The Event

by McBride, Michael

  He took her hand and pulled her back down into the bench beside him.

  She smiled and clapped him on the knee.

  “Besides, I’m also one hell of an investigator, in case you’ve forgotten. My brain could use a little stimulation in that regard. All I do anymore is eat, sleep, and breathe the market, and I’m not even making any money off of it.”

  “I highly doubt that.”

  “Okay, so I draw a solid paycheck, but it’s not like I’m out there wheeling and dealing. A floor supervisor is really just a market cop who makes sure people on the trading floor are behaving themselves like they’re supposed to.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short. Lord only knows the kind of scams people might be able to pull off if you weren’t there to make sure they didn’t.”

  He smiled and looked at her from the corner of his eye. Nodded to himself. He’d never been the kind to accept praise with any kind of grace. Whatever the circumstances surrounding the end of his tenure at the FBI, he had more than landed on his feet. His was a position of great responsibility and trust. He could easily violate that trust and manipulate events in any number of ways, and make himself astronomically rich in the process. Fortunately for all, there were few men on this planet with the same level of integrity.

  “Just spit it out already, Renee. My head gets any bigger and you’ll have to tie a string to me to keep me from floating away.” He took a sip from his coffee mug, which no longer steamed. “Turns out it might even be nice to close the books on this one for me, too.”

  She hadn’t looked at it from that perspective. She’d been so careful during the last five years not to remind him of the case and her continued involvement that she’d essentially tiptoed around the only other person who could possibly understand her obsession with it.

  “I guess what it comes down to is this.” She couldn’t look at him when she spoke, so she instead focused on the distant skyscrapers only barely visible above the treetops. “Lloyd was a smug, imperious prick who took full advantage of the suffering of others to pad his pockets, but when it came right down to it, I believe him when he said he wasn’t directly involved.”

  “Why?”

  She bit her lip as she tried to formulate her thoughts into words.

  Adams misinterpreted her silence.

  “Just playing devil’s advocate, you know.”

  “For him to have been involved, he would have had to have been in a position to control these boys. He would have had to understand them. Their fears. Their insecurities. He would have needed to know what they wanted to hear in order to give it to them. And I just don’t see Lloyd as the kind of person who could look beyond his own desires long enough to contemplate what anyone else wanted.”

  “He could have hired someone to do it for him.”

  “True, but I don’t see Lloyd doing that. He was the kind of guy who needed to be in control of everyone and everything around him. Which is why I think the cancer was ultimately more than he thought he could handle and he ended up taking control the only way he knew how. And he had an ego. One so large I don’t think it would have allowed him to let someone else do something so important for him. Either he did it himself and took full credit for the victory, or he didn’t do it at all.”

  “What about that guy always attached to his hip? What was his name again? Heatherton?”

  “I don’t see it.”

  “Smithers was in love with Mr. Burns. That kind of thing adds an element of unpredictability you can’t always account for. And he would have had an easier time reaching out to teenage boys.”

  “True, but my gut’s telling me I’m missing something.”

  “Weren’t you there when Lloyd shot himself? Regardless of your thoughts on the matter, Renee, something like that could be interpreted as an admission of guilt.”

  “He was already dying. In the end he merely developed a terminal case of perspective.”

  “You think he found God?”

  “I think he was a miserable old man who found himself alone with his money and realized that was exactly how he was going to die. No one wants to go out like that. It makes everything up to that point seem to have been for naught. And it’s not like his condition was common knowledge. I never would have learned about it had I not been…”

  “What? Following him? Stalking him?” She felt the weight of his stare upon her. After a long, uncomfortable moment, he finally laughed. “You must have really wanted him bad.”

  “You can see why I’m having such a hard time accepting the fact that he wasn’t responsible.”

  “Even though the case is wrapped up with a nice, pretty bow?”

  “That’s just it. How many cases did you ever close that were so neatly tied off?”

  “That’s all you’ve got? A nicely resolved case and some doubts about how a rich old man could reach out to some teenage boys? Hell, Renee. He could have easily met them on the internet.”

  “It’s more than that. Where’s the motive?”

  “There are only three motives. Money, sex, and power. No matter what the crime is, it always comes back to one of those things.”

  “So which one is it?”

  “Money. Pure and simple. It always boils down to the money. You know that. Money runs the world. You can buy sex and power, but you need money to do it. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned through the course of my professional life, it’s that people who have money always need more. It’s an obsession. There’s no finish line and no award for reaching a certain amount. Just the insatiable desire to make more.”

  “Speaking from experience?” she said with a wry smile.

  “You know me.” He chuckled. “I can never make enough.”

  Lawton watched a woman jog past with an enclosed stroller on bicycle wheels and thought about the path not taken. She wished she felt more regret.

  “There’s an element of evil here, Wes. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s beyond sadism and opportunism and even the limits of greed. We’re talking about someone who not only talked some insecure teenagers into killing themselves, but convinced them to dress up in a theatrical manner and take a bunch of strangers to the grave with them. That’s the kind of power that money simply can’t buy. Think how much time had to have been invested into these boys. You can’t just walk up to them and tell them to go on a killing spree. You have to cultivate them. Understand them. Live inside their skin. Make them believe that everything they’re missing in their lives can be theirs if they just cross this one line. Then the next. And a series of little, seemingly insignificant lines until killing is the next logical step. Think about the kind of person who could do that. Evil is the only word that can be used to describe him.”

  “And you think Lloyd was incapable of that kind of evil? He would have slit his own mother’s throat for the money in her coin purse.”

  “You act like you know him.”

  Adams shook his head and looked away. He made a sound she recognized even after all these years. A heavy sigh through his nose. Frustration. His signal that they were nearing the end of the conversation.

  “I know his type.”

  “What type is that?”

  “The kind who’ll suck the life out of everyone around him and then rifle through their pockets when they’re dead.”

  “Maybe. But it takes a special kind to actively participate in the killing. To sit down and plot out all of the nuances in order to make a fortune in a way designed to appear almost coincidental. I mean, if you really look at it, more time and effort were invested into creating mass murderers than in making money. The stocks involved were already winners. They were set to pay off big regardless. It’s almost as though whoever’s responsible needed the challenge and the market no longer provided it. He picked stocks right out of the garbage—stocks that no one wanted—and made a fortune off of each and every one of them. Whatever challenge they had once held was gone. He needed to take risks. To feel the thrill of victory, which can
only be experienced when contrasted with the agony of defeat. After all, what’s the stock market if not the educated man’s version of casino-style gambling, with not only big money, but lives and careers on the line. In this sick bastard’s case, he found that thrill in twisting some poor kid’s head inside out and setting him up to instigate a mass casualty event on the date and time of his choosing. Think about how much power he had to have over them. The kind of perverse evil it would take to wield that power.”

  “Maybe he’s just misunderstood.”

  He laughed, but there was no humor in it.

  “Yeah, right. Someday they’ll build statues in his honor.”

  “Did you ever think that maybe he’s making a statement?”

  Lawton paused to mull it over.

  “How so?”

  “Maybe he’s trying to make everyone see that the world has become so wrapped up in the pursuit of material gain that it’s lost touch with what’s important. That everything else is secondary to wealth and prestige.”

  “Seems like a pretty crappy way to get that message across. And if that were the case, then what’s the significance of the animal faces. The snake and the goat and the badger. What sort of message is that supposed to convey?”

  “Maybe that when it comes right down to it, we’re all animals on the inside. No better or worse than those upon which we feast. That maybe on the inside some of us are different, that if we shed our outer skin the world will see us for what we truly are. Not mere sacrificial offerings to the machine, but powerful individuals capable of achieving greatness in a society designed to suppress individuality and creativity in the quest for monetary gain, which, for all practical purposes, merely serves to funnel it into the pockets of those who already have more than they could hope to spend in a hundred lifetimes.”

  “Or maybe he’s just releasing their inner beasts like he feels he’s released his own.”

  “We’re all beasts on the inside, Renee.” He gestured to his scarred face. “Some of us on the outside, as well.”

  Fifteen

  Logan International Airport

  Volpe International Terminal

  Boston, Massachusetts

  September 29th

  8:00 p.m.

  Six hundred and sixty minutes post-event.

  Lawton strode down the middle of the marble-tiled corridor toward Gate E8B, where British Airways Flight 1284 was preparing to board. The woman working the currency exchange booth looked up at her and smiled. Her smile vanished when she saw the dozen or so armed federal agents following twenty paces behind Lawton with a mob of TSA agents. Unlike the others, Lawton wasn’t wearing a Kevlar vest or a helmet or carrying an assault rifle. All she had was her Glock in its sling beneath her left armpit and the same windbreaker and cap she’d been wearing all day. And what an exhaustingly long day it had been.

  She opened and closed her right hand at her side to signal the others to fall back, as they’d arranged. The last thing they wanted to do was cause mass panic in the middle of an international airport, especially on the heels of the morning’s tragedy in Manhattan. And they couldn’t entirely rule out the possibility that the suspect had somehow managed to slip a small quantity of sarin through security. Lawton highly doubted it, considering the elevated state of security and the danger involved, but any risk in an area like this was too great.

  Men and women in rumpled clothing shuffled past her like zombies from the gate to her right, where Lufthansa Flight 843 from Frankfurt disgorged them, pale and half-asleep, and dreading the unendurable passage through customs. She offered them her most reassuring smile as she shouldered through and made her way toward the end of the terminal.

  Mere hours ago, she had been standing in her former partner’s bedroom, watching the men from the medical examiner’s office removing Adams’s remains from his closet in a silver body bag on a gurney, wondering if there had been some clue she had missed, some change in his behavior or mannerisms she should have recognized, some crucial point when she might have been able to stop this nightmare before it even started.

  She’d never suspected him. Not once. Maybe he’d been too good of an actor. More likely, she’d allowed her guilt over what happened to him to blind her to the truth. It didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. The blame fell squarely on her shoulders anyway. After all, she’d known he’d gone to school to be a stockbroker before offering his expertise to the FBI; she’d simply never bothered to ask him about it. Same as she’d never divulged the reason she transferred from Behavioral into White-Collar Crimes was because her grandmother had lost her entire life savings to Bernie Madoff and his reprehensible Ponzi scheme. She wanted to make people like him pay. To hurt them like they hurt so many others. And the moment she so much as spoke those feelings out loud, even to her partner, she ran the risk of being removed from the unit. She’d never asked Adams about his past for fear he might ask her in return and sense the lie in her words or see its expression on her face. A simple conversation between partners and she would have known better than to allow him to walk into a hostage situation in a former coworker’s office.

  That was her cross to bear.

  In retrospect, everything was so clear she couldn’t believe she’d missed it. All of the answers had been staring her right in the face for the last five years.

  Keep him away from me! Don’t you see? He’s going to kill me!

  She’d chalked up Hargrove’s panic to the paranoia of a guilty man who knew there was no way out of the situation he’d created, when he’d really been telling her that Adams’s only choice was to kill him to prevent his involvement from being revealed.

  Can’t you see what he’s doing? He has to kill me!

  Which is exactly what Adams would have done if Hargrove hadn’t gotten off the first shot and thrown off his aim, forcing her to shoot Hargrove instead.

  But if she conceded that Hargrove hadn’t been mentally unraveling to the extent she had originally assumed and that his admissions were for her benefit alone, then she had to look at his statements from a different perspective.

  I didn’t understand. Not then. They never fucking explained to me how this worked!

  They. Hargrove had already confessed his guilt. What he was telling her was that Adams wasn’t working alone. That there was a third party in collusion with both Hargrove and Adams, one he assumed Lawton knew because of his use of the plural pronoun “they” without feeling the need to state the accomplice’s name.

  A scattering of people filled the chairs to her right, waiting for their eventual flights. Some drank coffee or ate fast food at extortionist prices. Others texted or worked on their laptops with such concentration that none of them so much as blinked. She passed Gate E6. The ticketing agent looked up from his monitor and past the woman loudly berating him, then quickly back down at his screen again. He obviously feared the wrath of the passenger more than anything she could do to him.

  This wasn’t supposed to happen. They promised. They fucking promised!

  So who was the other half of Hargrove’s cryptic “they”? She knew the reason they had all painted their faces or worn masks; Adams had all but written it down for her when they met in the park. The problem was that with his facial deformities, there was no way any of the boys they had used to commit the atrocities would have allowed him to get close enough to manipulate them in the first place. And it definitely wasn’t his voice on either of the recordings. She would have recognized his speech patterns, if only after the fact. And the body of the man in the bear mask hadn’t been his. The frame was too narrow and the chin she had seen through the bear’s mouth hadn’t been scarred.

  So what were the implications of those facts? The third party went to great lengths to hide his face and his hands and disguise his voice. There was something distinct about them, something he feared would give him away. The face she could understand, but why the hands and the voice? You can’t fingerprint a video image and you need an existing voiceprint agains
t which to compare a sample. And there had to be something about him, some seductive quality that allowed him to insinuate himself into the lives of four different adolescent males and convince them to willingly sacrifice their own lives in the act of committing mass murder. What was in it for them? What was their motive?

  There are only three motives. Money, sex, and power. No matter what the crime is, it always comes back to one of those things.

  Power meant nothing to a teenage boy and money was still a poorly defined concept. In any teenager’s mind, money came from his parents and they had a seemingly inexhaustible supply, especially in the case of Logan Billington, whose mother paid his credit card bill without even opening it.

  That left sex.

  She’d known enough men in her life to understand that there was no easier way to control them, especially during their younger years when they were as much victims of their hormones as the girls upon whom they preyed. But did the same physical and emotional rules apply to homosexual intercourse as they did to heterosexual? And what were the odds of finding four boys so willing to give their lives to an adult male when their sexuality was still in the formative stages? It would be far easier to accomplish that goal with a woman. Especially an attractive woman. It would allow them to cast a wider net in their initial search and give them a larger subset of boys to cultivate in hopes of creating their killer.

  Was that the reason for hiding the hands and changing the voice? Either one would be a dead giveaway. Was this simply an example of misdirection meant to throw them off if they started getting close?

  Gates 7A and 7B sat side-by-side to her right. Only a few passengers had arrived in advance of the 9:45 flight to Stockholm and sat as far apart from one another as the seating would allow. There were more people waiting for the flight to Paris, the majority of whom wore clothes that probably blended in a whole lot better on the other side of the pond. A teenage girl took a picture of Lawton on a cell phone with a pink Hello Kitty skin.