Twist (Book 1): The Abnorm Chronicles-Twist (9 page)

Chapter
20

Cooper stepped off the elevator in the victim’s apartment building. The crime scene was almost a day old, and the techs had already combed over it the night before, but he might still find salient details to help him see more of the pattern.

He
identified Chloe Eccles’s apartment by the crime-scene tape crisscrossed over the doorway. An evidence seal was taped over the closed door and frame near the knob. He had already called Detective Jones, who would join him in half an hour to reseal the scene, but Cooper wanted a look around alone, so he could absorb the subtleties without the detective watching.

Before touching the tape or evidence seal, he
inspected the doorframe. There were no disturbances or marks on the frame, nothing to indicate the door had been forced or that the victim had attempted to fight back or shut the door on the killer. It must have been fast. He squatted and rubbed his finger along the floor, but found only ordinary grime. No scuff marks or shoe prints he could discern.

Cooper slid his thumbnail through the tape
, lifting the evidence seal. The door was not locked—apparently the police thought that crime-scene tape was sufficient security—and he opened the door very slowly, careful not to disturb any details.

Before entering, he looked at the floor, careful not to step in any blood, but the
immediate area of the entryway was clean. After her throat was cut, Chloe Eccles had fallen away from the door, and to the side. Arterial spray covered the walls. Cooper could smell the tang.

He closed
the door behind himself. Standing in next to the one clean spot where the open door would have shielded the wall, he studied the rest of the blood spatter. Crime scene reports from the previous murders had been inconclusive when it came to determining the killer’s height from the spatter pattern. With his gift for pattern recognition, though, Cooper had an advantage that all the computers in the world did not. He drew on other details, the totality that came from peripheral vision, touch, taste, smell. He engaged all of his senses.

Slowly,
Cooper pantomimed the motion of gripping a bottle in his right hand and slicing the air where the victim would have stood. He made a short jerking movement with his arm, trying to line up with the blood spatter he saw on the wall. He repeated the motion, making minor alterations to his stance. He crouched, then stood on tiptoe, leaned to the side, leaned forward, trying to replicate the motion that his mind would connect with the specific blood pattern.

After methodically working his way through fifty different poses, he
cataloged all the angles then stopped and stood still. Closing his eyes, he focused in on the space, let his body find the negative spaces, the spots he had missed. Vectors of force, angles, and heights spun through his mind as his hand hovered, responding to what his brain saw. Crouching down and leaning forward, angling his body to the left, he found the spot where the first drops of fresh blood had started to leave the jagged edge of the broken bottle.

He froze in place
. The angle made very little sense. If the door had been open from the victim letting the killer in, then it should have gotten in the way, based on where his left shoulder was. Even if the killer were smaller in stature, the lines didn’t match up. Making a mental note, Cooper moved on. An aberration might lead to new information, and with any luck that would lead to an epiphany.

Cooper worked
his way around the edges of the wall, mindful not to disturb the dried blood on the floor. He knew how not to taint the crime scene. Once past the threshold, he could smell a litter box, remembered that Chloe Eccles had owned a cat, which had been taken away to a shelter. The cat hadn’t been able to disturb the scene either.

When he entered the victim’s living room
, he tilted his head to the side and looked out the window. Sure enough, he could just make out Adam Lee’s window across the street and up several stories. Impossible to see inside, but he had no doubt that the wheelchair-bound watcher was sitting at his window, even in the dark. He would probably be watching, suspicious to see movement in the victim’s apartment. Not wanting him to call in another 9-1-1 report, Cooper raised a hand, signaling to him, sure that Adam had spotted him already.

As he turned
back to look at the closed door, he tried to plot Adam’s lines of sight on the outer hallway and the elevator. The disabled vet’s hyperacute vision and assimilative perception had amazed Cooper, who was very familiar with Brilliant gifts. He hoped Adam could see something, add up details that would elude Detective Jones, even Cooper. When he got back to Washington, he would have Adam Lee reassessed for a potential tier-two or even tier-one gift.

Now, though, he focused on the crime scene.

He glanced back and forth between the elevator and Adam’s window, then opened the apartment door again. Kneeling, he analyzed the angles between the pool of blood, window, and elevator. Moving along the wall, he tried to understand where and how the victim had fallen. Cooper recalled the crime-scene photo, the young woman sprawled on the floor, her knees bent, ankles and heels almost touching the wall, her legs angled to the side. It felt to him, intuitively, as though the killer had been holding part of Chloe’s body. Maybe a shoulder? Maybe a handshake? Something had prevented her from just collapsing straight down—or straight back.

He moved
deeper into the victim’s apartment. When he tracked down a case for Equitable Services, an important ingredient in Cooper’s process was to know everything he could about the subject. The more he learned about personality, the more he understood why the subject made certain choices and what future choices he or she would make. Now he had to understand Chloe Eccles, murder victim.

Cooper glanced around. First impression: messy. Clothes casually tossed in corners, stuffed in drawers
, except for an Air Force–cadet uniform hanging on the wall. Another military connection. He would have to check her records.

The girl’s Equitable Services file said that she had a
tier-five gift: photographic memory and the ability to recreate artistically what she saw. Examples of the gift lay scattered around the apartment. Sketch pads with drawings of perfect skylines, photo-realistic landscapes, and portraits that seemed to show the subject’s every hair and fleck. As a Brilliant, she was an amazing artist, but the DAR had not flagged her talent as something potentially damaging to society.

As a
tier five, Chloe Eccles had not been pulled off to the Academy, which was reserved for tier ones and sometimes tier twos. Those schools were designed to instruct only Brilliants, and only the most talented ones. The smartest. The most potentially destructive. The Academy was a relatively new institution, another example of how the world was changing with the advent of Brilliants.

Since he was born in 1981, at the very beginning of the first wave of Brilliants,
Cooper was too old to have been pulled into the Academy. He was part of the first generation, before society or government knew how to handle the wave of genetic aberrations.

Because she saw so much detail, f
ew of Chloe’s drawings involved crowds. Most of the sketches were of individual people. Cooper used his datapad to take photos of each portrait, on the off chance that the victim had seen, and drawn, her own killer.

Cooper
found a sketch pad on the floor next to a love seat. Turning the pages carefully, he stopped in surprise. There was a sketch of Adam Lee in his wheelchair, framed by his seventh-floor window. So, she had noticed him watching. Cooper flipped through the sketchbook. There were drawings of buildings and streets, but every few pages he came across another sketch of Adam Lee.

N
ot only had Chloe noticed him, she had been fascinated by him. Pictures showed a range of his emotions, different expressions on his face; some of them included his hand pressed against the window as if it were an impenetrable barrier. On the very last sketch in the pad, she had written, “Why are you so sad?”

He looked out the window. From here, it was much easier to see Adam
, dim lights on in his apartment, maybe from the kitchen. The figure didn’t move in his chair; maybe he was slumbering.

Cooper
removed the last sketch from the pad and gently slid it into his jacket pocket.

Chapter
21

Ingrid shuffled papers into the appropriate file folders and stacked them on her desk. That morning, she had reorganized several appointments so she could meet Agent Cooper at Adam’s apartment. She was quite pleased at the change in her patient, how he seemed engaged and interested in helping, even opening up enough to explain his gift—and crying for Chloe. He had never done that before, certainly not in front of her. It had been a breakthrough.

Still, it had also thrown her schedule into an uproar, and now after a
nightmarish day of catching up, she was just wrapping up all of her file notes at 11:00 p.m. Another exciting Friday night for Ingrid Wolverton. She would have to take a stack of work home. Again.

A
weekend of downtime would do her good, and catching up on casework was how she relaxed. She knew it was sad, pathetic actually. But working on files with a glass of wine and a movie on in the background was her idea of heaven.

She
took the selected folders from her desk, including Adam Lee’s, and shut off the lights in the office. She locked the door behind her before heading out. Despite the late hour, the halls of the VA Hospital buzzed with activity, especially near the ER. The joys of Friday night.

As she walked toward the parking garage, s
he thought about how Adam had reacted to Agent Cooper. The fact that Cooper was also a Brilliant and could understand his gift in a way that Ingrid never could, might have helped Adam open up.

She paused
at the sliding glass doors to pull her brown cardigan over her blouse before heading into the chilly parking structure. With the case file folders tucked under her arm, she walked to her car and stopped to pop the trunk with her keys. She dropped the file folders in and paused before pulling Adam’s file back out. Before the drive home, she wanted to read through her notes on the conversation earlier that day.

Adam lived his life vicariously
by watching other people. The murder he’d witnessed—the loss of one of his secondhand lives—seemed to have opened a door in him, given him a purpose. Maybe it had pushed him into participating in his own life again. Even with the grim circumstances, Ingrid didn’t want to waste the opportunity. She could do nothing to erase the murder, but she could help her patient. This might indeed be a breakthrough.

S
he dropped the file back in with the others and slammed the trunk. Still holding the car keys in her hand, she paused, wondering if she should run back to her office and grab Agent Cooper’s number.

Ingrid
never saw the attack coming. The glass of a broken bottle tore into her neck like razor-edged teeth.

She
flailed, grabbed at her throat, but the attacker pushed harder, twisted the sharp broken bottle, and ripped the cut wider. Ingrid collapsed against her car. Her vision was already going dark as gouts of blood drained out of her. She felt something tugging her hands, her assailant grabbing . . . her keys. She gurgled. She heard her trunk open. The file folders . . .

On
the concrete next to her face lay a broken bottle of whiskey. She saw blood pooling under it. Her blood. She managed to look back up at the car, the killer standing at the trunk.

Ingrid
blinked, trying to understand what had just happened, but her eyes never reopened.

SATURDAY

Chapter 22

The hotel room was neither welcoming nor restful, but it was a place to sleep. Cooper crashed for several hours but merely stared at the dark insides of his eyelids as thoughts spun around inside his head, images of the murder victims, data from the crime scenes, Adam Lee’s explanation of the myriad sight lines that allowed him to see so much of the world from his tiny, distant shell. All the threads in the case were like those sight lines now, and they tangled up in Cooper’s mind.

And he had been so preoccupied that he hadn’t even been able to make a call home, until it was far too late—plus add two hours for
eastern time. Natalie would be worried about him, and he should have remembered in time to talk to Todd before bedtime, but he chose not to wake them up with another middle-of-the-night phone call.

He must have dozed, but when he woke early the next morning, he knew
there was no use trying to get back to sleep. Instead, he dressed and made his way back to the police department. Fortunately, the station house didn’t have open and closed business hours.

Even by 7
:00 a.m., the place was a bustle of activity, and he used his Visitor’s badge to get access to the conference room. Assuming Detective Jones wasn’t in for his shift yet, he sat down in front of the crime boards and studied them, again without seeing any more connections in the pattern.

In less than half an hour, a
harried-looking Jones poked his head into the conference room. “Hey, Nick?”

“J
ust call me Cooper.” He had been lost between the whiteboards and the Denver map. There was something behind the edges of what he could see, he was sure of that. And he had less than six days before the killer struck again. “I’m surprised you’re in so early.”

Jones looked disturbed.
“We’ve got another body, throat slashed with a broken bottle.”

Startled, Cooper cocked his head
to the side. “But it’s not Thursday.” Maybe it was a copycat, or just a crime of passion. In the state of Colorado it seemed everybody had a gun and a concealed-carry permit, but broken bottles were even more readily available to anyone having an argument. “You sure it’s connected?”

“You tell me.” Jones extended a case folder.
“Last night at the VA Hospital. The victim was found in the parking structure, throat slashed by a broken bottle of whiskey, which was left at the scene.”

Cooper
reached out to take the folder but froze before looking at it. “Was it Dr. Ingrid Wolverton?”

Jones
blinked. “How the hell did you know that, man?”

Cooper sighed
, feeling a heaviness in his gut. “Our witness, Adam Lee. She was his therapist.”

“
Right the first time. I met her Thursday night when we tried to take wheelchair boy’s statement. But how did you guess that without even glancing at the file?”

“
It wasn’t really a hunch, more a hope that it wouldn’t be true. Dr. Wolverton isn’t registered with the DAR as a Brilliant—I already checked. But she was a special therapist assigned to Brilliants who were disabled vets. They’re registered through the VA as well as the DAR.” Cooper’s mind was racing. “Our murderer kills Brilliants who served in the military—and does it on Thursdays. Wolverton’s murder seems connected but reactive, not part of the careful plan.”

Cooper walked over to the
street map, inserting another colored push pin at the location of the VA Hospital, Eighth and Colorado. “Were there any witnesses? Any security cams? The hospital must have them.”

“
The parking structure is kept under video surveillance, but our killer ruined the cameras from the exterior wall on all levels of the structure to Dr. Wolverton’s car. I scanned the footage, and the feed just goes black. Someone spray painted the lenses.”

Cooper
thought it through. “So this person planned to kill Dr. Wolverton, worked out an elaborate plan to blind the cameras ahead of time.” That fit what he had suspected all along. “A Brilliant might be able to do that. We’d better look at the VA staff.”

Then another thought occurred to him.
“And what about Adam Lee? He’s our witness. If his therapist was murdered, maybe he’s in danger, too. Have you checked to see that he’s all right? Can you send a detail over there?”

“
Yeah, took care of that the second I spotted the connection, parked two uniforms in a squad car at the entrance to the apartment building.”

Cooper
stepped back, studying the new connections. “You think it would be possible to get someone into his apartment? Direct protection?”

Jones finished putting Ingrid
Wolverton on the victims’ board, then wrote “VA Staff?” on the suspects’ board. “Maybe, but I won’t get clearance to do that for more than a couple days. Do you think the killer’s going to strike again before Thursday? This is the start of an escalation? Or is it just an aberration?”

Cooper considered.
“My gut says both. I think the killer was covering his tracks with Dr. Wolverton, but the accelerated killing schedule might whet his appetite. I don’t think we have until Thursday.”

Jones frowned, thinking about it.
“All right, if I’m going to get somebody stationed inside Lee’s apartment, I gotta go push some paperwork.”