Top Ten (22 page)

But Ariel was not interested by the found portion of Desmond Hart’s finger. It was the two sheets of paper and the envelope that drew her attention. She took out her notebook and jotted down what she could read of what was now clearly a letter. A letter done on stationary bearing the same name as the envelope: Aaron Rhodes.

But the letter had been signed by someone else.

Ariel looked up at what had been written on the wall above the bunk. No—correction—partially written on the wall. What was intended to be written there was fully in the letter, and it was the last things she jotted quickly down before dashing past Jaworski, yelling at him to check on Aaron Rhodes as she made her way for the nearest phone.

*   *   *

Ariel found a phone in the guard station, but there were correctional officers there, as would be expected. And they had ears. She asked where the warden’s office was knowing he was still with Jaworski, and was shown there by a second year officer whom she kept telling to hurry up.

The warden’s secretary let Ariel into the office and closed the door for her. It was obvious this call the agent needed to make was urgent, and likely private. You could see that on her face plain as day.

Once alone she picked up the phone and dialed the Atlanta field office from memory and was connected to Jack Hale’s office. She was told he was in a meeting, and Ariel told his assistant right back to get him out of it, pronto.

He came on the line two minutes later.

“What is it?” He did not sound pleased.

“Agent Hale, it’s Agent Grace.”

“Ariel. What is it?”

“You heard about Desmond Hart?”

“He offed himself this afternoon, that’s what the word from Bureau of Prisons is.”

Ariel was shaking her head. “No. I’m going to read you a letter the coroner pulled out of the toilet in his cell about five minutes ago, along with a piece of his finger. The letter is on his attorney’s stationary, but it came from Michaelangelo.”

“What?”

“Listen...” She flipped her notebook open and read it word for word.

Desmond Hart

Your mother Edina is a lovely woman. I drove past her house yesterday. The hydrangeas are wilting, it would appear, and the yard is a bit overgrown. She must be tired after a day at the sewing shop. Too tired for upkeep.

I can relieve her tiredness if you would like...

I think you do not wish that. If that is so, you simply must follow these instructions. Read them carefully and dispose of this letter. They provide toilets in your cells, do they not?

First, you will bite off the tip of your right index finger. The one you point and pick your nose with, I presume. This will hurt, so stuff something in your mouth to seal your screams in. A pair of dirty underwear, I would imagine would serve this purpose. Next, on the wall of your cell you will right in your own blood: Art Is Not Linear.

Ariel stopped there. “‘Art is not linear’. Do you know what that means?”

Nearly a thousand miles to the south, Jack Hale was nodding. “It means he’s going out of order.”

“He could go after Mills anytime.”

“Can you get to him?”

“It’ll take a day or two to find him.”

“Get to him, and stick to him. Have you got it?”

She did.

*   *   *

Back at Cell 17, Bernard Jaworski stepped inside the small, square room in which Desmond Hart had been made to die. Their freak had come here. Had killed through the mails. Had killed through intimidation. That made him different, Jaworski knew. That made him special.

If Jaworski didn’t know that this was a man they were dealing with...

But it was a man. A very talented man. A very creative man. A very dangerous man. But a
man
nonetheless. A man who could be caught.

If only they could get a damn break.

*   *   *

The nap had done him wonders. Bryan Marks woke near eight in the evening feeling like he could go another couple hours with Shelbee, if she were here. Or even continue on and be at his parents’ place tonight, ready to wake up and get to decorating for their annual Halloween bash, except that he had called them upon checking in and told them he’d be arriving bright and early—unless they wanted him to chance wrapping his car around a bridge abutment along the way. They didn’t, of course, and told him to get some rest.

Well, he had done that. And now he wanted to get a little relaxed with some brewskis and an old friend. Except he still had to find that old friend. Mark Wills. So he went to the phone table next to bed and opened the top drawer.

Wrong one. Gideon Bible. And a Book of Mormon. He wondered where the Koran and the Torah were.

Down to the lower part of the table, the cabinet, and voila! There it was. The white pages. The guide of all guides—unless, of course, his old buddy was unlisted. Which was a distinct possibility. And would screw his very non-definite plans for the evening. Can you say, beer for one?

But, hell, maybe he’d get lucky. He opened the thick book of flimsy pages and paged through to the W’s. Ran his finger down the columns. Got to the W-I-N’s...nope, too far. But...

His stare narrowed down at the mark on the page. A mark made next to and all about a name. One past where Mark Wills might be, though he wasn’t looking for that anymore right then. This marked up name was sparking a memory. He’d heard it. Somewhere. When was it? Where? Here? At home? Yes! He’d heard it when he was back at home. Visiting. There for his parent’s fortieth wedding anniversary last Valentine’s Day. He’d taken a week off work and come up and hung around the old homestead for a while. Right around the time there was all this news about some guy who’d been killed.
This
guy, Bryan was sure. Calvis Winkler.

The thought that struck Bryan Marks next came cold and hard and fast, and sent a sudden chill washing over him. A chill which dove inward and coalesced as an icy rock low in his gut.

“Holy shit,” he said to the lonely silence of the room, letting the thought come again. Was it possible? Was it? Could the man who killed Calvis Winkler have made this mark in this phone book?

Bryan Marks put the white pages suddenly down, not wanting to touch them. Not sure of what he should do. All thoughts of his friend, the friend whose name escaped him at the moment, had been swatted away.

For a long while he stared at the page. After a while more he decided to call his father and ask him if he thought he was being foolish.

His father thought not and looked up the number of the State Police for him.

Twenty Three

Options

He wanted a whore.

The itch had come again, and he wanted so desperately not to scratch it himself. But...

He really should stay focused. Focused like he had been just some minutes before, prior to the picture of the waifish nymph coming up on the computer screen. He had let himself wander. Had let himself troll for titillation. And he had found it.

He chided himself even as his fingers found his nub and began to work it.

He could be focused and satisfied. Yes he could.

Body. Mind. Separate. One could do one thing, and the other anotherrrrr...

He focused. Took his list in hand from where it lay next to the computer. The list he had taken from sweet Doris’s place of work. The list that had denigrated him. Had altered the path of his work. Yessss....

Focus. Four names had been crossed off. Four faces had large X’s drawn through them. Nine. Eight. Seven. Two.

Yes, two. That had been a stroke of.... stroke of....

He stilled his hand where it lay in the V of his legs. Made a fist with it and made himself bring it up. Put it on the arm of his swivel chair. Admit to failure. Temporary, minor failure. Brain. Body. One this night. Must be the night. Masquerade. Nothing was what it appeared to be. What it should be.

Happy Halloween.

He could focus now. On the list. On his next creation.

Clarity now, and he thought of number two. His stroke of genius. Cleverness, more appropriately. Yes. They would think him clever for dispatching of Mr. Desmond Hart in the way that he did, but it so stretched the process that he felt unfulfilled. So much had been left to the creation itself that there was bound to be mediocrity in the process. If there was, he would know someday. And that, too, was a negative. Not knowing. Not being able to feel the creation as it slipped from life to death to always.

Unsatisfying, yes.

He wanted a whore now more than ever. He kept his hand where it was and focused on the list.

Who next? Who next? What jump would he make now? Back to six? On to one?

Not one, he knew. Not yet. Out of the country he was. More planning that would take. Number one would be a challenging creation.

He moved up the list. Number three. No. A similar proposition to number one. More difficult, even. A greater challenge for a still greater creation.

Onward to number four.

Four. Attempted murder of a police officer.
Attempted
. A failure. He could do better this next time. Yes, he should do better.

To five.

A drug trafficker. A dangerous man. He had hurt a federal officer. How delightful.

What creations there were that could be made of him. What wonderful ways his screams would come during the process.

Number five.

He would look no further. He had chosen.

How precise these choosings were. How different from his previous, and certainly future, work. There was beauty in that which was random. Excitement. Challenges, even. But these choices. From a group. A fixed number. It was different. It was good. He wondered if it were the end he could envision to it.

But of course not. How could an end to creation be good?

He was energized now. The whore could wait. The tingle had left his nub. Beneath his shorts it was soft. Soft and unique. His alone.

He straightened in the chair in the darkened room. His favorite room. The room in which he was never alone. The room in which he had his computer.

His computer. So much could be done with computers now. So very, very much. They were like books. Books with infinite pages. And each and every thing that ever was was in the book. Each and every person. Well, not
every
person, but those who mattered to him at the moment most certainly were. His computer had helped him how many times now. Three? Four?

And it would help him again. Help him with a man named Mills DeVane.

As he thought it, the last name gave him ideas.

*   *   *

She was sitting at a desk she had spent maybe an hour at since arriving in Damascus almost three weeks ago, and Jaworski was showing her photocopies of pages from the phone book.

“This was the first one,” he explained, displaying the one a young man named Bryan Marks had stumbled quite accidentally on in a motel not terribly far from where their first victim had lived. “This came in last night. This morning forensics out of Albany established that there was a hole the size of a pen point obscured by the decoration around the name.” He slid that copy aside and showed her another. “We canvassed as many motels as we could in the area since last night. We got another page, this from one in Rome. That’s near Oneida, where Lew Bradford, victim number five, was found.”

She looked. Another page from a phone book. The name of Lew Bradford all scrolled up nice, fancy swirls and lines adorning the area around it.

“A hole there, too,” Jaworski said. “And in both phone books the hole had penetrated a few pages beyond the one with our victims’ names.”

Ariel knew where this was going, yet she could hardly believe that this was how Michaelangelo had chosen his victims.

“Like he had flipped open to a page,” Jaworski proposed, mimicking the action with a file folder on Ariel’s desk, “and dropped a pen to see who’d be next.”

“Who it marked was it,” Ariel said, and Jaworski nodded.

“Dots,” he said, thinking how appropriate his mantra seemed now.

“Major dots,” Ariel agreed.

Jaworski closed the file on her desk and took the photocopies in hand. “We’re going to have a list of all the motel guests around the times Calvis Winkler and Lew Bradford were killed near these places.”

“Credit card slips?” Ariel asked doubtfully. “You think Michaelangelo would use a credit card? Leave a trail?”

“Our careful boy?” Jaworski shrugged. “We can hope, but it’s not him that we need to find. We just need to find someone who saw him there. Someone who can give us a description. A license plate.”

“There are gonna be a lot of cash transactions,” she told him. “A lot of Mr. And Mrs. John Smith’s.”

“We only need one, Agent Grace. Just one.”

Needle in a haystack, she thought, though that truly wasn’t fair. It was simply that she wasn’t into what Jaworski was presenting. Other things were occupying her mind right then.

“Rudy Kingman’s people are helping out in New Jersey now that their boy is out of the picture,” Jaworski explained. “They’re going to check the motels around where Ricardo Lomanico disappeared. See if we can’t find a phone book with his name done up.”

“You could send some of our folks to Pennsylvania,” Ariel suggested.

“Only two,” Jaworski said. The rest would come from the Philadelphia field office to canvas motels in the Centre Hall vicinity looking for James Ondatter’s fancified name in the book. He had plans for his own people. “We have two locations and the credit card info from them should be coming in today, tomorrow. One of the places is a little hesitant. They don’t want any of their guests to get, shall we say, embarrassed. Knock knock, Mrs. Jones, could we talk to your husband about his stay at the So and So Motel last February?”

“You going to go for warrants?”

“If I need to,” Jaworski answered, and half sat on the edge of Ariel’s desk. “What I need you to do is take the lead on the Super Nine in Whitney Point. They’re the ones cooperating. Get the info from them and take four or five people and start knocking on doors.”

Ariel glanced briefly away from her boss. Her boss who had shown trust in her, and was demonstrating that further now. “Sir, I have to go do something. I’ll be gone for a day or two.”