Free Fall

by Kyle Mills

  Quinn reached into the bag hanging from her shoulder, finding her ID badge and holding it up. “I’m with the FBI, sir. I’m looking for Eric Twain.”

  “Eric Twain,” he repeated quietly. “What could you possibly want with him?”

  “It’s a private matter, I’m afraid. Is he home?”

  He hesitated, and in that brief moment of uncertainty, Quinn saw the uncomfortable little boy in the newspaper article.

  “You,” she said, taking another half step back before realizing that she’d already put too much distance between them to seem natural. “You’re Eric Twain.”

  “What’s left of him.”

  “I’d like to—”

  “Do you have a warrant?”

  “No, I—”

  “Good-bye, then.” He reached up and started to slide the door shut. Before Quinn knew what she was doing, she’d jumped forward and blocked it with her hand. And that impulsive little maneuver brought her to within six inches of a man who had almost certainly slit his girlfriend’s throat and may have tortured, raped, and murdered any number of other young women.

  He wasn’t much taller than she was, Quinn noticed, trying to return his intense stare. The truth was, she was frozen with fear, but he seemed to mistake it for resolve. His eyes turned toward the floor for a moment and then he started walking away from her. She still hadn’t moved when he disappeared around a corner in the hallway. She considered taking off, running back to her car, and getting the hell out of there. But she knew she couldn’t. If she was going to risk throwing away her future over this, she needed something a little more solid than a screwy computer printout and a few police files.

  She finally forced a compromise between her mind and her rattled nerves. She’d go in but she’d leave the door open. Just in case.

  The music grew louder as she moved down the wide corridor, a disorienting wall of sound with elements of the country music she’d grown up on, twisted almost beyond recognition. By the time the hall opened up, she couldn’t hear anything else.

  The room she found herself in was probably a hundred feet across and forty feet high, mostly brick and glass, but with original pipes and machines still integrated into the ceiling and walls. They had been painted in bright primary colors, though, and now created a stark contrast to the large paintings hanging around them.

  “Can I look?” She had to shout to be heard over the music.

  “I thought you didn’t have a warrant,” he yelled back, taking a seat in front of a large table covered with tools.

  “I mean at the pictures.” She was trying to seem calm, to hide her nervousness. A routine visit, backed by the full force of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That’s what she had to portray.

  It seemed to be working. He waved a hand dismissively and turned away from her.

  She moved along the walls, making sure that she always kept him at least partially in sight, and looked around for anything suspicious. What exactly that would be, she wasn’t sure. According to the books she’d read, this type of killer often kept souvenirs. Underwear, jewelry, body parts. She couldn’t help wondering what was lying just beyond her view.

  The paintings were actually kind of spectacular and she felt herself concentrating more and more on them as she continued her search. They were a bizarre mix of influences blended together into an unlikely whole. The subject was always simple: a woman, a child, a landscape. But the style was much more complex. The one she was standing in front of started at the left side of the canvas looking like a Picasso, then faded seamlessly into a Matisse, then ended as a Rembrandt.

  “Are these yours?” she yelled.

  He turned away from what he was doing and squinted at her for a moment, then jabbed at something on the table. The music faded into the background.

  “What?”

  “Are these yours?”

  He nodded.

  “They’re amazing,” she said, starting back across the room toward him. She paused for a moment in front of a state-of-the-art computer terminal framed by two blackboards. The boards looked like they had never been used but the walls behind them were covered with complex mathematical graffiti.

  “Do you have a name?” he said, turning back to the table he was sitting at and starting to work again. It looked like he was drawing on it

  “Name? I’m sorry, sir. It’s Quinn Barry.”

  When he spun on his stool to face her, she stopped short with ten feet still between them. It wasn’t a pen he was holding; it was some kind of woodcarving tool that looked a lot like a scalpel.

  “Are you all right?”

  He was beautiful—there was no other word for it. Smooth unblemished skin, full lips, and white teeth framed by long, dark hair that shone in the fading sunlight coming through the windows. Had he learned to use his physical appearance to draw in his victims?

  “Ms. Barry? Can I get you a drink of water or something?” he said.

  She smiled reassuringly. “I’m sorry. Thank you, but I’m fine. So are you an artist or a physicist?”

  “There’s no real difference.” When he laid the knife down on the table next to him, Quinn took a step forward. The carving on the top wasn’t complete enough to be identifiable yet, just a series of graceful lines.

  “I don’t mean to be rude, Ms. Barry, but why are you here?”

  “Just to confirm that this is still your primary address and to open a line of communication.”

  “A line of communication,” he repeated. There was no curiosity in his voice, just an increasing melancholy.

  “Yes, sir. Based on some new evidence, we’re going to be actively looking into the death of your assistant Lisa Egan again.” She examined his reaction carefully. Someone smart enough to get a Ph.D. at thirteen would be smart enough to know that this kind of direct involvement by the FBI might mean that Egan’s death had been connected to the deaths of other young women.

  “You want the killer brought to justice, don’t you?” she said when he didn’t respond.

  He wouldn’t look at her, instead staring over her shoulder at the back of the room. “The killer. That’d be me, wouldn’t it? The maladjusted little freak who turned on the woman he was sleeping with. Cut her throat from ear to ear for no reason. Listened too carefully to the voices in his head, right?”

  “We’re … we’re interested in the truth.”

  His mouth curled up a little, but she wasn’t sure she’d actually describe it as a smile. “You’ll excuse me if my ten years dealing with people like you makes me doubt that.”

  “You lied about your relationship with her,” Quinn said.

  He suddenly looked even more distant, like he was slowly falling into himself. “I did do that. I lied.”

  Quinn found it impossible to tear herself away. She was captivated—by him, by the danger he represented. It was like looking at a predator in a zoo, but without the bars. “May I ask why?”

  “Why I lied?”

  “Yes.”

  She could almost see pain in his eyes. An amazing illusion.

  “Lisa was a friend to me when I needed one more than anything. But she wasn’t comfortable with our relationship being public—I was still pretty young then. In fact, she used to joke that it wasn’t even legal in Maryland. Anyway, she was dead. I decided to respect her wish that our relationship remain between us. And because of that, the cops arbitrarily decided that the person I was with when she died was lying and marked me a killer…” His voice trailed off for a moment. “I’m not sure why I told you that”

  “Is that why you live out here?”

  “I tried other places—back when I thought I could still have a life.” He eyed her accusingly. “But no matter where I went, somehow people found out about my past.”

  “You live alone, then?”

  He nodded. “Renquist and your colleagues have made sure of that.”

  Quinn recognized the name of the Baltimore cop who had headed the investigation into Lisa Egan’s death. As n
ear as she could tell, the FBI’s involvement had actually been minimal—nothing more than a little consulting.

  “Where do you work now, Mr. Twain?”

  He folded his arms on his chest and leaned against the wall behind him, obviously trying to decide whether or not he wanted to continue to participate in her little interrogation. Quinn was starting to think she’d pushed it too far when he finally answered.

  “I still work for Hopkins. I don’t teach anymore, of course. We have an understanding: as long as I continue to provide them with interesting math and I don’t get within a mile of their campus, they continue to pay me. We mostly communicate through e-mail.”

  “I see.” She reached under her sweater and pulled out a small pad, making a show of jotting down a few notes. “Well, thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Twain.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I think so… Well, one more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you mind if I use your bathroom before I leave? I’ve got kind of a long drive.”

  He shrugged and pointed to the far comer of the room.

  “Thanks,” she said, trying to look natural as she backed away far enough to feel comfortable turning away from him.

  When she got into the bathroom, she locked the door and sagged against it, suddenly drained of energy. She took a few deep breaths and told herself over and over how well she was doing—the performance of a lifetime. When she’d calmed down a little, she moved to the sink and, thanks to the length of Eric Twain’s hair, easily found a few samples with good follicles still attached.

  She stuffed them into a small plastic bag and tucked it into the waist-band of her skirt before flushing the toilet. Her hand wasn’t even on the doorknob when the incredibly vivid image of Eric Twain standing just outside with a couple of coat hangers and his carving knife filled her mind. She froze for the second time that afternoon, feeling her heart pounding in her chest.

  Pull it together.

  She went back to the sink and splashed some water on her face. Her eyes looked a little bloodshot in the mirror as she dabbed her face dry.

  A quick search of the bathroom yielded nothing she could use to defend herself that was more deadly than a hairbrush. Finally, she just walked up to the door and jerked it open.

  He hadn’t moved.

  Quinn let out the breath she was holding and plastered a serene smile across her face as she moved confidently across the ancient wood floor.

  “So you’re not an FBI agent,” Twain said as she approached. He didn’t look up from the tabletop he was working on. “What is it you do, exactly?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Wrong ID,” he said. “And they all dress like morticians.”

  She’d hoped to make it out of there without being asked that particular question. “Technically, I’m a researcher. Like I told you, I’m just here to verify your address and get a little background.”

  “And how’d you happen into a job like that?”

  “It seemed like it would be exciting.”

  He finally repositioned himself so that he could look up at her and began spinning his carving knife along the backs of his fingers with dexterity that would make a professional magician envious. “Is it?”

  “You have no idea.”

  He nodded thoughtfully as she started for the hallway that led to the hopefully still-open front door. “Expect the investigating agents to be giving you a call in the coming weeks.”

  He didn’t answer.

  Quinn didn’t stop until she had put a good ten miles between her and Eric Twain. She finally pulled over at an office complex with a FedEx drop box on the sidewalk, turned off her engine, and bounced her forehead gently against the steering wheel. She’d made it. And except for the slight panic attack in the bathroom, she’d more or less kept it together. Not bad. She’d like to see the guys at Quantico hit her with something worse than that.

  Quinn slid the plastic bag containing Eric Twain’s hair into an envelope she’d addressed earlier and leaned out the window to stuff it into the drop box.

  That was it. In a few days she’d have her answer.

  The overcast skies had combined with the moonless night to turn everything around Quinn Barry’s car completely black. The headlights seemed barely able to cut through the darkness and illuminate the quiet rural highway, but it didn’t matter—she’d driven it hundreds of times before. She could do it with her eyes closed.

  A week ago she’d really been looking forward to a quiet weekend on her father’s farm; now she was almost desperate for it. After six years in the city, the pace of life back home seemed pleasantly slow. She’d convince him to let her sleep till noon. Then she’d make them some pancakes, maybe milk a few cows. And think.

  Her problems with David—the main reason she’d planned this trip—seemed far away now, as did the calm that she normally felt as her car floated through the Virginia countryside. She had Eric Twain to blame for that, of course. She’d escaped from the warehouse he called home just over twenty-four hours ago, but she still had the jitters. If anything, they had grown in intensity as the reality of what she’d gotten herself into continued to sink in.

  And what, exactly, had she gotten herself into? She wished she knew. The more she thought about the inexplicably compromised CODIS system, the more confused she became. She’d come up with countless explanations for the bizarre subroutine she found, but none held up very well to even halfhearted consideration.

  The chance that five separate glitches in five separate state computer systems would relate five crimes with obvious similarities was about a billion to one. And the chance of ATD accidentally using an existing DNA signature as a test string—assuming they were stupid enough to make that mistake—was so low it was hard to calculate.

  Quinn reached out and turned up the country station playing on the radio. The sound of Hank Williams Jr. filled the car but couldn’t penetrate her mind and drive out the conclusion that she was trying desperately to suppress—that the crimes were real and the modification to CODIS was an intentional effort to cover up the connection between them.

  Despite the evidence, it seemed impossible. What would the FBI have to gain by keeping secret the fact that a twenty-six-year-old reclusive Hopkins professor/artist was running around the country killing women? And if someone high enough up in the FBI to subvert CODIS was involved, where did that leave her? Nowhere good. Her strangely sudden transfer to Quantico was starting to look less like a random act and more like an effort to get rid of her. And if that was true, it made sense that she’d be sent someplace where she could be watched. Did someone at the FBI know she had the files?

  “No,” she said aloud, her voice swallowed up by the music filling the car.

  She was just being paranoid. It was just a computer glitch that the FBI was completely unaware of. But they wouldn’t be for long. The private DNA typing company she’d sent Twain’s hair sample to would have her results by tomorrow—Monday at the latest. Then she’d have everything she needed to save her job and make sure that Eric Twain spent the rest of his miserable life painting murals on the walls of his prison cell.

  Quinn rolled down the window and let the cold air wash over her as she thought back to her visit to Twain’s home—the smell of wood and old brick, the bright colors and music, his physical beauty and disarming demeanor. She hated to admit it, but it had been incredibly exciting to be that close to someone so brilliant and so evil. To play cat and mouse with him and to have escaped.

  The car lurched suddenly, bouncing Quinn against her seat belt and knocking her out of a daydream that had her showing up the other FBI trainees on the shooting range. She pumped the accelerator and the engine smoothed out, but it didn’t last long. Less than a minute later she was coasting to a stop in the short grass growing alongside the road.

  “Great,” she muttered, grabbing a flashlight from the glove box and stepping out into the thick darkness. It sounded like it wasn’t getting
gas. She opened the hood and stuck her head beneath it, checking the fuel line and what she could see of the fuel injection system. Nothing. She slid back into the driver’s seat and tried again to get the engine to fire, but with no success. She’d swear it had felt like she’d run out of gas. But that wasn’t possible—she’d filled up on the way to work and the gauge was reading more than a quarter of a tank. She stepped out of the car again and looked down at her skirt and blouse, trying to remember what she’d paid for them as she sat down on the grass and slid under the back of the car. A couple of taps on the tank with a stick confirmed her suspicions. Empty.

  “What’s going on here?” she said aloud as she stood and brushed herself off. It seemed pretty unlikely that anyone with an inclination to siphon gas from parked cars would do it in the FBI Academy lot.

  She poked her head back inside the open door of the car and, ducking under the dash, shined her flashlight directly on the gauge mechanism.

  It looked new.

  She slid in a little farther, getting a better angle. It looked like it had just been installed—and kind of a shoddy job at that. “What on earth…”

  The sound of an engine became audible just before the headlights washed over her. Crawling out from under the dash, she saw an old pickup ease to a stop in the empty road alongside her. The man inside leaned over and rolled down the passenger-side window.

  “Got problems, there, miss?”

  Quinn shrugged, only half listening. No mechanic had ever touched her car; she did all the work herself and she was certain she’d never replaced any of the gauges.

  “Yeah. I guess I do.”

  He grinned and jumped out of his truck. “Can I borrow that?”

  Quinn handed him her flashlight and watched him examine the engine, still trying to make sense of what had happened.