“Smiling Jack killed again,” I said. “I’m at a place called The Butterfly Refuge in Navarre, about fifteen minutes east of Pensacola.”
“How in the heck did you know? Wait, why didn’t you tell me?”
I wanted to crush the phone in my palm. “You need to listen, Rez,” I said. “I tried to contact you, tried to let you know…hold on a second.”
It got very cold. I killed the phone and looked up just as a massive shadowy form barreled into me and crushed me against the wall.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Fuming about Spector, Agent Rezvani checked her weapons. She sat beside Deputy Director Barnes in the SUV. Agent Klingler, rising star of the Mobile office, drove. Agent LePoast, who’d flown in that morning, rode shotgun. Rez checked the safety and slammed a clip into her Sig Sauer.
“How many times you going to do that?” Barnes asked.
“Helps me think,” she replied. And it did, but it also helped with her nerves and her anger. She wasn’t mad at Spector, not really. How could she be? He’d tried to reach her, seven times based on her phone’s log of missed calls. No, she was furious that she’d missed those calls; furious that she’d missed a huge opportunity; and a combination of furious and terrified that something was happening to Spector and she wasn’t there to back him up.
Rez caught a street sign flash by. They’d hit Navarre in two miles. She holstered the Sig Sauer beneath her jacket and then went to work on her Glock 27.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
“We’ve not long to wait now,” Dr. Gary called over his shoulder from the yacht’s wheel.
Jack ducked under the boom and stood at his partner’s side. “Perhaps, we’ve been overestimating them,” he suggested.
Dr. Gary smiled humorlessly. “That was with one body,” he said. “One body reveals only the beginnings. But two? Two bodies will reveal patterns…our patterns. And there, our beloved technology will become our undoing.”
“You sound so certain,” Jack said. “But we were so careful.”
“Meticulously careful,” Dr. Gary agreed. “But technology will shrink the nation like a noose, and someone will come calling.”
Jack stared out at the water. During the day, the Gulf of Mexico was a sparkling turquoise. At night, with no moon, it was black.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
“Sweet mother of Judah,” Special Agent LePoast muttered.
“FBI!” Klingler cried out dramatically.
Rez rolled her eyes. Whatever had happened at the Butterfly Refuge was over and done with. Rez shook her head, taking in the destruction.
“Get the MEs in here!” Barnes barked, windmilling his arm. “Get the body sealed off! But, for cryin’ out loud, watch the blood on the tile! Bloody footprints all over!”
Rez grimaced. Another young life taken by Smiling Jack. But looking at the interior of the Refuge, there was a lot that didn’t match up with the killers’ MO. The body positioning was different, but more than anything else, why all the destruction? Other than the area immediately around the body, the rest of the place was trashed. Display cases and terrarium’s shattered, glass everywhere, and peculiar scorch marks on some of the walls. It was almost as if the cause of the mayhem had purposefully avoided the body. Why? And why trash the place in the first place?
“Deputy Director?” Klingler called, his voice hollow. “You want to take a look at this?”
Watching her step, Rez followed Barnes toward the building’s rear entrance where all manner of debris covered the tile.
“You thinking bomb?” Barnes asked.
“I don’t know what I’m thinking,” Klingler mumbled. He pointed up. “Look.”
Rez was half-afraid to look up. She didn’t want to see another body, this one carved up and swinging from the ceiling. But when she let her eyes drift upward, there was no body at all. The cathedral ceiling looked to have been more than twenty feet high, but a five-foot section of it had been torn out: drywall, joists, insulation, and shingles—blasted right out as if someone had launched a rocket.
It didn’t add up. And that, Rez thought, probably meant Ghost was behind it.
Chapter 31
I needed water and I needed it badly. I was so emptied, so wrung-out exhausted that I barely made it back to Panama City Beach. The fight against the shades had very nearly ended me…very nearly ended the mission. There had been so many—haunts, roamers, and prowlers—that they forced me to my last resort. They forced an unmasking.
When I unmask, things get messed up. I get messed up. If anyone saw me now in the condition I’m in, if anyone got a good look at my face, there would be trouble. Forget zombie. My face looked like zombie-in-a-blender. I limped to the assassin’s car, drove to the nearest hotel with a pool, and just before sun up, I slithered over the hotel property’s fence and fell into the pool.
It was with a strange combination of utter relief and abject fear that I sank beneath the water’s surface. Water is my friend and water is my enemy. It allows me to heal and, at my current level of injury, it was the only way I could be healed. I had so many wounds: gouges from long, curving talons, jagged tears from cruel uneven teeth, bruises, and even fractures. And in the state of exhaustion I was in, the resetting wouldn’t begin without total submergence in water.
But, as brilliant white light blazed out of my wounds, and the familiar tightening of my flesh began, there also came teeth-rattling terror. I gasped for air and found only water coursing down my throat. I gagged, forced a gout of air to clear my lungs, and writhed. I was maybe two…three feet beneath the surface, and yet, to me, it felt like I’d just been expelled from a bathysphere near the ocean floor a thousand feet down. The pressure clamped me like a vice. My ribs felt like they would collapse and crush my organs. My ear drums popped, and my skull throbbed. I could bear it no longer. With whatever breath I had left, I screamed.
The sound underwater was alien and garbled, but still fierce and deep like a mortally wounded beast. I shot up from the water and sucked in enough air to fill a blimp. I swam rapidly to the shallow end, struggled to my feet, and gasped. I inhaled precious breath after precious breath. In reality, each air intake probably tasted like chlorine, but to me it was the rich scent of a meadow full of lavender and fresh cut grass.
Standing in the “kiddie” end of the pool, breathing like I’d nearly died, I felt a little like an idiot.
“Uhm…sir,” came a timid voice behind me. “The pool doesn’t open until 9:00 a.m. And, uh…we don’t allow skinny dipping.”
I turned and found a smallish man wearing green coveralls and wielding a pool skimmer. He was staring at me awkwardly…as if he didn’t really want to look. Then, I felt a lot like an idiot.
I realized then that the sun had crested the horizon while I’d been submerged. And in the light…I discovered that the few shreds of clothes that had survived the Shade attack were now floating on the surface of the pool’s deep end. I was butt naked. And yes, at that time, I felt like the king of all idiots.
I looked back to the pool maintenance guy and muttered, “Sorry. The mood just strikes sometimes, y’know?”
“I wouldn’t know about that, sir,” he said sheepishly.
“I don’t suppose you could grab me a towel?” I prodded gently.
He was a kind soul. He placed two towels on the edge of the pool near the ladder. And then, he disappeared into a shed near the fence. I saw him peek around the shed doors a couple of times, most likely hoping I’d be gone.
Okay, so two towels are a great help, but I had destroyed my wardrobe completely. I could manage to wrap my waist pretty well, but I would need new clothes and right away. I left the motel pool grounds, slid carefully into the assassin’s car and drove to the nearest fast food. In my present garb, drive-thru was the only real option. Thankfully, a Smack Burger was just up the road.
I think I stunned the employees with my order because their initial response was a rather rude suggestion that seemed a
natomically and pragmatically impossible. I assured them that I wasn’t kidding about the order, drove around to the window, and paid for the massive bill up front. The Smack Burger manager apologized profusely for the initial response but, since the order was so large, I had to pull around and wait.
Waiting wasn’t a problem as I needed to kill a couple of hours until a surf shop might open to allow me to get some new clothes. I spent the time thinking of what I’d learned from the second body. Number one: Smiling Jack wasn’t through sending messages. The way the victim had been posed this time, but for the gaping wound, a scene of startling beauty and peace—it was juxtaposition with some kind of nasty point. I had some suspicions about the message of the first body at Fort Pickens, but this one had me stumped.
Number two, and this was the most troubling aspect: Smiling Jack no longer cared if he got caught. For whatever reason, he’d run out of patience. The pictures and websites were no longer enough. He wanted to give us flesh and blood and, with that, he sacrificed his anonymity. Sooner or later, we would learn his methods and his patterns. And then, we would track him down.
But Smiling Jack had proven to be too cagey not to know that. Few things are more dangerous than a serial killer who no longer cared about getting caught. I blinked back memories of the photographs, the young women Smiling Jack had penned up like animals. If the pictures accurately represented the number of captives, there were only two women still alive. I’d already failed miserably, but I’d rather have my wings clipped than—
A sharp rap at my window. A disheveled looking man with a Chaplin mustache and a gaudy orange and red Smack Burger uniform stood there. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” the manager said. “We’ve never had to drop that many hash browns before.” He handed me half a dozen white paper sacks each emblazoned with the equally gaudy orange and red Smack Burger logo and, of course, Sir Smacks-a-lot the burger-eyed clown.
Resetting uses up every spare nutrient in my body and, when food nutrition is absent, will even consume muscular tissue…tissue that I could ill-afford to lose. So after such a full overhaul, I need to plow down thousands of calories. Smack Burger wasn’t so nutritious, but it was filling and full of some of the major macronutrients. And…I couldn’t wander into the local grocery store in a towel.
After nine sausage, egg, and cheese English muffin sandwiches, fourteen bags of hash browns, and three boxes of cinna-chomps, I felt like I had enough fuel to start the day. I let out a contented burp and noticed the cell phone on the passenger seat. In my hurry to flee the Butterfly Refuge and in my depleted, semi-clothed state, I wasn’t certain if I’d remembered the phone. “Thank God,” I muttered. I checked the display, and it flashed two pieces of information: low battery and nineteen new messages.
All from Rez. I hit her number. She picked up before I heard a ring.
“Ghost, what the heck did you do?” she asked, her voice hushed but urgent.
“I…I…uh, what do you mean?”
“The Butterfly Refuge looks like a bunker-buster missile hit!” She muttered something completely unladylike under her breath. “The place is wrecked. There’s a hole torn out of the roof for cryin’ out loud!”
“I didn’t have much choice,” I said. “I had some trouble.”
“I guess so,” she said. “But listen. This doesn’t look good. Evidence is scattered all over the place. They know I got the tip from you. They’re going to wonder if you had something to do with this.”
“I’m going to guess I’m not real popular with Deputy Director Barnes right now.”
Rez replied with an additional unladylike comment. “It’ll be a miracle if they don’t put out a warrant for your arrest,” she said. “Seriously, Ghost, bloody footprints everywhere! Could you have been more careless?”
“I get reckless when I’m tired…and when things are trying to tear my head off.”
“Whatever,” Rez said. “Just tell me you got something. Tell me the reason the place is wrecked is because you were taking down Smiling Jack and his accomplice.”
“I wish I could,” I said, releasing a sigh like a flat tire. “The killers were already gone when I got there.”
“Then who the heck were you fighting?”
“Remember the guy you shot in the alley?” I asked. “The guy with the invisibility suit? You called him a kind of terrorist. Well, there were a lot more of those guys.”
The next thing Rez said was not only unladylike but it bordered on startling. Then, she said, “Four year intervals.”
“What?”
“Smiling Jack’s killing cycles came at four year intervals…you know what else does?”
“It wasn’t four,” I said. “It was four, then eight, right?”
“Divisible by four, then,” Rez grumbled. “Look, I did some hunting around, and each killing cycle so far coincides with the impending election of U.S. Presidential candidate who happens to be Pro Life.”
“Wait,” I said. “What about four years after the first killing cycle?”
“Pro Choice.”
“Possibly still a coincidence,” I said.
“Possibly.” I could hear her muffle the phone with her hand. Then I heard muted conversation, but I couldn’t make out the words. “I gotta go,” she came on suddenly. “Don’t leave town.”
The line went dead. I stared at the phone and noted that it was still blinking two messages: low battery and, this time, one missed call. I didn’t recognize the number but pressed call.
“Panama City Beach Hospital Center,” answered a mellow southern voice. “To whom may I direct your call?”
Then, the phone died.
Doc, I thought. Had to be.
I fired up the assassin’s car, wondering what Doc Shepherd had to say. We hadn’t exactly parted on good terms.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
“Rezvani!” Deputy Director Barnes thundered. “Get in here!”
Rez hustled into the conference room and found Barnes, as well as Agent LePoast huddled in front of a computer screen.
“Sir?” Rez said as she stepped closer to the backs of their chairs. They didn’t answer.
“Scroll up,” Barnes said. “There. Do you see?”
LePoast leaned closer to the screen. His head went very still. “Son of a…how’d you see that with your old eyes?”
“Careful, LePoast,” Barnes warned. “I might replace you with Rezvani here.”
Rez looked back and forth between the two men and the wide, flatscreen monitor. There was a morgue photo, the victim from the Butterfly Refuge. There was also a scan of an old newspaper article. It had a black and white photo of a young girl in what looked like a school portrait. The girl couldn’t have been more than six or seven. She wore pigtails and freckles and had big bright eyes that somehow looked blue even in black and white.
“Seriously,” LePoast said, “Now that I see them side-by-side, I get it. But how’d you see this out of all those articles?”
“It’s the smirk,” he said. “Right corner of her mouth…that mischievous little curl.”
“Yeah, yeah,” LePoast said. “It’s hard to see it on the vic because…well, you know.” He cleared his throat. “Still, we’ll need the DNA. Gotta be certain.”
“It’s her,” Barnes said, using his Final Word tone. He leaned away from the monitor for Rez and said, “Special Agent Rezvani, meet Pamela Katherine Kearney of Anchorage, Alaska.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
If there were no complications, Doctor Shepherd was expected to be in surgery for the next six hours.
This was the news I got from the Nurse Pelagris at Panama City Beach Hospital Center’s cardiac floor. Six hours. I’d stood in a towel at quite possibly the last pay phone on planet earth…and six hours was all I got for my trouble.
I’d already wasted time eating and then trying to digest my ridiculously large breakfast—and that just to get to ten o’clock so I could find a place to purchase
new clothes. Now, it looked like I’d have to wait some more. If something went wrong during surgery, there was no telling how much more the wait might be increased. I sighed, buckled up, and pulled out onto Front Beach Road.
A few miles from Smack Burger and just a stone’s throw from the sun-dappled Gulf, I found Mad Monk’s Surf Shop. Colorful kites sailed high above the store, and the front door was propped open by a faux conch shell the size of park bench. Getting out of the low slung sports car without losing one of my two towels was no easy task. I managed, but it was a close thing. And, in the process, I learned just how chilly the morning air off the Gulf could be.
I decided to play it like I’d just walked in off the beach, that the towels were just to keep a wet swimsuit from dripping all over the shop’s floor. Then, I’d start browsing, pick up what I need, and duck into the nearest changing room. I’d wear the stuff to the register, pay for it, and move on. No scene. As little attention as possible. Low key.
The moment I set foot in the store someone shouted, “Dude! What happened, you fall into a pool of bleach?”
Against my better judgment, I froze in place and looked left and right, as if he might be talking to someone—anyone—else. I saw the guy then, at the counter. He had corn rows, a tan two shades darker than chocolate, and enough shell necklaces to outfit a hydra. He looked like he was born to work in a surf shop. And he looked like he was thoroughly content to draw attention to me.
“Seriously, boss,” the tan man continued, “you just fly in from Siberia, or what? Never seen skin so white.”
So much for low key. A teenage couple near the dressing rooms laughed it up. A little girl pointed me out to her father. The look on her face made me want to lock myself up behind bars. Poor kid. I kept my distance from the other customers as I browsed. The loquacious shopkeeper was another matter.
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