At the Stroke of Madness

by Alex Kava

  He felt the anger rising but it came with bile, threatening to back up from his stomach. He could taste it. No, no. He couldn’t be sick. He wouldn’t. He mustn’t think about the chair. No anger. He couldn’t afford to make himself sick.

  He placed the tray on the table next to her and avoided looking at the scarred chair arm.

  “You must be hungry,” he said, as he pulled up a stool from his workbench.

  “I don’t feel so good, Sonny,” she mumbled. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Why? Why? Because you must be hungry,” he said in a singsong voice, a fake happy voice he had learned so well from his mother. “You ate all of your sandwich but that was hours ago.”

  “Can’t we just talk for a while?” she insisted. And he thought her voice sounded whiny. He hadn’t noticed before how whiny her voice was.

  He scooped up a spoonful of soup and held it in front of her, waiting for her to open her mouth. She only stared at him.

  “Open wide,” he instructed.

  She continued to stare.

  He brought the spoon to her lips and began to wedge it in, but she kept her lips pursed tight. Suddenly she jerked her head away to the side, so abruptly that she almost knocked the spoon out of his hand and did end up spilling it on his shirtsleeve.

  He tasted the bile again. Oh, God! He couldn’t be sick. He felt his face grow hot. But he scooped up another spoonful and held it in front of her again.

  “Come on, now, you have to eat.”

  She turned her head slowly to look at him, this time the glaze clearing a bit, revealing her defiance.

  “Not until we talk.”

  “Look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he told her, continuing to keep his happy voice, despite the turmoil brewing in his stomach. “Now, open up.”

  He brought the spoon to her lips again, but this time she raised her restrained hand just enough to knock his elbow. It spilled all over his trousers. He’d have to change before work.

  He rose slowly to his feet, taking his time to roll up the soiled sleeves of his shirt. A difficult task when his hands were shaking and his fingers were balling up into fists. He could feel the transformation, a lead-hot iron stabbing into his guts. And he could see the transformation in the way she looked at him. Whatever drugged courage had possessed her was gone now. She struggled against the restraints, kicking at the chair legs and smacking the ankle shackles against the wood, leaving more grooves in the precious wood.

  “I guess you’ve chosen to do this the hard way,” he said through gritted teeth. This time he left the spoon on the tray, and he picked up the bowl of soup.

  CHAPTER 40

  West Haven, Connecticut

  Maggie wasn’t sure what she was doing here. There were other places she needed to check out, coincidences she needed to follow up on. Like Jacob Marley Jr. and whether or not anyone called him Sonny. Or if Wally Hobbs’s contract to dig graves for the funeral home had anything to do with Steve Earlman not staying buried. Not to mention the address she had found imprinted on Joan Begley’s hotel notepad, and whether or not it was the meeting place for a rendezvous that may have been her last. There were plenty of places where she needed to look for answers and she wasn’t sure this was one of them. Yet, here she was at the University of New Haven.

  The aroma filled the classroom laboratory. Maggie thought it smelled like beef broth. And annoyingly good. Professor Adam Bonzado stood over the industrial-size stove, lifting the lids of several steaming pots, stirring one with a wooden spoon before replacing the lids and turning down the gas flame. Today he wore a purple-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt with blue jeans and high-top sneakers. His plastic goggles were down around his neck, sharing swing space with a paper surgical mask. He glanced at her over his shoulder. Then did a double take, surprised to see her.

  “You’re early,” he said.

  “I didn’t have as much trouble finding the campus as I thought I might. Would you rather I go wander and come back?”

  “No, no, not at all. I’ve got lots to show you.” He checked the pots one more time and turned to give her his attention. “Welcome to our humble lab.” He waved a hand over the area. “Come take a look.”

  Maggie let her eyes take in the shelves of specimen jars and vials, odd assortments and sizes, some makeshift baby-food jars alongside bell jars and pickle jars with scientific labels covering the name brands. From a corner came the soft whirr of a dehumidifier. The room felt cool, and beneath the aroma of soup broth there was a trace of cleaning supplies, perhaps a hint of ammonia. The countertops were filled with microscopes and a scattered, strange collection of tools, from an impressive jawlike clamp without teeth to small forceps and an array of every sized brush imaginable.

  In another corner were two huge plastic bubbles. Maggie guessed they were odor hoods. She could hear the quiet wheezing of ventilation fans from inside the contraptions that reminded her of old-fashioned beauty parlor dryers. The contents below, however, quickly dispelled that image. In the double sink underneath the two hoods Maggie could see skeletal remains, soaking in what appeared to be a sudsy solution. A hand stuck up out of the foam as if waving to her, most of the flesh gone.

  And then there were the tables, six-foot-long tables, three of them between the aisles, a fleshless village of skulls and bones. Several skulls stared back at her. Others, too wounded to sit up, lay with hollow sockets staring at the wall or gazing at the ceiling. The bones were a variety of sizes and shapes and pieces, as well as colors. Some were sooty black, others creamy white, some dirty gray and still others a buttery yellow—butterscotch came to Maggie’s mind. Some were laid out carefully as if reconstructing a puzzle. Others were tangled in cardboard boxes at the edge of the tables, waiting to be sorted, waiting to tell their story.

  “Let me finish this, okay? Then I want to show you a few interesting things I’ve discovered.”

  Bonzado put on a pair of latex gloves, then put another pair over the first. He pulled the plastic goggles and mask in place, then grabbed what looked like an oven mitt and lifted the lid off one of the pots. He waited for the steam to clear, then took an oversize wooden spoon and began fishing out what looked like chunks of boiled meat and fat and carefully placed them into an open, waiting plastic bag.

  “We save as much of the tissue as we can,” he explained, raising his voice to get through the mask in what sounded like a practiced tone, perhaps his teaching voice. “These bags are great. They’re like 4.5 mil thick so we can heat-seal them, make them airtight and throw them in the freezer. Plus, they can go directly from the freezer to a boiling pot or the microwave.”

  Maggie couldn’t help thinking he sounded like a chef on one of those cable cooking shows.

  “The periosteum is what takes the longest to remove,” he said, holding up a long thin piece of what looked like gristle. “I’m sorry—” he looked at her over his goggles “—I hope I’m not being condescending. You probably know all this stuff.”

  “No, no. Go on. I’m quite sure there’s a thing or two I don’t know.” The truth was, despite all the time she’d spent hanging around the FBI’s crime lab to pester Keith Ganza, she had never been to an anthropological lab, least of all, a teaching one. The surroundings fascinated her. And Bonzado’s enthusiasm and style were far from condescending. He simply seemed excited to share. His excitement could be contagious.

  “We try to get all the way down to the bone,” he continued while he filled one plastic bag and then another. “Usually using some dishwashing detergent. My personal preference is Arm & Hammer’s Super Washing Soda,” he said, holding up the container and sounding like a commercial, “and a good long, slow boil. That usually does the trick. But this stuff takes forever.”

  “The periosteum?”

  “That’s right.” He smiled at her, another practiced response for his students, but practiced or not, Adam Bonzado’s smiles always seemed genuine, even to a trained FBI profiler. “All our bones are covered with it. It
’s this tough fibrous material. I tell my students that a really gross comparison is when you eat barbecue ribs and there’s that tough part that sticks to the ribs. You know the stuff I’m talking about?”

  She simply nodded.

  “That’s the pig’s periosteum.”

  This time she rewarded him with a smile and he seemed pleased, all the while she was thinking she probably wouldn’t be eating barbecue ribs any time soon. It surprised her that little things like that would make a difference, considering what didn’t bother her. But to this day she still couldn’t eat anything Keith Ganza offered her from the small refrigerator he kept in his lab. Maggie looked at it as a good sign. A sign that she hadn’t grown so jaded she could eat a tuna salad sandwich after it had shared a shelf with human body tissue.

  “I’ll let these others boil,” he told her while he heat-sealed the two newly filled plastic bags and crossed the room to place them in the freezer. He stopped at the sink to pull off the gloves and wash his hands. He reached for a small bottle of what Maggie could see was vanilla extract, dabbing some onto his hands and rubbing it in. Then he started removing his goggles and mask, but hurried back to the stove when one of the pots started boiling over.

  He lifted the lid and grabbed a clean wooden spoon to stir. He turned down the flame and then absently scooped out a spoonful and brought it to his lips, blowing on it before he did the unthinkable—he took a sip from the spoon.

  “What the hell are you doing!”

  He glanced at her, then quickly back at the stove and pot before his face flushed with embarrassment. “Oh, jeez! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to freak you out. It’s my lunch.” But her look mustn’t have convinced him, so he scooped up more as evidence, showing her what she could now identify as carrots, green beans, maybe some potatoes. “It’s just vegetable beef soup. Really.” He fumbled around the countertop and finally held up the can. “See. It’s just soup. Campbell’s. Mmm-mm…good.”

  CHAPTER 41

  “I guess I get so used to being around this all day, I forget. Sorry about that,” Bonzado apologized for the third time. “Let me make it up to you. How ’bout I take you out to dinner?”

  “You don’t have to do that. Really. It’s not a problem. It just surprised me, is all.”

  “No, really, I insist. There’s a place called Giovani’s close to the Ramada.”

  “Okay, if you insist.”

  “Now, let me show you some stuff.” He finished peeling off the mask and shoved the goggles up atop his head, messing his hair and not caring. Finally he returned to his enthusiastic self. “On to our body-snatcher case.”

  “Body snatcher?”

  “That’s what the kids are calling him. Actually, I think that’s what they’re calling him in the news media, too. You have to admit, it has a ring to it. Don’t you FBI types nickname your killers?”

  “I think everyone watches too much TV.” But it was true. They often did give killers nicknames. She remembered some of her most recent ones: the collector and the soul catcher. But it wasn’t a matter of policy or even morbid name-calling. Perhaps it came out of a need to define, maybe a need to understand and control the killer. Body snatcher seemed appropriate. Appropriate but too easy.

  Bonzado waved her over to a table where freshly cleaned bones lay on a white drop cloth.

  “This is the young man from barrel number three.” The numbering was one of those things that unfortunately had come from necessity. She had watched Watermeier request the number be painted onto the barrel and its lid. And now she saw that all the paper tags with strings attached to each of the skeletal remains were also given the number three.

  “Young man? How can you tell?” This was one of the barrels that she hadn’t seen inside. The one Stolz had said was a bunch of bones. She wondered if there could have been enough tissue to indicate sex, let alone age.

  Bonzado picked up what Maggie recognized as a thigh bone, or the femur. She did, after all, have a medical background, not that bones had been a favorite subject.

  “At birth there are several places where there is an epiphysis, or a separate element, separate pieces of bone that throughout childhood and into young adulthood end up getting larger and slowly ossify…or rather, it eventually joins or unites. The end of the femur is one of those places. Right here—” he pointed “—at the knee. Can you see the slight separation? It’s just a groove now, sorta looks like a scar on the bone where the growth has occurred. In adulthood it disappears.”

  He bent over the bone so that his forehead almost touched hers, his elbow brushing her side. For a brief moment his closeness distracted her. She seemed suddenly and acutely aware of his scent, a fresh deodorant soap perhaps with a subtle hint of aftershave lotion, despite being surrounded by the ghastly odors of the lab.

  “Do you see it?” he asked again.

  She quickly nodded and shifted her weight to put some distance between them.

  “Now, because the groove hasn’t totally disappeared, I’d say he was a young adult, between eighteen and twenty-two, maybe twenty-three or twenty-four at the oldest. Sometimes with adolescents and young adults it’s difficult to determine sex, but this was definitely a young man. You’ll notice his bones are thick, the joints are knobby, the skull has a square jaw and a low, heavy brow.”

  “Which means this killer has chosen a fortysomething-year-old woman, an elderly man who had already been dead and embalmed, and a young man. What about the fourth barrel? The one with the waffle pattern imprinted on the back? Do we know anything more about that victim?”

  “Not much. Stolz faxed me the head wound, only because I asked. It’s a woman. He’s having a tough time determining age.”

  “Most serial killers choose a particular type of victim. Ted Bundy even went as far as choosing young women with long, dark hair, parted in the middle. This guy is all over the place. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern to the victims he chooses.”

  “Oh, I think there is a pattern. But not the kind we’re used to seeing. That’s why I think you’ll find this interesting.” Bonzado put down the femur and reached for its pair or a part of what was once its pair. This one looked like it had been sawed above the kneecap. “Take a look at the end of his right femur.” He handed it to Maggie and she examined the bulbous growth of bone or cartilage that stuck out at the end. Part of it had been sawed away as well.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s probably been there from birth. I’m guessing it was some form of bone spur. Maybe it’s a progressive disorder that they may have been waiting to remove or correct after he finished growing. This part on the femur would have been a small part of the problem so it’s difficult to tell. He probably would have had a limp. I’m not sure how pronounced a limp. Depending on what shape the tibia and fibula is in I could probably tell you more.”

  “But let me guess,” Maggie said. “You can’t tell me because that part of his leg is missing, right?”

  “I’m afraid so. That’s your pattern. The first woman’s body was missing her breast implants, right? And the old guy had a brain tumor and the killer took the brain. This kid’s bum leg must have been what the killer wanted. The barrel was sealed when we found it. As far as I can tell, everything else is here.” He indicated the tabletop with the man’s skeletal remains stretched out and in place.

  “Even the woman with the waffle pattern on her back from livor mortis,” he continued. “Stolz hasn’t been able to figure it out yet because the maggots made a mess of her, but I bet he finds something, some imperfection or deformity missing. That’s got to be our connection. He wants to remove the deformity. Maybe he’s a perfectionist? Maybe he feels like he’s cleansing the earth of imperfections.”

  He stopped and waited. She could feel him watching her, gauging her response. “So there’s your victimology. That’s what they all had in common. It can’t be coincidence, right?”

  “No, you’re right,” she said. “I don’t believe in coincidence. But there’s s
omething else they all had in common.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They all knew the killer.”

  CHAPTER 42

  R. J. Tully cleared away the dirty dishes, putting them in the sink, and wiped up the crumbs. He pulled out the laptop computer and set it on the kitchen table, connecting the power cord to the outlet and the cables for Internet access. The lid showed a trace of dusting powder, otherwise the lab guys had been tidy, quick and efficient.

  Bernard was still trying to track down the e-mail address, though it looked like Tully had been right. SonnyBoy used only public computers. They had tracked him back to the Meriden Public Library and the University of New Haven. At this rate they might never be able to identify him or narrow down a user profile. It looked like he used this address strictly for chat. There were no accounts, no member profiles, no credit cards or online purchases. Nothing except dead ends.

  Tully accessed Joan Begley’s AOL account, using the password and going through her file cabinet. He read the e-mails that hadn’t been opened yet, but saved each, clicking on “Keep as new” just in case someone else was checking them, too.

  Harvey jumped up from under the table, startling Tully. He had forgotten the dog was there. Within seconds he heard the front door unlock. This dog was good.

  “Hi, Dad,” Emma said, coming in the front door, her friend, Aleesha, her constant companion, following.

  “You’re home early,” he said, trying not to sound as pleased as he was feeling. These days he barely saw her and that was only in passing.

  “We thought we’d study here tonight. Is that okay with you?”

  She had already thrown her armful of books on the sofa and squatted down to hug Harvey’s thick neck. She laughed at her friend, who had to move or risk getting swatted by the dog’s tail.