Free Perfect Victim by Jay Bonansinga

measured his words. “To this day nobody knows for sure why they were following me. Or who they were, or just why the hell they picked me to follow.”
    Drinkwater nodded and asked how he knew all this.
    â€œTom Geisel told me.”
    A beat of silence. Drinkwater cocked her head again. “Mind if I ask how old you were when you were allegedly being followed?”
    â€œI was ten, eleven…something like that. Geisel was a middle manager at the Bureau in those days, moving up the ranks. One day, these people came to him out of the clear blue. Six old men. Told him to keep an eye on me, told him someday I’d make a pretty good FBI agent.”
    Drinkwater was frowning. “He didn’t find out who these guys were?”
    Grove rubbed his eyes. The grief and shock had dragged down his normally handsome, sculpted-bronze features, making his dark eyes darker. “He got their names, addresses. Not much else. He thought they were a bunch of senile old coots. Didn’t worry about them that much. They all checked out fine, too—no jackets, no records whatsoever. I guess Tom eventually looked me up out of curiosity.”
    A long pause, Drinkwater absorbing all this. “When did you find out about this?”
    â€œLast year.”
    â€œDoes anybody else at the Bureau know about it?”
    Grove told her no, nobody other than Geisel.
    After another pause Drinkwater asked, “Why do you think he told you about this just recently?”
    Grove had expected this question, and had been torn about how much he should tell her. Over the last few years, working some of the strangest investigations in law enforcement history, Grove had stumbled upon a bizarre phenomenon running like an undertow through his work. It involved a vague, undefined personality buried in the fractured psyches of those he hunted—an alter ego—which Grove had come to think of as Factor X.
    Factor X seemed to have an agenda beneath all the killings—an agenda that had something to do with Grove —and this revelation had poisoned the profiler’s dreams. It tainted his private ruminations, and it appeared in symbolic form in visions, hallucinations, portents. It also reverberated back through the years to his early childhood in Kenya, resonating in ways he would be unable to fully explain. Tom Geisel was the only other human being on earth privy to all this.
    Now, in his deathbed note, the section chief may have provided a linkage to this dynamic—maybe even to the Archetype itself—through his odd reference to the six old men. Near the end of the note, Geisel had cobbled together phrases such as “something they told me back then.” Was he referring to the six old men? Something they told him back then? And what was Grove to make of the gibberish at the end of the note:
    thee ws an o her b y a b d one who yo have to Ul h ss yr tn
    And now, today, flashing back to these fragmented words, Grove finally looked at Drinkwater and broke the spell of silence. “I’m sure you’ve heard rumors. About my methods, my background. You can’t work here without hearing all sorts of crap—how I manage such a high closure rate on a lot of these serial cases, how I got some kind of African mojo working all the time.”
    She had a strange look on her face now. “Well?”
    â€œWell what?”
    â€œIs it true?”
    Grove gave her a nervous grin. “Oh absolutely, I’m a regular bogeyman.”
    â€œAnd now you want me to find out who these guys were, the ones came to Geisel…where they came from?”
    Grove nodded, said nothing.
    â€œWhy me?”
    â€œBecause you’re an outsider. You’re a skip tracer. Woman like yourself, all those tricks up your sleeve. What do you think?”
    The young lady stared at Grove. She seemed to be sizing him up, which, in all honesty, made Grove more than a tad uncomfortable.
    For a long moment Drinkwater considered