Alpha Kill - 03

by Tim Stevens

  Then another series of shots, from further away, as a car’s engine revved.

  The rifle fire had stopped, and through the ringing of the aftershock, Beth could hear voices, lots of them.

  And, in the distance, sirens.

  *

  The firing had stopped, and in the sudden relative silence, pieces of plaster dropped off the walls, and a plant pot dropped off a ruined table to smash on the floor.

  Two men appeared at the foot of the stairs, one after the other. From where he was crouched against the wall, Venn gestured frantically at them to get away, get back up the stairs. They stared about, uncomprehendingly.

  “Get back up there,” Venn yelled. This time he got through to them, and they disappeared once more.

  Venn put the phone to his ear once more but the connection had been lost.

  He raised himself to a fully standing position, edged over to the door frame, and risked a peek round.

  The car, an SUV, was swinging away already. Along the street, lights blazed in every building and people stood huddled in doorways.

  Venn stepped out and aimed the Beretta in a two-handed grip at the head of the man in the passenger seat.

  He would have pulled the trigger, but something made him hesitate. Some sucker-punch of astonishment in his brain, before he had a chance to analyze it.

  From the right, a woman came racing along the street toward Venn, screaming, a tiny lapdog clutched in her hands. Venn shouted at her, “Get back,” but the woman, in the grip of hysteria, kept coming.

  The SUV pulled away as the woman drew level with Venn. She was right in his line of fire.

  He threw himself sideways, trying to keep his aim steady. But the SUV rocketed round the corner and out of sight.

  Venn didn’t waste a moment running after it. Instead, he turned and sprinted in the opposite direction, toward where the Jeep stood, shattered glass strewn around it.

  Please, he thought. Please...

  He slammed against the side of the Jeep, seeing the bullet holes in the door panel at the rear, and stuck his head in the gap where the window had been.

  Beth peered up at him from the footwell, her eyes so still that for a moment he thought it was the stare of death.

  Then he noticed the tremor, the way her whole body was shaking as if the very core of her was about to erupt.

  He glanced into the front seat, saw Harmony leaning back, breathing hard through pursed lips. her eyes angled toward his, and he knew she was unhurt.

  Venn turned and scanned the vicinity slowly, his gun extended. But there was no sign of anybody hostile. Just a growing horde of onlookers, emerging from apartment blocks and houses and side streets, drawn in fearful wonder by the noise, gazing at the debris on the street, the glass and the spent shell casings.

  The first of the police squad cars screamed to a halt and Venn held up his arms, his gun in one hand and his shield, clearly displayed, in the other.

  Only then, as the uniformed cops came running forward, their guns drawn and their eyes darting, taking in the scene, did Venn allow himself to think about what he’d seen a second ago.

  No, not what he’d seen, but who.

  The hair was wrong, and the shape of the face was a little different. But Venn had no doubt.

  The man in the passenger seat of the SUV, the one who’d fired the automatic rifle, was Gene Drake.

  Chapter 33

  “Son of a bitch,” Skeet shouted. “Son of a bitch. You had him. You had him.”

  In the rearview mirror, Drake saw the flashing lights of police cars massing behind them. He said to Walusz, “Slow down a little.”

  The Pole eased off on the gas pedal. He’d already put several blocks between them and the scene behind. They could afford to slow down, and thereby reduce the risk of attracting attention.

  Skeet hovered in the gap between the front seats, whining like a bored child on a long family trip. “Whyn’t you finish him off, man? We coulda driven through those fuckin’ doors.”

  “See those flashers behind us?” Drake said. “Hear those sirens? If we’d stuck around a moment longer, we’d be dead now. Is that what you’d want?”

  “Yeah, but, man...” Skeet’s teeth were chattering. “A chance like that... there may not be another one.”

  Drake knew that. And yes, he was pissed that he hadn’t hit Venn. After the cop had gone into the building and the lights had gone on in the Colby woman’s apartment a minute later, Drake knew he was up there. When the lights went out again, he knew he was coming down.

  If he’d waited just a couple more seconds, until Venn was back out in the street, he’d have got him.

  Still, there was no point wallowing in regret. The euphoria Drake had felt when he’d first recognized Venn hadn’t left him. He knew now that Joe Venn was in New York. That was the main thing.

  Now all he needed to do was track him down, and finish the job.

  Drake’s phone rang. Gudrun.

  “What the hell happened back there?” he said.

  “There were other people in the Jeep, as you suspected,” she said. Her voice was as matter-of-fact as if she was describing what she’d had for lunch. “Two women. I think one was Colby, though I couldn’t see for sure. The other was a cop. Herman pulled alongside and opened fire.”

  “You kill them?” asked Drake.

  “Maybe Colby. I can’t be sure. The cop was fast.” Gudrun didn’t sound embarrassed. “She returned fire. We saw you heading away, and decided to follow rather than duke it out.”

  Drake couldn’t very well complain about that. “Okay.”

  “Another thing,” she said. “Our car’s taken a hit. Nothing serious, but there’s a hole in the side. Very visible.”

  “Ditch the car,” said Drake. “Tell me where you are and we’ll come collect you.”

  He took the address, then hung up.

  At his shoulder, Skeet said: “What’s the plan now?”

  “We go back to the safe house,” Drake said. “Meantime, I’ve got a call to make.”

  He found the number he wanted, thumbed it.

  This time, the man answered more quickly than the last. “Yes.”

  “You said to call you if I needed any help.”

  “Surely.”

  “I need you to find out about a cop. A guy named Joseph Venn.”

  Chapter 34

  The street resembled the aftermath of a war zone. Red, white and blue lights splashed the walls of the buildings into which an army of uniformed cops was corralling onlookers. The crime scene techs were already at work, collecting the shell casings and taking photos from multiple angles.

  Beth leaned against a squad car, hugging herself. Venn and Harmony stood close by, along with the two detectives from earlier, Brady and Rich.

  Venn ticked the numbers off on his fingers. “So. We’ve got at least four of them. Drake and his driver. The two in the car that shot at you, Harm. And I’m pretty sure there was another guy in the back of the SUV, which makes five.”

  Rich was taking notes in an old-fashioned spiral-bound notebook. To Harmony, he said, “And you think one of the two in the car was a woman?”

  “I don’t think it,” said Harmony. “I’m certain. Blond. Like the gunman. A good-looking pair. Guess they see themselves as Bonnie and Clyde or something.”

  Harmony had already said she’d hit the station wagon with at least one shot, though probably not anywhere that would disable it. More importantly, she’d had the presence of mind to note the license plate. The number was already being run through the DMV.

  Once enough cops were there to secure the scene, and Venn had made sure that Beth was okay, he’d called Rockford, and asked to be put through to Special Agent Dennis Yancy as a matter of urgency. Despite the late hour, Yancy couldn’t have been asleep because he came on the line in under a minute.

  “Drake’s here,” said Venn. “In Manhattan.”

  He gave Yancy a brief rundown. The man listened, punctuating Venn’
s monologue with barked orders off to the side as he mobilized his people.

  At the end, Yancy said, “Holy crap, Joe.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What the hell’s it all mean? You figured it out yet?”

  “No,” said Venn. “But I will.”

  “You need to watch yourself, Joe. He won’t stop, not now that he failed to kill you once.”

  “I know that,” said Venn. “And I’m going to use that to our advantage.”

  Yancy said: “What, like use yourself as bait? You gotta be nuts. No, man. Leave him to us. We’ll seal New York up tighter than an asshole.”

  “Gotta go, Yance.” Venn hung up and made his way back to the others. He wanted to get moving, to keep some momentum going. Soon the New York FBI guys would want to talk to him, and that would slow him up.

  Venn drew Lieutenant Brady aside. “Listen,” he said. “What you asked me earlier, about why I was so interested in Brogan’s death. You were right. I wasn’t just being supportive of Beth. Brogan was tied in with a case I’m investigating. And now it seems Drake is, too.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “So I’m asking if you’ll give me a little latitude. I’ve told you everything that went down here just now. Let me get on with my case. I’ll do the interviews and the statements and the paperwork later. And I promise you, if I discover anything more about why Brogan was killed, or how it relates to Drake, I’ll let you know.”

  “Sure you will.” Brady didn’t quite roll her eyes, but her tone suggested it. “Go on. Get out of here.”

  “Appreciate it.” Venn went over to Beth and Harmony. “Come on. We’re going back to the office. There are camp beds there you can rest up on, Beth.”

  Harmony nodded past his shoulder. “Jeep’s pretty shot up.”

  He turned and looked. The Jeep was barely visible though all the crime scene people swarming over it.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Damn.”

  He approached Brady again. “One more request. You got a squad car you can spare?”

  *

  They sat round the office once again, Venn and Harmony and Beth and Fil, drinking coffee and caffeinated soda and working their way through a colossal pile of sandwiches Fil had ordered in from the all-night deli round the corner when he’d heard they were on their way back.

  Venn was surprised and pleased to see that Beth had an appetite. In fact, she seemed ravenous, wolfing down the pastrami subs as if she’d been starved for a week. He’d half-heartedly tried to persuade her to lie down and rest, but she wouldn’t stand for it.

  Although her face was drawn, her eyes haunted, and although she’d clearly been shaken anew by the events outside her apartment, Venn detected a steeliness in Beth which had been absent for a long time. She no longer conveyed the impression that she could fall apart at any moment.

  A large whiteboard covered part of one wall of the office, and Venn drew three circles on it in different colored marker pens. Inside the circle he wrote, respectively, Drake, Paul and Clinic.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s link them up.”

  He drew connecting lines between the Drake and Paul circles, and Paul and Clinic. Then a broken line between Drake and Clinic.

  He tapped the line. “This is the key,” he said.

  “Assuming it exists,” Harmony mumbled around a mouthful of corn chips.

  “If it doesn’t,” said Venn, “then we’re looking at a whopper of a coincidence.”

  Fil got up and traced his finger along the Drake-Paul line. “How about this one?” he said. “We’re assuming, I guess, that Drake and his cronies killed Dr Brogan deliberately, that it wasn’t just some random crime. So what’s the link?”

  Beth stirred. “Those flash disks,” she said. “The ones from my apartment.”

  “Yeah. I forgot about those,” Venn admitted. He took them out of his pocket and handed them to her. Beth sorted through them on her palm, placing most of them aside until she was left with four.

  “These are the ones Paul gave me,” she said. “Let me use a computer.”

  She wheeled her chair over to the nearest workstation, where the desktop computer was already booted up, and inserted the first of the drives.

  The others hovered at her shoulders. Venn saw a long list of Excel spreadsheets. Beth began to open them, one by one. The array of figures meant nothing to Venn.

  “They’re data from a research study Paul was supervising,” said Beth. “Prevalence stats on different forms of psychiatric disorder in the Bronx. Nothing especially relevant to us.”

  The second drive contained Word documents and PDFs, which Beth determined were various drafts of a review paper Paul had been writing for the journal Annals of Psychiatry. Again, it didn’t look to be related to their inquiry.

  The third drive contained far more files, again mostly word-processing documents.

  “These are reports,” Beth said. “Case studies, but also court assessments. Paul’s redacted them so that the names aren’t shown – he always was a stickler for patient confidentiality. Scores of them, going back a decade.”

  Venn looked away from the monitor. Something was nagging at his memory.

  “Hang on,” he said. “Paul only took up his current post three, four years ago, right?”

  “Yes,” said Beth.

  “So some of these reports predate his time in New York.”

  “Right.”

  The nagging in his head was turning into a shout.

  “And he worked in Chicago, before coming here.”

  Fil looked up, met Venn’s eyes. “Ah, man,” he said.

  Venn searched his memory quickly. “Beth, see if there are any reports from eight years ago. Even better, from seven and a half. Say the spring of 2007.”

  She scrolled through the list. “Yes, here’s one. A big file, by the look of it.”

  Venn peered over her shoulder. The report was set out in dry, legalistic terminology.

  Phrases jumped out at Venn.

  Convicted on two counts of first-degree murder.

  Two concurrent life sentences.

  Displaying features suggestive of psychosis, including third-person auditory hallucinations and persecutory delusions of a bizarre content.

  “Hot damn,” said Venn. “That’s Gene Drake.”

  The others looked at him.

  He said, “Fil. See if you can get into the online archives of one of the big Chicago daily newspapers. The Tribune or the Sun-Times, one of those. Around April or May 2007. Look for mentions of Drake.”

  Fil sat at the adjacent computer and tapped away, the others crowding around him this time.

  “Yep, here we go,” he said.

  Killer Drake Loses Appeal, said the front-page headline.

  “That’s it,” said Venn. “His lawyer lodged an appeal on the grounds that Drake had schizophrenia, which was undiagnosed at the time of his conviction. The stress of the trial and the life sentences supposedly triggered an acute psychotic episode. The symptoms were so convincing that the court ruled he could appeal against his sentence. It wouldn’t have changed the conviction, but it would have meant he’d go to a treatment facility rather than remain at Horn Creek. I guess he might have escaped more easily from the new place. I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time, because I’d done my part, putting him away, and I couldn’t care less what happened to him after that. But I remember reading that the psychiatrist called by the prosecution to provide an assessment wiped the floor with the shrink the defense hired. Basically, the psychiatrist said it was all bullshit, that drake was faking his symptoms. The court believed him, the life sentences were upheld, and Drake stayed at Horn Creek.”

  As if on cue, Fil scrolled down, and there was the name: Dr Paul Brogan.

  “So Brogan blows Drake’s last shot at getting out of Horn Creek,” said Harmony. “Drake harbors a major grudge, and the first thing he does when he escapes is track Brogan down and kill him.”

  “Not track him down,”
said Venn. “Drake already knew exactly where Brogan lived. He headed straight here from Illinois. Must’ve done, because he only escaped last night.”

  Harmony dropped into one of the office chairs and swayed this way and that, looking deflated. “But that means this is all a big coincidence. Whatever Brogan’s involvement with this clinic business is, Drake happened to be after him for a totally different reason.”

  Venn said: “I don’t know.”

  He began to pace the office, forcing himself to take it slowly, so that he could think.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll ask questions, and you guys give me an answer. First: how did he know where Paul Brogan lived? Most doctors keep their home addresses even more private than us cops. I’d imagine psychiatrists in particular.”

  “Some connection on the outside,” said Harmony.

  “Like who? Drake’s a shrewd bastard, and a cut above your average gangbanger, but he isn’t mobbed up. He’s never had friends in high places. Who would he get to track down a doctor, especially one who’s moved away from the city?”

  “He had almost eight years to work on it,” said Fil. “It’s possible.”

  “All right.” Venn turned, began pacing back. “Let’s grant that it’s possible Drake bribed somebody, or whatever, to track down Brogan’s address. Next question. How did he escape from Horn Creek?”

  “Like you said,” Harmony pointed out. “The power supply was sabotaged.”

  “And my FBI guy thinks it was an inside job,” said Venn. “One of the guards. Now, what would it take for a guard to risk something like that? Trigger a full-scale breakout from a maximum-security facility?”

  Fil said, “Money.”

  “Exactly. And a lot of money. Prison guards aren’t exactly paid a king’s ransom, but it would still take a hell of a big sum to convince one of them to put his neck on the line in such a way. There’d need to be sizable up-front payment, too, to seal the deal. Now, Drake didn’t have access to a fortune. His assets were seized after he was busted. Even if he’d hidden away a stash, the total amount he’d gotten away with from all the raids and heists we suspected him of wouldn’t amount to all that much. Thousands, probably. No more than that.”