by Matthew Dunn
The butcher spat. “So what are you then? Judge and jury?”
“Right now I’m a father who found his daughter screaming in a ditch. It’s a shame for you that happened.”
He blew the butcher’s brains out.
Thyme Painter was Joe Kopański’s NYPD detective partner. The former Black Hawk helicopter major hobbled as she arrived at Hunts Point. Her prosthetic limb had been expertly fitted after she’d deliberately flown into the path of a SAM missile in Afghanistan to save another helicopter that was carrying SEAL Team Six. But sometimes the limb felt like it was gnawing at her stump. The svelte, black-haired, single woman often joked it kept her weight down and stopped her from having to worry about sex and men. In reality, the limb had become an intrinsic part of her, as much as Kopański’s mottled face helped define his mind.
Painter’s parents were investment bankers; she was a Harvard and West Point grad, top of her class at both institutions, with postgraduate options on Capitol Hill. But like Kopański she always wanted to do things different. She’d been on the force for fifteen years and could have been fast-tracked to deputy commissioner had she not been a rebel who favored pure police work rather than careerism.
It was nearly two a.m. as Painter arrived at Hunts Point. The vast building was abuzz with workers sorting produce in the 328-warehouse complex, which was divided into fruit and vegetables, meat, and fish. It was the Fulton Fish Market segment that Painter headed to, though she didn’t enter. Instead, she waited outside the massive warehouses, watching people in hard hats driving forklifts and huge trucks, entering barricades to unload fish caught near Long Island.
She was hunting the female criminal who’d lured victims to the butcher—victims including Kopański’s daughter. The enabler would be driving one of the trucks. She always arrived in the early hours. Painter was here for her.
A fine rain drizzled vertically, highlighted by the beams of work vehicles, the droplets soaking Painter’s hair as she stood adjacent to her vehicle, her hand on her holster.
Kopański had done his bit. Now it was time for her to do her share of the work. Even if it meant she’d get kicked out of the NYPD. Six months ago, Kopański had told her not to get involved. She knew he secretly loved her, not that he’d ever revealed that emotion. But because of that knowledge, she was here to avenge the trauma he’d had for so long. It was the least she could do.
Tonight they were taking out the trash.
A truck stopped by the security booth. Painter couldn’t see the driver or the plates because of the headlights. But no doubt it was one of the vehicles heading to the market, capable of carrying thirteen tons of red snapper, bream, cod, and other species. Its engine roared as it was allowed to proceed. Painter waited.
The truck pulled up outside the warehouse where Painter was positioned. Its driver didn’t notice Painter. It was too dark and bustling with night shift workers who were desperate to get everything set up for the morning’s trade with wholesalers. The night shift was a race—get produce ready, find out what each vendor was prepared to sell for, adjust prices accordingly so other vendors weren’t undercut, and make sure everything was pristine and fresh. Once, the market was America’s biggest. Gang wars among vendors and the aspirations of realtors drove the market to the Bronx. The place was still worked by tough men and women who’d seen thieves and competitors shot in the head. They were used to violence.
A woman got out of the truck. She was wearing jeans and a windbreaker, her blond hair tied in a ponytail. Under other circumstances Painter would have envied her good looks and attractive frame. But under these circumstances she just felt revulsion.
The detective walked up to her. “Margie Bane?”
Margie looked quizzical. “Yes.”
“Are you carrying a piece?”
“Of course not.”
“Yes, you are.” Painter used her gloved hand to pull out a Smith & Wesson sidearm she’d seized off a perp a year ago. “This is your gun.”
“What the hell?! It’s not my gun!”
Painter’s expression was cold. “The butcher raped. But he was only able to do that because you enabled his actions. You brought him the women. Got drunk with them in bars. Befriended them. Asked them back to your place so you could party. Enabled. And that’s when you got off watching the butcher raping the people you brought him. You’re a damn bitch.”
Margie looked venomous. “Are you a cop?”
“Yes. But tonight I’m off duty.” For the benefit of any potential witnesses, Painter shouted, “Gun! Gun! Put it down!” She shot Margie in the head, hunched over her, placed the spare pistol in her hand, and radioed the NYPD.
Chapter 7
Washington, D.C., cops took Unwin Fox’s body to the morgue and submitted it to analysis. The room was brightly illuminated by ceiling spotlights and had huge drawers for cadavers. Four people were in the room: two doctors, a D.C. detective, and Marsha Gage. On the slab in the center of the room was Fox’s naked body. On other slabs next to him were bodies of criminals and prostitutes, all of them sliced open to reveal their lungs, the folded-back flaps of flesh making them look like grotesque angels.
The air was rich with the scent of formaldehyde and decay. One of the spotlights flickered and buzzed like a fly that was hoping to nest maggots in the most rotten elements of the dead.
It was three a.m. The doctors and D.C. cop were tired but focused. Gage, however, was irritated to be here. This wasn’t her case. It belonged to D.C. and she was present only to ensure Fox hadn’t been killed to jeopardize national interest. She’d never met Fox and she’d avoided spooks. The CIA, she’d long ago concluded, was an institution filled with overqualified underachievers.
Only one spy she’d confronted was very different and filled her with dread. But Cochrane was dead. Allegedly.
The senior doctor spoke calmly and with command. “Severe bruising to the neck. A witness caught the attack on camera. The assailant was male and placed his knee on the victim’s throat.”
Gage asked, “Did it cause death?”
“Yes.” The senior doctor glanced at the cops. “Death by asphyxiation. Odd way for a man to be killed in a park.”
Gage asked, “An altercation that got out of hand?”
The D.C. detective answered, “Could be. Very hard to tell from the witness’s cell phone camera. It looks like the assailant and victim spoke briefly first, but despite our efforts, we can’t pick up audio.”
“Where’s the video now?”
“We’re processing it. Trying to identify the perp.”
The senior doctor continued. “This is nagging me.”
The D.C. detective asked, “Why?”
“Because I’ve done this for thirty years. Strangling is always rare. It’s an unpremeditated crime of impetuosity.”
Gage interjected. “You’re sure the contusions are the cause of death?”
The senior doctor nodded. “Yes. The larynx is crushed.”
Gage was now alert and focused. Like the doctor, something was nagging her about the death. “How long for the blood test results?”
“We’re running them now but it’ll take a few hours.”
“Your laboratory needs to move quicker.” Gage moved closer to the body. “What if the killing wasn’t the only crime?”
The senior doctor didn’t follow. “We know what killed Fox.”
“Do we?” Gage stared at the body. “You’re working on the assumption that the killer was out of control. But what if the killer had a very rational mind and was covering something else up. Or . . .” Gage’s mind was racing. “Or his act was mercy.”
“Mercy?”
“A mercy killing.”
The doctor glanced at his medical colleague. “The victim had a fatal physiological condition?”
The junior doctor shook his head. “Strangling someone to save him from a worse fate means the condition would have to be sudden, rather than progressive. Otherwise the killer would have found a more h
umane way to kill.”
The doctors spoke fast:
“Heart attack?”
“More preferable to strangulation, plus people can recover from heart attacks. There’s no mercy in killing someone with a weak heart.”
“Stage four cancer?”
“If someone cared about a terminally ill cancer patient, he’d have made better plans to end his misery.”
The junior doctor shrugged. “So let’s wait for the bloods, but here and now this looks like a fight. Two guys who lost their temper. Something like that.”
Gage wouldn’t let it drop. “What if he was poisoned? The strangulation was to kill a worse killing.”
Both doctors shook their heads. The senior doctor said, “Death by poison, no matter which poison, shows up quickly. Skin discoloration. Change of color to the tongue. Contortions. Variations in pupil dilation. Other obvious symptoms.”
Gage agreed but had experience the doctors didn’t, including knowing the more insidious ways states sponsored death. “Does he have any lacerations?”
“He’s got a cut on his calf. Tiny puncture mark. Probably an insect did it. But we’re not taking it for granted. The tests will give us clarity.”
Gage had already thought about something that had happened in London in 2006.
The killing of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko.
She asked, “Have you got a Geiger counter?”
The senior doctor said, “Are you crazy?!”
“You don’t have one?”
“Of course we do!”
Gage pointed at the corpse. “I reckon you might want to run a test.”
The junior doctor returned two minutes later and ran the counter over the corpse. “Holy shit!”
His superior snatched the Geiger from him and read the display. “Everyone get out of the room right now!”
Thunder boomed as Will Cochrane headed to west D.C. through a ragged forest on a deserted road, his windshield wipers on full, a flask of black coffee nestled beside him. His thoughts were racing.
Haden poisoned Unwin Fox—but why?
He should have just stayed low and enjoyed his stolen cash.
There must have been a trigger, something that happened very recently, to bring Haden out of hiding.
What was the trigger?
For now, Will concluded it didn’t matter.
A lightning bolt struck a tree and sent it crashing across the road. Will carried on, swerving past it, his thoughts too preoccupied to worry about the sometimes angry confluence between the heavens and earth.
Haden. All roads led to Haden.
A man who was a superstar in the military; he would have been the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff if he hadn’t let his machismo get in the way of leadership. Nevertheless, an undeniably brilliant yet incredibly ruthless commander.
Haden was the problem. Will was going to sort that out.
The scientific department of the FBI had taken over jurisdiction of the morgue containing Unwin Fox because D.C. cops didn’t have the expertise to deal with the situation. The Feds were dressed in white NBC suits as they descended the stairs to the morgue. Fox was still in the center of the room, surrounded by other dead who’d been torn apart by the doctors.
Once in the room, the Fed scientists moved slowly while Gage and the senior doctor who’d conducted the autopsy watched through a one-way mirror, having been tested for radiation and cleared.
“What’s happening?” asked Gage.
The doctor pressed a finger against the glass. “This is the first time for me. The guys in there know what they’re doing.”
“Which is what?”
“They’re pursuing your very clever lead.” Though he’d never conducted an autopsy on a person with polonium poisoning, the D.C. doctor had some knowledge of the effects. “If you hold a piece of polonium in your hand, it’s obviously radioactive. But it won’t hurt you in the short term. However, if it’s converted into a soluble compound it can have catastrophic effects.”
“What compound?”
“Salt. The big problem with radioactive salts is that they dissolve in liquids.”
“Water?”
“Also blood.” The doctor was glad to be behind the glass. “When I was a professor in med school I used to put a Geiger counter near Brazil nuts in lessons to show students how radioactive they are. Nut trees in Brazil absorb via their roots the natural volcanic radiation in the water.”
“Your point?”
“My point is that radiation is all around us, but we can live with it. But what happened to Fox was on a whole other scale. I can’t give you a time frame, but I can give you an end result. Polonium mutates cells extremely rapidly. It’s worse than cancer. You die in agony.” He was somber as he added, “Your colleagues are testing to see whether the tiny lesion on the back of Fox’s calf was the point where polonium was injected. If so, goodness knows how it was done.”
Gage knew. “It would have been done with a special contraption. A rod, no longer than an umbrella, probably disguised to look like an everyday item that would have blended into activities in the park. The tip would have been spring-loaded. The murderer places the tip against Fox’s calf and pulls a trigger at the other end of the rod. The tip is so fine and strong it would have punctured Fox’s pants and would have only felt like a tiny pinprick. Probably, he thought nothing of it and carried on walking. Problem was, he now had a huge dose of polonium inside him.”
The doctor nodded. “Like darting an animal. How did you know to call for a Geiger reading?”
“I didn’t know anything. It just occurred to me.” Gage’s mind was racing. “Whoever killed Fox had no reason to do so if he was the one who darted Fox. This was a mercy killing. But for that to happen, it means the man who crushed Fox’s throat knew exactly what had happened. We’re dealing with someone very different. Skilled. Unusually so.” She knew the killer was a highly trained professional. More than that, someone who knew the dark arts of assassination. “I need to see the video of the assailant.”
Will arrived at the burned-out shell of Fox’s house in Vienna. He hadn’t anticipated the CIA officer’s home would have been destroyed, instead believing it might have been burgled and torn apart by men looking for something. Fox was carrying a secret that made men kill him. Fox would have known that possibility. He’d have stored his secret somewhere in case his mouth was permanently shut. His house was the obvious location.
But now it was a blackened shell, the smell of cinder and smoke still evident despite the rain and a wind that was swirling aimlessly at three a.m.
Will parked three hundred yards away.
Close enough to reach if he needed to bolt.
Far enough away to allow him to approach the building without others noticing.
On the other side of the street, he watched everything around him. He knew what he had to do.
He walked into the ruins, ducking under police tape, his sidearm tucked into his waistband.
Smoke was still coming off the shell, walls and roof nearly gone, clumps of siding, brick, and wood dropping to the floor because they no longer had anything to adhere to. Everything was burned to a crisp, the remnants of furniture reduced to ugly molten vestiges of what they once were. Rain drizzled through the open roof. The whole place would have to be pulled down to make space for a new home.
He moved through the ruins, his brain processing everything and imagining Fox living here. The key question was where Fox would have stored the evidence that something was wrong with Berlin.
The cellar door was nearly off its hinges, a crumbling black shadow of its former solidity. It resembled a shield that had failed to protect its master in battle, broken and impotent.
Will descended to the basement, a flashlight in his hand, and saw a wooden chest in the center of the bare room. The chest was ravaged by fire. Will ripped off the lid. Inside was nothing but ashes. He gathered some of the ashes in his hands and rubbed them between his fingers.
Burned paper or cardboard, he decided.
“What the hell are you doing in here?”
Will turned to face the man who’d asked the question. The man was standing next to three others. All were wearing suits. Will’s eyes took in everything he could see. “I’m a friend of the man who lived here. Who are you?”
The men pulled out their guns and pointed them at Will.
Will let them.
“We’re cops and you’re trespassing in a crime scene.”
Will stared at them, saying nothing.
“This is a D.C. crime scene!”
Will nodded. “Yes, it is. So why are you here?”
“What?”
“Why are you here?”
“We’re detectives!”
“No, you’re not.”
The men glanced at one another. Their leader said, “We’re here on official duty.”
“Of that, I’m certain.” Will kept his eyes on the guns as he scooped a handful of ash out of the chest. “It’s just ash. Nothing more. There’s no reason to pull triggers for ash, is there?”
He held their gaze as he walked past the men and exited the house.
Marsha Gage entered the D.C. detective’s office. “My people have ascertained that without question Fox has been assassinated. But someone close to him put him out of his misery. Something is going on here that’s way beyond a murder.”
“A cover-up?”
“Could be.” Gage could tell there was a degree of territorial hostility in the D.C. detective’s tone. The murder was being transferred to the Feds. He didn’t like that one bit. Gage didn’t care.
“Perhaps Fox was injected and then strangled to make sure of death.”
Agent Gage shook her head. “Why not just strangle him in the first place?”
“He was injected to weaken him first? That way the killer could move in and finish him off.”