Bend, Oregon—Monday, January 19
She lies where she died, a lump of still-warm broken flesh on the barren, cold summit of a nameless hill overlooking the semiarid scrub of middle Oregon.
The man sits on his haunches several feet away, occasionally bouncing lightly, as if perched on a spring. He stares with unconcerned eyes at her body, throwing pebbles at her outstretched leg with the measured frequency of a metronome and counting the times he can successfully bounce them off her dead thigh.
The things you do to kill time.
He waits and watches, his senses tuned to his surroundings: the sights, smells, vibrations, and sounds of this exact moment in time, so that he’ll know instantly if something changes, but nothing does. It’s just like before. As the minutes march on, he grows increasingly frustrated and the pebbles become larger and the throwing becomes harder.
Twelve times he’s repeated the steps.
Twelve times he’s failed.
He glances at his watch, a stainless-steel Casio synced with the U.S. “atomic clock” in Boulder, Colorado. The digital readout is self-adjusting and flawlessly displays the day, month, year, hour, minute, and second. It’s accurate down to one billionth of a second, or so the salesman told him when he purchased it three years ago.
Such precision, such accuracy, and yet the watch betrays him, neither moving forward nor back, but continuing to tick tick tick the time away, as if it were an ordinary watch and this was an ordinary day. He feels the urge to fling it from his wrist, but tosses another pebble instead, harder this time. The stone bounces off the abused thigh and lands almost in the same spot he’d plucked it from a moment before.
His failure makes no sense.
The codes had been difficult but decipherable, and the images, though obtuse, came into focus and started to make sense when you studied them long enough, stared at them long enough, screamed at them long enough. He was certain his interpretation was correct from the moment he discovered it, and he’s certain now; it’s the only thing that makes sense. And yet here he is again, having diligently followed the instructions of the codes and images, and nothing has changed.
His great result is no result.
The only thing different this time was the age of the catalyst. The others were in their late teens to early twenties—at the peak of their energy. This one is older; could that mean the difference between success and failure? Was that the one element that ruined the experiment?
He didn’t think so.
He’d walked a circle around the body fifteen times; once for each year, just as before. He’d elevated the arms and then returned them, so they were perpendicular to the body, pointing east and west. And he’d spread the legs into a wide stance and then returned them so that they pointed south, just as before. He even used true north as his guide, expecting that Da Vinci would have done the same.
That was something he hadn’t figured out until just recently.
His therapist had called his ideas delusions. He would have stopped going after the first such utterance if not for his mother, who insisted that he continue his treatment or forfeit access to his substantial trust fund.
The sessions were weekly, so he tolerated them.
Besides, he had bigger problems these days, mainly the report a few months earlier about the so-called “Leonardo” killer. The article itself was shruggable, the kind of story most would scan quickly before moving on, unless the deed happened in their hometown.
He knew about the article only because he keeps an eye out for such stories. His computer runs automated news searches for terms like homicide and body, but only when they match the names of the eleven—now twelve—towns and villages that he has scribbled down on a torn sheet of paper in his top drawer.
His therapist knew of his interest in Da Vinci, and particularly the Vitruvian Man. It was the main element of his so-called delusions, and it was only a matter of time before she too stumbled upon the article. She followed such things, and if the Leonardo story gained traction, she would put two and two together and arrive at him.
That’s why she had to go, risky as it was. No doubt her patients would be high on the suspect list, but he’d seen to that, forcing her to delete all the files related to him. He also deleted her schedule and pulled his substantial file from her filing cabinet. It now smolders in his wood-burning stove.
The trail has been erased … mostly.
There were things about him that she never knew, never imagined. Things that drove him crazy, true schizoid-nuts, the bang-your-head-on-the-wall type of stuff. It was the quest for Leonardo’s secret that kept him on an even keel, that gave him hope, that kept him from putting a gun in his mouth.
Glancing down at Dr. Emma Nicholson as she cools on the frigid winter ground, he’s struck once more by how beautiful she is. It was the one thing that made their sessions tolerable. He tosses another pebble at her thigh and finally accepts the failure.
Still, this could change everything.
Even if they find no link to him, the police will be all over Emma’s history, her patients, where she lived, where she worked out, where she ate. He feared this most. And yet, it was Emma who had taught him to embrace his fears, to take power away from them.
A smile suddenly cracks across his frozen face and he rises. Walking ten paces to his backpack, he unzips the main compartment and digs around a moment before finding it. Closing the flap, he makes sure the backpack is zipped up tight before laying it back down and then walking back to Emma’s prone form.
Kneeling, he hikes her shirt up until the bottom quarter of her breast is exposed. Twisting the cap off the red marker, he writes seven words on her belly in bold block letters, taking care not to smudge the ink before it dries. Pressing the cap back in place, he stands and studies the seven words, the grand revelation.
“Goodbye, Doc,” he says, and as an afterthought, he reaches down and straightens her shirt, hiding the exposed belly and the contagious words. They’ll find it soon enough, but it’s a game now, and the pieces must be played one at a time.
He leaves the cold summit cloaked in the same indifference with which he arrived, though without the company of the beautiful and gifted Dr. Emma Nicholson. When he reaches the bottom of the hill he glances back, but only for a moment. There is no regret or remorse in the gesture, just the quiet discomforting knowledge that time marches on and nothing has changed.
When the wind kicks up later that afternoon, it comes from the south, a warm and steady breeze with occasional gusts that push the hastily smoothed shirt back up the torso of Emma Nicholson.
The exposed words look like a wound: red, raw, and open. To the casual observer they would mean little, just another clue among clues, something to be documented and entered into evidence. To the right eyes … well, those seven words will turn the world upside down.
Someone waits for those words.
They don’t yet know that they wait for this revelation, but they wait nonetheless. He made sure that the words and those seeking them will find one another. The first four words—FBI DONOVAN AND CRAIG—read like a partial postcard address, as if Emma’s body were the message and her death the cost of postage. The words perch on her belly, scratched there in letters two inches high.
If the first four words are the address, the last three are a warning. In other circumstances they would be fun words, the kind of words you say while cooing at a baby or playing hide-and-seek. Here, in this context, they’re poignant and chilling.
I SEE YOU.