Jet (32 page)

The newspapers had been filled with accounts of the shootout on the boat and the ensuing fire, and the tragic explosion in Nice that had claimed the life of one of Russia’s most enigmatic oligarchs, but aside from jumbled and contradictory accounts from some airport personnel, nobody had linked her to the incidents. After laying low for forty-eight hours and dying her hair, she had booked safe passage to the United States with no complications.

The sound of other passengers loading onto the plane reassured her that this was really happening, and that within a few more minutes, she would be winging her way to her daughter – a daughter she’d never met; part of herself stripped away, stolen, punishment for a crime she hadn’t even known she had committed. The surrealism of it all still had her in a daze, and occasionally the force of the unfolding events of the last week would intrude with the impact of blunt-force trauma.

David’s betrayal still devastated her in a profound way, even while at the same time she understood his reasoning – that no matter how careful she tried to be there was no way to completely escape her past, and that meant there was always a chance that an enemy would surface when least expected – as the Russian had with her. And she recognized that she had told him time and time again that she would be the worst mom in the world, given her background.

But.

Even though she appreciated the logic, and also knew that his personality had demanded control over every aspect of whatever he touched…she couldn’t help but feel that a part of her had died when he had confessed, just as a part of her had died when he had.

The contradictions were enormous. She wasn’t sure she would ever be able to make sense of them.

And the thought of David, of their last few days together, when a new future seemed possible and theirs to grab, crushed her in a way nothing had ever before.

How could you both love someone and hate them, simultaneously?

Sometimes things didn’t make sense. Life was messy that way. You mushed on, nursing wounds and displaying your scars, some with pride, some with remorse. The only thing she knew for sure was that in the end, nobody got out of it alive.

A canned warning came over the speakers advising her to pay attention to the screen, and then cheerful, smiling flight attendants warned of steps she’d need to take if they crashed into the ocean at six hundred miles per hour. She adjusted her seat back and turned her head, staring out through the window at a world she didn’t understand, that she didn’t belong to.

The heavy plane rolled to the edge of the runway while the flight crew completed its last-minute preparations and strapped themselves in, and then the pilot’s confident voice announced that they were ready for takeoff. After a few seconds, the jet surged forward and gathered momentum, and then the miracle of physics took over, and the mammoth jet’s wheels left the ground as it hurtled into the warm spring sky.

<<<<>>>> 

Excerpt from Silver Justice

Foreword

Silver Justice is a work of fiction. Those disturbed by the information presented herein are encouraged to treat it all as storytelling and make-believe. Those interested in where the fiction begins are encouraged to read the material in the Afterword section.

As always, any resemblance between people or organizations, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Chapter 1

“We found it.”

Assistant Special Agent in Charge Silver Cassidy grabbed the radio hooked on her belt, thumbed the transmit button, and raised it to her mouth.

“Where?”

“The sick bastard threw it down the garbage chute.” Special Agent Seth Thompson’s ironic tone was unmistakable even over the radio. “Seven floors. It’s hard to recognize it as a head now. Bumpety bump bump.”

“Nice. Forensics will go crazy for this one,” she said, glancing at the group of agents standing near the bedroom door.

She caught a flash of her reflection in the hallway mirror and paused to plump her dark brown hair. The morning had been a whirlwind, between the early call on the latest murder and trying to get her daughter to school before heading to the crime scene. She knew she looked tired and harried, having had no time for makeup or hair gel in the rush.

That was fine. As the head of the FBI task force hunting this serial killer, Silver didn’t need a glamorous look or a ready-for-the-cameras presentation in order to be taken seriously. She was the no-nonsense presence representing the Bureau leadership on the investigation, so everyone at the crime scene gave her a respectfully wide berth.

A generally good idea before she’d imbibed her second cup of coffee.

Static burped at her from the two-way again.

“You got anything more up there?” Seth asked.

Silver paused, considering possible responses as she turned towards the floor-to-ceiling glass of the living room, taking in the West Side apartment’s magnificent view of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline. Some people knew how to live.

Or in this case, where to die.

“Just more of the same. Body in the bedroom tied to the bed. Evidence of loss of bodily functions and a whole lot of blood…he didn’t go easily. Over.”

Silver shook her head and pursed her lips. This was victim number four for their killer, who had been kind enough to leave a laser-printed calling card that she knew could have been made on any of tens of thousands of HP laser printers that used the same ink.

One of the forensics techs had bagged it after dusting it carefully. She caught Silver’s eye, then shook her head. Nothing. Clean as everything else had been on this frustrating hunt. Still, patience would pay off. They would find something. They just needed to look a little harder…

This was a murderer who reveled in the limelight. He clearly wanted to be known, so much so that he’d been willing to help the process along by contacting the press with photos following the first killing. The papers had gone berserk after that. One of the Florida rags had made the shots of the victim and the calling card the central feature of their front page treatment after the ruthless and sensational slaying. As a publicity grabber the little rectangle was elegant and brief, offering two words on one side.

The Regulator.

The media had immediately picked up on the moniker, and now that was the case name.

The FBI had kept the messages neatly printed on the opposite side to itself – standard operating procedure to ensure there were elements only the real killer could know about. This one said: ‘Cooler heads prevail’. She knew from lab reports on the earlier slayings that the message had been printed at the same time the card had been created. Premeditation wasn’t even in question.

Silver adjusted her belt, shifting the Glock 23 in the hip holster over, already sweating in the navy blue FBI windbreaker she wore over her blouse and slacks. They had taken over the crime scene from the NYPD detectives, who had reluctantly acceded federal jurisdiction given that this was an interstate killer. A few uniformed patrolmen waited in the hall, securing the area, and the two homicide detectives who’d initially been assigned to the case were keeping them company, unwilling to completely remove themselves from the action but finding themselves with nothing to add.

“What do we know, people?” she called out to the remaining group, all FBI, mostly male, white, and older than her. At thirty-six she was considered young to be running such a high-profile investigation, especially in the boys’ club that the Bureau continued to be – all the FBI’s marketing photos and insistence on politically-correct diversity notwithstanding. But Silver had earned her position and didn’t make any excuses; she was used to swimming upstream in a man’s world – had been doing so for as long as she could remember. She’d been proving herself since her training days, when she’d graduated second in her class at Quantico – she would have been first had she not annoyed one too many instructors with her independent attitude and been marked down accordingly.

That still stuck in her craw. By rights, she should have been first.

Supervisory Special Agent Sam Aravian, a tall, gangly man with olive skin and an unruly head of black curly hair, emerged from the bedroom and shot her a worried glance.

“This one is grislier than the last. It looks like he was tortured, judging by the lacerations,” he reported, shaking his head. “I’m thinking the killer was trying to get information out of him.”

“Little soon to speculate, don’t you think?” Silver cautioned.

Sam turned his head towards the dining room’s picture window and rolled his eyes, thinking Silver wouldn’t catch his expression in the dim reflection. She let it go.

“Have we got anything from the doorman? Any witnesses? What about security cams? Tell me this isn’t four in a row where the perp’s a ghost…”

“Nothing so far. The maid found him. NYPD is interviewing her with two of our agents, but she doesn’t know much, and she’s still in shock. It isn’t every day you find your employer of six years doing the headless horseman thing,” Sam offered, biting short the rest of his remark when he caught the look in Silver’s eye.

Silver keyed the radio again.

“Seth. What are you going to need to process the downstairs?”

“We have the garbage room sealed off, and two techs are on it. They called upstairs and have someone going over the chute room, too. I’ll be up in a few minutes. But I don’t need to tell you this is going in an ugly direction.”

Silver looked out at the park again and wondered when they would catch a break. It had been six weeks since the first killing, three weeks since the last, and they were no closer to closing in on the killer than when the first victim had been discovered in his car with the calling card stuck in his mouth, stabbed to death and left to drown on his own blood. That
modus operandi
, coupled with the killer’s contacting the press and promising more killings, had galvanized the Bureau into creating a serial killer task force even before he’d slain his second victim.

Besides the lack of any breaks in his having been seen or caught on camera, she was concerned with how clean the crime scenes were. That implied at least a passing familiarity with forensics, which didn’t bode well for their hunt. This was an organized, patient planner who hadn’t slipped up.

Yet.

But they always did.

That wasn’t completely true, though, was it?
an internal voice chided her, reminding her of the ones that had gotten away.

The Capital City murderer.

The Grim Sleeper.

The Zodiac Killer.

The Original Night Stalker.

Every time she was on one of these cases her worst nightmare was that her quarry would turn out to be the next Jack the Ripper or Zodiac and simply disappear into the fog one day after a run of devastating brutality – on her watch. That fear kept her driving hard and had molded a herculean work ethic which had served her well.

“Okay, Sam. Let’s make sure we get statements from everyone who could have potentially seen anything,” Silver said, turning to survey the scene. “We should probably go to the surrounding buildings and talk to anyone who had a sightline on this place. Although that’s a longshot, given the timing.”

“I’m on it,” he agreed and moved back into the bedroom.

Silver had been with the Bureau for thirteen years and had risen through the ranks, starting in Organized Crime before switching to Violent Crime, and since making the move, this was the second task force where she’d been the assistant special agent in charge. The last one, disbanded two years earlier, had stopped a particularly ugly serial killer who’d been targeting prostitutes in the Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York areas. It had taken nine months to capture Tom Rinkley, but they had ultimately arrested him in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where he drove a cab for a living. DNA had proved his undoing – they had managed to get just enough samples from four of the victims to put him away with a clean, unassailable case – so much so that once he’d been told what he was facing, the killer had confessed to a total of a dozen slayings spanning two years, reciting them with clinical precision.

Rinkley hadn’t been a particularly bright man, but he was methodical, at least at first. They had gotten him after he’d increased his frequency and gotten sloppy, which they later discovered was because he was having breaks from reality – vivid drug-induced hallucinatory episodes where he believed he was receiving messages from God to kill unclean women.

Silver had participated in the interrogation. Her skin still crawled as she recalled his gleeful account of how he’d reduced the incidence of AIDS and deterred any women considering the vocation. The interaction had made her want to put a bullet between his eyes right at the questioning table.

“Well, Agent, they were whores. Unclean, polluted vessels for disease, sent to tempt good men and contaminate them with their foulness.”

“Good men? You mean the kind of good men that leave their wives and families at home and go seek out prostitutes in truck stops or near bus stations, like those you targeted? Those kinds of good men?” Silver had inquired in a neutral tone.

“Men are like dogs. They don’t know any better. It’s women who lead them astray and spread the corruption of their bodies and their spirits. Exterminate the vermin and the neighborhood becomes clean over time.” Rinkley had fixed her with cold, dead eyes, smirking as he winked at her. “You should know how filthy women can be, Agent Cassidy.”

Silver had outwardly been unmoved, but that night after crawling into bed, she’d cried for an hour – for her soul, for her daughter, and because the universe produced sick animals that viewed her gender as inferior, and therefore something less than human. She knew Rinkley was atypical, but being in the same room with a man who was so palpably evil strained her composure and tested her inner fortitude.

If she’d had a gun in her hand when he’d winked at her…