Twisted (5 page)

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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Twisted
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Ordinarily he would have ignored it. After all, this was a funeral. People watched. Mourners kept tabs on other mourners. But after the events of the previous night—the thwarted intruder, and the carabineer left at the scene—Grove was hyperattuned to such feelings. And he could not remember ever having such a strong sense of being watched. It bored into the back of his skull like drill holes, raising gooseflesh on his scalp and neck.
He turned away from the casket, and he searched the huddled mourners for Maura.
She was standing over by the Cuban, holding a paper program, fanning herself with it, gazing at the floor. She looked so small and sad and beautiful to Grove right then, she nearly stole his breath away. He almost hated to tell her what he was feeling. It would most certainly put up another wall between them, maybe even scare her away once and for all. He wanted so badly to tell her he was getting out of the game. But he couldn't. He couldn't change who he was.
He went over to her and whispered in her ear, “I need to take care of something at the professor's place. After the burial. Can you come with me?”
A slight pause, a subtle knot over her eyebrows as she thought it over. “I guess ... I mean. Yeah, sure. My flight's not till tomorrow.”
“Perfect.”
Grove took her hand, then led her through the crowded chapel to the entrance vestibule, where they stood waiting for the funeral procession to form.
 
 
After a series of eulogies, poetry readings, and eccentric musical numbers—including a performance by an obese drag queen singing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” to the accompaniment of an accordion and a musical saw—the casket was finally sealed and carried out into the overcast day by pallbearers representing both Tulane's distinguished faculty and the finer drag clubs of Bourbon Street.
A horse-drawn hearse-carriage waited at the curb, flanked by the “grand marshal”—an old dapper black gentleman in a Salvation Army uniform. The coffin was loaded under a low, greasy sky. Then the procession made its way down Magazine Street—which still looked like a war zone, complete with boarded, swamp-stained buildings and empty shells of looted stores—creating an undulating snake of garish multicolored umbrellas sprouting like exotic blossoms in the mist.
LaFayette Cemetery Number 1 is a New Orleans landmark, one of the great Cities of the Dead. Encompassing an entire square block from Prytania to Coliseum, and from Washington to Sixth, it is bordered by a high rampart of ancient marble the color of weathered gunmetal. All the grave sites are aboveground due to the vagaries of living below sea level, not to mention the shifting mud of a river delta. Inside Lafayette's walls, the rows and rows of squat marble tombs and decorative family crypts—many of them containing remains dating back to the early nineteenth century—now lay in disarray like discarded dominoes. Last year, Katrina had had her way with Lafayette Number 1, ripping the tops off the sarcophagi and sending coffins sprawling every which way on the furious currents. The cemetery now resembled an ancient Greek ruin, a stony acropolis of broken stone markers, most of them beyond repair, a few scaffolds here and there where the NOLA Friends of the Cemeteries Association had been reconstructing historic tombs.
Today a new resident was moving in.
Professor De Lourde was laid to rest in a grand vault at the end of row seven. The band played “Amazing Grace” while the pallbearers slid the great steel coffin off the carriage runners and into the darkness of a gleaming marble crypt erected just six months ago by the Benevolent Society on the former plot of the orphans and homeless tomb. It was over within minutes.
After a few hushed good-byes, Grove and Maura made their exit and took a trolley back into the French Quarter. En route, as the rickety streetcar snapped and sifted over ancient petrified rails, Maura looked at Grove, who was staring out the grimy window, deep in thought. “What's wrong, Ulysses? What's going on?”
He looked at her, licked his lips, measured his words, and finally decided to tell her the truth. “Moses De Lourde was murdered, Maura.”
She stared at him for a moment, then gazed out her window with a pained expression, her murmur barely audible above the clack of the streetcar. “Oh Jesus ... here we go again.”
3
The professor's little shabby-chic apartment had always impressed Grove as being like a set in a stage play, maybe some traveling road show of
A Streetcar Named Desire
. Situated above a sheet music store at the corner of Dumaine and Bourbon, the building had been a typical Spanish double-gallery with ivy-clogged wrought-iron balconies and chipped, pastel-colored trim ... before Katrina. The hurricane had literally denuded the storefront exterior, as though it were sandblasted. The street-level window was now a moldering slab of plywood with graffiti scrawled across it, and the outlines on the siding where sconces, gaslights, and signs once hung were now merely tangles of wires.
Inside, the place was a virtual curio emporium, with all manner of antiques, folk art, knickknacks, bric-a-brac, and various and sundry tchotchkies. But very few gadgets. No CD player. No TV. Nothing but an old rotary phone, an ancient Norge icebox, and an antique Apple computer dating back to the first Bush administration. His files, including his notes and journals—De Lourde had been a compulsive diarist—were either saved on old floppy diskettes or scattered throughout the place, tucked into drawers, shelves, nooks, and crannies in every room. The details that Grove needed right now were hidden somewhere—he was convinced—in these journals.
Which is why Grove was currently hunched over the keyboard of the old Apple SE, opening files, looking at documents and notes, trying to find something, anything, that might hint at a connection to the suspicious way the professor had died. Still clad in his Armani dress shirt, his tie undone, his sleeves rolled up, his caramel skin shiny with perspiration, Grove was especially interested in that expedition to the Yucatan that Miguel had mentioned at the funeral.
“Okay, here's something about him planning an expedition to South America,” Grove was reporting aloud to Maura, who was in the kitchen, brewing tea with the contents of a dead man's pantry. Miguel had given them the keys, but what they were doing was probably illegal. “Unfortunately,” Grove added with a shrug, “it's dated in the midnineties.”
“What's the connection?” her voice called back.
“I'm not sure yet.”
There was an old dial-up modern on the table next to the Apple, and on a whim Grove decided go online. He tapped into a local AOL server, listened for the trademark toots and squeaks, then used the bureau account and Googled the following: de lourde + archeologist + expeditions.
Grove waited for the list to display itself. Within seconds a scroll of entries appeared, and Grove's eye fell on one particular item:
From Professor M. De Lourde's journal: “... made base camp near
Los Manos Negro
... all grad students and instructors back at TU ... learning more than we bargained for about the ancients and their nature gods.”
—Similar pages
Grove stared at the entry. The word
hurricane
struck his eye like a beacon.
He couldn't resist double-clicking the heading. The screen flickered for a moment as the home page for some obscure academic journal unfurled across the screen. Nothing fancy. A few logos for charitable foundations at the top, and a menu of subjects ranging from offshore geological surveys to paranormal investigations. But at the bottom was a box with abstracts from Mose De Lourde's Yucatan expedition journals.
Pulse quickening a little, Grove quickly scanned the first few entries. The basic information could be gleaned fairly quickly: In early 2004, De Lourde had led an expedition of archaeologists and students to the Yucatan to establish a dig and study artifacts from the ancient Toltec civilization. But when Grove read the entry from day sixteen, the linkage started engaging in his brain:
DAY 16: Helena hit at around five this evening, and she is a royal bitch. I must say, the Greek allusion is a canard. Helena flooded the lowlands, and decimated both the dig and the camp. Most of our specimen tables washed away. All is lost. Perhaps it's appropriate. The only saving grace is the fact that the whole team made it back to high ground at Merida City. All accounted for. Looks like we all shall make it back to the States with our skins intact. Although I'm not so sure about our sanity. Will certainly have plenty to discuss at the Royal Society symposia this autumn! More later.
Grove's scalp crawled. He knew in his bones he was onto something. He felt this way whenever the opaque aspects of a case began to clear. The crawling scalp, the dry mouth, heart rate speeding up—it was practically neurophysical. The fur standing up on a cat. Three years ... and three hurricanes?
“This feels wrong, Ulysses,” Maura's voice called from the kitchen. “Us poking around in here.”
“Wrong how?”
She came back out with two steaming teacups, handed one to Grove, and stood looking over his shoulder for a moment. She still wore her little black dress. “Wrong like creepy.”
“Listen, the old man would have
wanted
us to dig, believe me, he was the champion digger.”
“How can you be so sure he was murdered?” she asked then, sipping her tea.
He looked up at her. “Accumulation of detail.” He started to say something else, to amplify, but he realized there were aspects of all this, cognitive leaps that he was making, that he didn't understand himself.
“Excuse me?” Maura was looking incredulous.
Grove smiled. “Call it intuition.”
“Didn't the coroner deem it an accidental death? Officially, I mean?”
“Yes, and he may be right, but it looks hinkty to me.”
She looked at him. “Hinkty?”
He nodded. “In the words of Delilah Debuke ...
fishy.
”
“Why?”
A pause here as Grove considered how much he should tell her. Even though Maura County was tough as nails, and ambitious as hell, and smart, too—smart enough to crack open the strange connections between a six-thousand-year-old mummy and a modern-day serial killer on the Sun City case a year ago—she was still pure civilian. She had been scarred permanently by her flirtation with Sun City. Kidnapped by Ackerman in the final throes of his spree, beaten to within an inch of her life, left for dead in the Alaskan wilderness, the young journalist had experienced trauma that would have destroyed most psyches. But now, in a strange way, she seemed more grounded than ever. It was as though the experience had galvanized her. Grove saw it in her level stare, in the way she carried herself, that stubborn sort of vigor.
“Because of a lot of things,” Grove finally said, blowing on his tea. “But mostly because of what happened last night, at my hotel.”
“What happened at your hotel?”
He told her everything. Told her about the carabineer, about the shadowy figure trying the scale his wall. He told her about the suspicious wound patterns on the professor's body. He even told her what Delilah and Miguel had said about De Lourde inexplicably turning up dead in a place he vowed never again to visit.
When he was done, Maura looked ashen. “You're telling me whoever's responsible for this is after
you
?”
“It's too early to tell, actually ... and besides, I didn't say he was
after
me. That's not exactly what I'm talking about.”
“Then what exactly
are
you talking about?”
“I've seen this kind of thing before.”
“What do you mean? What kind of thing?”
Grove sipped his tea. “Look, sometimes I get in the newspapers. That's all I'm saying. I get into the press, and that leads to certain stuff.”
She thought about it for a moment. “You mean like last time ... with the
Weekly World News
?”
He gave her a look. “You had to bring
that
up, didn't you?”
She was referring to an article that had appeared in the sleazy tabloid during the Sun City case, the headlines crowing:
EXCLUSIVE: BEHIND-THE-SCENES PHOTOGRAPHS OF A MONSTER HUNT.
The lurid copy had introduced readers to “Ulysses Grove, the mysterious manhunter from the FBI, and his mystical methods.” A few lines farther down the page, the article had promised readers a hair-raising story of “a monster on the loose, possessed by the spirit of an ancient mummy.” As usual, they'd gotten most of the facts wrong, but they had also gotten just enough right to avoid a lawsuit. But it wasn't the copy that had bothered Grove. What had bothered him was the accompanying photograph, rendered in grainy paparazzi-style shadows, showing Maura and Grove having a private moment outside the lobby of an Anchorage Marriott.
That was the day he had gotten up the nerve to ask her out, and was in the process of doing just that when the photo was taken. They had almost kissed at that point. But not quite. She had agreed to go out with him, though, and all had seemed to be well with their budding relationship ... until the trauma of Sun City had curdled both their enthusiasm, and they had agreed to part ways.
Now Grove was trying to figure out how to breathe life back into their stillborn relationship.
“What are you telling me, Ulysses?” Maura wanted to know. “You've been stalked before?”
“Not
stalked
exactly.” He put his tea down, got up, and paced across the room. “After the Keith Jesperson trial, for instance, I did a profile for the Seattle police. Tried to figure out this random series of murders, people getting killed in their homes. What happened was, the perp started writing me.”
“You've got to be kidding.”
Grove waved off her skepticism. “It's not as uncommon as you might think. The BTK Killer in Kansas, for instance. He loved to write the press, loved to toy with the investigators. Son of Sam, Jack the Ripper. It's all part of the sociopathy, part of the sickness. But this suspect up in Seattle, he had a thing for
me
, for some reason. He'd send me mementoes.”
Maura looked aghast at him. “Oh Jesus ... you don't mean ... ?”
“No, no ... nothing grisly, nothing wet. I'm talking about the drivers' licenses of known victims, articles of clothing. That kind of thing.”
She let out a sigh, and said nothing. Her eyes clouded over for a moment with bad memories. She looked like a passenger on an unsteady ship.
“He was using an industrial postal meter,” Grove went on. “It's what finally led us to him. Turned out he was a letter carrier. Which was how he was gaining entrance.”
Maura shook her head then. “You know what? This is too much information.”
Grove felt a pang in his gut. “I'm sorry. Maura ... I'm sorry. I never should have—”
“No, it's okay.”
“But I really shouldn't be talking about—”
“No. It's all right. I'm here, aren't I?” She laughed bitterly. “I'm back for more punishment. More death and mayhem and sick shit.”
He took a step toward her, then paused. “Maura—”
“No, it's okay. I'm a big girl, Ulysses, I can handle it. I can handle this.” She reached over to her purse and dug out a cigarette. She lit it with shaking hands. “I'm smelling another great story here. Okay? I'm totally cool with it.”
It was very clear to Grove that she was not totally cool with it, and he had made a big mistake, talking about this stuff in front of her. “I'm sorry I dragged you over here,” he said finally.
“You don't get it, do ya?” She angrily puffed her unfiltered Camel. “I
chose
to come here.”
He looked at her then. He was close enough to smell her hair, which was still damp from the rain. “If you don't mind my asking ... why? Why did you come here in the first place?”
“To say good-bye to Moses, whattya think?”
“No, I mean now. Back here. Why did you come back here with me?”
She looked away, her voice softening. “I don't know ... maybe because I miss you
.”
Grove was speechless. A long pause, as she looked at him, and they studied each other.
Maura was still shivering. “Okay, I confess I came here because I miss you. Because I'm apathetic, lonely workaholic with no life. Because I'm a hopeless piece of—”
“Okay, stop.”
He reached over and took her cigarette out of her hand, then snuffed it out in a nearby ashtray. Then he took her by the arms and looked squarely into her eyes, and he spoke in a low, hushed tone: “I give you my word, my solemn word, as an agent of the federal government and a former Boy Scout ... I will never let what happened on Sun City happen to you again.” He suddenly burned with the urge to kiss her, and the timing felt right. He leaned down slowly, tenderly reaching up to her face, but before he had a chance to lock lips with her she pulled back suddenly.
“No.” She looked faint, the blood draining. “No, this is not right.”

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