by Tim Stevens
“Harm,” he said. “You’re gonna make it. They patched you up real good.”
There was no response but the gentle rise and fall of her chest beneath the cover as the ventilator breathed for her.
Venn looked at Beth. “Can she hear me?”
Beth shook her head. “She’s deep under, Venn.”
He turned back to Harmony and said, anyway: “You did great, though. Things have moved along. We’re closing in on the killer.” He wished he could sound more confident.
Venn watched her for a few minutes while Beth checked the charts at the foot of the bed and conferred quietly with the ICU resident, who’d wandered over. A few times, Venn thought his words were getting through to Harmony. Her face twitched, and there was a flicker of movement under the cover where her hand would be. But he knew he was kidding himself.
“Oh, and by the way,” he said. “When you get out of here I’m kicking your ass for disobeying me.”
That was when his phone rang.
*
He took the call in the corridor outside the ICU. It was Teller.
The Camaro had been found. A long-haul truck driver in New Jersey on the other side of the George Washington Bridge noticed smoke coming from a field, just off a side track. At first the thought nothing of it, but then he wondered if there’d been an accident, if somebody had been caught in the sudden descent of snow and had lost control. So, against his better judgment, he swung his eighteen-wheeler down the track to take a look.
The preliminary report from the Jersey cops said the car had been torched, probably after being doused in gas. By the time they got there the flames were out, and it was nothing but a blackened shell, the tires melted right away.
There was one body in the remains of the car, propped in the passenger seat. Well, not so much a body as a charred skeleton, the flesh almost completely burned away, the teeth outsized and grinning. The hair was gone, as were the clothes. The cops could see it was an adult, but couldn’t tell if it was male or female.
But the blackened license plate was still legible enough to confirm that the car was Rickenbacker’s.
Teller was on his way to the scene. He sounded different than usual, Venn thought. His voice was flat, carefully neutral. Venn knew he was holding his emotions in deliberately, and with great effort.
“Ah, man,” said Venn. “I’m sorry.” He looked at his watch. “Meet you there in an hour.”
*
The stench hit Venn’s nostrils first, and punched all the way up into his reptile brain, making him gag.
He parked some distance away, because the number of vehicles clustered along the track and by the edge of the field made the area look like the parking lot of a football stadium. Venn ran the gauntlet of people who tried to stop him, flashing his shield, until he reached Teller. The snow was coming down steadily, everybody was wrapped up, and he had a hard time identifying the FBI man at first.
Teller’s face was set, and hard. Without looking at Venn, he said, “They found a necklace on the body. I took a look. It’s Fran’s.”
Once again, Venn wondered if Teller and Rickenbacker had had a thing going, maybe in the past.
“I guess we can’t tell if it’s the same MO as before,” said Venn. “The Sigma symbol.”
“No,” said Teller. “But the autopsy will show us if the base of the skull has been fractured, and maybe if the brain’s been penetrated. Assuming there’s anything left of it.”
They continued to gaze at the frame of the car, the team of CSI people swarming over it like excavators around a newly discovered fossil. After a time, Teller looked at Venn.
“How’s your friend? Harmony?”
“She’s out of surgery,” said Venn. “Stable, but it’s touch and go. Early days.”
“That’s good,” said Teller. “That’s she’s come through the surgery, I mean.”
They stood in silence for a few moments more.
Teller said: “You still want to go through with your idea?”
“More than ever,” said Venn, his voice grim.
Chapter 28
It took Sally-Jo two hours to reach Manhattan once again. two hours of almost hallucinatory trudging through the freezing landscape, transformed eerily by the sudden snowfall.
She’d anticipated the change in the weather, and had stashed an extra-thick fleece-lined coat in her rucksack. But, even so, the cold gripped her like a vise, threatening to crush her into a singularity. Her hands, encased in wool mittens, were just on the painful side of numb. Her feet felt like blocks of frozen meat, heavy and knobbled.
But she didn’t care. She was free, and she exulted in her new-found liberty without regard for her surroundings.
She would have gotten back to the city quicker if she’d hitchhiked. Numerous cars and trucks had passed her by, many of them slowing. She was a single female, and however uneasy a driver might be about picking up any hitchhiker, most people would probably feel more uncomfortable leaving a woman to trudge through the snow on her own.
But she couldn’t hitchhike. She couldn’t allow anybody to identify her afterward, which was why she turned away and pulled up her scarf to hide the lower half of her face whenever a car came by.
Besides, she might get picked up by some psycho. Some serial killer trucker. Wouldn’t that be ironic, she thought, almost smiling.
Sally-Jo had worked quickly after she’d gotten out of the Camaro. She’d siphoned the gas out of the tank using a length of rubber hose she found in the trunk, and used a jumbo bottle of windshield-washer fluid, emptied of its contents and refilled with the gas, to douse the car systematically until it was reeking. When she was satisfied that it was covered, she fashioned a makeshift fuse from the shirt she stripped off Rickenbacker’s body, lit the end with the lighter she’d used to heat up the branding iron earlier, and walked rapidly away.
She hoped the snow, which was starting to pummel down with increased relentlessness, wouldn’t tamp down the fire before it could get going. But she heard the soft whoosh behind her, and turned, and saw the flames limning the car, turning its silhouette black against the whiteness that was settling on the field around it.
By the time she heard the first sirens of the police cars and the fire trucks, and saw the distant strobing lights, Sally-Jo was well on the way back to New York.
*
She’d never given much thought to what she would do after she was free. In the long run, she had grand plans of moving to another part of the country, maybe even overseas. Seeing some more of Europe, or the Far East, or even Australia. Going somewhere she knew she’d never, ever be recognized, somewhere she could turn her mind and her heart to the riches the world held but which she’d always felt cut off from before.
Cut off because of who she was.
What she was.
She had money. It was fragmented, squirreled away in various bank accounts and funds and investments. Sally-Jo had been careful to hide it, to spread it far and wide so that even if some of it was tracked down, it would never all be taken from her in one go.
Wherever she went, whatever she did... she knew she’d be doing it on her own. Without Frank.
Finally, for the first time, she’d be free from him.
She didn’t hate him. He was part of her life, and in a crucial sense always would be. But he wouldn’t be with her, ever present.
But she knew she had to go back to him now, in New York, and face him. One last time.
That was what she hadn’t been considering before now. She’d thought about the long haul. Had dreamed about it. But Sally-Jo hadn’t turned her mind to what she would do immediately. Because she was now a wanted criminal, the subject of one of the biggest federal manhunts in years. Even more so now that she had shot one law enforcement official, and abducted and killed an FBI agent. She’d be a fugitive for the foreseeable future, and even though nobody had a clear description of her, and she was in any case able to modify her appearance with relative ease... she’d need
to keep the lowest of profiles.
Sally-Jo dodged a snowdrift which had already formed by the side of the road. Her boots were heavy, with thickly ridged treads, and she had little difficulty keeping her footing.
Her thoughts wandered to the woman she’d shot on the sidewalk, after she’d subdued Rickenbacker. She still didn’t know if the woman was a fellow FBI agent, or a plainclothes cop from the NYPD. Even on the drive out of Manhattan into Jersey, she’d kept the Camaro’s radio turned off. Sooner or later, though, she was going to have to listen to the news. To take a measure of what the cops and the FBI knew, and how tightly the net was closing in.
*
She crossed the bridge and plunged into the nighttime lights of the city. The snow had steadied now, still coming down hard but no longer building in intensity. By morning, the streets and the sidewalks and the rooftops would be blanketed in three or four inches.
It was easier to hide in cold weather. You could bury yourself beneath layers of clothes without attracting suspicion.
Sally-Jo trudged along an almost empty street, starting to feel the cold seriously now, and feeling a peculiar lightheadedness which she knew was dangerous. It signaled fatigue, the onset of hypothermia. She needed to sit down someplace warm, flood her belly and her veins with hot coffee, get a bite to eat. Suddenly, she felt ravenous, in a way she hadn’t for as far back as she could remember. Was this a sign of freedom, she wondered? The willingness to indulge the simple needs of your body, without layers of doubt and worry getting in the way? She could probably afford to gain a few pounds, in any case. It would help disguise her appearance.
But she knew she could never do that. She’d come too far, sacrificed too much, to let herself go.
Ahead, she saw a junction with a busy, brightly lit thoroughfare, and she knew she was back in the city proper. She was so attuned to the quiet and the dark of the roads she’d been traversing over the past two hours that she felt almost reluctant to plunge once more into the bustle of urban existence. But the sooner she could do that, the sooner she could start getting back into something approximating a normal existence.
Sally-Jo turned the corner into the main street. She couldn’t immediately see a road sign naming it, but she knew she must be somewhere in Washington Heights.
The display window of a TV and audio store caught her eye. It was evidently a place that stayed open through the night, or at least until the early hours, because it was lit up and she saw customers moving around inside. The window was filled with a bank of plasma TV screens of varying sizes.
All of them were tuned to the same news channel.
Sally-Jo stopped. On the screens, a photo of Rickenbacker’s face appeared, alongside that of a younger black woman. Sally-Jo couldn’t be sure, but it may have been the woman she’d shot on the sidewalk. The cop, or federal agent.
With no sound available to her, Sally-Jo couldn’t hear what the earnest anchorperson was saying into the camera. But she watched as the display cut to a jerky helicopter-cam view of the street near Gramercy, where she’d snatched Rickenbacker. The street crawled with police and crime-scene personnel.
There was no sign yet of the burnt-out Camaro, even though Sally-Jo knew it had been discovered.
What happened next came as an almost physical punch in her gut.
Fran’s face filled the screen.
It was an old photo, taken more than five years ago when he’d still been stationed at Fort Irvington. Sally-Jo knew the picture well. It was the one from his file at the military base.
Under the picture, the caption said: Wanted: former sergeant Franklin D. Gray.
The dread twisted the ropes of bowel in Sally-Jo’s abdomen until she thought she was going to soil herself, or vomit, or both.
Frank. How did they know?
She stepped through the glass doorway of the store.
*
Fifteen minutes later, she reeled out, almost colliding with a muttering young kid who scurried by furtively.
She’d listened to the footage once, then found another TV with another news channel. The message was the same, almost word for word.
The New York City Police Department and the FBI have issued an urgent appeal to members of the public for information on the whereabouts of Franklin Gray. He is currently the number one suspect in the so-called Sigma killings which have been terrorizing New York City for the last month.
And: earlier reports that a woman was thought to be involved have been superseded. Gray is thought to be the only suspect. A woman is not involved.
And: The law enforcement officer who was shot, Detective Sergeant Harmony Jones, has positively identified her shooter as a man resembling Gray’s general description. Detective Jones is currently recuperating from her injuries in hospital and was unavailable for comment.
There was a lot of other stuff: Gray should be regarded as highly dangerous, and under no circumstances should he be approached if sighted. That kind of thing. But Sally-Jo had stopped listening.
The only suspect...
A woman is not involved..
Detective Sergeant Harmony Jones has... identified her shooter as a man resembling Gray...
Sally-Jo gripped a lamppost, the cold of the metal instantly burrowing though the wool of her mittens and icing her palms.
The bitch, she thought, tears welling in her eyes and freezing on her numbed cheeks. The lying, spotlight-seeking bitch.
This was for her. For Sally-Jo. All of it, up to and including the final victory she’d achieved with Rickenbacker, the only person apart from Frank who truly understood Sally-Jo. It wasn’t for Frank. And now this woman, this detective, was screwing it all up with her stupidity and her lies.
Sally-Jo straightened her back. Took a deep breath through her nose, sucking in huge lungfuls of cold air until it felt like her chest would expand and carry her floating up into the snow-laden sky.
She had to meet up with Frank. Talk with him. Even though she knew what he would say. Knew he’d come to the same conclusion she herself had.
The Jones woman needed to be forced to tell the truth.
Chapter 29
On his way back from the field where the Camaro had been found, with the news choppers rattling low overhead, their blades scattering the snow into blurred flurries, Venn listened to as many news stations as he was able to find, punching through the buttons on the dial of the Jeep’s radio.
The coverage was as saturated as the ground outside threatened to become from the snowfall.
Every outlet banged the same drum. The police and the FBI were looking for Franklin Gray, and Gray alone. There was no woman involved: that had all been a mistake. Detective Harmony Jones, survivor of the shooting, had recovered consciousness long enough to reveal that she’d been shot by a man, on his own, a man who looked a lot like Franklin Gray.
If that didn’t provoke Gray, nothing would.
Venn felt his conscience rise in protest once again. As he’d done before, he got it in a mental headlock and wrestled it back down while he drove.
Every hospital in the Greater New York area was now permeated with NYPD officers and FBI agents. Most of the manpower was concentrated at the major hospitals in Manhattan, with the bulk stationed at Revere Hospital. Venn knew Gray and his woman accomplice were smart. They’d figure that Harmony would have been most probably taken by the ambulance to Revere, because it was a large teaching facility with a trauma center, and it was the closest such place to Gramercy Park, where she’d been gunned down.
So that was where Gray was likely to strike.
Except it wouldn’t be Gray. He was by now too recognizable, his face decorating even the wards at Revere. No. He’d send the woman to silence Harmony.
She was an unknown quantity. There was no accurate description of her, not even from the three corporals who’d seen her in the bar when she’d led Fincher away. The picture the elderly couple, the Van Burens, had painted of her was at odds with that of the seductive vamp from the b
ar. Which meant the woman was adept at blending in.
So Venn was assuming she’d find some way into Revere, and onto the ward where Harmony was being kept. Venn had advised Teller and his people to go easy on the details about Harmony. He’d said not to mention which hospital she was at, still less that she was in the ICU. Too much information would have sounded phoney, and would have aroused Gray’s suspicions. Better that he work out Harmony’s location himself. Which Venn was certain he’d do.
The hospital was locked down, every floor crawling with law enforcement officers. The ICU itself had plainclothes cops masquerading as nurses and doctors. Harmony was about as secure as if she were under house arrest.
And yet... Venn was aware that he was quite deliberately using her as bait, without her knowledge. He was thereby exposing her to danger. To a potentially lethal attack from a person who’d killed, ruthlessly and cold-bloodedly, at least five times before.
Gray was ex-military. Venn had no idea what kind of resources the man had access to. Was it possible that he’d mount an all-out assault on the hospital with high-grade ordnance? Did he possess bomb-making capabilities, in which case far more people than Harmony were being put at risk?
Well, Venn thought, he was going to put his money where his mouth was. If Gray or his female sidekick made a move on Harmony, as he felt deep in his gut they would, he himself was going to be right there, waiting for them.
He was heading through Morningside Heights down Broadway when his phone rang.
It was Fil Vidal.
“Boss,” said Fil. “Got something interesting.”
The guy was still at the Division’s office. Venn hoped his wife understood.
“Shoot.”
“The algorithms have been working on the victims, and they’ve shown up a commonality,” Fil said. He sounded excited, and not in the least fatigued, even though it was after three in the morning. “Especially now that I’ve factored in the FBI agent, Rickenbacker. You want to know what it is?”