through the receiver. But Royce’s end of the connection was already dead.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Pittsburgh Field Office of the FBI occupied three floors of the six-story Carnegie Building. Royce sprinted out the front door toward a cab idling at the curb. It had taken less than an hour to get bereavement leave from his squad SSA and unload his active cases on the squad deputy.

  He sprang into the back of the cab flashing his badge. “Airport.”

  Two whiskies and twenty thousand feet later, he was hurdling toward the crime scene on a United 737. He couldn’t stop seeing Alex lying lifeless in his living room. Who would want to kill a law professor?

  On reflex, he threw his hand up and downed the rest of his second whiskey. Reaching for the call light, he signaled for another.

  In a murder case, the ex-wife is always a suspect, but Claire struck him as incapable of hurting anyone. He’d actually seen her scoop up spiders and set them free on the front porch of the home she shared with Alex before their divorce. The home where they were currently bagging his brother.

  Was a pediatrician even capable of murder? She was as big-hearted a person as he knew. But breaking up can make people crazy, and Royce had seen her fly off the handle a few times. Not far enough off the handle to hire someone to kill her ex-husband. But on the other hand, under the right circumstances, people are capable of anything. Alex could be a bit of a dick, especially when he felt wronged.

  He wrote Claire’s name down, first with Johnson, then crossed it out. He started to form a letter, but realized he had no idea what her maiden name was. He didn’t really know his brother anymore. He knew the little boy version, the teen version, the college version, and a bit of the law school version, but that was it. Once his kid brother became a man, he was a blank screen. He didn’t even know him well enough to guess who would want him dead.

  A vision of himself at fourteen years old sprang to mind. Alex was ten, dancing around the bedroom in a broad half circle, white tube socks pulled up over his hands to above his elbows. Alex lunged forward, head down, with his hands covering his face, and then flailing upward.

  Royce, also wearing white socks over his hands, and with at least six inches and fifty pounds on Alex, bobbed backward and let loose a flurry of blows to the side of his brother’s head. No doubt, he was the better slap-boxer, but Alex kept on challenging him. Why had the kid endured the beatings? Now, somewhere over Ohio, it came to him: Alex wanted to be with him, no matter what. If it had to be slap-boxing, then so be it. Alex used to trail after him, shouting facts from his Guinness Book of World Records to get attention. “Did you know that the fattest man in the world weighed over a thousand pounds? Robert Earl Hughes was his name. He’s dead now.”

  Royce came back from the past, chuckling softly. Then the image of Alex now, gray and stiff and lifeless in a drawer at the morgue, rushed back. Reaching for the call light, he signaled again to the flight attendant, make it a double. He’d have to wait. The hospitality cart was positioned abreast of the hallway. Behind it, a pilot emerged to use the restroom. The flimsy cart was supposed to protect the cockpit from a bum-rushing terrorist. Royce shook his head. He knew better.

  His thoughts drifted back to the day his job changed forever. On that clear September day in New York, fifteen years ago, he was across the street from the World Trade Center interviewing a CI when the first plane hit. The rest of the day was a blur of helping direct traffic, screams and smells of burning flesh and jet fuel, aiding the wounded and terrified, running from the falling debris.

  The trauma of seeing jumpers explode just a few feet away came at night. Every night. It didn’t help that fighting terrorism also became part of his waking life. “Every investigation is now a national security investigation,” the assistant special agent in charge told his squad on September twelve. Royce liked his job less from that moment forward. He’d signed up to get John Dillinger, not Osama Bin Laden.

  Now his job had changed again. Now it was personal.

  Jack Daniels in hand, he turned back to Alex. Did he have enemies, rivals, spurned lovers, people he betrayed or disappointed? Certainly all of the above. But ones that would be moved to violence? He honestly didn’t know.

  So, he wrote down some general categories: “Student,” “Work colleague,” “Lover,” “Creditor.” Next to “Student,” he added, “Tough grader? Recent run-ins with students?” He remembered half-sleeping through a recent Dateline episode that chronicled a student who had been caught cheating. The young man hired an assassin to kill the only person who knew the truth—the law school secretary. Royce made a mental note to pay a visit to the law school where Alex worked. Used to work. “Damn,” he said it loud enough to catch the attention of the woman reading People magazine in the seat next to him.

  As for other possibilities, he knew what Alex could have done—the FBI exposed him to the worst in everyone. Squeaky-clean do-gooders with drug problems, vengeful mistresses, guys who’d done business with the underworld. Maybe Alex borrowed money from a local thug and got behind on the juice. But that didn’t make sense. Dead guys can’t pay debts. And why would the Outfit cloud the message to make it look like suicide?

  The stewardess—he never got used to calling them flight attendants—came by again. The Jack Daniels burned in his throat along with the knowledge that however it happened, everyone involved would want Alex’s death to be suicide. Especially the university. This could turn into the kind of viral story that would significantly impact a law school’s U.S. News ranking. Imagine what the popular website Above the Law would run if Professor Alex Johnson were killed in his home a few miles from work because his Socratic style humiliated someone in class? No wonder the dean was involved.

  Out the window, ten thousand feet below, Chicago looked like a circuit board. Thousands of orangish streetlights lapped up on the western edge of Lake Michigan. Mayor Daley, the Elder, designed the bright lights with a peculiar orange glow to signal the arrival to the Great City, gateway to the West. Royce cringed.

  The Chicago PD would want to wrap this case up and put a bow on it as soon as possible. Officer Dziewulski bungled his only job, and probably couldn’t be relied on to do more than put up yellow tape. The city cops would be slightly more competent but less pure of motive. Average cops almost always took the path of least resistance. In this case, that path was clear: suicide.

  Royce leaned his head back and thought of Alex slap-boxing in the bedroom. Rafting on the river. Cold on an embalmer’s table. He squeezed
his eyes shut tight against tears. When they opened, the 737 had dipped below five thousand feet and the buildings of Rosemont were looming.

  Maybe it was time to call Claire. Maybe if she sobbed or had hysterics over the phone it would help with his own mental state. He’d have to hold it together for both of them. Being the rock would help him forget.

  The stewardess signaled that he wasn’t allowed to use his phone, so Royce pulled his badge and flashed it.

  Three rings later, Claire answered.

  “Royce? Have you heard?”

  “I have, Claire. I’m so sor—”

  “Are you going to be taking care of the arrangements?”

  Her cool demeanor took him by surprise. He heard talking and machines beeping in the background.

  “Are you at work?” he asked incredulously. In the Johnson family, this was called “stupid stubborn.” But Claire would have called it dedication or, maybe, coping.

  “Kids getting chemotherapy don’t care that my ex-husband was a selfish asshole.”

  He heard her muzzle the phone and bark instructions at an intern.

  “I’m at O’Hare. I can be at the hospital in an hour, hour and a half.”

  “It is not appropriate for you to come to my work, Royce.” She said it without contractions to make the message as pointed as possible.

  The plane touched down with a jolt.

  CHAPTER 3

  Royce rounded the corner on the fourth floor of the Children’s Hospital in his narcotics-squad uniform—a Penn State sweatshirt and a black Pirates cap. He was aware the look was more fugitive than cop, or mourning ex-brother-in-law. Couldn’t be helped though.