Face of a Killer

by Robin Burcell

  “Why would anyone in his office want me dead?” she asked, trying her best to look mortified, and hoping one of them might slip up, tell her something Scotty hadn’t mentioned.

  “We’re not sure,” Scotty replied. “But we think it may have something to do with what your father did for the government quite some time ago when he worked with Gnoble. And that material is classified.”

  “Which means you can’t tell me?”

  “Correct.”

  She crossed her arms, having no trouble acting angry over that statement. It still galled her. “But of course you’re going to go out and arrest this person? Take care of it?”

  Scotty’s gaze flicked to the ASAC’s, then back to her. “We could. But our case isn’t… where we’d like it.”

  She thought of the pouch in her backpack, wondered if that had anything to do with any of this. “I don’t understand.”

  And the ASAC said, “Apparently this is a joint investigation, the details of which I can’t go into right now. But they’re asking for your help.”

  “ My help?”

  “They’re worried that if we suddenly pull you from your duties, it might tip off someone to their investigation. I, however, don’t care what they’re investigating. My concern is for your safety.”

  She looked at Scotty, his face still unreadable. So he’d done it after all. Kept his promise to keep her on the street. Now it was her turn to make sure she didn’t blow her chance. “What kind of help?”

  And Scotty said, “Nothing more than you going about your day-to-day job as though nothing were amiss.”

  She looked out the window long enough to appear as though she were thinking about this, before she turned her attention to the ASAC. “I’ll do it. If someone’s trying to kill me, I want to make damned sure there’s enough evidence to put whoever’s behind this away.”

  “You’re sure?” the ASAC said.

  “Damned sure.”

  He turned to Scotty. “And you and your team can provide the security necessary to ensure she’s not in danger?”

  “We’re equipped to provide all necessary security, assuming she can follow orders, understand that I’ll be her handling agent, and that if necessary, if we determine it’s too dangerous,” he said, his gaze holding hers, “we call off the whole thing.”

  Okay, so he got in his last dig. At least she was assured of some freedom. But was it enough to do what she needed?

  Dixon, however, looked unconvinced about the entire affair, his gaze moving from her to Scotty and back again. But it was the ASAC who said, “If anything happens to her, Special Agent Ryan, I’ll have your job.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  There was a knock at the door. Dixon got up, answered it. Carillo stood there, handed him the op plan to approve. “We’re, uh, ready to start the briefing,” he said, then looked at Sydney. “We definitely need copies of that report, and uh, your sketch.”

  Sydney said, “Any chance you can burn them for me?”

  Carillo nodded, left, and Dixon looked over the plans. “You’re partnered with Carillo on this,” he said. “You can bow out tonight if you like. I’ll get Ren Pham-Peck to take your place.”

  “No,” she said, standing. “I think it’s best to keep things normal. Don’t you, Special Agent Ryan?” she asked, looking right at Scotty. “Make sure no one else knows what’s going on?”

  Scotty’s smile didn’t reach his eyes.

  The ASAC said, “Well, looks like we have everything taken care of.” He looked right at Sydney. “I’m glad you’re taking this so well. You’re an asset to the Bureau.”

  “Thank you, sir,” she said, and almost felt guilty.

  He gave Dixon a pat on his shoulder, his public show of confidence. “I’ll leave you to handle this, Dave.”

  After he left, Dixon told Scotty, “Before I get started on the task force meeting, I’d like to speak to Fitzpatrick. Alone.”

  Scotty pulled a cell phone from his pocket, handed it to her. “You left your phone behind. For safety reasons, we need you to keep it with you.”

  “Well, this would’ve come in handy.” She smiled at him, took the phone, and, if truth be told, was amused at his ire as he strode from the office.

  Dixon, however, wasn’t amused at anything. He picked up a felt-tip pen from a container on his desk, then stood. “Normally,” he said, making a show of marking off a day on his retirement calendar, “I wait until I’m leaving for the day to do this. The way things are going around here, I’m not sure I’ll get the opportunity.”

  She knew better than to speak.

  “Your trip to Texas…” He snapped the cap on the pen with enough force to break the thing. “How was it?”

  “Just as you thought, cases weren’t related. Probably a big waste of time.”

  He eyed his calendar, then dropped the pen back into the container, before turning his gaze on her, and then her scraped hands, his expression unreadable. “Let’s hope it wasn’t. I’d hate to think you went to all that trouble for nothing.”

  28

  Scotty cornered Sydney the moment she cleared Dixon’s office, then dragged her into a vacant one. “I want to know what the hell happened down there,” he said.

  “Your bosses breathing down your neck?”

  “You mean the neck I just stuck out for you so you could remain on the street and run off to Baja, with little regard for your safety and everyone else’s in this operation?”

  “Maybe if you’d told me what was going on from the moment you came spying around my house, trying to steal my mail, I might not have had to resort to such measures.”

  “It was for your own safety.”

  “No it wasn’t. Someone’s trying to cover some ass. What is it? CYA for the CIA or whatever other government agency has convinced you that whatever the hell this is, it happens to be a matter of national security?”

  “That’s precisely what it is. Once McKnight left that note, we had to be sure it didn’t get out, because it made reference to a matter that we believe is still in operation today. That means government secrets, intelligence and nuclear technology are still being traded and sold. So you can see why it’s imperative to find out who and where and not let them know we know.”

  “It’s my father’s life. He was involved in this, he was killed because of it, and I have the right to know what happened.”

  “First of all,” he said, closing the distance between them, “your father was not killed because of this.”

  “You don’t know that. You only know what they’ve told you.”

  “Two years ago I sat down with you and read your father’s murder investigation, because you were worried then, when there were rumblings that some attorney was looking into Wheeler’s case to see if he could get out. Back then you wanted him kept in. Now, because some suicidal drunken idiot sends you an old photo that has nothing to do with anything, you suddenly think this guy is innocent?”

  “No, what I think is that this drunken suicidal idiot has a lot of very important people running around, scared that they’re going to be implicated in a twenty-year-old scandal that they barely escaped from the first time.”

  “Look, I don’t know how to make this any clearer. Some of these matters are of national security. They might look bad on the surface, but could undermine years of work involving antiterrorist matters.”

  “Like the BICTT banking scandal?”

  He froze.

  “So that is what this is all about?” When Scotty didn’t answer, she said, “Then why else send someone down to Baja to find the missing records Orozco absconded with on the BICTT matter, then try to kill me because I happened to be the sucker who ended up carrying them out of there?”

  “You did what?” he asked, his face turning ashen. “You didn’t say you were carrying anything back.”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “Jesus Christ, Syd. Do you realize how dangerous that was?”

  “Gee. You’d think I would’v
e thought of that while they were trying to blow my goddamned brains out. Of course I thought of it. But what was I supposed to do, Scotty? Toss it into the water? If someone’s going to the trouble to kill an FBI agent for that stuff, then I have to guess it’s got someone worried. The question is which OGA would go to the trouble of sending some black ops guys after little old me?”

  “What was it you brought back?”

  “I have no idea, a sheet full of numbers I didn’t understand, some code maybe. It’s in a bank pouch. Robert said it had to do with the BICTT records, that part of the original faction is still in operation, something called a Black Network, and that’s all I know.”

  Scotty ran his hands through his hair in frustration. “Jesus. Where is it?”

  “My desk.”

  He stormed from the room.

  “This is a secure facility. Who’s going to take it in here?” she called out.

  He didn’t answer, and she hurried after him, wondering if Carillo had returned it yet. When she got there, there was nothing on her desktop, and Scotty was pulling open the drawers. No pouch. “It’s not here,” he said, looking panicked, not an emotion she usually associated with him.

  Her backpack was slung over her chair, and she looked inside. The pouch was there, and she handed it over to him. “Here.”

  He unzipped it, eyed the contents, then zipped it back up. “Who knows about this?” he asked, keeping his voice low.

  “You and me…” And Carillo. And possibly Schermer, since Carillo told him about everything.

  “This is classified. Do not discuss this with anyone.”

  “Does any of this have anything to do with Senator Gnoble?”

  Scotty looked around the room to make sure they couldn’t be overheard, little chance, since it was now deserted, everyone having moved on to the briefing room for Operation Barfly. “Look. The guys sent down to Baja? If they were black ops, this Black Network, or any other government agency forces, then I don’t think Gnoble was behind it.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because we know someone from his office hired someone to kill you. And if whoever that someone is did have access to any black ops, chances are you would’ve been dead before we found out.”

  She wasn’t sure if that was good news or not. “But won’t these guys come after me, because they think I still have that bank bag?”

  “First thing I intend to do is make sure they know you don’t have it. From that point on, the objective changes, and it’s all about damage control.”

  He walked off toward the briefing room, leaving her wondering two things. One, how the hell did he know so much about it, and two, exactly what was the “objective” before they’d realized they’d lost the bank bag.

  Come to think of it, the whole “damage control” bit was disconcerting when she really stopped to think about it. She did not, however, get much time to ponder matters, as Carillo poked his head down the hall. “You want to grab those sketches and meet us? We’re getting ready to start.”

  The briefing for Operation Barfly took place in the SAC’s conference room just off the front lobby. Dixon called everyone to order to give a brief outline of the discovery and connections between the crimes-just to make sure everyone was on the same page.

  Sydney was standing at the back when Carillo walked up, handed her a copy of the op plan. “Just got done talking with your former sweetheart,” he said, nodding toward the front of the room, where Scotty stood just behind Doc Schermer, no doubt to keep his eye on her. “Not sure how you pulled this off, but you’re back in the game. At least tonight you’re stuck with me for a while.”

  “Disappointed?”

  He gave her a once-over, then shrugged. “Schermer doesn’t look near as cute in all black. You should wear it more often. And the stuff I copied? I have no friggin’ idea what it means, but the way I see it, if they were trying to kill you over it, it’s gotta be priceless.”

  She glanced at Carillo, but his gaze was fixed on the front of the room, where Dixon started the briefing on their initial call out in the Reno case, Sydney’s sketch, the suspect phone call after her Jane Doe sketch appeared in the paper, recounting what the suspect told Sydney about his next victim, along with the remark about biting her.

  Dixon continued with “We have a profiler assigned to the case, and so far we believe that our UnSub is what we term an organized murderer.” He then gave a partial laundry list of the organized killer, higher than average IQ, but maybe working below his intelligence level, socially competent, usually living with a partner, mobility, decent car. “This individual probably has a continued fantasy,” Dixon said. “The fact he contacted our office and Fitzpatrick after the sketch appeared tells us he’s following his crimes in the newspaper. Craves the attention.”

  “What if he really is after Fitz?” one of the agents standing at the opposite end of the room called out.

  Great. Like she needed any more negative attention, and she couldn’t help but glance at Scotty, thinking, if anything, he’d be using that as an excuse to get her pulled from the case. Dixon, however, continued on, unfazed. “The organized offender displays certain traits. He will often target the same type of victim-so it’s highly unlikely he is after Special Agent Fitzpatrick. I’d say it’s more likely that he has noted her name and called her simply to draw more attention to himself. In our case, he’s kidnapped two women, both from bars. One in Reno, the other here in the city. Although the Reno victim wasn’t a prostitute, she was frequenting a bar that is known for prostitution. Our Hill City victim appears to have been a prostitute, and there may be others we haven’t connected to him yet, and others we have, such as the series of Sunday rapes SFPD is investigating. Since fantasy and ritual usually dominate the organized offender, we look at the similarities in the known cases. Both victims were frequenting the same sort of bars, both dumped in shallow bodies of water, easily accessed by the public, yet in locations not likely to be frequented at late hours. He may have a fascination with water, or more likely thinks the water will help eliminate forensic evidence. He’s taken jewelry from the Reno victim, a souvenir. I expect, once we get the Hill City victim fully identified, we’ll learn he did the same with her. Both victims were bitten, and”-he looked at Carillo-“you mentioned we got a call from the forensic odontologist?”

  Carillo nodded. “Received the fax this morning.” He pulled open his pocket notebook. “The report reads that our UnSub’s number eleven, maxillary left cuspid has a fractured mesial-incisal edge. For those of us who didn’t graduate from dental school, that translates to a chipped upper left canine, specifically the front corner. Oh, almost forgot,” he said, looking up. “Dr. Armand made a positive match to both victims.”

  “There you have it,” Dixon said. “Once we have him identified, despite the lack of DNA, we’ve got some pretty damning evidence, including a suspect sketch, which, up until now, hasn’t been released to the local press, but has been sent to the surrounding agencies. Special Agent Fitzpatrick will be passing out copies with updated info.”

  Sydney walked to the front of the room, opened the folder containing photocopies of the sketch and kept one, then handed the remaining stack to the agents at the front to pass back. “I’ve included the physical characteristics on the bottom,” she said. “We have this scanned, so if anyone needs a digital copy for some reason, let me know.”

  Michael Schermer eyed the sketch. “Is there a reason for the delay in releasing this to the press?”

  “Yes,” Dixon said. “We weren’t sure the cases were related. Reno PD released it in their area the moment we sent it to them, since the kidnapping occurred there. But now we believe our UnSub may also be from this area or have connections here, and we intend to hold a press conference. For now, we’re holding it back, until after tonight’s operation. We’ll reevaluate tomorrow. Any more questions before we get started on Operation Barfly?”

  “Yeah,” Schermer said, eyeing the sketch. “Cari
llo was telling me that they found some bits of taillight out at Golden Gate Park and white paint transfer, and that you and Fitzpatrick saw a white utility truck out at the hospital. Any chance the two are related, being that both vehicles are white? Maybe the guy Fitz saw driving the truck is this guy?” He held up the sketch.

  Dixon said, “I didn’t actually see the truck. Fitzpatrick did. But Maggie took the pieces of taillight from Stow Lake to the lab to get a parts identification… Maggie?” She was seated at the table, and stood so everyone could hear her. “According to SFPD’s incident report of the suspicious person at the hospital, an Officer Harper described the vehicle as a newer model Chevy utility truck. That doesn’t match the bits of taillight found at the Stow Lake crime scene, which belong to a 1970s style of Dodge van. So, other than both are white, we are talking about two unrelated vehicles.”

  Sydney stilled at the mention of the utility truck, not because of the possibility that the vehicles might have been related. It was more the feeling she recalled, of being watched that night, first at the bar she’d left, then later that night in the hospital parking lot as the truck drove by her… “That guy raced out of there so fast, we had to dive out of the way,” she whispered to Carillo.

  “Which fits with a burglar, trying to get the hell out of there.”

  And she realized that was entirely possible, that he could’ve just been trying to get out. A burglar fleeing the scene? Or something else altogether…

  Her gaze flew to Scotty’s, and she found it curious he wouldn’t even look at her. How long had he and his team been watching her? Since she’d left the bar that night? She’d definitely thought she was being followed then. One of Scotty’s team?

  She thought about the truck in the parking lot, the guy getting out, moving specifically to Dixon’s car after they’d gone into the hospital… They’d placed a GPS device on her car to keep track of her, so why not Dixon’s? What should have been a simple piece of surveillance work failed because they hadn’t realized she’d be watching from the window. Unfortunately, before she could walk over and ask Scotty, Dixon called for everyone to open up his op plan, which contained all contact info, personnel, cars assigned, cell phone numbers, and hospital locations, in essence, operation plans for everything they’d need should the shit hit the fan. “As you can see,” he said, “we’re expecting this to be lowkey. Schermer has an update on our UnSub that just came in. Michael?”