Free Perfect Victim by Jay Bonansinga Page B

physical laws of the universe, an evil we take for granted today.
    â€”U LYSSES G ROVE , The Psychopathological
Archetype: Toward a Statistical Model

TEN
    The following Tuesday evening, exactly a thousand miles west of Quantico, just outside of Galveston, Texas, around 7:35 P.M . Central Standard Time, a forty-one-year-old junior college student named Madeline Gilchrist, unaware she was about to become the third sacrificial lamb, heard a noise in the darkness behind her.
    She kept walking.
    That’s what Grandma Rose always told her to do if she found herself in a pickle such as this. Just keep on truckin’, Maddy . Clad in a halter top and shopworn jeans plastered with patches and embroidered messages like IMPEACH SHRUB and GO GREEN , she was carrying an empty plastic gas tank, heading along the gravel shoulder of the weed-whiskered Intracoastal Highway. About a quarter of a mile back, her VW bug had mysteriously run out of gas. This made no sense. She had topped the tank off last night. Now everything felt wrong. The back of her neck crawled with heat chills.
    Footsteps—furtive, quick, powerful—circled around the Joshua trees and the scrub brush to her right, then abruptly halted.
    â€œHello? Anybody there?”
    No answer.
    Madeline picked up her pace. Off to her left the roar of the Gulf waves hitting the breakwater called out in the distance like a giant invisible lung. The footsteps loomed somewhere ahead of her now. Ahead of her? Madeline faltered, slowing down, dizziness washing over her. Was there more than one figure out there in the darkness? The drone of crickets and frogs suddenly ceased.
    In the silence Madeline stumbled to a sudden stop, paralyzed with panic, dropping the plastic container. She stared into the darkness ahead of her.
    A lone figure had stepped into her path about twenty yards away.
    Madeline could not believe what she was seeing. Garbed all in black, a big chimney hat shrouding his face in shadow, the figure stood very still, facing her in a column of flickering light from a faulty streetlamp. Moths swarmed above him. He dripped with menace, and every fiber of Madeline’s being told her to turn tail and run like bejesus, but for one horrible instant she was transfixed.
    It wasn’t the great big knife in the man’s hand, dully gleaming in the streetlight, that held Madeline rapt for that single moment. Nor was it the air of weird, unearthly calm about the figure, standing there in the middle of the road with the cruel indifference of a wax figure in a museum.
    On the contrary, it was a subtle little detail of behavior exhibited by this strange figure that positively hypnotized the girl.
    It was the fact that the man was holding a pocket watch in his other hand, consulting it like a train engineer diligently keeping a schedule.
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    Ulysses Grove stood alone in the far reaches of the Beth E’met Cemetery. Situated in the high woods along the Mason Neck nature preserve, about twenty miles south of Alexandria, the cemetery was now deserted, bathed in the shadows of tall white pines. The waning light of dusk had already closed in like a predator.
    Grove turned up his collar against the chill and gazed down at the recently dug and manicured grave. Yellow light spilling from a nearby lamppost shone off the headstone. “I know what you’re thinking,” Grove murmured, addressing the departed mentor. “I should be home with Maura and the baby.”
    The headstone said nothing. No ghostly reply, no Dickensian whisper from the ether.
    â€œI need you on this one, Boss.” Grove stared at the waist-high block of clean, white granite. The epitaph etched into the stone— Geisel, Thomas Edward, 1941–2008, Father Husband Friend —called out to him. Twisted in his guts. Made his eyes sting in the cold breeze. “This one’s different.”
    Only the rustling leaves answered.
    Grove wiped his moist eyes. “I gotta shut this one