Twisted (28 page)

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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Twisted
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25
Grove's hands, moving on pure instinct now, reached up and found
Doerr's
throat, one nanosecond before the entity had a chance to ooze from one host to another.
No, you don't!
Grove's hysterical inner voice demurred.
Not this time! Not this time! NOT THIS TIME!
The two men hung there in the wind for one insane moment, clutching each other's throats in a state of mutually assured destruction, staring into each other's eyes, into each other's souls.
Grove could not breathe, could not utter a sound now, but the adrenaline-fueled rage pulsed in his veins and gave him superhuman strength and made his hands tighten like vises around the killer's throat—and for one fraction of a second, in that shimmering darkness, Grove's senses absorbed everything about Doerr.
The killer's eyes resembled highly polished onyx ball bearings placed into the head of a doll or an automaton. His teeth, exposed now in his death throes, looked like the yellowed, burnished fangs of a deformed jungle predator, a creature in a carnival freak show. His breath penetrated even Grove's strangled olfactory organs, and smelled of ammonia, of things under a rock, of rancid proteins gone so bad they had changed their chemical structure.
Many things happened over the space of that single terrible instant.
With his heart and lungs threatening to erupt in his chest, and his good eyeball threatening to pop out of his skull, Grove saw entire worlds pass across Doerr's tortured brown features, the horrors of human sacrifice, the destruction of entire villages, the pain and agony and sheer terror of an innocent child drawn into deadly dark machinery. Doerr's face was a death mask of metaphysical hate, quaking and shivering and rippling as Grove strangled the last spark of life out of it. A weird hissing noise issued from Doerr's throat.
“
Aaacccchhh—”
Grove tightened his grip on the killer's throat, his thumbs pressing down so hard they were nearly buried in the man's tendons, and Doerr's hands did likewise, tightening their python stranglehold, and although he could not see his own face, Grove felt his features contorting, his lips flaying back, teeth clenching so tightly they were starting to crack, forming a grimace of utter hellish rage.
In this state Grove managed to let out a barely audible grunt in Doerr's face.
“
Y-you
—”
The first word came out in a strangled gasp, registering in Doerr's sharklike eyes as a tiny cinder of heat, a crimson spark. And Grove strained and strained and strained to get the other words out before fainting dead away and slipping off the rail and plummeting into the water: Sisyphus dragging the eternal stone toward inevitable doom, a man completely torn free of the moorings of sanity.
“—
are
—”
The second word, although following close on the heels of the first, barely escaped Grove's crimped airways, and he began to convulse in Doerr's deadly mechanical vise, and the pain only fanned the flames of madness blazing out of control inside Grove, as he let out a garbled wail that fed his grip on Doerr's throat one last surge of pressure, one last furious cry in the darkness of the storm.
“—
finished!”
Grove put everything he had into a final, violent, and very abrupt twist of Doerr's neck.
Ironically this little trick was taught to Grove when he was back in the army's crack CID training unit as a young MP candidate, learning paramilitary assault techniques. They had taught Grove all the spooky fast-kill tricks such as plunging knives into major organs, or striking instant shut-down blows to a combatant's skull, all of which Grove had promptly managed to forget. But
this
one—the sudden dislocation of the upper cervical vertebra, resulting in a swift paralysis or, in many cases, death on arrival—had come back to Grove tonight at the precise moment he was beginning to lose consciousness himself. But the result of this killing move—albeit a precursor to the inevitable shutting down of Doerr's stubborn, insectlike bodily functions—was not what Grove had expected. The result was something else entirely.
 
 
It was like watching a chrysalis melting and reforming, as Doerr's head lolled forward, all the demonic anger melting away like a fogged pane of glass suddenly clearing. His hands instantly loosened their grip on Grove's throat, then slipped away, dangling lifelessly, and Grove reared back, coughing and hacking and drawing in great heaving gouts of air, nearly falling off the rail. He held on to the iron with one hand, the other going instinctively up to his own injured neck and trachea as he sucked in huge unobstructed breaths.
But Grove's gaze never left Doerr, because Doerr was changing before his very eyes.
The ravages of mental illness seemed to evaporate from the young man's face as though the wind were sweeping it all away. His eyes cleared, returning to their original chestnut-brown color, filling with innocent awe, the creases around his mouth vanishing. By all medical accounts, he should have expired by then, but he hung on, he hung on for many incredible moments, while Grove watched, transfixed. The expression of rage on Doerr's face melded into one of pure, unadulterated anguish, the anguish of a frightened child. It wasn't just the realization of the searing pain and agony knifing through his organs.
Michael Doerr had transformed back to Michael Doerr.
Grove shuddered. Something deep in the pit of his being clenched up suddenly as he gazed at the dying killer and felt the pain and sorrow radiating off that face, that heartbreaking face. Tears shone in Doerr's eyes as he tried to speak, tried to say something. Of course, he couldn't. He was breathing his last breaths, and he could only stare in his final moments at Grove. He could only stare at the profiler while his sad face collapsed like a little boy who never had a chance to live a normal life.
A little boy lost and alone in thousands of years of darkness.
Grove suddenly hugged Doerr to his chest, hugged him tightly, even tenderly.
It was a ridiculous gesture, something that would haunt Grove for a long time, something that he would ponder for weeks and months and even years. This was not what criminologists did—even rogues like Grove. This was unprofessional, ludicrous, and offensive. But Grove didn't care. At that moment, he only wanted to give the little boy inside the monster one last moment of peace before he left this life. So Grove held the frightened child and stroked the back of his head, and whispered that it was okay to die now, and he would go to heaven, and he would be with God, and he wouldn't have to be afraid anymore, and nobody would hurt him anymore.
Doerr heard very little of it, Grove realized later, because the young man had already died.
 
 
Fiona did not go quietly into that particular dark night. After savaging the wetlands west of town, she changed course and curled back up over Lake Pontchartrain, dumping four feet of tidewater over the Black Pearl River, and pounding communities northeast of New Orleans like Slidell and Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi—communities that had only recently begun to recover from last year's apocalypse called Katrina, not to mention, most recently, Cassandra.
By the time dawn came, the worst of it had passed through Louisiana. The state licked its salted wounds in a series of stunning bulletins in every medium. Newsradio anchors droned grimly on about death tolls and property damage, and the irony of the Second Coming of Killer Hurricanes. TV units set up remotes on the outskirts of a ravaged New Orleans, emoting dramatically over the wind in their modulated voices about starting all over again, and rebuilding the already rebuilt, and tsk-tsking about how much these tough southerners could take. Mercifully, the newly remodeled infrastructure of New Orleans seemed to have survived by the skin of its teeth, the recently installed pump stations already draining the mess.
It seemed as though New Orleans would rise again from this calamity.
But this did little to appease Grove, who sat on the passenger seat of a rattling swamp boat that was making its way up the misty green reaches of the Atchafalaya River. A blood-spotted bandage patched Grove's injured left eye. The boat's driver, a stoic deputy from the Assumption Parish Sheriff's Department, kept his square head and thick eyeglasses fixed on the foggy horizon.
The sky had begun to lighten.
“Sun's comin' up,” the deputy commented over the whine of the big stern-fan. His name was Prudhome, and he had hardly said two words since Grove had dropped in unannounced at the Pierre Cane Sheriff's office a mile north of the bayou cemetery an hour earlier, his left eye completely hemorrhaged out, his face maplike with splattered blood, begging somebody to help search for Maura County.
“So it is.” Grove gave a little downtrodden nod, shivering in his still-soaked and torn overcoat. He had received rudimentary medical attention at the Pierre Cane Hospital emergency room—first aid applied to his eye, the gash in his arm dressed, stitches, plasma and antibiotics administered—but the night resident had issued stern warnings that he was still in shock, and probably suffering from both hypothermia and a concussion, and he would most likely lose his left eye if he didn't get some treatment from a major trauma center as soon as possible.
“I know she made it, I
know
she did,” Grove murmured, lying to himself. “Gotta keep circling, keep looking.”
A wall of tangled cypress passed on either side. Debris floated in their wake, bumping the hull every few seconds. Clouds of mosquitoes brushed past Grove's face. The early dawn made the swamp look eerily luminous, as though the netting of air moss and cobwebs and thick tangles of palmetto were phosphorescent in the magic-hour light. It made the bayou look beautiful, but dawn was a milestone for which Grove had not yet prepared. It signified the futility of his search.
“One place I'm thinkin' we should check,” the deputy commented suddenly. He leaned on the stick, and the prop boat pitched to the right, throwing a three-foot curl as it turned down a tributary choked with vines and saw grass.
“What's this?”
“This here's the Chitimacha Indian Reservation.” The deputy nodded at the broken-down row of docks in the distant shadows. One of the storm-battered boats looked official, like some kind of police boat with some sort of seal or coat of arms just above its keel. Prudhome threw the swamp boat into low gear, the engine grinding, the craft lurching as it slowed. “Tribal police department's right up yonder.”
They drifted through a narrow channel of storm wreckage up to the rotting pier, came to a bumpy stop, and docked the boat. Grove had no expectations, no hope, no enthusiasm whatsoever as he climbed out of the boat, hopped onto the creaking dock, and followed the laconic deputy into the encampment of buildings.
The tribal police department was situated at the end of the promenade.
“This here fella's a G-man, worried he lost one o' his best folks last night,” Prudhome announced to the plump little Native American matron sitting at a desk just inside the door, a dispatcher's headset perched on her oily black bouffant.
“Hold your horses, HQ,” she said into the headset, while holding up one plump index finger, tipped with a long pink press-on fingernail. Then she looked at Grove and jerked a thumb. “Is that gal in there yours, honey?”
Grove's heart hopped as he pushed his way past the cluttered desk, past the watercooler and file cabinets and other desks, and then into the inner office.
She was huddled in the corner, her hair still matted to her head, her shivering body covered with a police-issue woolen blanket, the kind they put over horses. Her lips were nearly blue. She looked up at Grove without comprehending what she was seeing.
“Thank Christ,” Grove uttered, pausing in the doorway, paralyzed with emotion.
He couldn't move. He couldn't smile or wave or wink at her or do any of those things that men do to break the ice with women. He could only stand there, staring at her, feeling his spirit rise out of his body. For one brief instant, he shot his cuffs and smoothed his wrinkled lapel.
“Oh my God,” she said at last, suddenly seeming to recognize him like an old friend or a loved one she hadn't seen in many years. She looked thunderstruck. “You're crying,” she said. “I've never seen you cry.”
Grove looked down at his hands, which were shaking now, and he felt the wetness on his face, a tear tracking down from his good right eye. “So I am,” he said.
Maura rose and went over to him.
Another pause.
Then they hugged, and Ulysses began to sob.
EPILOGUE:
Legacies
Learn what you are and be such.
—Pindar,
Odes
 
That autumn's hurricane season would live in the annals of meteorological lore as the worst on record, far worse than the previously year's deadly spate. In the weeks after Fiona, five more category-three storms battered the Gulf Coast, albeit none of them remotely as powerful as the Big One that swept through New Orleans that dark night in September. Damage estimates for Fiona alone were in excess of $75 billion making it the single-most expensive natural disaster in the history of the United States.
The only silver lining to Fiona's perilous sky was the relatively low death toll, and the fact that the Louisiana Office of Emergency Preparedness, in the aftermath of Katrina, had drilled such a wide-ranging evacuation plan into the state's media. In those critical days during which Fiona lurked out in the gulf, bloating to unprecedented levels, moving ever closer to the Big Easy, the citizenry reacted with stunning immediacy. All told, only forty-eight deaths were attributed directly to Fiona, bringing the grand total of hurricane-related deaths that season to 279.
Of course, one of these deaths, which was first directly linked to the hurricane, was later ascribed to an even
more
unnatural cause.
In his haste to find Maura, Grove had simply left Michael Doerr's body mounted there on that jagged rail, abandoned in the rain in that flooded graveyard. The Assumption Parish Fire Department finally stumbled upon the body in the wee hours, got it down, and had it shipped off to the morgue in Napoleonville. It took nearly a week for the body to be released to the FBI for autopsy and DNA tests.
In the meantime, Grove had already given both oral and written statements to the bureau's Department of Professional Standards, including a fairly detailed time line reaching all the way back to the mysterious phone call a week and a half earlier from Moses De Lourde. It wasn't until the middle of December, however, a full month after Fiona had vanished into the history books, that the Central Crime Lab and Index at Quantico released positive matches on Doerr's blood type and DNA with trace tissue found on three of the victims, including a single hair found underneath Professor De Lourde's right index fingernail, an artifact that continued to haunt Grove. How much did De Lourde know back then on that blustery night he had made his desperate cell phone call? Had he tangled already with Doerr's alter ego? Had he seen that mysterious symbol—a star within a star—scrawled in human blood on his window? The answers would forever be buried in LaFayette Cemetery Number one.
Despite all the physical evidence, though, Grove found himself embroiled in a series of contentious disputes between the bureau, the Justice Department, and the Louisiana State Police Investigative Unit. Evidently, rogue FBI agents were not tolerated well in this post 9/11, post-Katrina world. Never mind that Grove hunted down and caught one of the strangest and most elusive serial killers in the history of law enforcement—he'd done it without proper documentation. Plus, he got Ivan Kaminsky killed in the bargain.
The Russian's memorial service was held in October on Kitty Hawk Island, not far from the weather station in which he had spent his latter years staring at screens, exiled from civilization by the National Security Agency. Kaminsky had been an atheist, and had left strict instructions that he was to be cremated, and his ashes were to be spread over the sea, and people were to get together afterward and drink enough vodka to, in the words of his last will and testament, “properly become so inebriated as to forget not only their own troubles but the reason they had gathered in the first place.”
Covered in bandages, walking with a cane, and now sporting a rakish black eye patch, Grove complied with Kaminsky's last wishes as best he could. Grove's poison was single malt scotch, but he drank nearly half a fifth of vodka that day.
After the ceremony, Grove and Maura County stood arm in arm on a rocky outcropping, under an overcast sky, toasting Kaminsky, laughing at his antics. Afterward they threw two unopened bottles of Stolichnaya into the ocean. They figured the Russian would appreciate the extra supplies.
Then they walked back to the little Point Harbor bed-and-breakfast in which they were staying—not far from the banks of the Alligator River, where Grove had first seen that arcane hexagonal symbol slashed in blood on the grass. The inn was a quaint little two-story clapboard, with a butter churn on the porch, and a four-poster bed that squeaked noisily with the slightest movement. Grove had convinced Maura to stay there with him that night, although they had yet to resolve their future together.
Around ten o'clock that night, woozy from all the booze, they decided to turn in. Grove decided to sleep on the davenport out in the living room by the fire—as usual—and Maura would sleep in the bedroom on the four-poster. But before retiring, she came out of the bathroom in an oversized San Francisco 49ers sweatshirt and fuzzy slippers.
“I need to know something,” she said, standing in the bathroom doorway, the single incandescent bulb behind her putting a halo on her dishwater-blond hair and revealing the silhouette of her nude hips.
“This sounds serious,” Grove murmured, rising from the couch. Still dressed in his jeans and velour shirt, he stood in his stocking feet across the room, staring at her, waiting. The pause stretched.
“Grove, I need to know if you're sleeping out here on the couch because you think it's what
I
want.”
After a long pause, he told her yes, that was probably the case.
She took a step closer. “Well then ... maybe you should check with me first.”
Grove swallowed hard. Her words had that intense slur of a tipsy person finding courage, expressing some painful truth. Finally Grove said, “You're right. When you're right, you're right.”
She took another couple of steps toward him until he could smell her powdery scent, and could see the gold flecks in her green eyes. She looked up at him. “So then ... tell me why the hell I'm sleeping alone in the bedroom.”
Grove smiled. “That's an excellent question.”
She had to stand on the tips of her toes in order to kiss him on the lips.
Grove took her in his arms.
Time came crashing to a halt as they tasted each other, as they consummated their desire in one great, moist, seething kiss that carried them backward like a warm tide to the sofa. And they lowered themselves to the sounds of the light rain tapping at the building's roof, and they urged each other's clothes off in the flickering light of the fireplace. She was careful around Grove's wounds, lightly brushing her fingers across his bandages as she flicked her tongue here and there. She wore nothing under the sweatshirt, and Grove's hands were everywhere, sampling every curve of her thin, wan body. She found his erection and fell back against the armrest and guided him into her, and they made love in convulsive, desperate gasps, and there was a hint of blessed release beneath the passion, and even traces of sorrow, sorrow that brought tears to Grove's eyes as he thrust softly into her, clinging to her, holding on for dear life.
 
 
In late January, two individuals came forward during the roughest part of the bureau's internal hearings to vouch for Grove.
Grove's old friend, mentor, and section chief, Tom Geisel, made a surprise appearance one morning, showing up in a crisp white linen suit that made him look like a southern dandy who had just walked off the pages of a Carson McCullers novel. Instantly taking charge of the proceedings, Geisel angrily testified that Ulysses Grove had
always
been a rogue on some level, and that this very same rebellious nature was what made him such a valuable member of the Behavioral Science Unit. “You people ought to be pinning a medal on this guy, for Chrissake,” Geisel snarled to the panel before storming out. Oddly, Grove could not find the man after the proceedings. Tom Geisel had simply vanished without a word, flying back to his Virginia farm, leaving Grove's future with the bureau as mysterious and unresolved as Geisel's appearance.
The second person who figured prominently in Grove's defense was a slight, olive-skinned Bulgarian woman who appeared before the dais wrapped in a shawl and scarf, looking like a refugee from some forgotten war. In broken English, she related how her ex-husband had loved adventure, and also had loved Ulysses Grove. And according to this little woman from another time and another world, if Ivan Kaminsky could have chosen the circumstances of his own death, they would be “fighting some son of the bitch by the side of Mr. Ulysses.”
By mid-February, most of the bureaucratic tortures had been administered, and Grove had ultimately been cleared of all complaints brought against him by Professional Standards. The hard truth was, Grove had brought a mass murderer down with extreme prejudice, and that, in the end, was exactly what Joe Citizen wanted from his investigative agencies. The fact that Grove was working essentially under the radar—and stepping on the toes of law enforcement people in five states—none of this mattered to old John Q. Public.
During his final days in the wounded, moldering city of New Orleans, Grove visited the professor's old haunts one last time, and spent time with his cronies. He drank absinthe at Poppy Brite's, and heard the Joe Crown Quintet play at Tipitina's. He also dined at Antoine's with Miguel Lafountant, Delilah Debuke, and Sandi Loper-Herzog, and he answered all their questions about the dreadful business with the Doerr boy. They could not conceive how such a sweet and adorable kid such as Michael Doerr could do all those hideous things, especially to poor Moses. Grove agreed with them, concurring that a normal, healthy human mind had difficulty finding purchase on such a slippery slope.
“But what about
you
?” Delilah blurted at one point in the evening, fixing his painted eyes on Grove. “
You
seem to be able to conceive of such things.”
Everybody was drunk by that point, and Miguel shushed the drag queen from across the table.
Grove waved it off, and said, “It's okay. She's right. You're right, Delilah. It's what I'm good at. It's what I do.” Then he allowed himself a faint, exhausted smile. “I guess somebody's got to do it.”
The moment passed, and they kept drinking and talking about everything
other
than murder, and the evening dissolved away like the sugar cubes in their chartreuse cocktails. But hours later, after they all had said their tearful good-byes, and Grove had started back to his hotel, the accusation continued to reverberate in his brain. Why
did
he have a hunger to hunt? Why
him
? He thought of his mother, and he thought of his birth amid that terrible dream-storm. He thought of his biological father—the angry, volatile presence in the heart of that hallucination. The truth was, the only storm that day was the storm kicked up by his father's rage. Everything flowed from there. Everything. For better or worse.
That night he dreamed of that same Kenyan village in which he was born, but this time he was alone, the sky overhead a blank gray shroud.
As silent and still as a tomb.
 
 
The day after the final hearing, Grove was in his hotel room packing for the trip back to Virginia, when his phone rang. It was Maura. She was down in the lobby, which made no sense whatsoever, since he had put her on an airplane less than a week ago. He had not expected to see her until the following week when he was scheduled to take a holiday in San Francisco.
Grove was nonplussed, but also delighted that she had caught him, and told her he was just checking out and he'd be right down. He quickly finished his packing and then checked himself in the mirror.
His injuries were still apparent. A slender pucker marred his brow above his left eye where the stitches had come out a week earlier. His eye patch now was the sporty black velvet model worn over the years by such fashion plates as Moshe Dian and Yule Brenner. Some of his bruises had yellowed, and some showed as dark patches on his brown skin. But other than that, he had cleaned up fairly well. He looked at his reflection, and checked his suit, an Armani double-breasted number the color of toasted coconut. Underneath he wore an eggshell button-down oxford, open at the collar.
The old Grove stared out from the mirror.
With a nod, Grove turned away, grabbed his suitcase, and strode out of the room.
He took the elevator down to the lobby, and found Maura waiting for him by the bar. “What are
you
doing here?” he said, putting down his suitcase and pulling her into a hug. “I thought we were meeting in Frisco next week?”
“That's a fine greeting,” she said, embracing him with an almost aggressive warmth and affection. She smelled of chewing gum and the stale air of a jet cabin. She wore a black, spandex tank top, and had her milkweed-blond hair pulled back in a no-nonsense ponytail.
Grove was vexed. “I'm sorry, kiddo, I'm just a little. . . Did I miss something?”
“We need to talk,” she said, her gray-green eyes shining with emotion. The ebullient, almost earnest look on her face told Grove something new had developed here. He couldn't put his finger on it, but he could tell immediately—
something
was going on.

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