“Now, there’s a reason I told you not to tell anybody what he asked you to do. Nobody knows that he wants you to commit murder. We can’t off Swain’s mom, now. She’s too closely watched. But if another person dies, one of these justice jumpers, well, the cops are going to think the SHS Killer has struck again, and Ruby goes free.”
A sour taste rode the back of my tongue.
“I can’t think straight,” I said. “I . . . I can’t take all of this in.”
“Sometimes we do what has to be done,” Clegg said. “Did Swain’s mom pull a gun on us? No. But we said that she did, because we had to. She’s no good. She’s protecting her son. Fiend or no Fiend, they’re going to find kiddie porn on his computer. The forensics guys already told me it’s there. She’s a dirt bag, and she’s getting justice, just in a different way. Sometimes that’s how things need to work.”
“I don’t know. I need time to think about this,” I said.
“We have some time,” Clegg said. “But not much.”
CHAPTER 54
On the day Ruby was kidnapped, Winnie came out of her coma. I felt like my prayers had gotten mixed up somehow. I’d been back in the apartment—yes, John’s place—all of two hours when the hospital called with the news. My eyes, heart, and soul felt heavy with the absence around me. The silence filled my ears like screams. I desperately wanted to get out of here, but Ginger needed food, and I needed a bit more sleep. Soon enough, I wouldn’t get another chance.
As it turned out, sleep eluded me. I lay on the futon, plagued by inescapable thoughts. I wondered how Ruby slept. Did she stay upright in that chair? Did he feed her? Were her hands ever untied so she could feed herself? Was he giving her water? Could she take her medication? Oh, I doubted that. Did he let her use the bathroom? But the questions I wanted answered above all were, where was my wife, and how would I find her?
The answers, though grim and difficult to fathom, brought me back to Clegg.
At first, his offer seemed insane. Actually, Clegg seemed insane. I knew the guy had a few bolts loose, but maybe his whole wiring was screwed up. But the more I thought about it, the less crazy the idea became. Who were these people who had, as he put it, slipped through the knot of justice? I wondered. Murderers, rapists, drug czars, I supposed. Were they more deserving of life than Ruby? Could I do the unthinkable? Husbands and wives hire so-called professionals to kill each other all the time—just watch 48 Hours Mystery or Dateline—and they do it for anything but noble causes. He wants her money. She wants her lover and no complications. Assuming you don’t get caught, divorce is a lot more expensive than murder. Their reasons are plentiful, and the excuses probably made sense to the perpetrators at the time of the crime. Did Clegg’s offer somehow stand on different moral ground? I didn’t know. I couldn’t answer, so I did the only thing I could think to do.
I went to see Winnie.
Winnie’s hospital room smelled of strong cleaning chemicals, which only heightened the scent of sickness. Propped up in her bed, Winnie had the dazed and confused look of a car accident victim shocked by her circumstance. The equipment attached to her, IV drips and heart monitors and such, paled in comparison to the apparatuses employed during her stay in the ICU. Winnie assessed me wide-eyed, as though I could be a mirage. But recognition dawned, and tears fell from her eyes in streams.
“John,” she cried, her lips trembling. “What happened? What happened to me?”
Winnie hid her age with dyed hair and a perpetual tan, but her skin looked almost bleached. I saw bruise marks on her neck, thin wrists, and arms. The marks that looked like handprints or rope burns turned my thoughts to Ruby and the marks that would be left on her by the Fiend. I stood beside Winnie’s bed and took hold of her shaky hand.
“What happened to me?” Winnie sobbed.
With my throat going tight and dry, I wiped clear her tears and used a damp cloth to help cool her forehead.
“Hi, Winnie,” I said. “How are you feeling?”
“I don’t understand any of this . . . don’t know what happened. . . . Ruby . . . where is Ruby?”
“She’s okay,” I lied. “She’ll come to see you soon.”
“Who did this to me, John?” Winnie said. “Why would somebody want to hurt me?”
“I don’t know,” I said, finding the lies came easily, knowing the truth would be like shoving smoke down her already singed lungs.
“How long have I been here?” she asked. I could feel my resolve weakening, tears pushing against my eyes until they forced their way out. And when they started to flow, they wouldn’t stop, and for the first time since this ordeal began, I thought, Dead is better. If anything happened to Ruby, if I couldn’t free her from the Fiend, how could dead not be better?
“John, what’s wrong?” Winnie asked, right before she coughed—the racking, hacking kind of cough that made people wince in sympathy.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “I’m just glad you’re all right.”
“What’s happening?” Winnie asked.
“What do you remember?”
“Nothing. They said I was in a fire. I remember flying into Boston. I remember a phone call from someone, your friend, I think. What’s his name?” Winnie squinted, trying to force the memory. “I can’t remember,” she said, her disappointment evident. “Ruby’s cancer had gone into remission. I remember feeling so happy for her. That’s it. . . . That’s what I remember. Except . . . except . . .” Winnie cringed. “When can I see Ruby?” she asked.
I was gripping the side of the bed, trying to keep from crying more. That was when I noticed all the vases of flowers surrounding the empty bed in Winnie’s two-person hospital room.
“Soon,” I said, finding my composure by focusing on those flowers. “Where is your roommate?”
Change the subject. Get yourself together.
“Dead,” Winnie said. “She died last night, not long after they moved me in here. She was young, twentysomething, and went into a cardiac arrest. It was quite unexpected and horribly sad. All these doctors and nurses were in here trying to save her. They moved me into the hallway. I didn’t want to see it, anyway.” Winnie was talking quickly, more like her old self, free-form speech without too many filters. “Her family has been in and out of here grieving all day. The mother is amazing, though. She’s donating all of her daughter’s organs—eyes, liver, everything. Poor thing had Parkinson’s disease. I heard a nurse say they think that’s what caused her heart attack. Who knows? So young, so sad. I guess her mother is going to donate her brain to a medical school, so maybe they’ll find out.
“God, I want a drink. John, can you get me something to drink? Not water, I mean. Something with a bit of a kick. Maybe a glass of wine. Something to relax me. I’m dying for a drink.”
Winnie’s voice drifted to the back of my mind. I could hear her talking but wouldn’t have been able to repeat a single word she said. I could feel the cogs of my brain beginning to turn, slowly at first, but quickening as the momentum began to build. I needed to leave the hospital right away. I needed to find Clegg. I looked up at the clock on the wall and shuddered.
I had twenty-four hours to produce a victim of the SHS Killer or Ruby would die.
And now I knew how I could do it.
CHAPTER 55
The War Room, the centralized meeting place for coordinated information exchanges about the SHS Killer, was located in the basement of the Boston police headquarters at One Schroeder Plaza. Gathered around a long conference table, and eyeing Clegg with a mix of curiosity and suspicion, were all the people essential to locating this predator. Chief Higgins sat across from me, red-faced and paunchy, and to his right were detectives Gant and Kaminski. Special Agent Brenner was also seated at the table, along with a few others from the FBI, the state police, and other agencies with acronyms that were meaningless to me.
I should have expected the hostile reception. Only Clegg knew about my plan, and it was his idea to call this gathering together without
first providing details or specifics. Less chance of getting it shot down during one big powwow than if we piecemealed the approvals, he assured me. So nobody here knew what we were going to propose. This was my plan, and it explained why and how Clegg got me a seat at the table. He didn’t want anything getting lost in translation, and neither did I.
Looking around, I could tell by the fidgeting fingers, long stares, tapping toes that most viewed this impromptu meeting as a giant distraction and profound waste of their time. Of course, they were wrong. The Fiend might have been a step ahead of me before, but this time things would be different.
Following the arrival of some last-minute invitees, Clegg began to speak as soon as the conference room door closed. These people understood the Fiend had kidnapped my wife. They knew that every tick of the clock brought Ruby that much closer to death, but they were not aware that the Fiend wanted me to commit murder in exchange for Ruby’s life. As of that moment, we had less than twenty hours to make everything happen.
Papered on the wall behind Clegg were various maps, photographs, timelines, and charts—all the stuff of an investigation that I knew was going nowhere.
“We’ve heard from the SHS Killer,” Clegg began, using the moniker most familiar to this group.
Brenner stood, palms flat on the table, face brightening. “When? How?”
Before this meeting, I had worked things out with Clegg and advanced the lie using some rudimentary computer scripting. Technically, we had obstructed justice by not revealing the Fiend’s initial demands from the get-go. Since Clegg worried that we might need to produce an actual victim in exchange for Ruby’s life, we couldn’t have told them what we needed and produced that very thing without having suspicion cast right on me.
“I think it’s best that John tell you what happened,” Clegg said.
“Why? He isn’t a cop,” somebody shouted from the back of the room.
“No, numb nuts,” Clegg barked. “He’s the guy who came up with a plan to save his wife’s life. So show him some respect, or show yourself out the door. Sound good?”
Nobody debated, so I stood up and went to the front of the room while Clegg passed around copies of the e-mail that I wrote myself.
“The person who kidnapped my wife contacted me through my game One World,” I began. “He used Elliot Uretsky’s game account to send me a message.”
I had modified the transaction logs for my game server so that the IP address could not be traced. I figured the BPD forensic guys, or the FBI, for that matter, would try and track down the Fiend’s location by IP, so I faked them. They were going to hit a dead end, no matter how hard they dug. My plan was all that counted, and I believed this little bit of subterfuge was necessary to set things in motion.
I waited for the folks gathered to get their copy of the simple note. It had sickened me to write it, but I had memorized it nonetheless. I began the letter “Dear John,” thinking the Fiend would view the formality of his greeting as a pleasing bit of irony. Brenner and the other experts at the FBI would be dissecting every word, trying to match it to the profile that I helped to create.
I read the letter aloud, just to emphasize the urgency.
“Dear John, it’s time for you to take your criminal career to bold new heights. I want another victim of the SHS Killer, and you’re going to provide the goods. Man or woman, doesn’t matter to me. What I want is a dead body by your hands, with two fingers set upon their dead lips, one in each ear, and two on each eye. See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil. You have twenty-four hours to make this happen, otherwise Ruby is going to be my next victim. Signed, SHS.”
“When did you get this?” Higgins asked, rolling the letter up like a wand, shaking it at me.
“Two hours ago,” I said. “We’re already late.”
“John’s prepared to turn over his computer to the FBI’s forensic guys,” Clegg said. “But he has another idea that I think we need to listen to.”
Again all eyes fell to me.
“I want to give him a victim,” I said.
“Sounds great,” Gant said. “Only one small problem. We’re the police. We catch killers. We don’t employ them.”
“My victim is already dead,” I said. “I want to use a body donated to a medical school or some research facility. We’ll need to make a bunch of calls to relatives of the deceased until we find someone willing to help us. I’m betting that somebody who wanted to use his body to help save lives or train doctors would want to help save my wife’s life. Let’s just hope the living relatives see it the same way.”
Agent Brenner stood again. “How is this going to help us catch him?”
“It’s probably not,” I said. “Honestly, I don’t know how we’re going to catch him. Right now, I just want to get Ruby back. That’s what matters most to me.”
Clegg interjected, “For that, we’re going to need Chief Higgins’s help.”
“Me?” Higgins said, sounding a bit surprised.
“We’ll need to arrange a media press conference,” Clegg said, “announcing the discovery of a possible new victim of the SHS Killer. You’ll say that you can’t provide any more details at this time.”
“Why are we going to do that?” Higgins asked.
“To get his attention,” Clegg said. “Obviously, we can’t show a dead and mutilated body on the six o’clock news, but this monster is going to be on the lookout for some sort of news report. He wants another SHS victim. It’s all part of his game. We keep a small circle that knows about this in case of any leaks. Everyone involved will think it’s a real murder.”
“So you think this guy is going to try to contact you after it makes the news,” Kaminski said.
I nodded. “He’ll demand his proof. That’s when I’ll send him a video recording of the victim. I’ll tell him that Detective Clegg took it for me.”
“Will he buy that?” Brenner asked the room.
Clegg said, “We’ve got to think this guy has already dug into John’s past. He’ll know that we’re friends, so it won’t come as a surprise to him that I helped out. Bent a few rules.”
You were going to bend a lot more than a few rules, I thought as a hush settled over the room.
“What then?” Higgins asked.
“Then I’m hoping he lets my wife go,” I said. My voice cracked. Clegg poured me a glass of water from one of the dew-coated metal pitchers set out around the table. I struggled to get enough air into my lungs. The room felt oven-hot. “Please,” I said, pleading. “Don’t say no to this. We don’t have enough time. He’ll kill her. He’s going to do it. Please.”
Before anyone could answer, the conference room door burst open. In stepped two breathless guys, neither looking like a pinnacle of fitness, or the beneficiaries of sunlight, for that matter. Computer jocks, I thought.
“Hey,” the stouter of the two said. “Sorry for the interruption, but we just found something on Elliot Uretsky’s computer that you’ve got to see.”
“What is it?” Higgins asked.
“We think we know why the SHS Killer is using body parts to communicate the proverb ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.’ ”
“Why?” Higgins asked.
“Chief,” the guy continued, “you’ve got to see this to believe it.”
CHAPTER 56
I didn’t need a badge or credentials to qualify me for inclusion in the big discovery. I was a major stakeholder in this affair—the guy who had played an integral part in the Fiend’s twisted game, the only one related by marriage to his potential next victim, close friend of a lead detective, and not to mention the man with a plan. Those were qualifications enough, I suppose. Which must have been why nobody questioned my presence as I followed Clegg up a dingy staircase, through a warren of cubicles, and then along a maze of corridors that called for a bread-crumb trail. A parade of people followed, with Special Agent Brenner close on my heels.
Brenner gripped my arm gently as she pulled up alongside. She spoke so
ftly, the tense quiet of the processional necessitating a hushed voice. “Just so you know, I think your plan is a good one,” she said. “He’s going to kill her if you don’t give him a victim.”
“Every second counts,” I said, matching her whisper. “I hope what we’re about to see isn’t a waste of time.” Assuming my frayed nerves didn’t send me into cardiac arrest, I’d soon find out.
We came to a stop at a shuttered metal door secured by a keypad entry mechanism. On the frosted glass windowpane I read the stenciled words BOSTON POLICE COMPUTER FORENSICS LAB. With the locking mechanism engaged, the door popped open with a swoosh. Our group, a dozen or so strong, shuffled inside in an orderly fashion.
The open floor plan of the carpeted room featured four rows of workstations, none of which had been cordoned off into cubes, with storage space above and file cabinets underneath. Computers and monitors occupied virtually every inch of available work space. Their persistent hum and artificial glow gave me the feeling of being trapped inside some sort of living organism. Two fifty-inch monitors took up most of the front wall, while whiteboards scribbled with obtuse algorithms and equally cryptic notes occupied the two adjacent walls.
People settled themselves into plush seats, swiveling their chairs to direct their attention toward the oversize screens, as if about to watch a movie. Clegg knew I couldn’t sit, so he stood with me. His composure contrasted sharply with my churned-up anxiety.
“You’re doing great, John,” Clegg said, quietly enough so only I could hear.
The buzz of electronics thrummed in my ears and seemed to grow louder, while the powerful air conditioners keeping the room meat-locker cool set bumps upon my skin. “Do you think they’re going to do it?” I asked. “Will they help me pull this off?”
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