Vicious (20 page)

Mitch’s posture fell. “Man, you always ruin a punch line. But yeah … and I made it easy for you to see,” he said as he pouted. “I turned the pages down. Easy to see a pattern when it’s all that’s in front of you…”

“What do you mean, flagged?” asked Sydney, standing on her tiptoes to see the pages.

“Look,” Victor said, gesturing to the profiles. “What do all these people have in common?”

Syd squinted at the paper, but shook her head.

“The middle names,” said Victor.

Sydney read them aloud. “Elise, Elington, Elissa … They all have ‘Eli’ in them.”

“Exactly,” said Mitch. “They’ve been flagged. Specifically for our friend, Eli. Which means—”

“He’s working with the cops,” said Victor. “Here in Merit.”

Sydney stared down at the photo of the girl with the blue hair. “How can you be sure?” she asked. “What if it’s a coincidence?”

Mitch looked smug. “Because I did my homework. I cross-checked the theory by pulling up some of their old profiles, ‘Persons of Interest’ now deceased, all of which had conveniently found their way into the digital trash bin. Which is its own red flag, by the way, but I found matches to Eli’s killings over the last four months.” He dropped the dead EO folder on the table. “Including your man Barry Lynch. The one you just spent the night digging up.”

Victor had started to pace.

“It gets better,” said Mitch. “The flagged profiles were created by one of two cops.” He tapped the top right corner of a page. “Officer Frederick Dane. Or Detective Mark Stell.”

Victor’s chest tightened. Stell. What were the odds? The man who’d had Victor arrested ten years ago, the one who’d been on EO duty at the Lockland precinct, and the one who, when Victor recovered from his multiple gunshot wounds, personally escorted him to the isolation wing of Wrighton Penitentiary. Stell’s involvement, along with Eli’s testimony, was the reason Victor spent five years in solitary confinement (he wasn’t declared an EO on the records, of course, only an extreme danger to himself and others, and it had taken him half a decade of deliberately not hurting anyone—at least not in a conscious or appreciable way—to get himself integrated).

“You listening?” asked Mitch.

Victor nodded absently. “The men flagging the profiles, they are, or have been, in direct contact with Eli.”

“Exactly.”

Victor toasted the air with his water, his thoughts miles away. “Bravo, Mitch.” He turned to Sydney. “You hungry?”

But Sydney didn’t seem to be listening. She had taken up the folder with the dead EOs, and was flipping through, almost absently, when she stopped. Victor looked over her shoulder and saw what she saw. Short blond hair and water blue eyes stared up at her beside a cleanly printed name: Sydney Elinor Clarke.

“My middle name is Marion,” she said quietly. “And he thinks I’m dead.”

Victor stooped over and swiped the page. He folded the paper and tucked it inside his shirt pocket with a wink.

“Not for long,” he said, tapping his watch. “Not for long.”

III

THIS MORNING

TIDINGS WELL BANK

ELI
parked a block and a half from the yellow tape of the crime scene barrier, and repositioned the prop glasses on his nose before getting out. He could see, as he wound his way behind the eyes of the crowd of morbid spectators and the gathering photographers, to the back of the bank, and the crime was no longer in progress. People lingered, lights flashed, but the relative quiet—sirenless, gunless, shoutless—told him enough.

He stiffened when he saw Detective Stell, even though Serena promised it was safe. Still, the detective had come to Merit a few months before to investigate a string of killings in the area—Eli’s handiwork, of course—and even Serena’s assurances couldn’t entirely wipe away Eli’s doubt regarding the detective’s loyalty. Stell, who now had salt-and-pepper hair and a permanent crease between his eyes, met him behind the building, and lifted the tape so he could pass. Eli pushed the prop glasses up his nose a second time. They were a fraction too big.

“How Clark Kent of you,” said Stell drily. Eli was not in the mood.

“Where is he?”

“Dead.” The detective led the way into the bank.

“I told you I wanted him alive.”

“Didn’t have a choice. He started firing, or whatever you want to call it. Couldn’t aim worth a damn. Like that power of his was on the fritz. Didn’t stop him from making a mess, though.”

“Civilians?”

“No, he ordered those all out.” They reached a black sheet cast over a vaguely human shape. Stell nudged it with his boot. “Media wants to know why a madman who’s supposed to be dead enters a bank with a weapon, but doesn’t try to rob it, and doesn’t take any prisoners. All he does is kick everyone out, and fire at the air and scream and scream for someone named Eli Ever.”

“You should have never let that story run last week.”

“Can’t stop the press from using their eyes, Eli. You’re the one who wanted to make a scene.”

Eli didn’t like the man’s tone, had never liked it, never trusted the thread of combativeness that ran through it.

“I needed a demonstration,” Eli growled. He didn’t want to admit that there was more to it than that, that he’d
wanted
an audience. It had been Serena’s idea, he was sure, before it became his.

“A demonstration is one thing,” said Stell. “But did you need a spectacle?”

“It covered up the murder,” said Eli as he threw back the black sheet. “How was I supposed to know he wouldn’t stay dead?” Barry Lynch’s brown eyes gazed up at him, shallow and dead. He could hear the whispers from the other cops milling around, hushed voices wondering who he was, what he was doing there. He tried to look official as he stared down at the dead man.

“You dragged me out here for nothing,” he said under his breath. “Now that he’s dead.”

“Forgive me, but he was dead before, remember? And besides,” added Stell, “this time he left a note.”

Stell handed Eli a plastic bag. Inside was a crumpled piece of paper. He withdrew the paper and unfolded it gingerly.

It was a stick-figure drawing. Two people holding hands. A thin man in black and a girl, half his height with short hair, and wide eyes. The stick-girl’s head was cocked slightly, and a small red spot marked her arm. Three similar spots, no bigger than periods, dotted the stick-man’s chest. The stick-man’s mouth was nothing more than a faint grim line.

Beneath the drawing ran a single sentence:
I made a friend.

Victor.

“You okay?”

Eli blinked, felt the cop’s hand on his arm. He slid free, folded the paper, and put it in his pocket before anyone could see or say otherwise.

“Get rid of the body,” he said to Stell. “Burn it this time.”

Eli went back the way he’d come. He didn’t stop, not until he was safely in his car. In the relative privacy of the side street in Merit, he pressed his hand against the drawing in his pocket, and a phantom pain started in his stomach.

Victor lifted the knife from the table. “You called the cops and you accused me of being an EO. I didn’t rat
you
out, you know. I could have. Why would you tell them something so silly? Did you know they have special people that come in if there’s an EO suspected? Some guy named Stell. Did you know that?”

“You’ve lost it.” Eli sidestepped. “Put the knife down. It’s not like you can hurt me.”

Victor smiled then. He looked like someone else. Eli tried to step back, but the wall came up behind him. The knife buried itself in his stomach. He felt the tip scratch at the skin of his back. The pain had been sharp, persistent, dragging itself out instead of flashing forward and dissolving.

“You know what I figured out?” Victor growled.
“
Watching you in the street that night, picking the glass from your hand?
You can’t heal yourself until I take the knife out.” He twisted it, and pain exploded behind Eli’s eyes, a dozen colors. He groaned and began to slide down the wall, but Victor hoisted him up by the handle.

“I’m not even using my gift yet,” Victor said. “It’s not as flashy as yours, but it’s rather effective. Want to see it?”

Eli swallowed hard, and dialed Serena as he put the car in gear and headed for the hotel. He didn’t wait for her to speak.

“We have a problem.”

IV

TEN YEARS AGO

LOCKLAND UNIVERSITY

ELI
Ever sat on the steps of his apartment in the cold morning and ran his fingers through his hair before realizing they were covered in blood. Caution tape surrounded him in streamers of yellow, too bright against the dull winter dawn. Red and blue lights dotted the icy ground and every time he looked at them, he ended up spending minutes trying to blink the colors away.

“If you could tell us one more time…,” said a young cop.

Eli touched his stomach, the echo of pain still there even though the skin had healed. He rubbed his hands together and watched blood flake off into the sidewalk snow. He wove a distress he wasn’t sure he felt back into his voice as he recounted everything from Victor’s panicked call the night before, confessing to Angie’s murder, to his sudden appearance in their living room, gun in hand. Eli left out the knives, having scrubbed and returned them to their drawers before the police arrived. It was odd, the way his brain had made space around the weedy panic, helping his hands and legs do what needed to be done even as a fading voice in the back of his mind screamed and his best friend lay shot full of holes on their living room floor. Something in Eli had gone missing—fear, that’s what he’d told Victor—right down the drain with the icy bath water.

“So you wrested the gun from Mr. Vale.” Wrested had been Eli’s word, not the officer’s.

“I taught a self-defense seminar last summer,” he lied. “It’s not that hard.”

And then he pushed himself shakily to his feet. He was covered in blood, arms curled carefully around his ribs to hide the knife hole in his shirt. Two other officers had already questioned him about it. He’d told them he got lucky. He didn’t know how the weapon could have missed him. But it did. Obviously. Look, hole in shirt, no hole in Eli. Fortunately the cops had been too interested in Victor’s bleeding out on the hardwood floor to care much about Eli’s magic trick.
One lucky man,
they muttered, and he wasn’t sure if they’d been talking about him, or Victor, who had managed to avoid dying, for now.

“And then you shot him three times.”

“I was distraught. He’d just killed my girlfriend.” Eli wondered if he was in shock, if that was the thing keeping Angie’s death from sinking in the way the knife had. He wanted to care, he wanted to care
so badly,
but there was this gap between what he felt and what he wanted to feel, a space where something important had been carved out. And it was growing. He’d told Victor the thing he lost was his fear but that wasn’t quite true because he was still scared. He was scared of that rift.

“And then?” prompted the cop.

Eli rubbed his eyes. “And then he came after me. I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. I tried not to kill him.” He swallowed, wishing he had a glass of water. “Look, do you think I could go clean up?” he asked, gesturing to his ruined clothes. “I need to go see Angie … her body.” The officer called past the yellow tape, and was given the all-clear. The ambulance was long gone. All that was left was a mess. The officer held up the tape to let him pass.

A trail of red wound through the living room. Eli stopped and stared at it. The fight replayed behind his eyes as relentlessly as the police lights, and he forced himself to veer toward the bathroom. When he caught sight of himself in the bank of mirrors, he stifled a laugh. One of those ill, halfway-to-tears laughs. Blood stained his shirt. His pants. His face. His hair. Eli did his best to wash it off, scrubbing his arms OR-style in the sink. His favorite shirt, a bold red one that Victor always said made him look like a ripe tomato, was ruined.

Victor. Victor was wrong. About everything.

“If I’m missing something, then so are you. Life is about compromises. Or did you think because you put yourself in God’s hands that He would make you all you were and more?”

“He did,” said Eli aloud to the sink. He did. He would. He had to. Whatever this gap was, it was there for a reason, there to make him stronger. He had to believe that.

Eli washed his face, cupped water over his hair until the red ran out of it. He pulled on fresh clothes, and was just about to duck back under the yellow tape across his front door when he caught the end of the young officer’s remark to another cop.

“Yeah, Detective Stell’s on his way.”

Eli paused, and stepped backward into the apartment.

“Did you know they have special people that come in if there’s an EO suspected? Some guy named Stell. I bet you didn’t know that.”

Eli turned, made a line for the back door, only to find his path blocked by a very large cop.

“Everything all right, sir?” asked the cop. Eli gave a slow nod.

“Door’s taped,” he said. “Just trying to get out of everyone’s way.”

The large cop nodded, and stepped aside. Eli was through the back door and into the small communal courtyard by the time the large officer reached the younger one. He didn’t look guilty, he told himself. Not yet.

Victor was the guilty one. The Victor that he knew was dead, replaced by something cold and vicious. A twisted, violent version of himself. Victor had never been good, or sweet—he’d always had a sharp edge; Eli had been drawn to the metallic glint of it—but he’d never been this. A murderer. A monster. After all, he’d
killed Angie.
How? How had it happened? With pain? Was that possible? The medical part of his mind tried to break it down. A heart attack? Would the pain cause a short-circuit, like electricity? Would the body shut down? Would the functions freeze? He dug his nails into his palms. This was
Angie.
Not a science experiment. A person. The one who’d made him feel better, saner, kept him afloat when his mind began to sink. Was that it, then? Was Angie the missing thing? Wouldn’t it be lovely to make the gap another person instead of a part of himself? But no, that wasn’t it. Angie had helped, she’d always helped, but he’d felt the hole before she died, felt it even before
he
died. The feeling—the
lack
of it—had only ever come in glimpses, like a cloud passing overhead. But from the moment he woke up on the bathroom floor, the shadow had settled over him, a sign that something was wrong.