Joe and I looked at the photocopies. The names of the relevant victim had been printed on each sheet, along with an arrow pointing upward. I examined the different arrays of geometric shapes, but couldn’t make a meaningful pattern out of them.
“Doesn’t look particularly occult to me,” Joe said.
“No,” I agreed. “Then again, the Antichurch of Lucifer Lunatic notwithstanding, we don’t think the murders really have too much to do with the black arts, do we?”
He shook his head. “In which case, what is this shit?”
“Joseph, I don’t have the faintest idea.”
We split up before we reached the paved road.
Clem Simmons was looking out of the office window. He didn’t register the walls of the neighboring buildings or the pale blue autumn sky above. Instead, he was watching himself as he would soon be-a man in late middle age without a job or, most likely, a pension. Although he’d considered what to do carefully before the meet, after the event his thought processes seemed pathetically flawed. He’d been sure that slipping information to Joe Greenbaum would be an agreeable way of sticking it to the Feds, and perhaps garner some new insight. He had contacts that Clem could only dream about. But the reporter had blind-sided him with Matt Wells. And, even more surprisingly, Clem had been convinced by the Englishman’s crazy story.
He shook his head. Ever since the cancer had taken Nina, he’d been struggling. Until the occult killings, he hadn’t really cared whether he and Vers caught murderers. The only thing he’d wanted was to get back to the house he and his wife had shared for twenty-four years, to take in her scent before it finally faded from her clothes. But these cases were different. He had a burning need to find the killer, no matter the cost. Perhaps it was because a voodoo believer had been murdered, but he thought it was more than that. If he could crack this case, if he could solve it before the Feds, he could retire happy. And now it was more likely he’d be sent packing without a penny to his name.
Gerard Pinker came up. “Where the hell have you been?” he demanded. “I got so bored waiting I went down to the coffee shop to check out the girls in uniform.”
Clem Simmons handed him a sheaf of pages, each one in a transparent cover.
“What’s this?”
“New information, a letter addressed to me by the guy in the Anacostia River.”
“What?”
“Keep your voice down. We’re off the case, remember?”
“Wait a minute.” Pinker looked at his partner apprehensively. “You mean, you haven’t shown this to Chief Owen?”
“Nope. He’d have to pass it to the Feds.”
“What are we going to do with it?”
“Follow it up, of course. You’d better read it first.”
Gerard Pinker went through the text, taking in the photocopied photographs that had been attached. When he’d finished, he dragged his chair over and slumped into it. “Christmas has come early for us this year.”
Clem Simmons finished writing. “Could be… Okay, here are the main points as I see them. The first photo confirms this is the dead man, right?”
Pinker nodded. “Hold up. Where did the letter come from?”
“The owner of the Travel Happy Motel brought it in. The maid found it on the bed this morning. The envelope was marked ‘Urgent.’”
“He must have seen you on the TV.”
“Yeah, that press conference after Monsieur Hexie was found.” Simmons looked back at his notes. “So, the floater is Richard Bonhoff, a forty-three-year-old farmer from Iowa. He came to D.C. a week ago to find Gwen and Randy, his twenty-one-year-old twin children.”
Pinker sat up straight. “Who won a competition in the Star Reporter last December that brought them here, and they were looked after by our friend Gordy Lister. No wonder that fucker looked shifty yesterday.”
“According to the dead man, Lister tried to scare him off with a couple of heavies and Bonhoff, ex-marine that he was, dealt with them as only marines can. Then Lister took him to see his kids. They’ve apparently become junkies. When he went back to find them later, there was no one around.”
Pinker stared at his partner. “What do you reckon? Gordy Lister’s into dope? Or maybe he’s running some kind of white slave ring.”
“You reckon Lister’s up to that, Vers?”
“Hell, yeah. That little prick would sell his mother if the price was right.”
Simmons nodded. “Yeah, he probably would. But I think there’s more to it than Gordy running a solo scam. I think there might be something in what Bonhoff says about Woodbridge Holdings being involved.”
“Could be. They own the Star Reporter, so they aren’t exactly scoring high in the ethical business chart. What else are they into?”
“I’m about to start working on that.”
Pinker stood up. “So what do we do? Haul in Lister?”
“We could do.” Simmons smiled wickedly.
“Oh-oh,” his partner said, suddenly the apprehensive one for a change. “What have you got in mind, Clem?”
The big man stood up and moved close to Pinker. “Well, I was just thinking, we’re off the case anyway, so why don’t we keep this unofficial.”
“This being?”
“We tail Gordy Lister.”
The small man raised an eyebrow. “You forgetting what happened to this Bonhoff guy when he did that?”
“Um, we’re cops, remember?” Clem Simmons took the pages back from Pinker. “By the way, there’s something else I’ve got to tell you.”
His partner’s face went white as his partner described his meeting with Joe Greenbaum and Matt Wells. And Clem thought Pinker’s eyes bulged like an impaled octopus’s when he heard that the official prime suspect had been handed copies of the killer’s diagrams.
Joe had made a prepaid Internet reservation for me in a cheap hotel on the other side of the Potomac. We reckoned that would keep me away from prying eyes, not that I was planning on doing anything except sleeping there. Joe also gave me five hundred dollars. I used a couple of hundred to buy some jeans, shirts and a thick jacket. No doubt the New York State police would have circulated a description detailing the clothes that Mary Upson had given me.
I took a shower and changed into my new outfit. The hotel was near the Rosslyn Metro station, within walking distance of Georgetown. I was about to set off when I felt a sudden pulse of pain in my head and staggered to the bed. Images flashed before me in rapid succession-a wire between the camp and the pine trees; a flat machine covered in wires and flashing lights lowering over me like the lid of a coffin; an explosion of sound from the line of soldiers with rifles to their shoulders…
I shook my head, trying to rid myself of the visions. I was sweating heavily and my hands shook. Then everything went blank and I felt the rough bedcover against my cheek. I gradually got my breathing under control and opened my eyes. The roar of the traffic on the freeways filled my ears and I sat up. What was going on? I had thought that as time passed the effect of whatever was done to me would wear off. My memory was getting better, even though there were still plenty of gaps. But I wasn’t free of the place-there were still invisible chains tying me to it. That machine, its lights and the hum of sophisticated electronics, the things I’d been forced to see and hear-I couldn’t recall them in detail, but I felt their weight. It was like a worm with sharp teeth wriggled in my brain, endowed with the power to extinguish my thoughts and personality at any time. I was going to have to be very careful when it came to making important decisions.
I stuck one of the Glocks out of sight under my belt, leaving the other one in the wardrobe safe. Worried about my erratic memory, I wrote the code on my forearm. In my pocket, I had a piece of paper with the address of the house in Georgetown that Gavin Burdett stayed in when he was in D.C. Although I’d remembered it once, I
