Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief (15 page)

By his third Mercedes, Bernal was already running into trouble.

“The bastard,” the woman, Serena, said. “Can you believe that bastard?”

“No,” Bernal said. “I can’t.”

“I mean, after all those years ... I supported him. Through truck-driver school, through computer-repair school, through art school . .

“Art school?”

Serena was a thin woman with tight jeans, cowboy boots, and fluffed blond hair, and looked like a young woman dressed like an older woman trying to look young. Yolanda could have taught her a few things, Bernal thought.

“Petey could always draw Binky,” she said. “From the matchbook cover. Pretty good. I got that fawn head somewhere. He drew it on the back of a miniature golf scorecard with that little pencil they give you. He cheated: kicked his ball through that windmill. But the fawn looks real nice. That was for my birthday, the second one we had together.”

“Is the car in the garage?”

“Oh, the damn car. So, here I am, supporting him, and what does he do? Goes down to Foxwoods, bets it all on 18 black, which is my birthday, November 18th, and wins fifty thousand dollars. My birthday. And never lets me know.”

She viciously punched the keypad and the garage door opened. A black Mercedes stood there, crammed in among gardening tools, old tires, and neat bundles of newspapers. Getting it in and out without knocking anything over would have taken some skill.

The taillight was fine. This wasn’t the car Muriel had escaped in.

“So he buys this thing and brings it home, like it’s nothing, like he picked it up along with a bottle of Colt down at the packie. I ask him where he got it, and he’s like, ‘what?’ And I’m, ‘where’d you get the money for the car, didn’t you borrow money against the truck?’ And he’s like, ‘you can get a deal on these things if you know where to look.’ Bastard never used a coupon in his life, even when he could get two-for-one on the Quilted Northern, he used TP like a girl, like a troop of Girl Scouts, we were 
always
 out, and he’s talking deals.”

“But you think he’s been here, driving this car?” For a new vehicle, it was fairly dinged up, as if someone had been using it in speed trials on gravel roads.

“Look, I can tell when he’s been in here. He moves stuff around. Can’t help himself. Always done it. You’d think he’d sneak in, steal money out of my bedside table, beer from the fridge, whatever, and get the hell out, but he has to sort my magazines, or pull dead leaves from the dieffenbachia.”

The doors weren’t locked. Bernal examined the interior. Where the radio and CD player should have been there was nothing but a hole with wires sticking out. And someone had even pried the steering wheel open and , taken off with the airbag.

“How long ago did he leave?” Bernal asked.

“He didn’t leave. I kicked his ass out.”

“Good for you. When was that?”

“Two months, eight days ago. On the anniversary of our second date. The first one he’d come on gangbusters, taken me to some Italian place with white tablecloths. They had great tiramisu, let me tell you that. Second date he took me to Bernard’s. You know Bernard’s?”

“Can’t say I do.”

“Some guy threw up on my shoes. Buddy of his, in fact. Nice ones, Ferragamos, I got them at DSW marked down, a steal. Never wore them again, that alligator hide really holds the smell. I love a ‘No Gang Emblems’ sign, don’t you? It’s the mark of a real class place.”

Feeling uncomfortable with her confession, and looking for something to do, Bernal popped the hood. For a moment he thought it was just the shadows from the overhead light, but then there was no doubt: most of the pieces were missing. Alternator, starter motor—the fuel injectors had been yanked out. All that was left was the engine block and the heavier mechanical parts. It didn’t look like this car had gone anywhere recently.

Serena took a glanqe, wailed, and collapsed on a bag of Scotts Turf Builder. “Oh my God! Is there anything left?”

The front right wheel, invisible unless you clambered over the gigantic rider mower and peered over, was gone too, the car propped up on a jack. Mercedes wheels fetched a nice price. The guy had eaten the thing away from the inside, and Serena had never realized. It was only the shell that was left. The shell, three wheels, and the leather seats. He had no doubt that those were going next.

“How the hell did he get in here?”

“Doesn’t he know the combination?”

“I changed it!”

“To 1118?”

Serena looked flabbergasted. “How did you know?” 

“Just a lucky guess.”

She grabbed Bernal’s arm, sharp nails digging in. “Help me with this, will you please? What am I supposed to do now? I have a dealer coming over to look at the car in a couple of days. The thing is worth—”

“All you’ll get from a dealer is some more room in your garage.” Bernal felt tired. The cars he’d looked at so far had shown him absolutely nothing, while this one had showed him entirely too much. “If you’re lucky, he’ll tow it for free. I’m sorry.”

He glanced back as he got into his car. Serena was still sitting on the fertilizer, staring at the shell of the Mercedes. All Bernal could do for her was hope that there were no particularly valuable plumbing fixtures or structural members in her house.

“Should I be worried?” The guy named Alistair scratched his thinning hair. “I mean, I drove the thing home. Anthrax? Explosives?”

“Nah, nothing like that,” Bernal said. They trudged up the long driveway. “How long were you gone?”

“A week. Eight days, actually, Monday to Tuesday the next week. San Francisco, Tucson, and, God help me, Omaha. I left the car at the Enfield station, took the train to North Station, then the T to Logan. I like taking the train. I don’t have to fight the traffic. It’s really pretty easy.”

It sounded like he was trying make sure Bernal didn’t think he was lame for taking public transportation.

“Anything different about the car when you got back?”

“No! I mean, I didn’t notice anything.” Alistair sounded genuinely panicked. “But. . . okay, I don’t know if this is a clue or anything, but...”

“Yes?” 

“I’d been expecting to pay sixteen bucks for the time I was parked. They charged me only two. . . .”

“You thought it was just good luck?”

“I get reimbursed . . . what the hell? What’s up with my car?”

“Don’t worry. We just know a guy who take joy rides in nice cars that are left somewhere for an extended period. We’re trying to build a case. That’s all.”

“Sure.” The garage door hummed up. “Um, car’s unlocked.”

Bernal stopped. “What the hell is that smell?”

“Ah? Oh, my wife . . . Rue makes calamari when I’m on the road. I don’t like it. She doesn’t eat the tentacles, though. I don’t know why that’s her sticking point, but it is. So—jeez, it does stink. Trash pickup is tomorrow.” 

“How does she cook it?” Bernal said.

“The calamari? I hate the stuff. I don’t know.”

“She home?”

“No. No, she’s not home. She’s ... well, to tell the truth, we’ve been having a bit of trouble lately. Communications ... issues. Nothing we can’t handle. We’ve gone through worse things before.”

Hence the week-old squid in the trash, Bernal thought. Poor Alistair.

“Go ahead, take a look. There it is.”

“I see it.” And it was the right one, this time. He could see the strip of tape across the taillight. Until this moment, he’d been fearing he imagined it and would be searching for the rest of his life for something that wasn’t there.

“What happened to the taillight?” he said.

Alistair looked at it. “Rue backed into our mailbox. Just before I left. Now that I’m home, I can get it fixed.” 

“That’s a good idea.”

Bernal tried to figure out the course of events. Only one really made sense right now. Alistair drove his Mercedes  to Enfield and parked it in the lot, then took the train into Boston. The Connoisseur boosted it from the lot. Then Muriel stole the car from the Connoisseur and . . . drove it back to the Enfield lot? That seemed to explain the ticket issue. Pretty smooth, actually. Maybe she hopped the train into Boston, just as Alistair had. If Bernal hadn’t come along looking, no one would even have noticed that the car had ever been missing.

Muriel was much more evaporative than he had given her credit for. Now she was sending him messages from wherever she was, guiding him without really being clear.

Alistair stopped outside. The guy wasn’t going to go into his own garage. That was fine with Bernal.

Not that there was anything for him to worry about. It was a nice car. Leather upholstery, walnut burl trim, individually heated seats ... and it was as clean and neat as if it had just been driven off the showroom floor. There were a hell of a lot of stickers on the windshield. Alistair and his wife had joined a lot of local organizations, looked like: Historical Society, Arboretum, Nature Conservancy. . . . Alistair was as fastidious as the Connoisseur. Every crime left a trace, but somehow it would have been easier if a loose piece of birds-eye maple veneer had peeled off a dresser.

Bernal went around to the back and opened the trunk.

For an instant he thought that he’d found some inadequate lubrication. But that creak was Alistair groaning. Then he was throwing up into the bushes by the side of the garage.

It was a decent-sized trunk. The corpse, a woman, dressed in black microfiber, was curled up on its side with plenty of room to spare.

Of course, it wasn’t quite the challenge it could have been, since the body had no head.

Morning light seeped in through the high windows. Bernal could feel the pad hard under his sleeping bag. He could hear his own breath whistling through his nose. He could move his eyes and examine the struts and hanging lights high above.

What he couldn’t do was move anything else.

Something pushed down on his chest. The pressure was strong but soft, like a big hand ... or something sitting on him. Something with a huge ass. He couldn’t see what it was. All he could see were the sharp details of the struts that made up his sky. He found himself tracing them out, as if there was some solution to his life in the way they distributed the weight of the roof.

Was this a heart attack? He was young, he’d never even had his cholesterol checked, and now .. . Maybe it was a stroke. The pressure grew stronger, and his panic grew with it.

“Hesketh?” He tried to say it, but nothing came out of his mouth. His breath kept going, but he couldn’t control it.

He would lie here forever, he knew, with his thoughts running around the inside of his immobile skull like crazed lab rats. And something would sit there and watch him. He sensed a presence, an observant intelligence, out there in the half-darkness of the lab. It had been there all along, it had never left, and now that he was alone in there, it had him to itself.

It could do what it wanted.

Something tapped at the door.

The pressure vanished. He tried to unzip his sleeping bag, but the zipper stuck, and he writhed on the floor, finally pulling himself out on the end. He rolled to his feet.

He took a couple of slow breaths. His heart wasn’t even beating fast. He felt fine. He felt better than fine: he felt alive.

The tap again, louder this time.

He pulled on his pants and buzzed the front door.

Charis’s huge shape filled the doorway, black against the wet morning glow. She wore something that was almost a dashiki. That was quite a claim, but she came close to carrying it off. Her dark hair had frizzed in the moist air. Strands draggled down on her shoulders, as if she had tried to get it to behave and then had given up.

She paused there.

“Come . . He cleared his throat. “Come on in.”

Without a sound, she slid to the side and vanished into the shadows of the loading dock.

What the hell?

“Charis?”

What had she seen? He turned slowly around. There was nothing in the shadows. Hesketh’s limbs hung in a still row. Tools lay on their racks.

While he waited for her to reappear, he pulled an electric shaver out of his overnight bag and ran it over his chin. Despite the fineness of his beard, it labored, reaching the end of its charge.

“What the hell was that?” Charis had made her way completely around the perimeter of Ungaro’s lab without making a sound and now stood in the doorway to the office. “That the way you normally greet people at the door? You sounded like a hostage situation. All fake normal like.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound like that. I’ve been faking normal all my life. I thought I’d gotten pretty good at it. I had a bad dream. Sleep paralysis.”

“What the hell is that?” Charis brushed big hands over even bigger upper arms. She could have had a position as Strongest Woman in the World in some traveling show in an era before steroids changed the ideal of what a really strong person looked like. “This gal Ungaro was a neatnik, but only about stuff that touched her own body. Typical.”

“Your body normally disconnects its motor neurons during REM sleep, otherwise you’d be breaking windows and humping your pillow as you dreamed.” Bernal rubbed his chin and realized he’d missed a spot, but this time the shaver refused to even start. “Under stress, they don’t reengage when you wake up. ‘The hag,’ it’s called. The old hag. Sits on your chest. I’d never had that happen. Incredibly real.” He paused. “Did you think there was really something back there?”

“I wasn’t going to assume anything. I leave that kind of thing up to smart people who already know all the answers. Do you have any coffee around here?”

“You want me to make coffee? Is that a way of calming me down?”

“No. It’s a way of getting coffee. I love my husband, but Muneer’s coffee sucks. You’d think it would be scientific or something, and right up his alley, but he always makes it too weak. And I didn’t have time to stop at a Dunkin’ on the way over.”

Bernal had gotten used to Ungaro’s tiny cooking area. He set up her complicated camping coffee maker.

“I pulled all the strings I could, but they still wouldn’t let me see you yesterday.” Charis pulled over the desk chair and sank her weight down on it, legs splayed. “How are you?”

“Fine. You know, Charis, I thought it was Ungaro in the trunk. That Muriel had, I don’t know, hunted down and killed her. Then, I realized . . . Who killed her, Charis? Who would murder Muriel?”

The Cheriton police had questioned him from soon after his discovery of Muriel’s body until late in the evening. “I mean, they wanted information, and they were all excited because they thought it was the Bowler, and didn’t want me to know they were excited, because, after all, it was my friend who was dead, and I had seen her headless body in the trunk of a car.. . .”

Charis had a wide face, suitable for expressing emotion across a stage and into the last row of the second balcony. Up close like this, it was almost too much. Her hoop earrings swung and caught what little light there was. She put a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt on his shoulder and pushed him to sit down.

“Did they offer you any help? Support?”

He shrugged. “The usual. Grief counselors, stress counselors. Nothing that would really help me.” He packed some ground coffee into the coffee gadget and poured water. He clicked the spark on the cookstove, and the burner came to life with a heavy hiss.

“What would help you?”

“Understanding a few things would help me. They think the Bowler killed Muriel. That night. I saw her run off. She came here, then left, either with Madeline Ungaro or without, and then died.”

Charis caught it immediately. “You know she came here?”

Bernal reached into his shirt and pulled out a pink sash. It was soft, with satin on one side. He held it out to her, but she didn’t take it. “She had a pink nightgown on when I saw her. Over that ridiculous black Kevlar ninja outfit. She was over sixty, Charis. She shouldn’t have had anything like that in her wardrobe. I found this sash here, in Ungaro’s lab. She made it at least this far that night.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s put things in some order.”

“Okay. Makes sense. I’ve heard of the Bowler, of course. They were sure it was him, but they were pretending they still had their minds open to other possibilities. They asked about drug connections, her grief over her son’s long-ago death, all sorts of stuff, but their hearts weren’t in it at all. They knew it was the Bowler. The other possibilities were just ritual, so that they could pretend to themselves to be open-minded. I want information from you, Charis, so I can understand what they’re after.”

“What? About the Bowler?”

“Yes. I want your facts and your interpretations of those facts. I want to know how you see it.”

“First, pour coffee.”

A fountain of brown liquid spilled over into the serving flask. The gadget was too complicated but seemed to do the job. And it was light, presumably the point.

She held out her Social Protection travel mug and he filled it.

“In the past two and a half years, there have been four murders in the Black River Valley that involved beheading.” Charis spoke carefully. “That’s out of a total of fifteen murders, sixteen if you count one that got listed as accidental, but looked like a woman offing her abusing husband. The victims were Damon Fry, Warren St Amant, Christopher Gambino, and Aurora Lipsius. And now, they think, Muriel Inglis.”

“But you don’t?”

“My opinions are complicated. Like I said, let’s try to keep it a bit organized. Now, with a serial killer, ‘first victim’ is something you only know later, maybe much later. So, Damon Fry and Warren St Amant were known murders, and their heads were indeed cut off, but they weren’t tied together until the murder of Christopher Gambino.”

“Whose head ended up in a bloodstained bag at a bowling alley.”

“Right. That kind of focused people’s attention, as well as getting a lot of media coverage. But Gambino actually came out as Victim #3. There was a look back over the previous couple of years for common traits, and Damon Fry came up as the earliest in time. A manager at a marketing consulting company, forty-three, divorced father of two, man with a nasty whore habit, Caucasian. Liked to go down on South Main, pick up some drugs, and pick up a prostitute. He never used drugs himself— they were for his woman of that night. He was known for being ... a bit rough. Kind of a pudgy guy, not in the greatest shape, but he could get violent. I think the drugs were really for that, so that it was easier for him, dealing with someone whacked out. And, despite his rep, girls would go with him, because of the drugs.

“Then, two years ago on the night of January 18th, someone killed him. Bruises and cuts on his body: someone had decided to fight back, and fight back hard. No one ever figured out who he had been with that night. Area got rousted, everybody questioned, most of the girls had some story about Damon and his habits, but no one would say she was with him that particular evening. Cause of death was blunt force trauma that might even have been accidental. Near as anyone could tell, he was backing up, tripped over something, and hit his head on a concrete block. They later found the block, and the corner seemed to match the depression in his skull.

“That, of course, took a while to figure out, because when his body was pulled out of the Connecticut River, down around Sunderland, it didn’t have a head. It had been in the water two, three days. Someone saw it swirling around with a bunch of floating cans and milk bottles, downstream of a sewer outfall, coated with ice.

“Head had been removed by a high-quality carbon steel Chinese-style culinary cleaver. And I can say all those words that fast because that’s all anyone ever described the murder weapon as, a ‘high-quality carbon steel Chinese-style culinary cleaver,’ like it was all one word. That’s what the ME made of the scratches on the top remaining vertebrae, guess he was a bit of a cook, and everyone kind of glommed on to it. Bad practice, since one or another feature might be wrong, and accepting them all as necessary can cause you to miss stuff, like something only medium quality, or a heavy chopping knife instead of a cleaver.

“Now, whenever a reporter writes about a killer chopping a body up, he’ll always emphasize the ‘surgical exactness’ of the cutting. Same way any woman involved is a hottie and any kid an honors student. Well, in this case, the cuts didn’t show much surgical ability. Or even culinary. ‘Rushed chopping’ was the order of that night. Took the killer a while to find the gap between the vertebrae, and the neck got pretty well turned into hamburger in the process.”

“You guys did eventually find the head,” Bernal said.

“Yeah, we did. About two weeks later. It was dangling in a culvert, in a sling made of orange safety mesh. Nothing weird had been done to it, except that it had been kept in a freezer, and it was in pretty good shape. Aside from freezer burn. But it didn’t tell us anything.

Theory was, the killer, we guessed a woman at that point, panicked and cut the head off to conceal the body’s identity. That didn’t work, but no one could figure out who the killer was, so whoever it was finally dumped the head.

“Searching for Fry’s head had been a bit of a local hobby for a while, but other than that, it was a fairly normal case. Six months or so goes by. South Main had another regular, guy by the name of Warren St Amant, black guy, looked to be in his fifties, maybe older, but, later, when his body was identified, everyone found out he was thirty-six. Rough life. Rough death.

“He’d moved up here from New York, bus, the way people do. We got some good benefits up here, people say the town’s on the bathroom wall down at Port Authority. I’ve never gone down to check. Warren was a drug addict, with a preference for sedatives of various sorts. Oxycontin was his favorite, but he would do almost anything that depresses your central nervous system. Codeine. Heroin. He wasn’t fussy, Warren. He helped out with the girls, picked up some extra money from the pimps, did favors, people kind of liked him, he got by.

“One day he told some people he knew that he was going to make a big score. As in a big pile of product, somewhere. He was kind of vague as to what it was, and various people had different opinions: case of oxy that someone had stolen from the CVS warehouse, some H condoms a mule had crapped out in a stall in an interstate rest stop, not noticing because one had burst, and he was hallucinating and dying. Even a shoebox full of Quaaludes. Remember ’ludes?”

“No.”

“Ah, kids these days. No contact with the self-screwing habits of their ancestors. Sad. With that particular variant, some guy was getting promoted to CEO and found a shoebox full of his old crap, hash pipes, ’ludes, a rolled-up hundred dollar bill white with old cocaine, who knows, and dumped it in a garbage can. I guess street folks can’t be expected to know much about vetting procedures at Fortune 500 companies, but they had a whole story going.

“Anyway, old Warren was heading for it. Knew where it was. People agreed on that. He went off and disappeared. No one thought much about him, until, a few days later, there was a huge flock of crows on the median of the Mass Pike, down near Springfield, tearing at something. Road crew got out there and found Warren’s head, or what was left of it.

“The body turned up the next day, inside an old boiler in an abandoned apartment building. His head had been chopped off with a guillotine of some sort, spring-loaded was the guess. And he’d died right there, right in the rusty boiler, lying on a bunch of trash, and bled out without being moved. There was no sign of any drugs.

“This time the slice was much neater. It was starting to look like some kind of weird drug-related thing, though no one could come up with a good motive. I suppose if Warren was right, if he’d actually found something valuable, someone else might have killed him for it. But there was no reason to try to conceal his identity, or any of the possible explanations for Damon Fry. And it looked . . . neat, kind of planned, even. Like someone set him up.”