The driver did as he was told.
Grove thanked the men and got out, then carried his camera up a muddy rise and into a thicket of loblollies. He stood there, gazing through the curtain of branches down at the scene like a lone surveyor preparing to measure a plot of ground for some obscure building project. Through his functional eye he saw the peripheral buzz of police cars and eager reporters like a radiant corona of glowing light. He saw the inner ring of yellow tape fluttering in the misty breeze. He saw the tiny numbered flags dotting the weeds, leading downward, closer and closer to the clutch of grim-faced investigators and morgue attendants in their ghostly white hazmat suits. Finally his gaze took in the forlorn nucleus of all this activity: the ragged pale lumps, buried in the weeds near the water’s edge.
What he was doing was starting the spiral.
The “spiral” was a technique that Grove had developed years ago as a first-year investigator. Designed to take in the whole of a scene, and to move from objective to subjective space, it began with Grove physically stepping back as far as possible from the victim while keeping the victim in view. With his bad eye he had gotten into the habit of turning his head at severe angles so he could scan the scene with his right eye like a periscope. With each scan he moved slowly toward the victim in an ever-tightening spiral pattern, sweeping the place with his good eye, taking pictures from each vantage point. (Looking through a viewfinder had actually gotten easier with his bad eye; he didn’t have to squint or close one eye to orient the other eye to the lens.) Throughout the process he made sure he looked at the ground and foliage, as well as the trees and the sky, for any clues that might have been missed. But the search for physical evidence was only part of it.
What he was really doing was getting the subjective feel of the environment, the killer’s point of view, the way the perp saw the act.
But on this gray, drizzly morning, down by that great muddy river, Grove had gotten halfway to the bodies before he noticed something strange was happening around the periphery of the spiral, something that never happened at sensational crime scenes such as this one. He had been so busy taking photos of the twisted poplars and the weed-whiskered road, moving around behind the crowd, keeping his focus on those sheet-covered victims, that he hadn’t noticed the sudden quiet. And the faint, muffled noise underneath it. Behind him. Beside him. All around him.
Grove paused.
It sounded like leaves rustling, the hushed yet expectant whispers rippling through the crowd. Grove looked up and realized that all eyes were on him. The reporters, the onlookers, the morgue attendants, the uniformed officers—even the other plainclothes investigators—all of them watching him now. Watching and waiting for the great and mysterious Special Agent Ulysses Grove to do something brilliant. The whispering faded away. The ensuing silence was so eerie and incongruous it made Grove’s flesh crawl.
Of course they knew who he was. For years he had been a regular fixture in the tabloids: the “monster hunter” from the FBI with his “mystical methods.” Even his budding romance with science journalist Maura County had gotten all kinds of ink. And his looks had only made matters worse – not long ago he was featured in Ebony magazine’s Fifty Most Beautiful People of Color in America, and later that year he appeared on national TV as a guest on The Tavis Smiley Show, discussing the recent increases in black-on-black violence with his rakish eye patch still in place from his recent surgery.
But now, this morning, Grove realized he had been wrong about letting the media watch him work. This was a bad idea. This was a huge problem, and he had to do something immediately. He turned to Agent Menner, who had been discreetly following along, and Grove started to say something like “Let’s move these people further back”…or “Let’s put up some privacy curtains so we can work in peace”…but he abruptly stopped himself.
A spark—a revelation actually—flashed in Grove’s mind, so powerful and unexpected it practically took his breath away. He looked up at the hundreds of people gathered in the drizzle like an audience at some macabre play. Camera lenses were trained on him, microphones aimed at him, pens poised to capture his every gesture. It was almost sensual, the power it conjured in him. Like a blast of hormones. Then he looked back down at the sad little bundles of human remains in the weeds twenty-five feet away, facing each other, their rain-spattered shrouds marbled with bloodstains.
The realization nearly peeled off the top of his head. “Agent Menner,” Grove murmured, unable to tear his good eye away from the victims.
“Yes, sir.” The stocky field agent now stood beside him, waiting, his arms crossed against his barrel chest.
“I’m going to need you to do me a favor.” Grove started walking toward the victims.
“Anything you need,” Menner said, trundling along in the muck.
Grove approached the first victim. He had to step over a low strand of yellow tape connecting a pair of evidence flags; then he sidestepped an ambu-gurney left in the weeds by the medical examiner’s assistant.
Finally he reached the closest white-shrouded bundle of human remains. It lay at the base of a leprous elm tree. “I’m going to need you to get a specialist down here, Agent Menner.” Grove pulled out his rubber gloves and knelt down by the victim. “Immediately if possible.”
Menner produced a small spiral-bound notebook from his pocket and prepared to write.
Grove’s pulse quickened as he peeled the sheet away from the thirty-five-year-old female Caucasian lying in the fetal position. As Grove would later learn, her name was Dina Louise Dudley, and the ligature marks around her neck suggested that she had been strangled to death well before her evisceration. Like all the other Ripper victims, she would show a marked increase in free histamine and serotonin levels in her blood, indicating torture. But the method and motive for the torture—up until now—had remained elusive.
Grove looked at the other sheet-covered lump lying in the cattails twenty feet away. The ME would place that victim’s time of death at one to two hours earlier than Miss Dudley. Like all the other scenes. Two dead women, offset times of death, a perfect matching set.
“Okay…what kind of specialist are we talking about?” Menner finally asked, his voice sound faint and distant to Grove’s throbbing, ringing ears.
Grove didn’t answer. He reached down to the blood-speckled face of Dina Dudley and touched the wet, dark tracks on her cheeks. Then he brought his fingertip back up to his tongue and tasted it. The salty, alkaline tang of tears was shot through with a telltale bitter flavor.
“How the hell did I miss it?” Grove was muttering more to himself than anybody else.
“Excuse me? Agent Grove? You say something?”
Grove stood. Swallowed hard. Put his gloves away. Then looked at Big Bill Menner. “I’m going to need an ophthalmologist down here on the double.”
The burly investigator wasn’t sure he had heard him correctly. “Pardon?”
Grove didn’t blink. “An eye surgeon. I know a doc in Washington who can refer us to somebody around here.”
THREE
In the hour and fifteen minutes it took Special Agent William Menner to go and find the only qualified ophthalmologist in the Quincy/Hannibal area, very few onlookers left the scene. If anything, more reporters arrived. More remote trucks, more talking heads, and more bystanders dressed in yellow parkas and hooded sweatshirts. They pressed up against the fluttering cordon tape, while the CSI people waited in the mist down by the bodies, drinking cold coffee from paper cups and grumbling about the delay.
For most of that time Ulysses Grove sat in the back of a squad car, scribbling in his notebook, reviewing photos and diagrams of the Ripper’s earlier victims stored in his camera—always in pairs, always facing each other, always with the offset times of death. Grove hadn’t told the other investigators anything of substance yet, and he hadn’t made any calls to Quantico. He had to be sure his theory was correct, and the only way he was going to be sure was to have the eye surgeon conf
irm his suspicions. But it all seemed like a forgone conclusion now. He knew he was right.
Grove knew he was right because he felt the same delicious mixture of exhilaration and relief that he had felt so many times before when a case had cracked wide open—the soothing rush of a thorn pulled from his side. He had felt it while hunting the Hurricane Killer, when he stared into that thermograph of a deadly storm bearing down on New Orleans. He felt it a couple of years ago when he gazed upon the Mount Cairn mummy posed in precisely the same postmortem position as the Sun City victims. He felt it when he was hunting Keith Jesperson and saw that happy-face sticker in that squalid restroom in that South Dakota truck stop. This was the part that Grove never told anybody: it was like a drug. It was the only moment in his life when he truly felt alive—when he finally turned over the correct stone and saw evil clearly, saw it in the light.
Was this the mysterious part of him that people talked about behind his back? Was it the part of him his mother called “his birthright”? Old Vida Grove, the eccentric Kenyan woman whom the neighborhood kids back in Chicago had called the voodoo lady, had always thought her son Ulysses was born to be a shaman, a visionary. And who was he to question his gift? Who was he to resist his own destiny?
Let them watch.
A sudden muffled thud pierced Grove’s thoughts, and he turned with a start, just in time to see Agent Menner standing outside the squad car, rapping his knuckles on Grove’s window. Grove rolled it down.
“I got a Dr. Samuel Habbib here from Quincy’s Blessing Hospital.” The beefy FBI agent jerked his thumb at the gentleman standing behind him in the overcast light.
“Good, excellent, thanks a lot.” Grove opened the door and climbed out.
The rain had lifted, and now the gray sky hung low over the pewter-colored waters of the Mississippi. A chill breeze was blowing in off the Missouri side, and the air smelled of fish reek and ancient boat oil. Grove lifted his collar, then extended his hand to the surgeon standing behind Menner. “Appreciate you coming down, Doc, especially on such short notice.” Grove gave him a perfunctory smile. “I’m Agent Grove. Ulysses. Surgeon out of D.C. did some work on me last year, Stanholm at Johns Hopkins, gave us your name.”
“John Stanholm and I went to medical school together at Oxford,” the little man marveled, shaking Grove’s hand with a nervous tic of a smile twitching in his face. He was a diminutive Pakistani man with a narrow, pointed face and a receding hairline. He wore a North Face windbreaker that looked a little anachronistic over his hospital tunic. “I’m guessing you had an open-globe injury to the left eye?”
“I’m impressed, Doc.”
“I wish I knew what this was about.” Habbib seemed unnerved by all the spinning light and forensic minutiae around him. He glanced over his shoulder. “I’ve got a LASIK procedure scheduled at two o’clock.”
“This should just take a minute. C’mon.” Grove gave Menner a nod, then ushered the surgeon under the tape, down the slope, and across the rain-slick weeds.
The doctor was visibly jittery. “I heard something about a double murder?”
“How’s your stomach, Doc?” Grove asked as they approached Dina Dudley’s corpse. Grove reached down and peeled back the shroud.
“I’m still not clear as to what you gentlemen want me to—”
The doctor’s gaze fell on the brutalized corpse of Dina Dudley, and his voice stalled. He cocked his head as he took in the grisly details, the blood-stippled features of her face, the ligature marks around her neck like dark purplish worms, and the abrasions around her eyes. It looked as though somebody had scourged her eyelids and forehead and scalp with barbed wire. “Oh, dear,” Habbib muttered under his breath, aghast, staring and staring.
“I’d like to draw your attention to the wound patterns on the woman’s eyelids and forehead.” Grove pointed a rubber-gloved index finger at the blackened, coagulated cuts and puncture marks across Dina Dudley’s forehead. “I’m curious to see if you draw the same conclusions I have.”
“Oh…boy…oh, boy…oh, boy…” The doctor kept staring and then, all at once, his posture changed, as though he were seeing something new in the tragic remains. “Wait a minute. Yes. I see. I see what you mean.” The doctor pursed his lips judiciously like a man pondering a formula, then looked up at Grove. “You’re thinking these wounds are from a speculum or some kind of retractor.”
Grove gave him a mild smile. “You’re the expert, Doc. You tell me.”
They all wanted to know what was going on. Everybody within a five-hundred-yard radius of the scene. They all could feel it—from the lead investigators down to the lowliest morgue wagon attendant—the buzz of revelation. They could smell it. They could see it in the way Grove had rounded up all the St. Louis field agents, the medical examiner, Special Agent Menner, the Adams County sheriff, and the surgeon from Blessing Hospital. The group had been ushered over to a quiet corner of dry land between the paramedic trucks and the road, safely inside the cordons, far enough from the crowd to be out of earshot.
Now the group was huddling with the intensity of a Super Bowl team in the final minutes of the game. Onlookers were craning their necks to get a glimpse of what was happening inside that huddle. A few rogue cameramen had wandered over to the edge of the gravel shoulder, right up against the yellow tape, aiming their lenses and boom microphones at the strange powwow fifty feet away, trying to glean a word, a phrase, a gesture, anything that would hint at what was being said. But the river winds and rustling trees drowned most of the voices.
Grove and the Pakistani doctor knelt, side by side, inside the circle of investigators, scraping a crude diagram in the mud with sticks. It looked like a human face with one eye wide open. With the tip of his branch the doctor traced a hook above the upper eyelid, tugging the lid up. “You see, a speculum works like this.” He spoke to the group with the patience of a kindergarten teacher showing flash cards. “It’s designed to dilate the opening of a body cavity.”
Grove chimed in then: “In past victims we just wrote off the abrasions as part of the torture…even the meticulous placement of duct tape adhesive across the forehead. We just figured it was part of the bondage and torture component.”
The doctor nodded and went on: “In ophthalmic surgery, the speculum retracts the eyelid for the duration of a procedure, allowing access to the sclera or pupil.”
“Plus there’s the eyedrops,” Grove added. “We won’t know for sure until we get the lab results back but I’m betting there’s artificial tears on the victim’s face.”
“Artificial tears?” This was Menner. “You lost me there.”
“If a retractor was used to keep the eyelids open,” the doctor explained in a soft, accented voice, “it’s highly likely there was Perfluoron or some kind of saline compound dropped into the eye at regular intervals.”
One of the lead investigators from St. Louis spoke up then, a slender, gray-at-the-temples man. “I think I see where this is going.”
Grove nodded deferentially at the man. “Go ahead…Agent Watkins, is it?”
“That’s right. Joe Watkins. Belleville field office. This is about watching, isn’t it?”
The group got very still.
Grove gave a grim little nod. “It’s about the second victim being forced to watch, yeah.”
A long pause.
In the far distance the sky rattled with thunder.
Menner thrust his hands in his pockets and mumbled under his breath, “God, I hate the sadists.”
Grove looked at the big man. “Right again. This is definitely a sadist we’re after here, a pure sociopath, but he’s the trickiest kind because he’s probably a highly organized personality.”
Menner looked at Grove. “Meaning he’s good at it? Cunning? Smart?”
Grove told him that was exactly right.
The sheriff jumped in then. “Okay, so what are we looking for here?” He was rubbing his thick neck as he spoke. “Somebody with medical training? An eye su
rgeon?”
“I don’t think so,” Grove said, then shot a glance at Dr. Habbib.
The surgeon was nodding: “I have a colleague in Cincinnati, he goes to third world countries and shows them how to make eyelid clamps out of paperclips.”
“And the eyedrops you can find at any Walgreens,” Grove added. “There’s also a battlefield crudeness to the way he tapes the victims’ heads to trees or whatever…lampposts.”
“So where does that leave us?” Agent Watkins wanted to know. “We can’t canvass every drugstore in the Midwest.”
Grove looked over at the two shrouds in the weeds. “We look for somebody who fits the profile…and who’s all about watching.”
Another moment of tense silence as the group mulled that over.
“And a control freak,” Grove added. “That’s really important, the control part…and the watching part.”
Less than fifty feet away, standing in the chilled river breezes, the killer watched. He watched the scene with fervid intensity through the lens of a TV camera. In fact, he watched with something close to awe as the handsome black FBI agent enlightened the team of investigators.
The killer wore a nylon WJID-TV ST. LOUIS windbreaker, hip-wader boots, and a heavy battery belt connected via electric umbilical cord to his video camera’s yoke. It was the standard uniform for a remote news cameraman at the NBC affiliate, at which he had been an employee for nearly ten years. But he wouldn’t be able to work there much longer if this brilliant profiler from the FBI found out about his compulsion.
On one level, the cameraman greatly admired this dapper African American criminologist. He had read several articles about him, and had seen him in the flesh on two other occasions: last year at the scene of the Davenport killings, the two nurses from Augustana College, and a month later, in Memphis, those two fry cooks, strangled and gutted in the alley behind the Popeyes Chicken place.
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