by Osborne, Jon
FBI LEADING TASK FORCE TO FIND TEEN KILLER
By Justin Williams
Plain Dealer staff reporter
CLEVELAND – FBI Director William Krugman on
Wednesday said that he’s finally put the finishing touches on a task force assembled to track down Jack Yuntz, the young killer suspected of several recent mass shootings in the northeast Ohio-area.
“Special Agent Claire Wexler will be heading things up from our end,” said Krugman, who’s led the FBI since 1979. “Though young, she’s experienced beyond her years and I have complete and total faith in her. Agent Wexler is more than capable of doing this job; I feel entirely confident in that fact. If she weren’t capable, I wouldn’t put her in this demanding position in the first place. The people of Cleveland can also rest assured that I will personally monitor each and every aspect of this troubling case from start to finish. I won’t be returning to Washington, DC until Jack Yuntz is finally caught and locked safely away behind prison bars. That’s my direct order from the President.”
Jack had stopped reading for several long moments at that point in the article, attempting to arrange all the many disorganized puzzle pieces that were floating around inside his mind into a complete picture of what he should do next. Bill Krugman would play a major part in it, of course. No other option for the old fart now. If Krugman had known what was good for him, he would’ve kept Jack’s name out of his mouth entirely. Too late for that now, though, obviously. Now the Director would need to pay for his bold-faced arrogance.
Jack fought back a hot surge of anger in his chest that warmed up his blood briefly against the inclement weather that was freezing him solid to the jagged rocks. He’d kept a very careful eye on the venerable Director ever since the Chessboard Killer slayings in Manhattan the previous year, once even getting close enough to glance over the old man’s shoulder while Krugman had sat alone in a downtown New York City coffee shop fiddling with his phone. What Jack had seen on the small screen in Krugman’s hands had nearly stopped his heart dead in his chest. From all appearances, it seemed that Jack hadn’t been the only one hiding secrets in his closet. Not even close. Even the head of the FBI had a few skeletons of his own tucked safely away out of the prying sight of the general public. Good for Krugman – it only made him that much more interesting – but how best for Jack to exploit those skeletons now? How best for him to make those old bones rattle and dance and do his bidding?
And that was when the last piece of the puzzle finally snapped into place in his mind.
Taking another deep breath through his nostrils, Jack finally allowed himself to shiver, feeling frozen all the way down to his bone marrow now. But he didn’t shiver against the cold. Not even close. Why would he? The cold couldn’t touch him now. Nothing in this world could touch him now. Instead, he shivered in delicious anticipation of what would come next. It was so goddamn simple that he needed to resist the powerful urge to smack his palm forcefully against his forehead as punishment for his own unforgivable stupidity. Why the hell hadn’t he thought of it earlier? he wondered. Odd as it might sound, though, it seemed that Dana Whitestone wasn’t dead, after all. She was still alive and kicking and out there on the streets trying to track him down right now.
Though she’d tried her very best to escape his wrath with her recent and incredibly cowardly suicide, her part in this deadly little game hadn’t ended when she’d killed herself the previous week. Hell, Jack had practically watched the woman come back to life in the words of the newspaper article he’d read at the bus station. She had a different name now, true; looked a little bit different now, too. But it was her: Jack had absolutely zero in his mind about that. And judging by the picture of her that he’d seen next to the Plain Dealer article, she was a whole lot hotter these days, too – not that Agent Whitestone had ever been all that hard to look at in her original form. Still, she was even hotter in her new form now. Smoking hot, as a matter of fact.
Jack allowed himself a small smile while his heart began to sing a song of pure and utter joy deep inside his chest. Unbelievably, against all odds, Dana Whitestone would still die by his hand. Or at least by the hand of the character he’d be playing from here on out.
All five of his senses tingling in electric anticipation now, he leaned down and removed all his weapons from their cases. One by one, he hurled his weapons out into the choppy lake just as far as he could possibly fling them, hurting his shoulder badly with the effort and afraid that he might tear a tendon or two in the process. Still, even that sort of excruciating physical pain would’ve been worth it. Because after all this time of thinking that he’d missed out on his chance to kill Dana Whitestone, Jack finally realized that he’d been wrong about that. Dead wrong, actually.
He whispered the name softly to himself, enjoying the way the beautiful words tasted on his lips. “Claire Wexler.”
PART VIII
“If one took no chances, one would not fly at all. Safety lies in the judgment of the chances one takes.” – Charles Lindbergh, world-famous aviation pioneer whose infant son was kidnapped from his crib in the dead of night and brutally murdered in 1932. When investigators dug up the baby’s badly decomposed body two months after the abduction, a massive skull fracture was cited as the primary cause of death.
CHAPTER 34
Thursday; 5 a.m.; FBI field office; Lakeshore Avenue; downtown Cleveland
Bruce Blankenship sat at his desk long before any of his colleagues had even made it into work yet, yawning loudly and feeling absolutely exhausted all the way down to his tired old bones.
He tapped into his email and leaned forward in his seat, narrowed his eyes, staring in disbelief at the computer screen in front of him. The bold subject line at the top of his inbox had immediately caught his attention – had demanded his attention, actually – completely chasing away all the exhaustion he’d been feeling just a moment earlier:
AVOID THE PLANE CRASH, AGENT BLANKENSHIP
Blankenship leaned forward in his seat even closer to the computer screen and zipped his confused gaze over the odd words, feeling the muscles in his throat constrict painfully. He clicked on the link to open up the email. What he read inside made him want to vomit up his own stomach:
ATTN: AGENT BRUCE BLANKENSHIP, FBI
This correspondence comes from the group that has kidnapped Zachary Paulson’s baby. The child is still unharmed at this point, and he will remain that way for as long as you follow all forthcoming instructions to the letter. Do not deviate even one iota from the instructions you will be given or the game will end in a horrible and thoroughly bloody fashion before it even has a chance to begin properly. So tell us something, Agent Blankenship, are you ready to play a game with us?
Blankenship’s ears rang. His palms flooded with sweat. Fingers flying, he punched a series of commands into the computer and waited anxiously for the results to pop up.
In a matter of minutes, he’d matched the ISP the email had originated from to an address over on the east side of town, using the same technique of computer tracking that had recently brought down CIA Director David Petraeus, blowing the lid off Petraeus’s extramarital affair with his female biographer and prompting the former Army general to resign from his lofty position in well-chronicled disgrace.
Scribbling down the address on a Post-It note and jumping to his feet, Blankenship grabbed his coat off the back of his chair and sprinted for the elevator at the end of the hall, calling Bill Krugman as he went. The Director answered after just one ring. “What is it, Agent Blankenship? I’m just on my way into work now. Coming all the way from Lorain, though, so I probably won’t be there for another half an hour or so. Anyway, what’s going on?”
Breathing hard through his mouth as his stomach continued to turn a nauseating series of somersaults deep within the core of his being, Blankenship brought Krugman up to speed just as quickly and coherently as he could under the circumstances, wondering briefly what the Director had been doing all the wa
y out in Lorain this early in the morning before quickly shaking away the thought. Probably something connected to the paintball-shooting and subsequent murder of Agent Meghan Shaughnessy over at St. Anthony’s. In any event, wasn’t important now. What was important here was saving that poor baby. And until the kidnapping task force was up and running and fully functional it was up to Blankenship to do that on his own.
When he’d finished relating all the details to his boss, Krugman said, “Get backup before you go out there, Agent Blankenship. Anyone, I don’t care who it is. Call some locals if you need to. I don’t want any lone wolves patrolling the prairie out there. Hasn’t worked out too well for us in the past.”
Blankenship fought back an intense wave of irritation in his chest and only barely resisted the urge to shout at his boss. “No time for that, sir,” he said, finally reaching the ground floor of the FBI field office building and bolting out of the elevator before racing for his 4-Runner that was sitting in its assigned space out in the parking lot fifty feet away. “I need to act fast here.”
Krugman’s thunderous response exploded in his ear. “I said get backup, Agent Blankenship. I wasn’t asking you a goddamn question there. That was a goddamn order.”
Blankenship gritted his teeth, knowing full well that he didn’t have time to engage in a pissing contest with his boss. Not when that poor baby’s life could be on the line. Reaching his vehicle, he jumped inside and paused briefly when the thought occurred to him. Not the most original idea in the world, he knew, but worth a shot, anyway. Any port in a storm. “I’m losing you, sir,” he said, reaching over to slam shut the driver’s-side door behind him before cranking the engine into life and putting the 4-Runner into reverse. “I’ll call you back just as soon as I can get a better connection.”
The Director’s voice clapped in his left ear again. “Goddamn it, Blankenship! Did you hear what I just-“
Blankenship switched off the phone with the Director before Krugman could finish his sentence. “Sorry, sir,” Blankenship said to himself. Tossing his Motorola Razr onto the passenger seat beside him, he slammed the 4-Runner into drive before peeling out of the parking lot in an ear-bending screech of spinning tires. “But like I just told you, I don’t have time for that.”
CHAPTER 35
Weaving dangerously in and out of the early morning commuter traffic that was clogging up I-90 but still managing to drive nearly a hundred miles an hour the entire way despite all the maddening congestion, Blankenship made it to the Manor Inn in just under fourteen minutes, calling Krugman again along the way as he raced down the busy highway but hanging up once more before the Director could get out even a single word this time.
Blankenship grimaced, knowing full well that he’d fucked up. Badly. Unlikely as the possibility might seem right now, though, he hoped that the act of calling Krugman again might somehow provide him with a measure of protection against the formal reprimand that would no doubt go into his service jacket on file down in Quantico for having so blatantly disobeyed his boss’s direct order, however flimsy that protection might ultimately prove. Still, Blankenship hadn’t been lying to the old man when he’d told Krugman that time was of the essence here; that he needed to act fast. According to the timestamp on the email, it had been sent just five minutes before Blankenship had seen it. If he was lucky, Blankenship might even catch the sender unawares before the kidnapper could realize that Blankenship was hot on his heels and baying for blood. Waiting for backup to arrive would’ve completely eliminated that crucial element of surprise.
Finally coming to a screeching halt in the parking lot of the Manor Inn, he flung open the driver’s-side door of the 4-Runner and banged into the lobby of the rundown motel in a matter of seconds. A young Hispanic female was working behind the front desk. A pegboard lined with room keys was visible over her slender left shoulder, and the entire space smelled of badly burnt popcorn. Blankenship wrinkled up his nose against the offending odor. Breakfast of champions.
Flipping open his ID, he showed it to the woman while at the same time trying to control the dizzying flood of adrenalin coursing through his veins and causing the fringes of his vision to blink in and out of focus. Didn’t work. The edges of his world started to go black before everything in his line of sight suddenly cleared up again in a brain-stabbing flash of color. “Do you have any guests here with infants?” he asked, squinting his eyes against the horrific pain slamming away at his temples.
The young woman in front of him casually smacked the gum in her mouth, clearly uninterested by Blankenship’s breathless query as his stomach continued to boil over with nausea. “Yeah, we got babies here,” she said, screwing up her pretty face and pressing together her full lips in thinly veiled annoyance. “As a matter of fact, we got lots of babies here. You in the hood now, you know. Take a look around you. You ain’t in Kansas any more, Dorothy.”
Blankenship ignored the girl’s tone, knowing he had a much more important fight to pick at the moment. If nothing else, he’d deal with her later on. Obstruction of justice immediately came to mind as one of the possible charges. And if that baby were hurt, God help her, too; there’d be a whole hell of a lot more charges than that. “Do you have any white babies here?” he asked, fighting back his own powerful wave of annoyance by clamping down his teeth hard in his mouth.
The clerk lifted her right hand and studied her elaborate nails. Long, acrylic and painted blood red. “Yeah, we got one of ‘em.”
“What room?’
The young woman looked up at him again and arched her left eyebrow sardonically. “Really? I mean, really? C’mon, dude. You know better than that.” She paused and held his stare. “How much are you willing to pay for that kind of information, Tonto? Nothin’ in this world’s free, you know. Not even for good-lookin’ cops like you.”
Blankenship closed his eyes and resisted the urge to reach for the gun at his side. Instead, he reached around for his wallet and extracted the beat-up leather from his left-rear pocket before counting out the bills inside as quickly as he could. “How does sixty-eight dollars sound to you?” he asked, holding out the bills. Three wrinkled twenties, a crisp five and three ones.
The clerk lifted both of her overly plucked eyebrows at him this time and reached out to take the proffered cash. “Well, now, whaddya know?” Plucking the bills from his trembling fingers and folding the money in half lengthwise, she tucked it away into the lacy black bra peeking out teasingly from the chest area of her low-cut, ruffled white blouse. “That just so happens to be exactly how much the information costs.” Flipping open a ledger on the counter in front of her, she traced a column with one of her sharp red fingernails. “Room 129,” she said without bothering to look up at Blankenship again. “You’d better hurry, though. If I’m not mistaken, I think I might have seen them packing up not too long ago.”
Blankenship frowned. “How many of them were there?’
The young Latina shrugged. “I don’t know. Three, maybe. A man, a woman and a baby.”
“What name did they sign in under?”
“Sarkozy.”
Blankenship turned and bolted out of the office, jangling a tinny bell as he went. No more time for talking. It was time for action. Scanning the room number on the door nearest to him, he figured out the direction the numbers were going and headed north.
Stopping outside of Room 129, he yanked his Glock from its holster and felt his world begin to seesaw crazily again. He took a quick breath through his nostrils to steady his nerves and switched off the safety of the Glock. Then he took one quick step back and kicked in the door without announcing his presence. Fuck a search warrant. Bureaucratic red tape sure as hell wasn’t going to mean the difference between that little boy’s life and death. Not today.
Blankenship’s heart thumped madly against his ribcage as the door flew open with a deafening crack and a small shower of splintering wood.
Then his heart stopped dead inside his chest at what he saw next.
CHAPTER 36
Blankenship blinked hard, so stunned there for a moment that he could barely even breathe. Finally, he managed it. A cool rush of air invaded his lungs and steadied his nerves. Still, it didn’t make what he was looking at right now any less shocking. Not even close. There were three babies inside the filthy room, all of them propped up on pillows without cases on the unmade bed.
But none of them were human babies.
Blankenship stepped inside the foul-smelling space (stale cigarette smoke and, as near as his nostrils could figure it, moldy cheese) and cleared the bathroom – the only other room in the place – before making his way quickly back over to the bed and picking up the baby nearest to him. A Cabbage Patch Kid – apparently modified to look just like him. Wavy brown hair and a mostly shapeless plastic key featuring a Toyota 4-Runner keychain dangling from its left hand. The female baby in the middle of the trio of dolls had bright green eyes and fiery-red hair and had been positioned right beside a second male baby whose curly hair had been spray-painted a distinguished silver. Claire Wexler and Bill Krugman, obviously.
Blankenship shuddered. Whoever had left these dolls here knew exactly who they were, knew exactly what they looked like, too. Though he still hadn’t met Claire Wexler in person, he’d seen a picture of the youthful-looking agent in the Plain Dealer newspaper article detailing the construction of a Jack Yuntz task force. A real looker, that much was for sure, and way too young to be heading up something as important as the mass-shootings investigation, if you asked him.
Still, no one had asked him, now had they?
All three babies had crude, homemade paper FBI badges attached to their chests by safety pins: badges that had been fashioned out of the same kind of lined notebook paper that schoolchildren used. Extracting a fresh new pair of latex gloves from the front pocket of his black dress pants, Blankenship pulled on the gloves before removing the badge pinned to the baby’s chest that had clearly been meant to represent him, not wanting to smear any possible fingerprints with the action. He turned the badge over in his hands and took a quick breath, feeling his heartbeat begin to rev up again inside his chest. On the reverse side of the homemade badge, a dollar figure and what looked to be an overseas bank account number had been written neatly in what appeared to be a woman’s feminine script: