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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

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BOOK: Twisted
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“These were DOAs that came into the Okaloosa Morgue yesterday,” Grove explained, holding the photographs up for all to see. “They came in only hours after Hurricane Darlene had moved through the area—about two hundred miles from here.”
The room got a lot quieter then. The sounds of shifting feet under the table, throats being cleared. The photographs were stark, ghastly close-ups of faces. Bloodless, dead faces. A woman named Suzanne Kennerly. An octogenarian named Barney Kettlekamp. A thirtyish businessman named David Stohlp. Each face was toothless, and each featured a hideous, livid, purplish socket from which a missing eye had been extracted.
“Tom, you should have copies,” Grove said to the speaker box on the table.
“Got 'em,” the voice crackled. “So tell me what we're looking at here.”
“Let's start with the MO,” Grove began, walking slowly around the table, around the backs of the investigators who were glancing over their shoulders at Grove's Xeroxes, each grainy photograph looking pretty darn irrefutable. “At roughly 5 o'clock last night, Hurricane Darlene hit the Gulf Coast around Panama City, with winds of maybe a hundred miles an hour or so, which would make it a category-two storm. Satellite images tracked the storm's eye across the Choctawatchee Bay and into—”
“Beg your pardon, sir?” Nesbitt interrupted. “But what in heaven's name does this have to do with modus operandi? Are you referring to
God's
modus operandi?”
Grove offered the coroner a cold smile. “Time of death on each body, and the location of each dump, correlated perfectly with the position of the eye.”
“Okay, hold your horses a second,” Pilch chimed in. “I want to make sure I'm following this. You're telling us
all
these murders occurred
inside
the eye of a storm.”
Grove did look away from Nesbitt. “Different storms, different eyes ... but yeah.”
“How do you know they didn't happen somewhere else and just
blew
into the path of the eye after the fact?”
“It's possible ... but I think they
happened
in the eye,” Grove asserted. “I went back and checked the illustrious Dr. Nesbitt's time of death on Moses De Lourde. The official record states the professor died between midnight and two o'clock that evening, which tracks perfectly with the moment the eye passed directly over Algiers.”
Another tense beat of silence. Pilch looked at Brenniman, and Brenniman looked at Arliss, and Arliss looked at the rainbow-colored spiral taped to the blackboard: Hurricane Darlene viewed from space, her dark nucleus like a bullet hole in a pristine blanket of gray.
Grove knew they all thought he was crazy, but he didn't care. He was no longer interested in the MO. The modus operandi was the least critical part of any psychological profile, and it was the only part that was fluid and could change according to opportunity. Far more interesting were the
patterns
and
signatures
of the killings—those uniquely personal compulsions that always remained static. The imagery of the eye, the ritualistic fetish of hurricanes, and the obsessive flirtation with Grove himself. Sooner or later, the accumulation of these patterns and details would reveal something far deeper here, far more savage, far more intricate: the purpose.
To the criminologist,
purpose
is the finest edge you can put on a profile. It reveals the raison d'etre of the act. Often the only purpose of a psychopathic killer is to derive sadistic pleasure. But once in a while—and these cases are as rare as albino tigers—a case is so complex and mysterious and seemingly motiveless that the purpose becomes the final touchstone by which the killer will ultimately be caught. That seemed to be a real possibility here: The eyeballs and teeth being removed, the systematic wounds, the murders happening
inside
hurricanes—it would all ultimately reveal purpose. It always did. Take Jeffrey Dahmer, for instance. It would turn out to be his collection of “mementoes” of “souvenirs” ranging from victims' belongings to their actual severed body parts that would ultimately lead profilers to conclude that Dahmer's purpose was to fill an agonizing, bottomless pit of loneliness. In
this
case, Grove suspected a purpose far more ritualistic and obscure. But he didn't have it yet.
Not yet.
“The caribineer is all smooth glove,” Grove went on. “No latent prints. The perp is A-positive, size eleven double-E shoe. Lab results also indicate that the killer may very well have disabled the victims before killing them. Traces of sodium pentobarbital were found in the victims' bloodstream, as well as indications they were tortured before they lost their lives.”
“How do we know this?” Detective Brenniman asked in a smoky baritone.
Grove pointed to one of the forensic shots of De Lourde's upper palate, then indicated a lab report thumbtacked to a bulletin board on the wall. “These ridged wounds here, I'm convinced, were all man-made, the teeth removed by an instrument, and the increase in serotonin and free histamine levels in the wound sites indicates that the victims lived for at least fifteen minutes after the teeth and eyeballs were extracted.”
Stony silence in the room.
A long pause.
“Let me jump in here for a second, gentlemen,” Geisel's voice crackled from the squawk box.
Grove looked at the speaker. “Go ahead, Tom.”
“For the sake of argument here, let's say we were going to allocate resources on this thing—”
“Whoa there, Tonto,” Chief Marvin Pilch broke in, glaring at the talk box. “LBI is pretty near tapped out, and we have been since Katrina... . I mean, shit, we got dozens of active case files right now screamin' for attention.”
“I understand that, Chief.” Geisel's voice was monumentally patient. “I'm not saying we're going to funnel anything away from state or local. I'm just trying to figure out where we stand here. Ulysses, hypothetically speaking, what exactly would you need from us on this situation?”
Grove's chest tightened with nervous tension as he measured his words. He needed Geisel right now. He needed the section chief to be on his side on this thing. It had been over a year since Grove had worked on an active case, and now he was being drawn into one whether he liked it or not. His gut burned with urgency as he said, “I'm not asking for resources, I'm just asking for access. Access to files, to crime scenes, to databases. Basically, Tom, I'm asking to be put back on active duty here. That's all.”
Now there was a long, agonizing silence, during which throats were cleared and gazes were averted.
Grove knew he had developed a reputation over the years as a flake. And his last case had only cemented this image in people's minds—this notion of Grove as an eccentric egghead who had been pushed over the edge by too many scuffles with the monster. Rumor had it that Grove was damaged goods now, a shell-shocked head case who should just retire and write books or teach abnormal psychology at some junior college in the sticks. But what nobody at the bureau knew was that Grove had been changed by the Sun City debacle.
The mysterious sickness that had overtaken Grove at the end of Sun City—the strange “psychosis” that could only be cured, ultimately, by ancient ritual—had somehow launched Grove on a new trajectory. He was now being tugged along by something unseen, something unspoken, some kind of secret conflict that he had yet to figure out. But it was there, it was present at all times now, in the shadows around him, in the clues being left behind,
purposely
, by this bizarre lurker in the wind.
“I'm going to have to get back to you on this,” Geisel's voice finally informed the room.
“Fine, fine ...
whatever.
” Grove slammed his briefcase shut, his face stinging as though it had been slapped. His life was on the line here. Hundreds of future victims of this escalating murder machine ... and Geisel was
going to have to get back to him on this?
“Ulysses—”
“No, that's okay. I understand where you're coming from, Tom. I do.”
Then Grove strode across the room to the door. He paused before leaving, turning back to the others. “Gentlemen ... I thank you for your time.”
Then he walked out.
 
 
Grove got halfway across the parking lot, the edges of which bordered a swampy landfill, the sky low and dark above it, when his cell phone began chirping. He dug it out of his pocket and looked at the display. It was a Virginia prefix. Grove snapped it open. “What, Tom?”
The section chief's gravelly voice: “I can't think of too many other profilers who would storm out of a meeting on me like that.”
“What do you want from me, Tom?”
“You really think this perp is trying to lure you into a trap of some kind?”
Grove sighed. “What do you want me to say?”
“And you don't think it's too early for you to be traipsing off on a case?”
Grove climbed into his rental car and sat behind the wheel for a moment with the phone pressed against his ear. “Like I said, I don't have a choice. This case chose
me.
”
Geisel was silent a moment. “You're going to use yourself as bait, aren't you?”
“Tom—”
“Don't answer. I don't want to know, I don't.”
“I'm going to find this guy, Tom, and when I do, I'm going to take him down. Simple as that.”
After another pause: “Ulysses ... this perp ... first of all, he killed your friend. That's a conflict of interest, and that's grounds for reassignment.”
Grove gripped the phone a little tighter. “Is this conversation coming to an end?”
“I didn't say I was going to reassign you. But this thing has got to be kept off the books. I don't assign my profilers to vengeance jobs. Besides, you're a consultant, you're not Tactical. How many times do I have to tell you that?”
Grove stared at the windshield, the water droplets on the outside surface looking like diamonds in the pale light. “What do you want me to do?”
“It's up to you. We never had this conversation. This is your deal.”
“I hear ya.”
Geisel's voice got sharp and hard then. “And if I find out you found this guy, and you didn't call in Tac for backup, I will personally see to it that you spend the autumn of your career as a traffic guard. Comprendé?”
“Anything else?”
“Nope.”
“I gotta go, Tom.” Grove started the car. “I'll call you at home in a couple of days.”
“Uly, wait!”
Grove paused before snapping the phone shut. “What is it?”
The longest pause of them all now.
Geisel's voice returned at last, soft and low: “Go catch this son of a bitch.”
PART II
The Killing Jar
These who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind.
—Old Testament, Hosea 8:7
5
At O'Hare, Maura County bought a ticket to San Francisco, then waited in one of airport's innumerable coffee kiosks, perching herself on a sad little plastic stool, composing a note to Ulysses Grove in her head. It wasn't going to be easy. There was so much she wanted to say to him, so many bittersweet feelings. She had started the note a dozen times in her head on the flight from New Orleans to Chicago but simply had not been able to come up with the right words.
She didn't want to hurt him.
At last, she opened the little spiral notebook that she carried with her at all times. It was the same dog-eared, salmon-colored Mead notebook in which she had recorded her nightmares at the behest of her therapist. She had been keeping the dream journal ever since the Sun City fiasco.
Getting kidnapped by a deranged, psychotic serial killer was bad enough. The physical trauma alone had necessitated weeks of treatments and convalescence. Maura had been subjected to three full-blown blood transfusions, countless stitches, and a metal pin surgically inserted into her knee where the cartilage had been violently torn away. She had walked with a cane for nearly three months. But that stuff had been the easy part. It gave her something to write about in her articles and books, and something to talk about in interviews.
The hard part was the
psychological
scarring. It seemed to come out of nowhere—months after the fact—just when she thought she was truly over the ordeal. It started with sudden and chronic insomnia. Every creak in her apartment, every whisper of her air conditioner, every flutter of the breeze through her blinds started sounding more and more sinister and started pegging her eyes open like an electrical jolt. But whenever she closed her eyes she saw the
face
: the gaunt, stoic, pasty face of the killer Richard Ackerman.
Phase two was even harder to take. She started seeing Ackerman's ghostly face everywhere she went. In cars at stoplights, in crowds at train stations, behind store windows. That was when she finally broke down and sought out help from a Napa Valley stress specialist named Dr. Herbert Ford. The shrink helped her immensely by letting her vent, and prescribing some decent medication.
But one thing that remained unresolved in her life was her relationship with Grove. Dr. Ford thought it went far deeper than mere romantic attraction. He thought there was a part of Maura that was attracted to Grove's world, even attracted to the danger of it. But Maura maintained that it was exactly that—the grisly aspect of Grove's profession—that was keeping her from consummating anything.
Which was precisely why she was now sitting in a busy airport, trying to compose a proper note to the man. She turned to a blank page and started in earnest:
Dear Ulysses,
Where to begin? Okay ... what I wanted to tell you ... well, let me just blurt it out: I can't handle you and me. I just can't manage it. I love you, Ulysses, and I think I always will, but I'm writing this letter because it's easier to articulate my feelings and thoughts on paper than doing it while staring into your big brown eyes. You know, those amazing eyes can be intimidating, kiddo. But never fear: This is no “Dear John” letter. Okay? It's not going to be one of those “it's not you, it's me” type things, because the truth is, it's
both
of us. For my part, I don't have the stomach for your avenging angel routine. I just don't. I know I've said it a million times before, but I just can't handle all the excitement. But I've also come to the conclusion that I can't ask you to change just for my own selfish purposes. I can't ask you to shed that part of your life like a dead skin or something.
This
is who you are. You are a person who lives to chase down evil fucking freaks (pardon my French). But I also think you might want to take a long, hard look at yourself. Like the twelve-steppers say: Take a searching moral inventory ... because your behavior is becoming a compulsion, and when it becomes a compulsion it's a problem. I really believe this. Your profiler thing is becoming a problem. Or maybe I should say your
obsession
with it is the problem. It's not just because of the dangers involved (although, God knows, there's plenty of those), but it's more because you seem to have this weird tunnel vision that blocks out any other part of your life. It's kind of hard to explain. But the truth is, I'm worried about you. Really I am. Maybe you could see somebody. Maybe you should
“Christ, this is ridiculous.” She hissed the words under her breath, tore out the page, and wadded it into a ball. Then she tossed it into the trash receptacle next to the coffee counter. The acne-scarred teenager behind the counter stared at her, and she offered him an exasperated smile.
She just could not put her feelings into words. Was it because she still wanted to be with Grove? Was it because she was a born journalist, and was too ambitious to let this amazing relationship go? She closed the notebook and let out a pained sigh, sitting back in the stool and watching the ebb and flow of passengers passing through the terminal.
Maura found airports oddly comforting: all the hurly-burly action, all the transient noise and cross-sections of middle-class travelers bustling silently back and forth across desolate corridors—all of it hermetically sealed in air-conditioned, single-serving stasis. It reminded her of her childhood, growing up on Long Island. Her father, who had been a sportswriter for the
Daily News
, would take her down to Penn Station, and they would get ice cream cones and sit on one of the burnished oak benches and just watch the passersby.
Now, thirty-odd years later, her beloved father long ago claimed by lung cancer, she found herself sitting next to a Cinna-Bunz, craving a cigarette (she was trying to quit for the third time in as many years), and basically doing the same thing her father and she used to do.
She watched it all. She watched the harried businessmen hustling toward their gates, murmuring compulsively into cell phones. She watched frazzled mothers lugging children and strollers and equipment toward exits. She watched lithe and shapely flight attendants effortlessly pulling neat little overnight cases on little wheels, walking two or three abreast, idly chatting, looking like android soldiers marching toward some silent conflict.
Finally she got up to get a cup of coffee and passed a newspaper vending machine, when she saw a headline that caught her eye.
She stopped. And stared. It wasn't really the headline per se that gave her such pause:
WORST HURRICANE SEASON ON RECORD: IS THE EAST COAST NEXT
? That was mildly attention-getting, considering it was ostensibly a hurricane that had apparently broken the back of her relationship with Grove. But that's not what sent the little
zing
of electricity through her memory circuits. It was the accompanying graphic: a huge, multicolored swirl of aerial thermophotography.
The whirlwind from space
.
For a moment, Maura just stood there, staring at that little squat, glass case with the
Chicago Tribune
logo on the side, trying to figure out why that sinister rainbow-colored image was giving her the jimjams.
All at once, she remembered the article she had written for
Discover
so many years ago. It had been a spec job, about six thousand words of investigative prose. She remembered poring through those thermographic aerial shots of hurricanes for endless hours at the Smithsonian, and scouring the National Archives, and the Library of Congress, and even the great European libraries like the Biblioteca Pasolini and the Karlsruh Bibliothek. This was in the dark ages of the late 1980s, while Maura was still a freelancer, and the Internet was still a few years away, still merely cocktail conversation among computer geeks. But what had sunk a hook into Maura back then and had gotten her a cover byline—in fact, what had truly spooked the hell out of her—was now bleating in her brain like a clarion horn.
“Oh my God, the
other
one
.
”
The words blurted out of Maura, almost unconsciously, startling an elderly woman standing next to her, who was searching through a little rubber coin purse. The old blue-haired woman looked up with a thunderstruck expression on her face. Maura blinked and backed away, thinking to herself:
No way ... no way. But Jesus, what if?
She hurried back to the bench where her carry-on bag sat on the floor next to her chair. It was a little nylon rucksack containing her purse, a few magazines, an emergency pack of Marlboro Greens, a notebook, and her cell phone. She fished in it and grabbed the phone.
She dialed Grove's cell phone number on the off chance she might get through. She expected to hear the obnoxious recording from AT&T or Southern Bell or whoever it was these days that controlled the airwaves or the satellite or whatever it was out there that connected wireless communications. She was surprised, after only a few rings, to hear a click and then Grove's comforting, silky baritone: “Hi, this is Ulysses, you've reached my personal voice mail, and I'm away right now, but leave a message and I'll get right back to you.”
After the beep, Maura tried to keep her voice steady and casual: “Ulysses, it's me, Maura, I'm ... well, it's a long story. I need to talk to you about something. It's too complicated to leave on your voice mail but it's very important, Ulysses, it's about your theory that people are getting murdered during hurricanes. It's about an article I wrote for
Discover
a long time ago.”
She paused and thought about it for a moment. “Tell you what ... I don't know when you'll get this, but I'm in Chicago now, and I think I'll page you. Call me as soon as you can. Hope you're okay and you didn't get eaten by an alligator in those woods. Anyway ... call me.”
She thumbed the End button, then called him back and tried paging him.
 
 
Grove was heading east on Highway 10 in a rented Chevy Geo, chasing the next hurricane, when her page came through. He had left Baton Rouge earlier that day, and now, as darkness rolled over the Florida panhandle, he reached down with his free hand, dug his phone out of the map case, and checked the display. A 415 area code told him it was Maura, and he grinned in spite of his nerves.
“There she is,” he muttered and quickly punched in her wireless number.
He got a recording.
“Shit,” Grove whispered under his breath, and then, at the sound of the beep, he raised his voice loud enough to be heard over the whine of the wheels: “It's me, it's Ulysses, trying to reach you, call me back as soon as you can, I'm in Florida, and I'm heading east, toward the East Coast, where the next big storm is heading. I'm gonna try and get inside the eye, if possible, because I have a feeling that's where this guy wants me, because that's where he operates, so that's where I gotta go. Anyway ... I'm sorry I dragged you into all this. Please call as soon as you get this.”
He thumbed off the phone and put it back in the map case, then let out a sigh.
He had been on the road for five hours now without a break, all the revelations swirling through his brain—
this freak is on a spree now, the death toll rising with each storm, De Lourde in New Orleans, three separate victims back in Panama City, so how many next time? And why? Why! Just to lure me into the storm? It doesn't make any kind of sense yet! Yet! Yet! YET!
The stress was starting to get to Grove. He was sore and hungry and tired and covered with all manner of road grime. He badly needed food and rest and maybe even a little medication. He had forgotten to take his antidepressant and antianxiety meds that morning, and he felt that terrible tightness in his gut that signaled a panic attack coming on. Unbeknownst to any of his colleagues or friends, he had been having the momentary attacks since his tribulations on Sun City, and he had almost gotten used to them.
Almost.
But now there was a counterpoint to the dark dread stirring in his solar plexus, almost like an undertow deep down inside him, a strange mixture of restlessness and exhilaration. He was on that investigative “vector” again, relentlessly following leads, working a case. He started tapping his foot, and tapped it ceaselessly throughout the next hundred miles.
He drove east through the misty, waning light, trying in vain to reach Maura on her cell phone.
Around Pensacola, as darkness set in, he managed to retrieve Maura's message about her being in Chicago—O'Hare Airport, to be exact—and having something terribly important to tell Grove about people getting killed in hurricanes. Nothing about walking out on him in such a state of agitation in New Orleans, though, nothing about their tattered relationship. Grove wondered if she was really done with him. But repeated attempts to reconnect with Maura's cell phone had been futile.
In the shifting bands of storms rolling across Florida, cellular connections were miserable.
By midnight Grove had reached Georgia, and was starting to drift intermittently across the center lines. His fatigue was catching up with him. He needed to find a roadside motel and rest his eyes, maybe have something to eat. Just for a few hours. Maybe take his medication. Then he'd be good as new. Then he'd finally be able to get his notebook full of disparate forensic details laid out in the logical order.
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