The waves crept closer, the foaming tide only inches away now. The salt winds swirled around them, whistling through the wheelchair, tossing the old woman’s gray ponytail.
Grove leaned down closer, gently brushing a rubber-tipped finger across the bottom edge of the symbols.
“Agent Grove?” Phipps sounded restless, anxious, a little angry.
Grove looked at the tiny wet pink smudge on the tip of his index finger. “These were made with the murder weapon.” He made his announcement in a low, grave mutter, then stood up and looked at Phipps. “Postmortem.”
“Quiet!” The old woman sniffed, then started translating, madly sketching formulas on her legal pad. Her crippled, age-spotted hand, curled around the pen, turned white and translucent as she worked.
A foamy stream of water slid across the symbols, making the edges bleed into the sand.
“Hurry,” Grove murmured.
“I could do this a lot faster if you would kindly stop telling me to do it faster,” the doctor snarled, her gaze still riveted to the symbols in the sand.
Another wave came up, sloshing around the chair’s wheels, momentarily covering the symbols with a slimy sheet of brine, then rolling away again.
The ancient cuneiform streaked and blurred. It was nearly gone.
“Almost got it,” the old woman said.
“Hurry, please.” Grove’s stomach burned with nervous tension. “Hurry.”
“This isn’t a damned spelling bee.” The cryptologist leaned closer, pressed her lips together, then scribbled something else in her notebook. Then she looked down at the shifting sand with a slight tilt of her head, the wind tossing a stray hair in her eyes. “I don’t have the whole string yet but I can definitely tell you what the last word is.”
Grove straightened. The others quieted. Grove looked at the old woman. “What is it?”
“That pictogram at the bottom represents the Semitic word hubur.”
“Which means…what?”
Dr. Millhouse took off her sunglasses and looked up at him with pale blue eyes surrounded by wrinkles. “The word means netherworld…or, more precisely, hell.”
SIXTEEN
“You gotta be kiddin’ me,” Drinkwater said from the darkness of the taxi’s backseat, gazing out the greasy window at the pathetic excuse for a tavern. A blue neon sign glowed in the darkness above the tops of the trees, adjacent to a broken-down clapboard façade. “That’s it? That’s the Cherry Pit?”
“Pride of the Low Country,” muttered the elderly black gentleman behind the wheel. He flipped down the metal flag. “Watch your pocketbook in there, darlin’.”
“Lovely.” Drinkwater fished around in her purse for the fare, paid the man, and climbed out.
For a moment she just stood there in the humid swampy air, taking in the timeworn outpost, as the cab belched away in a cloud of exhaust. The bar sat all by its lonesome at the end of a narrow dead-end dirt road, a two-story gallery building buried in overgrown willows and cypress trees. A small gravel parking lot to the west hosted a few rusted pickups. Mosquitoes swarmed around a bug zapper near the door.
Drinkwater took a deep breath. She had traveled all the way to Charleston on a hunch, spent most of her spare cash on the airfare. Now it was the moment of truth. She was either going to shed some light on Geisel’s diary tonight, or quit this wild-goose chase and get back to Quantico before she flunked out of the Academy.
She brushed the dust off her denim jacket, smoothed her hand over her braids, and went inside.
The narrow barroom, choked in a fog of blue smoke, reeking of hard-luck cases and sour whiskey spilled on hardwood floors, was mostly silent except for the scratchy drone of a jukebox in the far corner. A few yocals sat bellied up to the bar, one of them head down and sound asleep, while an old black fellow wiped down the counter, giving Drinkwater a lascivious look. “Evenin’, sweet pea.” His bayou drawl was as thick as blackstrap molasses. “Pull up a stool and name your pleasure.”
“Evening, sir.” Drinkwater gave a nod as she approached. She casually leaned against the counter. “Why don’t you gimme one of them brown bottles of Dixie?”
“You got it.” The man fished in a cooler, extracted a beer, popped the cap, and slid it over to her. “You’re in luck, sweet thang, ’cuz tonight’s ladies’ night, so that’s just seventy-fi’ cent.”
Drinkwater tossed the coins on the bar. “Understand Chainsaw Okuba plays here once in a while?”
The bartender showed his rotting gold-plated front teeth and hissed an approximation of laughter. One of the guys at the end of the bar gazed up from his drunken stupor and let out a giggle.
Drinkwater looked around. “Did I say something wrong?”
“Y’all might say old Oky Okuba play here once in a while, ’specially since he owns the joint.”
“No kidding?”
“That’s a fact. He’s just finishin’ up his second set downstair as we speak.”
“Where?”
The bartender indicated a doorway shrouded in beads on the opposite side of the room. “Right yonder. Go on down. It’s okay. He don’t bite…much.”
This last comment roused the sleeping drunk, and all the boys had a good laugh at that one. Drinkwater gave them a convivial nod and laughed along for a moment, then took her beer and her purse and went over to the doorway.
She descended a crooked staircase and found herself in another world. The smoke was so thick it was difficult to make out any shapes other than a general impression of a rotting hurricane cellar. Overturned chairs, battered metal kegs, and peanut shells littered the dirt floor. Broken holiday lights hung from the moldering rafters. Languid, drunken spectators sat on stools along the bomb shelter walls.
Drinkwater strolled through the haze toward a tiny stage at one end of the room, on which an emaciated black musician was putting a guitar back into its case. He looked drugged, spent, malnourished. Sporting a mousy gray goatee, his tight coils of black hair starting to recede, he barely resembled the sinewy bluesman depicted on the wrinkled poster still folded in Drinkwater’s purse. “Mr. Okuba? David Okuba?”
The musician glanced up, but didn’t say anything, just gave her a nervous smile and snapped the guitar case shut.
“Can I talk to you for a second?” Drinkwater was playing it as casual as possible. “Just for a second?”
“Talk?” His voice was a slow delta wind through a rusty tin can. “Talk, yeah.”
He turned and ambled toward a backstage doorway, vanishing in the dark.
Drinkwater shrugged, glanced around the room, then followed the man into the dark.
She found herself in a cluttered hall redolent with the stench of marijuana smoke and spoiled fish; it was too dark for her to identify any of the oblong objects stacked along the floor or against the walls. A single yellow cage light shone dimly at one end of the corridor. “Mr. Okuba?” Drinkwater gazed up and down the passageway. “Hello?”
Something moved behind her.
“Don’t you move that big booty one more inch,” a new voice oozed in her ear from the darkness, a deep, gravelly, baritone drawl.
Drinkwater froze stiff at the sensation of cold sharp steel against her throat. “Okay, easy, easy there, I’m not moving.”
The blade remained against her jugular, the sharp edge digging in.
“I’m trying to tell you there’s something strange about the use of cuneiform here.” Dr. Millhouse navigated her wheelchair around a makeshift chalkboard that was leaning against an oil drum, her palsied hand curled around her chair’s joystick, the whirring motor and squeaking wheels echoing in the abandoned boathouse. She had a pen behind her ear. A single ceiling light hung down above her, illuminating a cracked, oil-spotted cement floor littered with her notes. “It doesn’t transliterate like most archaic Hittite I’ve seen.”
Grove nervously paced the length of the cavernous boat garage, which had long ago succumbed to Gulf Coast decline and now was overrun with rats and cobwebs and rotting timbers
stinking of mold and rancid motor oil. It was the only private room to be procured in Galveston on such short notice in the middle of the night, but that didn’t mean it was conducive to delicate linguistic work. Grove had to get out of there or he was going to lose his mind. It was nearly one in the morning, and he was burning up with adrenaline, not to mention a horrible feeling of slippage, of losing control, and the old woman had yet to provide a translation of the killer’s message. “Just give it your best shot, Doc, please, it doesn’t have to be perfect, just gimme the gist.”
“Wait a minute…no.” The old woman suddenly lifted her hand from the joystick, the wheelchair coming to an abrupt halt. She raised her trembling hand as she stared at the rows upon rows of script that she had scrawled in blue chalk across the back of the signboard. “That’s too easy. That’s just too dad-blamed easy.”
“What is it?” Special Agent Keith Phipps tossed his cigarette to the floor, ground it out with the toe of his wingtip, and came over to the oil drum.
Grove stopped pacing. He stared at the blackboard. “You got something?”
“I shall surely be drummed out of the International Society of Cryptologists, missing this.”
Grove clenched his fists. “Doc, you’re killing us.”
“This symbol here, the Stag head it’s called, see?”
The old woman pointed her long quill pen at a primitive line drawing of a faunlike head. The head was at the beginning of each row of pictograms—arrows, spirals, daggers, curlicues, triangles. “At first I reckoned it must be part of the grammar of the message, embedded in the syntax. That’s how you transliterate something, in case you’re interested, which I’m sure you’re not. See this row of pictograms?” She pointed at a series of crude sketches. “Transliteration will give you the Sumerian words.” She pointed at the phrase ES UG IGI E-ZE HUBUR. “When you do that, you quite often get more context than you bargained for—especially here.”
She brushed a long painted fingernail at a row of crudely drawn animals—deer or antelope.
Grove felt a twinge of icy cold travel down his spine. “What does it mean?”
The old woman glanced at Phipps, then back at Grove. “It means this message is directed to someone in particular—someone referred to repeatedly as ‘the hunter.’”
Grove stepped forward. “What’s the message, Dr. Millhouse?”
“ES is three,” she said.
“What’s the full message?”
“UG is death or sacrifice, and IGI means to pierce or to open; and finally we have this last string, which is like a mathematical equation.”
“Three victims, is that what you’re saying?” Grove drilled his gaze into the old woman. He was not even aware that he was clenching his fists so hard his fingernails were breaking the skin of his palms.
Outside the boathouse came the hushed whisper of waves breaking against the beach.
Millhouse looked up at Grove. “Best I can tell ya, the message says, ‘After three sacrifices…the netherworld shall open…for both hunter and hunted.’”
SEVENTEEN
Shivering, dizzy with panic, Edith Drinkwater swallowed the taste of bitter acid at the back of her throat and tried to control her emotions. Puffs of cold white vapor pluming from her nostrils. She wanted to scream, but somehow she held it in—for the moment, at least. Wrists tied with hemp rope behind her back, her legs hog-tied to the legs of the cold metal folding chair on which she now sat, she squinted to see through the gloom of a walk-in freezer stacked to the ceiling with boxes of frozen alligator filets.
“Who sent you here?”
The figure on the other side of the freezer was barely visible behind a veil of icy white vapor. Sucking on a bong, the pale smoke like a wreath around his face, David “Chainsaw” Okuba trembled while he waited for an answer, but it was impossible to tell whether he was trembling from the cold or the paranoia implicit in his question.
“You got no reason to rough me up,” Drinkwater managed in an even voice.
“Who the fuck sent you?”
Drinkwater swallowed and spoke very quickly: “I told you, I’m a private investigator, I swear to God, you can look at my ID, you rifled through my purse already, go ahead and look, I’m telling you the truth, go ahead, I’m on a case involving your uncle Baruk—”
“What do you know about my uncle?”
Drinkwater’s heart pumped in that crazy way it pumped in her nightmares. She knew men like these men—coarse country types—very, very well. She knew their odors, the smell of lust, fear. Right now she could detect a strong stench of fear on Okuba. “I work for a party wants information on a group of men who followed—”
“Bitch is talkin’ shit!”
The other voice came from off to Drinkwater’s left, belonging to the enormous mixed-race man who had grabbed her from behind. Clad in faded denim coveralls and porkpie hat, with biceps like great brown muskmelons, he lurked in the shadows now near a stack of frozen hush-puppy boxes, cleaning his fingernails with the same knife with which he had subdued her. “She ain’t no private eye.”
“Clarence, hush.” David Okuba drew a big nervous gulp off the pipe, holding the sweet rush in his lungs. Then he exhaled painfully. Trembling, he gave Drinkwater a suspicious look through red eyes. “What group of men?”
“I got their names written down,” she told him. She could see the fear in the man’s eyes coalescing into something else. Maybe awe. Maybe a deeper dread. “Bernard Schoenbaum was one—the only one still alive. That’s where I saw your poster, in Mr. Schoenbaum’s room.”
The blues singer stared. “Keep talkin’….”
“There’s five others. Your uncle Baruk was one of them; a fella named Goodis. Let’s see, a couple of Middle Eastern gentlemen.”
Okuba gave her a grave little nod, lowering his pipe. “Mohammad Achmadra and Mr. Norgaru. Thank Christ you ain’t from the other side.”
Drinkwater looked at him. “No, I’m—I mean, what other side would that be?”
“Untie her, Clarence.”
The bodyguard grunted. “But we ain’t even sure she’s—”
“I said untie the lady!”
The big man grumbled as he came over, knelt down behind Drinkwater, and loosened the ropes. Drinkwater rubbed her sore wrists while Clarence untied her legs. She stood on weak knees and clapped her hands to get some feeling back into them. She felt as though icicles had formed under her nose. “Well, that was fun.”
“I’m sorry,” Okuba offered. “I had no way of knowin’ who you is.”
Drinkwater shivered. “All right…so. You mind telling me what’s going on?”
“C’mon.” Okuba went over to the big walk-in door and muscled it open. When the warm air of the kitchen met the coldness of the freezer, a cloud of vapor momentarily obscured Okuba, who had paused in the doorway. “We’ll have some whiskey, and I’ll tell ya everything I know.”
Drinkwater followed him out into the sultry warmth of the tavern’s kitchen, wondering if she was ready for this.
Ulysses Grove convinced the Texas Air National Guard to scramble an F14 out of Ellington to fly him through the night back home to Virginia—his fears metastasizing, spreading the terrible notion through him that his family once again could be in mortal danger. When he landed at Andrews, a police cruiser and two uniformed officers were waiting to rush him south across the Virginia state line to his home. It was 3:11 A.M. Driving mostly in tense silence, the sound of the siren howling the whole way, the cops got him up the coast in record time.
The squad car topped the hill south of Pelican Bay right around four that morning.
Grove, hunched in the darkness of the backseat, craned his neck to see his property in the distance. His jacket was off, his oxford shirt unbuttoned and his briefcase open on his lap. He was sweaty from all the frenzied travel and adrenal activity, and when he leaned forward, all his notes and haphazard doodles of faceless demons and black silhouettes with horns and glowing eyes tumbled to the floor o
f the cruiser. “I don’t see any lights on. She usually leaves the living room lights on.”
The uniformed officer behind the wheel—a gray-haired vet named Weems—grabbed the radio mike. “Twenty-seven, you got the home secure?”
The speaker crackled: “Fifty-nine, copy that. Secure’s an understatement.”
“What did he say?” Grove strained to see his place through the windshield, but the predawn darkness obscured his street in a blanket of black. All he could see of his property, still a block away, was the mailbox at the end of the drive. The late moon shone low and huge off the bay to the north, a long broken ribbon of shimmering luminous yellow off the water.
Panic pinched at Grove’s chest. He had tried to reach Maura by cell phone repeatedly with no luck.
“Hold tight, be there in a sec,” Officer Weems commented.
Grove gripped the back of the seat, stomach burning with nerves. Perhaps he was overreacting, but he had convinced Operations at Quantico to have a black-and-white waiting for him at Andrews so he could get home as soon as possible. He was worried that the killer was likely inside the Bureau system and therefore knew where Grove lived. Worse than that, the killer had reached out—albeit in a cryptic fashion—to Grove personally, in the sand on Galveston Island. Not by name. But Grove knew the code. He knew the dance.
The cruiser screeched up to the curb in front of Grove’s Cape Cod, lights blazing.
Grove lurched out the rear door and into the cool predawn air, instantly noticing the other three cruisers parked single file along his narrow driveway. The house was dark, a flashlight flickering behind a second-floor window. Grove raced across the wet grass and up his porch steps, taking the wooden stairs two at a time.
Inside the front door he paused, scanning the dark living room. He could immediately see that something was wrong. The lock had been jimmied. The lights were off, the place neat and orderly. Not the usual haphazard clutter that a family with a toddler naturally amasses over the course of a day. The air smelled of disinfectant and change.
Perfect Victim Page 10
