Twist (Book 1): The Abnorm Chronicles-Twist (10 page)

Chapter
23

“Dammit, Dick!” Chantel looked at her husband, frustrated. “I don’t understand why you had to go out on a Friday, and I don’t understand why there’s blood on your clothes from last night.”

Adam watched the conversation from afar, fascinated by what was unfolding. Richard
Benedict Sr. put his hands on his wife’s shoulders. “Honey, I told you—after Thursday night, we made the playoffs. There’s extra bowling practice for the next month, and I’ll be going out a lot. I’ve gotta get up over a one sixty, otherwise we’re not going to make it all the way to the championship.”

Chantel
frowned. “Are you telling me the truth? I didn’t think you guys in the league did anything but drink beers and occasionally throw a ball down the lanes. I thought none of you cared about winning.”

Richard
Sr. smiled at his wife. “You’re half right. We do enjoy getting together and drinking the beers, but it’s a league. We might not be the best team, but we did really good this season, and we made the Cities Championship Playoff. It’s not like this’ll ever happen again, so we have to try.”

“
And what about the blood on your shirt?”

“
Stupidest thing ever.” He shook his head. “Donny hadn’t put his shoes on yet, tried to walk in front of the score computers, and he slipped. It’s just from his bloody nose. That’s the last time I run to help a wounded buddy.” When she remained clearly skeptical, he said, “What are you so uptight about? It’s just a bowling league. I’m not having an affair!”

“
I . . . I don’t know. With the murder upstairs, I worry about you—and I worry about us. You weren’t home. The killer could have gotten in here while we were watching TV.”

He hugged her.
“Don’t worry, most nights I’ll be here safe with you and the kids.” He looked into the other room where Rick Jr. and Ariel were watching Saturday-morning cartoons. “I’ll stay home today, I promise. We’ll just hang out and watch TV. There’s a game on this afternoon.”

Adam locked the scene in his head, holding on
to the thread. For the last day and a half he had been practicing nonstop, pushing his limits, pushing his boundaries. Watch, eat, sleep. Watch, eat, sleep.

H
e hadn’t felt this engaged since before his injury. He was defeating his limitations, overcoming the things that held him back. For Chloe. He pressed his hand against the window, felt the vibrations, felt the outside as he added a second view to his mental landscape. His eye muscles twitched, his heart rate slowed.

Selene was dragging the sheets off her bed, trying not to cry
after her Friday-night conquest. The sex had been good. No, the sex had been great. But he was an abusive asshole, just like all the others. She had brought this one home late, well past 2:00 a.m., when all the Capitol Hill bars and pubs closed. She had encouraged the bondage, the slapping, but the jerk had gone too far. Now she had a black eye, and there was blood on her sheets. She had gotten him the hell out of her apartment by 8:00 a.m., but even now he was banging on the door.

“
Let me in, you bitch!” His voice was clear between the thump, thump, thump of his fist hitting the thin wood. “I want my damn pants back.”

“
You should have thought about that before you gave me a black eye, asshole!” she screamed. “Maybe if my damn lip wasn’t bleeding, I’d let you have your pants. Now get the hell out of here before I call the cops.”

The
pounding stopped. “Fuck you, skank!”

Adam widened his view
, watched the windows, the doors, letting his gaze travel inside the building. With the right combination of angles, he spotted the tattooed man clad in only a pair of boxers standing outside Selene’s door. Though he didn’t keep knocking, he remained standing there. He seemed puzzled about what to do. Ten minutes passed, and he still didn’t move. Was he waiting to pounce on her? Poised for the moment she opened the door to see if he had gone?

Adam decided to act. Still holding the two scenes in his mind, watching the
dull Benedict family and the perpetually abused young woman, he keyed the phone on his wheelchair and dialed Selene’s phone number. He had tracked down the contact information for everyone in Chloe’s building, as part of getting to know them. He even had Chloe’s number—how he wished he had found the nerve to call her, at least once.

He knew all of their numbers, except the new guy. Should he call each of them, find some pretense? It would make each one of them more real, sharpen his distant image.
No,
not until I need to.

He heard the ringing on his line
and also the faint ringtone— Filter’s “Nice Shot”—from the apartment across the street. “Dammit.” Selene threw the sheets back onto the mattress, frustrated, and scrambled around on her floor until she found the jeans she had discarded the previous night. She yanked out her cell phone. Adam had a blocked number, so she wouldn’t know who he was, but she answered regardless. “Who the hell is this?” She covered the tears with anger. “Is it you, asshole?”

Adam blinked in surprise. It was the first time he had actually heard her voice with his own ears
—not quite the same as what he heard in his mind. But the auditory clues through the phone line added another layer of richness and detail to his picture of her. The tiny clues just added to his imaginary vision, minute traces and trims based on how the sounds echoed. It was like turning a black-and-white image into color, and then into 3-D.

“
Uh, I live down the hall from you, and, uh, do you know there’s a man in his underwear just standing in front of your door?” Adam tried to fake a disinterested drawl. “I’m going to call the police if he doesn’t go away.”

Selene hung up the phone
without saying anything.

Even with
the connection cut, his gift remembered. Her room was still more three dimensional in his mind, more vivid than it had been before. Adam was amazed.

He watched as
Selene punched the mattress and then stormed to the door. She glanced through the peephole, then yelled, “I said get lost!”

“
I need my clothes!”

“
Fine.” Adam tracked her through the window and watched through the reflection on the closet door as she grabbed his discarded pair of jeans, boots, socks, a T-shirt and a leather jacket.

She paused on
her way to the door, extracted the wallet, and snagged all of the bills before shoving the wallet back into the pocket. With the security chain in place, she opened the door a few inches.

Seeing his opportunity, the tattooed
man pushed his bare shoulder into the door, but the security chain held, barely.

“
You’re a worthless shit.” Selene started shoving his clothes through the crack. Once all the items were through, she threw her body against the door, forcing it closed, and locked the deadbolt.

Watching with an even sharper intensity,
Adam controlled his breathing, carefully drew back the focus. He relaxed the muscles around his temples and let his eyes unfocus. They zoomed in on the new tenant in the building, the man with the fancy liquor collection.

His
furniture had been moved in, and the swarthy man was dressed in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, still unpacking. The furniture was made of stout wood. The man seemed to prefer deep reds and browns with the occasional hint of yellows.

He had already
set up a futon, folded into couch position, and two wood-framed chairs on either side. A flat-screen TV hung on the opposite wall. Adam scanned the room. One of the man’s liquor bottles was gone from last night, but the reflections from the curved glass gave Adam a full view as he assembled the visual bits. A single tumbler on the kitchen counter still had a thin film of amber on the bottom. A whole bottle gone, though?

The man had a large frame, and apparently he could
pound it down and keep it down. He showed no signs of hangover misery as he whistled to himself, arranged furniture, unpacked boxes. Framed posters went up on the walls, showing that he was a Hitchcock fan.
Vertigo
,
Psycho
,
Rear Window
.

For a moment,
as he intensified his concentration, Adam thought he could hear a heartbeat. A thump, thump, thump. That was ridiculous, hearing a heartbeat from across the street through multiple windows. He tried to concentrate harder, then he suddenly realized what he was hearing. Not a heartbeat at all.

He
’d been so focused using his gift on the world across the street that he missed what was happening right here.

Someone was knocking on his door.

Chapter 24

Sounds from the nearby street echoed through the VA Hospital parking structure. The entire level had been roped off. Crime-scene unit investigators worked outward in a careful spiral from where Dr. Wolverton’s body had been found the night before.

Cooper ducked under the police tape
and walked toward the victim’s car. Halfway along the row of empty spaces, a table had been set up, covered with an assortment of gloves, plastic booties, evidence bags, manila folders. He paused to gear up so he wouldn’t disturb the active crime scene.

He could see Ingrid’s body sprawled behind her car, and he looked questioningly at Jones. “Why is she still here?
It’s been hours.”

The detective shrugged. “The lab boys said something about not wanting to move it yet. We’ve had the coroner waiting.”

“Okay, it’s your crime scene.”

Together, the two walked to
her car. As with the other victims, Dr. Wolverton’s throat had been cut open. The slice itself was jagged and the weapon, a broken whiskey bottle, had rolled up against her bent knees. Blood had flowed down the sloped floor of the parking garage, traveling twenty feet before it finally pooled.

“Give me a little space, Detective, let me do my thing.”

Jones raised an eyebrow but backed off. “Hey man, you’re the Brilliant.”

Cooper gathered details from all directions, all angles, and started to assemble them in his mind.
He repeated the ritual he had used at Chloe’s house the previous evening. Squatting down, he tried to angle his vision to match up with Dr. Wolverton’s dead gaze. Something wasn’t right.

After falling, she had moved her head
—turned to look at something. He leaned close to the ground, followed her glazed eyes. His gaze landed on the trunk of her car. Why would she have been looking there? Did it mean anything?

Standing
back up, Cooper dusted off his gloved hands. He assessed the body again and positioned himself near where she would have been standing. With repeated glances, he changed his stance until he guessed that he was matching her position.

“Angle of blood spatter suggests the killer would have been right behind
the victim,” Jones said.

Cooper wondered if
Dr. Wolverton had seen her assailant coming, or if she had turned around and been completely surprised; he guessed the latter. Looking over the body, he realized her left hand was loose and open, her right hand clenched. She didn’t look as if she had flailed or fought against the killer. He pried at her clenched hand, but found nothing inside her fist.

“Do we have the keys to her car? She must have had them
in her grip.”

“Didn’t find any keys on the body or in her purse,” Jones said. “Nothing’s been removed from the scene yet.”

He frowned. Then how did she expect to drive anywhere? Maybe she had simply forgotten the keys back in her hospital office, which would be easy enough to check—but too much of a coincidence. Did the killer take her keys? For what purpose? Certainly not to steal the car.

“Better get somebody over to Dr.
Wolverton’s address. The killer may be using the keys to gain access to her home. And she would have had an office key on her ring, too, so double-check if it’s been ransacked.”

Jones made a note.

Cooper turned, thought of where Dr. Wolverton’s gaze had been. He made sketchy motions with his hands. “I think she had the keys out, got to the car. Maybe she was about to open her trunk, or maybe she had just closed it when the killer came up behind her. See where the body is—doesn’t look like she was about to climb into the driver’s seat.”

Jones yelled
to the techs, “We need a locksmith, find a way to open her trunk. She may have had something in there.”

Cooper guessed, though, that if the killer had taken her keys, he would also have taken whatever was in the trunk.
“Did he grab her wallet?”

“No. Just the keys.”

One of the CSU techs grabbed a small case and trotted over with tools to pop the trunk. It was empty except for a never-used emergency kit, an old blanket, an ice scraper, and a coupon mailer, long expired. Nothing else.

“Well, that’s a dead end,” Jones said.

Cooper studied the trunk, but nothing jumped out at him. Eventually, he went back to inspecting the body, but his gaze kept being drawn to the jagged, bloodstained whiskey bottle.

While Jones lifted up the carpet in the trunk
to expose nothing more exciting than a spare tire, Cooper continued staring until he came to his conclusion. “The spatter is in the same pattern as the previous victims, the bottle appears to be broken in about the same way . . . but I think I’ve spotted something new.”

Jones pulled his head out of the trunk
to look where Cooper pointed.

“See how
the bottle rolled down here by her knees?” He stood back up without touching the bottle. “Let me show you. Imagine I’m holding a broken bottle. Now stand in front of me. Here.”

The two men stood face-to-face while Cooper pantomimed. “Now, I slash your throat, you fall down
, I drop the bottle, and bend to pick up your keys. Where does the bottle end up?”

Jones looked confused. “By my head.”

“Right, except it’s at Dr. Wolverton’s knees.” He focused, added the details, saw the pattern.

Jones tried to come up with an explanation. “
Did the killer toss it to one side?”

“I don’t think so.”
Cooper smiled. “I think he’s left-handed.”

Jones eyes widened. “That’s a stretch, but you might be right.”

More pieces from Chloe Eccles’s apartment filled slots in the ever-widening picture his brain assembled, along with details from photos of the other crime scenes. “It would also explain Chloe’s apartment. If you look at the spatter angles there, the killer would have had his left shoulder in the same space as the door. Unless, of course, he was left-handed and swung the bottle up from the opposite side.”

Jones pulled out a notebook and jotted in it. “All right, let’s check our files of people we’ve identified around the scenes,
find the ones who are left-handed. That’s ten percent of the population, but I’ll take any lead.”

Cooper nodded. “We also need to
cross-reference this against VA staff, see about any of Dr. Wolverton’s coworkers. I’ll put in a request with the hospital administration.” The other murders seemed to be random choices, any Brilliant victim, but the killing of Dr. Wolverton seemed more personal, more intentional. She had been a specific target, for a specific reason.

He was
more sure than ever that the trunk had not been empty.