Level 26

by Anthony E. Zuiker

  The agent raced down the scaffolding, but in his heart he knew it was futile. The monster was loose on the rooftops of Rome, an invisible tendril of smoke wafting up and away, nothing but the faintest lingering trace left to prove he had ever really been there at all.

  PART ONE

  the man in the murder suit

  Two Years Later

  chapter 1

  Somewhere in America / Vestment Room

  Friday / 9 P.M.

  The emaciated, ghost-thin man the FBI called “Sqweegel” worked feverishly at his grandmother’s sewing machine. The maniacal pecking thundered in the small bedroom on the second floor.

  ThwakwakwakwakwakwakWAKWAK.

  WAK.

  WAK.

  WAK.

  Sqweegel’s small bare foot pushed the pedal. His toenails were manicured, as were his fingernails. A desk lamp cast a glow on his intent face. His delicate hands coaxed the material forward, sending the cloth around the zipper directly into the path of the throbbing metal head as it applied the stitches. It had to be right.

  No; scratch that.

  It had to be perfect.

  The hot parts of the machine made the room smell of burning dust; the blood smelled like pennies.

  The piece of material was still tacky with dark, partially dried blood. The material was tough but not indestructible. He’d caught the zipper on something just sharp enough to slice through an inch of the black cloth attaching it to the rest of the latex suit. There was no blood loss; it had scraped away a few layers of epidermis at most. Still, even this was too much. He’d dug the lighter out of his tool kit, then held a flame to the edge of the metal until whatever skin cells had clung to it were gone. He mustn’t leave anything of himself behind. Then he’d come home.

  And now he was repairing the tear.

  It had troubled him the entire way home from the little whore’s apartment on the outskirts of the city. Before packing it in its case, Sqweegel had tried to poke the curled flap back into place. But it refused to stay. He closed the case and tried to forget about it. That proved impossible. He saw the tiny cloth flap sticking up off the suit in his imagination, like a black flag frozen midflap on an airless moon. It distracted him so much, he almost drove off the road so he could open the trunk and push the flap back into place.

  He resisted the urge. He knew it was silly. And he knew he’d be home soon enough.

  The moment he closed the front door behind him, Sqweegel took the suit to the sewing room. This had to be taken care of immediately.

  Sqweegel used his grandmother’s machine because it worked as perfectly now as it had the day she’d ordered it from the Sears, Roebuck catalog in 1956. It was a Kenmore 58, and it cost $89.95. Sewed forward as well as in reverse, under a built-in light. All it required was a little oil on the moving parts and a good cleaning of the exterior every few weeks. Give something enough attention, it’ll last forever.

  Like the suit.

  His small foot stopped working the machine. The speeding head cycled down to a complete stop. He crouched down until his eyes were inches from the material. He admired his handiwork.

  There.

  No more tear.

  Now it was time to wash all of the filthy whore blood away.

  chapter 2

  The Bathroom / Dressing Room

  Sqweegel rubbed his hands with powdered soap and watched the pink water swirl at the bottom of the white porcelain sink. Another sad life down the drain. But this sacrifice would be the herald of something new. Something wondrous. It excited him to think about it.

  Now, though, it was time for more practical matters, such as the removal of the hair.

  Sqweegel’s blade was clean, the water hot. His skin was already moisturized with vegetable oil—never shaving cream. That would be like mowing a lawn under six inches of snow. He needed to see what he was doing. Every square inch.

  Top to bottom. Open areas first: Scalp. Face. Neck. Forearms.

  Chest. Legs.

  He paused after each pass of the blade to hold it under the running water. Bits of black stubble and microscopic skin flakes swirled in the drain before disappearing.

  Then, his underarms. The backs of his legs. His ankles.

  Scraping. Pausing. Rinsing. Swirling.

  Next came the most difficult—yet satisfying—part of the process: flensing the hair from his genitals and anus. To do it right required pulling his scrotum until it was perfectly taut, ready for the pass of the blade. The positioning took time—sometimes upward of five or six minutes. The pass of the blade, by contrast, was always steady, deliberate, careful.

  The shaving of his anus required even more positioning. His feet pressed high against the tiled walls of the industrial bathroom, his torso leaning forward, for easier access. One hand steadied him; the other held the blade. It was as if the base of his spine was hinged, and he could fold himself in half. The ritual was the same: Scrape. Pause. Swirl in a bowl of warm water. He took his time, sometimes holding the position for a few minutes before another pass of the blade.

  The more hair he removed, the calmer he felt, and the easier it was to hold this position. The closer he felt to pure.

  The closer he came to salvation.

  In the next room, Sqweegel opened the combination lock on the refrigerator—which was kept at the warmest temperature possible—and removed four and a half sticks of butter. He had tried economizing and getting it down to four, but the extra half stick really was necessary. Five was too much and not really a solution, anyway.

  Four sticks were the ideal; four sticks come in every package. Which meant that every eight packages required one extra package, to be used for half sticks.

  He tried not to think about the half stick too much. Someday he’d find a way around the half stick.

  He carefully opened the paper wrapping of the first stick, split it in half with his hands, and began to rub his chest and shoulders—the largest part of his body first—before moving to his extremities. Each limb required a half stick, as did his genitals and anus. The depth of the butter must be consistent over the entirety of his body. No peaks, no valleys.

  The last of the butter—about a quarter of the final half stick—was spread on the part of the suit that would cover the soles of his feet. It took a lot of practice to get the amount just right.

  Now the suit.

  He paused for one last spot check. The suit was spread out on a piece of industrial plastic on the floor of the clean room, which he had been resanitizing for the past few days.

  No holes. No thin spots in the material. The parts of all three zippers—the chains, the teeth, the sliders, the tape ends, the bottom stops—were in perfect working order.

  It was ready. So was he.

  He began to climb into the suit, a process that was studied, slow, and precise. An observer might liken the sight to a five-foot, six-inch, 126-pound stick bug wrapping itself in a thin white chrysalis tailor-made to its insectoid body. That is, if an observer had the patience to watch the entire process, which took the better part of two hours. He didn’t time it. He focused on the task at hand. And the half stick really did make all the difference. The cleansing. The plastic. The shaving. The four and a half sticks of butter. The suit.

  It all led to this.

  He turned toward the mirror slowly, delaying the gratification for as long as he could stand it, but it was hard now, so hard. He raised his slender arms in the air as if to praise something that lived in space.

  Turning, turning, turning, hearing nothing but the faint beat of his heart against his rib cage.

  Finally, the mirror captured his image.

  Ah, there he was.

  No one.

  chapter 3

  The Library / Viewing Room

  Sqweegel walked down two flights of stairs to his dark, damp basement. The plaster on the walls had chipped away in places, revealing the thin wood slats beneath. They had always reminded him of the rib cage showing through the
torn carcass of a large beast. An animal that had been gutted by a larger, more savage animal.

  He wanted to run his fingers over the wood slats, just as he had as a child, but a splinter at this point would mean another trip to the sewing room. And he was too eager to watch the clip he had in mind. It was more than ten years old, but he’d been fantasizing about it since first light. The footage had just popped into his imagination, unbidden.

  Only later did he realize why. How it was a sign.

  But that’s how Sqweegel’s mind worked. Making subconscious connections that would later aid his mission.

  The most important mission of his mortal life.

  Below ground level, the air smelled not just of death but of many deaths, fighting with one another. It was a sweet cologne of suffering, with aromatic notes painstakingly gathered over the last few decades. No other place on earth smelled like this; no other place could. It was instantly intoxicating.

  He stepped into a small room, just off the first landing. The room was lined with custom-made wooden shelves, and nearly every inch of shelf space was filled with eight-millimeter film canisters.

  His bony, latex-covered thumb glided along the labels:

  Slut Redhead Before Wedding

  4/17/92

  Just the printed text on the label brought back snatches of memory: the bone-white lacy dress, torn, dirty, rolled up into a ball in the corner of the dungeon. The shivering pale bride, begging to know what she’d done wrong, struggling against her binds. Sqweegel telling her, You know nothing about purity. It’s a mockery to wear that dress, and now I’m going to show you what it’s like to stand naked before God….

  And then another label, another set of memories:

  Vain TV News Whore

  9/11/95

  Oh, Sqweegel remembered her in vivid detail. She thought this grisly series of unsolved murders would be her big break. Ratings. A book deal. She bragged to her colleagues that she’d be the one to solve it, become her own brand. She needed a lesson in humility, and Sqweegel was only too happy to give it to her—her own video camera probing parts of her body she had never seen before. The juicy, dirty, hidden parts, expertly lit and shot and then mailed to the station for her viewers to see…

  Self-Absorbed Mother Who Ignores Her Boy

  3/30/97

  You squeeze a life out into this world; then you turn your back on it? Let me show you what happens when God turns his back on you, my child….

  His thumb finally stopped on the one he wanted:

  Senator’s Cunt Mistress

  7/28/98

  Sqweegel plucked the canister from the shelf and brought it to the viewing room on the next level down. It was a fully soundproofed home theater, constructed long before such things were in vogue. No fancy digital disc, or even video: Nothing beat the raw rush of images on film, speeding by at twenty-four frames per second.

  After loading the film reel onto the projector and snapping it on, Sqweegel sat in a worn leather chair in the very center of the room and let the images on the screen wash over him.

  Sqweegel’s breath was hot with anticipation. He freed his cock from the murder suit and began to stroke it. Slowly at first.

  But as the film unspooled, his fist moved up and down more urgently, violently, his eyes never leaving the screen.

  He hadn’t watched this one in a while. He’d forgotten how good it was.

  He’d forgotten what her insides had looked like.

  Sqweegel reversed the film and started again. He knew he would watch it dozens of times before dawn. He’d been watching so much surveillance footage these past few months that he needed a small diversion—a mental palate cleanser, of sorts. A reminder of who he was, and what he could do in the name of the Lord.

  The film countdown flickered across the screen: 10, 9, 8…

  To watch the 8mm film, log into LEVEL26.com and enter the code: snuff

  chapter 4

  Quantico Marine Corps Base / Special Circumstances

  Division / War Room

  Monday / 7:30 A.M. EST

  The eight-millimeter film flapped around the reel a few times before rolling out to leave a blank white screen. Nobody said a word, even after a few moments. Dead silence filled the room.

  Not that you could blame them.

  Tom Riggins scanned the faces gathered before him. A few minutes before, they were pumped. Excited to be called to the fabled Special Circs division at Quantico for this hush-hush meeting, all expenses paid. Some of them acted like they didn’t give a shit, but Riggins could tell. The curiosity was killing them. He was counting on it.

  And a few minutes before, they were like schoolkids before a midterm exam. Focused. Determined to succeed.

  But now…

  These were not just cops or forensic scientists. The people gathered here were the best of the best, and they’d been summoned by the most elite law enforcement division in the country. But to Riggins—a man in his fifties with the lean, hard muscle of an ex–middleweight champ—they were a bunch of doe-eyed kids, some even bearing the faint traces of acne scars. This was nothing new. Everyone in Special Circs had started looking ridiculously young in the early 1990s, when momentum took over and Riggins realized he’d be a Special Circs lifer.

  “You’ve just watched the handiwork of Sqweegel,” Riggins said. “He’s a psychopath who has shot, raped, maimed, poisoned, burned, strangled, and tortured upwards of fifty people in six countries over a span of more than twenty years.”

  Two decades, Riggins thought. The monster had started his work when some of the people in this room were still stuffing lunch boxes in book bags for their first day of school.

  He continued.

  “Sqweegel is a very patient killer. He takes his time between targets and expends an almost inhuman number of hours preparing. We only see his homework after he’s struck. In some cases, the prep work stretches back months.”

  Riggins scanned the room. They appeared to be listening—or at least, they nodded at the right times. But he could tell they were still thinking about the piece of film they’d just watched.

  Some of them even blinked rapidly, as if their eyelids could wash the images from their retinas.

  Good luck with that, kids.

  Special Circs had been born out of the Justice Department’s ViCAP—Violent Criminal Apprehension Program—in the mid-1980s. The public knew all about ViCAP, a computerized think tank that attempted to track and compare serial killings. Cops and investigators everywhere could use ViCAP as a resource. But there were certain cases that no city police department—or even the FBI—was equipped to handle. Wanted to handle.

  That’s when they were flipped up to Special Circs.

  Riggins knew better than anybody else that the burnout rate here in Special Circs was stunning—agents lasted anywhere from forty-eight hours to six months, tops. A spectacularly “long” run might be considered a year or two, but that usually ended in suicide, solitude, or sedation. You don’t bounce from Special Circs into another career. You bounce into survival mode.

  Special Circs was the little-known division that floated below the radar of the American public. Few newspapers covered Special Circs cases. They don’t make TV specials about them. Their cases don’t come up at cocktail parties in L.A., the Beltway, or Manhattan. They work cases most citizens never heard about, would never want to hear about, and certainly did not want to think possible.

  If they did, they’d never leave the house.

  Not that they’d be safe at home. A high percentage of the really twisted stuff happened behind front doors all over the country. Like the husband who found out his wife was running around with an old college boyfriend, then took a golf club and impaled her with it, from anal cavity to throat. The lab guys marveled at the sheer muscle it took this guy to force the steel rod through her entire body, past tough muscle and bone.

  Then there was the fifteen-year-old meth head who searched everywhere in his house for his copy of Ve
hicular Homicide, the video game that he would play for hours on end to offset his tweaking. The kid looked and looked and looked; no game. Then his grandparents got all intervention on him, told him that they threw away that horrible game for his own good, and that he was going to a special place near the beach that would help him. The kid left the room, then returned with a power drill and proceeded to irrigate their ear canals, one at a time—right through a hearing aid, in the case of his grandfather, a Korean War vet. You’re not hearing me; you never listen to me, he reportedly screamed at them as their blood and brain tissue rained down around him.

  Riggins could list cases all night. The body parts in fruit jars. The pregnant slaves in the pit. The semen in the baby diaper.

  This was all stuff nobody in their right mind wanted to think about for more than a few seconds.

  This was the stuff he thought about all the time.

  He lived for the dark side of man.

  But this case at hand, and this snuff film they’d just watched…

  Well, he could almost understand the silence.

  chapter 5

  Tom Riggins had never liked the Special Circs War Room. It looked too much like a college classroom—long, For mica-topped desks on four risers. Riggins stood at the bottom, in front of three screens. They were full-color, HD, next-generation smart screens that could move files, enhance photos, and update field operatives all with a single touch.

  Which made him seem like a professor, addressing his students.

  At fifty-three, Riggins almost looked the part. He dressed in dark, muted colors that suited his general demeanor. The only flash of color was the white on the ID badge that hung from his jacket pocket at all times. Riggins had been at Special Circs longer than anybody else. And what did he get for it? Three ex-wives, and two kids who hated his guts. An apartment he never saw, full of books he never read and a handful of CDs he never listened to. And a burgeoning alcohol problem.