Orsetta's face flushed. 'This is my card,' she said, slapping it down on the cold counter. 'It is an urgent police matter. Have him call me as soon as you see him.' She glared at Nancy. 'This is not a request, Signora, it is an instruction.'
For a second the two women locked eyes. Orsetta smiled as sweetly as she could, then elegantly turned on her immaculate heels and left.
11
Days Inn Grand Strand, South Carolina The lady who answers phones at UMail2Anywhere proves as good as her word. Within an hour of the call, Stan, the delivery boy, turns up with a length of bubble wrap, four cardboard boxes, three sheets of brown paper and a roll of sticky tape. Spider appears at the door seemingly with car oil all over his hands, gets the kid to dump the gear on his bed, then quickly washes and tips him for his trouble. He's just scrubbed the skull clean of prints and isn't about to add fresh ones to the parcel he intends to send Sugar home in. Stan hangs around by the pool, drinking lime coke and checking out girls, while his big-tipping client takes his time wrapping some fragile cargo that has to be shipped air mail that afternoon. He seems a nice guy, not many customers give a tip these days, let alone ask his name and thank him. Waiting around for a real gent like that is no problem. The dude has even said he can find him some private work, running errands for a bit more than the basic he gets at UM2A. Says he might have something for him later that day, if he takes care of this package first, and does a real good job of looking after it.
Spider pulls on cotton gloves. Not long ago he'd read that cops could somehow pick up prints from inside rubber gloves. He isn't sure it's true, but doesn't intend taking any chances. When he's finished, he'll take the gloves with him. Meanwhile, he uses a Swiss Army penknife to cut off a length of the bubble wrap and forces it tight inside Sarah Kearney's skull. The plastic bulges through the eye sockets and jaw giving a grotesque illusion of membranes, muscles and even life. He wraps another sheet around the outside, holds it down with tape and places the whole thing inside one of the smaller boxes Stan brought him. He seals it with tape and wraps it in a sheet of brown paper. He cuts more bubble wrap, tapes it around the box and places it snugly inside one of the bigger boxes. He runs sticky tape around all the joints and carefully covers the outside with the remaining two sheets of brown paper. He takes a black felt-tip marker from his case and writes the delivery address in nondescript capital letters that contain no clue to his true handwriting. For a second he pauses and takes a slow, satisfying sniff of the pen. It smells of pear drops. Spider smiles at the irony of it all. Who would have thought that innocent reminders of childhood sweets could come to mind when you're handling the decapitated head of a woman you killed twenty years ago?
He flattens the spare boxes and puts them and the tape and bubble wrap inside his suitcase. Spider then carries the box out to the landing and places it at the foot of the front door. His room is on the second floor of the three-storey motel block and from the door he can clearly see Stan. The kid is checking out some teenagers in bikinis so tiny you could floss your teeth with them.
'Hey, Stan!' he shouts.
The delivery boy breaks from his adolescent daydreaming and raises a hand to acknowledge the call. By the time Stan appears on the landing, Spider has removed his gloves, tucked a cell phone between his left ear and shoulder blade and is writing something on a motel notepad while seemingly talking to someone.
'Yeah, sure, I finished the work about an hour ago and I should be able to get the accounts faxed to you sometime this afternoon. Don't you worry about it.'
Stan can see the guy is real busy. He nods at the parcel on the floor and asks, 'It's ready to go?'
'Just a second,' says Spider to the party on the phone, covering the mouthpiece as he answers Stan. 'Yeah, you can take it. Thanks again for waiting. I'll call your number later for the other job.'
'Sure, no problem,' says Stan, picking up the box, smiling and walking away.
Spider carries on pretending to talk. He watches the boy until he is out of sight and then ducks back into the motel room. So far, so good, his plan is going well. He takes a bottle of ink from his suitcase and deliberately spills it over the bedsheets and pillows. Quickly, he uses the room towels to mop up the mess, then hauls the whole bundle into the shower and turns on the taps. Next, he calls room service and tells them he's tripped and spilt ink everywhere but is soaking the sheets to get the stain out. A Mexican maid is at his room quicker than a 100-metre sprinter on steroids. She shouts at him in Spanish but settles down when he gives her ten dollars and helps her squeeze out the soaking linen and put it into her cart. He feels better knowing that within ten minutes all the sheets, quilt cover, pillows and towels that may contain traces of his DNA will be in a boil wash in the laundry room.
Spider double-checks the bedroom to ensure he hasn't left anything behind. He grabs his belongings, locks the door and heads down to the twenty-four-hour reception desk to settle his bill. He pretends to be embarrassed about 'the accident' and is polite and apologetic. After a call is made to Housekeeping, he's told that everything is okay and there won't be any extra charge. He thanks the clerk, pays cash and leaves to collect his silver Chevy Metro hire car from the forecourt. He's only minutes away from the Thrifty Rent-a-Car depot on Jetport Road, where he'd used a false driver's ID to hire the eighty-dollars-a-day special and again had paid cash. Good old untraceable cash, the international currency of crime.
It takes an age for the attendant to get to him, then like everyone else, he objects furiously when he gets stung for the petrol surcharge. He's still complaining when he catches the shuttle over to the airport's main terminal. Spider's first stop is the Delta ticket desk, where he pays cash for his one-way trip out of South Carolina. He checks in his suitcase, collects his boarding pass and heads off for something to eat.
He has plenty of time before his flight.
There's one last call to make. One more piece of important business to take care of before he can catch his plane out of Myrtle.
12
Florence, Tuscany Were the nightmares always the same? Was he frightened of going to sleep after them? During the waking hours did he have flashbacks of what happened in the dreams? The questions came thick and fast but Jack didn't duck any of them, not even when Elisabetta Fenella asked if he was depressed, tearful, overly emotional or even impotent.
Eventually, she managed to persuade him to take her through his childhood. Unlike that of those he had pursued in his professional life, his own past contained no trauma, no abuse or deprivation, just the solid love and support of two parents who had been teenage sweethearts. They stayed married for more than thirty years, inseparable until five years earlier when a hit-and-run driver killed his father soon after his retirement. Jack Snr had been a New York City cop all his working life and his mother, Brenda, had been a night sister at the Mount Sinai Medical Center near Central Park. His mother had died alone, in her sleep, just over three years ago of a heart attack. Jack still thought it was probably as much to do with being broken-hearted as with the high cholesterol that doctors believed had clogged her arteries.
'Would it be fair to say…' said Fenella, checking dates in her file, '… that just before your collapse, the stress was at its peak?'
'Stress comes with the job,' said Jack. 'I'm not sure I felt significantly pressured then.'
'But if we look at the timings, we see your mother dies, and then weeks later you collapse at an airport. You think they are entirely unconnected?'
Jack hated easy-fit psychology. Life was full of shitty coincidences and sometimes lots of good things happened all at once, sometimes you got dealt several crappy hands one after the other. 'I don't for one moment buy the idea that my mother's death in any way contributed to my illness,' he said, sounding slightly annoyed. 'Of course I loved her, of course it saddened me deeply, but I'd dealt with that. I'd understood that part of my life was over. Listen,' he continued, more sharply than he'd intended, 'every working day of my life, I was up close and
personal to some form of death. I saw all variety of dead mothers, dead children and even dead babies. I met death in binders of crime scene photographs, on slabs down at the city morgue, under the buzz of a cranium bone saw in an autopsy and I saw death in the eyes and souls of all the evil bastards who had taken a life. Death and I are no strangers, we've been in close contact for a lot of my life.'
Fenella paused. She let the heat from his monologue cool in the air around them. She knew she needed to give him some space. In time he'd come to recognize that even he should have given himself the opportunity to grieve properly for his parents. She decided to move on and opened the file on the coffee table. She found herself swallowing hard and steadying herself for what lay ahead. The details of the Black River Killer's reign of terror made horrific reading, even for a hardened professional. 'This was the case you were working on when you were taken ill. Sixteen victims, maybe more, going back at least two decades?'
'Undoubtedly more,' said Jack. He glanced at the file papers and the gates to his memory burst open: victims' faces, glazed dead eyes, corpses mutilated as the killer hacked off the body part he always kept as a trophy; all the abominations rushed through again.
'Tell me about him,' urged Fenella.
There was so much Jack could say that he barely knew where to begin. 'BRK, that's what the press called him, started like so many of them do. His first prey, or at least what we think was his first, was a young woman living in an isolated area. Somehow he abducted, murdered and killed her, then he dumped her body in the Black River, hence his nickname. Once he realized he could kill and get away with it, he developed a taste for it. He grew more confident and started to experiment. His paraphilias probably widened, his fantasies grew deeper and we started to discover evidence that he tortured the women before he killed them.'
Fenella took a sip of water and made notes as Jack continued.
'It became part of BRK's MO to keep the corpses for as long as possible. Then, as soon as decomposition set in, he moved quickly to get rid of them, disposing of their bodies in the Black River. As time passed and he grew more experienced, he began dismembering the bodies and weighing down their severed limbs in plastic refuse sacks before scattering them miles apart. With every kill he'd become harder to catch.'
'How often do you think about the Black River Killer?'
'A lot. I still think of him a lot.'
Fenella glanced at some dates in her notes. 'It's more than three years since you worked on the case, what makes you still think about him so much?'
Jack shrugged.
'Is it when a new murder occurs, or do you find yourself just thinking about him without any reason?'
'He's not killed since I was working the investigation. His last victim was the one I was handling when I had the collapse.'
Fenella made more notes, then added, 'So it isn't news about him that triggers your thoughts and your nightmares?'
'No. He's always there at the back of my mind, I never lose his shadow, it's always around somewhere.'
'Tell me, during the day, when your mind turns to him, what are you thinking?'
'I wonder about what he's doing, who he might share his life with, how he manages to live with himself. How normal he may be, or appear to be.'
Fenella knew he was self-censoring, holding back the full force of what was filling his thoughts. 'And do you think about how he actually felt while committing those acts?'
'No, not as much as I used to,' he answered. 'When I was working on the case, I used to think about that a lot. We are trained to think like that, to put ourselves in the shoes of those we hunt. We have to think how they think, feel how they feel, and understand what it's like to do what they do.'
'And what do you think it's like?'
'For them? What do I think scum like BRK feel when they do these things?'
'Yes.'
Jack's face hardened. 'I think, for them, the experience is amazing. Godlike. They literally have the power of life and death. And that, for the BRKs of this world, killing is the ultimate thrill. Nothing on earth compares to it and, once they have experienced it, they are addicted as surely as if murder were a narcotic.'
The flashbacks came again: blood splatters, floaters in the river, fingertip searches. Jack mentally dammed the flood of images.
Fenella leant forward on the couch and lowered her voice. 'You don't sound judgemental. How do you do that?'
'Do what?' He gave her a puzzled look.
'Suppress the disgust, the repulsion that you must feel?'
Jack was thrown for a minute. The honest answer was that he didn't feel anything any more. The endless diet of homicidal horror had bludgeoned his senses into dullness. But how could he say that out loud and not sound inhumane? How could he admit that victims and killers had ceased being people and had been reduced in his mind to objects and puzzles, a mere algebra of violence? 'It's a good question,' he conceded. 'To be judgemental would be to blinker myself as an investigator, and I can't afford to do that. I can't afford any killer or rapist I interview to see any sign of that. Whatever they've done, however they've taken a life, I have to show them that I'm there to understand why they did it, rather than condemn what they've done.'
Fenella noted that he still spoke, and to a large extent behaved, as though he were an FBI agent. It was something she'd come back to, perhaps at another session, if indeed there was one. 'I want to move on now to the exact content of your nightmares. Are you comfortable doing that?'
Jack shifted defensively in his seat. 'You going to go all Freudian and Jungian on me?'
'Maybe a little. Freud described dreaming as "the royal road to the unconscious" and I think it's a route worth going down.'
'Then, let's go.' Jack was surprised to see that he'd clasped his hands and was bracing himself. He felt his temperature rise and his heartbeat quicken. He closed his eyes for a second and stared into the grey-black eggshell darkness of his mind. 'I'm at an autopsy. It's being held in the middle of a night, in some dead-end town I've never been to before. It's not my case; the cop in charge has asked me to step in at the last minute. We're all downstairs, in some kind of basement; looks more like a cellar in a house than an autopsy room. It's cold and has the sweet stink of old sump oil and running damp. The walls are brick and painted white, the floor is black and hard and your feet crunch when you move, as though you are walking on broken glass. Rusty pipes run along the ceiling and hiss and rumble in a way that makes you think they are going to break and burst at any minute.'
She noted the vividness and starkness of his language, how even in his dreams Jack had a sharpened sense of observation, was aware of sounds, smells and even things under his feet that he couldn't see.
'The ME's working like crazy, almost as though he's a surgeon trying to save a life, rather than a pathologist methodically opening up a body. He's moving so quickly around the slab I can't see who he is. Every time I reposition myself to try to say something, the guy shifts on to another part of the body. The girl on the slab is sixteen-year-old Lisa Maria Jenkins, BRK's last known victim. She'd been butchered like a piece of meat. Head, hands, legs, feet, all cut off. Her left hand was never discovered, BRK had kept it as a trophy. But in the dream, Lisa's intact; looking as beautiful as her last birthday picture, when her long brown hair was tied back in a pony-tail.'
Jack struggled to go on. Clearly the cognitive experience was troubling him, but Fenella did nothing to fill the silence or give him a way out. He pinched his eyes for a second, then continued. 'As I look at her face, I realize something's wrong. She's still breathing. I shout "Hey, look, look, she's alive!', but the ME ignores me and just carries on cutting her open, pulling intestines and organs out of a huge cavity in her stomach. Suddenly, the pipes break free from the wall and start pouring blood on to the floor, as if they're giant veins. I'm screaming now, "Stop! For Christ's sake, stop cutting her, she's alive!" But he blanks me. As I rush around the table to try to get hold of him he runs the buzz saw
across her neck, decapitating her. I recognize him now. I realize why he's been dodging me, not letting me see his face.'
'You say you recognize him. Who is it, Jack?'
He raised his head and stared straight at her. 'It's me. The monster in my dreams is me.'
It was Fenella's turn to sit in silence, pen motionless on the notepaper.
'Tell me, please tell me; how can I control these nightmares?'
Fenella's heart went out to him. She understood his dilemma and it was a dark and dangerous one. 'Jack, you already have control. The level of lucidity you describe indicates that you deliberately trigger these thoughts. Subconsciously you want to see these things, you have a need to re-examine the case that you walked away from and, in the absence of new evidence, your imagination is inventing it.'
Jack was staring at the floor. He nodded slowly. He understood now, but what was the way out? 'What exactly do I have to do to stop them?'
The psychiatrist waited until he raised his eyes to look at her. 'You already know that, don't you?'
And he did.
Jack fully understood that he could choose to stop the nightmares any time he wanted. But he could only do so by admitting to himself that his personal hunt to catch the Black River Killer really was over.
13
FBI Field Office, New York Special Agent Howie Baumguard sat at his desk, losing a messy hand-wrestling competition with a deli lunch. The bagel spewed salmon out of one side and low-fat cheese out of the other. He licked the cheese away but the salmon hit his paperwork before he could juggle it into his hungry mouth. He'd missed breakfast and had been forced to cancel a lunch appointment, so right now the bagel and a blisteringly hot Americano figured top of his list of life's priorities. Howie was carrying too much weight, not just for his own liking but also for that of Carrie, his size-zero, Botox-addicted wife, who'd pronounced that either the 'love handles' went or Howie could start learning how to cook for one on the few cents she'd leave him after she sued his fat ass for all the alimony she could get.
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