by Hadena James
“I’ve never thought about it that way,” I told him.
“That’s because you lack empathy and sympathy, which is why you don’t understand people very well. However, you can’t say you immediately trusted me when I took over the SCTU.”
“I don’t remember,” I admitted. “There are a lot of holes in my memory and they are getting worse not better.”
“I know,” Gabriel sighed and lit a cigarette that he pulled not from the bag but from his coat pocket. He handed me one, along with the lighter. “Soon you are going to have to trust us to take point entering lairs and things because the considerable damage you are doing to your body you are also doing to your brain which is causing some of the memory problems. And Ace, I agreed to lead the SCTU knowing that you were different and that I would have to challenge myself to accept and trust you, knowing that you would never change, but you have. In the years I have known you, you have changed most of it for the better, which is why I have no problems trusting you. But earlier today, I expected you to wake up and demand we kill Raphael, not leave him locked in a room and hope for the best, but you didn’t.”
“Because I knew,” I told him. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to have to kill Eric or Malachi, I could do it, but it wouldn’t feel good and I wouldn’t be happy about it. Psychopath or not, Raphael is your brother, your twin brother of all things, I know that while you may not hold it against me if I kill him, I also know that some part of you would hate me for eternity if I did. I don’t want to live with that burden.”
“That was a very deep emotional realization, especially for you,” Gabriel told me. “I’m not sure I’d hate you, I would have understood, Raphael hasn’t exactly been my best friend for the last three decades, but you’re right, it would take me a while to get over it.”
“You realize I consider us friends, right? I’ve never had a lot of friends, so having as many as I have right now is weird for me. Despite being a psychopath or a sociopath or whatever it is that defines my mental makeup, I am not a solitary person, not totally. I appreciate that you, Lucas, Xavier, and even Fiona have learned to put up with me and trust me. However, to maintain the relationships, sometimes I have to be a little less me. I don’t mind, but sometimes I have to fake my emotions.”
“You never have to fake them with me,” Gabriel told me. “I get that you may not feel as deeply as anyone else I consider my friend, but I never want you to feel like you have to fake it for my sake. And if you talked to the others, I believe they would feel the same. We know you as best we can, and we are good with who you are, even when you aren’t.”
Patterson
PATTERSON CLACHAN WAS paying fifteen hundred dollars a month plus utilities to pretend to be a normal person, so he could watch the townhouse of the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It was strange that no one had recognized him, but then, he didn’t think the Director paid much attention to his surroundings. In Patterson’s opinion this made him lazy for someone that was supposed to be a predator. But Patterson had always considered him lazy from the very moment Donnelly Clachan had called and told him that Aislinn had identified him as one of the men in the house with Callow during her time in his clutches.
He was in DC to right the wrongs he had let happen over the years. He should have gone out the very night Donnelly called him and killed the now Director of the FBI. He hadn’t because he had believed Donnelly was capable of handling everything himself, in a legal way. Donnelly hadn’t been a fan of vigilantism, even if it was to protect his daughter. Myrna was more accepting of it. She was part of the reason Patterson was here, watching and waiting for his opportunity to arise. Her family would never be safe, and that included Eric and all her grandchildren, as long as the Director of the FBI was alive and organizing hit squads of serial killers to come after them.
No, he had waited too long to take care of this matter. As a result, there were a lot of dead bodies of people that shouldn’t be dead, including his own son and granddaughter. However, Patterson had lost friends and allies along the way too, people like Nathan Green and Lucas McMichaels’ parents had fallen simply because Donnelly had made his father promise not to go after the man he was currently watching. Patterson was probably the only person that knew exactly what had happened to the McMichaels, including Lucas’s brother. Unfortunately, he couldn’t prove most of it and no one was going to believe him over an FBI agent, even if he managed to produce the bodies of the McMichaels, he would look like the killer, not the avenger.
Rumor had it that the Director kept trophies not just from the young ladies he killed, but from everyone he had killed including the McMichaels.
Of course, simply breaking in would result in claims of planted evidence, someone trying to frame him for murder. What needed to happen was for a SCTU team to go through the house on their own suspicions and find his trophy collection. Then justice might be done. Which was part of the reason Patterson had taken up residence a few doors down on the opposite side of the street. He could watch the comings and goings of the entire family. However, most importantly, he had managed to get a video of the Director of the FBI picking up a girl he later sexually assaulted and then drowned.
He had anonymously sent the video to the detectives working the young woman’s case, but nothing had happened yet. That had been three weeks earlier. He didn’t know if the Director had managed to talk his way around the incriminating evidence or what or maybe the detectives had deleted it thinking it was spam or maybe the Director had somehow managed to intercept the email and delete it from the police servers before they saw it. Patterson probably wouldn’t know about most stuff, but he did know he had a copy of the video that was set to be sent to Peter West of the National Security Agency in a few days. It would also go out to Harry Burns and the director of the US Marshals.
However, his stalking had been interrupted, and he was now wondering if this too had come too late. Aislinn and Gabriel were both missing, kidnapped by the Director’s protege, Raphael Henders. Patterson had been in contact with Apex, but he was in Russia and getting home quickly was difficult. He couldn’t tell anyone his niece had been kidnapped and he had to return home to help find her. After all, he was supposed to be dead. His survival depended on almost everyone believing that Jacob Strong was dead, Myrna Strong’s younger brother was dead. That made life tricky and somewhat difficult for Jacob, but easier at the same time. He was a man without ties, except a few bonds he had forged over the years with his niece and nephew and Malachi, who had basically been adopted by Myrna and Donnelly when he was a teenager.
It had been twenty-one years since Aislinn’s kidnapping had started a series of murders that would affect so many people and even pull in people that they hadn’t known existed at the time. But it had run its course and Patterson was going to make sure it ended soon, he was going to make sure everyone he cared about was untouchable by this monster once and for all. After that, he’d turn himself in and enjoy serial killer retirement in the newly rebuilt Fortress. He and Eric could play chess and enjoy their days. The Fortress wasn’t like other prisons where gang violence and rape were a constant worry. Since everyone was equally as dangerous as the person in the next cell over, things like violence were kept to a minimum by the prisoners because once violence broke out, the bloodletting wouldn’t stop until the floors were soaked in blood.
Besides, serial killers were actually ideal prisoners. Most of them just wanted to get to the next day and then the next without worrying about being shanked or some other ridiculous situation. When you put a bunch of them together, violence dropped to nearly zero, because most of them understood that the guy next to them might be the too mentally unstable to attack. It was why Eric had made sure a few of his trusted friends, like Turkish Jack, were inside with him. They were big fish in a pond full of big fish and they preferred order.
After the riot at the Fortress, they had moved some of the serial killers to Fort Leavenworth and that had done all sorts of
things to quiet down that prison. Of course, deaths had increased because Eric and John and the other killers were going to make sure that their tranquility wasn’t disturbed by thugs who thought they were tough, when really, they were just convicts who were locked in the wrong prison.
If you were on the outside, it was hard to imagine a prison like The Fortress working well. Everyone had expected it to be chaos, an experiment that would be shut down in just a year, but Nathan Green and some others had stuck to their guns, believing it would decrease violence in other prisons. They had been right. Gangs were still a problem in other prisons but not the Fortress, because serial killers didn’t care about that kind of stuff. There were criteria for whether a serial killer went to the Fortress or another location, and that criteria had worked really well for more than ten years. When the dust had settled, there were a lot fewer serial killers and a lot more bloodshed than anyone would have expected, but it was much worse when the killers were moved out of the Fortress, so it could be rebuilt.
They had brought chaos and death to every federal prison they had inhabited, mostly because criminals liked to prove they were bad asses. A few prisons had been smart enough to put their serial killers in solitary or in secure wards, but not all of them, and as a result, the prison population had dropped. Leavenworth had lost over a hundred prisoners in just a few short months. The worst serial killers were taken back to the Fortress as soon as it could house prisoners again, people like Brent Timmons and Turkish Jack were now housed in the Fortress. Each had expanded their body counts while in Leavenworth, because while Timmons may not have started out as an ally of Eric’s, he had become one simply because of the insane affection Timmons had for Aislinn Cain, Eric’s little sister. By the end of the riot, even Deacon Priest, a killer known to have no love for law enforcement, was grateful to Eric and the SCTU for keeping him safe.
Priest just wasn’t as scary as some killers inside the Fortress, and Alejandro Gui had been gunning for him on the inside. Then Ace had killed Alejandro and Eric had made sure Priest stayed alive during the riot which insured that even he was now a convert to the SCTU fan club. Only serial killers could have fan clubs devoted to the people that captured them. That was a very strange thing to do, but for some reason, it made sense to serial killers. Just like for some reason, serial killers mostly policed themselves and kept things from happening in their prison that happened in other prisons.
Patterson’s phone rang, interrupting his musings about how serial killers were different from regular criminals. The screen showed Jacob’s name and personal cell phone number, which he rarely used. Patterson felt a sense of urgency as he answered the call.
“Gabriel and Aislinn are in the process of escaping Raphael. How’s it coming with the Director?”
“I have some new ideas,” Patterson stated.
“Good, I have a favor to ask and I only do it because I think Aislinn and Malachi need to focus on Raphael. It involves Nadine.”
“Is she in trouble?” Patterson asked. Nadine was another of Myrna’s adopted children, simply because Nadine made it possible for Myrna to see Isabelle’s children. Nadine’s security force was useful in protecting the grandkids and escorting Myrna to see them. Myrna and Nyleena were currently being protected by a couple of Daniels’ Security right now in Australia, men Zeke and Anthony had hired on the quiet who lived in Australia full time and specifically made it possible for them to send clients into protection in Australia.
“She needs help finding a serial killer, and that means she is already in over her head, but the mob is going to kill her because she didn’t bring Aislinn to track down the serial killer that’s been killing them off one by one.”
“The one from the news then?” Patterson asked.
“Yes, that one who likes to leave tortured and dead mobsters in tourist spots around Moscow. The point was that someone told them Nadine would bring Ace to Moscow to help with this problem along with money. She has the money, but not Ace, last night she was kidnapped by Chechens and I can’t help but think it’s all connected.”
“Meaning if the mob doesn’t kill her whoever they want Aislinn to catch might,” Patterson sighed. “I’m not a profiler, Jacob, I’m not sure how much help I would be.”
“You already figured out my dilemma, though,” Jacob answered. “You think like these guys more than I do.”
“Okay, he’s killing people who are supposedly able to take power, right?”
“Yes,” Jacob answered.
“Then the mob should look within their rank and file, it’s going to be a psychopath they employ, probably as a go between for the different factions and he is going to be someone that can’t rise through the ranks no matter what he does.”
“Like a Chechen,” Jacob said.
“Or a woman,” Patterson answered.
“Women can rise to power in the Russian mob,” Jacob told Patterson.
“Yes, but even female psychopaths aren’t big into torture,” Patterson answered. “At least not the ones I have met, this guy is going to be a lot like Malachi with Aislinn’s ability and desire to kill.”
“Thanks. I’ll tell Zeke and Nadine.”
“Jacob,” Patterson stopped for a moment.
“What?” Jacob asked after Patterson had been silent for a while.
“If I bring up the McMichaels’ bodies, think that would make a difference?”
“Probably not.”
“I feel like Lucas should know,” Patterson told him.
“We all think Lucas should know,” Jacob agreed. “But it isn’t going to get a conviction if we decide against our current course of action with the Director.”
“I have no desire to change the course of action we decided on to deal with the director. I have been thinking all day that I should have done this twenty-one years ago regardless of what Donnelly thought.”
“You and me both,” Jacob told him.
“You think I should have done it back then?” Patterson asked.
“Not necessarily you, but in the last couple of months, as things have gotten more and more dangerous for Eric, Aislinn, and Myrna, I have been thinking I should have done it, especially since I knew where Aislinn was back then.”
“Except not going after her proved us right,” Patterson said.
“That’s true,” Jacob agreed. “I still feel like I let my family down by not going and getting her and killing all of them myself either back then or in the years immediately following it. “And they say psychopaths have low impulse control.”
“If he sticks to his schedule, he should be looking for a girl in the next week or so.” Patterson told Jacob.
“Good idea,” Jacob agreed. Patterson didn’t always have to explain things to Jacob. Sometimes Jacob just knew where Patterson was going with an idea.
Patterson had decided to kill the Director the next time he took a victim. He could be her hero as well as his executioner, it seemed fitting after all these years of letting him live unscathed. If something happened and he failed, the video would still be sent to Peter West, Harry Burns, and the director of the US Marshals as well as the Department of Justice and several newspapers. It would be hard for the Director to get out from under that. One server was doable, especially since he had other people, like Christian Hunter, at his disposal, but multiple servers, especially if he didn’t who exactly had received copies of the video. Aislinn, Gabriel, and Malachi would also get copies as would all the employees of Daniels’ Security. Patterson was determined that he wouldn’t escape justice any longer. He also had a copy of the wire transfer that he had sent to the guy that killed Isabelle and Donnelly, which would be hard to explain with a video accompanying it showing the murder of a young lady whose body had already been discovered.
Patterson turned off all the lights and went to his garage. He had a car parked there that was registered to someone who didn’t exist. One of the many things Daniels’ Security was capable of doing. Sometimes there was a fine line between
good guys and bad guys. Patterson was willing to ignore most law breaking by people like Daniels’ Security because they weren’t actively trying to kill people. Peter West and Harry Burns had procured the car for him, understanding when they helped him escape why they were helping him escape.
For the most part, Patterson wasn’t a serial killer in the traditional sense. Sometimes he lost his temper and accidents happened, but most of the time, he was just a vigilante who was willing to kill bad guys. He hadn’t killed anyone for the sake of killing in more than forty years, though. He had woken up one morning and decided to stop because it was hard to be so disconnected from his family.
He drove for several hours, leaving Washington DC and the state of Virginia behind him and entering Pennsylvania around dark. He found a little motel and checked into a room. He slept fitfully. He desperately wanted to go to Maine and save Aislinn, but he had to trust her to save herself once again. Herself and Gabriel, because the AHEAD movement was gaining steam again and the SCTU was about to play a bigger role than it ever had in the past, because even though they were going to kill the Director of the FBI, the man responsible for organizing serial killers to do his bidding, there would be someone else to take his place eventually and serial killers were still on the rise, making the SCTU a necessity.