CHAPTER 4: THE PERFECT SUBJECT
George tracked Amara for three weeks. He didn't care about her life; he only cared about her frame. She was 5'8" with a 14-inch shoulder width—the exact dimensions he needed to fix the three-inch mistake from the last body.
It started raining around 8:00 p.m. George rolled his wheelchair into the dark space behind the campus generator house. Once he was sure no one was looking, he got up and walked toward the faculty scrap yard.
He unlocked a small, rusted shed at the back. Inside was a dusty Peugeot 504. George started it up, kept the headlights off, and drove toward the shortcut behind the old lecture block.
Amara appeared at 8:31 p.m. She was walking with her head down, looking at her phone. George stepped out from behind a concrete pillar.
"Excuse me," George said.
Amara stopped. She recognized him as the guy from the Engineering block. "George? What are you doing out here? It's raining."
The fact he could walk, not clicking in her mind.
"I dropped my room keys in the grass," George said, keeping his voice steady. "My eyes are bad in this light and I can't really get down to look. Could you help me?"
Amara hesitated, then stepped into the wet grass. "Where did they fall?"
As she bent down, George pressed a cloth soaked in sedative over her nose and mouth. She kicked for a few seconds, then her body went heavy. George loaded her into the backseat of the Peugeot and drove out of the back gate.
The cold-storage unit was three miles off-campus. Inside, George had spent the previous night preparing the space.
He had draped every inch of the walls in thick, translucent plastic sheets, securing them with industrial staples. The floor was layered three times over with the same material, the edges taped up the walls to create a seamless, waterproof basin. The room looked like a vacuum-sealed box. In the center, a heavy steel work table sat bolted to the floor, also wrapped in plastic.
He lifted Amara onto the table and stripped her. He didn't look at her as a woman; he looked at her as biological material.
He used heavy-duty zip ties to fix her wrists and ankles to the table legs. He wrapped a thick strap across her chest to keep her spine flat. He needed her posture to be perfect.
When Amara finally woke up, the room was blindingly bright. George was standing over her with a scalpel and a digital caliper.
"George? Wetin be this? Abeg..." she tried to scream, but the tape across her mouth turned it into a muffled vibration.
George didn't answer. He began with the precision of a surgeon. He made a clean incision along the hip, peeling back the skin to expose the bone structure. He wasn't interested in the blood; he kept a suction pump running to keep the "canvas" clean. He used a small surgical saw to notch the pelvic bone, adjusting the angle until it matched the 45-degree slope he'd planned.
He spent an hour on her left leg. He had to detach the muscle from the bone to rotate the limb without it snapping back. Every time he made a cut, he used the calipers to check the distance.
*2.9 inches. 3.0 inches. Perfect.*
As he worked on the shoulder joint, George felt a cold shiver. He stopped, the saw still in his hand. He looked toward the dark corner of the warehouse, beyond the plastic-draped walls. He felt like someone was standing there, watching him. Not a ghost, but a weight in the air.
He stared into the shadows for a full minute. Nothing moved. He went back to work, ignoring the feeling. He had a schedule.
He finished by removing her right molar. He used a pair of dental pliers, twisting until the root snapped clean. He placed the tooth in a glass vial.
By 2:00 a.m., Amara's body didn't look human anymore. It looked like a geometric diagram made of flesh and bone. He cleaned the table, bundled the bloody plastic floor sheets for disposal, and loaded the body into the Peugeot.
He didn't take her back to campus. Instead, he drove to the Third Mainland Bridge construction site. The night security was lazy, and the rain provided cover.
He used a pulley system to hoist her up onto one of the concrete pillars. He arranged her limbs in a mirrored spiral, pinning the joints directly into the wood of the construction scaffolding.
At 3:10 a.m., he placed the molar on the ledge. He left the site at 3:15 a.m. and drove the Peugeot back to the scrap yard.
At 6:30 a.m., the first commuter bus spotted it. By 7:00 a.m., the bridge was a parking lot of police cars and onlookers.
...Anyi stood on the scaffolding, her face pale in the morning light. She didn't look at the crowd or the news helicopters circling overhead. She looked at the hip joint. She pulled out her measuring tape and checked the gap between the bone and the structural timber.
"Three inches," she whispered. "He did it on the bridge. Right in front of the whole city."
Femi looked down at the dark water below. "Anyi, this is a message. He's telling us he can go anywhere. He's not hiding in the shadows of some back alley anymore. This guy is a pro."
"No," Anyi said, picking up the molar from the white cloth. She held the vial up to the light. "A pro wants to get away with it. This person wants us to see the correction. He's not hiding, Femi. He's publishing."
"Publishing what?"
"His work." Anyi looked back at the arrangement—the perfect mirrored spiral. "He's treating the city like a gallery. We're not even chasing a killer anymore. We're chasing an architect who uses bodies instead of bricks."
Femi shook his head. "Whoever he is, he's got balls of steel to pull this off on a construction site with security."
"He doesn't have balls," Anyi said, stepping off the scaffolding. "He has a plan. He knew exactly when the guards would be distracted. He knew exactly how much time he had to set the pulley. This isn't luck. It's engineering."
At 9:00 a.m., George was back in his wheelchair in the Engineering lobby.
Chris ran in, looking like he'd seen a ghost. "George! Did you see the news? That girl, Amara... they found her on the bridge. Hanging like a sign. Omo, the whole Lagos is talking about it."
George looked up from his textbook, his expression neutral. "On the bridge? I heard she didn't come back to the hostel last night."
"Nobody knows how she got there," Chris said, leaning against the wall, trying to catch his breath. "The police are blocking the whole Third Mainland. They say it's the most gruesome thing they've ever seen."
"People exaggerate," George said calmly. He tapped the page of his notebook. "Look at Question 5, Chris. You calculated the load-bearing capacity wrong. If you build it like this, the whole thing will collapse."
Chris stared at him, baffled. "George, the girl is dead. Probably the same guy who did the others. Who cares about the bridge assignment right now?"
"The bridge in your assignment has to stand, Chris. Just like the one she was found on," George said.
George looked out the window. He could still feel that presence from the warehouse, like a shadow sitting on his shoulder. He ignored it. He opened a new page and started calculating the tension needed for a vertical display.
He was already thinking about Chapter 5.