Next Victim (16 page)

The element leader ticked off a silent count on his fingers.

On three, they went in.

Where there had been silence, there was a sudden eruption of noise as the door was thrown wide, the SET squad rushing in to cover both sides of the doorway, the leader shouting, "Police, you’re under arrest!" More shouts from squad members checking the bathroom, closet, and balcony—"Clear!" "Clear!" "Clear!"

Tennant watched from outside the doorway. When his chest started to hurt, he realized he’d forgotten to breathe.

Then the leader reported, "Team leader to base, premises are secure. There is one, repeat one, occupant of this room, a female, and she is one-eight-seven."

One-eight-seven was the section of the California Penal Code that covered homicide.

Amanda Pierce was dead.

"You say one-eight-seven?" Garzarelli asked over the radio, seeking confirmation.

"Affirmative, sir. She’s about as one-eight-seven as it gets."

Her contact had killed her. Tennant could think of a dozen reasons. She had been followed from Oregon and had inadvertently endangered them both. The killing might be her penalty for that mistake. Or maybe it was an insurance policy, a way to ensure that she never talked.

Tennant didn’t care about the reason. What mattered to him was that Donald Stevenson, whoever he had been, had killed Pierce and left the room.

Which meant he must have taken the suitcase.

Slowly, Tennant stepped through the doorway into the room and looked toward the bed, where the breathing had come from.

Amanda Pierce was on the bed, but she wasn’t breathing.

His gaze tracked to the nightstand, where a room-service menu flapped in the breeze of an air-conditioning vent. A rhythmic flutter, which the scope had read as respiration.

He looked around the rest of the room and saw the suitcase. It lay on a desk chair, its contents scattered. He experienced a wild moment of hope, which died when he looked over the miscellany of items.

There was no metal canister. It was gone.

The team leader’s voice, loud in his earpiece, took him by surprise. "Looks like her partner offed her," he said.

Tennant realized the SET officer was addressing him. He nodded and turned toward the body again.

Amanda Pierce’s eyes stared at him, wide and somehow angry, even in death. She had been duct-taped to the headboard, her throat cut.

Duct-taped…

Throat cut…

Tennant kept up with the major investigations handled by the bureau. He remembered the maniac in Denver who had recently resurfaced in LA.

"It wasn’t her partner," Tennant said slowly.

The element leader glanced at him. "Sir?"

He didn’t answer. He stood staring at the bed, thinking of the missing canister and the case code-named RAVENKIL.

Things had been bad before. But they had just gotten a whole lot worse.

17

Mobius
.

His name, his mantra, coiling through his mind, a snake swallowing itself in a perpetual act of self-devouring, of unappeasable appetite.

It was a name that signified many things, but above all the loop of time coiling to intersect itself, merging past and future in an endless present, the great
now
extending forever.

He had killed before and he would kill again, but always it was the same act, the same victim, the same moment in time.

Always he saw there, the gun in her hand, the song playing like background music, the theme song of his life.

She spoke to him, and then there was the gunshot blast, the heat and pain, and the water closing over him like the petals of a flower as he sank into a humming brightness.

He tried to call to her for help, but the water got in the way, the water that flooded his mouth and filled his eyes like tears, and around him slow tendrils of blood unwound in the water, making clouds of red….

And then—and then—

He was out of the water, he was strong, reanimated, and he was holding her down, taping her wrists to the headboard of the motel bed. A knife was in his hand, and she couldn’t hurt him. He was the one who would do the hurting now, and the bitch couldn’t stop him. The bitch could only writhe and struggle and die.

That was how it had been tonight, in the MiraMist Hotel. That was how it was, every time, always.

Mobius had left the MiraMist at 2:45, taking the stairs to the lobby, exiting via a rear door without being seen by the hotel staff. His car was parked a short distance away. He had driven east on Wilshire Boulevard, into the Westwood district.

At 3:15 A.M. he parked on an elm-shaded side street outside the Life Sciences Center on a university campus. He put on his gloves and took the canister with him when he got out of his car.

The campus was deserted at this hour. The Life Sciences building was situated along one side of a picturesque quadrangle. He was considering the best way to break in when he noticed a light in the basement windows.

Someone was at work in a lab.

This was very convenient. Although he had intended to perform the procedure himself, he knew he would be unfamiliar with the new equipment. Now, by pure good fortune, he had found an assistant.

It took him no time at all to defeat the lock on the front door of the building with a set of tools from his glove compartment. Silently he descended the stairs. A sign with an arrow pointed to ORGANIC CHEMISTRY LAB II. The lab door had a window in it. Looking through, he saw long countertops crowded with Bunsen burners, Pyrex flasks and beakers, test tube racks, and triple-beam balances. This much he’d expected, but what surprised him was the quantity of computer gear in the lab—keyboards and monitors and boxy CPUs.

At the far end of the room stood the lab worker in the white coat, bending over a table. Mobius opened the door and entered, unheard. When he was halfway across the room, he rapped his knuckles on a counter, and the other person turned.

"What the hell? How’d you get in here?"

"The building was unlocked."

"No, it wasn’t."

"It is now."

Mobius looked over his new friend. He was just a kid—early twenties at the oldest. Sandy hair, thin build, hard plastic goggles over his wide, alarmed eyes.

"What are you up to at three-thirty in the morning?" Mobius asked.

The kid took a step forward. "Get the fuck out of here."

"You’re a poor host."

"I’m calling security."

"No, you’re not."

The kid reached for a phone. Mobius closed the distance between them, and in a quick downward arc his knife sliced through the lab coat and incised a shallow wound in the kid’s lower abdomen.

He expected shock and fear to incapacitate his victim immediately, but the kid surprised him, lunging at Mobius in a wild attempt at self-defense. Mobius stepped backward, stumbling, off balance for an instant, and the kid flailed with a looping swing that swept a row of flasks onto the floor with a shattering of glass. Then Mobius steadied himself and caught the kid a second time with the knife, slashing his thigh, and the kid collapsed, a surge of red dyeing his pants.

Mobius stared down. "Don’t be a hero, asshole. It only costs you blood."

The kid touched the two wounds and gasped, shaking all over, then lifted his head to gaze up at Mobius with eyes that were now utterly cowed.

"You plan to cooperate now?"

The kid nodded.

"No more bullshit?"

"No."

"Fair enough. So tell me, son, what’s your name?"

His lips worked for a moment before he answered, "Scott Maple."

"You’re a student, I assume. Too young to be a teacher."

"Grad student." Another shudder worked its way through him as he looked at the widening stain on his clothes, the red pool on the floor. "Christ, it won’t stop bleeding."

"Yes, it will. The first cut is barely more than a scratch. The second one’s a little more serious, but you have only yourself to blame for that. You never answered my first question. What are you up to?"

"Research project. For my Ph.D. thesis."

"On Easter weekend, in the middle of the night?"

"Deadline."

"What’s the nature of this all-important project?"

"Analysis of carcinogenic environmental contaminants." He spoke in a dull monotone, as if reciting a memorized lesson. "Pesticide concentrations, industrial residue, vapor discharged from burning fossil fuels. I’m using bomb calorimetry—"

"Bomb what?"

"Calorimetry."

"You make bombs?"

"Not exactly. I mean, it is a kind of bomb, but…Look, what the hell do you care?"

"Bombs interest me." Mobius looked Scott Maple up and down. "So are you calmer now? Are you lucid?"

"Guess so."

"Good. Because I’ve got a job for you. I found this item." He held up the canister in a gloved hand. "There’s liquid in it. I want to know what kind."

"Is it…something dangerous?"

"Probably. But you handle toxic substances all the time, don’t you? Pesticides, industrial residue. You just told me so."

"I…yeah, that’s what I told you."

"You have a gas chromatograph in here, I’m sure."

Maple jerked his head in the direction of an oven-size box hooked up to a computer. "There."

"Okay, then." Mobius tossed him the canister, and Maple caught it reflexively. "Get to work."

The kid struggled upright, holding on to a counter for support. By now the bright flush of blood on his lab coat and pants was fading. The flow had ebbed.

"You have safety masks available?" Mobius asked.

"Sure."

"Give me one. You put one on, too. And put on gloves."

Mobius donned his mask, then stood back, careful to keep his distance from the canister. Scott Maple kept talking nervously, aimlessly, as he started a software program on the computer linked to the gas chromatograph.

"Okay, okay. The chromatograph is a Hewlett-Packard 5890. The PC maintains a stable environment for the chemical separation process. Okay, so first I turn on the FID air and hydrogen. FID, that’s—"

"Flame ionization detection," Mobius said.

Maple glanced up, startled. "Uh, that’s right. Sensitive to zero point four five parts per million. Next we ignite the flame." He pressed the ignition button on the chromatograph. "It ought to register at least fifteen on the screen. Okay, there it is."

"Stop saying, ‘Okay.’"

"Am I doing that?"

"You are."

"Okay. I mean—I’ll stop. Now we just, uh, set the appropriate values." On the computer, he chose
Set Method
, then set the temperatures of the injector, oven, and detector to their defaults. "Check the status. Then we…we have to wait. Till it warms up, basically. Shouldn’t take long."

"While you’re waiting, prepare the sample."

"Right. The sample." He studied the canister. "How do I extract the contents if I don’t know what I’m dealing with?"

"How would you handle the pollutants you’re cataloging?"

"Use a pipette to siphon out a few drops…"

"There you go. And by the way, it would be a good idea to stop trembling. If this stuff is what I think it may be, you can’t afford to make any stupid mistakes."

Maple drew a quick, shallow breath that pulled the face mask tight against his nostrils. His goggles were steaming up with sweat.

He opened the canister and transferred a few drops of clear liquid into an Erlenmeyer flask. When the gas chromatograph’s temperature reached 325 degrees Centigrade, he fed the sample into the injection port and initiated the run.

The details of gas chromatography had changed in the twenty years since Mobius had attended college, but the basic science was the same. The sample, heated to a gas, would travel into a column lined with silicone grease. The grease would absorb the gas molecules and release them at varying intervals, known as exit rates. Every compound had its own unique exit rate, a chemical fingerprint. When the exit rates of the molecules were registered by the flame ionization detector, the exact chemical composition of the vapor would be known.

He and Scott Maple waited until a readout appeared on the PC’s screen.

"Exit rate of forty-five point three seconds," Maple said.

"What is it?"

"Not sure. Almost like a pesticide, maybe. I’m running it through the database now. We ought to—Oh, shit."

His voice had dropped an octave with the last word. Mobius took a step closer, and on the monitor he saw a long chemical name beginning with
O-ethyl-S
.

"Tell me," he said.

"It says here this is…this is…"

Maple turned toward him. Above the antiseptic mask, his eyes were wide and helpless.

"Tell me," Mobius repeated.

The kid told him.

And Mobius smiled.

When he was finished at the lab, Mobius visited Tess.

He knew where she was staying, of course. He had even sat in the motel parking lot and watched her enter and leave on a few occasions. It had occurred to him that it would not be difficult to kill her whenever he wished. So far he had felt no particular urgency about it. But now the time had come.

He guided his car into the motel parking lot and brought it to rest under a dead street lamp. The time was 4:45, still too early for any activity around the motel. The windows were unlighted, the drapes shut.

Canister in hand, he crossed the parking lot to the door of room 14. It would be locked, naturally—he didn’t even bother testing the knob. He had no need to get inside the room.

He cast a long, cautious look around, then crouched near the air conditioner.

It was a large unit installed under the window, and it was off now. He didn’t know if Tess had left it off when she’d gone to sleep, or if it had clicked off automatically during the coolest part of the night. But this March was unseasonably warm, with near-record highs forecast for Saturday. She would turn it on eventually.

He put on his gloves and the mask from the lab. Averting his face, he opened the canister and dribbled a few drops of its contents into the AC unit’s air-intake duct. When the air conditioner started running, the liquid would be aerosolized and dispersed as a mist throughout the room.