A Boy's Hammer, page 20
“Great, I’m making some headway. Just picked up an address from a lead from the first vic. I was thinking of rattling some cages.” O’Brady could hear the sigh from the other end.
“Jefferson, come on. No mind games. You’re going to spook someone, they’ll tighten up, and we’re going to get our asses handed to us.”
O’Brady looked down at the address written on the paper. Gladwyne. In fact it was the next house over from Mimi Timalti’s estate. A quick search of the address through his database yielded a surprising result—to wit, that a Gladwyne address would even be in the database. The owner of that home had called the police numerous times. Mostly complaints about Mimi Timalti. What kind of neighbor would have issues with Mimi?
At least he had a name for the guy—Lamont Hedley.
“Jefferson?”
Alan isn’t the killer but is he involved in some way? Coincidences don’t happen in this line of work.
“Jeff?”
Maybe I’ll go over there first, ask Miss Timalti what her impressions of her neighbors are…
“JEFF?”
“Yeah, Cap?”
“Jesus, Jefferson. You’re frustrating the shit out of me.”
“Sorry, Cap. I’m going to get this guy. I’m going to,” O’Brady said to himself as well as to Kerr.
“We’re dealing with a goddamn monster. Just keep your fuckin’ guard up. Don’t be a knucklehead.”
O’Brady hung up and continued driving.
His phone rang again just as he pulled into the mouth of the ramp that opened down into the underground garage at the station.
He saw the Virginia area code and picked up immediately. “Detective O’Brady.”
“Hey, Jefferson. It’s Kirk down at VDFS.”
“Ah, forensics! Boy, am I glad to hear from you. Tell me you have good news.”
“Well, that depends on what you make of it. Jefferson, do you have a computer at home with WebEx set up?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Can you get to your home computer?”
“Sure… but what’s wrong with the office?”
“It’s difficult to explain. Just… I think you’re going to want some privacy for this one.”
Twenty-Eight
Juhani was tearing up the town.
Blood. Door opened. Serrated edges grown blunt from the bludgeoning. Door closed. Feast. Door opened. Satiety—no, hunger. More hunger. Closed. Feast. Open. Devour. Close.
Another door opened.
Blood.
Another door closed.
Corpse.
Another door opened.
Slit.
Another door closed.
Intestines.
Another door opened.
Throttle.
Another door closed.
Death.
A bloody feast. A bountiful cornucopia of carnage, to be relished, to soak in. Juhani had spent his day weaving pathways through those ephemeral doorways lined with abyssal liquid black and plumes of purple flame. And in each hour of the day, a new slaughter. He’d crisscrossed behind the curtain, dotting impossibly distant new scenes with a trail of crimson spatter. And acquiring new trophies, of course.
Juhani—Kerpeikkari now. Kerpeikkari again. Kerpeikkari always and forever—would take a token from one site, go through the door, murder again, then leave a piece of his last victim’s body at the new crime scene. It was a neat trick.
The newspapers—really, the internet, he’d learned it was called—started calling him The Night Crawler Killer, a riff on the devout Catholic carny demon from comic books who could teleport from place to place. It had the neat initialism of NCK, too, meant to evoke memories of the BTK serial killer, who had long evaded police. This juiced up the already stewing climate of panic. Which was the point, from what he’d seen on television.
Little made sense to him, but as he’d reasoned before—and he said this again and again to himself—don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Juhani had his doubts that anyone in this city of the unholy and double-fucked future even knew the meaning of the proverb. How many horses had he seen? None. There was no trade flourishing here. No farmers. Just strange little cards you put in strange little machines, then you got your stuff for free. It was all quite bewildering. Then again, who was he to question the paradoxes of the modern world?
Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
The queen, Juhani supposed, was the gift horse. Although, he now thought, if he did look her in the mouth (which he had), he would see (as he had) that her teeth were rotten. But that had nothing to do with her value. I suppose I looked the gift horse in the mouth anyhow, and I liked what I saw.
Including Amanhi and her boyfriend, the two elderly women he’d strung up in the square, the hobo, and the various and sundry victims slaughtered throughout his murder marathon, Juhani had delivered up twenty-seven souls in little more than two weeks. He couldn’t have done it without her. He knew that. And so, he was grateful.
Grateful but also a bit jealous of even the minute praise the queen heaped upon Henneman-Hedley and his merry band of dumbshit delinquents. Juhani had tried to train the men and women of the Kalman Society in the art of bloody, orgasmic destruction. The bloody stuff they were okay at. The orgasmic part… not so much. But he’d not had much time to reform and further shape those minions. He. Had. Things. To do. Imperatives.
The doors made it all so simple. He was able to open one, disappear, and reappear fifty miles away. Instantly. Which made the murders all the more confusing to the press. Some had editorialized on the killings and put forward that it was all the work of a cult—no separation between Juhani’s art and the cult’s kindergarten finger-paintings. Perhaps something like the Manson Family, the news folks said, with one man at the helm and peons carrying out his orders.
Juhani had read extensively about this Manson fellow. He found his gaslighting and psychological manipulation to be brilliant. But the man himself didn’t kill anyone. Now that showed a lack of conviction.
But the news decided to compare him to this Manson fellow, and while Juhani did not like the comparison, he did enjoy the press. On the television. In the small phones in people’s hands, which meant that he was in their heads as well. It was wonderful!
This editorial had created panic. And quickly. Very quickly. There was a tense atmosphere, a thickness that had settled into the city. Denizens of dictatorships and totalitarian police states would have recognized the gloomy pall it cast. It was the dense air of paranoia. The driven insanity of fear. And it was everywhere.
That was exactly what the queen had wanted. She had told him as much.
It must, must, MUST be terror. Terror everywhere, so that mothers cannot trust their own daughters and fathers will be in a fiendish fright over reprisal from their own sons! Institutions destabilized. A reaping. I want them shaking and quaking and crying in their shitted slacks and soiled panties. I want you to make them fear us far more than they’ve ever feared themselves—and this is quite the journey, my Kerpeikkari—you are the one who can make them fear what we’ve done, what we’ve sown, and they will drown in that terror, sunken by the dread of their own reaping. A great, filthy REAPING.
Kerpeikkari hadn’t understood this last part. He figured she was just waxing poetic (as was her habit). He heard something on the television that aptly described his feeling about the path he was on:
If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.
Twenty-Nine
O’Brady returned to his apartment and went straight into his office space—a windowless room behind the laundry machines. He sat at his desktop and opened WebEx. O’Brady connected with Kirk Jang from the VDFS lab.
“Kirk, you there? I can see you on-screen but you’re not moving.”
“Yeah, I’m here. Just a sec.” Kirk craned his head back and whispered something to someone else off-screen then redirected his attention to O’Brady. “Open the shared file. I sent it to your personal email.”
“Why? Would you be so kind as to tell me what the hell is going on?” O’Brady placed his hand on his forehead and ran it down his face. “What’s with the secrecy? Did the fibers turn out to be the Shroud of Turin? Did the goo prove Bigfoot exists or that the pyramids were made by lizard people who live in the sewers?”
Kirk stared into the camera. “You’ll understand why we’re doing this very shortly. It gets… weird.”
“Weird?”
“Yes, but before we get weird, I do have something you can work with. Let’s start with the fibers, okay? The strands you sent us were silk and vicuña, and then silk and guanaco. Very distinctive textile, uncommon mix of already rare fibers. Very expensive. Vicuña and guanaco are both llama fibers, usually exported from South America. I also experimented with a little pattern reconstruction program I’ve been working with to place it. The textile is incredibly fine detail, very distinct. The only matches we have here—and I’m fairly confident that this is correct—is Brioni. Brioni uses those fabrics. There’s one place in Philadelphia that sells the brand with those fibers in it. Boyd’s.”
Yes! O’Brady practically cheered. Boyd’s is within spitting distance of Govberg’s. I bet he hit both in the same day. If O’Brady could get the receipts from Boyd’s, match up the address to the one from Govberg’s, then he’d really be cooking with gas.
“Buckle up for this next one; this is where things get strange. Now, we looked at DNA—looked at DNA blood methylation levels. And the results were, well, purrr-tty interesting, to say the least.”
“Okay…?”
Kirk sighed. “You’re not going to believe me.”
O’Brady crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, looking straight up. Typically, he wouldn’t speak to someone he did not know very well the way he proceeded to speak to Kirk. “Goddamnit. Just fuckin’ say it already.”
“Your perp is approximately two-hundred years old.”
O’Brady placed his face in his palm. “What are you… why? Come on, tell me the—”
“Listen, Jefferson. I’m not yanking your chain. Saliva and blood methylation—we used Horvath’s clock, ran it again and again. We use a couple hundred epigenetic markers for these tests. Your perp is two-hundred years old.”
“What’s the margin of error on those tests, a century?”
“Between three and six years depending on age. The older the subject, the greater the margin of error. So theoretically, your perp could be more like two-hundred and ten years old.”
O’Brady laughed. “Okay, Kirk. So, we got a vampire, or maybe a fuckin’ zombie on our hands here?” He laughed again. Kirk groaned.
“We have some hypotheses,” another voice cut in.
“Who’s that?” O’Brady asked.
“Hello Detective. Sorry, didn’t mean to be rude. My name is Professor Johnstone. I’m an astrobiologist at Georgetown. Used to be with NASA.”
Jesus Christ. We got NASA in the room, O’Brady thought. He’d worked complicated cases before, but none that had gone so in-depth, and certainly nothing that touched on the nebulous fringes of known science the way the NCK case (apparently) did. He felt the sudden urge to scream into his microphone as loud as he could. “The more the merrier,” he said, leaning back and spreading his arms wide.
Kirk added, “The remaining test results are outside my areas of expertise, so Professor Johnstone is going to take over from here.” Kirk reached toward the camera and angled it so that Johnstone was in view.
An astrobiologist? That’s… strange, O’Brady thought. “Nice to meet you, Professor. What do you make of all this?”
“I’d say it’s the most exciting and most terrifying thing I’ve seen professionally,” Johnstone replied. “I’m going to explain to you exactly what I saw during my examination. I urge you to wait until I explain the whole shebang, as it were, before you ask questions.”
“Okay,” O’Brady answered, “shoot.”
“Before I arrived, Mr. Jang—Kirk—conducted a number of tests on the blackish-violet substance recovered at the crime scene. The results were unusual, yet inconclusive. When I arrived at VDFS, I suggested examining the sample using an electron microscope. We found nothing.”
“Well that’s disappointing,” O’Brady interjected.
“No, you don’t understand, Detective. I don’t mean ‘we found nothing’ in the colloquial sense. To put it as simply as possible: it had no protons or neutrons.”
“Which means?”
“What we saw were, possibly, weakly interacting massive particles or maybe just nothing in the most severe, purest sense. What I’m trying to say is that the sample you sent us—I can’t believe I’m saying this—was dark matter.”
O’Brady just sat, staring at the two communicants on the other end of the video conference.
“One of the theories regarding black holes is that they’re composed of dark matter, Detective. This is going to sound strange, but what if—”
O’Brady finished her thought, “The killer is going around, uh, what? Teleporting through wormholes?”
“Not exactly how I would phrase it, but for the purposes of this conversation, that explanation will be adequate. No, actually, that explanation is accurate.”
O’Brady got up from the desk. “Excuse me. I need… just a moment to—to absorb this. Do you mind?” He thought he saw them nod but took off to chug a half a beer before he could be certain.
What the fuck?
The urge to scream died down just a bit. Twenty-five seconds. That was how long it took for the booze to take the edge off. These people were talking crazy to him and he couldn’t handle it in the condition he was in. Booze would help with that, though he wondered whether LSD would be more appropriate under the circumstances.
He returned a bit peppier but still annoyed. “Okay! So. Black holes, huh? Come on,” O’Brady said. “I mean…” he drifted off, leaving a smoke trail of weakening emphasis on his last word. But then he thought about the locations of the murders, the undeniable fact that evidence from one crime scene was transferred to others in timeframes that made absolutely no sense.
The killer could make it to Roxborough from the Ben Franklin Bridge in seven minutes. Or killers. It was still certainly possible that more than one person was involved. That made more sense than a two-hundred-year-old perp who opened portals. Maybe at this juncture it was both. There had been a twenty-percent increase in extremely violent crimes across the city in the past week alone. But only one man held a signature style. It was unique. It was a style. It was almost violence carried out as modern art. Well, if there were many, he would have to find that man—the blood artist—before he found any of the others.
O’Brady finally spoke again. “You’re gonna have to sell me on this one.”
Kirk chimed back in. “Listen, Jefferson. This is what we have for you. I don’t know what to think about it either but… I don’t know. I was present for microscopy. I saw the—I saw the ‘nothing’.”
“What am I… what am I even supposed to do with this? You two are the experts but you know—you have to know—how ridiculous this sounds. On its face—how ridiculous this sounds,” O’Brady said. He saw Kirk shrug on the other end then heard Professor Johnstone’s voice before he saw her face.
“I might offer a suggestion, Detective, if you’re willing to hear it,” she said.
“I’m listening.”
“Bury it. I can reach out to my contacts at NASA and see if this can be presented through the proper channels, though that will be difficult since the sample is gone. It will take a chunk of time—I won’t lie, there’ll be a wait on something like this—but the result would be monumental for the people in my field, if proven, that is. If we can prove it’s possible. Anyway, it’s better to go… federal, I guess you’d say, on this one.”
“Wait, wait. What do you mean the sample is gone?”
“Well, it collapsed in on itself—which lends further credence to the hypothesis that it was dark matter. Although I might guess that it’s some unknown thing that fits within the taxonomy of phenomena that includes dark matter but perhaps isn’t dark matter itself. After all, it didn’t suck us in with it.”
O’Brady again sat silently for a few moments then asked, “What could it be?”
“Anything,” Johnstone answered. “That’s why I think you should bury it. No one is going to understand. No one is going to believe you. Hell, you might not believe you because you might not believe me. Do you know what I mean?”
“No. I mean… yes, yes. Yeah, I get it.”
Kirk took up most of the screen again. “Listen, I’m sorry about all this. Although, who knows? Maybe you’ll win the Nobel Prize along with us,” the forensics expert joked. “On the upside, you have those fiber samples to work with. I’ll send over the report and documentation.”
“Yeah. Yeah… that’s good. I gotta go. I appreciate the time and effort you two put into this. Thank you.”
O’Brady turned off his computer and tried to think of what to do next. He went to the kitchen and poured a shot. He stood there for almost two minutes, the bottle in one hand and the full shot glass in the other. He looked at and through the amber liquid, watching the kitchen light reflect off the bottle, illuminating the cheap whiskey inside. He lifted the glass to his lips and tilted his head back to drink.
A two-hundred-year-old perp traveling through wormholes? The hell am I supposed to do with that information? Burying it sounds ideal. Bury it like a dead animal in the backyard and hope it never pops through its grave.
His head was still spinning. O’Brady poured another shot.
Down the hatch.
Thirty
Rebecca walked down the sunlit hallway that connected the indoor pool solarium to the rest of the house. Her father rounded the corner ahead—much to her dismay—striding in her direction so they would pass one another.
“Hello.” Lamont stopped walking and stared directly at her, waiting for a response. Rebecca wanted to keep walking, to blow him off, but the effect of him smiling, rare and toothy, and the pinpoint brake of his locomotion stirred her.
