Extreme Liquidation: Caitlin Diggs Series #2

by Gary Starta

  He swung open the driver’s side door as quiet as a mouse. Armed with a gun, a recording device and binoculars, Andrew Dudek resolved to bring Connah Hainsworth to justice the old fashioned way. He had planned on using the trust serum on Hainsworth to force a confession, but Dudek couldn’t chance the risk of being caught breaking into Hoyt’s lab. If he were spotted, it would have given Hainsworth an easy out to fire him. Additionally, if Hainsworth were to resume his morning ritual, there would be no time to enter the lab through the necessary bureaucratic channels. It might have taken an hour to fill out the necessary paperwork to gain lab admission.

  Yesterday, Hainsworth arrived at the Verizon Center hockey arena at seven o’clock sharp. Dudek believed the director was a creature of habit; therefore, it was most crucial to arrive at the arena on time. At six forty-five, Dudek parked in the garage adjacent to the arena and exited his car. On his knees, positioned snugly along the passenger side of his Buick, Dudek endured the brutality of the January cold upon his back. His joints and bones protested from exposure to the cold concrete below him, but Dudek stood his ground, waiting patiently, crouching behind the hood of his vehicle to gain a vantage point on the man heading for the entrance door. A sarcastic smile enveloped his face when the binoculars confirmed the man in the distance to be none other than Director Connah Hainsworth.

  Hainsworth dropped his cinch sack to the pavement, fumbling for a pair of glasses in his overcoat. Simultaneously, Dudek bore down upon his target with the binoculars, training the telescopic device upon Hainsworth as if it were a weapon. Dudek grimaced as his nemesis proceeded to enter a numeric code upon a keypad. Dudek’s hope for justice all boiled down to matching the exact sequence of numbers.

  Minutes later, Dudek correctly repeated the seven digit code. A chime confirmed his entry; it also alerted Hainsworth to his presence. Dudek utilized his binoculars as a makeshift doorstop and went inside.

  ***

  Connah Hainsworth had frequented the arena every morning for the past two weeks. He had called in a favor to a friend of a friend who had been arrested for fraud last spring. Hainsworth had magically made the charges disappear. The friend of the friend was only too happy to oblige the FBI Director, yet he was somewhat perplexed as to why a government official would want to spend his mornings all alone in a sports venue. The friend of a friend didn’t know Connah Hainsworth was the reincarnation of Aleister Crowley, a.k.a. the Master. He also didn’t know the Master was a delusional FBI Director hell bent on exterminating the entire human race.

  Every morning, the Master pretended a flock of humble followers filled the arena. The Verizon Center, home to hockey’s Washington Capitals and basketball’s Washington Wizards, seated nearly twenty thousand. The Master pretended each and every one of those twenty thousand seats was filled with a devoted follower ready to throw down his or her life for the cause.

  It sure beat the hell out of spending time in the dismal, draft-filled abandoned church. There, in the confines of a dilapidated rectory, the Master sometimes had a hard time convincing himself of his powers. Rats brazenly approached him during Black Masses held there. They stood upon their hind legs, twitching their mouths, mocking him. Sometimes, cockroaches scurried up and down the church pulpit. It reminded him how small he must seem to the gods.

  A few years ago, Connah Hainsworth believed he was an ordinary man, a mortal man—a man fortunate enough to become the FBI’s youngest Director. He didn’t realize that an inner voice secretly willed him to this position or even that the voice did not belong to him. He would come to recognize the voice as Aleister Crowley’s. It eventually commanded him to obey the laws of Thelema, an occult philosophy for life.

  Hainsworth would eventually lose his family because of Crowley, but Connah believed it was a small price to pay. His work as Director would never be fulfilling. No matter how many crimes he solved in his lifetime, he could never right the wrongs of civilization. The next generation would experience the same hate, war and intolerance of its predecessors. Only an exit strategy would ensure success. Because humanity bred hate, war and intolerance, it must be vanquished.

  The fantasy gave him the strength to be Connah Hainsworth. By day, he was the nation’s trusted and respected FBI head. By night, he was the purple-robed Master, the reincarnation of black magician Aleister Crowley, the one who would lead his disciples through the Golden Mean Spiral to the Kingdom of the Gods.

  ***

  Dudek followed a shiny linoleum-tiled hallway, stealing glances over his shoulder every few seconds. All the while he kept his hand on his weapon, although he heard not one footfall ahead or behind him. He followed the hallway until he came to an entrance labeled Section 100. Instinct compelled him to enter. Hainsworth might very well be in any one of the arena’s twenty thousand seats. He could be across from him, above him, to the left, to the right. It made sense to access the seating section from its center. There, at this nexus, Dudek might be able to quickly ascertain the Director’s whereabouts from a central vantage point.

  He came to a tactical realization. He must enter and assess the situation in seconds. Even one moment spent dawdling in confusion could mean life or death. He must contain his emotions and treat the enemy as nothing more than a nameless, faceless suspect, and above all, he must never allow the pursuit to become personal. Dudek had drilled these words into every agent he had ever supervised. He clenched his jaw at the hypocrisy. Hainsworth had converted him into someone else. Someone he could no longer recognize. It was demoralizing, and worst of all, Hainsworth had accomplished this feat without the aid of psychotropic drugs.

  Dudek drew his gun. A few meters ahead, the small, enclosed hallway he now stood in would open into the spacious environs of the Verizon Center. He crouched his body at a right angle, pointing his gun upwards as he traversed his way across the threshold, exhaling small breaths of air into the dank atmosphere.

  The first thing he noticed was a huge overhead scoreboard mounted on the arena’s ceiling. It told him the Washington Capitals would be facing off against the New Jersey Devils later that evening. Dudek could feel a chill in the air. His rational mind might have reasoned the cold was emanating from the frozen ice surface directly in front of him, but his subconscious mind fed on fear.

  He imagined an invisible presence was somewhere near, waiting, watching. He did not feel this presence before he entered the arena; therefore, his mind reasoned the intangible specter might be seated somewhere in close proximity. He refused to associate this invisible presence with that of Hainsworth. He had no reason to believe the pair of unseen eyes boring down on him belonged to his nemesis. Hainsworth may be a bastard all right, but he was flesh and bones just like any other man.

  Because he possessed an open mind, Dudek would not discount the possibility that some unexplained phenomena not part of Hainsworth—but quite possibly in league with him—may be at work.

  Andrew Dudek’s association with Caitlin Diggs had influenced him greatly, expanding his mind to entertain the existence of the paranormal. As a consequence, he refused to believe the ominous feeling that had now enveloped him arose simply from a few jangled nerves. He also realized this presence might continue to elude him as a shapeless form if it could indeed exist outside his fringe of reality. Because he might never see this presence with his own eyes, he refocused his energies on the man he could follow: Hainsworth himself.

  Dudek aimed his gun, right, left, then directly in front of him as his feet led him along a narrow passageway between rows and rows of red-colored seats. The path would take him to center ice. Between him and the ice stood a gated door attached to a meter-high wall known in hockey circles as “the boards.”

  A large truck-like vehicle designed to clean the ice was parked about five meters beyond the gated door. Dudek surmised the Zamboni ice machine might provide him with an effective means of cover. He ambled toward the boards, plodding along at a slow, deliberate pace, eyes scanning and straining to ensure each seat encompassing him
did not contain his enemy. The rows of red seats ahead, around and beside him collectively seemed to move along with him. It was as if they had suddenly come alive. They too moved deliberately, resembling dominos in slow motion.

  Their movement began to take their toll on Dudek. He braced himself for a wave of motion sickness. As a kid, he recalled how his mind seemed to play tricks on him each time he rode in the back seat of his parent’s station wagon. He would watch the landscapes from his window. Sometimes the land appeared to move in several directions at once, turning both the laws of physics and his stomach upside down in the process. He fought the urge to vomit much as he did some forty years earlier.

  His head swam, like it did all those years ago. No, the seats could not be moving, he told himself. It was an optical illusion, like the ones he had in the wagon. Chairs don’t start revolving around like the pretty, painted ponies on a Merry Go Round, unless... The unseen presence may be creating his hallucinations. He began to wonder if all strange experiences he had ever endured in the back seat of his parent’s station wagon were merely attributable to motion sickness. Maybe he was sensitive to the presence of unseen forces back then. But the urgency of the moment afforded no time to take a trip down memory lane.

  Right now, he had to resist the urge to vomit, make his way through the gated door and get himself into the Zamboni. Despite his awareness of a strange ethereal presence, instinct told Dudek he might still be able to wage a surprise attack on Hainsworth. Minutes later, atop the Zamboni, gun trained on a section of seats directly across the arena, Dudek swore Hainsworth had suddenly appeared out of thin air.

  Despite their carnival like rotations, those cherry red colored seats were completely and utterly empty mere seconds earlier. Dudek would have sworn his life on it. His mind struggled to process what he believed to be false sensory perceptions. Dudek watched a man, a man he had simply classified as an ordinary—albeit evil—human being, transform the area about him. He seemed capable of converting space into matter, and vice versa. The gray overcoat he wore shimmered into a veil of nothingness, and in its place, a purple robe materialized about him.

  Now cloaked in the cocoon of a hooded purple robe, the man who appeared to have been Hainsworth consisted as mere shadow. He began to wave what still appeared to be an arm above and across his obsidian body, as if he were some kind of rock star leading a crowd in a unified chant. The motion of the man’s arm sent the air directly above and around him swelling into a strange metamorphosis. The atmosphere about his body wavered, stretching into an oblong blob of golden light before finally transmuting itself into a shimmering spiral. From that spiral, a projectile emerged.

  Stunned by this apparition, Dudek came to the realization a bullet had entered his body when bright drops of crimson red began to stain the tops of his shoes. He stumbled sideways and fell into the driver’s seat of the Zamboni. Blood soaked his shirt. He had been shot in the stomach.

  And then his cellphone rang.

  Chapter 27

  The combination of armed guards, concrete walls and steel bars are usually adequate to keep the public safe from humanity’s monsters. And like most prisons, the MCI-Cedar Junction penal facility in Walpole, Massachusetts depended upon these three key ingredients to make sure its convicted killers were never afforded the slightest opportunity to threaten society again. Yet one man, allegedly capable of killing with only his mind, spent his days making prison staff quite uncomfortable at this facility. Here, the guards, and even the warden himself, had come to a realization that they and the public they protected would never be completely safe from serial killer Aldo Mollini.

  Deep in their hearts, they allowed fear to slowly poison them. Of course, the prison staff never vocalized these feelings with one another. Any belief in the paranormal might expose them to ridicule and ultimately the loss of their jobs. As a consequence, these men and women went about their daily business pretending with their minds that Mollini posed no threat to them. But in their hearts, a place deep in the human psyche, a place where logic often decays, they couldn’t block out an inner voice.

  The voice reminded them instinctive fear would never quite be weeded out of the human genetic pool. And like a small clock ticking within them, this primal fear also suggested that intangible trepidation might pose a bigger threat to both their mental and physical welfare than any three-hundred-pound human gorilla currently in lockdown.

  Condemned to spend the rest of his days here, Aldo Mollini embodied the unknown, possessing the ability to inflict intangible fear beyond the confines of concrete and steel. For this very reason, MCI-Cedar Junction Warden Val Garrity had become disturbed when Boston Crime Lab detective Stanford Carter requested a visit with Mollini, outside his cell on prison grounds.

  A year ago, state prosecutors convinced a jury to convict Mollini on multiple counts of attempted murder, thanks to Carter’s diligence. Despite the fact Mollini never laid a hand on any of his victims, nor used any type of conventional weapon upon them, jurors found Mollini guilty as charged.

  At the suggestion of Carter, prosecutors called upon a top New England psychiatrist to substantiate the detective’s theory that Mollini had hypnotized his victims. Carter testified to this on a witness stand, employing celebrity psychiatrist Will Arbor to confirm his theory was sound. Arbor presented a compelling argument, maintaining that the power of suggestion is often more effective than any drug. Under Mollini’s influence, Arbor testified the victims willfully induced fatal harm upon themselves.

  Arbor, a familiar face among Bostonians, often broadcasted live counseling sessions on both TV and radio, assisting some of Boston’s most celebrated movers and shakers on anything from relationships to career choices. As a consequence, Arbor’s quote ran as a headline in the renowned Boston Globe, inviting criticism from many journalists who blasted the newspaper for printing tabloid journalism.

  Jurors ultimately bought the theory, because it came accompanied with a taped recording of Mollini as well as a signed confession. Instead of a gun or knife, an answering machine tape, recorded in the confines of the victim’s home, had become the smoking gun. Contracted by a wealthy couple to remodel their bathroom, Mollini intended to work his machinations against them from the start, literally using the power of suggestion via satanic chant. This chant had been caught on tape.

  The defense attorney conceded that Mollini had ample opportunity, but did he have motive? Carter countered with a strong supposition. The detective theorized Mollini had a strong motive to kill his clients because his contract assured him payment up front for any and all remodeling work. Therefore, if they were to conveniently die during the remodeling, Mollini could stand to walk away with free money.

  But it wasn’t lax behavior that condemned Mollini to a jail cell. Thanks to the couple’s pet—a Tonkinese cat named Celeste—a recording of Mollini’s satanic chants was captured on an answering machine. The cat presumably had not only activated the recorder but also dialed Carter’s phone number in time to prevent the coerced suicides. The Andersons, at Carter’s suggestion, had put the detective’s phone number on speed dial.

  Celeste’s ability to capture Mollini on tape had finally provided enough tangible evidence to convince jurors the human mind could be malevolently manipulated. Other bits of evidence, including occult books and magical charms confiscated from Mollini’s residence also served as an exhibit for the jury. Coupled with a signed confession for two counts of attempted murder, hotly contested by the defense attorney afterward as “taken under duress,” Mollini was sentenced to two consecutive twenty-year terms.

  Nestled amidst a bedroom community, one could easily mistake MCI-Cedar Junction as a formidable fortress, based upon appearance alone. Its concrete structure conveyed a material line between society and its criminals. But the Massachusetts Department of Correction and Detective Stanford Carter knew better than to trust logic and appearance.

  Deep in their hearts, they questioned whether that material line would be suff
icient to keep society safe from the likes of Aldo Mollini. Carter’s logical mind believed the thick cement walls of the prison might actually inhibit Mollini from using his telepathic powers of suggestion. His heart told him different. And because of this, Carter visited the maximum security prison on a brisk Saturday morning with the hope he could coerce one monster to give up another. Ultimately, it was this notion that won over Warden Garrity, although he never quite admitted this to the crime lab detective.

  “So, Detective Carter, did you bring your pet cat along today? Have you finally taught her to talk, so she can provide further damning evidence against me?”

  Carter chose to ignore Mollini’s opening taunt with silence. With arms folded in front of him, Carter began to peruse the small confines of Mollini’s jail cell, using only his eyes to mock the killer and his limited surroundings. Carter continued to maintain his silence as guards worked within the cell. They were preparing Mollini for transport outside the facility. He and Carter would meet on a small stretch of land located on the west end of the property. Mollini agreed to the meeting on the condition that it would be held outdoors and at a distance from guards.

  Along the perimeter of prison property, on a quiet Saturday morning, Mollini stood toe to toe with Carter. The standoff between evil and good had begun. The sun shone brightly in the eastern sky. In the west, a few clouds tinged with black languished. And a couple hundred meters away, families were beginning to sit down for breakfast.

  The detective and prisoner seemed to reside in some sort of twilight existence at this moment, caught in the wake of an invisible vortex where either one could easily step into the other’s shoes. Shackled in restraints, Mollini did not appear to be a threat. Still, Carter realized, if Mollini were to put his mind to it, he might be capable of escape. Worse, he might be able to hypnotize him. Silently, Carter chanted in his mind, I won’t do your bidding for you, Mollini. I won’t do your bidding...