Shattered Read Free

well. She felt herself being propped against a tree.
    Now she could hear the faint mewling cries of her best friend, maybe twenty or thirty feet away, still muffled by the duct tape.
    The lunatic had gone back to his van and was fiddling with something just inside the rear doors. It looked like a toolbox. Dina wanted to chew off his testicles. “C’mon, let her go, you got me, you can do whatever!” she called out to him. “Why do you need two of us?”
    The man paused. He turned around and looked at Dina. He was smiling.
    The grin turned Dina’s heart to ash.
    His reply was soft and courteous. “Because it only works with two.”

TWO
    In the predawn gloom, over the soft hissing of the baby monitor, Ulysses Grove heard the chirping noises first.
    He stirred awake next to Maura, rolled over, and blindly muted the beeping cell phone. At this hour, on this phone, the call could only mean one thing. Section Chief Tom Geisel—or possibly his trusty assistant Shirley Milch—was on the blower from Quantico with another pair of Mississippi Ripper victims. Grove snatched the phone out of its charger and levered himself into a sitting position on the edge of the bed.
    A rangy, chiseled African American with a marathon runner’s physique and dark almond-shaped eyes, Grove wore his customary Michigan Wolverines boxer shorts and sleeveless T-shirt. He hadn’t been sleeping well in recent weeks, and it showed in his stooped shoulders and somnambulant stare. Part of the problem stemmed from his bad eye.
    Injured in hot pursuit outside a New Orleans cemetery, Grove had nearly lost his left eye during an altercation with a psychopath named Michael Doerr. The cornea had sustained severe ocular contusions and subconjuctival hemorrhages, mostly from Doerr’s knife work, and later Grove worried that he would spend the rest of his life the butt of Sammy Davis jokes. Over the last twelve months Grove had undergone three separate operations to save the eye but, unfortunately, the surgeons at Johns Hopkins were only able to avoid the need for a prosthetic. The eye that remained in Grove’s skull was virtually blind. Grove had happily accepted the prognosis. He wore the scars of past cases he had closed like war medals.
    And other than slight adjustments in his driving, reading, and writing habits, the only drawback to the partial blindness was the dreaming.
    Grove had started having nightmares in which he saw things—prophetic things, apocalyptic scenarios, troubling visions—through his blind left eye, and only through that eye. His good eye never worked in these dreams, always blurred or flickered out like a TV tube with bad reception. But the blind eye saw everything, inexplicable things, road signs spattered with blood, shadowy figures lurking in the woods, ghostly horsemen riding over the bones of battle casualties. One night he dreamt he could see the future through his blind eye, and he woke up in a sheath of sweat after seeing his own family lying murdered in their beds. His psychotherapist referred to all this as “understandable” and “even healthy” considering the sights Grove had seen over the last few years.
    But it wasn’t merely angst over his blind eye that was currently keeping Ulysses Grove up at night. Nor was it workload. Nor was it the emotional obstacle course of his young marriage or the stress of juggling his professional life as the FBI’s top criminal profiler with his role as a loving father. The thing that was disturbing Grove’s sleep these days was anticipation . He was very close to identifying the Mississippi Ripper. Over the course of twelve months and eight victims, Grove had amassed a hundred-plus-page profile.
    It was only a matter of time.
    Which was precisely why Grove snapped the flip-phone open with such vigor this morning. He glanced at the display. It was a Virginia prefix, the number registering in Grove’s sleepy