by Mark Nolan
Beth went around the corner, got into her car and drove down a side street. She didn’t want the men to see her car. They might realize it was an unmarked police vehicle, and take a phone pic of the license plate. That could result in a complaint filed against her at HQ, and then the Internal Affairs crew would start investigating her.
Mostly, though, Beth wanted the group of young men to think that when one of them had harassed a random woman, he’d received an instant and painful lesson in courtesy. And he could have been shot if he’d pushed it too far. That might make them all think twice about harassing someone in the future.
Beth had to admit that she was still angry about her husband’s affair, and she’d taken out her anger on that punk. Oh well, he could have kept his mouth shut, but he’d disrespected a female cop and he’d paid the price. She opened and closed her sore right fist as she drove the streets of San Francisco.
Chapter 15
The Artist parked his car several blocks away from his luxury hotel and walked the remaining distance. He entered the hotel through a side door near a gift shop and rode a lesser-used elevator to his room.
He changed into sweat pants and a t-shirt and started doing some plyometric exercises. He constantly trained in the specialized workout that had been developed by Russian scientists during the cold war to give soldiers explosive speed, power, and agility for attacking and fighting. While he exercised, he played music on his phone via a small high-tech speaker with a rich sound. And he focused his mind on his plans to kill the next lawyer in a creative, memorable and artistic way.
After a while, his favorite song came on, and it put him into a trance-like state. It was an old song from before he was born, titled “Behind Blue Eyes,” by The Who. The lyrics spoke to him of what nobody could understand, how he felt being the hated man, and the liar with an empty conscience. How his love for Tatiana was now turned into feelings of vengeance. The lonely days and sad dreams. Holding back the anger, and thinking of the people he blamed for it all.
As he went through the exercise routine and listened to the song, he saw memories in his mind’s eye—flashes of knife fights, gun battles and carefully orchestrated murders. Some of the killings went as planned, some of them went wrong. Such was life… and death. The kaleidoscope of violent memories went on and on. Soon he was covered with perspiration and he felt the familiar anger burning inside him. It was time for a cold shower or else he might lose his temper and hurt somebody he was not being paid to hurt. He stripped off his clothes and stood there in his black silk boxer shorts as he turned on the shower and adjusted the water to the desired cool temperature.
Before he got into the shower, there was a knock at the hotel room’s door. He turned off the shower, grabbed his pistol and looked out the door viewer. In the hallway he saw a room service maid delivering a bottle of their best vodka, along with a martini shaker and a bowl of crushed ice. The delivery was arriving early. Room Service had either misunderstood him or they were incompetent—or this was a trick and someone was trying to kill him.
He set his pistol on a chair within easy reach and hid it by tossing his t-shirt on top of it. Next he placed a special wide-view scope against the peephole viewer that let him see far into the hallway in both directions. Once he was satisfied that the hotel employee was alone, he answered the door. A wide-eyed woman wheeled in the serving cart. She tried not to stare at the sexy rippled muscles of the hotel guest’s ridiculously athletic and tattooed nearly naked body, but her eyes were drawn to him like a moth to a flame.
After the woman had come into the room, The Artist stepped out of the door and looked into the hallway in both directions. Seeing that all was well, he came back inside and locked the door. The maid had seen a lot of interesting things in her hotel career, but this man looked like he’d stepped out of an advertisement for Calvin Klein underwear designed for sexy Russian gangsters. The man had a strange smile, and his cool blue-gray eyes seemed to look right into her and read her mind. She handed him the room service receipt for his signature. He scribbled the fake name he was currently using that matched the credit cards, and he added a $100 tip. Her eyebrows went up in surprise.
“Thank you so much, sir,” she said.
“It is worth it just to see your beautiful face my love,” he said. And he smiled that seductive yet alarming smile of his.
The maid nodded and quickly fled the room. She tried to clear her mind of thoughts about what kind of trouble she could have gotten into with the sweaty, half-naked mystery man. She wondered who he was and where he’d come from, and what all of those tattoos of foreign words and symbols meant.
Chapter 16
Jake sat in his Jeep near the golf course. He thought about how Terrell had said that the shooter walked out of the woods to this street and made his getaway.
It would be lucky if one of these houses had a security camera. He looked through his camera’s telephoto lens at each house, hoping to find a home security video camera mounted somewhere. He checked the first two houses just before the edge of the golf course woods… no luck. He checked the next two houses up the street… nothing.
When he studied the third to last homes, he saw something he’d missed on his walk past. One home had a gate on the front of the driveway, and in the fenced front yard next to the gate was an artistically painted bird house on a pole. It was only about six feet off the ground. That was too low for a real bird house. Some cats could jump that high. It must be only for decoration, unless…
He got out of the Jeep and walked over to take a closer look. He found a small, wireless video camera hidden inside the bird house. It was pointed toward the driveway entrance and the street, so it must have recorded video of the killer as he walked or drove past. Jake recognized the camera make and model. It was a high-quality unit that could connect to your home’s wireless Wi-Fi router and record up to 200 days of video on your computer. There was an app for live viewing and playback on your phone.
Jake took a picture of the birdhouse with its hidden camera, then he looked at the gate that was closed across the driveway. The gate was made of black aluminum tubes, designed in the shape of a wrought iron fence. On the gatepost there was a button and a little brass sign that said: “Doorbell.” Jake pressed the button, but there was no response from the house.
There might not be anyone home, or they might just be ignoring him. Jake used his phone to access a pay-per-search website that private investigators and skip tracers used to find people who didn’t want to be found. If you had a pulse and could fog a mirror, they had your information in their database. They knew more about you than your own mother did. He tapped on his phone screen and entered the home’s address into the search form.
The website instantly provided the name of the homeowner as Frank Tisdale, along with his income, age, occupation, photos, social media profiles and a long list of marketing related data including his cell phone number. Jake called Tisdale’s phone and waited for the unsuspecting man to answer. He stood where the birdhouse cam could see him, and he smiled and tried to look non-threatening. His call went to voicemail, but he tapped on his phone for auto-redial and kept calling over and over again. On the third try, the phone was answered.
“What in the world?” Tisdale said.
“Hi, Frank Tisdale?”
“Who is this?”
“Sir, my name is Jake Wolfe, and I’m with the television news. I have a quick question about the hidden video camera you have installed in the birdhouse in front of your home.” Jake held up his media ID card at the hidden camera, just in case Tisdale was watching him on it right now.
“What about it?” Tisdale said.
“Well sir, we pay $50 cash for information that helps us with one of our television news stories. I only noticed your camera because I’m a cameraman, and I must say you are a genius of camera disguise. Quite frankly Frank, I’m impressed.”
“Fifty is cheap, make it a hundred and I might talk to you, I’m a busy man.”
>
“You drive a hard bargain, but I’ll be happy to give you a hundred in cash as long as I get the specific information that I’m looking for, and get it in time for my quickly approaching deadline today.”
“What kind of information?”
“I just wondered if I could get a copy of your security camera’s video recording of the street in front of your house for the past few hours. That’s all I need, and it would only take a minute.”
“Why, what happened on my street today?”
“I’m doing a story about a local celebrity who was playing golf here, and I think he might have walked down your street with his mistress by his side.”
“Some guy is cheating on his wife, and you want to waste my valuable time?”
“No sir I want to pay you a one hundred dollar bill in cash money for five minutes of your valuable time,” Jake said.
“Fine, whatever, I’m in the garage, working on my project,” Tisdale said. “I’ll open the gate, and you can come up to the garage door. But be quick about it, only five minutes, okay?”
“Yes, thank you.”
The gate clicked and swung slowly open as it hummed on quiet electric-powered hinges. The home had two garage doors, and the one on the right rolled up with the help of an automatic door opener. Jake saw Frank Tisdale standing there, squinting at him in the sunlight. Jake held out his hand to shake.
“I’m Jake, nice to meet you Mister Tisdale.”
Tisdale hesitated, then shook hands. “Call me Frank.”
Jake nodded, and Tisdale led him over to a computer on a desk. Half of the garage was taken up by an elaborate home brewing setup. Tisdale was either hoping to go into the small craft brewery business or he really, really liked beer.
Tisdale said, “The video is digital so you just type your email in here and then click that icon. It will send a copy of the most recent twenty-four hours of video to you. Or you can watch it run backward in fast motion to review it on this computer.”
Jake didn’t want Tisdale to see the video. This guy had apparently been hunkered down in his garage working on his beer project, and he had no clue yet that a murder had transpired in his neighborhood today. Jake typed in his work email at the TV station and sent a copy there, and sent another copy to his personal backup storage in the cloud.
“What kind of beer are you brewing there Frank?”
Tisdale turned toward the home brewery, and his chest swelled up with pride.
“It’s my famous double IPA. I make it with four kinds of hops and I balance those with a sturdy malt backbone. Everybody who tries it likes it, so I’m going to start my own craft brewery to bottle it and sell it.”
Jake pressed the fast rewind command and kept one eye on the computer monitor as he listened to Tisdale describe the hops and how he used forty percent more malt and did two dry hoppings. The video showed a man walk past, heading away from the golf course and pushing a golf bag on a three-wheeled cart. Jake slowed down the video and saw that the man was wearing the exact same ball cap and sunglasses as the shooter he’d seen. One of the golf clubs in the bag looked out of character. It seemed to be a bit too long. The shaft was the color of gunmetal and shaped more like a pipe or… a rifle barrel.
“That’s an impressive beer recipe you developed, how would you describe the taste?”
“My IPA has flavors of pine and floral citrus, hoppy bitterness, caramel sweetness, and some grapefruit on the finish.”
As Tisdale went on, Jake fast-forwarded the video to the point where he saw himself walk past the first time, to meet with Terrell and the K9 Unit. He then backed up the digital video and restarted it right at that point, so his own images would be erased by the recording of new video.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” Tisdale said. He appeared at Jake’s side and looked at the computer screen.
“Uh, I’m not really sure, maybe or maybe not.”
“Really, well about that hundred dollars.”
Jake smiled. “Give me one second while I check my phone to make sure the email arrived.”
Jake looked at his phone and saw the email with the digital file attached. He tapped his phone to make sure the video would open and play, then took a hundred dollar bill out of his wallet and handed it to Tisdale.
“Thanks for the video, Frank.”
“No problem, thanks for the hundred. What did you say your name was again?”
“Dick Arnold,” Jake said as he walked away.
Chapter 17
Jake walked down the driveway, and the automatic garage door rolled down and closed behind him. He turned and headed up the sidewalk toward his car, and as he passed by the birdhouse cam he ducked his head down so he wouldn’t be recorded on video.
He drove several miles to a coffee shop, parked in the lot and sat in his car as he reviewed the video on his tablet. There were four video segments of the shooter. Two pushing his golf cart past the camera as he was coming and going. And two as he drove past in an SUV, turned around in the cul-de-sac and passed by again as he looked for a parking spot.
Jake used video editing software to cut and extract the important scenes and then merge them into one short highlight video compilation. It was easier to do the editing work in his car than at the office because his boss or somebody else would always be interrupting him and bothering him there.
Once the highlight video was ready, he sent a text message to Terrell’s phone and attached both videos along with the background check on Tisdale and a photo of the birdhouse. He followed up with a call to Terrell, but it went to voicemail, so he left a message.
“Hey, check your text messages, I sent you some video of the golf course shooter and his vehicle,” Jake said. “The short highlight video is going to be on the news very soon. So you may want to show it to the Chief real quick and get a few points before the whole world sees it.”
With that done, he typed up a brief blurb in an email and attached the video, then sent it to his editor’s secretary. Jake’s email said, “Norman, you wanted close-up images of the shooter’s face? You got ‘em boss.”
Jake drove toward his office. On the way there, his phone buzzed with a return call from Terrell.
“Thanks for the video evidence, good work,” Terrell said.
“You’re welcome, but now you owe me a steak dinner, the shoe is on the other foot. Ha, this is great.”
“Yeah sure, good luck thinking that I owe you something. Do the words ‘tourniquet’ and ‘blood transfusion’ ring a bell? Remember when you were bleeding to death and all that?”
“Oh, here you go again.”
At the same time, they both said, “Instead of putting that tourniquet on your thigh, I should have put it around your neck.”
“Seriously, though, I’m calling to warn you that the killer might take a shot at you once he sees himself on your news video. That happens sometimes to people who use their phones to take videos of criminals.”
“Thanks for the warning, I’ll be careful,” Jake said.
“Are you carrying?”
“Yes, I’ve got my pistol in my camera pack.”
They said their goodbyes, and Jake continued driving toward the news station. As he drove he checked his rearview mirrors more often than he normally did.
Chapter 18
The Artist was in his hotel room, planning out an unusual way to murder the second lawyer. After he’d exercised and taken a cold shower, he sat at the room’s teak wood table with a pen and some paper. He began making lists and drawing sketches as he considered every potential scenario and outcome. There were plenty of risks involved in the plan, but he was confident that he could pull it off, and the end results would be spectacular. When he was finished going over his notes he burned the papers in the bathroom sink, with the overhead fan on to take away the smoke.
His thoughts were interrupted when his phone buzzed with an incoming text message. The unique series of vibrations told him it was a text from Chairman Banks. The h
ighly annoying, highly generous and highly dangerous man was scheduled to pay him a large sum of money today. The funds were in payment for the first attorney assassination, and would be transferred to one of his many secret bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong or Singapore.
The text message from Banks said: Have you seen the news?
He turned on the television and watched a local news channel for a moment, but he didn’t see anything of interest, just the over-hyped human stupidity of the day. He changed the channel several times until he saw a news video featuring the vehicle he’d been driving today. His blood pressure went up and he squinted at the television in disbelief. The video showed him driving past what must have been a well-hidden video camera at a home near the golf course. He could clearly see himself driving the vehicle. The image of his face was somewhat clear, as was the car’s make, model and paint color.
That was bad enough, but it got worse. Next he saw himself on television walking past the camera and pushing his golf bag on a three-wheeled cart. Now his face was very clearly seen. Thankfully he’d been wearing a facial disguise, along with sunglasses and a hat. But if you knew what to look for you could see the rifle barrel in among the golf clubs in the bag. The televised video froze when he passed directly in front of the camera, and the image of his disguised face was broadcast to the world. A moment later, that image moved to the left of the screen, and another image appeared on the right. It was a photo of him in the tree, pointing his rifle at the viewer.
Down in the corner of the TV screen there was a small photo of a media person’s face. Beneath the photo was the name Jake Wolfe. The Artist might not have recognized the face in a crowd, but it had to be the man he’d seen at the golf course, sitting in a vehicle and pointing a telephoto lens at him. Very cute, this Wolfe fellow. He was going to die, painfully, and soon. The Artist did not want to get a reputation for leaving loose ends. He was known to be highly creative but never sloppy. This was, as the Americans liked to say, really pissing him off.