Perfect Victim

by Jay Bonansinga

  He lay there for some time while the aftershocks shivered across the Allegheny Mountains.

  He regained consciousness only once that night before anybody found him. But in that brief interval, alone under that vast canvas of stars, completely senseless, numb from the neck down, hovering near death, he managed to gaze up at the sky for a single moment and shiver with a strange sort of undefined satisfaction.

  The cool air on his face was bliss, the floating sensation euphoric. And for one fleeting instant he felt as though he had been resurrected, transformed from something he could not remember into something new.

  Then he passed out again, only minutes before the cleansing dawn began to burn off the darkness.

  His work done, his fate all that was left.

  And the silence.

  EPILOGUE

  The Law of Exchange

  Flesh perishes, I live on

  Projecting trait and trace

  Through time to times anon

  And leaping from place to place

  Over oblivion.

  —THOMAS HARDY, “HEREDITY”

  “Wait! Down there! By the road, by the road!” Edith Drinkwater, drenched in flop sweat and nerves, bundled in an FBI Windbreaker, pressed her face against the canopy of the Huey helicopter at exactly 6:21 A.M. Eastern Standard Time the morning after the earthquake.

  She and the others had been sweeping the epicenter of the Wormwood cataclysm for hours, ever since the tremors had torn the surrounding county asunder, and this was the first breakthrough—the dark crumpled outline of a figure a hundred feet below the chopper, stuck in the mud. “In those logs, in the trees!” Drinkwater stabbed her finger against the window.

  “Hold on!”

  Captain Barkham, a stocky Navy SEAL with a hairbrush mustache—the same man who had dumped Drinkwater and Grove here in his Piper Cub less than twenty-four hours ago—yanked the stick to his right and eased back the foot pedal. The chopper, a loaner from the Floyd County Sheriff’s Police, banked and descended with a rattle. Barkham had stayed in the area last night, worried, and had found Drinkwater at the sheriff’s office in the wee hours following the earthquake, demanding rescue and recovery for Grove.

  “What is it?” Sheriff DeQueen wanted to know, craning his wrinkled neck, his pipe clenched in his teeth. Dawn had broken behind the aircraft, a wan glow around the dark silhouettes of mountains to the east, and now the watery oblivion below them, the place that used to be Wormwood mine, rushed toward the Huey’s belly. “Can’t see a dad-burned thing!”

  “Looks like a body,” ventured old Ryland Clinger in the rear of the cabin, his basset-hound eyes aglow as he gazed down at the nude remains.

  The helicopter slammed down on a swampy patch of high ground fifty yards away.

  All their guns came out. Even Drinkwater drew a .44 caliber Bulldog—Grove’s gun—from a shoulder harness under her Windbreaker. The sheriff had a .38 Special. Clinger had a snub-nosed .45 Smith & Wesson, and Barkham had a Glock. Before the engine even started winding down, before the wind had dissipated enough for them to talk, they were on their way out the doors.

  Hand gestures guided them along the edge of the fast-flowing waters.

  In the dull gray light of dawn they cautiously approached the body tangled in the wreckage of trees and twisted metal. All the gun barrels went up commando-style, bodies tense as coiled springs.

  “Stay back for a second,” Barkham suggested to the group with a sharp gesture of the hand.

  He took the lead, and crept through the muck, his big jackboots smucking noisily as he trained his Glock at the motionless figure in the wreckage. At this close proximity it was clear that it was a man, completely naked and mortally wounded, and very possibly dead.

  “Grove?” Barkham called out. “Can you hear me?”

  Drinkwater watched from the periphery, gripping her gun in both hands. Something was wrong. She felt it on the back of her neck. The body was either stained with coal dust or burned beyond recognition. It looked as though someone had painted it from head to toe with black grease-paint.

  Something deep inside Drinkwater sent up an alarm. The man on the ground was bald. “I’m not sure that’s Grove,” she murmured, almost to herself, her voice barely audible over the idling chopper. “I’m not sure that’s him.”

  “I’m gonna check for a pulse.” The beefy pilot knelt down by the body. “Hold on for a second.”

  Drinkwater said something then, almost a whisper. “That’s not Grove.”

  “What? What was that?” The sheriff couldn’t hear a thing, holding his .38 on the body. “Say again?”

  Barkham called out: “He’s alive! I got a pulse! Got a pulse here!”

  Drinkwater stared at the body. “I’m telling you that’s not Grove.”

  “What did she say?” Old Ryland Clinger stood shaking in his big hip waders, gripping his gun with one arthritic hand, leaning on a cane with the other, his yellow rain slicker zipped up to his flabby neck. “What?”

  The body jerked suddenly, a wet cough coming out, lungs gagging up bloody water.

  Everybody jumped back instinctively—even Barkham, who nearly fell on his ass, snapping his Glock up to the ready position—and all the gun barrels drew down on the coughing man on the ground, the big, lanky, coughing bald man who looked as though he had been dipped in a vat of black ink.

  A tense moment passed before the man’s eyelids began to flutter open as he regained consciousness. “Ww-wherrrzzz thuh—wherzzz—?”

  The voice sounded alien, coal-choked, wrought with hoarseness, as though it were a scratchy recording. Nervous thumbs pressing down on gun hammers, rounds clicking into chambers. The sheriff called out: “Careful, y’all! Careful now!”

  “Take it easy, brother,” Barkham muttered as he leaned back down near the body.

  “Wipe off his face!” Drinkwater held her gun tightly in both hands, heart racing. She kept her distance. “I can’t see his face!”

  Barkham dug in his pocket, found a handkerchief. Wiped the nude man’s face.

  The moment Drinkwater saw the face—very similar to Grove’s but with darker, blood-rimmed eyes, and a series of Aboriginal tattoos curling down his cheek, hastily drawn, prison-style—she clenched her teeth. “Goddamnit, that’s the other guy!”

  “Shit!”

  Barkham sprang to his feet and aimed his gun at the dying man’s head. “He’s coming around.” He thumbed the hammer back. “Hey! Look at me—I said look at me! What the hell did you do with Grove?”

  The man on the ground could barely lift his head; he looked lost.

  Grove kept trying to form an answer, trying to focus on his accuser, the big guy with the mustache and the gun hovering over him. But it was very difficult. Very, very difficult. Lying prone on the ground, naked and hypothermic, Grove could barely raise his head. His body was spent, his eyesight split into bleary double vision. His skull rang and gonged with intense pain, his mind scrambled from all the blunt trauma injuries to his brain. He had no sense of time or place, no equilibrium, no idea where he was.

  “Git some cuffs on that shitbird!” somebody else was yelling in the background, a gray-haired sheriff holding a .38 Special.

  “I’m—I’m not—” Grove’s mouth wouldn’t work, the words wouldn’t come.

  “Where’s Grove?”

  Another voice, enraged, garbled with tears, approached from the back.

  “I’m not hhhhuh—” Again Grove tried in vain to speak, when all of a sudden a black woman in a gray FBI Windbreaker came stumbling across the weeds with her .44 Magnum in a two-handed grip.

  She charged at Grove, her face full of fury. “Where is he, goddamnit? Where’s Grove?”

  “I’m not—”

  The black woman pressed the barrel of that Bulldog down on Grove’s newly shorn head. “What did you do with him, huh? Huh? Answer me, you fucking freak!”

  “I’m—”

  The blow came out of the darkness to his left, a hard, shar
p kick from the black woman, striking Grove in the ribs so hard it knocked him sideways and sent him rolling across the ground. Fireworks of pain launched up his midsection.

  “Answer me, goddamnit!”

  Grove wanted to so badly to tell this lady he didn’t do anything and she had the wrong guy and he wasn’t who she thought he was, and please, please, please, give him a chance, but it was futile, because he realized right then and there, as he lay paralyzed and mute and nude on that cold, mushy ground, he not only had no idea what they were accusing him of…

  …he could not figure out who this Grove person was that everybody was screaming about.

  They airlifted the suspect to Pennington Air Force base outside Lexington, Kentucky, where he received emergency medical treatment. The man had a hairline fracture in his left leg as well as major contusions requiring scores of stitches, not to mention second-degree burns over at least 20 percent of his body. Both his eyes were hemorrhaged from all the blunt trauma; they were shot through with bloody capillaries the color of eggplant. A rapid blood test showed off-the-scale levels of free histamine and serotonin in his bloodstream, as well as a laboratory-grade hallucinogen called dimethyltryptamine. Under armed guard and heavily shackled, the suspect was fingerprinted and photographed. A quick comparison with latent prints on file in Chicago showed a perfect match with John Q Public’s fingerprints.

  Throughout these early protocols the suspect was docile and cooperative, albeit outwardly confused, maybe even a little frightened. After a brief interrogation, Air Force doctors diagnosed the man as having acute episodic amnesia, likely brought on by head injuries, but also very possibly a symptom of the drug-induced psychosis.

  By mid-afternoon, they’d discharged him into Federal custody, and he was transported, via armored vehicle, to the Federal Dentention Center just outside D.C. The four-hour trip was made in secret. The suspect was accompanied by two U.S. Marshals, a special agent from the Louisville field office named Karpinsky, and a civilian trainee from the FBI’s academy at Quantico named Edith Drinkwater. After she revealed the disturbing events leading up to Agent Grove’s disappearance in the mine, Bureau authorities agreed to allow Miss Drinkwater to accompany the suspect to Washington.

  En route to D.C., Agent Karpinsky gave Drinkwater a few minutes in the rear of the transport van alone with the suspect, who was conscious and fairly comfortable on the shackled bench seat. He was maybe a little woozy from pain medication, but lucid enough to talk. What follows is a partial transcript taken from surveillance-camera footage in the back of the van:

  DRINKWATER: And you have no recollection of what happened in the mine?

  SUSPECT: (in a hoarse, damaged voice) None. I mean …they told me about the mine and the FBI agent that I supposedly…(inaudible)

  DRINKWATER: Can you repeat that?

  SUSPECT: I said I could never do something like that.

  DRINKWATER: Are you okay?

  SUSPECT: Yes. I mean…yeah, I’m okay. (wiping eyes)

  DRINKWATER: How do you know, though?

  SUSPECT: Pardon?

  DRINKWATER: If you can’t remember who you are…how do you know you could never kill anybody?

  SUSPECT: I never said that.

  DRINKWATER: Said what?

  SUSPECT: That I could never kill anybody.

  DRINKWATER: I’m confused…I thought you just said you could never do something like that.”

  SUSPECT: I meant I could never kill an innocent man.(NOTE LONG PAUSE HERE)

  DRINKWATER: Those tattoos on your neck…they look infected.

  SUSPECT: I’m sorry…what?

  DRINKWATER: Nothing…never mind.

  (TRANSCRIPT ENDS HERE)

  Drinkwater had already gone back to her motel when she made the discovery about the fingerprints. She was alone, wrapped in a blanket and slumped in front of her laptop, nursing a water tumbler full of Glenlivet scotch, just idly listening to the radio. All afternoon, reports of the apocalyptic earthquake in Kentucky had dominated the airwaves, stories of heroism and cowardice, epochal property damage, and an inept FEMA once again getting caught with their bureaucratic pants down. But when Drinkwater stumbled upon the “Elimination Print Index” on the FBI’s secure website, she saw a link for the Behavioral Science Unit staff.

  Elimination fingerprints are for crime labs faced with messy scenes riddled with nonessential prints. Through the process of elimination, the technicians can rule out the fingerprints of investigators. Ulysses Grove had been printed several times early in his career for this very reason, once in the military, and then again several times at the Bureau.

  Drinkwater stared and stared at the screen as it filled with the familiar whorls and curlicues of Grove’s fingerprints. She clicked over to her e-mail file, and then compared Grove’s prints to the attachment sent to the Chicago field office earlier that day, the one with John Q’s prints. She opened her Photoshop program, then superimposed one of the graphic images over the other.

  “Jesus Christ,” she uttered, dumping her drink across the cluttered desktop.

  Her heart raced as she sprang to her feet and started gathering up her stuff. She threw on her coat, threw on some sneakers, grabbed her keys, snatched up her cell phone, and then she went back over to her computer, quickly downloaded the data onto a flash drive, and then charged out of the room.

  She plunged into the misty night.

  Getting into the Central Detention Center on D Street late at night wasn’t easy, especially for an Academy recruit like Drinkwater. But a guard at the receiving gate recognized her from a newsletter on honor students—Drinkwater’s renown on the shooting range had caught his eye (as had her large bosom)—and he let her enter the wing under the strict promise that she not implicate him in any way if she got in hot water. Of course she hurriedly agreed.

  Pulse pounding faster and faster with each passing moment, she literally ran the quarter mile of deserted white cinder-block corridors—the fluorescent overheads blazing down at her—all the way to the interrogation ward. She found the night receptionist and waved her flash drive of Grove’s prints like a talisman, blurting out, “I need to see the Section Chief right away! Is he here? It’s an emergency!”

  The receptionist, an elderly black man with thick-lensed spectacles riding low on his nose, raised his gnarled hands. “Whoa there, sis, you gotta—”

  “It’s a matter of life and death, sir, national security, whatever you want to call it!”

  “I can’t let you—”

  “Is this the famous Drinkwater?”

  The voice came from across the waiting room, a flat Midwestern drawl, and Drinkwater turned just in time to see Ray Kopsinsky striding toward her in shirtsleeves, the armpits damp, his hand extended genially. He looked exhausted. “So you’re Grove’s girl Friday.”

  She quickly shook his hand, measuring her words. “Sir, I know this is highly irregular, but I think I can prove that’s not John Q Public in there.”

  “Calm down, Drinkwater.”

  “But, sir—”

  “We already know.” He rubbed his eyes. “VICAP matched the prints up this afternoon.”

  Drinkwater visibly sagged, all her muscles loosening. “Then you know who it is?”

  Kopsinsky gave her a tired smile. “This guy’s gonna be the death of me yet.”

  “I knew it. Even in the van. I knew something was wrong. Then I saw the prints.”

  Kopsinsky shook his head. “Obviously the tattoos, the hair—it was symbolism, done to trade places with him. I just can’t figure out the voice, the voice was so damn different, a different tone.”

  Drinkwater shrugged. “All that coal dust, the underground gases, whatever, must have done a number on his vocal cords. I would have noticed the droopy left eye if wasn’t for the hemorrhage.”

  “Yeah, well…that’s not the problem.”

  She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Kopsinsky let out a sigh. “You know it’s Grove and I know it’s Grove…
problem is, he doesn’t know it yet.”

  The next day the man sat at a plain rectangular wooden table in a conference room at the end of the main corridor. The room, with its minimal furnishings, single ficus plant by the window, and lingering odor of cigarette smoke, gave off a sense of purgatory to all those who spend any length of time in it. In spite of this, however, the man at the table was thankful. Dressed in a T-shirt and khaki slacks, his arms and neck bandaged, he was thankful that he had been allowed to change out of the hideous orange jumpsuit. Thankful that the shackles had been removed and that he’d been given the freedom to get some fresh air, or make phone calls, or even leave the facility if he so desired.

  Unfortunately he knew no phone numbers, had nobody to call, had nowhere to go, and was just as mystified by this sudden mood swing among his captors as he was by their earlier insistence that he had murdered people.

  Now they wanted him to know how sorry they were, and how they wanted to help him, and most of all, they wanted him to understand that he was a man named Ulysses Grove who worked as a criminal profiler for the FBI, a man with incredible skills, a venerable career, and a family that consisted of a lovely wife and young son. None of it rang true. None of it sounded even remotely familiar.

  The man at the table had a lead shield around his memory. Even the strange tattoos that adorned his wounded body rang no bells. He felt like a featureless outline of a man, a cipher. Strangely enough, though, in some deeply buried capsule of his imagination, his brain reminded him of a target silhouette, the kind you might see on a gun range, an opaque bust of a generic unknown subject. And this image haunted him, disturbed him…right up until the moment the outer door of that meeting room clicked open.

  Kopsinsky came in first. Dressed in a smart navy suit, a laminate ID tag clipped to his pocket, he approached the table with an awkward smile. “Ulysses, I don’t want to throw all this at you at once, but we have a few special visitors to see you today.”