To think of him alone in that room with Sibby, what he was capable of, where his sick, fevered mind wandered…
And then the image returned.
The attack seemed to be over. Sqweegel drew back, then moved across the room—into the master bathroom.
There was no video surveillance in the bathroom. But Dark already knew what Sqweegel had done there. Riggins had told him about the phone number on the mirror. They had no idea, however, what Sqweegel had used to write the message…
Until now.
chapter 55
Sqweegel’s exit from the Dark home looked simple. Effortless.
Dark watched the freak’s ghostly image float down the stairs, dress himself in the street clothes he’d left in a pile on the floor. Completely at ease. Like he owned the place and was preparing to leave for his nine-to-five.
But then Sqweegel returned to the glass patio window and carefully retrieved the smooth disc of glass from the floor. Using a tiny bottle he had in the front pocket of his pants, Sqweegel coated the edge of the glass with what Dark presumed was adhesive, then placed it back in its hole. He unlatched the patio door, slid it open, then left.
Fast-forward fifteen minutes.
Sqweegel returns with a rock in his gloved hand.
Dark recognized the rock.
He hides behind the curtain, posed like a department-store mannequin.
Fast-forward sixty-five minutes.
The first rays of dawn are visible.
Dark returns home. Races through his own living room, unaware that Sqweegel is standing just a few yards away.
The son of a bitch was still inside when he returned from his late-night talk with Riggins.
Dark watched the footage, amazed.
Sqweegel stands there, motionless, not even seeming to draw breath into his lungs. Arms at his sides. Head down. It’s as if he put himself in place, then flipped a kill switch in his brain that froze all biological and electrical activity.
This was a combination of patience and brazenness that no one else would have been able to pull off. It also spoke of Sqweegel’s massive confidence.
Confidence…or knowledge.
Sqweegel knew he’d been out.
Knew who he’d been meeting with.
Knew that he’d be too eager to see Sibby and that he would rush in to make sure she was okay.
But how? How did he know all of that?
How was Sqweegel able to keep a God’s-eye view on all of them—the people who were hunting him as well as the man who was being recruited to hunt him? And his wife?
It was more than confidence, Dark thought. Sqweegel had some other advantage. Partners? It was a possibility.
The surveillance evidence, however, indicated that he was a one-man show.
Look at him now.
Using the rock to shatter their patio window.
Leaping over the patio gate and strolling across the shared lawn to the neighbor’s property, then doing the same to his patio window.
What had Dark told Riggins at the scene? That this wasn’t like Sqweegel?
Just kids, throwing rocks through their neighbors’ windows.
Dark realized that he had been making serious mistakes with Sqweegel—not just underestimating him, but failing to engage his own special skills and think like him, refusing to push himself to inhabit Sqweegel’s mind the way only he could. He wasn’t going to catch him with cold, deductive reasoning. He wouldn’t make the same mistake countless other operatives had over the years. Dark was going to catch him by embracing his gift—his ability to tune in to his target’s wavelength and follow him beyond the boundaries of reason, into the depths of Sqweegel’s darkest fantasies, wherever they led.
chapter 56
Socha Medical Hospital
9 P.M. PST
Riggins was nursing a crappy cup of coffee in the hospital waiting room, pad and pen in his lap. He’d just finished a series of calls that woke up at least two dozen people on the East Coast. But fuck ’em. This was the nature of the beast. And the job at Special Circs was about to get a lot more chaotic in the next twelve hours. They’d have to learn to deal with it.
At least Wycoff seemed satisfied for the moment. Mobilization was something the secretary of defense could wrap his mind around. Finally, Wycoff had mocked. You should have brought everyone out here hours ago.
Dark walked into the room and sat down next to him. Riggins looked him up and down, then shook his head.
“You didn’t shower, did you?” Riggins said. “What part of go home and shower didn’t you understand?”
“Any word from Sibby’s doctor?”
“Nothing. I cornered a nurse a little while ago. She told me the minute she knew something, I would.”
“Thanks.”
“You don’t have to thank me.”
The two men sat in silence for a while, pretending to look at the same smudge on the opposite wall. But their individual brains were running at full speed, turning the case around in their minds.
“Let me ask you something,” Dark said finally.
“What’s that?”
“After two years, why is this little fucker suddenly so interested in me?”
Riggins sighed. “I’ve been thinking about that a lot. You know how I always say sometimes, the only right answer is the simplest answer?”
“Yeah. So what’s the simple answer?”
“You just said it: You were on the case two years ago,” Riggins said. “You retired…left…whatever. I think he just misses you. Realizes how much fun you were. And now he wants to bring you back into the game.”
“Sqweegel was the one who took me out of the game.”
“Maybe he thought it’d have the opposite effect. He thought doing what he did to you would…intensify things.”
Dark shook his head. “Still doesn’t make sense. Hundreds of investigators have chased Sqweegel. Why is he spending so much time on me? Why push me out, pull me back in? I’m nothing special.”
“You came the closest to catching him.”
“Maybe. We have no proof.”
“You were the only one to lay eyes on him, and I think that rattled him. And now he’s throwing a tantrum like a child, trying to get your attention.”
“And he knows exactly how.”
Riggins turned, a confused look on his face. “What do you mean?”
As Dark explained to Riggins what he’d found on the surveillance footage, Riggins stared blankly into his coffee, which now looked like a cardboard cup full of liquid shit. He listened to Dark’s dispassionate encapsulation of what Sqweegel had done to his pregnant wife.
That son of a bitch, Riggins thought. And then the writing on the bathroom mirror with her…
Good Christ.
The thought of him doing something like that to his daughters—hell, even his ex-wives—would have sent him into a blind rage. He was amazed at how well Dark seemed to be keeping it together. Picking at the case rationally. Calmly. As if it didn’t have a personal component. Fuck, if it’d happened to Riggins, he’d already be drunk and ranting about how he’d want to paint the walls with the freak’s blood.
But that’s not how Dark operated.
Maybe that was why Sqweegel wanted him back in the game. Agents and operatives who blew their tops at the slightest hint of pressure probably weren’t much fun to a professional monster. Maybe he wanted to play with someone more durable. Who could take a Job-like licking and, somehow, keep on ticking.
Not that Riggins would tell Dark any of this.
Someone’s BlackBerry chirped. Riggins patted his pants—wasn’t his. It was Dark’s.
Dark pulled out his phone and looked at the screen. One new text message.
To get an e-mail from a “friend,” log into LEVEL26.com and enter the code: headline
chapter 57
11000 Wilshire Boulevard
Friday / 2 A.M.
Since its creation in the late 1980s, Special Circs had never m
oved from its home base in Quantico, Virginia.
Until Riggins made a series of phone calls from the Socha Medical Hospital waiting room.
And within hours of those calls, Special Agent Constance Brielle found herself on a plane to L.A. with a dozen of her colleagues—from forensics analysts to computer techs to full-on agents and operatives. At first, she’d asked Riggins whether he was kidding. He assured Constance he wasn’t. Then she asked, Wouldn’t it be a little easier for you to, you know, head back to Quantico? Riggins assured her it wouldn’t be.
“What’s going on, Tom?” she’d asked him. “Seriously.”
“Rhymes with beagle,” he’d said. “Now go call the airline and get out here.”
Constance would have killed to have eavesdropped on Riggins’s phone calls to his superiors in the Justice Department, just to see how you could convince them to temporarily move an organization like Special Circs clear across the country.
She hadn’t seen Riggins for three days now—ever since their disastrous teleconference with the secretary of defense and Robert Dohman and the rest of the international crime community. Later that night, Riggins had disappeared, leaving little more than a hasty e-mail—Constance: Be back in a few days. Keep after the pissants. Riggins—and a stack of case files left on her desk.
With no hint as to where he’d gone. Or why.
But that changed when Riggins had called her that afternoon and told her to join the crew that was already preparing for the trip to L.A. Wheels up in an hour.
And now she was inside the Federal Building at 11000 Wilshire Boulevard, sandwiched between Beverly Hills and the concrete ribbons of the on-ramps to the 405. Here Riggins had commandeered a War Room, a crude simulation of what they had back in Virginia. Later, Constance would learn that this was basically a high-tech show area—a series of rooms meant to impress Hollywood types and foreign dignitaries when they wanted a tour of the world-famous FBI. It would be embarrassing to walk them around the real desks, with broken phones and PCs that barely limped by with operating systems at least six years out of date.
Again, Constance marveled at what Riggins had assembled with just a few phone calls.
The centerpiece of their new War Room was a huge LCD screen attached to a state-of-the-art control panel—everything connected to the computers back in Quantico with the most insane encryption and cybersecurity they could muster. It even smelled like a new car.
Constance fully understood the sudden relocation only when she saw who was seated at the controls.
Steve Dark.
You don’t ask Mohammed to take a red-eye to the mountain; you move the mountain to Mohammed. Especially if Mohammed had retired after the case that got his entire foster family slaughtered.
Riggins nodded at her. “Glad you could make it, Constance.”
“Sure, Tom.” Like she had a choice?
Dark turned slowly in his chair, then turned his head to look at her. There was a strange blankness on his face, like he was trying to place her. C’mon, Dark, she thought. It hasn’t been that long. It wasn’t contempt, or anger, or guilt, or surprise, or anything. To Constance, it was like Dark floated on a different plane of existence than the rest of them, and it took some effort for him to tune in to normal reality. “Hi, Constance,” he said flatly.
“Steve. I’m so sorry,” Constance said. “How is Sibby?”
“Still in critical condition.”
“Oh.” Constance fidgeted for a moment, trying to think of the reassuring thing to say, the thing that would comfort Dark, make him open up to her, for even a second. Instead, she heard herself repeating the words: “I’m so sorry.”
And she was.
Did Riggins catch that moment? She sure hoped not, but it was hard to tell with Riggins sometimes. Sometimes he seemed like he tuned out, but she would find out later that he could recall every word as accurately as a court stenographer.
Constance tried to focus on the case, not Dark. In just a few days, Sqweegel had escalated his kill pattern, which was highly atypical. What’s more, he’d decided to focus on a single geographic area—Greater Los Angeles—which was also unprecedented.
Of course, this was a new level of killer they were dealing with, Constance reminded herself. You’ve been spending your days and nights thinking about Level 24s or 25s. This was a new kind of beast. The old criteria didn’t apply right now.
She also had a hard time separating the case from Dark himself. He was Holmes to Sqweegel’s Dr. Moriarty; the near apprehension in Rome was the closest anyone had ever come. And now, suddenly, Dark was involved again.
How had this happened? The last time she saw Dark he’d made it perfectly clear: it was all over. There was no going back. This was it for him.
And how did Riggins go from No, never, not going to happen to Oh, Constance, you remember Steve, right?
Constance decided to puzzle it out later. She watched over Dark’s shoulder as he typed:
mounted police horses kill
Dark chose the first article that popped up. It was a New York Times piece titled, “9/11 Widows Donate Horses to NYPD Mounted Police.”
“Horses?”
“He killed five of them,” Dark said. “Fed them carrots, then shot them at point-blank range. One by one, one stall at a time.”
“Jesus. We sure it’s him?”
“He more or less told us he did it.”
Dark quickly told her about the murder poem. Constance immediately jumped to the fifth line:
Five a day ask why.
Five horses, with no idea why they were being slaughtered. Is that what the line meant?
“Are the horses asking that?” Constance asked. “Or is that supposed to be us?”
“Nothing is ever that clear with Sqweegel,” Dark replied. “There’s always a meaning behind the meaning.”
Then Dark showed her the news story that Sqweegel had sent, and Constance skimmed it. She’d always been a fast reader. This, coupled with a flash-drive-style memory, had enabled her to ace both college and grad school. Growing up she was called “genius.” But to Constance, it was just a strong ability to recall any fact she’d previously read or heard. Powerful memory, nothing more. A computer could do the same thing. Everyone seemed fixated on that—not her other cop skills.
Real genius was the ability to take the same facts and see the hidden connections between them. Constance was often quite good at it, something no one seemed to notice.
The story, however, didn’t present any obvious connections to Constance. Seemed like little more than an extremely cruel act of vandalism—the destruction of city property. Of course, New Yorkers didn’t see it that way. The local papers were all over it that morning, bemoaning the loss of five members of New York’s finest, featuring black-and-white photos of their uniformed riders, sobbing openly, not even an hour after the bodies were discovered by a maintenance man.
“So the question is, why kill the horses?” Dark said. “Everything Sqweegel does is symbolic. What’s he trying to tell us?”
“I don’t know,” Constance. “What did the widows do wrong? They’re just looking to turn their loss into something positive.”
“Doesn’t fit Sqweegel’s usual MO.”
“He has an MO?”
Dark turned to look at her. “Oh. Most definitely.”
chapter 58
Riggins, meanwhile, found it hard to focus on the horses when he knew that Air Force Two would be arriving in a matter of hours. And with it, King Asshole Norman Wycoff.
He’d thought the mobilization of Special Circs—the most elite crime-fighting team in the country—would have chilled the son of a bitch out.
It hadn’t.
The message from the Pentagon had been terse…and weird. Wycoff was flying to L.A. to personally deliver a piece of evidence from the murdered teenaged mother’s apartment—the one he only knew about thanks to Dark. Wycoff wouldn’t say what kind of evidence he had. But clearly it was too important to consi
gn to the hands of FedEx or even an undersecretary of defense.
It was a “new development,” Wycoff had said.
Oh, the suspense was killing Riggins.
But frankly, he was also worried about Wycoff and his goons hanging around. The head of the Department of Defense was no longer content to kick back in D.C. and wait for results. No, he was most likely going to second-guess every operational move, which, yeah—would do wonders for catching this psycho. Riggins had thought he could avoid this kind of suffocating oversight by relocating Special Circs to L.A. Not the case.
Even worse: If Dark was right, then Sqweegel seemed to have jumped to the East Coast.
Dark turned to face Constance. The War Room monitors blinked with information behind her. Back when he still worked at Special Circs, he’d assumed a mentor role with her. Okay, maybe he didn’t so much assume the role as Constance kind of pushed him into it.
She hadn’t taken a position with Special Circs with blinders on. She knew the burnout rate. So early on, she had decided to align herself with one of the best. A few days later, she’d realized that Dark wasn’t one of the best—he was the best.
He’d taught her a lot. She desperately wanted him to continue to teach her now.
“Take it from the beginning,” Dark said. “What do we know about Sqweegel’s victims?”
“I’ve reviewed each of his murders since the first in 1979. Up until now, they seemed without rhyme or reason. Spaced apart. Like he took his time and chose his victims at random.”
“And now?”
“Now there’s some other element to them. A kind of frenzy. And a new purpose. Where things seemed random before, now little details jump out at me.”
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