The 20th Victim

by James Patterson

  The sound man tested the level. The cameraman counted off five seconds to go with his fingers, and then tape rolled. Lori introduced Cindy as the star reporter and head of the crime desk at the San Francisco Chronicle.

  She said, “You have big news this morning, Cindy. A bombshell email that you’ve just posted on your crime blog, from someone claiming to have inside knowledge about the recent sniper attacks that have terrified people in five cities.”

  “That’s exactly right, Lori. I received an email just minutes ago giving reasons for the sniper attacks and warning of future executions,” Cindy said. “I find the email credible. But viewers must understand that, like the Zodiac Killer’s letters to the Chronicle decades ago, the email is unsigned.

  “I’ve weighed both sides of the argument carefully and have decided that it’s better to release this email than keep it quiet.”

  “Cindy, is there a time stamp on that?”

  “It landed in my inbox early this morning. The heading was ‘For Immediate Release.’”

  “Can you read it for our viewers now?”

  Cindy raised the sheet of paper from her lap and began to read the highlights.

  “Quoting now: ‘This is a warning to all drug slingers, the pushers who sell grass, coke, meth, and Molly, the sickos who sell oxy, heroin, fentanyl, unprescribed pharmaceuticals, and designer drugs, or name your poison. Deaths from overdoses have risen to seventy thousand Americans per year, nearly half of those from opioids like fentanyl. It’s not okay. It’s not stopping. It’s getting worse.

  ‘A coalition of citizens across the country has had enough of ineffectual ad campaigns and political slogans. We’ve launched a new war on drugs. A real war. Nine scum dealers are dead so far and we’re just getting started. We have a list. If you’re part of the problem and value your life, stop selling drugs now, whatever it costs you. Destroy your product and get straight.

  ‘Or spin the wheel. You’ll never know when your number comes up.’”

  Lori said, “Cindy, correct me if I’m wrong, but until right now we have not known the motive for the shootings that have taken place here and in Chicago, LA, and, as of yesterday, Houston and San Antonio. Is that right?”

  Cindy said, “There have been theories that there was a drug connection, but to my knowledge, this email is the first public communication from someone asserting a connection with the shooter or shooters and that their mission is to rub out drugs.

  “We have to take it seriously.”

  Chapter 60

  Cindy wove through the maze of cubicles in the messy, crowded newsroom.

  Artie Martini, sportswriter, called out over a partition, “Great interview, Cindy. I sent you the clip.”

  “That was fast, Martini. Thanks.”

  Cindy glanced through the glass wall of her office while fishing her keys out of her coat pocket. She had cleared her phone lines before the interview, and twenty minutes later, barely seven forty-five, all twelve buttons were in a blinking frenzy. She hoped that a cop friend, of which she had many, had called to confirm what she’d just told the entire freaking world.

  And there was something else. The anonymous writer had said that nine victims were down.

  She counted eight. If the writer was telling the truth, one victim had not yet been accounted for, or had not been connected to the others.

  Either way, victim number nine was news.

  Cindy retrieved her phone from her coat pocket, dropped into her chair, and turned on the Whistler TRX-1 scanner on the windowsill.

  She started her beat check, again listened to the police radio, checked the wire services and network feeds on her laptop. Satisfied that there hadn’t been a big earthquake or a fire on the West Coast, that no terrorists were holding an airliner hostage, she checked incoming email.

  Her interview with Lori Hines had been widely covered.

  There were bulletins on Google and Yahoo!, and a request from the New York Times for more information, and she saw that other journalists who’d gotten their own copies of the war-on-drugs email had released it far and wide—but not first.

  To her great relief, nothing in her mailbox claimed that the email was a hoax.

  Cindy pulled the office phone toward her and began punching buttons.

  The voice of Brittney Hall, Henry Tyler’s assistant, came over the speaker: “Cindy, Henry wants to see you at eight.”

  Why? Slap on the back, or had her impromptu interview with Lori Hines put her in trouble of the job-threatening kind?

  The next caller was Lindsay: “Cindy, I just spoke with Claire. She’s out of the ICU. Room 1409, doped up, but receiving visitors for a couple of hours a day. She sounded okay. Considering. Hey. I saw your interview. You were terrific.”

  Another dozen messages followed—more compliments on her interview, an art department query, an editor asking for a call back, but nothing that shook her world.

  She called Johnson Hughes Cancer Treatment Center and was relayed from operator to nurses’ station to Claire’s room, until she spoke with a nurse’s aide who told her that Claire was with her doctor and took Cindy’s number.

  Cindy went back to work and was googling Warning to drug dealers when her phone rang. The number on the caller ID was from a local exchange, but she didn’t recognize it. She picked up, hoping it was Claire.

  “Cindy Thomas?”

  The caller was male, and Cindy got a sudden chill when she realized that he’d disguised his voice with a digital voice changer.

  “Speaking.”

  “You read my email. I saw your interview, and you’ve earned a reward. We just put down another dirtbag in Chicago. A perfect hole in one. Have a good day.”

  “Wait. Wait just a minute.”

  The line was dead.

  She tapped Call Back, but the unidentified caller didn’t pick up. Shit. She looked up the phone number and there was no listing. Of course the caller was using a burner phone.

  Cindy scribbled notes, a verbatim account of what the caller had said. The ninth victim had been shot in Chicago. She sent the memo to Tyler, even as she checked the Chicago PD blotter. There was nothing there about a sniper shooting. It was early yet. For the moment, she had what the caller had implied; her reward was an exclusive.

  She left a message for Lori to call her and simultaneously opened the Chicago Trib website. There was nothing there about a new sniper shooting. Nothing, nada, zip. If her anonymous caller had told her the truth, a Chicago drug dealer was dead, and the Chronicle still owned the story.

  The digital clock in the lower right corner of her computer screen blinked 7:57. Pulling a mirror out of her pencil drawer, Cindy fluffed up her hair, slicked on some lip gloss. Then, clutching her phone and her tablet, she took off for Henry Tyler’s office.

  Tyler’s PA, Brittney, betrayed not the smallest emotion as she waved Cindy into the office of the publisher and editor in chief.

  Tyler was there. And so was Jeb McGowan.

  Chapter 61

  I tipped back my chair so that I could better see the TV hanging above my desk in the squad room.

  News anchor Jason Kroner was reporting from the studio of ABC7 Chicago.

  “According to a police source, this morning an unidentified man was found shot dead on the pavement on the Chicago Riverwalk at approximately 7:00 a.m. An hour later a person of interest in the shooting was apprehended on the Michigan Avenue Bridge, standing at a distance from his SUV, the engine left running and a .308 Remington rifle in the front seat.

  “There’s a sight line from several places on the bridge to the pavement where the victim was discovered. The shooter may have fired from a vehicle.”

  I sighed as the reporter gave a rip-and-wrap of the other sniper killings, all unsolved cases, starting with ours. And then there was a cutaway from Kroner to a thirty-second clip of Cindy reading the war-on-drugs manifesto.

  Cindy could be annoying for sure, but she was really admirable—smart, professional, and I have to
say it, adorable. Richie was beaming and we shared a grin. And then the camera was back on Kroner, who closed, saying that the station would update the story as news became available.

  I said, “Could be a break. The guy said, ‘Stop selling drugs.…Or spin the wheel.’ Who says that? You say, ‘Take your chances.’ Or, ‘Roll the dice.’”

  “It’s a reference to Moving Targets, all right.”

  “Jesus. And the guy Chicago PD has in custody. I wonder if he was looking through a gun sight.”

  “You feeling lucky?”

  “If this is Christmas, the suspect has a beard and his name is Leonard Barkley.”

  We stopped for coffee in the break room, then took the short walk down the hall, past the interrogation rooms, the elevator bank, and the virtually empty Robbery Division detail, and unlocked the door to our war room.

  I sat down at the phone, punched in a number I’d put on speed dial. When a phone rang inside Chicago PD, I asked for Detective Richards.

  He picked up, saying, “Boxer, are you haunting me?”

  “I guess I am. Have you spoken to the unnamed gunman?”

  “I processed him. His name is Jacob Stoll. He’s a former marine lieutenant, did a couple of tours in the ’Stan. His prints match what we got off of AFIS. He’s currently employed part-time as a school bus driver. The gun is registered to him and it wasn’t recently fired. We’re holding Stoll as a person of interest, but if he shot the guy found dead in the park, he didn’t use the rifle in his car.”

  “No?”

  “The gun hasn’t been recently fired. We’ll hold him as long as we can. It’s possible he shot the victim with a different firearm, maybe tossed it off the bridge.”

  Conklin said, “Maybe he’s revisiting the scene to watch what the cops do.”

  “Possible,” said Richards. “After we get him in the box, we’ll hear what he has to say.”

  I said, “Richards, the so-called video game, Moving Targets. The person who tipped off the press used the phrase ‘spin the wheel.’”

  “Yep, I got your email and saw your screen shot of the site. I’ll try to work it in when my partner and I talk to Stoll. Would you be interested in watching our interview, live streamed from our house to yours?”

  “Hell no.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Just kidding, Richards. That would be great. What do I have to do?”

  “Stand by for a password. One more thing, Boxer.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You owe me.”

  Chapter 62

  Conklin and I sat side by side at the old desk in the war room, staring into a computer screen that was, in effect, a window into an interrogation room at the Chicago PD Violent Crimes Division.

  We got our first look at Detective Sergeant Stanley Richards. He was fortyish, of average height and weight, a restless, hands-in-his-pockets, coin-jingling man with a five-o’clock shadow at ten in the morning.

  He took his hands out of his chinos and dropped into a seat at the table approximately twenty-one hundred miles away from our desk in the war room. Sitting beside him was his partner, Detective Suzanne Waltz. She was wearing a man-tailored white shirt, a navy-blue blazer a lot like mine, and a hint of a smile, an expression I would have loved to wear myself. She looked calm, relaxed, and unreadable.

  The suspect, Jacob Stoll, sat opposite from the detectives and had sprawled across both chairs on his side and folded his arms over the table. His body language was saying that he owned the table, the room, the story he was about to tell.

  My hope that Stoll was Leonard Barkley by another name evaporated. Unlike Barkley, who was a Fidel Castro look-alike, Stoll had a fleshy face. He looked to be six foot two to Barkley’s five foot nine, and he had a wide, toothy grin, perhaps prompting Detective Waltz’s Mona Lisa smile.

  He said to her, “You’re a really good-looking woman, Detective, you know that?”

  Waltz said nicely to Stoll, “Jacob? Okay if I call you Jacob? Mind taking a look at this?”

  She held up her phone so that Stoll could see a photo. Richards had forwarded it to us, and I recognized the shot of the recently deceased man. According to the police report and the dead man’s bloodstained shirt, he had taken a bullet through his heart. According to Richards, he’d also had a boatload of heroin in his backpack.

  Stoll said, “May I?” Without waiting for an answer, he took the phone from Waltz and gave the screen a good long look. Then he handed it back.

  “I don’t recognize him, at least not from that angle. I can’t swear he wasn’t one of the three thousand enlisted men I trained or served with. But this I know: when you check my rifle, you’ll see it hasn’t been fired. You checked my hands for GSR, so you know I haven’t fired a weapon. Anything else?”

  “Yeah,” said Richards. “Where were you at six thirty this morning?”

  “Is that when that guy in the park bought it?”

  “Where were you, Lieutenant Stoll?”

  “I was at the South Blue Island Avenue bus depot having coffee and joking around with three other drivers and my supervisor, Jesse Kruse. We cleaned the buses, and I started my route at seven. Picked up thirty-six little kids and took them all to school. Drove nowhere near the Riverwalk. I got more eyewitnesses to my whereabouts than you got time in a week to interview.

  “And now I have a question for you,” said Stoll. “Are we done? If not, I’m through talking without a lawyer. If so, I’ll take my gun and go about my business.”

  Richards said, “Remember when I read you your rights?”

  “I remember. But this is ridiculous. You didn’t arrest me. I thought you just wanted me to tell you what I saw from the bridge.”

  The confident body language was gone. Stoll was getting exercised. It wasn’t going to do him any good. My partner and I looked at each other, brought our eyes back to the screen as Richards said, “Stoll. You’re a person of interest in a homicide. We’re holding you in custody until we check out your alibi, and if you’ve been honest with us, we’re gonna clear you. Understand? We have to do that, if it takes a week, or longer.”

  Richards continued, “Furthermore, now that you said you want a lawyer, we have to stop talking to you.”

  “Fuck that. I waive my rights.”

  “Good thinking,” Richards said almost kindly. He pushed a pad of paper and a pen across the table.

  “After you sign the waiver, we’re gonna need names of all the people who can vouch for your whereabouts during the hours before we brought you in.”

  Chapter 63

  Sitting beside me, Conklin exhaled loudly and ran his hands through his hair.

  He said, “Is Stoll innocent, arrogant, or dumb and dumber? It’s hard to know.”

  Stoll signed the waiver. Richards signed it. Waltz signed it, too, and sat with Stoll as Richards took the waiver out of the room. He returned a minute later, took his seat, asked Richards if he wanted anything—soft drink, coffee?

  Stoll shook his head no.

  Richards said to Stoll, “Explain the rifle.”

  “I was going out to DeKalb County to shoot at tin cans. It’s my brother’s land, and I have permission.”

  “So I don’t get what you were doing on the bridge.”

  “I was taking in the view. It was looking to be a gorgeous day. Man, when I’m wrong, I’m really wrong.”

  Detective Waltz asked Stoll for his brother’s name, contact information, location of the property. She also took the number of Stoll’s supervisor. Then she left the room to run down Stoll’s alibis.

  Richards said, “Stoll, have you ever heard of a website called Moving Targets?”

  “No. Oh. It’s a video game, right? A buddy of mine used to play. Compete, you know. I didn’t find it very challenging. Not for someone trained like me.”

  “Is there more to it than a game? In your opinion, could Moving Targets be a front for targeted hits on drug dealers?”

  “What? Where’d you get that? That
’s nuts. If we’re talking about the same thing, it’s like a kids’ game. Anyone saying otherwise is just full of crap.”

  Richards drilled down, asking the same questions in different ways, taking his time, playing up to Stoll’s military expertise, asking Stoll’s opinion, looking for Stoll to contradict himself.

  But Stoll was consistent.

  Richards returned to the subject of Moving Targets, saying, “That website has come up during our investigation. I’d like to talk to your buddy. Ask him about how the game works.”

  “I’d like to talk to him, too. Name is Sid Bernadine. He’s dead. Stroked out two or three years ago. I miss the hell out of Sid.”

  Stoll looked empty. Like he’d given up everything he had to give. Richards had done a good job. I don’t know anyone who could have gotten more or better out of Stoll—not me, or Conklin, or Brady or Jacobi.

  Waltz returned to the room with another cop.

  Stoll said, “So what’s this now?”

  Richards said, “I told you, Stoll. We’re gonna make you comfortable here while we check your alibis and your gun. You get a phone call. You want to do this nice? Or should we go ahead and cuff you?”

  Richards put his hands in his pant pockets, and that opened his jacket. I caught a flash of yellow, the handle of his Taser gun.

  “I’ll take that phone call now.”

  The room emptied and our screen went black.

  Chapter 64

  Henry Tyler had been breaking news at the Chronicle since before Willie Brown was mayor.

  Cindy liked him, respected him, and was anxious to get his thoughts on the anonymous email and its writer who called out the “new war on drugs.”

  When Cindy entered Tyler’s office and saw McGowan, she had a visceral reaction. Why was the nervy Chronicle cub in Tyler’s office?

  What kind of meeting included the two of them? She flashed on him prowling around, his leaking her news to the competition, showing signs of marking her territory for future acquisition.