Twist (Book 1): The Abnorm Chronicles-Twist (13 page)

H
is gift kicked in, and spectral versions of himself began to extend outward, although shadows muffled his ability to see with the clarity of daytime. But he had patience and will. He explored the world outside.

The night had been waiting for Adam to awaken.

Chapter 29

Darkness stretched across the streets of Denver, punctured by the occasional street lamp. Front lights and porch lamps helped brighten the walkway into the Lion’s Regency Apartment building—where Adam Lee lived.

But still, there were enough shadows. Enough opportunities. From a vantage rich with shadows, the killer watched the
apartments.

At this time of night,
nearly three in the morning, traffic was sparse in the neighborhood, a few pedestrians walking or weaving their way home, an occasional car rolling past. Entire minutes would stretch by without any interruptions.

Plenty of opportunities.

The two cops in the squad car were complacent, sitting snugly—in the way, watching too closely.
Pissing all over my territory. Worthless!

It was an affront. Exerting their power here, of all places?
Parked right outside the building! This transgression could not be allowed—it would interfere too much. Especially not to protect a filthy Twist . . . as Dr. Wolverton’s files had made plain. The creepy man who sat in the window all day and watched
everything
was one of the freaks, too! He, at least, would be an easy one to kill. Given the right opportunity.

So,
the cops had to be taken out. That was not only a practical necessity so the work could continue; they needed to serve as examples. Police protecting a Twist? It was nauseating. Consort with the freaks, die like one of the freaks.

Stumbling along like just another drunkard on the way home from one of the nearby bars, holding a bottle pressed against a loose coat, the killer brushed against the squad car,
paused, swayed. Leaned against the roof of the car—and quickly deposited the bottle there.

The two cops inside were annoyed, bored,
sleepy. “Hey, go home!” yelled the cop in the driver’s seat.

An incoherent mumbled reply, and then more stumbling, moving on
—but now the pulse raced. The cops didn’t notice the missing bottle from a gloved hand.

Rounding the corner
into an alley, a quick change of clothing left the killer clad in all black; the wig and gray hoodie tossed in the Dumpster—where it would surely be found.

Next, pulling a
face mask into place, ready for fast, fluid movements, the killer glanced around the corner at the car. Waited . . . watched the object placed in plain sight on the roof of the squad car.

A bottle of
Everclear with a rag taped to the bottom, which had muffled any clink of glass on the car roof. The officers hadn’t heard a thing. A second rag protruded from the top of the bottle, which acted as a wick that had been absorbing the 150 proof alcohol.

The device was more complex than that, though. At the end of the wick was attached a toy that could be purchased at any magic shop, a remote flash bomb triggered by a fifty-cent toy RF button. The
Everclear was the most expensive part of the makeshift bomb.

Hunting now, flitting from shadow to shadow, the killer moved back toward the squad car, crouch
ed down behind another car twenty feet away. The thick leather shirt provided good protection for slithering under the car, working forward, inch by inch . . . finally reaching the undercarriage of the squad car. It was time.

Clutching a broken bottle in the left hand, the killer triggered the RF button and detonated the
Everclear bomb on top of the car. The modified Molotov cocktail exploded with a whump as glass shards flew. Liquid fire sprayed across the squad car’s roof and windshield.

The two cops yel
led, fully awake now. Instantly, both doors opened, feet appeared on the street at the driver’s side. Two exposed calves.

A slash with
as much force as the angle would allow took out the cop’s legs. Grabbing an ankle even as he gasped and fell, the killer used the cop as leverage, pulling him down while sliding out from under the car. The jagged bottle quickly slit the man’s throat. It was all a single, well-choreographed movement. Step by step in a perfect blueprint of a plan. Grabbing the holstered sidearm on the cop’s belt, the killer arose in a smooth movement, fitting a hand around the grip, the trigger.

No time,
no chance to cut the other worthless officer’s throat—as would have been preferable. Check the safety, clear. Line up the shot, clear.

The second cop turned around, reacting to the sound of the scuffle. “Hey,
Marshal—”

The gun fired before the cop could even register surprise. The sound was explosive, far louder than the grace and finesse of a silent broken bottle.

The killer bolted.

Less than a minute later, a Latino man holding a draw
n pistol burst through the front doors of Adam Lee’s apartment building, breathing hard after running down seven flights of stairs—but he was much too late.

Chapter
30

Ready to collapse where he was standing, Cooper gave in to exhaustion at midnight Saturday night and left the police station. Maybe he would get a little more worth out of his hotel room tonight.

The case had
absorbed him, and even with his pattern-recognition ability, he was still playing catch-up. Detective Jones already had weeks of work invested in it. After the murder of Chloe Eccles, Cooper had thought he would have a week to absorb he details from all angles and all dimensions of subtlety, but Dr. Wolverton’s murder added a bright, bold splash to the tapestry, a prominent connection if he could only figure out what it was.

And he worried that it
could also mean that, after breaking the established Thursday-night schedule, the killer might escalate into a spree.

How could
Cooper justify giving up time to sleep? But his body insisted. Three days of running on empty was too much, and he had pushed too hard. His brain just said
enough
.

Detective Jones—for whom it was just another day on the job—
went home and got sleep each night. “It’s a big city. There’ll always be another murder. Job security, Agent Cooper. And if I lose sleep over every one, man, then I’ll never sleep at all.”

C
ooper went to his hotel, saw that it was much too late to call Natalie or Todd, again, and went to sleep.

Three hours later, the
incessant ringing of the phone woke him. Apparently Detective Jones didn’t take his own advice to sleep through the night.

Cooper groped for the bedside lamp and flicked it on
, listening to Jones’s stress-ragged voice. “Another one, Cooper. And it’s bad.”

Cooper was
wide awake now, though his body felt as if he’d been in a boxing match. “What happened?”

“
The killer took down . . . just . . .” There was a pause. “I need you here, Cooper. At the Lion’s Regency Apartments.”

A cold front swept through Cooper’s bloodstream. “Is it Adam Lee?”

Jones sounded sickened and angry. “No, the detail uniforms downstairs are dead. Both of them—butchered . . . Christ, Cooper!”

“On my way.”

#

Hunching his shoulders against the cold air, Cooper half walked and half
jogged up to the line of flashing lights and gathered cops. He slowed, preparing himself. He didn’t need his ability to know it was going to be a ghastly scene.

The police car
parked outside of Adam Lee’s apartment building was blackened. The exterior paint burned in a superficial fire. A distraction, perhaps.

The officer on the driver
’s side lay on the ground with blood pooled from slashes on the backs of his calves—that blood mixed with the sticky red puddle that had poured from his torn throat.

Cooper caught all the details in an instant—and something else.
The officer’s sidearm was gone.

The second
cop, sprawled on the sidewalk, had been shot in the head. Apparently the killer had not found the broken bottle swift or efficient enough to kill two cops together.

Crime
-scene tape barricaded the block from both directions, isolating the street. At 3:30 a.m. there wasn’t any traffic to worry about anyway, but groggy neighbors and pedestrians had started to gather.

Flashing his Equitable Services badge at the officer guarding the barricade, Cooper ducked under
the tape and found Detective Jones by the burned police cruiser.

Jones looked up. His face wore a sick expression.
“You know, Agent Cooper, I’m starting to long for the good old days when the killer only struck on Thursdays. Shit, this is four dead in four days.”

“I was afraid of escalation, but this . . . something bad was triggered after Chloe
Eccles’s murder.” The pattern circled around him like a vortex: first, the disabled man had witnessed the murder, then his therapist was killed, then the two cops stationed outside his building to keep watch. He looked at the apartment building, glanced up at the array of windows, some dark, some illuminated, that faced one another from the two buildings. “And this is ground zero.”

Jones’s
eyes had dark rings under them, his jaw was clenched. Anger burned in his eyes. While crime-scene techs moved around the two bodies, taking images and measurements, Jones leaned into the burned cruiser through the open passenger-side door.

“Detective Rodriguez says our wheelchair
boy saw the whole thing go down. Rodriguez ran down to the scene, but too late.” He unbolted the car’s laptop from the console, removed the security casing, and backed out of the police cruiser with the computer. “But I prefer this over an eyewitness report from seven stories up. Real dash-cam images so I can see the face of the guy we’re going to take down.”

Knowing Adam Lee’s
sharp- seeing ability, though, Cooper wouldn’t discount what the vet saw. But with dash-cam footage and the eye-witness statement, it would be enough to find the killer and put him away forever.

And if the killer
was a Brilliant, as Cooper suspected, that would be exactly what Director Peters would want as a victory for Equitable Services.

Cooper
stood by Jones as he opened the laptop, found the dash-cam footage. Jones braced himself before he hit “Play.” “Get ready, man.”

#

As he watched the grainy, uncertain images from the dash cam, Cooper assembled what he saw, formed a full image while Jones was still trying to process what he saw.

“The first man who walked down the street, the drunk—that was him,” Cooper said. “He must have been assessing
the two officers, at the same time as he planted his Molotov cocktail.” The supposed drunk’s disguise was obvious to Cooper, and even though the killer tried to modify the walk with swaying and exaggerated staggers, the overall pattern of body movement matched the template he saw a few minutes later from the swiftly fleeing killer in the dark mask.

“When he’s staggering past in disguise, the hoodie pulled around his head, is
that first image going to be good enough for facial recognition?”

Jones shook his head. “It’s a clean enough shot, but his head was down and
obscured. All we get is part of the jawline. Clean-shaven . . . that’s about all.” His knuckles were white. “And it looks like you were right—he’s left-handed.”

Cooper saw the anger on the detective’s face, as well as on the crime scene techs, the other uniformed officers. He said, “We are going to catch this guy—and soon. With this kind of escalation, there
’ll be a lot of mistakes.”

“Damn right,” Jones said. “But
this doesn’t hit you like it hits me, man. These are my guys, my department. You come in from Equitable Services, going all Federal on me. I thought, sure, why not let someone else do the heavy lifting? Why did I listen to you in the first place? You’re not a detective. You don’t have any background in solving murders! You just keep an inventory on Twists.”

Cooper
felt the force of the other man’s anger, but he endured it. “That’s right. Tracking them down and catching them when they cause harm to society. And now there’s one particular Twist I need to catch. We’re on the same side here, Jones.”

The detective
gritted his teeth. “I’m sorry, man. This just gets under my skin.”

“
I know. Let’s focus on taking this asshole down. Come with me upstairs to talk to Adam Lee. If he was watching from the window, don’t underestimate his ability. He can see things that you and I would never notice.”

Chapter
31

Darkness fought back against Adam’s perception, but he used his gift to battle against the shadows, to use every flicker and inference to enhance his view. Every street lamp, every window light, every source of illumination was as much an obstacle as the darkness; the glare ruined his sensitivity.

He had seen the attack on the police car
as it went down. From his chair he yelled to awaken Rodriguez, who bolted up, took only a second to listen to Adam’s frantic report, and then ran down the stairs to assist his fellow officers. Too late.

Now,
Adam kept scanning the scene, the flaring and painful red-and-blue flashers of the cop cars, the red lights of the ambulance. Down below, Agent Cooper and Detective Jones inspected the bodies, the burned squad car. Together, they set up a laptop and watched something on the screen.

Rodriguez had come back, edgy and distraught, pacing the apartment as if
hoping
the killer could come up to threaten Adam, because that would give him a chance for payback. Adam shut out all the distractions and kept pushing, sending out his visual avatars to hunt for the killer in ways that the other detectives could not.

His
perception flitted from window to window, reflection to reflection, struggling to see, to
witness
. There were figures behind the curtains, curious tenants watching the unsettling activity in the street, already nervous because of Chloe’s murder. But most of them had been asleep at the time. They hadn’t seen anything.

But Adam had. Awake and staring out the window, he had actually glimpsed
the killer at work, the same piece of trash that had killed Chloe. While the police continued to comb the crime scene on the street below, Adam kept looking around corners, down the side streets.

He
hadn’t been able to see a face, and he might not be able to pick out the person from a crowd, not right away, but he had acquired a million little details. He had seen the shadowy form, gathered nuances that were part of a totality, and those details were burned into his mind. He had told Rodriguez what he had seen, but the other detective, no matter how sympathetic he might be, couldn’t comprehend or believe the scope of what Adam could perceive, even up here in his isolation.

He had glimpsed
other hints off a darkened window, a flicker of movement from a side street. He had been watching even before the bottle bomb spilled its fire over the squad car as a diversion. He had seen the hunched, hooded figure stagger past the squad car and plant the Molotov cocktail; more importantly, he had also seen the figure duck down the side alley, strip off the disguise, and don the dark mask . . . getting ready to kill.

The wig and jacket had come off,
tossed in the alley’s Dumpster. And for the briefest moment, Adam had seen the back of the killer’s head—long hair darkened by shadows and flowing down to midback.

A
s he sat in tense, amped-up silence, he pondered that hair. It was long, wavy, and appeared well cared for. It didn’t look like a man’s haircut, not even a wannabe rock star—could the killer be a woman? He could not rectify the things this person had done with the women he had known. Like sweet Chloe with her beautiful drawings.

But
he had known plenty of badass women, too. Squirrel, for instance—probably the toughest SEAL on the team. He smiled to think of her, then stopped, shocked. He had not thought about those comrades outside of his persistent nightmares in a very long time. He usually blocked those memories to avoid the feelings of guilt and loss that paralyzed him as much as his damaged body did.

But not tonight.
No, he had other priorities tonight. Those memories, no matter how painful, were part of his life—part of what had transformed him into what he was now.

He reassessed that fraction-of-a-second glimpse.
Could the killer really be a woman? Now he reconsidered the actual body, despite the hoodie, despite the loose clothing. Once those preconceptions went away, he did spot certain telltale signs. The shoulders were narrow, the hips were curved, the agile movements as he/she squirmed under the parked cars and came up from beneath the squad car just after the flames blossomed.
Maybe. Maybe . . .

Biting his lip,
Adam thought he should share that insight with Agent Cooper. Given his experience with Brilliants, the man from Equitable Services might be the only one who’d believe Adam’s claims.

As if his thoughts had caught
Cooper’s attention, the agent turned from the laptop on the car hood and looked up toward Adam’s window. Together, he and Detective Jones headed for the entrance to the apartment building. Yes, he should have expected they would come up here, wanting to talk with him.

H
e pivoted his chair and rolled back toward the center of the room. Detective Rodriguez had been pacing the floor, clearly wanting to be down at the crime scene, but believing more firmly than ever that Adam might be in danger. When the wheelchair moved, Rodriguez was instantly on alert. “Everything all right?”

“
Agent Cooper and Detective Jones are on their way up.”

Rodriguez
went to face the door, standing ready where he would have a perfect view. Reaching under his jacket, he unclipped the safety strap on his holster. Before the two men could knock, Adam touched the button on the arm of his wheelchair, and the door unlocked. Springs and a single gear pulled the door open.

Half a minute later,
Cooper and Jones walked in, surprised to see Adam in his wheelchair beside Rodriguez. “Come inside. I’ll tell you everything I can—provided you’ll believe me.”

Jones looked skeptical, but not Agent Cooper. “I’ll believe you.”

Before closing the door, Rodriguez glanced both directions down the hall, from the stairwell on one end to the roof-access door on the other. He closed the door and took up his position again.

Cooper
stepped up to Adam. “The first three murders don’t seem to fit into the pattern that’s crystallizing in my mind, but these last ones are all centered around you. Chloe Eccles, Dr. Wolverton, now the two officers stationed to watch over you. Nothing random about it.”

Sickened,
Adam shook his head. “I don’t know why it would be about me, but it’s not
only
about me, no matter what. Even if I’m the next victim, nothing’s going to change. The killer will keep targeting Brilliants. Maybe every Thursday night, or maybe a lot more often than that.”

“Not
gonna happen,” said Rodriguez from the doorway. “You’re safe, Adam.”

Detective Jones pushed forward, as if he didn’t want Agent Cooper to do all the work. “
Mr. Lee, if you forgot to tell us any details, you’d best let us know now. Rack your brain. That creep killed two of my officers who were down there just doing their jobs.”

“And Chloe,” Adam said, his voice going
soft. “Chloe was murdered, too. And Dr. Wolverton.” His throat tightened. “Don’t you think I want this monster caught?”

For so long,
he had been nothing more than a vicarious watcher sitting alone in his tower of isolation. He was an observer, nothing else. But now he realized that he was not the weak person he thought he was. Ingrid had tried to tell him, again and again. Adam was smart, he still had a brain and an incredible gift, and now he had resolved himself—he could make real a difference in this case. “I’ll help you however I can.”

Cooper
bent down and put his face next to Adam’s. “I’m going to level with you. The first day we met, I told you what we have in common. I’m a Brilliant, too, but I didn’t tell you exactly what I can do. With my gift, I can read people the same way that you can
see
them—on a whole different level than what normal people experience. Just like you can see what’s far away, I can see what’s right in front of me. And I can see that
you
saw something—something I need to know.”

Adam looked at him.
“Explain why you think the killer is a Brilliant. Why?”

“I’ve studied
Brilliants for years, tracked them, tried to anticipate what they’ll do. I have a better feel for that than just about anyone else. Brilliants all share a particular trait—including you and me. We analyze details, and we’re able to pick apart what those details are and imprint them in our memory before we act upon them. How this skill manifests can be vastly different from one Brilliant to another, but most of us are exceptional at strategy and tactics in one way or another.”

Cooper’s face took on a distant expression. “
When I was a kid, I heard about how the Russian chess masters got to be what they were. From childhood on, they would sit in parks, constantly study how they played. In Russia, chess was like baseball or football in America. Chess was ingrained into them, which led to a superior grasp of overall tactics and strategy wired into their brains—an instinct.

“
At baseline, Brilliants have a separate culture with that superior sense of strategy and tactics built into us, just like the Russian chess masters do. It’s how it is, how we are. Back at the DAR in Washington, our analysis routines flagged this case, and something made it stand out in my mind. After I reviewed the initial victims, all three Brilliants, and after I saw the dash-cam video from tonight . . . I just know. This person can’t be a normal.”

“
And you think I’m next?”

“
Honestly, I don’t know. But the pattern seems pretty clear to me.”

As he watched Agent Cooper
, Adam’s gift gave him another unusual insight. With his intense perception, he could see every pore on the man’s skin, the gentle throb of a pulse in the veins in his neck, the faint sheen of perspiration caused by the exertion of climbing seven flights of stairs. But as Cooper talked with him, the agent’s heart rate remained even.

Truth
, Adam’s gift seemed to whisper.

He
blinked. That revelation was unexpected. He wanted to trust Cooper, give him what he needed to complete the pattern, and that gave him the reassurance. “You haven’t found all the important evidence yet. Have your men look down the alley just around the corner of this building. South side. There’s a Dumpster, and you’ll find a wig and a hoodie. The killer dumped them there before coming back to kill the two cops.”

Jones
turned away from the window, frowned at Adam. “How in the hell could you see that from here? That’s on the other side of the building.”

“Reflections,” Adam said.
There was a fire in his voice and brick walls behind his eyes. “And I can’t be sure, but I saw a flash of long hair, watched the way the killer moved. It could be a woman.”

Jones let out a bitter laugh. “Man, with
what happened to my guys down there? The brutality of those throat slashings? Not unless she was some kind of a ninja.”

“Just telling you what I saw.”

Cooper put up his hand before Jones could scoff. “Don’t underestimate him.” He looked hard at Adam, nodded slowly. “When we look in that Dumpster, I bet we’ll find exactly what he says will be there. And keep your mind open.” He took Jones’s arm. “Come on, it’s only seven flights down and seven flights back up.”