by Janie Crouch
Between Tyrone’s death and Roman’s severe injuries, whoever this mystery man was who’d masterminded the entire scenario had just jumped to the top of Omega Sector’s wish list. Not a comfortable place for any criminal to be. The mystery man had no idea who he was messing with.
But he was about to find out.
But for right now, they had Harper. He wasn’t dead, but he probably wished he was. He’d be in the hospital for a long time, recovering from the burns that covered a great deal of his body. And then once he did, he’d be going to jail.
The only advantage to Curtis Harper’s injured state was that his fury no longer directed itself toward Ashton. Harper had a much bigger enemy to hate now: the “partner” who’d left him as bait and planted a bomb directly under his feet.
So Harper was willing to talk to Omega. Wanted to tell everything he knew about his partner to bring the other man down.
“He only told me his name was Damien. I don’t know if that was his first name or last.”
Jon Hatton sat at Harper’s bedside, now three days after the explosion. It would be weeks, if not longer, before Harper was in any condition to be questioned anywhere but at a hospital. The man was handcuffed to the bed, although the chances of him escaping right now were almost nonexistent.
Jon was questioning the man, but Ashton watched from where he leaned against the window. He wanted to know everything there was to know about the unidentified man who had almost cost him everything. Cost him the woman he loved.
Jon pulled out a copy of the picture they’d gotten from the security camera last Friday when Harper had been caught talking with the other man.
“Is this Damien?”
“Yes. Bastard.” Harper spit the word out.
“How did you meet him?”
“I was in a bar, a place called Crystal Mac’s.”
Jon nodded. “Yes, I know the place.”
“We started drinking some beers and eventually we got around to talking about our dads. When I told him my daddy had been killed by someone in Omega Sector, Damien mentioned how much he hated Omega, too.”
Ashton’s eyes narrowed. So the unknown man, Damien, wasn’t a garden-variety psycho who just wanted to hurt or kill random people. He was targeting Omega, too.
“He told me he could help me get revenge on Fitzgerald—” Harper’s eyes darted over to Ashton “—for killing my dad.”
“So Damien had the plan from the beginning?”
Harper latched onto the idea that he wasn’t at fault for everything. “Yeah, it was always Damien’s idea.”
“The shoot-out downtown at the florist?” Jon asked. “That was him?”
“No,” Harper admitted sheepishly. “That was me. I followed Fitzgerald. And when I saw him stop at the florist, I knew the office across the street would be a good place to set up my hunting rifle. Just like hunting deer.”
“But you talked to Damien afterward. Once the police got there and you left.”
“Yeah, he caught me and pulled me into a building around the corner. Told me to let him help get Fitzgerald. He’s the one who told me about Summer Worrall’s place. That I could break in there and finish Fitzgerald off before he even knew what happened.”
Ashton turned and looked outside so he could resist the urge to go over to the hospital bed and beat the hell out of an already severely injured man. Killing Ashton was one thing, but Harper had been willing to just rush into Summer’s bedroom and shoot them both, even though she had nothing to do with any of it.
That was why Jon was doing the interviewing and Ashton was a member of SWAT.
“And when that didn’t work...” Jon prompted.
“Then Damien showed me his planning room. Told me he had a plan to help me take Fitzgerald down. Bastard,” Harper murmured again.
But Jon zoomed in on the important thing Harper said. “Planning room? Can you tell us how to get there?”
“Maybe. What will it get me?”
“For one thing, it will get you the knowledge that you helped bring to justice the man who put you in this hospital bed. For another, it gives the District Attorney someone else to throw some blame at once indictments start being handed out.”
Harper didn’t even try to resist; he rolled over immediately. He gave them the address of Damien’s house. Harper had barely finished speaking before Jon and Ashton were heading out the door.
They rode together, calling it in to Omega on the way. This wasn’t a location that could be rushed. Only after the bomb squad deemed it clear—after searching meticulously for any booby traps or explosives—could anyone enter.
Even afterward, Glock in hand, Ashton made sure every room was clear. That no one hid in any closet, bathtub or under any bed. He made extra effort to look for any traps the bomb squad might have missed, anything that might not be an explosive, but still dangerous, but found nothing.
The house was clean, at least from danger.
Ashton caught sight of what Harper called the “planning room” in the midst of his sweep, but couldn’t take time to study it then. Couldn’t even wrap his head around something that complicated.
Then forensics came in to see if they could find anything usable. It was an important part of crime fighting, but waiting for them to finish seemed to take an eternity.
“When Harper said planning room, he wasn’t kidding, Jon,” Ashton told the profiler as they stood at the car waiting for the go-ahead from forensics. “Elaborate is not a strong enough word.”
When they were finally allowed in a couple hours later and Jon saw the room, he immediately turned to Ashton.
“Call Brandon Han. Tell him he needs to get over here right away.”
Brandon was a genius. Like, certified genius. Two PhDs and a degree in law or something like that. If anyone could make sense of the wall full of newspaper clippings, photos, drawings, police reports, Google search printouts, fingerprints and whatever other unknown pieces of information were on the wall in that room—with different colored strings connecting them all in mind-boggling, crisscrossing patterns—Brandon Han could.
“This thing is giving me a nosebleed just looking at it,” Ashton rubbed his forehead.
“Yeah.” Jon continued to stare at the wall and its massive amount of information. “Whoever did this is...”
“A nutcase?”
Jon chuckled. “Probably. But also a genius. Harper never had a chance against this guy. He was just a small measure of this man’s much larger symphony.”
“I don’t think I like what you’re saying, Jon. A symphony implies that there’s a lot more music yet to come.”
Jon looked over at him and nodded, gesturing to the wall with his hand. “You’re right. Whoever this is, he’s just getting started.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Freihof watched all afternoon and evening from his true apartment—across the street from the one they were searching—as the Omega team carried out section after section of his wall of clues.
He was glad to see Brandon Han and Jon Hatton on site. He knew the other two men would appreciate the gift he’d left them.
It almost made up for the frustration he felt at the ruination of his original plan. Neither Summer nor Ashton had been killed in the explosion he’d set. Curtis Harper had one simple job to do: get Fitzgerald over to the sofa with Summer. The idiot hadn’t even been able to do that correctly.
Fawkes had warned Damien not to underestimate Omega Sector, and Damien could admit that maybe he had. Damien had known the SWAT team wouldn’t be far behind Ashton, but he hadn’t thought they’d figure out the plan so quickly and adjust accordingly.
The plan hadn’t been a total wash. From his visit to the hospital yesterday—and he’d been there right under a dozen agents’ noses—he’d discovered that one age
nt had died and one of the SWAT members was in a coma.
So not the win he wanted, but a win nonetheless. SWAT weren’t the only ones who could adjust accordingly as situations changed. And Damien planned to be in this for the long haul. His next play was already in motion. He’d had plans in motion long before he’d ever even spoken to Fawkes or Curtis Harper.
It involved a different state, different pawns, different victims. But it was still part of the bigger plan. What remained to be seen was if the Omega Sector agents could figure it out in time.
Damien was glad to see Omega was at least taking his clues seriously, moving sections of the wall piece by piece out to the truck with care.
Interestingly, Fawkes was on scene, too, helping load items from inside onto the truck to be taken back to Omega Sector. Damien wondered if that was the man’s job or if he’d volunteered when he’d found out what location was being searched. If he worried his own prints might show up.
Damien received a call on one of his burner phones. His business associate from Texas.
“Hello, Mr. Trumpold,” Damien answered.
“We’re ready to put the plan into action. They need to pay for what they’ve done.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
Convincing the Trumpolds that their brother had been wrongly accused of being a serial rapist, framed by two people in Corpus Christi, had required quite a bit more work than convincing Curtis Harper that he needed to go after Ashton Fitzgerald.
Damien had to doctor some evidence this time, make it look like it was all a setup. But ultimately the Trumpolds had been eager to believe their older brother—who they’d idolized—was innocent of all crimes. And since the man had died very early in prison, he wasn’t around to say one way or the other.
A little twisting of the truth, a sympathetic ear and he’d been able to convince them to take their revenge on the people who’d so wrongfully cost their beloved brother his life.
The Trumpolds had no idea that the people they’d be targeting happened to be closest friends with two members of Omega Sector.
Damien spent the next few minutes encouraging Trumpold, reminding the man that he was doing the right thing. The just thing. That the mission he was undertaking was a righteous one.
That the mission would also serve Damien’s purposes—picking apart yet another piece of Omega—was beside the point.
This time the plan wouldn’t fail. This time Damien would ensure Omega Sector knew his pain. Knew the agony of grief.
They’d won once, but they wouldn’t again. Damien would make sure they understood pain.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING when Ashton arrived at Omega HQ, Jon and Brandon, along with some of the likable nerds from the forensics lab, had rebuilt the entire “wall of crazy” in one of the conference rooms.
They’d been at it all night and were obviously way pleased with themselves for the exact replica they’d created.
Ashton and Lillian arrived at the conference room at the same time. Ashton shook his head as he entered. “Jon, you’re getting married in two weeks. Does the lovely Sherry know you’re spending your nights doing such kinky stuff?”
“And with Brandon,” Lillian continued, “who if I’m not mistaken has his own lovely fiancée at home waiting for him.”
“Our women,” Jon responded, “I’ll have you know, were very understanding and supportive of our need to get this project situated absolutely perfectly.”
Lillian turned to Ashton. “We’re going to need to talk to them about enabling.”
“Yes, sadly.”
Ashton and Lillian sat down at the table to study the wall as Brandon and Jon gave their thanks to the three lab techs who were leaving.
“Can you guys really make sense of any of this?” Ashton asked.
Jon shook his head. “Not yet, but we will. We’ve already gotten rid of some of the string. It had obviously only been added for confusion.”
Ashton and Lillian tried to help, while at the same time stay out of the way, as Brandon and Jon bounced theories off each other for the next few hours. They isolated and narrowed down concepts and patterns—connecting parts on the wall with their own string. The two men identified patterns Ashton couldn’t recognize even when they were pointed out to him.
“Both Summer and Curtis Harper stated how this Damien character told them that Omega Sector needed to suffer. To know the agony he’d known. That Omega needed to be forced to know what it was like to lose a loved one,” Jon said.
“So it’s someone who we’ve ‘hurt’ in some way,” Brandon said. He sat down in one of the conference room chairs. “You know, we’ve been working on the assumption that this secondary guy—since he was willing to kill both Harper and Summer—gave them a false name. What if he didn’t?”
“Damien Freihof,” Jon muttered, shaking his head. He sat down, also. Quiet.
This wasn’t good. Ashton looked over at Lillian. She just shrugged. “Who the hell is Damien Freihof?”
“We put him in jail five years ago when he tried to blow up a bank full of people,” Jon said.
Lillian scoffed. “There’s no way he’s doing this from jail.”
“He escaped last year.” Brandon rubbed his neck, studying the board again. “He’s definitely smart enough for this.” He threw his hand out toward the board. “And to manipulate Harper into wanting to kill Ashton.”
“Has there been any contact with him since he escaped from prison?” Ashton asked.
“Freihof was the guy who took Andrea last year and nearly killed both her and Brandon,” Jon explained.
Brandon’s voice was icy, his eyes closed, remembering. “He hung explosives around her neck right in front of me.”
Ashton flinched. The thought of finding explosives around the neck of the woman you love, as Brandon had, was enough to bring out the hardness in anyone.
“Freihof almost killed Andrea and me both,” Brandon continued. “He was injured by his own explosives, but he got away.”
“Looks like he might be back,” Lillian muttered. “With a definite vendetta to fill.”
“Damien wanted to kill Summer, not me,” Ashton said. “Harper wanted me, but the second man was always after Summer. The explosives would’ve taken both of us out. A bonus, I guess.”
“Damien Freihof is a psychopath. Completely evil. But he’s also a genius and loves games. Puzzles.” Brandon stared at the wall again. “I have absolutely no doubt this wall is his way of giving us clues to keep the game interesting.”
“If we can figure them out,” Jon muttered.
Ashton shook his head. “That’s part of the game, right? If we can’t figure it out in time, then we can’t stop whatever he has planned.”
“Exactly.” Jon nodded.
“I’m looking at this mug shot of Freihof.” Lillian spun her laptop around. “Granted he was arrested five years ago, but that picture doesn’t look like the man we caught on security footage talking to Harper.”
All three men studied the picture. “Different facial structure,” Ashton pointed out. “Fuller cheeks, hair and eyebrows different. But he meets the same basic height and build so it could be him, if he’s got some expertise in disguise.”
“It would certainly explain how he’s eluded us for so long,” Jon agreed. “If he knows how to change his appearance enough to fool facial recognition software.”
After notifying Steve Drackett of their fears and taking a short break for lunch, everyone headed back to study the wall again.
By midafternoon, Ashton hated that thing more than he’d ever hated any inanimate object.
“I don’t know how they do stuff like this every day,” he said to Lillian. “A profiler’s life is definitely not for me. Give me a building to rappel down or a window to break through any
day over this.”
Jon and Brandon, with the occasional help of Molly Humphries-Waterman, Derek’s wife and genius in her own right, had narrowed down whatever it was they were looking for until they were studying one small area near the left bottom corner.
Jon walked over and pointed to a newspaper cutting on the opposite edge of the wall. “This clipping is about a playing card company that decided to start using a new type of ace card.”
Brandon pointed out another section of the wall. “And the string was attached to these sets of dates: June 3, 2010, June 23, 2011, June 7, 2012, May 30, 2013, and June 19, 2014.”
Ashton walked closer to the wall. “Do you think those are crimes? Something happened on those days connected to Omega?”
“We don’t think so.” Brandon turned to Lillian. “Can you look up Catholic holidays?”
Ashton stared at the wall he couldn’t make any sense out of whatsoever. The dates weren’t familiar to him at all. “Catholic? Is this guy some sort of religious fanatic? Takes religious beliefs and slants them for his own selfish purposes?”
“No,” Jon said. “We don’t think so.”
“Those are all dates that the Catholic Church has celebrated the Feast of Corpus Christi over the last few years,” Lillian said.
“Corpus Christi,” Brandon whispered.
“I don’t get it,” Ashton said. “What does a Catholic holiday have to do with the deck of cards company or our guy?”
“It’s not the card company,” Jon said. “It’s the fact that they have new aces.”
“Nueces County, pronounced new-aces, is where Corpus Christi is located.”
Ashton might have studied this wall for the rest of his life and never put those two clues together. “Okay, I’ll buy it. And Corpus Christi has something to do with whatever you’re talking about down in that corner.” He pointed to the opposite edge of the wall.