They made a stop at the alley behind the bar, but there was no sign of anything. The body was gone. The car, too. No sign of blood on the ground. Another FBI agent had checked on Erickson when he didn’t respond to the radio, and soon agents had swarmed the scene. Lucky that they found him, instead of some local, Priest said. They could keep it out of the news.
Standing there, David saw nothing lucky in it, the old FBI man bleeding to death. Dying in the street while David was passed out drunk.
They went then to Site One, where the three of them sat around the broad table in the central room at Building Seventeen. For a long while, they said nothing. There was so little that David knew about Erickson. Where he was from. Whether he had any family. What hobbies he had. Hell, David didn’t even know the man’s first name.
Still, the death carved at him in a way none of the others had—except for Jason. Erickson had been his protector. Literally following David, watching over him. But in subtler ways, too. In all the madness since David had fallen into the investigation, Erickson had been the steady hand, there to show him the way, to stick up for him to Priest and Conover, to keep him from embarrassing himself. And now, he was gone.
He could tell it had struck Sunny just as deeply, if not more. She had sobbed the whole way to Site One, and even now her eyes were red and puffy, and she said nothing but occasionally sniffed lightly.
The morning between them seemed a lifetime ago. Seemed more a dream than a reality. David wanted to reach out and comfort her, to take her hand. But something told him to hold back. Maybe it was Priest’s gaze, or that the murder had so suddenly cut off whatever moment they had shared. Watching her, David puzzled again over this enigmatic woman who had so suddenly become part of his life. What was it that made him open up to her, that put him at ease in a way no one else ever had? He’d never felt that, not even with Tabby.
But this wasn’t the time for those thoughts. Erickson was dead. The killer was following David. Maybe David had been the real target. The killer came for him but missed his chance. Then saw Erickson and went after him instead. Could that be the motive?
Or could Erickson have learned something that the killer wanted hidden? Could it be that whatever Erickson knew about those crystals—the drug that people were ingesting—had gotten him too close to the truth?
Subconsciously, David’s finger traced a scrawling pattern atop the table as he worked through possibilities.
“We have to keep the investigation moving,” Priest said, finally breaking the silence. “The FBI will assign someone new. I’ll get that person up to speed. In the meanwhile, the work needs to continue. You did your thing with the cameras?”
David realized she was talking to him.
“Yeah. They’re in place. I have the feed linked to my phone.”
“Good. What else do we have? Why Erickson? Why last night? How does it all connect? Take me through the night.”
Sunny still seemed almost catatonic. David spoke for her, explaining the grand sweep of the night, admitting that he’d gotten good and drunk, that Erickson had been at the bar, that then they’d left.
“You left together,” Priest corrected.
“Right.”
Sunny looked toward them then. “I talked to Erickson. Outside. He asked if I was okay to drive. I told him I was fine. He said he’d follow us to David’s apartment. I didn’t realize he wasn’t behind us. I didn’t . . .”
Priest showed no compassion as Sunny’s eyes went wet again.
“First of all, I doubt this needs to be said, but it is a summarily bad idea for any of us to mix our professional and personal lives,” Priest said, shifting her gaze between the two of them. “That said, Doctor Lee has been working under a tremendous amount of stress for a long time now. I’m sure you offered a suitable release.”
Priest didn’t seem embarrassed at all at the conversation. No, she seemed a woman who either saw no need for sex or saw it only as a function, something one could choose to do for practical benefits, like exercise or eating vegetables.
“Now, the investigation. You and Erickson were working an angle that drugs might be the common link,” she continued. “Where did that lead you?”
David thought again of the strange substance he’d found in the van that Erickson had confiscated. Then the bitter water poured down his throat by the tiger cult. The propulsive journey into the cosmos. He shook off the vision and began carefully to respond—whatever Erickson knew about that drug, whether it truly was the giant or some other hallucinogen, he had been hiding the truth. And then, there was Sunny’s warning.
“Two of the victims were drug dealers, and they were killed right after I made a drug bust. It seemed like it couldn’t be a coincidence. But we haven’t found any connection to any of the other victims. Obviously, Erickson was investigating all of this, so there’s the chance that he found something, and the killer was protecting himself.”
Even as he said it, it didn’t quite feel right. He couldn’t imagine Erickson holding something like that back. If he’d had a line on the killer, he would’ve rushed to put the case to bed.
“I had thought about going to this club on the east side of town,” David continued. “We know a good bit of dealing goes through there. Figured it’s worth checking out.”
What he didn’t say was that he’d learned from Jason’s credit card statements that he’d started visiting the strip club over the past several months, once every week or so. Maybe there would be a connection.
“Fine,” she said, cutting off further discussion. “Report back exactly what you see.”
He looked over to Sunny. She held something in her hands, turning it slowly. It was a black key card, just like the one he’d been given. All at once she gripped it and stood.
“I need to see him,” she said.
Sunny moved across the room in purposeful, almost robotic strides. She went not to her own lab but to the door at the far end of the room. The third door. And whatever forbidden things lay inside it. As she reached the door she stopped and turned back, looking at David, her face serious, commanding.
“Come,” she said.
Priest stood sharply.
“Doctor Lee. What are you . . . ?”
“He knows already,” Sunny said.
Priest made no movement. Hell with it. David stood and went to Sunny. She tapped the card to the sensor. It beeped green. The door opened. They went through.
He followed her down a narrow corridor, lights tinged with blue casting down from above. This opened into a large room, lit in the same unnatural shade. The walls were lined with glass panels, as if to look into another room, but each was opaque. In one corner was a metal cabinet and table. Something about the room felt medical—a faint hint of bleach in the air.
“What is this place?” David asked.
Sunny pushed a button next to one panel. A screen arose, and through the glass the lights sputtered. It was a small room that held only a metal table. And on the metal table was a body. The helicopter pilot. Jim Holly. Naked. Blanched of any color. Skin a map of wounds. Frost formed around the corners of the glass.
She pushed another button at the next panel, then kept moving. Screens rose. Bodies appeared. The drug dealers. Kapoor. And then . . .
Jason.
What used to be him. The head cut in half. Torso sliced from hip to shoulder. But this frozen pile of meat and bone was empty of the vibrancy, the energy, the illuminating spark, the thing that had been his cousin.
David bit down. No. He couldn’t fall back once again into reliving that night.
She had pressed two more buttons, and two more screens lifted. And there, on the next metal table, was Erickson. He was almost unrecognizable. Not for the litany of wounds but because he seemed so small and shriveled and weak. A faded tattoo of an eagle on one shoulder was the only color to his skin.
Sunny leaned against the glass and cried.
“He died immediately. He didn’t suffer much.”
It was Priest, standing behind them. She seemed to be trying to comfort Sunny; it didn’t work.
“You’ll need to inspect the body, Doctor Lee. Confirm that it was him.”
Sunny wiped at her eyes and nodded.
David turned then to the last open window. One more body on a slab. He moved closer. It was a woman. Thin. Average height. Shoulder-length brown hair. Where the other bodies were cut and carved, hers bore three simple darkened splotches in a tight pattern around her heart. Gunshot wounds.
“This is the scientist who went crazy?” David asked.
“Dr. Megan Smythe,” Priest said. “Sunny told you the rest?”
“Yeah. You’re sure? That whatever happened to her is the same thing that happened to the killer?”
“No,” Priest said. “We can’t be certain until we apprehend the killer and examine him. But it is the exact same pattern of behavior. And we’ve recovered traces of the crystals from all the victims, so . . .”
She gestured at all the bodies, as if they were anything other than what they were. He fought the impulse to be sick, thinking of all the hours he’d spent here, in his office, reading through case files, only some yards away from Jason’s frozen remains.
He hadn’t had time to fully process what it all meant, after Sunny had told him. First, they were together, and then Erickson’s murder. He thought again of the night that Jason had died. Of the killer shoving him down, the chase through town. The unnatural way in which the man had leapt over the fence. The third shotgun blast that left no trace. So many things that made no sense. Could this be what united them all?
And if the killer was infected with crystals, how could that help him narrow a pool of suspects? If crystals from Gulliver really had been in that water that the Tonys had given him, why didn’t it affect him in the same way? Then David looked again at the dead scientist.
“You said you’ve found crystals on all of the victims and on her,” he said, looking at Sunny, not Priest. “Crystals from the spire, though. Not from Gulliver . . . the giant, I mean?”
“Right,” she said, her voice still soft.
Then David pointed at Erickson.
“The cuts. The pattern. Then the one wound right through the chest. I’d never thought of it this way, but it’s like he’s trying to turn each victim into the giant. And then to kill it all over again.”
Another piece of information. Another rough shape tumbling through his thoughts, colliding against all the others. But at least now he knew the truth. He had all the pieces, and though there were so many of them, maybe they would start to find a way to fit, one to the next. Maybe this all could make sense.
Eventually, Priest left them, and Sunny moved at once to David and hugged him, throwing her weight into him, and he wrapped her in his arms and held her as tightly as he could, feeling his shirt dampen against his chest with her warm tears.
She looked up at him, and her expression was neither sad nor affectionate. She was scared.
“Be careful,” she warned. “There are other areas in this building. Places where I’m not allowed to go. There are things they’re hiding, even from me.”
David spent the rest of the day in his makeshift office, sitting and staring at the piled-up files and reports and photos. Dark crystals, somehow burrowing through skin, around tissue. Just dust, really, from some alien entity, causing all of the destruction he saw before him.
It made no sense. None of it made any sense.
He opened one of the folders on Jason again. There was a photo of Jason inside of it. Not an autopsy photo but something they’d probably pulled from social media. A photo of him, alive, tight on his broad face, a big grin plastered across it.
Some instinct drove David to tape the photo up on the far wall. Then he sorted through the other files, pulling photos of each victim, and taped those up as well, a few feet between each.
Next he taped up a printout of a satellite map, marked with red circles at the site of each killing. One near the airport. One at the strip mall to the northeast. One at the old courthouse. One in the parking lot to the far east. And one in Old Town, at the bar. No pattern to it. No grand shape described. No focused area.
David took a marker then and began writing on the walls around each of the photos. Whatever details struck him. Small lines going to other relevant details as each single case grew out.
Drug dealers. Killed at night. More precise than others. Took photos to send to media. Happened after drug bust. Related?
Once he was done with this, he stood back, surveying. Four little spider webs on the wall. Each with its own unique pattern but none of them connecting or cohering. No. That wasn’t right.
He drew one line, from Jason to Kapoor, the realtor. They had handled a land deal together, but there was nothing else to indicate they knew each other.
Looking again, he realized it wasn’t done. He didn’t have a photo, so he simply wrote “Erickson” and then circled it. Six victims. Six men who shared nothing in common. Nothing except for the brutal way in which they’d met their end.