Twisted (8 page)

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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Twisted
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He started searching for a suitable fleabag motel in which he could replenish himself.
Moments later a shimmering mirage appeared in the dark, misty distance about a half mile away, a nimbus of brilliant sodium light just east of the highway, smack dab in the middle of a peanut field. A massive neon sign, veiled in rain, rose on two pillars proclaiming in blurry magenta letters: ROOMS HERE—STARLIGHT MOTEL—FREE CABLE... .
 
 
The blue flicker of television news filled Grove's motel room that night with up-to-date bulletins on the next great storm of the season. Reports of Hurricane Eve, her birth out in the mid-Atlantic, and her subsequent march toward the northern edge of the Caribbean Sea, dominated CNN's headline channel. Raincoat-clad reporters, bracing themselves against the lash of wind-driven rain, stood on vibrating piers and shouted at the camera. High-tech graphics illustrated the ominous rainbow-spiral thermography of this new invader. Each utterance of that single-syllable name touched off dark, biblical connections in Grove's brain: Eve ... the original sinner ... Eve ... taster of knowledge ... Eve ... the destroyer of men. Grove watched all the reports, pacing the length of his cramped, airless motel room that smelled of burnt coffee and urine-impregnated rubber shower curtains.
Forecasters had plotted Eve's course across the upper edge of the Caribbean, and then about forty-five degrees northwest, straight toward the outer banks of Cape Hatteras. Experts predicted that she would hit the mainland, somewhere between Wilmington, North Carolina, and Norfolk, Virginia, at around five o'clock eastern standard time the next day.
Now Grove watched and listened and paced that tawdry little room with those two tiny pills melting in his palm. The Effexor was an aqua-blue two-milligram oval about the size of a Tic Tac, the Xanax a one-milligram pellet of egg-yolk yellow—his little colorful, cozy security blankets. But he could not bring himself to take either one. He was worried they would make him sleepy and he no longer wanted to sleep. He no longer wanted to rest. He calculated the amount of time left before Eve reached the U.S., and he calculated what he had to do before that happened, and all that had to be done afterward.
In forensic circles, there's a phenomenon known as the “evidence clock”—the critical time immediately following a crime, during which evidence is at its freshest. Unfortunately, each passing minute degrades the evidence further and further, until latent prints fade, DNA washes away, and even the psychological staging of a victim is lost in the clumsy shuffle of investigators and emergency personnel. Grove knew he had to try to get to the coast of North Carolina by five the next day, especially if his instinct about this killer was correct. Grove knew it wouldn't be easy, and he knew he would need help. He also knew that help would not be readily available from the bureau since he was basically working on his own time now, just another poor bastard in the private sector.
Grove went over to the window and looked out. Cones of sodium light shone down through the rain, reflecting off the flooded gravel lot. The tops of the tupelo trees and scrub palms flanking the property were bent over in the winds. Vast thunderclouds of mist rose off the distant peanut fields and erupted in the whirling atmosphere. Grove felt nerves knotting in his stomach. Something was happening to him. Something spurred on by the storm.
All at once he recognized the early warning signs of another full-blown panic attack, another paralyzing wave of anxiety. It felt as though a truck were parked on his chest now. His scalp bristled, and a cool trickle of inexplicable terror ran down his spine.
He fought the urge to anesthetize himself. He fought it by thinking about his dear friend Moses De Lourde. Most violent crime investigators and psychological profilers keep themselves focused and motivated by thinking about the victims, by working up that righteous rage. But Grove had a lot more to think about than one wrongful death. He had that mysterious, fractured cell phone call.
“ . . I believe I have a situation on my hands ... I said a situation! ... ”
It wasn't just guilt that Grove felt festering in his guts. If it was possible for Grove to feel love for another man he hardly knew, he had certainly felt love for De Lourde, genuine love. The professor had become Grove's adopted father. And now some freak obsessed with hurricanes had ended De Lourde's great life in the ugliest of fashions. The monster had mutilated Grove's best friend, tortured him, made him suffer.
You ruined his face, you motherfucking freak.
Grove's hot breath fogged the window glass as he focused his thoughts on the unknown subject—the “Un-Sub.”
It was a good and noble face, and you ruined it, and now I'm going to stop you. That's what you want, isn't it? That's what you're gonna get.
Grove spun around suddenly and hurled his medication at the wall. The pills bounced off the TV and the baseboard and the desk. Then Grove went over to the telephone, practically ripping the receiver off the cradle.
He made two calls in quick succession.
All of it accompanied by the tinny sounds of raincoat-clad reporters shouting to be heard, their pitiful monotones drowned by the mounting winds.
6
The Holy Ghost came from the south, from the train yards, slipping into town right before dawn on a tramp freighter as Hurricane Eve approached. He hopped off the train, then strode along the edge of the massive breakwater that bordered the town from the aging boatyards of Pamlico Sound, the rain enveloping the Holy Ghost's slender, muscular body like a silver sheath. He used the iron rail for purchase in the excruciating wind. He wore a long black coat that billowed regally behind him. His ropes and metal hooks and instruments of death dangled beneath his cloak, some of them flagging in the winds. He held his dark head proudly, upturned against the fierce waves of rain. He watched the last of the mortals scurry for cover all around him like parasitic insects fleeing down holes in the wasted earth.
A few reckless souls remained outside, their rain slickers flapping. Some were frantically stacking sandbags, others nailing sheets of plywood over windows and doors. Eve was bearing down on the quaint little village of Ulmer's Folly—an enclave of Colonial-style cottages, antebellum rooming houses, and steepled churches. Only a few hundred miles offshore now, the hurricane was closing fast, turning the sky the color of charred lampblack. Soon the storm surge would push over the breakwaters and bury the town in waves of brine.
The Holy Ghost paused near a worm-eaten piling, grasping the salt-weathered wood with one powerful hand. He was virtually invisible to the mortals, his dark form melding with the darkening horizon.
He pulled a cable from his belt with his rubber-gloved hands and looped it around the piling, mooring himself to the dock with the click of a rusty old carabineer. Then he watched with amusement the pathetic struggles of his prey, his storm bait. They meant nothing to him. They were
less
than nothing. In the grand scheme of things, they were strictly fuel for the machine. Merely fodder to draw the Last Manhunter into the eye.
That was the Holy Ghost's ultimate purpose. To lure the hunter into the sacred space where the Holy Ghost could complete a cycle that had started many millennia ago. It was a battle that had consumed many hosts, many bodies, many spirits over the years. But it was an eternal battle, a conflict that would continue to rage until the Last Manhunter was vanquished. It would take an enormous trap, and such a trap would require an enormous amount of bait.
A sudden sound pierced the seventy-mile-an-hour winds, and the Holy Ghost became very still. Ears preternaturally attuned to the mewling of his prey, he heard the dog barking before he saw it. Scanning the adjacent streets, he searched for the source of the sound until finally locking his gaze onto a small hound scurrying down a narrow side street.
It looked like a mutt, a spaniel-foxhound mix, with a dappled coat and a long little snout, darting in and out of the storefront shadows. A middle-aged man and two teenagers were half a block behind the animal, pursuing it through the deluge, their brightly colored nylon raincoats blurring in the downpour, their flashlight beams scissoring through the gloom. “Mitzie!” Their frenzied voices strained against the roaring sky: “Mitzie, come!”
The Holy Ghost loosened the cable, then slipped it off the piling.
The wind came in great heaving gusts now as the stranger lunged nimbly across the dock, then lowered himself down to street level and made his way through a grove of pecan trees. He had to stay low, hugging equipment close to him, creeping across a gully thick with weeds, moving silently toward the narrow side street. The noise all around him was tremendous—a jet engine bearing down on the land, wrenching the trees sideways, swirling loose trash up into the air in great whirling dervishes. But just under the roar came the desperate voices.
“Mitzieeeeeeeeeee!”
In one leaping stride the great Holy Ghost crossed Seafront Street, then slammed against a boarded-up barbershop with its charming little candy-striped pole and wrought-iron bench out front (now chained to a U-bolt in the sidewalk). He edged his way around the corner of the building and saw the father and two teenage sons chasing the dog into a blind cobblestone alley a block away. The Holy Ghost darted across the street and then crept through shadows under weathered copper awnings.
“Come, Mitzie stay! Bad dog! Stay! Mitzie, stay! Mitzie, you stay right there!”
The angry, disembodied voices, barely audible now over the storm, were homing beacons for the Holy Ghost. He moved toward the mouth of the alley with panther certainty, his heart rate a steady sixty beats per minute, his ropy, wiry muscles flexing under his long coat, his gaze dilating and fixing itself on the alley with the precision of a falcon.
“Grab her! There! There! Hold her, Brian, and don't let go whatever you do!”
The Holy Ghost reached the mouth of the alley, peered around the corner, and saw the three figures about forty yards away, near the end of the brick and mortar passageway, huddling close to the ground under an iron loading dock, wrestling with the errant dog. They were too distracted, too occupied with their task, to notice the tall, thin figure silently slip into the alley and approach them. The father was trying to get a leash on the wriggling, frightened animal.
“Hold her still, Brian!”
Cautiously, stealthily, unseen in the gauzy mist swirling through the wind tunnel of the alley, the Holy Ghost approached, reaching inside his coat for the metal flask in his inner breast pocket, the one with the specially designed cotton stopper. Sodium pentobarbital—the colorless, odorless liquid that sedated his subjects, made them manageable. With one easy motion the intruder tipped and squeezed the flask, saturating the cotton. His other hand busied itself with a homemade blackjack.
“Got her! Pick her up! Let's guhhhh—”
The sap came down hard on the father's cranium, cracking his skull through the hood of his rain slicker. The man flopped to the pavement, landing directly on the dog, which let out a stunned yelp. Lightning flickered overhead as the Holy Ghost whirled toward the sons.
It happened so abruptly, so decisively, and yet so
impassively
, that the two boys—both big kids, both varsity athletes—had little time to react. One of them looked up and gasped. The other boy simply reared back, shielding his face as though the very sky had started falling.
“Nnooo!”
The Holy Ghost lashed out again with the sap—a leather sock filled with steel slugs and lead sinkers—striking the older boy on the bridge of the nose as he tried to rise. The boy staggered, letting out a garbled cry—“Unh!”—right before his knees started buckling.
The younger brother, crying out now, tried to flee, but the Holy One grabbed him around the waist as though grabbing a squealing, rain-slick piglet trying to escape the slaughter. The flask came out, rose to the boy's contorted face, pressed down on his upper lip, and muffled his screams.
The father was starting to move again, writhing on the ground in rivulets of rain and blood, the dog still pinned and whining under him. By this point the younger brother had sagged into unconsciousness in the Holy Ghost's arms. The assailant let the boy sink to the cobblestones, then reached over and pressed the soggy stopper of sodium pentobarbital against the father's face, disabling him, silencing him.
As thunder boomed and waves of mist furled through the alley, the Holy Ghost dragged the father's limp body into an alcove behind a loading dock for safekeeping. The two boys were left in the alley; the Holy Ghost had no use for children. But the father's body would remain untouched in the alcove until the hour of transformation. And
he
was only the beginning!
Trembling with emotion, the Holy Ghost paused and looked up at the sky.
The black ceiling churned, lightning flickering like phosphorous veins. The hurricane was approaching. It would only be a matter of hours now. But there were many more subjects to harvest before the hour of transformation. The Holy Ghost turned his face to the angry heavens and let out a joyful howl until something unexpected caught his attention.
A noise to his immediate left: a faint whimpering sound. He looked down and saw the wounded dog. Panting and whining in agony, it was trying to limp away toward the mouth of the alley. Its hindquarters had been shattered.
The Holy Ghost went over to the animal, effortlessly scooping it up, then twisting its neck until cartilage and bone snapped. The dog expired instantly. Then the Holy One reached inside his pocket, found a spring-loaded blade, pulled it out, gave it a flick, and plunged it into the animal's underside between its teats. Blood bubbled and fizzed in the rain, a pink stringer momentarily swirling up into the wind.
The Holy Ghost reached into the dog's steaming carcass, plucked out its heart, and ate it.
 
 
“Grove, Grove, Grove ... have you finally gone ... what is the American phrase? Over the hill?” Shaking his enormous head, the Russian could not believe what he was hearing on the other end of the line. “I cannot scramble the aircraft in one hour, Grove, I cannot even get a single roll of toilet paper for the men's room in this place of the godforsaken.”
“‘Over the hill' means
old
, Kaminsky,” the voice informed him. “I think you meant to say ‘Around the bend.' Right? Meaning crazy? Nuts?”
“Yes, that is it, most definitely, you have gone around the bend with the crazy nuts.” Kaminsky nodded profusely. He sat in his little electronic nest at the National Security Agency's Plum Tree Island Experimental Station, chewing a soggy cheroot cigarillo, the phone propped into the crook of his thick neck as he kept an eye on three separate cathode-ray screens in front of him displaying three separate satellite views of Hurricane Eve as she approached the East Coast.
Ivan Kaminsky had been a weather analyst for the U.S. government for nearly two decades now, ever since he had defected in the mid-1980s during Reagan's “tear down this wall” period. Before that, Kaminsky had been in the Soviet military, working in a top-secret branch of the KGB dedicated to studying global climate changes. At the time, rumors had circulated in the intelligence community that the Soviets were trying to
control
the weather, not just study it, but Kaminsky had always laughed that off as a folktale. The truth was, nobody could control the weather, but men like Kaminsky could certainly get inside it, ride the tiger for a while, get to know its most ferocious moods. And that's essentially what Ivan Kaminsky did for the NSA: He chased storms. He was practically a legend among the wags at the National Weather Service. In 2005 he flew a Lockheed four-engine prop job into the eye of Hurricane Katrina as it passed over Gulf Port, Mississippi, and he won a Pulitzer for his photographs, as well as a Distinguished Service Medal for his report to the NWS. In fact, the only thing that had kept Kaminsky from getting a top government desk job was the vodka.
Kaminsky loved his Stolichnaya more than life itself, and over the years this love affair had taken its toll on the Russian's mind and body. A massive bear of a man with a great, frizzy, iron-gray beard, he had expanded at a geometric rate over the last decade. His huge hooked nose now looked like a road map of busted capillaries, and his memory had blown out like a bad fuse. He could still quote the wind speeds of storms from the 1970s, but he couldn't remember what he had had for breakfast that morning. All of which was why he had been exiled by the feds to this rat-infested lighthouse overlooking a wild corner of the Chesapeake Bay.
“Look, Kay, I know it's short notice, but this freak's on a spree, an upward spiral,” the voice of Ulysses Grove explained after an agonizing pause. “And like I said, it has something to do with me, so whatever you can do to get me up there, in the eye, in a hurry, would make a huge difference.”
“But why? This one is already up to a category three, and she is still just north of Nassau. She will be category four by the time she reaches the cape, you realize this, I assume?”
“I realize this, and it's not like I'm dying to fly into the eye of a hurricane, but I have no choice.”
“Why though? Why do you not have the choice in this matter? Please explain.”
A sigh on the other end. “Because I believe the eye of the storm is the key to catching this guy.”
“The key? The key—what does this mean, the key?”
“The only way I'm going to catch him is in the act, in the eye, in the middle of a storm. He wants me there.”
“Ah ... now I
know
you are ‘around the hill.'”
“Around the
bend
, get it right, Kay, for Chrissake, it's ‘around the bend.'”
“This is impossible, what you are asking, it is ... How did you come up with this?”
Grove told him about the details surrounding De Lourde's murder, the shadowy figure who delivered the missing eyeball, the murders down in Florida during Hurricane Darlene, all the missing eyes, all the weird little circumstantial clues. “Trust me on this, Kay,” the voice went on, “the clock is ticking for people up around Cape Hatteras. More people are going to die unless I can get up there and take this guy down. I need you to get me right in the middle of the shit.”

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