Spider Read online

  But that’s not the plan, Spider. Stick to the plan. You have great things in mind for her; don’t ruin the bigger picture all because of one small setback.

  Spider looks down at his bandaged hand, blood still weeping from where she’d sunk her teeth into the soft flesh. The bones around the thumb still throbbing painfully.

  Lu Zagalsky can’t hide the fear in her eyes. She tries to mouth words at him, to plead for her life, but nothing comes.

  Her vocal cords have been bleached into silence.

  ‘Whorebitch!’ he shrieks and smashes the butt of the hardwood saw handle on to the bridge of her nose. ‘You think you can hurt me, and get away with it?’ he snarls. ‘You fucking, arrogant little whorebitch!’

  He hits her again with the butt of the saw and the pain from the second blow is so excruciating that she’s sure he’s broken her nose. Tears sting her eyes but her focus never leaves the blade.

  ‘Look at you!’ says Spider disgustedly. ‘Look at how filthy and unworthy you are.’ He stands back and laughs at her.

  It’s a spiteful, bullying, degrading laugh and in that split second Lu Zagalsky realizes that she’s soiled herself. Something she would never, not even in her darkest nightmares, have dreamt could happen to her. He’s right. This fucking crazy lunatic is right, sometime in the last five minutes, at the height of their struggle, she had failed to control herself.

  Spider sneers at her. ‘You’re disgusting. You’re no better than the others.’

  Lu tries to look away from him and bury her illogical feelings of shame by reminding herself of what this animal has done to her, and to the other tortured and murdered women who have preceded her.

  Spider’s lips flatten into a thin smile. ‘They’ve all done that. Sooner or later, all you dirty bitches shit and piss yourselves like that. Why did you think I stripped you naked?’

  Lu feels like sobbing. Was even this planned? Is everything now so hopeless. She turns her head away from him and tries again to tell herself that it is stupid to feel so childishly humiliated. Forget your stupid pride and dignity – this man is going to gut you like a fish; that saw in his hand is not there for fun, any second now he’s going to cut your throat and go slash-crazy over all your sorry little ass.

  Spider is feeling calm now. Everything is under control again. Nothing bad is going to happen. It feels good to have restored the balance of power.

  He walks behind her tethered body, kneels down and tightens the loose chain around her right wrist.

  Lu’s heart starts to pound hard. He’s doing something – he’s tightening the chains – why? Is he now going to kill me?

  Spider seems to read her fear. ‘I am going to kill you, Sugar.’ He holds the bone saw blade against her throat, the jagged teeth pressing painfully into her flesh. ‘But not with this, and not right now.’ He drags the saw blade lightly across her throat, enough to scrape the skin but not cut it. ‘Oh no, I’m going to kill you with something much more amusing than this.’

  31

  Rome

  Benedetta Albonetti was by no means the only love in Massimo’s life. As well as his wife, he had another great passion: a very sexy young model.

  His blue’97 Maserati Ghibli coupé had been a surprise gift. It had been left to him in the will of a Roman banker whom, almost two decades earlier, Massimo had saved during an armed robbery that ended in a very public and bloody shoot-out. Mass had picked up the classic car just six days after his fiftieth birthday and he intended to keep it until his dying day; which, Benedetta joked, would be sooner rather than later, judging by the way he drove it.

  Today, despite leaving the office early, it had taken him almost an hour to get out of the centre of Rome and another twenty minutes before he had a chance to ease the manual gearbox into sixth and open up the twin turbo. While Massimo could clearly see the irony of enduring a two-hour journey in a car that could hit 100 kph in less than six seconds, instead of catching a sluggish metro train that would have got him home in less than thirty minutes, he couldn’t care less. He loved every minute he spent in the Maserati, and, for him, the daily drive home to the seaside village of Ostia wasn’t an ordeal, it was ‘therapy’. It was his way of leaving work behind, both geographically and mentally. Usually, by the time he pulled up outside his modest three-bedroomed house, he was a completely different person from the police Direttore who immersed himself in a world of blood spatters, body swabs and bullet entry wounds.

  Fifteen minutes from Ostia, his in-car telephone rang. When he answered, the voice of Jack King immediately made him slow down.

  ‘Where are you?’ asked Jack, acutely aware of the engine noise as the Maserati growled its reluctance to be shifted from sixth into fourth.

  ‘On my way home,’ shouted Mass, fiddling with the awkward blue-tooth ear attachment that he hated wearing. ‘Benedetta and the children are flying to Nice, to be with her sister and some friends of hers. I have promised to take them to the airport, so I left the office early.’

  ‘I hope they’re well,’ said Jack. ‘Nancy was asking after them.’

  ‘Grazie,’ said Massimo. ‘So, do I understand then that you have told your charming wife everything about our conversation?’

  ‘Most of it,’ answered Jack. ‘Though of course I spared her some of the details. There’s no need for her to know too much, you understand how they all worry.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Massimo. ‘And after talking with her, you are still willing to help?’

  ‘Would I be calling if I wasn’t? Where and when do you need me?’

  ‘Rome. As soon as you can make it.’

  ‘Okay. Fine.’

  ‘When will that be, Jack?’

  He thought for a moment. ‘Not tomorrow. I need a day at home to sort things out, make sure Nancy is going to be okay running the hotel without me. How long do you think you’ll need me?’

  Massimo swore in Italian and sounded his horn at a big old Ford that seemed to extract great delight from undertaking and then cutting in front of the Maserati. ‘Scusi, some idiots on the road here,’ he explained, then added, ‘It’s hard to imagine you as an hotelier, Jack. You should think of being away a week. Maybe a couple of days here in Rome, then I’m sure you’ll want to go to the scene in Livorno.’

  Jack ran the dates through his head. ‘Sounds about right, but I don’t have much leeway, I have to be back for the eighth, it’s our wedding anniversary. I’m dead as Parma ham if I don’t make that.’

  ‘Non c’e problema,’ said Massimo, fighting an urge to chase the old Ford, fill its bonnet with his exhaust fumes, then pull the guy over and show him his badge.

  ‘You got a translator for me? You know my Italian is non-existent.’

  ‘Orsetta will go with you. Her English is good enough, no?’

  Jack hesitated. Really, he would rather she wasn’t there, but it would be impossible to explain why. ‘Sure, her English is just fine.’

  ‘She is bellissima, no?’ said Massimo, mischievously. ‘Una bella donna.’

  ‘Leave it out, Mass, you know me better than that. I’m a one-woman man, always have been, hope I always will be.’

  ‘Perfetto,’ answered Massimo. ‘Me too, but Orsetta, she would drive even the Holy Father to sin.’

  ‘Well, it’s not a complication I need in my life,’ said Jack. ‘The documents she gave me were useful, but I could do with more details.’

  ‘We will prepare a full brief for you when you arrive.’

  ‘Great, but I need the complete autopsy report as well. No disrespect, but your Medical Examiners are not US standard. Maybe we should have whoever did Cristina Barbuggiani’s examination on standby for interview? Will you please check he isn’t on holiday, and can see me sometime soon?’

  ‘The pathologist you ask for is a she,’ answered Mass. ‘I will make sure she is available for interview while you are here.’ Hesitantly, he added, ‘There are – how should we say – some other post-mortem details that were not in the report
that I sent you.’

  Jack remembered that the papers he’d seen had been a top-level report, sent to the Prime Minister’s private office. ‘Mass, the documents I saw had gone to the Prime Minister himself. Are you saying there’s something you are keeping from him, or is it something that you are keeping just from me?’

  Massimo Albonetti screwed up his face. ‘I’m afraid it’s something I have had to keep from both of you. Only a few people know what I refer to, and I am sorry but I cannot go into it on a phone line like this one. I promise though, I will tell you the very minute you get here.’

  Massimo said ‘Ciao’ and hung up before Jack could press the subject. And in that split second, Jack was sure he heard the Maserati growl down a gear and then let out a loud roar of hard acceleration.

  32

  Marine Park, Brooklyn, New York

  Spider leaves the basement and returns to his bedroom to fix his damaged hand. Beneath the sink in the bathroom he unlocks a medical cabinet that would be the envy of many a drugstore.

  He looks through his stock of local anaesthetics – Procaine, Lidocaine, Novocaine and Prilocaine. He’d obtained them via a fake medical trading firm that he’d set up, enabling him to deal with an array of online liquidation companies that regularly auctioned off surplus drugs and medical equipment. He’d found more than enough salesmen happy to take his order online and ship the supplies without ever asking for any medical licence checks.

  He settles on 50ml of Lidocaine, his favourite anaesthetic. He discards the rags he used in the basement to patch himself up, throwing them into the shower tray, not to wash but to take away and burn. The cloths had been in contact with the victim and he’d eventually get rid of them, along with the clothes he was wearing. Spider swabs the bitten area with a sterile wipe and injects the drug into the tissue surrounding the bite. As the nerves and muscles start to relax he checks out the wound. The bitch’s teeth have opened up quite a cut, deep enough for it not to heal on its own.

  Spider dips into the cabinet again and finds a box of wound closure Steri-strips. It’s difficult with one hand, but he takes his time and soon does a decent job of closing the cut with the adhesive strip. He finishes it off with a wraparound elastic bandage and strips of Band-Aid.

  After relocking the medicine cabinet he returns to the bedroom and sits on the edge of his coffin-like bed. He nurses the hand and checks the bandage, then turns on a small portable television beside him. The set crackles into life but there’s no picture on the screen, just a fog of sizzling grey static.

  The first channel he tunes to throws up a black-and-white picture of the road outside his house. The screen is split into four. The top two shots show wide-angle views of all approach roads to the house, coming from east and west. The lower two pictures feature tighter shots of the outside of the garage and the front door. The framing has been precisely calculated to capture the head and shoulders of any callers and the cameras have fully remote tilt, pan and zoom facilities to track any movements. Spider presses the remote control again, and once more, four quarter-frame black-and-white pictures fill the screen. Camera One shows the basement in an extra-wide shot. The black plastic on the walls, ceiling and floor have lowered the light level so much that it’s impossible to see where one surface ends and another begins. The result is that the prostrate body of Lu Zagalsky appears to be floating in the middle of space. Of all the camera shots, it’s this one that Spider loves most. He imagines her in the total, never-ending darkness of afterlife, suspended there for ever – eternally his. The next shot comes from an overhead camera, fixed to a ‘hothead’, a special device that allows the lens to rotate 360 degrees as well as zoom in and out. The third and fourth cameras are set at much lower angles. Camera Three is fixed behind Lu’s head and looks down her body. Camera Four is a reverse angle, positioned at the same height as Camera Three but looking up her body from a line along her left foot. From his remote control, Spider is able to direct his own deathly video show, pulling in every imaginable combination of wide shots, close-ups, zooms, pans and tilts of his victim.

  He creeps in on Lu’s face.

  The picture goes soft as the auto-focus kicks in and takes a second to get the correct focal length and exposure rates. The remote-control box also has a digi-pic facility which allows him to freeze-frame shots and download them to store or make digital printouts.

  Spider watches her for a minute or two, his eyes locked on hers. He tries to get inside her mind, tries to imagine what is going on in her head as she lies there, naked and vulnerable in almost virtual darkness. He notices that she doesn’t blink, that her body is no longer riddled with fear. He suspects that mentally she is removing herself from the scene, using some form of crude meditation to block out the reality of what is happening to her.

  Or what is going to happen to her.

  Spider fires off a couple of digi-pics that he thinks will at a later date be both pleasurable and useful for him, and then he switches the screen view to his favourite shot on Camera One.

  The Lidocaine is making him feel groggy. He knows it’ll last two to three hours before wearing off. He cradles his injured hand and lies down on his side in the coffin bed. The bed feels good, he is ready to rest. He reaches out his undamaged hand and strokes the glass of the TV screen next to him.

  She looks so beautiful down there.

  So wonderfully peaceful.

  So nearly dead.

  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.’