Spider

33

West Village, SoHo, New York Howie Baumguard's all-time favourite movie scene was in Pulp Fiction: the part when Vincent goes to the toilet during a stakeout at the apartment of runaway boxer Butch and then Butch unexpectedly appears in the doorway with a Mac-10 and blows the hitman away while his pants are still around his ankles. Like most boys, even those in their mid-thirties, Howie is hooked on toilet humour. But what he told people killed him most about this scene was the sheer realism of it. As a cop who had found people dead on the pan (one heavy drug-user and one geriatric Mafioso with a heart condition), he loved the fact that Tarantino 'has the balls to tell it how it is'. Fittingly, Howie was taking his regula-as-clockwork morning dump, just as his cell phone rang. Now usually Howie would take one peek at the user display and forget about it until a more opportune moment. But as this call showed an Italian prefix, he automatically jammed the phone to his ear.

'Baumguard residence, how the fuck can I help you?'

Jack's laugh rolled down the line before he answered. 'Well, Mr B, glad to find you're up bright and early. How're you doing?'

'Early bird gets to bite the head off the friggin' worm, you know me, boss.'

Jack let the 'boss' remark slide. He guessed the big guy had been saying it for so long that he still hadn't managed to kick the habit. 'Well, when you've finished your bowl of worms and Cheerios, maybe you can let me in on why you've been calling my beloved wife? You and she got some kind of thing going? Maybe she found a way into your heart at last?'

'Right through my ribcage, that's the only way your wife would like to get into my heart.'

They both laughed. Then Jack hit a more sombre tone. 'Seriously, buddy. I got told a bit about your call. Nancy said it was serious.'

Howie swallowed his last chuckle. 'Yeah, it is. Man, we've been through some weird stuff together, but what I'm about to pitch is going to stump even you.'

'Hang on,' said Jack, as Nancy entered the bedroom with a silver tray of food covered with a crisp cotton napkin. Jack looked up and instinctively put a hand over the mouthpiece. 'Thanks,' he said, and his mind flashed back to their row.

Nancy said nothing, but as she put the tray on the bed she managed a half-smile before leaving.

'Jack, you still there?' shouted Howie, from thousands of miles away.

'Yeah,' said Jack. 'I'm sorry about that; Nancy's just brought me some food. Where were we?'

'Remember Sarah Kearney, the BRK victim buried back in Georgetown?'

'Yeah, sure do,' said Jack, pulling off the napkin and looking at the salad bowl of rocket, sliced tomatoes and succulent mozzarella fior di latte that Paolo had probably made only a few hours ago. 'She was a local girl, wasn't she? No kin, but I think I read that the local community took care of her service and buried her?'

'That's right, they did,' said Howie. 'And now it damned well looks like they could have saved their money. Some sick fuck, maybe BRK, has been back and dug her up.'

The blood froze in Jack's veins. 'You sure? You don't think it's vandals, some local crackheads?'

'No. You can't take enough crack to make you do what this sicko did. He dug up the coffin, got out the poor kid's bones and then sat her up against the headstone.'

'Posed it?' asked Jack, wondering whether BRK was taunting the FBI by the way he had left the skeleton, knowing the press would soon be around to take photographs.

'Looks that way. Some kids going fishing found her.'

Jack pushed a cherry tomato around the bowl with his fork but he was already losing his appetite. 'What the fuck would he want to do that for?'

Howie shrugged. He'd asked himself the same question. 'Beats me. We know these fucks get off by revisiting their crime scenes, sitting by their victims' graves and stuff, but digging up bones, well, that's in a different league to the one I'm used to.'

Jack wasn't convinced that it had been done for sexual kicks. 'Maybe he's trying to attract our attention?'

'Then he's doing a fucking good job,' Howie scoffed.

'You remember Massimo Albonetti?' asked Jack, deciding he should introduce the Italian case he'd been asked to help with.

Howie had to think for a second. 'Yeah. Cop from Rome, went on to head up their profiling unit. Weren't you and he tight for a while?'

'We were. I like him, he's a good guy, and he's just asked for some help on a case that has much more than a passing similarity to BRK's handiwork.'

'I hope you're kidding me,' said Howie.

'I wish I was. A woman's body parts have turned up all over the western coastline, and from the briefing notes I've seen there are certainly enough similarities to put BRK into the reckoning.'

'The hand?'

'The hand,' confirmed Jack. 'The left hand is missing and the bone cuts are the same. But there's more. Victim description also fits our series – dark hair, mid-twenties, slightly smaller than average height, all the usual stuff is in there.'

Howie grimaced as he tried to weigh up the impact of BRK killing on another continent. 'Why the hell would BRK be killing in Italy, and at the same time messing around in the US with the body of an earlier victim?'

'You thinking the Italian job is a copycat?' asked Jack, looking down at his salad bowl and deciding to try the mozzarella, then in the same second remembering the verb mozzare means 'to cut'.

'That's hard to buy,' said Howie. 'You'd have to believe that the graveyard incident in South Carolina and your case in Italy are both unconnected coincidences happening at almost exactly the same time.'

'Or conversely,' said Jack, 'you have to accept BRK is now working on two continents.'

Suddenly, there was the sound of heavy-fisted banging on Howie's bathroom door. 'Howie, you gonna stay in there all day?' shouted Carrie. 'I have to go before my Pilates class.'

'You in the bathroom?' asked Jack. 'Tell me you're not doing what I think you might be doing.'

'Right in the middle of it when you rang.'

'Oh, man, too much detail!' said Jack in the most disgusted tone he could manage.

'Hey, you asked. And you know I can never lie to you.'

'Believe me, Howie, at times like this, it's okay to lie.'

'Are you gonna let me in there?' shouted Carrie again.

'Just a minute, Jack,' said Howie. He turned from the cell phone. 'Carrie, will you please shut the fuck up for just one friggin' minute? I'm on the phone to Jack in Italy and I'm on the pan as well.'

'Un-fucking-believable!' came the reply, and she banged once more on the door before storming off.

Howie cleared his head and focused again. 'I'm sorry, buddy, a bit of a domestic waging here. Where were we?'

'Connections,' said Jack. 'We were discussing whether there's a connection between the Kearney incident, BRK and the Italian killing.'

'I'm sure it's BRK who visited Kearney's grave,' said Howie forcefully.

'Sure as in gut sure, or sure as in forensics sure?'

'Bit of both,' said Howie. 'He cut Kearney's head off her corpse and took it away.'

'Say what?'

'Sawed the skull clean off. And before you ask, we don't have anything back yet on exactly what he used to do that, but it was a saw cut, not brute force or blunt instrument.'

Jack pictured Sarah Kearney's desecrated body and felt a bolt of anger shoot through him. 'Heads aren't BRK's style. Okay, he's decapitated bodies before. Christ, he's severed every limb and mutilated every body part known to man, but that's functional not emotional; he did it to dispose of victims, not to take trophies. The hand has always been his thing, his one thing. I'm still not sure this is connected.'

'It's connected, Jack, trust me.'

'Go on,' said Jack, sensing he didn't yet have the full picture.

'We have the head. He mailed it directly to us.'

'To the FBI?' asked Jack.

'He mailed it to our New York office. Airport boys at International in Myrtle pulled the package as a matter of routine and scanned it.'

'He would have known that they would do that,' added Jack. 'No prints I suppose, nothing from AFIS?'

'It's cleaner than the Pope's underpants.'

'It's still not a clincher,' said Jack, continuing the role of devil's advocate. 'I accept that Sarah Kearney's grave has a special link to BRK. But exhuming the corpse is not in his MO, severing heads is not part of his offender profile and direct contact with the FBI is certainly not his style.'

Howie knew not to argue with Jack when he was on an analytical roll. 'You might be right,' he conceded, 'but there's one more thing, something that might alter your view. Whoever did this – BRK or no BRK – they mailed Sarah Kearney's decapitated skull to you. They put it in a box and addressed it to Jack King, care of the FBI in New York. So you tell me, Jack, why would some random whacko send you the severed head of one of BRK's victims?'