Twist (Book 1): The Abnorm Chronicles-Twist (14 page)

Chapter
32

Three plastic bags sealed with evidence tape sat on the hood of Jones’s car, each one labeled with time, date, and corresponding photograph number to link each bag to where the object had been found. Adam Lee had been exactly right.

Jones
picked up the smallest bag that contained a few single hair strands. “The hoodie covered much of the head, and the wig would have messed up facial-recognition programs. But the techs found these hairs caught in the wig. Careless.” The detective’s hard smile was like a slash across his face. “Six strands, without even looking hard, and I’ll bet we get plenty of good DNA. If this unsub is in CODIS, then we’ve got him.”

“
Unsub?” Cooper asked.

The detective
rolled his eyes. “Unknown subject. Man, I forget you’re used to Washington speak.”

“We’ve got plenty of acronyms of our own.”
Cooper took the bag containing the hairs. “How fast can your department run a DNA analysis?”

“
I’ll put a rush on it—this bastard’s a cop killer now, and I’ll go to the front of the line with anything we want. Top priority. Best estimate, we’ll know in less than thirty-six hours, maybe even twenty-four.”

Cooper gritted his teeth.
“That’s way too long! Our body count is stacking up.”

“Not physically possible, man. Detailed tests and comparison panels take time.”

Cooper dug through his pockets and pulled out his phone. “Not for the DAR. Let me see what I can do on my end.”

Jones looked both offended and hopeful at the same time as
Cooper dialed Director Peters. He didn’t often call in favors, but he did it when necessary.

After
a brief conversation, he pocketed the phone and turned to smile at the other detective. “Equitable Services specializes in DNA identification and cataloging, and we’ve got some specialized equipment developed by Brilliants. Cutting-edge technology. With any luck, we’ll have results back by eight or nine in the morning.”

SUNDAY

Chapter 33

Predawn
tones of pink and orange simmered on the horizon. Soon enough the darkness would fade, and daylight would flood through the streets of Denver. Bakeries would spread the aroma of freshly baked bread. Coffee shops would open their doors to add fresh-roasted smells to the air. Traffic would pick up as Sunday workers began their commute by bus, bicycle, car.

All traces of the crim
e below would be washed away as the world woke up.

But every detail remained burned in
Adam’s mind. His eyes darted from side to side. Right now, on the edge of dawn, he was a hunter. The spectral Adam, composed only of perception, surfed on reflections from building to building, window to window, room to room. While his avatar scouted farther and farther, part of his focus remained on the building across the street. Chloe’s building.

He had watched
those lives for so long, he was inexorably linked to them.

Richard
Benedict Sr. was awake, despite the early hour. The television was on, the family’s ever-present companion, but Richard Sr. spent more time looking out the window, distracted by the remaining crime-scene activity below. Adam knew the man’s habits, and the man never got up before dawn. Maybe the sirens had awakened him . . . or maybe he’d already been awake.

A little worm of doubt ate it
s way through Adam’s belly. Richard Sr. was obviously distracted, concerned, preoccupied—more than would be exhibited by a curious bystander gawking at an accident.

Richard Sr. participated in a bowling league
every Thursday night
. Because of the championships, he’d been out more and more often for practice, gone from home on atypical nights. And he’d come home Friday—the night of Ingrid’s murder—with his bowling shirt covered in blood, supposedly from Donny’s bloody nose.

Adam narrowed his eyes.
Just after Chloe’s murder, he had seen the blurry form of the killer get into the elevator . . . but never emerge onto the street. The killer could have exited the building from a different door, or at a later time. Or maybe it was someone who lived inside the building.

The only other
tenant currently awake was Dan Peterson, the new guy. Adam watched him as well, pushed his vision through a half-closed curtain, bounced off the glass covering his
Rear Window
poster, caught Dan at the kitchen sink.

S
hards of broken glass lay scattered on the countertop in his kitchen. Dan stood there calmly drinking a glass of amber liquid while he continued organizing his possessions, as if he had become obsessive-compulsive. But, even at 5:00 a.m.? That didn’t make sense to Adam. Every few minutes Dan would go to the window, pull the curtains apart, and peer out to the street below.

The broken glass,
all the liquor bottles in his collection . . .

But Dan
Peterson was a big-framed man, stocky and sturdy. All those layers of muscle and fat never would have fit underneath the cars on the street. No, Adam had watched the furtive killer as he slipped past the parked squad car. It had to be someone smaller, more flexible.

Richard
Sr. was lanky but taller than the figure he had seen. Again, Adam doubted it was him. All the tiny observations he had made from the window, the line of the killer’s hip, the shoulders, the glimpse of long hair.

Maybe it wasn’t anyone in Chloe’s building after all.

Adam expanded his search. On some fundamental level he could hear Rodriguez pacing the room behind him, wide awake. He went to the bookshelf, took one of Adam’s
X-Men
graphic novels, and paged through it.

Though
Adam was exhausted, he needed to finish his hunt, his survey, before he let himself sleep, before the symphony of Sunday-morning activity scrambled the last subtle details.

As
the dawn brightened, he worked his way around Lincoln Avenue. The shops weren’t open yet. Heading west toward Broadway and the bizarre architecture of the Denver Art Museum, he searched every nook and cranny. Simultaneously, a second avatar worked his way eastward toward the sunrise. That direction was a lot harder to canvas, leading to a residential area with few open spaces where his assimilative vision could penetrate.

He brought the two pieces of his perception back together and sent them
north and south. He made it just past Colfax in one direction and Sixth Avenue in the other. Again, no luck—but he realized he had learned remarkable control over the past few days, ever since he’d set his mind to
doing something
.

I
t wasn’t just a drive to find Chloe’s killer that motivated him. Wandering with his perceptions, moving virtually through the city liberated him from his chair. Being at his window opened a mirror-gallery of other windows. Now, with his perceptive avatars, Adam could dance through alleys and jump across rooftops in the blink of his eye. Nothing had ever felt this good.

Adam wanted—no, he
needed
, to find the killer himself. Before the city filled his world with a cacophony of bustle and noise, he focused hard, tried to see any incongruous details.

But
his search came up empty.

Chapter
34

Selene got dressed in the dark, with the curtains closed. Usually, she didn’t care, but she wanted privacy this morning. Needed the privacy.

Slipping
on her long-sleeved shirt, tugging it down to hide the handcuff bruises on her wrists, she considered everything going on in her life.
Spinning out of control
. She hated the Sunday shift, but it was part of the job. She pulled the top of her scrubs over the long-sleeved shirt and clipped her VA Hospital ID card onto the breast pocket.

Usually she liked being able to
look out her apartment window. Every once in a while, she would watch the man at the window above and across the street, sitting there in his wheelchair, just staring out at the world.
Adam Lee.
Knowing who and what he was had changed everything.

She tugged the curtains close
d, just to make sure he couldn’t see inside.

The loser du jour was still asleep
like a dead man in her bed. She hated herself for attracting so many assholes. Worthless prick. She knew she was demeaning herself, but it was a longtime remnant of her upbringing. A childhood filled with being told by her oh-so-loving father how worthless she was, how she was a waste of skin. Beatings were daily, expected. Physical contact and bruises became indistinguishable from caresses.

Years of therapy had taught
Selene to recognize the permanent psychological damage that had been done to her, even if the therapy hadn’t repaired anything. Did a broken object appreciate
knowing
that it was broken?

It was easy
to pick up the abusive scumbags, and Selene was good at it—so, she wasn’t worthless in this one area, at least. They were magnets, and she was a lump of cold iron. The guys were always short-tempered, bad lays but good bruisers, and at least with the pain, she felt something. At least when she grew angry enough to throw them out of her apartment, she felt emotions.

Sitting on the edge of the bed,
she was sure that even a marching band wouldn’t disturb him—which would be good for a sharp slap, she guessed, even if he was still groggy. But he wasn’t going to wake up, though. The dose should have been high enough. He breathed in soft snores as he continued in his deep, drugged sleep.

She
pulled on her scrub bottoms, socks, shoes. Although the room was quiet, Selene’s mind was not. With the world whirling, how could she keep a grip on it?

Even at
the hospital, people were starting to notice her. Just the other day that nosy therapist had pressured her, tried to talk to her supervisor. If Dr. Wolverton had started paperwork, then Selene would have to undergo a body inspection, a welfare check—and they would find the bruises. Not from domestic abuse, just from bedroom play . . . although that might well be considered abuse. How many other people had noticed the bruises? Couldn’t a person have a little privacy? Who else was she going to have to worry about?

Pulling her long auburn hair back into a ponytail,
Selene left the bedroom, grabbed her purse and keys, and exited the apartment. Loser du jour would have to find his own way out when he woke up. He would wonder why his head was pounding, where she had gone, what she had done to him.

She
pressed her shoulders against her front door, taking advantage of the empty hallway. How the hell was she going to get out of this? But she couldn’t give up now. She couldn’t!

She shook her head and walked to the elevator, head
ing to work.

Chapter
35

Cooper glanced around the City Grill, not wanting breakfast but knowing he needed to eat. According to Jones, local food critics voted this restaurant as having the best burger in Denver, but it was way too early for lunch. He ordered the eggs benedict instead, remembering that Natalie usually chose that when they went out for a rare family breakfast. Todd would satisfy himself with french toast cut up into small pieces, slathered with syrup (most of which usually slathered his face and shirt as well).

Instead of his wife and son,
a hangdog Detective Jones sat across from him, eating hash browns soaked in egg yolks as he packed away calories for the day. Cooper ate his eggs benedict, which were either the best he’d ever tasted or else he was completely famished.

The process of eating forced a lull in the conversation, and Cooper had a chance to look around the
City Grill, gathering images, filing away snapshots into his mental scrapbook. Booths were upholstered in maroon pleather; wall adornments consisted of paraphernalia from Colorado sports teams or classic seventies bands. The bar section had been opened to accommodate more tables for the Sunday midmorning rush.

Cooper
watched Jones mop his plate with a triangle of white toast, nudging the last of the hash browns and egg like a snowplow cleaning up a cul-de-sac.

Cooper put his elbows on the table.
“Equitable Services says we’ll have something soon. DNA print will likely give us a good ID—our database is quite extensive.”

The detective wiped his mouth. “Your DAR can give us a magic name.
Maybe you will pull off a miracle and get an answer faster than humanly possible. Then, combining your resources with ours, we’ll see if we get a hit on CODIS. But I think wheelchair boy is off base when he says it’s a woman.”

“Don’t call him that.”

Jones rolled his eyes. “Sorry—I don’t see how
Mr. Lee
could have made that kind of determination from such a distance. In my experience, women don’t tend to commit this type of close-up violence. Slashing throats with a broken bottle? The victims were adults, all of them healthy, and they could certainly fight back. Hell, the last two were fully trained cops.”

Cooper
tucked into his second egg, then sipped his coffee. “Stop thinking along gender lines—if the killer is a Brilliant, then all bets are off. Normal assumptions don’t apply. The strategy and execution of these killings—both the initial Thursday victims, then Dr. Wolverton stalked and killed in a parking structure after all the security cams were disabled, and then a complicated assault that took out two policemen in their own squad car—that’s a level of tactical finesse that no normal amateur could pull off.”

Jones looked
uncomfortable. “Twists are your specialty, not mine, man. But in
my
specialty, as a homicide detective, I look at these crimes and see that they’re up close, personal, and brutally violent. Not the hallmark of a female killer.”

Cooper
fought to arrange his tired thoughts. “But in another sense, they’re
not
personal. Each one was like a job that needed to get done, something to check off a list, a task to be completed. One strike with the broken bottle, inflict a mortal wound, job done. No mutilation of the bodies, no expression of passion or revenge. It’s like the killer is on a mission. He—or she—isn’t even taking trophies, not that we can spot, anyway.”

“Then why not just shoot the victims? Fast and sure,
and a lot less risky than getting right up to somebody.”

Cooper had thought of that. “
Not everybody has a gun, even in Colorado. And guns can be traced. But it’s easy to break a bottle. You get one anywhere and, presto, you have an instant weapon that’s not traceable.”

Jones was listening. Cooper continued.
“Our killer was in disguise, walked past the squad car, managed to deposit a bottle bomb on the roof while the two officers were right there inside. Then the killer got rid of the disguise, came back around for the real ambush, worked his way—or her way—under several parked cars to keep from being seen.”

“Must have been a contortionist,” the detective said.

Cooper leaned across the booth, closer to Jones. “That’s either an average to slender woman, or an abnormally small man. Definitely someone strong, flexible, maybe someone used to being in tight situations. Even from that awkward angle, the killer managed to strike as the cops sprang out of their vehicle.”

Jones
looked sickened as he pictured the scene again. He drank his coffee as an excuse to turn away.

Cooper didn’t want to get sidetracked from his point. “
Either way, it’s an extraordinarily complicated plan and flawlessly executed, when dozens of things could have gone wrong at any stage.” He pushed his plate aside. “That’s why I think we’re dealing with a Brilliant—a Brilliant who is killing other Brilliants, as well as those connected to Brilliants.”

“Okay, man,”
Jones said. “But if your killer is such a super-genius, why did he or she leave that obvious disguise in a nearby Dumpster where we were sure to find it, even without Adam Lee’s help? And careless enough to leave strands of hair for DNA testing?”

Cooper wanted to answer with
Everybody makes mistakes
. But somehow, he didn’t think this killer would.