Perfect Victim (11 page)

XOXOXOXOXOXOXO

 

M

 

“Fellas, can you gimme a second here?” Grove kept his eyes on the note still in his hands.

He had read the entire thing twice now, as though it might transform into something less significant, like a grocery list or a note to pick up Aaron at Toddler Town Day Care.

“Gimme a second here,” he repeated.

He could not look into the eyes of the two uniformed policemen standing behind him in the archway, waiting. Gaze downturned, jaw tensing like a ratchet wrench, he felt the heavy, leaden despair filling his veins. The dark matter of his life was destroying him now from
inside
his family, like a slow cancer.

“Agent Grove—”

“I'm fine, I'm okay, I just need a second. You guys can take off.”

“But they told us to hang around until the morning shift gets down from—”

“Do I have to spell it out?!”

Grove glared hotly at them, the note still gripped in his clenched hand, the shock of his booming cry still bouncing off the tiles.

After a beat of tense silence: “Sir, you left your briefcase out in the prowler.”

Grove gritted his teeth. “Go get it, please…and then you guys can go ahead and take off.”

They both slipped out, and a moment later one of them returned with the attaché.

Grove had not moved from the kitchen doorway in the ninety seconds it took for the cop to retrieve it; he still clenched the note in his sweaty grasp, still reeled with contrary emotions. The cop brought the briefcase over and gingerly set it down on the kitchen table next to Grove. Then the officer turned and got the hell out of there without uttering a word.

For quite a long while Grove remained in that tiled archway, engulfed in silent rumination, the stagnant air smelling of Pine-Sol and desertion—a moment that seemed to stretch interminably, like the passage of time within a fever dream. As he stood there, trying to gain purchase on the tilting angle of events, his thoughts churned.

On one level, it was good that Maura had vacated the place. Grove could now focus on the investigation without worrying about the dangers of bringing the darkness too close to home. But on another level, Maura's exodus woke Grove up to troubling possibility. Maybe he was incapable of having a normal, stable home life. Maybe he was doomed to be a bridesmaid at the Bureau the rest of his life.

For a single instant, the entire arc of his marriage to Maura County sparked across his memory screen. He remembered meeting her in Alaska on the Ackerman case, nearly getting her killed in a storm-lashed New Orleans on the Doerr investigation, and the horrible sequence of events last year when a madman named Henry Splet invaded their safe house. Those were terrifying milestones that would have ripped a weaker marriage apart at the seams, but somehow, in the case of Grove and Maura, these traumatic events only served to more tightly knit the couple together.

On a deeper level, though, it was the small, intimate, seemingly trivial moments—both positive and negative—that Grove remembered the most vividly. He remembered watching goose bumps rise on the small of Maura's back once after making love. He remembered sharing a bottle of champagne in the maternity ward at four in the morning the night Aaron was born. He remembered hearing Maura speak Latin once in her sleep. And maybe most vividly, he remembered the night Maura told him about the young kid from the IT department who had propositioned her.

Looking back on it, Grove still wondered why it had bothered him so much. He should have been flattered. He should have laughed it off. But he could not get that revelation out of his mind. He would never forget the night Maura told him about it. Every little detail was burned into his midbrain: the Middle Eastern food they were eating, the way she pointed out the scene of the crime.

“He hit on me, Uly, right here, in this very kitchen, he comes over one night—you were away—he comes over to drop off a file and he comes on to me.”

Grove remembered feeling a weird sort of unresolved dread that night, even after hearing Maura's assurances that she had kicked the kid out immediately after his blunder. Grove remembered working with Benjamin Bard and being annoyed by the young man's beach-punk swagger. Recruited out of graduate school at UC Berkeley for the Bureau's newly retooled Information Technology department, the kid had been a typical young computer geek, socially inept and self-absorbed. Bard had installed all the new firewalls and security systems on Grove's office and home computers and—

Suddenly, in that empty, silent house, Grove looked up on a quick inhalation of air, almost a gasp.

Something sparked in the back of his mind, a synapse firing suddenly, a faulty circuit crackling with a realization: Bard had visited the Grove house once before his awkward little moment with Maura. He had been in the basement. Grove remembered it vividly, a rainy Saturday afternoon, the kid ringing the doorbell, standing on the porch like a wet rat, holding a box of computer cables and disks. Bard had come to Grove's home to install secure software.

Bard had seen Grove's hard drive.

The memories streamed through Grove's brain with the force of a tidal wave. He remembered the young man fawning over him that day, wanting his autograph, talking nonsense about Grove being a legend. More important, Grove remembered leaving the kid alone in the basement with all the computer gear for hours. Bard had access to Grove's class notes, his syllabus, and all the various drafts that ultimately became the finished textbook. Bard had been alone with Grove's entire body of work.

Benjamin Bard was the only other human being on earth who had seen that unpublished computer model of the thornlike bloodstain found at the archetypal scene
.

“God
damn
Jesus Christ—
Christ
,” Grove babbled to himself in the empty, desolate kitchen.

He dug in his pocket for his cell phone, his hands shaking with adrenaline. He dropped the phone. The phone bounced. He got down on his hands and knees and crawled after it, the memory of Bard's sudden departure from the Bureau bolting through him like a shot of amphetamines:
One day the kid calls in sick. Three days later his weird resignation letter arrives on the desk of the Operations Chief, very short, very terse, almost cryptic, something like “I'm not cut out for this, pressure's too much, I'm off to India to discover myself, so sorry.” Follow-ups are made, per Bureau policy, but nobody ever lays eyes on the kid again. They never find him. Ordinarily all this might raise a few red flags, but the kid was such a flake the Operations guys probably just figured it's good riddance to bad rubbish
.

Grove barked into his cell phone after scooping it up and punching in the emergency dispatch: “Tactical, I need Tactical, this is Special Agent Ulysses Grove!”

“Go ahead, Twenty-four,” a nasal female voice crackled in his ear.

“Got probable cause on a person of interest, case numbers three-oh-two-A, three-oh-two-B, and three-oh-two-C.”

“Copy that, Twenty-four. You want to go ahead with the SIT code?”

Grove quickly gave the dispatcher the eight-digit ID code required to initiate a cold pursuit.

“Copy that, Twenty-four, you want to start with the suspect name and twenty?”

“Negative, negative—current twenty is unknown!” Anger flared in the pit of Grove's stomach, but he stuffed it back down. He would not let his emotions rule. He wanted to find Bard and chew his head off at the neck, but he would not allow his rage and pain to get the better of him. “The suspect's name is Bard.” He spelled it for her. “Benjamin David, I believe, a former Bureau employee. You copy?”

“Copy that.”

“Start with the staff files, and when you get a twenty, scramble the TAC unit and call me back on this cell. Suspect could very easily be psychotic and packing, highly dangerous, et cetera. I'm going in with them. Do you copy?”

“Got it.”

Grove snapped the cell phone off, pocketed it, then hurried upstairs to get his gun.

“You got no idea what y'all are dealin' with here, girlfriend, but believe me it's real and it's dangerous. All of it foretold in the Gnostic prophesies. Can I pour you one?”

In the predawn gloom of the tavern's kitchen, by the flickering light of a kerosene lantern, David “Chainsaw” Okuba raised the trembling spout of an ancient iron kettle over a coffee mug in front of Drinkwater. She sat shivering at a butcher's table, wrapped in a wool blanket, trying to assess whether this wild yarn Okuba was spinning should be taken seriously. She gestured at the teakettle. “Can I ask what it is?”

“Purely medicinal,” the bluesman said with a nervous nod, throwing a glance at his bodyguard, who sat hunched on a stool in the shadows next to the icebox. The man was spooked down to his bones. “Herbs mostly. St. John the Conqueror root, sassafras. Keeps the bad juju out.”

She shrugged. “Why not?”

He poured her a steaming, foul-smelling cup of opaque liquid the color of river-bottom while he continued his tale in that intense, smoky wheeze that he employed on dark delta blues songs. “This here prophecy's exactly what my uncle Baruk and his crew was studyin' all their lives—these secret gospel stories—which they believed was as real as that cup o' tea there.”

Drinkwater sipped the tea and practically coughed it up. It tasted like paint thinner. “So what exactly did this prophecy say?”

Okuba put the teakettle back on the stove and sat back down. He spoke carefully to her. “It was written in scrolls my uncle found, there was this spirit—long, long time ago—got lost.”

The room had begun to blur slightly. Drinkwater felt warm all over. “Lost?”

Okuba put a cigarette between his crooked teeth and fired it up, his slender brown hands trembling fitfully. “That's right. Don't tell me you ain't never heard of no lost spirits.”

“I don't know…yeah, sure.”

“I ain't talkin' 'bout no ghost or goblin here. I'm talkin' 'bout somethin' my Uncle Baruk used to call a displaced spirit. Kinda spirit gets stuck in our world.”

Drinkwater chewed the inside of her cheek. “Stuck how? What do you mean?”

“I mean this here spirit's kinda whatchacall
doomed
. Know what I'm sayin'?”

“No. No, I don't. Doomed how?”

Okuba shrugged. “Doomed to wander, I guess. Doomed to be reborn every few generations…takin' on human form and all that shit.”

Drinkwater sighed. “So you think this has somethin' to do with this guy I'm working for? The FBI agent?”

Okuba wiped his mouth. “I'll tell ya this: my uncle believed he came across a very, very special person. Maybe it's all a buncha damn bullshit, I dunno, but my uncle believed he found the—the hell he call it?—the
good incarnate
. Some kid in Chicago. Must be all growed up by now. S'pose that could be the fella hired you.”

“I'm sorry.” Drinkwater put her cup down. She felt so light-headed her vision was beginning to tunnel. “I mean no disrespect, but I gotta tell ya I haven't been to Sunday school since I was—”

“I don't give two whits whether y'all believe me or not.” Okuba nervously sucked his cigarette, glowering at her. “I didn't ask y'all down here. But I'm warnin' y'all right now—y'all better not fool around with this shit because it's dangerous shit.”

Drinkwater raised a hand, a contrite gesture. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry…it just takes a little getting used to. Go on, please. Tell me why it's dangerous.”

Okuba glanced at the doorway, a creaking noise from the dark empty tavern making him jump. “I never got the whole story, but I understand my uncle believe this one displaced spirit might be in danger.”

Drinkwater looked at him. “What kinda danger?”

“Huh?” Again Okuba glanced uneasily out at the doorway. “Say what?”

“What kind of danger?”

Okuba rubbed his mouth again. “I dunno, danger of being destroyed I guess, which is bad news for the rest of us, 'cuz my uncle, he believe that the End Days is what comes after that.”

Drinkwater thought about it for a moment. “So we're supposed to protect this spirit, this incarnate?”

Okuba was glancing over his shoulder again. “I said too much already, I ain't gonna say no more.”

“But what about—?”

“Get on outta here.”

Drinkwater started to say something else but caught movement out of the corner of her eye, the big man near the icebox rising off his stool with a grunt. “All right, all right.” She scooped up her purse and shrugged off the blanket. “I'm going. Thanks for the tea, and for not killing me in the freezer.”

She went over to the doorway, through which the darkened, deserted tavern was barely visible. She paused, turned, and looked at Okuba, who still had the jitters, worse than ever now, trying to light another cigarette with shaking hands. Drinkwater measured her words. “One more question and I'm outta your hair forever.”

Okuba looked at her, eyes shimmering with fear. “Go ahead, get it over with.”

“This incarnate you've been talking about—if it's such a good spirit, why the hell are you so afraid?”

He looked at her for a long time before answering.

 

The battering ram—about the size of a small tree trunk—broke the cabin door on the third blow. The noise was surprisingly immense, reverberating out across the dark marina, a cannon blast of cracking wood and wrenching metal in the night.

Two tactical officers on either side of the ram lurched past the flapping door and into the dark, disheveled houseboat. The center of gravity shifted, the floor tilting severely, as three more Tac guys followed them in with assault rifles raised and readied.

Grove was behind them, watching all this from the edge of the pier. His Kevlar flak vest weighed a ton under his woolen suit coat, the sea breeze slapping him in the face, the smell of brine and metal bracing him, waking him up. He had his .44 caliber Bulldog gripped firmly in both of his hands, which were already clad in rubber surgical gloves, his feet planted shoulder-width—the Weaver position—an instinctive posture during forced entry.

A gull cried directly above the houseboat, way up in the black sky, echoing over the voices and lapping water.

“Bard, FBI! Identify yourself!” The lead Tac officer, a young Latino with pork-chop sideburns, hollered protocol at the empty darkness of the houseboat. “If you're present identify yourself now please!”

No answer.

The battering ram dropped to the flimsy floor with a loud clang and rolled. The boathouse pitched again. This time, three out of the five Tac officers lost their balance, staggering toward the starboard side. One of them hollered an obscenity and grasped a window ledge. Another banged against a wall, knocking a picture frame to the deck. “Billings, take the lower deck! Now! Now!”

Pork Chop's booming voice got things moving. Headlamps snapped on. Beams of light pierced the musty darkness of the apartment as Pork Chop gave hand signals to the two point men. One went left toward a narrow set of varnished steps leading down into the deeper darkness of the sleeping berths, the other went right toward the tiny galley.

“Nobody touch anything!” Grove entered the boathouse with his gun at the ready, gazing down the front-sight at shadowy corners. Even though dawn had broken over the Chesapeake outside, the houseboat's cabin was bathed in darkness.

Grove didn't expect a maniac to jump out at him; he didn't even expect the Surf Punk to be home. He had gotten the boathouse's location from Dispatch, who had gotten it from Operations: a low-rent marina at the end of Highway 235 near St. George Island, Maryland. The neighborhood was a rusted-out wasteland of crab boats and old retrofitted cabin cruisers inhabited by bohemians, recluses, and retirees who kept to themselves and studiously ignored their neighbors. Eyes adjusting to the dark, Grove saw signs of a struggle: an overturned armchair, a jagged hole in the port-side wall, a broken boogie board.

The first rays of morning sliced through mangled, crumpled window blinds.

A strong chemical smell hung in the air, a very familiar smell that Grove could not immediately identify. He spun in a three-sixty, his gun still raised, his good eye taking in fallen bookshelves, dark stains on the walls. The floor leaned and yawed again, and Grove braced himself against the bulwark, as the sounds of the Tac guys doing their frantic room-to-room filled his ears.

“Galley's clear! Clear!”

Formaldehyde
. That's what he was smelling—goddamn formaldehyde. He shuffled toward the beams of light flickering in the galley, his arms aching with adrenaline, his hands sweaty inside the rubber gloves. Broken china on the floor. Bootsteps crunching. Light coming through a narrow shaded window. Dirt from an overturned plant. The powerful odor of rancid meat.

“Head is clear! Downstairs john is clear!” Another frenzied voice from belowdecks.

Grove paused near a broken portal, his gun pointing at the ceiling. He listened. He heard an electric motor running somewhere in the bowels of the boathouse, and he felt the floor vibrating faintly. He had been hearing that infernal humming noise, barely audible beneath all the yelling, from the moment he had arrived. He had made note of it, figuring it was a generator or bilge pump or filter or whatever. But now it set off an alarm in his brain.

“Agent Grove, the Sleeper Cabin! In the fore-deck! Got a stiff! We got a stiff!!”

Grove lowered the Bulldog's barrel and hustled toward the staircase, sidestepping a stack of cardboard boxes and spilled computer disks like so many shiny plates on the deck. Through the low archway. Down the creaking steps. Toward the furthest hatch in the lower level in which all the flashlights and figures were now convening. Somebody was coughing fitfully inside the cabin.

“Give him some room! Back off, back off!” The Tac officers backed away, their guns going up, allowing Grove passage inside the berth.

Grove entered the cramped, moldering sleeping area—the whole chamber was probably less than a hundred square feet. A beefier stink hung in the clammy air just beneath the chemical stench.

He pulled a penlight from his vest. Flipped it on. Swept the bloodstained mattress on the floor…the coils of ropes…the blankets bunched at one end of the berth…the chains dangling from the light fixture…and the huge rusting Frigidaire freezer in one corner, its horizontal door propped open by one of the Tac guys.

In the darkness to Grove's left, the voice of Pork Chop muttered into his two-way: “HQ, we're gonna need the lab guys, the site people, the whole team, pronto.”

The body had been stowed in the horizontal deep freeze—petrified in a slab of fishy ice—for many months now, maybe even a year. It was hard to tell from the coloring of the flesh, the milky frozen eyeballs, the gaping rictus of blackened teeth, the swollen purple tongue protruding from the mouth like a fat slug.

Grove gazed down at Benjamin Bard's nude remains and gritted his teeth. Contrary emotions flowed through Grove like a riptide tearing at his sanity:
This was the cocky kid who had come on to his wife, and now look at him, now look at him, with his spiky bleach blond Mohawk and peach-fuzz goatee frozen in a rotting pink sarcophagus, but wait, wait, wait, look more closely, look at the room, Ulysses, look at that gaping mouth, the look of terror in his pupil-less eyes, and the ligature wounds up and down his frozen limbs…the man was tortured, he was tortured—systematically, savagely, purposefully
.

All at once, over the space of a nanosecond, Ulysses Grove started fitting together all the tiny puzzle tiles tumbling around in his brain.

The humming sound had been the Frigidaire, running perpetually off the marina's power, and the strange stench
beneath
that chemical smell had been the fishy smell of old frozen meat—better known as freezer burn—but far more important, far more critical, the scene was talking to Grove now, whispering to him in the ancient dead language:
ES UG IGI E-ZE HUBUR—go deeper, deeper, yes, that's right, forget your pain, my brother, forget your ego, go down, down, down into the frozen dead heart like a clock stopped at the precise apocalyptic hour of revelation—this is how the perpetrator knew! This is how the perpetrator knew how to stage the killings! This is how! The surf-punk gave up the information! Benjamin Bard possessed the classified modus operandi, the computer models, the lecture notes….

“What was that?”

The sound of Pork Chop's voice penetrated Grove's stupor, and Grove turned to the Tac leader like a man stirring from a dream. “What?”

“You said ‘This is how he knew.'” The leader spoke in a flat, disaffected voice. “I'm not following.”

Grove shone his penlight at the frozen corpse. “See the ligature marks, the superficial trauma—here, here, along the nerve bundles under the feet, along the sides of the tongue—all indicating torture.”

Pork Chop frowned, rubbing his nose. The smell was getting to him. “That's a lot of torture.”