What Harms You

Book 2: Locard Institute Thriller

by Lisa Black

Genres: Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

This suspense-driven page-turner from New York Times bestselling author Lisa Black continues her gripping Locard Institute thriller series with a story that poses a chilling question: What happens when a serial killer goes to CSI school?
The Locard Institute is a state-of-the-art forensic research center where experts from around the world come together to confront and solve the world’s most challenging and perplexing crimes. When Dr. Ellie Carr arrives for her first day as an instructor at the prestigious facility, the buildings glimmer
amid the brilliant fall foliage on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. But within hours a colleague, Dr. Barbara Wright, is found dead on the floor of a supply closet. Her death appears to be an accident—but Ellie and her new supervisor, Dr. Rachael Davies, suspect a more sinister explanation.
A young woman attending a professional training program then disappears, only to be found in a gruesome tableau. Other than their link to the Institute, there seems to be no connection between the student and Dr. Wright. Although forensic traces are elusive, Ellie and Rachael are determined to
find the bizarre link between the violent and diverse deaths.
As reporters shatter the privacy of Ellie’s new workplace, she searches old files and finds evidence of a crime that feels much too personal. But who, among those dedicated to justice, could be the threat? No matter how skilled she and Rachael may be in uncovering the truth, they may not be able to
prevent a well-schooled killer from striking again.

Release date: July 25, 2023

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

Wednesday

Ellie Carr waved her brand-new keycard at the mounted sensor a second time. Still, nothing. The updated metal door remained flush in its frame and didn’t give so much as a click to indicate an attempt to open for her. As far as the door was concerned, she did not exist. She tried not to take this personally. The door was only doing its job.

But if it didn’t open, she would be late for the very first day of her job, hardly the impression she wanted to make on those in the antique stone building now looming, impenetrable, before her. The prestigious Locard Institute would allow her to research new techniques, instruct groups of peers, and investigate unique crimes for private clients. She hadn’t been this out-of-her-mind jazzed since her first day at the bureau.

With that realization came a twinge of nostalgia. The FBI might have had her tracking mob payoffs instead of developing latent prints, but at least their keycards worked. The Hoover Building had never locked her out on a concrete stoop as she held a cardboard box of pens and notepads and books and the course syllabus and silly personal tchotchkes to make her new place feel as if she belonged there. It never left her surrounded by oak trees that delighted in holding on to the morning’s light rain until they could spill their leaves on unsuspecting passersby—

“Excuse me.” A man materialized next to her and waved his arm. The door promptly unlocked with a mocking series of clicks. Twisting the latch, he pulled it open, but then held the chunk of steel so that she could duck under his arm if she wished. She wished. She’d ride him piggyback if it were necessary to breach that entrance.

She ducked, eye level with the winged logo on his blue jacket and noted that he had a visitor ID. Fabulous. The course attendees’ cards worked, but not the new crime scene instructor’s . . . She thanked him and looked around to get her bearings, having only been to the Locard a few times. Two floors plus basement, long hallways in a horseshoe shape around a central courtyard, classrooms and student labs in the far wing, staff offices down the corridor to her right. Second floor, research labs, meeting rooms, more offices. Gym, locker rooms, and cafeteria on the basement level. The floors were gleaming terrazzo that bounced and amplified every sound.

Her rescuer trotted off to his classroom and two other occupants milled about, none she recognized. Rachael, who had offered her the job, would be somewhere in the building, teaching the Crime Scene Documentation course. Ellie would take over Collecting Evidential DNA at crime scenes.

Number 11, her assigned office, turned out to be the last in the hallway on the courtyard side, a nice-size room with wide windows, plenty of filing cabinets, and a large wooden desk clearly visible through a door that had three panes of glass in the upper half. The door was, of course, locked.

The same kind of proximity pad gave her card the same nonreaction as the outer entrance. She shifted the cardboard box to her hip. Bad enough she’d already been held up that morning at the closing on a house she’d barely seen before purchasing. Rachael had said she didn’t need to take over the class until after lunch, but—

“Not working?” A portly guy in a grunge band T-shirt under his open lab coat paused in the hallway, then shook his head with a sympathetic smile. “You must be Ellie. Rachael told me you’d be starting today.”

“That’s me.”

“I’m Hector Azores. Crime Analysis. I’m not surprised Barbara locked you out. She flunked sharing in preschool and never looked back. You can set your stuff down in my office if you want.” He gestured toward number 10 across the hall. That door wasn’t even closed.

“Thanks.” Nearly every surface in Hector’s room already sagged under the weight of assorted folders, books, periodicals, laptops, and the odd bottle of an unidentified-colored liquid, but she found a free, if scarred, straight chair on which to deposit her items. “I appreciate the help. Who’s Barbara?”

“Barbara Wright. That’s her office, at least for another two days. Then she can brush us all off for the big time and present her crime analysis breakthrough to the American Academy. She can’t wait, and the rest of us are pretty happy about it too. Not for the same reasons.”

Ellie smiled, catching the drift.

“Where do you need to go next?”

“I’m supposed to take over a class—” She pulled her USB and some notes out of the box, all she would need to get through the next two and a half days of instruction. She hoped.

“Collecting Evidential DNA or Crime Scene Documentation?”

“DNA.”

“Ah, inheriting Barbara’s class, as well as her office. I can show you where the room is.”

She thanked him, but he had already swept into the hall, and she trotted to keep up. “The courses run for two weeks, so there’s three days to go. It’s a light month, only two courses going, twenty, twenty-five people in each one. Rachael’s mostly handling the documentation one, Barbara the other, with me and Sam doing guest spots. Students are from all over, like usual. They stay at the Marriott on 261. Lunch here—you know where the cafeteria is? That’s one advantage of having classes in session, we actually have cooks serving up hot lunches. When there’s no classes, it’s sort of an Automat, prewrapped stuff delivered daily, that sort of thing. But, hey, it comes with the job and any free food is good food.”

“I completely agree. This is quite the facility.” They rounded the corner into the back hallway, dodging a young woman with a metal cart and hair the color of green apples. Her test tubes clinked out a discordant tune and she focused mightily on guiding the undersized wheels to the elevator.

“Yes and no. The building started out as a private boy’s school, around the turn of the twentieth century, so, yeah, it looks like Oxford and has nice touches, like large bathrooms and the gymnasium downstairs. Locker rooms—since subdivided when they let those icky girls in. The cafeteria is nice, since we are kind of in the middle of nowhere. There’s Chesapeake Bay on our back step and you have to drive for about fifteen minutes in any of the other three directions to find something approaching civilization.”

“I’m figuring that out.” The rural setting and copious trees made quite a change from Georgetown. A welcome change.

“The disadvantage is, it still looks like a school, so if you have any past ‘Mean Girls PTSD,’ it might bubble up. At least they took out the lockers lining the hallway, so I stopped having nightmares about forgetting the combination. Here it is.”

He gestured at the closed door to a large classroom. Through the glass she saw that individual desks had been replaced by long tables and the padded industrial chairs more suited to adult frames. Their occupants listened to a cool blonde, with tortoiseshell glasses and every hair in place, standing at the front of the room. Ellie put her hand on the knob, feeling the jazz in her head turn to unexpected needles in her stomach. She shot Hector Azores a look.

“Oh, no. Sorry, New Girl, but you’ll have to brave the fish eye of death on your own.”

Ellie squared her shoulders and went inside.

Clearly, Dr. Barbara Wright did not appreciate even a near-silent, tiptoeing interruption. She spared Ellie one icy, and not unexpected, glare, then pointedly waited for her to take the first available seat.

Ellie’s life had required walking into a great deal of new classrooms, new jobs, new friends, new families. After her mother died, and her father hadn’t let the door hit him on the way out, Ellie had lived with a variety of extended family members since the age of four. Loving homes, homes she knew and people she loved, but still—new. By now, she’d become versed, and knew what to do.

She planted herself in a chair, folded her hands in her lap, and sat absolutely still. In one second flat the people around her gave up hope that she would do anything interesting and returned their attention elsewhere. Perfect.

“We’re a nation of pharmaceuticals,” Barbara Wright said, pacing in front of the smartboard with a swish of her dark green lab coat. “We have access to extensive medical care and twenty-four/seven television full of commercials telling us exactly what meds we need to take for common and not-so-common conditions, like irritable bowel or Tardive dyskinesia. Many conditions treated with meds are genetic. Take retinoblastoma, eye cancer. It can be crippling. It can also be readily treated if caught early, and afterward controlled by taking anticancer drugs, like cyclophosphamide. Tetrabenazine can be used to reduce some of the involuntary movements of Huntington disease. Hydroxyurea is prescribed to prevent the more painful crises of sickle cell anemia.”

She projected a map of the Eastern United States on the board, the colors streaking her form as she pointed to the amorphous circles hovering above different cities. “These dots are color-coded to indicate a dispensation of medication for one of twenty-five different genetic abnormalities. I focused on larger cities with a high number of unsolved murders, where many have enough similarities to be classified as the probable work of a serial killer. With a research grant I’ll be retesting any biological samples from those murders, blood, semen, urine, hair. If the drugs are detected—say, for example, we find tetrabenazine in foreign hairs on a murdered corpse in Austin—then we can search for people in the area that have Huntington’s.”

“How?” a woman burst out, twirling an orange-tipped dread between her fingers. “That’s all protected by HIPAA. You can’t make Pfizer give you a list—”

“We don’t need the corporations,” Barbara Wright snapped. “Or the doctors. All prescription meds go into a clearinghouse now—thank you, opioid epidemic. Law enforcement can request access to that if it doesn’t involve any patient information.”

“Then how do you find your serial killer if there are no names attached to the meds?” asked another student.

“That will require a subpoena,” she admitted, fingering the ID badge hooked through a belt loop as if it were a talisman. “But when I can prove that someone who takes tetrabenazine for Huntington’s has killed five women in the Boston suburbs, I have sufficient reasonable cause to get one. No federal judge can afford to ignore that. And she hasn’t—the detective in charge of that case is getting the warrant as we speak.

“Or you can reverse the equation.” The doctor went on, pacing in front of the boards, while Ellie took the opportunity to let her heartbeat slow back to normal from the bustle of the morning. The surroundings were familiar—the disciplines that made up forensic science were spread too far and wide to be covered in a single degree, even a doctorate like hers. Most of a forensic scientist’s education came as continuing ed.

The people sitting around her were of all sizes, ages, genders, and colors, and in various stages of interest, distraction, and boredom. Some took notes on legal pads or laptops. A bag boutique’s array of purses, totes, and backpacks were scattered along tables and the backs of chairs. Pens and phones competed for surface space with travel mugs, paper cups, and water bottles, both disposable and non. In other words, like every other training class she’d ever been in.

Dr. Wright was giving another example: “In Arkansas a suspect cut himself on the knife he stabbed the victim with. His DNA wasn’t in CODIS, but his red blood cells were abnormally shaped. I searched the clearinghouse for dispensed hydroxyurea and found fifteen possible subjects.”

CODIS meant the Combined DNA Index System. Clearly, the attendees knew that and didn’t ask, but a beefy guy in the back row scoffed: “Can they even detect drugs in a dried spot of blood? I’ve never heard of that.”

Barbara fixed him with a cool look, one Ellie remembered well from certain teachers over the years. “Labs have been doing that for years, Sergeant Bennett, with dried blood dots from autopsies. It’s even better than liquid urine or blood samples, when analyzed via ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography-ion booster-quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry—or,” she added, with an even more condescending tone, “UHPLC-IB-QTOF-MS, if you prefer to use shorthand.”

The sergeant did not seem cowed. “But aren’t they only looking for opioids?”

Dr. Wright’s eyelids flickered, only for the briefest of moments. “Of course most lab analyses are geared toward illegal drugs, but restyling or adding certain analysis to look for prescription meds that are not what we call ‘controlled substances’ is an easy adjustment.”

That made sense, but many faces around Ellie reflected skepticism. It might sound like a cool idea while remaining a massive long shot . . . Hydroxyurea, for example, had additional uses beyond sickle cell anemia. On top of that, a good number of people had the sickle cell trait, but only about .003 had the disease, and most of those would be children . . .

Though when it came to serial killers, even a long shot might be a good one. If it solved even one murder, wouldn’t it be worth it?

“Where do you stop, though?” another student asked, swirling the liquid in his plastic travel mug. “It’s often stated that many serial killers suffered a brain injury. If you round up everyone who’s on clonazepam to deal with seizures, because seizures are a common issue after traumatic brain injury, then aren’t you—”

“I doubt anyone would be ‘rounded up’ until the field has been narrowed to one specific person. And personally I’d want a correlation much more significant than some serial killers have traumatic brain injury and some might take some kind of medication for it. This system would be utilized only with a provable link to crime scene evidence.”

“So the problem isn’t stopping,” the student said. “It’s starting. You have to have a killer who both leaves DNA evidence behind and has a condition requiring steady medication.”

The man next to her said, “With enough analysis, finding medication is probably easy enough. Everybody’s on something these days.”

Barbara Wright spoke firmly, retaking control of the classroom before it broke down into individual debates. “I’m going to present this next Monday to the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. The week after that, I will be receiving my preapproved grant from Caltech to further this research there.”

Ellie heard: It doesn’t matter what you think. Better minds are already going ahead.

A man next to Ellie muttered, “Counting chickens . . .” Another sighed with apparent boredom. A few made polite and awkward noises of appreciation.

“So for your last two days of class, I will be turning you over to Dr. Carr, although after lunch I’ll still walk you through your DNA samples.” With one motion she unhooked her USB from the projection system and gathered up her folders, adding, “You can have the class now.”

She made this announcement without so much as a glance in Ellie’s direction. And then she was gone.

Some attendees looked about for this Dr. Carr to materialize, but most took the opportunity to check mobile devices for emails and texts.

“Take control,” her uncle Wayne had advised in situations like this.

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression,” Aunt Rosalie told her more than once. “Get it right the first time.”

She stood, straightened her blazer, refrained from patting her hair to make sure the auburn locks hadn’t budged from the chignon, and moved to the front of the room.

Ellie hadn’t, in fact, aspired to be a teacher. But she had lectured to plenty of groups at the bureau—one of those “other duties as assigned” immediately foisted off on the junior agent, along with adding paper to the copy machine. She had taken to it, though, and enjoyed sharing ideas with people who wanted to hone their skills. The ones who only attended in order to get an employer-paid trip away from their desks—not so much.

Over the years she’d found the key to winning over a group’s hearts and attention: snacks. The institute provided a table in the rear of the room, with an urn and a variety of Danishes, bagels, and cookies.

“Hi, I’m Dr. Carr. You can call me Ellie. I don’t know how long this morning’s session has already lasted, so let’s take a ten-minute break for restrooms and coffee.”

As a unit the attendees burst into wide smiles and two made an instant beeline for the door.

There, she thought. Not so hard.

Dr. Rachael Davies sat at a long table in the institute’s cafeteria, ate tuna salad, and listened to the conversation around her. The attendees from both courses had spent daily lunch together for eight days and even organized outings over the weekend to see all the sights of DC. Now they chatted as easily as old friends—that is, old friends whose conversations always ended up on the weirdest clue or the gooiest decomposed body they’d ever seen.

She usually ate lunch in her office, attending to paperwork during the break. As one of the institute’s two assistant directors, Rachael accepted that her paperwork never ended. But with classes wrapping up, and none scheduled for another two weeks, her workload had become temporarily light. She had finished the report for the Locard’s latest client, a woman in Tennessee who wanted her missing daughter found. After Rachael analyzed the stained scarf found at the scene of the teen’s supposed abduction, and found equine blood and an alfalfa bud, it took no time at all to locate the girl at her online boyfriend’s racehorse farm. So Rachael could take one non-multitasked lunch.

The “basement” of the Locard stretched only along the back leg of the building; built partly into the hill, its wide windows along the rear wall looked out into the deep woods. The view of the trees sufficed for décor. Purely practical terrazzo floors, laminate-topped tables, and metal chairs made up the rest of the environment. Today the air smelled like too-done toast overlaid with tomato sauce.

“She killed him with a claw hammer,” Stefanie Parsons was saying over an avocado toast. Stef was a Border Patrol agent from California who seemed to exist on cigarettes, coffee, and air. “Not the head part, the claw part. It left really distinct marks.”

“What was the cause of death?” Rachael, the former pathologist, asked. “Blunt force trauma or exsanguination?”

“Heart attack. I guess waking up in the wee hours to find the ex-girlfriend you forgot existed, doing her best to crush your skull, would make anyone’s heart skip a few beats. Or all of them.” She coughed. Rachael could imagine her alveolar septum thickening with every class break, when Stef and one or two others would return on a cloud of tobacco fumes. In thirty years the oxygen would have such a tough time getting through, the CO2 would build up to respiratory failure—

“What is a hammer?” Farida asked. Farida Al Talel was from Saudi Arabia, all dark eyes and deeply black hair under a loose headscarf. Her English skills were excellent, but now and then a word still confounded her.

“You pound nails with it,” Tony Altamonte, the New Mexico homicide detective, said, making a weak pantomime with one hand.

Oliver Suarez, from Montana, sat next to Farida. Tall and slender to the point that Rachael thought he could use more protein in his diet, the crime scene tech sketched a small doodle on the back of his notebook and showed it to her.

“Oh. Shakush.”

The two men on the other side of Farida looked up at the Arabic word, didn’t hear more, and promptly lost interest. Bashar was Farida’s cousin, and she described Irfan as “a more distant cousin.” They were at the Locard only as guardians for their female relative and spoke very little English. Farida’s wealthy father, from a branch of a branch of the Saudi royal family, only allowed her to make the trip if the two men came as well. He’d paid all the expenses for his daughter and the two men, even including tuition for the male chaperones, who could not understand a single word of the classes that they were attending. They were no trouble—politely quiet during class and bursting into low conversation with each other only around food.

Farida fascinated Rachael. The girl provided a crash course in Life in Saudi Arabia Today. It surprised Rachael that a country that didn’t let its women drive cars until quite recently would let one travel halfway around the world to go to a coed school with an uncovered face. It turned out that cases were not as rare as Rachael would have thought. She had done some research before Farida’s arrival. Women could receive a thorough education in Saudi Arabia—at gender-segregated schools—and work at nearly any job—provided their father or husband agreed. To be so free and yet not free . . . Rachael couldn’t wrap her head around it. But every day with Farida provided more insights.

“We had a guy beat his pahtnuh to death with a Rossi. 22.” The New York City homicide sergeant, Craig Bennett, spoke around a mouthful of rib slider. He was in Barbara’s DNA class. Rachael didn’t know much about him except that he wanted to attend because he would shortly be promoted to lieutenant in charge of the forensic unit. “Thing was loaded. He could’a simply pulled the trigger, but no. I don’t know why it didn’t go off and shoot at least one of them. He told us later, ‘I only wahnted him to start running the Christmas advertisements a week earlier. I didn’t wahn-tuh kill him.’ I said, ‘Then maybe you shouldn’ta cracked his skull, ya think?’”

Everyone—except the two guardians—chuckled. Gallows humor, it was called, industry banter that happened to involve someone’s life or death. Normally quiet Alyssa Cole, from the DNA class, described a New Year’s Eve block party where two men got into an argument. The one went home to get a knife, returned, and stabbed the other. “And he went to trial. He couldn’t figure out that when you walk a block away, get a knife, and come back, it’s pretty hard to claim self-defense.”

“Are we going to visit Chester today?” Oliver asked.

Rachael swallowed and said, “Of course. Temperatures dropped last night, and that can affect the insect activity. His maggots might be a bit stunned.”

The Crime Scene Documentation course needed a crime scene to document, and the Locard provided one in the form of a half-buried goat in the wooded area between the parking lot and the bay. His name really had been Chester, according to the farm donating his body. He had been more of a pet than a commodity until he’d broken through a fence to feast on a pretty vine with bright flowers called yellow jessamine. Its neurotoxic alkaloid had doomed the aging goat.

Stef made a face. “They won’t be the only ones. Maybe we should have dealt with the maggots before lunch.”

“Weak stomach?” Oliver teased.

“Always. Ten years on the job and I still get queasy at the sight of blood. Vomit will make me vomit. I don’t even like spit on the sidewalk.”

“Who does?” Craig asked rhetorically. “It’s just your lot. I know detectives who get to their retirement and still hafta go outside and lay down if they catch a stabbing.”

Rachael said, “Besides, we couldn’t go out before lunch, unless you wanted to take notes in the rain. Again.”

“Does it always rain so much here?” Farida asked. Rachael said no, but October did tend to be one of Maryland’s rainiest months. The others joined in a chorus of comparing precipitation at their home locations, and Rachael noticed a new arrival. Ellie Carr crossed the gleaming floor with one of the attendees from the other class in tow.

Rachael beamed to see her. Ellie had been thrilled to come to the Locard, and Rachael had been thrilled to get her. She’d be a great addition to the Locard’s panel of experts, and Rachael already had a line on a private client who could use Ellie’s skills.

She opened her mouth to apologize for not finding and welcoming Ellie sooner that day, but they’d had a lot of coursework to get through, and with Ellie’s late arrival—

The words died in her throat. Ellie didn’t look thrilled to be there. In fact, she seemed about as thrilled as someone in a dentist’s office awaiting an extraction.

Ellie gave no preamble. Putting her mouth close to Rachael’s ear, she said, “We have an issue. Barbara Wright is dead.”

During Ellie’s morning, as she reacquainted herself with the role of teacher, she spoke for an hour and a quarter about the rare but solid successes in getting DNA off fired bullet casings. Yes, when a bullet explodes inside a gun, the temperature can reach 200 degrees Fahrenheit, and, yes, metal was not a particularly cooperative substrate for DNA results, but loading rounds into a snug, stiff magazine required a lot of touching and shoving and pushing of the little buggers.

After which the woman with the orange-tipped dreadlocks tapped a jeweled pill case on the table like a judge’s gavel and let Ellie know that it was time for lunch. They only needed an hour, the woman added apologetically, with the cafeteria in the building.

Ellie checked her watch, announced that Barbara Wright planned to resume the course on the next hour—one p.m.—and waited until the attendees filed out. Was she supposed to shut the door. . .