The Shadow Man

by Mark Murphy

  "I got real close to 'im. The space was so tight that the bastid couldn't turn on me. And then I found 'is heart, found it just by listenin'. When I stabbed 'im in that poundin' heart he knew I was comin' and there was nothin' he could do. I told 'im so."

  He'd usually stand up at that point.

  "I said, 'This here's for the little girl you took.' I wanted him to be aware of what he was dyin' for. And when I ran the knife in 'im, he thrashed about like nobody's business, 'is tail just a whackin' and 'is claws just a scratchin'. But then he died, just like that, and I left 'im to the Almighty."

  When Billy was tracking the Shadow Man, he was fueled by the same self-righteous fervor that his grandfather had in stalking his own reptilian predator nearly fifty years before. It was his destiny, his sole purpose in life.

  Billy Littlebear was no fool. He knew that the Shadow Man was dangerous. But he trusted in his own abilities enough to be certain that eventually, God willing, he would win out.

  He had considered it a measure of divine providence, then, when he happened across Mimi and Amy King as they made their escape from the fishing shack which had been their prison.

  Billy had been trying to find a way to get into the first fishing shack—the one wired with multiple explosive charges—when he saw two slim female figures emerging from the chimney of a similar shack two houses down.

  "Sonofabitch," he said out loud.

  He knew it was them. It had to be.

  Billy realized that he needed to be where they were by the time they reached the ground. Otherwise, they could simply vanish into the hodgepodge of clapboard houses and palm trees that were scattered across Tybee Island like barnacles, and that would be it. He'd lose them. His mission would have been a failure. And failure was not an acceptable option. He'd learned that in Iraq.

  The only way he could catch them was to go into the street, right past the ominous black SUV.

  He glanced at his watch. The killer would be meeting with Malcolm right now if he adhered to his schedule.

  Not even the Shadow Man can be two places at once, he thought.

  The big Seminole sprinted into tree-lined Chatham Avenue, right toward the SUV. The headlights on the damned car appeared to be glow­ering at him as he ran towards it, staring him down.

  Billy's dark reflection gleamed back at him from the car's hood as he approached, the emerging sun shining like a neutron star over his doppelganger's shoulder. Although the windows were tinted, the wind­shield was not. There was no one inside. A constellation of red and green lights flickered inside the vehicle, winking at him like tiny eyes.

  Billy stopped.

  That's not right.

  He stopped running and cupped his hands over the windshield so that he could see inside.

  What he saw flipped something over in his gut.

  The rear seats in the vehicle had been removed, and the guts of the SUV had been replaced by something else. A phalanx of metal canisters loomed dimly in the back, packed in like sardines in a massive tin. The flickering red and green lights he had seen were actually a complex deto­nation device, a contraption which resembled a giant electronic octopus wedged in between the two front seats. Cables as thick as a man's thumb snaked ominously away from the octopus, draping themselves over the seats and into the lethal rear of the vehicle.

  "Shit," Billy said out loud.

  The entire SUV was a VBIED, a "vehicle-borne improvised explosive device"—a truck bomb—and a big one. Probably ammonium nitrate-based, from the looks of it. He'd seen a bunch of VBIEDs in Iraq, but those were usually crude homemade jobs improvised from unexploded mortar rounds. This one was extremely sophisticated. In all likelihood, it had a remote cell phone trigger, mercury motion sensors, and a timer. Hell, he knew it had a cell phone remote, for it was that cell phone GPS signal—from Amy's iPhone—he'd been tracking all along.

  And Billy also knew that he had to get away.

  He started running. He got to Mimi and Amy just as their feet touched the ground.

  Both women were filthy, covered from head to toe in black soot. Their hair, wet from the rain, hung limply in their faces. Their clothes were torn and disheveled.

  Billy thought he had never seen a more beautiful sight in all of his life.

  "I'm warning you, I know karate, and kung fu," Mimi had said. Her brows were furrowed. Her eyes had a hard look to them, like they were made of smoky quartz.

  "You might want to save the martial arts for later, Mimi. I'm a friend of your father's. My name's Billy Littlebear."

  Amy smiled weakly.

  "Littlebear. Like Ursa minor. The constellation."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "You're the one whose brother was targeted by the same man as Malcolm, right? The one who's been helping him?" she said.

  Billy nodded.

  "I'm a cop," he said. "Malcolm sent me to find you."

  "Malcolm told me about you. He said we could trust you," said Amy.

  Mimi dropped her fighting stance.

  "Sorry," she said. "I thought you were the bad guy."

  "You are definitely your father's daughter, Mimi King. That is one thing I am sure of," said Billy, grinning.

  "Where's M-Malcolm?" said Amy. She was shivering.

  Billy put his Army jacket around her slim shoulders.

  "Malcolm's meeting the killer on the beach. Trying to set him up. I'll tell you about that later. Right now, we've got to get out of here. You see that SUV up there?"

  The girls both nodded.

  "It's a truck bomb, and a big one. Probably a thousand pounds of explosives in there. The blast radius for a bomb that size it usually at least 125 feet or so, and we're inside that distance. If it goes off right now, the concussion wave alone could rip us all apart. We need to get away from it. Right now."

  Billy put his arms around the shoulders of both women and began hustling them down Chatham Avenue.

  "What's that?" Mimi said, pointing at Billy's chest.

  "Flak jacket. Iraq war surplus. I always wear body armor when I'm working on a case. It's a habit, a holdover from my army days. You never know . . ."

  And at that precise moment, the world exploded.

  37

  Tina Baker crouched behind a battered blue Toyota Prius. She was propped up on her elbows, ball cap turned backwards, balancing the tele­vision camera on her shoulder like she used to in her younger days.

  She could scarcely believe what she had been hearing.

  Tina had not doubted the young surgeon after she heard him tell his story, as incredible as it was. But she had hardly expected to have it play out for her like this, on camera, with the killer essentially confessing that he had framed Dr. King and many others like him.

  I'll be famous, she thought.

  She immediately felt guilty for thinking like that. There were people whose lives were at stake, and the drama here was just unfolding. But the ambitious newswoman in her could not help but feel grateful for the opportunity to document something so monumental on her own.

  I'm helping Malcolm King, she thought, rationalizing a bit.

  That settled her churning gut somewhat.

  Scattered rays of sunlight were breaking through the clouds as the rain abated. The breeze coming in off the ocean was moist and fragrant, carrying the fresh-scrubbed odors of ocean and new rainfall, and Tina realized that she had not felt so alive in a long, long time. Every sensation was enhanced; colors seemed more vibrant, sounds more intense. It was as though her life were being viewed in Super HD format.

  Which was why the explosion caught her off guard.

  The blast came from behind her. There was a visceral thud, like a five-ton bag of sugar being dropped from an airplane, and then a blast of heat and light that knocked her on her ass. The camera skidded sideways across the hood of the Prius and clattered to the asphalt. She tried to grab it and missed, knocking off her cap and scraping her knee in the process.

  "What the hell?" she said out loud.

 
She turned around to see a mushroom cloud of flame and ash billowing up from a few blocks away, over by the Back River. Tina stood with her mouth open for a second before her newswoman instincts took back over.

  She snatched the camera off the ground and put it back up to her shoulder. The parabolic microphone was bent, but the rest of the camera seemed unscathed. Training the lens on the explosion's aftermath, she watched as the pillar of black smoke boiled into the sky. It was like some­thing out of the Old Testament, something God would have called Moses from.

  And she realized that she had no idea why it was there. Tina turned back towards the beach, towards the Eleventh Place beach access, and saw . . . no one.

  The street was empty.

  During the blast, Dr. King and the Shadow Man had somehow disappeared. They had been standing next to aJeep, but that vehicle was now gone, leaving only an empty street and about a hundred scrabbling, squawking seagulls, who were at this point aggressively surrounding an old couple who had been feeding them. They were eyeing the old folks suspiciously.

  The old man put his arm around his wife and began backing away.

  The hungry gang of gulls edged forward.

  "Shit," Tina said.

  For she suddenly realized what she was going to have to do.

  She had not dialed the number in a while now—not at least since last New Year's Eve, when she had been drinking alone and feeling sorry for herself. That was an ill-advised phone call, a drunk dial. She had regretted it for weeks.

  But she dialed it now.

  Sam answered on the first ring.

  "Bad day, Tina?" he said. "It's a little early for vodka, don't you think? Or is it gin this morning?"

  Normally, that sort of comment would have pissed her off. Today, she just brushed it away. She needed him this time, needed the no-nonsense self-righteous cop she had fallen in love with once, long ago, before life's ebb and flow had pushed them apart.

  "Sam, listen to me. You've been working the Malcolm King case, right?"

  "I can't make any statements to the press, Tina. You know that."

  "I don't want a statement. I'm trying to help you solve the case."

  Sam sighed.

  "I'm listening," he said.

  "I'm out at Tybee. There's been some sort of huge explosion here, I don't know what, but that's not the important thing. Malcolm King is out here. And here's the most critical aspect of all of this: I've found out that Dr. King isn't guilty. He's been set up by a psychopath, a serial killer who has done this sort of thing before."

  "King's there? You've actually seen him?"

  "Yes. But Sam, listen to me: he's innocent."

  "Tina, come on. King's guilty as hell. What's the deal—you looking for a gig with the National Enquirer?"

  "Sam, I've got it all on video. I have footage of the real killer confessing to the murders while talking to Dr. King. I just filmed it, right here on Tybee. But then the bomb I told you about went off and I lost them. Sammy, you've got to seal the island. Get the whole goddamn force out here and seal it off. The killer has kidnapped Dr. King's wife and child. And I think he's going to murder them. Killing someone is just like breathing to this guy. You've got to help them, Sammy. You've got to keep this asshole from getting away, and from hurting more people."

  Tina could hear Sam grinning over the phone.

  "I still love you, you know," he said.

  "Sammy, there's no time . . ."

  "I've got it. I promise. We'll nail the S.O.B."

  Tina kissed the air, smacking her lips over the phone. It was some­thing they once did every phone call, eons ago, when life was simpler.

  "Yeah, yeah, you with the kisses. You know how that always got me," he said.

  "Love you too, Sammy," she said.

  And with a shock, Tina realized she probably did.

  38

  Here's one thing Malcolm always liked about surgeons: they liked order.

  Order thwarts chaos, which is the enemy of precision. And in the OR, precision is often the difference between a favorable outcome and a bad one. On the razor's edge between life and death, a single out-of-control variable can lead to instability. And instabilities are like those butterfly's wingbeats that result in hurricanes, to paraphrase Lorenz.

  But the Shadow Man's Jeep was a rolling set of contradictions.

  The back seat had two large wooden boxes in it. They were latched, with heavy stainless steel handles on top of them. A copy of the lap appy paper that Malcolm and Joel had been working on lay on the floorboard. Otherwise, the back seat was spotless.

  The front seat was a mess.

  Old clothes and candy wrappers and crumpled grease-stained bags from fast food restaurants littered the floor. A set of muddy work boots huddled together on the passenger's side, trying to remain incon­spicuous. A tin of Kiwi boot black and a lock blade were stuffed into the drink holders, along with a bundle of dirty rags that smelled like rotten fish.

  The car reeked of a pervasive petrochemical odor, as though someone had spilled a volatile oil someplace under the seat.

  "I haven't had much of a chance to look at the draft of the paper yet," the killer said.

  Malcolm stared at him.

  "You're serious?" he asked. "Making small talk about a research paper after you killed one of your co-authors and kidnapped the family of another?"

  "Killing Carter Straub was an accident," the Shadow Man said.

  "An accident? You cut his head off."

  "Carter was a smart young man, but that was, in some respects, his undoing. I went by his place trying to get a copy of the current draft of the paper and he mentioned what had been going on with you. Said he knew you well. He was 100% certain that you were innocent. Unlike the police, who could be tricked into thinking that you were a murderer, Carter was convinced that someone had to be framing you. He was rocket-sledding down the logic path of possible suspects, figuring out possible motivations and backgrounds, and he had come to the conclusion that it had to be a surgeon who knew enough about you and your situation to target people who could be linked to you. And then he looked at me, eyebrows raised, and I realized that he knew. That sonofabitch had figured it out. So I had no choice but to put him down. A shame, too. He'd have been a damn fine surgeon."

  "'Put him down'? Like a horse with a broken leg? Let me reiterate: you cut his freakin' head off," Malcolm said.

  "All part of the show. Once he was dead, I figured that I ought to use him to help bolster the case against you. But just to let you know, Carter Straub was a crime of opportunity. I did not want to kill him, but he was too damn smart for his own good."

  The killer put on his blinker and turned down Butler Avenue.

  Malcolm could see the thick plume of black smoke as it rose into the sky from the other side of the island.

  The Shadow Man was driving right toward it.

  "You're going over there?" Malcolm said, pointing to the pillar of smoke.

  "That's where our project is," the killer said.

  "But that area will be swarming with firemen and cops," Malcolm said.

  The killer grinned.

  "Precisely. They'll be distracted. Won't be looking for anything else going on right under their own noses. The last place you expect someone to hide is right in front of you."

  "What the hell does that mean?" said Malcolm.

  "You'll see."

  Malcolm pointed into the back seat.

  "What are those wooden boxes for?" he asked.

  "Take a look," the Shadow Man said.

  Malcolm unbuckled his seat belt and grabbed the smaller of the two wooden boxes by the handles, pulling it into his lap. He re-buckled the belt as he sat down.

  The killer glanced over at him.

  "Really? The seat belt? We're only going a couple of miles," he said.

  "You do it your way, and I'll do it mine," Malcolm said.

  "Pussy," the killer said. "No wonder it was so easy to beat you."

  Glaring
at him, Malcolm unlatched the box.

  At first, he thought he was simply looking at fishing tackle. There were myriad baubles and trinkets and feathers and locks of hair, each one in a small zip-lock bag, organized into separate compartments in the box. And then he saw the cards, with various photo I.D.s, all lined up in another compartment on the right side, and he realized what this was.

  "Trophies," he said.

  The Shadow Man nodded.

  "But there are dozens and dozens of things here. Heck, there may be a hundred . . ."

  The killer shook his head.

  "Not a hundred. That's Box B, isn't it? Yeah. Box B. Eighty-seven in that box," he said.

  Malcolm felt a wave of nausea sweep over him.

  "Are these people all dead?" he asked.

  The killer drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.

  "Pretty much," he said. "Last time I checked."

  Malcolm thumbed through the various drivers' licenses and college I.D. cards, smiling faces and dour faces, eyes half closed and eyes wide open, gray-haired and dark-haired and everything in between. He could not believe it.

  So many lives, he thought.

  His fingers sifted through them and then stopped.

  Mimi's smiling face stared back at him. It was her school I.D.

  Malcolm's hands were shaking. He felt sick, violated. His heart­beat was tripping along too fast, palms sweaty, eyes tearing up, blinding him.

  "This is my daughter's," he said.

  The Shadow Man glanced at the card in Malcolm's hand.

  "So it is."

  "Joel, you asshole, does this mean . . .?"

  Malcolm swallowed. Hard. It felt like there was a rock in his throat.

  Don't cry. Don't cry, don't cry, don't cry, not with him, not here. Not now.

  "Have you killed my daughter?" Malcolm asked. His voice was tremulous, strangled. He felt like all of the air in the car had just been sucked out.

  "Hah hah. Trick question. Not yet."

  "Not yet? "

  "That's where you come in," the killer said.

  Sunlight was scattering the clouds in earnest now, driving back the darkness and the rain with a vengeance. The Shadow Man turned west, down 15th Street.