In the Belly of Jonah (37 page)

“Looks like the mom tried to protect her kids, Jonah and Jacan, kept them away from the family business and all the danger. They were raised in a luxury condominium along the western shore of Tampa Bay, prime waterfront property in the artsy district. Two major museums within a stone’s throw of their building and the private school they attended.”

“Pushed her kids into culture rather than cultivating poppies,” Kelleher quipped.

“Seems so,”Tuygen answered. “But to answer your question, Streeter, I think everything fell apart for Jonah’s family once he graduated from college. Looks like his mother was murdered a year later. His sister overdosed six months after that.”

“Let me guess again,” Kelleher said. “Heroin?”

“Yes, indeed. The way I figure it,” Tuygen continued, “St. Petersburg was the perfect place to set up a smuggling operation. Sleepy town compared to Miami. Largest city marina in the U. S. Great place, if you need to dock boats unnoticed. Nearly two hundred thirty-five miles of shoreline. How do you patrol that? Not to mention that the family’s condominium was minutes from the airport. It would have been easy pickings for someone like Jonah Bravo.”

“And a profitable outlet for the Este family,” Streeter figured. “Based on the photos we’ve seen up here on his bedroom wall, looks like Jonah Bravo murdered his mother and sister. I’ll get someone to scan and send them to you if you can compare them to what you’ve found.”

“Yeah, sure. That doesn’t surprise me,”Tuygen responded. “He’s wanted for questioning by the Pinellas County homicide investigators on the murder of Rosa Este Bravo, his mother, and on drug trafficking linked to the death of Jacan Bravo.”

“So they suspected him,” Kelleher summarized.

“Not right away,” Tuygen said. “Or if they did, they waited until they had enough evidence before they posted the warrant for his arrest. In the meantime, he slipped away from them.”

“To Fort Collins, Colorado,” Kelleher added. “A long way from St. Petersburg.”

“With several stops in between,” Tuygen reminded him. “All told, Jonah has worked in better than half a dozen postsecondary schools since he graduated ten years ago.”

Streeter squinted in the sun as the convoy of cops and agents drove north out of Fort Collins on U. S. Highway 287. “Tuygen, did you run across any unsolved, bizarre murders in any of the other counties that Jonah Bravo lived in during the last decade?”

Tugyen hummed as he thought. “Don’t think I inquired about anything like that. I was focused more on where this guy came from and what he was made of. Want me to poke around?”

“Could you? It might be a mutilation or death involving a naked corpse,”Streeter suggested, thinking of the photograph of “The Bather” that Jonah had hung on his bedroom wall just after the one of Jonah’s sister.

“Anything else?” Kelleher asked.

Tuygen paused. “Nothing of real significance other than he worked during high school and college to put himself through school. He was a tour guide at the Salvador Dalí Museum, a block from where he lived, and in the summer of his senior year in college, he won the Salvador Dalí look-alike contest.”

Kelleher closed the phone after thanking Jon Tuygen and telling him what an excellent, thorough job he’d done in such a short time. Streeter was lost in thought about Jonah Bravo’s fascination with Salvador Dalí.

“Look, there’s the mine,” Kelleher said, pointing to his right just as Streeter pulled off the highway and alongside Andy Doughty’s car.

“GET OUT,” BARKED DR. JAY

I looked to the east, out over the highwall to the foothills rolling into long stretches of prairie beyond. The Rocky Mountains were behind us, the piñon grove to our left. I knew every nook and cranny in this quarry like the back of my hand. As they say in tennis, “my ad, butt wipe.”

The door of his truck creaked as I pushed it open and stepped out, feeling stronger with the limestone ledge as my foundation. Familiar ground. I heard his door creak open as well and watched as my captor walked around the back of the truck and opened the window of the topper. I took the opportunity to retrieve the screwdriver from my panties and slid it up the right sleeve of my shirt, practicing once as I bent my wrist, allowing it to drop into the palm of my hand for quick use. I nearly dropped it, panicked as I considered what might have been if he heard it clank on the rocks, and pushed it back up my sleeve.

Dr. Jay rounded the truck and approached me carrying a folded white sheet.

“Undress,” he said, his voice mechanical, robotic.

I wondered where his arrogance had gone, his lilting accent, his exotic charm. I wondered if all that had been faked and this was the real Jonah Bravo. I glared at him through my swollen eyes, gently touching my broken nose and bloody lip with the fingers of my left hand. I knew my only chance to defeat him would be to render him useless, unconscious. Or kill him. If not, he was going to kill me. Or worse, kill someone in my family. He was a twisted bastard and I wasn’t about to leave anything to chance.

“Another demonstration of your inability to fantasize? Need the real thing because you’re incapable of imagining?”

He didn’t budge. His hands weren’t clenching into fists, his jaw muscles weren’t working overtime. He just stood there, staring at me. With dead eyes.

“Undress,” he repeated.

Maybe I’d been unconscious long enough to miss where the pod people had overtaken this otherwise emotional basket case and invaded his body. I tried again to push a button.

“Is this what ‘Figure on the Rocks’ is all about? Dalí getting his rocks off by making defenseless, helpless women strip in front of him on a quarry ledge?”

Nothing.

The air was still and hot. And thin. My breathing was heavy. Fear more than anything. Or maybe it was adrenaline, my wanting to use the screwdriver I felt against my right forearm.

“Undress or Ida dies,” he said, a smile playing around the corner of his mouth.

“Fuck you,” I replied, planting my feet shoulder-width apart and rolling onto the balls of my feet, ready to launch myself. “You’re nothing like Dalí. He was a sick fuck like you, but at least he had some balls. It took balls to be a controversial artist. You ... you’re nothing but an unimaginative dullard, incapable of anything besides bullying women, the weaker sex.”

He laughed. I had finally reached some emotional core within the robot. I was trying to stall, trying to prepare for my moment to maim him, hoping against hope he didn’t have a gun or a knife hidden beneath his shirt or tucked into his pants. Or under that stupid sheet.

I squinted, cocked my head. “What’s so funny?”

“You are anything but weak, Genevieve Liv Bergen,” he said, chuckling, taking a couple of steps toward me, and unfolding the sheet. “In fact, you might be more fun than Lisa Henry was.”

That got my blood boiling. I offered up a quick prayer for God to give me strength, and I dropped the screwdriver into my palm, lunged toward him, and stabbed at his heart. Jonah darted away, my screwdriver glancing off his left bicep, ripping skin and shirt along the way. Before I could reposition and take another stab, his right fist connected with my chin in a powerful uppercut, hurling me backward. I stumbled and fell. The gray was crowding my vision, but I’m pretty sure I saw an upside-down view of the prairie and blue skies.

And the bottom of the pit.

The sound of my screwdriver crashing against the rock floor thirty-five feet below confirmed my suspicions and I panicked. Shit, I was dangling upside down over the highwall, about to plummet to my death, my head being smashed like a melon against the floor of my own quarry.

I felt a yanking on my ankles and heard him grunt as Dr. Jay pulled me back onto the ledge. Rather than focusing on how closely I had just come to dying, all I could think about was if he had felt my keys through the leather of my boot.

“You stupid cow,” he said. “You nearly ruined my photo shoot.”

I lay on my back, eyes closed, trying to make the merry-go-round of stars in my eyes stop spinning, the ache of my teeth and jaw stop pounding in my head. I was going to be sick. Once the stars stopped spinning and I remembered to breathe, I started to feel all the sharp rocks against my back where I lay. I pushed myself up to a sitting position.

He was still there. Staring at me.

“For the last time, undress,” he said in a low voice.

I threw up my hands in surrender, staggering to my feet. We squared off as if in the gunfight at the O. K. Corral. Dr. Jay staring at me, me glaring at him. I had nothing left but the keys in my right sock, which apparently he hadn’t felt while he was pulling me off the highwall, sparing my life.

This crazy bastard really needs the photo more than he wants me dead
, I thought. I slipped off my jacket and unbuttoned and removed my shirt, tossing them at his feet.

“How’s this going to work, Jonah?” I had resorted to using his real name rather than Dr. Jay, hoping to evoke the same outburst of anger and energy he exhibited in the car when I first used it. “Now that you’ve blackened my eyes, broken my nose, and split my lip,” I taunted.

I untied my boots, careful to bunch up my socks at my ankle to conceal the bulge of my keys. I pulled off my boots and threw them at him, one at a time. He grinned and arched an eyebrow.

I continued, “What kind of a model do I make for your photo, all bloodied and bruised, huh, smart guy? Have you thought of that?”

“I’ve thought of that,” he said. It worked. I got him talking again.

“And it’s ruined, isn’t it? The picture. Your perfect picture of ‘Figure on the Rocks,’” I challenged him.

His grin was unnerving, but at least he hadn’t asked me to take more clothing off. I was standing in my bra and stocking feet, my jeans the only real clothes I still had on.

“As you’ve already admitted, you don’t know ‘Figure on the Rocks,’” he said tauntingly. “If you did, you’d know her face is obscured, hidden.”

My stomach dropped. If I had had anything left to hurl, I would have, but my stomach was empty.

“You didn’t think of that, did you, you imbecile?” he jeered. “Now, get on with it. Take off the rest of your clothes.”

At least his voice was no longer frighteningly robotic. The cocky, narcissistic Dr. Jay was back. I had a chance. I unbuttoned my jeans and pulled them down over each leg, careful to block his view of the keys in my right sock.

“What are you going to do, rape me?” I spat.

He laughed again. Louder and longer. He was greatly enjoying this and I was happy for the delay. “I wouldn’t soil myself for a beast like you.”

“Wouldn’t or
couldn’t
?” What the hell was I saying? I didn’t want to provoke him into raping me, did I? Or would that be my only chance to stab him in the jugular with the key?

Dad’s face popped into my head, showing me how to drive the tiny little bones in a person’s nose back into their brains with the heel of my hand if I ever got in trouble, pretending not to be imparting such a wise strategy to such a little girl when Mom rounded the corner from the kitchen. I didn’t forget, Dad.

“Did hell finally freeze over?The great Jonah Bravo is at a loss for words,”I said mockingly, deciding I’d rather take my chances with a rape for the opportunity for close proximity to this monster. “I repeat, wouldn’t or couldn’t?”

He blinked once, the eyes going dead again. “And I said get undressed.”

I tossed the jeans onto the heap of my clothes that lay at his feet.

“Everything,” he said.

I pulled off my left sock, then started pulling off my right one, but I pretended to hear a noise and looked up past Dr. Jay’s shoulder to the road cut in the rocks. He glanced over his left shoulder and as he did, I gripped the keys in my right fist.

He turned back toward me, eyes shooting daggers at me. At least they were no longer lifeless.

I stood and tossed the socks into the heap. “Thought I heard someone coming.”

“You wish.”

Lilt in his voice. It was hard to understand what made this man tick. One minute he had the lilt, the next his voice offered no inflection at all. Lively to lifeless.

I didn’t have anything on now except my bra and panties. My feet were blistering against the sun-beaten rocks. For the first time, I felt defeated. He wasn’t going to allow himself to get close to me again. I’d already proven I was not trustworthy. The blood trickling down his left sleeve brought a smile to my split lip. I was certainly a sight to behold. At least my family would be told by Agent Pierce that I had put up a fight.