Onyx Webb 7 Read online

  “It’s a bit racy, don’t you think?” George asked thoughtfully, doing his best to avoid sounding negative. “And it really doesn’t look anything like Onyx—especially in that dress, if that’s what you want to call it.”

  “We’re going after a younger demographic, Dad,” Abigale said. “The ad agency says we need to target young males with raging hormones.”

  “Abby’s right, Dad,” Aaron said. “Teenage boys want sexy. They want slutty. They want to imagine themselves—”

  George held up his hand, cutting them off. George knew exactly what teenage boys imagined, especially when it came to Onyx Webb.

  He’d imagined it a few times himself.

  CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA

  NOVEMBER 23, 2001

  Stan Lee Mungehr leaned back in his favorite chair, flipping through the pages of the magazine he found in the girl’s backpack, wearing the most comfortable outfit he owned.

  Nothing.

  He lowered the magazine and peered over at the girl. “Don’t you think it’s ironic—a girl with a horror magazine in her backpack being taken by a serial killer?”

  The girl whimpered and closed her eyes, like a child playing hide-and-seek—as if she could make the world around her disappear.

  “That’s one of my pet peeves, you know,” Stan Lee said.

  “What—what is?” the girl managed.

  “People using the word ironic incorrectly. Like that Alanis Morissette song. There’s not one ironic thing in that song. Not one. Funny? Yes. Annoying? Sure. Coincidental? Absolutely. But ironic?”

  The girl tugged on her restraints for the hundredth time, even though she knew it was useless. She had to find a way to connect with the man, to reason with him. It was her only chance. “I’m from Great Britain,” she managed to say. “I’m here on holiday. My friend and I are—”

  “For example,” Stan Lee continued, “an old man wins the lottery then dies, right? What’s ironic about that? He’s old. That’s what old people do. They die. Something that is expected can’t be ironic. A black fly lands in white wine? That’s funny, annoying maybe—but not ironic. A guy gets a pardon from the governor, but the call gets there too late. Bummer. Rain on your wedding day? Bad luck maybe but ironic? Ironic would be deciding to have your wedding indoors because you’re afraid it might rain and then having the sprinkler system malfunction and drench everyone. Now that would be ironic. See the difference?”

  “My friend and I are going to the film festival,” the girl said. “It’s in Oregon.”

  “Oregon? Did you look at a map before you booked your ticket?” Stan Lee asked.

  Okay, good. Keep him talking.

  “The festival isn’t until January,” the girl said. “We flew in early, so we could backpack across the country and see the states.”

  “This magazine is good, well-written,” Stan Lee said.

  “Oh, do you like horror?” the girl asked, instantly realizing the stupidity of her question.

  Stan Lee glanced at the girl over the top of the magazine again. “You might find this strange, but actually—no, I don’t.”

  The girl released a breath. “What about movies? The festival looks like it’s going to be great. Maybe you could come with us.”

  Stan Lee nodded his head, as if he were considering the proposition. The girl obviously had no idea that her friend was already dead. From his perspective, there was no reason to have kept her alive—she didn’t match his tastes. Besides, she had tattoos all over her legs, something Stan Lee found disgusting. There was no way he could allow them into his collection. If he had the energy, he would bury the girl in the tunnel. Or he could just drop her body by the side of the road.

  “There’s an ad for the festival on the back cover,” the girl said. “Thousands of people are coming from all over.”

  Stan Lee flipped the magazine over and saw an ad with a headline reading:

  THE ONYX WEBB FILM FESTIVAL

  A 3-Day Event So Frighteningly Good It Took 60 Years to Put It Together!

  The festival was being held at the George Dietz Theater in Crimson Cove, Oregon, on January 11–13, 2002.

  “That’s the film festival we’re going to,” the girl said. “It looks fun, doesn’t it? Maybe we can all go together in your van.”

  “Be quiet,” Stan Lee said. “I’m thinking.”

  Oh my God, this might be working! the girl thought.

  “Onyx Webb,” Stan Lee said aloud. The name sounded so familiar. Where did he know that name from?

  Then Stan Lee remembered.

  Stan Lee dropped the magazine on the floor and began pulling on his prosthetics. Once they were on, he went to the back of the kill room and began moving boxes from the stacks of things that had accumulated over the years, obscuring his shrine.

  Finally, he cleared a path and pulled the drape back.

  There, in the center of everything, was the article he’d clipped from the newspaper at the library—the one with the two young girls standing at the World’s Fair with the giant Ferris wheel behind them.

  The first girl’s name was Katherine Keane.

  The second girl was Onyx Webb.

  “What do you think?” the girl asked. “Do you want to go?”

  “Yes,” Stan Lee said as he walked to the cabinet and opened the drawer. “The film festival sounds fascinating.”

  The girl released a long breath.

  Thank God.

  Stan Lee pulled a bottle of ketamine and a syringe from the drawer. “Unfortunately for you, I’ll be going alone.”

  SAVANNAH, GEORGIA

  OCTOBER 30, 2010

  What was unthinkable a month earlier was now one of Mika Flagler’s few remaining options. She had to sell her house.

  Quick.

  Pressure from fellow Restoring Savannah Foundation board members to account for the funds Mika had taken was growing. And the situation with Declan—who’d caught Mika stealing personal belongings from his office—had made things considerably worse.

  The good news was Mika’s real estate agent had a hot lead.

  “They want to come by as soon as possible,” the real estate agent said.

  “Set it up for tomorrow,” Mika said. “Late in the afternoon like five or six.”

  “Okay, that will work.”

  “Vanilla or cinnamon?” Mika asked. Mika had read there were seven scents that were most effective when selling a house: orange, pine, basil, vanilla, cinnamon, lemon, and cedar. Currently, the house smelled like Tiny.

  “Vanilla or cinnamon what?”

  “Never mind,” Mika said. “I’ll be ready.”

  Mika hung up the phone and reviewed the check list of tasks that needed to be done before the house would be ready to show:

  Remove surface mold from walls with bleach.

  Check.

  Scrub the calcium water spots from shower door, using a mixture of one-part muriatic acid and six-parts water, scrubbed with superfine-grade steel wool.

  Check.

  Paint the kitchen and hallway walls, especially where Tiny tended to pee when she left him alone too long.

  Check.

  Paint the bedroom walls a neutral color to appeal to both sexes and replace the bedspread.

  Check.

  Buy new kitchen appliances from Williams-Sonoma since Mika’s current appliances were all outdated—and keep the receipts so she could return later.

  Check.

  Buy throw rugs to cover the damaged and discolored floor boards in the entry hall, the result of Tiny racing around the place.

  Check.

  In addition, Mika replaced every window covering in the house, spent $600 to have a student from SCAD re-stain the kitchen cabinets, and hired a landscaping service to mow the lawn later in the afternoon.

  Mika’s cell phone rang. She glanced at the number.

  Declan Mulvaney.

  There was no need to answer—Mika already knew what Declan wanted. He wanted his precious limited-editio
n copy of Ulysses back.

  One thing at a time, Mika thought.

  One thing at a time.

  PORTLAND, OREGON

  JANUARY 1, 2002

  oah Ashley hurled the microphone across the garage with such force it left a one-inch deep dent in the wall. The microphone didn’t fare any better.

  “Nice throw,” the band’s bass player said. “You’re paying for the new one.”

  “It’s my microphone,” Noah said, trying to calm himself down and thinking that maybe the band was a lost cause.

  “No, it was the band’s microphone,” the drummer said. “Remember when we agreed—?”

  “Yeah, I remember,” Noah said. “I also remember when we said any decision about a new lead singer would be made by everybody. And you want Alec Yost of all people?”

  Noah had nothing against Alec Yost personally. Alec was a legend in the Portland area, a musical talent who should have gone all the way to the top. In fact, Alec was Noah’s teenage idol—he still had one of Alec’s posters hanging on his bedroom wall. Had it not been for a poorly timed obscene gesture—and a few inappropriate comments hurled at runner up Justin Guarini—Alec would probably have won season one of American Idol.

  But in the ten years since imploding on TV in front of thirty-five million viewers, Alec Yost had jumped from band to band, always with someone or something else to blame for the group’s eventual break up.

  It was never Alec’s fault. Neither were the drugs.

  But Noah knew better.

  “Alec Yost is the perfect front man, Noah,” the lead guitarist said matter-of-factly. “He can sing—no, strike that—Alec can wail.”

  Noah understood what was being implied.

  “Okay, so Alec can sing,” Noah said finally. “But he’s got a drug problem and an even bigger attitude problem. And he’s a bad fit for a blues rock band.”

  Having its roots with musicians in the 1960s, blues rock was a blend of artists like Muddy Waters, Albert King, and Howlin’ Wolf, with a more aggressive sound by bands like The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The Animals, Lonnie Mack, Grand Funk Railroad, and Noah’s favorite band of all time:

  Cream.

  From as early as Noah could remember, he and his grandfather had a running gag:

  “What do Eric Clapton and coffee have in common?” his grandfather would ask.

  “I don’t know,” Noah would answer every time. Then, they’d pause, and—with great fanfare—they’d yell out:

  “They both suck without cream!”

  Now Noah watched as the members of his band lowered their eyes or looked away. “Okay, what am I missing?”

  The drummer was the first to look up. “We’ve been talking about that, too. We’re thinking, you know, that—well, maybe it’s time to make a change.”

  “A change? A change to what?” Noah asked. “What, you guys want to switch to contemporary rock?”

  “Actually, we were thinking of going in the direction of acid-punk-grunge,” the lead guitarist said. “Something that works with Alec’s voice and makes the most of his reputation.”

  Well, here it was. The day Noah feared had finally arrived.

  The band was attempting a coup.

  “Okay, fine,” Noah said, pretending to give in to put an end to the conversation. “Go ahead, call Alec Yost. But he’s not going to be interested.”

  “Shit, dude,” the drummer said. “You’re not getting it, are you? We met with Alec two days ago. We offered him the gig, and he said yes. It’s a done deal.”

  Fifteen minutes later, after he’d told everyone to get the hell out his garage, Noah grabbed his guitar. Take advantage of the anger and pain, he told himself. A true artist never lets a painful moment go to waste.

  Noah tried a bunch of things, finally coming up with a chorus he felt good about:

  You wake up in the morning,

  and think it’s just another day,

  But then, without warning—

  your dreams get swept away.

  Maybe what I should have done

  Was stay there in my bed,

  And let the life I thought I had

  Remain safely in my head.

  Not bad, Noah thought. Now, it needed a title. How about, “Worst Day Ever”? Yeah, that summed things up pretty well.

  The choice of song titles was confirmed an hour later when two officers with the Oregon Highway Patrol knocked on the front door of the house and delivered the news.

  The car that had been hit by the tanker truck on Route 1 the night before was an Aston Martin.

  A silver 1964 Aston Martin DB5.

  Noah’s grandfather, Alistar, hadn’t checked into a hotel to avoid the storm as they’d assumed he had.

  His grandfather was dead.

  QUANTICO, VIRGINIA

  JANUARY 3, 2002

  Newt Drystad grabbed a quick lunch in the FBI commissary, where—as usual—he sat alone and spoke with no one. Nor did anyone speak to him.

  It wasn’t what Newt wanted, but it was what it was.

  Newt understood all too well the way people were with others who were different—like him with his autism—especially if the person was smarter and more successful. Add to that, after two years of increasingly blurry vision, he’d been forced to get prescription glasses with thick lenses that only made him look nerdier.

  Newt removed the black-rimmed plastic glasses and tucked them in his pocket, behind his plastic pen protector. Then he fastidiously unpacked his brown lunch bag.

  Sandwich first.

  Chips second.

  Pickle last.

  Several fellow agents came his way, carrying hot lunches on plastic trays, and—as Newt anticipated—they continued past and took seats at another table.

  Newt took a bite of his turkey sandwich and fantasized about how different things would be if he were the boss. If he were the boss, which he had no desire of ever becoming, people would be friendly to him all the time. On the surface at least.

  But that’s all it would be.

  Pretend.

  Newt’s only true friend in the world—besides his father—was his supervisor, Pipi Esperanza. But even with Pipi, Newt couldn’t help but wonder if their friendship was simply built on their need for each other.

  Newt’s success rate helped Pipi achieve her meteoric rise within the bureau. And without Pipi, where would Newt be? He sure in heck wouldn’t be living his dream of being an FBI profiler. His father still thought Newt should be using his unique gifts to do something important for mankind, like solving the problem of perpetual motion or cold fusion. In Newt’s mind, what he was doing—finding serial killers and removing them from society—was more important than anything else.

  Newt took another bite from his sandwich and opened a Ziplock baggie containing exactly nineteen Pringle potato chips—one for each year of his age. He wondered what it would be like to eat a hundred Pringles when he turned a hundred years old. Would they even still be making them then?

  Probably.

  Anything as addictive as Pringles would be around forever. As long as they kept using the holy trinity of fat, sugar, and salt, Pringles would be a top seller. And since Newt never seemed to gain weight, he didn’t care what they put in them as long as it wasn’t radioactive.

  Newt finished his sandwich, popped another Pringle into his mouth, and opened the case file he’d brought along.

  The case involved two British girls who’d been found a month earlier. The first body was discovered in the manger of a nativity scene outside a Baptist church in Manning, South Carolina. The second was found three days later tossed in a dumpster behind a gun store in Myrtle Beach.

  Though the girls had been found almost one hundred miles apart, there was no doubt they’d been killed by The Leg Collector. Each girl’s legs had been amputated from just above the knees—and each had anagrams scrawled on their torsos.

  Newt pulled the crime scene photos from each file and laid them side by side on the table, popped a
nother Pringle into his mouth, and studied the details of each photograph.

  Besides their physical differences and the locations where the bodies were discarded, the one unique clue was the pictures on the girl’s foreheads.

  On the first girl’s forehead was a hand-drawn picture of a spider. The second girl’s forehead bore the drawing of a fly.

  Message sent.

  Message received.

  Six Pringles later, Newt shifted his focus to the anagrams written on each of the girl’s torsos. Newt wrote the first anagram on the outside of the file folder:

  BOMBAX TWELVE SNIFFILY

  Newt quickly determined there were only 123 possible combinations, but none of them jumped out at him. The bureau had developed software for the specific purpose of determining anagram combinations for any word or phrase, but Newt preferred to review the options in his head.

  Newt popped another Pringle and wrote the anagram found on the second girl’s body on the file, beneath the first:

  ECONOMICS GOVERNOR

  The bad news was there were even more combinations to consider—22,282 to be precise. The good news was one of the combinations immediately caught Newt’s attention:

  CRIMSON COVE OREGON

  Newt had been on his way to Crimson Cove, Oregon, once. It was the trip where he and Pipi had flown into Portland at the request of the town’s sheriff. The event was memorable for several reasons. The first was how the trip was stopped in its tracks because of the possible connection to ghosts. The second thing was that it was one day before Pipi would supposedly die in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

  Newt had an amazing memory when it came to numbers—but names were another matter entirely. What was the sheriff’s name again? Oh, yeah. Clay Daniels III. And his son, Clay IV, was there, too. A sharp kid, Newt seemed to recall. Smart. IV was smarter than III, that was for sure.