“Agent Grove?”
Pure, white-hot anger began to smolder in Grove’s gut. This freak Splet had hired a hit man to kill Grove, but worse than that, much worse, was the fact that Splet had been gazing at pictures of Maura. The same eyes that had gazed upon eviscerated women, that had coveted empty eye sockets, that had savored ghastly human misery and torture—these same eyes—had gazed upon Grove’s wife only hours earlier. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was the circle, and the familiar scorch mark burned into its nucleus.
“Here we go,” Grove murmured in a strained voice, as he stared at the circle of ash. The familiar burn mark was imprinted into the moldy straw like a negative image burned into photographic paper: a perfect shadow of the purse-shaped caul.
The rotted walls of that barn started closing in on Grove as he gawped at that litter of articles and pictures. He shuddered at the thought of Maura being associated in any way with this insane world, this squalid evil game, this ancient cycle.
Bill Menner’s voice seem to wake him from a dream. “You’re looking at the stuff from the tabloids?”
Grove slowly nodded, unable to look away from those wrinkled scraps of paper.
Menner shrugged. “I figure he knew you were closing in, got a little fixated. What do you make of it?”
Grove stood up. He started to say something when another voice pierced the stillness of the barn.
“Agent Menner!”
Big Bill Menner whirled. “Over here.”
A younger man, a Bureau trainee, his skinny neck swimming in his suit, came charging up to the two men. “Agent Menner, Agent Grove, I’m sorry—sorry to interrupt—but we got a—we found something—”
“Slow down, Atkins.” Menner pulled a cigarette from his pocket. “Spit it out.”
“We found something in Splet’s SUV.”
Menner and Grove looked at each other, then Menner gave the young trainee a look. “Take a breath, kid.”
“You know the SUV with the TV equipment in the back?”
“Yeah, it’s been dusted and processed already.”
The young man shook his head frantically. “No, no, they found a camera, and it was still running, and they looked at the—the—whaddyacallit.”
“The tape?”
“Yeah, the tape, they looked at the tape.”
Menner shot another glance at Grove, then looked at the young man. “And?”
Agent Atkins swallowed hard. “He’s on it.”
“Who.”
“The guy, the perp.”
“Splet?”
More furious nodding. “Yeah, yeah—Splet—the perp, he’s on the tape.”
After a stunned pause, Grove stepped forward and said, “Let’s go have a look.”
For the first twenty minutes or so, the footage revealed very little other than a rotting old barn glimpsed through the side window of the SUV, and a few flickers of movement beyond the edge of the frame. Every so often a shadow would cross the screen in a dark blur, as though somebody has passed the field of view, close to the lens, or perhaps something crossing just a few inches behind the perimeter of the lens. The sound was muffled and indistinct behind the sealed windows of the vehicle, but disturbingly provocative nonetheless. Timbers snapping, a faint crackle of gunfire, a human scream, something being dragged in the dirt—all of it captured while the picture just sat on that weird, tilted angle of a barn blurred by moonlight reflecting off window glass.
The camera must have been purposely turned on at some point in the wee hours, or maybe jarred by a struggle and accidentally engaged. But regardless of the reasons—which would more than likely never be known—the camera started rolling around the first victim’s time of death. Maybe Splet turned it on. Maybe this was all merely one more iteration of his eye obsession—the cold, cruel, impassive gaze of the video lens, the tyranny of the watcher. After all, wasn’t this the electronic, mass-media version of his modus operandi? Making people watch? Making people witness the nadir of a victim’s last moments, kicking and screaming as they are dragged down the portals of hell?
“Here he comes, right there, there!”
Sandra Callaway, an evidence technician from Menner’s task force, jabbed a fingertip at the small monitor that was set up on the SUV’s rear hatch, picnic style, for everybody to see. A slender black woman with graying dreadlocks, she was Menner’s favorite technogeek, and right now she held a large umbrella over the equipment, ignoring her own rain-dappled shoulders, as though the video gear was a delicate child.
It had started to drizzle, making the scene a miserable crucible of mud and clammy, fetid tension. Grove stood directly behind Callaway, gripping an umbrella, watching the screen with feverish interest. Menner and the others stood behind Grove, looking on, jockeying for position with their own umbrellas. Onscreen something moved in the distance, subtly at first, but unmistakable: the barn’s entrance doors were shifting, slowly opening.
“That’s him, that’s the guy,” Agent Callaway said with a pert little nod toward the screen.
Grove stared at the screen. He couldn’t see anything at first. But then he saw the dark figure in the distance, materializing in the doorway, emerging from the barn. At this point in the footage, the figure paused. It wasn’t clear what he was doing. His face was overlaid in shadow. He looked out at the parking lot. Then he looked back over his shoulder at the darkness inside the barn. Then he looked directly at the camera in the SUV and started coming this way, toward the lens, toward us.
“Wait a minute.” Grove couldn’t believe what he was seeing. His stomach lurched. “What’s going on?”
Callaway glanced over her shoulder at him. “What’s the matter?”
“That’s Splet?” Grove pointed incredulously at the screen, the image showing a little man in a torn, bloody dress, emerging from the barn.
“That is correct, my brother. Say hello to Henry Alan Splet.”
“Holy Christ,” Grove murmured, staring at the strange footage of a man dressed as a woman coming directly toward the camera. In the video, he walked with a weird, stiff gait, as though he just had a hip replaced or had just been shocked by a jolt of electricity. His eyes had the strangest look in them, an almost maniacal alertness, a glassy, knowing sort of gaze, like he was privy to some cosmic punch-line.
“What’s the matter, Grove?” Bill Menner had stepped a little closer and lowered his voice. “Something ring a bell?”
Grove could not tear his gaze from the monitor. “That’s the same son of a bitch who rushed my place in Virginia.”
“I’ll be goddamned.” Menner’s utterance was barely audible above the rain.
Callaway turned back to the screen. “Y’all ain’t seen nothing yet—check this out.”
On screen, the man in the dress approached the SUV with that somnambulant stare burning a hole in the lens. His eyes virtually glowed with madness. It was hard to watch. His mouth was moving, slowly, like that of some toothless, drooling crone. Then, without warning, he slipped offscreen for a moment. A series of muffled clicks follows, suggesting that the rear door was being opened. A bizarre noise rumbled on the soundtrack, a very deep chugging sound, like an engine. The frame jiggled. The image blurred. The madman was picking up the camera and aiming it back at himself.
A face filled the frame: a ghastly version of the man who once was Henry Splet.
“What the hell?”
Grove’s voice sounded almost alien to his own ears as he watched the footage. The killer loomed only inches away from the lens now. Eyes burning, gigantic mouth churning obscenely, he was snarling some kind of inhuman growl. In fact, the word growl hardly does the sound justice. It was a noise from the deepest bowels of a coal mine, an ugly, rhythmic grinding sound, so low and immense it practically corrupted the digital videotape, distorting the soundtrack to shreds like a series of hiccuping bomb blasts. It practically vibrated the cabinets.
“Turn it off,” Bill Menner blurted, nodding at the black woman.
<
br /> “No problem.” Callaway punched the stop button. The picture slammed into black, the sudden silence jarring. “Whattya make of it?”
Menner shrugged.
Grove said nothing, just kept staring at that black monitor, the memory of that possessed face burned into the back of his retinas. The thunderous, deep growling echoed in his ear drums. He knew what it meant. He knew. It would be difficult to explain to the others, but he knew the look in those fiery eyes. He had seen it in the faces of other psychopaths, in the shark-eyed gaze of Richard Ackerman back in Alaska, in the dead stare of Michael Doerr in New Orleans.
Factor X had returned.
“Whattya think, Dave?” Callaway had turned to one of her techies, a baby-faced young man in an FBI windbreaker standing off to the side in the drizzle, a stymied expression on his face, the brim of his Bureau cap dripping.
“You hear the sirens in the background?”
“Yeah, so?”
“A guy fleeing the scene? Stops like that? Takes the time to make a video?”
Callaway nodded. “He definitely wanted us to see this.”
Menner piped in: “The guy’s a loon. How can you—”
“It’s a message meant for me.”
All faces pivoted toward Grove at the sound of this glum, solemn announcement. Grove already had a reputation among working-stiff field agents for being a bit of a nut himself, a precognate type, the kind of spooky Quantico character best left to the chat shows and book tours. But today, amidst all the exotic aftermath and disturbing evidence, he carried a certain gravitas.
He let this latest assertion sink in for a moment. “I’m the guy he wanted to see this.”
Menner looked at him. “Okay, so…why?”
“I don’t know yet.” Grove looked at the blank screen. “Let me see it again.”
Agent Callaway turned back to the deck and punched play and the screen flickered back to life.
The horrible deep rumbling returned as the killer’s contorted features filled the screen.
The huge, black divot of a mouth churned obscenely at the lens.
“Wait a minute.” The realization struck Grove like an ice pick between the eyes. “Wait a minute—”
“What, what is it?” Menner was staring at the profiler, along with everybody else. Nobody was looking at the monitor anymore.
Everybody waited as Grove turned toward the baby-faced man in the Bureau cap. “Dave, right?”
“That’s right, Dave Hockenberry.” The geek stepped forward, gave him a nervous little nod.
Grove rubbed his mouth, thinking about it for a moment. “Can you adjust the speed of this thing?”
TWENTY-FIVE
Six people huddled in the airless crime-lab van, the narrow steel-reinforced cargo bay reeking of stale cigarettes and coffee. Ulysses Grove and young Agent Hockenberry stood near the front, hunched over an array of small CRT monitors embedded in a console. The others crowded the rear: Menner, Callaway, one of the lab assistants, and now Tom Geisel. The section chief had only just arrived from Washington, and now stood skeptically watching in his London Fog raincoat.
“What are we looking for here, Ulysses?” Gesiel wanted to know, his voice stretched thin with tension.
“Actually we’re not looking, Tom.” Grove kept staring at the scopes. “We’re listening.”
“Let’s try it at a hundred and fifty frames a second, see what that sounds like.” Hockenberry typed a command into the keyboard. The digital playback system clicked and whirred, and the picture of Splet swam on the screen for a moment. The image distorted as it rewound, backing up to the moment the murderer first appeared.
Grove felt his blood running cold as he waited for the video to engage. On each flank, the van’s corrugated walls pressed in on him. The stray candy wrappers, the empty paper cups, the coils of patch cords, the shelving units brimming with probes and sensors and electronic gear—all of it pushed inward on Grove with excruciating pressure.
“There.” Hockenberry punched another button on the console, and the image froze. He nodded. “Let’s see what that sounds like.”
The image raced forward. It looked like the Keystone Kops version of a madman, his face shivering and jumping up and down in fast motion.
“That’s five times the normal speed.”
The growling sound now resembled a buzz saw, but was still fairly low and gravelly, just not as rhythmic. At this speed it set Grove’s teeth on edge.
“Still doesn’t sound like much of anything,” Menner commented from the rear.
“Can you speed it up even more?” Grove asked.
A tense sigh from the baby-faced young man. “I’ve never tried this before, but I could lay this off, then run it through the processor again.”
“What would that buy us?” Menner wanted to know.
Hockenberry gave a shrug. “Basically it would be the growling sound twenty-five times faster.”
“Let’s do it,” Grove said with a terse nod, then glanced over his shoulder at Geisel.
The two men exchanged a grave look. For years Tom Geisel had been Grove’s lifeline, an old friend and mentor, but lately Grove sensed the section chief growing weary of the game, losing his edge, getting soft. It wasn’t anything obvious. And it probably wasn’t apparent to anybody but Grove. But Grove saw it around the edges of the older man’s eyes, heard it in the hoarseness of his voice—a certain resignation, a heaviness. The section chief had been best man at Grove and Maura’s wedding last year, and he had welled up with tears near the end of the ceremony. Grove had never seen Geisel cry like that. But it wasn’t mere sentiment. There was something darker going on behind Tom Geisel’s hound dog expression, something tugging at the older man’s relationship with Grove. And now, tonight, closed inside this stale-smelling mobile crime lab, Grove sensed the helpless feeling exuding from Geisel like a musk.
“All right, here we go.” Hockenberry flipped switches and typed commands into the keyboard, until the screen went completely white with snow. “We’re not going to see anything, but we’ll hear the voice at seven hundred and fifty frames a second.”
Grove gave him a nod. “Go for it.”
“Most sounds, this would basically kick it up into the ultrasonic,” Hockenberry murmured as he punched one last toggle. “Here goes.”
There was an audible pop, and the digital counter started whirring so fast it blurred.
The speakers hummed.
Grove frowned. “Can you turn it up any louder?”
“It’s almost pinned.” Hockenberry gave another shrug, and twisted another knob.
The noise that buzzed out of the speakers almost sounded like the raspy voice of a stroke victim.
Goosebumps formed on Grove’s neck. “There’s something there. Can we hear it again?”
The atmosphere inside the mobile lab seemed to crystalize suddenly.
“Sure…whatever.” Hockenberry, exceedingly uneasy now, typed another command.
The weird voice warbled and fluttered out of the speakers, then cut off again.
“I’m hearing words.” Grove leaned toward the speaker. “Play it again.”
Hockenberry pressed the button again. The strange voice snarled at them.
Grove turned to the group. “Is anybody else hearing that?”
The others stood there.
Grove pointed at the machinery. “Play it again, Dave.”
Another command into the keyboard, and the ghostly voice undulated out of the speakers once again. This time, Grove was certain he heard an approximation of a very familiar word. His scalp bristled.
Geisel said, “I’ll be a son of a bitch.”
Menner shook his head. “I don’t hear it.”
“Hold up, hold up.” Agent Callaway cocked her head toward the speaker. “Was that ‘grow’?”
“Listen closer.” Grove nodded at Hockenberry, and the speakers crackled and hummed again.
“It’s ‘Grove,’” Callaway blurted. “The voice is sa
ying ‘Grove.’”
“‘Grove—something,’” Grove corrected her.
Hockenberry typed the play command again, and the walls reverberated with the ungodly rasp.
“Jesus Christ, is that ‘eleven’—Grove eleven?” Menner looked nauseous. “What the hell does that mean?”
Geisel stepped forward. His face twitched as he pointed at the speaker. “Play it again.”
Hockenberry played it again.
Geisel looked at Grove. “That’s not possible.”
“Grove eleven black, is what I heard.” Grove felt light headed. “Grove eleven black? Right?”
“Sounds like a goddamn code,” Menner chimed in.
“There’s something else,” Callaway said. “At the end. Roll it one more time, Dave.”
Hockenberry tapped the keys.
The voice rasped at them.
Callaway licked her lips. “Grove eleven black rim, it sounds like. ‘Eleven black rim?’ What the hell does that mean?”
Geisel stared at the speaker, his face ashen. “Everybody out.”
Menner looked at the section chief. “Pardon?”
“I said everybody out. Except Grove. Everybody out, right now.”
Callaway looked at Menner, then back at Geisel. “Am I missing something? Should we be—?”
“I said out, goddamnit! Now!!”
There was a beat of stunned silence, a series of glances exchanged. Geisel’s outburst took everyone by surprise. Even Grove. He couldn’t remember the last time the section chief had cried out in anger.
Menner and Callaway shared one last uneasy glance and gave each other a shrug, then turned and shuffled over to the rear vertical door. Menner unlatched it and yanked it upward—the pulleys shrieking—while Callaway grabbed her umbrella. One by one the team members climbed out into the drizzle. Within seconds, Grove stood alone in the claustrophobic little enclosure with his boss.
“The voice on that recording did not say ‘eleven black rim,’” Geisel informed him after the door had been lowered and latched from the outside. The older man’s hands were shaking. His eyes glinted with alarm.
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