Chapter Twenty-Four
The girl with the flaming red hair stood at the center of the small stage, holding the microphone stand with both hands. She wore an off-the-shoulder black dress and was lit from above by the single spotlight recessed somewhere in the dark rafters of the club’s ceiling. The club had been a church for three hundred years, then spent forty years abandoned with the remains of its caved roof scattered in the bomb craters on the flagstone floor. Only recently had it been rebuilt as a club. The girl was too young to have seen any of this. Besides that, she hadn’t grown up in this country. She closed her eyes and held the microphone close to her lips and sang in French.
The stage behind her was dark, but he could see the musicians in the shadows perfectly well, in spite of the sunglasses he always wore in public to hide his eyes. The man playing the upright bass was tall and had an elongated neck that bobbed in time with the rhythm line. His skin was specked with acne and he had blue eyes the same color as the buttons on his black shirt. The drummer and the saxophone player were either brothers or close cousins and wore the same white shirts and black pants. But it was the girl who held his attention. He listened to her voice. He spoke French but he didn’t care about the words of the song.
In truth he had no interest in anything she might say in any language.
He was at the back of the club at a table by himself. He had put out the candle by holding the palm of his hand over the glass holder until the flame suffocated. In his dark corner, a hundred feet from the girl, separated from her by a span of room filled with cigarette smoke and plates of food and spilled beer and the breath of men who’d been drinking spirits and table wine, he could smell the perfume she had sprayed at the base of her throat—the warm scent of orange blossoms carried into a deep wood. He closed his eyes and smelled her, not just the perfume but all of her. Her hair and her skin, the tiny beads of sweat between her breasts, the creamy sweetness of her thighs.
A waitress passed and he put his empty wineglass on her tray. She looked past his shoulder as though she did not quite see him. She only registered the empty glass and his unspoken order to fill it. He was drinking red wine tonight. He had not eaten in eight days and was so hungry he felt dizzy. But that was part of the pleasure. He dismissed the waitress with a thought and gave his attention back to the redhead.
The perfume on her throat smelled sweet but its taste would be bitter, briefly, until he bit through her skin and washed her clean with her own blood. This would be late in the night, after everything else, because that bite would probably kill her. She was so young and healthy and he’d seen over and over how much a young and healthy person could endure. He would take her to all of those places before the last bite, and if ever she thought she could not make it all the way, he would be there to give her a little push.
The waitress returned with another glass of wine and set it on his table. She still did not really see him. If he took off his sunglasses and flashed his claws in her face—if he made her see, by yanking her out of the mental fog he threw around himself like a cloak—she might die of a burst blood vessel in the brain.
But there was no sport and little pleasure in that kind of killing.
He finished his glass of wine while the girl finished the song. She stretched the last note until it seemed she should have run out of breath. The club was silent and the musicians behind her had stopped playing, so it was only her voice that filled the room, fading as she pressed the last air from her lungs, the wavering elongated note weakening as she ran out of air. He felt himself stir. She would do this for him and him alone, and his ears would be the last to hear as her voice weakened and went silent.
The club burst into applause. He stood and left.
The night air outside the club was warm and smelled of the ocean. He had hunted in this very spot once before, but there would be no records of that. The club had been a church then and the girl he’d found in its congregation could not have been any older than seventeen. He smiled at the memory. She had begged for her life in a horse stable, her country accent and her skin the only things he hadn’t stripped from her.
She’d had neither by the end of the night.
He closed his eyes and steadied himself against the heavily buttressed stone wall. It did not take him long to pick up the singer’s scent and untangle it from the many paths on the street. He followed her invisible trail up the dark street, across an empty plaza. She’d lingered by the fountain. At some point, he opened his eyes again. He stood in front of her car, a cheap-looking Fiat. From the sidewalk, he could smell her fingertips on the door handle. The car’s tires were old and the rear two were balding. He breathed deeply and took in the scent of sun-baked, decaying rubber, and then trotted up the street. After a hundred meters, he stopped and sniffed at the air and then crossed the road and turned right at an intersection, following the winding street into the heart of the city. He had suspected the trail would end at one of the university’s dormitories and he was not surprised to find himself on the edge of the campus. He came to a parking stall, now occupied by another car, and he cast around its perimeter until he found her smell again. Then he followed her hours-old trail to a five-story stone dormitory. It was two thirty in the morning. He had not seen more than five cars in his jog across town. His long coat was the same coal-soot color of the old stone. Without another thought he mounted the sheer wall with his bare feet and his claws. He climbed to the first row of windows, four meters above the sidewalk. Moving on the vertical wall was as easy as walking on the sidewalk. He skittered sideways along the wall, beneath the line of the window ledges, but didn’t catch her scent. There were other interesting girls here, though. He paused at one window and drank in the smell of the sleeping girl on the other side of the aged glass. But he wasn’t ready to change his plan this far in. He was set on the girl in the club, on the smell of her throat and the way her voice had trailed off into the darkness of the crowded room. He climbed another four meters to the next row of windows. He caught her scent on the third window. It was unlocked and slid open easily. He stepped into the room, shut the window after himself and sat on her bed in the darkness. He had been too focused on her scent when he entered. It wasn’t until after he sat that he noticed the second narrow bed on the other side of the room.
She had a roommate, and he’d come in too quietly to wake her.
He stood and moved to the edge of the other bed and looked at her. She was on her side with her face to the wall, but the spill of red hair across the pillow and the warm fragrance that rose from beneath her quilted covers explained everything.
Of course the scent here was so strong: they were twins. Their paths had begun in the same womb, at the same time, and had led them both, inexorably, to him. They had one last thing to do together, and he would lead them through it. It would take the rest of the night, possibly until the sun was high and hot. He walked to the bureau drawer and quietly slid back the top drawer, looking for socks, panties or a bathrobe tie.
Because there were two of them, and because he was in no hurry, he’d need a gag.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The beach was wide and empty, curving away for five miles in an unbroken strip of sand as fine and white as sugar. At the far end, karst cliffs rose from the water. Thatched-roofed houses and green bursts of jungle competed with each other for horizontal purchase on the cliff faces. Chris walked in the wet sand at the shell line, following his own footprints, which were the only tracks on the beach. The sun was just rising and the shadows of the coconut trees stretched far over the water. He’d woken at five in the morning, left a note under Julissa’s door, and had set off to see the lay of the land. They’d arrived in Boracay in the night, after an hour’s flight in a propeller plane from Manila and a five-minute boat ride from Panay. A man with a tricycle taxi had taken them from the ferry landing along a winding road and deposited them at a beachside hotel. All they knew about Boracay was that it had dozens of hotels and plenty of Internet connec
tions.
July was the beginning of typhoon season in the Philippines. The hotel was empty except for a few families who had probably come down from Manila in between storms. The other hotels along the beach looked just as dead. The beach itself was beautiful, but the waves told of approaching bad weather. They were rough and began breaking far from the beach, and the foam was tan with churned up sand and flecked with clumps of seaweed brought from the bottom. He could see whitecaps miles out to sea. He knew from the map in his hotel room there were other islands close by, but they were all hidden beneath towering gray clouds. There would be a thunderstorm by lunchtime.
When he got back to the hotel, he stopped in the lobby. An old computer occupied a desk in the corner. A handwritten sign in English said, Internet For Guest Only. He sat in front of the computer. Julissa told him it was safe to check his Gmail account, so long as he only read email and didn’t send any. She had promised to teach him how to send email without the possibility of being traced. If Westfield had emailed again, he should at least find out. He logged into his email and scrolled through his inbox, which was mostly filled with junk. There was nothing from Westfield.
But one email caught his attention.
The sender was someone named John Smith, emailing from a Hotmail account. It was the subject line that stood out.
I ATE YOUR WIFE
The message was barely fifteen minutes old. The file size was almost five megabytes. He hesitated to click on the message. What if the attachment held some kind of virus? Julissa had mentioned geo-location software. His finger hovered over the mouse button, but after a moment, he decided the risk was too great, especially with Julissa so close at hand. Chris logged out of Gmail, cleared the web browser’s history and stood. He went to the back of the lobby, exited through the French doors, and followed the flagstone path past the gardens and swimming pool. A maid with a watering can was tending to the orchids that grew from the trunks of the coconut palms lining the garden path. He had rented side-by-side bungalows for himself and Julissa. Hers was still dark, but he climbed the three steps to its porch and rapped on her door. She opened it a crack, saw it was Chris, and let him in. She was wrapped in the bed sheet.
“Just a second and I’ll get dressed,” she said. She went into the room’s bathroom and shut the door.
“There’s something I need to show you,” Chris said. “You get wireless in here?”
“Haven’t tried yet. I didn’t even turn on the laptop—I just went straight to sleep.”
She came out wearing clothes from the day before.
“If we can’t get wireless, let’s go find a private place where we can. Somewhere no one’ll be looking over our shoulders.”
Julissa sat on the bed and took the laptop off the bedside table. She turned it on and waited for it to boot up.
“What’s up?”
“I checked my email this morning. I wanted to see if Westfield had contacted us. He hadn’t.”
“But someone or something else did, is that it?”
“I haven’t opened the email yet. It has an attachment. I figured I should bring it to you.”
Now Julissa looked completely awake. “That was the right thing to do.”
She played with her keyboard for a moment, then handed the laptop to Chris.
“Here, there’s wireless. Log in and show me.”
Chris took the computer and logged into his Gmail account. He passed the computer back to Julissa who took it and looked at the screen.
“Jesus.”
“Is there a way to find out if it’s safe to open?”
“Yeah. I need to download a program off the net. It’ll capture the email byte by byte so we can view the contents along with any hidden code. But it’ll keep everything in a secure environment and won’t allow any embedded code to execute.”
“Okay.” Chris wasn’t sure what most of that meant, but Julissa sounded confident enough. “You want a cup of coffee? I saw an urn in the lobby.”
“That’d be good.”
She spoke without looking from the screen. Her face was lit pale white by its glow and she was absorbed in her work. Chris watched her a moment before leaving, feeling not just friendship, but also close kinship. As if he’d been marooned on an island for six years and had suddenly discovered he shared it with another person. Now that he knew she existed, he needed her. He turned and left the room, walking through the garden and back to the lobby in a light rain. A frond had fallen from one of the coconut trees and was floating in the swimming pool. In the lobby, Chris nodded at the two girls behind the reservation desk, and went over to the coffee urn. He filled two cups and then went back to Julissa’s room. He let himself in without knocking, set one of the coffee cups on the bedside table for her, and then sat in one of the two chairs by the window. From that vantage point, he could see a small outrigger sailing canoe coming in from offshore and having a hard go of it in the wind and chop. The crew handled the boat well, flogging the oversized mainsail by sheeting it out all the way, so that the boat powered towards the beach on the force of the small jib. Behind him Julissa stirred and he turned to her.
“It’s a damned good thing you brought this in to me without opening the email.”
“Yeah?”
He sat next to her on the bed. The screen showed blocks of incomprehensible code. Julissa ran her finger under a line of type.
“This is clever. There’s a large file embedded in the email. It looks like a picture file, but a really big one, probably a photograph in raw data format. You get that from high-end digital cameras. Pro stuff. The file would’ve stayed on the Gmail server until you opened the email, and when you opened it, this line of code would have written over the stack buffer and installed the rest of the program.”
“I don’t get it.”
“The program is simple—it writes your computer’s unique ID number and your Internet server information onto the metadata of the sent email every time your computer connects to the Internet. So whoever sent this email can just continually check the email in his sent box, scroll down to the metadata, and get an update of what computer you’re using and where you’re logging into the net.”
“Is there any text to the email?”
“No. Just the picture file.”
“Can we look at it?”
“Yeah. Here.”
She typed a few lines of code. A pop-up screen appeared, slowly filling as the computer processed the photograph.
“Oh dear god,” Julissa said.
The image made Chris’s stomach churn. The half-cup of coffee he’d drunk lurched in his stomach, but he kept it in.
“Has he ever done anything like that before?” Julissa asked. Her voice was just a whisper.
“No.”
“I can’t look at it anymore.” She snapped the laptop screen shut. “I’m sorry.”
The killer, the thing, had sent them a high-resolution, full-color photograph of a murder scene. Two young women sat on a narrow bed with their backs against a white wall. Their arms were around each other, and they wore nothing but gags that looked like they had been made from a fuzzy pink bathrobe tie. One of the girls was missing her entire face and one eye; the other’s throat had been eaten all the way to her spinal column. Their stomachs had been ripped open and their intestines were piled in slick coils on the wooden floor. Their thighs had been stripped all the way to the bone. The flesh, what was left of it, was on the floor. A lot of it appeared to be missing. The mattress was soaked in blood. The photograph captured a long runner of blood as it fell towards the floor from one girl’s flayed ankle. Only their red hair had been untouched, and was, in fact, bloodless and clean. Chris thought the killer may have actually washed it before posing the bodies for the photograph.
But it was the wall behind the girls that Chris was thinking about after Julissa had closed the screen. The killer, dipping his hand into the ample pallet of the girls’ open abdomens, had written a very simple message on the wall in careful pr
int that had only just started to drip when the photograph was taken.
WHO’S NEXT?
Chris went to the window. He was trembling. The girls died holding on to each other for help that neither could provide the other. He pressed his forehead against the window glass and felt the tropical heat outside.
“What now?” Julissa asked.
“Does he know where we are?” Chris asked. “Could his code have done its job?”
“No.”
“Then we stick to the plan. You work on the FBI. I’ll see what I can make of this picture. I need to figure out where this happened so we can keep track of his movements. I can try to get something like Mike’s old program up and running again to watch the news.”
“We’ve got to find him soon, Chris.”
“I know.”
“This can’t go on.”
Chris nodded. He wanted to keep them on track and keep the momentum up. He thought of Westfield again.
“Somewhere in all this we need to figure out a secure way to get in touch with Westfield. And if he got blind copied on that email we need to figure out a way right now to warn him not to open it.”
“As for warning him, the email’s only twenty minutes old so we might still have time. I can set up a random Hotmail account in my name and send an email to his address through a proxy server so that it can’t get traced to Boracay. I can just put a warning in the subject line telling him not to open any emails. He might notice it first.”
“If he has any reason to be suspicious, he’ll play it safe.”
Julissa went to work. When she was finished, she closed the computer and stood.
“I need some air,” she said.
“It’s going to storm out.”
“That’s okay with me.”
Redheads Page 18
