Free Bloodman by Robert Pobi Page A

“Don’t say that. We don’t know yet.”
    Hauser pointed at Madame X. “No vaginal wounds, Dr. Reagan’s words, not mine.” Then, seeing his arm pointing at the dead, he let it drop to his side. “Was this about sex?”
    “Not in any way you or I could relate to. But to the perp? That bastard got a massive endorphin rush out of it. It’s too early to tell if this is sexual for him. Where’s her skin?”
    “I don’t know. It wasn’t there. We haven’t—”
    “Because it was taken. Maybe it was a little porn to jerk off to later so he can feel all big and powerful and in control of the storm raging inside the fucked-up fusebox that passes for his brain.”
    Hauser took a step back. “Jesus Christ.”
    Jake looked at Hauser, saw his hands twitching, his face going green like last night. “Go get some air. I’ll fill you in when we’re done.” Then he turned to Dr. Reagan. “Can I get copies of her tox scans? Especially the GGT, ALT, and AST ratios,” he asked, ignoring Hauser.
    Hauser spun and darted out of the room.
    The sound of a kicked garbage can was the last noise before the sheriff’s steps disappeared into the stairwell. Jake ignored the sound of the metal lid rolling in faster and faster circles and turned to the smaller hump on the next table.
    “Tell me about the child,” he said.

12
    22,216 Statute Miles Above the Atlantic Ocean
     
    Sent into space during the height of President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the geostationary satellite began its life as a tool of the Cold War, using thermal imaging to track nuclear submarines via the heat generated by their reactors. Under the watchful eye of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, the satellite—internally designated Loki —was launched in early 1985. A few months later, perestroika began, and the Iron Curtain quickly started to show signs of metal fatigue. But Loki continued to track Soviet naval traffic in the Atlantic for eight more years, until the SDIO was retooled as the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization under President Clinton’s administration. The satellite, written off the books as so much obsolete space garbage, was donated to the National Hurricane Center, and retasked to serve the people of the United States in spying on a less predictable adversary—Mother Nature.
    Now, a quarter-century after it had been launched, and performing a task for which it had not been designed, Loki’s unfeeling eyes stared down at the planet from its vantage point in space. Its taskmasters had focused its vast array of attention on a massive weather system that had somehow sprung to life nine days ago off the coast of Africa, gorging itself on heat and seawater, growing into a Category 5 hurricane—a hurricane now called Dylan.
    Loki’s data showed that in the past five hours, the distance from Dylan’s center to his outermost closed isobar was nearly nine degrees of latitude. Dylan was now the largest Atlantic hurricane in recorded history, with a diameter of more than 1,200 miles. This data in itself would usually have been enough to cause a panic at the National Hurricane Center, but Dylan was not yet finished reaching into its bag of dirty tricks.
    Dylan soon began to generate massive vertical winds. These winds carried particles of water off the ocean up through the body of the storm with a force stronger than regular evaporation by orders of magnitude. As these vertical wind-driven water particles, known to meteorologists as hydrometeors, were slammed upward, they rubbed against one another. This friction generated a charge in the water particles. The hydrometeors separated by weight and charge—the negatively charged (and heavy) particles dropped to the lower regions of the hurricane, and the positively charged (and lighter) particles rose to the top of the massive storm turbine. This separation of positively and negatively charged water molecules created a new weapons system for the hurricane.
    Dylan