But if Evelyn was right …

He scanned the links.

Cancer Researcher at University of Minnesota Arrested for Murder …

Fruit Fly Geneticist Indicted …

Panties of Eight Murder Victims Found in Attic of Geneticist Lyman Bishop …

Authorities Say the Zombie Maker Used Ice Pick to Perform Lobotomies.…

“Son of a bitch!” he muttered. Surely he wasn’t working for someone called the Zombie Maker.

He tried to call Terry, but Terry didn’t answer, so he went back to those links and read the articles. Most claimed Bishop had cut into his victims’ brains to make them more docile. If a victim died during or after the procedure, he’d simply kidnap someone else and try again—until one survived whom he could keep as his captive. Hence the nickname.

This time when he tried to call Terry, Emmett left a voicemail message: You’d better get back to me right away. Do you hear? I mean right away!

While he waited, he did a Google search on transorbital lobotomies. He hoped they sounded a lot worse than they actually were, but that didn’t turn out to be the case. From what he learned, an American neurologist named Dr. Walter Freeman, a Yale graduate no less, began scrambling his patients’ frontal lobes in the late 1940s in an attempt to cure them of various psychological complaints. He believed an excess of emotion caused mental illness and severing certain nerve connections would relieve that emotion.

He started out by drilling six holes into the top of a patient’s head. Later, he streamlined the process by shoving a regular, kitchen-variety ice pick through the patient’s eye sockets, where the bone was much thinner.

Emmett shook his head in amazement as he read one survivor’s account of how his stepmother took him to Dr. Freeman to have the procedure done because he was “a bad kid.”

“What a bitch!” Emmett muttered. He hoped she got what was coming to her. His own stepmom had hit him in the face with a Jack Daniel’s bottle when he was fourteen, which nearly cost him his eye. He’d always hated her. But this kid had it even worse. And, according to another article, he was only one of thousands who underwent the procedure. Most were older, but Dr. Freeman performed over thirty-five hundred ice-pick lobotomies during his career—some in front of spectators.

Lyman Bishop had used an ice pick in the same way, but he hadn’t been putting on a show and he hadn’t done it with the intention of helping anyone—except himself.

Emmett had hung out with some pretty tough dudes, especially while he was in prison. But what Bishop had done was barbaric.

Or … was he innocent?

As Emmett dug deeper, he found other links and articles that suggested Bishop might not be the Zombie Maker. The detective who’d investigated the case had planted the panty evidence that convicted him. Bishop had been sent to Hanover House but was released after only a short time. Extensive media coverage labeled his conviction a tragedy that never should’ve happened, especially to a highly educated scientist and distinguished advocate of medical progress like Bishop. Their take: an overly ambitious cop tried to make a name for himself by solving the high-profile case.