Crime Zero Read Free Page B

them little choice."
    Decker smiled. She sounded convincing. But then she had always been a good teacher with a flair for simplifying the most complex problem. As far as she was concerned, the world was one big puzzle that, if she thought about it hard enough and long enough, could be broken down into its component parts to find the one overarching rule that explained everything. To her the whole was never greater than the sum of its parts. That had been their problem. To him the whole was everything. He could never understand how humanity could be reduced to a line of programming. In the short time Kathy Kerr and Decker had been lovers during that last summer at Harvard they had spent most of their time in heated argument. The only area where they hadn't been incompatible was in bed. He thought of the five or six half-serious relationships he'd had in the last nine years and quickly realized that despite or perhaps because of the friction, none shone as vividly in his memory as those few summer months with her.
    "You're aware of Wayne Tice's family history, aren't you, Dr. Kerr?" asked the lawyer, pulling out a large board and placing it on an easel by the judge. The network of names and lines on the board formed a simple family tree.
    "Yes. That's why I agreed to be involved in this case."
    As the lawyer turned to the chart, Luke knew what was coming. He too had studied Tice's family, and he shook his head as Latona explained that the spidery lines leading to boldly typed names revealed how four generations of Tice men had, with two individual exceptions, been drawn to crime. All were famed for their tempers and aggressive drives. "Think twice before you marry a Tice" was a watchword in their hometown.
    The chart infuriated Decker. What did Tice have to complain about? He still had both parents, and he had a brother. Apart from his domineering mother and his successful brother making him feel inadequate, Tice had had it better than most. Decker would have given anything to have a whole family and to have known his father.
    Fluent in Russian, Captain Richard Decker had been an interrogator with the U.S. Navy at the height of the Cold War. As a child Decker often fantasized about his father's using his psychological skills to prize a piece of information vital to the safety of the free world from some recalcitrant Red admiral. Decker's mother used to reassure him that his own uncanny and unsettling ability to see into the minds of others must have been inherited from his brilliant father. But of course the Russians hadn't killed Captain Richard Decker; some street punk in San Francisco had. That was one of the reasons Decker had joined the bureau: to fight the war on the streets.
    Turning back to Kathy, the lawyer asked, "Dr. Kerr, you have applied your battery of tests to my client and his immediate living family?"
    "That's correct. I conducted a gene scan on Wayne Tice and a series of ancillary tests, checking serotonin, testosterone, and adrenaline levels. I also gave him a PET scan to probe brain activity on his frontal lobe. Tice's readings put him in the top five percent, in terms of propensity to violence. His male relations also have dangerous readings, although not nearly as high."
    "So would it be fair to say that he and most of the menfolk in his family, through no fault of their own, carry a gene calibration that makes them predisposed to aggressive behavior and crime?"
    "Yes, but--"
    "But broadly speaking," interrupted the lawyer, eager not to let nuances of interpretation cloud his crucial point, "isn't it the case that Wayne Tice dances to the beat of a more violent drum?"
    "Yes," said Kathy cautiously.
    Latona smiled and turned to the judge. "So, Your Honor, Wayne Tice was born with a particular set of genes, calibrated in such a way that he had to commit murder."
    "That's not what I said," protested Kathy. "I am talking about predisposition. No more. No less. Ultimately a person decides--"
    "Excuse me, Your