Perfect Victim (13 page)

The front door burst open with the force of Grove's kick, and he stumbled into the deserted Pelican Bay house with heavy Pendaflex expandable folders under each arm. He had been alone in the home many times, but not like this, not this woozy with nervous tension and paranoia, and the conspicuous absence of his wife and son only added to his disorientation.

He turned in a fidgety circle trying to decide what to do first. In the stillness, the midday sun glowed behind the front drapes, creating an oven effect. A musty odor filled the house, an odor that always pervaded the place when it was left empty for long stretches. Seaside homes are never completely free of mold. The scent of moisture is always there, in the wallpaper, under the floorboards, along the baseboards. But now the ghostly mildew merely tightened the uneasy knot in Grove's gut, playing a sour counterpoint to the constant refrain in his head.

JQP?

He headed for the stairs to the second floor, stumbling across the entry hall like some incorrigible derelict, drunk with exhaustion. He tripped on a braided rug, and his feet tangled, and he fell over. He dropped both files as he went down; one flopped open on impact and spilled its contents across the foyer. Forensic photographs of corpses in Minnesota, North Carolina, and Texas, coroners' reports, maps, Xeroxes of Sumerian symbols, notes—all of it fanned across the hardwood.

Grove struggled to get his breath, and tried stop that skipping record in his brain.

JQPJQPJQP?

He rose to his knees, head spinning. He could hardly see through his one good eye. He felt nauseated. He needed sleep badly, he needed to eat, he needed to think. Over the last few hours he had been acting purely on instinct, racing back to his office at Quantico before word got out about the chaotic scene at Bard's houseboat, retrieving all his Archetype files, consolidating his profiles into the two heavy Pendaflexes, then rushing back to his empty house in Pelican Bay to do God-knew-what with the letters JQPJQPJQPJQPJQPJQPJQP JQPJQPJQPJQPJQPJQPJQP—

The sound of the phone ringing in the kitchen shook Grove out of his trance. It was the unlisted phone. Grove had three lines, including his work cell, which was also unlisted. The private line was used only by Maura, a few superiors at the Bureau, and emergency dispatch.

He rose on shaky legs, took a deep breath, and made his way into the kitchen, leaving all the forensic documents on the floor where they had fallen. He snatched the cordless off the wall with a sweaty hand. “Grove.”

“Ulysses, it's Ray Kopsinsky.”

Grove knew immediately by the edgy tone of the man's normally rock-steady voice that there was major trouble. “Ray, I'm glad you called.”

“Yeah, well.”

“You got the news from Dispatch? I'm gonna need VICAP on these initials. Right away.”

The man on the other end of the line sighed. “Look, I got all the details on Bard and the scene—I also got an earful from Corboy about the reporter you tried to surgically remove from the planet.”

“He's not a reporter, he's a hack.”

“Be that as it may—”

“Ray, this guy Haskell, his articles were on Splet's walls—he got Maura kidnapped! Remember Ackerman?”

“Grove, listen to me. There's a line you vaulted over here. You tried to wax the guy in front of a live audience
and
a photographer—we're gonna be doing mea culpa for a year. Now, I realize you're in a bad place, with Tom passing and this freak out there who's hooked into your work—”

“We got the guy's initials, Ray. If we don't act, he's gonna kill again. He's going to torture a woman, and then kill her.”

“Ulysses—”

“I'm going to find this guy very soon. That's the best PR you can get!”

“Let me finish.” The voice on the other end of the line was strained with thinly repressed anger. “Corboy has ordered you on paid leave.”

“What?” Grove's sweaty palm was welded to the receiver.
“What?!”

“It's unavoidable, Ulysses. Pending an investigation—”

“I'm the only one, Ray.”

“Grove, I'm trying to—”

“Goddamn it, I'm the only one who can catch this guy!” Pain stabbed the bridge of Grove's nose at the sudden volume of his own voice.

On the other end of the line, Kopsinky's voice changed slightly. “You know, Tom always said you were difficult, but you were worth it because the plain truth is you get these guys off the streets. Fine. I get that. But I don't know the playbook, Grove. I'm not Geisel, I don't know the blocking routes. I don't have the juice.”

After a long beat, Grove swallowed. “What are you telling me, Ray?”

“There's nothing I can do.”

“Listen to me. You think Haskell is bad press? This perp is the grim reaper, Ray. He's the Antichrist, he's—”

“I tried. I'm sorry. I really am.”

The phone clicked in Grove's ear.

 

United Flight 287—nonstop from Charleston International to Chicago's O'Hare—landed on time that day in a flurry of vapor and noise. The aircraft rattled and roared to a stop on the northernmost runway, then taxied in a light mist to the jetway to the south.

Inside the stale, refrigerated fuselage, passengers stirred and unbuckled and rearranged their belongings in preparation to disembark long before permission to move was given by the flight attendants.

One passenger in particular was exceedingly antsy to exit the plane—a zaftig black woman with cornrows seated in 34A, Business Class. By the time the aircraft shuddered to a stop, she was already standing.

“Ma'am, I'm going to need you to stay seated until the seat-belt sign is off,” one of the attendants called out from the galley seats in back.

“Sorry, sorry,” Edith Drinkwater said with a wave, plopping back down in her seat. Others were stirring around her, flipping open cell phones, thumbing Palm Pilots like junkies cooking their next fix. Drinkwater gripped her carry-on bag as though it contained a human organ bound for transplant.

Back in Beaufort she had made a last-minute decision to change her plans.

As a rule, Edith Drinkwater was not big on changing her mind. Doubt was not a familiar state of mind for her. But something happened back in South Carolina that had started a mysterious clockwork mechanism of gears turning in the back of her brain. Maybe it was the unmistakable glint of fear in David Okuba's eyes when he spoke of displaced spirits and dark doppelgängers. Or maybe it was just the strange vibe Drinkwater had always sensed radiating off Grove.

Whatever the reason, Drinkwater was beginning to think of Ulysses Grove in a different way.

After leaving the Cherry Pit, she had rifled through her notes and had reviewed all the background she had amassed online and in the FBI archives on Grove. She had found the name she was looking for—as well as the address and phone number—in the Bureau personnel folders. The Kenyan woman had been listed on an insurance information form that Grove had filled out way back in the dark ages when he was a trainee. A couple of phone calls later, Drinkwater was on her way to the Windy City.

A sudden
DING
pierced her thoughts, and again she rose to her feet.

A lighted sign announced the all clear to de-board, and Drinkwater hurried off the plane.

 

O'Hare Terminal One is notorious for chaos—the worst record for delays on the continent—and always seems under some kind of inconvenient construction. Laid out like the ribs of a vast fossilized behemoth, the underground route to baggage claim is lined with decorative neon capillaries that have seen better days. People don't look at one another much. Echoes of distant jackhammers and jet engines ebb and flow.

Drinkwater hurried through the underground, then up an escalator to the main terminal, her brain swimming with possible scenarios, images of what the old lady might look like, speculations on what she had to say. The woman had not been very forthcoming over the phone—suspicious even—but had suddenly perked up when Drinkwater had mentioned Okuba and his story of demigods and dark destinies.

The appointed rendezvous spot was at the end of the main concourse—a cavernous mall teeming with travelers coming and going amid the Water-stones and Starbucks, the mélange of merchants masking the stale air with burnt sugar and coffee smells. Drinkwater found the meeting place and looked at her watch. It was a quarter to four. The old woman was due in fifteen.

Drinkwater went over to a contour bench against the corner windows and sat down to wait.

At length, a hunched figure loomed at the top of a nearby staircase. Approaching slowly, methodically, hobbling along with a cane, the woman caught Drinkwater's attention before any words were spoken. The afternoon sun haloed the old lady's face in a nimbus of washed-out daylight from the skylights, and the closer she came, the more her frizzy, white-streaked mane of hair glowed like a corona of angelic light. To Drinkwater she looked like a tarot priestess, like a black saint on a catechism card.

“Mrs. Grove?” Drinkwater stood up, brushing a stray hair from her eye.

“Vida, please call me Vida,” the old woman croaked in a husky, accented voice as she paused on her shellacked baobab cane, a trace of colonial Brit underneath the Kenyan lilt. She wore an ankle-length sarong-dress dyed in traditional African flora. And everything about her bearing—her long neck, her deeply lined regal face—spoke of hard-won wisdom. She had a leather pouch around her neck stuffed with unfiltered cigarettes like bullets in an ammo clip. “You must be…Miss Edith, is it?”

“Edith Drinkwater, that's right.” The two women shook hands. Drinkwater thought the old woman's hand felt like sandpaper. “You didn't have to come all the way out here to the airport, I would have met you anywhere.”

“I like to get out of the house,” the old woman said with a wink. “Doctor says it's good for me. Besides, the bus stop is a half a block from my two-flat.”

“Well, I really appreciate it.”

Vida smiled and patted Drinkwater's shoulder. “My son's fate is now your fate.”

“Excuse me?” Drinkwater wasn't sure she heard the old woman correctly.

Vida gave her arm a squeeze. “You're a strong girl, that's good.”

“I don't know about that.”

“You'll need all your strength for what is to come.”

Drinkwater looked at her. “May I ask what you're referring to?”

The old woman pursed her lips, then looked around the terminal. “Is there a place an old woman can rest her bones and smoke a cigarette?”

In the nightmare Grove is standing at the foot of Geisel's gurney, gazing upon the pale remains of his mentor and boss, when Geisel sits up like he's on a spring, like he's a puppet, and smiles. His teeth are as black as onyx, and a reverse-sound pours out of him like a yowling cat; Grove tries to run away, tries to escape that horrible room, and realizes he cannot move. He looks down. He is ankle-deep in dirty white sand, beach sand, as damp and heavy as wet cement. The sand is riddled with hash marks, symbols, coded messages, phone numbers, bar codes, puzzles, clock faces, lengths, widths, distances, and more; a seemingly endless array of cryptic data. A slimy gray wave licks across the sand, washing away the symbols, enveloping Grove's ankles in greasy salt water. Grove sinks deeper. He struggles and struggles. He sinks into the mire up to his knees; he cries out, but no sound comes out of him as he continues sinking to his waist. The waves curl around him. He looks at the bed and sees Geisel sitting there like a porcelain doll—on his face a weird mixture of utter desolation and horror and something urgent to communicate—and now he's convulsing as though electricity is bolting through him. Grove sinks deeper and deeper until he's up to his chin and can't move his arms or legs anymore. He arches his neck so he can breathe, but soon the soupy sand covers his face like a sticky blanket. He gasps. But somehow—this is a dream, after all—he can still breathe under the sand. He notices light above him and cranes his neck to look up at the hole through which he just sank, and then something very strange and unexpected occurs. The hole is freezing, icing over. Grove shivers. He can see a thin rind of frost forming across the opening, which is barely a foot in diameter, as though an invisible arctic wind is rushing over the hole. Soon the membrane of ice is nearly an inch thick, transparent, milky white. It looks like a window. Grove stares at it for some time, until finally a face appears behind the ice, and Grove screams. He screams and screams. The sound that registers in the dream is more like a delicate tinkling-glass noise, like a chandelier in the wind. The face is very familiar—it is Maura's face—but horrible wounds scourge her flesh, gouges and lacerations, blood speckles dried as black as India ink, the precise wounds discussed in Grove's textbook, in his class, in the MO of the Archetype. She's writing something with her bloody index finger, scratching it into the frost. It makes no sense—in the dream, that is—but Grove stares and stares and stares at the nonsensical words:

Grove came awake with a start. It took a few moments for him to catch his breath and realize where he was: alone, on the living-room sofa in his Pelican Bay home, most of the lights still on. It took him another few moments to realize it was the middle of the afternoon, and he had apparently passed out from exhaustion on the littered couch hours ago. His skin glistened with sweat, his T-shirt and slacks soaked through. His heart still palpitated with alarming irregularity, as prominent in his ears as a shoe banging around the inside of a clothes dryer. His bladder was about to burst, but there was something he had to do before dealing with that.

He managed to sit up and quickly shuffle through a pile of documents on the coffee table next to the sofa. He found a yellow legal pad and a pen, and frantically scrawled the words he had just seen in his dream.

Cilbup Q Nhoj?

 

“You see, the problem is, I'm dying, honey.”

The old Kenyan woman sat on a wrought-iron chair in the far corner of the airport cafeteria, shaded by a giant rubber plant, her baobab cane canted against the table, her proud, wrinkled face like parchment in the bright, diffuse light. Her burnished ebony eyes shimmered with deep sadness.

Drinkwater, seated across the round table, wasn't sure she had heard the woman correctly. “You're what? I'm sorry, say again?”

“I'm dying, sweetheart. Lung cancer.”

“Oh God, I'm sorry.”

“I've done what I set out to do in this life.”

Drinkwater let this amazing statement sink in. “Does Ulysses—?”

“He won't accept it.” The woman spoke tenderly. “Bless his foolish heart, he thinks it's all in my mind. Sends me articles on green tea. Relaxation techniques.”

“I understand.” Drinkwater was having second thoughts about this whole insane detour, about bothering this poor, poor woman, maybe even about the entire surreal scavenger hunt she was on—chasing folk legends and bogeymen, for Christ's sake. “Mrs. Grove, can I ask you something a little personal?”

“Vida, please.” The old woman smiled.

“Vida…do you mind if I ask you…about Ulysses' birth?”

The woman's smile flickered for a moment. “His birth? What about his birth?”

Drinkwater felt her face flush. This was ridiculous. But she had to ask it. “I understand Ulysses was your only son?”

Just the slightest pause here. “That's right.”

“And his father…”

“Yes?”

“Ulysses never knew his father, is that right?”

“That's true.”

“May I ask if you and he were—?”

“If we were divorced? Is that what you're wondering?”

Drinkwater looked down for a moment. “Well, yeah.” Then she looked up at the old woman. “I guess what I'm really wondering is whether—God, I know this is real personal—but I'm wondering whether your son was planned?”

Now there was a long pause.

Vida Grove leaned forward then, the light catching the side of her lined brown face. She looked like a ghost. Tears had gathered in her eyes. “I never told a soul about this,” she said softly, her liquid gaze holding Drinkwater rapt. “Only a few people ever knew about it, and they are long in the ground. I've waited all these years for this secret to come back and haunt me. I knew that it would. They always do. They always, always come back.”

The old woman paused. Drinkwater waited, the hairs on her neck standing up.

 

That night, Grove furiously paced the cluttered periphery of his living room, his heart chugging, the residue of his nightmare—and that jumbled anagram of a word at the end—still clinging to his racing thoughts. At last he reached down to the coffee table and snatched up the yellow notepaper on which he had jotted the nonsense syllables in large block letters.

He stared at the garbled dream-words.
Wait a minute, wait a minute
. Something clicked in the back of his brain.

The room spun.

He staggered across the living room and into the front foyer. Next to the big oak door stood a coatrack, a little pedestal on which Grove and Maura often tossed their keys, and a Warren Kimball mirror. One of Maura's beloved pieces of folk art, the mirror was framed in tiny American flags and cobs of corn.

Grove held the yellow pad up to the mirror, then cocked his head to give his good eye a clean view of the reverse reflection of
CILBUP Q NHOJ
: