A noise from somewhere nearby splintered her attention, and she glanced over her shoulder. The asphalt stretched behind her, deserted, bathed in shadow. Along the periphery slept rows of idling semis. Most of the drivers were inside now, filling their bellies, getting jacked up on either French roast or little white pills.
Karen turned back to her work, securing the empty pallet with nylon shipping straps. All at once she heard the odd noise again: the scuff of a shoe on cinders. Very close. She looked down at the pavement at her feet and thought she saw the flicker of a shadow moving behind one of the truck’s open rear doors.
She got very still, then carefully dipped her hand into her jeans pocket, where she kept a small folding stiletto knife. Then she grasped the edge of the door, took a deep breath, and suddenly yanked it shut.
There was nobody there.
Karen Finnerty let out a sigh of relief. She released the knife. Something was giving her the willies tonight and she had no idea what it was or why it was working on her. Maybe she needed a vacation. She turned back to her work and finished securing the straps, then shut the other door.
The tall man standing there suddenly lunged at her with something white in his hand.
Karen had no time to fight back, no time to react, no time to even scream—and she could have put up a fairly decent fight, given half a chance—because the big dark assailant immediately pressed a narcotic-soaked cloth over her face, then held it there with the pressure of an iron vise.
Karen Wanda Finerty sank to her knees, then sank through the pavement into a black void.
She regained consciousness only twice that night, the first time a brief instant of gasping for air as though she were underwater, blinking fitfully, desperately trying to focus on something. She had no concept of how long she had been out, but she sensed immediately, in some deeply buried compartment of her brain, that she had been moved indoors.
Head lolling to one side, she registered a sensation of cold—a metallic smoothness—beneath her; yellow light gleamed off steel devices hanging from a low ceiling. Eyes adjusting to her dim surroundings, she saw glimpses of gauges, dials, instruments. And then the realization—maybe revelation was a better word—pierced her consciousness with the icy abruptness of a nail from a nail gun hitting her between the eyes. She realized in that one groggy glance, right before blacking out again, just exactly where she was: lying on a giant scale.
She was being weighed and measured like a slab of meat.
Or more appropriately, as she would soon learn, like a sacrificial lamb.
THREE
After dinner that night, Ulysses Grove enjoyed another lively performance—rendered in the mixed media of peas and mashed potatoes—by his precocious three-year-old son, Aaron. “Big gween lady bugz all fly away Daddeee!” the little tyke enthused, pushing his plump little finger through the uneaten food on his plastic plate, his terrycloth bib a Jackson Pollock of gravy. “Big gween ladybugz all fly awaaaaaaaay! Look, Daddeee, look, look, look, look!”
Grove grinned over the top of his newspaper. Shirt sleeves rolled up, collar unbuttoned, he still had the stink of the academy on him, the chalk and coffee smells in the pores of his light bronze skin. “Wow, that’s a lot of green ladybugs.”
“All fly awaaaaay!” The boy furiously agitated his peas. A cherubic tyke, Aaron Grove had the pale eyes of his mother and the caramel complexion and tight frizzy curls of his father. He was already exhibiting a bubbly little personality, which he probably got from his mother, as well as a volatile temper. But there was something else about the child that worried Grove. The older the boy got, the more he seemed to hook into his father’s moods, the angst and the obsessive brooding.
A voice came from across the kitchen. “All of which begs the question: who’s on dishwashing duty tonight?”
Maura Grove was fiddling with the coffeemaker across the room, dressed in her floppy 49ers football jersey and Capri pants. A pale, whippet-thin woman with pewter blond hair, high cheekbones, and smart, hard eyes, she had an air of self-possession about her, the sanguine calm of a soldier who had served her tour and now had settled into the graceful banalities of homemaking.
“I believe I had that job last night,” Grove replied with a gentle, needling smirk, gazing at the mess on the table.
“Fly awaaaaaay!”
Maura came over with a cup of decaf and set it in front of her husband. “Man sounds pretty sure of himself, Aaron. What do you think?”
“Fly-fly-flieeeeeee—!”
Grove winked at his wife “I recall a particularly nasty crust of macaroni and cheese I had to deal with.”
Maura gave him a rueful smile, hands on her hips. “Fair enough. You can take bath time tonight.” Her grin widened. “Since you’re so handy with the macaroni and cheese.”
“Touché.” Grove put his paper down, pushed himself away from the table, and scooped his son out of his high chair. Aaron squealed as Grove bounced the sticky toddler in his arms. “C’mon, slick, let’s go get you cleaned up.”
Grove carried the boy out of the kitchen and across the spacious living room toward the stairs.
The house was a quaint, two-story Cape Cod overlooking a rugged stretch of mid-Atlantic coastline just south of Pelican Bay, Virginia. This upscale bedroom community was home to all manner of government types, from well-heeled policy wonks to senior intelligence analysts. The place was a little rich for Grove’s blood, but the Bureau had helped him relocate here last year after his Alexandria home burned to the ground in a terrible, inexplicable fire. It was, in a way, another in a long line of compromises he had been making lately.
The truth was, the teaching gig had been a compromise as well, a mutual decision made last year between Grove and his benefactor, confidant, and section chief, Tom Geisel, in the aftermath of a profiling assignment gone bad. On that job, the predator Grove had been obsessively hunting had somehow learned the location of the Grove family safe house in rural Indiana. Fortunately, in the eleventh hour, Grove had managed to save his wife and his baby son. But the incident had taken its toll. For months afterward the memories had wormed their way into Grove’s dreams. It wasn’t the first bout of post-traumatic stress that he had ever experienced, but it was turning out to be his first full-blown identity crisis. He didn’t know who he was anymore, and he was increasingly defensive about his new job, especially when VIPs visited, especially since he was supposed to be this big rock star at the Bureau. So what was he doing slumming down at the Academy?
“Make you a deal, slick,” he murmured into the boy’s ear as he carried him up the stairs. “You take your bath like a good boy, and I’ll tell you another exciting tale of romance and adventure.”
The boy had no idea what romance and adventure were, but from the sound of his squeals, it was clear that he thought a story was a good idea.
A few hundred miles to the south, on a leprous outcropping of mid-Atlantic coastline known as Emerald Isle, a battered, rust-pocked panel van pulled into the vapor-lit darkness of a deserted public parking lot. The lot was adjacent to a public pier known as Bogue Inlet. The van parked near a column of weather-beaten steps.
Nobody saw the dark presence emerge from that vehicle like a moving shadow.
Presence, because the individual with the odd headwear seemed to absorb light like a black hole. Face shaded by his shopworn top hat, broad shoulders draped in a black oiler, hands gloved in black rubber, the figure might as well have been invisible—despite the strange headgear and imposing height.
The stranger went around behind the van, opened the double doors, and pulled out a large canvas duffel bag that seemed to be loaded with cinder blocks from the way the big man hefted the strap over his shoulder.
He went over to the stairs and descended with an almost robotic stoicism, the hat tilted forward just enough for the brim to shade most of his face, which looked from a distance as though it were covered in soot. The hat itself—which had begun to show its age (a little shiny at th
e edges, the felt tattered and pilled along the top)—had an elaborate history.
Stolen from the British Museum in the late 1980s, it had floated around on the black market for decades, traded and relished by collectors of the outré, before coming into the possession of this tall, mute man in black. The hat was originally found at a murder scene in Whitechapel, London, in the year 1888. It was believed to have once belonged to Jack the Ripper.
Now the tall man was crossing the deserted beach, the sea wind buffeting his coat, flapping his hood, and threatening to toss his hat off, yet he remained oblivious to the elements. The inky black waves, shimmering with moonlight out beyond the sandbar, were merely vectors and angles of light to this unseen presence. Nature mattered only as a grid across which a higher purpose played itself out. It was nearly 9:43 P.M. It was almost time.
Ulysses Grove was leaning over the upstairs bathtub, reciting to his boy with great melodrama. His voice echoed off the bathroom tile as he traced the washrag around the tiny convolutions of the child’s ear. “‘The brave knight heard a voice then. He looked around the dark and saw no one present other than the tall dark trees.’”
“Looks like talking tweez!” Aaron exclaimed, pointing a chubby little finger at the illustrations of the Golden Classic book his daddy was holding over the bathwater.
“That’s right,” Grove said with a nod. “It’s the tree that’s talking to him.”
The boy was on a roll. “Like in The Wizard of Oz.”
“Exactly…the ones that threw their apples at Dorothy.”
Aaron looked at his dad excitedly. “Do these tweez throw apples?”
Grove shrugged. “Wouldn’t surprise me.”
The boy looked back at the book.
“Keep weading, Daddy, keep weading,” he insisted.
Grove grinned. “‘Beware,’ said the great old oak. ‘Beware the troll that lives under the bridge!’”
The little boy’s eyes widened with awe.
The dark man paused, the tide licking across the deserted beach brushing the edge of his black wingtips. His face cloaked in shadows, his muscles flexing under the coat, he felt something moving inside his giant duffel bag. He tightened his grip on the strap, then started toward the pilings.
A woman’s leg burst suddenly through the end of the duffel bag.
The tall man dropped his human cargo in the sand. In the moonlight, the leg appeared sunburned, peeling here and there. On closer inspection, the wounds revealed themselves as horrible bloody divots, still oozing.
The stranger stood over the wiggling mass and watched with a blank, poker-faced stare. The bag teetered in the sand, once, twice—accompanied by a strangled cry—and then began to roll. It rolled over and over again, toward the water.
The figure watched impassively. It was nearly time. The duffel bag landed in the water just as the flailing woman inside it tore through the broken seam.
“HHHEEEHHHHHHH—HHHHEEEHHHHP—!!”
Karen Finnerty—voice strained to the breaking point—attempted the word help but was impeded by a birth defect or injury of the soft palate. Somehow she had gotten her bloody hands free and had torn the duct tape from her mouth, and now she crawled madly out of the bag, trailing the canvas behind her like a giant slimy pupae in the dark breakers foaming across the beach.
The truck driver’s garbled shrieks were drowned by the crash of waves against the breakwater. Her bottle-blond hair sticking to her horrified face, her sinewy muscles defaced by all the superficial wounds across her sacrum, she kept crawling and crawling, and she got nowhere.
The shadowy figure behind her watched with the implacable calm of a nineteenth-century gentleman judging a croquet match. He looked at the moon, then glanced across at the cones of vapor light shining down on the parking lot.
A nearby rust-pocked sign demarcated the distance to the next town on the island, which the figure had calibrated carefully.
It was 9:48. The peroxide-blonde woman had two minutes to live.
“‘You must answer a simple question in order to pass over the bridge,’ said the Troll.”
In the bright, gleaming, soapy atmosphere of the bathroom, Ulysses Grove lowered his voice to nearly a whisper. The boy sat upright in the tepid water, rapt, his little mouth slack, his eyes huge.
Grove continued reading: “The Brave Knight nodded and said, “‘Very well. I am ready.’” And that’s when the troll smiled a crooked smile and said, ‘The question that I’m about to ask is the only question that matters. The only question there is.’”
Aaron gawked. Grove paused for dramatic effect, as he always did at this juncture in the story, then read the kicker at the end.
“‘The question is “Why?”’”
“PLLLLLLEEEEEEEEEEEEATH!!” In the salt-cured moonlight, Karen Finnerty rose up on wobbling legs and started hobbling through the sodden sand toward the higher road, unaware of the presence closing in behind her.
A second later he pounced.
His hat never left his head.
It felt to Karen like a hornet had stung her between the shoulder blades, except for the fact that the initial sting erupted into a maelstrom of cold fire spreading down her spine. Her legs buckled.
She stumbled to the ground, eating a mouthful of sand, legs already going numb. She tried to crawl through the darkness, but the paralysis was setting in from the eight inches of tempered steel sunk into her back. She gasped for breath—the knife had, unbeknownst to her, punctured a lung—as she managed to traverse a few more inches before giving out, the cold shade of unconsciousness drawing down over her.
The last thing she saw was a tiny hermit crab crawling through the moonlight toward her, its beady little eyes fixing on her, seeing her but not seeing her.
The woman expired in a swirling black corona of blood and salt water.
The figure loomed over her. The luminous sweep-second hand on his watch had reached twelve. The minute hand pointed to the fifty-seventh minute past nine. He knelt down and rooted the blade out of the victim’s spine. It came free with a satisfying, wet, smooching noise.
Perfect.
The second blow came down exactly six inches to the left of the initial wound. This time the body lay as still as a stone, as blood bubbled around the blade’s hilt. The woman’s vitals had shut down at 9:57:21 P.M., Eastern Standard Time.
Perfect.
The third blow landed precisely four inches below the original killing blow. The lifeless woman absorbed the impact like a pincushion, as blood bubbled and flowed in rivulets off the corpse and down into the black tide pool created by her own body.
Perfect.
Again the knife came down, piercing warm flesh, baptizing the sacred sand in sacrificial blood, marking the scene for posterity. Again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
Eleven times.
The perfect average.
As written in the Prophecy.
FOUR
Later that night, at a few minutes after 11 o’clock, the Groves’ phone rang. It was an odd time for a call, even for the telemarketers, who had been plaguing the Grove household for months.
Ulysses was in Aaron’s room, watching his child sleep, lost in his thoughts. Maura was still in the kitchen, dealing with the disaster otherwise known as the dinner dishes. Throughout all the scrubbing and rinsing, she had been idly thinking about all the things she wanted to do to the new house, vacations she wanted to plan, romantic getaways she wanted to enjoy with her husband. She loved—in fact, she cherished—having him home now, safely ensconced as a teacher, out of the danger zone of fieldwork. Maura had vigorously encouraged this conversion from soldier to sage, even urging him at one point to publish his class notes as a book. The more successes he had behind his proverbial desk, the more normal his family life would become.
And Maura adored being normal.
To say that she had gotten her fill of high-level criminology over the last few years was an understatement. Never mind t
hat she had gotten mixed up one too many times in the macabre minutiae of her husband’s work. Never mind that her own life—not to mention the life of her child—had been endangered on more than one occasion. The worst part was trying to believe the promises Ulysses kept making to her: he was done, he was getting out of it, for good, period, end of story.
Now she went over to the cordless on the wall and looked at the caller ID display as the phone rang a second time.
A current of nervous tension trickled coldly down her solar plexus as she recognized the area code; 703 usually meant Bureau business, and Bureau business usually meant a restless husband. It was not unlike a liquor store calling a recovering drunk just to tell him about the latest bargain prices on grain alcohol. Bureau people often called Ulysses for a quote for some profile, or even a few hours of consultation. “It’s just a little light reading,” he would assure Maura, “just a glorified book report.” But Maura knew the truth: every time the FBI called with some new abomination of nature, some new monster on the loose, Ulysses got restless, like a bloodhound getting the scent.
The phone rang a third time, and Maura finally snatched the cordless off its cradle and answered.
“Hello,” she croaked in an anxious voice, hoarse with nervous tension.
The voice on the other end of the line was not the voice she had expected.
A thick roux of fog had rolled in over Emerald Isle beach, and now the air stewed with a gray briny mist pushing down from Kitty Hawk. Somewhere out in the black opaque distance, a lighthouse bell sent a melancholy clang echoing over the breakers. The only other sound was the shrill babble of an old lobsterman who stood between two policemen on the beach, gazing down at the human wreckage on the sand, the ragged form barely visible in the magnesium-silver beams of their flashlights.
“I tell ya, it’s the drugs, it’s the crystal meth and the bathtub speed and them college kids comin’ down here from Duke every Easter. Just last year we had some drug addict commit suicide off that same dad-blamed dock right up—”
Perfect Victim Page 3
