Spider

13

FBI Field Office, New York Special Agent Howie Baumguard sat at his desk, losing a messy hand-wrestling competition with a deli lunch. The bagel spewed salmon out of one side and low-fat cheese out of the other. He licked the cheese away but the salmon hit his paperwork before he could juggle it into his hungry mouth. He'd missed breakfast and had been forced to cancel a lunch appointment, so right now the bagel and a blisteringly hot Americano figured top of his list of life's priorities. Howie was carrying too much weight, not just for his own liking but also for that of Carrie, his size-zero, Botox-addicted wife, who'd pronounced that either the 'love handles' went or Howie could start learning how to cook for one on the few cents she'd leave him after she sued his fat ass for all the alimony she could get.

Not many people would have been able to even think about eating when faced with what was on Howie's desk, but the FBI man had seen much worse and eaten much more. The pictures had been sent in by the cops over in Georgetown and downloaded and printed up by Admin. The glossies were good CSU shots, cold and brutal in their framing but hugely informative. Wide angles set the scene, first from out on the streets that surrounded the cemetery. Then there were 'aerials', high views, presumably from the nearby church, that showed the layout of the graves. Gradually the shots got closer to the desecration. They were framed wide-angle, then medium close-up, big close-up and finally damned near microscopic.

Howie's chubby fingers struggled to pick up the stray salmon. Finally, he caught it and then accidentally wiped the grease residue on a mid-shot of Sarah Elizabeth Kearney's decapitated corpse. Poor kid, thought Howie, dabbing away the grease, just twenty-two when she was butchered. If she'd lived, she would have been forty-two today, probably with a daughter of her own and maybe even grandkids. What kind of sick fuck would rob someone of their future like that? And more to the point, what even sicker fuck would dig her up two decades later and pull the skull off her skeletonized corpse? Howie shook his head in disbelief. To the best of his knowledge, twenty-first-century grave-robbing was damned unusual stuff. On the rare occasions that it happened, the perp was usually some whacked-out druggie, maybe a weird devil worshipper or, every now and then, an extremely disturbed husband who simply couldn't accept that his wife was gone for ever. Local cops always tried to hush up these kinds of cases and the newspapers usually played ball on the latter.

But there would be no chance of keeping this one quiet. No siree, the press wires were already buzzing like a queen bee at mating time. Seemed a Georgetown hack had got lucky with some photographs of his own. The little weasel had no doubt got a tip-off from the cops or ambulance crews, or maybe had even been listening in to the 911 comm's traffic. Anyway, he'd netted himself an exclusive and the pictures were now J-pegging their way across the news world and banking him some big bucks.

Howie looked at one of the hack's shots, forwarded to him by Billy Blaine, a tame NYC journo who ran a press agency and often traded favours with the feds. The shot was certainly a good one. Howie wiped his fingers again and held up the print that had been faxed through to his office. Even though it was a telephoto 'snatch', it was rock steady, with no blur or shake. Nodoubtthe guy had used one of those new fangled stabilizers that cost more than most people's cameras. Howie was always teasing the CSU boys that hacks took better pictures and this was no exception. It had been shot low-angle between the headstones, so you could just see flashes of out-of-focus graves and a glint of sunshine from behind the photographer, but no sign of the cops and crime-scene tape that must have been making the shot incredibly difficult if not damn near impossible. Despite all the problems, everything that mattered was razor sharp, perfectly exposed and absolutely in focus. Smack, bang, centre of the frame was Sarah Kearney's headless skeleton, grotesquely propped against her headstone.

Howie shook his big head again. The picture had a truly shocking power. He held it out at arm's length, not because he had vision problems, but so he could imagine he was actually at the crime scene and had stepped back for a more considered look. Shit, thought Howie, if Steven Spielberg ever made horror movies then this was the kind of shot he'd take. It was out on its own, a real spine-tingler and too gruesome for the TV news channels. The Internet had no such scruples though; it was already top of the virals and had beaten the download record set after Saddam's hanging.

Howie took a hit of the Americano and turned his mind to Jack King. It had been nearly two months since they'd spoken, and even then it had only been small talk. Howie had been deliberately careful to avoid anything that might have scratched at old sores. 'How you doin'? How're Nancy and little Zack? Did you read about the Yankees star that got busted in Queens?' Guy stuff that kept their cop bonds and personal friendship alive. They'd been through hell together and Howie wasn't going to let the mere matter of a continent and six hours' time difference stand between him and his ex-boss. But now he was going to have to call Jack and tell him about the wacko shit going on at Kearney's grave. He needed to warn him that any minute all the stuff about him and his breakdown was likely to be back in the press again. Hell and damnation. Would this case never go away?

Howie Baumguard looked at the photographs again and knew what Jack would say. He knew it, just as sure as he knew that one day his stick-insect wife would leave him for a younger, fitter, more-at-home guy. No doubt about it, this was the work of one particular man, the work of BRK, the killer that he, Jack and all the rest of FBI's finest had never managed to catch.