“What are you thinking?” Linda asked, as the seconds dragged out to a minute.
“Whose room was this?”
“I’m not sure.” They looked around and found a book with “Property of Andrew Gangle” written on the flyleaf.
“Who was he?”
“I think a tech. A grad student, if I recall.”
“He’s also our killer, and confessed before he carried out the murders. He was also very sick.”
“No kidding. Hello? Thirteen slashed-up bodies. He was sick, all right.”
“I mean ill. He had aphasia.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a speech disorder where the victim can’t process language properly. It’s usually caused by a stroke or brain injury, or it can progress as a result of a tumor, Parkinson’s, or Alzheimer’s.”
“And you’re able to figure this out how?”
“There was a game I used to play with some neuroscience grad students back at MIT. We’d make up sentences as if we had aphasia and challenge the others to decipher them.”
“You didn’t go on many dates, did you?”
Mark ignored her jab. “We usually had to give a clue, like a theme to the sentence, otherwise it would be impossible to work it out. The clue here was the killings, the murder, okay.”
“Sure, but what does ‘Mime Goering for crow Nicole’ have to do with murder?”
“What do you call a group of crows?”
“I don’t know, a flock?”
“A murder,” Mark said with a triumphant gleam. For someone who was always the smartest person in the room, he still enjoyed showing off his intellect. “A group of crows is called a murder. In Gangle’s brain, the two words—‘murder’ and ‘crow’—were synonymous.”
“So then we’re looking for some Nazi other than Göring?”
“No. Aphasia doesn’t work like that. The connections in the brain are messed up. It could be words that sound alike or words that describe objects that go together or words that reminded Gangle of something out of his past.”
“Oh, so Mime Goering sort of sounds like ‘I’m going.’ ”
“Exactly. ‘I’m going to murder.’ Gangle wrote the word ‘I’m going “for” murder’ instead of ‘to.’ I’m thinking in his brain, two is half of four. Switch numbers with prepositions and you get ‘I’m going to murder’ instead of ‘I’m going for murder’.”
“Okay, smart guy, what’s up with Nicole?”
Mark threw her a cocky grin. “That was the easiest part of all. Nicole Kidman stared in a horror movie called The Others.”
“ ‘I’m going to kill the others,’ ” Linda said, stringing together the complete translation. “Wait, does aphasia make you go nuts?”
“Not usually. I think the underlying illness that caused his aphasia also caused him to turn against his crewmates.”
“Like what?”
“You’d have to ask Doc Huxley. I only know about the condition because of the word game I used to play.”
There was a sudden sharp bang that made both of them jump.
“Linda, Murph, we got company,” Linc’s baritone echoed throughout the entire base.