Twisted (6 page)

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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Twisted
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“Maura, I didn't mean to—”
“No, I'm sorry.” She was shaking her head now. “We just can't pick it up right where we left off.”
He felt as though he'd been punched in the solar plexus. “But why not?”
“Because too much has happened ... because this is just ... this is not going to work.”
“I swear to you, Maura, you will never,
ever
be in the line of fire again.”
“I'm sorry. Ulysses ... I'm sorry.” She was looking around the room, looking for something. “I should probably go.”
“No way.”
“I should get back.”
“Wait a minute, just wait. The old man would've whupped your ass. Leave here on a night like this? I can sleep on the couch, you can take the bed.”
She chewed on a fingernail while she thought it over.
Grove gave her a sad smile. “You can trust me, kiddo, I work for the government.”
Maura grinned. “Oh, that's a relief.”
“Please,” Grove said. “Please stay the night, I'll take you to the airport in the morning.”
Another long pause, and then she said, “Okay, but I get the couch.”
His grin warmed.
 
 
Maura heard the sound first. Alone in the living room, curled up on the sofa, wrapped in an old afghan, she stirred now, trembling from the chill of cooled sweat. She sat up and looked around the dark room, trying to get her bearings. Through the teak blinds a pale membrane of light shone down on the rug.
The sound of bare feet padding across hardwood behind her made her jerk with a start. She twisted around and saw Grove coming out of the bedroom, pulling on a pair of sweatpants. “You okay?” he asked. “I heard a noise.”
Maura spoke softly, hoarsely, under her breath. “It wasn't me, I heard it too.”
“What was it?”
She pointed at the door across the room. “Out in the hall. Might have been the wind or it might have been—”
“Ssshh.”
Ulysses put a fingertip to his lips, cocked his head, and listened closely.
Just beneath the noise of the rain came another creak. And not merely a creak from a gust of wind, which sounded more like the yawing bulwark of an old ship. This was a shorter, more furtive creak. The creak of a footstep crossing the landing at the top of the stairs.
“The door to the sheet music place—did you notice which side of the building it's on? It's on Dumaine, right?” Grove was frantically tying the waist string of his sweatpants. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt, damp at the armpits.
Maura wore only her panties, but modestly kept the afghan around her midsection. “I have no idea,” she whispered, pulling her black dress over her shoulders.
“There's a back way up, but there's only one door up here, and that's the professor's.”
“You know this place better than
me.
You're the one who's stayed here before.”
“Are you expecting anyone?”
Her whisper rose an octave: “No—I mean, it could be anybody. Might be Miguel. Or the mailman.”
“It's six in the morning.”
“I don't know who the hell it is, Ulysses. What do you want me to say?”
“Stay here.”
“No way.”
Grove was slipping his feet into his loafers. He pulled on his oxford shirt, not bothering to button it. “There's no other way in,” he assured her. “Don't worry, you're safe in here.”
“Jesus Christ, Ulysses.” She watched him pull the .357 from inside his hanging overcoat. “Jesus
Christ
!” “Ssshhhhhh, it's all right. Just stay put.” He turned toward the door. “It's probably nothing.” But he knew it was
not
nothing.
He assumed the “Weaver” position, which had first been drummed into him back at the bureau academy—feet spread shoulder-width, one hand around the grip, the other underneath, cradling, stabilizing—and he moved toward the door, ready for anything. He crossed the twenty feet of Persian rug in seconds, and reached the door just as a thin shadow flickered under it, visible for a brief moment through the space at the bottom.
Grove took a quick breath, then with his free hand suddenly threw the door open.
“Hey!”
He almost fired but let up on the trigger when he realized the figure had already vanished around the corner of the narrow ten-foot-wide vestibule. Something skittered across the floor. Grove froze for a second, paralyzed with sensory overload, pointing the barrel at the staircase to his immediate left—down which the muffled sounds of frenzied footsteps were rapidly descending—and then at the object spidering across the welcome mat on the floor before him.
He frowned at the tiny little marble that had come to rest at his feet. His scalp crawled as he instinctively aimed the barrel at it. He recognized what it was. “Holy Christ,” he uttered in shock.
“What is it?”
Maura's voice was like a slap in his face, and Grove whirled toward the apartment.
“
Stay down
!”
Then he turned and lurched out the door, vaulting over the tiny orb, then hurling toward the staircase, his gun raised and cocked.
The figure had already reached the bottom of the stairs. Grove leaned over the banister and caught just a fleeting glimpse of the dark assailant darting toward the exit. Grove aimed the .357 and fired.
The blast lit up the dark hallway, a chink of plaster dust erupting down on the first floor, just missing the figure, who had already lunged through the doorway. Grove's ears rang as he leaped down the stairs—two at a time—his brain screaming that this might be his only chance.
He reached the dark lobby of crown molding, damp carpet, and old brass sconce lamps. The door was swinging free in the wind. Grove barreled through the exit and into the overcast, misty morning.
The pale light and rain assaulted him as he spun north, then south, then north again. A shadow flashed at the end of the block, lurching behind a wrought-iron gallery. Grove raised the gun and got off three more shots.
The bullets chewed through the newel post at the end of a gate, one of them ricocheting off the iron in a bloom of sparks, but none of them hitting their target. The shadowy figure had vanished once again into the veils of rain.
Grove stood there in front of De Lourde's for a moment, his heart thumping, the back of his shirt sticking to him. He tried to memorize every detail like a walking camera. Like a recording device. This was all significant. This was all feeding the psychological profile, which had already begun in earnest. He was part of the pathology on this one.
Somehow Grove was at the center of this profile.
The gun fell to his side as he turned, then made his way back inside. Grove could smell cordite emanating from his gun as he ascended the stairs and strode down the hall toward the professor's doorway.
The police would be here soon enough. The details of this private little game of cat and mouse would become public. Geisel would find out about all this. But Grove felt something more than nervous tension now. He ached with that weird hunger that usually accompanied an imminent breakthrough. It tingled at the back of his neck, at the cusp of his spine. He was about to make another huge intuitive leap. He could taste it on the back of his tongue as if he were sucking an old penny.
Maura was trembling in the doorway, now clad in her black dress, her slender arms holding herself as though she might fall apart at any moment waiting for him to return.
“It's all right,” he said as he approached. He gently urged her back inside the apartment, shoving the gun inside the back of his belt.
“Was it him?”
“Who?”
“The guy—the guy you think killed the professor.”
Grove shrugged. “Chances are good, yeah. Wait for me inside for a second.”
“The hell is
that
?” Maura was pointing at the object on the floor, the tiny ball about the size of a jawbreaker. “What
is
that?”
“Wait for me inside, Maura, please,” Grove said and gestured toward the living room.
Maura reluctantly backed away, then turned and marched across the room toward her purse, toward her pack of cigarettes. The distant sound of sirens was rising on the wind, the cops on their way, most likely summoned by a complaint of gunfire (sadly, a not uncommon phenomenon now in the Quarter).
Grove turned back to the shiny object on the floor. A thin leech trail glistened behind it like a translucent ribbon. He knelt down, dug in his pocket for his handkerchief, found it, and snapped it open.
He was carefully picking the thing up when he noticed something else out of the corner of his eye on the floor of the alcove, shoved into a corner. Yesterday's
Times-Picayune
. It was still in its plastic wrapping, a forlorn sight if ever there was one. A newspaper subscription that would never be renewed. But it was the front-page graphic that caught Grove's attention: the swirling multicolored satellite photo of a new tropical storm out in the Atlantic.
DARLENE BUILDING STEAM,
warned the headline, and it looked as though
this
storm was heading up the eastern edge of the gulf, on a direct path for Florida. Maybe Pensacola, maybe Panama City Beach. But all this information merely streamed into Grove's midbrain and evaporated as quickly as it had entered. What truly held his attention for that single, intense, revelatory split second was the graphic.
He stared at that swirling mass of color, the brighter oranges and reds spinning toward the middle, the tiny black nucleus like a seed or a pit. He stared and stared until the sound of Maura's voice snapped him out of his sudden momentary paralysis.
“What the hell was that thing on the floor?” she called from the living room.
Grove snatched up the newspaper and went inside the apartment, pausing to latch and secure the door. He threw the dead bolt, turned the lock, and jiggled it just to make sure. The sirens were closing in. Somebody was hollering something outside the building.
“The key to everything,” Grove muttered as he looked down at the gelatinous ball in his hankie.
“What?” Maura was madly smoking now, trying to control her trembling.
“I don't want you to freak out here,” Grove said, looking up at her, sounding almost apologetic. He had the newspaper tucked under one arm, and he held the specimen from the hallway floor like a wounded bird in his handkerchief.
“It's too late for that, Ulysses, I'm already in the throes of a major freak-out.”
“I'm going to need you to stay calm.”
“I'm calm. What is it?”
He told her.
“Oh my God.”
“Maura—”
“I need to go.”
“Hold on a second—”
“I need to get back, I got a deadline.” She started gathering up her things, her purse, her coat, her umbrella. “I need to go, I need to get out of here.”
“Maura, it's okay, calm down. This is a breakthrough, we're going to catch this guy.”
“Not with me,” she said, heading for the door. The sirens were outside the building now. The squad cars screeching to a halt one by one, radio voices crackling.
“Maura, wait—”
“I'll call you. Good luck with the case and everything, take care, bye-bye.”
She left, slamming the door behind her, leaving Grove standing there, alone, yet galvanized, staring down at De Lourde's missing eyeball nestled in his hankie.
4
The statuesque blond woman in the diaphanous linen top and thong bikini crouched against the raging salt winds, grimacing, struggling with a loop of nylon rope, completely unaware that it was the last time she would secure a storm tarp over her beloved little motel's swimming pool.
The sky had turned black, and now the winds were bull-whipping wildly across the cement pool deck and the granite breakwater just beyond the southern edge of the Sea Ray's property. Flagpoles rang and pinged hysterically. The furled Cinzano umbrellas flapped, and every few moments another wave would crash against the granite wall, sending particle bombs of water thirty feet in the air.
Hurricane Darlene was coming, her outer rings sending sheets of horizontal rain across the Florida panhandle, her eye bearing down on Panama City Beach.
Frantically the flaxen-haired amazon yanked the corner of the olive drab tarp with her long, slender, manicured hands, trying to get it onto the cleat. She had already broken two nails, and chipped another one, and
that
was really pissing her off. The wind bellowed over her head, a jolt of sea mist lashing her perfectly sculpted face. A deck chair cartwheeled past her like a tumbleweed.
Suzanne Kennerly braced herself against the cleat. A willowy woman in her late thirties with diamond-hard gray eyes and exquisite cheekbones, she had once been a top model at Ford's in New York, but that was ancient history now. Nowadays she was stuck down here on the Redneck Riviera with this roach motel and nothing but old men in black socks and sandals to keep her company. All because of two simple mistakes made at the peak of her career, the two biggest mistakes in her life: She had gotten knocked up, and had married the prick who did it to her.
In the subsequent divorce proceedings, her ex-husband, Hamptons real estate mogul Jerry Ruckman—he of the small prick and huge ego—had made her a deal she couldn't refuse: her daughter for the Sea Ray Motel. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Suzanne could conquer new territory in Florida without the yoke of a child tugging at her, and in time she could work her way down to Miami, where she could rekindle her modeling career and get back to a normal life. But that was nearly three years ago. And in that time, all Suzanne had gotten was mounting debts, an addiction to Xanax, and chronic sun poisoning. But no goddamned hurricane was going to change her game plan. She was going to ride this thing out just like she had ridden out every other hideous thing that had happened to her.
Another wave surged against the breakwater, the whitecap swirling up into the winds and exploding. Suzanne wiped the moisture from her face and tried to make her way across the deck toward the opposite corner of the pool, using the chain-link fence poles as leverage, but it wasn't easy. She could only move a few tentative inches now with each step. The wind was like an invisible anchor mooring her to the cement. The collar of her linen cover-up was flapping so hard it felt as though someone were slapping her.
Finally the blouse literally blew off her back like a papery skin shed into the wind, revealing her meticulously tanned, surgically enhanced bosoms nestled in a revealing leopard-print bikini top.
Another surge erupted over the breakwater.
Suzanne froze, gaping up at the enormous white monolith rising into the sky. It looked like a huge albino dinosaur climbing up over the breakwater, coming for her. Suzanne's heart rose in her throat. The monster suddenly burst apart in the wind, sending a wave of wet sand spraying across the pool deck. The wave struck Suzanne's legs with the force of a battering ram, knocking her feet out from under her.
She fell then, sprawling across the deck, skidding sideways, her oiled body as slick as a slug, skating across the sand-lashed cement until she smashed into the side of the cabana. The impact sent pain bolting up her back, and she gasped for breath, trying to get her bearings. Slowly, agonizingly, she began crawling toward the office, toward the safety of the side screen door, which was hanging open, banging wildly in the wind. She got maybe five or six feet closer when another great spasm of white sand roared over the breakwater.
The wave flung her against the building, slamming her into the bricks with enough force to crack her lovely capped molars. She let out an involuntary yelp, the pain was so sudden, so searing, so sharp in her ribs. It knifed up her side and seized her left arm.
Not yet, not yet, NOT YET!
her brain screamed at the storm.
Now Suzanne was crawling on her tummy toward the flapping door. It was only about ten feet away.
Just ten feet
. But her left leg was deadweight now, as if she were dragging a huge sandbar, and the wind was a freight train, and the deck was shifting beneath her, shifting and seething with soupy waves of sand. Suzanne could barely see.
Eight feet now.
Another gusher of sand levitated off the beach and crashed down on the deck, shoving Suzanne Kennerly sideways. She howled in pain, but somehow she kept going, kept crawling toward that flapping screen door and the safety behind it.
Six feet now.
Five now.
Four.
Three.
Two—and all at once Suzanne grabbed hold of the jamb with her cold, stiff, manicured fingers.
With every last shred of strength she pulled himself inside the doorway, dragging her numb leg behind her. Pain burned up her left side. Her vision blurred. But she ignored it all and managed to crawl inside the office.
She slammed the door with her one good leg, then collapsed. The office was dark.
Lying there, dripping wet, gasping for breath, Suzanne could not for the life of her remember if she had forgotten to turn on the office lights or if the power had flared out due to the storm. It was the middle of the day yet it was so dark. Like night. What was happening? The pain in her hip was disorienting her, making it hard to figure anything out.
A noise behind her, something shifting in the shadows of the office.
Suzanne managed to twist around enough to see a shape lurking in the corner. Was it that asshole Koz's German shepherd? Keven Koz owned the Gulf Breeze Motor Court a hundred yards south of the Sea Ray, and his fleabag of a dog would sometimes slip into unattended offices to wait out storms. But wait ... no ... this silhouette was human. Tall and dark and slender and silent, and
human
, and holding something that dangled like a pendulum.
“Who the hell are you?” Suzanne's voice was strained above the muffled roar the hurricane.
The shadowy figure pounced.
Suzanne tried to call out but something struck her hard, a roundhouse thump to the left side of her head, making her ear ring, and then there was something cold and reeking of ammonia pressing down on her mouth, and then the light dimmed.
And then there was nothing.
 
 
“This guy's on an escalating spree, believe me, De Lourde's murder was just the beginning.”
Ulysses Grove stood at the dry-erase board in the fluorescent-drenched conference room at the Louisiana Bureau of Investigation's Baton Rouge field office. He wore his sedate, pin-striped, double-breasted Bill Blass suit with his charcoal-gray power tie—the uniform of a CEO addressing his rank and file, or perhaps a dean of education giving a valedictory speech. In fact that was exactly what an FBI profiler was: a teacher, a highly trained consultant.
But over the past few years, Special Agent Ulysses Grove had become much more than a mere consultant; among bureau insiders he'd become a rock star. He was the man who had chased Richard Ackerman into the frozen tundra, the man who had faced off with the Happy Face Killer in a squalid truck stop restroom. But rock stars can also be flakes, and a lot of guys want to shove rock stars off their pedestals. Grove certainly had his share of detractors in the law enforcement community. Right now, in fact, he was having a hard time convincing the grizzled veterans sitting in front of him.
“All due respect, I'm hearing a lot of
extrapolation
here, a whole lotta
theory
,” said a portly man in a seersucker jacket in the front row, his southern drawl dripping with skepticism. His named was Marvin Pilch, and he was an LBI section chief in charge of the Orleans and Jefferson Parish region. “I mean, assuming De Lourde was murdered, I don't even see a series here yet.”
The other men, all seated around the oval conference table, each holding a report folder that Grove had prepared for this very meeting, offered various nods and grunts of agreement. These men included Lieutenant Harry Brenniman, a skinny black detective with the New Orleans PD detective squad; Special Agent Arliss Simms, a heavyset bureau lifer who had worked the back alleys of the French Quarter for most of his adult life; and Dr. Maynard Nesbitt, the balding Orleans Parish coroner, who had a special aversion to Grove since it was Grove's profile that was calling into question Nesbitt's original autopsy conclusions. In other words, this was a tough crowd.
A voice crackled out of the squawk box on the center of the table: “Gentlemen, I think it might be best if we just hear Grove out before we comment.”
The disembodied voice belonged to Tom Geisel, avuncular head of the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico; Grove's friend, boss, and mentor for nearly fifteen years. Thank God for Geisel. Thank God for that deep, stentorian tone coming out of that speaker. Grove didn't know where he would be without Geisel. Probably locked up in a rubber hotel somewhere.
“Believe me, guys, I understand your concerns,” Grove told the room, glancing at each man, one at a time. “I had the same concerns when I started down this road, but a lot of times a break like this starts with intuition. Connections. A chain of inconsistencies. De Lourde would never have gone to that place, and he was calling me for help that night. I could be wrong about all this, but I don't think so. I think De Lourde was murdered, and I think he knew his murderer.”
Marvin Pilch stifled a burp. “So ... explain to me again how the man's eyeball got into your possession.”
Grove sighed and glanced up for a moment at the dry-erase board that he had positioned at the front of the room. Clipped to the top edge of the board was a forensic black-and-white blowup of the errant eyeball, which was currently sitting in a pathology lab at the parish morgue.
In extreme close-ups the human eye looks like an overdone hard-boiled egg, with a corona of gelatinous color—the iris—and a fuzz of tiny white cilia around its milky spherical retina. Like a little tulip bulb, De Lourde's severed eye also sported a purple stem—the optic nerve—that snaked off the side of each photograph. Most human eyeballs, when viewed outside their owner's cranium, have a sheen and a weight to them, which is apparent in photographs. De Lourde's was no different. Billions of vitreous cells inside the sclerotic shell are ever coiled to translate visual information down the optic canal to the brain. Images take on meaning.
Profiles begin to take shape.
Also clipped to the board were close-ups from De Lourde's autopsy, highlighted by lavish microphotography of the strange ridged wounds on the professor's upper lip, chin, and soft palate. On the far edge of the conference table sat a row of Zip-Loc evidence bags, each one filled with a crucial item such as the metal carabineer that Grove had found outside his hotel, or shavings from the cobblestones. The rest of the blackboards and flip charts around the room were plastered with graphics and satellite images of
another
kind of eye, a far larger and more elusive one.
“It was delivered to me,” Grove finally said in a flat, unaffected tone.
“By the perp, you mean?”
Grove shrugged. “Could have been the perp, could have been an intermediary. But it was meant for
me
, it's fueling the fantasy here. It's a symbol, a talisman. For some reason, our guy
wants
me to break this thing.”
“Shades of the BTK Killer?”
“Something like that.”
Pilch frowned. “I gotta tell ya, I got nothin' but respect for you Behavioral Science boys ... but this one just doesn't add up.”
Grove looked at Pilch. “I would agree with you, Chief. It
doesn't
add up. Not yet.”
Pilch was about to respond when Detective Brenniman spoke up. “We're sure this here eyeball belongs to the victim, to the professor?”
All heads turned toward Dr. Nesbitt, the coroner, who sat perched on a windowsill in the rear, his bald pate shiny with nerves, his scowl reflecting his disgust. “Yes, well ... preliminary blood-typing and DNA analysis show a match, although the
manner
in which the eyeball was lost is still undetermined. Now maybe it's just me, but I just don't see how y'all can call that
irrefutable
evidence of a wrongful death. Hell, after Katrina, we had people impaled on parking meters, lobotomized by slivers of glass. Shoot, there were some eaten by
gators
. That don't mean there was serial killers roaming around.”
Grove had expected this from the coroner, and didn't say anything right away. Instead, he calmly went over to his briefcase, which sat open on the corner of the table. He dug inside a flap and pulled out a sheaf of Xeroxes faxed earlier that morning from the Okaloosa County medical examiner down in Fort Walton Beach, Florida.

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