Blood Trails

by Michael A. Black

  Colby nodded, his mouth drawing tight. As much as he hated the thought of handing Bosworth a bunch of easy closures, Colby cared enough about a few of the open ones to see they got good homes. And despite the bad memories, part of him did want to check into this copycat thing.

  Who knows, he thought, shifting his weight to stand up, maybe Laird himself might be somehow connected to the crimes. After all, the son-of-a-bitch was out of prison.

  Matthew ran his fingers over the edge of the blade, testing the sharpness. This one was going to be a bit trickier. Not a lot of time to assure exactness. He folded the knife shut and slipped it back into his pocket, allowing the metallic clip to hang on the outside of his pants. Taking the gold stud, he switched the magnet from his left earlobe to his right, and snapped it in place.

  Did the fags still do that? No matter. Even if he was a bit passé, he knew he had to fit into the scenery. Fade into the background. The rental car would help, too. It was a black Lexus. Plenty of trunk space. He remembered to spread the heavy tarp down first. Any clues he left had to be part of the master design, not left out of carelessness. And this one required an obvious clue, in the name of expediency.

  He turned onto Belmont and proceeded up toward the glowing neon lights and it wasn’t even dark yet. What an ostentatious affectation.

  Matthew smiled at his choice of words. Good choice for a college student. He hoped that none of his professors had dropped the dime on him to the old man. But why would they? What did they care if he attended class or not, as long as the New Genesis Foundation paid his tuition? Except for that bastard, Dr. Sellers. He was the busybody type who would gladly stick his nose in where it didn’t belong.

  I’ll deal with him later, Matthew thought, remembering his focus. Morgan’s seventh Illinois victim had been a young male prostitute that Laird had said came on to him. He’d left the fucking faggot gutted in an alley.

  A red Dodge Viper turned in front of him with a belligerent honk. Matthew slammed on his brakes and gave the driver the finger. A bunch of twenty-something girls, out for a night of drinking and carousing, shuffled across the street. For a moment he thought about following them, and making them into number eleven-plus, counting the ones in Indiana, but that would be deviating from the plan.

  Concentrate on the task at hand, he thought. No deviations, no matter how pleasant the thoughts. For a moment he envied Morgan’s freedom to act on impulse, rather than follow a carefully scripted plan. Chasing the rapture. No, that wasn’t right. With Morgan it had been more Darwinian. A version of natural selection, the predator’s natural dominance, rather than merely rapacious serendipity.

  The rapture came in a different bottle for Matthew. It was tied to the ultimate goal. Executing his master plan. The perfect plan. Exposing the truth…redemption…escape.

  The sign up ahead spelled-out: Rainbow Bistro. This was the place. Two queers walked hand-in-hand down the block. He cruised by slowly, then went around the block again. They all looked like couples.

  Fags of a feather, he thought. Then he saw him. The young man, waif-like, with longish hair, obviously dyed black, a rainbow ribbon pinned to his jacket lapel.

  Matthew slowed the Lexus and looked the waif straight in the eye as he rolled down the passenger window with a deft push of the button.

  “Hi,” he said, trying to keep that certain, vibrant, effervescent quality in his voice. “You going my way?”

  Knox drove up to the large metal gates and ran his pass-card through the electronic scanning slot. The oval eye of the camera stared blankly at him and he saw a convex distortion of his face as he waited.

  Finally, the gate on the left swung open and Knox drove forward. The entrance opened to a beautiful, man-made lake as the narrow ribbon of roadway split in two, each going off in the opposite direction to run parallel with the shore. Beyond it, the vastness of the square brick buildings was silhouetted against the setting sun.

  Knox went past the line of trees toward the main building, the edge of sunset filtering through the leaves to dapple the asphalt. He took out his cell phone as the road twisted toward the first set of buildings and called.

  The phone rang several times before Jetters answered.

  “I’m at the lab,” he said. “Meet me at section C.”

  That was all. Knox knew it was one of the old man’s quirks. Not wanting to talk on cell phones. Always convinced that Big Brother was listening, even here, in his own little fiefdom.

  What does he have to worry about? Knox wondered. The son of a bitch owns both sides of the aisle in D.C., as well as the damn White House.

  Knox swung the BMW over toward the second set of square, brick buildings set in front of still yet another artificial lake. This one had several swans skimming over the surface. A white security car cruised by in the opposite direction. The uniformed guard waved to Knox, who ignored him.

  It was getting late, he’d been on the road since early morning, and now all he wanted to do was relax in a hot tub with a drink, not to be reporting to some self-aggrandizing asshole. He found the special parking space marked Head of Security, and parked there. He shifted into park and plucked the new pair of driving gloves from the seat next to him, slowly working his big hands into the form-fitting confines.

  He didn’t want his fingerprints to be on merchandise when it was delivered. Thoroughness. That’s what made a pro.

  Knox watched his reflection in the opaque windows as he walked up the cement section toward the front entrance: a tall, athletic man carrying a briefcase, and marveled as to how fit he looked. Like a movie star. Did that make him a narcissist? He wondered for a moment how others saw him. A lawyer perhaps? A judge was more like it. Or, better yet, an executioner.

  Taking out his card, he swiped it in the box next to the door. Inside the synthetic decorum of solid rock walls, fifteen-foot waterfall, and the tropical garden looked as trite and phony as ever. This place was all illusion, all smoke and mirrors. Nothing, Knox reflected, was as it seemed, nothing was truly real.

  The rush of the flowing water echoed in the large, empty room. Knox walked past the winding staircase of steel, black slats and Plexiglas that wound over the fountain stopped at the elevator. He pressed the button and waited. In the mirrored wall in front of him, Knox saw the reflection of the solitary figure standing at the top of the staircase, hands clasped behind his back, the errant white hairs curling away from the large skull. He almost looked like an artist’s version of Einstein gone mad, except for the aquiline nose.

  The elevator doors slid open. Knox stepped in and pressed the button for the second floor. When the doors opened, Jetters was standing a few feet away.

  “Good evening,” Knox said, feigning politeness.

  “How was Toronto?” Jetters asked.

  Knox shrugged. “It wasn’t Vegas.” He knew his wit wasn’t appreciated.

  The old man’s lower lip tucked over his upper, vibrating with rage. His eyes stared so coldly at Knox that he felt a sudden urge to take his hands out of his pockets. Knox had seen him slap people during his legendary temper tantrums.

  But the old coot sure can’t afford to take a swing at me, no matter how mad he gets, Knox thought. And if he tries, I’ll break his fucking arm. “When I ask you for a report,” Jetters said, “I don’t expect flippancy. That’s not what I’m paying you for.” He rose up on his toes, but made no further physical movement. Knox allowed himself to relax a bit.

  The old bastard did have a point. The money was good. Plus, being a professional meant delivering the goods in the crunch. Knox walked over to the adjacent handrail, set his briefcase on it, adjusted the knobs to the proper combination, and lifted the lid. Reaching inside, he removed the laptop and held it toward Jetters.

  The old man’s eyes lit up.

  “This is his?” The veined hands grabbed the laptop and he held it to his chest, like a child receiving a much anticipated Christmas gift.

  Knox nodded.

  “And John?”
<
br />   “Tactically neutralized,” Knox said. He removed something else from the briefcase and held that out also. “Here’s the hard drive from his main PC, as well as two flash drives I recovered from his home.”

  Jetters’ eyes narrowed. “Any problems there?”

  Knox shook his head. “Only a minor one. I took care of it before I left for Toronto. His partner walked in on me.”

  “Peter?” Jetters blinked rapidly several times. “What happened?”

  “I made it look like an accident,” Knox said. “A fall from a high place. A fractured neck.”

  The old man’s sigh was audible. “I never wanted that. I liked him, but I guess it couldn’t be helped.”

  Knox thought of a felicitous reply, but kept it to himself.

  Jetters looked up and licked his lips. “We have another problem.”

  Knox waited, tugging off the thin leather gloves, one finger at a time. “What’s that?”

  “Matthew,” Jetters said, “is missing.”

  Chapter 4

  Leslie Labyorteaux looked again at the photos of the dead man. It was going on thirty-six hours since the body had been discovered, and she had yet to get the victim identified. The textbooks said that the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours were the most crucial in terms of solvability. She felt the case slipping away.

  Refocusing herself, she studied the file again. There were no fewer than twelve convention events scheduled at the Center the night in question. So far, she’d been unsuccessful in determining if the victim had been connected to any of them. Graven had expressed his opinion that it was a random mugging gone bad. A review of the “thug file” of known offenders who frequented the downtown area had so far proved less than elucidating, as well. She decided to concentrate on what she did have.

  The autopsy that morning had been especially telling.

  “He had a heart transplant,” the attending doctor had told her. That, in itself, was not totally unremarkable. But the body bore other surgical scars, too.

  The doctor’s fingers, glossy white in the latex gloves, probed the decedent’s right side. “Looks like other organs as well. Most likely a liver, maybe more.”

  She remembered the doctor’s thoughtful expression as he stood back after sifting through the man’s open chest cavity.

  “His organs are in remarkable shape for a man his age. I estimate him to be in his late-seventies, but these organs look much younger.” He laughed. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say they almost look brand new.”

  “Maybe he went in for a complete overhaul,” she said facetiously, trying to keep her mind off the putrid odor and horrendous sight of a human being sliced up the middle like a field-dressed deer.

  She remembered the doctor’s perplexed expression as he continued to shake his head.

  “Never seen anything quite like it,” he said, as he stared down into the gaping hole. “The anti-rejection drugs were doing an extraordinary job.” Medical operations like that would be recorded, she thought. At least that’s something to go on.

  Still, it had taken longer than she anticipated to get the victim identified. His pockets had been completely devoid of anything remotely personal, except for a roll of breath mints, a comb, and a handkerchief. No wallet, no hotel keys, no car keys. No record of the dead man’s fingerprints through Toronto PD, the RCMP, or any other Canadian data base. She’d submitted them to Buffalo PD, Erie County, NYPD, and also to the New York State Police.

  Good luck hoping for them to put a rush on it, she thought. If only things moved as fast in real life as they did on those American TV shows.

  She also submitted a request to the AFIS system of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, hoping for a sympathetic ear, figuring maybe the Feds, as the Americans say, would see her as something more than a pesky Canuck.

  Hopefully, something else would break soon, giving her a more substantial lead. It had to, if she wanted to solve her first homicide.

  After locating the silver Corvette in the parking lot of Matthew’s apartment building on the city’s southwest side, Knox tried to place a tracking device on the undercarriage. The burglar alarm had been engaged, and the car began an incessant honking and blinking. Turning, as if totally disinterested in the noise, Knox picked up his black leather briefcase and went back around to the front of the building. Inside the small foyer, he glanced in the mailbox for apartment 2B. M. Jetters.

  It was surprising that the old man had allowed the kid this much freedom. Moving off the New Genesis compound, having an apartment, a sharp car. He’d been raised exclusively on the compound, being home schooled and never allowed to venture into the outside world unescorted. And it showed. To say he was a weird little fucker was an understatement. Now it looked like Jetters had given him free rein, but he was the only normal one in a group of retards. Almost as if Matthew was actually Jetters’s surrogate son. Almost.

  Strict conditions were in place, like closely monitoring the kid’s cell phone, computer usage, and credit card activity. It kept Knox and his security team busy. Obviously, their surveillance had not been sufficient.

  Knox took out his lock picking kit. He concentrated on the mailbox first, slipping the gaping, jagged lock in easy fashion.

  It was full. Obviously no one had emptied it in at least two or three days. No wonder the old man was concerned.

  He sorted through the mail, pocketing any bills he could find, and sticking the ads in his other coat pocket. After a quick glance around, he stuck the thin blade of the pistol-pick into the security door’s lock and applied a gentle, simultaneous pressure with the L-shaped wrench. After a few flicks of the trigger, all the tumblers lined up and he felt the lock twist open. He carefully closed the door behind him and went upstairs. At Apartment 2B, he again used the pistol-pick. It took even less time than the first door.

  The apartment was dark inside and smelled musty. Stacks of papers, books, and magazines littered the coffee table and chairs in the living room. The bedroom was just as bad, the bed a twisted mix of sheets, blanket, and pillows.

  It was evident that no one had slept here for at least a few days. The red light on the answering machine blinked in the solitary darkness.

  After switching on the lights, Knox listened to each message. There were three, all unremarkable. School related. One from his graduate advisor informing him that she still hadn’t received the proposal for his thesis project. The second from the research librarian advising him that the books he ordered were in, and the final one from the advisor again, more petulant in tone than the last, once again reminding him that his proposal was due this week.

  I guess it pays to have a rich old man footing the bills, thought Knox.

  He settled in to the task at hand, switching the computer on. The message box, requesting a password, sprang into view.

  Knox frowned, feeling the growing sense of urgency to get this damn thing done. He removed his tablet from his coat pocket, connected it to the computer, and selected the override program. Twenty seconds later Matthew’s computer opened to the screen saver, a selfie of the Matthew holding a gun to his head. The weapon looked to be a BB pistol, but the effect was clear: this kid had more than just a couple of screws loose.

  Knox went through the computer quickly, hacking into Matthew’s e-mails and checking for social media listings. There were none, but Knox hadn’t expected any. Jetters had been clear that was forbidden, harnessing Matthew with another abnormal restriction. What normal kid today wasn’t on Facebook? But then again, Matthew was anything but normal.

  Knox continued to review the files until he found the ones allowing him access to the recent credit card information. The card was listed under New Genesis, Inc.

  He checked the list of recent charges. Three were of interest. Two at a gas station on the north side, and one from three days ago at the Bel-Aire Motel, on the south side. The gas purchases were substantial amounts. Knox didn’t think the Corvette would be that kind of a guzzler. Did he have a secon
d car?

  The third charge piqued Knox’s interest more. Why rent a motel room when he had his own apartment?

  Knox figured the obvious answer was that he wanted to do something that he didn’t want his neighbors to know about. Drugs? Parties? Hookers? Maybe all three?

  It was unimportant. He didn’t care what vices the little punk was into. Knox just wanted to find him quickly. Still, the discovery of this unexpected wrinkle had piqued Knox’s interest. The game was afoot, and he was beginning to enjoy it. He moved the mouse to see what else he could find.

  The break in the homicide case came four hours after Leslie’s initial request to the FBI. She looked at the e-mail:

  Attention: Detective Labyorteaux, Toronto Police Dept.

  The fingerprints you submitted have shown to be a positive match with the following FBI number: GS 44399010003. Norton, John H. DOB: 03-19-1933.

  It took her a few phone calls to find out what the information meant and where it led.

  “GS is the designation for Government Service,” the helpful man at the Bureau of Identification said.

  “Do you show any home address?” she asked, and heard a soft chuckle.

  “I couldn’t find that without narrowing it down more,” the man said. “Know what state he lived in?”

  “No idea. Isn’t there a central listing of all US residents?”

  “Not really. There’s way too many people for that.”

  The initial ebullience she’d felt was fading rapidly. “This is the first break I’ve had in this case. Do you show a last known address?”

  Another chuckle. “This entry is over thirty years old. I’d have to do a manual lookup. They don’t even keep these files on the computer anymore.”