by Rick Mofina
“Why do you say that?”
“Because they don’t tell me anything. Sydowski’s the primary. All roads of information flow and lead to the great one.”
“I see. So how are you doing, Ben?”
“Fine. Listen, this is not the best place to catch up, so could you, like, take a hike?”
“Sure, but I want to stay up on this. I’m going to call you.”
Over the next few days, Reed worked on his profile of Iris Wood. He argued with Sydowski about the exclusive tip on the cop.
“Walt, I am going to say a witness says he saw an officer in an unmarked car stop Iris Wood’s car near Stern Grove, then drive away with her.”
“If you do that now, you’ll blow the case.”
“You always say that.”
“Have you not learned from your mistakes?”
“Tell me how I’ll blow your case.”
“We need more time.”
“I’m not going to get beat on this?”
“Damnit, is that all you --”
“He came to me, Walt.”
“Listen, you are way out in front on this.”
“Is the tip good?”
“We haven’t ruled it out but we need more time.”
“Then I am going to use it --”
“Tom, if you hold off a bit, we can give you pictures.”
“What kind of pictures?”
“Exclusive pictures.”
“Describe them.”
“Taken a few hours before death. The last time she was seen alive.”
That sounded good.
“I’m coming over to the Hall to see them.”
The grainy stills from the campus security cameras, dramatically enlarged, showed Iris getting into her car for the last time. Reed had accepted Sydowski’s proposal. Sydowski also provided him with a time line and map detailing the final movements of Iris Wood’s life.
Reed had interviewed some of her former college classmates, including Penny Dumay, the woman who walked to the campus parking lot with her. He talked to the staff from Forever & Ever. He was given a brief tour of her apartment and the bridal shop with Turgeon as an escort, allowing him to produce a dramatic account of her life and her final hours.
Sydowski raised the specter of a serial killer and the ritualistic nature of Iris Wood’s murder, releasing some details, holding back on most as he outlined the last hours in the life of a quiet, lonely office worker in downtown San Francisco.
Brader did not criticize Reed’s piece.
“It’s going Sunday, Reed,” he said.
Reed was pleased. It was the Star’s largest circulation day. His article would dominate front and spill into two clear inside pages filled with previously unpublished photographs and information. It was also the feature the paper planned to use to kick off its new redesigned Web site.
Reed never told Brader, or anyone for that matter, about his tip on the cop, figuring he had done well so far in his high-stakes poker game with Sydowski, a man he respected and trusted. He could go with the tip later, at the right moment when it would bust the story open in another direction.
Driving home Saturday, Reed thought of Ann and Zach. He had immersed himself so deeply in the story, he forgot they had plans for dinner at their favorite Mexican restaurant. He also thought about Zach’s mystery reaction and wondered about allergies in his family tree. A horn blast yanked him back to his feature. He realized how well Sydowski had played him. All the information squeezed into tomorrow’s story was not meant to inform Bay Area residents.
It was meant to challenge the killer.
Reed has just taken dictation for Sydowski’s letter to the monster who murdered Iris Wood.
The eyes of a little girl rescued from a deadly fire, grainy photos from a security camera taken hours before her murder. The Scripture.
Sydowski must be convinced the killer was going to read his article.
TWENTY-FOUR
Eugene Vryke sat in the soft leather sofa of the large office of one of the country’s top neurological specialists.
Vryke was awaiting the verdict on the series of tests the specialist had performed on his brain over the past few days. The doctor had kept his office lights low during his appointments. Vryke disliked bright rooms. He took comfort in the gurgling water of the hanging wall fountain. Its soft blue light was soothing as Vryke looked across Manhattan from thirty-nine stories.
The doctor entered, holding a clipboard, closing the door quietly behind him. He deposited himself slowly in the sofa beside Vryke and removed his glasses.
“There is no easy way to tell you what the tests show us.” He looked at Vryke with compassion. His cushion made a leathery squeak as he positioned himself to deliver the news. He had a trace of a Swiss accent. “Given the rate of deterioration, advancing cell and membrane destruction, accelerated by each convulsive event, I fear --”
“How long?”
The specialist knew when a patient needed to be told point blank. “One month. Six weeks at most. It is an absolute. No treatment exists.”
Vryke stared at the fountain.
“I am deeply sorry,” the doctor said. “Perhaps I should give you a moment to collect your thoughts?”
Vryke did not respond.
“You must consider how you will inform your family.”
“There is no one.”
“A girlfriend, colleagues, business associates?”
“There is no one.”
The specialist thought this case profoundly troubling, given that his new patient was in his early forties, possessed an exceptionally high IQ, and was otherwise in fine health. He flipped a page of the file. “I observed that you said the pills no longer help control the painful convulsions.”
Vryke closed his eyes and nodded once.
“We have developed something for you more powerful to ease it.” The doctor reached into the pocket of his white coat, retrieving a small rectangular plastic case. He opened it. It held several vials of clear fluid and a hypodermic needle with a pistol-styled handle and thumb mechanism. “This can be easily self-administered, as you have done previously in your history. At the advent of an episode, make an injection. The precise volume is noted on each container. You must not exceed it.”
The specialist leaned forward touching his forefinger behind Vryke’s ear on the point where his neck met his jaw. “Make the injection here,” he said. “Relief should be instantaneous, but you must not exceed the prescribed maximum. To do so would prove immediately fatal. You understand my instructions?”
Vryke knew exactly what the doctor was telling him.
The older man offered a gentle smile and after they let a few moments pass, watching and listening to the fountain, he said, “Go now, my friend, and take care of the final things while there is still time.”
Vryke slipped on his dark glasses and ball cap. Taking the elevator down, he decided to walk back to his hotel on West Sixty-Third Street by way of Central Park South. It was dusk. Sirens wailed amid the fading din of mid-town traffic as he lost himself in the park.
One month.
It confirmed the inevitable. He had met the New York specialist for the first time a few days ago after securing an emergency appointment. He would never see him again, as was the case with the doctor he had seen six months ago in Boston and the specialist nearly two years ago in Chicago. All three were leading neurological experts. All three had told him what he had suspected. His condition had nearly run its course.
Approaching the hotel, he took his usual precautions, slipping on gloves. He always wore hats and glasses, kept his head lowered from security cameras. He had been very careful while in New York. He never used the bathroom in his hotel room. He showered, brushed his teeth and shaved using the public facilities at the hotel pool. Citing allergies, he requested the linen in his room be changed daily and the carpet vacuumed in the morning and at night. He left no garbage in his trash. He ate at fast-food places, crowded restaurants,
or on the street at hot dog stands. He had dozens of credit cards in dozens of names. He had charged this room to a Mr. Frederich H. Boller, using acquired account numbers belonging to a huge multi-national corporation that used the hotel daily and would never question the expenses when they came thirty days later. Vryke knew that three different executives named Boller had used the hotel in the last nine months. All of Vryke’s medical records in the New York doctor’s system were under yet another assumed named, as they were with the other doctors. He would see to it that vital information would be changed in the clinic’s data bank overnight without detection and that all tissue and blood samples would be automatically ordered destroyed. The file would vanish within days.
He left no trace. No one would remember him. He was a ghost.
Vryke entered his darkened hotel room. It was lit only by the screens of his laptop computers. He had built them himself.
He stood alone in the dark, statue-still, assessing his quest, reducing his breathing, his heart rate, letting the magnitude of his terminal condition take him to a higher plane of existence.
The clock was ticking.
This is a lost world awaiting a message.
Vryke was the messenger.
In the mystic visions arising from his painful episodes, it had been revealed. Vryke’s purpose on earth was to emerge from his dark lonely chamber and enlighten the world before he left it.
In recent years it became increasingly clear to him that this was his fate as he reflected on his past. He had been rejected by his mother at birth, disfigured as a child, and cast into a life of solitude, never understanding, until recently, that it had all been preordained. It had all happened for a reason. He had been chosen to create an everlasting message for the world by finding the One True Heart who would wash away his sins, purify his soul, then accompany him into immortality.
One True Heart.
He had been searching for so long. At times he wondered if he was hunting effectively. Did she exist, or was she merely an ideal, a dream? That could never be. She had to be real. She was real. She was out there. It was his destiny to find her, to release her for the journey.
The last candidate had held so much potential. They had grown so close. Before her betrayal.
Vryke pulled on his latex gloves and sat before his computers. Two were connected to satellite phones with encryption devices he had built and small dishes positioned near the window where pigeons cooed on the sill. The third computer was connected to a powerful black box Vryke had built and set up between one of his systems and the hotel’s switchboard.
He sat in silence before his machines, tapping his lip.
“The San Francisco Star newspaper, please,” he said to one of his computers.
It beeped, then displayed the Web site of the San Francisco Star.
“Articles on Iris Wood, beginning with the most recent, please.”
The computer beeped, then displayed Tom Reed’s long feature on her life and unsolved murder at Forever & Ever. Her smiling face in the insurance office photograph staring at Vryke from the newspaper’s Internet display. Vryke read the article, more interested in what police knew than the biographical aspects of her sad life. No one knew more about her than he did.
You’re a liar, Iris. Excuse me, were, a liar.
I thought you were The One.
He had found Iris while he was lurking among the free and the commercial on-line lonely-hearts, dating, and matchmaker sites. She had also surfaced on one of the several dozen sites he had created and set out in cyberspace, like global drift nets.
Vryke’s white-gloved fingers went to another computer and he entered a sequence. Words began to swim by. Screen after screen, saddening Vryke because Iris had held so much potential. Her file was all there as he quickly reviewed excerpts of his interview process with her.
What do you look for in a man? he had asked.
Honesty.
That was a fine answer, just like the others. So he had engaged her.
Are a man’s looks important to you?
Not really.
On that point, Vryke came back to her several times over several days from different angles to solidify her answer. It was consistent, so he took their relationship further, delicately encouraging her to open her heart to him.
Iris had, describing over time, and through self-depreciating humor, wit, intelligence, a life filled with low self-esteem, self-doubt, shyness, loneliness, and a yearning for someone to love.
You know, Iris had written, it is sooooo good to have another shy heart to talk to. It’s like having a best friend at the keyboard.
Vryke nudged her to step out, join a club, talk to men.
Be brave. Be bold. Make your star shine.
Thank you, whoever you are.
Iris promised to take his advice, saying that it was time because, as she joked during one exchange, she was so pathetic she was telling colleagues in the office that she lived with a man named Jack, who in reality was her cat.
Can you believe that!?!? she had written.
Then, during a particularly heartfelt exchange, Iris revealed how she found comfort in the Bible, and had wept at the fear of possibly never having children; how she had fantasized about being like the beautiful brides on display in the wedding dress shop near her downtown office. How she sometimes had dreamed of the special day when she would enter it to select her gown.
Do you think it will ever happen for someone like me?
Sooner than you think. I am convinced you will meet somebody soon.
I can hardly wait!
Later, it had been time for him to ask a critical question.
Say, if you found the right man, could you forgive him the sins of his past life?
Yes. If he was truly sorry for them and loved me. And he would because he would be the right man.
You are certain you could find such capacity in your heart?
Yes.
At that Vryke believed he had found his One True Heart. He had moved Iris to the top of his list.
He grew anxious with anticipation, knowing the time for him to accept his fate had come. Vryke had commenced preparations, learning through his computers that Iris Wood lived in San Francisco, in a second-floor apartment in the Western Addition. He had obtained her home address, her telephone number, information about her job at American Eagle Federated Insurance, her position, salary, desk location, extension and designated employee parking spot number. He knew she drove a Ford Focus. How much her car insurance and car payments were. Knew what she looked like, had obtained her photograph, her height, weight, hair and eye color, date of birth, shoe, dress, and bra size. He had access to her medical records, banking and credit card accounts. He knew where she shopped, what she ate, what movies she rented, and what size and type of pizza she ordered. He even knew what her cat ate and when it had last been examined by the vet.
In fact, given that she had confided her innermost feelings to him, there really was nothing Vryke did not know about Iris May Wood.
He knew she had enrolled in an astronomy course at SFSU. Knew the time and location of the first session, that she was nervous about driving that far south at night. He knew where she would park. He knew what time the course ended, knew the weather called for fog that evening. He had studied street maps and had researched the patrol patterns of the SFPD in the area.
Vryke had flown to San Francisco days in advance, checking into a cheap motel near the airport, to plan their meeting.
His intention was to keep her with him until he could complete their departure. But in her last message he found she had deceived him.
You know, on that forgiveness thing, I have to qualify it, because some sins can never be forgiven, they are just too painful to overcome.
He could not respond. This was a betrayal.
Liar.
She had probably been laughing at him.
Vryke’s fingers typed and his large laptop screen had filled with the face of Iris May Woo
d. Clear. Crisp. Full color. She was moving. It was a recorded movie, its flickering lights alive, dancing across the scars carved deep into his face as he revisited the terror in Iris Wood’s eyes. A section of silver duct tape covered her mouth. Wearing the Carruthers slipper satin ball gown. Her size. A nice fit. Bound to the heavy steel rods with their heavy metal bases. The curtain dropped in the display window of Forever & Ever. The security systems in the area put to sleep without so much as a blip at the master panels.
Vryke had done his homework.
There was nothing he did not know.
Then he had stepped into the frame, enshrouded head-to-toe in a hooded white bio-chem jumpsuit, complete with goggles, gloves and surgical mask.
He knew how she had dreamed of the special day she would come here for her gown. But she had lied, laughed at him, laughed at his face like all the others since his childhood. You are not worthy to join me in eternity.
He had gripped his scalpel.
Liar.
Vryke switched the movie off. He knew the ending. An icon on his screen said Iris in San Francisco. He dispatched it to the file that contained the others who had failed him.
He had to find his One True Heart.
He had narrowed his list.
Ah, the piano player. Averted disaster in Orange County. Could he risk returning to Santa Ana after such a close call so soon after Iris? The little gang bangers had interrupted him, forcing him to abort. Police spoke with him. It was too dangerous.
He tapped his lip. Now which one?
All of them strong candidates, all promising to wash away the sins of his past life. Like this one: I truly mean it from the bottom of my heart.
He had to choose. Time was running out.
TWENTY-FIVE
Wyatt watched the sun kiss the Pacific while waiting on the street outside of Iris Wood’s building. He checked his wristwatch.
Where were they?
He’d been there for over an hour. Since he was assigned to this homicide, every cop he met had treated him with contempt. He didn’t know how much more he could take. Maybe he should demand to be pulled from the file. Just head back to CFU. Let the homicide dicks play their games. Sydowski was determined to ignore his work. Wyatt looked both ways down the quiet street.