Shattered Read Free Page A

brain like tumblers clicking in a lock. This could be it. The crime scene Grove had been anticipating. The final puzzle piece that closes the Ripper down. Gooseflesh crawled on Grove’s arms as he rose, cupping his hand around the phone, answering in a hushed tone. “Grove here.”
    â€œMorning, Sunshine,” said the familiar voice on the other end. Tom Geisel had been section chief in the Bureau’s Behavioral Science Division for nearly a decade and had trained Grove, and now the low, gruff, whiskey-cured voice had an almost soothing effect on Grove’s ear. “Sorry about the hour, Slick, you know how it is.”
    Grove’s scalp prickled as he slipped out of the bedroom and into the dark carpeted hallway. The baby was asleep across the hall, the nursery door slightly ajar. “Dirtbags never sleep, huh?” Grove whispered into the phone.
    â€œTrue enough.”
    â€œMississippi again?”
    â€œTwo white females, looks like the same sig, same MO, everything lines up.”
    â€œThe dump is where?”
    â€œSixteen miles south of Quincy, Illinois, right on the river this time.”
    â€œOkay. That’s what office? St. Louis?”
    The voice said, “Yep…Bill Menner from Central Midwest is heading up there as we speak. Your ticket’s already booked, waiting at Reagan. Flight numbers, departure times, map to the scene—it’s all on your e-mail.”
    â€œGreat, great,” Grove said with a little nod and glanced at baby Aaron’s door. A flannel sculpture of Winnie-the-Pooh hung from a hook, the words Mommy’s Little Helper in fuzzy yarn-script across the top. A tiny, sharp frisson of guilt twinged in Grove’s gut: It was a Sunday, and he had planned on spending the entire day relaxing with his wife and baby. Now all that would have to wait. Grove thought about it for a moment. “How’s the scene this time?”
    A slight pause. “What do you mean?”
    Grove shrugged. “Good security? Good first-on-the-scene coverage?”
    Another pause. “Um…fair.”
    â€œFair?”
    Geisel’s voice dropped an octave. “Some yahoo at Pike County HQ called in the media wagons. The place is already crawling with hacks.”
    Grove licked his lips, visualizing the circus of tungsten lights and microphones milling about the edges of the yellow tape. He had seen it before, and it could be an enormous distraction. But now the vague guilt stirring in Grove’s belly turned into something else entirely. Bring them on , he thought for a brief instant, way down in his tangled subconscious. Let them see it, let them see the process.
    The feeling had been brewing in Grove’s midbrain for months now, ever since that first pair of victims had been discovered in a vacant lot behind a riverboat casino in Davenport, Iowa. The first in a meticulous series: always a pair of victims, posed postmortem, exactly twenty feet apart, facing each other, one killed an hour or so before the other—increased levels of serotonin and free histamine in the wound sites indicating struggle, probably torture. A banquet of physical evidence had been retrieved over the months from murder scenes snaking along the Mississippi River valley from Rock Island to Memphis: size-eleven triple-E shoe prints, DNA from secretions, clothing fibers, carpet residue, and latent prints galore. No positive matches yet, nothing in the index.
    Yet .
    But the most important part, the part that kept Grove tossing and turning at night, was the repeating pattern of dual victims, the precision with which the victims were posed, and the staggered times of death. The purpose had not yet announced itself to Grove but the revelation was imminent. Grove could smell it in the air, a trace of something acrid at the scenes. In his restless dreams it lurked along the periphery of his blind eye, something coalescing behind the shadows: the meaning of the act . Once