Blood List (2 page)

Coffee,
he thought. He grabbed his official Department of Justice mug, proudly emblazoned with the red, white, and blue shield with the bald eagle in flight on the front, and pushed his chair back from the desk.
When we find this guy I'm going to beat him to a pulp with that olive branch.
He shuffled down the hall toward the break room.

"You shouldn't drink that piss this late," Marty said from the hallway. He scowled in disapproval. "You won't sleep for shit tonight."

With a dismissive flick of his hand to stave off any more sage advice, Gene stepped around him. Marty seemed to think that once a man's ex-girlfriend could no longer nag him into a pounding headache, it became the sacred duty of the elder brother. Marty spoke behind him. "They found the phone, got prints. We forwarded them to Sam."

Samantha Greene was the invisible sixth member of the team. Two hundred and twenty pounds and five-foot-two, she hadn't passed the FBI's physical for field work in five years. Gene doubted she could walk a mile without dying, much less run three in thirty minutes. She was an expert marksman who practiced at the shooting range three times a week but had never worn a weapon on duty. It didn't matter.

Sam was the best field coordinator in the Bureau. She tracked the team with GPS, listened to and recorded their conversations over the COM, used gadgets and programs with other mysterious acronyms to perform astounding feats of technical magic, and crunched dizzying amounts of data for use in real time. She did all this from in front of a dozen computer monitors, safely ensconced behind a desk in the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C.

Privacy didn't exist in the field anymore. Everything was recorded, flagged for important words by massive supercomputers, and analyzed by the intel weenies back at HQ.

Marty continued, "The prints matched. We know it's him for sure now."

Gene turned around. "We knew for sure a week ago, Marty. We just didn't know who the victim was. Just like Denver. And D.C. And…."

"Yeah," Marty agreed. "Hell of a job we've got here, ain't it? Almost makes me wish I'd dropped out of school."

"Mama would have killed you, Marty."

"True," Marty said. "But then I wouldn't be working for a pencil-neck like you."

Gene grinned and turned back down the hall. "I should be so lucky."

Gene walked into the break room and glared at the half-empty coffee pot. The little red light stared back at him. The stale, bitter smell in the room indicated that this pot was probably brewed during the Rodney King riots, from stale beans.

"Gene, you've got a meeting with the Chief of Police at oh-seven hundred. Get some fucking sleep, boss." Gene nodded as he emptied the pot into the sink, clicked off the machine, and headed back to the couch in his office. He didn't need to see the smirk on Marty's face to know it was there.

He only calls me "boss" when he's telling me what to do.
With an exhausted grin of his own, Gene lay down on the lumpy couch to catch as much sleep as his aching head would allow.

*   *   *

June 23rd, 6:57 AM PST; LAPD Headquarters, Parker Center; Los Angeles, California.

Gene had done his research. By all accounts, Police Chief Logan Stukly was an ambitious and intelligent man. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he was as comfortable in the barrios and ghettos as he was in the mansions of the Hollywood elite. A third-generation police officer and a twenty-two-year veteran of the L.A.P.D., he hadn't just been around the block; he lived there. Add a fierce charisma and a pack of weasels willing to get dirty behind the scenes, and it all added up to a major appointment that had transformed a career cop into a budding politician.

Explosions on Rodeo Drive made the local PD look bad. Given Stukly's mayoral ambitions, Gene could guess his mood. Gene's head throbbed in time with his footsteps as he approached the door.

The man glanced up when Gene walked in. He waved Gene to a chair and kept typing. Twenty seconds later, he clicked his mouse and looked up.

"You Palomini?"

"Yes," Gene said.

Chief Stukly sneered through his teeth and looked across the massive oak table that served as his desk.

"Tell me, how long were you planning on letting a serial killer rampage through my city before you deigned to inform my men of his presence?"

Gene suppressed a groan. He'd hoped for some level of cooperation. "You understand that all of this has to be kept confidential?"

"Yes," Stukly said.

"He's known as the 'D Street Killer' after the location of his first murder. He likes to toy with the FBI, give us clues. We got the city location four days ago, when—" He jumped as Stukly slammed his meaty palms on the table.

"FOUR DAYS?" Stukly roared, spittle flying everywhere. Gene held up his hands and winced at the volume. The chief's face was flushed with rage, but his voice calmed. "I'm sorry, Agent, please go on."

Temper versus ambition,
Gene thought.
This man is dangerous, but mostly to himself.

He licked his lips and continued. "Yeah, well, this guy likes to taunt us. He gives us a state six days before a kill, always by pre-paid cellular, voice-over-IP, or text message. We get a city two days after that. Neighborhood the morning of the kill, almost always with the first and last initials of the victim. Within seconds of the kill, we get a victim ID and a street." He snarled. "Never enough time to catch the perp, though."

Stukly's frown deepened. "And you couldn't tell LAPD that he was in Los Angeles because?"

"Because we already had. Two of your sections were notified and had classified it as low priority, partly because the Bureau was already on it and partly because your homicide guys are already swamped. Until we found out the neighborhood, of course."

Stukly raised his eyebrows. "What about the neighborhood?"

"Rodeo Drive is not South Central," Gene said.

The chief raised his bushy eyebrows and shuffled the papers in front of him. Instead of answering the charge, he changed the subject. "Why this vic? Why Jenny Sykes? Why Rodeo Drive?"

"I wish we could tell you, sir," Gene said. "This guy's one of the slipperiest the Bureau's ever encountered." He told the man what precious little they knew and was asked the same old questions. M.O.? Usually a gun, but no consistent model or caliber. Knives on a couple of vics, but different kinds, usually taken from the area of the kill and always left behind, just like the guns. On top of that, they had a baseball bat, a lamp, a steel-toed boot, a television in a bathtub, and a ten-story drop to pavement. And now a car bomb.

It took Gene an hour and a half to explain everything they didn't know. The victims didn't correlate at all: old, young, male, female, pretty, ugly, rich, poor. The killer's profile was limited to Male, Caucasian, twenty-four to fifty years old, and a childhood history of arson, bed-wetting, and cruelty to animals, just like almost every other organized serial profiled by the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.

Forensic linguistics on early phone calls indicated the killer grew up in the Plains, 65% probability. All they really had were anonymous fingerprints on murder weapons and cellular phones, black hair, and some skin cells from many of the crime scenes. They knew he was Caucasian and male from DNA, and that was about it.

By the end of the meeting, Gene felt like he needed a shower. Captain Stukly obviously didn't care much about the poor woman blown to pieces only sixteen blocks away, except insofar as it affected his bid for mayor. Gene left the office with Stukly staring holes into the back of his head.

He made it down the hall, past rows of cubicles, barnyard pens for human cattle with crummy jobs, and saw a lean, young man in an LAPD uniform hurrying toward him. He looked familiar.
Right. The guy from the crime scene yesterday. Anderson.

The smiling young man had his hand out and an expectant look on his face. Gene took his hand and shook it.
Too hard again. He probably wants a job with the FBI.
"You here to keep me out of trouble, Officer?" Gene asked, his attempt at levity murdered by his scowl.

Officer Anderson's smile faded to a constipated grimace. "Wasn't very good at it yesterday, Agent Palomini. Not sure what good it'd do today." He looked even more chagrined as the implications of his statement caught up to him. Gene didn't give him the chance to back out.

"It didn't do any 'good' yesterday, and it wouldn't do any 'good' today, because we're the 'good' guys, and getting the 'bad' guys is our job. Why is it your job to get in our way, Officer? Aren't you supposed to be catching the bad guys, too?" He jerked a hand up to stifle a reply and added, "What can I do for you, Officer Anderson?"

Anderson flushed and looked out the window. "Detective Rodriguez told me you were with Stukly. I thought you'd want to know we've got preliminary analysis on the explosive back from the lab. Ammonium nitrate. Fertilizer. We're working on a source now, but that could take weeks."

Gene softened his tone, embarrassed. "Sorry, you didn't deserve that. Thanks for the info. Let me know if…. Let me know when you get the results back." He took out a business card and handed it to the policeman. "My cell's the second number. Call any time, day or night, if something breaks." Officer Anderson took the card, and it disappeared into a pocket.

Inwardly, Gene sighed. Timothy McVeigh used ammonium nitrate to blow up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. It was as common as anything and could have come from anywhere. In a month anyone could buy enough of the stuff from a garden supply store to make a car bomb without tripping a Department of Homeland Security threshold on dangerous substances.
That's if you didn't just pay a farmer for a truckload of pig crap and make it yourself.

Anderson's irrepressible smile reappeared. "No problemo. You just let me know if there's anything else we can do. I don't have much pull around here, but I'm well-liked, and Marco—that's Detective Rodriguez, homicide—might be able to help you cut through any bullshit Stukly throws in your face. And call me Jimmy."

Maybe this cop was one of the good guys. "I'll do that, Jimmy. I'll do that." His mood lightened ever so slightly, Gene headed to his car.

July 17th, 2:25 PM EST; Wegmans Supermarket; Fairfax, Virginia.

Three weeks later, Gene pushed his cart up and down the aisles of the supermarket, trying to stick to his list as much as possible in light of all the temptations offered. He caught a whiff of the in-store Chinese buffet and his stomach growled.
Why do I always come here hungry?

Every other weekend he drove to Fairfax to get "the good stuff" from Wegmans grocery store.
More like the Taj Mahal of eats.
He wandered aisles packed with everything he could ever want for his kitchen, whether he felt like cooking or just wanted something to take out. Even if it wasn't crowded, it took at least an hour to get out of there, and he always spent more than he meant to.
Why do I come here, again?
By way of reply, his stomach tried to convince his brain that, yes, he did need a two-pound bag of jumbo shrimp to go with the cocktail sauce already in his cart.

His FBI-issued cell phone rang and jolted him out of his reverie. He looked at the caller ID.
Unknown name, Unknown number.
And on a Saturday. He frowned and hit the green "talk" button.

"Hello, this is Gene."

"Hello, Special Agent." The voice on the other end was filtered through a computer scrambler, with no discernible accent. He hoped it wasn't Marty. His childish older brother hadn't met a practical joke he didn't like.

"What can I do for you, Mr. Scrambled-Voice Guy?" He cradled the phone on his right shoulder, grabbed the shrimp, and tossed it into his cart.

"Missouri," the voice said.

"Missouri?" Gene asked. The only reply was a dial tone.

He hung up and moved to dial just as it rang again. It was Samantha Greene's desk.

"Sam, I just got a call…." He didn't know why he bothered. All of their work phones were tapped. Their home phones probably were, too, even though that wouldn't be legal. And Sam was always listening. Even at two-thirty on a Saturday.

"Yeah, got it," she interrupted. "NetPhone. New account. This is the first time it's been used. Um, hold on."

Gene pushed his cart toward the front of the store, his mood obliterated along with his free weekend.
So soon after the Sykes murder, and that case dead in the water.
The explosives hadn't panned out to anything. The ammonium nitrate came from a Home Depot in Fresno that sold thousands of pounds of fertilizer a week. The case was idle, Officers Rodriguez and Anderson had been tasked to other investigations, and Chief Stukly was making "the incompetent feds" a campaign point in his bid for mayor. Sam spoke up as he reached the checkout.

"The account is tied to a new phone purchase with prepaid minutes, activated 2:18 PM July 3rd. Bought at, let's see…."

He loaded the heavy stuff onto the belt as Sam pulled up the information. The cashier started scanning his items.

"Yeah, okay. Maybe an hour out of town. The Wegmans Supermarket in Fairfax, Virginia."

Gene went cold. He looked around. No one seemed to be paying him any particular attention. He stepped out of the line and scanned the crowd. There were hundreds of people in the store. At least twenty blabbed away into handheld and Bluetooth phones.

The cashier gave him a concerned look. "You lose something, sir?" Gene looked through the cashier, not seeing her.

"Um, no, I—" He held up a finger. "Hold on a minute." She rolled her eyes.

"Crap, Sam, that's where I am now. I mean, crap. I was
here
on the third, in the afternoon! CRAP!" He slammed his hand down on the conveyor. The woman in line behind him glared and pointed at the toddler in her cart.