Spider - Michael Morley [14]
‘The ME’s working like crazy, almost as though he’s a surgeon trying to save a life, rather than a pathologist methodically opening up a body. He’s moving so quickly around the slab I can’t see who he is. Every time I reposition myself to try to say something, the guy shifts on to another part of the body. The girl on the slab is sixteen-year-old Lisa Maria Jenkins, BRK’s last known victim. She’d been butchered like a piece of meat. Head, hands, legs, feet, all cut off. Her left hand was never discovered, BRK had kept it as a trophy. But in the dream, Lisa’s intact; looking as beautiful as her last birthday picture, when her long brown hair was tied back in a pony-tail.’
Jack struggled to go on. Clearly the cognitive experience was troubling him, but Fenella did nothing to fill the silence or give him a way out. He pinched his eyes for a second, then continued. ‘As I look at her face, I realize something’s wrong. She’s still breathing. I shout “Hey, look, look, she’s alive!’, but the ME ignores me and just carries on cutting her open, pulling intestines and organs out of a huge cavity in her stomach. Suddenly, the pipes break free from the wall and start pouring blood on to the floor, as if they’re giant veins. I’m screaming now, “Stop! For Christ’s sake, stop cutting her, she’s alive!” But he blanks me. As I rush around the table to try to get hold of him he runs the buzz saw across her neck, decapitating her. I recognize him now. I realize why he’s been dodging me, not letting me see his face.’
‘You say you recognize him. Who is it, Jack?’
He raised his head and stared straight at her. ‘It’s me. The monster in my dreams is me.’
It was Fenella’s turn to sit in silence, pen motionless on the notepaper.
‘Tell me, please tell me; how can I control these nightmares?’
Fenella’s heart went out to him. She understood his dilemma and it was a dark and dangerous one. ‘Jack, you already have control. The level of lucidity you describe indicates that you deliberately trigger these thoughts. Subconsciously you want to see these things, you have a need to re-examine the case that you walked away from and, in the absence of new evidence, your imagination is inventing it.’
Jack was staring at the floor. He nodded slowly. He understood now, but what was the way out? ‘What exactly do I have to do to stop them?’
The psychiatrist waited until he raised his eyes to look at her. ‘You already know that, don’t you?’
And he did.
Jack fully understood that he could choose to stop the nightmares any time he wanted. But he could only do so by admitting to himself that his personal hunt to catch the Black River Killer really was over.
13
FBI Field Office, New York
Special Agent Howie Baumguard sat at his desk, losing a messy hand-wrestling competition with a deli lunch. The bagel spewed salmon out of one side and low-fat cheese out of the other. He licked the cheese away but the salmon hit his paperwork before he could juggle it into his hungry mouth. He’d missed breakfast and had been forced to cancel a lunch appointment, so right now the bagel and a blisteringly hot Americano figured top of his list of life’s priorities. Howie was carrying too much weight, not just for his own liking but also for that of Carrie, his size-zero, Botox-addicted wife, who’d pronounced that either the ‘love handles’ went or Howie could start learning how to cook for one on the few cents she’d leave him after she sued his fat ass for all the alimony she could get.
Not many people would have been able to even think about eating when faced with what was on Howie’s desk, but the FBI man had seen much worse and eaten much more. The pictures had been sent in by the cops over in Georgetown and downloaded and printed up by Admin. The glossies were good CSU shots, cold and brutal in their framing but hugely informative. Wide angles set the scene, first from out on the streets that surrounded the cemetery. Then there were ‘aerials’, high views, presumably from the nearby church, that showed the layout of the graves. Gradually the shots got closer to the desecration.