Cut to the Bone

by Ellison Cooper

  With her teeth, she stripped the rubber tubing off the phone’s wires and spent a few minutes twisting them together. She tried listening for something on the handset with every new wire combination, but she eventually realized there was a very good chance the earpiece wasn’t even working.

  There was no way to know if she was getting through to anyone.

  Shaking with fatigue, Kate decided to be as methodical as possible. She would wire one combination, dial 911, talk into the mouthpiece, trying to identify where she was, and then move on to the next combination.

  With four wires from the wall and four wires from the phone, she knew perfectly well that there were more than 250 possible combinations … was that even right? Maybe 500? That equation should be easy, yet she couldn’t quite figure out how to do simple math in her mind. No matter, she would just recombine until she couldn’t anymore.

  Kate twisted the wires, dialed, and spoke into the mouthpiece over and over and over until it became a monotonous repetition that felt almost like prayer.

  At some point she shifted from 911 to dialing her mom’s cell phone. At that point the calls felt futile and she just wanted to talk to her mommy.

  Then, for some reason, as the world began to feel even more distant, she dialed Declan’s cell. She knew he was dead, but she wanted to talk to him. She rewired the phone for the final combination, fingers trembling so much she could barely get them twisted around each other.

  She whispered, “Declan, I … I am so sorry I let you die. I’m scared. This man has us trapped here and I don’t know where I am.” Her voice broke with emotion and she stopped for a moment. “I miss you and this place is like a nightmare and I don’t even know what’s real anymore. We were in this big room with only darkness for walls and sand on the floor. And now I’m trapped in a pyramid and I think I’m in a tomb and outside there’s silos and a field covered with a grid of dark manholes that I think might lead to hell. I might be hallucinating and I miss my mommy and daddy and I wanted to kiss you again. And now you’re dead and I didn’t get to tell you anything.”

  Kate hunched over the broken phone, tears dripping on the plastic mouthpiece for a very long time.

  When she couldn’t cry any more, she curled into a ball around the plastic mouthpiece, slipping into a fitful sleep.

  SAYER’S APARTMENT, ALEXANDRIA, VA

  Ezra and Al dropped Sayer off in front of the burned-out town house so she could pick up her bike. Before she rode away, she looked up at her old home. Black scorch marks extended from the windows, scarring the crumbling white front of the building. The roof was entirely gone.

  At least the connected houses had been mostly spared.

  Sayer realized that Ezra was idling in his car. She waved him off, wanting a minute to herself.

  After Ezra drove away, she decided to make her way around to the garden. The entire back of their unit was missing and she could see the heavy roof beams collapsed into the interior like Lincoln Logs. Water from the fire hoses had combined with the burned-out building, leaving behind nothing but drying clots of wood and ash.

  The entire garden was permeated by an acrid smell and Sayer wondered if it would ever go away.

  As she stared, her phone rang.

  “Agent Altair,” she said softly.

  “Sayer?” Nana’s voice sounded far away. “Your case with those missing girls has been on the news constantly up here. Are you okay?”

  Sayer glanced up at her town house. Something about the question struck her as almost funny. Here she was, staring at everything she had once owned, now in ashes. Was she okay? “Well, I’ve had better days” was all she said, not wanting to explain at the moment. “How goes it in Montana?”

  “Things here are actually good.”

  “The measles outbreak is good?”

  “Well, as good as such a thing can be, of course,” Nana said. “We think we’ve managed to contain the outbreak and I just spent all morning traveling between a bunch of ranches talking to people about vaccination and staying well. It feels … important. Since my primary job was to help with the setup, I’m actually heading home in a few days. Though they’ve asked me if I’m willing to become part of the regular response team.”

  “That’s great, Nana. It sounds like this is where you want to be right now.”

  “Indeed it is. Plus, there’s a lovely man here working with us. A doctor with the CDC … he’s quite charming.”

  Sayer could hear the smile in Nana’s voice. “Is this the sound of someone smitten?” she gently teased. It felt good to connect with Nana. It reminded her that her family was safe and that was all that mattered.

  After talking to Nana for a few more minutes, Sayer hung up and decided to call Adi and tell her about the town house.

  Adi was shocked, but the news barely seemed to faze her as she babbled about how wonderful Stanford was.

  After saying her goodbyes to Adi, Sayer looked up at her old house one last time. It felt like she was closing a chapter in her life—a chapter full of mourning and grief. With a satisfied nod, she headed around to her bike and rode off toward Holt’s boat.

  HOLT’S BOAT, MARINA, SOUTHWEST WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Sayer caught up with Ezra and Al at the marina. Together, they headed along the wooden dock.

  As they climbed onto the deck, Holt emerged from the cabin.

  “Damn, hon, this is nice!” Al said, smiling. “You must be the infamous Janice Holt, former assistant director of the FBI and D.C. historian.” He climbed up next to Holt and held out his hand, bowing his head a bit.

  The corners of Holt’s mouth curled up in a way Sayer had never seen before. Rather than her normal tooth-baring smile, Holt looked amused. Maybe some other emotion Sayer couldn’t identify.

  Holt and Al seemed to make eye contact for an overlong time. When Holt finally looked away, her face fell into her usual scowl. “So, booted off the case by Anderson,” she said matter-of-factly as she gestured for them to follow her into the cabin.

  Ezra tried to work his way down the narrow stairs, but couldn’t quite make it with his prostheses. With a frustrated huff, he sat down and removed his legs and then used his arms to lower himself down. Sayer followed him down to find Al and Holt already jammed together on one side of the small table. Holt shoved her piles of maps and notes aside to make room for Ezra, who pulled himself up and smiled. “Can someone grab my bag so I can get set up? I want to log on to an encrypted network.”

  Sayer grabbed his computer bag and Ezra pulled out his laptop and began typing. While he got connected, Sayer thought about where they were with the case.

  Luke Windsor had fit perfectly as their unsub. His background with Egyptology meant he would know about the Amduat and the twelve goddesses of the night. His childhood full of discipline problems and animal abuse suggested that he was psychopathic. His history of extensive drug and alcohol abuse could also indicate a history of mental illness. And most convincing, everyone who interacted with the unsub had positively identified Windsor as their man.

  So how was it possible he wasn’t the killer?

  “Okay, I’m into the FBI system and can access anything we need from here,” Ezra said. “Since I’m, uh, off the case, I’ll have to access Rapid Start through a back door.”

  Sayer thought about it for a moment. “No, that will just get you in trouble. Log in on my account. As senior special agent I should be able to access cases I’m not officially working on. I’ll take any blowback if we get called to the mat.”

  Sayer leaned over to log herself in.

  Ezra took the computer back and typed for a moment. “Whoa, I haven’t actually even looked at the log-ins for the case since we’ve been so busy, but look at this.”

  He turned his laptop around so Sayer, Al, and Holt could see the screen. The same name appeared over and over again.

  “Director Anderson,” Sayer said.

  “Yeah. It looks like Anderson has logged in to review the case files”—Ezra coun
ted under his breath—“I’m seeing at least three dozen times in the last two days. Why on earth would he be watching these files so closely?”

  “Can you look at what he’s been accessing?” Sayer asked. “Maybe he’s been keeping tabs on me for some reason.”

  “He’s been reading everything about the case,” Ezra said. “You want me to try and figure out why?”

  Sayer rubbed her worry beads, trying to think. “Nah. We have much more important things to do than worry about Anderson.”

  “Why does this guy hate you?” Al asked.

  Sayer’s head hurt and she needed some water. She rubbed her temples as she spoke. “I have no clue. He tried to get me fired last year. He managed to push Holt out, but someone I know released a video of me to the news. It made me look … really good and turned public opinion in my favor.”

  Holt’s face darkened and Sayer could swear just the mention of her firing conjured up a black aura swirling around her head.

  “Oh yeah, I remember seeing that!” Al said. “Everyone was buzzing about the brave and kind Agent Altair.”

  Sayer smiled ruefully. She hated that it had taken a media stunt from a psychopath to save her job and now people recognized her all over the city. “That video made it hard for Anderson to fire me without some kind of public outcry. Maybe he’s just been biding his time and this will be the end.”

  “He can’t do that,” Ezra said indignantly.

  “I guess we’ll see.” Sayer waved her hand. “Right now I just can’t care about that.” She looked at the time. “It’s already midday. Assuming that the unsub is going to stick to his schedule, then he’s planning to kill one of the girls tonight at 10:00 P.M. Or maybe he’ll try again at 9:00 P.M. I have no idea. But before we dive into that, let’s review what we’ve got on Luke Windsor for Al and Holt, then go from there.”

  “Okay,” Ezra said, “even though he has an alibi for the murders, agents still interviewed numerous colleagues of Luke Windsor at the residential facility where he works. They all say he hit rock bottom last year not long after his brother’s death. He showed up at the facility and they took him in for treatment. He pulled himself together, got an apartment, managed to stay clean long enough that they offered him a job at the facility. Apparently they’ve had great luck hiring former residents as staff. They also all confirmed that he appeared uninjured over the past few days.”

  “Couldn’t that just be good makeup or something?” Al asked.

  Sayer shook her head. “The man I fought last night was severely injured. We’re talking major cuts along his face and arms. There’s no way to cover up that kind of damage. Plus, we have a brain scan from the Hearing Voices Institute.”

  “Brain scan?” Holt asked.

  “Yeah.” Ezra explained the two scans.

  “I knew something wasn’t quite right when I looked at the scans yesterday, but now I know why they looked like two different brains. Luke Windsor isn’t our unsub.”

  Ezra grunted affirmation. “And, with their prime suspect out of play, it looks like the task force at Quantico has no idea what direction to go next.”

  “Which means it’s up to us to figure out what the hell is going on,” Sayer said. “We were so sure we had the killer ID’ed, we let ourselves get blinkered. Where did we go wrong? And who the hell is our unsub?”

  “A doppelgänger?” Al asked. “I mean, couldn’t someone just look a hell of a lot like Windsor?”

  Sayer nodded. “It’s definitely happened before. At the academy, I reviewed a bunch of cases that are almost unbelievable. There’ve been at least a few dozen convictions of people who were virtually identical to the real culprit. I would buy that if we were just going off the unsub’s looks. But the doppelgänger effect doesn’t explain the Egypt connection. How could someone look exactly like him and have an extensive background in ancient Egyptian cosmogony? Can we accept that it’s just a random coincidence?” Sayer asked, pressing them to brainstorm outside the box.

  “Don’t forget the fake bus witness and fake FBI agent,” Holt said gruffly. “This entire case feels like it’s revolving around misdirection and false identities.”

  “We need to pull apart the pieces from the ground up and figure out what we really know,” Sayer said.

  “What’s the saying? ‘Eliminate the impossible and, whatever’s left, however improbable, must be the truth,’” Al added.

  “You’re quoting Sherlock Holmes?” Ezra laughed.

  “We are a team of detectives, are we not?” Al smiled. “And if it can’t be Luke Windsor, then it must be someone else.”

  Sayer frowned. She’d always hated that Holmes quote. In her experience, an improbable solution always had a perfectly logical explanation if you could just find it. It wasn’t her job to accept the improbable; it was her job to unravel the mystery until it made perfect sense.

  HOLT’S BOAT, MARINA, SOUTHWEST WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Sayer and her new off-the-books team spent the next hour reviewing everything they had on the case. Holt spread a few maps of D.C. out on the tiny table and she and Al hunched over them together.

  “Okay … the fourth chamber of the Egyptian afterlife is Land of Sokar, a sandy realm teeming with monstrous snakes,” Al said. “Metaphorically, the fourth hour is the beginning of the true descent into the dangerous chaos of the afterlife so it would have to be somewhere confusing, labyrinthine even. Hot. Frightening.”

  “You know, long ago there was an Irish neighborhood in D.C. in the late 1800s called Swampoodle, home to Jackson Alley, an overcrowded, disease-ridden maze known for its terrible smells and unfortunate snake population.” Holt smiled at Al.

  “What’s there now?” Al asked, smiling back.

  “Sadly it’s been entirely replaced by the Government Publishing Office. Home to a whole new kind of snake,” Holt said.

  Al threw his head back and laughed a little too hard. “I heard that you’re actually writing a book about D.C. history.”

  “The rumors are true. I was just working on the flap copy. Want to hear it?”

  Al nodded encouragingly and Holt picked up a page to read. “Imagined by the Founding Fathers as a beacon of liberty, Washington, D.C., was designed as a monument to the democratic values of a fledgling nation. Ironically, a city dedicated to ideals of freedom sits atop swampland stolen from the Nacotchtank tribe and built, in part, by slave labor. The nation’s contradictory economic, political, and social history is written into the sinew and bone of Washington, D.C., and this book will explore that explosive history through its iconic (and sometimes secret) architecture.”

  “So,” Al said, “you’re writing a book about how D.C. was founded on a swamp of corruption and greed. I love it!”

  At first Sayer couldn’t understand all the grinning and overenthusiastic laughter considering the situation, but it finally occurred to her that they were flirting. The thought of Holt actually flirting with Al was almost enough to make her smile.

  “Could you two please focus on possible locations for the fourth chamber. I know the team at Quantico plans to have the fountain staked out again tonight but I can’t imagine that he’s going to show up there.”

  Al and Holt agreeably dove into their historical discussion over the piles of maps.

  Ezra had his nose buried in his computer.

  Sayer wasn’t sure exactly what to do with herself. She got up to pace again, trying not to notice the time ticking down toward 10:00 P.M. If their unsub stuck to his previous schedule, another girl would die in just a few hours.

  “Go up on deck in you need to move, Sayer,” Holt said sharply after watching her take two steps back and forth over and over again in the small cabin.

  Taking Holt’s advice, Sayer climbed out on the deck. The midday sun shone golden on the water and the slight breeze felt crisp and cool.

  With a relieved breath to be out of the cramped cabin, Sayer made long rambling loops around the deck, rubbing her worry beads with sore fingers.


  “‘As above, so below,’” Sayer mumbled to herself as she mentally flipped through everything that had happened. She knew they were missing some key piece of information. Something that would make the improbable perfectly logical.

  Sayer ran her hands over her curls with frustration. It felt like every new lead just led to more questions than answers. “Okay, we need to take ten steps back to the very beginning. What do we know for sure about our unsub?” she said to herself. “We know the unsub has Cotard’s syndrome and believes that he is dead,” she kept muttering as she paced. “He knows a hell of a lot about ancient Egypt. And he also knows a hell of a lot about the architectural history of D.C.”

  Sayer paused to look along the dock at the bustling cafés and bars. For a brief moment she wondered what it would be like to be one of those people smiling and laughing over drinks without a care in the world. Instead, here she was pacing like a caged animal, gut churning, focused on stopping yet another horrific murder.

  A memory surfaced of her and Jake. Sayer had been working on her very first serial killer case with the FBI. It wasn’t going well and she hadn’t been eating or sleeping. In the middle of the case, Jake insisted they take a few hours to go out for a nice dinner. He drove her, still in her grungy work clothes, to L’Auberge Chez François, the fanciest French restaurant in the area. They’d split a bottle of wine and eaten glorious food for two hours. During dinner, Sayer had managed to forget the horror of her case for just a few moments.

  Somehow, Jake always made it feel like she was able to steal some joy and laughter no matter how immersed she was in death.

  After dinner, head clear and heart renewed, Sayer had helped to solve the case that same night.

  Shaking off the painful longing the memory stirred, Sayer was about to go back to her pacing and mumbling when she paused again at the sight of an unusual duo making their way down the dock.

  A compact man and a large wolfish dog hurried toward her.

  “Pizza delivery!” Max Cho called out as he lifted the pizza box for her to see. “Kona and I heard there might be some hungry agents here and I thought I’d bring sustenance.”