Perfect Victim

by Jay Bonansinga

  Ulysses Grove stood alone in the far reaches of the Beth E’met Cemetery. Situated in the high woods along the Mason Neck nature preserve, about twenty miles south of Alexandria, the cemetery was now deserted, bathed in the shadows of tall white pines. The waning light of dusk had already closed in like a predator.

  Grove turned up his collar against the chill and gazed down at the recently dug and manicured grave. Yellow light spilling from a nearby lamppost shone off the headstone. “I know what you’re thinking,” Grove murmured, addressing the departed mentor. “I should be home with Maura and the baby.”

  The headstone said nothing. No ghostly reply, no Dickensian whisper from the ether.

  “I need you on this one, Boss.” Grove stared at the waist-high block of clean, white granite. The epitaph etched into the stone—Geisel, Thomas Edward, 1941–2008, Father Husband Friend—called out to him. Twisted in his guts. Made his eyes sting in the cold breeze. “This one’s different.”

  Only the rustling leaves answered.

  Grove wiped his moist eyes. “I gotta shut this one down, Boss.”

  Silence.

  “Wish I knew what you were saying at the end of that goddamn note.”

  Leaves skittering.

  “I want this one bad. I cannot wrap my head around this guy.”

  No reply.

  “What were you thinking, leaving me on this one?” Grove wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I’m being selfish now, okay, so sue me.”

  Then, almost on instinct, Grove looked over his shoulder, as though somebody might be eavesdropping. He turned back to the headstone. “Never should have published that goddamn book…never should have done it…this one’s my fault…this one I created somehow. I…I don’t know how yet.”

  The gravestone said nothing. A couple dozen smooth little stones—tributes from the previous week’s mourners—still lined its top edge.

  Grove closed his eyes. “He’s out there, Boss. Right now. Hard at work. Because of me.”

  Madeline Gilchrist regained consciousness that night in fits and starts, writhing out of her drugged slumber like a diver struggling to the surface of a dark ocean, sensing a presence hovering nearby before actually seeing him. She could not move her head or breathe through her mouth due to the duct tape across her lips. She was barely able to see through her watery, mucousy eyes.

  She peered to her left, registering the blurry patterns hanging from the ceiling, crisscrossing the air, slashing through the middle distance all around her. At length she began to understand at least the gravity of her situation if not the purpose of all the diagonal lines in her field of vision. Strapped to a workbench in a windowless chamber (which would turn out to be the back of a panel truck), she was clad only in her underwear and wet with perspiration, urine, and oily grime. She felt prickly sensations all over her body, like mosquito bites.

  Eyes focusing gradually, irises adjusting to the dim light, she sensed—mostly in her peripheral vision—a tall dark man moving beside her. She looked up. He stood in front of her now. His back was turned to her. He wore some kind of tall hat, and maybe a black raincoat or an old overcoat—her eyesight was so bleary it was hard to tell. Hovering there, glimpsed in her watery vision, he looked like a big, shapeless, silhouette of a man: an empty-souled, generic, international symbol for STRANGER.

  He seemed to be hyperventilating, flexing his broad shoulders.

  He slipped off his oiler.

  He was nude.

  Maddy Gilchrist started screaming.

  Grove had one of the worst nightmares of his life at precisely the same moment that Madeline Gilchrist was living one out within the corrugated metal walls of that windowless panel van. The two events—separated by nearly a thousand miles—were connected in ways that Grove would not decipher for many, many hours.

  But right now, in the moist, clammy folds of his sweat-soaked sheets, only centimeters away from his slumbering wife, Grove dreamed he was moving down a narrow, dark passageway toward the third murder scene.

  Somehow, in his dream logic, he knew this was the third and final scene, and when he reached the squalid alcove of crumbling brick at the end of the passageway, he saw the victim supine in a pool of dried black blood. He opened his mouth to say something, but he couldn’t make any sound come out of his lungs, because he was staring at his mother. Vida Mae Grove, her slender brown legs protruding from her torn sarong, her proud face stippled with blood, looked up at her son and uttered two words in a dissonant, sibilant stage whisper that pierced Grove’s soul like a clap of thunder and violently woke him up: “It’s you!”

  Maddy Gilchrist ran out of breath just as her captor began to turn around to face her.

  Her muffled scream dying in her throat, she strained and strained against the leather straps holding her to the workbench, the airless cargo hold of the van closing in on her. The terror swirled up through her brain stem like a squall until she ran out of both air and sanity.

  The captor—a muscular simulacrum of a man—had tattoos over 90 percent of his body, his back virtually covered with them. At first Maddy thought they were serpents and vines and barbed wire, and all manner of billowing ribbony designs, but soon she realized in her hysteria that all the tattoos were of the same category: measuring devices. Long, flowing tape measures tattooed around massive, rippling triceps…rulers running down a sweat-glistening spine…delicate calligraphy spaced evenly along prominent ribs…fractions and hash marks and scientific calibrations along every bulging muscle and sinewy.

  The killer turned, and Maddy got her first and only glimpse of his face.

  White-hot terror choked the breath out of her. In any other context, this guy might be passed off as a run-of-the-mill street person, with the slack, empty gaze of ordinary madness dragging down his features; but here in this horrible, stifling truck, in the flickering light of a faulty dome lamp, with his profusely tattooed body—Jesus Christ, even his penis is hatched with tiny numbered measuring lines!—he appeared omnipotent, godlike.

  Maddy couldn’t breathe anymore, mostly because she finally realized, over the space of a single terrible instant, right before the torture began, what all the diagonal wires and cables and ropes crisscrossing the cargo hold had in store for her. Oh Jesus sweet Jesus no I don’t even want to know this anymore I don’t please please—

  The tattooed man was holding, in each hand, a tiny wooden cross, each device connected like the controls of a puppeteer to the cables fanning around the workbench. And rigged at the far end of each cable—each and every one—was a sharp instrument, such as a hunting knife, a scalpel, a needle, each pointing at Maddy, each carefully cocked on tiny loops and ready to slide home.

  The cables were attached to Maddy.

  Oh my God, that’s what the prickly sensations had been—the mosquito bites: the ends of those hideous cables stuck to me with some kind of adhesive, all over me, ohmygod, the ends of the cables marking me like I’m a voodoo doll or, or, or, or a specimen or God GOD GOD!!

  A dark shade came down across Maddy’s vision then as the silent tattooed man consulted the clock on the wall: It was almost time.

  Maddy passed out.

  Three minutes and thirteen seconds later, she was wrenched back to consciousness as the knives slid down their guylines with a chorus of zinging noises.

  ELEVEN

  The next morning Edith Drinkwater lit out on her below-the-radar branch of the investigation. With a little help from New York City directories and phone book archives, she had discovered, much to her amazement, that one of the old men who had visited the section chief all those years ago was still alive in an extended care center outside Newark, New Jersey. This old coot, as Drinkwater was about to discover, would turn out to be a connection between Grove and the Archetype.

  Drabbed down in her gray sweatsuit and sneakers, her hair pulled back in braids, Drinkwater spent most of the flight time out to Newark studying Geisel’s journal.

  She had made Xeroxes of key pages, then
bound them into her other notes on the Grove job—bios from the Internet, Mapquest directions, names and addresses of key people in Grove’s life—and today she read and reread key entries written in the section chief’s neat, tightly coiled hand:

  17 July 1978

  Strange day. Just when I’m feeling halfway confident about managing new department (HQ thinking of calling it Psychological Research and Metrics) I get this strange call from lobby receptionist. “Group of gentlemen here to see you.” What? No record of any meetings, nobody on the fourth floor knows a thing.

  Curiosity got the better of me I guess.

  Met with these six old men in first floor conference room. Claimed they were part of a community religious council. Multidenominational antiviolence group, something like that. But that’s not the weird part. Weird part is why they came. Said they read about me. How I’m a natural leader, a mentor. I remember that word for some reason. Mentor. They went on and on, how I’m going to change the world by studying evil and quelling violence. They gave me tips on who I should watch out for, people I should pay attention to, blah blah bah.

  End of day, asked Briskin to run checks on all the old codgers. Strictly routine. Don’t expect to find anything.

  Geisel never saw any of the old men ever again. The Bureau ran all the standard and customary background checks on the six geezers (“The Order of the Owls,” as Geisel had come to know them), and the results turned up a week later in Geisel’s diary:

  24 July 1978

  Not much to report today. Got rundowns on six old owls. Nothing much there. No jackets on any of them. Legitimate church group, DC address. Only thing out of the ordinary is variety of origin-countries. Names go in VICAP just in case anything crops up:

  Goodis, Arthur S. (US)

  Schoenb u, Bernard J. (Israel)

  Okuba, Baruk (Sudan)

  Pelsoci, Gerald H. (Czechoslovakia)

  Norgaru, Ten-Sin (Nepal)

  Achmadra, Mohammad (Morocco)

  Drinkwater ran her own checks, and found no immediate family members and all but one of the owls deceased. The second name, Bernard Schoenburg (or baum, as the original pen had smudged at that point), was listed as terminal at St. John the Baptist, age ninety-eight. Drinkwater immediately headed north to Newark to check it out.

  The hope was not only to find out why the old men had gone to the trouble of telling Geisel about this alleged wonder kid in Chicago, but just exactly how the old men had latched on to young Ulysses Grove in the first place. As did Tom Geisel those many years ago:

  9 September 1978

  Clipped more news items from Chicago. Following the whiz kid becoming a hobby of mine. He won a chess championship in August, got bumped into a gifted program this fall. Starting to feel a little weird about watching from a distance. Not sure about ethics. Old men knew what they were talking about though. This kid is one-of-a-kind. More than a prodigy. Something profound here. Something deeper going on behind this kid’s eyes….

  This brief entry, as far as Drinkwater could tell from surviving documents, was the last time Tom Geisel would mention the mysterious old men—or the prodigious young whiz kid whom they brought to his attention.

  While Edith Drinkwater’s plane was descending into Newark airspace, the whiz kid from Geisel’s journal—all grown up now and bearing the invisible scars of his dark fate—was nervously pacing the outer waiting room of FBI Director Louis Corboy’s office in D.C., waiting for the old man to get off the phone. Clad in his best sartorial armor—Armani suit, crisp rep tie, and spit-shined Italian shoes—Grove was dressed for psychological battle, ready to negotiate the bureaucratic shark tank.

  He had spent the bulk of that morning marshaling resources, making sure the full range of CSI materials from Minneapolis and North Carolina were delivered via secure e-mail to Ben Sehgal, his trusted analyst in the Behavioral Science Unit, for a second opinion. Shoe-print impressions, blood samples, hair and fibers, tire prints, wound angle data, pathology reports—all of it arrived on Sehgal’s computer before 9:00 A.M. Eastern Standard Time.

  Sehgal—a transplanted New Yorker assigned to Moses DeLourde’s Violent Crime Analysis Center at Tulane—finally got back to Grove on his cell phone around lunchtime. “If you’ll pardon my impertinence, this has gotta be a joke,” Sehgal said in his rapid-fire Noo-Yawk accent. “Any chance one of your students could be pulling a very psychotic prank?” Grove told him it was no joke, and yes, they should indeed be looking at Academy students, as well as anybody else familiar with the Archetype, including fellow agents and investigators. And they would have to do it in a timely fashion because all the hard evidence had a shelf life.

  Both Grove and Sehgal knew this all too well. They’d learned it in the Academy: the Natural Law of Exchange. All living organisms exchange matter with their environment. A perpetrator not only leaves a part of himself at a scene, but the victim leaves a part of herself on the perpetrator. And today, with the advent of genetic analysis and nanotechnology, the minutest trace of a fiber or tissue cell—down to the atom—can provide the crucial link between murderer and murder scene. This theory even extends to psychological issues, behavioral aberrations. Killers often trade raw experience with their victims, quid pro quo, trauma for trauma. But secretions can evaporate. Cells degrade. Even psychological extrapolations fade in importance. A scene must be consumed within its freshness date.

  But what Grove didn’t share with Ben Sehgal that day was the impossibility of any suspect knowing about the unpublished computer models on Grove’s hard drive. Sehgal did confirm the fact that the MO and signature at both scenes—Minneapolis and Emerald Isle—precisely matched just about every other average in Grove’s book-length study. The only part that Sehgal did not confirm was the exact reproduction of that leaf-shaped blood pattern on the salt-rusted piling near the Emerald Isle body dump: the pattern known only to Grove.

  Had the unpublished illustrations—those thorny, delicate computer-generated bloodstains that resembled the stems of a deadly rose—somehow leaked into the digital universe? Had Grove inadvertently cast them adrift in the data stream by clicking the wrong link or pressing the wrong key? Or had they been extracted by more metaphysical means?

  On that chaotic Wednesday afternoon, Grove had no idea how close he was to learning the answer.

  “Here we are,” the birdlike nursing home manager murmured over her shoulder as she paused outside a blemished oak door that was slightly ajar. The odor of urine hung faintly in the stale air, which made Drinkwater shudder slightly as she hovered behind the scrawny staffer.

  The manager was a dour, officious little woman named Jayne Symons; she seemed slightly put off by this intrusion into her daily routine as she knocked lightly on the ancient doorjamb. “Mr. Schoenbaum? Are you decent?”

  From within the room came an odd sighing noise like steam escaping a radiator.

  Jane Symons shot a glance at Drinkwater. “We’re catching him at nap time. Which is most of time, I’m afraid.”

  “Should we come back later?”

  The woman waved a dismissive hand. “He’ll be fine, a visitor’ll probably do him good.”

  She pushed the door open, and Drinkwater followed her inside the dim chamber.

  “Afternoon, Mr. Schoenbaum.” Symons spoke as one might to a slow child, with exaggerated enunciation and volume, as she roused the grizzled old man curled up in a fetal position in a tangled knot of yellowed sheets on a rusty hospital bed. Sunlight seeped around the edges of a faded, stained window shade above him, giving him and the rest of the cluttered room a sickly, yellow cast. The air was choked with dust. A large, aluminum Star of David hung on the wall over a bookshelf brimming with old newspapers and ancient oil-spotted grocery sacks. “Look what I brought you—a visitor!”

  “Macaroni and cheese again?” The bullfrog voice belched out of the old man as he struggled to sit up against the wall. He looked to be about a hundred and fifty years old, although the nursing home records, contrary to pub
lic documents, had him at ninety-nine. His sunken chest was barely covered by a damp, sleeveless T-shirt, the gray hairs poking out the top like corn silk. His bony arms and legs looked as delicate as balsa wood, and from the jaundice of his loose flesh and the red-rimmed edges of his eyes, it was clear he was close to the end.

  “A visitor, Bernie, you have a visitor.”

  Drinkwater stepped forward. “Sir, hello. How you doing tonight?”

  “I can’t shit.”

  A quick glance between the two women. Drinkwater smiled at the man. “I know how that goes.”

  A chirping sound rang out suddenly; Symons reached for the beeper attached to her belt. “Unfortunately I’m going to have to cut this short,” she said, staring at the beeper. “I assume we’ve established the man exists.”

  Drinkwater looked at her. “Ma’am, would you have any objection if I stuck around for just a few minutes? I can show myself out.”

  The bird-faced lady puckered her lips skeptically, then shrugged. “Mr. Schoenbaum agitates easily, so if you could make it quick I would appreciate it.”

  Drinkwater assured the woman she would do just that. After a reluctant pause, the supervisor shrugged again and whisked out the door with her clipboard in tow. Drinkwater took a deep breath and glanced around the room. She didn’t have much time, and wasn’t exactly sure what she was looking for. She turned back to the old man and spoke softly and quickly, yet loud enough to penetrate aged ears. “Sir, do you remember visiting a man at the FBI in the late seventies by the name of Geisel? Thomas Geisel?”

  The old man chewed the inside of his sunken cheek. “I’ve got some pain in my testicle area, I don’t mind telling you.”

  “How about the name Ulysses Grove? Ring any bells?”

  Something sparked behind the old man’s eyes, just for a moment, then vanished. His toothless mouth worked but made no sound.