Authors: Wayne Batson
And then I saw the body.
I was too late again. The rage boiled up, and I tasted something bitter in the back of my mouth. The victim was young, maybe early twenties like the others. In the reddish light, I couldn’t be certain, but her hair looked like a dark auburn. She was long and lithe, her limbs supple with young feminine muscle. And, of course, she was very pale. All the victims had been. Not surprising if they’d spent their childhood locked away from the sun and from prying eyes.
Unlike Erica Graziano’s cause of death, the killing stroke here was obvious: a cut throat. There were no lower body wounds visible. And unlike Erica, this victim hadn’t been left in the fetal position. The killers seemingly had taken time to arrange this young woman in a strangely artistic pose.
She was nude, reclined as a woman might lie by a pool: one arm raised, canted by her head, the fingers extended in a carefree gesture; she had one knee slightly bent, the other leg extended gracefully; her head was tilted back, resting on piles of thin stones; and her lush hair had been fanned out behind her as if gently moved by a cool breeze. But then, there was the ghastly wound: as with Erica’s, this cut was far deeper than necessary to sever the artery; clumped with dark, half-clotted, bloody gobbets; and gaping to the point of revealing bone.
I shivered…half from the cold and the grim discovery. A buzz on my thigh startled me, and I heard music. Before Liesl could utter a fifth syllable of song, I snatched up the phone.
“It’s about time!” I growled into the phone. “I’ve called you forty times!”
“So, so sorry,” Agent Rezvani said. “I’ve been busy following up leads on the knife. Your Doc Shepherd came through. Only six known Cain’s Daggers still around, but so far…no guarantee any of them was the murder weapon. I met—”
“Rez,” I said. “There’s another body.”
The line went silent for a few ticks then, “What?”
“Smiling Jack killed again,” I said. “I’m at a place called The Butterfly Refuge in Navarre, about fifteen minutes east of Pensacola.”
“How in the heck did you know? Wait, why didn’t you tell me?”
I wanted to crush the phone in my palm. “You need to listen, Rez,” I said. “I tried to contact you, tried to let you know…hold on a second.”
It got very cold. I killed the phone and looked up just as a massive shadowy form barreled into me and crushed me against the wall.
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
Fuming about Spector, Agent Rezvani checked her weapons. She sat beside Deputy Director Barnes in the SUV. Agent Klingler, rising star of the Mobile office, drove. Agent LePoast, who’d flown in that morning, rode shotgun. Rez checked the safety and slammed a clip into her Sig Sauer.
“How many times you going to do that?” Barnes asked.
“Helps me think,” she replied. And it did, but it also helped with her nerves and her anger. She wasn’t mad at Spector, not really. How could she be? He’d tried to reach her, seven times based on her phone’s log of missed calls. No, she was furious that she’d missed those calls; furious that she’d missed a huge opportunity; and a combination of furious and terrified that something was happening to Spector and she wasn’t there to back him up.
Rez caught a street sign flash by. They’d hit Navarre in two miles. She holstered the Sig Sauer beneath her jacket and then went to work on her Glock 27.
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
“We’ve not long to wait now,” Dr. Gary called over his shoulder from the yacht’s wheel.
Jack ducked under the boom and stood at his partner’s side. “Perhaps, we’ve been overestimating them,” he suggested.
Dr. Gary smiled humorlessly. “That was with one body,” he said. “One body reveals only the beginnings. But two? Two bodies will reveal patterns…our patterns. And there, our beloved technology will become our undoing.”
“You sound so certain,” Jack said. “But we were so careful.”
“Meticulously careful,” Dr. Gary agreed. “But technology will shrink the nation like a noose, and someone will come calling.”
Jack stared out at the water. During the day, the Gulf of Mexico was a sparkling turquoise. At night, with no moon, it was black.
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
“Sweet mother of Judah,” Special Agent LePoast muttered.
“FBI!” Klingler cried out dramatically.
Rez rolled her eyes. Whatever had happened at the Butterfly Refuge was over and done with. Rez shook her head, taking in the destruction.
“Get the MEs in here!” Barnes barked, windmilling his arm. “Get the body sealed off! But, for cryin’ out loud, watch the blood on the tile! Bloody footprints all over!”
Rez grimaced. Another young life taken by Smiling Jack. But looking at the interior of the Refuge, there was a lot that didn’t match up with the killers’ MO. The body positioning was different, but more than anything else, why all the destruction? Other than the area immediately around the body, the rest of the place was trashed. Display cases and terrarium’s shattered, glass everywhere, and peculiar scorch marks on some of the walls. It was almost as if the cause of the mayhem had purposefully avoided the body. Why? And why trash the place in the first place?
“Deputy Director?” Klingler called, his voice hollow. “You want to take a look at this?”
Watching her step, Rez followed Barnes toward the building’s rear entrance where all manner of debris covered the tile.
“You thinking bomb?” Barnes asked.
“I don’t know what I’m thinking,” Klingler mumbled. He pointed up. “Look.”
Rez was half-afraid to look up. She didn’t want to see another body, this one carved up and swinging from the ceiling. But when she let her eyes drift upward, there was no body at all. The cathedral ceiling looked to have been more than twenty feet high, but a five-foot section of it had been torn out: drywall, joists, insulation, and shingles—blasted right out as if someone had launched a rocket.
It didn’t add up. And that, Rez thought, probably meant Ghost was behind it.
Chapter 31
I needed water and I needed it badly. I was so emptied, so wrung-out exhausted that I barely made it back to Panama City Beach. The fight against the shades had very nearly ended me…very nearly ended the mission. There had been so many—haunts, roamers, and prowlers—that they forced me to my last resort. They forced an unmasking.
When I unmask, things get messed up. I get messed up. If anyone saw me now in the condition I’m in, if anyone got a good look at my face, there would be trouble. Forget zombie. My face looked like
zombie-in-a-blender
. I limped to the assassin’s car, drove to the nearest hotel with a pool, and just before sun up, I slithered over the hotel property’s fence and fell into the pool.
It was with a strange combination of utter relief and abject fear that I sank beneath the water’s surface. Water is my friend and water is my enemy. It allows me to heal and, at my current level of injury, it was the only way I could be healed. I had so many wounds: gouges from long, curving talons, jagged tears from cruel uneven teeth, bruises, and even fractures. And in the state of exhaustion I was in, the resetting wouldn’t begin without total submergence in water.
But, as brilliant white light blazed out of my wounds, and the familiar tightening of my flesh began, there also came teeth-rattling terror. I gasped for air and found only water coursing down my throat. I gagged, forced a gout of air to clear my lungs, and writhed. I was maybe two…three feet beneath the surface, and yet, to me, it felt like I’d just been expelled from a bathysphere near the ocean floor a thousand feet down. The pressure clamped me like a vice. My ribs felt like they would collapse and crush my organs. My ear drums popped, and my skull throbbed. I could bear it no longer. With whatever breath I had left, I screamed.
The sound underwater was alien and garbled, but still fierce and deep like a mortally wounded beast. I shot up from the water and sucked in enough air to fill a blimp. I swam rapidly to the shallow end, struggled to my feet, and gasped. I inhaled precious breath after precious breath. In reality, each air intake probably tasted like chlorine, but to me it was the rich scent of a meadow full of lavender and fresh cut grass.
Standing in the “kiddie” end of the pool, breathing like I’d nearly died, I felt a little like an idiot.
“Uhm…sir,” came a timid voice behind me. “The pool doesn’t open until 9:00 a.m. And, uh…we don’t allow skinny dipping.”
I turned and found a smallish man wearing green coveralls and wielding a pool skimmer. He was staring at me awkwardly…as if he didn’t really want to look. Then, I felt a lot like an idiot.
I realized then that the sun had crested the horizon while I’d been submerged. And in the light…I discovered that the few shreds of clothes that had survived the Shade attack were now floating on the surface of the pool’s deep end. I was butt naked. And yes, at that time, I felt like the king of all idiots.
I looked back to the pool maintenance guy and muttered, “Sorry. The mood just strikes sometimes, y’know?”
“I wouldn’t know about that, sir,” he said sheepishly.
“I don’t suppose you could grab me a towel?” I prodded gently.
He was a kind soul. He placed two towels on the edge of the pool near the ladder. And then, he disappeared into a shed near the fence. I saw him peek around the shed doors a couple of times, most likely hoping I’d be gone.
Okay, so two towels are a great help, but I had destroyed my wardrobe completely. I could manage to wrap my waist pretty well, but I would need new clothes and right away. I left the motel pool grounds, slid carefully into the assassin’s car and drove to the nearest fast food. In my present garb, drive-thru was the only real option. Thankfully, a Smack Burger was just up the road.
I think I stunned the employees with my order because their initial response was a rather rude suggestion that seemed anatomically and pragmatically impossible. I assured them that I wasn’t kidding about the order, drove around to the window, and paid for the massive bill up front. The Smack Burger manager apologized profusely for the initial response but, since the order was so large, I had to pull around and wait.
Waiting wasn’t a problem as I needed to kill a couple of hours until a surf shop might open to allow me to get some new clothes. I spent the time thinking of what I’d learned from the second body. Number one: Smiling Jack wasn’t through sending messages. The way the victim had been posed this time, but for the gaping wound, a scene of startling beauty and peace—it was juxtaposition with some kind of nasty point. I had some suspicions about the message of the first body at Fort Pickens, but this one had me stumped.
Number two, and this was the most troubling aspect: Smiling Jack no longer cared if he got caught. For whatever reason, he’d run out of patience. The pictures and websites were no longer enough. He wanted to give us flesh and blood and, with that, he sacrificed his anonymity. Sooner or later, we would learn his methods and his patterns. And then, we would track him down.
But Smiling Jack had proven to be too cagey not to know that. Few things are more dangerous than a serial killer who no longer cared about getting caught. I blinked back memories of the photographs, the young women Smiling Jack had penned up like animals. If the pictures accurately represented the number of captives, there were only two women still alive. I’d already failed miserably, but I’d rather have my wings clipped than—
A sharp rap at my window. A disheveled looking man with a Chaplin mustache and a gaudy orange and red Smack Burger uniform stood there. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” the manager said. “We’ve never had to drop that many hash browns before.” He handed me half a dozen white paper sacks each emblazoned with the equally gaudy orange and red Smack Burger logo and, of course, Sir Smacks-a-lot the burger-eyed clown.
Resetting uses up every spare nutrient in my body and, when food nutrition is absent, will even consume muscular tissue…tissue that I could ill-afford to lose. So after such a full overhaul, I need to plow down thousands of calories. Smack Burger wasn’t so nutritious, but it was filling and full of some of the major macronutrients. And…I couldn’t wander into the local grocery store in a towel.
After nine sausage, egg, and cheese English muffin sandwiches, fourteen bags of hash browns, and three boxes of cinna-chomps, I felt like I had enough fuel to start the day. I let out a contented burp and noticed the cell phone on the passenger seat. In my hurry to flee the Butterfly Refuge and in my depleted, semi-clothed state, I wasn’t certain if I’d remembered the phone. “Thank God,” I muttered. I checked the display, and it flashed two pieces of information: low battery and nineteen new messages.
All from Rez. I hit her number. She picked up before I heard a ring.
“Ghost, what the heck did you do?” she asked, her voice hushed but urgent.
“I…I…uh, what do you mean?”
“The Butterfly Refuge looks like a bunker-buster missile hit!” She muttered something completely unladylike under her breath. “The place is wrecked. There’s a hole torn out of the roof for cryin’ out loud!”
“I didn’t have much choice,” I said. “I had some trouble.”
“I guess so,” she said. “But listen. This doesn’t look good. Evidence is scattered all over the place. They know I got the tip from you. They’re going to wonder if you had something to do with this.”
“I’m going to guess I’m not real popular with Deputy Director Barnes right now.”
Rez replied with an additional unladylike comment. “It’ll be a miracle if they don’t put out a warrant for your arrest,” she said. “Seriously, Ghost, bloody footprints everywhere! Could you have been more careless?”