Perfect Victim

by Jay Bonansinga

  A ghostly figure crouched near the sealed, petrified entrance to the Shaft Number 1 pithead building: a huge, black, tattooed, muscular, zombie-like phantom dragging a big circular tape measure along the scarred ground.

  Liquid terror flooded Jamie’s bloodstream as she stared at this incongruous nightmare of a scene—a faceless dark figure measuring the ground along the threshold of the mine, a series of three concentric measuring tapes fanning out from the entrance—and her mind grappled with the logic of it. Was she seeing things?

  She only watched for a brief moment, but her eyes took in so much: the figure wore a funky old top hat; and a huge old suitcase lay on the ground near this creep, open, while scraps of rotted timbers the size of hog legs slowly inched across the ground around him, on their own power, as though sliding on ice.

  Timbers moving on their own power?

  It is amazing how much visual information the human mind can take in over the space of a single instant: especially a young, hyperalert, hyperimaginative teenage mind. In that awful instant before she turned away, Jamie realized just exactly why the wood scraps were moving—

  —because the stranger had just turned to the boarded entrance door and yanked on it, sending up a sudden grating squeak, which scattered the carpet of insects that were writhing under the wood. All at once, a moving wave of beetles, silverfish, and centipedes dispersed across the ground like a school of frightened minnows, leaving behind the boards in the ocean of shadows—

  —and that was when Jamie managed to abruptly tear herself away from this otherworldly tableau.

  She turned tail and charged like a jackrabbit across the cinder-strewn apron, into the fir trees, and down the other side of the ridge. She ran and ran headlong through the woods, not feeling a thing but white-hot horror, branches whipping at her face as she raced toward the far clearing at the bottom of Northmoor Road.

  She didn’t stop running until she reached the gate to the trailer park, and even then she trotted nervously through the maze of mobile homes and blacktop courts until she reached her home. She felt as though her heart was going to explode. She could not get the image of that ghostly bogeyman out of her brain, nor would she ever forget what that apparition had been doing in the darkness of the Wormwood ruins, which was something far stranger than a moving carpet of bugs.

  He was trying to get into the mine.

  “I don’t know what’s happening.” Grove stared down at Drinkwater on the carpet across the room, the realization of what he had done cleaving his brain like an ax. All his fury drained out of him, he went over to her. Keeling down beside her, he trembled as he tried to touch her reassuringly, to stroke her shoulder like a trainer calming a cowering wild animal, but she jerked at his touch, obviously triggered by something buried deep within her that had been awakened by the slap.

  “I’m so sorry,” Grove murmured, “I’m so, so, so sorry.”

  She turned her back to him and lay there for a moment, as though embarrassed, taking deep breaths and rubbing her face. Her trembling subsided. “I’m okay.”

  “I can’t believe I did that.” Grove felt his guts seizing up, his eyes welling with tears. The lack of sleep, the fear, the shame, the fixation on the hunt—all of it pressed down on him now, constricting his throat, scalding his eyes. “I’ve never hit a woman in my life.”

  Drinkwater managed to sit up. She looked at him. “I been hit harder.”

  “I can’t—” Grove tried say something else, crouched next to her, but he couldn’t get the words out. He tried to swallow, but the lump in his throat was choking him. All at once he became horribly aware of the empty bedrooms above him, the lost dreams of that drafty Cape Cod home, the absence of his family, the broken promises, the darkness winning.

  He looked down. A single tear dripped to the floor.

  She gently patted his arm. “It’s okay, Ulysses. Forget it. I could’ve said it a little better than I did.”

  Grove tried to say something else, but he couldn’t; he could only stare at the carpet where his tear had fallen. His crying abated into a dizzying, stabbing migraine.

  Drinkwater patted his shoulder. “I’m all right, really. I’m fine.”

  “You sure?”

  “You bet.”

  “I’ll make it up to you.” Grove stood up. Dizziness coursed through him, his knees wavering severely. What the hell was happening to him? Was it the lack of nourishment and sleep? Was it grief? He was stretched as thin as a razor blade.

  “Something else your mom told me….” Drinkwater remained on the floor, taking a deep breath. “She made me swear not to talk about it with anybody, including you.”

  Grove looked down at her. “I’m afraid to ask.”

  “She was scared, Ulysses. I could see it on her face. She’d been holding this in all her life.”

  “Why didn’t she…” Grove blinked. The dizziness rose in him like a wreath of smoke around his head. He grabbed the edge of the doorjamb. His vision blurred. The room darkened suddenly.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m just—”

  “Ulysses?”

  “I’m—” The floor seemed to tilt beneath him. His hand slipped off the edge of the jamb.

  “Whoa!” Drinkwater reached out and tried to catch him, but it was too late.

  Grove never even realized he was falling.

  It was as though the floor had levitated, and he barely managed to twist sideways before hitting the carpet. Though the meaty part of his shoulder took the brunt of the impact, the air was still knocked out of his lungs as he landed in a heap, one arm pinned under the other.

  “Oh my God, Ulysses! Ulysses?” Drinkwater crabbed over to him. She cradled his head. “Hey, you okay? You okay? Hey! You okay?”

  Grove was only out for a second or two, but in that moment of floating darkness he saw his first glimpse of where he would find John Q Public.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  At the precise moment Ulysses Grove was momentarily losing consciousness in Pelican Bay, something of great import was occurring hundreds of miles to the west, in the dead-still darkness of a rural Kentucky night, along the edge of a hole in the earth known as Porchard’s quarry. At that exact moment, old Maynard Ferguson saw the first piece of evidence floating near a boulder field on the north side of the man-made lake.

  The retired mailman had been ensconced just south of there, perched on a tattered lawn chair in the shadows of a little clearing, his ice chest next to him full of cold Budweisers and warm night crawlers, three of his lines in the water loaded up for bass or maybe, if he got lucky, a decent-size bullhead. At first Ferguson thought his eyes were playing tricks again—since turning the big seven-oh, his peepers had been doing that quite often—but the more he stared at that shimmering black water gently licking at the edges of the rocks, the more he became convinced he was seeing what he thought he was seeing.

  At last he levered his creaking bones out of his lawn chair and gingerly made his way through the cattails and weeds to the moss-carpeted stones to the north; then he managed to trundle out to the edge of the water and reached the pale floating object with a long willow switch. He fished it out and held it up in the moonlight.

  “I’ll be goddamned,” he muttered, staring at a pair of white ladies’ panties streaked with deep purple bloodstains. Maynard knew bloodstains when he saw them—any good angler knows the color on cotton cloth, especially when it’s old and set in.

  Other objects floating nearby caught the old man’s attention. A tangle of something shiny and wormy-gray that looked like duct tape; a clear plastic container that the sheriff would later identify as an IV bottle; a linoleum knife, also permanently bloodstained; a charred ruler; a torn bench seat from a large vehicle; a knotted phalanx of measuring tape; and perhaps the most disturbing item of all: a scorched human skull. Old Man Ferguson saw all this in one wide-eyed gulp before digging in his pocket with his crooked, palsied hand and fiddling open his cell phone.

  It only took a
little over a minute for him to get Sheriff DeQueen on the line—that night was, as usual, another slow one in Catacomber County—and another ten minutes or so for the sheriff to get his fat Irish ass over to the quarry. Ferguson waited up by the road near his pickup, shivering in the cool night air. When the lights of the cruiser finally materialized to the south, first sweeping across the dense wall of black oaks, then glaring in Ferguson’s eyes, the old man let out a relieved sigh and started waving the sheriff over. The cruiser pulled up and the sheriff stuck his big ruddy cranium out the window and said, “You ain’t been tipplin’ the blackberry brandy again, Maynard, have ya?”

  The old man said this was no joke and why didn’t the sheriff just get his sizable rear end out of that car and down to the lake to see for himself.

  After a split second of thought, the sheriff decided to do exactly that.

  The vision came to Grove without fanfare or warning, the fiery flare popping behind his blind eye like a Roman candle, making him flinch at the vivid bright colors: three yellow beams of light shooting toward a dark hole in the center of his field of vision. Then a nimbus of light sparked around the nucleus, as though a match had been struck, and the hole in the heart of his vision coalesced, rimmed in shadows, framed in rotting boards, a portal in the ground, a doorway, a passage.

  Then Grove jerked awake on the floor of his drafty Cape Cod in Pelican Bay.

  The duration of the vision had been less than a couple of seconds, but the narrative had been clear: a strange doorway sucking him down into the blackness of hell as violently as a jet engine vacuuming a bird out of the sky. When Grove finally got his bearings back and looked up at Edith Drinkwater, his voice was in shreds. “Oh God, that’s it—”

  She stared at him. “That’s what?”

  “That’s it that’s it that’s it that’s it,” he muttered softly under his breath, the room going in and out of soft focus, the woozy feeling clinging as he tried to stand. He saw the answer on the floor all around them, scattered across the disordered house.

  “What is? What’s it?” Drinkwater looked as though she were awaking from a dream herself, her eyes sober and alert now as she stood.

  “The measuring man.” Grove stood on his feet, wavering for a moment as he rubbed his eyes. He looked at the room. In one corner, black-and-white glossies of poor Barbie Allison contorted on the cracked pavement of a Minneapolis alley lay in disarray across the sofa cushions.

  “What?” Drinkwater kept staring.

  “He’s showing me where it is, the rendezvous, the meeting place.” Grove stared into another corner, where pictures of Karen Finnerty’s corpse on a North Carolina beach hung off a lamp shade, news photos of her grieving family above them on the wall, the victimology, the backstory, the pain and suffering caused by this freak.

  “Ulysses, you’re killing me here. What are you talking about?”

  “He’s telling me where to go.” Grove stared at the fax of Madeline Gilchrist’s body dump along a deserted windswept boardwalk near Galveston pier. “Galveston…North Carolina…Minnesota.”

  Drinkwater looked around at the chaos of paperwork, not seeing it, not getting it. “Okay so?”

  Grove looked at her. “‘And the netherworld shall open.’”

  “Okay.”

  “Galveston, North Carolina, and Minneapolis.”

  She shrugged. “So what.”

  “Get me a straightedge—a long one—like a yard-stick, something like that, now, please—look in the coat closet. Quick!”

  Drinkwater whirled, nearly falling over, searching the cluttered vestibule, while Grove rushed over to the corner sofa, nearly tripping over a file box.

  He tore a map of the United States off the wall, the pushpins flying. “He’s telling me where it is—hell.”

  In the foyer Drinkwater found the closet, threw it open, and found a yardstick just inside the door leaning against an umbrella and a broom. She snatched it up and hurried back into the living room.

  Thunder rattled in the rafters suddenly, lightning flickering, as Drinkwater handed the yardstick to Grove. “Show me.”

  “Look, look—here.” Grove dropped to his knees, spreading the wrinkled map across the floor. “He’s showing me where hell is.”

  Drinkwater knelt next to him.

  “Here…” Grove pressed the yardstick down on the map, connecting Minneapolis in the upper Midwest to Emerald Isle, North Carolina, on the East Coast. He found a pen in an end-table drawer and drew a thick black line connecting the two murder scenes.

  Drinkwater waited for it to make sense.

  “And here…” Grove drew another thick straight line between Emerald Isle and Galveston, then another one back up to Minneapolis. “…which makes a triangle, which provides a perfect average, which is an inversion of the trinity, a corruption of the father/son/holy spirit, which is the median of all serial killings in America. You still with me?”

  “I guess, yeah.”

  Grove looked at her, the yardstick still pressed to the map. “Read your Inferno, The Divine Comedy.”

  “Now you lost me again.”

  Grove gazed down at the map, then slowly made three more lines connecting the corners. In the exact middle of the triangle was a point where all three lines came together. “Dante wrote that the epicenter of the earth is the netherworld.” His voice softened suddenly, lowered an octave. “And the epicenter of the epicenter is where the devil lives.”

  Drinkwater stared at the map a long time, stared at that three-way intersection of felt-tip lines. Then she looked at Grove. “The devil lives in eastern Kentucky?”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Sheriff Howard DeQueen of Catacomber, Kentucky, got things rolling that night with uncharacteristic vigor. He pulled his deputy off watch duty over at the Armour Star plant and got him down to Porchard’s quarry within an hour with a patrol boat as well as a tow truck from Roberts Machinery (the one with the heavy-duty winch).

  They dragged the swimming hole and eventually recovered the charred remains of a recently torched Chevy Econoline van. It took them about an hour to fish the thing out, and the sheriff supervised it all with his ever-present Meerschaum pipe clenched between his big yellow teeth.

  They got the heap back up to the road, and the sheriff told the young driver from Roberts to take the metal carcass as well as all the suspicious items skimmed out of the water over to the impound lot out back of the Piggly Wiggly and make sure the damn thing was locked up good and tight.

  By the time Sheriff DeQueen got back to his office he was fully immersed in thought, wondering how he should process this thing, wondering what kind of cowshit he had stepped in this time, so distracted, in fact, that he didn’t even hear the crackling voice of Dispatch in the other room. The third shift had not yet arrived, and DeQueen was alone. Finally he realized the voice was calling for him.

  He ambled into the radio room and picked up the table mike. “This is DeQueen, go ahead,” he said.

  “Sir, we got a call from a Bureau gentleman out of Virginia for y’all.” It was the voice of Carmella Bozen, the morning gal in the Pinckey PD. “Mind if I route him through?”

  “Route him on through, darlin’.”

  A split second later the desk phone lit up, and DeQueen grabbed it. “Catacomber Center here, who am I speaking to, please?”

  “Sheriff, this is Special Agent Ulysses Grove, Quantico.” The voice was amped up, jittery. “Sorry to bother you in the middle of the night.”

  “What can I do for ya, sir?”

  “Just wondering if you or anybody in the area have seen anything…you know…out of the ordinary recently?”

  “Out of the ordinary?”

  A pause. “Yeah, you know. Anything suspicious, signs of foul play.”

  The sheriff thumbed his big Stetson hat back on his huge head. “Well now, that’s funny y’all should ask that.”

  THIRTY

  Grove had a grand total of forty-eight rounds of ammunition in two different ca
libers in his house—an unopened box of twenty-four liquid-tip .44 slugs for his Bulldog in the basement office, under lock and key in a strongbox, and sixteen .22-caliber zippers on the top shelf of his bedroom closet—which he gathered in tense silence, moving with the grim methodical focus of a commando. The remaining eight hollow points were still in his Bulldog, injected there with a speed loader before he had embarked for Benjamin Bard’s houseboat the previous morning.

  Over the last half hour, since speaking with the Kentucky sheriff and learning of John Q Public’s trail of bloody bread crumbs—proof positive that the killer was luring Grove into a trap—Grove had gone from room to room, gathering up his firearms and taking inventory of his personal off-the-books arsenal. As he did this, he felt as though he were outside himself, watching his body performing these tasks, watching his hands snapping bullets into magazines, stuffing duffel bags full of supplies—topographical maps rolled up in extra pairs of socks, cans of mace, his handgun stowed in a vinyl case, the night-vision goggles he’d used in New Orleans a couple of years ago, a few pairs of rubber gloves, a webbed belt sheathed with three serrated commando knives, and on and on.

  Grove had already called Mike Hauser, a friend and fellow instructor at Quantico, a man with connections at a local airstrip, in order to charter a single-engine job to Kentucky. Apparently Hauser had not gotten word yet that Grove was on suspension: he agreed to meet Grove at the airfield in an hour. Valesburg, Kentucky, was only about forty-five minutes away by small aircraft, and Grove wanted to get there as soon as possible, before the developments at Porchard’s quarry reached the Bureau task force and the little town flooded with investigators looking for the owner of the panel van.

  According to the FBI’s secure website, which Drinkwater could still access, the team had already tracked down the man’s last known address—the Saint Aquinas Group Home in Chicago—and had collected a busload of leads from the squalid basement room in which John Q Public occasionally lurked, including a journal written in pictograms, a floor plan of the Mall of America, and lots of DNA.