Perfect Victim

by Jay Bonansinga

  “Don’t fight it, just let it happen,” a voice purred into her nape. Maura felt arms slinking around her midriff. Her heart raced.

  She squirmed out of his grasp. “Um…you know…I’m thinking that maybe it’s just about time you finished up that little marijuana cigarette and hit the road.”

  “I just thought we—”

  “Yeah, I’m sure you had all kinds of thoughts bouncing around that noggin of yours, but right now I’m thinking it would be best if you got the hell out of here.”

  The surfer dude finally gave up and made his exit in a flurry of muttered profanities.

  Afterward, Maura had felt so flustered and alone that she drank an entire bottle of pinot noir that she was saving for Ulysses’ birthday. Part of it was outrage at the gall of this kid, this snot-nosed slacker who’d had the nerve to hit on the wife of a principal player in the FBI hierarchy. But part of it was the guilty excitement, the cheap thrill of it all. What was wrong with her?

  The strangest part, though, was what had happened a month or so later. Around the dinner table one night, Grove had idly mentioned that the Bureau was having staff problems. “One kid in IT just up and left,” he marveled, morosely picking at his tabouli salad. “Big gangly surf-punk kid, name of Bard, Ben Bard, decides to just not show up for work anymore. Wrote an e-mail to his supervisor telling him to eat shit.”

  After a long moment, staring at her food, Maura said, “Punk is right.”

  “Pardon?” Grove looked at her.

  “He hit on me, Uly.”

  “Bard?”

  She nodded. “Right here, in this very kitchen, he comes over one night—you were away—he comes over to drop off a file and he comes on to me.”

  Grove waited. “And?”

  She shrugged. “That’s it. I kicked him out. End of story.”

  After a moment’s thought, Grove wondered aloud, somewhat rhetorically, like a professor posing a Socratic question, but with an edge to his voice: “Why would you not tell me about this?”

  She didn’t have an answer. She couldn’t explain it to herself. How was she going to explain it to her husband? All the mixed emotions—the shame, the morbid curiosity, the guilty thoughts—had kept her awake at nights and made her wonder if she needed more therapy.

  Now, alone at the Geisel shiva, woozy from too much wine and worry, these thoughts swirled through Maura’s mind as she watched her husband through the window, out there in the overcast afternoon, talking about something very upsetting with one of his students.

  NINE

  “I understand you were a PI in another life.” Grove was leading Drinkwater down a flagstone path along the edge of the Pattons’ expansive lawn. The backyard was deserted. Off to the east, a child’s swing set, long abandoned, lay in cobwebs. Along the western edge of the lawn, chicken coops bordered a split-rail fence. Nothing stirred, no sound came from within the barns or from the densely wooded Virginia farmland in the far distance.

  “Yessir, I was.” Drinkwater seemed jumpy, apprehensive, maybe even a little defensive, as she strode along in her good heels and dark dress.

  “Tracked down bond jumpers?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Accident scenes?”

  “Yep.”

  “Affidavits?”

  “You bet.”

  “Missing persons, I’m assuming?”

  “Yessir, um—”

  “Why don’t you call me Ulysses? You still have your license?”

  Now the woman looked at him. “Last time I checked. Got my passport, too.”

  Grove sighed. “Look, I don’t mean to give you the third degree. I need to talk to you about something, and I want to make sure I’m not wasting time for either of us.”

  They walked in silence for another moment. Grove took in a deep breath of musky country air, and tried to clear his mind. Drinkwater was his star pupil, but also an outsider. He needed to handle this situation delicately, but he was too distracted by the loss of his best friend and the improbable connection between the Archetype killer and the strange death note that ushered in the section chief’s last moments on earth:

  A dark figure, like a shadow. No face, just an outline.

  Grove could not get those disturbing phrases and fragments out of his mind. They festered and fomented there like tangled cancerous threads:

  Not tellin yo

  Grove wondered if Geisel’s reference to “not telling you” concerned something that Geisel had not told him about a case, maybe a recent one, maybe a cold one; perhaps that was what Geisel felt bad about, which led to the most disturbing part of the note, and the reason Grove was dragging Drinkwater into this right now:

  s’thing they tol me bac then

  Grove let out another sigh and tried to clear his mind. He looked at Drinkwater. “Bob Wexler over at Justice says you’re a regular bloodhound.”

  “Deputy Wexler said that?”

  “Yes ma’am, he did.” Grove gazed out at the distant hills. “Says you could find the needle in the proverbial haystack.”

  “I don’t know about needles.” Edith Drinkwater had a defensive sort of tang in her voice. “But you got an individual wants to hide out, they’re a little shy, I can usually dig ’em up.”

  “Good, I’m glad to hear that. Because I need your help on a case.”

  Drinkwater cocked her head ever so slightly at him then, and the way she did it—that trademark sister-girl double take—sent a faint jolt of recognition through Grove. Drinkwater still had some of the playground in her, some of the street. Grove admired that more than anything else about her.

  Right now she was giving him an incredulous look. “An active case?”

  He looked at her. “That’s right. On the down low, if possible.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Think of it as independent study.”

  She gave him a look. “I’m getting a grade on this?”

  “As a matter of fact, you’re getting something better than a grade.”

  “Which is?”

  “The chance to save somebody’s life.”

  After a moment she asked, “What am I going to be doing exactly?”

  Grove gritted his teeth, thinking of that next female, white, forty-two-year-old victim—an unlucky winner—he would find mutilated and left for the maggots. Pain throbbed in his jaw, a sensation not unlike biting down too hard on an ice cube. It was a symptom of his compulsive teeth-grinding. He saw a dentist about it once, who had prescribed a rubber bite-plate to avoid tooth wear, but the mouthpiece did little to alleviate the pain. Later, a doctor told him he also had early signs of TMJ—or temporomandibular joint syndrome due to a subtly misaligned jaw—which made the grinding all the more excruciating. But Grove had very little control over it. “You cannot tell your closest family member about what I am about to tell you,” he said finally.

  “Okay, sure.”

  Grove took a girding breath. “There is a serial murderer at large who may or may not have some connection to me, to my history at the Bureau, and maybe even to my relationship with Tom Geisel.”

  Drinkwater took this in, kept walking, didn’t say a word, just nodded.

  Grove went on: “The clock is running. I do not have time to pursue the two parallel tracks of this investigation. I need you to dig into something that happened to me.”

  Now Drinkwater looked more intrigued than nervous. She waited for him to continue.

  “When I was a kid, way back in the Stone Age, I have reason to believe some people were following me.” Grove paused and measured his words. “To this day nobody knows for sure why they were following me. Or who they were, or just why the hell they picked me to follow.”

  Drinkwater nodded and asked how he knew all this.

  “Tom Geisel told me.”

  A beat of silence. Drinkwater cocked her head again. “Mind if I ask how old you were when you were allegedly being followed?”

  “I was ten, eleven…something like that. Geisel was a middle ma
nager at the Bureau in those days, moving up the ranks. One day, these people came to him out of the clear blue. Six old men. Told him to keep an eye on me, told him someday I’d make a pretty good FBI agent.”

  Drinkwater was frowning. “He didn’t find out who these guys were?”

  Grove rubbed his eyes. The grief and shock had dragged down his normally handsome, sculpted-bronze features, making his dark eyes darker. “He got their names, addresses. Not much else. He thought they were a bunch of senile old coots. Didn’t worry about them that much. They all checked out fine, too—no jackets, no records whatsoever. I guess Tom eventually looked me up out of curiosity.”

  A long pause, Drinkwater absorbing all this. “When did you find out about this?”

  “Last year.”

  “Does anybody else at the Bureau know about it?”

  Grove told her no, nobody other than Geisel.

  After another pause Drinkwater asked, “Why do you think he told you about this just recently?”

  Grove had expected this question, and had been torn about how much he should tell her. Over the last few years, working some of the strangest investigations in law enforcement history, Grove had stumbled upon a bizarre phenomenon running like an undertow through his work. It involved a vague, undefined personality buried in the fractured psyches of those he hunted—an alter ego—which Grove had come to think of as Factor X.

  Factor X seemed to have an agenda beneath all the killings—an agenda that had something to do with Grove—and this revelation had poisoned the profiler’s dreams. It tainted his private ruminations, and it appeared in symbolic form in visions, hallucinations, portents. It also reverberated back through the years to his early childhood in Kenya, resonating in ways he would be unable to fully explain. Tom Geisel was the only other human being on earth privy to all this.

  Now, in his deathbed note, the section chief may have provided a linkage to this dynamic—maybe even to the Archetype itself—through his odd reference to the six old men. Near the end of the note, Geisel had cobbled together phrases such as “something they told me back then.” Was he referring to the six old men? Something they told him back then? And what was Grove to make of the gibberish at the end of the note:

  thee ws an o her b y a b d one who yo have to Ul h ss yr tn

  And now, today, flashing back to these fragmented words, Grove finally looked at Drinkwater and broke the spell of silence. “I’m sure you’ve heard rumors. About my methods, my background. You can’t work here without hearing all sorts of crap—how I manage such a high closure rate on a lot of these serial cases, how I got some kind of African mojo working all the time.”

  She had a strange look on her face now. “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Is it true?”

  Grove gave her a nervous grin. “Oh absolutely, I’m a regular bogeyman.”

  “And now you want me to find out who these guys were, the ones came to Geisel…where they came from?”

  Grove nodded, said nothing.

  “Why me?”

  “Because you’re an outsider. You’re a skip tracer. Woman like yourself, all those tricks up your sleeve. What do you think?”

  The young lady stared at Grove. She seemed to be sizing him up, which, in all honesty, made Grove more than a tad uncomfortable.

  For a long moment Drinkwater considered her response carefully. She wondered if she had perhaps stumbled into a pivotal moment here—a crossroads, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Maybe this was the back door to success she had been seeking. Maybe, just maybe, Drinkwater could manipulate the master manipulator.

  The biggest irony here was that Grove had no idea how diligently Drinkwater had investigated him before coming to the Bureau, how she had spent the months leading up to her arrival at Quantico digging up details on his life. She had used FBI websites, city directories, academic records, and military archives to build his biography. She had also used the Freedom of Information Act to get transcripts of public hearings, cold case files, and declassified memoranda among investigators.

  On the surface, of course, Grove’s background, albeit very cosmopolitan, didn’t give Drinkwater much to go on. Born forty-one years ago in the small Kenyan town of Kinyasha to an African mother and a Jamaican father who vanished shortly after Grove’s birth, young Grove had emigrated at the age of two with his mom to the United States. Raised on the mean streets of Chicago, the boy kept to himself, got good grades, and stayed out of trouble. Undergraduate studies in criminology at the University of Michigan were followed by basic training, followed by three years as a noncommissioned officer in the Army—first as an MP and then as an investigator in the military’s CID unit.

  But none of that interested Drinkwater as much as the stuff that was missing.

  Nobody knew how Grove did his “thing” at the Bureau, how he tracked these monsters down. Notwithstanding all that hooey about his spooky African juju, or his eerie connection to the perps, Drinkwater was starting to wonder if she had been wrong about his insincerity. During his lectures, something had sunk a hook into her. She had been dreaming about that shooting range silhouette from his Archetype talks—and some of these dreams had been nightmares. During the daytime, every now and then, she would close her eyes and see that disgusting, coal-black, featureless outline of a head.

  “Before I agree to do this, I’d like to ask you something,” she said at last, pursing her lips thoughtfully. “If you don’t mind.”

  Grove looked at her with an inscrutable expression now. “Go ahead.”

  “There’s only a half dozen field agent spots waiting for us this spring.”

  “That’s true.”

  “What I’m saying is, let’s say I do this thing. Will I get one of those spots?”

  Grove kept looking at her with that unreadable expression. Then he smiled. “Seems fair.”

  “And if there’s any legal question, you’re gonna have to take the heat.”

  “I understand.”

  Drinkwater took a deep breath. “I’m gonna need access to Geisel’s files.”

  Grove nodded. “Got them all on hard disk. I’ll have them delivered to your hotel. I’ll pull his personal journals, too, if that’ll help.”

  Drinkwater chewed the inside of her cheek, and then stopped walking. “Okay.” She gave him a hard, determined look. “Fine. I’ll do it.”

  “Good, good.” Grove shook her hand. “Go home. Get some sleep. You can start tomorrow. I’ll square your absence with the dean.”

  “There’s one more thing.”

  Grove told her he was listening.

  She looked at him. “What if I find out something—something about you—something you don’t really want found out?”

  Grove stared at her for a long time.

  He didn’t have an answer for that one.

  PART II

  Cold Metal Misery Machine

  The future overcomes the past by swallowing it.

  —JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET

  Once upon a time the psychopath wore the skin of legends—folktales, witches, werewolves. It was the only way we could comprehend an evil so perverse it defied the physical laws of the universe, an evil we take for granted today.

  —ULYSSES GROVE, The Psychopathological

  Archetype: Toward a Statistical Model

  TEN

  The following Tuesday evening, exactly a thousand miles west of Quantico, just outside of Galveston, Texas, around 7:35 P.M. Central Standard Time, a forty-one-year-old junior college student named Madeline Gilchrist, unaware she was about to become the third sacrificial lamb, heard a noise in the darkness behind her.

  She kept walking.

  That’s what Grandma Rose always told her to do if she found herself in a pickle such as this. Just keep on truckin’, Maddy. Clad in a halter top and shopworn jeans plastered with patches and embroidered messages like IMPEACH SHRUB and GO GREEN, she was carrying an empty plastic gas tank, heading along the gravel shoulder of the weed-wh
iskered Intracoastal Highway. About a quarter of a mile back, her VW bug had mysteriously run out of gas. This made no sense. She had topped the tank off last night. Now everything felt wrong. The back of her neck crawled with heat chills.

  Footsteps—furtive, quick, powerful—circled around the Joshua trees and the scrub brush to her right, then abruptly halted.

  “Hello? Anybody there?”

  No answer.

  Madeline picked up her pace. Off to her left the roar of the Gulf waves hitting the breakwater called out in the distance like a giant invisible lung. The footsteps loomed somewhere ahead of her now. Ahead of her? Madeline faltered, slowing down, dizziness washing over her. Was there more than one figure out there in the darkness? The drone of crickets and frogs suddenly ceased.

  In the silence Madeline stumbled to a sudden stop, paralyzed with panic, dropping the plastic container. She stared into the darkness ahead of her.

  A lone figure had stepped into her path about twenty yards away.

  Madeline could not believe what she was seeing. Garbed all in black, a big chimney hat shrouding his face in shadow, the figure stood very still, facing her in a column of flickering light from a faulty streetlamp. Moths swarmed above him. He dripped with menace, and every fiber of Madeline’s being told her to turn tail and run like bejesus, but for one horrible instant she was transfixed.

  It wasn’t the great big knife in the man’s hand, dully gleaming in the streetlight, that held Madeline rapt for that single moment. Nor was it the air of weird, unearthly calm about the figure, standing there in the middle of the road with the cruel indifference of a wax figure in a museum.

  On the contrary, it was a subtle little detail of behavior exhibited by this strange figure that positively hypnotized the girl.

  It was the fact that the man was holding a pocket watch in his other hand, consulting it like a train engineer diligently keeping a schedule.