Mario smiled a little. “I remember that dinner. Yeah, but for the app, it was some kind of chiming noise. Kind of like wind chimes.”
“And do you remember her getting those regularly?”
“Oh yeah. I used to tease her about it.” He shook his head. “I teased her that her boyfriend was calling. Not that she ever cheated on me, but she liked the meditation part of the study so much I called it her boyfriend because whoever narrated that part was a dude.”
“So there was a guided visualization part of the app with someone narrating?”
“Yeah. She’d usually just go in another room twice a day when it chimed, but every now and then she’d get the notification at an odd hour and she’d do it then. Or if she was stressed about something.”
“What about that day?” Katherine asked. “Did you hear the chimes then?”
“On the day she attacked me?” He frowned. “Yeah. I told the police even. I heard that notification once, and then again like five minutes later. I thought maybe she was ignoring it even though she was in the bedroom. But then maybe fifteen minutes later, she comes out of the bedroom, goes to the kitchen, takes the trash out to the corner, comes back, and…” Mario clammed up. “You know the rest.”
It mirrored the timeline of Kaylee’s notifications too. One notification and then another five minutes later, then an erratic outburst fifteen minutes after that.
“Thank you, Mario.” Katherine rose. “For what it’s worth, I know Abby loves you, and I think there’s a logical explanation for all this.”
Chapter 28
“Could a guided meditation really do all that?” Megan asked as they were driving back to Moonstone Cove. “Could it make you do something that completely out of character?”
“It seems like a stretch, but you have people who have willingly allowed this program access to their brain. Mario said the voice was male,” Katherine muttered. “Greg Hammond. He helped write the app. He was the administrator. It had to be him.”
“Why though?”
Isn’t it always personal?
“Sarah Jordan’s incident was months before any of the others.” Katherine pulled out her phone and called Sarah.
The phone picked up after three rings and a man answered. “Jordan Ranch.”
“I’d like to speak to Sarah Jordan please. Tell her it’s Professor Katherine Bassi from Central Coast State.”
“She’s out of the house right now. Probably be back in an hour or two. Can I take a message?”
“I have a question for her. If you could have her call me back as soon as she’s able, I would appreciate it.” Katherine told the man her number and hoped Sarah would call her back. “What if it was all an experiment for him too? What if Greg targeted Sarah for some reason, trying to use her participation in the study to manipulate her?”
“And it worked, so he tried it on other people? Why?”
“I don’t know that part yet.” Katherine picked up her phone again. “We need to call Detective Bisset.” She dialed the number of the Moonstone Cove Police Department and put the phone on speaker. “Detective Bisset please.”
“One moment.”
After a few minutes, a male voice came over the line. “This is Drew Bisset.”
“Detective Bisset, this is Katherine Bassi again. Before you hang up, I want to tell you that we’ve discovered a link between all four students who’ve had violent incidents in the past few months.”
“Did you say four?”
“I told you about Sarah Jordan weeks ago.”
He was silent for a moment. “You’re saying they’re connected?”
“Obviously. This most recent incident was averted; there was a student who was on top of a building at the university last week and something bad was going to happen. Her name is Kaylee Ivers. You can ask campus security about it if you wish. I was there.”
“You were there?”
“It was another odd coincidence, but I know this girl from one of my laboratories and she is the last person who would—”
“Professor Bassi, I appreciate you trying to help, and I know you care deeply about the school, but—”
“They were all part of a study, Detective.” She pressed forward when he fell silent. “Sarah, Justin, Abby, and Kaylee. They were connected to a seemingly harmless biofeedback study that utilized an app on their smartphones. Tell me something—was Abby’s smartphone damaged like Justin’s was?”
He was silent for a long time. “How did you know his phone was damaged?”
“I have my sources. Was Abby’s phone damaged?”
He huffed out a breath. “She dropped it in the sink in the kitchen before she attacked her boyfriend. Water damage.”
“That’s convenient. There was an app on her phone to help her with the visualizations she’d been practicing for the study. She received two notifications from the app prior to her violent outburst. Her boyfriend told you about them, about the wind chime noise, but I imagine you didn’t realize the significance.”
“Professor Bassi, are you saying that a meditation app caused these people to commit violence? Isn’t it usually the opposite of that?”
Katherine took a deep breath. “This study carefully pinpointed deep-seated sources of an individual’s anxiety or fear, and then someone exploited that fear through guided visualizations that caused the students to react in the opposite way they normally would.” She pressed her eyes shut. “Think of it as a form of very intense hypnosis.”
“You know, my brother used that to quit smoking, but I don’t see him going off and trying to stab someone after a session.”
Katherine covered the phone with her hand and said, “Did everyone’s brother quit smoking via hypnosis?”
“No,” Megan said. “But I had a cousin—”
“Seriously?” She uncovered the phone and continued speaking to Detective Bisset. “Instead of calming them down, the visualizations played on their fears, eventually causing them to lash out, probably as a form of self-defense. Then, like hypnosis, they forgot what they’d done.”
“And you think a phone app can do all that?”
“Detective Bisset, if you can think of another explanation for normal kids to be committing
