by Graham Brown
“But sometimes you leave me all alone,” he said.
She sighed. “Sometimes Mommy has to go do things,” she explained. “Sometimes I have to go catch the bad people. But I always leave you with Nana, and I promise I’ll always come back for you. No matter what.”
Calvin nodded, wrinkled his face, and then sneezed. The last thing either of them needed was to catch a cold.
She looked back at her husband’s grave. I miss you. It’s so hard without you. I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing anymore. And I don’t have anyone to ask or talk to.
For the first time in her life, Kate understood why the living could be angry with the dead. The sense of abandonment was so strong there were moments when it overrode all reason.
She choked back the tears that were forming and took a breath. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I know you didn’t want to go, either.”
No matter how long she stared or how many times she came to this place, the one-sided conversation was always the same. There were no answers. There was no sense of absolution. Only silence.
“Come on, Cal,” she said. “Nana’s baking cookies.”
He nodded sadly.
Leaving was always painful. But the fact was, she had a job to do. A job she did better than most. And even though part of her wanted to quit and be done with it, part of her was defiant.
Every time she considered it, an angry voice rose up inside, insisting that she never quit. Not until she was too old to go on, or until they made her step down, or until she’d cracked every case the Bureau thought it would never break. Not until she’d somehow paid the criminal world back for everything they’d taken from her and her son.
It was a dark, lonely road. But it was the path she’d chosen to keep. And for now, it lead to New York and a homicide that just might be related to a case she’d been working for a very long time.
CHAPTER 4
AN HOUR later, Kate found herself sitting in the window seat of the Amtrak Acela as it raced from Washington to New York. Her partner Billy Ray Massimo sat across from her, his attention buried in the USA Today.
The trip to New York was an odd one. They were following up a new lead, one that might or might not have been connected to their current case—a string of nineteen murders in several states, the last eleven in the Boston area.
All the victims had died the same way, throats slashed, jugular veins torn open. Autopsies showed the victims had been drained of most of their blood, yet there was never much spilled at the scene.
The incident in New York was different. The victim was a young woman at an after-hours party. Her throat had been partially sliced, and she’d somehow escaped death. A shootout in the parking lot followed and then a near riot as everyone fled the scene.
It didn’t sound much like the Boston murders to her, but they wouldn’t know for sure until they got there. In the meantime, Kate stared out the window as the scenery flew past in a blur: trees one minute, an open field or commercial area the next, abruptly followed by the walls of a dark tunnel that seemed to spring upon them with the suddenness of a lightning strike.
Her own thoughts were playing a similar game. The details of their case raced around in her head, accompanied by the confidence that they would solve it at some point and then engulfed by the sudden dose of reality that some cases were never solved, including her husband’s.
She looked across to Billy Ray. “Haven’t you finished that yet?”
He lowered the paper. “You want a section?”
“No, I want talk about the case.”
Billy Ray gave her a slight smirk and then folded the paper and put it away. “What’s there to talk about?” he asked. “I thought we’d beaten everything to death by now.”
There was no malice in Billy Ray’s voice, only humor and his sweet Southern accent.
“Have we come to a conclusion?”
“No.”
“Then there must be more to discuss.”
He sighed. “I guess this comes with having an partner who’s OCD.”
“Your damn right it does,” she said. “And I’ve been obsessing over two different things this whole ride up. Back and forth like a tennis match. This case, then my husband’s case, and then back to this again.”
“Kate,” he said, shaking his head as if he knew where this was going.
“What if they’re related?”
“Related?” Billy Ray said. The sound of exasperation was hard to cover. “The MOs are completely different. Marcus was stabbed.”
“People had been disappearing from the shelter he ran,” she said. “People he insisted were on the right track to sobriety. Recovering one day, and then, suddenly, they were gone.”
“That’s what happens in rehab, Kate. People fall off the wagon. They disappear. First, they go on a binge, and then they’re too ashamed to come back. They move on. If they’re lucky, they find a new place and get straight again and hope and pray it sticks this time.”
There was something in Billy’s tone that told her he knew this firsthand somehow.
“Mark thought they were being lured away,” she said. “A month after he died, the Virginia State Police found two of them. Their throats had been cut.”
“Had their blood been drained?”
“The coroner couldn’t tell,” she said.
Billy Ray exhaled and looked away. When he turned back, he had a different expression on his face, more like a parent trying to get through to a stubborn child.
“I didn’t know Mark all that well,” he said. “But he seemed like a terrific person. He worked with people the rest of the world would rather just forget about. He gave them hope. You can’t imagine how much respect I have for that. But everything about his death says it was a botched robbery. Someone broke into your house, and he surprised them.”
She took a deep breath. She understood what he was saying. She’d been considering this thought for hours now. But if the New York thing was connected to their case—if it was a break or a change in the MO—then there might be other breaks in the pattern.
“Mark knew something,” she said firmly. “Maybe he knew what this guy looked like, or where he could be found, or who he was hanging out with. He called me. He said he had something to tell me.”
“You have no idea what he was going to tell you, Kate. Maybe he was going to tell you that someone had just given him a big donation so he could open another halfway house or that someone from the house had gotten on their feet and gotten a job and started a new life.”
All that was true. Those were the kind of things Mark had reveled in. He loved to share good news, whether it was big or small.
“I should have come home.”
“Mark wasn’t defenseless. He wasn’t a child.”
“Nor was he a federal agent taught to shoot and kill,” she said.
“Which somehow makes it your fault again?” Billy Ray asked. “How many times are we going to get on this merry-go-round?”
Kate looked out the window. There wasn’t much to see. The train had begun to slow. It was rounding a long curve and heading east. Buildings blocked the view to either side.
Maybe he was right. She just didn’t know anymore. She didn’t know what was worse—losing someone to a random incident or losing him or her to some grand conspiracy. She guessed it was all the same. The pain came from losing; it didn’t matter how.
She looked back to Billy Ray. “You should be a shrink instead of an agent,” she said. “You’d make a hell of a lot more money.”
He chuckled and smiled. “And disappoint the old man? You know he’s got me charted to the Senate in ten years. Shrinks don’t get to be senators.”
She laughed. Around them, other passengers began getting their things together. They were a few minutes from the station. The train continued on. It coasted into another tunnel and began the long, dark ride under the city to the waiting platforms of Penn Station.
Forty minutes later, after grabbing a rent
al car and heading north through the city, Kate and Billy Ray stood in front of a stained concrete loading dock in front of the abandoned Hammersmith Mills factory. White outlines marked the spots where two armed bouncers had been found dead. Large swaths of dried blood showed how violently they’d died.
Here and there, little chalk circles marked the final resting places of nineteen different shell casings. Long, straight chalk lines traced bullet paths away from where the dead men had fallen. Orange chalk indicated shots from one victim’s .357 revolver. Blue chalk tracked shots from the Tech 9. From the look of things, they’d gone down with guns blazing.
“These guys went out like the seventh cavalry,” Billy Ray said.
Kate couldn’t disagree with that.
“We found nineteen casings,” a stocky New York City detective named McMullan explained. “And the .357 had a single live round left inside to go along with five spent shells in the cylinder, so we have to assume it was fired five times.
“Twenty-four rounds,” she said.
He nodded. “So far, we’ve dug bullet fragments out of two cars and a truck across the street from here. Total of twelve. Based on the shell types, we were able to determine who fired what. Those are the lines you see on the ground. The rest of the slugs haven’t been recovered yet.”
Kate scanned the lines. It looked like both men had been up against the loading bay doors of the factory when they opened fire.
“They hit anyone?” she asked. “’Cause I don’t see another outline.”
McMullen shook his head.
“You’re telling me they fired twenty-four shots in a space the size of a two-car garage and hit nothing?”
“That’s exactly what I’m tellin’ you,” McMullen said.
Billy Ray offered a possible explanation. “I’ve seen a few gang shootings where the two sides sprayed bullets in every direction, but no one hit a damn thing because they were all taking cover or running at the time.”
“Sure,” McMullen said. “I’ve seen that too. Except, out here, we have no return fire. This was a one-sided gunfight, but somehow, the guys with the guns ended up losing.”
Kate noticed that most of the orange lines and most of the blue lines converged at a single point, like they’d been fired at a stationary target, catching it in a cross fire. The point was inside the fencing. The target couldn’t have been a car.
“You found no blood?” she asked, just to be sure.
“Only theirs,” he said, pointing to the chalk outlines.
“And they died how?”
“Their throats were ripped out.”
Billy Ray looked surprised. “What?”
“Don’t you FBI types hear too good?” McMullen snapped. “I said their throats were ripped out. Larynxes, voice boxes, and everything else in there—gone.”
“Which means…” she began.
“Someone killed these bastards with their bare hands.”
“While they were blazing away with their guns?”
“That’s what the evidence shows.”
Silence fell over them. Kate looked around, wondering how it could have gone down that way. McMullen stood with his hands in his pockets and his eyebrows up, rocking back and forth as the truth soaked in.
Finally, Billy Ray shook his head. “No way,” he said. “You’ve got something wrong here.”
Kate didn’t like what she was seeing, either. “Maybe they had armor on,” she offered. “Like those guys who robbed the bank in California a few years back. The ones who took on thirty cops, till the cops broke into a rifle store to get more firepower.”
“Yeah, I remember that,” McMullen said scratching his head. “Those guys were walking tanks. They looked like robots from outer space. According to the witnesses here, this was one guy, and he was all decked out in civilian clothes. Looked like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Last I checked, shiny polyester ain’t bulletproof.”
“You’ve witnesses to confirm that?”
“A whole roomful of ’em,” McMullen insisted. “And none of them say anything about a guy in armor or even a vest. Besides, if the perp was wearing a vest, we’d find compressed slugs that hit him, mushroomed, and fell off.”
He pointed to the chalk lines once again and came back to his conclusion. “These guys weren’t drilling shots uselessly into an armored assailant; they were missing.”
Kate couldn’t see how that was possible from such close range, but she couldn’t come up with any other answer.
“What else you got?”
“We believe there was a third victim.”
“Where?”
McMullen pointed to a circle on the ground. “We found a Glock over there,” he said. “Most of the witnesses said there were three guys at this door when they came in—two black guys and one white guy. The white guy seems to be missing.”
“Could the Glock belong to the assailant?” Billy Ray asked.
“Possibly,” McMullan said, shrugging, “except it was never fired. Would you get in a war like this and never pull the trigger and then leave your gun on the ground when you left?”
McMullen was right; that made no sense. The Glock seemed more likely to be the third bouncer’s gun. “What are the chances you’ll get a hit on the prints?”
McMullan tilted his head to the side as if he was calculating. “Considering the quality of people at a rave like this, I’d say damn near a hundred percent. Most of these guys have enjoyed the hospitality of the New York State penal system at one time or another. We should have a name in a day or two.”
Kate guessed that McMullan was right, but she wondered what good it would do beyond telling them who the third victim was.
She studied the scene again, walking around it, looking at it from the victims’ perspectives. None of it made any sense to her. The .357 shells were aimed fairly consistently. Shots from the Tech 9 had fanned the whole lot. At the rate a gun like the Tech 9 dispensed bullets, the whole thing couldn’t have taken more than a few seconds. But how in the hell they’d managed to hit nothing and then been killed at arm’s length was beyond her.
“Any motive?”
McMullen eased toward the door. “Our first thought was robbery. Maybe someone got greedy. The problem is, nobody touched the cash.”
“What about the drugs?”
“My guys impounded enough dope to fill a couple of suitcases. This wasn’t a theft. Even these poor bastards died with the door money on ’em. I’m talkin’ thousands.”
Kate looked at Billy Ray. He shook his head. Neither of them had any answers.
“So it wasn’t a hit, it wasn’t a turf war, and it wasn’t a theft,” she said. “What the hell was it?”
McMullan shrugged. He looked tired and a little ragged, probably sick of being on the scene already. “I don’t know,” he said, waving them toward the open doors. “But come with me. I’ll show you the weird part.”
As McMullen went under the police tape and entered the building, Billy Ray exchanged glances with Kate.
“The weird part?” he said.
“I’d have thought this was the weird part,” she replied.
She ducked under the tape and stepped into the expansive warehouse. Shade and light fell down from above, mixing on the floor in strange patterns.
McMullen pointed to an opening in the ceiling. It was a busted-out skylight. Glass littered the floor beneath it.
“I’ve been here for the better part of twelve hours,” McMullen said. “I’ve interviewed hookers who promised to take care of me if I let them go and trust funders who tried to bribe me or threaten me with their big-time lawyers. I’ve talked to junkies and thugs and a few businessmen who were pissing their pants about even giving me their names. Everybody has a different story about why they were here and what they thought was really going on in this place. But on this”—he nodded toward the busted skylight—“on this one point, every single one of them says the same damn thing.”
“Which is?”
&nb
sp; “He fell.”
“Who fell?” Billy Ray asked.
“The assailant,” McMullan explained. “He crashed through the skylight with a big knife sticking out of his ribs, dropped to concrete floor, and landed flat on his face. They all thought he was dead. Then he got up, ripped the knife out of his side, and ran into the crowd. At least five people saw him leave through this entrance. That’s when the shooting started.”
Kate now understood why no one had bothered trying to explain the incident over the phone or even talk about it until she and Billy Ray were on the scene.
“That’s a hell of a fall,” Billy Ray noted. “The guy had to be on something.”
“Sure,” McMullen said. “But even if he was on some designer drug that makes you insane and unable to feel pain, that fall would have killed ninety-nine out of a hundred people. Yet this guy gets up and walks away.”
Kate couldn’t even imagine the hundredth person surviving. “What was he doing on the roof in the first place?”
“That’s where he took the girl,” McMullan said. “The one whose throat he cut.”
Suddenly, Kate remembered why they were here. “We’re going to need to talk to her,” she said.
“Sure,” McMullen said. “You can find her at Belleview in protective custody. But good luck getting anything out of her. Whatever she was on, she doesn’t remember a damn thing.”
Kate looked at Billy Ray. “Maybe her mind will clear up by the time we get there.”
“Yeah, that always happens,” McMullen said sarcastically.
Kate sighed. Looking over the entire scene, she felt lost. The initial call had given her hope that they might be on to something, especially when they’d heard that a victim had survived, but the details were baffling.
It felt odd. It felt wrong. All the other crimes were so clean and quiet. This one was loud and chaotic and messy. She had no way of explaining what had happened in the abandoned factory, but whatever had gone down, she didn’t think it was connected to the Boston crimes.
When Billy Ray spoke, he sounded like he was thinking along the same lines. “So all this happens,” he said, “and all we know is that some crazy, doped-up freak managed to kill a couple of armed thugs and run away. Is that it?”