Chapter One Of 'Top Ten'
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What is Top Ten about?
A killer who believes himself an artist of unmatched talent is incensed when he is placed last on the FBI's most wanted list, and begins killing off those fugitives above him, each in a twisted manner that serves his creative vision.
But his horrific climb to the top, which leaves both guilty and innocent dead in its wake, must be stopped by a young, driven FBI agent who is given an almost impossible and equally inexplicable task— save number five on the list.
At all costs.
I hope you enjoy the sample.
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One
Dots
God's gray rain fell on Damascus, New York.
Special Agent Bernard Jaworski, stern and stick-like, bald and yellowed by the chemo and radiation the whitecoats were hopeful would do a number on the tumor raging low in his back, sat at his desk mid-morning on Monday, the weather glazing the window behind him, and read the orders just handed him for a third time.
"I don't get it." He looked up to the person who'd brought the orders with her. "Why is Atlanta sending me personnel?"
"I've been reassigned to you," Ariel Grace told him, though to her a more proper term would be 'exiled'. She'd thought that from the minute she saw the orders Saturday morning. Expecting Jack Hale to shift her to FEDBOMB for her perceived failure to get DeVane, or maybe have her sitting on a wire, or at worst running background on clearance applications, she'd instead gotten a letter with a plane ticket attached. And here she was, standing before her new boss, pissed as hell and unable to do anything about it but curse Jack Hale under her breath and move on.
"From Atlanta?" Jaworski asked, puzzled. A cough shook his wasting frame. He took a long sip of ice water. Ariel thought his fingers looked like dying twigs wrapped 'round the sweating glass.
"The orders were approved by Washington," Ariel said. And mustn't that have been a trick for Jack Hale to arrange overnight.
"I can see the signature, Agent Grace, but what I can't see is why I'm getting you from all the way down south. I've requested additional personnel, but usually they get pulled from somewhere close."
"I didn't request this, sir. But I'm here, and I'm ready to work."
"Sit down, Agent Grace." She took the only other seat, a government issue facing Jaworski's desk, stiff and gray, vinyl and metal. He looked at the orders again as she shifted for a comfortable position. "What did you work in Atlanta?"
"I ran task force five," she said, surprised that he didn't know that.
Jaworski looked to her, squinting a bit. "You ran a most wanted task force?"
"Looking for Mills DeVane, sir."
He considered her for a moment. Businesslike, she was, in matching blue blazer and slacks. Her hair was brown and fell just below the collar, coiffed very proper. Voice clear, blue gaze steady. All things very right—very purposely right. She was trying hard to not be something. To not be seen as something.
"How old are you Agent Grace?"
There was the briefest pause before she replied. "I'll be thirty in December, sir."
"Twenty nine then, are you?"
She nodded to his 'clarifying' query.
"Twenty nine and running a task force," he said as comment. "How long have you been with the Bureau?"
"Six years, sir," she told him. No hesitation this time. "I was fully capable of doing the job."
He nodded. "So why aren't you still?"
That pause stalled her again. Jaworski had her number. Had her dialed in. She wasn't sure she liked that.
"One of my warrant services went bad," she told him. That was one man's opinion, anyway.
Lines cleaved his brow. Hell, he'd been living and breathing his own task force, number ten, night and day, but he hadn't been that disconnected from Bureau happenings, had he? "People get hurt?"
She shook her head.
Now he was really lost. "No one was hurt. So what went bad about it?"
"DeVane wasn't there." Would have been, except for that car...that car that was and wasn't there.
"Wait," Jaworski said, sitting back, letting the chair's soft cushion nearly swallow him. "You got yanked and spanked because your guy wasn't there? Because you missed him?"
That might seem the reason, but Ariel knew better. Knew as soon as she'd read her orders Saturday morning. The orders that also mentioned her replacement.
"ASAC Hale made the call, sir. It's his task force now."
"I see that," Jaworski said. Right there, in the orders, it was spelled out. And wasn't that odd? Why in the hell was the number two agent in Atlanta taking on a task force? There had to be something more to this.
But whatever that might be, it was not Jaworski's concern. He had no time for it. More pressing matters were at hand. Like catching his own freak, who was very much out there, and very much active. And now he had one more body to throw at his boy. One more body that he had to get up to speed. Fast.
"You're all squared away, then, Grace?"
"Sir?"
"Ride, place to stay? The F.O. get you what you need?"
"Yes, sir." She'd flown in on Sunday and had been issued a Bureau Taurus by the Albany Field Office, and vouchers for the Bright I Motor Hotel here in Damascus. She'd spent a restless night there watching an old horror flick on the tube and eating take-out Chinese. When sleep finally dragged her down she dreamt of Jack Hale. He was getting the shit stomped out of him by some Frankensteinish fiend.
"All right then," Jaworski said, and pushed himself up using both arms of his chair. With a grimace and some difficulty he stood and came around his desk, heading for the door. "Your learning curve here is going to look like the steep side of the Matterhorn."
"I can handle that," Ariel said. She stood and followed her new boss out of his office. They made a quick left through an outer office, and a right after that, heading down a long, dim hallway. Stacks of boxes yet to be unpacked crowded the passage, creating chokepoints through which one had to slip sideways. Jaworski took those walking straight on.
He moved fairly quick, considering, Ariel thought. But then maybe being up was better than being down. A physical thing. Maybe mental, too.
Her mother had done housework all through her chemo. Called it her 'therapy'. She did the dishes the day she died, looking better than the man walking ahead of Ariel right then. Walking as he started talking.
"Welcome to Task Force Ten, Agent Grace," Jaworski said. "Around here we call it Base Ten. Someone nicked it that. I don't know why." At an intersection with another passage they turned left. More boxes cramped their way. A lone window in the distance washed the corridor with dim and dirty light. They walked toward it. "The Bureau rented it for our operations when we outgrew the space at the Utica R.A." The R.A., or resident agency, was the Bureau equivalent of a police substation, a local presence maintained in areas from which a field office was too distant, or where one was deemed necessary. "The building is vacant except for us and the rats."
"How many agents are you running?" Ariel asked. The bulge of her hip-holstered weapon snagged a box as she squeezed by and almost sent it tumbling.
"Sixteen counting you."
"I only saw one agent at the door when I came in."
"I believe in field work, Grace. Our freak is not going to walk in here and hold out his hands. This ain't Hollywood. People who work for me work leads. Cold, warm, or hot. That's how I run Task Force Ten. I only wish I could get out there more."
"Someone has to run things," Ariel reminded him.
"It's kind of you to put it that way," Jaworski said. "So how many did you run, Agent Grace?"
"Forty full time."
"How long?"
"Ten months."
"So you were around for this numbering crap."
"I was," Ariel said.
"Tell me, did it 'focus task force efforts' any more by having that number tacked on to DeVane."
"It was crap, sir, like you said."
Jaworski glanced back at her as he walked. A smile flashed. "Glad to see me and the other five thousand or so people aren't alone in our thinking."
"Washington comes up with some beauts," Ariel said. She knew that now better than most.
They neared the window. It had once been clear but now was filmed opaque with grime. A heavy door was set into the wall to the right of it. Jaworski mustered all his strength and shoved it open, letting them into the stairwell. They started up.
"Did you take the elevator up to three, Grace?"
"Yes, sir."
"Use the stairs from now on. They don't break down twice a week."
"Thanks for the warning." They made it to four and passed through another heavy door and were in another hallway when a question came to Ariel. "Why are you on three, sir. If the building's vacant."
"The rats have one and two. They rarely come to three."
Ariel looked at the ground as they moved down this hallway and wondered how often they came by four.
"How much do you know about our freak, Grace?" Jaworski asked her. His pace had slowed. His breathing hadn't.
"Some."
"I'll give you the quickie on him before I show you something. He calls himself Michaelangelo. Like the artist, but he spells it wrong. One extra 'a'. He thinks he's an artist, too. A master, even. He's killed six already. Two just this last Friday." Jaworski stopped suddenly, half propping himself against one wall with a stiff arm. He sucked a deep breath of stale air. A shallow, wet cough hacked up, and he swallowed its spawn back down again. He looked straight at Ariel. "Let me tell you something, Agent Grace–off the subject. They may save my life, but until the day I do kick I will hate every doctor who ever lived for practically killing me with this cure."
She made no comment to what he'd said. Simply let him take a few more breaths and compose himself.
"Four men, two women," Jaworski went on. "All found in either Jersey, Pennsylvania, or our dear Empire State. He...uses them. Makes 'art' out of them. And I'm not talking recreating The David. This freak goes for shock value." He paused, took one more deep breath, and continued on down the hall. "He treats the men and women differently."
"How?"
"Couple of ways. There's mutilation of the males' genitalia. ISU and some outside shrinks have looked at everything and decided either he's gay or not, afraid he's gay or afraid he's not, was abused or was an abuser. You get the picture, Grace?"
"He's not easily profiled."
"I hate that term, Jesus. Sometimes there are just monsters. Freaks. Evil pieces of human garbage that need to be hunted down. The only pigeonhole this guy fits into is fucked up...pardon my Polish."
"Pardoned, sir," she said, smiling at his back. "So he doesn't mutilate the women?"
"Oh, hell, he'll mutilate the hell out of them. But he's not interested in their genitalia. Plus we don't get any letters on the women."
"He writes?"
"After each male murder a letter arrives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art addressed to the chief curator. Gives us the 'titles' of his 'works'." Jaworski shook his head. "Since the first one we've been able to intercept them."
"Prints?"
Jaworski stopped again, this time outside a door just before another intersection of corridors. His breathing was not terribly labored.
"Oh, he's not afraid of leaving prints. We've got them by the hundred."
"So he's never been arrested, in the military, or had certain jobs."
"He's been a careful boy," Jaworski said, and reached into his pocket for a small ring of keys.
Ariel looked to the door they stood at and noticed now a makeshift sign tacked above it: GALLERY.
"Did you eat breakfast, Agent Grace?"
Ariel shook her head.
"That's probably a good thing."
He inserted a key into the lock on the door but didn't turn it. "That agent you saw on your way in..."
"Yes..."
"That was Vargas. He's the gatekeeper. No one gets into this building unless they have business here. Any tabloid photographer worth his salt would give a limb to get shots of what's behind this door."
"More rats to deal with," she observed, and Jaworski turned the key and opened the door to a darkened room.
"After you."
She stepped in and heard the door close behind her, making the space black for a second before Jaworski switched on the lights and set the walls to scream.
"Dear God," Ariel exclaimed softly, as though to speak too loud might stir the madness fixed upon three of the room's four walls to life.
Jaworski himself gave the room a long look, taking it in yet again. It stoked the fire. Helped him to hate the freak that was his to catch.
Ariel was in the center of the room, her eyes tracking from right to left, vibrant and vicious hues assaulting her from dozens upon dozens of stills the Bureau photographers had captured. A visual symphony of horror.
In one a man's penis had been grafted to his forehead, making him a unicorn.
Jaworski saw where she was looking and stepped that way. He tapped the photo holding her rapt. "Calvis Winkler, the one our freak made into a unicorn, was victim number one. Twenty three years old, an auto mechanic from Shakes Ferry." He pointed to a less prominent photo of the crime scene. "His body was found on Valentine's day in a Utica motel room standing before a mirror."
"Standing?" Ariel asked, looking closely at the indicated photo. There was Calvis Winkler, standing at the vanity in a motel room, hands planted on either side of the single-bowl sink, his boxer shorts and white tee shirt wet red nightmares. He seemed to be intently gazing at the mirror. At the dead perversion of himself in the mirror. But how...
"Re-bar," Jaworski said in response to the question her puzzled expression was asking. "Those metal rods they put in concrete to strengthen it."
Ariel nodded at the horror.
"Cut to length and bent just right," Jaworski explained. "He made holes in Mr. Winkler and pushed the re-bar in along the long bones in the legs and arms. Spine, too. The medical examiner said that one was hammered down through the skull. That would have killed him if he wasn't dead already." Jaworski paused. "I hope to God he was dead already."
"He sculpted him," Ariel observed. "He made himself a human sculpture on a frame."
Jaworski nodded. "His letter told us he called it 'Reflections Of A Myth'."
"The unicorn is a mythical figure," Ariel said. "But here he gave it a reflection."
"Don't chew on it, Grace," Jaworski warned her. "Don't try and figure him out that way. Let the shrinks and the gurus at Quantico handle that end of it. Focus on the tangible. Be a cop, not a psychoanalyst."
She looked to him. "Those methods have worked, sir."
He allowed a nod and looked to the pictures. "I don't think it's going to be that way with this freak. I just don't."
She turned toward the next set of photos in line as Jaworski moved to them. In all the photos an older man sat naked in a chair, his right hand fixed over his mouth, his left over his eyes. His penis was nowhere in sight. "Ricardo Lomanico, sixty, a retired army master sergeant. Found dead in his house in Jersey City in early March by his painter who was touching up the trim around his bedroom window. His uvula had been removed and his penis attached in its place. It was blocking his windpipe."
Ariel grimaced, but stayed focused on the photos. "He couldn't have been alive..."
"Traces of a muscle paralyzer called napoxcypharin were found in his system. And in Calvis Winkler's. It was found in all the men. The medical examiner said this drug paralyzes the voluntary muscles, but lets you breath and lets your heart beat." Jaworski glanced at Ricardo Lomanico's hideously abused face. "It also allows one to still feel pain. But not scream."
A shiver scampered up her spine at the thought of that terror. Agony without expression. The cry withheld. She wondered if that could drive one mad.
"This creation is called 'Hear My Evil'. Try and pick that one apart."
Jaworski took a step down and was now on a new wall, the one opposite the door. He touched the picture of a heavyset woman whose breasts had been removed and fixed to the side of her severed head like earmuffs. Her head rested on a lamp whose shade had been removed. The burning bulb glowed through her gaping mouth. "Susan Rollins, age forty-one, she was from Trenton, New Jersey, but was found in a motel room just outside of Centre Hall, Pennsylvania. Her body was found in the bathtub, here." Ariel looked where directed. "Fully clothed but drained of blood. We found about four pints in the toilet tank."
Stone, Ariel thought. Be stone. It was hard. She felt her stomach churning.
"Like I said, we didn't get a letter for this victim or the other woman, but he did leave what I guess you'd call messages at each scene. This one he left in lipstick on the bathroom mirror."
Ariel saw the photo nearby. "Women bleed."
"You think that means something other than the disgustingly obvious?"
"It might," Ariel replied.
Jaworski shook his head and tapped the wall in a random succession of spots. "Connect the dots, Grace. Connect the dots."
"When was she found?"
"April second, though we know she was killed on the first."
"April fools day," Ariel said. "The second significant day with Valentine's day."
"And March fourth, Agent Grace?" Jaworski challenged her. "What day of significance is that, other than the day that Ricardo Lomanico choked on his own dick?"
There was no answer to be had. She was thinking too fast, here. Taking in too much all at once and trying to put it in place, without knowing what the places were. She was trying a puzzle without having a picture for reference. That would not work. She had to see all the dots before trying to connect them.
"Who was next?" Ariel asked, signaling her readiness to go on. Jaworski obliged.
"This one is called 'Taken For A Ride'," Jaworski said. The accompanying photos showed the naked upper torso of a man seemingly grafted to a horse lying on its side, both dead. "The guy with half of himself missing was James Ondatter, victim number four. He drove a taxi in Centre Hall, Pennsylvania. He was found in the same area. The mount he's stuck to was called Lady Anne Green Apples. Her owner looked out a window in the morning last April third and saw Lady Anne galloping around the pasture. It looked like someone was riding her. Someone was."
"The horse was alive when he did this?" Ariel exclaimed more than asked.
"Police shot it when they got there. They found Ondatter's lower half less the dick stitched to the underside of another horse wandering through open country outside of town. The dick was in the horse's rectum, which was stitched up. That one died before they could shoot it. Stress from a too-high dose of a veterinary tranquilizer called equipsyx."
"He has access to drugs."
"And surgical glues, sutures," Jaworski said. "But we've done those dots. Pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, doctors, etcetera, etcetera."
"You couldn't have checked everywhere," she said.
"You can never check everywhere, Agent Grace. And even if you could, there's no guarantee you'd see this guy. I doubt he's walking around drooling and showing off his collection of catgut and equipsyx."
Likely not, she knew, but he had to be getting his toys somewhere.
"He used duct tape on Susan Rollins," Jaworski added. "We ran the lot. It came back as shipping to over eight hundred outlets over a year. Maybe fifty thousand people bought it. Mostly cash transactions."
"Not much chance there," Ariel commented. A thought came to her. "Susan Rollins was from New Jersey—how'd she end up in Centre Hall one day before Ondatter was found?"
Jaworski tipped his head approvingly toward her. "Now there are some dots, Agent Grace. Susan Rollins was in Centre Hall on business. Real estate business. A company she worked for back home was purchasing a tract of land in the area. She was there for an appraisal. She never showed up."
"So why kill her?"
"Dots, Agent Grace. Dots." Another step down the line, to the last two in the grisly series. "For six months our freak was quiet. Then these next two were killed. Close in proximity, and even closer in time." He touched a photo showing a naked man impaled on an iron rod in a clearing in some brush. "Lew Bradford, fifty. A car salesman. Found in a field near Oneida, his home town, on Friday morning. Not far from here. He was killed Thursday night. Napoxcypharin in his system, as well. Our freak hammered a sharpened piece of scrap iron about an inch thick into the ground so that about six feet of it stood proud like a flagpole. The he sat Lew Bradford on top, positioned the point in his anus, and let him slide. Gravity did the rest. Near the end our freak helped things along, tipping Bradford's head back so the top of the pole would slide out his mouth. Topped it off with you know what on the end of the spike."
There it was, the object of number ten's interest, hovering a foot above the victim's mouth.
"He called this one 'Snacktime'."
Ariel looked away, and her eyes fell upon the dismembered pieces of a woman suspended from a ceiling.
"Doris May," Jaworski began. "Victim number six. Thirty eight. A postal worker. She was found cut up, photocopied, and hung like a mobile in a post office in Pembry late Friday night. Pembry's just up the road from Oneida. An hour before you got here this morning the letter concerning Mr. Bradford was flagged at the Metropolitan Museum. It came from this post office."
"He mailed it there, then killed her?" What sense did that make? Ariel wondered. Then again, what sense was there in any of the things she was seeing.
His sense, the answer came to her.
"No drugs, just like the other female victim. But unlike her, he didn't use duct tape."
Ariel was making mental notes as best she could. Later she'd put them on paper. Reduce what she was being shown, being told, to cold words. When this was all done, the next day, the next week, the next year, she could file them away. Or toss them. Make them gone.
If only the memories could be so easily dealt with.
"On the wall he wrote in her own blood 'She Went To Pieces'." Jaworski showed her the photo. Ariel looked. Made it a memory.
The light above dimmed briefly, then went back to bright. Ariel would have preferred it go black. She had seen enough.
"Someone's on the elevator," Jaworski said. "I have an appointment. Doctor here to give me a shot of insta-sick. Oh joy." He turned and opened the door. "Shall we?"
She was ready to leave. She wanted to leave. But when given the chance right then by the man who was now her boss, she did not. She could not.
"Agent Grace?"
The walls were still screaming at her.
"Agent Grace?"
Making memories.
"Agent Grace?"
She turned finally away from the walls.
"I have work for you," he said.
"Right, sir."
The light clicked off. Darkness killed the screams.
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