Three young middle-management types with laminate badges and sport coats bustled around the oblong teleconference room, which was lined with acoustic tile and blazing with fluorescent light. A large plasma screen hung on the far wall, flickering with an image of color bars. A shrill tone rang out from speakers embedded in the ceiling, and the air smelled of burnt coffee.
Corboy took a seat at the head of the conference table, motioning for Grove to sit across from him.
Grove did so, opening his briefcase, pulling out his notebook. “What are we looking at here?” he wanted to know.
The Director gave a terse nod to one of the underlings, and the sport coat fiddled with a keyboard. The screen flickered with shaky handheld video footage of a deserted beach—presumably Galveston Island—framed in a window on one side of the screen, an unidentified talking head on the other.
Corboy spoke up: “Are we on yet? Agent Phipps? Can you hear us?”
The talking head, a square-jawed man with a buzz cut and cheap sport coat, was wrestling an earpiece into his ear. “Keith Phipps here, Houston field office.” The man’s southwestern drawl crackled out of the speakers, slightly out of sync with his mouth. “Who am I speaking with?”
“You’ve got Louis Corboy here, along with Ulysses Grove, Quantico.”
“Fellas, I gotta be honest with y’all…I’m not sure what we got here.”
“Go ahead and run it down for us.”
Onscreen the man read off a small spiral-bound notebook in his hands: “We got a white, female victim, looks like multiple stab wounds. Latent has nothing. Looks like smooth gloves.” He looked up into the camera. “Y’all gettin’ this?”
Grove watched the shaky footage on the opposite side of the screen. The camera panned to the left, then tilted down, revealing drag marks in the sand, a dark smudge—most likely blood—and footprints. Like a Xerox copy of North Carolina. The camera panned to the right and a dark bundle came into view. The camera moved in closer, finally revealing the pale, sodden remains of Madeline Gilchrist.
“We’re seeing it,” Corboy commented flatly. “This footage was taken this morning?”
“No, actually, it was early this afternoon, at low tide,” Phipps explained. “Wanted to get as much physical evidence on record before it washed away. What happened was, just as soon as I got the MO up on the wires, I get a call from the Mid-Atlantic folks with Minneapolis on the other line—the modus here I guess matches both those deals.”
“You got a positive on the vic yet?”
The man on the screen looked at his notebook. “Gilchrist, Madeline Louise, resident of the South Houston area. Age forty-one, single, no criminal record. Understand she was a student at South Dayton Junior College. ME reports just came back, toxicology has a cocktail of thiopental, prescription antidepressants in her bloodstream.”
Grove clenched his teeth as he watched the poorly framed high-def image zoom into a close-up of the dead woman’s porcelain-white face, matted with blood and hair and seaweed. A cold, sharp knife-edge touched his heart. His eyes watered. “Agent Phipps, Ulysses Grove here—got a question.”
“Go ahead, sir.”
“What part of Galveston is the scene located in?”
“I guess you could say this part of the island’s more of a transitional area. Commercial docks, bait shops, marinas, things of that nature.”
The averages clicked in Grove’s mind. He stared at the screen. The shaky image panned across the blood-soaked sand, the stains like photocopies of both the blood-spattered wall in Minneapolis and the carnage-strewn beach in North Carolina. “Let me guess,” Grove said. “There’s a grand total of eleven sharp trauma wounds between the six vertebra and the sacrum.”
On the screen the field agent looked at the coroner’s report, then looked up. “That’s right, did somebody—?”
“Time of death,” Grove went on, staring at the table now, “is somewhere between eleven and noon Central Standard Time.”
“Yeah, that’s correct, but how did—?”
“Cause of death is heart failure stemming from hypovolemic shock.”
“That’s correct.”
Grove closed his eyes. “Victim was last seen at a public place within fifty miles of the dump site.”
Onscreen, Agent Keith Phipps was frowning. “Right again. But how—?”
Corboy let out an irritated sigh. “Grove, that’s enough—”
Grove kept his eyes closed. “Victim was kept alive for approximately twelve hours before the fatal wounds were inflicted.”
“Grove—”
“There were three distinct shoeprints found at the scene, one of them male, size eleven and a half E.”
“Grove, we get it,” Corboy grunted.
“Tire marks a hundred yards from the scene indicate a large multipurpose vehicle.”
“Grove, I said that’s enough!”
The suddenness and volume of Corboy’s outburst made Agent Phipps jerk with surprise at the pop in his earpiece. He stared into the camera. “What’s going on?” He let out a dry little nervous chuckle. “Y’all didn’t tell me I’d be visitin’ with a psychic.”
“Agent Phipps,” Corboy said, his voice laced with thinly veiled anger, “we have reason to believe we got a copycat situation—”
Grove saw something. “Hold on a second, hold on…hold on.” He stood up, his startled tone of voice making everybody in the room pause. He stared at the shaky video. “Stop the playback—freeze it!”
“What?” Agent Phipps looked confused.
“Freeze the video, please.”
Agent Phipps glanced off-camera, whispering something to an assistant.
Grove watched the shaky image panning across foamy waves washing up across the beach. He cocked his head slightly, favoring his good eye, as he stared—an unconscious habit he had developed since his left eye had been injured.
All at once the video froze.
“Okay, now I need you to rewind it, just go back about five seconds.”
Agent Phipps glanced off camera. “Johnny, you get that? Back it up five seconds.”
Corboy rose. “What is it, Grove? What are we looking at here?”
The image blurred slightly as it quickly rewound. The camera was panning across the beach in reverse, scanning the dirty sand, the shells and trash and shards of driftwood littering the beach. Grove took a step closer to the screen. “Right there! Freeze it there!”
Phipps said, “Pause it right there, Johnny.”
Corboy stared at the screen. “What is it?”
The image froze at an awkward angle—right in the middle of a zoom—showing a portion of a bloodstain on the right, a slice of the beach, and part of the sky. Off to the left, the edge of a boardwalk was visible.
“Upper left-hand corner, by the dock.” Grove pointed at the screen. “See it?”
“No, I don’t.” Corboy shook his head. “What are we looking at?”
“In the sand.” Grove took another step toward the screen until he was close enough to touch the pebbled fabric of the projection surface. “See the writing?”
“Writing?”
Grove leaned closer. In his one good eye, the glowing image broke up into a matrix of ten thousand pixel dots, a scarlet pointillist painting. “Bottom of the piling.” He spoke in a low, controlled tone now, brushing his fingertip across the screen. “A few inches to the right. See it? I promise you that’s not part of your average scene.”
Corboy kept shaking his head. “Okay, I see symbols of some kind, chicken-scratch, I just don’t—”
“And then the camera pans away.” Grove swallowed hard, looked at his watch, a twinge of panic pinching his gut. “When exactly was this video taken?”
Keith Phipps looked at his notes. “Um, let’s see…”
“Easy does it, Grove.” Corboy looked confused, irritated. “You left me in the dust here. Some local scratches something in the sand with a stick—big deal. How do you know that’s even part of the scene?”
Phipps looked into the camera. “Video was taken at one-thirty this afternoon.”
Grove clenched his jaw, the sudden pain radiating. “You said that’s around low tide, right?”
“Yeah. Just about.”
Grove glanced again at his watch. “It’s almost two.” He looked at the screen. “When’s high tide?”
Phipps gave a shrug. “I dunno, seven-ish, something like that.”
“That’s five hours, at the most. Probably less than that. You got anybody out there right now?”
“Couple of uniforms maybe, I don’t know. The scene’s taped off.”
Grove’s heart thumped as he stared at the partial image of something scrawled in the soggy, dirty sand on-screen. It looked like worm tracks curling and spiraling back on themselves, crisscrossing, looping, slashing. “Get the lab guys back there, Phipps. Get a cast of that stretch of sand near the piling.”
“I understand what you’re saying, but I’m not sure we can get a cast before the tide comes in.”
“Then get a goddamn backhoe and lift the whole thing out of the beach.”
“Again it’s a matter of time—”
“Get them back there, Phipps. Trench it off from the water somehow. Get digitals of it, plenty of close-ups. Get shots of it at least.”
“But—”
“Less than five hours from now the sea’s gonna take that message.” Grove whirled toward the Director. “Let’s go ahead and scramble a plane out of Andrews; we can make it out there in three hours if we catch a tailwind.”
Corboy looked as if he’d just swallowed a chicken bone. “Goddamnit, Grove, slow down. How the hell do you know that was left by the perp? Even if it’s fresh, it’s just some kid with a stick.”
Grove barely heard the man. He threw his notes in his briefcase, snapped the attaché shut, then headed for the door. Corboy grabbed him. The two men came nose to nose. Everybody in the room waited. “Goddamnit, Grove, it’s a kid with a stick.”
Grove stared at Corboy. “How many kids in Texas with sticks have a command of Sumerian, you think?”
“A command of what?”
“Sumerian, Lou. It’s written in Sumerian. It’s a dead language.”
Corboy released his grip on the profiler, then turned and glowered at the two-dimensional image of worm tracks on the projection screen.
Grove had already vanished out the door.