The Torso Murders

by Lee Perry

  “Look,” she shrugged, “I didn’t say you weren’t smart.”

  “It’s all ready to go,” he said, his voice reassuring, “his company’s encryption was easy enough to crack, he’s only here now as a symbol of the frailty that Wall Street ultimately is.” He snickered, “The instant before the closing bell sounds, it will be done and Wall Street will be no more…” His smile was benevolent and he shook his head in slow self-appreciation from side to side, “all from my humble laptop… All of them; the central banks, the stock exchanges, none of them give a damn about American business and if it was possible; they care even less about the individual investor. The only thing any of them have ever cared about is how much money they make each day and that is all. The American investor is as ignorant and helpless as sheep, blindly trusting that an utterly rigged and untrustworthy market will treat them fairly and let them make a few pennies each day toward their child’s college fund, or their retirement while the traders are taking millions of their money.” His laugh was both sad and ironic, “They’re all such deluded fools.”

  “Yeah, except that’s over now, Jonas. Put the gun down before the cops get here.”

  He frowned, considering her words, “Don’t you know who I am?”

  “Yes,” she nodded, “I know.”

  “I am a Peaceful Being…” He said and pointed the gun to his head, pulling the trigger.

  Jordan quickly looked away, flinching when she heard the shot. She looked back when she heard him fall and drew a deep, careful breath before checking the body.

  Boehne lay limply on the drip pan and sobbed quietly, facedown, “That fucking asshole’s crazy!”

  She could hear a vehicle come to a skidding halt on the gravel outside and holstered her weapon, “More help is here, just relax now.” She muttered and returned to the doorway, fishing her badge wallet out of her jacket pocket.

  Two officers rushed from their vehicle, their weapons drawn, “I’m Lieutenant Gordon Walker…” the elder man introduced himself.

  “Agent Hawkins,” she said, holding her ID up for them to see, “the suspect is dead so don’t touch anything in here… but does one of you have a pocket knife or something to cut the plastic ties off the hostage?”

  The second officer holstered the gun he held in shaking hands and fumbled in his large cargo pocket, “I gotta’ Swiss Army knife with a pair of wire cutters on it.”

  “Great.” She motioned him inside.

  He ducked past her and was halfway across the garage floor when he saw Alden’s body and splattered blood and brains. “Oh shit.” He squeaked, and tiptoed the remaining distance to the hostage.

  “Lieutenant, this is a crime scene for a serial murderer.” Jordan pointed at Boehne, “I need you to move the hostage to your car ‘til the paramedics arrive and make sure no one comes in here ‘til the bureau’s scene investigation unit arrives, okay?”

  He nodded, “Understood.”

  While she spoke the other officer cut the plastic ties from Mike Boehne’s wrists, ankles and thighs and the lieutenant helped him half drag half carry the weeping CEO out to their patrol car. She closed the door behind them and looked up at the gray sky, relieved the rain had stopped.

  She could see more police cars speeding up the long drive and she called after the lieutenant, “I’ll be in the house if you need me, have some of your officers guard the driveway out at the road, okay? Once the media gets wind of this they’ll be crawling all over this place.”

  “NO!” Boehne suddenly twisted in their grasp, “NO! NO PUBLICITY! It’ll kill us! Our stock will be worthless!”

  Jordan stood for a moment longer, watching the shouting man in both sympathy and some bewilderment then headed for the house.

  She pulled her weapon again, although she seriously doubted anyone was inside, and opened the door. Gun held at the ready, she entered cautiously, straining to hear the slightest sound while her eyes swept the rooms for any movement. She entered the living room, taking quick inventory of the exercise equipment, small couch, TV, and the laptop and large monitor on the ranch style wooden kitchen table sitting prominently in the middle of the room. A swivel chair sat before it and Jordan quickly approached. It’s running… She stared down at the screens; the program’s name, Eve of Destruction/Atom of Rebirth topped both, the large monitor displayed a graph with what looked like a flickering EEG signal and in front of it, the laptop’s screen had a timer counting down.

  “Dammit.” She muttered aloud and dug her cell phone from a jacket pocket. One-handed, she dialed Stewart. “Hey,” she greeted him, still holding her weapon extended towards the open doorway, “I found the torso murderer, he just killed himself but he’s running a program that’s gonna take down Wall Street just before closing bell at four o’clock today.”

  “Holy shit!” Stewart suddenly sounded as if he was running, “It’s almost one now! What do you need?”

  “I need Catherine here at my location… right now.”

  New York City, NY

  Catherine was still studying what she now knew was Alden’s algorithm, looking for more cleverly written code when her phone rang. When she saw the caller ID, she didn’t bother saying hello.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Hey there, yeah, I’m fine, listen, Stewart is coming to get you, I need your brain to diagnose what Alden has going on his laptop.”

  “You arrested him?”

  “I was going to, but then he killed himself.”

  “Oh, my god!”

  “It’s okay,” Jordan stared down at the screen, “the hostage is still alive, so it’s all good… except for what I’m seeing on Alden’s computer here.”

  Stewart suddenly burst in the door and Catherine jumped and yelled, still clutching the phone to her ear.

  “Sorry!” Stewart held up his hands in apology, out of breath, “Sorry!”

  “I take it Stewart’s there now?” Jordan asked drolly.

  Catherine sputtered, “Yeah!”

  “Grab your stuff, he’s gonna bring you and Bea out here, okay?”

  “Okay…” she swallowed audibly, “I’ll see you soon.” They hung up and she was barely able to grab her jacket, purse, phone, and tablet when Stewart grabbed her by the hand and dragged her out the door.

  “Come on,” he rasped, “We’re going up to the roof.”

  Howell Township, NJ

  Jordan explored the rest of Alden’s house while she waited, her service weapon held at the ready even though it became increasingly obvious it was empty. She checked the kitchen and room at the rear of the house Alden clearly used as his bedroom before exploring the vacant rooms upstairs. When she finally returned to the living room and holstered her weapon, she flexed her hand and shook it out at the wrist, groaning softly, The place is in great shape, but he didn’t have an eye for decorating, did he?

  Several whiteboards were stacked against the wall, What have we here? She squinted at the neat writing that completely covered the whiteboard, Oh jeez, Catherine’ll have to tell me what this is… She pulled the cuff of her sleeve down over her fingers to tilt the board forward and flipped past two more boards filled with codes and formulas and stopped. The title at the top of the board was, Protocols for Catch Research. Her eyes scanned the list, “Wow, so this is how he chose and grabbed his victims…” She flipped to the last board and winced, Dismemberment and Disposal Protocols/A Ritual for Organization, Neatness and Efficacy. “My god.” Jordan said aloud as she scanned Alden’s list of tools needed to kill, how to first decapitate, then sever limbs and genitalia, and how to stack them teepee style on his drip pan to maximize fluid drainage. He wrote when to wear gloves, collect personal effects, bag body parts and… Her brows arched, Oh… he dumped them from his boat. “So Lucas may be able to match that arm found in the ocean to one of the victims after all.”

  She got out her phone and made a lengthy audio file to be transcribed for her report and when she heard the approach of the rotors, she knew her phone would rin
g shortly and she went out to stand on the front porch to wait.

  When it rang she answered, “Hey Stewart, I hear you coming.”

  “Okay, I can see you, we’re gonna put down in front of the house.”

  She hung up and watched as the FBI helicopter pilot landed in the grassy field, powering down the rotors while Stewart, Bea and Catherine exited.

  She waited until they were close enough for her not to shout, “Hello,” she greeted them with a smile, “sorry you had to land in the wet grass.”

  “I’m just grateful this storm’s a fast mover,” Stewart said, “I hate flying in crappy weather.”

  Catherine noted Jordan looked dry but still somewhat bedraggled by her run down Alden’s long driveway in the rain and she shuddered again as she regarded the long sloping drive and the white house from her dreams, now surrounded by police and FBI vehicles.

  “Hey, Bea,” Jordan greeted the Cyber Division leader, “thanks for coming.”

  “Are you kidding?” She scoffed, “I wouldn’t have missed this for anything.”

  “This way,” Jordan gestured to the front door, “to Stock Market Armageddon…”

  “That’s not funny Jordan.” Stewart scowled.

  “I know.” She shrugged and followed them inside.

  They stood in front of Alden’s kitchen table in the middle of his living room and regarded the two monitors.

  “Hoy crap…” Stewart groaned, “There’s less than two hours on his countdown.” He turned to Catherine, “Can you crack this before it runs out?”

  “Oh, my…” she whispered, “that pulsating graph looks pretty scary.”

  Jordan gestured at the wall, “You might want to have a look at his whiteboards first.”

  She had spread out the three boards with the mass of code written on it and both Catherine and Bea moved to stand in front of them. An uneasy silence fell over the room and Jordan watched how Catherine’s eyes swept from one board to the next, pouring over and seemingly through condense and concisely written code.

  “He incorporated the error from the flash crash in his new program.” She pointed at the bottom of the middle board.

  Stewart crossed his arms nervously over his chest and chewed a thumbnail.

  “But I’m not sure where the failsafe is.”

  “Are you sure he’d have one?” Jordan asked.

  “He planned to still be around after he took the stock market down, didn’t he?” Bea had parked her hands on her hips and her voice had a droll quality to it, “It would make sense he’d still want control over it so he could blackmail everybody the day after.”

  Jordan looked skeptical, “I don’t think blackmail was on his radar.”

  “So this is The Eve of Destruction.” Catherine murmured under her breath and stepped closer. “Can I touch this?”

  “Well,” Jordan shrugged, “can you do it through your coat sleeve?”

  “Oh, sure,” she pulled her sleeve down over her fingertips. Her eyelids fluttered closed and she breathed quietly and deeply in through her nose, You may speak to me but not through me… She saw a hand, holding a marker… the hand wrote in a peculiar cadence, at a particular speed, the letters and numbers precisely formed and the flash crash code flickered in her eyes… like when I saw it that day in the server room, only…

  Jordan stood next to Stewart and she heard him whisper, “What is she doing?” under his breath.

  “Shut up.” She whispered back.

  Without a word, Catherine returned to the table and adjusting the swivel chair to her height, pulled herself up to the table, keeping her hands in her lap while she studied the screen.

  Stewart whispered hoarsely, “The countdown has less than two hours on it.”

  “Will that be enough time?” Jordan asked.

  Bea set up her own laptop on the table next to Alden’s and plugged in a cable connecting the two, “Let’s hope so.” She turned to Stewart, “How about seeing if there are some more chairs in this place?”

  “Sure.” He hurried from the room

  “Wait…” Jordan followed, “he has chairs in the kitchen.”

  “Can I work from yours?” Catherine asked.

  “Of course you can,” Bea gestured distractedly, “that’s why I brought this stuff.”

  “I believe the pulsations on the graph indicate his program is already online at Stealth Networks…” Her voice dropped to a mumble as she accessed Alden’s laptop from Bea’s and typed furiously for several seconds, “Oh yeah, that’s just what he did.”

  Jordan and Stewart returned with three wooden chairs from the kitchen, “Can’t you just unplug it from the Internet?” Stewart asked.

  “No, he’s already has digital tendrils in the network to prevent that. His program’s already been uploaded into Stealth, it’s just waiting there for the final countdown to finish and initiate full activation. Any disruption in this feed,” she pointed to the pulsing graphic, “will trigger the program to start immediately and bypass the pre-closing bell activation about three millionths of a second before four o’clock.”

  Stewart had begun to pace nervously behind them and he moaned, “Oh, my god…”

  Bea hooked up Catherine’s tablet to her laptop, “I’m gonna rig this to record everything that happens digitally so we can study the hell out of it later.”

  “Fine by me...” Catherine muttered, staring at the screen. Her fingers flew over the keyboard for long minutes.

  Jordan kept her voice low, “Gonna’ let more experts have a look at it when this is all over?”

  “Oh, hell no...” Bea pulled one of the kitchen chairs next to Catherine, “This code is brilliant,” she quietly, “there’s no way I can ever let this go public.”

  She looked surprised, “Why not? Just to private contractors, I mean. If Alden could write code like this aren’t there a whole lot of other people out there who can too?”

  “Stop it.” Stewart whispered worriedly. More long minutes passed in silence until he asked, “Should I order pizza?”

  “That graph looks like an EEG,” Jordan stared at the flickering green line, “but the spikes are so small, it’s looks more like buzzing… from an insect.”

  “If only…” Bea shook her head from side to side.

  “Gotcha’.” Catherine suddenly whispered and turned to Bea, “If you agree I’ll shut it down.”

  Bea squinted at the screen and scanned the newly written code, “Uh, huh…” she muttered, seeing how Catherine hacked Alden’s code and subtlety rewrote it to withdraw the program currently floating in Stealth Networks servers and shut down. “Be my guest.” She stood, grinning.

  “Whoa, whoa, WHOA NOW!” Stewart’s eyes flew open wide, “You are absolutely sure you can take this thing offline and Wall Street won’t crash?”

  Catherine nodded, “Yes, Alden used the rogue code that flash crashed SAEx. He must have studied it for some time before figuring out how to incorporate it into his program… Remember he did figure out how to stop the rogue element of that code. I can stop it now just like he stopped the flash crash that day.” She pointed at the screen, “I rewrote his code in such a way that his program will recognize the directive to initiate the program to withdraw and shut down.”

  “Initiate?” He face drained of color, “But that means be active, or wake up and go or whatever… right?”

  “It’s okay, Stewart, it’s going to initiate a command to withdraw from Stealth and shut down.”

  “And if you’re wrong, Wall Street blows up?”

  “It won’t.”

  Jordan rolled her eyes, “Jeez, Stewart, have a little faith.”

  He turned panicked eyes at Bea, “Are you sure it can be deactivated?” His voice shook, “Shouldn’t we check with someone first?” He turned back to Catherine, “No offense.”

  Catherine’s smile was sublime, “None taken.”

  “Check with who?” Bea snorted, folding her hands across her chest, “The best cyber brain on the continent just
told you she cracked it…” She pointed at the countdown on Alden’s laptop, “You wanna’ keep discussing this while the clock ticks down?”

  Stewart had begun to perspire and he waved his hands distractedly, “Jesus, I know, Bea! For chrissakes! I’m just sayin’…”

  “It’s alright now.” Catherine stood and stretched.

  He turned to her, exasperated, “What is?”

  “Alden’s program, I deactivated it.”

  Jordan was watching when she took the program offline and she snickered, “Yeah, just now while you were busy trying not to have a coronary.”

  Bea pointed at the screen, “See?” She snorted, “I guess someone has quite the investment portfolio…”

  Mary had arrived with her scene investigation unit and Jordan went outside to talk to her while Bea and Catherine copied files and shut down the collection of devices on Alden’s kitchen table.

  She saw her and walked over, “You know, Agent Hawkins,” she said, stripping latex gloves off her hands, “it’s a damn good thing you caught your guy in there.” She nodded to the garage, “I have paid top-dollar for a non-stop flight to Hawaii that leaves next week…”

  The helicopter pilot had restarted the engines and Jordan turned briefly at the noise before turning back to her, grinning, “Then I’ll be expecting a nice Hawaiian shirt for my troubles, Agent Fielding.”

  “Hey, Jordan?” Stewart climbed down the front steps of the house, Bea and Catherine in tow, “Bea and I are gonna head back, can Doctor Bernard head back with you?”

  “Of course.”

  Catherine waved goodbye to them and greeted Mary, “His house has hardly anything in it, hopefully it won’t take long to process.”

  “From your lips to God’s ear…” she scoffed and grinned, heading back to the garage.

  Jordan and Catherine walked in silence down the long driveway, and halfway to the car she finally asked, “You sure you’re okay?”

  “I am.” Jordan an arm around the petite shoulders, “It’ll be getting late by the time we get back, should we stay in the city tonight? We have our emergency overnight bags in the van and we can tell Cam we’re having a surprise mini-vacation…”