He disconnected and said, 'Put him under.'
One of the brigadiers stepped forward with a needle and jammed it into my leg again. Whatever was in that syringe was powerful stuff. I was out before they untaped me from the chair.
Chapter 58
When I regained consciousness I was back in the trunk and we were moving. I wasn't sure how long I'd been out, but my whole body ached, and my left index finger was throbbing like a bitch.
Memory started to return, and as it did, I knew I was going for a ride I wouldn't come back from.
I now had some of the 'bows,' but the 'whys' still eluded me. To keep my mind from disintegrating in fear, I tried to reason them out.
Nix was Virtue's right hand, so that meant Virtue was, for some reason, allied with the Petrovitches. Why?
Virtue and the Petrovitches were all in Moscow in the mid-eighties. Stan Bambarak and Bimini Wright had also been stationed there. Was this part of Bimini's '85 problem? Alexa told us that Sammy had been an assassin for the KGB. Was he the shooter who did Bimini's Russian doubles in that Moscow prison? How did all of that tie to R. A. Virtue? Why would Virtue take such a risk? I wasn't sure, but it felt as if it started back then.
Then came a wave of frustration and anger, most of it directed at me. For the past three years, I had gotten into the habit of playing just outside the boundaries. I was usually able to pull it off, but little by little, I had become overconfident. Past successes had blinded me to current weaknesses. I had allowed myself to be taken and then hadn't held up. I'd given our case away. It would now come to nothing. That memory shamed me.
I started to review the events that lead me here. There was now little doubt that Samoyla Petrovitch had degenerated from whatever he'd been in Moscow into a much more dangerous, murderous psychopath. He had pulled that tree-limb cutter from the trunk of his car. Then he'd snipped off my fingertip. Did it without a hint of hesitation or a flicker of emotion.
A question began to bump up against that gruesome memory. What the hell was Samoyla doing with a tree limb cutter anyway? Maybe he bought it to cut off Davide Andrazack's fingertips so the Mossad agent could be dumped in our serial murder case. Then a new idea struck me.
Alexa told me about the Stinger attack in Kabul. How Sammy had been stitched up by a U. S. corpsman who saved him, but also disfigured him for life. I'd seen firsthand that Sammy was an impulse killer. He almost murdered me in his Century City office.
Chapter 59
As I lay stuffed in the trunk of the moving Cadillac, I tried hard not to curse my stupidity. I had been so locked on the idea that Zack was the Fingertip Killer, that I had completely overlooked Sammy.
The hub of my case against Zack hinged on the fact that Vaughn Rolaine was involved in both of his murder cases. But Alexa had pared that coincidence down. As she had said, it was statistically possible that Zack and I just happened to catch the Vaughn Rolaine murder on that Friday night two months ago.
I suddenly wondered if all of the logic I'd used to tie Zack to these murders might just as easily apply to Sammy. Maybe Vaughn Rolaine was the precipitating murder that got Sammy started killing homeless men. He'd been ordered by Virtue or Nix to kill Davide Andrazack because Davide was finding those reverse-engineered Americypher bugs and tracking them to a receiver station on the roof of their Century City office building. But maybe Sammy was so ritualized by then that he just continued the same rage-based techniques he'd been employing during all the other homeless murders.
We didn't find any bugs or scans on the ME's computer, so maybe that chest carving hadn't leaked after all. Maybe Sammy had been using it all along, carving a Medical Corps insignia on Davide Andrazack as well as all the other homeless vets he killed. All of it because of psychopathic anger over that botched field triage in Afghanistan. Maybe Davide Andrazack wasn't a copycat kill, but part of the same series of murders, and the only thing that was different was the motive.
I had to admit that Sammy fit the unsub's profile at least as well as Zack. I remembered Underwood's suggestion that the unsub was covering the eyes of the vics because he thought he was ugly and didn't want them looking at him even in death. I had scoffed at that, but now with Sammy as a suspect, I wondered if I was wrong, just like I was wrong about the unsub being an organized, methodical killer. Sammy was an impulse killer with a questionable IQ who didn't plan his murders. But he was also a KGB-trained assassin. He knew how to cover up his crimes, and those acts made the crime scenes appear organized when in reality they weren't. He was a classic example of a mixed unsub, and cutting to the bottom of it, Judd Underwood's profile was a lot closer than mine.
Clever detective that I was, I had actually managed to get myself caught by the very serial killer I was investigating. It doesn't get much worse than that.
The car slowed slightly, and I felt the tires humming on asphalt. We had left the highway and were now on a winding road.
Suddenly, the car passed over something, and intense vibrations rattled the chassis. A cattle grate? It seemed we were outside of L. A., far out in the country.
Half an hour or so later, I felt the car tilting and tipping as the driver negotiated what felt like deep rain crevices.
After what I estimated was about a half mile, we made a long sloping turn and came to a stop.
Car doors slammed.
A minute later, the trunk opened and I was looking up into the sunlight. Looming over me, looking like something a mad scientist concocted in his basement, was Samoyla Petrovitch. He reached down and scooped me out of the trunk, using so little effort, it shocked me. Then he turned and threw me on the ground nearby.
I thumped in the damp grass. When I looked around, I realized I was about a hundred yards from a beautiful, blue lake. Wherever we were, it appeared deserted. No neighbors or houses in sight, no docks or boats. I saw Kersey Nix getting out of a gray government sedan, which was parked behind the black Cadillac Brougham I had ridden in. I took a head count. Including Nix, Sammy, Iggy, and their five brigadiers, there were eight all together.
I started to lose it.
To begin with, no full-grown male likes to be lifted off his feet and thrown around like a sack of laundry. Secondly, eight against one is lousy odds unless you're the star of a kung fu movie. I couldn't see any way to change that. I was in terrible shape-beat to hell with one fingertip gone, taped up, and weak from loss of blood, miles from civilization. I wasn't going to get out of this.
I craned my neck and saw that we were on a rolling lawn in front of a sprawling mountain lodge in a garden framed by low brick walls. The house was designed to look like a Swiss chalet with wood carved eves and Disney- esque pastel colors. The Petrovitches' summer place on New Melones Lake. I was going to disappear up here just like Calvin Lerner.
I glanced at Sammy. He had a blank expression on his ruptured face and was again rocking side to side. Two brigadiers were standing behind, watching him sway, frozen by his murderous intensity.
'Sammy. .,' I said.
He didn't answer.
'Listen, man, you don't want to kill me. This is a very bad plan. I'm a cop. You kill a cop, it doesn't go away.' Thinking even as I said it, that it hadn't slowed him down, or hurt him much when he shot Martin Kobb ten years ago.
The Petrovitches and Kersey Nix went into the house, leaving me on the lawn with a few brigadiers assigned to guard me. Ten minutes later Sammy came back out carrying a fifty-pound Danforth anchor in his left hand. Then he grabbed my bound feet in his right, and began dragging me down toward the lake. My head kept hitting rocks on
