Perfect Victim

by Jay Bonansinga

  He managed to sit up and quickly shuffle through a pile of documents on the coffee table next to the sofa. He found a yellow legal pad and a pen, and frantically scrawled the words he had just seen in his dream.

  Cilbup Q Nhoj?

  “You see, the problem is, I’m dying, honey.”

  The old Kenyan woman sat on a wrought-iron chair in the far corner of the airport cafeteria, shaded by a giant rubber plant, her baobab cane canted against the table, her proud, wrinkled face like parchment in the bright, diffuse light. Her burnished ebony eyes shimmered with deep sadness.

  Drinkwater, seated across the round table, wasn’t sure she had heard the woman correctly. “You’re what? I’m sorry, say again?”

  “I’m dying, sweetheart. Lung cancer.”

  “Oh God, I’m sorry.”

  “I’ve done what I set out to do in this life.”

  Drinkwater let this amazing statement sink in. “Does Ulysses—?”

  “He won’t accept it.” The woman spoke tenderly. “Bless his foolish heart, he thinks it’s all in my mind. Sends me articles on green tea. Relaxation techniques.”

  “I understand.” Drinkwater was having second thoughts about this whole insane detour, about bothering this poor, poor woman, maybe even about the entire surreal scavenger hunt she was on—chasing folk legends and bogeymen, for Christ’s sake. “Mrs. Grove, can I ask you something a little personal?”

  “Vida, please.” The old woman smiled.

  “Vida…do you mind if I ask you…about Ulysses’ birth?”

  The woman’s smile flickered for a moment. “His birth? What about his birth?”

  Drinkwater felt her face flush. This was ridiculous. But she had to ask it. “I understand Ulysses was your only son?”

  Just the slightest pause here. “That’s right.”

  “And his father…”

  “Yes?”

  “Ulysses never knew his father, is that right?”

  “That’s true.”

  “May I ask if you and he were—?”

  “If we were divorced? Is that what you’re wondering?”

  Drinkwater looked down for a moment. “Well, yeah.” Then she looked up at the old woman. “I guess what I’m really wondering is whether—God, I know this is real personal—but I’m wondering whether your son was planned?”

  Now there was a long pause.

  Vida Grove leaned forward then, the light catching the side of her lined brown face. She looked like a ghost. Tears had gathered in her eyes. “I never told a soul about this,” she said softly, her liquid gaze holding Drinkwater rapt. “Only a few people ever knew about it, and they are long in the ground. I’ve waited all these years for this secret to come back and haunt me. I knew that it would. They always do. They always, always come back.”

  The old woman paused. Drinkwater waited, the hairs on her neck standing up.

  That night, Grove furiously paced the cluttered periphery of his living room, his heart chugging, the residue of his nightmare—and that jumbled anagram of a word at the end—still clinging to his racing thoughts. At last he reached down to the coffee table and snatched up the yellow notepaper on which he had jotted the nonsense syllables in large block letters.

  He stared at the garbled dream-words. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Something clicked in the back of his brain.

  The room spun.

  He staggered across the living room and into the front foyer. Next to the big oak door stood a coatrack, a little pedestal on which Grove and Maura often tossed their keys, and a Warren Kimball mirror. One of Maura’s beloved pieces of folk art, the mirror was framed in tiny American flags and cobs of corn.

  Grove held the yellow pad up to the mirror, then cocked his head to give his good eye a clean view of the reverse reflection of CILBUP Q NHOJ:

  JOHN Q PUBLIC

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The telltale ring of the private work line—a low, incessant alarm tone trilling across the darkened room—awoke Ray Kopsinsky from a deep sleep. He stirred, careful not to wake his wife, Cynthia, who sleepily murmured something inaudible before turning over and putting the pillow to her head.

  The acting section chief climbed out of bed and padded across the deep shag of his Georgetown bedroom to the phone, which he answered with a whisper that managed to be both alarmed and annoyed. “Kopsinky here.”

  “Ray, it’s Grove—I got an ID on the Archetype killer.”

  “What?”

  “Listen to me—the Archetype killer is a transient, goes by the name John Q Public.”

  Kopsinsky woke up a little. “How do you know this, Grove? What’s going on?”

  “The note at the Bard scene—Bard was trying to tell us—it’s John Q Public, Ray.”

  The bureaucrat looked out the window at the predawn streets. “You know this individual?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “John Q Public? I’m drawing a blank.”

  “Funny you should say that.”

  Kopsinsky frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “‘Blank.’”

  “What do you mean?”

  A slight pause, then Grove’s voice: “That’s exactly what our impression of this guy was—tabula rasa, man—a complete blank.”

  At that moment, a little over six hundred miles to the east, just outside of Habers Mill, Kentucky, at the crest of a narrow mountain pass, in the deep-well darkness of night, a tall black man in a stovepipe hat lit a wooden safety match with a long, curved, nicotine-stained thumbnail. The tiny yellow flame bloomed in the wee-hour stillness. The tall man looked at the flame.

  The only other sound—barely audible above the ubiquitous drone of crickets—was the idling engine of a battered panel van, rear doors ajar, its rust-pocked white finish beginning to chip, parked on the dirt road next to the man.

  The van was considered by most criminologists to be the preferred mode of transportation for the average American serial killer. So this vehicle had been carefully selected by the tall man, meticulously outfitted, and relentlessly driven, thousands and thousands of miles, from coast to coast, from sacrifice to sacrifice. The interior had been aged and dressed with the loving attention of a museum curator. Every cigarette butt, every gouge, every seam, had been placed with photographic accuracy. Data from The Psychopathological Archetype: Toward a Statistical Model by Ulysses Grove, as well as the private collection of Benjamin Bard, had served as a sort of bible for the tall man.

  He tossed the match into the van just as those who came before him had done.

  There was a whoomp as the flame landed in a puddle of lighter fluid and caught. An orange glow rose against the tall man’s face, the light momentarily illuminating the elaborate Aboriginal-style tattoos tracing the bone structure of his cheeks, running down the sides of his neck. An African by birth, the tall man had deep mahogany skin and sculpted features. Under his long black duster, his broad shoulders and coiled muscles undulated as he moved—like the pistoning sinew under a panther’s coat. His head, crowned with that tattered black Abe Lincoln hat, turned with the hyperalert jerks of an insect. Only his eyes lacked any kind of life force whatsoever. His eyes were inanimate objects. Like gray coins.

  The madness had settled there, in those tiny orbs the color of moonlight.

  “We brought this guy in as a person of interest in the Karen Slattery case.” Grove’s voice sounded strange to Kopsinsky’s ear—robotic and thin. “Very, very unsavory dude, this guy. We all thought so. Off-the-scale nasty.”

  Kopsinsky paced back and forth across his gloomy second-floor hallway, absorbing Grove’s taut proclamations with a mixture of emotions—suspicion, excitement, even a little dread. The section chief searched his memory. “Slattery, Karen Slattery—you’re talking about that kidnapping up in Milwaukee?”

  “Yep, that’s the case. John Q Public. He’s the Archetype, Ray. He’s our boy.”

  Kopsinsky rubbed his face. “I’m not remembering this at all. I thought Slattery’s killer turned out to be the
boyfriend.”

  “That’s correct, but we had our cards on this John Q Public guy for weeks.”

  “Because of the MO?”

  “That and opportunity.”

  “Remind me.”

  “This guy, John Q Public—Milwaukee Homicide gave him that nickname—he was a street person in Chicago. Black guy, big muscles. Prison-yard buff, you know what I mean?” Grove’s voice sounded brittle and jittery. “Spent most of his life in mental hospitals, violence wards. All the skels around the Loop knew him and gave him a wide berth.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Ray, this guy was a ghost. No family, no background, no records. Never saw anything like it. He was just a complete black hole. Very weird.”

  “Why Slattery, though? Why’d you like him in that case?”

  Grove sounded almost breathless: “Brought him in for a routine lineup—witness saw somebody hanging around Slattery’s sorority house, sketchy description. But this guy spooked everybody, so I pulled him out of the lineup. Had a little Q and A with him—if you could call it that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was more like a staring contest. This guy had the dead lights. Know what I mean? Shark eyes. Nobody home. Covered from head to toe with these crazy tattoos, prison tats, all over him. Didn’t make any kinda sense at the time, but Jesus, they do now, the tats make sense now.”

  Kopsinsky was silent for a moment. “Why the hell would they make sense now?”

  Grove told him about the rulers, the measuring devices.

  Kopsinsky stopped pacing. “Oh, Christ…the fetish component. From your study. Always a fetish with these guys. Jesus Christ, Grove, where do these guys come from?”

  There was no answer.

  The dark man lingered near the driver’s-side door of the burning van as the fire bloomed in the rear, sizzling off the corrugated metal floor, climbing up the sides of torture devices and blood-sodden straps and countless items of physical evidence. The van’s accelerator pedal had been locked into mid-position with a brick, the automatic transmission shifted into neutral. The dark man reached in and yanked the shift lever down to drive, then lurched backward with the innate speed of a cobra.

  The van jerked and fishtailed for a moment, then roared across the shoulder.

  It struck the opposite guardrail with enough force to rip through the metal, sending up a loud rending noise like paper tearing. The rear of the van bucked as it went over the ledge and down a wooded embankment. The tall man had to crane his neck in order to see the vehicle slam through a netting of foliage, then sideswipe a tree, then plunge down the remaining twenty-five yards or so of under-growth toward the flooded quarry.

  The vehicle hit the water with an immense splash that filled the night air and scattered a cloud of bats into the black sky.

  Ray Kopsinsky rubbed his eyes. “I’m assuming we got the guy’s prints on file?”

  Grove’s voice: “Prints, DNA—you name it. But here’s the thing. Something happened in that Q and A in Milwaukee, something I never told anybody about.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I got a little overzealous in the interview, sweating this guy extra hard, trying to get a rise out of him.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Finally the guy pushed himself away from the table and got up, like he had just paid his bill at a restaurant. He was just gonna take off, and I guess I kinda grabbed him. There was contact, and…”

  Kopsinsky waited. “Go on.”

  Grove’s voice sounded strange. “It was like, something happened…when we touched. Like a spark almost, I don’t know. It’s hard to explain.”

  “You’re going to have to do better than that.”

  “When those dead eyes focused on me, Ray, I saw something new there.”

  “New like what?”

  Long pause. “Like he saw me for the first time. But that’s not all of it. It was like…”

  “What?”

  “Like he had been searching for something, maybe all his life, I don’t know, but it was like he had finally found it and it was…me.”

  The dark man went over to the edge of the forest and gazed down at the water as the van sank into the oily black oblivion. A cloud of sparks and steam rose off the back as it vanished, swamping out the fire, leaving behind only a whirlpool of noxious bubbles.

  In moments, the bubbles were gone as well. The tall man waited. The surface of the water roiled for a moment, then pieces of evidence began bobbing to the surface. First a knot of bloodstained rope. Then a bottle of sodium thiopental, a linoleum knife, leather leg restraints, and more.

  Galvanized by the sight of it, so close to his visions and dreams, the dark man turned and ambled back across the deserted road to his luggage.

  The suitcase was a big old Samsonite with a grip of worn brown leather and brass, shiny at the corners, scarred with countless miles and unspeakable secrets. Inside it lay the sacred tools of the tall man’s quest—measuring tape, talismans, boning knives, rulers, dried human skin, compasses, needles, snake heads, bottles of ink, protractors, electronic devices, a box of teeth, and coils of rope of all size and description. It was a sort of a doctor’s bag for a practitioner of a very old, very secret craft.

  He lifted the suitcase with little effort—despite the fact that it weighed close to a hundred pounds—and started down the road toward the next town.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  That next morning the rains came with a vengeance. A low-pressure cell roared down the eastern seaboard out of Nova Scotia, dumping half a foot of rain on the D.C./Maryland/Virginia triangle. In the nation’s capital, sewers flooded and streets became creeks—even the Great Reflecting Pool across from the Washington Monument over-flowed across walkways, shutting down the entire Mall.

  In Virginia, Atlantic squalls drove gray sheets of rain across the Chesapeake and Potomac corridors. The skies flickered and popped in silver flares like vast photographer’s strobes, as the rain billowed and blew across the lush hills of Quantico and outlying areas to the west and north.

  Pelican Bay got the worst of it. The gales strafed the cliffs and sent waves pounding up and down the shore. By late afternoon, flood warnings had gone out.

  Inside Grove’s house, the noise was incredible. Between the gales buzzing off the roof shingles and the barrage of horizontal rain rattling the dormers, he could barely hear himself think, and right now he desperately needed to do just that—think. His brain, overloaded now with urgent minutiae, revved like an engine as he paced across the rain-slashed front windows.

  The bulletin had gone out hours ago on John Q Public—last seen eleven months ago at a Chicago homeless shelter—but Grove hadn’t heard anything yet. According to Kopsinky, Grove would be apprised of the situation the moment there was any news to report, but until then, he was under no circumstance to go anywhere or do anything heroic. Now he felt like a caged animal. He ached, his stomach twinged with cramps and nerves; he missed Maura, he missed Aaron; he could barely eat—he had managed to swallow a bowl of lentil soup an hour ago, but that was it, and it had been it for days now.

  He stopped pacing for a moment and peered through a space in the window blinds.

  The gray Ford Taurus still sat out there in the rain, idling, a vaporous smudge of exhaust swirling off its tailpipe. The unmarked cop car had been stationed outside his home since nine that morning, parked against the curb on the opposite side of the road, where the abandoned play lot with its dilapidated wooden slide and broken swings shivered in the winds. Ostensibly the cops were there for Grove’s protection, but Grove got the feeling they were also charged with making sure he stayed put.

  Grove was about to turn away from the window when he noticed a car approaching from the south. It came around the bend at a brisk clip, its brights on, the rain stitching down through its high beams like luminous needlepoint. Grove stared. The car skidded to a stop on wet leaves, nearly sliding into the unmarked Taurus.

  The driver’s door flew
open, and a stocky black woman in an FBI Windbreaker came stumbling out holding an umbrella and fumbling with a laminate FBI ID tag.

  Edith Drinkwater flashed her Bureau tag at the plainclothes guys, who were lurching out of their Taurus now with urgent expressions, fingering the stocks of their holstered guns. She waved the ID at them and motioned at the Cape Cod. “Edith Drinkwater, gentlemen—Bureau special, working with Grove.”

  “Hold on!” One of the plainclothes officers raised a hand, thumbing the hand-mike of his two-way. He said a few words into it in a low voice, that hand still up, the rain drenching him, his irritated partner standing behind him, wiping water from his face.

  The drops noisily peppered Drinkwater’s umbrella while she waited.

  Finally a voice crackled from a tiny speaker in the car, and the cop waved her on. “Go ahead.”

  “Appreciate it.”

  Drinkwater turned and hurried up the walk, past Maura’s lovely little stand of daylilies and yellow mums, past a wheelbarrow overflowing with multicolored petunias, up the herringbone brick steps, and over to the brightly painted Colonial front door. The quaintness and hominess of the place proved a bizarre counterpoint to the dark, troubling thoughts sloshing around Drinkwater’s brain. How the hell was she going to lay all this out for the man? How do you talk about evil in a house of yellow mums and white chintz doilies?

  She didn’t even have to ring the bell. There was a click before her hand could reach the button. The door jerked open, and Grove’s hand shot out at her, grasping her by the lapel of her Windbreaker. “Get in here!” he ordered in a weird, juiced-up voice.