Spider jk-1

by Michael Morley

  Italians visiting La Casa Strada always asked that, and Nancy loved the fact that they wanted her to share their passion for the country. 'I adore Italy,' she said with gusto. 'We've been here a couple of years now and I feel more and more at home every day.'

  Vincenzo's face lit up. 'Meraviglioso, wonderful,' he said.

  'Let me show you the damage,' said Nancy.

  As they walked outside, she slowed down and looked around. It was something she did every time she stepped outside La Casa Strada. To her, every view around the hotel was a visual feast, a delicacy marinating in time itself, growing deliciously better every day she spent there. Today the sunlight in the private garden behind the kitchen was as soft and golden as pure honey.

  'It's just down that slope there,' said Nancy, pointing across the garden. 'You can see where my husband has moved some old fencing across to stop anyone going down.'

  Vincenzo nodded and walked slowly over, his eyes drinking in the view across the lush valley towards Mount Amiata in the south and Siena in the north. Nancy watched him disappear down the banking, and then, amid the birdsong in the orange trees she heard a strange sound, a sort of harsh clunk and click, a metallic kind of noise, the type that simply didn't belong in a garden. She took a couple of paces around a tree and was startled to find herself face to face with her highly inquisitive fellow American, Terry McLeod.

  'Excuse me,' she said abruptly, 'it's private back here. Would you mind returning to the guest gardens?'

  'Oh hell, I'm sorry,' said McLeod jovially. 'You've got such a wonderful place; I was just walking around taking some photographs. I'm real sorry.'

  Nancy noticed the expensive-looking camera strung on a thick Nikon strap around his neck, his finger still on the shutter button. 'That's okay. Just please remember in future.' There was something about McLeod she didn't like, something that she just couldn't work out.

  'New camera, I just can't leave it alone,' said the American. He lifted it from his neck to show her and in the same moment clunk-clicked off a head and shoulders shot of Nancy. This irritated the hell out of her. 'You never think of asking permission, do you?' she snapped, her face colouring.

  'Hey, sorry again,' said McLeod, disingenuously. He sauntered off without saying goodbye, swinging the camera on its strap.

  For one moment Nancy's mind went into flashback. The heavy black camera looked strangely familiar. Why?

  And then she remembered. It looked identical to the square, black object she'd seen the previous night. The object in the hand of the burglar in her bedroom.

  49

  FBI Field Office, New York Angelita Fernandez put down the desk phone and grimaced as she turned to Howie Baumguard. The big guy really looked as though he could do with a break. And this wasn't going to be it. 'I just talked to Gene Saunders out at Myrtle. Seems our man Stan is a no-show.'

  'He ever done that before?' asked Howie, lost in some work on his computer.

  'Nope. Doesn't seem that way. His boss at UMail2 Anywhere says he's a good kid. Always bang on time. Never swings a day off without asking, or at least calling in with a reason rather than an excuse.'

  'Sounds like Jack's right,' said Howie, typing with two fingers. 'Poor kid.'

  Fernandez tried to picture what the delivery boy looked like and settled on young, thin and scrawny, still trying to make his way in life. 'You really think Stan got wasted before BRK did a runner from Myrtle?'

  'It's sure starting to look that way,' said Howie.

  Fernandez picked up a pencil and twirled it like a baton through the fingers of one hand. It was a trick she'd picked up in high school and somehow it helped her concentrate. 'I'll check on the bones downstairs. Dental should have some results now on Kearney. You think it's a match?'

  'I'm banking on it,' said Howie. He'd asked for the dental check to make doubly sure that the skull they'd found was really Sarah Kearney's and not someone else's. He didn't want the embarrassment of finding out later that they had all been jerked around yet another time by BRK. He stopped typing and turned to Fernandez. 'You know much about necrophilia?'

  'You're kidding, right?' she said, shooting him a disapproving stare. 'I've dated some deadbeats in my time, ex-husband top of the list, but not literally.'

  'Necrophiles,' said Howie, paraphrasing an FBI entry on his screen, 'get their rocks off having sex with dead bodies.'

  'Go away. I would never have guessed that. Now I see why you got the big stripes.'

  'Shut up and listen, I might just need your help here.'

  She twirled her pencil again and thought he was kind of cute when he pretended to be annoyed.

  'The word is Greek in origin, comes from nekros meaning corpse and philia, which as we all know means love.'

  'I kind of like those two words when they're not in the same sentence,' said Fernandez.

  Howie shot her another shut-the-fuck-up glance. 'The psych notes say necrophiles have poor self-esteem, have a need for power over or revenge against something or someone that makes them feel inadequate, and have been deprived of certain key emotional contact.'

  'Hang on though,' said Fernandez, getting serious for a moment. 'What little I know about these creeps, which again I stress is not through any personal dating, is that they don't usually kill. They like their meat cooked already. Ain't that right? As you so eloquently said yourself, they "get their rocks off" by messing around with dead bodies, not by making people dead for them to mess around with.'

  'Subtle difference, but yeah, you got a point,' admitted Howie, searching the on-screen files for more info. 'But let's agree that having sex with a dead body isn't normal. Now, from that intellectual standpoint, it ain't too big a leap of faith to think that an abnormal guy, who likes stiffing it to a stiff, might just start making stiffs for himself if his regular stiff supply has run dry.'

  'You got a natural gift with words, anyone ever tell you that?' said Fernandez sarcastically.

  'I'm constantly fighting the urge to write poetry,' countered Howie, scrolling to a new page.

  'Why does BRK qualify as a necrophile?' asked Fernandez.

  Howie started to run through a list. 'He keeps the bodies after death. Look at how long he kept the Barbuggiani girl after he killed her. He takes trophies from them. He goes back to graves, digs up their corpses and hacks off their heads. Sounds like a necrophile to me.'

  'So this guy could be a serial killer and a necrophile. A kind of hybrid?'

  'That's what I'm thinking,' said Howie 'A double-trouble psycho. Maybe he started killing for a non-sexual reason.'

  'Revenge, accident, opportunity?' suggested Fernandez.

  'Something like that. Then when he was faced with a dead body, he suddenly got turned on by it.'

  'You got any case studies in there that I can read up on?' she asked.

  Howie hit a search function. 'Yeah, here you go. Man, there's one hell of a list coming up: Carl Tanzler, Richard Chase, Winston Moseley, our old pals Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy – those last three seem to be pretty much in every classification there is.'

  'Lazy research,' said Fernandez, scribbling down their names. 'If everything that was written about Bundy was true, he'd have had to have lived three lifetimes.'

  'This is interesting,' said Howie, ignoring her pet rant about Bundy. 'There's a bullet-point summary. It says necrophiles are usually fearful of rejection by women they sexually desire. Can you imagine what a necrophile would do in the kind of situation where he feels rejected?'

  Fernandez was in step with his thoughts. 'You mean he'd kill her to keep her?'

  'Exactly!'

  Fernandez mused on it. 'Maybe BRK got badly jilted once, and he just couldn't bear the idea of anyone else walking out on him.'

  'Once bitten twice shy,' said Howie.

  'He couldn't face the idea of being on his own? Maybe he was just shit-scared of the whole thought of being lonely. A kind of lonelyphobia?'

  'I think that's it,' said Howie. 'Death is the way he
ensures that they never jilt him, that they stay with him, devoted to him, for ever.'

  'Hmm,' said Fernandez. 'I'll remember that next time I give some Brad Pitt lookalike my number in a bar.'

  50

  Marine Park, Brooklyn, New York It has been more than fifty hours since any food or liquid has passed the parched and blistered lips of Ludmila Zagalsky.

  As she slips in and out of delirium, her mind is constantly tormented by the knowledge that she is involved in a unique act of self-cannibalism. As well as the awful stinging in her eyes, a new agony has surfaced, a raw and wretched stabbing pain in her kidneys. Lu doesn't know enough anatomy to be able to even name the organ that's hurting, let alone diagnose that she's rapidly heading towards permanent renal damage. But she knows one thing for sure; something important inside her is screaming for water and without it she is going to die.

  Once upon a time, back in the real world where people weren't kidnapped, stripped naked and tortured to death, she'd been eating pizza with an old boyfriend; they'd watched Scream, or was it Scream 2 or 3? Anyway, they'd jokingly discussed what would be the worst way to be killed – the bullet, the blade, drowning or maybe fire. Her friend had said he'd hate to be burned alive at the stake, like they used to do in France with chicks such as Joan of Arc. Lu had confessed she couldn't swim, had never been in the sea or a swimming pool in her life and was shit-scared of drowning. As they'd finished off the deep pan and thought about making out, neither of them had considered that probably the worst way to die was to be deliberately starved to death.

  Right now, Lu reckons drowning might not be such a bad way to go after all. A girl she used to work a corner of the Beach with once told her that she should drink about half a gallon of water every day to stay healthy. Half a gallon a day! She'd nearly wet herself laughing. The kid had said she'd been balling some kind of health freak, a gym monster who had muscles like the Incredible Hulk, and he'd told her that more than eighty per cent of blood is made up of water so you've got to keep topping up the fluid level. It had sounded like bullshit. Until now. For the first time in her life, she understood every word of it.

  In the last hour or so, she's noticed that her mouth isn't only painfully dry, her tongue has started to taste bitter and almost poisonous. Were the gym monster around, he could have explained that her electrolyte balance is badly screwed, or, to be technical, critically destabilized. Her body cells are under fatal attack and her blood plasma is already seriously damaged.

  Ludmila Zagalsky doesn't believe in God. She's never been in a church or, for that matter, anywhere holy in her entire twenty-five years. Her mother didn't even bother to have her birth registered, let alone have her baptized. But this very second she is praying. She is telling the God of her own special Darkness, whatever religion he is, that she is sorry for everything bad that she has ever done in her stinking, miserable, worthless life. She's telling him that she forgives her stepfather for all those things that he did to her; that she hopes he's fine and happy and healthy and that she didn't mean it when she told him that she wanted him to rot in hell while devil dogs chewed his bollocks off. She's asking for forgiveness for blaming her parents for her anger and for hating her mother for the beatings that she got. And she's confessing to all the sins she's committed and all the sinful thoughts she's ever had. And in return, she's asking God for only one thing.

  Not to save her, but just to let her die quickly.

  51

  Rome Roberto returned to the Incident Room with four coffees and a mouthful of bad news.

  He put the tray of drinks down on a table and politely waited until a conversation between Jack and Benito finished.

  'I am sorry,' he said, 'but while I was making coffees, I got a call from my contact in Milano.'

  'About the courier?' asked Orsetta.

  'Yes,' confirmed Roberto. 'They are now sure there is no such courier company as Volante Milano. It does not exist.'

  Jack lifted a coffee from the tray and accepted he was hooked again on caffeine. 'So how did BRK get the package here, if not through a courier?'

  Orsetta was thinking the unthinkable. 'In person? You think he delivered it in person?'

  Benito nodded. 'Something like that.'

  'Please,' interrupted Roberto. 'My contact had an idea what might have happened. Right now, there are many students looking to earn some extra money. It seems in Milano they stand as advertisements outside airports and railway stations, offering to do anything.'

  'Anything? What do you mean?' asked Orsetta.

  'I am sorry, maybe I don't explain properly,' said Roberto. 'They hold up the card, saying they will carry things anywhere for you. They stand near the parcel offices and offer to take things anywhere on a train, even on planes. The courier companies they do not like this, they find this very bad.'

  'I bet they do,' said Jack. 'So what you're saying is that BRK may have given the package to a student at the railway station, and had it delivered here?'

  'Si, yes, that is what I am trying to say,' said Roberto, relieved finally to be understood.

  'He's taking a bit of a risk, isn't he?' said Orsetta. 'I wouldn't trust a student to deliver something valuable for me.'

  'How do these student couriers get paid?' asked Benito.

  'It is cash, I think,' said Roberto.

  Benito played with his goatee beard, thinking hard. 'BRK will have bought a return ticket for the courier, maybe rail, maybe air. He'll have paid cash, so we'll have problems tracing it. He may have given the courier some money upfront and then promised to pay him much more when he returned.'

  'Doesn't work for me,' said Jack.

  Orsetta was growing frustrated. She ran her fingers through her hair. 'This is just messing up my mind.'

  'That's it!'Jack snapped his fingers. 'That's exactly what he's trying to do. Confuse us. Have us chasing shadows. There is no Volante Milano. Yet he went to enormous trouble to make it look as though he was there in Milan and used the company. He did this to make us think he had been there so that we would divert our resources to searching in Milan.'

  'So he was never in Milan?' asked Orsetta, still struggling to make complete sense of it all.

  'No, not at all,' explained Jack. 'I think you'll find that the Volante courier label was made on his own computer, and that the cardboard box and bubble wrap packaging will match the box from UMail2Anywhere sent to the FBI.'

  'And the black felt-pen too,' said Orsetta.

  'That too,' added Jack.

  'He's pulling us all over the place,' conceded Benito.

  'He's trying to,' said Jack. 'The courier story Roberto told us is probably old news and common knowledge. I've heard about students being used as couriers, it's been going on for a few years in the States. Like Roberto said, kids even get free holidays by babysitting boxes on flights all over the world. I think BRK will have wanted us to think our package was delivered by a real courier company in Milan, hence the label. If we got through that test, then I reckon he was sure we'd come across the widespread use of Milanese students as couriers and would have wasted even more time chasing that dead end.'

  'Which means he really may have delivered the package in person,' said Orsetta, believing that the killer would no doubt get an enormous kick out of such an act.

  Jack didn't think it likely. 'Remember that this guy is not a risk-taker, so I'd bet against it. No, I suspect Roberto's friend is partly right, but I think BRK used a student courier in Rome not in Milan.'

  Benito volunteered another piece of the puzzle. 'Because in Rome he could pay the student on return, with nothing upfront, and be sure the package wouldn't be tampered with.'

  'Which means,' said Jack, 'that our man flew to the States from Rome, not Milan, and that he probably left on the evening of the twenty-fifth of June or sometime during the twenty-sixth.'

  'Maybe later,' said Benito. 'If he was confident that we'd be chasing around in Milan, he could wait in Rome until the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth and catch
a transatlantic flight that would have him arriving in the USA and getting to the cemetery in Georgetown on June the thirtieth. We'll check all Rome flight details as well.'

  They paused for breath and looked at each other. Each and every one of them knew that, for the first time, they'd picked up the real scent of BRK's trail.

  'One final thing,' said Jack. 'I don't want to rain on our parade, but let's check for recent student deaths in Rome as well. You know how our guy likes to tidy up as he goes along.'

  52

  Pan Arabia News Channel, New York Crime editor Tariq el Daher was beginning to wonder whether he had made the biggest mistake of what he had once been told was a highly promising career. Just over a year had passed since he'd left his job at Reuters and joined the controversial Dubai-based station Pan Arabia to beef up their newly launched English language network.

  At first, major technical problems had seriously delayed the station's long-awaited debut transmission and hugely undermined their credibility as a news outfit. But those difficulties had faded into insignificance compared with the vitriolic criticism unleashed upon them by competing Western media groups once they did get on air. Sitting in his New York office, scanning the digital airways to check the content of competing channels, Tariq consoled himself by recalling that neither he nor his bosses had been under any illusion that they were in for an easy ride.

  As a Muslim, he didn't just understand the facts and figures of minority life – he lived them. Of New York's twenty million people, fewer than two per cent followed the doctrines of Islam and fewer than two per cent were Buddhists, Hindus or Sikhs. But behind those figures were the earthquake tremors of a massive change that wasn't yet visible. While New York is home to a quarter of all America's Jews, it has also quietly become the chosen land for a quarter of all America's Muslims.

  Ask Tariq whether he loved Islam more than America and the devout 35-year-old would dismiss your question as naive and ask you if you loved your child more than your wife or husband. His love for both Islam and America was equally passionate but subtly different and, because he didn't view them as mutually exclusive, when the chance came to join the New York bureau of one of the Middle East's largest and fastest growing news channels, he saw it as his dream job.