Now Riggio had his eye on another attractive woman, though he was resisting his natural impulses, trying to curb his appetite for her. He was sensing something about Tatsy without knowing what it was, sensing a desire within himself to harm the new woman. But unknown to him, his very attraction for her would set off a series of unstoppable events.
It was only a matter of time before Meredith Lamour had to die.
For a couple of years now Tatsy had realized that she was intensely jealous of her brother whenever he was with other women; she didn’t want him to be with anyone else, to care about anyone else. She loved him, and despised him at the same time.
In her irritation she’d been doing other things to Riggio while he was in deep sleep—piercing his ears and putting posts in them, causing him to dream that he was a woman, and defying him to figure out what was going on. She could read his thoughts, and thus far he was not aware of her, only suspecting that he had conflicting desires and a serious mental problem—as if he was trying to self-diagnose himself, and cure himself.
Tatsy had used him to kill Mrs. Monroe’s dog, as well as all those lovers. And she was not done with him.
CHAPTER 18
Meredith and Riggio waited while the click chamber went through its cycles... the clicking noises, the intriguing scents she detected, the incredibly rapid trip across the solar system. She had left her little cat with a neighbor to watch. She and Riggio had talked about Blue Girl that morning, when he asked her if she had any pets, and she told him the story of how she’d found the kitten near death, and how tiny and emaciated it had been.
They’d also spoken of the unfortunate thing that happened to Mrs. Monroe’s dog, how someone—probably a neighbor who didn’t like the dog barking, or who felt threatened by it—had stabbed it to death, and how this devastated Mrs. Monroe.
“Pets have a way of calming people,” Meredith said. “They’re more than pets, in fact. That’s a bad word to use. They’re friends, they’re family members.”
He’d agreed.
A large travel case hovered in the air behind them, filled with their personal belongings and the four risk-management scanners they’d brought along for this inspection assignment. After less than a minute, the doors of the click chamber opened and she stepped out, followed by Riggio. The hover mechanism whirred as the trunk floated behind them. She felt a little rush of air at her feet, from its mechanism.
They had arrived at the tiny Saturn moon Vanni, a place that held fond memories for Meredith. She’d been here three times before, twice on business, and initially as a stop on her honeymoon trip with Zack. They’d stayed in a hotel that featured a spectacular view of Saturn’s glittering rings....
Remembering this, she paused for a moment at an enhanced viewing window, to gaze out on a magnified spacescape of the fascinating orbital debris, with icy moonlets, misshapen rocks and tiny particles, all caught in the gravitational pull of the great planet. By spinning one of the control dials on the side, she adjusted the focal point until she saw a swath of glowing fragments, a residue of the great nuclear war that occurred here eighteen years ago, between two major corporations vying for control of the region. One mercenary army faced off against another, until the two powerful companies agreed to share what was here—especially the rare, valuable minerals that could be mined from the orbital rings. Tourism was a comparatively small part of the revenue base of the region, and this completely enclosed moon was one of the most attractive places for people to visit from Earth.
Meredith told him the history as they caught a tram car to the Saturnia Hotel, crossing over a deep natural canyon that provided them with a thrilling, though stomach-churning, view of the dry, rocky floor far below.
“That’s a long way to fall,” Riggio said, looking down.
“This car has a backup safety system. If it breaks loose from the wire it goes into chute-mode and drifts down gently.”
“This moon also has artificial gravity, doesn’t it?” he asked. “Isn’t there some way of shutting off specific zones in the event of an emergency?”
She smiled. “Perhaps, but I haven’t heard of a way yet. The grav-system is either all on, or all off, as far as I know. You could be an inventor, Riggio, with an imagination like that. Of course you’d need to have the technical knowledge to work out the details of how it would actually work.”
“So it’s just one of those dime-a-dozen ideas, eh?”
“I didn’t mean it that way. No, I think it’s a good idea, and it shows me that you’re already thinking in terms of risk-management.”
To her, he didn’t seem nervous at all, not even at this height, but he did say, “The reason I mentioned shutting off the gravity zone is that the emergency chute on this car could fail. Does it have a backup system?”
“I’ve never heard of one. But I’m impressed. You’ll be a full-fledged risk-manager before we know it, maybe even an uber agent, to use one of Piers Johansen’s terms. You seem to have a natural ability for it.”
“Or a natural ability to survive,” he said. “Self-preservation might have something to do with my spark of inspiration.”
She smiled, but noticed he did not seem to be humored by his own witticism. As the tram slowed, to glide onto a platform at the other end, she noticed that Riggio’s dark blue eyes were steely-hard, as if he was thinking about something very serious, beyond anything he had expressed in words.
And she remembered Zack’s warning about him: “Watch out for this guy. I don’t like his looks.” As she recalled this, she noticed the young man was trembling a little, which she presumed to be from a fear of heights. They were a long way up.
~~~
Riggio realized he’d been trembling, and knew this was partially from a fear of heights, the acrophobia that hit him on occasion, but not consistently. No, his feelings now were mostly from his own internal turmoil when he was around this woman. He noticed her studying him intently, but didn’t hold eye contact with her. On the tram, out over the chasm, he’d had the bad thoughts again, thoughts of grabbing her and hurling overboard to her death. He’d also thought of killing her with the straight razor he had in his luggage. But he’d tried to chase away the evil thoughts by making small talk with her, and attempting to be witty. It had not entirely worked. Part of him—the part he loathed—knew he was missing an opportunity.
These were crazy, deranged thoughts and he didn’t like them, desperately wished they would go away. He felt like a man standing on the edge of a cliff, where he could step back from the edge and be safe, or lose his mind and hurtle over the edge.
If he killed Meredith he would be going over the edge, and he’d no longer have anything to live for afterward. He couldn’t possibly harm her, and yet he wanted to. He didn’t know if he could resist the urge; it was a powerful tugging from deep in his soul.
But how could that be? He was not a violent person, and could not understand why he felt such a terrible thing. Meredith had never been anything but kind to him. She was the most considerate person he could ever recall meeting—at least what he could remember from his spotty memory bank.
First he’d saved this beautiful woman’s life, and now he wanted to do away with her? It made no sense.
~~~
To Meredith it had always seemed as if something was beneath the surface of the young man beside her, something he didn’t show to others. She’d been assuming that this was involuntary, and that he truly had memory lapses that he had not been able to solve.
But what if Zack was right? What if Riggio was not what he appeared to be, and was hiding more than he let on? She assured herself that even if that was true, it didn’t mean he was dangerous. After all, he had already saved her life, and in an emergency she was sure he would help her again.
She’d seen that part of him beneath the surface, in his heart of hearts. And that was enough for her.
It also gave her a feeling of security that she was staying in the same hotel she’d enjoyed on her honeymoon
trip with Zack. Despite the problems the two of them had experienced, she still felt his protective embrace, even from so far away, millions of miles across the solar system. She missed him terribly, missed what they had lost. It had been so sweet and thoughtful of him to give her the painting of their dead son Travis—just one of many wonderful things he’d done.
She looked at a photograph of the painting she’d taken on her smart phone. He was a terrific artist, and a good man. If not for that one horrific day, they would still be together....
Three attendants in red-and-gold hotel uniforms strode toward them. The trunk Meredith and Riggio had brought was on hover mode, operating under its own power, but she decided to tip the employees anyway, for walking beside it. She didn’t like the idea of technology taking away jobs, wouldn’t want that to happen to her.
Now Riggio’s eyes were softer, as he gazed in awe at the immense glass and metal structure that towered in front of them, on the other side of a spectacular plaza of fountains, statues, and cosmic special effects. The fountains were like water and light at the same time, with meteorites and comets seeming to shoot out of the water and circle the plaza, before returning to the water in precise, successive splashes.
“We’ll check into adjoining rooms,” Meredith said to Riggio. “I’ll have the attendants separate out your travel case and bring it to you.”
“This is quite a place,” he said.
“Yes, it is.” She resisted the urge to tell him she’d been here before with Zack, and said instead, “I’ll meet you for dinner at 7:00 in the hotel restaurant. Tomorrow we’ll inspect the robotics factory.”
CHAPTER 19
During her long career in the FBI, Agent Jantz had been adept at using all available crime-fighting tools, including the national crime data base and an understanding of the most complicated methods of forensic analysis. Following the trail left by evidence, she had hunted down and arrested some of the most notorious criminals of the day.
Now she sought another one, a murderer with a past that was more strange and deeply troubling than any in her experience. He was a genetic mutation, a laboratory-bred monster who had stabbed, strangled and bludgeoned at least eight women. And she suspected there were even more murders that had not been detected yet, a feeling that she had deep in her gut.
Now she sat inside the blacked-out compartment of an unmarked FBI van, staring at a computer screen, on which reports from federal agents were coming in. Two other agents sat at additional screens—they were discussing the field operation, while Jantz glowered at them silently, feeling frustrated at the lack of progress today. It was mid-afternoon, and her team of six agents was canvassing the neighborhood where the killer had left the Denver murder victim’s car.
One of the agents, a stocky black man with short hair, said, “There’s no new information, and we still don’t know what the killer looks like.” Jenk Hurd had almost as many years on the force as she did, and she liked him.
“Only that he’s a male,” the other said. A cocky young agent with long blond hair, Flip Okung rose to his feet. “Time for me to go back out there,” he said.
“Maybe our perp is one of the people we see on these images, dressed like a woman,” Hurd suggested. This had already been discussed, and remained a possibility.
Standing at the rear door of the van, Okung said, “Or he’s a midget, impersonating a child.” He was looking through a one-way window, waiting for the right opportunity to open the door and climb out.
The two of them laughed, but Jantz didn’t think it was funny at all. She’d been crippled by the psychotic scientist who created this monster, and perhaps additional creatures she didn’t know about yet. She would never see anything funny in this case.
“Knock it off,” she said.
Okung grunted. An interior shield went up inside the van, to prevent anyone outside from seeing the computer operations when the door opened. He slipped outside.
Jantz had offered to pay these agents out of her own money, for them to work on their own time. She had not wanted to ask the FBI to pay for anything extra, not after the trouble she’d had getting Director Gilmore to allow her to work on this investigation in the first place. But somehow he’d gotten wind of what she was offering, and he’d sent in FBI personnel to work on federal time. It was a sign of respect he was giving to her, a much-deserved one, she thought.
She had just come inside the van. For the past couple of hours she had been out on the street herself, going from door to door and speaking to people on the sidewalk, performing interviews with anyone who might know something about the driver of that car, who might have seen the smallest thing. Even with all of the technology available to her, she believed in old-fashioned detective work.
Jantz changed her computer setting, watched the images of hundreds of people who had walked in the neighborhood since the car was abandoned weeks ago—a time they had figured out from city surveillance records. But somehow there was no image of the driver leaving it there. It was a big hole in the records, but not out of the ordinary; throughout the city and across the nation, average neighborhoods such as this were not under tight surveillance. Only central districts and historical problem areas were watched block by block and corner by corner.
On the screen she watched the surveillance images of men, women and children. The killer could be any of the adults, but all had not been identified. There were unknowns. Due to lighting problems or the directions people were facing, some of their features were not shown in enough detail; they were moving shadows that would not clarify enough under enhancement. All of the identified people had been run through data bases, and some had criminal backgrounds. The fingerprints of every identified person had been taken, but so far there were no matches with the known Riggio crime scenes, or with the car.
There were also drone-patrol photos, as well as images taken by dash-cam units on a number of local cars. All of the data that could be retrieved was being analyzed, but so far nothing had turned up.
A young agent had said it was as if the murderer had been dropped onto Earth from an alien planet, as if he was not part of what went on here—except to destroy, except to kill.
But Jantz knew better; she knew that the demented research scientist Kato Yordanius had created this monster in his laboratory, and maybe more of them. To lure his victims and lull them, the killer must look ordinary, perhaps even handsome. He must be attractive enough to draw women into his web so that he could slaughter them.
An attractive man...
What do I have to do, she thought, look for a male model, an actor?
She saw only dead ends. It was frustrating. The fugitive was like a ghost, emerging from the shadows to murder, and then melting back into darkness.
But he was bound to make mistakes. All killers made mistakes. For the first time Jantz had both DNA and fingerprints—mistakes left behind by the killer. He had also made a mistake of driving the murder victim’s car to Seattle. Satellites had tracked it to Washington state—and if there had not been a break in sat-tracking, they would have at least shown the killer getting out of the car—and then he could be followed.
Agent Jantz was looking for the next mistake....
CHAPTER 20
Dr. Kato Yordanius was hiding right under the noses of his pursuers. The FBI—and especially that agent Sariah Jantz—probably thought he was either dead or on another planet, far across the solar system. But he was neither.
His health had always been fragile due to a rare form of albinism that caused him to have problems focusing his vision at times and intermittent twitching of his eyelids, as well as an extreme sensitivity to light. His eyes were pale gray, and his hair had been pure white since birth. His skin was so ashen from a lack of melanin that he could not go out in the sunshine for even five minutes without covering up. He had been following a strict regimen of drugs and diet for years, which stabilized him most of the time.
An only child, he had been born with a rare, inherited
genetic abnormality, an autosomal recessive malady so severe that there was nothing he could do to rectify it—and he knew more about genetics than any living person. More in fact, than any person who had ever lived. He knew enough to play God, to create people and set them loose in the world. He could do that for humankind, but he could do little for himself, except to prescribe his own drugs and a limited exercise regimen, to enable him to get by from day to day. He’d been doing that for a long time.
His father, a highly successful investment broker, had paid for the best education for the young man. As a result, he had three advanced medical degrees, with a wide knowledge of human ailments, medicines, and cures. But when he was a teenager, before acquiring that knowledge, doctors told him he would not live another five years. But Yordanius had proved them wrong, had beaten the odds. He’d been determined to do that, or he would never have been able to conduct his grand experiment on humanity, his valiant attempt to improve the human animal. So he had patched his imperfect body together, enough to complete his great and essential work.
Yordanius had no girlfriend, no wife, no gay lover or any other person with whom he enjoyed a close personal relationship. He was, in fact, asexual. Years ago, whenever he’d had sexual urges toward women, or even men, he’d sublimated them and decided—for the sake of his work—to remain celibate. Even so, he had children... those he created in his own laboratory.
He was eating a meal with three of them now, at a table in his small, austere apartment. It was in the same structure as his laboratory, concealed underground in a remote, forested region of northern California. He owned the property and ostensibly used it as a hunting camp; one of his lab-children had arranged for the purchase under a secure trust, serving as trustee under an assumed name.
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