Twisted (13 page)

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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Twisted
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Maura loaded the tape, then clicked the little video screen icon on the Mac. Her heart thudded in her chest as she watched the virtual screen fill the monitor. Then she pressed the Play button, and the first jumpy handheld images of a psychotic, shackled Ulysses Grove appeared on the screen.
For quite a few moments, her gaze riveted, Maura forgot to even breathe.
 
 
“Excuse me, folks! FBI! FBI!” Ulysses Grove called out over the dull roar of the early-morning rain and voices, pushing his way through the crowd, holding his ID tag aloft with as much authority as he could muster, his long trench coat billowing in the gusts, his muscles aching from all the excitement of flying into the eye, and then spending a restless night at Camp Lejeune on a bunk that resembled a concrete slab.
He approached an old antebellum wooden footbridge, separating the cordon of gapers from the bloodstained riverbank. The water level was high, only a few feet from the edge of the bridge, the current still hectic and unpredictable. The paramedics looked miserable as they stood thigh-deep on the bank, dressed in hazmat suits, working in the mist, dragging white-swaddled corpses off the police pontoon. The bodies had been collected upriver, a couple tangled in the wreckage of a fishing skiff, a few more in the weeds by the yacht club, several floating helter-skelter around the bends and turns of the silvery Alligator.
“Morning, Deputy,” Grove said with a nod as he approached the sheriff's deputy with the Fuller brush mustache and plastic-wrapped Stetson hat. Grove's knees still felt a little watery from all the excitement, his nerves jangled from the lack of antidepressants; he moved with the tentative quality of someone who had just had major surgery. Just for an instant, as he approached the deputy, Grove saw a glint of contempt behind the lawman's blue-gray eyes, a remnant of an Old South that still leered at the presence of an uppity, slick-talking
colored
FBI agent—
colored,
no less—colored and acting all superior. “I'm Special Agent Grove, this is Special Agent Kaminsky,” Grove said and jerked a thumb at the hulking Russian, who stood behind him, restlessly smoking a cheroot in his yellow rain slicker. The big man looked more like a drunken whaler than an FBI agent. “Wanted to get a look at the fatality situation,” Grove explained, indicating the bloody cocoons coming out of the river.
At this proximity, in the overcast morning light, the bloody water looked purplish black, as though beets had stewed in it. There was an odor in the misty air that Grove could not identify, a chemical smell like rotten eggs masked by cleanser.
“Well, I'll tell ya,” the deputy said and tipped his hat brim toward the flooded river, and the white-clad mummies being lifted out of the fast-moving water. “Seventeen years with the sheriff's police, I ain't never seen nothing like it. Like something outta the goddamn book of Revelation.”
“Bad one, huh?” Grove commiserated.
“Ain't just that. We've had plenty of blowers around here before, see a whole slew of 'em every spring. Never saw fatalities like this one though, never. Turned the goddamn river red.”
Grove asked where they found these bodies.
“That's just it,” the deputy said, wiping moisture from his mustache. “Found a lot of folks upriver, right around the bend at Pickman's Ferry.” He shook his head, droplets spraying off his Stetson. “Like they all just collected there.”
“Mind if I take a look?” Grove gestured toward the clutch of bodies.
“Help yourself.”
The deputy called to a couple of the paramedics who were coming up the adjacent bank, ankle deep in bloody river water, carrying an e-vac gurney. They paused and eased their load to the sodden ground. The white-shrouded body landed with a splat. Grove told Kaminsky to wait there, and the Russian just shrugged noncommittally.
Grove came around the end of the bridge, trundled down the bank, and knelt in the mud by the corpse.
“You got my attention ... now show me something I can use,” he mumbled under his breath after putting on his rubber gloves—which were still wadded inside his wrinkled Armani sport coat. He peeled back the white plastic fold covering the dead man's face. It was the father of the two teenage boys, the same father who had chased the family dog Mitzie out into the crosshairs of a madman. The man's face was devastated with lacerations, his bloody gums revealing rows of ragged holes where his teeth had once been, his left eye reduced to a gaping black socket full of bloody pulp.
Grove rose, thanked the paramedics, then started north toward the mill house. The rain had momentarily lifted, but the wind gusts were still heavy with brine and metal, and suffused with the reek of ozone. Grove scanned the flooded pea-gravel road for further evidence, further invitations meant only for him, only for his eyes.
He saw constellations of broken glass, random tangles of newspaper, and splinters of wooden siding torn asunder by the hurricane. He saw odd little things, too, like a child's plastic rubber duck floating upside down as though drowned, and a car's rearview mirror lying cracked in the gravel, reflecting the mercurial gray sky. But none of these items resonated for him, and he was about to turn back ... when he saw the pattern of human by-products arranged in the muck.
He paused suddenly and stared at the teeth and blood and tissues. They had been embedded in the hard-packed mud like a makeshift mosaic, forming a crude design. Grove stared and stared. Thunder rumbled in the distance. The row of teeth led his gaze to a sheltered area behind the corner of the mill house, where more human material was arrayed in a cryptic design on the ground.
Grove went over and inspected the grass.
“Holy Christ,” he whispered under his breath as he looked at the display. An untrained eye would have missed it. Storms have a way of depositing things on beaches and riverbanks in strange, Rorschach-like configurations. In 1989, Hurricane Hugo, according to a small sect of local Catholics, stirred the sand into the spitting image of the Virgin Mary. But right now Grove was staring at the work of a highly organized, highly dangerous psychopathic personality—an individual who knew something very personal and very secret about Ulysses Grove.
Grove reached down and parted the saw grass with his rubber-gloved hands.
The ragged little teeth made a huge oval in the weeds, maybe six or eight feet in diameter. A row of human organs, purple and glistening, lay in the center of the oval. A blood-dipped writing instrument—either a palm frond or a finger—had rendered the ancient symbols with astonishing clarity, as though they were traced from a book. A human eyeball lay nestled in its nucleus. Grove recognized the seal as readily as Moses De Lourde had recognized the same symbol on the window of his second-floor bathroom last week in those awful revelatory moments before the rain of Hurricane Cassandra washed it away.
Grove stood up, took a step back, and looked at the whole display.
“Kaminsky!”
The alarm in Grove's voice made the entire clutch of reporters look up in stunned silence.
10
Maura couldn't move, couldn't breathe, couldn't blink. Her eyes could not leave that little square inset on De Lourde's computer screen as it played back a crackling, grainy, shaky, handheld home movie of an exorcism.
The footage showed Ulysses Grove unlike Maura had ever seen him, had ever
conceived
him. Scarred and feverish and wild-eyed in his underwear, he was tied to a padded wooden trundle bed in a knotty-pine cabin somewhere. The image awkwardly zoomed in to a close-up of his contorted face. His jaw kept clenching and seizing up as though electricity were jolting through him, his chapped, blackened lips trembling fitfully. His sputtering voice kept gasping unidentified expletives.
It sounded to Maura like a dead language—Sumerian or Toltec—and it grated at her ears. She had seen films of actual real-life exorcisms on the Learning Channel and in documentaries. She had heard field recordings of missionaries casting out demons in Third World backwaters. She had even written articles on the subject for
Discover.
In fact, she realized now what the abbreviation “
deposs”
stood for:
depossession
. A clinical term used by psychologists for any ritual or ceremony meant to cast out parasitic personalities. Whether or not the psychiatric community believed in the devil was open for discussion. But Maura had never witnessed a friend or loved one in this state. It was beyond excruciating to watch.
On-screen, De Lourde's camera panned suddenly, jerkily, to reveal two other individuals standing over Grove: Father Carrigan and Grove's mother, Vida, whom Maura had met and adored and respected. Vida looked drenched in sweat as she waved a smoking hank of ceremonial wheat over her son and chanted in Swahili: “
Nge—nge!—nge!—NGE!—Nnn!”
Meanwhile Father Carrigan was murmuring litanies from his dog-eared book of Catholic rites as Grove jerked and jerked and jerked back and forth on the bed as though he were being electrocuted, the padded ropes and creaking bed frame barely containing him, his skivvies ragged with blood and bile. Maura literally jerked backward at the force of Grove's scream, a bloodcurdling wail.
“The Archangel Michael commands you!”
Carrigan cried out in a righteous voice. “
Leave this innocent soul this instant!”
The priest suddenly reared back in surprise, his glass vial of holy water flying out of his hand and shattering against the knotty pine wall behind him.
The image on-screen suddenly blurred, violently twisting sideways, as De Lourde's camera slipped from his hands and fell to the floor. The camera landed on the hardwood, and the image came back into focus for a moment—albeit sideways—revealing a surreal moment that Maura would never forget, as long as she lived, an image that would never leave her memory.
Grove's beleaguered body—blackened, scarred, and savaged by demonic possession—had suddenly and spontaneously jerked upward into a semisitting position. . . and then something extraordinary happened. A
second
body—an astral body that appeared initially as pure white light—tore through the flesh of the first like a butterfly ripping out of its chrysalis. It appeared on the sideways video as a glowing, blurry double image.
Then this
second
Grove lurched forward across the foot of the bed and tumbled to the floor. And then, just for an instant, captured forever in that sideways video, bisected down the middle by the cracked lens, there were
two
Groves in that cabin: a blackened husk of the man on the bed, and a glistening, damp, exhausted version sprawled on the warped oak floor, and then, almost instantly, the shell of the man on the bed began to dissolve, literally dissolve, as the sound of an alien wind moaned through the cabin like a dying beast.
The figure blurred and undulated for a moment, like a sculpture made of smoke, then began to whirl off the bed, a column of noxious gas, rising and swirling upward, penetrating the ceiling and then vanishing on a faint, torturous shriek. Thunder rumbled suddenly on the sound track, and in the background, through a window, the gray sky above the treetops was partially visible, roiling like a cauldron, a black whirlpool—as deep and opaque as squid ink—as the black charred air shot upward from the roof of the cabin, darkening the horizon like burned skeletal fingers clawing the heavens. Lightning crackled and veined the sky, and the rains started. But none of that held Maura's gaze. None of that transfixed her as much as what was visible in the foreground of the video.
In the foreground, Grove lay on the floor, clad only in his boxer shorts and bloody bandages, still semiconscious, and a little delirious, but apparently okay. But he was alive, and he was whole, and he was back. Vida went over to him, and took his battered body in her arms. He closed his eyes and clung to his mother and tried to breathe normally again. Nobody said anything for quite some time as the blessed sound of the rain filled the cabin and the video continued to run—sideways—in the fallen camera.
Maura didn't know it then, but contained within the pixels of that video—the very image of Grove sprawled on the floor of that cabin after his deliverance—was the key to the Holy Ghost's identity. It lay within that shaky, handheld footage of that cabin, visible now for the first time at such a low angle.
The design drawn on the floor in red paint by the priest, the one that circumnavigated the bed within which Grove had writhed and tossed, was known in some religious circles as the Seal of Solomon. To the more outré practitioner, it had come to be known as the Hexagonal Circle. It was made up of two equilateral interlaced triangles within a circle, and was used in binding unwilling spirits in magical ceremonies. This one was unique in that it had another symbol
inside
it—a pentagram—with two points facing upward.
It looked like this:
But Maura had no idea what she was looking at here, had no idea that something so significant lay on the periphery of the video. She had a vague memory of studying magical symbols in graduate school while she was working on her master's in anthropology, but could not remember what the pentagram meant with the two points facing upward (as it was in this symbol on the floor of the cabin).
She had forgotten that the two points represented the horns of Satan.
In other words,
pure evil
.
 
 
“Pull over here!” Grove ordered from the Jeep's passenger seat. For the last twenty miles or so, they had been heading inland, away from the disaster area along the coast, while Grove sketched on a shopworn spiral-bound notebook the talismanic symbol scrawled in blood and body parts in the weeds along the banks of the Alligator River.
“Where did you say? Here? Into this place!” Ivan Kaminsky, his yellow mack still dripping on the seat, was squinting to see through the fogged windshield as the Jeep thumped along the barren two-lane. They were cruising past a row of roadside businesses outside Greenville, North Carolina, most of the stores still closed down and boarded in the wake of Eve. Distant thunder rumbled on the horizon, the rains intermittent now, the air smelling of metal and rot, still agitated in the shifting storm systems.
“Yes! Here!”
Ivan Kaminsky yanked the wheel, and the Jeep cobbled over a gravel shoulder, then scraped into a narrow parking lot in front of a desolate little strip mall. The Jeep came to an abrupt stop, bumping a cement parking block—the Russian drove as vigorously and hell-bent as he flew—and Kaminsky shoved it into Park, then turned off the engine. In front of them, a neon sign buzzed behind a grimy window, sending a sickly pink hue through the mist around them, painting the windshield with a magenta bruise. It said
LIQUOR—BAIT—LOTTO
.
“What in the hell are we doing now?”
“Just give me a second,” Grove said, finishing his sketch of the shape within a shape.
A few minutes ago he had thrown his raincoat and jacket over the backseat, and now he sat in his shirtsleeves, his bronze face glistening with sweat. Without his field gear, his cameras and recording devices, he felt naked and amateurish. But this was the only way. Back in Ulmer's Folly, he had been forced to slip away from the suspicious deputy without any pictures or tracings of the bloody display. He didn't want the sheriff's department calling the bureau just yet, or nosy reporters catching wind of foul play going on during a hurricane. And yet, the deputy had still been curious, and kept saying, “You saw somethin' up there, huh? You saw somethin', didn't ya? You saw somethin'?”
Grove had
indeed
seen something, something critical, and he now drew it as best he could on a page of ruled paper in his tattered notebook. Of course, he could easily have drawn the basic shape from memory—the pentagram within a hexagram—which Father Carrigan had painted on the floor of that cabin a year ago. The symbol would forever be burned into Grove's midbrain.
He would never forget waking in his mother's arms in that airless cabin, as limp and damp as a used washrag, feeling as if he had just been underwater, drowning in the deepest part of the ocean, and had struggled back to the surface, inch by inch. He had noticed the mysterious symbol on the floor right before he had broken down into racking sobs in his mother's bosom. Later, Father Carrigan had told Grove that the symbol was ancient, from the gnostic gospels, and very few scholars even knew about it. It represented the symbol of evil contained and neutralized by the larger symbol of good around it.
Kaminsky was gazing down at the sketch, pursing his lips incredulously. “Are you at last going tell me what that is? Or do you insist on keeping me in the darkness?”
Grove told him it was in the weeds next to the old mill house back in Ulmer's Folly, and chances were good that it was part of the killer's ritual, and it was also why the killer wanted to confront Grove.
Kaminsky made a face. “Does that say ‘human eyeball'? Is that what that says, Grove?”
“Yes, Kay, that's what it says.”
“Those symbols,” Kaminsky said and pointed a big, nicotine-stained finger at the diagram. “Those look Sumerian to me, or possibly Egyptian?”
Grove shook his head. “Old Testament. Hebrew. They have to do with binding spirits.”
“Dick Lupoff is the best,” Kaminsky said, pulling a Garcia cheroot cigar from his breast pocket. “I would get Dick Lupoff to look at that.”
Grove looked at him. “Who?”
“Agent Richard Lupoff down at Quantico, best cryptologoist in the field.”
“I don't need a cryptologist, Kay, these symbols are not encrypted. They're from a magical ceremony. The same ceremony my friends conducted to save my life last year.”
Kaminsky raised his bushy eyebrow. “You are talking about this nonsense that they did to you on Sun City? This exorcism?”
“That's right.”
“How would this suspect know about that?”
Grove shrugged. “That's what I'm going to find out.” Then he nodded at the Russian's cigar. “You're not going to light that up, are you?”
“Grove, it is my vehicle. If you want first class, buy a ticket.” The Russian pulled out his Zippo, snapped it, and sparked the tip of his cheroot. The cigar crackled and filled the interior with an acrid blue cloud. “What are we doing here, anyway?”
Grove opened his door. “Wait here. I'll be right back.” He got out, raised his collar against the wet wind, and hustled across the lot to the liquor store.
Of course it was open. Liquor stores are the cockroaches of retail: Even during the direst emergencies, they are the first to open and the last to close. An electronic doorbell chimed as Grove went in and searched the blazing fluorescent aisles and sticky floor displays for the vodka aisle. He looked for the Stolichnaya, found none, then settled for a bottle of Kettle-One. He also selected a package of smoked almonds, a bottle of water, and an energy bar for himself.
An acne-scarred teenager in a Dave Matthews Band T-shirt bagged his items. Grove asked if there was a bus stop anywhere nearby, and the kid said there
was
one, actually, right at the end of this very strip mall.

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