Top Ten (5 page)

“Did you eat breakfast, Agent Grace?”

Ariel shook her head.

“That’s probably a good thing.”

He inserted a key into the lock on the door but didn’t turn it. “That agent you saw on your way in...”

“Yes...”

“That was Vargas. He’s the gatekeeper. No one gets into this building unless they have business here. Any tabloid photographer worth his salt would give a limb to get shots of what’s behind this door.”

“More rats to deal with,” she observed, and Jaworski turned the key and opened the door to a darkened room.

“After you.”

She stepped in and heard the door close behind her, making the space black for a second before Jaworski switched on the lights and set the walls to scream.

“Dear God,” Ariel exclaimed softly, as though to speak too loud might stir the madness fixed upon three of the room’s four walls to life.

Jaworski himself gave the room a long look, taking it in yet again. It stoked the fire. Helped him to hate the freak that was his to catch.

Ariel was in the center of the room, her eyes tracking from right to left, vibrant and vicious hues assaulting her from dozens upon dozens of stills the Bureau photographers had captured. A visual symphony of horror.

In one a man’s penis had been grafted to his forehead, making him a unicorn.

Jaworski saw where she was looking and stepped that way. He tapped the photo holding her rapt. “Calvis Winkler, the one our freak made into a unicorn, was victim number one. Twenty three years old, an auto mechanic from Shakes Ferry.” He pointed to a less prominent photo of the crime scene. “His body was found on Valentine’s day in a Utica motel room standing before a mirror.”

“Standing?” Ariel asked, looking closely at the indicated photo. There was Calvis Winkler, standing at the vanity in a motel room, hands planted on either side of the single-bowl sink, his boxer shorts and white tee shirt wet red nightmares. He seemed to be intently gazing at the mirror. At the dead perversion of himself in the mirror. But how...

“Re-bar,” Jaworski said in response to the question her puzzled expression was asking. “Those metal rods they put in concrete to strengthen it.”

Ariel nodded at the horror.

“Cut to length and bent just right,” Jaworski explained. “He made holes in Mr. Winkler and pushed the re-bar in along the long bones in the legs and arms. Spine, too. The medical examiner said that one was hammered down through the skull. That would have killed him if he wasn’t dead already.” Jaworski paused. “I hope to God he was dead already.”

“He sculpted him,” Ariel observed. “He made himself a human sculpture on a frame.”

Jaworski nodded. “His letter told us he called it ‘Reflections Of A Myth’.”

“The unicorn is a mythical figure,” Ariel said. “But here he gave it a reflection.”

“Don’t chew on it, Grace,” Jaworski warned her. “Don’t try and figure him out that way. Let the shrinks and the gurus at Quantico handle that end of it. Focus on the tangible. Be a cop, not a psychoanalyst.”

She looked to him. “Those methods have worked, sir.”

He allowed a nod and looked to the pictures. “I don’t think it’s going to be that way with this freak. I just don’t.”

She turned toward the next set of photos in line as Jaworski moved to them. In all the photos an older man sat naked in a chair, his right hand fixed over his mouth, his left over his eyes. His penis was nowhere in sight. “Ricardo Lomanico, sixty, a retired army master sergeant. Found dead in his house in Jersey City in early March by his painter who was touching up the trim around his bedroom window. His uvula had been removed and his penis attached in its place. It was blocking his windpipe.”

Ariel grimaced, but stayed focused on the photos. “He couldn’t have been alive...”

“Traces of a muscle paralyzer called napoxcypharin were found in his system. And in Calvis Winkler’s. It was found in all the men. The medical examiner said this drug paralyzes the voluntary muscles, but lets you breath and lets your heart beat.” Jaworski glanced at Ricardo Lomanico’s hideously abused face. “It also allows one to still feel pain. But not scream.”

A shiver scampered up her spine at the thought of that terror. Agony without expression. The cry withheld. She wondered if that could drive one mad.

“This creation is called ‘Hear My Evil’. Try and pick that one apart.”

Jaworski took a step down and was now on a new wall, the one opposite the door. He touched the picture of a heavyset woman whose breasts had been removed and fixed to the side of her severed head like earmuffs. Her head rested on a lamp whose shade had been removed. The burning bulb glowed through her gaping mouth. “Susan Rollins, age forty-one, she was from Trenton, New Jersey, but was found in a motel room just outside of Centre Hall, Pennsylvania. Her body was found in the bathtub, here.” Ariel looked where directed. “Fully clothed but drained of blood. We found about four pints in the toilet tank.”

Stone
, Ariel thought.
Be stone
. It was hard. She felt her stomach churning.

“Like I said, we didn’t get a letter for this victim or the other woman, but he did leave what I guess you’d call messages at each scene. This one he left in lipstick on the bathroom mirror.”

Ariel saw the photo nearby. “Women bleed.”

“You think that means something other than the disgustingly obvious?”

“It might,” Ariel replied.

Jaworski shook his head and tapped the wall in a random succession of spots. “Connect the dots, Grace. Connect the dots.”

“When was she found?”

“April second, though we know she was killed on the first.”

“April fools day,” Ariel said. “The second significant day with Valentine’s day.”

“And March fourth, Agent Grace?” Jaworski challenged her. “What day of significance is that, other than the day that Ricardo Lomanico choked on his own dick?”

There was no answer to be had. She was thinking too fast, here. Taking in too much all at once and trying to put it in place, without knowing what the places were. She was trying a puzzle without having a picture for reference. That would not work. She had to see all the dots before trying to connect them.

“Who was next?” Ariel asked, signaling her readiness to go on. Jaworski obliged.

“This one is called ‘Taken For A Ride’,” Jaworski said. The accompanying photos showed the naked upper torso of a man seemingly grafted to a horse lying on its side, both dead. “The guy with half of himself missing was James Ondatter, victim number four. He drove a taxi in Centre Hall, Pennsylvania. He was found in the same area. The mount he’s stuck to was called Lady Anne Green Apples. Her owner looked out a window in the morning last April third and saw Lady Anne galloping around the pasture. It looked like someone was riding her. Someone was.”

“The horse was alive when he did this?” Ariel exclaimed more than asked.

“Police shot it when they got there. They found Ondatter’s lower half less the dick stitched to the underside of another horse wandering through open country outside of town. The dick was in the horse’s rectum, which was stitched up. That one died before they could shoot it. Stress from a too-high dose of a veterinary tranquilizer called equipsyx.”

“He has access to drugs.”

“And surgical glues, sutures,” Jaworski said. “But we’ve done those dots. Pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, doctors, etcetera, etcetera.”

“You couldn’t have checked everywhere,” she said.

“You can never check everywhere, Agent Grace. And even if you could, there’s no guarantee you’d see this guy. I doubt he’s walking around drooling and showing off his collection of catgut and equipsyx.”

Likely not, she knew, but he had to be getting his toys somewhere.

“He used duct tape on Susan Rollins,” Jaworski added. “We ran the lot. It came back as shipping to over eight hundred outlets over a year. Maybe fifty thousand people bought it. Mostly cash transactions.”

“Not much chance there,” Ariel commented. A thought came to her. “Susan Rollins was from New Jersey—how’d she end up in Centre Hall one day before Ondatter was found?”

Jaworski tipped his head approvingly toward her. “Now there are some dots, Agent Grace. Susan Rollins was in Centre Hall on business. Real estate business. A company she worked for back home was purchasing a tract of land in the area. She was there for an appraisal. She never showed up.”

“So why kill her?”

“Dots, Agent Grace. Dots.” Another step down the line, to the last two in the grisly series. “For six months our freak was quiet. Then these next two were killed. Close in proximity, and even closer in time.” He touched a photo showing a naked man impaled on an iron rod in a clearing in some brush. “Lew Bradford, fifty. A car salesman. Found in a field near Oneida, his home town, on Friday morning. Not far from here. He was killed Thursday night. Napoxcypharin in his system, as well. Our freak hammered a sharpened piece of scrap iron about an inch thick into the ground so that about six feet of it stood proud like a flagpole. The he sat Lew Bradford on top, positioned the point in his anus, and let him slide. Gravity did the rest. Near the end our freak helped things along, tipping Bradford’s head back so the top of the pole would slide out his mouth. Topped it off with you know what on the end of the spike.”

There it was, the object of number ten’s interest, hovering a foot above the victim’s mouth.

“He called this one ‘Snacktime’.”

Ariel looked away, and her eyes fell upon the dismembered pieces of a woman suspended from a ceiling.

“Doris May,” Jaworski began. “Victim number six. Thirty eight. A postal worker. She was found cut up, photocopied, and hung like a mobile in a post office in Pembry late Friday night. Pembry’s just up the road from Oneida. An hour before you got here this morning the letter concerning Mr. Bradford was flagged at the Metropolitan Museum. It came from this post office.”

“He mailed it there, then killed her?” What sense did that make? Ariel wondered. Then again, what sense was there in any of the things she was seeing.

His sense
, the answer came to her.

“No drugs, just like the other female victim. But unlike her, he didn’t use duct tape.”

Ariel was making mental notes as best she could. Later she’d put them on paper. Reduce what she was being shown, being told, to cold words. When this was all done, the next day, the next week, the next year, she could file them away. Or toss them. Make them gone.

If only the memories could be so easily dealt with.

“On the wall he wrote in her own blood ‘She Went To Pieces’.” Jaworski showed her the photo. Ariel looked. Made it a memory.

The light above dimmed briefly, then went back to bright. Ariel would have preferred it go black. She had seen enough.

“Someone’s on the elevator,” Jaworski said. “I have an appointment. Doctor here to give me a shot of insta-sick. Oh joy.” He turned and opened the door. “Shall we?”

She was ready to leave. She wanted to leave. But when given the chance right then by the man who was now her boss, she did not. She could not.

“Agent Grace?”

The walls were still screaming at her.

“Agent Grace?”

Making memories.

“Agent
Grace
?”

She turned finally away from the walls.

“I have work for you,” he said.

“Right, sir.”

The light clicked off. Darkness killed the screams.

Two

Image Maker

“We called her DoDo,” Judy Bryce said between puffs on her smoke out behind the Pembry post office. Her eyes were teary. The sleeve of her postal uniform was damp. She’d been crying a lot.

Ariel Grace stood close to her on the gravelly ground with a small notebook in hand. The rain had stopped, but a chilly wind blew.

“It was a joke kind of thing,” Judy said, glancing upward and sniffling. She took a hard drag and spit the smoke toward the woods. “‘Cause she was blonde, you know? But she wasn’t dumb.” She put the back of her hand to her mouth and stared at the ground. “She wasn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” Ariel told the woman whose friend had been butchered. The page in her notebook had Judy Bryce’s name at the top. She’d written nothing else yet. Her pain was not notable.

“I can’t believe she’s gone,” Judy said, puffing again. “I can’t.”

“It’s difficult, Mrs. Bryce. I can imagine.” It was time to move past sympathy. “I understand you were on vacation all last week.”

Judy Bryce nodded. “My husband and I took the kids to Disneyworld.” She sniffled. “DoDo always wanted to take Lucas there, but she never had the money. It’s hard without a husband, you know.”

Ariel nodded. She’d jotted Disneyworld without looking. “You returned, when, Mrs. Bryce?”

“Last night. There was a message on my machine from Mr. Hayes...”

“Hayes?”

“He’s the postmaster. He said that Doris had been killed and he needed me in this week.”

“You were supposed to be off, then.”

Judy Bryce nodded. “So here I am.” Dry sobs shook her. “DoDo was working for me last week.” Tears streamed down her cheeks. She put her cigarette shakily to her lips and drew on it. After a moment the spasm eased. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Ariel said. This was going fast to nowhere. Jaworski had sent her to talk to this woman, to pick up this one last interview of staff at the post office where Doris ‘DoDo’ May had been cut up. But what could this woman possibly offer? She’d been out of town when the crime occurred. Out of town in the week leading up to it. What possible dots could be
gleaned
from her.

“Do you think she suffered?” Judy Bryce asked. Her wet eyes pleaded for a wanted truth.

“I don’t think so,” Ariel told her, giving her what she wanted. By any other name it was a lie. “Before you left on vacation, did Doris mention anything about anyone to you? Someone new in her life? A boyfriend? An admirer?”

Judy Bryce shook her head. “She had a steady guy. Mike DeRoy.”

Who had been checked and cleared already, Ariel new from the case notes Jaworski had given her. She’d read them while stopped for lunch en route to Pembry. There’d been no pictures included. She’d been able to finish half a sandwich before the cold words sparked new memories.