Perfect Victim

by Jay Bonansinga

  “Sir, please,” one of the cops broke in, raising a beefy hand in an attempt to stem the flow of babble. The older of the two patrolmen, Officer Ted Stenowski had been on the Outer Banks beat for most of his twenty-seven years with the force, but he had never seen anything on the beach quite like this. “I’m going to need you to hold that thought and be quiet for a second.”

  The old salty dog stuck out his lower lip and gave the cop an indignant grunt.

  Stenowski went over to Karen Finnerty’s remains, his Wellington boots sinking down to the ankles in the muck. High tide had come in only minutes ago, and now the waves licked at the woman’s corpse, gently nudging it sideways with every sudsy ripple. Stenowski shone his flashlight down at the victim. Darkening blood swirled on the seafoam like threads of raspberry syrup.

  “This is no suicide,” Stenowski muttered, somewhat rhetorically, more to himself than anyone else. He shone the light off to the left of the corpse, then off to the right. Then he took a second look at everything. He saw the remnants of something scratched into the sand vanishing on the waves.

  They looked like letters.

  “Johnny, get on the blower to Raleigh, get Dave Van Teigham and the whole CSI bunch down here.”

  Behind Stenowski, the younger cop frowned. “You want the Bureau in on this thing?”

  Stenowski didn’t answer—he had too many things running through his mind at that moment as he stared down at the meticulously mutilated victim.

  The door to little Aaron’s room clicked open softly, and Maura peered into the darkness.

  Ulysses Grove sat in a bentwood rocker next to his child’s crib, rocking and thinking. Only the faint yellow glow of a night-light and a pale perfect victim of moonlight coming through the blinds illuminated Grove’s chiseled features. One of Aaron’s coloring books sat on his lap.

  For the last hour he had been absently doodling in the margins of the book with a black crayon, drawing the same symbol over and over—the bulbous gun-target silhouette from his class. The faceless effigy of the every-killer. It was a symbol that had been haunting the periphery of his dreams and visions for nearly a year, ever since he had turned his elaborate 125-page class syllabus into a forensic textbook ponderously titled The Psychopathological Archetype: Toward a Statistical Model. Somehow, in his fervid imagination, Grove had anthropomorphized that human target silhouette into a monstrous individual, an individual he had birthed into the world.

  He closed the coloring book and looked up at his wife like a man stirring from a dream. “What’s wrong?”

  “Lois Geisel just called,” Maura whispered as she approached her husband. She was holding herself as though she were cold.

  Grove reflexively looked at his watch. Lois Geisel rarely deigned to make personal calls, especially not at this late hour. She was a very private, very introverted, very patrician woman who had served her husband well over the years as the unofficial “first lady” of the Behavioral Science Unit. She was a party-giver and a function organizer, but never a kibitzer. Grove got along well with her, and had nothing but respect for any woman with the good taste to stay married to Tom Geisel. The aging patriarch of the BSU was Grove’s mentor, his best friend, his moral compass. Without Tom Geisel running interference for him over the years, Grove would have been chewed up by the Byzantine politics of the Bureau long ago.

  “Uly…” Maura stopped, something terrible glittering in her wet eyes.

  “What is it?”

  She swallowed. “Tom Geisel’s had a stroke.”

  By 3 A.M. the soupy air over Emerald Isle beach flickered with the silver strobes of forensic cameras. The field office in Raleigh had dispatched two additional special agents to accompany the senior investigator, David Van Teigham, to the scene, and now the sand—most of it staked off with yellow tape and patchworked with plastic drip cloths—bustled with crime scene technicians.

  “What I’m trying to figure out here is why the first on the scene shoots an immediate call to us,” Van Teigham was saying, standing off in the darkness by a weathered piling, his thick head of chestnut hair tossing in the sea breeze. He was young for a senior investigator, with a stylish look about him apparent even in the wee-hour dark. He had surgical gloves on his hands, and a laminate ID card dangled across his Bill Blass tie, twisting and flapping in the wind. “In other words, what gave you the idea this was anything more than, you know, a one-shot deal?”

  Officer Stenowski stood next to the agent, his burly arms crossed defensively against his chest. “Honest truth? I really had no idea.”

  Van Teigham gazed at the scene, the blatant array of footprints, the darker patches of sand, the black arterial stains fanning out from Karen Finnerty toward the sea grass to the north. “That makes two of us.”

  The cop licked his lips thoughtfully. “You mind if I ask you something?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Does it look like a series?”

  Van Teigham looked at the cop. “You didn’t really answer my original question.”

  Stenowski looked at the victim, then shrugged. “The thing is, I read a lot.”

  Van Teigham cocked his head. “Reading is good. What do they say—reading is fundamental?”

  “I know it sounds corny.”

  “Not at all. We’re all friends here.” The agent gave the cop a smile that faded almost immediately. “You got a theory about this situation?”

  “Theory? No. Well…I wouldn’t exactly call it a theory.” Silver strobes flashed in the fog like heat lightning. Stenowski looked at the agent. “Am I crazy or does it all look familiar?”

  “All what?”

  “Everything, every little thing.” Stenowski gestured at the victim, the scene. “The body, the pose, the evidence. I don’t know. Everything.”

  The agent ran fingers through his thick, sandy hair. “You’re thinking we got a copycat on our hands?”

  Stenowski shook his head. “No…not exactly. It’s just…familiar.”

  The agent thought about it for a second, then said, “Lemme ask you something, Stenowski. When you say you read a lot, you’re talking about, what? Sherlock Holmes? Forensic stuff? Mickey Spillane? What?”

  Stenowski shrugged. “Textbooks, mostly. Forensic science, criminology, behavioral profiling, stuff like that.”

  The agent glanced at the evidence flags, the blood-mottled sand, the huge black oval under Karen Finnerty’s torso. “That’s very interesting.”

  Stenowski looked at the younger man. “Why’s that?”

  Van Teigham pondered the victim’s pale, mildewed corpse, and the fact that it perfectly matched another random, motiveless killing in Minneapolis just a few weeks ago. “Because I was thinking the same goddamn thing—how familiar it looks.”

  FIVE

  Grove was dozing fitfully in a cheap armchair in the corner of Tom Geisel’s hospital room when his cell phone began trilling incessantly in his pocket.

  Grove had been maintaining his lonely bedside vigil since 4 A.M. Not long ago he had told Lois to go get something to eat, and the subsequent silence had made Grove drowsy. He needed to rest his eyes. For hours he had been doing nothing but staring at his comatose boss, praying that the man would come back to the land of the living. Now the chirping cell phone seemed an affront to the older man’s dignity. “Should’ve turned this piece of shit off,” Grove grumbled under his breath as he rooted the cell phone out of his pocket.

  Across the room, a cold, gunmetal dawn rose behind the Venetian blinds, bathing the gurney bed in cameos of pale light. The section chief, nestled in his white linen sarcophagus, did not stir, did not move. Eyes closed, his strong, cleft chin shadowed with whiskers, Tom Geisel looked almost serene. Regal, even. Lois must have combed his hair, because it still had his trademark ruler-straight part, the iron-gray wings sweeping back over his large ears. His enormous, gnarled, liver-spotted hands lay in repose at his side. The soft beeping noises of the vital monitors drowned his shallow breathing.

  The se
ction chief’s prognosis, according to the young, sober-faced resident who had been periodically charging in and out of the room, was still inconclusive. They were still studying MRIs, still analyzing CT scans. They suspected either a massive stroke or an aneurysm of some sort, but they were not ruling anything out, especially in light of the man’s symptoms. According to Lois, her husband had been dozing in front of the TV last night when he suddenly awakened from a terrible nightmare with blurred vision and chest pains. He had stumbled into the bathroom, and minutes later Lois found him on the floor, mumbling, disoriented, a part of his face slack and twitching.

  Grove looked at the caller ID display on his buzzing cell phone and saw it was a Bureau field office calling.

  An unexpected twinge of dread stabbed Grove in the chest: Bureau field offices never called him directly unless there was a time crunch on something. Was this the other shoe dropping? Was this the second act of this inexorable little tragedy he had stumbled into? Bad news comes in threes, his mother used to say. But right now, one was enough for Grove. At the moment, in fact, he wasn’t even sure he could handle a new case. Not with his lifeline—his anchor, his voice of reason—fading away in front of him.

  Tom Geisel had been Grove’s benevolent ring man from the very beginning: recruiting Grove fresh out of the military, and always present in Grove’s corner; carefully selecting Grove’s assignments, protecting the wonder boy. Grove and Geisel had caught dozens of elusive criminals together, and had also gotten to know each other on that bone-deep level shared by fellow trench warriors. They had attended weddings and funerals together, had burned CDs of old jazz tunes for each other, and on alternating mornings had even brought each other lox and bagels. Without even being aware of it they had become like brothers. And now Grove’s only brother in the world was dying, and it made Grove’s guts twist with anguish, and it made him curse this goddamned cell phone for squeaking and vibrating in his hand like a viper.

  “This is Grove,” he snapped into the cell.

  An unfamiliar voice said, “Agent Grove, this is Dave Van Teigham, special agent out of Raleigh-Durham. Sorry to bother you so early in the morning, sir.”

  Grove frowned. He didn’t know anybody out of Raleigh-Durham. The voice on the other end had a youthful quality to it, and a calibrated drawl that suggested New South, maybe a college degree from someplace like Duke or Tulane. “Listen, uh, Agent, uh—”

  “Van Teigham.”

  “Right, um…look. I’m a little tied up this morning. Can you leave a message at Quantico?”

  There was a tense beat of silence, then the voice said, “The thing of it is, I would normally go through channels, but this thing is…”

  Grove waited. “I’m listening.”

  “Okay. In a nutshell. We got reason to believe we got a series going now—and it’s a little unique.”

  “Go on.”

  The voice took a deep breath. “We just taped off a scene outside a little resort town in North Carolina, along the Outer Banks, called Emerald Isle—female, white, early forties, name of Karen Finnerty, apparent cause of death sharp trauma. Signature matches up with an unsolved killing in Minneapolis two weeks ago.”

  “You mean the MO?”

  “Actually there’s a real signature here, looks like a ritual type deal.”

  Grove let out a pained sigh. He felt slightly guilty talking about this stuff in front of his unconscious boss. He turned away, toward the wall, as though this conversation might actually infect Geisel with its tainted backwash. “Look. Van Tiegham…I’m going to have to get back to you—”

  “If you just give me a chance to—”

  “I’m sorry.” Grove rubbed his eyes. “I’m going to have to pick this up next week—”

  “It’s just like your book.”

  Grove frowned. “I’m sorry?”

  “I said it’s just like your book.”

  Grove stood up, turned toward the wall, his voice suddenly low and urgent. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  On the other end of the line, Van Teigham’s voice dropped an octave. “I didn’t want to just drop this in your lap like this.”

  “What do you mean, just like my book?”

  “I think we got a situation here—I don’t think copycat is the right word for it: the evidence is staged exactly the same way it appears in your book.”

  The door to Geisel’s room whooshed open, and Grove lurched into the corridor, his sweaty grip tight on the cell phone, the back of his neck tingling with nervous tension. “I’m not following what you’re telling me here,” he said under his breath, oblivious to the nurses brushing past him, the orderlies pushing carts down the hallway.

  “Let me repeat what I’m saying,” the voice in his ear said. “The evidence—both in Minneapolis and North Carolina—it matches down to the last fiber the model in your book—what did you call it? The archetype?”

  “How did you even—?”

  “I caught your lecture at the annual AFP meeting last March, met you afterward at the banquet, got a copy of your book. I probably wouldn’t have connected anything up if I hadn’t seen that illustration.”

  “What illustration is that?” Grove stared at the scuffed tile floor, chewing the inside of his cheek. He did not notice the frail, gray-haired woman approaching from the bank of elevators fifty feet away. Dressed in jeans and a fleece vest, her eyes raw from crying, Lois Geisel carried a large purse, a brown paper bag, and a newspaper under one arm. She walked with the somnambulant, zombie gate of the traumatized.

  Van Teigham’s voice kept crackling in Grove’s ear: “It was in the chapter on spatter patterns, bloodstain pathology—the artist rendering—I checked it again this morning—compared it to the CSI shots from the Finnerty scene. Pretty damn uncanny. Same exact pattern in the smudge marks across the sand, same exact volume. In the alley in Minnesota, too. Same story—”

  Lois Geisel walked up to Grove and put a cold, slender hand on his arm.

  Grove patted her shoulder, and made a “gimme one second” gesture, as Van Teigham’s drawl continued sizzling in his ear.

  “—which got me to thinking, what about the other averages from your study? You can look at the two scenes yourself. They’re identical, they perfectly match the averages in your study. The MO, the body dump, the print dispersions, victimology, the whole shot. The archetypal killer. And I’m thinking, is this even possible? I’m wondering is this even within the realm of—”

  “Okay, Van Teigham, I get it.” Grove chewed on his lip, thinking. “Where are you right now?”

  “I’m at the Raleigh-Durham field office.”

  “Okay, look, I’ll call you back. Stay put. I’ll call you back in fifteen.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  Grove thumbed his cell off and folded it shut, then put an arm around Lois Geisel’s thin body.

  She gazed up at him through strands of gray hair. Her eyes, spiderwebbed with wrinkles and running mascara, looked parboiled. She managed a halfhearted smile. “Always working, you boys.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “I forgot to tell you.” She dug in her purse for something. “He wrote you a note.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s here somewhere. He was lucid in the ambulance for a while. Managed to scribble something before he…lost consciousness.”

  Grove looked at her. “Tom wrote me a note?”

  “Here it is.” She pulled out a folded piece of ruled paper. “He said something about getting this to you as soon as possible.”

  Grove took the note.

  Lois shrugged. “I didn’t even read it. I’m not even sure it’s legible. By that point, he was”—she swallowed the end of the sentence, her eyes welling up—“he was—”

  “He’s gonna be okay, Lois.” Grove gave her a hug, the note crumpling in his fist. “Just a bump in the road—he’s gonna pull through.”

  From the look on her face it was clear she didn’t believe a word of what Grove
what saying.

  For that matter, neither did he.

  By two o’clock that afternoon, Grove was on a commuter flight to Raleigh-Durham.

  Before embarking, he called Maura from the airport, assuring her that Tom was stable and that there was nothing to worry about—something had come up that necessitated a quick trip down to North Carolina. Just for the day, no big deal. He’d be home by suppertime. From the resignation in Maura’s voice, Grove could tell that she was suspicious, worried, even a little aggrieved. But Grove would have to deal with that later.

  Now, seated in the rear of the small Jetstream aircraft, coursing high above the steel-gray coastal plains of the Chesapeake—one of only three passengers in the narrow cabin of twenty-nine seats—Grove was on his own dime. He hadn’t taken the time to notify Operations of this unexpected consultation. He hadn’t bothered telling anybody at the Academy; luckily he had no classes. But the truth was, he wasn’t even sure he was authorized to go on such a trip.

  None of these factors, however, currently occupied his thoughts. None of these considerations even entered his mind as the plane pitched and bumped over angry turbulence. He was too busy staring at the damp, wrinkled note spread out on the tray table in front of him.

  Grove had read and reread Tom Geisel’s hurriedly scrawled message, at least a half a dozen times now, and it still remained as cryptic and foreboding as the first time—especially the last few lines, when the spidery handwriting disintegrated into illegible gibberish, probably due to the onslaught of convulsions.

  Ulysses—

  Mind’s a little scrambled now, bear with me. Full disclosure time. Been having nightmares last few years. Thought it was stress. Now, I think has something to do with this thing inside the perps that you’re in the habit of mentioning. This entity you speak of. Let me start over. Having trouble organizing my thoughts. Tonight had the worst dream ever, a dark figure, like a shadow. No face, just an outline just not feeling too good about not tellin yo s’thing they tol me bac then tht thee ws an o her b y a b d one who yo have to Ul h ss yr tn