The man paused. He turned around and looked at Dina. He was smiling.
The grin turned Dina’s heart to ash.
His reply was soft and courteous. “Because it only works with two.”
TWO
In the predawn gloom, over the soft hissing of the baby monitor, Ulysses Grove heard the chirping noises first.
He stirred awake next to Maura, rolled over, and blindly muted the beeping cell phone. At this hour, on this phone, the call could only mean one thing. Section Chief Tom Geisel—or possibly his trusty assistant Shirley Milch—was on the blower from Quantico with another pair of Mississippi Ripper victims. Grove snatched the phone out of its charger and levered himself into a sitting position on the edge of the bed.
A rangy, chiseled African American with a marathon runner’s physique and dark almond-shaped eyes, Grove wore his customary Michigan Wolverines boxer shorts and sleeveless T-shirt. He hadn’t been sleeping well in recent weeks, and it showed in his stooped shoulders and somnambulant stare. Part of the problem stemmed from his bad eye.
Injured in hot pursuit outside a New Orleans cemetery, Grove had nearly lost his left eye during an altercation with a psychopath named Michael Doerr. The cornea had sustained severe ocular contusions and subconjuctival hemorrhages, mostly from Doerr’s knife work, and later Grove worried that he would spend the rest of his life the butt of Sammy Davis jokes. Over the last twelve months Grove had undergone three separate operations to save the eye but, unfortunately, the surgeons at Johns Hopkins were only able to avoid the need for a prosthetic. The eye that remained in Grove’s skull was virtually blind. Grove had happily accepted the prognosis. He wore the scars of past cases he had closed like war medals.
And other than slight adjustments in his driving, reading, and writing habits, the only drawback to the partial blindness was the dreaming.
Grove had started having nightmares in which he saw things—prophetic things, apocalyptic scenarios, troubling visions—through his blind left eye, and only through that eye. His good eye never worked in these dreams, always blurred or flickered out like a TV tube with bad reception. But the blind eye saw everything, inexplicable things, road signs spattered with blood, shadowy figures lurking in the woods, ghostly horsemen riding over the bones of battle casualties. One night he dreamt he could see the future through his blind eye, and he woke up in a sheath of sweat after seeing his own family lying murdered in their beds. His psychotherapist referred to all this as “understandable” and “even healthy” considering the sights Grove had seen over the last few years.
But it wasn’t merely angst over his blind eye that was currently keeping Ulysses Grove up at night. Nor was it workload. Nor was it the emotional obstacle course of his young marriage or the stress of juggling his professional life as the FBI’s top criminal profiler with his role as a loving father. The thing that was disturbing Grove’s sleep these days was anticipation. He was very close to identifying the Mississippi Ripper. Over the course of twelve months and eight victims, Grove had amassed a hundred-plus-page profile.
It was only a matter of time.
Which was precisely why Grove snapped the flip-phone open with such vigor this morning. He glanced at the display. It was a Virginia prefix, the number registering in Grove’s sleepy brain like tumblers clicking in a lock. This could be it. The crime scene Grove had been anticipating. The final puzzle piece that closes the Ripper down. Gooseflesh crawled on Grove’s arms as he rose, cupping his hand around the phone, answering in a hushed tone. “Grove here.”
“Morning, Sunshine,” said the familiar voice on the other end. Tom Geisel had been section chief in the Bureau’s Behavioral Science Division for nearly a decade and had trained Grove, and now the low, gruff, whiskey-cured voice had an almost soothing effect on Grove’s ear. “Sorry about the hour, Slick, you know how it is.”
Grove’s scalp prickled as he slipped out of the bedroom and into the dark carpeted hallway. The baby was asleep across the hall, the nursery door slightly ajar. “Dirtbags never sleep, huh?” Grove whispered into the phone.
“True enough.”
“Mississippi again?”
“Two white females, looks like the same sig, same MO, everything lines up.”
“The dump is where?”
“Sixteen miles south of Quincy, Illinois, right on the river this time.”
“Okay. That’s what office? St. Louis?”
The voice said, “Yep…Bill Menner from Central Midwest is heading up there as we speak. Your ticket’s already booked, waiting at Reagan. Flight numbers, departure times, map to the scene—it’s all on your e-mail.”
“Great, great,” Grove said with a little nod and glanced at baby Aaron’s door. A flannel sculpture of Winnie-the-Pooh hung from a hook, the words Mommy’s Little Helper in fuzzy yarn-script across the top. A tiny, sharp frisson of guilt twinged in Grove’s gut: It was a Sunday, and he had planned on spending the entire day relaxing with his wife and baby. Now all that would have to wait. Grove thought about it for a moment. “How’s the scene this time?”
A slight pause. “What do you mean?”
Grove shrugged. “Good security? Good first-on-the-scene coverage?”
Another pause. “Um…fair.”
“Fair?”
Geisel’s voice dropped an octave. “Some yahoo at Pike County HQ called in the media wagons. The place is already crawling with hacks.”
Grove licked his lips, visualizing the circus of tungsten lights and microphones milling about the edges of the yellow tape. He had seen it before, and it could be an enormous distraction. But now the vague guilt stirring in Grove’s belly turned into something else entirely. Bring them on, he thought for a brief instant, way down in his tangled subconscious. Let them see it, let them see the process.
The feeling had been brewing in Grove’s midbrain for months now, ever since that first pair of victims had been discovered in a vacant lot behind a riverboat casino in Davenport, Iowa. The first in a meticulous series: always a pair of victims, posed postmortem, exactly twenty feet apart, facing each other, one killed an hour or so before the other—increased levels of serotonin and free histamine in the wound sites indicating struggle, probably torture. A banquet of physical evidence had been retrieved over the months from murder scenes snaking along the Mississippi River valley from Rock Island to Memphis: size-eleven triple-E shoe prints, DNA from secretions, clothing fibers, carpet residue, and latent prints galore. No positive matches yet, nothing in the index.
Yet.
But the most important part, the part that kept Grove tossing and turning at night, was the repeating pattern of dual victims, the precision with which the victims were posed, and the staggered times of death. The purpose had not yet announced itself to Grove but the revelation was imminent. Grove could smell it in the air, a trace of something acrid at the scenes. In his restless dreams it lurked along the periphery of his blind eye, something coalescing behind the shadows: the meaning of the act. Once Grove knew the meaning, he would find the perp. It was only a matter of time. Grove knew it. His colleagues knew it. Perhaps even the killer knew it.
Maybe that was why Grove secretly craved the cameras. He was a celebrity now, his recent cases thrusting him onto the public radar screen.
Grove was the man who had hunted down the demon-haunted Richard Ackerman in the famous Sun City case. He was the guy who caught a ritualistic killer in the eye of Hurricane Fiona. And of course, there were the private battles nobody knew about: the bouts of depression, the spiritual crises, and the push-pull of Grove’s African ancestry. Perhaps most important of all, though, was Grove’s fabled yet grudging relationship with the paranormal. After years of experiencing what can only be described as eerie intuition, he was tired of denying it. “You are who you are, Ulysses,” his shrink had kept repeating only months before Grove had taken the plunge into marriage and fatherhood. And now Grove had taken the advice to heart. He was through fighting his true nature. His métier. His cal
ling.
Let them watch.
“Okay,” he finally said into the phone. “I’ll call you from the scene, let you know how it’s going.”
“Good. Let’s put the lid on this one before this prick kills again.”
Grove said good-bye, snapped the phone shut, and went looking for his travel clothes.
Maura rolled over and gazed through sleep-crusted eyes at her husband of exactly eleven months as he primped at the mirror. Even in her groggy, half-conscious state she had to smile. “You know, if I didn’t know better,” she murmured in a hoarse voice, still thick with sleep, “I’d say you were dressing up for some secret booty call.”
He wheeled around with a start, dropping one of his cuff links on the carpet. “Oh…sorry…I woke you up, didn’t I? I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, the milk fairy just dropped by again.” She gestured down at her swollen, heavy breasts, which felt like two inflatable life preservers lying on the mattress next to her. In the six months since she had given birth to Aaron she felt as though her narrow-hipped body had been taken over by aliens. She had gone from a B-cup to a double-D in a matter of weeks, which had delighted Ulysses to no end, but had given Maura about as much sexual pleasure as an anvil strapped to her ass. Now her nipples tingled sorely as she struggled into a sitting position against the headboard. “I like the polka-dot one better with that shirt,” she said with a quick nod toward the closet.
“You think?” He gave her a quick grin, turning toward his elaborate tie rack. He had at least fifty silk ties of every conceivable pattern and hue meticulously strung along the burnished chrome conveyor.
“And I’d go with the Florsheims instead of the Bill Blass,” she added, rubbing her tender breasts, feeling like a water balloon about ready to pop. She watched with a wry sort of amusement as Grove fiddled with his motorized tie rack.
Ulysses was a fussy dresser, immaculate and finicky about things such as silk shirts and French cuffs and Windsor knots and high-polished Italian loafers. It was something that Maura County had suspected about the man from time she had met him—after all, how could she not notice all the Armani socks and cashmere scarves—but now that they were married, she was witnessing the whole range of this quirky behavior on a daily basis. Even at the wedding last summer, Grove had agonized over the tiniest minutiae such as the color of the groomsmen’s ascots and the shape of the napkin holders. The Bureau guys had teased him unmercifully about it—joking that he should just come out of the closet and be done with it—but it made Maura love him more than ever. Somehow all the fastidiousness seemed to Maura like a defense mechanism—a way to compensate for the gruesome messiness of his work. But lately Maura was beginning to wonder if there wasn’t a darker vein beneath Grove’s behavior. Perhaps an early stage to some obsessive-compulsive disorder? It was silly to worry about such things, of course, but over the last couple of years, Maura had become a worrier.
She wasn’t sure exactly how or when she had acquired this trait. As a journalist, she had encountered many terrifying and traumatic things while keeping her intellectual distance. She had written about abominations of nature with little personal risk or involvement. But after meeting Ulysses Grove, this emotional distance seemed to close. She started getting personally involved in her stories—a little too involved, in fact—which had led to a series of near-death encounters. But that was all ancient history now. She was retired. She was a wife and a mother, and she was happy to watch from the sidelines. Just so her husband stayed out of harm’s way…as he had promised her the night before their wedding.
“You don’t have to look so happy about it,” she finally wisecracked as he finished snuggling the prescribed polka-dot tie against his Adam’s apple.
“About what?” He gave her a look as he slipped into his pin-striped suit. “What are you talking about?”
“I assume the call was from Tom Geisel?”
Grove didn’t say anything, just stared at her like a boy anxiously waiting to run onto the playing field.
She let out a sigh. “Most people would consider this sort of news kinda bad.”
He looked deflated, and finally told her where and when the new murders had occurred.
“How long will you be gone?”
He told her he didn’t know for sure but he promised he would call her from the hotel after his initial look at the scene. He said this while hastily running a lint roller over the perfect creases and double-stitched seams of his tailored suit. Next he pulled on his Burberry overcoat, shot the sleeves, and took one last glance at himself in the mirror.
Then he came over and gave Maura a tender kiss on the lips. His breath smelled of Listerine. “I’ll call you tonight,” he murmured in her ear.
“Just remember to take your folic acid pills,” Maura said with an exasperated sigh.
“I will, Mom.” He gave her a grin, turned, and strode out the doorway.
“And wear your galoshes!” she called after him.
“Yes, Mom!”
His footsteps receded down the hallway, then down the stairs. A shuffling pause at the front door for a moment. The sound of his keys jangling, and then the door opening and closing.
The abrupt silence that followed made Maura’s ears ring. The tidy little two-story seemed to hang there in suspended animation like a dollhouse, perfectly set in its little picket-fenced lot in its little picture-postcard Virginia suburb. Utterly still and silent except for the muffled hiss of the baby monitor, and the first cooing noises of Aaron coming awake. Maura took a deep breath, then hauled her bloated self out of bed.
She wriggled into her robe and slippers, then padded across the hall to Aaron’s room.
In the dim, perfumed world of the nursery the baby was stretching and rooting in his crib. Maura went over and hovered there for a moment, gazing down at her precious little man. The baby made a few mewling noises, then blinked awake, his miraculous little eyes fixing their gaze on Maura.
It never failed to delight her, making eye contact with her baby like this. From the moment of his birth—a Caesarean delivery due to complications with Maura’s narrow uterus—the baby’s little almond eyes seemed to focus preternaturally well on their surroundings. Maura had always laughed off the clichés about some babies being “old souls” (a New Agey expression that she had always detested), but now, with the advent of the ethereal, caramel-skinned Aaron, she had begun to wonder if there wasn’t something to the hackneyed phrase. The baby seemed to possess some kind of strange alertness.
“Look who’s up,” Maura said softly, opening her robe, and urging a nipple out of her nursing bra. The baby let out a tiny squeal and smacked its lips at her. Maura grinned. “The dairy bar’s open for business.”
She lifted the baby from its swaddle, then carried it over to the corner rocking chair. It took a few moments for the baby to latch on. A moment of pain before the delicious warm current began spreading through Maura, accompanied by the delicate little sucking sounds.
Maura had never been this happy. She closed her eyes and said a silent prayer of thanks.
Then she added a few thoughts for the families of victims number nine and ten.
The bodies had been found—like all the others, within twenty feet of each other—in a thick stand of weeds and cattails along the Mississippi. The remains were on the Illinois side of the river, which meant the investigation would fall under the jurisdiction of the IBI. But when word began to spread that these were victims of the Mississippi Ripper, the state Bureau called in the St. Louis FBI field office because of its superior CSI facilities. Word had also spread to both print and electronic media. Local affiliates from as far north as Chicago and as far south as Memphis had dispatched news vans. The St. Louis Post arrived early, followed by crime beat reporters from WGEM Quincy, the Peoria Journal Star, the Bloomington Pantagraph, and the Chicago Sun-Times. By midmorning the area was teeming with vehicles and personnel.
Adams County is an 800-mile slice of floodplain crisscros
sed by winding blacktops and dotted with hardscrabble little river towns. To the east, the landscape rises up and buckles and rolls over limestone bluffs. It’s a rugged, disheveled corner of the state, with much of the working class eking out meager livings on factory farms or at the calcium carbonate processing plant south of Quincy. Plus the Big River has a kind of solemn weightiness to it, tugging at the land like a gray pall. Especially on rainy days like this one. Especially at scenes of human misery. Like this one.
By midmorning uniformed officers had set up a cordon of yellow tape around the perimeter, midway between the edge of the river and the adjacent access road, in order to keep the onlookers and media folks at a safe distance. Plainclothes investigators huddled down by the bodies, which had been covered with white sheets (now soaked through by the drizzle). By the time Ulysses Grove arrived at the scene, around eleven o’clock, the crime lab people had burned through six “megs” of digital photos. Hundreds of little numbered flags had been staked into the moist ground along the bank, labeling key pieces of physical evidence such as shreds of cloth, footprints, and blood streaks.
Grove arrived with all the pomp and circumstance of an incognito rock star. They chauffeured him through the snarl of traffic and throngs of reporters in an unmarked FBI minivan with tinted windows and headlamps flashing hypnotically. It had begun to drizzle, the sky turning so dark it looked like black-lung disease. The unpaved road had deteriorated to muck, and it took forever to get Grove down to the scene. En route, he sat quietly in the rear of the van with his digital camera in his lap, waiting patiently, oblivious to the cacophony of lights and voices piercing the mist.
When he finally reached the general vicinity of the scene, Grove asked his escort—a genial, portly field agent from St. Louis named William Menner (“Big Bill” to his friends)—if he could be let out at the top of the slope, behind the crowd, far away from the body dump. For the briefest instant, Menner seemed nonplussed by the request, but then graciously obliged without comment. He told the driver to pull over behind the medical examiner’s van.
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