Twisted (19 page)

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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Twisted
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Grove started thinking about turning back.
 
 
Once in a while, during horrible accidents, bar fights, car wrecks, and the like, everything slows down. The passage of time—a single instant, in fact—gets caught in the neurochemical sludge, and all of a sudden that single moment can stretch like taffy.
Maura saw Doerr coming toward her with the blade, and also sensed out of the corner of her eye a single bare lightbulb above her swaying on its frayed cord like Poe's pendulum, slower and slower, the sound of the table creaking faintly under her trembling body, and all at once her mind fixed on a single concept like an alarm bell going off in her head:
The table's old, and wooden, and old wooden tables can be unstable
.
She had no time to think it through, or measure the odds of success, or even make a conscious decision, the moment was so fleeting; all she knew was that her only chance was to put every last ounce of strength she had left into yanking that damn table hard enough to—
Doerr pounced at her, the knife arcing down like a falling star.
Maura yanked the table upward as hard as she could, and there was a loud
crrrreeeeaak!
as the legs slipped suddenly, and the table tipped.
The universe seemed to pitch.
The table landed on its side, and the impact nearly knocked Maura unconscious—the side of her head and the shank of her left shoulder both slamming down hard on the linoleum. Fireworks shot off behind her eyes, and a blast of pain traveled down her spine as she gasped for breath, hands still bound. For a moment, all the pain and disorientation and flashing, flickering, dancing light—the table must have struck the hanging bulb on its way over—created an almost dreamlike sensation of drifting underwater.
Maura lay there for a moment, trying to get her bearings with her face pressed against the cold kitchen tiles, her ragged breathing blowing puffs of dust off the floor. Where was Doerr? Where was he? Maura couldn't see very well now and she felt even more vulnerable wedged between the table and the wall, but the adrenaline kept her sharp enough to sense the killer circling her like a hungry jackal. She began madly working her right hand out of its bonds (the rope had slipped just a bit in the fall, maybe enough to manipulate).
A shadow loomed, only inches away from her head, on the wall, sliding at an odd angle up the plaster like a living ink blot—a perfect silhouette of a man with a blunt instrument, some kind of knife or animal horn. It approached so slowly, so gradually, and with such sinister majesty—the swaying light made it pulsate with mesmerizing power—that Maura could only gape at it for one catatonic instant before she saw something else in her peripheral vision that made all the blood drain out of her face.
The little black Smith & Wesson handgun lay on the floor less than two feet from her bound left hand. It must have fallen behind the table (where she had put it after taking it away from a sniveling Michael Doerr an hour ago). Now the .38 lay almost within her grasp. If she could only work her right hand loose. If only ...
if only
.
The sweat was helping, the oily perspiration working into the rope, greasing her sore flesh, working it free. Almost, now ... almost. The shadow loomed on the wall, elongated, distorted, and Maura's right hand was almost out of the knotted rope.
All at once her right hand popped free as the table leaped backward and away from her.
Doerr, standing there, trembling with bloodlust, let out a garbled cry that sounded like something noxious belching out of the earth, something very old and black and rotted by centuries of hate. Maura twisted around and grabbed at the gun. It slipped out of her hand. She made another frantic attempt to grab it, at the same moment Doerr lunged at her, but the table had suddenly shifted between them, and Doerr banged into its corner, letting out a yelp.
Now Maura was dragging the table toward the gun. The table, which was still affixed to her left wrist, made a wrenching, fingernails-on-a-chalkboard sound as it scudded across the tiles, and the pain was excruciating, but Maura's gaze was fixed on that handgun lying only inches away on the linoleum.
She got a hold of it.
Then two things happened at the exact same moment: Maura spun toward the killer, the gun raised and trembling, her finger on the trigger, ready to blast away, even though she had never fired a gun in her life, and Doerr suddenly squirted something in her face. It came from the slender bottle in his hand that Maura had mistaken for a weapon.
Maura coughed and winced at the stinging sensation in her eyes, the gun still raised and ready, as Doerr whirled, then leaped away, vanishing around the edge of the arched passageway into the living room.
Maura had no idea what had just happened, but she managed to rise to her feet with the gun in one hand and the table still tied to her left. She coughed and coughed, wiping the cool alcohol-smelling fluid from her face, and searched the shadowy living room for Doerr.
“
Michael!”
Her cry sounded bizarre to her own ears—a low, distorted baritone version of her own voice, like a tape that had suddenly slowed down—and the table seemed to weigh more now, as though she were dragging a wagonload of sandbags. She managed to hold the gun aloft and keep her finger on the trigger. A shadow moved to her left.
She squeezed the trigger.
The gun barked, and the blast flashed in the gloomy living room, and a chink of plaster blinked across the room. The recoil nearly knocked the gun out of her hand, and the report was so loud it instantly deafened her, starting her ears ringing. The living room started spinning. Maura swallowed back the nausea and dizziness washing over her and screamed: “
Michael, you will not leave this apartment!”
A noise behind her.
She staggered around and fired wildly into the opposite wall, shattering a framed portrait of Louis Armstrong. Glass erupted, and the picture hopped off the wall, and the blast rang in Maura's ears. The whole living room was tilting on its axis now like a carnival ride, and Maura's vision doubled—quadrupled, actually—and she tried to drag the table toward the front door, because even in her rapidly deteriorating condition she sensed the urgency of protecting the exits. She reached the front door and vomited on the rug.
The bile and the single cup of chicory coffee that she had consumed for breakfast splashed on the floor, and she doubled over for a moment, her stomach cramping, the wooziness tugging her down now, but she could not give up, she
would not
give up, she
would not
be a goddamned victim again and she would not let this killer of innocent people get out of here!
That's when she heard the bang out in the kitchen. She turned and dragged the table toward the archway, her wrist screaming in pain, but the pain was dulled now like radio signals from far away, wavering in and out of audibility. She reached the threshold of the kitchen and collapsed.
She landed awkwardly on her left shoulder and breast, the sudden blunt ache shooting across her sternum. The pain was almost welcome. It woke her up a little, and thank God she was fairly flat-chested—she had never worn a bra above a B-cup—but still, nothing hurt like getting a breast suddenly smashed. It was a radiant pain, like an ankle twist, which was mercifully buffered now by whatever narcotic Doerr had misted in her face.
She looked up.
Something flew past the window, and Maura fired at it, but now the gun was behaving strangely, the report sounding all low and wobbly like that slowed-down recording. The blast, missing the window by a mile, went
splat!
into the refrigerator, almost as if Maura were throwing mud balls, and now Maura heard another noise behind her, out in the living room, a loud click, and she started laughing, or maybe she was crying, it was hard to tell now, the storm was so loud and swirling around the house like the twister in
The Wizard of Oz
, and Maura started dragging the table back toward the living room, thinking—
Auntie Em! Auntie Em! I'm going to blow your friggin' head off, and your little dog Toto, too!—
and now the whole house was spinning and spinning, rising up into the sky toward the Land of Oz, and Maura was still dragging that silly old table, and she was bleeding, the color of her blood all candy-apple red and pretty as a lollipop as it smudged the floor, and now she saw the funny man standing in the front doorway, and she laughed and laughed and shot at him with her pretty little bullets in her funny black gun.
16
“Grove, look out!”
Grove, standing in the bungalow's doorway, ducked down just as the blast rang out, sending a silver plume of fire blossoming across the shadowy living room.
The bullet chewed through the lintel just above the door, sending a puff of plaster particles down on Grove's head, a cloud that immediately dispersed on the roaring wind invading the tiny house.
Kaminsky, who was crouching on the porch behind Grove, yelling again above the noise of the storm: “Get down, get down, get down!”
“It's okay, kid, it's us—it's us!” Grove moved behind the jamb, pressing his back against the door frame, his stomach tight with panic. Lightning zipped across the sky, strobing against the front of the house like a beacon. “It's okay! Maura? Can you hear me!”
Kaminsky was on his belly on the porch, holding his hat over his head, soaking wet and squinting against the rain. “This is the reception you usually get from your girlfriends?”
Grove shushed him and listened. He could hear Maura's crying in there. It was faint, and hard to discern over the locomotive churning of the storm, but he knew it when he heard it. Her sobbing sounded scrambled and hysterical, and maybe even a little drugged up. “Kid!” he yelled. “Can you hear me!”
After a horrible pause, her voice sang out, sounding slurred and intoxicated, “Ulysssssss—”
“That's right, kid, it's me and my friend, Ivan—Ivan Kaminsky. He's a great guy! You'll love him once you get past his cigars! You okay?”
From inside the house: “I'm really, really sleepy.”
“Okay, sweetie, we'll fix you a nice bed and you can take a nap.”
After another pause: “I'd like that, Uly—Ullllluh—”
“Hey, kiddo, can I ask you a favor?”
“Sss-sure!”
“Can you put the gun down? Maybe stop shooting for a minute?”
“Okay, but ... but see ...”
Her words drifted off. Grove sucked the inside of his cheek, trying to think, as the storm swirled through the little vestibule. “Hey, kiddo! You there?”
No reply.
Grove looked over his shoulder at Kaminsky, who was getting soaked. The Russian shrugged and gestured at the thickening black sky behind them.
“Ullleeee ... ?”
Maura's voice was almost gone. It sounded like the strangled voice of a child.
“I'm still here! How about we come in now? Huh? No more gunplay, whattya say?”
After another tortured pause: “Okay, but ... there's sssomm ... something you should know.”
“What's that, honey?”
No reply. Another nervous glance between Grove and the Russian. Wind buzzed through the telephone wires above them. Rain slashed at the porch, crawling inside Grove's collar and sleeves and socks. He held his hand up with fingers splayed.
The Russian nodded. He recognized the urgency of the situation, and also Grove's universal gesture of all SWAT teams and paramilitary units. Five fingers splayed open:
Get ready to move
.
Grove then pointed one index finger toward the right side of the vestibule:
You go that way
.
Another nod from Kaminsky.
Grove jerked a thumb, then pointed another index finger to the left:
I'll go this way
.
Kaminsky nodded again.
Three fingers splayed:
On the count of three
.
Grove started counting down, bending each finger over one at a time, when Maura's bleary voice suddenly returned: “H-hhee's still in here sssomewhere!”
Grove and the Russian froze. Grove's hand hung in midair on the count of two.
“Say again, Maura! Not sure I heard you!”
“Heee's still in here! That ... that guy!”
“Who!
Doerr
? You mean Doerr? What guy?”
A terrible pause: “The guy whooooo's beennn k-killing people in h-hurricanes.”
She's delirious,
Grove thought to himself in that frenzied instant.
She can't mean that the owner of this house, which looks like it belongs to a little old lady, is the actual hurricane killer, she can't, she's been drugged, she's not thinking right, but wait, wait, wait, wait, the high free-histamine and serotonin levels in the victims' blood also indicated druggings—
Thunder pealed as Grove swallowed back the nerves and made another gesture at Kaminsky. A wiping motion:
Stand by.
Then Grove pointed at the Jeep Cherokee, which was parked roughly twenty-five feet away, behind the Ford Taurus rental car that Maura had parked next to the curb. He made a little “shooting” gesture, his hand forming a childlike pantomime of a gun.
Kaminsky nodded.
The wind keened as both men whirled and leaped off the porch, shielding their faces as they shambled across the soggy front lawn toward the vehicle. Grove went around back while Kaminsky popped the door locks with his keyless remote. Adrenaline pumping, Grove ducked down low behind the cargo hatch in case he was being watched.
The wind buffeted him as he opened the hatch and dug out his black plastic road case. He worried it open and rooted out the massive onyx-steel revolver that a fellow profiler, the late Terry Zorn, had given him on the Sun City case. The Charter Arms .357 Tracker was a double-action handgun, geared for firefights, no need to cock the hammer, just point and shoot, its hollow-point, liquid-tip bullets ensuring “one shot” stops.
Grove thumbed it open and slammed a speed-loader into its wheel, then ejected six rounds. He stuffed the other speed-loader in his pocket.
Then he made his way back through the rain, crouching, practically duckwalking across the lawn, to the front door where Kaminsky was waiting for him. The Russian held a cut-down twelve-gauge shotgun, the kind with the pistol grip favored by city detectives. Not exactly a subtle firearm but satisfactory for their purposes. The rain dripped off its muzzle as Kaminsky signaled he was ready.
Grove gave him a nod. Then made the splayed-fingers gesture again. Then a fist. Then he yanked it downward:
Go, now
.
Kaminsky kicked open the screen door, the shotgun swinging up in the ready position.
Grove went in first.
His senses hummed as he plunged into that dark living room in the Weaver position, the odors of chemicals and burnt sweat and human terror thick in the air. He scanned the “fire zone” within his field of vision. The layout registered in his mind's eye like an infrared camera marking significant objects. One body—a friendly—lying still in the center of the room. Maybe unconscious now, it was hard to tell in a quick glance. An overturned table behind Maura. Left arm moored to its leg by thick rope.
Nobody else in the immediate vicinity.
Kaminsky moved slowly, cautiously, along the far wall, toward the kitchen pass-through. Grove noted his position. Then noted the position of the windows, as well as the half-open door behind him. He judged it safe to take a closer look at Maura. He went around one side of her so that he had both the kitchen archway and the front door—both forms of egress—in his peripheral vision. Then he knelt and felt her neck for a pulse. It was rapid but strong.
He carefully pried the black .38 Smith & Wesson from her free hand, and checked the breech. The steel was still warm. Maura had fired four times. Grove popped the cylinder and dumped the two remaining slugs on the floor. Picked them up, put them in his pocket. Then shoved the gun behind his belt. Then loosened the rope on her left wrist.
“Maura! Kid! Gotta wake up!” Grove gently held her by the shoulders and shook her. He could see her complexion had turned ashen, with blue circles under her eyes, and her skin felt cold and clammy. Probably very low blood pressure. An instant diagnosis here told Grove she had probably slipped into a narcosis or maybe some kind of anaphylactic shock from a forced overdose, some kind of cheap tranquilizer, chloroform or pentobarbital. He could smell it on her clothes. He knew that she could not sleep this one off.
“The kitchen is clear!”
Kaminsky's voice boomed out in the kitchen, as Grove lifted Maura to her feet. Her legs wobbled. Her arms dangled limply. Grove began “walking” her around the living room as though playing with a rag doll.
“Do a room-to-room, Kay!” Grove yelled out at Kaminsky. “Watch your back! Keep your front sight up around corners, and make sure he's fled the premises!”
Maura moaned. A good sign. Grove walked her a little faster, her legs dragging along as though numb and paralytic. Grove lifted one of her limp arms around his neck for better leverage, raising his voice above the noise of the storm. “Time for school, kiddo, wake up, wake up now!”
A door banged somewhere down the hall, followed by Kaminsky's bellow: “Bedroom is clear!”
“C'mon, c'mon, stay with us, you can do it, girlfriend, c'mon, c'mon.”
She murmured something.
“What was that? What did you say, honey?” Grove shook her gently, ushering her briskly around the outer edge of the oval rug. “Say that again, talk to me, c'mon.”
Another bang down a hallway. “Bathroom is clear!”
Maura muttering: “Wh-what—toook y-yyoooo—”
“That's it, talk to me, go ahead.”
Out in the kitchen, Kaminsky's voice: “The house is empty, Grove!”
Maura slurring: “What—took yy-you sss—”
“That's my girl, keep talking.” Grove felt a twinge of emotion in his gut for this amazing little woman in her sweat-damp denim jeans and sleeveless gingham top. She looked like a courageous little punk rocker. It made his eyes well up slightly. “C'mon, say it!”
“What took you sssso long?”
Grove smiled despite his surging emotions. “That's my girl, that's my girl.” He hugged her flaccid body. She was shaking slightly in his arms. He felt her arms feebly reach up and wrap around him.
Her irregular breathing filled his ear: “I love you,” she whispered.
Grove squeezed her. “Same back at ya, kiddo, same back at ya.”
They stood there like that, in each other's arms, for one long moment, as the storm raged against the half-open front door, lightning crackling constantly now, the screen door slapping arrhythmically like Morse code,
S-O-S ... S-O-S ... S-O-S
, until Kaminsky's voice rang out again from the kitchen, breaking the spell.
“Sweet Lennon's tomb!”
Grove glanced out through the archway, into the kitchen, and saw the big, hulking Russian filling the pantry door, looking at something in the shadows. “You have
got
to see this, Grove!” the big man announced.
 
 
Grove would have given his right arm for a “Pathfinder” print kit with an electrostatic dust lifter and a canister of Luminol to gather fresh latents off the floor and walls. He also could have used a portable Hemident tester with serology ampules in order to obtain a good workable DNA sample. An ultraviolet camera would not have hurt, either, since the inner room was most likely lousy with the victims' secretions, many of them probably smeared and smudged in unpredictable places. Grove could also have put a methane probe to good use since the decay rates on the biosouvenirs in Doerr's little chamber of horrors were probably all over the map. But alas, by that point (a quarter to eight), the closest CSI unit was probably a hundred miles north, settling into storm cellars, starting games of gin rummy, waiting for Fiona to have her way with the coast. As it happened, the only evidence analysis equipment that Grove had at his disposal was out in the back well of the Cherokee.
For nearly an hour, while Kaminsky force-fed strong coffee to Maura in the living room—they had found an unopened canister of Café du Monde chicory in Doerr's pantry—Grove went about the business of documenting the evidence in the secret room as best he could with the equipment at hand. He wore his rubber gloves, and he got as many angles as possible with his digital camera. He documented the human organs in their beakers of formaldehyde, noting the relative freshness of most, guessing they were recently harvested, presumably matching many of the victims, starting with Professor De Lourde's dentures and the delicate root system of his optical nerve.
Grove photographed many of the artifacts and pictures tacked to the walls, instantly making corresponding notes in his spiral-bound notebook. All the drawings of demonic transformations and gruesome carnage coming out of heads suggested to Grove a dissociative mental illness—what the old-timers called a “multiple.” The swirling designs and drawings of funnel clouds somehow connected hurricanes to the pathology, although Grove had yet to conclude what those connections actually signified, or how the Yucatan trip figured into the fantasy. Judging from the doctored framed photographs in the little corner video shrine, there were family connections to the disorder, perhaps abuse, the details of which would be relatively easy to gather once the storm had passed and the lines of communication had been reopened.

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