Top Ten (25 page)

“Special Agent Hale wants you to call him, Agent Grace,” the young agent said, handing her the phone.

She took it and wandered a bit away from him, to a planter with cigarette butts piled ‘round its base. As she dialed, her arms were tucked close to her body, an almost automatic reflex to the trauma she’d suffered. That and maybe the painkillers wearing off. They’d offered her more, but she’d refused. Sooner or later she’d have to get back behind the wheel of a car to find Mills.

Or so she thought.

“Hale here.”

“It’s Agent Grace, sir.”

“Jesus, Ariel how are you?”

“Sore.”

“How bad?”

“I think I’m an a-cup now.” She made the mistake of trying to laugh at her own humor. A spike of pain in her ribs put a quick stop to that. “Jack, I need a car. Mills is gonna be—”

“Mills isn’t going to be anywhere for you to find,” Hale told her.

Dread made her mouth go suddenly dry. “Why? Is he—”

“He’s probably been dragged off for safe keeping by Hoag. But besides that, you’re too known a commodity now. Especially now. A lucky news crew on your tail...”

She understood. He was right. But that didn’t make leaving Mills out there on his own any easier.

“Meeks is dead, isn’t he?” Ariel asked.

“He’s a predictable lunatic, your boy,” Hale said. “We should have known to have Mills’s known associates watched. He’s got no family for Michaelangelo to go after.”

“
DeVane
has no family,” Ariel reminded Jack Hale.

“You know what I mean, Ariel.”

She wasn’t sure that mattered to him, though. “If I’m not on Mills anymore...”

Hale had that direction all thought out. It was direct and pure in its simplicity. “Find him, Ariel. Find him and stop him.”

*   *   *

Gareth’s little spread outside of Gainesville was no mansion, but it was a far cry from what Mills had been used to. He was, however, going to be able to get accustomed to it. For a day or so.

“You are not getting out of my sight, number five,” Gareth Dean Hoag told Mills DeVane as they sat in the living room of his house in the pines and shared a beer. “Not now. Not after I almost lost you.”

Lionel and Nita had saved his ass, and in any other life, any other twisted universe, he might have felt indebted to them. But here he did not. “I was lucky.”

“You were lucky I had people looking out for you.”

Mills nodded and drew long on the bottle that was cold in his hands. “He almost got me.”

“You, some FBI agent.”

Mills did not react to that. He knew it was Ariel. Knew she’d been hit. Knew that her vest had saved her. The TV news had told him that. But she had been there following him. Obviously ignoring what he’d said. Putting her life on the line for him.

And he felt sick about it.

Gareth sipped fast at his beer and flashed a foamy smile suddenly at Mills. “Guess what, number five?”

“What?”

“Friday is the day.
The
day.”

Again, Mills tried not to react. Tried not to look at the phone next to Gareth, the phone he could not chance using while he was here. Tried not to look out the window to Lionel, standing guard out front. He would not be able to sneak out to make contact. No.

“Friday, number five,” Gareth repeated. “What do you think about that?”

“It’s about time,” was all Mills could say, knowing now that he was on his own. That he would have to play it by ear, and play every move right. Either that or all that he’d done would have been for naught.

Twenty Seven

Multiples Of One

Mikhail Ivanovich Luketsin was confused.

For an hour now he had stared at the two photographs and for an hour now he could not make himself understand what he was seeing. He was only hoping Mr. Borotsin might be able to explain it when he got there.

Pavel Yurievich Borotsin arrived just as his young associate was swallowing three aspirin. Locally produced. He’d have to remember to get the lad some from Europe or America.

“Mikhail Ivanovich, there is a problem?” Pavel asked as he entered the office space his workers usually filled. This late hour though, only one remained. The one he’d charged with a very important project. A very quiet project.

“I am sorry to have called you at home, sir, but...”

Pavel slipped out of his two coats and laid them over the back of a chair. “What? What is it?”

The young man hesitated, then showed him, laying the two photographs that had troubled him side by side on his desk. “This.”

Pavel tipped his head back and looked down through his bifocals. “Earlier and later photos of the same man. What?”

Mikhail shook his head. “These are not of the same man.”

“What?”

“This one,” Mikhail said, touching the photo on the left, “is the man you asked me to check on. I went through the files Pyotr acquired for us.”

Acquired for a very tidy some, Pavel thought, though that was an expense, and it would be Valentin Yevgenovich who would ultimately be paying for the access. “Yes...”

“This is Mills DeVane,” Mikhail said, tapping the photo now.

“And this is Mills DeVane,” Pavel said, pointing to the other photo. “No?”

“No. I stumbled upon this one by accident. The last name is similar. Donovan.”

“Donovan,” Pavel repeated. “I don’t understand.”

“His name is Theodore Donovan.”

“But he is almost identical to DeVane,” Pavel said, looking at the eyes. The striking eyes.

And his gaze flared. The eyes. He bent forward and studied them. Both. Mills DeVane and Theodore Donovan. And from a pile on the young man’s desk he took the photo Valentin had supplied him. He laid it between them.

“I had to put that one away,” Mikhail told his superior. “Seeing three of them was driving me crazy.”

Pavel stared at the three sets of eyes, two Mills DeVanes and one Theodore Donovan, and thought he might go a little crazy seeing this.

He was certain his friend Valentin was going to as well.

*   *   *

He had too much energy. Way too much energy. And wasn’t that just the hap-hap-happiest fucking problem in the world to have, Special Agent Bernard Jaworski thought as he paced back and forth in his office.

CLEAN.

That’s what the whitecoat had said. That’s what two whitecoats had said. Not cured. No. No one was ever cured. They were CLEAN.

The MRI last night was CLEAN.

They couldn’t find the tumor. It was gone. It had vanished. And he was feeling like a sixteen year old with a hundred years ahead of him.

Jesus H Fucking Christ he was CLEAN!

He swung his fist at the vacant air in front of him just at the right moment. A second later and he would have clocked Tom Romero coming through the door with a file for him.

“Sir,” Romero said, holding the file out toward his boss. Holding it and smiling a big and fat smile.

“What?” Jaworski asked, then realized he was not stationary. He was bouncing up and down on his toes like he had pogo sticks for legs. He stilled fast and made the gruffest face he could manage. It wasn’t very convincing.

“Nothing, sir,” Romero said as he started to back out. “Those are the Super Nine records you wanted.”

“Right. Good. Thank you.”

Romero was still splitting that grin when he closed the door.

Jaworski opened the folder and paged through the records. There were more than he’d expected. Then again, the Super Nine was right off an interstate. Weary travelers would be common. Less hanky panky and more likely to use their credit cards. Or, there might have been a plethora of people in the area of Whitney Corners who just didn’t give a damn about their affairs being known someday. Or they were just plain stupid.

He closed the file and dropped it on his desk.

He stared at it for a moment and picked it up again, opening it to the several pages of contacts his people would have to make. His people in the field. Connecting the dots. Having all the fun.

“Like hell,” Jaworski said aloud to himself, grabbing his coat from the rack by the door and folding the first page of contacts to a pocket size square. He was the damn boss, after all, and if he was feeling like he wanted to do a little leg work, well, he damn well could.

It was either that or he was going to have to run some laps to burn off the energy flooding him. The life energy.

How good it felt to think that, Jaworski thought as he left his office with a very definite spring in his step.

Twenty Eight

Eyes

She returned to Base Ten in Damascus, New York, late Thursday afternoon, and immediately asked where Jaworski was.

“Probably out getting shit faced,” Agent Anthony Dominic told her, and when her face said she didn’t understand he explained. “I think he got more good news.”

“That’s great,” she said, truly feeling that, but her mind was moving in another direction right then. One that had started some days before, but had only picked up steam on the flight from down south. “Tony, you know where Tom is?”

“Romeo Romero? He was out, but now he’s not.”

“Funny. His desk, I presume?”

“Don’t presume,” Dominic said as he moved away from her, “You make a...yeah, doesn’t work as well without the ASS up front.”

Every place needed a joker, she figured. But right then she needed someone to bounce ideas off of, and she found that someone coming into the bullpen from a bathroom break. She corralled him, grabbed some files from her desk, and dragged him into the conference room that had rarely been used.

When she dropped her files on the table a dust cloud erupted.

“Would it break the Bureau to hire a cleaning service?” Romero asked, waving the dingy mist away from his face.

“Never mind that,” Ariel said, and slid chairs out for both of them. He took the hint and sat next to her.

“Okay, what can I be of assistance with?”

Ariel opened one of the files and grimaced. She’d sat down a bit too fast. Combined with her refusal of painkillers still, she had a good hurt going between her neck and navel.

“You okay?” Romero asked.

“Fine,” she said, a little too breathily to be convincing. She sucked up the pain and got herself going. “Here are the files on Doris May and Susan Rollins.”

“The two female victims,” Romero said, starting the process. Bouncing. Throwing things out. Back. Around. “He didn’t send letters on them.”

“They were different,” Ariel said. “Not part of his plan.”

Romero shrugged. “We don’t know his plan, but, considering what he did with the men, I suppose you could say he had some sort of plan.”

“A random plan,” Ariel tossed out.

“Because of the phone books,” Romero expanded. “Did you know they found more holes in some of the books, like he’d dropped the pen other places, but when it came up next to a woman’s name he didn’t doodle it all up.”

“Men were his plan,” Ariel said. “For whatever reason, and we may never know that, he was planning to do his thing to men.”

“So why Doris May and Susan Rollins?”

“We know Doris May,” Ariel told him. “He was angry. He had seen himself tenth on the list. None of us can know exactly what was going on there, but my guess is that he was berating her about it. Wanting her to tell him about it. Explain it.”

“What could she explain?” Romero asked.

Ariel shook her head. “Nothing to his satisfaction. So he kills her. Okay?”

“All right. Let’s say that’s the way that went down. That was his reason. Next...”

“Susan Rollins,” Ariel said. “Why her?”

“You got me.”

“But there has to be a reason,” Ariel said. “He told me himself.”

Romero’s brow folded at her. “What?”

“That night on the pay phone, he said he only kills for a purpose.”

“He also says his murder is art, Ariel...”

“He
believes
it is. He also believes what he told me. So let’s take it as gospel and see what we get from it.”

“Okay,” Romero obliged. “Go.”

“What do we know about her?”

“She was killed in proximity with James Ondatter.”

“A
planned
victim,” Ariel said.

“Okay. So?”

“So what made Michaelangelo kill Susan Rollins? And before Ondatter by, what, a day?”

“Two,” Romero corrected her.

“Why?”

He shook his head.

“If he killed her for a purpose two days ahead of a planned victim,” Ariel said, “what are the possible reasons? Any of them?”

Romero thought for a moment. “She was an obstacle to getting Ondatter.”

“No evidence to back that up,” Ariel told him. “No relation between them at all. What else?”

Romero rubbed his head. It reminded her of Mills, but she forced that memory down and stayed on track. “Jeez, Ariel, I don’t know.”

“Me either,” she said, and spread the contents of Susan Rollins file on the table. “What else do we know about her?”

“Well...he restrained her.”

“Right. Taped her up. Hands and feet.”

“And mouth,” Romero reminded her.

“Right. He couldn’t have her screaming.”

“And the eyes.”

“Ri—” The eyes. Ariel’s own gaze twisted on that bit of fact. “Why would he do that?”

“Tape her eyes?”

“Yeah,” Ariel said, checking the file. Michaelangelo had removed the tape once his victim was deceased, to better shock his audience, no doubt, but traces of the adhesive were found near her eyes and mouth and wads of used tape were found in the wastebasket. “Why would he do that? He doesn’t care if his victims see him? They won’t be able to identify him. They’re going to be dead?”

“Maybe he didn’t want her to see what he was going to do,” Romero suggested. “Go into fits, you know?”

“He’d drug her then,” Ariel countered. “Like the men.”

Romero nodded agreement. “You got me then, Ariel.”

“I got me, too,” Ariel thought. Why? Why would he tape her eyes? There was no logical reason. None. She was going to be dead. She would never be able to identify him.

The hair on Ariel’s neck stood suddenly. “Christ, Tom.”

“What?”

“His purpose.”

“What?” Romero repeated.

Ariel looked to him. “I think he killed her because he knew her. Because she knew him. Because she knew him and
saw
him.”