49
Police cordons fluttered on the bitter breeze as Donovan climbed out of his car. The traffic on 79th was being diverted through the block past the apartments, the rush hour causing havoc nearby. In the middle of the sidewalk was a large white tent that rumbled in the wind as though breathing. A forensics vehicle and a couple of men in white jumpsuits were flanked by beat cops guarding the cordon.
Glen Ryan appeared from the tent and dragged one hand across a face taut with anxiety. He saw Donovan coming and hurried toward him.
‘Jesus, it’s happening,’ he snapped. ‘It’s happening to us.’
Donovan raised a hand to slow the young officer down. ‘What’s going on?’
Ryan took a deep breath and gestured over his shoulder with a jab of his thumb. ‘Jackson took a dive.’
Donovan hesitated on the sidewalk and then craned his head up to the soaring apartment blocks high above. There, several stories up, he saw a shattered window with bright yellow police-cordon tapes criss-crossing the gaping hole.
‘From up there?’ Donovan uttered.
‘Yeah.’ Ryan nodded. ‘If a job’s worth doing…’
Donovan started walking again, toward the white tent, Ryan alongside him.
‘He didn’t jump, boss,’ Ryan said.
Donovan tried not to betray a response but he shook his head involuntarily. It wasn’t worth the effort of even trying to deny the obvious. Jackson was head-over-heels for his girlfriend, loved his job and had no history of depression. All that Donovan knew for sure was that their encounter with that damned thing the previous night had shaken Jackson up far more than any of the gruesome, countless homicides they had dealt with over the years.
‘I don’t know,’ Donovan replied finally, as they reached the tent. ‘But it wouldn’t have been like him.’
‘Not like him,’ Ryan replied flatly. ‘No shit.’ Donovan turned for the tent, but Ryan grabbed his arm. ‘He didn’t jump. Forensics will tell you.’
Donovan frowned and pulled the tent flap aside as he ducked in.
A lone forensics officer was taking samples from Jackson’s body. Donovan swallowed a dense bolus of vomit that lodged briefly in his throat. Jackson was sprawled on his back, his skull flattened against the asphalt and his eyes vanished from their sockets. Thick blood had leaked from his shattered skull and from deep lesions in his skin, soaking his clothes where his body had burst like a balloon. His form seemed oddly shapeless and deflated, as though the skeleton within had simply crumpled, and a lake of fluids stained the sidewalk.
Donovan looked at the forensics guy, who was staring up at him.
‘Anything?’
The officer shook his head. ‘We’ve got trace samples from at least thirty different people, but as he’s a cop that’s not surprising. Can’t make any comment about who might have done this but they sure as hell gave him a shove.’
Donovan looked at Jackson’s ruined body. ‘How do you mean?’
The officer gestured to the body.
‘We found glass embedded in what’s left of his skull. We’ll have to confirm but it seems to match the glass in his apartment windows, which means he went straight through them at some velocity. People who are intending to commit suicide through a fall would normally bother to open the window first.’
Donovan thought for a moment. ‘Maybe he just lost it, had a severe breakdown and hurled himself straight through the glass.’
The forensics guy chuckled bitterly. ‘Maybe at a stretch, except that he could not have just thrown himself out of that window. In free-fall the human body attains a maximum velocity of about a hundred twenty miles per hour. But the injuries this guy has sustained are consistent with an impact at more like twice that speed.’
Donovan stared at Jackson’s corpse. ‘You mean he accelerated?’
The forensics man stood. ‘Beats the hell out of me, but this guy dropped out of that window like he had a motor on him. Last body I saw that looked like this was in the front seat of an airplane that went into the ground vertically. There wasn’t much left to look at.’
‘How fast was Jackson going when he hit the sidewalk?’
‘Best guess,’ the forensics officer hazarded, ‘about two hundred miles per hour.’
‘Physically impossible then,’ Donovan replied.
The forensics man nodded. ‘Don’t envy you solving this one, guys. Either this guy was Clark Kent on a bad day or he was murdered.’
Donovan walked out of the tent with Ryan close behind him.
‘It got him,’ Ryan insisted. ‘Whatever this thing is, it got him and it’ll be after us next.’
Donovan sucked in a deep lungful of cold air and looked about him thoughtfully.
‘All of the victims have been iced at night,’ he said.
‘Great,’ Ryan replied, ‘that gives us a few hours to get packed and get a flight the hell out of here.’
‘We’re not going anywhere!’ Donovan snapped, and jabbed a thick finger into Ryan’s chest. ‘Running won’t achieve anything, except to expose us even more.’
‘I’d rather give it a try than facing that thing!’ Ryan shot back. ‘Jesus, Donovan, it’s killing us!’
‘It’s Tom, you asshole!’
Ryan stared at him for a moment in blank disbelief. ‘Tom? What the hell are you talking about? Most of the time, he can barely walk and talk. Jackson would have pulverized him.’
‘He’s not doing it himself exactly,’ Donovan growled. ‘I don’t know how, but he knows what happened and he’s bringing us down one at a time. We stop Tom, and this ends.’
Ryan’s gaze flickered as he digested what Donovan was suggesting.
‘What do you mean, stop him?’
Donovan shoved one big arm across Ryan’s shoulders and steered him out of earshot of the nearby police and forensics team. ‘Tom knows, Glen. He knows what happened and he knows that we’re implicated.’
Ryan shook his head in disbelief. ‘But how? How could he know and how the hell could he be doing this? All of the victims have died in ways that no human being could achieve. And what about Karina? How come she hasn’t been attacked?’
Donovan slowed as he considered that fact, and the answer came quickly.
‘Because she wasn’t in on it, Glen. We knew we couldn’t trust her. Did you check her cell, find out who she called when we were in the law school?’
Ryan swallowed thickly, ran his hand across his face again as he nodded. ‘She called Tom Ross,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t know if he answered or not but somehow the call stopped the attack. Jesus, Donovan, we can’t fight this.’
‘We can fight this, because we can fight Tom. Without him, this all goes away.’
‘You sure?’ Ryan snapped, facing Donovan. ‘You sure that this goes away? If Tom’s got somebody else pulling the strings for him, then how do we know that it won’t get even worse when we’ve arrested Tom?’
Donovan’s rugged features creased into a smile that matched the bitter wind blustering down the street around them.
‘Because whatever Tom’s doing, it doesn’t involve another person. Nothing else makes sense, Glen. Somehow, God knows how, Tom’s doing this himself. Karina’s call to him must have interrupted whatever the crazy asshole’s doing. We’ve got to stop him before the sun sets tonight because it’s just you and me now.’
Ryan glanced up at the morning sky and Donovan could tell that to the kid the rest of the day now looked impossibly short.
‘But how do we stop him?’ Ryan asked. Donovan did not reply, simply staring at him until the kid finally got it.
Ryan gasped and turned away. He shook his head.
‘It’s the only way,’ Donovan insisted.