by J. J. Stone
Andrew tried to position the boy against him so he sold the idea of having dozed off. He tried to imagine how a father would look with his son sleeping beside him and almost laughed at himself at the absurdity of that idea. How would he know what a father would do?
The boy grunted and Andrew felt one of the boy’s hands flinch against his leg. He suddenly realized how quick and shallow the boy’s breathing had become. “Dammit,” Andrew whispered, touching his fingertips to the boy’s forehead. His skin was clammy and starting to turn a sallow shade of gray.
“He’s not sick, is he?” The nosy cab driver would not give up.
Andrew re-plastered his reassuring grin-grimace. “No. It’s probably just that third soda he just had to have.”
“I’ve never seen soda knock a kid out like that. Usually it has the opposite effect.”
“Look, he’s fine!” Andrew said, harsher than he had meant.
The cab driver glared at him through the mirror. “You two here on a trip?”
Andrew frowned at the shift in conversation. “No.”
“You’re living at the Bluemont?”
Andrew connected the older man’s thought train. “Yeah, we’re just staying there temporarily. Our house is getting fumigated.”
The cab driver nodded, but the frown remained carved into his wrinkled face.
Andrew looked out the window, attempting to block out the odd tension in the cab. They were driving through an industrial part of town, the mix of torrential rain and yellow street lamp light casting the cavernous warehouses in sepia tones. Half of the buildings looked utterly abandoned, and the rest of them seemed to be on their way out the door.
The boy suddenly started gasping, dry heaving breaths that seemed less about vomiting and more about continuing to get air into his body. The cab suddenly pitched to a halt and the driver whipped around in his seat. “You need to tell me what the hell is going on, sir.” The cab driver’s eyes were wide as he looked at the state of the boy.
Andrew felt panic fizzing up inside. The boy was obviously reacting to the amount of sedative, and the cab driver hadn’t bought the story from the moment they sat down in his backseat. That left one option: flee.
“I’m going to try to get him to wake up so he can walk off this sugar rush.” Andrew latched his arm around the boy and slid them both toward the door, wrapping a hand around the strap of his bag.
“That boy doesn’t need a walk, he needs a hospital!”
Andrew tossed a damp wad of bills into the back seat and slammed the cab door shut. He shuffled himself and the boy away from the car and down the sidewalk. He waited for the cab to start moving but nothing happened. Finally, he heard the engine rev and the yellow car drifted slowly past them then picked up speed and pulled away.
Waiting until the cab had gained a few yards distance from them, Andrew jerked the boy around and headed toward one of the more abandoned looking warehouses. In his bag, empty jars clinked against each other as Andrew scurried toward the safety of the building. He was glad he’d had the foresight to bring his supplies with him. Without the safety of his hotel room, Andrew would have to improvise if he wanted to restock before the boy’s parents realized their son wasn’t at his friend’s party anymore.
He finally got the two of them up a loading dock ramp and reached the door at the top. He prayed it was unlocked. The longer he was out in the open, the more chance he had of getting caught. He grasped the rusting metal handle and heaved. The door groaned open, scraping against the concrete of the loading ramp. Andrew could have cried in relief. He maneuvered himself and the boy into the thick blackness of the warehouse and wedged the door shut behind them.
——
Brenda rapped firmly on Ada’s door for a good twenty seconds before it finally opened a crack. Ada peered out at her, her eyes puffy and her hair wrapped in a messy top knot. “There better be a fire,” she said, her voice gruff with exhaustion.
“We just got a report of a man leaving a taxi with an unconscious boy.” Brenda watched the sleep evaporate from Ada’s body.
“I’ll be outside in five minutes.”
“Make it three. Everyone is already in the cars.”
Ada mumbled something under her breath and shut her door.
Brenda walked back down the long hallway and entered the lobby. She stopped in front of the sliding glass doors and held up three fingers to Dade, who was waiting in the driver’s seat of one of the SUVs in front of the hotel.
Almost exactly three minutes later, Ada jogged into the lobby, scraping her hair up into a more presentable bun. Brenda rose from her armchair and smiled wearily at the analyst. “This might be our chance to get one of these guys.”
Ada nodded, a determined look on her face. “I hope so.”
——
When Dade pulled into the warehouse parking lot, it was swamped with police and SWAT cars. News vans were beginning to trickle in, and before long the helicopters would be overhead. In the SUV in front of them, James drove through the police blockade followed closely by Dade as officers shuffled the temporary barriers to the side. They parked beside each other at the outskirts of the police perimeter. The team spilled out of the SUVs and congregated between the vehicles.
A police officer came up to the group and waved at James to get his attention. “Sir, the SWAT team is halfway through their sweep of the building. No sign of the suspect or the boy yet.”
James gave him a quick nod of thanks then turned back to the team. “The taxi driver stated that a few minutes after the suspect entered the vehicle with the boy, the boy started showing signs of severe illness. When the driver questioned the suspect about their destination, the suspect became frantic and fled the cab. As the driver was pulling away, he saw the suspect heading here.” James glanced at the abandoned warehouse and sighed wearily. “We might be here a while.”
Ada studied the mammoth facility and felt ten times wearier. She had only gotten about two hours of sleep prior to Brenda’s wake-up call. However, upon further observation of the rest of the team, Ada realized she was one of the more rested members of the group.
Dade strode to the trunk of his SUV and pulled the lift gate open. He started passing around FBI flak vests. “Waiting on them?” he asked James, who was keeping watch on the police.
James turned back to him and nodded once, taking a vest from Brenda and pulling it on.
When Dade held out a vest to Ada, she felt her stomach clench. Her panic must have transferred to her face, because he gave her a reassuring grin as he pressed the heavy vest into her hand. “Just a precaution,” he murmured to her.
Ada lowered the vest over her head and exhaled as its cool weight sank onto her shoulders. She fumbled in the dark with the straps but finally got the vest secured against her torso.
A SWAT team member emerged from the entrance of the warehouse and waved quickly at the police before disappearing back into the building. As the officers drew their weapons and jogged in, James nodded to his team and dipped under the police barrier and headed toward the warehouse. Ada rested back against the side of the SUV as the team rushed past her. She watched as they drew their guns and entered the cavernous building right behind the police.
For what seemed like years, Ada kept her eyes glued to the warehouse. She left the SUVs and walked up to the wooden barriers, leaning cautiously against the rickety wood beam. Her ears strained for any clue from the police radio as to what was going on in the building. All of the officers that had chosen to wait outside the building seemed to be holding their collective breath. Overhead, a pair of helicopters arrived and hovered above the herd of police vehicles. They were close enough to kick up a moderate wind, and Ada wished she’d grabbed her sweatshirt in her hasty exit from her hotel room.
A burst of garbled commands rasped over the police radio, and a team of medics
burst from the blockade line and raced into the warehouse entrance. Ada’s heart pounded as she ducked under the barrier and moved up behind a police car. The radio blazed to life with shouted orders and codes. From what she could discern, the boy had been located.
The crowd that had gathered back behind the police barrier suddenly erupted in cheers. Ada went up on her tiptoes and relief rushed over her as the medics flew out of the warehouse with a small boy strapped to the gurney. They raced into the back of the waiting ambulance, which then tore out of the parking lot and down the street. A flash of victory coursed through Ada at the sight of the rescued boy. No matter what else happened tonight, the one innocent life had been spared.
A few more minutes crawled past before police began slowly trudging back out of the warehouse. From the hang of their heads and their slow pace, Ada knew in her gut what had happened. When the BAU team exited and Ada caught sight of their devastated faces, her dread was confirmed. Three cases down and still no one to question.
CHAPTER 6
Dade slammed his hand against the metal wall of the warehouse. The resulting shimmy reverberated for a few seconds and felt oddly satisfying against his eardrums. The surges of red were beginning to dissolve from behind his eyes. His mind clung to those final moments before the suspect had popped his suicide pill. Dade had been mere seconds from reaching the suspect. The room where the suspect had taken the boy had a glass wall that gave those in the hallway a front-row seat to what was going on. As the BAU team came around the corner and entered the final hallway, Dade saw the suspect spot one of the police officers. He knew they were too late, again. James had arrived at the same realization, and he and Dade plowed through the sea of uniforms in a futile effort to get into the room and secure the suspect before he could down the suicide pill. The man was beginning to convulse just as James grabbed his arm.
Dade felt a light tap on the back of his arm and whipped around to see Ada standing behind him, squirming in the midst of the crime scene bustle. She looked like she was trying to decide between offering him sympathy or asking for details. He really hoped she would go for the latter.
“At least the boy wasn’t hurt.” Ada gave him a half-way sympathetic smile and he inwardly groaned.
“We almost got him. Deacon got a hand on him right as he was hitting the ground.” Dade looked across the crowded entrance to the warehouse and watched James talk with the coroner about analyzing stomach samples from the suspect. “This is getting old.”
“We just need to figure out how to get a step ahead of them.”
“I thought that was why you were here.” Dade snapped at her then winced. “I’m sorry.”
A somber darkness descended on Ada’s features and she looked into the dark entrance of the warehouse. “No, you’re right.”
Brenda approached them and handed Ada a flashlight and gloves. “Deacon said we have about ten minutes with the suspect before everyone comes in to process the scene. We also have a name: Andrew Bean.”
Ada pulled on the gloves with practiced swiftness and clicked her flashlight on. Dade couldn’t help but muse at how different this Ada was compared to the professor he’d met a month ago.
——
Ada craned her neck to look up at the silent crowd of machines and gears surrounding them. She wondered what this warehouse had produced in its prime. Her gaze was inevitably drawn to the body of Andrew Bean sprawled across an open section of floor. His clenched hand poked out from under the clinical white sheet someone had already draped over his corpse. Ada’s skin still crawled at the sight of a body, and she wasn’t sure that particular reaction would ever go away.
A shattered jar was beside the body, shards of glass glistening as Ada’s flashlight beam drifted over them. As Dade crouched beside the body and pulled back the sheet, Ada spotted a hefty hunting knife near Andrew’s other hand. “A hunter?” Ada asked as she pointed her flashlight at the blade.
“No. Just an easily accessible option for someone needing a quick, deep cut.” Dade said as he replaced the sheet and stood.
Brenda scrolled through her tablet. “Andrew Bean was a sales rep for a tennis shoe company in Baltimore.”
Dade pointed at the jar. “He’d perfected his method if that’s all he brought to collect the boy’s blood.”
An image of Andrew Bean slicing across a child’s neck flashed before her eyes and Ada fought down a wave of nausea. “The boy’s OK. Right?”
Brenda nodded. “He has some sedatives to get out of his system, but no physical harm done. We got lucky this time.”
“If we were lucky, we would have gotten this bastard alive,” Dade fumed. He glanced at Ada and Brenda. “Do either of you need to see any more, or can we turn the scene over?”
“Did you check his pockets? Did he have a bag or anything?” Ada asked.
Dade nodded. “He had a duffle bag. No notebook, though.”
Brenda cleared her throat. “The cab driver said that Andrew asked to be taken to a dive hotel about fifteen minutes from here. If we’re done with the scene, that’s where Deacon wants us to head next.”
Ada looked down at Andrew’s body one last time and shook her head. “I just don’t get it.”
“Join the club,” Dade snorted as he waved the waiting team of forensics officers into the room.
——
Andrew Bean’s dated hotel room was a fascinating study in organized chaos. There were small piles of seemingly random junk throughout the room, yet upon closer inspection, each pile seemed to have a viable theme. One mound was a pile of newspapers. Another was a pile of dirty socks. A pile of hotel notepads sat directly beside the bed. These contained random phrases and mostly useless directions. Whatever was scribbled on these notepads, however, was important enough for them to be the first thing Andrew saw in the morning and the last thing at night.
When an officer discovered the gruesome blood stash in the tiny motel fridge, it had brought home for everyone just how long Andrew had worked unnoticed. There were seven filled jars, each labeled with a different name or location. In one of the wet bar’s cabinets, a collection of empty, used jars revealed at least nine other victims. After the fridge had been emptied, Dade examined the remaining jars’ contents and commented on the absence of organs. This discovery, coupled with the lack of food in the room, cemented the morbid fact that Andrew Bean had been sustaining himself with his victims.
It was Brenda who located the notebook, wedged underneath the mattress. It contained the same organized chicken scratch as the previous two notebooks. Brenda also retrieved what appeared to be a diary. In it were detailed recollections of each victim and the intricate “extraction” process that Andrew had used to harvest each victim’s blood and the organ of choice. Ada focused her attention on the diary while James gravitated toward the notebook.
James shook his head as he flipped through his reading material. “He had just gotten started.”
Ada thought for a moment then nodded. “So you think the first set of handwriting is directions, and the second set is notes.”
“It makes sense.” Dade replied as he took the notebook from James and flipped through the first few pages. “Our linguistics expert back in DC has pretty much cracked the first column of code in the Seattle notebook. Each line seems to be a physical description. We’re assuming, since the second line hasn’t been completely cracked yet, that the second column contains the description of each victim that was ultimately chosen by John Klinton.”
Ada carefully turned to the next page in Andrew’s diary and winced as she glanced over an entry concerning an old, homeless woman. “The other two didn’t leave diaries.” She read a sentence about kidney density and her stomach lurched. She slapped the diary shut, pressing the back of her hand to her mouth. Dade held his hand out for the diary, and she gratefully passed it to him. “Why the break in MO?” she asked
.
Janice shrugged as she peered over Dade’s shoulder at the first page of the diary. “He’s a different personality type from the other killers. Maybe this was something he felt he had to do. He might have been a bit of a pack rat, but he definitely liked everything organized.”
Ada nodded and realized her breathing had gradually become shallower over the past few minutes. She reached down and picked up an evidence box that was ready to go. “I’m gonna bring this to the car,” she mumbled and navigated her way through the junk piles to the door.
She was stepping over the threshold when the sole of her shoe slipped on something beneath it. Her stomach clenched as she felt the foot slip out from underneath her. Right before she launched the evidence box in the air so she could catch herself with her hands, someone firmly grabbed her elbow and righted her balance.
“Got it?” James asked from behind her.
Ada cursed under her breath. Of course James had been the one to witness her moment of clumsiness. “Yeah, thanks,” she said quickly, readjusting the box in her hands.
James waited until she had passed completely through the doorway then brushed past her, headed for one of the SUVs.
Ada walked to the SUV on the opposite end of the lineup and placed the box in the trunk. She sat down on the back bumper of the vehicle and tilted her face up toward the sun that was beginning to peak through the early morning fog. The air was still damp from the night’s rain showers, and the brisk breeze whispering through the motel parking lot felt good against her skin. She heard a door shut and opened her eyes to see the occupants of the motel’s second floor rooms gathered out on the exposed walkway, peering down at the FBI activity.
James shut the driver’s door of his SUV, and Ada waited for him to emerge from between the parked cars. Ever since her talk with Janice, Ada had felt an overwhelming urge to mend, or build, the bridge between her and James. She wasn’t anticipating him becoming her best friend. She just wanted the air to be cleared and for the time they had to spend together to be cordial, at the very least.