Dr. O

  DR. O

  Robert W. Walker

  Copyright © 2010 by Robert W. Walker, www.robertwalkerbooks.com

  Cover copyright © 2010 by Stephen Walker, www.srwalkerdesigns.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Robert W. Walker.

  BOOK ONE

  The soul of man does violence to itself... when it becomes an abscess and... tumor on the universe....

  Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

  Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

  Mark Twain

  CHAPTER ONE

  Arlington National Cemetery, Washington, D C.

  FBI Chief Inspector Donna Thorpe flinched at each sudden crack of the twenty-one gun salute in honor of her closest friend in the agency, Tom Sykes. It was an old ritual, a gesture toward the dead from those left behind to wonder what might have been... those left to second guess not only the actions of the deceased, but their own actions as well. Doubts filled Donna Thorpe's mind; her thoughts ran like quicksilver, one moment obvious, the next moment unclear. The same thoughts sent sparklers of electricity through her every nerve as she stood amid the agency's top men and women and felt like a failure.

  Tom had died at the hands of a maniac who enjoyed games and who enjoyed calling himself "Dr. O."

  Case file number 87133 was not like any other problem she had ever faced; Maurice Ovierto was like no killer she had ever known. He was a highly intelligent meglomaniac and sociopath who felt nothing for anyone but himself, nothing but his desire to do evil and bodily injury to others. He enjoyed torturing not only his victims but Donna Thorpe, to whom he "reported" in one form or another his every foul deed.

  She did not know why he had targeted her as the recipient of all his ugly gifts, such as Tom Sykes's body, telling her alone where it could be located, or why he had made her the privileged audience to his macabre killing spree. But he was no ordinary psychopath or serial killer with a demented set of parents and a brutal childhood. On the contrary, he'd had a sterling upbringing in a well-to-do family. He was a medical doctor and had once lived a routine, normal life. Something had changed him; something had occurred which turned him from an M.D. to a maniac M.D.

  Dr. Maurice Ovierto had brought her to this: to stand before an open grave into which Tom Sykes's re-mains—at least those parts finally released by Dr. Samuel Boas's forensics labs—were now being lowered into the earth.

  She thought of Ovierto's taunting letters, which proclaimed him the "Picasso" of cutters, an artist with a scalpel. Tom's body had been almost unrecognizable. Dr. Boas's crime lab had had to call in a dental pathologist to be certain it was Sykes.

  Donna Thorpe had never known Boas to go white and shaken, but Sykes's body had had that effect on anyone who viewed it. Donna Thorpe, too, had stood there shaking.

  Ovierto could be anywhere at the moment, while Donna Thorpe's best friend was seeing Arlington National Cemetery from a special perspective, a view none of the camera-snapping news people would ever know.

  The gesture of the twenty-one guns —of burial for that matter —seemed useless, and yet it was only proper for Tom to be brought home. Ovierto had buried him once before, buried him with crushed bones and severed arteries while he was yet alive, or so Boas had led her to believe. Such a nightmare... poor Tom.

  She desperately needed a drink. I like high stakes, but this is too high, and too damned painful, she told herself. They'd come up together; they had been friends when they attended the academy at Quantico. They'd continued their friendship, despite her having risen in rank faster than he. They had shared weekend hunting trips, watched ballgames together, shared family together....

  Tom's crippled family was this moment being held up by her own.

  Tom had liked high stakes too. His backup, Bate- man, ought to have slowed him down, for Christ's sake. Bateman was the junior partner, though, and so far, his body hadn't surfaced. No doubt Dr. Ovierto was experimenting still.

  For the moment, it seemed the mad genius of Dr. Ovierto would continue and continue like a series of cheap sequels to a bad horror film. For all anyone knew, the "Dr. O" was some kind of wolf man or vampire, indestructible by common means; maybe he carried the genes of Jack the Ripper.

  No, no! She forced back the thought of Ovierto as some supernatural power or fantastic Devil's agent, just as she always did. Ovierto is flesh and blood, a man, and in the end he'll be stopped, she told herself. He must be stopped... must be. At any cost, she promised Tom as she stepped beside the coffin and tossed in a flower as a final useless gesture.

  She knew that Tom's soul would not rest easy until Ovierto was punished.

  Her husband, Jim, held her shoulders. She'd begun to cry again and to quake. Jim was now the strong one. And she was Auntie to Tom's two boys and his girl. Together with her own kids, they made for the black limo in a flurry of sniffles and bawling, the very littlest ones playing tag, not understanding that they couldn't play here. Their last memory of D.C. would be a dismal one. The limo driver had orders: straight to the airport. Bags would follow. Today they had a date with Delta Flight 132 bound for Lincoln, Nebraska by way of Chicago.

  Out of the Virginia-Washington area, perhaps for good.

  The ride in the plush red velvet limo was confining, coffin like, and quiet. Everyone —Brucie, Jim Jr., Kay and their father —each had his or her own thoughts. Donna Thorpe felt the familiar tight scars across her abdomen where Dr. Ovierto had once cut her so badly that she'd only stayed alive by holding onto her in- sides. The scars seemed now to want to burst, and a fiery itching traced the long stitch lines. This was true although they were years old. She'd been the only agent ever to bring Ovierto in. Too bad she hadn't killed the bastard when she had had the chance. There was no asylum or prison in the country that could hold Ovierto.

  After his escape, no one had come close to catching him again. Donna now felt her husband's hand firmly squeeze her own. The silent gesture told her how concerned he was for her. She needn't say a word, but the silence was too much for him: "It isn't your fault, Donnie.... Donna, maybe Nebraska's not such a bad idea.... Perhaps we can be a real... a real family and life will be closer to... to…

  "To normal?" she finished. She stared into the eyes of her children. "I could use a little normal. How about it, guys? You want to show me some normal, huh?"

  Jim Jr. worked up a sad little smile. "Uncle Thomas, Mom, he should've waited for backup, and if he had-"

  "Son, your uncle was the best, I don't care what else you hear.... Remember, he was the best."

  Brucie chimed in. "You're the best, too, Mom."

  "Yeah... that's why we're going to Nebraska."

  The kids were sullen about uprooting on top of the death of their loved one. Like her little girl, the two boys fell silent once more. Jim just squeezed her hand even more tightly.

  She thought about Dr. Ovierto and just how the man managed to elude the most sophisticated police network in the world. Primarily it was accounted for in the evil genius of the man and in his gifts of charm and gab and disguise. His life was a sleight-of-hand performance. The man had an amazing ability to make use of simple distraction, but he was helped by the amazing gullibility and stupidity of people around him. His impostures were so good that people helped him escape, helped hide him, in fact—and often died for the privilege. When he was in custody, seeing he was a madman, guards, shrinks, and others had underestimated him.

&n
bsp; When the case fell to Tom Sykes, she had repeatedly warned Tom about the insidious and devious nature of the beast. But Sykes thought he knew Ovierto's every alias, his every disguise and M.O. Tom had been with her in Houston when they'd nailed the human aberration, Thorpe almost losing her life in the bargain. They'd been canvassing St. Stephen's Hospital on a tip when she came eye-to-eye with Ovierto and something in the moment of knowing clicked along with the knife he suddenly rammed into her, pulling her into a stairwell, racing away and leaving her to bleed to death. Had Tom not found her there...

  An APB was immediately put out, and Ovierto was surrounded in the plaza, where he stabbed to death his own hostage, tore out a policeman's eyes, and managed to scar several others before he was subdued. It had been only sheer, dumb luck that several units had been available for backup on what everyone thought would be a routine call.

  She had warned Tom again anyway, repeatedly re-minding him of how sudden the viper turns and strikes. To no avail, it would appear. She wondered where Tom had slipped up, and recalled once more that her own mistake with Ovierto had been so sudden and startling that there hadn't been time to draw her weapon.

  She had lost the right to hunt Ovierto down and feed him his own pound of flesh. Along with Tom's life, her team had lost credibility. A big loss of prestige with the department converted into a major loss of monies, manpower, equipment, and the confidence of her superiors. But it was losing Tom Sykes that made Donna Thorpe feel like a washed-up, useless member of the department. Had it not been for this devastation, maybe she'd have stood up to Jennings and pushed his crap back down his throat. But there was no bringing Tom back, and so maybe Inspector Thorpe deserved what she got.

  "You're only as good as your last job, Donnie," she said, reminding herself and her family what Tom would say of the circumstances, if he were here. It was a phrase Tom used over and again since their training days together. It was a phrase their training officer, McEachern, used a lot. McEachern, too, was gone, killed years before in the field by a crazed bastard with less than a tenth of Dr. Maurice Ovierto's brains.

  McEachern had been good. Sykes, over the years, had become the best; and yet he was found twenty feet under the earth where Ovierto had instructed the FBI to dig in the loose, sandy soil of a resort village in the Florida Keys, near a pier two weeks before. Forensics, Boas's team, had finally released Tom's remains for buried after their intensive examinations. The coroner's results would ordinarily have come to Donna, who, as Sykes's commanding officer, would oversee the manhunt, but not now. She had been yanked from the case, reassigned to nowhere by the idiots in charge. Still, she wanted very much to see Boas's findings. Sam was the best in the country. She knew she could learn more about Ovierto from the reports. She also knew that the reports would sicken her to no end. Still, the inspector in her knew that she must get a copy and read every bloody word and view, every photo and slide depicting the new Tom Sykes— persona non living. What choice did she have? She must do it for Tom, just as she'd stood there the whole time Tom's putrid remains were laid out on a table like the seemingly unrelated pottery and stone pieces of an archeological dig. She'd gone to get Tom's body in the morgue in Miami, to see it returned to Quantico, Virginia, where it had been flown, encased in ice.

  She had called in markers in order to get a copy of Boas's final report. She had Dr. Lee Rogman working on it. But Rogman was blubbering fearfully about losing his job if he did so. Word was out on Donna. Word had it that she was too close to the case and that, as good a chief as she was, she was slipping where Ovierto, and now Tom Sykes, were concerned.

  Inspector Thorpe didn't know what mistake or mistakes Tom Sykes had made, only that his body was riddled with torture marks and his insides burned out by the detergents and bleach he'd been forced to swallow. The body had been wrapped in Handi-Wrap and chains. The purpose of the chains —or the "meaning" of them—remained a mystery.

  Inspector Thorpe had stood over what was left of Sykes's worm-eaten form at the autopsy, praying over it for the least clue to Ovierto. If Sykes could have, he would have etched a message in his own skin with his teeth to tip Thorpe off to Dr. Ovierto operation—operation; sick term for what the mad M.D. did. He'd sometimes take a portion of his untold fortune to set up shop in a storefront as a caring, ghetto doctor (once in Cincinnati, once in San Diego). Other times he'd served on staff at a hospital or a university medical complex (Chicago, Portland, Atlanta, and even D.C.—under their noses!).

  There was a long, long list of his "cures." Only trouble was that Dr. O's cures usually led to an agonizing death; only if the patient died did he feel himself a "successful surgeon." Lately, too, he had begun playing with poisons. In fact, he had sent in a request to the U.S. Patent Office to patent one of his poison concoctions, labeling it: Euphamirine. He was a card... a deadly, wild card. He'd adminster/test his concoction and sign a death certificate all in the same hour.

  At the autopsy, there wasn't enough left of Sykes to be of any apparent use to either the FBI or anyone else. All that was left was a pale, pulpy shell of the man, his physical ghost. Donna Thorpe would never forget the sight of her friend and partner on the slab. In fact, she'd begun to have nightmares about Sykes and the way he had died.

  For this reason she was never alone. She had Jim in bed with her, and the kids were never far away. Weekends now she'd have to cultivate new ties, new networks, including those personal ones with the local folk of Lincoln, that's all—join the bloody club, get some golf or tennis in, keep busy, forge useful contacts with local cops, attorneys, judges, and medical experts.

  The alternatives were pretty near as bleak: let the mind fester until it boiled over with guilt and impotence and rage, compliments of Dr. Ovierto. Or quit, turn in her badge, walk out. Some people would applaud that.

  She was goddamned forty this month. She ought to have kept Tom on a tighter rein, ought maybe to have been right beside him on this one, ought maybe to be wherever Bateman might now be. Barring that, maybe her superiors were right. Maybe Inspector Donna Thorpe ought to be in Nebraska.

  They arrived at Washington National Airport, where Dr. Samuel Boas joined them to wish them well. Boas was a lanky, gray-haired man with probing eyes and a Germanic demeanor that gave very little away. Just before she stepped onto the plane he said to her, "It's no longer your problem now, Donna. Let it go and reclaim your life. You have so much else to turn to. Let it go."

  She hadn't been able to respond to Sam. If there was anyone on the planet who should understand that she could not possibly let it go, it was him. She gripped his hands in hers. "Sam," she began slowly, "get the results of Tom's autopsy to me, whatever it takes."

  "Or else you use your information against me? You've become that obsessed, haven't you?" His eyes covered over with a terrible sadness.

  "Just do it." She stalked down the empty gangway to the plane, the last to board, fighting her own steps.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Twenty miles southeast of Denver, Colorodo

  Dr. Maurice Ovierto believed that it would be great fun to keep Bateman for a while.

  The safe-keeping of an imprisoned man —an FBI agent at that —was no simple matter. Still, before leaving for Europe, he had made arrangements, leaving the man enough food to sustain himself—if he stretched it. As for water, the bottom of the mine shaft that Bateman lay in was always wet. Ovierto had had to find just the right place, and he had. It was actually the most perfect place for his needs with regard to Bateman. No one around for miles. A rat hole from which escape was impossible, especially for a man with two severed Achilles tendons.

  The location had also served well as prison to Tom Sykes for a while, before he became more trouble than he was worth, attempting an escape. Sykes had been tough and shrewd, and starvation had had little effect on the man's will to fight back.

  Dr. O. now weaved through the curtain-network of chains dripping with condensation in the old foundry, a dark place thousands of miles from where Thorpe
's old friend, Tommy Sykes had been buried alive. He'd begun to bore Maurice. He was just barely able to lift a finger anymore, much less present a threat or be of use in any entertaining way So, Ovierto buried him near his precious love, the sea.

  Donna Thorpe would find that out in due time: that Sykes was alive when Maurice had decided to cover him over in the dunes of a deserted stretch of Florida beach. She'd learn the truth from Boas, when the autopsy report came in, if the autopsiest stayed off the booze.

  Boy, Thorpe was going to be pissed.

  Ovierto snickered at this. Good and holy bitch, Donna just didn't know what to make of him, sending her letters to tell her where to go and what to look for, providing her with clues so the game might continue, telling her what it was she was looking for and who was responsible. If the public only knew! One day, maybe he would tell the world just what a bunch of screw-ups the FBI was made up of. Without directions they'd be unable to find their way to the john. Was it any surprise they could get nowhere near him? He was that good....They were so fucking stupid they'd have trouble following a monopoly board. He was so far ahead of them that they were only now dispatching a team to the site of the killings in England.

  And the idiots had busted Thorpe, burying her in a Nebraska bureau! No matter, he could do business with Donna in Nebraska. It all made for a kind of Wizard-of-Oz logic, except that Dorothy hailed from Kansas, and now Donna hailed from Nebraska. Close enough. Might even be fun getting out of D.C. Certainly was closer to Bateman than Virginia... getting warmer, Donna... hotter, hotter! The thought made him chuckle. He got so little out of life, a good laugh was the least he might take, he told himself.

  He'd have to remember to share this one with Donna soon... give the poor girl a call, for old time's sake.