Perfect Victim

by Jay Bonansinga

  “He would have been a child when you knew him or knew about him, maybe twelve years old? Again, the name is Ulysses Grove.”

  Drinkwater studied the wizened, shriveled face, the blood-rimmed eyes. Was there a faint glimmer of fear in those milky gray pupils? Reaching into her purse, Drinkwater pulled the binder out, then paged through the Xeroxes until she came to the names of the rest of those old men in the Order of the Owls. She asked Schoenbaum if he remembered any of his old colleagues, slowly reading off each name.

  His back pressed against the wall, his gnarled hands shaking in his lap, the old man mouthed something, a faint whistle of a sound coming from deep within his throat. It sounded like a word.

  “What was that, sir?” Drinkwater leaned down close so she could hear.

  “Long way…”

  “What’s that, Mr. Schoenbaum? Did you say ‘long way’? What’s a long way?”

  Barely a whisper: “Long way to fall.”

  Drinkwater looked at the wrinkled visage of the old man, his wormy lips moving impotently, moist with spittle. “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that. Long way to what?”

  No answer.

  “Sir?”

  Nothing.

  Glancing at her watch, Drinkwater wondered how long she could safely linger in the room with the old man. She thought about making some notes. Long way to fall? Is that what he said?

  She turned and went over to the bookshelf. A quick glance inside the stuffed grocery sacks revealed yellowed back issues of the Jerusalem Post and the Forward. She glanced down the spines of old dog-eared texts stacked between the bags: books on Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, and the occult. Drinkwater dug in her purse for her cell phone and took a few still frames of the literature.

  For what it was worth.

  Drinkwater was about to give up and say goodbye to Bernard Schoenbaum when a trio of framed pictures in the opposite corner of the room caught her eye.

  She went over to the wall and took a closer look: a framed photograph of a sixtyish woman with thick glasses—presumably the late Mrs. Schoenbaum—and a group photo of six middle-aged men lined up outside an ivy-covered building on some unnamed college campus. Some of the men were dark-skinned. Middle Eastern, perhaps. Drinkwater felt a tingle in her spine. Was she looking at the group of six who had visited Geisel? Maybe, maybe not.

  Between the two photographs hung a faded, rainbow-colored eight-by-ten-inch broadside—the kind that adorned bulletin boards at taverns and nightclubs, or perhaps might be found taped to telephone poles or the sides of buildings to advertise forthcoming musical acts.

  The performer on the lobby card was a young black man with a steel-plated guitar, looking world-weary and brooding with his boot propped up on a garbage can, a classic blues pose that brought to mind Robert Johnson or Howlin’ Wolf. The venue advertised was the Cherry Pit in Charleston, South Carolina, August 27th through September 3rd, in some unnamed year. But it was the name at the top of the placard that mesmerized Drinkwater.

  David “Chainsaw” Okuba.

  How many Okubas could there be in an old Jewish intellectual’s circle of friends? Her heart quickened as she remembered the name in Geisel’s diary, listed among the six old men—Baruk Okuba (Sudan).

  Leaning down close enough to fog the glass with her breath, Drinkwater saw a messy inscription scrawled across the bottom of the picture, a blue ballpoint pen long faded to gray chicken-scratch. The best she could tell, it said, “For Uncle Baruk, the last true African American.”

  Glancing over her shoulder to make sure the old man was still gazing off into oblivion, she quickly snatched the framed poster off the wall and stashed it in her purse. She did this all in one fluid movement, then turned to face Bernie Schoenbaum as if nothing had happened.

  “You take care of yourself now,” she said with enough volume to register out in the hallway. “I’m gonna be on my way.”

  Then she turned and marched out the door, her heavy purse banging her in the ribs.

  If she hurried she still might be able to catch a commuter flight to Charleston that evening.

  TWELVE

  “Earth to Agent Grove…”

  The voice shook Grove out of his troubled ruminations.

  He had been pacing a rut into the floor of Corboy’s outer office, his adrenaline spiking for what seemed like hours but was probably more like fifteen minutes. His work at the Academy was a million light-years away now, as though it were from another life. He kept thinking of the inevitable third murder; how he burned to prevent it, to catch this beast before it fed off another innocent. But like a shortwave radio crackling with interference, Grove’s thoughts kept returning to that nightmare about his mother. She was the source of all things inexplicable for Grove—his heritage, his bloodline, his inchoate connection to the metaphysical. So was this why she had made such a surreal entrance into his consciousness? For years now, Vida had lived in her son’s memory as a series of sensory impressions: the musky smell of curry in an iron pot; the itchy sandpaper texture of her dresses; the mismatched irises of her huge, sad eyes, one gray, one brown, always seeing beyond the rational. Over the years she had given her son talismans, charms, magic trinkets, all manner of paraphernalia to ward off evil. Grove wondered if he needed those things now more than ever.

  He blinked away the daydream as he looked up across the reception area at the deputy assistant to the director.

  A meticulously groomed thirtysomething dressed in a sharp linen jacket, Jake Bloom peered out from behind the door to Corboy’s inner office. “You can come on in now, Ulysses,” he announced with a smile on his face.

  In the macho gun culture of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, few employees felt comfortable exhibiting alternative sexuality. Not Jake Bloom. As one of the only staffers who was proudly out, he had always harbored a schoolboy crush on the dapper Grove, and Grove had always found it amusing, if not flattering. Today, however, Grove was too preoccupied to notice any subtle flirtation as he crossed the outer office, buttoning his coat with one hand, carrying his attaché with the other.

  “Very sorry about Tom,” Bloom said as Grove passed. “I know you two were very tight.”

  “Thanks, Jake.”

  “Word to the wise.” Bloom lowered his voice as Grove stepped up to the doorway of Corboy’s command center. “The big guy’s in a mood today, so step lightly.”

  “Thanks.”

  Grove went in and found Corboy talking on a headset behind his massive teak desk on the far side of the room.

  “They got a time of death yet? Who’s the primary down there?” The Director was pacing across a shuttered window with his jacket off and his shirtsleeves rolled up, his belly straining the buttons of his shirt.

  Louis Corboy had a jock-gone-to-seed look about him, as well as the flat pallor of a born bureaucrat. Whenever Grove was around, the man seemed to radiate contempt. In his early years at the FBI, Grove had pegged Corboy as a racist, but now the hostility seemed more specific. Louis Corboy didn’t like things he couldn’t understand—things he didn’t get—and Grove was at the top of that list.

  The big man motioned for Grove to wait a second. “Spell that, would ya?” Corboy wrote a name on a pad. “Okay, let’s teleconference the scene when you’re ready. You can work it out with Bloom. Okay…thanks.”

  He thumbed a switch on his earpiece and turned to Grove. “What is it with you and these redline cases?”

  “Funny you should mention that.” Grove let out a nervous sigh. At the Geisel shiva, he had confided the broad strokes of the Archetype killings to the Director. Now Grove needed more time and money and personnel for the case—things with which Corboy hated to part. “I just talked to Ben Sehgal about the—”

  “I know all about it.”

  Grove looked at Corboy. “Pardon?”

  “Walk with me, Ulysses.” Corboy scooped his suit coat off a chair back, and came around the side of his desk. “The shit is hitting the fan, and I for one don’t want to get
it all over me. C’mon.”

  The portly director lumbered out of his office, taking big robust strides, like an angry parent leading a recalcitrant child. Grove followed, a little dazed, a little nonplussed. Crossing the vestibule office, Grove heard Jake Bloom jabbering on his own headset, talking with somebody about patching through forensics from a hot crime scene somewhere.

  “Got a new scene I want you to explain to me,” Corboy was saying as he led Grove through the outer door and down the corridor.

  “What do you mean, ‘explain’? What new scene? You’re talking about Emerald Isle?”

  “Galveston, Texas.”

  “Texas?” Grove felt a faint vibration in the base of his neck.

  “Got it fresh this time,” the Director went on. “Same-day service. Gonna telecon it on the big screen in the conference room.” He turned a corner and nearly ran over a secretary. “Sorry, Carol. Excuse us. Grove…don’t get me started on North Carolina. You definitely have a talent for trouble.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Some cop down there, Stenowski I think his name is, he got a burr up his ass about this field agent—Van Teigham. This nosy uniform proceeds to call the Mid-Atlantic section chief and chew his ear off. Gets the whole goddamn region bent outta shape over this copycat thing.”

  “What exactly did Dave Van Teigham do?”

  Corboy turned another corner and led Grove down a narrow carpeted hallway lined with red warning lights. Windowless steel doors stood entry to audio labs, latent print rooms, and fiber analysis suites. “They’re waiting for us,” Corboy said, motioning toward the last door on the right.

  “Boss, what did Van Teigham do?”

  Corboy paused outside the teleconference room. “Stenowski was first on the scene, claims he saw the connection first, the similarities to your book. Now he claims Van Teigham is stealing his thunder.”

  “Who cares?”

  Corboy gave him a hard look. “I care. That’s who. Understand something, Grove. I spend fifty percent of my time dealing with congressional oversight committees—time better spent running the circus. Now somebody leaked this latest freak show to the media, probably this Stenowski character, and I gotta go into PR mode again. Which means I need this thing closed down. Now. Which means I need you to pay attention.”

  Grove met the man’s angry glare. “You have my undivided attention.”

  Corboy shoved the door open, and the two men entered the noisy teleconference room.

  THIRTEEN

  Three young middle-management types with laminate badges and sport coats bustled around the oblong teleconference room, which was lined with acoustic tile and blazing with fluorescent light. A large plasma screen hung on the far wall, flickering with an image of color bars. A shrill tone rang out from speakers embedded in the ceiling, and the air smelled of burnt coffee.

  Corboy took a seat at the head of the conference table, motioning for Grove to sit across from him.

  Grove did so, opening his briefcase, pulling out his notebook. “What are we looking at here?” he wanted to know.

  The Director gave a terse nod to one of the underlings, and the sport coat fiddled with a keyboard. The screen flickered with shaky handheld video footage of a deserted beach—presumably Galveston Island—framed in a window on one side of the screen, an unidentified talking head on the other.

  Corboy spoke up: “Are we on yet? Agent Phipps? Can you hear us?”

  The talking head, a square-jawed man with a buzz cut and cheap sport coat, was wrestling an earpiece into his ear. “Keith Phipps here, Houston field office.” The man’s southwestern drawl crackled out of the speakers, slightly out of sync with his mouth. “Who am I speaking with?”

  “You’ve got Louis Corboy here, along with Ulysses Grove, Quantico.”

  “Fellas, I gotta be honest with y’all…I’m not sure what we got here.”

  “Go ahead and run it down for us.”

  Onscreen the man read off a small spiral-bound notebook in his hands: “We got a white, female victim, looks like multiple stab wounds. Latent has nothing. Looks like smooth gloves.” He looked up into the camera. “Y’all gettin’ this?”

  Grove watched the shaky footage on the opposite side of the screen. The camera panned to the left, then tilted down, revealing drag marks in the sand, a dark smudge—most likely blood—and footprints. Like a Xerox copy of North Carolina. The camera panned to the right and a dark bundle came into view. The camera moved in closer, finally revealing the pale, sodden remains of Madeline Gilchrist.

  “We’re seeing it,” Corboy commented flatly. “This footage was taken this morning?”

  “No, actually, it was early this afternoon, at low tide,” Phipps explained. “Wanted to get as much physical evidence on record before it washed away. What happened was, just as soon as I got the MO up on the wires, I get a call from the Mid-Atlantic folks with Minneapolis on the other line—the modus here I guess matches both those deals.”

  “You got a positive on the vic yet?”

  The man on the screen looked at his notebook. “Gilchrist, Madeline Louise, resident of the South Houston area. Age forty-one, single, no criminal record. Understand she was a student at South Dayton Junior College. ME reports just came back, toxicology has a cocktail of thiopental, prescription antidepressants in her bloodstream.”

  Grove clenched his teeth as he watched the poorly framed high-def image zoom into a close-up of the dead woman’s porcelain-white face, matted with blood and hair and seaweed. A cold, sharp knife-edge touched his heart. His eyes watered. “Agent Phipps, Ulysses Grove here—got a question.”

  “Go ahead, sir.”

  “What part of Galveston is the scene located in?”

  “I guess you could say this part of the island’s more of a transitional area. Commercial docks, bait shops, marinas, things of that nature.”

  The averages clicked in Grove’s mind. He stared at the screen. The shaky image panned across the blood-soaked sand, the stains like photocopies of both the blood-spattered wall in Minneapolis and the carnage-strewn beach in North Carolina. “Let me guess,” Grove said. “There’s a grand total of eleven sharp trauma wounds between the six vertebra and the sacrum.”

  On the screen the field agent looked at the coroner’s report, then looked up. “That’s right, did somebody—?”

  “Time of death,” Grove went on, staring at the table now, “is somewhere between eleven and noon Central Standard Time.”

  “Yeah, that’s correct, but how did—?”

  “Cause of death is heart failure stemming from hypovolemic shock.”

  “That’s correct.”

  Grove closed his eyes. “Victim was last seen at a public place within fifty miles of the dump site.”

  Onscreen, Agent Keith Phipps was frowning. “Right again. But how—?”

  Corboy let out an irritated sigh. “Grove, that’s enough—”

  Grove kept his eyes closed. “Victim was kept alive for approximately twelve hours before the fatal wounds were inflicted.”

  “Grove—”

  “There were three distinct shoeprints found at the scene, one of them male, size eleven and a half E.”

  “Grove, we get it,” Corboy grunted.

  “Tire marks a hundred yards from the scene indicate a large multipurpose vehicle.”

  “Grove, I said that’s enough!”

  The suddenness and volume of Corboy’s outburst made Agent Phipps jerk with surprise at the pop in his earpiece. He stared into the camera. “What’s going on?” He let out a dry little nervous chuckle. “Y’all didn’t tell me I’d be visitin’ with a psychic.”

  “Agent Phipps,” Corboy said, his voice laced with thinly veiled anger, “we have reason to believe we got a copycat situation—”

  Grove saw something. “Hold on a second, hold on…hold on.” He stood up, his startled tone of voice making everybody in the room pause. He stared at the shaky video. “Stop the playback—freeze it!”

&nbs
p; “What?” Agent Phipps looked confused.

  “Freeze the video, please.”

  Agent Phipps glanced off-camera, whispering something to an assistant.

  Grove watched the shaky image panning across foamy waves washing up across the beach. He cocked his head slightly, favoring his good eye, as he stared—an unconscious habit he had developed since his left eye had been injured.

  All at once the video froze.

  “Okay, now I need you to rewind it, just go back about five seconds.”

  Agent Phipps glanced off camera. “Johnny, you get that? Back it up five seconds.”

  Corboy rose. “What is it, Grove? What are we looking at here?”

  The image blurred slightly as it quickly rewound. The camera was panning across the beach in reverse, scanning the dirty sand, the shells and trash and shards of driftwood littering the beach. Grove took a step closer to the screen. “Right there! Freeze it there!”

  Phipps said, “Pause it right there, Johnny.”

  Corboy stared at the screen. “What is it?”

  The image froze at an awkward angle—right in the middle of a zoom—showing a portion of a bloodstain on the right, a slice of the beach, and part of the sky. Off to the left, the edge of a boardwalk was visible.

  “Upper left-hand corner, by the dock.” Grove pointed at the screen. “See it?”

  “No, I don’t.” Corboy shook his head. “What are we looking at?”

  “In the sand.” Grove took another step toward the screen until he was close enough to touch the pebbled fabric of the projection surface. “See the writing?”

  “Writing?”

  Grove leaned closer. In his one good eye, the glowing image broke up into a matrix of ten thousand pixel dots, a scarlet pointillist painting. “Bottom of the piling.” He spoke in a low, controlled tone now, brushing his fingertip across the screen. “A few inches to the right. See it? I promise you that’s not part of your average scene.”

  Corboy kept shaking his head. “Okay, I see symbols of some kind, chicken-scratch, I just don’t—”