Vengeance Road (11 page)

A
s Jack Gannon showered the next morning, needles of hot water revived his tired muscles but didn't thaw his impression of Styebeck.

As cold as an executioner.

Did that make him guilty?

And something unholy was going on between Styebeck and Fowler.

The new facts took this story into a wicked realm, making him wonder if Ascension Park's hero detective was a Jekyll-and-Hyde case, especially considering Tuesday's information that Styebeck admitted his desires “were sick” and had blamed his father.

His father?

As Gannon dressed he decided to dig deeper into Styebeck's past. He was going to dissect his career, climb up and down every branch of his family tree.

He started making a full-court press on all public, federal, state and local records he could get. Then he made calls to sources, starting with a woman he knew in the Ascension Park personnel department who owed him a favor. After launching his research, he made coffee and had just grabbed a bagel when his phone rang.

“Gannon?”

“Yes?”

“It's Fowler. Can you come into my office now?”

He'd expected this call
.

“Is this about last night?”

“Just get in here.”

Thirty minutes after the call, Gannon was in the newsroom.

As he headed to Fowler's office he sensed an undercurrent; something grave was going on. Conversations halted; people in the middle of phone interviews gazed at him.

“Gannon!”

Fowler was cutting across the metro section toward him, tie loosened, collar button undone, sleeves rolled to the elbow. A clipboard listing the morning's assignments was in his left hand, which he'd raised to point to his box-shaped, glass-walled office.

“In there. Now.”

Fowler shut the door behind him.

“Give me your
Sentinel
cell phone.”

Gannon put it on the desk.

“And the paper's credit card.”

“Is this about last night?”

Gannon produced the plastic card he'd used for trips and expenses. It snapped when he put it on Fowler's desk next to the phone.

“You going to tell me what's going on?”

“You're going to stand there and act like you don't know?”

Fowler slid the surrendered items into the top drawer of his desk.

“Know what, Nate?”

Fowler waved to Kathy, his assistant. She entered with an envelope, handed it to Fowler then left, keeping the door open.

Fowler gave the envelope to Gannon.

“What's this?”

“You're fired.”

“What?”

“There's severance pay and vacation.”

Two uniformed security officers filled Fowler's doorway.

“I didn't want to do this, but you left me no choice. Your actions are indefensible and do not represent this newspaper. Kathy will collect your personal items from your desk and send them to you later.”

Fowler nodded to the security guys, big, unsmiling strangers.

“Hold on, Nate. I don't understand.”

“You're unbelievable, Gannon.”

“Come this way, sir,” one of the security men said.

At that moment, Paul Capresey, a news photographer, fired several frames before Gannon and the officers got into the elevator car. It was a tense silent descent. Gannon could smell cologne. A tattoo of a spiderweb reached above the neckline of one of the officers.

The doors opened to the lobby where Gannon was met by Pete Martinez, a
Sentinel
reporter, who held a small recorder in front of him. Martinez walked quickly alongside Gannon as the security people hurried him to the
Sentinel's
glass doors.

“Pete, what's going on?”

“Jack, I need your reaction to Styebeck.”

“What reaction? For what?”

At that instant Gannon saw a tangle of reporters in the street, people he knew. News cars and vans were parked behind them.

Was that a satellite truck?

The officers released Gannon and bright camera lights blazed, cuing the press pack to advance. Microphones,
lenses and hardened faces lurched at him with an eruption of questions.

Gary Golden fired first.

“Jack, what's your response to Karl Styebeck's wife?”

“What about her?”

“She overdosed last night.”

“What?”

“According to Styebeck, it happened after you crashed a fund-raiser and publicly accused him, in front of his wife and friends, of visiting hookers and murdering Bernice Hogan.”

J
olene Peller was not alone in her dark prison
.

Her encounter had sent her scurrying back to her mattress.

She'd pushed herself hard into her corner, trembling as she contended with the fact that a few feet from her someone else was alive.

Enemy? Or ally?

Jolene's nostrils flared as she panted.

Adrenaline rushed through her body, giving rise to the primal instinct to fight. But at the same time Jolene struggled to be rational.

It could be Bernice.

Ashamed and angered at herself, Jolene tore at her gag with such ferocity she loosened it just enough to allow her to breathe easier.

And to speak.

Her jaw welcomed the relief and she swallowed several times before she whispered.

“Bernice?”

Jolene crawled through the blackness to the person moaning on the floor.

“Is that you, Bernie? It's Jo. It's going to be okay. I'm going to get us out of here. Be calm while I try to help you, okay?”

A muffled moan—the soft tone of a female—rose
from the floor as Jolene's bound hands explored the stranger's body.

She felt fabric. Thin fabric. There was warmth under it. A T-shirt. She felt sturdier fabric. Denim. Legs. Shoes. Sneakers, or tennis shoes. Legs and ankles unbound. Moving upward she felt a flat stomach. Curves. The ridged outline of a bra. This woman had a larger bust than—
this wasn't Bernice
.

Jolene felt warm skin. Arms, leading to binding and thick coils of duct tape around the wrists, just like hers.

Jolene felt the woman's neck then the binding around her mouth, a dampened rag wedged between her upper and lower jaw, knotted tight as a cord behind her head.

“Let me help you.”

Jolene tried to slide the rag down at the back of the woman's neck. The woman rolled her head from side to side, resisting Jolene's help.

“Honey, be still, let me help. I'm your friend. I'm going to help.”

Jolene could feel the woman's entire body shaking. She was in shock. Jolene tried to soothe her but the woman flinched.

“Take it easy,” Jolene said. “Let me try to loosen the gag on your mouth.”

The woman moaned but stilled herself long enough for Jolene to work on the gag. Firmly Jolene pushed and pushed until she managed to slide it lower, so that it loosened and the woman drew air into her mouth.

Jolene stroked her hair.

“Isn't that better? It's better, right?”

No response.

 

Time was impossible to measure.

Jolene had no way of knowing how much of it had
passed. She felt like they were underwater in a dark river, rushing into the eternal night. As they drifted in and out of consciousness, Jolene wondered about the other woman.

Who was she? How did she get here? Did she know about Bernice? Or who had kidnapped them? Where were they going?

The stranger was in worse shape than Jolene.

The woman never spoke.

She would come to, roll her head and groan.

“That's okay,” Jolene said. “We're in this together. I can be strong for both of us. I've got a good mother. I've got a beautiful little boy. I've got a new life waiting for us in Florida. I've been through some tough times and I'm not going to let my family down. Or you. You'll see.”

The woman never responded.

“I'm going to see what you have in your pockets,” Jolene said. “Maybe you've got something in there that can help us.”

Like a cell phone. Keys, a knife. Jolene turned the woman on her side and checked her rear pockets. Nothing. Then she checked her front left pocket and found a small plastic box. She shook it. By the sound and cinnamon smell, she guessed it was breath mints.

Jolene felt something hard in the woman's right pocket, managed to slide her fingers in and tugged out something metal, jingling.

Keys.

Good.

Jolene felt the key ring, a few metal keys and a small cylinder. Her fingers assessed the cylinder. It had a smooth tip, like glass, a button like a—Jolene pushed—small flashlight!

A flash of bright light burst on the horror.

Jolene gasped.

The woman's face was a surreal stew of bloodied torn flesh; her T-shirt and jeans were brown with dried blood.

Then all went dark again.

The flashlight's tiny batteries had slipped from the cylinder, clunked on the floor and rolled in the darkness.

“No!”

Jolene groped for them.

She pawed the floor for the longest time but it was futile. She could not find them. Maybe they'd rolled into a crack, or a seam, or deeper into hell.

Jolene cursed.

The keys chimed as she put her head in her hands, the image of the woman's face seared in her mind.

What sort of monster had done this?

And why?

What had he done to Bernice?

Would she ever see Cody and her mother again?

Jolene crawled back to her corner and cried until she lost consciousness.

B
ernice Hogan is standing alone on Niagara Street. A rig—just the tractor, no trailer—rolls by then vanishes. A few minutes later a car emerges and stops. Looked like a Chev Malibu? Bernice leans into the window, hustles the driver. The car leaves without her. Then a man walks up to her. Is it Karl Styebeck? Impossible to say; traffic obscures the view. Then Bernice disappears into the darkness
.

Like she was never there
.

Michael Brent, New York State Police investigator, took a moment to absorb the scenes he was reviewing on the security videotape.

Had he just watched Bernice Hogan meet her killer?

As Brent drank coffee from his Buffalo Bills mug, he glimpsed Bernice Hogan's self-conscious smile from an open folder. He didn't see a hooker whose lifestyle invited her death. What he saw was a young woman who deserved better and he vowed to avenge her murder.

But why had her killer marked her?

Brent pondered the key piece of evidence that he and Esko had kept from nearly everyone, a cryptic message the murderer had carved into Bernice Hogan's body.

What did it mean?

He'd grappled with these questions ever since the autopsy.

The job was all he had going these days, he thought as he watched the tape again. His stomach tensed the way it always did when his gut told him the answers were in front of him.

But he was missing them.

“Who is that guy?” Brent asked the screen as he replayed the tape, losing count of how many times he'd rerun the footage.

It was 10:30 p.m. in the Bureau of Criminal Investigation offices of State Police Clarence Barracks, Troop A, Zone 2. He was working with Roxanne Esko, preparing for the next case-status meeting of the task force investigating the homicide.

The video's quality sucked. It was like looking through a snowstorm. The forensic guys in Batavia had tried to clean it up, but it was still terrible. Going public with it would not have helped. So they kept it as holdback, a card to be played later.

The tape had been volunteered by Samson's Music Mansion across the street from Bernice Hogan's corner at Lafayette. Samson's sold used guitars, drums and keyboards at a run-down store that had an outdated security system.

The angle from the store's camera had captured partial images of Bernice.
The last pictures of her.
The minutes, hour and date running across the bottom were key to establishing a time frame for her disappearance but little else. Brent shifted his gaze to Esko, who'd stopped watching it to review the files.

“Your neck muscle's pulsating, Mike.” Esko worked at her computer. “What're you thinking?”

“Jack Gannon's an asshole.”

“I know he's a pain, but he's just doing his job. Or was.”

“He messed up my case.”

“Let it go. Being pissed at him is a waste of time. He's gone. Fired. We've been at this since 6:00 a.m. Why don't you take a break while I finish up.”

Brent shook his head.

He came from a long line of dedicated police officers who were not inclined to take breaks. His great-grandfather, Stanislaw Brentkozeska, had been a cop in Warsaw before arriving in the U.S., where an immigration officer at Ellis Island shortened his name.

“Welcome to America, Mr. Brent.”

Brent's grandfather and father were cops and Brent kept with tradition when he joined the New York State Police, a decision that had nearly cost him his life.

He was working as a trooper near Watertown when he stopped a car for speeding. While writing the ticket another car struck him. The accident had left him with a lifetime of back trouble and a sour attitude.

Then his heart broke last winter when his wife died of cancer. Her loss was evident in his weary eyes and fugitive smile. Brent thought of her every day. He dreaded his retirement in a few months. He was a solitary investigator but found that working with Esko made his life bearable.

Roxanne was happily married to a furniture-store manager she had met while shopping for a bed at the Eastern Hills Mall.

While Esko entered data on her computer keyboard, Brent removed his bifocals, then reread his notes.

They had known about Karl Styebeck from the get-go, about the community-cop hero and his volunteer work. But Brent also had statements from hookers alleging Styebeck's habit of first trying to rescue them, then insulting them. And about his disturbing preference for “young ones.”

Was he some kind of predator?

The women had witnessed Styebeck on Niagara talking to Bernice the night she vanished. One recorded a plate number for a rental, which they'd traced to him.

Why use a rental? Why not a departmental unmarked?

Styebeck was vague but admitted he'd talked to Bernice; claimed he was on the job talking to informants. Styebeck said he was asking about a strange truck, whose driver had creeped out some of the girls.

Really? Nobody got the plate? And why would Styebeck care? Protecting the girls is something pimps do.

That's when the partner theory arose.
Maybe Styebeck and another person were responsible. And maybe Styebeck was protecting them.

It was tricky but Brent shifted gears. He'd thanked Styebeck for clearing things up and requested his help on the case. Brent couldn't let Styebeck know that he was a suspect; he even made a cop-to-cop joke about it, while secretly they focused on him.

They wanted to know his link to Bernice and to the rig. They had partial tire impressions from the unpaved parking lot near the murder scene. They had taken casts of them and of larger tire impressions, consistent with the tires on a rig.

Brent requested the rental-car company retrieve the car Styebeck had rented from circulation and return it to Buffalo so the lab could analyze it. The company was cooperating, but it would take time.

The car was in Pittsburgh.

At this point they still had no solid evidence.

The District Attorney's Office had advised them that they didn't have grounds to charge Styebeck, or even enough leverage to question him.

Not yet.

Brent wanted to put Styebeck under surveillance, build a case. Then Gannon blew everything with his front-page story and Brent damn near put his foot through a
Sentinel
news box. He wanted to know Gannon's source, wanted to know who in the task force had compromised his investigation.

As Esko's keyboard clicked away in the empty office, Brent poured himself fresh coffee and considered Jolene Peller's file.

It was a missing-person case that took on a chilling dimension, thanks to Gannon's discovery of Jolene's unused bus ticket near the scene. A ticket to Orlando that had been purchased by Styebeck's outreach group.

They were working with the FBI on Peller's case.

Brent couldn't believe Gannon's tenacity and, privately, he was developing a begrudging respect for him. Hell, he could've built a bridge with Gannon that would've served them both.

The demand for a retraction hadn't come from Brent or Esko. Brent didn't know where the demand had come from. There were rumors that either Brent himself, or the D.A.'s office, had leaned on the
Sentinel.
Styebeck seemed to be cozy with Fowler, the paper's managing editor, whose wife, Madeline, worked with the Attorney General's Office.

It got strange last night when Styebeck's wife OD'd after mixing booze and pills following the fund-raiser where Gannon showed up to take another shot at Styebeck while his boss was praising him.

Which reminded Brent…

“Rox, did you call the hospital to find out how Alice Styebeck is doing?”

“She's not out of the woods yet.” Esko kept working at her keyboard.

“What about Karl? We need to talk to him again.”

“That's not going to happen for a while. He's with his wife at the hospital.”

Brent checked his watch.

“How are you doing there, Rox?”

“Almost done.”

Esko was working on their submission to the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.

She scrolled through the form on her computer monitor. ViCAP was the nationwide database that gathered and analyzed details of missing-person cases and violent crimes, specifically murder, and linked them to others with similar patterns.

Brent's case would first go to the New York State Police Forensic Investigation Center in Albany. The center administered the state's ViCAP system and worked with the FBI in Quantico, who operated the national system.

Esko was a great believer in ViCAP.

The program's goal was to detect signature traits that could pinpoint crimes committed by the same offender. Some detectives were anxious about giving up all of the critical key fact evidence and often held back stuff that no one but the primary investigators, or the offender, would know.

Esko reread the autopsy report, inhaled slowly and flipped through the crime-scene photos of Bernice Hogan.

In her career, Esko had seen horrible things up close. But nothing, nothing compared to the Hogan case. Esko had fought to maintain her professional composure and kept her game face on for the sake of the other guys at the scene.

At home, she'd lost it in the shower.

The photos brought it all back.

She swallowed hard and closed them.

They had to catch this guy.

“Ready to submit it, Mike.”

“You put in all our holdback, the details on the message?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

Esko submitted the case then massaged her temples.

“Mike, do you think our guy's done this before?”

“I don't know.” He studied Jolene Peller's file. “At this point I'm only concerned with stopping him from doing it again.”