Top Ten (4 page)

“It’s copying something,” Nance told his partner.

“Oh, Jimmy, you don’t think...”

But he did think, exactly what his partner could not voice, and for some reason even he did not understand Trooper James Fitzgerald Nance had to know. Had to see. Had to lay his gaze upon what he knew, just
knew,
was in that small room off the right of the hallway. Maybe to convince himself that this was real, or unreal, or something in between, some macabre scene come to life, to
his
life. And so he started down the hallway, his partner hanging back now, covering from where he waited. Stepping with care on either side of the ghastly trail, nearing the pile of papers, new ones shooting out from the doorway one after the other, one floating earthward and slipping down the side of the mound and landing face-up at Trooper Nance’s feet. He shined his light down upon it and swallowed hard.

A dead face stared back at him in black and white.

It was what they’d feared, and he’d seen the image captured, but not the truth from which it had been cast, and so he took one more step forward and looked through the doorway and saw the copy machine pushed almost out into the hall, its lid angled half open and resting upon the severed head of a woman, light flashing beneath it every second or so, blood and tissue dripping from the ragged edge of the neck, pooling in large, slick clumps on the glass.

“Oh, Jesus,” Nance said, stepping back, the sight his now for all time. “Oh dear sweet Jesus.”

“Jimmy,” Callahan said as he watched his partner back away from the door and through another opposite it. “Jimmy!”

But Trooper Nance wasn’t hearing his partner. His senses were tuned to what was across the hall from him now, that face, that head, the machine chugging along, its rhythm seeming the echo of a dead heart’s beating, and nothing could have drawn him from his rapt fixation upon the horrid scene.

Nothing but the hand that brushed his cheek and sent him reeling.

He spun in place in the darkened space, the hand tapping him, and another, the beam of his flashlight slicing the din, tracking fast across the hand, and an arm, and a leg, a breast, all seeming to be in a floating stasis about his head. He swatted at the passive assault and his hand came back wet with blood.

“NO!”

He fell to the floor and scooted his way through a slick puddle, driving himself into a corner as his partner made it to the doorway and lit up the space with his own flashlight.

“Oh my God,” was all Trooper Kyle Callahan could say at the sight of his partner huddled fetally, the severed pieces of a woman dangling above him in some grotesquely prepared mobile, each suspended to the drop ceiling supports by various lengths of twine. Chest in the center, legs at the rear, and arms and hands toward the door as if reaching across the hallway for the head that lay on the copy machine. “Oh my God. God. God.”

“He’s not here,” Trooper Jimmy Nance said, laughing and weeping, hugging himself as blood fell upon him in a slow rain.

One

Dots

God’s gray rain fell on Damascus, New York.

Special Agent Bernard Jaworski, stern and stick-like, bald and yellowed by the chemo and radiation the whitecoats were hopeful would do a number on the tumor raging low in his back, sat at his desk mid-morning on Monday, the weather glazing the window behind him, and read the orders just handed him for a third time.

“I don’t get it.” He looked up to the person who’d brought the orders with her. “Why is Atlanta sending me personnel?”

“I’ve been reassigned to you,” Ariel Grace told him, though to her a more proper term would be ‘exiled’. She’d thought that from the minute she saw the orders Saturday morning. Expecting Jack Hale to shift her to FEDBOMB for her perceived failure to get DeVane, or maybe have her sitting on a wire, or at worst running background on clearance applications, she’d instead gotten a letter with a plane ticket attached. And here she was, standing before her new boss, pissed as hell and unable to do anything about it but curse Jack Hale under her breath and move on.

“From Atlanta?” Jaworski asked, puzzled. A cough shook his wasting frame. He took a long sip of ice water. Ariel thought his fingers looked like dying twigs wrapped ‘round the sweating glass.

“The orders were approved by Washington,” Ariel said. And mustn’t that have been a trick for Jack Hale to arrange overnight.

“I can see the signature, Agent Grace, but what I can’t see is why I’m getting you from all the way down south. I’ve requested additional personnel, but usually they get pulled from somewhere close.”

“I didn’t request this, sir. But I’m here, and I’m ready to work.”

“Sit down, Agent Grace.” She took the only other seat, a government issue facing Jaworski’s desk, stiff and gray, vinyl and metal. He looked at the orders again as she shifted for a comfortable position. “What did you work in Atlanta?”

“I ran task force five,” she said, surprised that he didn’t know that.

Jaworski looked to her, squinting a bit. “You ran a most wanted task force?”

“Looking for Mills DeVane, sir.”

He considered her for a moment. Businesslike, she was, in matching blue blazer and slacks. Her hair was brown and fell just below the collar, coiffed very proper. Voice clear, blue gaze steady. All things very right—very purposely right. She was trying hard to not be something. To not be seen as something.

“How old are you Agent Grace?”

There was the briefest pause before she replied. “I’ll be thirty in December, sir.”

“Twenty nine then, are you?”

She nodded to his ‘clarifying’ query.

“Twenty nine and running a task force,” he said as comment. “How long have you been with the Bureau?”

“Six years, sir,” she told him. No hesitation this time. “I was fully capable of doing the job.”

He nodded. “So why aren’t you still?”

That pause stalled her again. Jaworski had her number. Had her dialed in. She wasn’t sure she liked that.

“One of my warrant services went bad,” she told him. That was one man’s opinion, anyway.

Lines cleaved his brow. Hell, he’d been living and breathing his own task force, number ten, night and day, but he hadn’t been that disconnected from Bureau happenings, had he? “People get hurt?”

She shook her head.

Now he was really lost. “No one was hurt. So what went bad about it?”

“DeVane wasn’t there.” Would have been, except for that car...that car that was and wasn’t there.

“Wait,” Jaworski said, sitting back, letting the chair’s soft cushion nearly swallow him. “You got yanked and spanked because your guy wasn’t there? Because you
missed
him?”

That might seem the reason, but Ariel knew better. Knew as soon as she’d read her orders Saturday morning. The orders that also mentioned her replacement.

“ASAC Hale made the call, sir. It’s his task force now.”

“I see that,” Jaworski said. Right there, in the orders, it was spelled out. And wasn’t
that
odd? Why in the hell was the number two agent in Atlanta taking on a task force? There had to be something more to this.

But whatever that might be, it was not Jaworski’s concern. He had no time for it. More pressing matters were at hand. Like catching his own freak, who was very much out there, and very much active. And now he had one more body to throw at his boy. One more body that he had to get up to speed. Fast.

“You’re all squared away, then, Grace?”

“Sir?”

“Ride, place to stay? The F.O. get you what you need?”

“Yes, sir.” She’d flown in on Sunday and had been issued a Bureau Taurus by the Albany Field Office, and vouchers for the Bright I Motor Hotel here in Damascus. She’d spent a restless night there watching an old horror flick on the tube and eating take-out Chinese. When sleep finally dragged her down she dreamt of Jack Hale. He was getting the shit stomped out of him by some Frankensteinish fiend.

“All right then,” Jaworski said, and pushed himself up using both arms of his chair. With a grimace and some difficulty he stood and came around his desk, heading for the door. “Your learning curve here is going to look like the steep side of the Matterhorn.”

“I can handle that,” Ariel said. She stood and followed her new boss out of his office. They made a quick left through an outer office, and a right after that, heading down a long, dim hallway. Stacks of boxes yet to be unpacked crowded the passage, creating chokepoints through which one had to slip sideways. Jaworski took those walking straight on.

He moved fairly quick, considering, Ariel thought. But then maybe being up was better than being down. A physical thing. Maybe mental, too.

Her mother had done housework all through her chemo. Called it her ‘therapy’. She did the dishes the day she died, looking better than the man walking ahead of Ariel right then. Walking as he started talking.

“Welcome to Task Force Ten, Agent Grace,” Jaworski said. “Around here we call it Base Ten. Someone nicked it that. I don’t know why.” At an intersection with another passage they turned left. More boxes cramped their way. A lone window in the distance washed the corridor with dim and dirty light. They walked toward it. “The Bureau rented it for our operations when we outgrew the space at the Utica R.A.” The R.A., or resident agency, was the Bureau equivalent of a police substation, a local presence maintained in areas from which a field office was too distant, or where one was deemed necessary. “The building is vacant except for us and the rats.”

“How many agents are you running?” Ariel asked. The bulge of her hip-holstered weapon snagged a box as she squeezed by and almost sent it tumbling.

“Sixteen counting you.”

“I only saw one agent at the door when I came in.”

“I believe in field work, Grace. Our freak is not going to walk in here and hold out his hands. This ain’t Hollywood. People who work for me work leads. Cold, warm, or hot. That’s how I run Task Force Ten. I only wish I could get out there more.”

“Someone has to run things,” Ariel reminded him.

“It’s kind of you to put it that way,” Jaworski said. “So how many did you run, Agent Grace?”

“Forty full time.”

“How long?”

“Ten months.”

“So you were around for this numbering crap.”

“I was,” Ariel said.

“Tell me, did it ‘focus task force efforts’ any more by having that number tacked on to DeVane.”

“It was crap, sir, like you said.”

Jaworski glanced back at her as he walked. A smile flashed. “Glad to see me and the other five thousand or so people aren’t alone in our thinking.”

“Washington comes up with some beauts,” Ariel said. She knew that now better than most.

They neared the window. It had once been clear but now was filmed opaque with grime. A heavy door was set into the wall to the right of it. Jaworski mustered all his strength and shoved it open, letting them into the stairwell. They started up.

“Did you take the elevator up to three, Grace?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Use the stairs from now on. They don’t break down twice a week.”

“Thanks for the warning.” They made it to four and passed through another heavy door and were in another hallway when a question came to Ariel. “Why are you on three, sir. If the building’s vacant.”

“The rats have one and two. They rarely come to three.”

Ariel looked at the ground as they moved down this hallway and wondered how often they came by four.

“How much do you know about our freak, Grace?” Jaworski asked her. His pace had slowed. His breathing hadn’t.

“Some.”

“I’ll give you the quickie on him before I show you something. He calls himself Michaelangelo. Like the artist, but he spells it wrong. One extra ‘a’. He thinks he’s an artist, too. A master, even. He’s killed six already. Two just this last Friday.” Jaworski stopped suddenly, half propping himself against one wall with a stiff arm. He sucked a deep breath of stale air. A shallow, wet cough hacked up, and he swallowed its spawn back down again. He looked straight at Ariel. “Let me tell you something, Agent Grace–off the subject. They may save my life, but until the day I do kick I will hate every doctor who ever lived for practically killing me with this cure.”

She made no comment to what he’d said. Simply let him take a few more breaths and compose himself.

“Four men, two women,” Jaworski went on. “All found in either Jersey, Pennsylvania, or our dear Empire State. He...uses them. Makes ‘art’ out of them. And I’m not talking recreating The David. This freak goes for shock value.” He paused, took one more deep breath, and continued on down the hall. “He treats the men and women differently.”

“How?”

“Couple of ways. There’s mutilation of the males’ genitalia. ISU and some outside shrinks have looked at everything and decided either he’s gay or not, afraid he’s gay or afraid he’s not, was abused or was an abuser. You get the picture, Grace?”

“He’s not easily profiled.”

“I hate that term, Jesus. Sometimes there are just monsters. Freaks. Evil pieces of human garbage that need to be hunted down. The only pigeonhole this guy fits into is fucked up...pardon my Polish.”

“Pardoned, sir,” she said, smiling at his back. “So he doesn’t mutilate the women?”

“Oh, hell, he’ll mutilate the hell out of them. But he’s not interested in their genitalia. Plus we don’t get any letters on the women.”

“He writes?”

“After each male murder a letter arrives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art addressed to the chief curator. Gives us the ‘titles’ of his ‘works’.” Jaworski shook his head. “Since the first one we’ve been able to intercept them.”

“Prints?”

Jaworski stopped again, this time outside a door just before another intersection of corridors. His breathing was not terribly labored.

“Oh, he’s not afraid of leaving prints. We’ve got them by the hundred.”

“So he’s never been arrested, in the military, or had certain jobs.”

“He’s been a careful boy,” Jaworski said, and reached into his pocket for a small ring of keys.

Ariel looked to the door they stood at and noticed now a makeshift sign tacked above it:
GALLERY
.