Deadly Messengers (10 page)

When he smiled, she screamed: “Why? Why?”

He knew why, but couldn’t say. Destiny had arrived. Catherine would have a ringside seat.

The match tingled maddeningly, wonderfully. The time had come. Catherine groped at his legs, pleading with him, attempting to raise herself. Benito didn’t look away from the match, he now held in his hand, the match that seemed to spark even before it was struck. He anticipated the tiny swish of the head against the matchbox’s roughened side. Musical, delightful.

He wanted to smile, to say, “It’s alright. We’re witnesses to fate,” but he couldn’t speak. He did try, but nothing came, the words trapped inside his head, just as Catherine was trapped inside this room with him and destiny. All he heard was the voice.
Straight and true. Straight and true.
In the end, she’d understand. His actions would speak louder than words.

Benito Tavell struck the match.

O’GRADY, TRIP, AND ALLEN, THE audio-visual tech, had stared at the video screen for more than an hour. Something about the man on screen looked familiar to O’Grady. The second he’d appeared in the recovered security footage, the hairs on the back of O’Grady’s neck stood up like the hackles of an annoyed dog.

“I feel like I know this guy, Trip. You recognize him?”

Trip leaned into the screen, studying the grainy black and white image. He stood back and slowly shook his head.

“No, can’t say I do. He just looks like your everyday garden-variety psycho.”

“There’s something about him. His face. Or the way he moves, maybe. He keeps angling his head, twisting his neck. See there?” O’Grady pointed to the screen. “Like a nervous twitch. I don’t know, maybe I interviewed him once.”

O’Grady sighed a long, tired sigh, rubbing at his eyes with a fingertip. “Maybe, I’m just imagining it. I’m kinda beat.”

“Maybe it’ll come to you later.”

“What do you think we’re looking at here, anyway?”

“Beats me,” said Trip. “It’s like the guy’s a robot. I’ve never seen a vic act quite that way.”

“See, look there.” O’Grady motioned to the corner of the screen.

He addressed Allen. “Roll that back? What’s he doing there?”

On screen, the man they now knew as Benito Tavell had stopped in the middle of a corridor while people moved in a wild panic around him. Tavell stood, rooted to the ground, gazing around like a tourist admiring scenery. It was one heck of a
Twilight Zone
episode, considering the fatalities.

“What kind of crazy person just stands there, even if they’re
insane
enough to have set fire to the place,” said Trip, rubbing the back of his head, his habitual response to stress or tiredness. After three years, side-by-side, O’Grady knew his partner’s quirks like he knew his own.

As O’Grady watched the scenes captured on video, O’Grady wondered at the misfortune that saw them catching two mass murders in a single week. Some kind of freaking bad lottery ticket, right there. This Benito Tavell and his gruesome little play was a piece of work. Images like this never left you. They faded, but always remained, waiting to float back unexpectedly. Eventually there were too many; they were like a steaming garbage pile begun to ferment.

If Tavell had been arrested, right now a shitload of bodies would be assigned to this. Instead, it was just them and a couple of wet-behind-the-ears boys. If the killer were still out there, a taskforce would have been assembled to hunt him down. The D.A. would brief them on what they could and couldn’t do, and the pressure from the food chain above would be immense. But this case, like the Café Amaretto killings, was open and shut. Both killers had died in the process. A good thing.

The downside was he and Trip were left with cleanup duty: a mountain of paperwork and liaising with the necessary departments handling media and enquiries. They’d brief the sergeant, once they had all the facts. No doubt, then, all the white collar number crunchers and analysts would have a field day with their long-winded reports on how the police force could develop freaking mental telepathy so something like this wouldn’t happen again.

Luckily, they had plenty of the Kenworth Home’s security footage from the dozen-plus cameras installed through the hallways and common rooms. Their security was good. They just hadn’t planned on one of their own employees turning
Firestarter
. The other piece of luck was the Cloud. The footage had been fed online for security. Otherwise, this evidence would have been destroyed with the majority of the building.

Ten people died in the inferno, including one of the managers. Six more lay critical in hospital, two with little hope of survival. It was one of the worst fires in the city, especially heartbreaking for the population because these were defenseless elderly folk.

They’d already interviewed some of Tavell’s friends and his family. He lived with his parents—no wife or children. The parents hadn’t seen him since that morning, when he’d left to run errands before starting his shift. When he didn’t come home from his afternoon-evening shift, they hadn’t worried. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for him. He had many friends and, according to everyone, was well liked.

The main witnesses were fellow workers at the nursing home, who’d briefly seen him before the fire. They’d made nothing of him coming back to work, even though his shift had ended two hours earlier.

“I thought he was working overtime or got called back in,” a shocked middle-aged female nurse told them, between sobs.

One of his co-workers and several residents, who remembered seeing Tavell during the evacuation, described his behavior as strange. As
too
calm.

Another co-worker saw him before the fire took hold. She said: “He was carrying a wastebasket filled with paper up a hall. I thought he was emptying it. It was odd—him emptying the trash—the cleaners do that normally. If only I’d thought about it, maybe he could’ve been stopped.” She, also, began to cry, requiring some consoling.

They didn’t realize it was Tavell, at first, before they had the footage. It took less than a day, though, to isolate him as a suspect. The security footage confirmed it. Benito Tavell purposely set the fire and then succumbed to it, a victim of his own handiwork.

O’Grady paused that thought.

He was hardly a victim. He was a cold-blooded killer; his movements calculated, disturbing. That was, except for the piece of the video they were staring at now. Fourteen seconds of Tavell standing amid the chaos. Fourteen seconds, where he stopped being a robot and appeared to suddenly understand what he was doing and what was happening around him. He seemed to have awoken not from a nightmare, but
into
one. For maybe five of the fourteen seconds, his face was the face of a terrified man.

On the screen, the dark-skinned twenty-nine-year-old—well on his way to overweight—looked down at his hands as though surprised he possessed fingers. He turned his gaze slowly then to look around the hallway.

“What’s he doing?” said Trip under his breath, the first time they watched this scene. “Lost. He looks lost, doesn’t he?”

“Yes,” agreed O’Grady, “Every movement before this looks determined. Calculated. Like everything’s planned. Then it’s as if he changed drivers mid-race. Then back again to zombie land.

Trip rubbed at the back of his head as though something had stuck there. “Is it drugs, do you think?”

“He sure isn’t behaving like any wacked-out addict I’ve ever seen. Nobody we’ve interviewed has mentioned drugs. Nothing, except he was the perfect employee and a
good guy
. If he was using, someone would’ve noticed or it’d show in his work.”

Trip shook his head and sighed. “Then what sets someone off in the middle of the night to do this? Blows your mind, really.”

O’Grady leaned back in his chair and rubbed a hand back and forth across his mouth. “I don’t want to say this, because it makes me sound as crazy as him. But this guy’s behavior has similar hallmarks to our café killer Benson.”

Allen, who’d remained silent the entire time, piped up. “I’ve seen my share of this kind of footage—goes with the job—but this one, it’s playing on me, too.”

Trip patted Allen on the shoulder. “Just be glad you’re only seeing it in black and white and on a screen, man.”

The three men returned to the horror film starring Benito Tavell. Slowly the killer pushed a mop-bucket up the hall. The action appeared so innocent. Four minutes and forty seconds later, he returned to the janitor’s closet.

“Shit, he’s merciless,” said Trip as Tavell pulled the night manager inside the closet. Then close on a minute later it was like a bomb exploded. The door flew outward, slamming against the wall across the hall. A fireball burst from the room and traveled up the hallway, engulfing two stragglers with ferocity. The film ended abruptly, the screen turning to black, as the blast reached the camera.

Nobody spoke. Words didn’t come easy after seeing something like that. Allen hit a few keys and the screen returned to the original opening frame of an empty hallway.

Finally, Trip spoke. “Wow, that sure is one hell of a horror show.”

O’Grady blew out the breath he hadn’t even realized he’d held in. “That it is. That … it … is.”

Allen turned to them. “Do you want to watch again?”

“Not now,” said O’Grady. “We need to check in with the coroner. Later this afternoon a preliminary arson squad report should be ready we need to look over. The second story partially collapsed, so the place looks like a warzone.”

“You know,” said Trip, “I honestly don’t get this guy. Why would he be so obvious? It’s not your usual arson m.o.”

O’Grady stood back from the screen. He agreed. He’d never seen anything like it and hoped he never would again. What O’Grady actually needed was to get away and mull everything over. What he knew; what he needed to know; and why he couldn’t help thinking a connection between this crime and the Café Amaretto killings existed. The only thing certain: that for the second time in one week, people had died at the hands of a madman in a city that usually didn’t breed madness.

Questions would be asked: How could two mass killings occur? Could they have been prevented? It was human nature to ask
why.
Another even more frightening question: What if there was no reason? What if Tavell and Benson were normal everyday people just like everyone they’d interviewed had attested? What then?

Were they dealing with serial mass killings or terrorists? Or just something in the air? Bad luck, maybe? Could these have been created by circumstances they were yet to discover? The last question, truly the most frightening when, after all these years, O’Grady thought he’d seen everything evil. Was this a
new
evil?

KENDALL FELT SICK TO HER stomach. Initially, she’d thought the fire was an accident, but already early news coverage had speculated it was another mass killing. How could anyone kill innocent, elderly people? It was just too horrible.

What made her so upset now was the predicament suddenly facing her.

That darn article she’d written on the Café Amaretto killings, had, in the minds of news editors, made her some kind of expert in mass killings. Her, of all people! If it didn’t make her feel sick every time she thought about it, she would find it amusing.

After she’d interviewed Beverley, the survivor from Café Amaretto, a management attorney had weaseled his way in. All other news agencies were forced to pay a sizeable figure to speak to Beverley, except for Kendall. Beverley had taken a real liking to her and had been happy to speak to her again, feeless. Turned out, Beverley’s vantage point had been the best to literally see everything, making her a valuable witness. She’d become the face of the surviving victims.

Her tear-streaked appearance, complete with running mascara, was center stage on two morning shows—one of them syndicated—and several evening current affairs programs. Only yesterday, she’d seen a
Sixty Minutes
commercial with Beverley seated on the very lounge that just over a week ago Kendall had sat sipping coffee. In print media, Kendall’s articles had become the main source material for other media outlets.