Perfect Victim

by Jay Bonansinga

  The first rays of morning sliced through mangled, crumpled window blinds.

  A strong chemical smell hung in the air, a very familiar smell that Grove could not immediately identify. He spun in a three-sixty, his gun still raised, his good eye taking in fallen bookshelves, dark stains on the walls. The floor leaned and yawed again, and Grove braced himself against the bulwark, as the sounds of the Tac guys doing their frantic room-to-room filled his ears.

  “Galley’s clear! Clear!”

  Formaldehyde. That’s what he was smelling—goddamn formaldehyde. He shuffled toward the beams of light flickering in the galley, his arms aching with adrenaline, his hands sweaty inside the rubber gloves. Broken china on the floor. Bootsteps crunching. Light coming through a narrow shaded window. Dirt from an overturned plant. The powerful odor of rancid meat.

  “Head is clear! Downstairs john is clear!” Another frenzied voice from belowdecks.

  Grove paused near a broken portal, his gun pointing at the ceiling. He listened. He heard an electric motor running somewhere in the bowels of the boathouse, and he felt the floor vibrating faintly. He had been hearing that infernal humming noise, barely audible beneath all the yelling, from the moment he had arrived. He had made note of it, figuring it was a generator or bilge pump or filter or whatever. But now it set off an alarm in his brain.

  “Agent Grove, the Sleeper Cabin! In the fore-deck! Got a stiff! We got a stiff!!”

  Grove lowered the Bulldog’s barrel and hustled toward the staircase, sidestepping a stack of cardboard boxes and spilled computer disks like so many shiny plates on the deck. Through the low archway. Down the creaking steps. Toward the furthest hatch in the lower level in which all the flashlights and figures were now convening. Somebody was coughing fitfully inside the cabin.

  “Give him some room! Back off, back off!” The Tac officers backed away, their guns going up, allowing Grove passage inside the berth.

  Grove entered the cramped, moldering sleeping area—the whole chamber was probably less than a hundred square feet. A beefier stink hung in the clammy air just beneath the chemical stench.

  He pulled a penlight from his vest. Flipped it on. Swept the bloodstained mattress on the floor…the coils of ropes…the blankets bunched at one end of the berth…the chains dangling from the light fixture…and the huge rusting Frigidaire freezer in one corner, its horizontal door propped open by one of the Tac guys.

  In the darkness to Grove’s left, the voice of Pork Chop muttered into his two-way: “HQ, we’re gonna need the lab guys, the site people, the whole team, pronto.”

  The body had been stowed in the horizontal deep freeze—petrified in a slab of fishy ice—for many months now, maybe even a year. It was hard to tell from the coloring of the flesh, the milky frozen eyeballs, the gaping rictus of blackened teeth, the swollen purple tongue protruding from the mouth like a fat slug.

  Grove gazed down at Benjamin Bard’s nude remains and gritted his teeth. Contrary emotions flowed through Grove like a riptide tearing at his sanity: This was the cocky kid who had come on to his wife, and now look at him, now look at him, with his spiky bleach blond Mohawk and peach-fuzz goatee frozen in a rotting pink sarcophagus, but wait, wait, wait, look more closely, look at the room, Ulysses, look at that gaping mouth, the look of terror in his pupil-less eyes, and the ligature wounds up and down his frozen limbs…the man was tortured, he was tortured—systematically, savagely, purposefully.

  All at once, over the space of a nanosecond, Ulysses Grove started fitting together all the tiny puzzle tiles tumbling around in his brain.

  The humming sound had been the Frigidaire, running perpetually off the marina’s power, and the strange stench beneath that chemical smell had been the fishy smell of old frozen meat—better known as freezer burn—but far more important, far more critical, the scene was talking to Grove now, whispering to him in the ancient dead language: ES UG IGI E-ZE HUBUR—go deeper, deeper, yes, that’s right, forget your pain, my brother, forget your ego, go down, down, down into the frozen dead heart like a clock stopped at the precise apocalyptic hour of revelation—this is how the perpetrator knew! This is how the perpetrator knew how to stage the killings! This is how! The surf-punk gave up the information! Benjamin Bard possessed the classified modus operandi, the computer models, the lecture notes….

  “What was that?”

  The sound of Pork Chop’s voice penetrated Grove’s stupor, and Grove turned to the Tac leader like a man stirring from a dream. “What?”

  “You said ‘This is how he knew.’” The leader spoke in a flat, disaffected voice. “I’m not following.”

  Grove shone his penlight at the frozen corpse. “See the ligature marks, the superficial trauma—here, here, along the nerve bundles under the feet, along the sides of the tongue—all indicating torture.”

  Pork Chop frowned, rubbing his nose. The smell was getting to him. “That’s a lot of torture.”

  “He needed a lot of information.” Grove looked around the room, then at the Tac leader. “I want you to keep everybody out of here until Cedric Gliane gets here from Quantico—you got that?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “I want this place pickled, and I want Latent on every surface, and I want every shrimp rat from here to Virginia Beach canvassed, and I want the lab people to transport the vic frozen.”

  “Um, yeah, I’m just not sure whether—”

  “Listen to me. Don’t talk, just listen.” Grove fixed his gaze onto the deep-set eyes of the Tac leader. “He’s still here, he’s here. Do you understand?”

  “Who’s still here?”

  “The perp. The killer.”

  “What?” The Tac leader’s hand instinctively went down to the butt of his Glock in its holster. Confusion boiled in his eyes. “What are you talking about?”

  Grove closed his eyes. Let it come to you, Uly—his mother’s voice, deep in his midbrain, her heavily accented Kenyan lilt—your fate is fixed. “He spent a lot of time here, left a lot of himself behind. Trust me. He’s still here in the woodwork.”

  Pork Chop looked around. A big sigh. “I’ll take your word for it. I’m sure you know this guy pretty well by now, huh?”

  “Not as well as he knows me.” Grove looked at one of Bard’s bluish frozen hands, two blackened fingertips protruding from the ice. “What’s that?”

  The Tac leader looked down at the remains. “What?”

  “By the vic’s left hand—see?”

  “I don’t—”

  Grove leaned over, then ran a rubber-gloved fingertip down a series of faint hash marks beneath Benjamin Bard’s putrefied frostbitten fingers. The marks were on the inside of the ice, lined with flecks of dried blood like pepper flakes. Grove passed his light over the ice and the underside glistened with inch-long parallel lines.

  “Holy fucking shit,” uttered the man with the pork chop sideburns.

  In his death throes Bard had managed to scrawl three crude letters on the inside surface of a large, concave air pocket in the ice:

  J Q P

  TWENTY

  “There’s another one, another spirit.”

  “What?”

  “A dark one, an opposite one.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Yin and yang. My uncle told me all about it, believed it down to his bones. You understand now?”

  “No, I don’t understand, as a matter of fact, I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.” Edith Drinkwater stood in the doorway of the Cherry Pit’s grimy kitchen, a slender beam of sunlight filtering down from a ceiling grate, the column of light specked with dust motes. She felt queasy with nerves and dizziness. Without even realizing it, she had crossed a line, and now she had a horrible feeling she could never go back.

  “Your employer, whoever he is, he got a double. A twin. On the other side.” Okuba now sat on the edge of a rusty steel counter, nervously wringing an old bandana in his long brown fingers, chewing a wad of tobacco, and spitting juice into a copper
pot full of shrimp shells on the floor. His eyes watered with terror as he spoke. “My uncle and his crew searched in secret all their lives for this other spirit, and I ain’t sure if they ever found him. I hope they didn’t.”

  Okuba paused, shuddering at the very thought of finding this individual. He dipped his yellow fingertips into a tin of Copenhagen, adding to the huge gob between his cheek and gum. Then he spat again into the pot on the floor. Every time he spat, the dull ping off the pot would ring out like the clack of a marimba. “This is pure distilled hundred-proof evil we’re talking about here. You have any idea what that is, missy?”

  Drinkwater looked at the floor. “I’ve seen my share of evil, I’m sorry to say.”

  “This ain’t like that, missy. This ain’t like anything y’all have ever seen before.” He swallowed hard, as though staving off maniacal laughter. “This is worse than your worst nightmares. This is the dark rotten thing that lives inside the worst of us, that lives off misery. It’s worse than Satan, ’cause even Satan got his weaknesses. Satan’s got pride, lust. This thing, this dark spirit—it’s just a cold, cold, cold, cold-metal misery machine.” David “Chainsaw” Okuba spat into the copper pot on the floor, as if punctuating the gravity of his statement, then wiped his mouth with the back of a trembling hand. “This thing is like a virus you can’t even talk about, or think about, for fear it’ll infect your brain.”

  Drinkwater didn’t say anything. She thought about that black target silhouette from Grove’s class, and she thought of the Archetype, the homicidal sociopath who tortures and kills out of ego and self-gratification. And she also thought about those whispered words of old Bernard Schoenbaum, longtime comrade of Baruk Okuba and current guest of St. John the Baptist Extended Care Center in beautiful downtown Newark, New Jersey: long way to fall. Goddamn right it was a long way to fall—especially for a spirit floating around the ether. But it was also a long way to fall for Drinkwater—street-smart girl from the projects, woman of reason.

  Okuba was looking at her, chewing a fingernail now. “I ain’t even doin’ this thing justice. Words ain’t enough. You don’t want to know.”

  “All due respect, David, how do you know all this?”

  He spat again with a ping! “What difference does it make? Y’all don’t believe a lick of what I’m sayin’. My uncle got drunk once, told me things about the dark one would straighten them cornrows of yours.”

  Drinkwater started pacing across the kitchen, the soles of her shoes crackling on the sticky floor. “So what’s the endgame?”

  Okuba gave her a cockeyed glance. “Say what?”

  “The finale, you know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She stopped pacing, looked at him, and shrugged. “How’s it all play out? In the prophesies, I mean. Do these two—whatever you call them—do they ever face each other? Is that the endgame?”

  For a moment it looked as though David Okuba was about to yell at her, his eyes sparking with emotion. He balled his hands into fists. But then his face broke into a sideways smirk and he began to laugh.

  He laughed and laughed, as though the sick irony of it all was too much to bear.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Two things instantly assaulted Grove—who was now livid with anger, exhausted, and running on very little sleep—as he exited Benjamin Bard’s houseboat and hustled over weathered planks toward the nearest police cruiser: one, daylight had broken with a vengeance, the cloudless sky over the Chesapeake now blazing brightly, driving an ice pick of pain down between Grove’s eyes. And two, somebody was calling out for him behind the yellow tape that had been strung up since he arrived at the scene.

  “Special Agent Grove! Over here!”

  Grove paused at the end of the pier and glanced over his shoulder in the general direction of the voice. Something about the grating, shrill sound was familiar, but at first Grove didn’t see the owner of the voice in the small crowd of gawkers who had gathered at the edges of the cordons—a few old geezers in Bermuda shorts, a baker in stained whites wiping his hands in a bread towel, a grease monkey from a local marina up early to fix motors.

  At last Grove saw the prematurely balding white man in low-riding baggy jeans, a big medallion, and a T-shirt about ten sizes too big for him waving his hand. “Agent Grove, it’s Byron Haskell from The Weekly World!”

  Grove felt his stomach clench at the sight of the tabloid reporter. “Not now, not now,” he grumbled, turning in the opposite direction, heading toward a SWAT van that had parked on the edge of an adjacent lot.

  “Yo, Agent Grove—wait!”

  The reporter scurried around the crowd, then hopped over a low barrier between the boardwalk and the parking lot. He moved with the jackrabbit energy of a skateboarder, despite the fact that he was nearing forty and his fringe of hair was starting to salt with gray. He darted across the edge of the parking lot toward Grove.

  Grove paused near the rear doors of the SWAT van, then turned to face the approaching pest. “What do you want, Haskell?”

  “Whassup?” the reporter panted as he reached the rear of the SWAT van and pulled his mini-recorder from the back of his baggy denims. “Long time no talk, dawg. Quick couple of questions.”

  “I’m in a hurry.”

  “Promise I won’t keep you more than a sec.” He raised the tape recorder as though asking permission. “Y’all mind if I roll on this?”

  “Why bother?” Grove stared into bloodshot eyes. “You’re gonna make it all up anyway.”

  Haskell feigned a hurt look, his little soul-patch goatee twitching. “Now why you gonna go and do me like that, my brother? I’m here to get the four-one-one from the source, get the inside scoop.”

  “We’re not brothers.”

  Haskell thumbed the record button with a click. “This one here, is it connected to the ones in Minneapolis, North Carolina, and Texas?”

  Grove stuffed his rage back down his throat, and tried to breathe through it. Years ago, Byron Haskell had stolen some candid photos of Grove and Maura courting in Alaska, publishing them in The Weekly World News right under the banner headline J-LO’S BUTT IMPLANTS EXPLODE! The unauthorized photos had made Maura a target of the psychopath Richard Ackerman, nearly getting her killed. To add insult to injury, the tabloid subsequently started an absurd continuing series on “Ulysses Grove, the manhunter from the FBI with mystical methods and mysterious past.” Grove had considered initiating a lawsuit; though he ultimately opted for simply ignoring it, his contempt for Haskell becoming harder and harder to stanch. “Get out of my face,” Grove warned.

  “Just tell me whether they’re connected.”

  Grove’s jaw throbbed. “This is an ongoing investigation, Haskell, and if you were a real journalist you would know I can’t discuss open cases.”

  Grove turned and started walking away when the reporter grabbed his arm. “Hold up, man—hold up!—please, one more, just one more question.”

  Grove turned and bored his gaze into the reporter’s face like an augur. “Let go of my arm.”

  Haskell released him with a mischievous smirk. “Just tell me one thing, dawg.”

  Grove didn’t say anything. Just stared. The rage squeezing his guts.

  “Just tell me”—and then the reporter lowered his voice, smirk still plastered on his face—“Is the reason your wife left ’cause she was on her way into witness protection again, or is it marital problems this time?”

  What happened next occurred with the surreal unraveling of a car accident or a nightmare, as though time had suddenly slipped a belt. Grove was outside his own body, watching the action transpire in flash frames of unreality, like a motion-picture projection flickering on and off. FLASH! Grove shoving Haskell with brutal force. FLASH! Haskell stumbling backward over his own feet, tripping and falling ass-down on the cracked pavement of the lot.

  And then FLASH! Grove was on top of Haskell, knees pressing down on the flailing reporter’s arms, holding him down on the ground. Haskell writh
ed and spat and grunted inarticulate grunts. Grove wrapped both hands, still in their rubber gloves, around the reporter’s skinny neck. Haskell convulsed. Grove squeezed. Haskell twitched and kicked and gasped.

  By this point, the rear door of the SWAT van had burst open and two younger Tac officers lurched out with eyes bugging.

  Other doors opened across the marina—Bard’s houseboat, one of the cruisers, an ambulance—voices almost instantly calling out. In fact, it seemed as though half of St. George Island, on edge due to the grisly discovery at the marina, had come to their doors and were now peering out at the unexpected tussle.

  “Hey! Hey! What the hell—?” Pork Chop came hustling around the cordon with his Glock drawn, raised, and pointing at the sky, unsure of the rules of engagement here.

  Grove noticed very little of this peripheral action, his attention now locked with welding-iron intensity both on Haskell’s reddening face and something within himself, something just now flickering in his mind. It was there just for a second like a strobe flash on the back of his blind eye, and it seemed to feed off his rage like a surge of accelerant on a fire, blooming in his brain: the sensation of falling, falling down a long, dark chasm in the ground.

  Now there were hands on Grove’s shoulders and arms, yanking him off the reporter, but Grove’s rubber-coated fingers had tightened a viselike grip around Haskell’s stringy neck. The sound of Pork Chop’s high, shrill voice: “Jesus Christ, Grove! Let go of him! You’re gonna waste the guy!”

  At last, the collective heave of all three Tac officers managed to tear Grove from the reporter. Grove and the officers tumbled backward, sprawling to the pavement, while Haskell rolled in the opposite direction across the boardwalk like a bundle of cordwood.