Shattered (19 page)

Fox Run, Indiana, founded in 1898, population 4712, was a typical middle-American farm town. Located about twenty-five miles southeast of Indianapolis, the little hamlet lay at the intersection of two main rural routes. Surrounded on all sides by a sea of cornfields, the place gave off a feeling of timeless, sepia isolation, like some countrified version of Darwin's archipelago, where pop machines and old men in overalls sit in charming stasis, unchanged for decades. The central business district—which was not much more than a couple of blocks of cracked sidewalks and Victorian brick storefronts—dripped with quaintness. Castellani's Market sat at the corner of Main and Fourth, as it had for nearly a century, its smoked meats and plucked fowls hanging on hooks in the windows. Margie's Five-and-Dime was next door, its needle-point samplers and hand-dipped candles on display in windows bordered by ruffles and chintz. The town had two gas stations—one at each end of the main drag—a one-room schoolhouse, a feed and seed store, a sheriff's office, and three restaurants. The Dixie Cafe served up chicken-fried steaks and cherry Cokes; the fare at Al's Barbecue was self-explanatory; Bomgartners, a fern-and-brass eatery, featured everything from prime rib to pasta primavera, and catered to the recent influx of white-collar patrons. These affluent middle classers were mostly employed at the nearby Maytag plant, and mostly housed on the north side of town in a new subdivision known as Sherwood Forest. There was also Camp Steagall, a military base, less than ten miles away, which was a big employer and one of the reasons why the Federal Marshal Service listed Fox Run as an active site on their WITSEC database. It was close to both a Bureau field office
and
a government airstrip.

The town also sported four taverns. Dewey's Tap, Bud and Hank's, The End Zone, and Michelmann's Brauhaus. Fox Run's ratio of drinking establishments to residents was about average for the area—.0008 bars per capita—but some of the towns-people yearned to increase the balance. Perhaps this was due to the fact that the vast Indiana sky, with its endless waves of grain, weighed heavily on the psyche. Especially at night. After sunset, Fox Run transformed itself into a deserted oasis—a place of lonely, neon-drenched crossroads, desolate, rolled-up sidewalks, and isolated pools of sodium vapor lights. Rust-freckled metal signs dangled over farm implement yards, rattling in the night breezes. Moths swarmed the street lamps. Distant freight trains out of Fort Wayne or Columbus moaned and clattered through the night, and sent shivers of loneliness across the silent streets. And even up in the tidy cul-de-sacs of Sherwood Forest, the desolation resonated across dark lawns, the property lines butting up like breakwaters against endless oceans of corn.

Maura's little brick town house was no exception. After dark, her backyard lay in absolute blackness. Every hour or so another train would howl by in the distance, its solitary headlight beam weaving through the night, a luminous thread stitching the tops of the cornfields. On her first night alone in the safe house, in fact, Maura didn't sleep a wink. She just sat on the rear windowsill, gazing out at the night, waiting for another train to pass, wondering if she would ever see her husband again, wondering if she would see something in the news about him.

Now, as the sun set on her third night, Maura paced the tiny kitchen that overlooked her backyard.

It was a galley-style kitchen, equipped with a miniature stove that could fit easily in a double-wide camper, a modicum of counter space, and a small refrigerator. The single-basin sink was stainless steel and rimmed with rust. The air smelled of mold and grit. Ancient ruffled curtains hung off a solitary window. The drone of crickets came through the screen, blending with the hiss of the baby monitor. Aaron was stirring again. He hadn't been sleeping well in his new nursery. Maybe he sensed his mother's imminent breakdown.

Dressed in a San Francisco 49ers jersey, jeans, and sneakers, Maura felt another spell of anxiety coming on. She wore her nursing bra beneath the nightshirt, damp spots showing through the 49ers logo. She lit another cigarette and compulsively puffed it as she paced. The darkness of the backyard, visible between the curtains, bothered her. The emptiness of it, the ceaseless noise of the crickets and trains. She was losing her mind. The medication hardly affected her anymore. She had taken another anxiety pill only an hour ago and it had barely registered. Why was she getting worse? Was she sinking into a full-blown nervous breakdown? Had life with Ulysses Grove finally taken its toll on her?

A noise from the basement—a very faint creaking sound or a dry snap—interrupted her thoughts.

She paused, cocked her head…and listened…but the sound had faded away. She listened more closely, but only heard the hiss of the baby monitor next to her, and the soft rattle of the wind outside in the eaves. Nothing more from the cellar. Was she imagining things now? Hearing things? The new house had its own symphony of night sounds, taps and rattles to which Maura had not yet grown accustomed. After all, it was only her third night in purgatory.

Only three days earlier she had been whisked off the face of the earth, erased from the world.

They had flown Maura and Aaron out to Indianapolis on a commercial airliner, listing her on the passenger manifest as one “Garnett, Melanie” (allowing her the same initials as her real name). The pair of elderly federal marshals who escorted Maura, each of them with Navy tattoos and tough as old iron, had been polite, courteous, and deferential. And Maura had given them plenty of shit. She demanded that the marshal service pay for her incidentals, which she insisted on buying at an Indianapolis Target the moment they were on the ground: baby formula, diapers, wipes, towels, bar soap, Tylenol, cigarettes, cereal, milk, sleeping pills, and Formula 409.

Glancing across the kitchen at the little dining table, she regarded the row of pill bottles, the over-flowing ashtray, the dirty dishes from dinner, Aaron's applesauce-crusted high chair, and the shellacked wooden case containing the .22 pistol that Vivian Casino had given her. Is this what her life had been reduced to? A shadow of what she once was, trapped in a spiralling depression, alone in the middle of nowhere, a shut-in hunkered down in a forlorn little kitchen in a forlorn little house, imagining noises coming from her basement?

She went over and sat down at the table. She opened the case and looked at the gun. Her ears still rang from the lessons Mrs. Cansino had given her that afternoon in the backyard. Maura had killed an entire watermelon, turning it into pinkish pulp. She had been surprised at how easy the Ruger pistol was to shoot, the aim astoundingly precise.

But weren't watermelons a lot easier to kill than human intruders?

Stubbing out her cigarette, she went over to the sink and splashed water on her face. Dizziness threatened to knock her over. Another panic attack was coming, she could sense it like the smell of rain on the wind. She was accustomed to these panicky feelings. She had been having them off and on since she was a young cub reporter for the
San Francisco Chronicle
a million years ago. But she had always been able to manage them, control them, control her nerves. She had interviewed captains of industry. Never missed a deadline. Worked her way up the journalistic ladder first at
Omni
magazine, then
Outdoors
, then
Discover
. Now look at her. Is this what her life with Ulysses Grove had wrought? Is this…

Again she paused.

The noise from the basement had returned. This time, the creaking sound was clearly audible, sending chills along the backs of Maura's arms and neck. Something primal within her, something deep down in her reptile brain, began to react to these muffled, intermittent noises with the spontaneity of a chemical reaction. Her belly turned cold. Her flesh crawled as she turned and stared at the latched door on the other side of the kitchen, the one at the top of the basement steps.

She told herself to stay calm. Chances were it was nothing, merely a settling noise. All houses emit those kinds of sounds late at night, especially when there's a jittery insomniac around to hear them. Maura was simply unfamiliar with this meager little bungalow's natural ticks and tocks. That was it. Her imagination was merely—

Shuffling noises came from behind that latched door, stiffening Maura's spine.

Now she was sure there was something down there. Maybe an animal. Maybe something worse. She glanced over her shoulder toward the archway leading out of the kitchen. The stairs to the second floor lay just beyond it. Instinct told her to move quickly.

In fact, everything she did for the next few minutes was purely instinctual.

“Why would they give her an unlisted number?” Grove sat with jaw set and teeth clenched on the edge of a bench seat in the forward section of the aircraft, still clad in the damp flight jacket that he had dug up at Langley. In his threadbare sweats and muddy infantry boots, his brown skin glistening with flop-sweat, he looked like some mad Black Panther about to lead a violent charge on an administration building. His heart had not stopped racing since the time they had left the Pickman Creek crime scene. “Get the marshal service on the blower.”

“Already did it,” Geisel told him. “They're on their way to the Indy field office as we speak.”

Tom Geisel sat across from Grove, jacket off, tie loosened, sleeves rolled up. He was working his BlackBerry, the earphone stuck in one ear.

He had already made a call to the Fox Run sheriff's office and had gotten the after-hours voice mail. He then patched through to the Bureau's Midwest Tactical office, and managed to rouse the town sheriff out of bed. Now Geisel was coordinating the agencies from the hermetically sealed world of the Eclipse 500, soaring through the black sky at 375 knots, bouncing over invisible troughs of turbulence forty thousand feet above Southern Illinois.

The plane was a small, twin-engine jet, part of the 11th Wing out of DC's Bolling Air Force base, chartered by Geisel's Behavioral Science Unit. The cabin was a white padded chamber that smelled of coffee and disinfectant, and the ceaseless vibrations made Grove's skull throb.

Time had sped up somehow, the ticking clock chipping away at Grove's sanity. The Eclipse was the fastest, longest ranging aircraft in the fed's fleet, but delays at Scott Air Force Base in Belleville had put Grove behind. Indianapolis was about four hundred miles away. They could get there in an hour with the wind at their back but unexpected factors had begun to impede the journey. According to Grove's hasty calculations, the killer had at least six, maybe eight, hours on them. Depending upon his mode of transportation, he could already be in Fox Run, Indiana.

“Don't they have anybody on patrol out there?” Grove's stomach lurched as the plane bumped and careened through the slipstream. “Where is this place?”

“Mayberry, USA…by design,” Geisel explained. “These safe houses gotta blend in.”

“They don't make provisions for contingencies? Emergencies?” Grove glanced at his watch. “What time is it?”

“Take it easy. It's 12:30. Maura's gonna be fine. This guy isn't gonna risk the exposure.”

“Where the hell is that sheriff?” Grove looked at his boss. “I'm dying here, man.”

“They're patching him through right now, just stand by.” Geisel looked out his window at the black wall of clouds. “How did this happen, Ulysses?”

“What?”

“How did the freak find the safe house?”

Grove had already been asking himself that for the last hour and a half. He knew the answer. He knew the moment he heard his own name ooze out of those speakers in Hockenberry's mobile lab. It was time to confess his sins. He looked over his shoulder at the empty cabin. He glanced forward at the sealed cockpit door. He was alone with his surrogate father confessor. “It's my fault,” he murmured.

“Say again.” Geisel took the earpiece out of his ear. “It's what?”

“It's my fault, all of it.”

“I hope you're planning on explaining that.”

Grove rubbed his face. “Tom, I know you've seen me make some leaps that don't add up. I know what the rest of the unit thinks of me.”

“People hate what they don't understand.” Geisel's face was open, patient. “That's not what we're talking about.”

Grove looked at him. “I'm going to tell you something now, and it never leaves this cabin. And if you repeat it, I'll deny it to my grave.” He paused then, measuring his words. “I'm hooked into something, Tom. I don't know how else to explain it.”

“Okay.”

“Started way back, maybe before I was born. Hopkins at the academy—you remember old Hopkins?—he used to call it the
para-forensic
. The way things reveal themselves to certain folks. But it's not just a gift, or a psychic thing…or whatever you want to call it.”

Geisel frowned at him. “You're talking in circles now, Slick. Just spit it out.”

Grove let out a sigh. “This guy Splet, he might have started out your run-of-the-mill psychotic. Like Ackerman, like Doerr. But the stakes got raised.”

“How's that?”

“Look at all these redline serial murder cases—Gacy, Ackerman, Doerr, Ramirez, now Splet—there's a dominant personality that emerges in the subject. Call it a parasite, call it an entity. Call it any damn thing you want.”

“When you say entity—?”

“I'm talking about something that's consistent.
Consistent
. You understand what I'm saying?”

Geisel stared at him. “I'm not sure if I do or not…or maybe I just don't
want
to.”

Grove lowered his voice. “It's the same energy, Tom. In all these perps. An entity unto itself. It reappears again and again. And it's been around for thousands of years. The nastiest goddamn vibe you could ever imagine. A million times worse than these pathetic spree killers. Why? Because it's got an
agenda
. It's after something.”

A taut moment of silence at this point as the plane vibrated and yawed.

Grove went on: “I know it sounds paranoid, delusional, crazy—hell, I don't even believe it half the time—but this thing is after
me
. That's what happened back in '05 when I got sick, when I caught Ackerman. That thing got inside me, tried to tear me apart.”

Geisel didn't say anything, just stared at the floor of the cabin.

“That's why it's going after my family now.” Grove glanced out the window at the night sky rushing past the fuselage. “Somehow—
somehow
—it locked on to the safe house.”

“That is simply not possible.”

Grove shook his head. “Everything's impossible until it happens. I'd call Walt Dickinson over in IT, have him check all the Bureau mainframes, Marshal Service, too, but it doesn't much matter anymore.”

Geisel was thinking. “Didn't this guy Splet work at a TV station?”

“Who cares, Tom. It happened. People hack elections. Get used to it.”

“All I'm saying is—” Geisel's BlackBerry trilled. He quickly thumbed the answer button. “Talk to me.” A beat as he listened. “I'm going to put you on speaker.”

“
Who do we got?”
The voice crackled from the BlackBerry after Geisel positioned it on the arm of his seat.

“You got Special Agent Ulysses Grove and Section Chief Tom Geisel en route.”

An older man's gravelly Midwestern drawl squawked out of the tiny speaker: “Sheriff Gene Tomilson here, along with Agent Raymond Potheuse from the Indy Bureau office, and Federal Marshal Harry Stenheiser.”

Grove spoke up. “Gentlemen, I apologize for the bluntness but we're up against a time crunch here. Who's the closest to the site?”

Through the speaker: “Agent Grove, Harry Stenheiser here. No need to apologize. We got Indy Tactical on their way to the site.”

“Are they there yet?”

An awkward pause. “Well, no, but we're only talking about—”

“I'll ask it again, who's the closest to the site?”

After a moment, the sheriff's voice returned: “That would be the third-shift deputy, good old boy named Tommy Elkins.”

“Where is he now?”

Pause. “According to dispatch, he just came on duty, so that would put him about a mile and half west of Sherwood Forest where your wife is.”

“Get him over there, please, right away if possible,” Grove said to the device, wanting to scream at it, smash it with his fist.

Through the device: “Consider it done, sir.”

“Thank you.”

“One question, Ulysses.”

Grove recognized the voice of Agent Raymond Potheuse from the Indianapolis field office. Grove remembered the man from the Happy-Face Killer investigation seven years earlier. Potheuse was a smart, heavyset former jock who had helped Grove canvass truck stops. “Go ahead, Ray.”

“What's the protocol here?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do we go in with reasonable force no matter what? Or do we hang back and assess?”

“Go in, Ray. Go the fuck in the minute you get there.”

Geisel spoke up. “Ulysses—”

“What?” Grove shot a look at Geisel. “What's the problem?!”

“We don't even know if this is real.”

Grove turned to the BlackBerry. “Listen to me, everybody. I don't care if you scare the shit outta my wife, wake the baby, blow the goddamn cover—I want somebody packing iron inside that house with my wife as soon as humanly possible, does that make sense?”

After a pause, Potheuse's voice replied, “Makes perfect sense to me.”

“Thank you.”

Geisel added, “Just get that sheriff's deputy over there right now.”

“He's on his way.”