Shattered (17 page)

“What's the problem?”

“Trooper's just a kid, couldn't be more than twenty-something.”

“Yeah, and…?”

“He's kinda rattled. What he found in there…it put the hurt on him, messed with his head.” Menner paused in front of the double doors. “Here we are.” He pulled a pair of rubber gloves from his pocket and handed them to Grove, then pulled a pair of paper booties out and handed them over. “I think you'll see what I mean when you see this place.”

Grove sighed and slipped the paper booties over his shoes, then looked up again at the barn's entrance.

The double doors, crisscrossed with yellow police tape, hung by the threads of broken, rusted hinges. Mold and bird droppings clung to the worm-eaten timbers. The doors looked as though they were welded shut with a patina of age, stuck together in the aspic of decay. They also looked strangely imposing, like a drawbridge sealing off some haunted, bewitched fortress.

For the briefest moment imaginable, Grove flashed on a line from the
Inferno.
In the story, Dante Alighieri sees a legend at the threshold of the underworld, warning off all who dare enter.

“Lay Down All Hope, You That Go In By Me.”

“After you, Agent Grove,” Big Bill Menner said at last, gesturing at the double doors.

It took a while for Grove to discover the clippings, and the secrets contained within their wadded remnants. He was too busy taking in the banquet of evidence strewn about the barn, the amazing array of human dementia made solid. When he first entered the dark, cobweb-covered space, for instance, he immediately noticed the weird way the bales of straw were arranged across the floor. He had to step back for a moment in order to finally identify the purpose of the oddly shaped rows: Like a child's playroom, they formed imaginary chambers, secret hallways, private hiding places. Evidence flags riddled these areas where blood from multiple sources—of all different ages and stages of decay—had formed droplets and streaks and spatters. An expert would be able to recreate a death chronology from all those stains with the reliability of a linguist translating a text.

As he slowly walked through the airless, hidden world of a madman, gazing at everything all at once, Grove wished he had his equipment, a camera, and maybe a digital recorder. The barn was as silent as a library. A pair of forensic technicians, the only other souls currently in the place, quietly worked in one corner with an ultraviolet scanning device. Purple light pulsed. Menner followed Grove at a respectful distance, softly indicating key pieces of evidence.

“Horse stalls,” the big man murmured at one point, tipping his head at the rows of wooden enclosures lining the barn's east and west walls.

Grove paused to take in the rows of stalls. The simple wood-framed cubicles were lined with moldy hay, and some featured the names of former equine occupants embossed on silver-plated plaques affixed to the doors: Angel, Nurse White, Circus Lady, Mister Klister, Arturo the Artist, and The Hillbilly. All the names had that whimsical tone that horse names often have—maybe they had been racing horses, maybe show horses. Everything was coated with a thick layer of dust and grime, and the air smelled of chemical rot and quicklime.

Upon closer inspection, Grove saw that many of these horse stalls had been doctored, cryptic numbers spray painted across boarded doors, the feeding troughs filled with garbage, tires, old bottles, shoes, and discarded articles of clothing. Somewhere down in the tangled ganglia of Grove's subconscious he recognized this honeycomb of vaults as the product of a madman's delusional world: a territory of the imagination, a
locus dementia
.

“We left the last one pretty much how we found it,” Agent Menner was saying, indicating the last stall on the left where tiny red evidence flags spread in profusion off the base of the doorway. Red strings connected some of the flags with key blood smears, resembling a cat's cradle of forensic minutiae. The odor of formaldehyde hung in the air like a curtain. “Kept his collection in there.”

Grove felt a chill pinch his spine as he approached the doorway to the stall marked 213 in black spray paint—a feeling not unlike biting down on crushed ice. He looked in and saw the tawdry, blood-spattered furniture illuminated by one bare hanging lightbulb, a thin film of print dust shimmering on most of the surfaces. Grove saw the road cases, the trays of surgical instruments, and the bottles of chemicals. But mostly he saw the pictures on the walls.

“Ophthalmic retractors,” Grove muttered, flexing his hand inside its rubber glove.

“What was that?” Menner asked.

“Pictures on the walls.” Grove hovered in the doorway, staring. “The eye thing. Forced the victims to watch. We were right about that one.”

“
You
were right.”

“Very sick individual, this guy.”

“Yeah.”

“What's in the minifridge?”

“Don't bother looking, IBI took it all to the lab. Body parts.”

Grove kept staring at a poorly focused photograph of a dilated pupil, shiny with terror, wrenched open by razor-thin wire clamps. “What kind of body parts?”

“Eyeballs, mostly.”

With a nod Grove stepped inside the cell, then turned slowly around, 360 degrees, in order to take it all in, hoping there might be some detail that would hasten the man's capture. This was a critical time in any manhunt, the point at which the beast has been flushed out of hiding, the most dangerous hours. Desperation sets in. The killer often goes on one last rampage. If Grove could absorb some tiny shred that would help find Splet, some infinitesimal detail,
something
specific, lives might be saved.

He turned and scanned and searched…until his gaze fell on the pile of litter.

At first glance the trash appeared random, just an assortment of wadded newspaper and crumpled documents shoved into the corner. But the more Grove looked at the papers, the more his gut tightened with recognition. The wads of paper lay within a circle of ash. Faint symbols rimmed the circle. Numbers. Pictograms, perhaps. Some of them scrawled in blood, some in soot or grime. Grove knelt and drew a rubber-tipped index finger across the ash.

It was still warm.

“What is it?” Menner wanted to know.

“Not sure.” Grove picked up one of the wadded clumps of paper and opened it.

He stared at the wrinkled page torn out of a
Time
magazine. The headline said, “Superstar Profiler Zeroes in on Latest Quarry.” Grove read the first few lines of the text, the bit about the “famed FBI criminologist” claiming he is about to nab another killer.

Gooseflesh trickled down Grove's back.

“What's the matter?”

Agent Menner's voice faded in Grove's ears as he picked up another piece of paper. This one was a Xerox. It was made off a microfiche machine—a grainy clipping of a social announcement from the
Alexandria Arts Weekly
—showing Grove and Maura one year ago, on their wedding day, arm in arm, smiling stiffly for the photographer.

“Agent Grove?”

Pure, white-hot anger began to smolder in Grove's gut. This freak Splet had hired a hit man to kill Grove, but worse than that, much worse, was the fact that Splet had been gazing at pictures of Maura. The same eyes that had gazed upon eviscerated women, that had coveted empty eye sockets, that had savored ghastly human misery and torture—
these same eyes
—had gazed upon Grove's wife only hours earlier. But that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was the circle, and the familiar scorch mark burned into its nucleus.

“Here we go,” Grove murmured in a strained voice, as he stared at the circle of ash. The familiar burn mark was imprinted into the moldy straw like a negative image burned into photographic paper:
a perfect shadow of the purse-shaped caul
.

The rotted walls of that barn started closing in on Grove as he gawped at that litter of articles and pictures. He shuddered at the thought of Maura being associated in any way with this insane world, this squalid evil game, this ancient cycle.

Bill Menner's voice seem to wake him from a dream. “You're looking at the stuff from the tabloids?”

Grove slowly nodded, unable to look away from those wrinkled scraps of paper.

Menner shrugged. “I figure he knew you were closing in, got a little fixated. What do
you
make of it?”

Grove stood up. He started to say something when another voice pierced the stillness of the barn.

“Agent Menner!”

Big Bill Menner whirled. “Over here.”

A younger man, a Bureau trainee, his skinny neck swimming in his suit, came charging up to the two men. “Agent Menner, Agent Grove, I'm sorry—sorry to interrupt—but we got a—we found something—”

“Slow down, Atkins.” Menner pulled a cigarette from his pocket. “Spit it out.”

“We found something in Splet's SUV.”

Menner and Grove looked at each other, then Menner gave the young trainee a look. “Take a breath, kid.”

“You know the SUV with the TV equipment in the back?”

“Yeah, it's been dusted and processed already.”

The young man shook his head frantically. “No, no, they found a camera, and it was still running, and they looked at the—the—whaddyacallit.”

“The tape?”

“Yeah, the tape, they looked at the tape.”

Menner shot another glance at Grove, then looked at the young man. “And?”

Agent Atkins swallowed hard. “He's on it.”

“Who.”

“The guy, the perp.”

“Splet?”

More furious nodding. “Yeah, yeah—
Splet
—the perp, he's on the tape.”

After a stunned pause, Grove stepped forward and said, “Let's go have a look.”

 

For the first twenty minutes or so, the footage revealed very little other than a rotting old barn glimpsed through the side window of the SUV, and a few flickers of movement beyond the edge of the frame. Every so often a shadow would cross the screen in a dark blur, as though somebody has passed the field of view, close to the lens, or perhaps something crossing just a few inches behind the perimeter of the lens. The sound was muffled and indistinct behind the sealed windows of the vehicle, but disturbingly provocative nonetheless. Timbers snapping, a faint crackle of gunfire, a human scream, something being dragged in the dirt—all of it captured while the picture just sat on that weird, tilted angle of a barn blurred by moonlight reflecting off window glass.

The camera must have been purposely turned on at some point in the wee hours, or maybe jarred by a struggle and accidentally engaged. But regardless of the reasons—which would more than likely never be known—the camera started rolling around the first victim's time of death. Maybe Splet turned it on. Maybe this was all merely one more iteration of his eye obsession—the cold, cruel, impassive gaze of the video lens, the tyranny of the watcher. After all, wasn't this the electronic, mass-media version of his modus operandi? Making people watch? Making people witness the nadir of a victim's last moments, kicking and screaming as they are dragged down the portals of hell?

“Here he comes, right there,
there
!”

Sandra Callaway, an evidence technician from Menner's task force, jabbed a fingertip at the small monitor that was set up on the SUV's rear hatch, picnic style, for everybody to see. A slender black woman with graying dreadlocks, she was Menner's favorite technogeek, and right now she held a large umbrella over the equipment, ignoring her own rain-dappled shoulders, as though the video gear was a delicate child.

It had started to drizzle, making the scene a miserable crucible of mud and clammy, fetid tension. Grove stood directly behind Callaway, gripping an umbrella, watching the screen with feverish interest. Menner and the others stood behind Grove, looking on, jockeying for position with their own umbrellas. Onscreen something moved in the distance, subtly at first, but unmistakable: the barn's entrance doors were shifting, slowly opening.

“That's him, that's the guy,” Agent Callaway said with a pert little nod toward the screen.

Grove stared at the screen. He couldn't see anything at first. But then he saw the dark figure in the distance, materializing in the doorway, emerging from the barn. At this point in the footage, the figure paused. It wasn't clear what he was doing. His face was overlaid in shadow. He looked out at the parking lot. Then he looked back over his shoulder at the darkness inside the barn. Then he looked directly at the camera in the SUV and started coming this way, toward the lens, toward us.

“Wait a minute.” Grove couldn't believe what he was seeing. His stomach lurched. “What's going on?”

Callaway glanced over her shoulder at him. “What's the matter?”

“That's Splet?” Grove pointed incredulously at the screen, the image showing a little man in a torn, bloody dress, emerging from the barn.

“That is correct, my brother. Say hello to Henry Alan Splet.”

“Holy Christ,” Grove murmured, staring at the strange footage of a man dressed as a woman coming directly toward the camera. In the video, he walked with a weird, stiff gait, as though he just had a hip replaced or had just been shocked by a jolt of electricity. His eyes had the strangest look in them, an almost maniacal alertness, a glassy,
knowing
sort of gaze, like he was privy to some cosmic punch-line.

“What's the matter, Grove?” Bill Menner had stepped a little closer and lowered his voice. “Something ring a bell?”

Grove could not tear his gaze from the monitor. “That's the same son of a bitch who rushed my place in Virginia.”

“I'll be goddamned.” Menner's utterance was barely audible above the rain.

Callaway turned back to the screen. “Y'all ain't seen nothing yet—check this out.”

On screen, the man in the dress approached the SUV with that somnambulant stare burning a hole in the lens. His eyes virtually glowed with madness. It was hard to watch. His mouth was moving, slowly, like that of some toothless, drooling crone. Then, without warning, he slipped offscreen for a moment. A series of muffled clicks follows, suggesting that the rear door was being opened. A bizarre noise rumbled on the soundtrack, a very deep chugging sound, like an engine. The frame jiggled. The image blurred. The madman was picking up the camera and aiming it back at himself.