Perfect Victim (26 page)

 

Getting into the Central Detention Center on D Street late at night wasn't easy, especially for an Academy recruit like Drinkwater. But a guard at the receiving gate recognized her from a newsletter on honor students—Drinkwater's renown on the shooting range had caught his eye (as had her large bosom)—and he let her enter the wing under the strict promise that she not implicate him in any way if she got in hot water. Of course she hurriedly agreed.

Pulse pounding faster and faster with each passing moment, she literally ran the quarter mile of deserted white cinder-block corridors—the fluorescent overheads blazing down at her—all the way to the interrogation ward. She found the night receptionist and waved her flash drive of Grove's prints like a talisman, blurting out, “I need to see the Section Chief right away! Is he here? It's an emergency!”

The receptionist, an elderly black man with thick-lensed spectacles riding low on his nose, raised his gnarled hands. “Whoa there, sis, you gotta—”

“It's a matter of life and death, sir, national security, whatever you want to call it!”

“I can't let you—”

“Is this the famous Drinkwater?”

The voice came from across the waiting room, a flat Midwestern drawl, and Drinkwater turned just in time to see Ray Kopsinsky striding toward her in shirtsleeves, the armpits damp, his hand extended genially. He looked exhausted. “So you're Grove's girl Friday.”

She quickly shook his hand, measuring her words. “Sir, I know this is highly irregular, but I think I can prove that's not John Q Public in there.”

“Calm down, Drinkwater.”

“But, sir—”

“We already know.” He rubbed his eyes. “VICAP matched the prints up this afternoon.”

Drinkwater visibly sagged, all her muscles loosening. “Then you know who it is?”

Kopsinsky gave her a tired smile. “This guy's gonna be the death of me yet.”

“I knew it. Even in the van. I knew something was wrong. Then I saw the prints.”

Kopsinsky shook his head. “Obviously the tattoos, the hair—it was symbolism, done to trade places with him. I just can't figure out the voice, the voice was so damn different, a different tone.”

Drinkwater shrugged. “All that coal dust, the underground gases, whatever, must have done a number on his vocal cords. I would have noticed the droopy left eye if wasn't for the hemorrhage.”

“Yeah, well…that's not the problem.”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

Kopsinsky let out a sigh. “You know it's Grove and I know it's Grove…problem is,
he
doesn't know it yet.”

 

The next day the man sat at a plain rectangular wooden table in a conference room at the end of the main corridor. The room, with its minimal furnishings, single ficus plant by the window, and lingering odor of cigarette smoke, gave off a sense of purgatory to all those who spend any length of time in it. In spite of this, however, the man at the table was thankful. Dressed in a T-shirt and khaki slacks, his arms and neck bandaged, he was thankful that he had been allowed to change out of the hideous orange jumpsuit. Thankful that the shackles had been removed and that he'd been given the freedom to get some fresh air, or make phone calls, or even leave the facility if he so desired.

Unfortunately he knew no phone numbers, had nobody to call, had nowhere to go, and was just as mystified by this sudden mood swing among his captors as he was by their earlier insistence that he had murdered people.

Now they wanted him to know how sorry they were, and how they wanted to help him, and most of all, they wanted him to understand that he was a man named Ulysses Grove who worked as a criminal profiler for the FBI, a man with incredible skills, a venerable career, and a family that consisted of a lovely wife and young son. None of it rang true. None of it sounded even remotely familiar.

The man at the table had a lead shield around his memory. Even the strange tattoos that adorned his wounded body rang no bells. He felt like a featureless outline of a man, a cipher. Strangely enough, though, in some deeply buried capsule of his imagination, his brain reminded him of a target silhouette, the kind you might see on a gun range, an opaque bust of a generic unknown subject. And this image haunted him, disturbed him…right up until the moment the outer door of that meeting room clicked open.

Kopsinsky came in first. Dressed in a smart navy suit, a laminate ID tag clipped to his pocket, he approached the table with an awkward smile. “Ulysses, I don't want to throw all this at you at once, but we have a few special visitors to see you today.”

The man looked up. “Okay….”

“Let's take this nice and easy, all right? One step at a time?”

“Sure.”

Kopsinsky turned and signaled to somebody hovering outside the door. “You've already met Edith Drinkwater, I believe…”

The black woman entered tentatively. Decked out in a conservative navy pantsuit, also sporting a laminate tag around her neck, she had her hair in tight braids. She looked nervous. “Got somebody here wants to see you, Ulysses.”

The man nodded. “Okay.”

A moment later, a thin ash-blond woman in a sweater and jeans came in the room with a plump, caramel-skinned three-year-old on her hip. The woman paused, her face a topography of pain, her child instantly recognizing Grove, transfixed by the shorn head and markings. “Daddeee?”

Grove stood up so abruptly he knocked his chair over.

Momentarily stricken, his breath catching in his throat, he saw this small-hipped woman and curly-haired child casting off a ghostly aura of light. It radiated off them in faint luminous filaments that reached across the room and penetrated Grove with a surge of heat, the stabbing pain in his hips, in his spine, in his temples, all of it suddenly burning away on a wave of cleansing truth.

The lead shield around his memory dissolved, revealing his identity in a sudden and unexpected nickelodeon-flash of raw experience—
climbing down a bottomless well, ocean waves obliterating a message in the sand, trembling hands holding a heart-wrenching note from a forlorn wife, a father reading a fairy tale to a child, an upside-down monster
—all of the memories so vivid and bright that he nearly collapsed.

“Oh Jesus, there you are, there you are, there you are, there you are,” he mumbled under his breath as he limped around the side of the table and went to them, reaching out first for the child, then for the mother, embracing both, one in each arm, the tears blurring his vision. “There you are, there you are, there you are, there you are—”

The room became a tableau of almost reverent stillness and silence.

The section chief stood near the window, his head down respectfully, his expression one of weary acceptance, acceptance of genius, acceptance of the inexplicable.

And the woman named Drinkwater hovered stone-still near the door, looking down at her hands as though praying, a certain kind of acceptance passing over her face as well—

—the realization that this strange and terrifying assignment, as well as her role in this man's life, which would forever remain a secret, had come to an end.