by Marcus Wynne
"For an old dog almost out to pasture, you think pretty good, Obi-Wan," Bobby Lee said. "Let's get those sausages, I can still eat."
"You can do that, you're still young and got your life ahead of you. Rot your stomach, you'll enjoy it."
2.6
Getting the combination to Harold Nyquist's home security system was simple. Alfie lay in the long grass behind the fence in back of Nyquist's home, with a 24-power spotting scope on a small tripod he'd purchased in a sporting goods store. He zoomed the scope in at maximum magnification on the keypad in the kitchen beside the kitchen door. There were four numbers and a symbol written on a Post-it note beside the keypad. When Nyquist came home, he drove his car into the garage, then came in through the kitchen and punched in his entry sequence before the alarm was activated. The keypad was mounted at a slight angle, just enough so that Nyquist's body didn't block Alfie's view. Like most busy people, he didn't want to think too much when he came home, so the code was simple: 1, 2, 3, 4, then hit the # sign. Just like the Post-it note said.
Dead easy, that.
Alfie watched Nyquist go about his business. His wife arrived not long after him, and he helped her unload groceries from her car into the kitchen. Since his home backed onto the long stretch of land that rose up into the bed of the highway, Nyquist rarely bothered to close the curtains or shutters at the rear of the house. He liked to look out, at the expanse of marshy land that dried out as it rose up to the highway roadbed. The hum of passing cars and the steady stream of red lights one way and white lights the other must be quite attractive from inside.
Once inside, Alfie found it to be so.
2.7
The younger of the two patrolmen stationed on the sidewalk outside Harold Nyquist's home said, "What does exsanguinate mean?"
His field training officer, a gray-haired rotund Irishman with eyes that had seen too much and didn't much care who knew, said, "Means to drain all the blood out."
"How do you know that?"
"I had to look it up for the crossword once."
"What does this guy do with it? Does he really drink it?"
"Don't know, don't much care. I'll tell you this for true, though… I ever get anywhere near this sick bastard I'll shoot him till he's very dead."
"The lieutenant didn't look so good when he came out."
"Go stick your head in there, see if you come out looking good."
"You don't mind?"
"This is what an FTO is for, kiddo. Go ahead, get your first sniff of stone crazy. Better you get used to it now."
Charley eavesdropped on the conversation with the ease of long practice. He stood outside smoking a cigarette to help him get the stench of rotten blood out of his nostrils. He'd shot six rolls already and probably had everything he needed except for the exterior shots of the house with its alarmed doors and windows that hadn't kept the killer out nor alarmed once through a long night of terror and pain.
Nyquist had been surprised in his bed. His wife had died there, a thin stiletto-type blade inserted into her brain through the eye socket. The killer had spent time with Harold Nyquist. The realtor had been strapped to a chair with long lengths of duct tape. Lengthy strips of flesh had been skinned from his chest in a series of zigzagging stripes, and much of his pudgy waistline had been removed in long fatty strips and cooked while he was still alive, or so the medical examiner thought. They wouldn't know for sure until after the autopsy.
The ME had found fresh needle tracks on the inside of Nyquist's arm. He might have been shot up with drugs during the torture, since there was nothing in the house to indicate he had a drug habit.
It hurt Charley's head to try to make sense of it. He drew furiously on his cigarette, as though he could suck the poison out of the pictures in his mind and exhale them like smoke, watch them crumble into ashes that he could grind underfoot like the glowing butt of his cigarette.
Nyquist had been tortured before he died, unlike Madison Simmons. More than likely he'd died when his skull was crushed in the same way Simmons's was, but the needle marks might have been a cause of death and the club merely gratuitous violence after the fact.
But Charley didn't think so.
Nothing this guy did was gratuitous. What Kativa had told him made him see the scene with new eyes. There was purpose to this, purpose hidden under the guise of madness… but maybe it was just their response to all this that made it seem like madness. To the killer it all made perfect sense. Only in the orderly scheme of daylight and the crisp air of a Midwestern early fall morning did the inside of Nyquist's house scream of madness in the language of the crime scene.
The picture on the wall was the same. This one took up almost the entire panel wall in Nyquist's study, where the torture and ultimate killing took place. The killer had taken time to cook himself his favorite treat and then return. The remains of his meal were on a fine china plate set neatly out of the blood flow in a corner of the room.
Nyquist's state-of-the-art computer, set in a corner hutch in his study, had its drive completely overwritten, then initialized, wiping out any data that had been on the drive. The forensics people had boxed up the machine after Charley took his photos, but Charley thought they were optimistic: anyone who knew enough to overwrite a disk before initializing it wasn't going to be dull enough to leave them any sectors to work with. They couldn't find any backup disks to go with the Zip drive in the machine, leaving them to speculate that the killer had taken them with him.
The coroner figured that Nyquist had finally died around 4:00 A.M. No one had come to the house till late morning, when Nyquist's secretary came by to see why no one was answering the phone or her repeated pages. What she saw through the window on the side of the house sent her reeling away to vomit in the bushes and fumble out her cell phone to call for the police and an ambulance. A hasty entry by the responding officers ensured that there was no one left alive, and so they buttoned up the scene and waited for the detectives.
Bobby Lee and Lieutenant Oberstar came out of the home together, Oberstar talking fast and furious in a low tone, "We got to get something for the press, Bobby, the mayor's office, they want a bone and we've got to give it to them."
"We don't have anything to toss them," Bobby Lee said. "I got the Bureau flying in a profiler from Quantico on a special priority for us. Maybe they can come up with something."
Bobby Lee looked tired, Charley thought, and he didn't like to see that look on his friend.
"Want a smoke, Bobby?" Charley said. He nodded to Oberstar. "Lieutenant."
Oberstar pushed the air with his hand to keep distance between him and Charley. Bobby Lee took the cigarette Charley lit for him and sucked greedily on it.
"So," Charley said.
"No shit," Bobby Lee said.
"So what?" Oberstar said, confused.
"It's an old thing," Bobby Lee said. "You gonna stay out here, Obi?"
"I've had enough crazy shit for the day, and I've still got to go back and deal with more," Oberstar said in a voice rich with disgust and barely contained frustration. "You see those news crews over there?" he said, pointing at the television vans with their camera booms directed at the Nyquist home. "They're going to want to know everything about what we're doing, which is fuck all, and a Public Affairs Officer is going to be climbing up their asses kissing all the way and the only PAO around here is one I used to sleep with and she's still pissed at me for not calling her," Oberstar sputtered.
Charley slowly turned to look at Bobby Lee who gawked in open-mouthed surprise at Oberstar.
"You mean you've actually had some, Obi?" Bobby Lee said.
Oberstar, beet red, burst into belated laughter. Charley and Bobby Lee joined him in loud belly laughter, surprising the patrol officers who stood nearby.
"I think the loot has gone nuts," said the old Irishman FTO. His younger partner, his face pale after peeking in at the crime scene, shook his head in disagreement.
"I think they're all nuts," he said. "
That in there is enough to drive anybody nuts."
2.8
At a table in the back of the Uptown Bar, Alfie held court with a group of Susan's young friends.
"But why the Army, Alfie?" said one of the boys, his nose pierced in three places and a single silver bomb weight protruding from his chin. "Didn't you hate people telling you what to do twenty-four/ seven?"
"Where do you go where someone isn't telling you what to do?" Alfie said. "Until you can do that, nothing much you can do about it, so you pick your fights. That's all well and good when you've got a place to go. Remember, I didn't have a thing, no family left to me. I had to have somewhere to go and it taught me to work through me fears. Jumping out of an airplane, that teaches you a lot about facing fears. The fear of falling is the greatest ingrained fear in us. Little tots, they're naturally afraid of heights, it's down deep in the brain. So if you can overcome that fear, that loosens up all the other fears you carry around with you.
"They have you practice leaping off a tower, but that doesn't come close to what it's like to be standing in the open door of an airplane at fifteen hundred feet, looking down and realizing that all that stands between you and the ground is a bit of air beneath a nylon panel. And then to make yourself go… mate, I'll tell you it's terribly frightening, but it's bloody amazing at the same time."
"I want to do it," Susan announced. "I want to jump out of a plane."
"Me too," several of the others said. "There's a parachute club out in Eden Prairie, we could go there. How about it, Alfie?"
"That's the brew talking now," Alfie said, pointing at the almost empty pitcher of beer. "We'll see if you still think it's a good idea after the beer's worn off. In the meantime, who's up for another cold one?"
Alfie waved for the waitress to bring them another pitcher of beer. He pushed himself back from the table and kicked his long legs out in front of him, crossed his booted feet at the ankles, lowered his eyelids in a sleepy squint, and watched Susan and her friends talking eagerly among themselves. The silent observer that catalogued everything in his head took it all in, and he felt a pang at the genuine friendship and interest from this group of youngsters. Even though they were all in their twenties, they felt so much younger than him. At thirty-six he was ten years older than any of them. Their lives in the arts, acting, painting, writing, and in the service industries of coffee shops and restaurants that supported them until they made their "big break" seemed like life from another planet to Alfie. When he was twenty-six he'd been a senior sergeant in the Australian Special Air Services, working alongside American Special Forces in the jungles of Indonesia and the Philippines, mounting covert actions against the fundamentalist Muslims funded by Iran, intent on destabilizing the fragile governments there.
He was surprised by how much he enjoyed talking with Susan and her friends about things like fear and metaphysics, things he thought a lot about to himself, and he grinned and then laughed out loud at the difference between his work here and his life at home.
"What are you laughing at?" Susan asked.
"A little of this and a little of that," Alfie said. "Just enjoying the company."
Susan looked at the plate in front of him with a barely picked over omelet. "You didn't eat much."
"Ah," Alfie said. "I had a big meal last night."
"When you were out in the middle of the night?"
"It's a bit of insomnia. I don't sleep well."
She laughed and her girlfriends giggled. "I know. I guess I'm not doing a good enough job of wearing you out."
Alfie laughed. "That's not it at all, mate." He winked at the men. "Right, lads?"
He rose to general laughter and went through the thin crowd toward the back rest rooms. He heard one of the girls say to her boyfriend, "Alfie's so cool."
So cool. He laughed again while he urinated, staring at his face in the mirror above the urinal. His face was genial when relaxed, the broad face and the deep lines softened by lack of tension. He looked over his shoulder to make sure he was alone, then stared in the mirror for a moment and let the chant of the ritual that played softly in the back of his mind all the time rise up in volume— just for a moment. He watched the darkness rise in his eyes, and the grubby bathroom seemed to go soft in focus as though it might disappear if he let it go on, and then he brought himself back, pleased with how he responded. He walked between two worlds and he enjoyed reminding himself of that. What he saw in the mirror satisfied him.
He came out of the rest room wearing his genial smile for anyone who cared to notice, and stopped at the jukebox to see what sort of music he might get with his pocket full of change. He looked up as the front door to the bar opened and let a sudden flare of midday light into the dark room. Framed in the lighted doorway was a woman. He stared at her, his eyes squinting against the brightness. All he could see was an outline, a figure of a woman rich in the breasts and hips, her hair pulled back in a knot at the back of her head.
Something about her drew him.
He dumped his change back in his pocket, and slowly made his way toward her as she entered, blinking in the darkness as her eyes began to adjust and she sat at a vacant spot at the bar. Alfie stood beside a support pillar and watched her sit. She was beautiful, with olive skin. She brushed a few stray hairs that had worked loose of her braid away from her face. She set a satchel on the stool beside her. The satchel tipped, spilling several large books and one small one. From where he stood, Alfie saw several art books.
The smallest book was titled Rock Art of the Laura Area.
He froze for a moment, unaccustomed fear rising in him. He felt a sudden chill come up his spine and his skin pimpled as though cold. Australian rock art of the Laura area? Who was this woman? He watched her load the books back into her satchel. She hadn't seen him. This felt like trickster energy, he thought. The hands of the ancestors were all in this and he felt himself slipping into the dreamy unfocused state that presaged his own communion with the voices that came to him sometimes.
Stay clear of her, the voice urged. She walks with the Timara.
Alfie stalked to the table where Susan and her friends sat, and picked up his leather jacket.
"Gotta go, mate," he said, pitching his voice low.
"Where are you going?" Susan said.
"I've got to get to the cyber café, check me mail from home," he said. "Later, all," he said to the table.
A chorus of voices bid him good-bye, and he was careful to keep his back to the bar as he hurried out the side door, glancing once over his shoulder at the woman at the bar who sat with her back to him.
We'll see her again, the voice within promised.
He straddled his motorcycle, taking his time fitting his helmet in place over his mane of hair drawn back in a ponytail. He marveled for a moment at how the ancestors moved things even in the light of day. Who'd have thought he'd run into a woman reading about the Laura rock art? There'd been no pictures in the papers of the images he'd so painstakingly drawn as part of the ritual. The ancestors moved in strange ways and he wondered what it meant. Connections and connecting, that was the lesson of the elders: we're all more connected than we know how, tiny points of light connected with bright strands to make the mosaic that was the world of the Dreamtime. He turned his ignition key and gunned his motorcycle into life, then pulled into the traffic and sped toward the intersection of Lyndale and Lake, where his favorite Internet café was located. He parked his bike and went inside, waving a greeting at the girl sitting at the front counter.
"Got a machine for me, mate?" he said.
The girl brushed back her hair and smiled. "I'll start the clock for you," she said, pointing at an Apple I-Mac.
Alfie sat down and logged on, then sent the browser to Hotmail and entered his account name: [email protected]. There were two messages: one a maintenance message from Hotmail and the other a Highest Priority message from Surferdude.
Alfie clicked on the tab and opened up the message.
&
nbsp; "There's been some fallout over the last two deals," the message began. "Someone whose job it is to look into these things is closer than we'd like. The person responsible for looking out for that is getting cold feet. You'll get some more information shortly, but be prepared to meet and deal with both of those parties. I'd bring you back now, but this may need your special attention. When I have more, I'll let you know. Then we can sweep up and you can come home. The surf is good and the beer is cold."
Alfie drummed his fingers and stared at the screen. The circumlocution in the language rendered the message innocuous to anyone else, but he got the message clearly: someone was close to uncovering his connection to the killings. A cop? Not too likely. The ritual demanded a certain precision, but the same precision lent itself to confusing contradictions in any analysis of the crime scene. He'd studied with professional interest the work of the behavioral profilers at the FBI and made it a point to be familiar with their techniques. They'd be looking for connection between the victims, victimology, and yes there was connection but not necessarily in the sense they were looking for. Alfie had no overt connection to the business deals that contributed to their tasty demise.
And even if they pieced together the bad bit of work those two naughty boys had cooked up to rip Alfie's boss off for a significant portion of the take from his real estate investments, including that classy little strip club, there was no way to tie it to an Australian wanderer just passing through. Tying it to him would be a long stretch, but Alfie hadn't lived as long as he had by being careless.
He'd have to look into this, read the papers a little more closely. He generally didn't stick around long enough to follow the aftermath of his operations, but his boss wanted to be sure that the other players got the message clearly: stealing from his boss wasn't allowed. Surferdude pointed him, he went, and it wasn't so much for the money anymore as it was for the increasing sense of power he felt gathering in him each time he took down a target and ingested something of their life force.
