The Eighth Trumpet (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) (3 page)

“He would have used it eventually.”

“You miss my point. Turan’s use of a dummy car included using a double for himself. The odds were fifty-fifty that it would’ve been the double that got fried instead of him. I can’t accept that. The killer wired the right limo because he knew it was right even before Turan made his choice.”

“Psychic maybe?”

“I wouldn’t dismiss anything.”

A few moments of silence passed before the Ferryman spoke again.

“What about the other?”

“Adam Rand.”

“Rand Industries?”

“You do surprise me, Jared.”

“News reaches even the backwoods of Vermont. Rand Industries revolutionized the auto industry with their hypersensitive transmission. A whole new way of driving. The fuel injection of the nineties. Rand had to be worth a billion on his bad days in the market.”

“Which puts him in the same league as Turan. And Lime. You can see what I was getting at back at the cabin. We’re facing the ultimate serial killer here.”

Kimberlain looked at him across the seat. “That’s a pretty strong statement considering the last time we worked together.”

“With good reason. Jordan Lime ordered twenty-five thousand-dollar-a-day security from Pro-Tech
after
the Rand murder two weeks ago. And in spite of that, this killer still found a way through, impossible as it seems.”

“How’d Rand buy it?”

“In his sleep.”

“Really?”

“His bed was blown up.” Kamanski hesitated to let his point sink in. “Our killer likes a challenge and takes on a greater one each time. He’s proving that nobody’s safe. He’s rendered all levels of security impotent.”

“How can you be so sure it’s one man?”

“Simple. A group would have an aim, a purpose. Someone would have heard from them by now with a list of demands. But there’s been nothing. This is sport for our man. I can feel it.”

Kimberlain was nodding. “So what we’ve got so far are a new kind of steel and a revolutionary transmission. What’s Lime’s claim to fame?”

“Most recently, a transistor coupling that resists burnout. Since these couplings had such a high breakdown rate, that discovery would have placed him above Turan and Rand before too much longer.” Kamanski realized what the Ferryman was getting at. “You think our killer is keying on the product, not the people, in choosing his victims?”

“Probably a combination of the two. Anything’s possible with the kind of mind we’re facing here, if you’re right about it being only one mind,” Kimberlain told him, unaware that his hands had clenched involuntarily into fists. “Serial killers key on something that attracts them and keeps attracting them. While they’re active no other factor is as important as that one single thing, because it allows them to attain their own version of superiority. It dominates their consciousness. Killing allows them to maintain the illusion that they’re still in control, and even to increase that control. And killing the object of their obsession maintains their feeling of superiority.”

“You’re talking about Peet.”

“A worthy suspect.”

“Forget it. He remains under twenty-four-hour guard. He never even leaves his cell without a four-man escort.”

“That’s not much for him to overcome.”

“A three-mile swim through frigid waters would follow even if he did.”

“He could manage it. Believe me.”

“Not behind bars he couldn’t.”

Kimberlain smiled. “I’m glad I didn’t kill you back at the cabin, David, but I should have three years ago.”

The plane brought them to a small airfield in southern Connecticut, where a helicopter was waiting to carry them the short distance to the Lime estate.

“I had the room sealed,” Kamanski explained above the chopper’s roar as they buckled themselves in. “Body parts removed, of course, but nothing else altered.”

“You’re a true professional, David,” Kimberlain said. And when they were in the air, through the headset, “I’ll want to hear and see your tapes first. I want to experience it from the perspective of all your helpless security guards.”

“I’ll arrange it.”

The vastness of the Lime estate was the first thing that struck Kimberlain. It was much too large for anything but an entire army to patrol. Kamanski said Pro-Tech had made it impregnable and boasted that the surveillance equipment could pick out a fly if it wasn’t wired properly. The Ferryman nodded and let him drone on, not bothering to point out that all that hadn’t been able to stop Jordan Lime from being mutilated in his bedroom.

The front gate was still manned, but the perimeter guards had been dismissed. The sprawling mansion was shrouded by the misty, damp day, and the drizzle felt like ice against Kimberlain’s cheeks as Kamanski led him up the steps to the mansion’s entrance. The marble foyer that had contained the surveillance station was empty, so they made their way to the library, which had a big-screen television with a built-in VCR.

The tape in question was already loaded.

“There’s nothing to see,” Kamanski claimed. “I’ve been over it myself a hundred times.”

“Push
PLAY,
David.”

Kamanski punched the button and the screen filled with the last image of Jordan Lime’s bedroom, its occupant resting beneath the covers, unaware of the awful violence that was to come. There was the crash of glass, and in the next instant the picture became a snowy, almost total blur.

“What was the crash?”

“Picture fell off the wall.”

“How?”

“We don’t know.”

Now the blur was in motion, darkened seconds later by the splash of blood against the lens. Kimberlain rewound the tape and watched it a second time. “Any idea what caused the video breakup?”

“The feed line running from the wall was partially severed.”

“And the line ran close to the picture that conveniently slipped from the wall?”

“Close enough.”

Kimberlain watched the tape again, this time with the volume turned up higher. He didn’t know precisely what he had been expecting, but this was worse. Total silence, then the sudden, awful screams—sounds of a struggle, maybe—followed by the dripping of blood.

“What if the killer was already inside the room when Lime hit the sack?”

Kamanski shook his head. “No way. The room was checked before Lime entered and was under guard all day. Even supposing the killer could have hidden himself for a number of hours, the security system is equipped with motion detectors sensitive enough to pick up breathing. No readings all day. I’ll show you the printouts if you like.”

“I’ll take your word, Hermes. I also assume you’ve had the audio on the tape slowed and filtered.”

Kamanski nodded. “We brought every single sound up to a hundred times its normal resonance and separated each one into individual segments.”

“Footsteps?”

“Not that we could find. If there were any, they got lost in the screaming.”

“Let me see the bedroom,” said the Ferryman.

Kamanski hadn’t been exaggerating in the helicopter. Other than the removal of severed body parts and other remnants of the corpse, nothing in Jordan Lime’s bedroom had been touched. Huge pools of dried blood were everywhere—on the floor, the sheets, the rug. Fingers of near black reached out from the walls in frozen animation, seeming almost to slither as Kimberlain gazed at them.

He moved about the room and in his own mind could see it all happening, Jordan Lime being torn limb from limb. But he couldn’t visualize the actual murder. All he saw were the pieces being scattered to the sounds of the horrible screaming he had heard on the tape downstairs. He tried once again for a fix on Lime, tried to envision what had done this to him, but drew a blank. Very often when the Ferryman walked onto a crime scene he could feel the residue of the perpetrator as clearly as he could see the crawling fingers of blood in Lime’s bedroom. But now he was coming up empty.
Stick with the technical, then
, he urged himself. “The floors?” he asked.

Kamanski was just behind him. “Dusted and electronically scanned. No footprints other than Lime’s.”

“Inconclusive. The killer could have worn shoes with Teflon-coated soles. No marks or residue that way.”

“Granted, except Teflon squeaks on wood. We’d have heard something on the tape.”

The Ferryman continued to gaze about the room. He focused on the window. “Was that open Sunday night?”

“Yes, but the glass curtains covering it are reinforced with steel linings. Bulletproof and electrified. Our man didn’t come through that way. Nothing living did, anyway.”

The Ferryman was still looking that way. “A ray,” he said. “A ray fired from a good distance beyond the window. Your steel lining might not stop that.”

“But a ray would certainly have left heat fringes on the severed body parts. Lime’s limbs were sliced off. A sword like the one you were polishing back in Vermont. That’s what we’ve been thinking about.”

“Wielded by a killer who couldn’t possibly have been in the room.”

“The theory’s not perfect.”

“I want to bring that inventor friend of mine in on this,” the Ferryman said.

“The best minds in the country have already run the circle.”

“Conducting a search based on what they can legitimately accept to be real. My friend can accept anything. Nothing gets ruled out.”

“Call him in. Whatever it takes.”

The sun was down by the time Kimberlain pulled into a parking lot adjacent to Sunnyside Railroad Yard, a resting place for mothballed railroad cars in New Jersey, just outside the tunnel under the Hudson River to Penn Station. He danced across dead tracks as if current might still have been pumping through them.

The gray and brown steel corpses of Amtrak and New Jersey Transit cars were lined up for a good eighth of a mile, rows squeezed so close together that there was barely enough room for Kimberlain to shoulder his way between them. The pair of rusted brown cars he was heading for had carried cargo, not passengers. They were off to one side, apart from the neighboring lines of Amtrak cars, and were in relatively good condition; they seemed to be beggingto be hitched onto engines once more.

“Ferryman here,” he said softly into a small slit, cut at eye level on the side of one of the rusty cars. The car’s rear door opened with a familiar
whooosh
.

“Welcome aboard,” said Captain Seven.

The captain’s hair had hung past his shoulders, wild and unkempt, for as long as Kimberlain had known him. The only difference lately was the graying edges along his temples. He wore cut-off jean shorts which exposed his thin, knobby legs, and a leather vest over a black Grateful Dead T-shirt. A medallion with a sixties peace sign embossed on it dangled from his neck, even though he’d spent much of that era fighting in Vietnam instead of protesting about it. Kimberlain didn’t know the captain’s real name and never had. He knew him only as a spaced-out tech whiz who’d made his mark in Vietnam as a brilliant flake from the seventh planet in another galaxy. “Captain” wasn’t his real rank, but it sounded nice when you ran the “Seven” after it. He seemed content never to return to his own identity, and Kimberlain never pressed him about it.

“Hope you haven’t come to complain about the video system,” the captain said.

“Not a chance. Works like a charm.”

“Course it does,” Seven said proudly.

Kimberlain followed him through the doorway into his decidedly unhumble abode. The furniture was stunning. Each shiny black leather piece was built precisely to fit in its location. The carefully arranged interior was filled with flashing lights, diodes, CRT screens, monitors, switches, and assorted machines and data banks from floor to ceiling. Kimberlain caught the pungent scent of marijuana and flared his nostrils. “Ventilation system needs to be flushed.” He smiled.

From a nearby table, Captain Seven lifted a plastic contraption bristling with tubes and dominated by water-filled chambers. “This shit’s too good to flush out,” he said, wrapping his mouth around a small hole in the device and sucking air from it deeply.

Kimberlain could hear bubbles churning. Almost immediately smoke poured through the various serpentine chambers, tunneling ultimately into Captain Seven’s lungs. He inhaled until the smoke was gone. The bubbles stopped.

Seven held his breath briefly, then let it out, stray smoke following with it. His eyes fell fondly on the marijuana-filled thing. “Best bong ever,” he reported, voice thinner with each word. “Don’t need to be lit. Breathing in supplies all necessary combustion. Don’t remember how I came up with it. If I’d had it over in Nam, though, I’d be in the millions now.”

“Retire right,” said the Ferryman.

“Yeah. Just imagine. All those boys in their foxholes at night lighting up a joint and sending a signal to the Cong for hundreds of yards. They had these, they could smoke themselves silly and the Cong would never know. We might even have won the war. Who knows?”

“Maybe you should take out a patent.”

“Too fuckin’ late.” Captain Seven sighed. “World’s turned to that powder shit. Freezes their minds. This stuff, well I been smokin’ it for damn near thirty years now, and look at me.”

“Right.”

“Sure you don’t want any?”

“Yup.”

Captain Seven plopped down in a black leather chair under a terminal board with a dozen flashing red lights. He turned to Kimberlain. “So what do you want?”

“Got a challenge for you.”

“Oh?”

“Ultimate locked-room murder. Got the best tech boys in the country baffled.”

“Not the best, old buddy, but please go on.”

Kimberlain told him about Jordan Lime’s murder, told him everything in the clearest, most deliberate terms so that Seven’s brilliant but often frazzled mind could absorb it. When he was finished, the captain just sat there expressionless, not even blinking, the slight motions of his chest in and out the only reminder he was alive.

Without warning or word, his eyes flashed alert again and he drew the bong back to his lips. Once more bubbles churned like water boiling in an open pot on a stove. Smoke filled the chambers, and then it was gone.

“I need to know how it was done,” Kimberlain added after the captain had exhaled.