Sarah didn’t feel herself doze off, but the relaxation she felt in her muscles and the peace of her thoughts let her know she was asleep, a type of sleep where she was cognizant of what was happening around her.
An icy chill went up her back, and she lost her breath. She saw Stefan and Gio and several other men, dressed in what appeared to be combat gear. Stefan and Gio had thick black vests that said FBI across the back in yellow. Someone dressed in SWAT gear broke through the door of what appeared to be a condominium or apartment. Others officers swarmed inside, Gio and Stefan right behind them. They shouted out when a room was clear. Cupboards were opened, rugs kicked up to see what was underneath, the balcony searched.
The image flashed forward. Sarah knew this because the sunlight was hitting the condo differently, so the sun had moved. The SWAT team had cleared out, and only Stefan and Gio and a few other people remained. Stefan and Gio spoke on the balcony.
And then Sarah’s vision swept upward to another building across the street. A man sat on his own balcony with binoculars, looking into the condo and watching Stefan and Gio. He lowered the binoculars and smiled.
Another flash, and Sarah watched as Gio was hit over the head coming out of a hotel at night and stuffed into a van. The man from the balcony injected him with drugs. He woke up somewhere in the dark, and the man bent down over him and whispered, his voice like the hiss of a snake. “A federal agent… this will be a glorious work.”
Sarah jolted awake. She gulped air in large, panicked breaths. Gio, she thought. Gio.
“Excuse me, excuse me,” she said to the stewardess, panic in her voice. “We need to turn the plane around. Turn the plane around, please.” Sarah unbuckled herself.
“Ma’am, you need to remain in your seat.”
“Turn the damn plane around!”
Several stewardesses came out. Sarah didn’t know exactly what was happening. Her chest felt tight. What the man was going to do to Gio was right there on the periphery of her consciousness. If she wanted to see it, she could.
As they tried to calm her, she got a glimpse. And saw only blood, bone, and organs.
“No!” she screamed. “No, turn the plane around. Stop the plane!”
Sarah was held down, and the more they pressed her into the seat, the more she panicked.
Gio.
36
The cold air of the open fridge refreshed Farkas as he searched for a beer. He found one near the back, a European beer with pear and apple. He poured it into a large crystal glass and then sat outside on his balcony and watched the show across the street.
His official address was in the building across the street—an apartment rented by him under a false name. It was even decorated just in case something like this ever occurred. He sipped his beer as he watched the FBI and the LAPD SWAT team rush into the apartment with fingers on triggers. A man he knew a long time ago had been killed by a SWAT team. He was growing marijuana in his house, and the SWAT team raided the home at two in the morning, wearing all black. The man, thinking a gang had just invaded his home, lifted a golf club, at which point the officers promptly shot him in the chest. Farkas had no doubt that if he had actually been at the apartment across the street, he wouldn’t have been walking out of there alive. Not after the officers saw what he had created on that video.
The raid seemed by the book. The rooms were cleared, the incident commander in charge of the raid inspected every nook and cranny himself, and then the FBI and forensics people began poring over everything, hoping to find some trace of Farkas—though he knew they couldn’t have known his name. It was curious that they even got this far. He had been careful to forward mail from a different address, a service that guaranteed no one but the Post Office itself could find out who had sent the packages.
He sighed. It seemed, ultimately, that few guarantees were ever kept.
No matter. Clearly, he’d have to leave the city now. He’d been wanting to move to Buenos Aires for quite some time, and it seemed as though the opportunity had just presented itself.
As he lifted the glass for another drink, he stopped. The glass lowered as his eyes fixed on a single individual: a man standing on the balcony speaking with another man. Farkas reached for his binoculars and observed the two.
Both were FBI, but the one was… beautiful. Something about him. Not just his appearance, though he was strikingly good looking, but his eyes and his countenance, the way he held himself. It was a man who had felt great pain and was attempting to mask that pain. A feature that, to Farkas, was as beautiful as a rose.
Every instinct told him to flee the city now. None of his bank accounts were stateside, so there was no money needing to be transferred or withdrawn. He could pack up his clothing, a few trinkets he needed, some memorabilia, and be on the next plane to Brazil.
But that man… He couldn’t resist. Farkas had to have him. The man would be his goodbye to Los Angeles and all the beauty and horror it contained. This one though, should be public. Very public. Something so outrageous the media would cling to it for weeks. He would have to come up with something brilliant—his magnum opus.
As he stared at the man, a smile parted his lips, and he held up his glass of beer in salute.
37
The room was blue. Blue walls, a blue computer monitor, and a poster of the ocean on a particularly clear-blue-sky day. Sarah sat in a seat in front of the desk. Her wrists were handcuffed.
The pilot had had to make an emergency landing in Dallas. Four people held Sarah down. She didn’t know now why she’d acted that way. It was almost as if something, some great horror, had taken hold of her and she had temporarily lost her senses. Only a single image kept coming back to her: Gio sedated on a table as a dark figure began to work on him with a collection of monstrous tools.
She had calmed now and thought her behavior abhorrent. There was no way they would’ve turned the plane around. She should’ve waited for their landing in Atlanta and then taken another flight back to Los Angeles after calling Gio and Stefan to warn them. But even by then, it might’ve been too late.
The problem was that now she didn’t have her phone, her money, or any means of going anywhere. And she’d been sitting in this room for over twenty minutes by herself.
Finally, a TSA officer in a blue uniform came in. He sat down across from her, his prodigious belly lying on the desktop, and pulled out some forms.
“Ms… Sarah King, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Please tell me if this information is correct.”
He pushed the top form across to her. It contained her birthday, social security number, height, age, weight, place of birth and current address. “Yeah, that’s right.”
“Good,” he said, withdrawing the form. “So, do you know why you’re here?”
“I caused a disturbance on the plane.”
He filled in one of the boxes. “That’s right. Tell me about that.”
“Listen to me, the life of a federal agent is at risk. If I could just call the field office in Los Angeles—”
“We’ll let you make a call eventually, but first I want to hear about this disturbance. I’ve got some statements here from witnesses that say you were pretty outta control. Were you trying to take over the plane?”
“Take over… no, no. And you’re not listening. Please, just call the FBI and connect to an agent named Stefan Miles. He should be in Los Angeles right now. I just need to talk to him for thirty seconds.”
“Do you think the FBI is after you?”
“No, they need my help.”
“Do you hear them speaking to you?”
“Who?”
“The FBI?”
Sarah sat in stunned silence. She hadn’t even considered what now dawned on her: they thought she was crazy. Of course they weren’t going to help her. This man believed she was delusional. “I want to talk to a lawyer.”
The man shrugged. “If that’s the way you wanna play it. It’d be easier just
to talk to me though, wouldn’t it?”
“Get me my lawyer.”
The man sighed and rose. “Might be a while.”
Sarah sat in that room for over an hour. When the man came back in, he had her stand up, read her her Miranda rights, and then escorted her to an awaiting Dallas PD cruiser. She sat in the backseat with an officer in the driver’s seat.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked.
The officer was eating a piece of candy and said, “Jail. Your lawyer can visit you there.”
The drive took a long time. Though she knew she’d caused a disturbance, she wasn’t exactly sure what she had done to warrant sitting in a cell. It didn’t matter. Right then she felt about as powerless as she could feel.
The jail consisted of several chocolate-brown buildings in a complex that resembled a concentration camp. The officer drove to a door around the back and got out. He opened her door and helped her out before walking her inside, his hand on her biceps the entire time as though she’d try to make a break for it with fifty police officers around.
They put her through the booking process. She sat in a chair and gave them all of her information before they snapped booking photos and took fingerprints.
“I’m not sure what I’m here for,” she said.
“Assault. You hit one of the stewardesses.”
“No, I didn’t. I was just hysterical.”
He shrugged. “You’ll see a judge by tomorrow, he’ll set bail and you’ll be out.”
“Tomorrow’s too late,” she said, as the guard pressed her fingers to a black inkpad. “Please, I just need one phone call to the FBI. You can even have it on speaker phone and listen in.”
“That bullshit about getting a phone call is only in the movies. You can sit in the cell until you see a judge.”
After fingerprints, she was strip-searched by a female guard. One of the male guards stood by and watched.
“I want him to leave,” she said.
“He ain’t botherin’ nobody.”
She was ordered to change into a gray-and-white striped outfit that resembled pajamas. Finally, humiliated and afraid, she kept her eyes on the cement floor as she was led to a cell and sat down on a cot as the white door closed. The cell consisted of white walls, a steel toilet and sink, a cot, and a white steel door with an opening near the top so the prisoners could see out.
Sarah lay down on the cot and closed her eyes. In a flash of pain and color, she saw Gio again. He lay spread-eagled on a table. He couldn’t move, but his lips were trying to form words. A man stood before him, nude, a sparkling tool in his hand as he bent over him, and smiled.
Sarah jolted, and her eyes shot open. She sat up in the cot, ran to the door, and screamed, “I need to get out of here!”
She pounded on the door with her fists and continued shouting. The only response she got was from other inmates hollering back. After a minute, she stopped and sat back down on the cot. She put her face in her hands and wept.
38
Finishing up at the apartment, Gio was the last to leave. He stood in the living room with his hands on his hips and looked around. He had wanted so much to believe that they would burst through that door and find the man who had made the Murder 42 video. The images on that video haunted him in his sleep, more than he would ever admit to anyone. Somewhere out there, parents didn’t know where their child was. The hope that the child was still alive would drive them insane as the months turned to years, and the years to decades. Never, not for a moment, would they find peace. Not that finding out the horrific and public manner of their child’s death would bring them peace, but at least they would know the truth.
Then again, maybe the truth was overrated—maybe what would get them through each morning was thinking that this particular day would be the day their child would come home.
It didn’t matter, because with nothing else to go on, the Murder 42 case would officially be transferred to the Open/Unsolved files within a couple of months.
He exhaled loudly and left the apartment, shutting the door behind him. The hallway was empty though he could hear music from down the hall. Kanye West. He passed the door and could clearly make out the scent of marijuana smoke.
Why the hell not?
Gio turned around and knocked on the door. A young kid, maybe twenty, with spiky hair and the crimson eyes of a stoner, answered the door. He looked Gio up and down and said, “Yeah?”
Gio pulled out his badge. “Open the damn door.”
“Um… you gotta like, wait a sec ’cause we got—”
Gio pushed right past him. Two other young male stoners were sitting on the couch, a girl on a chair against the far wall. A bong and pipes with several bags of weed lay on the coffee table. All three of them sat in stunned silence, no one sure what they were supposed to say or do.
Gio picked up a glass pipe on the table and one of the bags of weed. “Police. I’m confiscating your weed. Because you’re so young, I’m not gonna bust you. But if you’re gonna smoke, go to Washington or Colorado and do it legally.”
One of the guys glanced around and said, “It is legal, dude. I got knee pain. I got a medical license.”
Gio didn’t respond. He turned on his heel and left the apartment with the glass pipe and a bag of weed. Then he got into his car, rolled the windows down, and packed the glass pipe with marijuana before going to a convenience store for some matches.
The store had several gas pumps and was busy from the second he got there. He came back out and moved his car to a stall at the very end near the dumpsters. He lit the pipe and inhaled. In college, pot had been a common occurrence in the dorms, but he hadn’t touched the stuff for years. Not until he first got back from his tours in Iraq.
In a moment, he was right back there in the desert. The sand was the worst part. Fighting came and went, rockets came and went, but the sand was always there. Morning, noon, and night. In his food, boots, clothing… even in his ass. Clouds of it got everywhere and covered him like a thin sheen of sweat.
The sun there burned his face and left an afterimage in his eyes. He squinted the entire time he was there, even through his sunglasses on some days. The heat would penetrate him and sweat would roll until there was no water left in his body to excrete.
As Gio inhaled another puff of smoke, the pot loosening him and making him feel a bit dizzy, he remembered when he had smoked opium over there in a small town outside of Fallujah. The man had brought him tea and sat next to him. They smoked opium and drank tea together without a word, and when the opium and tea were gone, the man got up and left just as silently. A single moment of civility in a war in which he felt he couldn’t trust anyone. But it stood out more than all the death and hatred, like a diamond among coals.
Gio opened his eyes and thought that a long time had gone by. When he checked the clock on his dashboard, however, he counted only seven minutes. He set the pipe and the baggie on the passenger seat and started the car, heading back to his hotel.
He liked LA. It had a certain comfort to it, letting him know that civilization existed. It was a city where you knew you weren’t alone. There was always someone nearby, no matter where you were.
Before leaving, he wanted to see the beach just once. He turned around and headed north on the Pacific Coast Highway until he saw a quaint little beach near what appeared to be a college. He pulled off the exit and followed the narrow road down to the slit of sand before the crystal blue waters.
There were a few surfers and some beach bums but no families or children. He smoked one more bowl of pot and then got out of the car and walked toward the beach, slipping off his suit coat. He slung it over his shoulder as his feet sank into the soft sand. The heat rising into his shoes gave him a pleasant, warm feeling.
Gio sat down right near where the water rolled to a stop and foamed into white froth. He could see several women in bikinis lying about on a boat a few hundred feet out, but he couldn’t make out their faces. There was one man ther
e, too—as far as Gio could see, the only man on a boat full of women. Gio wondered what the difference was between himself and that man.
Gio felt broken, without an ounce of luxury in his life. The job gave him purpose. It gave him forward motion and the adrenaline rush of anticipation and accomplishment. He had no friends outside of work, no hobbies, no religion or faith in anything. It terrified him that one day he would have to retire, because he couldn’t think of a single other thing he had in his life, other than Sarah.
Sarah.
Just thinking about her lifted his mood. He had to admit to himself that he missed her, but he also felt guilty because she had been right. When they had made the bust, when he had handcuffs on the biggest distributor of child pornography he’d ever heard of, something about his need for her diminished, and it shamed him. How could he do something like that—bring her into a case, put her in danger, put her through pain with whatever the hell it was that she felt, and then ignore her when her role was over?
A former girlfriend had told him he was incapable of forming long-term relationships. Whenever he grew close to someone, he would find some way to screw it up. Had he done that now? Had he purposely distanced himself from her just so she wouldn’t get too close? The thought that he had subconsciously sabotaged the best relationship he’d ever had terrified him more than acting immorally and using her. Suddenly, the beach wasn’t so beautiful. He rose and went back to his car.
The hotel they’d stayed at had the roof of a Swiss villa and the interior of a seedy motel on Skid Row. He didn’t mind. As long as the sheets were clean, it didn’t matter to him what was happening in the rest of the hotel.
Gio sat in his car for a minute, leaning his head against the headrest. His stomach felt as if he’d swallowed a massive bowl of Jell-O. It was the jittery feeling of defeat. The thought that the Murder 42 video would be sitting in some basement with not a single person in the world looking into it filled him with a dull, gray dread, as if the world didn’t make sense.
Murder 42 - A Thriller (Sarah King Mysteries Book 2) Page 14