Shattered (12 page)

The gruesome contents of the alley registered in Grove's midbrain in stages. The woman to the left was alive, on her knees, fully clothed in the squalid rags of the homeless, her stringy hair dangling across her filthy, grease-stained face. Probably in her fifties, but now appearing much older, she was the one who had screamed, her raw, parboiled eyes averted now like a punished child's. The woman on the right was either dead or very close to expiring.

“L-ll-look at her eyes,” moaned the homeless gal on the left, her face trembling.

Grove moved in. “It's okay, I'm FBI, it's okay, stay back, ma'am, stay back now.”

“Oh, l-ll-look at what he done to her eyes…oh sweet Jesus, Jesus!”

“It's okay, stay back now.” Grove knelt down by the woman on the right. There was nothing he could do. He still had his rubber gloves on so he felt for a pulse. Nothing. The nude wreck of a woman had been hastily assaulted, stripped of her clothes, and then mutilated. She lay in a pool of her own blood, still so fresh it was steaming in the wee hour chill. She looked to be in her midsixties, maybe a prostitute, maybe just a street lady; it didn't really matter.

Grove's brain reeled. This made no sense. Hit men did not behave this erratically. Private contractors might be nasty, but they weren't psychopaths. Grove looked at the dead woman's face. Her eyes were gone, removed quickly, with very little finesse, leaving behind two sockets of red pulp. Twin rivulets of blood ran down her face, dripping off her chin.

Grove turned to the lone survivor. “We're gonna get help right away, sweetheart. Can you tell me your name?”

“D-doris.”

“Doris. Okay. You saw the man do this, Doris?”

The homeless woman nodded.

“Was he naked? Was the man naked?”

Another nod.

The sirens had almost reached them, the keening wail penetrating the alley. Grove rose on unsteady legs. He found the radio and thumbed the call button. “Tom, it's me. You copying this?”

After a moment of static, the voice crackled: “Chrissake, it's about time! What the hell is going on?”

Grove stared down at the nude, crumpled remains of the homeless woman. His voice softened. “Scratch that last transmission, Tom.”

Through the speaker the voice asked him what the hell he meant by that.

Grove let out a pained sigh. “I don't think our boy's naked anymore.”

 

The next morning, in a quiet suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, Helen Splet stood in her damp, moldy basement laundry room, tears burning her eyes, as she worriedly ironed her husband's oxford-cloth shirts, ruminating on his whereabouts. Henry had called on Monday evening from the station, claiming that he had to work all night on a bunch of WJID public service announcements. He had told her not to wait up for him. But that was two days ago, and now the kids were starting to ask questions. Where's Daddy? When is he coming home? Helen had been telling them he was on assignment for the station, a big news story that required all the camera operators to work overtime. But she wasn't sure how long this ruse was going to keep the children placated. Caleb suspected something was wrong. And little Ethan had cried himself to sleep last night. Now Helen was getting desperate. Nobody at the station knew where he was, and the private investigator whom Helen had hired last year to confirm her suspicions that Henry was having an affair had come up with nothing.

Helen sprayed starch on another collar, dragging the iron, spitting and hissing, across the fabric. The house above her was as quiet as a coffin. Caleb and Rachel were both at school, and Ethan was at a playdate over at the Wilkinsons'. Helen felt the loneliness pressing down on her.

She wondered if she should pray harder. She tried not to bother Jesus with trivial matters such as her arthritis, or Ethan's day care, or the over-drawn bank account, or Rachel's braces. But this was different. This was her marriage. This was her family's future. If her husband was having an affair, then she and the Lord would deal with that. But the uncertainty was killing her, these disappearances tearing her apart inside. She had to know. She had to know the truth, and she asked Jesus Christ, her Lord and Savior, on a daily basis, to keep her strong, to keep her focused on her family.

Hanging the last of the oxford-cloth shirts on a wire hanger above the old iron sink, Helen decided to pray once again for strength. She wiped her eyes and took a deep breath. But just as she was kneeling down on the cold cement slab to talk to the Lord Jesus, the phone rang upstairs.

She sprang to her feet, then hurried up the steps. She figured she better answer it in the unlikely event that it was Henry. She crossed the kitchen and grabbed the receiver on the fourth ring. “Hello,” she said, her voice sounding wooden and falsely hopeful to her own ears.

The flat baritone on the other end was familiar. “Mrs. Splet?”

“Yes?”

“It's Ray Reinhardt again, ma'am. Sorry to bother you. Do you have a second?”

“Oh. Yes. Mr. Reinhardt, what is it?”

Helen's stomach tightened. Reinhardt was the St. Louis investigator whom Helen had been paying a hundred and fifteen dollars an hour plus expenses, off and on for over a year now, to get to the bottom of her husband's mysterious behavior. Helen had talked to the man yesterday morning when her husband had not come home, but Reinhardt had offered no help.

“Mrs. Splet…um…this is going to sound kind of odd,” the voice said.

“Odd?”
Here it comes
, Helen thought.
Please, Lord, help me be strong
.

“Yeah, um, look.” Reinhardt sounded hesitant, uneasy. “This is highly unusual, a case like this.”

There was a pause.

Helen gripped the receiver tighter. “Mr. Reinhardt, is my husband having an affair?”

Another pause. “You know…it might be easier if we sit down face-to-face. Any chance we could meet today?”

Helen swallowed the taste of acid in her mouth. “Mr. Reinhardt, I asked you a question. Now,
is
he or is he
not
seeing someone?”

“Ma'am…there's something you need to know. But it's way too complicated to tell you over the phone.”

“I don't…I don't understand.”

“Ma'am, is there any way you could come by my office today? There's something you really need to know about your husband.”

Helen licked her lips. “All right, fine. I have to pick up the kids from school first. Then I'll try to get a neighbor to babysit.”

 

Grove spent the balance of that day at Quantico, the sprawling Virginia campus situated about thirty miles south of Alexandria, on a hundred wooded acres, which served as the central headquarters for the FBI. Most of the day was spent in meetings with bureaucrats. The endless procession of stoic Justice Department men in suits sat across from Grove in white acoustic-tile rooms, asking the same questions about who authorized the trap, and why wasn't Grove in the WITSEC program with the rest of his family where he belonged, and what evidence did he have that this assailant had
anything
to do with the Mississippi Ripper. Grove took it all in stride, dutifully telling them what they wanted to hear.

By dinnertime, he had run the entire gauntlet, and had finally stolen away to his private little corner of the BSU office.

His cubicle was next to a window overlooking the tree-lined campus. A cluttered warren of bulletin boards, light tables, and haphazard stacks of files, the office, at first glance, seemed better suited for an overworked actuary or film lab manager than a senior profiler with the FBI (a famous one, at that). The swivel chair was tattered and squeaky, the old Steelcase desk slumping with the sediments of past cases. Many of the black-and-white photos tacked to the corkboards were of mutilated corpses, scourged faces, eyelids mangled or ripped away. All that misery, all those bereaved families.

Both of Dina Louise Dudley's parents were still alive, as well as her sister and ex-husband. Jennifer Quinn had a five-year-old son. Both of the nurses came from big families. These wrongful deaths would haunt the generations, they would scar entire extended families. Murder is viral. Especially motiveless serial murder. Pain and survivor guilt and ceaseless grief and soul-deep trauma would haunt these families for decades. Something had to be done. The universe insisted upon it—a response.

Lab results had determined that the substance on Dina Dudley's cheek was indeed Perfluoron, or artificial tears. The makeshift ophthalmic procedures, the involvement with the eye area, the obsession with watching—all of it would eventually lead the FBI to the Ripper. But something was wrong. Somehow the puzzle pieces did not quite fit. Something kept nagging at Grove, something just beyond the reach of his conscious mind.

The hitter who had come after Grove—this cowboy lunatic bent on destroying Grove and his family—he had left a message. The gouged eyes of the homeless woman were no mere coincidence. Had the Ripper ordered such mutilations? Was it part of another elaborate ritual? In the back of Grove's mind, deep in the tangled synapses of his lower brain, he sniffed a familiar stench. It reeked of decay, the dry stink of the grave, the odor of ancient shrouds and ceremonies and black magic. It strummed some buried chord in Grove, like a tuning fork vibrating at a subsonic level, and it triggered feelings and sensations beyond logic, beyond physics, beyond the mundane protocols of psychological profiling.

Grove was thinking about Maura and Aaron—stranded somewhere to the west, at this very moment, in some innocuous community, the identity of which even Grove was unaware—when he noticed a rectangular box on his desk that hadn't been there the day before.

“What's this?” Grove picked it up and looked at the address label. It was the standard red, white, and blue overnight postal box, dated yesterday, the return address written in the flowery script of his mother: 7716 Lawrence Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60617.

It weighed very little in his hands. He hurriedly tore open the perforated strip and looked inside. Something flat and papery was wrapped in tissue. A small watermarked note fell out. He looked down at it.

The message bore Vida's distintive, careful hand:

Grove read the note a second time before once again peering inside that box as though it held something that might bite. He pulled the tissue-wrapped object out of the carton, pushed his files aside, and laid it on the desk blotter. Then he carefully peeled the paper away.

At first glance it looked like a deflated bladder, or a purse of ancient linen from some musty display case in some esoteric old museum. It was the color of old parchment, and marbled in delicate intertwining capillaries that were long dried and desiccated into blackened threads. Grove found a fold along one edge and spread it open like the seam of an enormous pita. The caul had apparently been stretched and tanned. It smelled of alkaline and old cinnamon.

Somewhere in the back of his mind Grove recalled reading about this little-known anomaly of childbirth.

The amniotic sac envelopes all fetuses and usually breaks free during labor. But in rare cases—something like one tenth of one percent of all births—this thin, almost transparent membrane covers the face of a newborn like a fleshy mask. The phenomena has inspired a large body of folklore. In Victorian times sailors took dried cauls with them on long voyages as preventives against shipwrecks and drowning. Cauls were used for centuries to heal, to conjure, to tell the future in arcane potions.

Grove carefully folded the membrane, put it back in the tissue, then slid it back into the mailing box.

As the dying light threw long shadows through the dusty blinds flanking his cubicle, and the raw Virginia sky, just visible at the top of the window, turned the color of ash, Grove leaned over the table and punched the intercom button on the desk phone. “This is Grove, if it's okay with the team, I'm gonna head home now.”

A moment later he turned off the lights and walked out with the caul safely tucked away in its shipping box, stowed neatly inside his attaché case.

“Come in, Mrs. Splet, have a seat.” The private detective rose up behind his cluttered desk, extending his meaty, callused hand to the haggard woman coming through the door.

“Oh…thank you.” Helen Splet paused in the vestibule for a moment, shaking his hand and gazing around at the tawdry little office, which was gloomily lit by fluorescent overheads. The three-hundred-square-foot hovel was crowded with computer desks, metal shelves, file boxes, and filthy motel-style furniture coated with decades of dust. The grimy front window—formerly the storefront of a pawnshop—was printed with the words
REINHARDT INVESTIGATIONS UNLIMITED
, and lined with steel mesh. A second person, a slender, severe-looking middle-aged woman, sat on a folding chair behind Reinhardt.

“Over here?” Helen gestured at a swivel chair next to a file cabinet.

“Please.” Reinhardt motioned at the chair. He was a big, gangly man with receding hair and a taste for collegiate clothes. Tonight he wore an orange and blue silk jacket with the University of Illinois emblazoned on the back. “I'd like to introduce you to Doctor Boeski.”

“Hello, Helen.” The woman rose and came over with her hand extended. She wore her shiny coal-black hair cut short in a 1920s-style pageboy, and sported a shapeless black dress and horn-rim glasses. Her bony hand felt cold to the touch. “Susan Boeski. It's a pleasure.”

The two women shook hands, and then Helen sat down, nonplussed.

Reinhardt and the skinny doctor scooted their chairs closer so that they were flanking Helen with nurturing, sympathetic looks on their faces, as though they were high school guidance counselors about to dispense some tough love.

“You're a doctor?” Helen asked the Boeski woman.

“Susan's a psychotherapist and an MD,” Reinhardt said.

“I know this is a very difficult for you.” Dr. Boeski patted Helen's knee. “Information is power in these types of situations.”

Helen looked at the doctor, then glanced at Reinhardt. “I'm confused. I'm sorry.”

Reinhardt sat forward. “Mrs. Splet—”

“What type of situation
is
this?” Helen felt anger turning in her belly. “My husband is missing. Do you have information on his whereabouts?”

A pause, Reinhardt measuring his words. “Actually, no…we don't know where he is. He could be anywhere.”

“Then shouldn't we go to the police, and fill out one of those—those missing person reports or whatever?”

Reinhardt glanced at the doctor. “Dr. Boeski? You want to…elaborate?”

The doctor took a deep breath. “Helen, the thing is…” She paused. “May I call you Helen?”

“Sure, sure.”

“The thing is, Helen…I'm breaking the rules by telling you this but I'm going to anyway…your husband's been a patient of mine for a little over a year now.”

An awkward moment of silence as the doctor let this sink in. Helen stared at the psychiatrist. The anger stirring in Helen instantly congealed into fear. “What? He never said…he's been seeing you?”

“Since last January, actually.” The doctor shot a nervous glance at Reinhardt.

Helen felt woozy. “I don't—I don't understand. He's a patient of yours? He's seeing a psychiatrist?”

“Helen, I need to ask you something.”

“Go ahead.”

“Are you familiar with the phrase ‘doctor-patient privilege'?”

Helen felt as though she were floating. She began wringing her hands, squeezing so tightly her knuckles began to whiten. “Not really…I've heard it before…but I never really knew what it meant.”

“It means that what I'm about to tell you is completely confidential.”

“I would never—”

“I realize you're his wife,” the doctor went on, her jaw set with tension, “and I suppose you have a right to know your husband's medical issues, but what I am about to tell you is private information, and you must, must,
must
keep this completely confidential or I will lose my license. And worse than that, I will lose your husband as a patient.”

Helen clenched her fists. “Please tell me—what is going on?”

Reinhardt spoke up then: “Mrs. Splet, take it easy. We're going to work this out. I promise. We just have to take this one step at a time. Now, the whole reason Doctor Boeski is here is because I followed your husband to her office one night. I followed him to other places, too.”

Helen interrupted: “What are you telling me? What are you saying?”

“Mrs. Splet, your husband is very…ill.” Reinhardt gazed into her eyes. “
Mentally
we're talking about here.
Mentally
ill.”

Helen swallowed a lump in her throat. She refused to cry again. She had already burned out her tear ducts, and besides, as long as she walked with Jesus, she could handle any curveball the world threw at her. “Okay, I'm listening. Please tell me everything. Please don't leave anything out.” She looked at the doctor. “I can handle it. I can. I need to know what's going on. He's my husband.”

Boeski and Reinhardt exchanged another glance. At last the doctor looked at Helen and said, “You feel up to taking a ride across town? There's something we'd like to show you, something that might help us find your husband.”

 

That night, two unmarked squad cars sat outside 2215 Cottage Creek Drive, parked single file against the curb. Each car had a pair of occupants—two uniformed officers equipped with 12-gauge shotguns—and each vehicle was connected via satellite to the FBI command post at Quantico. Behind the two-story colonial, in the shadows near the tree line, sat a pair of Tactical officers, one on each corner of the property. None of these officers expected further assaults on the house; perps, like lightning, rarely struck the same place twice. Inside the unmarked sedans, where silent men played cards and smoked cigarettes and absently fingered the stocks of their weapons, minds began to wander, thoughts turning to upcoming vacations and worker's comp for sprained knees, and office politics.

The house at the center of this vigil was mostly dark, a single light burning behind a second-floor window, the sound of someone furiously typing away at a keyboard.

Behind that second-floor window sat a lanky, good-looking black man in khakis and sandals. He sat at a desk, pecking at a laptop. The room was littered with files, photographs, and maps. The typing noises were accompanied by the soft drone of a Dexter Gordon CD. Grove loved the iconic jazz saxophonist's lazy, round tones—they reminded Grove of summer rains and Sunday mornings—and right now the music was imperative. Grove needed it to concentrate, to clear his head.

The Ripper investigation had mysteriously stalled, despite the recent attack on Grove's home. Cedric Gliane's lab people had been testing and scrutinizing the assailant's clothing for several hours now, but other than isolating the genetic material, there wasn't much to be learned. “Armed-and-dangerous” bulletins had been sent out—even suggesting the possibility of a fugitive in bag-lady drag—but the shooter had evidently vanished into the hinterlands. And even with the plethora of evidence—including clean DNA sequences off the hair at the Adams County scene, shoe prints, fibers galore, and a psychological profile that was getting big enough to publish in two volumes—the case had simply hiccuped in the eleventh hour.

Agent Menner's temporary task force had come up with exactly zero likely candidates from area mental institutions, and nothing out of the ordinary on the thousands of rap sheets provided by regional violent crime divisions. Dr. Booth from Iowa City had uncovered not one suspicious ophthalmology student. Nor had the IBI found anything of interest in the network of field offices investigating similar crimes. No parolees, no scumbags with criminal jackets out on bail, no suspicious behavior noted on any police blotters. This was always the central problem with genetic results: Without persons of interest to compare and contrast the DNA samples to, the lab results were essentially about as valuable as the paper they were printed on.

The feeling of stalemate lay in Grove's belly like jagged glass as he madly searched the VICAP site for
anything
suspicious, any sign whatsoever of a logical candidate. Deep down he knew the real problem was the nature of outwardly motiveless killers: They were ciphers. Everymen. Shy, withdrawn, introverted nerds. People who blended into the scenery.

Grove pushed himself away from the desk and paced the room. He paced and paced, clenching his fists, concentrating on the Ordinary Person who could do something like this. The Ripper was out there somewhere, the faceless guy in the crowd, the worker bee in the office cubicle, the guy in the fast-food uniform asking if you wanted fries with that. He was out there in the great vast nowhere, waiting for news from a hit man, waiting to hear about another butchered family.

“Shit!” Grove stormed out of the room.

The caul was waiting for him out in the kitchen, on the counter.

Grove had put the box in there when he got back from Quantico, having second thoughts about using it. Now Grove opened the end of the shipping box, pulled out the membrane, and unwrapped it. In the low light it looked like a flattened, dried fish. He picked it up and smelled its musty, peppery aroma.

Should he mess with this stuff, this old, old magic from his mother's world?

He stared and considered, and found himself thinking of that nameless everyman preparing to bring more hell into the world somewhere in the Midwest.

 

The parking lot behind the boarded-up Piggly Wiggly flickered in the light of a broken vapor lamp. Mayflies swarmed through the aluminum-silver funnel that shone down on the cracked asphalt. An echo of a scream that only moments ago filled the night air now faded away into silence.

The Hillbilly crouched on the north edge of the lot, wiping the blade of his tarnished bowie knife on the hem of his skirt. Still garbed in the ragged pinafore dress of the homeless woman, the Hillbilly rose to one knee and wheezed with exhaustion. His face was streaked in grime and sweat. He was not as young and facile with close-contact killing as he used to be. Killing people hand to hand had gotten to be a labor.

He stared at the fresh kill lying facedown on the pavement a few feet away.

The corpse, still warm and twitching, had been a night watchman who had snuck up on the Hillbilly a few minutes ago, surprising him in the shadows of the deserted lot. The Hillbilly has quickly and decisively slashed the man's throat, but the ensuing struggle had also taken the Hillbilly by surprise. The dying man had grappled and wrestled and swung wildly at the Hillbilly despite the subsequent strikes of the blade, one to the man's neck, severing his carotid, another to the femoral artery in his leg. The man dropped after that, but he had bled like a pig due to all the exertion.

Now the Hillbilly watched a pool of blood spreading under the corpse, creeping across the blacktop. In the darkness it was the color of India ink. And for some unknown reason, that shiny puddle of blood made the Hillbilly feel strange, uneasy, edgy.

He looked down at the blood.

He jerked back with a start.

In the dark pool he could see his reflection as clearly as if he were looking in a mirror, and he couldn't believe what he was seeing. It was a trick. He must be hallucinating. The sight of his contorted reflection made his innards squeeze. His head spun with dizziness.

He was looking at his reflection but it
wasn't
his reflection. It
wasn't
a gaunt, middle-aged cracker from the hills of Arkansas. It was a reflection of someone
else
—a doughy, balding man with pale skin.

The face in the puddle, the one staring back at the Hillbilly, was the face of Henry Splet.