Perfect Victim

by Jay Bonansinga

  At-Large bulletins had gone out to state police in a nineteen-state swath between Texas and Maryland. The lab had matched DNA from the Galveston dump site to samples collected at the group home, so now the man was a hard target, with enough physical evidence to win him the needle…or at least send him up for a half dozen lifetimes without possibility of parole. Grove knew it was just a matter of time now before somebody caught him. Big, buff black guys covered from head to toe in surreal tattoos are hard to hide.

  Plus this guy wanted to be caught, as would the average killer—a self-destructive trait that the Archetype would surely exhibit. But Grove knew something else, something that was hard for him to articulate, hard to explain with words, hard to even face, but clear nonetheless: Grove had to be the one to catch the monster.

  The universe and John Q Public both seemed to want it this way.

  “Ulysses, I need to say something and I need your full attention.” Drinkwater’s shrill voice warbled after Grove as he carried his duffel bag across the living room. She had been nipping at his heels from room to room, trying to get his attention.

  “I’m sorry, go ahead.” Grove went over to his briefcase, which lay open on an end table. He put the duffel down on the table, setting it a little too close to the edge, his depth perception still compromised by his damaged eye. He moved it a few inches, then turned to her. “I’m listening.”

  She licked her lips nervously. “I don’t know how to put this exactly—”

  “Go ahead, Edith, just spit it out.”

  “All this woo-woo shit is just—”

  She paused, gazing at the wall behind him, where a big white sheet of poster board was tacked up among the clinical forensic photos of carnage. The endless string of Sumerian symbols, scrawled in blood like decorative wallpaper around Madeline Gilchrist’s savaged remains, were now hurriedly jotted in black Sharpie pen across every square inch of the poster, the space underneath bearing Dr. Milhouse’s transliterations and embellishments: through the hole in the firmament the hunter must pass through the portal of the earth and down the bottomless pit the hunter must fall and pay with his blood and with his endless torment and with his hopeless soul the hunter must pay. Above these translations hung a laser printout that Grove had taped there only minutes ago. It was an aerial photograph—a satellite image from Google Earth—of the dark wasteland directly northeast of Valesburg, Kentucky, known by the locals as “the barrens.” In the dense, detailed gray tones of the photograph, down on a thickly forested slope, crisscrossed by railroad tracks like delicate tiny sutures, was a minuscule complex of smokestacks and stone buildings just big enough to identify. A white tag, almost like a thought balloon, flagged off the edge of the complex and said: WORMWOOD COAL MINE—CLOSED C. 1972. An intersection of three thick black lines crossed the mine’s entrance.

  “It’s a little out of my comfort zone,” Drinkwater said finally, looking away from the satellite photo.

  Grove gave out a sigh. “Look, I don’t expect you to go down there with me. I just need some help getting there. Then I’ll cut you loose. I promise.”

  Drinkwater wiped her mouth nervously. “This is like off-the-hook insane. You said yourself you’ve never even seen a coal mine—at least call somebody, call Dispatch, get some backup.”

  “Those babysitters out there in that unmarked squad would stop me before I got my garage door open. All I need is a little diversion, then your work is done.”

  Grove turned and strode over to the front coat closet. He threw open the accordion door and reached up to the top shelf. The Derringer was in a wooden cigar box sealed with packing tape and hidden behind a stack of board games.

  “You don’t know who this dude is—what he is!” Drinkwater swept up behind him. “I gotta tell ya, this is over my head.”

  Grove peeled the tape off the cigar box. His hands were shaking. “You and me both, Drinkwater.” He knelt down and lifted the cuff of his jeans, then taped the tiny, two-shot .22 caliber Derringer pistol to his ankle. “You and me both.” His mutter was barely audible. “You and me both.”

  She watched him. “I’m sorry, Ulysses…but I gotta get outta here.”

  He stood and gave her a nod. “I understand. Believe me. I understand where you’re coming from.”

  “I could lose my spot at the Academy. Seriously. I could lose my license.”

  He nodded again. “Don’t blame you one bit.” He reached into the closet and pulled out his long white canvas duster. “I really appreciate all you’ve done. I’ll be fine. You can go. It’s all right.” He shrugged on his coat. “And I’m really sorry I got carried away with you like that.”

  “I have to go.” She turned and strode toward the front door. She paused for the briefest instant before opening it. Then she walked out.

  The door clicked shut.

  Grove stood there for a moment in that empty house, feeling just about as alone as he had ever felt in his life. Then he turned and headed for the basement.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Edith Drinkwater paused on Grove’s porch, standing in a cone of mist, illuminated by the coach light. The rain had lifted, and now the air was as still and dense as aspic. She could feel the gazes of surveillance officers on her, emanating from that unmarked Ford Taurus parked across the street. She could feel the pulse of her heart in her neck, her cheek still tingling hot and cold where Grove had slapped it, the stinging sensation still sending mixed signals down her spine.

  It was as though she were caught in a dream, her feet cemented to the ground, her legs seized up by the taffy-glue of indecision.

  She knew she should get the hell out of there. She knew it was the smart way to play it—cut her losses, go back to school, pretend none of this ever happened. Let Grove hang himself, get himself killed. That was his choice. Drinkwater had nothing to do with this. She was an innocent bystander, a subcontractor, an intern, a rube. She didn’t owe him anything.

  She waved at the surveillance officers. It was an odd gesture, paralyzed with regret.

  She knew Grove was about to slip out the rear of the house. In seconds he would be gone, and her role in this drama would come to an end, and maybe that was the way it was supposed to be. Maybe Fate had engineered it this way.

  Drinkwater made a move toward the porch steps but suddenly balked, pausing again on the edge of the top step.

  The wizened brown face of Grove’s mother flashed in her brain: that ancient, leathery dowager’s face, with eyes the color of wet tobacco leaves, and the bearing of a sad Nubian priestess. My son’s fate is now your fate. Drinkwater’s midsection seized up with emotion, her eyes stinging. Maybe the decision had already been made. Maybe somewhere deep down in her core she had already chosen her path.

  She looked across the street and offered a second gesture to that Ford Taurus.

  The rest of it happened so quickly, the surveillance officers did not register the import of what followed. They caught a glimpse of Drinkwater quickly whirling around, then heading back inside the Grove house, slamming the door behind her, as though she had forgotten something.

  They certainly did not register the exact meaning of the gesture that Drinkwater had aimed their way before vanishing back inside the Cape Cod.

  Her middle-finger salute was only partially visible in the nimbus of mist.

  THIRTY-TWO

  “Hey! Excuse me!” Grove rapped his knuckles on the driver’s-side window of an idling cab, which was parked at a cabstand in the shadows of a deserted Pelican Bay BP gas station. Dawn had not yet broken, but the dark sky seemed to hang low, glowing like a shroud of black phosphorous. “Got a piece of luggage to put in the back.”

  The old Pakistani man behind the wheel jumped. He had been dozing behind a copy of the Post, and now he rolled his window down, displaying a brown smile, peering up at the apparition looming outside. “Yes, sir, where is it that you are going?”

  I’m going to hell, Grove thought in a single awkward instant of hesitation before replying,
“Jefferson Davis Field north of Quantico.”

  The little man climbed out, trundled around to the trunk, opened it, and helped Grove with the enormous duffel. They got the bag situated, and then Grove went around and climbed into the backseat.

  He was damp with flop sweat. He wished he had taken the time to change out of his Reeboks back at the house and into something more suitable for spelunking in coal mines, like his hobnail boots or hikers, but now he would have to make do with the sneakers. Thank God he had paused long enough to grab his duster, which he now wore buttoned up to the neck over his white T-shirt and jeans.

  It would be cold and damp and miserable where Grove was going.

  The old man climbed behind the wheel, revved the engine for a moment, then slammed the shift lever down into drive. He was just about to pull away from the stand when a loud muffled rapping noise thudded off the back window. Grove jumped, twisted toward the window, and gaped.

  Edith Drinkwater was standing there, out of breath from running, gazing through the window at him; she gripped the huge handbag slung over her shoulder, as though she had been fleeing a purse snatcher. “Don’t worry, they didn’t see me,” she said breathlessly after Grove had rolled down the window.

  “What are you doing, Drinkwater?”

  “There’s a lot more you need to know,” she said, trying to get air into her lungs.

  “Okay, tell me.”

  “Move over.”

  “What?”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  Grove looked up at her. “No way.”

  “You said yourself you need help; you can’t do this alone.”

  Grove fixed his gaze on her. “Alone is how I have to do this.”

  “Bullshit, move over.”

  “Drinkwater—”

  “Move the fuck on over.” She gave him that homegirl look with the subtly swaying head and sidelong gaze that Grove had seen many times on the streets back in Chicago. One did not fuck with that look.

  “Goddamn it to hell,” he grumbled and pushed open the door, scooting across the bench seat.

  Drinkwater climbed in and slammed the door.

  The driver stepped on the gas and they launched out of there.

  They headed north on Highway 3, toward Fredericksburg, the air cool and fishy through the vent, the sky over the Chesapeake just starting to change from the flat black of night to a kind of luminous indigo. It gave everything a dull glow, like a photo negative in a chemical bath—that time of night Grove’s mother used to call “voodoo hour,” the doppelgänger of dusk.

  Drinkwater was digging a legal pad out of her purse. “First of all, you had that deathbed note on your wall, the one Tom Geisel wrote.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. So?”

  She looked at him. “I used to be a crossword freak.”

  “And?”

  “Could do the New York Times puzzle in five minutes by the time I was twelve.”

  “Okay, so…?”

  “I don’t know why I didn’t see it at first.” She held up the pad, showed it to Grove in the gloomy light. “Here’s the first broken-up line.”

  Grove looked at the pad:

  thee ws an o her b y a b d one

  Below it Drinkwater had written:

  There was another boy—a bad one

  Grove swallowed hard. “So the old geezers had their eyes on a bad seed as well. We know this already—”

  “Just wait,” Drinkwater said, flipping to the next page. “He goes on to say this.”

  who yo have to Ul

  And Drinkwater’s translation:

  who you have to face Ulysses

  “I’m just guessing the word was face,” Drinkwater said softly then, her voice low and discreet enough not to reach the driver’s ear. “But it could easily be kill or destroy, right?”

  Grove didn’t say anything. His gut burned with nervous tension.

  “Now, the last line confirms something your mom told me, which I didn’t tell you about, because she made me promise not to; she made me swear to God, under penalty of death, and I did, I swore to her.”

  Grove looked at the phrase:

  h ss yr tn

  Then the translation:

  he’s your twin

  “Ulysses?”

  Grove sat staring at the line, his entire being going cold and hollow like an empty well.

  “Ulysses, look at me. Are you okay?”

  Grove could not form a reply.

  “Ulysses?”

  At last, he said in a very low, grave voice, “Tell me everything my mom told you.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  All through his life, in his secret 3 A.M. ruminations, behind the membrane of his everyday life, Grove had suspected something had not been quite right with his own birth. He knew he was an only child. He knew this for a fact. But he had also gleaned over the years the occasional odd little anomaly, like his being born “in the caul,” as Vida had put it, which meant he had been the one-in-a-hundred-thousand baby born with the amniotic sac still clinging to his face. He had also noticed over the years weird little gaps in Vida’s recollections of his birth. For reasons that were only now becoming clear to Grove, she had always seemed to be withholding something.

  Now, for the first time in his life, as he stood in the chill morning mist, alone with Drinkwater on the gravel parkway of a small airfield north of Quantico, the horrible truth had started to coalesce in his mind. He gazed off at the steel-gray dawn rising over the black horizon and murmured, “I always knew there was something weird somewhere, something wrong….”

  Drinkwater had her hands in her pockets, her breath coming out in plumes of vapor backlit by the airfield’s silvery sodium lights. “I guess back in the sixties they only had a few clinics in Kenya that were equipped to do sonograms.”

  Grove looked at her. “Then how did she know for sure? How did she know?”

  “She said a shaman told her she had two warring spirits inside her.” Drinkwater looked up at him, her eyes glinting with some unreadable emotion in the half-light of dawn. “But she didn’t know for sure until the day of the delivery.”

  Grove nodded, looked at the gravel at his feet. “They found a trace of it?”

  “An extra growth, extra tissue in her womb.”

  He looked at her. “Extra tissue.”

  “A failed twin.”

  The phrase seemed to hang in the gloomy air like a toxic fog.

  Drinkwater swallowed hard, looking down. “I don’t know how much of this you want to know.” She looked up at him. “I don’t want you to hit me again.”

  “Very funny.” Grove looked out beyond the horizon. “So you’re telling me there was a twin.”

  “That’s right. You had a twin brother in the womb. Didn’t gestate all the way. Only enough nutrients in the womb for one, so the other twin gets absorbed into the placenta.”

  Grove shook his head. “Survival of the fittest.”

  “Yeah, I guess you could say that. Vanishing Twin Syndrome is what they call it.”

  “Cute.”

  “This was a rare case, too, according to the doctors in Nairobi. This tissue—the thing, this lost embryo—was something they call a mirror twin.”

  “Go on.”

  “One twin is right-handed, the other left-handed; all the features, every little freckle, is exactly the reverse of the other’s, a perfect inversion.”

  Grove stared at the horizon for a long moment. “How the hell did Tom know about this?”

  Drinkwater shrugged. “Somehow the old geezers got the hospital records, I don’t know. Maybe they knew all along.”

  In the distance, on the northeast horizon, Grove saw a pair of headlights coming down a switchback road. “Here comes the pilot,” he said nodding at the oncoming four-wheeler. “Let me do the talking.”

  Drinkwater smiled in spite of her nerves. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

  Grove wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “It’s just a few
cells got flushed down the toilet.”

  Drinkwater looked at him. “What?”

  “The unborn twin.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Yeah…you’re right.”

  Grove watched the vehicle approach. “Just superstition. That’s all it is.”

  “Sure,” Drinkwater agreed. “Absolutely.”

  Grove dug in his pocket for his wallet. “I don’t want to hear about it again. You got that?”

  “No problem,” Drinkwater said with a nod, then followed Grove toward the oncoming headlights.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The single-engine Piper Cub, with its government-issue olive drab fuselage and heavy array of DIA spy cameras lining the underbelly, took off out of the rising sun shortly after 6:00 A.M. that morning, the surly ex–Navy SEAL pilot named Barkham at the controls. Strapped into the rear jump seats, positioned single file, guerrilla-style, Grove and Drinkwater rode in leaden silence as the aircraft climbed a northerly wind toward Leesburg, reached a cruising altitude of fifteen hundred feet, then banked steeply to the west, soaring over the sprawling emerald ocean of pines south of the Green Ridge forest.

  The journey took them over the ancient stone pillars of the Allegheny Mountains, the harsh rays of daybreak creeping with the inexorable slowness of a sundial across the plane’s scarred canopy, while Grove brooded in the back about the meaning of Geisel’s death note, his mother’s revelations, displaced spirits, lost twins, and suicide missions. Grove didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to be a hero. But something in those desolate aerial photographs of the Wormwood property called out to him.

  He thought about all this almost subconsciously as the Piper Cub buzzed over the verdant ruins of Civil War killing fields, pitching and yawing gently on the tailwinds. Through the side window Grove could see the passing patchwork of mountain roads and dense wilderness like miniature landscapes in a fishbowl, broken only by an occasional grassy slope upon which thousands and thousands of siblings fought to their deaths in the War Between the States: Gettysburg, Cumberland, Manassas, Bull Run—the fossilized battlefields passed beneath the aircraft with time-lapse speed while Grove burned with adrenaline.