Read Online Twisted by Jay Bonansinga - Free Book Online Page B

hard-boiled egg, with a corona of gelatinous color—the iris—and a fuzz of tiny white cilia around its milky spherical retina. Like a little tulip bulb, De Lourde’s severed eye also sported a purple stem—the optic nerve—that snaked off the side of each photograph. Most human eyeballs, when viewed outside their owner’s cranium, have a sheen and a weight to them, which is apparent in photographs. De Lourde’s was no different. Billions of vitreous cells inside the sclerotic shell are ever coiled to translate visual information down the optic canal to the brain. Images take on meaning.
    Profiles begin to take shape.
    Also clipped to the board were close-ups from De Lourde’s autopsy, highlighted by lavish microphotography of the strange ridged wounds on the professor’s upper lip, chin, and soft palate. On the far edge of the conference table sat a row of Zip-Loc evidence bags, each one filled with a crucial item such as the metal carabineer that Grove had found outside his hotel, or shavings from the cobblestones. The rest of the blackboards and flip charts around the room were plastered with graphics and satellite images of another kind of eye, a far larger and more elusive one.
    â€œIt was delivered to me,” Grove finally said in a flat, unaffected tone.
    â€œBy the perp, you mean?”
    Grove shrugged. “Could have been the perp, could have been an intermediary. But it was meant for me , it’s fueling the fantasy here. It’s a symbol, a talisman. For some reason, our guy wants me to break this thing.”
    â€œShades of the BTK Killer?”
    â€œSomething like that.”
    Pilch frowned. “I gotta tell ya, I got nothin’ but respect for you Behavioral Science boys ... but this one just doesn’t add up.”
    Grove looked at Pilch. “I would agree with you, Chief. It doesn’t add up. Not yet.”
    Pilch was about to respond when Detective Brenniman spoke up. “We’re sure this here eyeball belongs to the victim, to the professor?”
    All heads turned toward Dr. Nesbitt, the coroner, who sat perched on a windowsill in the rear, his bald pate shiny with nerves, his scowl reflecting his disgust. “Yes, well ... preliminary blood-typing and DNA analysis show a match, although the manner in which the eyeball was lost is still undetermined. Now maybe it’s just me, but I just don’t see how y’all can call that irrefutable evidence of a wrongful death. Hell, after Katrina, we had people impaled on parking meters, lobotomized by slivers of glass. Shoot, there were some eaten by gators . That don’t mean there was serial killers roaming around.”
    Grove had expected this from the coroner, and didn’t say anything right away. Instead, he calmly went over to his briefcase, which sat open on the corner of the table. He dug inside a flap and pulled out a sheaf of Xeroxes faxed earlier that morning from the Okaloosa County medical examiner down in Fort Walton Beach, Florida.
    â€œThese were DOAs that came into the Okaloosa Morgue yesterday,” Grove explained, holding the photographs up for all to see. “They came in only hours after Hurricane Darlene had moved through the area—about two hundred miles from here.”
    The room got a lot quieter then. The sounds of shifting feet under the table, throats being cleared. The photographs were stark, ghastly close-ups of faces. Bloodless, dead faces. A woman named Suzanne Kennerly. An octogenarian named Barney Kettlekamp. A thirtyish businessman named David Stohlp. Each face was toothless, and each featured a hideous, livid, purplish socket from which a missing eye had been extracted.
    â€œTom, you should have copies,” Grove said to the speaker box on the table.
    â€œGot ’em,” the voice crackled. “So tell me what we’re looking at here.”
    â€œLet’s start with the MO,” Grove began, walking slowly around the