Redheads (26 page)

“This’ll work. How about a scope?”

“Over here.”

Westfield picked out a low-light scope, the biggest one in the case. Its objective lens was fifty millimeters across to gather light. He also picked out a laser sight that mounted to the side of the scope, and two boxes of match-grade ammunition.

Everything totaled just over two thousand dollars. Westfield counted it onto the counter in new hundred-dollar bills, fanning them across the glass top above faded Polaroid photographs of dead ten-point bucks and mountain lions, while the dealer stood on the phone, on hold with the FBI’s instant background check hotline. Westfield looked at the pictures and kept his eyes down. The dealer hung up the phone.

“You’re good to go.”

He limped back to the van, put his purchases into the passenger seat and took a bottle of Excedrin from the glove compartment. He dry swallowed a couple of the pills, worked his throat to get them all the way down, and then started the van.

There was an hour of light left. Enough to find a quiet spot and take thirty shots at a boulder from a hundred yards, adjusting the scope after each round. It would be better if he could bench mount it and practice with it in an indoor range. But he had been making do with what life dealt him since 1978.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chris sat on the porch of his bungalow with his new computer on his lap. It had not taken long to get some semblance of Mike’s old program running, searching the back alleys of the Internet for news of a killing. There had been plenty of mayhem in the world since he’d last checked, but there was no sign of another redhead murder. Let alone a double murder. He and Julissa read the stories together over lunch and eliminated them one by one. If the killer emailed them the photograph on the morning after the killing, then perhaps there was nothing in the news because the girls hadn’t been found yet. They had no idea where the girls might be, rotting away on the bed in their final pose. They could be in any city in the world, closed up behind a locked door, missed by their friends and family but not yet missing in the official sense. So Chris turned to the photograph.

He sat with his back against the wall of the bungalow and studied the picture. Zoomed to a nearly microscopic level, he could stand to look hours at a time. On the other hand, looking at the scene in its entirety was a mistake. The monstrosity of it was more than he could bear. And he thought the word was apt: they were on the trail of a monster. Chevalier had been right. The thing was inhuman.

He was looking at the upper left corner of the photograph. At this level of zoom, the picture would probably be bigger than his bungalow. He couldn’t see the girls at all, though there were two spots of blood in this section of the photograph. One was high on the wall and the other was on a ceiling beam, a droplet that was pregnant with weight and about to fall.

Just looking at the spot where the ceiling beams came up against the wall, he could draw some conclusions. The building which held the dead girls was old, probably several centuries old. Chris was neither an historian nor an architect, but he was used to paying attention to small details. The wooden beam was hand hewn. A modern beam would have the lightly curved marks left by a sawmill’s circular blade. An older beam would have been cut with a cross-cut saw wielded by two men, and would have diagonal marks. This beam bore the chips and pockets of an adze and didn’t have a saw mark on it. Then there was the wall itself. It was built of handmade bricks, each one slightly more than an inch thick and ten inches long. The kind of bricks the Romans made by the millions and stacked across their empire. The bricks were covered with plaster that had fallen away in a few patches near the ceiling. At the highest level of zoom, Chris could see small brown hairs coming from the broken edges of the plaster. He would have been willing to bet almost anything it was horse hair. Medieval plaster was made of horse hair, lime and bone ash. That would narrow their search down to, roughly speaking, the borders of the old Roman Empire, and helped about as much as saying they could forget about anywhere but Europe, the British Isles, North Africa and the Middle East.

He scrolled through the photo, purposely averting his eyes from the girls’ faces as he passed them, and then refocused his attention to the shadows beneath the bed. He had started by looking under the bed, but hadn’t been able to make out much because of the shadows. In the last several hours, though, he’d learned a lot about how to see into this photograph. He opened a control window and used it to adjust the lighting. Because of the photograph’s file format, he could manipulate it endlessly, almost as though he held the camera and could retake it from the same angle, but with any camera setting he wanted. He played with the lighting until the shadows beneath the bed receded. There was less light under the bed, so objects there were grainy at high levels of zoom. There was a violin case under the bed, and on its handle was a leather luggage tag. It was facing away from him. No amount of toggling would turn it around. There was a glint of reflection from the brass clasps on the violin case and he guessed the picture was taken with a flash.

To have a view under the bed like this, the room must have been either very wide, so the killer was standing far back when he took the picture, or he had been sitting on the floor. Chris guessed the killer was sitting on the floor. If the ceiling was five hundred years old and supported by wooden beams, it had to be a narrow room. He didn’t think that knowledge was going to do him a bit of good. Maybe, after eating half of two girls, the killer had to sit down to rest a moment.

There was another shadow under the bed, to the right of the violin case. Chris scrolled the picture over and brightened the area. A corner of bloody bed sheet hung down from the mattress, and though it did not directly block the thing next to the violin case, it cast an additional shadow under the bed. Also, whatever it was, it was farther under the bed.

Chris played with the light and then sat back when he finally had it.

A book.

It was a hardcover college textbook, three inches thick; its spine was facing towards the room. The lettering on the spine was nearly the same color as the glossy binding. He turned his head and tried to make it out. It was like trying to read the headline on a newspaper drifting beneath the surface of a river at night. He closed his eyes and let them rest awhile, then opened them again. He used the mouse to select the area around the book, then flipped that section on its side so that the book appeared to be standing on its end. He stared at the words.
Fondamenti di Chimica.
Then, in smaller print that was almost impossible to read, he made out one other word:
Bianchi
. The wooden floor under the bed was dusty, but there was a long clean streak leading from the edge of the bed to the book.

He thought about that. The book had been sitting on the floor but had been kicked under the bed. Recently. Perhaps it had been kicked during the struggle.

One of them had been using the book, probably on the day she died.

He went to Google to see what he could find about the book and the author. The first three links were Italian websites selling college text books. The fourth was the American site of Amazon.com. The fifth link, in Italian, was a .pdf file. He clicked on it and found himself looking at the current syllabus for a summer semester chemistry lab at Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II. The professor was teaching from Bianchi’s book, the book underneath the dead girls’ bed. He looked again at the name, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II. He thought that was probably the University of Naples, and when he checked it on the Internet, he saw he was right.

He pulled up a map of Naples and looked at the university, which was less than a quarter mile from the ocean in the heart of the old city. In the satellite photograph, he could see cranes unloading a cargo ship and a nest of warehouses in the port district not far from downtown. It was the same story he’d seen roughly three-dozen times before.

He went back to the photograph, resized it to fill the computer screen, and then just looked at it. Maybe ten minutes passed before it hit him. The floor was made of heavy wooden planks, likely supported from beneath by hewn beams like the ones in the ceiling. The bed was framed in wood. Counting the furniture, the room probably had three tons of wood in it. The creature could disable security systems; it would have no trouble taking out any other kind of alarm. The wood in the building would have been ancient heartwood, heavy and hot burning.

Chris went back to the Internet and began searching Italian news sites. It didn’t take long.

When he found it, he used a web-translator to convert the page into English. The story was ten hours old; the fire started at 4:45 a.m. in a girls’ dormitory at the University of Naples. The journalist speculated it may have begun in the basement, where there was a boiler. But there was no room to speculate the fire was a freak accident. Someone had locked the front entrance and the back exit from the inside with chains. The doors were made of cast bronze and would have been impossible to break down without a medieval battering ram. People on the street had been able to do nothing except stand and listen to the girls scream. The fire was well underway by the time anyone outside noticed it; all the electrical and telephone lines to the building had been cut, and the main fire control system had been disabled not from inside the building, but from the central circuit breaker in a utility duct under the street in front of the building. Twenty-five girls were unaccounted for. The death toll would be even higher if any of them had boyfriends sleeping over.

Of the twenty-five, twenty were summer students from abroad. Chris found another website, a blog by a student journalist at the University of Naples. This student had posted a list of the missing. He scanned through it and saw the names of two who could only be sisters: Claire and Elaine Rochelle, who had come for the summer from Montreal.

There was really only one thing left to check. He went to Facebook, that giant yellowpages of the world, and typed in their names. It didn’t take him long to find them. They were twins. They were beautiful. They were redheads. And, though their Facebook pictures showed them alive with all of their flesh and skin intact, fully clothed and without gags, they were surely the dead girls in the photograph.

Chris closed the computer and went to find Julissa.

He found her at a table under a cluster of coconut trees, facing the ocean. There were storm clouds on the horizon. A young girl in dirty shorts and a white T-shirt was holding a handful of white seashells for Julissa’s inspection. He watched Julissa take a coin from her purse and hand it to the girl, who left the shells on the table and scampered down the beach looking for more.

“How’s it going?”

Julissa turned to him. The wind coming off the turquoise waves blew her hair around her face. She tossed her head and gathered her hair behind her, taking a tie off of her wrist and making a ponytail. Chris saw how white her neck was, saw how the thin gold chain she wore sparkled in the stormy sunlight. She was wearing a simple cotton dress she’d bought at the outdoor mall they’d found that morning. It was wet six inches up the hem of the skirt; he supposed she had taken a break from her work and walked down to the water. He imagined her gathering the dress above her knees and walking into the water, watching sailing canoes transit the horizon, her brow furrowed as she thought through a problem. Her computer was on the table and showed lines of code on a white screen. It would be easy to forget how dangerous she was. Her beauty could eclipse her other qualities. He remembered the casual way she’d held the gun on him in his motel room in Galveston.

“It’s going like I thought it would. I got into Special Agent Barton’s computer—she accepted the e-vite I disguised as coming from her son’s fiancée. Once I could use her computer, it only took an hour to find her VICAP login and password. It took me awhile to figure out how to navigate their system. They’ve got an information structure that’s kind of dated. Looks like they’ve just been adding to it since they first started the network. It’s not very secure. In fact, it violates about half the security protocols we’ve set up since 2001.”

“Can you find out anything about how the data has been altered on all the redhead murders?”

“Have a seat and I’ll show you.”

She took her feet off the other chair and pulled it out for him. He sat next to her and looked at the screen. He could make no sense of the code.

“The system keeps a chronological index of all changes to the data. So I’ve been going through and checking all the entries within a week of each killing.” She pulled up a list of dates and names. Chris recognized it immediately as the long string of murders. “Three days before a new killing there is always a large-scale deletion.”

She touched the screen on the entry that read
July 4, 2010 — Allison Clayborn
(Galveston, Texas, USA)
. Then she pulled up another table she had created, which showed killings in one column and deletions in a parallel column. On July 1, 2010, someone penetrated VICAP and deleted the information for Jill Moyers. She had been killed on November 12, 2009, dismembered aboard a sailboat docked near Granville Street in Vancouver.

“The information on Jill Moyers is still on VICAP,” Julissa said. “Whoever did this didn’t delete the files. He just deleted the table entry, so when someone runs a search for victims, Jill won’t show up. As far as the search program is concerned, it’s deleted, because he deleted the file path.”