by Chris Holm
Lester crawled for two miles trailing blood from the stumps of his ruined legs before collapsing, determined to find help for his brothers-in-arms, and was picked up on the verge of death by a routine patrol. By the time Hendricks came to—fevered, concussed, and nearly dead of starvation and exposure—all evidence of the ruined caravan was gone and all mention of their missions scrubbed from the record.
And why wouldn’t they have been? Officially, they had never existed. They were disavowed in death as they would have been in any other failure. And those few who knew the truth—about his unit and their demise—thought Hendricks to be among the dead.
It took Hendricks a month to walk out of Afghanistan. At first, he was near feral, operating on instinct. His memories were ragged, his injuries severe—so he holed up, living off the land as he recuperated. He didn’t know whom he could trust, so he hid from insurgents and American patrols. Once his fever broke and the swelling in his brain abated, his memories returned—and with them, the crushing guilt of all the innocents he’d killed. He supposed he could have come in from the cold, but why? As far as the military was concerned, Hendricks was dead—which meant Evie thought him dead as well. It was for the best, he told himself. He never could have faced her knowing what he’d become—a monster, a ghost. And so he hiked southeast, toward Pakistan, where the border was rendered porous by treacherous terrain and tribal control.
Once in Pakistan, he set about gathering new papers, crafting a new identity—building a new, if hobbled and incomplete, life. He thought even this damnable half-existence was better than he deserved.
This gig hitting hitters started out as retribution, of sorts. Hendricks figured once you agree to kill an innocent, you deserve whatever’s coming to you. That ridding the world of people who murder for a living was some kind of public service.
The irony of his chosen vocation wasn’t lost on him.
Or maybe his motivations were simpler than that. Maybe he killed because he was good at it. Maybe he killed because he didn’t know how to do anything else.
It’s also possible that he kept at it because he figured one day somebody was going to turn the tables on him and put him in the ground.
God knows he deserved it.
7
A bead of sweat trickled down Charlie Thompson’s side as she paced the sidewalk in front of Miami Police Headquarters, her cell phone to her ear. Garfield was inside, enjoying the relative comfort of the building’s air-conditioned lobby. They’d arrived over an hour ago and had been waiting for their department contact to collect them ever since. In that time, Jess had called twice. It seemed yesterday’s manic episode led to boy problems with a tequila chaser, and somehow it was up to Charlie to set Jess’s world right again. She wasn’t wild about the idea of Garfield overhearing her family drama, so she took the calls outside.
The building she paced beside was a squat, imposing concrete structure accented with tile the color of rust and red desert sand. It sat to the east of the city center, just blocks from Biscayne Bay, two miles and change from where Cruz met his fate. Low concrete barriers lined the building on all sides, disguised halfheartedly as retaining walls or planters for exhaust-choked palm trees. But they were architectural flourishes in a building devoid of architectural flourishes, and they weren’t fooling anyone. They were battlements, intended to protect the building and the people within from a street-level assault, or from a vehicle on a collision course. In a town full of drug smugglers and gunrunners, terrorists and gangbangers, an attack on police headquarters wasn’t entirely out of the question.
“Look,” Thompson said into the phone, “I’m not saying he shouldn’t have mentioned they were back together, Jess. All I said was snooping through his phone probably wasn’t the best idea.”
Jess gave Thompson an earful in reply while she wilted in the morning’s rising heat. Her brow beaded with sweat. She dabbed at it with her sleeve as she paced.
“Well, if you can’t trust him,” Thompson said, “maybe you shouldn’t be sleeping with him.”
An old woman with a hooked nose and oversized sunglasses eyed Thompson with disdain as she walked by, her hair rinse silver tipping toward blue. The way she cocked her head, she looked to Thompson like a cartoon owl.
“No, you shouldn’t text her back and tell her off.” A pause while Jess, riled up, responded. “Because he’s the one who fucked up—not her. Damn it, Jess, I don’t care how pretty he is—you deserve better. Yes, you do.”
It took a while, but eventually she talked Jess down. By the time she reentered the lobby, her patience was wearing thin. Garfield, for his part, looked unruffled: his suit was clean and crisp; his tie too flashy but well knotted; his collar buttoned and pressed. But then, that might’ve been because Garfield spent the hours after the Petrela collar catching some Zs, taking a shower, and changing his clothes, while Thompson had been perched atop her hotel room’s bed with her notebook computer on her lap, cranking through the necessary post-bust paperwork and poring over the file on the Cruz hit—which meant she hadn’t slept or showered in forty hours. Even as the night wore on, she’d been unable to stop her brain from cycling; she couldn’t force herself to sleep. Not when they were so close.
“Spill it,” Garfield had said, flipping through the file on his lap as Thompson piloted their rented Focus from the airport to police headquarters. “What’s this ‘ghost’ thing all about?”
Thompson smiled at the question as she weaved through Route 112’s dense morning traffic, though it was less a smile of amusement than vindication. The term had started as a joke. She’d been on this case since long before her fellow agents thought there was a case at all, and in the early days, they’d ribbed her mercilessly for it. Much as she loved her job, the FBI was still a good ol’ boys’ club at heart; the instincts of female agents were called into question far more often than those of their male counterparts. But she hadn’t cared what they thought—she’d known in her gut she was right. That there was a new player in the game. Someone talented. Dangerous. And one hundred percent off the Bureau’s radar.
Every time Thompson had added another kill to her whiteboard, another report to her file, her colleagues would tease her, saying, “Thompson’s ghost has struck again.” And whenever a case on her list was proven to be the work of some low-level thug—in the early days of her investigation, she’d yet to discern the pattern and had cast too wide a net—she’d never heard the end of it.
But then a pattern did emerge, and the killings escalated to the point that the Bureau brass could no longer ignore them. By the time the deputy director appointed Thompson, the resident expert, to head up the investigation, her colleagues had stopped laughing.
Garfield gripped the dash and inhaled sharply through clenched teeth as Thompson threaded their rental between a minivan and a delivery truck. Somewhere behind them, a horn blared.
“It’s not a what,” Thompson replied, “it’s a who. Some new hitter on the scene. Relatively new, at least. Bagged thirty-five kills we know of in the past two years alone, though I suspect his CV stretches farther back than that.”
“And you think this Cruz was number thirty-six?”
Thompson didn’t think Cruz was thirty-six—she knew it. “Has all the hallmarks.”
“What hallmarks?” Garfield asked. “He shot a guy. Seems to me anyone can pull a trigger.”
“You kidding me? I wouldn’t call popping a guy from four blocks away just pulling a trigger,” said Thompson. “But anyway, that wasn’t what I meant—he rarely kills the same way twice.”
Irritation flickered across Garfield’s face. “Okay then, what’re the hallmarks?”
“For one, his hits are flashy. Asphyxiation in the middle of a crowded convention center. An airport knifing. A precision shot on a busy city street. Hell, he once used a shaped charge to blow a theater chair—and the guy inside it—to pieces without injuring the patrons on either side. And for two, despite the fact that they’re so flashy, no one�
��s ever
managed to get eyes on him.”
“Not even traffic cams? Surveillance footage?”
Thompson shook her head. “Disabled or obscured.”
“Then I’m guessing he ain’t the sort to leave prints, either.”
“You’re guessing right. But I haven’t told you the best part yet.”
“And that is?”
“My ghost only hits other hitters.”
At eleven a.m., after nearly two hours’ wait, their contact finally arrived. A stocky, hirsute man in a cheap gray suit bounded across the atrium with a vigor that belied his heft. Both his suit and bald pate gleamed beneath the lobby’s fluorescent lights.
“Agent Thompson? Agent Garfield? I’m Detective De Silva.”
He extended a hairy-knuckled hand to each of them in turn.
Thompson shook it.
Garfield didn’t. “Special agent,” he corrected. Thompson winced. The Bureau doesn’t have a rank of agent— all investigators are titled special agent—but it was a common enough mistake, and one only a supercilious prick would bother to correct. Particularly when the person that supercilious prick was correcting was someone whose cooperation was far from guaranteed.
“Detective,” Thompson said, as De Silva let the hand he’d extended to Garfield drop, “thanks for agreeing to meet with us.”
“Of course,” he said, though the scowl on his face suggested he was thinking better of it now. He looked around the lobby, which teemed with uniformed cops and civilians. “How ’bout we step into my office, huh?”
De Silva took them up an elevator, then down a labyrinth of cramped hallways. Turns out, his offer of an office was sarcastic. His desk was one of many in a detective’s bull pen, which was only slightly less cacophonous than the lobby they’d left behind. Once there, he shunted them into a tiny, windowless conference room that looked like it might have been a converted broom closet.
“Sorry about the accommodations,” he said. “I’m sure Uncle Sam takes care of you Federals just fine, but us lowly city cops consider it a good day if the AC stays on. Now, what can I do for you?”
Thompson tamped down her irritation at De Silva’s tone. Friction with local law enforcement was part and parcel of working for the Bureau—and anyway, she reminded herself, it was Garfield who kicked off this particular pissing contest. She tried a smile. In her current exhausted state, it came out a grimace, and likely did more harm than good.
“I was wondering what you could tell us about the Cruz murder,” she said.
“I assume you read my report.”
Garfield snorted. “If that’s what you wanna call it,” he said.
Thompson glared at him. De Silva bristled. “What’re you trying to say, Agent?”
Garfield leaned back in his chair and showed De Silva his palms. “Just that it was a little slight, is all.”
“Through no fault of mine, pal, I can assure you. We traced the shot back to a vehicle, and the vehicle back to a long-term airport parking lot. The owner was at some kinda conference in Reno and had no idea it was even missing. The Crime Scene guys tell me the interior of the vehicle was a bust for prints and DNA, on account of our perp bleached the living shit out of it and wiped down all the surfaces he touched—including his shell casings and gun. And, yeah—the rifle was left behind, but its serial was filed off, so no luck there, either. Somehow every security camera for blocks around went down hours before the shooting, so we’ve got no footage of either the shot or Cruz getting hit, and eyewitnesses were no better. Edgar Morales, the owner of the building, is hiding behind a wall of lawyers— we can’t get a straight answer as to whether he was even in the country when the shit went down. We spent hours canvassing the area, and the best we could come up with was a valet for the hotel the shooter’s car was parked at who said our suspect was, and I quote, ‘a white dude, maybe, in a ball cap, aviators, and a bushy beard.’ That beard, by the way, was fake—we found it bleached white in the center console. And when we called around to costume shops in town trying to find out where he got it, we rolled a donut. We worked the trail. The trail ran cold. As simple as that. Whoever killed Cruz knew what he was doing—and my guess is, he’s long-ass gone by now.”
“Look, Detective, we appreciate your efforts,” Thompson said, flashing a glance at Garfield, “and I’m sure my partner didn’t mean to imply your investigation was anything less than thorough and professional. In fact, your expertise could prove invaluable to us. If you’d be willing to take us out and walk us through the crime scene, maybe help us track down some known associates of the vic—”
But De Silva cut her off. “Listen, lady, much as I’d just love to drop everything and help you out, the Cruz case ain’t exactly a priority. This whole goddamn state’s a war zone. In Miami-Dade alone, we’ve had fifty-four murders so far this year. Three hundred cases of sexual assault. Well over two thousand aggravated assaults. A full third of those cases haven’t been cleared yet. Most likely, they never will be. If I had to guess, I’d say your so-called vic Cruz was responsible for a handful of each, so to my thinking, whoever whacked him did me and the decent citizens of this city a favor. You want to poke around, that’s your business. But if you want to stand here and gripe that the file’s a little thin, feel free to fill it out yourself. I got better things to spend my time on.”
De Silva stood, yanking open the conference room door. It slammed against the wall, rattling glass. Then he left, red-faced and fuming.
Thompson fumed as well. If Garfield had played it differently, maybe De Silva would have been more cooperative. She eyed her new partner with distaste, but if Garfield noticed, he sure didn’t let on. Instead, he smiled and shook his head, saying to Thompson, “Some fucking detective he was. Probably couldn’t find his own dick with both hands and a flashlight.”
“Ass,” Thompson called him.
“Excuse me?” Garfield replied.
Thompson stared at him a sec, an expression of blank innocence honed in many a late-night poker game pasted on her face. And then she said, “What? That’s the saying. Couldn’t find his own ass with both hands and a flashlight.”
“Right,” said Garfield, somewhat mollified. “Now whaddaya say we go take a look at that crime scene?”
8
Engelmann, comfortable despite Miami’s heat in a linen suit and woven cowhide loafers, sipped his espresso and watched the two federal agents bicker in the shadow of the Morales Incorporated Building. From his table at a sidewalk café across the street, he’d watched them parade up and down this stretch of Brickell Avenue for the better part of the afternoon, alternately examining the scant physical evidence Cruz’s murder had left behind, and sniping at each other like an embittered married couple.
Engelmann spent most of his life observing from a distance. Even as a child, he’d felt set apart from his family, from other children, and from the string of governesses in whose care his parents placed him—and whose emotional states he slowly destroyed with his sadistic manipulations. It was by impulse, rather than design, that he tormented them—an omnipresent itch that he could never truly scratch, an urge to ruin and destroy that could be quieted but never quelled.
It wasn’t until he discovered killing that he’d felt truly present in this world.
His first was a pheasant at his family’s summer manor, which was nestled in the Inn River Valley in southwest Switzerland. He was ten. The house chef mistook his interest in the process as culinary in nature, and after he’d observed a slaughter without crying, the chef allowed the boy to bleed a bird himself. In that blissful moment when knife parted flesh, and the headless pheasant began to thrash within his grasp, the air had never seemed so crisp, the sky never quite so true a blue. But if the wizened old chef took note of his aroused state—as Engelmann suspected he had, for Anatole never again allowed the boy to partake in the daily slaughter—he never breathed a word of it to anyone.
Engelmann’s path had nevertheless been determined. So tr
ansformative was the experience, young Engelmann spent the better part of that afternoon traipsing about with hands coated red, only grudgingly washing away the stains when they’d crusted dry, the blood’s color fading to rust— and with it, the colors of the world around him. As he watched those flecks of spent iron swirl downstream on the icy waters of the River Inn, he knew they represented the compass by which his heart had been set—a conclusion reinforced weeks later when he took his first human victim, a local farm boy, and experienced an emotional and physical release so thunderous that mere words failed to do it justice.
Today, he watched, as he’d watched the village children decades before, his mind calm and appraising. Of course, he had no intention of harming these investigators. Not that he wouldn’t have enjoyed it. The woman was pretty enough, he thought, or at least would be if she gave a damn, and the man had a certain swagger it might be fun to break him of. But he didn’t see any utility in it—nor did he expect that they’d discern anything from the crime scene he had not yet himself discerned. He’d arrived in Miami some hours before they did and had already been over every centimeter of the sidewalk and the parking lot, so he knew just how meticulous the hit had been. He elected to stay and watch them not for evidentiary reasons, but because he believed the better he understood his fellow hunters, the better he would understand their common quarry.
Engelmann downed the last grainy bit of his espresso and left a twenty on the table. Ordinarily, he found tipping gauche, a horrid American practice he avoided whenever possible, but today he was in good spirits and thought the mood worth sharing. Then he left the café, and left the investigators to their fruitless examination of the crime scene. His nerves vibrated like a tuning fork from excitement and caffeine, a clarion note of anticipation ringing in his head.