Time seemed to become elastic. Stretching and slowing then snapping forward in a blur of lights and sirens and shouts and faces. David fought to grab a hold of some piece of it, to seize onto reality and drag himself out of the memory of that office and the body inside it. No. Not the body. Jason’s body. His cousin—cut apart as if he was a deer that had been shot, gutted and half skinned. David forced his eyes open and saw the wrinkled face of Erickson, the FBI man, leaning into his own. His lips moved slowly, calmly. David centered himself on the words, willing himself to hear.
“. . . need to get you away from here. Okay? Can you stand?” Erickson was saying.
David was sitting on the steps of the courthouse. He reached for his hat and discovered it was missing—must’ve been knocked off when he was slammed into the file cabinet. Around them, dark-suited men and women moved in and out of the building. A forensics team stepped down out of a van, wearing white hazmat suits that made them look like strange spirits wafting past. Caution tape demarcated the whole block. Beyond it, Andrea and Brooke stood. Brooke clutched her face, sobbing. Beside her, David saw Dale. The old man stared ahead blankly. David thought then of Jason’s wife. His twin daughters. All the rest of the family.
“I need to go. I have to talk to them,” David finally said.
David started to stand, but Erickson held his ground, not letting David past.
“They know already,” the old man rasped. “I need you to come with me. Now.”
There was no fight left inside David. He let himself be led to a black sedan and settled into the back. Only once the car was moving did David think to ask where they were headed. From his seat behind the wheel, Erickson said nothing.
The man’s heart still drummed a frenetic rhythm. The first two times it had been so simple. So clean and perfect. Yes, with each one he had advanced his technique, had taken more time in the artistry of it. But they both had been almost effortless.
Nothing about this had been easy. The last victim had seen it coming and reacted more quickly than expected, grabbing the shotgun down from the rack above his desk and firing. Then the struggle that left the large man in pieces on the floor.
He had only just started into the real work of it, delicately putting blade to flesh, when he’d heard the office’s door open and the sheriff yell out. He should have killed the sheriff. He knew that as he waited in the shadows, watching the sheriff enter, seeing the horror in his eyes as he saw the carnage.
But the man had made his choice, and the sheriff lived. Now the sheriff would be after him. The sheriff hadn’t seen his face, couldn’t recognize him. The man was sure of that. All the same, they were tied to each other now. He could feel it, the inevitability of pursuit with the only uncertainty being how it all concluded.
His heart slowed. He grinned. Good. Let the sheriff come. Because as messy and imperfect as it was, this killing, it was also something new. It was fun.
The man lost himself in thought, imagining the game ahead.
Absentmindedly, he lifted his shirt. The skin of his abdomen was dotted with what looked like large, black goosebumps. With his index finger and thumb, the man squeezed one of the bumps. A tiny metal ball popped free, oily with blood. Shotgun buckshot. He hadn’t even felt it, being shot. Couldn’t feel any pain now.
He put his fingers to another bump and squeezed.
Erickson guided the black sedan to the north, out of Old Town, heading straight toward the rounded, glass-sided structure of the Countryman Federal Building. It had always been something like Mount Olympus to David, an inaccessible realm populated by gods whose dictates guided the lives of the mortals below. He supposed that the FBI ran its operations through the building.
David focused on the details of the world flowing past, staying in the present, not letting himself slip back into the reality of what had just happened. Still, as he sat there, his hands refused to stop shaking.
The car ducked suddenly down onto a ramp that led beneath the building and circled around and around, one level after another, until finally they came to a thick metal gate manned by army soldiers carrying machine guns.
Erickson rolled down his window, whispered something to a soldier, and magically the gate opened. The car rolled through, then parked. Erickson stepped out and opened David’s door. David looked for an entrance or elevator.
“This way,” Erickson said, pointing toward a white van that sat idling nearby.
David recognized the vehicle immediately. It looked like an airport shuttle, though absent any marking beyond the federal government plates. The windows were tinted solid black. Every day, these vans went back and forth between the Countryman Building and Site One, the scientific research base sitting beside the giant’s face. David always supposed they ferried people and supplies in and out of the base, ensuring absolute security.
Erickson held out his hands to David.
“Radio and cell phone. And your gun.”
“Why?” David started to ask.
“It’s the rule,” Erickson said. “No outside electronics. And no weapons unless you’re army or FBI.”
“What’s going on? Where are you taking me?”
“Question-and-answer comes later, kid.”
David felt himself unbuckling his belt and handing it over, all while he wondered why he was being so obedient.
The van’s door slid open automatically. Erickson nodded. David stepped inside, and Erickson followed, each of them taking a separate bench. A man with a crewcut wearing a plain white polo shirt sat behind the wheel. Without a word, he began to drive.
Erickson closed his eyes, as if he was sleeping in place. David began to regain his hold on time, his mind turning again, remembering the murder, locking in the details of the killer. He was a little shorter than David. Five-nine or five-ten. Average build with broad shoulders that marked him as a man. Strong but not muscular. The blade in his right hand, maybe twenty inches long, with the slight curve of a fishing knife. David saw again the man vault so cleanly over the tall fence.
He looked down at his hands, which still trembled. He should have shot the man. He’d had his cousin’s killer dead to rights, and he just stood there. He failed.
The van drove up out of the parking deck and onto the street, headed north and then west. Shortly, the buildings stopped at the demarcated no man’s land surrounding the giant. Locals gossiped that the stretch was full of land mines. Only one road led through it, a simple blacktop angling directly for Gulliver’s face, toward that massive brow and clusters of eyes. They came to the fence circling the giant. Metal plating some twenty feet tall. Twin towers on either side of the road, a solid gate blocking the path. Armed soldiers approached. There was some quick exchange, and the gate opened.
Ahead, the giant grew impossibly as the van moved again, drawing them closer. David had never been this near to it. His hands shook even more. The giant blotted out half of the sky, then more. It would swallow them. Devour them. Not from any overt action but only because it was so big it must have its own gravitational pull.
They came then into Site One itself. From a distance, the buildings seemed small, but now David saw that they were massive—white metal structures the size of airplane hangars arranged in a neat grid, each building connected to the others by tunnels and walkways. It was a trick of perspective, this. Being next to the giant, anything would seem microscopic. All that anyone knew for certain about the compound was that it was run by NASA, and supposedly scientists from around the world gathered there to study the mystery of Gulliver. But beyond that, nothing was said, and the void was filled with rumors and conspiratorial theories.
The road led into an opening on the end of one building, and inside they came to a stop amid a massive area where dozens of the white vans were staged. Beyond that stretched what looked like the security area of an airport. Lanes with scanners, all overseen by more soldiers. Erickson led David into the checkpoint.
A soldier stopped them. Erickson held up a badge, and then the soldier scrutinized David.
“He doesn’t have a badge.”
“I’ve already talked with Priest. Call her. Potential contamination.”
David read the alarm on the face of the soldier, who inched back from David. The soldier leaned away and spoke into a radio. A few moments later, he waved them on.
“Clear to proceed.”
Once they were through the scan and Erickson was leading the way through labyrinthine hallways, David came even with the agent.
“You said potential contamination. What does that mean?”
Erickson held his lighter in his hand, opening and closing it again and again.
“Just code, kid. Bureaucracy-speak. Come on.”
They went from that building into another through a covered walkway, and to another and another. At each, Erickson scanned a badge to open the glass doors that blocked the way. The buildings were interconnected so that one could traverse the entire site without ever going outside. Each building was marked with a number. Finally, they stepped into Building Seventeen.
“We’re here,” Erickson said.
He led the way down a large central hallway, past dozens of unmarked doors. Occasionally, they passed people in civilian clothing and white lab coats who walked without raising their eyes.
Erickson stopped at one door and scanned his badge at a sensor. It clicked, and he opened the door.
“Inside.”
David stepped into the dark, and a light came on automatically. Behind him, Erickson shut the door from the outside.
“Hey!” David said.
He tried the door handle, but it wouldn’t move.
The room was all white. Three blank walls, then another with a wide mirror—a one-way window, he felt certain. He could feel eyes watching him. The only things in the room were a white plastic chair and a small wheeled cart, the kind nurses move about in a hospital, with wires and monitors. David wondered how late it was; he felt then a tiredness that crested like a wave.
It was silent aside from the scrape of his boots on the tile floor. Why had Erickson brought him here? Why had Erickson taken over the scene?
Then he remembered Erickson appearing suddenly at the site of the realtor’s murder. And that the state police detectives had as much as confirmed that the FBI had shown up after Jim Holly was killed. All three victims dead from stab wounds. David saw again the hooded man in his mind’s eye. The blade at his side.
“Sheriff Blunt.”
The voice seemed to come from above, but there was no one there. A speaker secreted in the ceiling. The voice was robotic, atonal, but with a natural cadence, as if a real person were speaking through some modulator that gave it an artificial inflection. Instinct told him it wasn’t Erickson.
“Please remove your uniform. You may leave on your underwear.”
He glared at his own reflection in the mirror.
“The hell I will. Who are you? What is this place?”
“Sheriff Blunt. Either remove your clothing or we will send in someone to do it for you.”
For a moment, David thought he would resist. Let them come. Let them try. But what was he going to do? Take on an entire army? He unbuttoned his shirt, tugged it off, folded it, and tossed it to the ground. Then he removed his pants.
“Sit.”
He stared at the mirror, seeing only his nearly naked body. His expression betrayed exhaustion, confusion, and a growing spark of anger.
“Sheriff Blunt. Please attach the cuff to your left arm,” the voice continued. “And attach the clip to your right index finger.”
“Why?”
No answer came. Once again, he found himself suddenly complying, as if exhaustion sapped him of any ability to act on the emotions churning inside him. He grabbed the cuff from the cart and wrapped it around his arm, then clipped the heartrate monitor to his index finger. He sat.
The cuff inflated automatically, the device whirring and clicking and beeping in the cart.
“What is your name?” the voice returned.
“You know my name.”
“Please. Oblige us. This won’t take long.”
“David Blunt.”
“Where do you live?”
“Here. Little Springs. You want the address?”
“Where do you work?”
The questions were coming faster, cutting off the end of his responses.
“You just called me the sheriff. You know I’m the sheriff.”
Silence. The cuff gripped his arm tightly enough to cut off circulation.
“Fine. I’m the sheriff.”
The cuff began to deflate.
“David, what do you dream of, when you dream?”
“Excuse me?”
Silence.
Just as David was about to push for an explanation, the voice returned.
“Thank you, Sheriff Blunt. You may remove the monitors.”
“Thank you for what? What the hell kind of question was that?”
He tore the devices away and let them hang from the cart.
“It was a test, sheriff. A test that you passed. Now, please tell us what happened tonight.”
David looked again to the door, but he knew it was still locked. His only hope at getting out of this room was to obey.
“I went to the courthouse to see my cousin. Jason.”
“Why did you visit him at night?”
With each question, his confusion diminished, replaced by more anger.
“That’s my own fucking business. And if you don’t stop interrupting me, this is going to take all night.”
“It will take as long as it takes,” the voice said, showing no reaction. “Continue.”
David leaned forward in the chair, putting his head in his hands, and allowed the memories to come forward, taking them through, detail by detail. The window exploding out. Two figures in silhouette. Two more shotgun blasts. Jason on the ground. The form crashing into him.
“You saw it?” the voice interrupted.
It. Not him. They asked if he saw it.
“Him,” David corrected. “I saw him.”
He continued the story, through the chase into the town, the blade swinging at him, his shot going wide. Then the man disappearing.
“Sheriff. Is there anything you’re forgetting?”
He shook his head. The voice remained silent.
David leaned back and forced himself to think. Three killings, somehow connected. The FBI involved in each. Yet they didn’t even know the killer was a man. Meaning David was the only person to have seen the killer and live.
There was a click behind him, and the door opened. Erickson returned. Behind him was the woman from the realtor’s office. She wore her dark hair in a loose bun and had on sweats. She looked as if she’d been woken from sleep. She carried the same backpack she had had when David saw her before.
David stood.
“What is this?” he asked. “Who is she?”
Erickson held up a hand, signaling him to remain in place.
“This is Dr. Sunny Lee,” Erickson offered. “She needs to check one last thing.”
The woman pulled on latex gloves, then took a device from her backpack. It was small enough for her to hold in one hand, a simple black box with a few buttons and a meter.
Sunny approached David. She looked into his eyes, sympathetic.
“This will just take a second,” she said.
She waved the device over his body, around his face, then moving down to his neck, his chest, along each arm, and finally down his legs. It made steady clicking sounds but didn’t react otherwise.
All at once, Sunny was done and put the device away.
“Here. Wear these. We’re going to have to keep your clothing to check for any evidence,” Erickson said, holding out a gray T-shirt and matching sweatpants.
“My boots and my hat?” David asked as he tugged them on.
“We’ll get everything back to you. Your belt and gun, too.”
Dressed, David felt his anger return.
“I’ve been awfully damn patient. I think it’s time for you to answer some questions now,” David said, then looked at Sunny. “What is that thing you waved at me? What kind of doctor are you? I saw you the other day. At the other murder scene.”
Sunny looked to Erickson, who mouthed something imperceptible. Then she looked to David.
“I’m a PhD, not a medical doctor,” she said. “I’m a geologist.”
David was only more confused.
“Geology? What does that have to do with murders? What the hell is really going on here?”
“There is a serial killer in Little Springs.”
A woman’s voice came from behind Erickson, by the door. David knew by the rhythm of it that it belonged to the same person who had spoken to him from behind the mirror. He saw a tall Black woman in a dark skirt suit with neon yellow high heels that hammered the floor as she stepped forward. In her hand, she held a manila folder.
“Director Priest,” she introduced herself, “Department of Defense Security Service. I manage Site One. And anything of military interest that falls outside of the perimeter.”
Beside her stood an overweight man with red hair and small, green eyes set into a wide, unassuming face. He had the stiff posture of a military man but wore the suit of a bureaucrat.
Priest gestured to the man.
“This is Vice Chairman Conover. He runs the military operations here.”
Neither Priest nor Conover made any movement to shake David’s hand. He looked closely at their faces, committing the names and roles to memory. The old, tired FBI man is Erickson. The big redhead is Conover, the military guy. The Black woman is Priest, with a vague DoD role. And the young Asian American scientist is Sunny.
“A serial killer,” David said. “Kapoor and Holly?”
Erickson nodded.
“And now Mr. Blunt.”
Conover spoke then for the first time, his voice surprisingly high for such a large man.
“Sheriff, I hope you understand that the situation here is of the highest sensitivity.”
All at once, the anger that had been building in David reached a crescendo. He kicked the medical cart, which raced crazily on its small wheels before toppling and crashing to the floor with a loud bang.
“My cousin is dead!” he shouted. “My cousin. A murderer is loose in my town, and you couldn’t even tell me? Now you drag me here. You make me take off my clothes. Answer your questions.”
The outburst had burned off the last reservoir of energy he had. David was tired. So goddamned tired.
“We have to protect the sanctity of the investigation,” Priest said. “We can’t offer any more information than we already have.”
“Bullshit,” David said. “I’m the only one here who has seen the killer. If I walk out right now, I’ll tell the world everything I know, and I’ll tell them who you all are, and that you’re hiding this thing.”
Priest’s face hardened.
“Or,” David continued, “you let me help solve this case. Give me whatever evidence you have. Everything. I’ll help you find the killer, and in return, I will tell the world whatever lies you want told.”
The others looked at each other, except for Sunny, who kept her eyes on David. He guessed that Priest, Conover, and Erickson were in charge of things here. And for whatever reason, this geologist had gotten pulled into their orbit.
“Just tell him,” Erickson said finally.
Priest looked pained, but then she stepped forward and handed the manila folder to David. He opened it and was greeted with a crime scene photo of Sanjay Kapoor, the body just as he had discovered it.
“I’ve seen this,” David said. “I was there.”
“Keep looking,” Conover instructed.
David flipped to the next photo. It was Kapoor again, but now the body was stripped naked and washed clean of blood, lying on a metal examining table. The dismembered arm sat beside it. The massive chest wound. Then, as David peered closer, he saw them. Dozens of other cut marks all over the body. Radiating cuts that spiraled out across the skin.
“This looks like . . .” he started to say.
He flipped to the next photo. A closer image. Superficial cuts that were perfectly curved, beginning in the armpit, then going out onto the man’s chest and neck. What was that pattern called? A fractal.
He flipped to the next photo. Another body on a table. The tour guide, Jim Holly. The same massive chest wound.
He flipped to the next photo. A closer view of the man’s skin, which had been carved with the exact same pattern as Kapoor’s. The exact pattern that traced across the body of the giant.
David recognized it then. That large wound in the center of each dead man’s chest? It was right where the spire stabbed down through the giant.
“God,” he muttered.
“We don’t know how or why, but we know the killer has some connection to the giant. Or obsession with it,” Erickson said. “The bureau is taking over the investigations so that we can keep this secret. If people learn there’s a killer out there, we’ll have a panic. And if the details about the patterns leak, we could have copycats, and it would make it impossible to know whether any tips that come in are any good if everyone knows all the details.”
“You can be part of this investigation. But you don’t speak a word of it to anyone,” Priest said.
Priest, Erickson, and Conover all stared at David with stony faces. He glanced to Sunny. She bit her lip, then looked quickly away from him. The others were old professionals. They knew how to lie. But Sunny couldn’t hide her reactions. David read it on her face: This story that he’d been given was the truth but only part of it. There was far more that they were hiding.
David looked back to the others.
“I’m in,” he said.