Mark of the Beast Read online

  In court, Mr. Bellshaw, after initially pleading innocent to the charges, eventually changed his plea to guilty on the grounds of demonic possession.

  He claimed that his ancestors were from Salem, Massachusetts, and that he was possessed by his great-great-grandmother—a theory found ridiculous by the court but not by Pellagrini.

  “What do you mean, that’s possible?” asked the chief when the gang returned to the precinct.

  “I read somewhere that—” began Pellagrini.

  “Here we go again,” two voices muttered, interrupting Pellagrini’s explanation.

  “Hey, let the man speak,” cautioned the chief, eyeballing everyone. “After all, he’s the one who solved this case, not you. Go ahead.”

  “As I was saying, before I was rudely interrupted,” continued Pellagrini, shaking his head in feigned disbelief, “there was this bizarre ritual among the witches in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century after the famous Sarah Good and Rebecca Nurse trials.

  “The story was that, whenever a witch got burned at the stake, the other witches, after bribing the municipal officeholders, were allowed to scavenge the remains of the dead witch. These remains were then used in the making of a secret potion. Those secret potions were revered because, when taken in daily drops, they acted as protection against conviction of witchcraft and being burned at the stake.

  “If, however, a witch who happened to drink the potion was caught and burned, the spirit of that witch would automatically be transferred to the next of kin in that family.”

  “Incredible, and unbelievable, but what does that got to do with this case?” Detective Schumann, another detective recently assigned to the case, asked.

  “Well,” continued Pellagrini, “after these spirits passed on from person to person, they became restless and through some … occultation transformation … took on bizarre behaviors like Mr. Bellshaw’s.”

  “Occultation, hey, I think you made that one up. Can you spell and explain that in English, please?” mused Detective Stubbs.

  “You are not gonna understand, even if I explain it ten times,” said Pellagrini.

  “Try me,” Stubbs insisted.

  “Please spare us,” interjected the chief. “Are you implying that if we execute this guy, it is possible that his spirit will enter into one of his relatives’ bodies, and another killing spree will start all over again?” asked the chief.

  “According to the annals of witchcraft … yes,” Pellagrini said.

  “I never heard of such annals,” Chintzy remarked.

  “That’s because you don’t read enough,” Schumann said.

  “Yeah, I do, once in a while,” Chintzy said. “Check this out: I read about these two men who rented a truck and were randomly killing people at gas stations using a high-powered rifle. They must have mowed down eight people before they were finally caught. The strange thing was, one of them sent a note to the police chief saying, ‘I am the beast; you and your children are not safe.’”

  “Creepy, but listen to this,” Stubbs said. “There was this bizarre case in either Chicago or Milwaukee of this man who molested and killed a dozen young boys and buried them all in his basement. I forgot how he was caught.”

  “I think that was in Chicago,” Pellagrini said.

  “Speaking of Chicago, I remember this one vividly: that creep who seduced young boys brought them to his house, killed them, then cooked and ate them,” Chintzy said, nodding her head in anticipated approval.

  “She remembered that one vividly,” mocked Stubbs.

  Before an angry Chintzy had a chance to say what was on her mind about Stubbs, Pellagrini interrupted. “I don’t think he cooked the whole person all at once, but rather cut him up piece by piece, stored him somewhere, then later cooked him.”

  “Take the case of the husband and wife that needed babies so badly that they searched three states,” said Schumann, “found three pregnant women, and proceeded to cut the baby out of each womb. Mind you, no anesthesia, and no gloves.”

  “I remember … that was gross,” Pellagrini agreed.

  The conversations suddenly degenerated into who could recount the most gruesome crime.

  “Oh let me tell you this one, I read … I said read”—Chintzy shook her head at Stubbs—“about this case from Los Angeles, where they were finding dead bodies with different parts missing. Some were Latinos, two black, two Asians, one Caucasian, and one American Indian. They finally arrested the psycho killer, and in his stinky basement floor, they found the missing different parts sewn together. When they questioned him, he claimed that he was about to create the perfect race.”

  “Now, is that twisted or what?” Officer Martha Henry said in her loud voice as she walked in and overheard the conversation.

  “Here goes the tattooed lady,” said Schumann, who had made it known he disapproved of her.

  The guys whistled in support of Schumann.

  “You know, fellows, two wrongs do not make a right, but two dumb dudes always make a doo-doo…,” retorted a cavalier Officer Henry, who was always quick with a response.

  There was a burst of laughter in the room, including Pellagrini, who winked an eye at Officer Henry as if to say, “Nice comeback.”

  “By the way, Schumann, do you have something against tattoos?” asked Officer Henry, spreading her hands and exposing the tattoo on her chest. “Or is it because you wish to have one?”

  Officer Henry, an abrasive policewoman, was recently assigned to the precinct. She had caused quite a stir in the precinct, where most officers were conservative in their attire.

  Officer Henry, however, wore slacks, and shirts with her belly sometimes exposed. She sported a beautiful butterfly tattoo on her left chest, sitting right on top of her upper breast area. She also had a tattoo of her dead brother’s name on her back.

  Being slightly well-endowed, a point she made obvious by her choice of clothing, she would often get comments like, “Oh, that’s a beautiful butterfly.” To which she would always respond, “Wouldn’t you like to have one?”

  “No, I don’t break laws,” Schumann said when asked the same question.

  After a moment of intense stares from all, Henry spoke up.

  “What the dickens are you talking about?” Henry asked, frowning, while everyone else looked at Schumann.

  “There are no laws against tattoos,” the chief said.

  “In the Bible there are,” Schumann answered.

  “I didn’t know you read the Bible. You surprise me all the time,” said a baffled Pellagrini. “But which law in the Bible are you talking about?”

  “The law of 1928,” Schumann said without hesitation.

  “What…?” echoed at least four voices in the room.

  “Leviticus, the Book of Laws, chapter 19, verse 28, better known as the law of 1928, and it says, and I quote, ‘You shall not lacerate your bodies for the dead and do not tattoo yourselves, I am the Lord.’ I call that the law of 1928.”

  There was a momentary silence and a look of awe on everyone’s faces.

  “You fascinate me,” Pellagrini said. “I will check that out.”

  “That’s a bunch of crap,” Officer Henry finally said. “People have been tattooing themselves since antiquity.”

  “Now, that’s an educated woman,” Stubbs said, who could not resist.

  “Yes, and I think you better reco-nize.” Officer Henry nodded while showing her familiarity with street slang by dropping the g in recognize.

  There was some hissing and muttering in the room.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the chief said. “Let’s not lose track of the issue at hand, and that is to congratulate Ed on a job well done.”

  Everybody applauded.

  “Way to go, Ed,” Stubbs blurted out.

  “Don’t forget next Thursday’s banquet at the Sheraton in Manhattan in honor of our illustrious detective. The governor and the mayor will be there with all the precinct chiefs. I want you guys and gals to be
have yourselves,” the chief finally instructed.

  “Don’t we always?” Chintzy asked.

  “Yeah, yeah, just remember, Ed will be an honoree,” the chief said.

  After the chief left … “Hey, you, where is the law against gays?” Stubbs asked, not wanting to let go.

  “I am glad you asked,” Schumann said. “That will be the law of 1822.”

  “What are you, a preacher or a detective?” Henry asked.

  “Fellows, read the Book of Laws—Leviticus, that is—so you know how to act,” Schumann advised.

  “So now you are the only one who knows how to act, just because you read this Leviticus book?” asked Officer Henry, looking at Schumann with disgust.

  “Stop hating, Officer Henry, just spread the love,” Schumann said, letting Officer Henry know that he, too, was street smart.

  PART

  IX

  1

  THE SENATE HEARING STARTED without any significant snag. The room was packed with reporters. Dickerson wondered why they crammed all these people into such a small chamber.

  Of the sixteen senators scheduled to attend, only one was in his chair at 10:00 A.M. when the hearing was supposed to have started. By 10:20 A.M., however, all the senators were seated. The chairman, Senator Seymour Adams (a Democrat from Georgia) called the meeting to order.

  Senator Adams was the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Domestic Affairs. He started by thanking Drs. Abramhoff and Dickerson for attending, and then went on to say how the Senate and the nation had been spellbound by the HLA findings.

  He cautioned the Senate members to restrict their questions and follow-up comments to the scientific findings at hand, so that an appropriate bill could be proposed from this discussion, if need be.

  “In conclusion,” cautioned Senator Adams, “this is an issue that crosses party lines, because American lives may be at stake here. I will entertain questions from the panel after the doctors have read their prepared statements.”

  After the brief statements, in which both doctors essentially just introduced themselves, Senator Adams opened the floor for discussion. “Senator Burton, please.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Could either one of you explain to the panel what an HLA is and how it came to be related to criminals?” asked Senator Burton from Indiana.

  Abramhoff responded by giving his usual standard answer of what an HLA was, how they were related to diseases, and how this relationship was extrapolated further into human behaviors.

  “How specific were the data that linked an HLA to criminals?” the senator persisted.

  Abramhoff responded by explaining how he started looking at the link between HLA and predestined behaviors.

  Dickerson’s discovery, on the other hand, was by accident, involving a criminal in San Diego who was so bizarre she thought that he had a genetic abnormality, only to discover that he was HLA B66 positive.

  “We found a marker on the HLA B loci that has not been identified elsewhere, and further tests bore it out,” Dickerson said.

  “Speaking of the testing,” Senator Christine Samples of Maine asked, “what specific tests are we talking about? How do you administer these tests, and how accurate are they?”

  “The testing is done through a drawn blood sample,” Dickerson said. “After centrifugation or spinning, to separate the plasma from the blood, we analyze the white blood cells. We locate the HLA band and identify the locus. The process is standard worldwide, and it is through the same process of identification that HLA has been linked to multiple diseases, such as diabetes and multiple sclerosis. As for the accuracy, Dr. Abramhoff and I have run case-controlled studies and age-matched analysis using standard statistics. These were used to make our final analysis. The specificity and sensitivity of our testing are about ninety-two percent. That is superior accuracy.”

  “I understand that you have concluded your National Institutes of Health-funded studies,” said Senator Reuben of Washington State. “Can you share with us your conclusions, or better yet, your final analyses?”

  “We have pooled our studies together,” Abramhoff said. “We analyzed exactly 10,977 convicted hard-core criminals in the San Diego and Los Angeles counties of California, and the Joliet, Kankakee, and East St. Louis counties of Illinois. Of these criminals, especially the mass murderers and those we classified as psychopathic killers, there was almost a ninety-two percent concordance between hard-core crime and HLA B66. Even among inmates who committed murders in the act of a criminal intent, such as stealing, carjacking, or bank robberies, there is still almost a seventy percent positive HLA B66 finding. There is no doubt that HLA B66 may predetermine the heinous criminality of certain individuals.”

  A brief reflective moment permeated the room. Some of the senators began chatting among themselves. The chairman immediately requested order.

  “I have a question, Mr. Chairman,” Senator Ridge of Texas requested.

  “Yes, Senator.”

  “What are the unknowns here? Specifically … what I am trying to say is, what exactly don’t we know about HLA B66?” the senator asked.

  “If your question is what else we do not know about these people…,” Abramhoff said.

  “Yes, it is, in a sense,” Senator Ridge replied. “I am looking for that unknown variable.”

  “The only thing we do not know at this point is the trigger mechanism,” Abramhoff said. “By trigger mechanism, I mean that these individuals have this HLA assigned or expressed in them at birth. It is not inherited. Expressions can be dormant for a while, but what the actual reaction is that turns on the switch for it, to unleash behaviors that have been assigned to it, is what we do not know at the moment.”

  “In other words,” Senator Adams asked, “you are telling us that you can pick anybody from the street, test him or her for HLA B66, and if he or she tests positive, that person has already been marked or assigned, and when the switch is turned on, whenever that is, there goes the heinous behavior.”

  “Precisely, Senator,” Dr. Dickerson added. “And since we do not know where the switch is, or who turns it on, or when it is going to be turned on, we may have millions of loose cannons running around our streets.”

  “Mister Chairman,” Senator Hewlett of Tennessee shouted, requesting attention. “I understand that we are supposed to keep our discussions purely scientific, but I cannot help but ask Dr. Dickerson to comment on her overt interpretation of the HLA B66 finding and its relationship to the number 666 in the Bible.”

  Muffled discussions were heard among the senators whether to allow Dr. Dickerson to answer or not. Finally, by a majority vote, she was allowed to make one comment only.

  “I did a lot of research concerning the number 666 in the Book of Revelation. I also studied ancient languages and alphabetic writings, with some assistance from a professor in the Middle East, and found that the alphabet letter B in lowercase resembles, in fact matches, the figure or number six in an old Aramaic language. To make a long story short, I, personally—and Dr. Abramhoff does not agree with me on this—believe that the number in the Book of Revelation is located at the HLA B66 that we are discussing. The question we need to ask ourselves, if there is any doubt, is why this HLA B66 is only found in individuals with devilish intentions?”

  “What do you think, Dr. Abramhoff?” asked Senator Hewlett.

  “As Dr. Dickerson has said, this is a very personal belief which I do not share at this moment. Without more tests and follow-ups, it will be difficult to make any other conclusion, except the fact that HLA B66 predetermines certain behaviors.”

  “Thank you all, ladies and gentlemen, for attending the Senate subcommittee hearing on HLA B66. Because of time constraints, we have to conclude this hearing. The Senate members will go into executive session for further discussions. Again, thank you one and all,” Senator Adams concluded.

  2

  THE MORNING AFTER THE hearing, The Washington Post, quoting an unnamed source, reported that at the ex
ecutive session that followed the Senate hearing, there was a heated debate about the religious implications of HLA B66 and its bearing on the number 666. In the end, it was finally recommended to authorize a national testing of incarcerated criminals. The tests were to be limited for now, only to individuals who committed murder, mayhem, and psychotic and heinous crimes.

  A selection committee from the Senate, in collaboration with the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, selected several prominent regional research institutions for the initial testing.

  The nerve centers, however, would remain with Dr. Abramhoff in Chicago and Dr. Dickerson in San Diego. Their mandate was to test selected inmates in the United States who fit the strict criteria set by the United States Senate.

  Drs. Abramhoff and Dickerson were to report back to the Senate at the conclusion of the testing, and based on the result, the Congress of the United States would reconvene and vote on subsequent actions.

  The Canadian government, according to The Associated Press, requested and obtained permission to add the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, and McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, as additional test centers to collaborate with the United States government on this venture.

  Detective Edward Jim Pellagrini of the New York City Police Department, who gained national fame when he solved the Central Park serial killer case, was lobbied heavily by the governor of New York to be the federal watchdog in case of interstate turf battles.

  “What do you think of Pellagrini?” Dickerson asked Abramhoff

  “From what I read, I think he is a bizarre individual,” Abramhoff responded.