Twisted (9 page)

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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Twisted
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Kaminsky laughed out loud, then stubbed the cheroot out in an ashtray. He reached over and filled a paper cup with another inch of Stolie, then took a sip. “You can rest assured, my friend, you will get plenty of ‘shit' coming at you at precisely a hundred and seventy-five miles per hour.”
“I understand that—”
“No, my friend, I do not think you understand, I do not think that you are hearing me at all.” Kaminsky took another slug and let it burn the back of his throat. His voice lowered an octave as he stared at the TV screen projecting satellite images of Eve. “Have you ever seen what a category five eye wall can do to a telephone pole?”
“Kay—”
“Let me finish, Grove. Please. In 1992, during Hurricane Andrew, I witnessed a telephone pole jump out of the ground and impale a fireman to a barn, Grove. It drilled itself right through his chest cavity, pinning him to the barn like an insect, Grove, like a butterfly.” Kaminsky stifled a belch, and Grove started to say something but the Russian would not let him interrupt. “One year ago ... Hurricane Katrina ... we found a severed hand, Grove, in Slidell, Louisiana, in a vacant lot next to an overturned tractor. Police could not identify this hand, which had a Spanish signet ring on it. Do you know where this hand came from, Grove?”
No answer.
Kaminsky asked again if Grove knew where this severed hand came from.
“No, I don't, Kay, I don't know where it came from,” the voice said with a sigh. “But I'm sure you're going to tell me.”
“Cuba, my friend. The hand, it came from Cuba, a thousand miles away.”
After a pause, the voice said, “Are you finished?”
Kaminsky grinned. “I simply offer this word of warning as a service to the public.”
“You mean a ‘public service,' it's called a ‘public service.'”
“Right, yes. Precisely.”
“I appreciate the thought, Kay, but I still want you to fly me into Eve's eye today.”
Kaminsky shook his head. He had known Ulysses Grove ever since the Happy Face Killer case back in 1990. At that time, Grove was still a young turk, pissing off the brass at the bureau on a regular basis with his controversial theories regarding lunar cycles and weather, and their effect on the psychopathology of serial killers. During the hunt for the murderous truck driver, Keith Hunter Jesperson, Grove had come to Kaminsky for expertise on the moon and its effect on tides and weather. The twosome instantly clicked, notwithstanding their vast personality differences. Kaminsky had always admired Grove's methodical, relentless professionalism. Kaminsky had known young men like Grove back in Moscow, men who invariably clashed with the Central Committee and were often exiled to Siberia.
Men with balls
. Kaminsky looked up to these men—mostly because Kaminsky never had the courage to stay in his homeland and fight. Instead, he defected, and ran away from his problems. But Ulysses Grove had never been the type to defect from anything. Even now, this very moment, Kaminsky could sense this iron spirit radiating over the wires. “Still the same old Grove,” Kaminsky said finally, taking one last sip of vodka.
“Whattya say, Kay? You gonna help me out here or what?”
Kaminsky glanced at the clock, then shot a glance over at the wall map that hung above the coffee machine. “Tell me where it is that you are again?”
“Let's see, I'm about forty miles south of Savannah, in a little fleabag just off I-95.”
“Hold on, I am putting you on speaker.” Kaminsky dropped the phone, poked the Speaker button, then quickly rolled his swivel chair across the tile floor to the topographical map of the eastern seaboard. Color-coded stick pins denoted the coastal “entry points” of past hurricanes: Elena, 1985. Gilbert, 1988. Hugo, 1989. Emily, 1993. Opal, Michelle, Lily, Isabel, Jeanne, Cassandra, and ... of course ... the mother of all hurricanes, Katrina. Other colored pins showed federal disaster facilities, military bases, and quick-response centers. Kaminsky traced his long, nicotine-stained finger down the coast of South Carolina. “You and I are apparently equal distances from the cape,” Kaminsky bellowed at the room.
Grove's voice, filtered now through the tiny speaker: “Sounds about right.”
“How quickly can you get to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina?”
Through the speaker: “Goldsboro ... is that near Wilmington?”
Kaminsy yelled back that it was about forty miles southeast of Raleigh/Durham, and it was also a high-security base so Grove would probably have to answer a lot of questions.
“That's about two hundred miles away,” the voice sizzled through the speaker. “So basically if I get moving, I could get there around noon today. Is that going to work for you?”
Kaminsky glanced at the monitors displaying Eve's progress across the Atlantic. “It does not leave us much of a margin of contingency,” he said with a sigh, “but yes, all right, I will tell you what I will do. But I must also warn you if you tell anyone at the NSA that I helped you today I will tell them I have never met you, and that you are insane and should be locked up, do you understand what I am telling to you?”
Grove said he understood, and then Kaminsky told the profiler where to meet him.
 
 
Grove left the Starlight Motel at 7:00 a.m. in his rented Geo, which had begun to reek of body odor and stale fast food. He stopped at a Dixie Boy Truck Stop and got a muffin and a large coffee, then topped off the gas tank. The wind whipped fishtails of mist under the overhang roof, soaking Grove's long coat, rattling his pant legs. Grove welcomed it. He needed to wake up, needed a bracing slap in the face.
Inside the truck stop, while paying the tab, he noticed a display of little white “diet” pills on a spinner rack by the cash register—Truckers' Friends, they were called, chock-full of ephedrine—and he considered buying some. He knew the last thing he needed right then was speed, but he also knew he was going to be useless in a few hours without either a couple of hours of sleep, or some heavy-duty pharmaceutical stimulants.
Ultimately he decided against the Truckers' Friends, paid his bill, and hurriedly got back on the road.
He pushed the little Chevy as hard as he could through the rain, up Interstate 95, scooting around Savannah, then tooling across the state line and up into the eastern sand hills of South Carolina. The landscape got bigger and more ruggedly beautiful the farther north he got—even in the storm—now stretching in all directions over endless forested dells and limestone cliffs rising up into the black sky like alabaster monuments. The gusts toyed with the little sedan, every few moments giving it a violent nudge.
When Grove finally got Maura on the phone, he had to press the wireless hard against his ear in order to hear her over the noise. “Finally, finally we connect,” he said into the cell phone. “I've tried getting through at least a dozen times.”
Her voice sounded as though it were underwater. “God, how I hate cell phones.”
“Where are you?”
Fffffhhhzzzt
—“on my way ba”—
fffht
.
“What?”
“Atlanta ... I'm in Atlanta.”
Grove frowned. “
What
are you doing in Atlanta?” “I'm”—
fffht
—“back to New Orleans”—
fffzzzt—“
had a stopover in Atlanta.”
“Did you just say you're heading back to New Orleans? Did I hear you right?”
The voice informed him that he had indeed heard her correctly, she was heading back to the Crescent City. “Got halfway home,” she said, her voice softening, “then started feeling guilty for bailing out on you. Figured you could use some help.”
Grove's gut clenched with emotion for a moment. He had underestimated how much he needed this woman, how much he wanted a relationship with her.
For the last five years, Ulysses Grove had been living in a shell of grief and repression, consumed by his work, ignoring his needs. But something had happened to him—something unspoken and inchoate—on that Alaskan mountainside last year, when he had grappled with the madman named Richard Ackerman. Whether or not there had been an actual demonic entity inside Ackerman—and regardless of whether that entity had projected itself into Grove—there
had
been a change within Grove that day. He had faced his true self. He had come to terms with who he was: the latest in a long line of manhunters. It was there in the DNA of a six-thousand-year-old mummy, a paleolithic bounty hunter, and it was there in Grove's blood chemistry. He was the genetic descendent of those ancient manhunters, the shamans and medicine men who had ferreted out evil from the tribes and villages. This epiphany had changed the way Grove looked at himself. This was
who he was
, and there was nothing he could do about it—even if he wanted to. This sense of self, this sense of peace with himself, had made him want Maura all the more. No more lies, no more shame. He wanted a companion who was an equal—a strong, feisty, brilliant, soulful woman.
“Maura ...” Grove began, then paused when he heard a shuffling sound coming through the earpiece. He realized it was the sound of Maura lighting a cigarette. “Are you smoking again? I can hear you puffing away.”
“Okay, yes ... yes, I'm smoking again,” she confessed. “Look at me, smoking again, and back for more murder and mayhem. Pathetic, huh?”
Grove smiled to himself. Outside the car, the wind was raging so hard now the rain was sheeting
up
the windshield, and he had to grip the wheel with both hands to keep the Geo in the fast lane. He had the speedometer practically pinned at ninety miles an hour. “I'm glad you're back, Maura, I really am.”
Her voice had a grin in it. “Don't get cocky, smart aleck.”
“I won't, believe me ... but what's all this about an old article on hurricanes?”
A brief pause, then Maura's voice changed, becoming soft and grave: “I was at O'Hare last night and I saw this picture of Hurricane Eve out at sea, and all of sudden it hit me like a ton of bricks:
the first global warming.
”
“The what?”
Another pause, then this: “I did this piece for
Discover
years ago on ancient climate change, and it turns out there was this period of global warming about fifty thousand years ago that was a lot like our current situation. . . and I remember digging this stuff up about hurricanes.”
“Go on.”
“In the fossil record they found, there was just this amazing number of hurricanes back then. It was like the apocalypse or something. But that's not the weirdest part. You want to hear the weirdest part?”
“I do, yes.”
“Unexplained”—
ffffzzzzt
—“Ulysses.”
“Say again, I didn't hear that last bit.”
“
Unexplained deaths,
I said. That's how Leakey put it in 1972 right before he died—Louis Leakey, the great anthropologist. He uncovered these huge mortality rates, and all these unexplained human and animal remains at the ground-zero sites of these hurricanes.”
Grove shrugged. “Sounds like you're just talking about basic storm fatalities. I mean, these primitive villages would have just gotten chewed up by the hurricanes. Right?”
The voice crackled: “This is something else. This is Louis Leakey we're talking about here, this is the guy who discovered the missing link. I remember he had perfect fossil evidence of these bizarre deaths that were always directly in the path of these ancient storms ... but were not accidental deaths.”
“What do you mean—‘not accidental'?”
A surge of static obscured her voice for a moment.
Fffht
—“down their throats or”—
ffffzzzhht!
Grove gripped the steering wheel tighter. “You're breaking up again.”
More static. “I said. Some of them. Had
spears.
Rammed down their throats. Others were dismembered, or decapitated. Cows mutilated and dismembered. Stuff like that. Really disturbing shit.”
“I suppose the wind could do that.” Grove didn't believe his own words any more than she did.
“Now you sound like that medical examiner down in New Orleans, what's-his-name.”
“Nesbitt.”
“Right. Nesbitt. C'mon, Ulysses. You're telling me the wind can drive a stake down a person's throat? I just remembered running across all that stuff and being so, you know, like repulsed and fascinated at the same time. I guess for quite a few years this was one of the big mysteries in the archaeology field that Louis Leakey basically took to his grave with him.”
Grove drove in silence for a moment.
He found himself gazing through the layers of rain at the distant horizon. The muffled, percussive tattoo of the wipers combined with the rhythmic waves of rain striking the windshield, creating a hypnotic drone that held his gaze for a moment. His eyes stung, watering from lack of sleep.
Scan, don't stare
, his old high school driving instructor used to admonish him. But Grove had always been a daydreamer, a gazer, and now he found himself staring at the bleary gray distance and thinking of tornadoes from his childhood in Illinois. Then he found himself thinking of his mother, thinking of Africa, thinking of the place he was born and the great siroccos that used to blow across the dusty wastelands of southeastern Kenya.

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