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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Twisted
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Blue sky?
“We made it! We made it!” Kaminsky's voice finally penetrated Grove's ringing ears. “We are in!”
Grove took the handlebar out of his mouth and croaked, “In where?”
The Russian grinned, his nicotine-stained teeth gleaming dully in the sunlight. “Pay attention, Grove! You are not paying attention!”
 
 
Crouched in the dark, the Holy Ghost heard the sudden silence fall like an axe, the smell of the kill thick in his nostrils, deep shadows cloaking him.
The sacred space at last!
Outside the shelter, the eye-wall winds faded as though a switch had been thrown, the thunderous churning noise trailing off, the dwindling tympany in synch with his pulse. He huddled there like a spider in the darkness of that old abandoned mill house on the edge of that silver river, surrounded by bodies, dozens of bodies.
The human remains gave off a meaty, protein-rich smell that aroused the Holy Ghost, fueled his ecstacy, galvanized his nervous system. Now, finally, it was time to harvest the ritual blood, to milk the chattel and make the ceremonial dye.
To lure the manhunter once again into the holy circle of vengeance.
 
 
The Lockheed went into a steep turn.
Grove gaped at the surrounding clouds.
“Take a good look, my friend!” Kaminsky urged as he canted the control yoke with one hand, his gravelly voice hoarse from screaming over the noise of the storm. The props hummed steadily now as the plane kept banking in one great circular pattern over the tiny fishing village of Ulmer's Folly. The wind had vanished. Streaks of rain were streaming off the outer shell of the aircraft as it kept banking and banking. “This is as close as a man can get, Grove!”
Grove kept gawking at the clouds. He had witnessed so many things in his life, horrible things, stunning things. He had even been lucky enough to observe one or two
miraculous
things—a meteor shower off the coast of Nova Scotia, his wife Hannah's sleeping face in the predawn light—but nothing compared to this.
Nothing.
He stared and stared at that coliseum of clouds. Somehow, at some point, through some dark magic that Grove would never be able to comprehend, the sky had turned into a stadium. Vast, sweeping vistas of black thunderheads rose up in all directions as far as the human eye could see like raked seating in some celestial temple of the gods. And yet,
and yet
, the sun shone down from overhead, shone down through the eye.
They were
inside
the hurricane. Simultaneously magnificent and menacing, the hole in the storm had a dizzying, claustrophobic effect on Grove, who made a futile attempt to comment: “Gimme a second—I mean I-I-I've never—I'm not sure what—”
“Concentrate, Grove! Concentrate now!” Kaminsky yelled. “I only have enough fuel to make a couple of revolutions—”
“No!
”
Grove was shaking his head. “Take us down!”
The Russian shot a glance at Grove. “What did you just say!”
Grove pointed at the floor. “Down! Down! Take us down! I need you to land!”
“Are you insane!”
Grove kept shaking his head. “That was the deal! You agreed to get me inside the eye!”
“
You psycho fruitcake case of nuts!—You
are
inside the stinking eye!”
“Shit!
Shit!
” Grove tore his gaze from Kaminsky and then peered down through the portal window at the acreage of waterfront land inside the strange, momentary calm.
In the alien daylight a good chunk of Cape Hatteras was visible, a long swath of Pamlico Sound, and many of the cozy little inlets, wetlands, and eddies—all of which lay bathing in the cold rays of the sun with pristine clarity, as though viewed in a dream.
Even a thousand feet up, Grove could see the checkerboard streets of Ulmer's Folly, many of the cobblestone roads flooded from the storm, the gabled rooftops, the steeples, and the tarred-roof warehouses all glistening in the eerie stillness. But he could not make
sense
of anything, could not make any connection to something as banal and ugly as murder.
The plane hit a bump, shuddering for a moment as it flew over a stretch of clear-air turbulence.
Grove bit down hard, cracking his molars, grabbing his armrests, and tasting the sour metallic taste of fear on the back of his tongue. He swallowed it back down, shoved it down inside himself. The fear was blocking him, scattering his thoughts, and he struggled to stuff it back down his throat. He turned to Kaminsky. “Damn it, Kay, I need to be on the ground if I'm going to ferret this guy out!”
“What is this ferret you are babbling about?”
“Kay!”
The Russian glowered at Grove. “What in the bloody hell are you talking about?”
Grove clutched at his armrests. “Goddamnit, we talked about this! You promised me—”
“You are one dangerous lunatic, Grove!”
“Be that as it may, I still need to get down there so I can lure this guy out!”
“Grove—”
“He wants
me
, Kay! I told you! People are getting killed because of me! I need to be on the ground!”
“That is not going to happen!”
“I will take full responsibility! Now land this piece of shit right now! Please, Kay!
Take us down!
”
Across the cockpit Kaminsky exhaled a puff of breath, glancing down at the instruments, taking inventory of each bouncing needle. “Try to understand something, Grove!” he called out, tapping a gauge with a ragged fingernail. “We only have enough fuel to get this piece of nuts and bolts back to Camp Lejeune! We are going to have to leave the eye now! Do you understand what I am saying!”
Grove let out an exasperated sigh, turning away and staring down through that portal at the brilliant ant farm of streets and buildings caught like bugs in amber. To the north of Ulmer's Folly, just on the edge of visibility, was the Alligator River, snaking through the wetlands like a dirty gray ribbon. Beyond the river, now engulfed by the dark thunderheads, was historic Kitty Hawk, the sacred, desolate grounds of the Wright brothers' miraculous first flights. Beyond that lay the black, slow-moving oblivion of Hurricane Eve.
“Lima Hotel Tower!” The Russian was talking into his headset now, madly flipping switches. The engines were beginning to whine. “This is Three-Delta, do you copy? Over! Lima Hotel Tower, do you copy!”
The air pressure in the cabin had begun to change again, the whistling noise returning. The back of Grove's scalp bristled, and he felt the air becoming agitated, starting to vibrate, the eye closing in around them, the distant freight train roar of the storm wall approaching.
The terror was palpable, a cold, blunt object forcing its way up Grove's esophagus and into his throat. He wanted to scream, but that other part of him was taking over now.
That's what it's all about, isn't it, the terror, the fear
? he thought, addressing that “unknown subject” in his mind, gazing out through the windscreen at that churning wall of wind dead ahead, maybe a quarter mile away, maybe closer.
You're steeped in it, aren't you? That primordial fear, you're soaked in it, baptized in it ... and these hurricanes are simply fuel, they're fuel for that nourishing fear.
Kaminsky was yelling again: “
Grove! Put the rubber piece back in! We're thirty seconds from penetration
!”
Grove realized he still had that bike handlebar cover clutched in his sweaty right hand like a charm, like a talisman, and he quickly wedged it back in his mouth. He barely tasted it this time. He was so transfixed by the sight of that dreamlike landscape down there, awash in sunlight, the floodwater shimmering. He stared and stared, and he knew the key to catching the killer was presenting itself.
A burst of garbled voices fizzed out of the console, and Kaminsky shouted into his mike, “
Lima Hotel Tower! This is Three-Delta! Do you copy?
”
Turbulence punched through the floor, tossing the plane sideways as though it were skating on ice, and Kaminsky fought with the yoke and yelled some more into the headset. The light darkened. High-velocity wisps of clouds began streaming past the windscreen, but Grove had stopped paying attention to the aircraft or his own safety. His attention was riveted to the ground now, to that unreal world laid out like a child's toys in the impossible sunlight.
At a thousand feet in the air a person can make out quite a lot on the ground—a missing shingle on a rooftop, a damaged fire hydrant spewing water, a shopping cart floating across a flooded supermarket parking lot. In those last few seconds before thunderclouds once again engulfed the plane, shutting out all the light, Grove saw two things that would stay with him for the rest of his life.
The first item registered in his brain at the precise moment the Lockheed penetrated the inner wall. The plane began to furiously shake, and rain pelted the fuselage with the force of a thousand fire hoses, and Grove had to clench his jaw and tense his body against the seat just to maintain eye contact with the window. But what he saw down there in that brief instant before the gray darkness returned burned an indelible image on the back of his brain, and stayed there, like the afterglow of a photographer's flash. He saw a flock of blackbirds—or maybe they were gulls, Grove wasn't sure; he had never seen black gulls before—
trapped
in the eye.
The birds kept circling the outer boundaries of the eye wall, making soaring leaps, then darting back toward the center, then curling back for another attempt to pierce the rain band. At this distance, they looked like insects caught in a vast, monolithic killing jar.
The Lockheed roared then, and Grove blinked and clenched and then saw the second thing that would forever live in his memory. It registered in his midbrain in the split second before the plane was engulfed in black clouds, but that single instant was all that Grove needed to see it and compute it, and derive a deeper meaning from it.
It first appeared out of the corner of Grove's eye, way up to the north, beyond the village, almost to Kitty Hawk, up there along the northernmost edges of the storm's eye: a vivid streak of color against the silvery gray landscape, glinting in the dying sunlight. And right before the light went away, as the plane lurched and shook and drifted slightly to the northwest, the streak of color came into better focus, and Grove realized it was a deep scarlet.
He swallowed hard and felt his heart rise up in his gorge: The narrow channel of the Alligator River that skirted the northern edge of Ulmer's Folly was now running red with human blood!
The image was gone within a millisecond as the plane plunged back into the vortex of rain and wind, but Grove registered every last detail on his mind screen—the way the river snaked willy-nilly through the ramshackle district of warehouses and foundries, the deep crimson dye clouding the water like ink in swirls and eddies, as though someone had spilled paint at its source. Even the stone banks were stained red at certain points—a stark, ghastly abomination overlaid on this charming little picture-postcard fishing village.
Then the hurricane gobbled all the light, and Grove saw nothing but gray out the window, and Kaminsky rode the bucking bronco screaming and cursing westward toward the safety of Camp Lejeune.
But Grove knew the truth.
He knew it as certainly as he knew his own name.
That river of blood was meant for him.
9
That night, in a brooding, inclement New Orleans, restlessly pacing the cluttered rooms of the late professor's French Quarter apartment, Maura County inadvertently stumbled upon the key to the hurricane killer's identity.
At first, of course, she had no idea what the contents of that mysterious videotape actually meant. The hand-labeled VHS tape was simply one of the many artifacts filed away in the professor's personal archives, and Maura was not exactly comfortable with the prospect of snooping around De Lourde's things. She kept expecting the old coot to jump out of the shadows and play her some Fats Domino on his Rockola, or fire up his old dusty projector with an old Bogart movie. To make matters worse, Hurricane Fiona was looming. Her imminent arrival was constantly being announced on the choruses of gulf winds and rattling shutters.
Most of New Orleans had already evacuated, and forecasters were predicting a storm that could very well rival Katrina. The system had already slammed into the eastern coastline of Mexico, a thousand miles to the south, and was in the process of transforming.
It was happening way up in the troposphere over South America. Way up in the upper air mass where weather lives. A new high-altitude wind was blowing, spinning the anticyclonic molecules in the same direction as the cyclonic molecules below. Weeks later, weather experts would call this a historically unprecedented event, but right now nobody had any idea what was happening. The cyclonic winds were suddenly fed with a sort of superfuel as the hurricane's engine gathered energy from the vast oceanic area around the storm, pumping it back into the storm's center, and the anticyclone continued to respond, turning faster and faster and faster.
Fiona was experiencing what hurricanologists refer to as “explosive deepening.” And she was now heading due north, across the Gulf of Mexico, toward the United States. Most estimates showed her ultimately striking the city of New Orleans sometime within the next twenty four hours. But more importantly, she was the spawn of a monstrous marriage, a marriage of global climactic change and freakish rises in average water temperatures across the Pacific, an epochal period not unlike the one about which Maura County once wrote in
Discover
magazine years ago.
All of which served to make Maura even more jittery, and more awkward and uncomfortable, as she rifled through De Lourde's files.
In those tense hours before she stumbled upon the videotape, she found plenty of tantalizing references to those “crackpot” theories about which Sandi Herzog spoke, references to De Lourde's “little rogue study” and “my notorious project” and then, perhaps most intriguing, repeated references to “the hurricane affair.” Like a hound on the scent, Maura began digging deeper and deeper into the professor's journals, unraveling the threads of De Lourde's connection to hurricanes.
Most of the entries were scrawled in haphazard script with grease pencil at high altitudes, others jotted during virtual whiteouts in leaking tents. The gist of the story was this: De Lourde had convinced the British Royal Society of Archaeology to fund a trip to the Yucatan to study unidentified Toltec rituals, the evidence for which had been suggested by fossilized ruins of sacrificial temples found in the mountains of Campeche. De Lourde brought along a ragtag group of grad students and gadflies, including his two best students, Sandi Loper-Herzog and Michael Doerr.
The first week of the trip seemed to go fairly well. De Lourde established a base camp, started a dig, discovered more evidence of sacrificial rites on the mountaintop, and sent back word that he believed now that countless animals such as goats and hares were sacrificed there to the gods of the harvest. But then Hurricane Helena hit the following Monday night, chewing through Cazumel and clawing up the eastern slopes of the Yucatan.
In his diary De Lourde managed to document the terrible grandeur of the storm:
It began around suppertime. Since we were so isolated, none of us had heard any forecasts that week. One of our translators said something about a tropical storm brewing out there, but we ignored it, thinking we were high enough, and far enough away from the coast, that it would never reach us. Arrogant stupidity is actually the coin of the realm among my colleagues and me.
Anyhow ... around five o'clock, the rains came, and the wind started lashing up the side of the mountain. We tried to batten down the hatches, tried to secure the specimen tables and hunker down in our tents, but the damn bitch just swooped up on us so suddenly. I don't know if the mountain somehow magnified the hurricane, maybe caused some kind of wind tunnel effect, but soon we were in hundred-mile-an-hour winds, and the rains were so hard they were like nail guns. The sky seemed to rage suddenly—a fireworks display of lightning and swirling rainclouds.
Half our camp has been torn away as I write this. Michael went screaming down the side of the mountain an hour ago. I guess the rest of the party made it to the bus, which has apparently either departed or sunk into the mud. Now there's only six of us, and I'm paralyzed here in my sad little tent, waiting out the storm. Miguel told me a few minutes ago that she is now called Hurricane Helena. How rich. The gentile Greek goddess of healing. How perfectly ironic. Now nothing makes sense but my awful little pet hypothesis.
And on and on it went, getting more and more surreal and desperate with each entry. Maura was transfixed by it. She kept running across that strange reference to De Lourde's so-called pet hypothesis.
It was obviously something he had cooked up about the ancient Toltec civilization, and it seemed to somehow embarrass him. But what hypothesis? What was he talking about?
Maura didn't realize it then, but she was very close to learning the answers to all her questions.
The videotape would hold the key.
At that moment, up in North Carolina, in the foggy darkness, Hurricane Eve would go the way of all tropical storms. She would slam up against an opposing front pushing down off the Chesapeake, and by midnight she would dwindle into a steady gully washer that would dump eighteen inches across the tristate area.
In her wake, flood-ravaged farms and villages from Wilmington to Richmond gasped for air. Half the region lay underwater, powerless, completely dark, the tops of gables and steeples poking out of the black, shimmering waters. Property damage estimates ranged from $750 million to nearly a billion dollars, which bumped the overall damage estimates for the season so far up to almost twenty billion dollars. It would turn out to be the worst hurricane season on record, and it wormed through Grove's soul like a parasitic cancer as he huddled that night in a deserted barracks at Camp Lejeune.
He lay in the darkness, staring at the ceiling, his long body stretched out on a cot that groaned and squeaked with every twitch. Dressed only in his skivvies, his milk-chocolate skin gleaming with a film of sweat, he could feel the humidity oozing from his pores, seeping from every seam and joint in the aging building. The storm season had turned muggy, temperatures creeping into the eighties, even at night.
The Russian lay two cots away, a beached whale, his big nude belly looking like a pale hillock in the darkness. He was snoring as loudly as a cement mixer. Grove closed his eyes and tried to get some much-needed sleep ... but sleep was far out of reach. His heart thumped. His blood simmered in his veins. He stared at the ceiling fan directly above him, stared at the center of its housing. He stared and stared at that little decorative brass hub.
It looked like an eye.
Grove was becoming aware of something turning inside him, something powerful and electric and primal. He had first become aware of it a year ago, when he had awakened from his ordeal in the cabin with the exorcist, Father Carrigan, his mom, and Professor De Lourde. Whatever Grove had absorbed—back in the aftermath of his confrontation with the murderous Richard Ackerman on that mountainside—it had been expelled from his body in that cabin that day through ancient rituals. It had been purged like a fever or a stomach flu, vomited out in a paroxysm of pain. But something had lingered inside him. A trace element, a residue. Maybe it was something that had been there all along, and the possession had simply
denatured
it.
But whatever it was, it now smoldered in him like a white-hot ember: an almost narcotic need to hunt, to stop the killer, to pierce the eye and track this evil freak down, and then devour him. This compulsion overrode everything else. It was more than vengeance for his friend, more than outrage at the river of blood, more than simple fulfillment of his duty as a criminal profiler. If asked to explain it, to put it into words, to truly articulate it, Grove would be hard pressed. In fact, he was probably reacting precisely the way the perp wanted him to, marching blithely into a trap.
So be it.
So fucking be it.
Around two o'clock that morning, after a couple of hours of fitful, nightmare-plagued sleep, Maura County climbed out of Professor De Lourde's ornate brass bed and went into the little kitchenette cluttered with spice racks, booze, and well-seasoned gourmet cookware. It was hard to believe the owner of this kitchen no longer existed. In the fridge Maura found lunch meats still in their blister packs, fresh fruit still in the crisper. The old man must have bought these oranges and mangoes the day before he died. Unopened containers of yogurt sat on one shelf, a half-gallon carton of 2-percent still viable inside the door.
To expire before your milk
, Maura thought morosely,
is there a more pathetic reality?
Her hands shook as she made herself a carafe of chicory coffee in the professor's fancy little coffee press and lit the first Marlboro of the morning. Then she sat at the wrought-iron table next to the French doors and got some welcome nicotine and caffeine into her system.
A few minutes later she went back into the bedroom to look for her cell phone among all the leather-bound diaries tented across the foot of the bed, stacked on the bedside table, arrayed across the floor and under the bed—many of them open to key entries that Maura had flagged with yellow Post-It notes. She found her phone under a notebook and was about to dial Grove's number when she noticed something sticking out of the bottom of a bookshelf that she hadn't noticed before.
She knelt and took a closer look. It was a TDK videotape in a store-bought box with a label on the spine scrawled in De Lourde's flowery cursive hand:
 
U. GROVE—DEPOSS.—4/28/05—CONFIDENTIAL
 
Maura's fingertips positively tingled as she turned the videotape over and looked for other markings, other labels, other hints at what it might contain.
U. Grove
had initially caught her eye, but it was the fragment
deposs
that particularly intrigued her. She looked at the date and realized that 4/28/05 was the dreaded weekend immediately following Richard Ackerman's violent demise.
The same weekend during which Ulysses Grove had suffered through a series of torturous exorcism rituals.
The gathering winds moaned outside De Lourde's shuttered windows as Maura carried the videotape out into the living room. The professor owned no TV, but he had an old beat-up VCR wired to his computer, which he used to view taped interviews and academic programs.

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