by Ethan Cross
When his eyes opened, he was ready. He looked at the house with new awareness.
From his vantage point, he could see into part of the kitchen and dining room but not clearly enough to know when Jessie Olague had gone to bed. They had left the lights on. He could see many of them burning in the windows, but from the alley, he couldn’t see her bedroom window on the far side of the house. Maybe from the front? No, a large hard maple tree blocked the view from there.
The killer would want to see her. That was part of the game, part of the excitement. To violate her privacy. Watch her and then own her, possess her.
The alleyway was on a slant. Maybe farther up it? Marcus walked up the slight incline and turned round. From here, he would have had a better view of the kitchen and some of the other rooms if he’d used binoculars. Marcus flipped on his flashlight and scanned the ground, looking for anything out of place—cigarette butts, candy-bar wrapper, coffee cup. But no such luck.
It still didn’t feel right. This woman hadn’t been chosen at random. She’d been selected for a reason, and every aspect of the crime was planned out carefully. He would want to see her, Marcus thought again. Maybe even know her, or at least feel as though he did.
“What the hell is he doing? It’s freezing out here,” Vasques said to Andrew.
Marcus ignored her and moved back to his original position. He would have wanted to know the lay of the land in order to ensure that he wasn’t seen as he approached the house. He was very careful. Every movement calculated, analyzed. Marcus made a mental note that the killer might work with numbers or variables, but he knew that was pure conjecture at this point.
As he examined the area—the alley, the position of the Olague house, viewpoints from the homes of neighbors, fences, trees, obstructions—the killer knew that there would be no way to make sure that no one saw him or his vehicle. He took them in the night, so most of the neighbors would be sleeping, but that couldn’t be guaranteed. Too many variables, not a risk he would take.
He would wear a mask or hood, obscure his face and hair in some way. And he would have taken precautions to make sure that his vehicle was untraceable.
Marcus moved toward the house, following the path the killer would have taken, until he reached the back porch and the sliding glass door. The porch was just an elevated concrete slab with an awning over the top. It provided no cover from watching eyes. A credit card wouldn’t work in a sliding glass door. He could pick the lock—as Marcus and Andrew had done earlier—but that would leave him very exposed. If someone was observing, he would want his entry to seem casual, not like a burglary. Picking the lock was risky, especially if the back-porch light had been left on. It would’ve been best to have a key.
“No signs of forced entry, right?”
“Oh, so you’re talking to me now?” Agent Vasques said.
Marcus shot her a withering glance and waited. After a moment she gave up on the staring contest and replied, “No forced entry.”
He nodded. Then he felt round the door but found no box for a hidden key. His gaze traveled across the small porch. There were a few potted plants scattered around. There was also an area on the outside of the porch filled with small rocks of assorted colors and dried-up flowers covered in snow. Red landscaping bricks surrounded the sectioned-out area and separated the rock from the grass. A key could have been hidden beneath any of the bricks, but that would have made getting to it more difficult. It would have been filthy, covered in dirt, surrounded by bugs and worms.
He walked over to the potted plants and started tilting them over. Beneath the third pot sat a small black box with white letters on it spelling out the words Hide-a-Key.
“Has this been dusted for prints? Maybe we’d get lucky. Maybe he forgot to put on the gloves until after he had the key.” Marcus doubted it, but everyone made mistakes.
Vasques said, “They might have checked it already, but I’ll find out for sure.”
Marcus pulled open the back door and stepped inside. He took in the red and white kitchen, the dining room, the living room. He absorbed the smells, the sounds. A few typical pops and groans. A faint trace of something in the air. Butterscotch. A candle showing signs of recent use sat nearby on an old oak hutch. The plain white label on its face read Maple Valley Candles.
He followed the path through the living room and up the stairs to the bedrooms. The stairs creaked loudly beneath his feet. He tested each step to find which ones made noise. He wondered if the killer would have known this as well. Was he that good?
At the top of the stairs, Marcus moved to Jessie’s bedroom and imagined her sleeping peacefully in the bed. The files and notes he had read climbed to the front of his mind. The killer drugged them to make sure there was no struggle. Marcus imagined inserting the syringe, scooping her into his arms, and humming softly to keep her feeling calm and safe.
But how did I know for sure that she would be asleep? he thought.
The Anarchist was too attentive to every detail to leave that to chance. If he opened the door and she was reading a book or had worries weighing on her mind that kept her from getting to sleep, there would be a violent struggle. She would fight him. She would scratch and bite. She would run, throw things at him. But that had never happened at any of the abduction scenes.
More questions came to mind. How did he know her husband wouldn’t be home? How did he know that no one would be stopping by to disturb them? What time did she go to bed? What time did she have to be at work in the morning?
The answer was simple. The killer knew those things because he had studied her. He knew all her habits and routines. He was a highly organized offender. Calculating, leaving nothing to chance.
But it still seemed as if he was missing something.
How did I know for sure that she would be asleep?
Marcus’s gaze centered on the three-foot-tall red capital letter A within a circle written in spray paint on the wall of the bedroom. It was the killer’s signature, his calling card, and it had earned him his nickname. The Anarchist.
Marcus imagined carrying the girl through the doorway, down the hall, down the stairs, to the back porch. At that point, he would once again have had to move exposed through the backyard.
“Have there been any witnesses at all?”
“We put the time of all the abductions and killings at around three in the morning. Most people are asleep. We did have one guy on the previous set of murders that went out for a smoke and saw a car pulling down the alley. It was a dead end. The best one was from the scene of the last girl’s abduction. A woman saw a guy park in the alley and approach the house. But she didn’t think anything of it at the time, so she couldn’t give us many details beyond what we already know.”
“I’d like to talk to her myself.”
Vasques pressed two fingers against her temple and rubbed. Then she took a piece of gum from her pocket and shoved it into her mouth, adding it to at least two other pieces already there. “Whatever,” she said. “I’ll arrange it. Are we done here? I’m going to turn off the lights and lock up.”
Marcus glanced around the room and then nodded. “Yeah, we’re done.”
As he stepped into the cold on the back porch, he fought down a wave of despair. He had learned a few things, gained a few insights. But it wasn’t much. The Anarchist was a pro, and Marcus had a terrible feeling that there was no way to stop him before more innocent people died.
17
Eleanor Adare Schofield bent down and kissed her husband goodnight. He squeezed her hand and rubbed it against his cheek. “Love you. Don’t stay up too late,” she said. She worked the early-morning shift as a nurse at Oak Forest Hospital. She was in bed early most every night.
“Love you too,” Harrison Schofield said as he watched Eleanor ascend the open staircase leading to the second floor of their beautiful home.
The dark wooden floors were a custom job based upon vintage designs. They featured a perimeter apron made from strips of oak i
n a log-cabin pattern inlaid with narrower strips of walnut with a square-knot pattern in each corner. Schofield had found the design on the Internet and had learned that inlays and intricate patterns became popular after the Industrial Revolution when wood flooring became cheaper to manufacture. The house itself was four thousand, six hundred, and fifty-six square feet, not counting the partially finished basement. Five spacious bedrooms. Three full bathrooms. Dark granite countertops. The master bath contained a whirlpool tub and a large and luxurious walk-in shower with multiple shower-heads that caressed his body from all angles. He and his wife both had walk-in closets the size of many people’s apartments. The ceilings were twelve feet high in the normal rooms, but many of the others had cathedral ceilings. The outside of the house sat on two lots and was clad in red brick dotted with diamonds of white brick.
It was their dream home. It was perfect in every way.
And yet it wasn’t enough.
He hated himself for not being happy in this life, but nothing seemed to fill the numb hollow feeling that had infected his heart like a cancer. He felt so anesthetized, so empty, so worthless.
A few years previously, Eleanor had found him a psychiatrist with a ratty gray beard, and he had agreed to a few visits. After a few months of sessions, the therapist had told Schofield that further testing was needed but he might be suffering from a reduced hedonic capacity or an impairment of his ability to gain pleasure from enjoyable experiences. The doctor with the gray beard had gone on to say that this was coupled with a knockout combination of mild depression and Avoidant Personality Disorder. He had explained that this accounted for Schofield’s feelings of inadequacy, extreme sensitivity to negative evaluation, and avoidance of social interaction.
But Schofield knew it was much more than that. He had ended the sessions shortly thereafter. A psychiatrist couldn’t help him. There was no treatment for what he had.
He couldn’t feel joy because he had been born without a soul.
Still, he loved his family, and he wanted to be better for them. They deserved better. They deserved a whole person, and there was only one way to accomplish that.
Schofield pressed the power button on the remote and the large flat-screen television blinked out with a digital chime. He sat alone in the dark for the next hour, planning out the rest of his evening. Then he walked up the stairs and checked on his wife and children. They were all sleeping peacefully in their beds.
It was time for him to go to work.
He made his way to the garage connected to his workshop and opened the trunk of his Toyota Camry. Jessie Olague was still asleep. He had dosed her periodically throughout the day based upon her height, weight, and body-fat percentage in order to ensure that there would be no complications that evening.
He stroked a strand of brown hair away from her face. Jessie reminded him of one of the girls from the compound in the woods where he had grown up. That was what had attracted his attention when he had first seen her working at the coffee shop in the mall. She looked so much like the adult version of the girl he had known all those years ago. The girl’s name was Mary Kathryn, and he had once had a secret crush on her.
A vision of the other children screaming and burning flashed through his mind. Their eyes were held open in terror as they stared into the center of the circle at him.
Schofield swallowed hard and pushed away thoughts of the past. He took one last long look at Jessie, and then he closed the trunk. It was time for another sacrifice.
Day Four – December 18 Morning
18
Taking aim at the target, Maggie placed six 9mm rounds into the center circle of the black silhouette’s chest. Breathing hard and seething with frustration, she ejected the magazine and slammed home another. This time she unloaded all fifteen rounds in quick succession into two tight circles, one in the chest and one in the head.
She blew a strand of light blond hair from her eyes and dropped the ear-protection headset over a nail on the side of the firing stall. Then she expertly broke down the Glock 19 by holding back the slide with her right hand and pulling down on the slide releases on both sides of the gun. She pushed the spring forward and pulled it out, repeated this with the barrel. She sprayed down, brushed out and oiled all the components, and reassembled the weapon.
As she exited the firing range, she flipped the lights on and off three times and proceeded down a long hallway to the second door on the right. The bathroom contained an old white sink with exposed pipes and an American Standard toilet. She moved to the sink, washed her hands with anti-bacterial soap, rinsed, and repeated the process twice more. As she stepped back toward the hall, she quickly flipped the lights on and off three times, creating a strobe effect.
The end of the hall opened into a large room that had once served as a sorting area for the old textile plant. The room now contained an odd combination of brick walls crumbling from decay and rusty red support pillars sitting beside some of the most advanced computer equipment that money could buy. The various server racks and workstations rested inside a large cage. Maggie remembered their resident tech genius, Stan Macallan, mentioning something about it being a Faraday cage that guarded against electromagnetic-pulse attacks. Network and power cables snaked across the floor in a tangled mess. Along with the computer equipment, the cage also contained an eighty-two-inch television, two black leather couches, a coffee table, and a PlayStation 3. The big television displayed the pause screen of a game, and a game controller flashed bright red on the coffee table.
Stan sat at one of the workstations, pounding away at its keyboard in quick staccato blasts. The big hacker wasn’t at all what she had expected after hearing about his career highlights. Stan had a PhD from MIT and had started a small software firm that had been purchased by Google for a lucrative stock-and-cash package. Maggie wasn’t sure what had happened to him after that.
Within the Shepherd Organization, they had an unwritten “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy concerning their sordid pasts. They all understood that they had been selected to join the group because of a trauma or incident that gave them a unique perspective. They were all damaged goods. She had learned that Andrew had once had a wife and a daughter and the Director had once been a profiler with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit.
And then, of course, there was her own story involving her younger brother and a serial killer known as The Taker. She cringed, thinking of how her brother’s killer was still out there, still at large. But she knew virtually nothing about Stan’s dark secrets except that she had never seen him leave the building.
Stan also didn’t resemble what she’d expect from someone with a PhD. He was six-foot-three and weighed two hundred and seventy pounds. Tattoos ran down his arms, and a reddish-blond beard stretched from his chin to the center of his stomach. A half-empty bottle of twenty-year-old Scotch and a plastic cup sat next to him on the formica surface of the desk.
Flipping a chair around backward, Maggie sat next to him and said, “What are you working on?”
His stare didn’t leave the computer screen. “Marcus thinks the Anarchist may not have been dormant during the past year and a half. He thinks maybe he just altered his MO or changed cities. So I’m scouring the cyber landscape for any connections.”
“Have you found anything?”
“Nada. What are you working on?”
Maggie filled the plastic cup with a double shot of Scotch and downed the whole thing. “You’re looking at it.”
Stan stared at her, his mouth hanging open. “I don’t think I’ve been more attracted to a woman in my entire life. Would you mind taking off your shirt and doing that again?”
She punched him in the shoulder and poured another glass.
Stan checked the time and said, “I take it Marcus hasn’t called you yet.”
“No, he hasn’t.”
“It’s still early.”
She said nothing but tipped back the glass of Scotch.
Stan continued. �
��You know, I agree with you. I think it’s a load of crap that he made you stay behind. What do you think Marcus would do if he were in the same situation?”
Maggie laughed. “Marcus would tell his superior where to stick it and do whatever he thought was right.” The smile faded from her lips. That was exactly what she needed to do.
Stan swiveled his chair toward her and said, “If it were me, I’d be off like a prom dress.” He grabbed a piece of paper sitting on the opposite side of the computer monitor and held it out to her. “I took the liberty of booking you on the next flight out of DCA heading to O’Hare. Here’s your boarding pass. You better get packing.”
19
Harrison Schofield sat down for breakfast beside his three children: two girls and one boy, ranging in ages from five to fifteen. His oldest daughter, Alison, placed a plate heaped with pancakes into the center of the dark granite island. He and the kids ate breakfast together every morning at the island in the middle of their kitchen. They had an elegant dining room, but it seemed so formal and impersonal. He and the kids typically ate cereal or Pop-Tarts for breakfast, but Alison had been taking a cooking class at school and had insisted that she prepare them a real breakfast at least once a week.
He knew that he should have felt a surge of pride and pleasure at her responsible and caring nature. After all, his firstborn child was becoming a young woman. But he felt very little, only the same dull ache that permeated every other moment of his existence.
Despite this, he went out of his way to make sure that his children couldn’t gauge his true feelings. He sniffed the air and put on a false smile. “It smells wonderful, Alison. I’m very proud of you. You did a great job.”
She sat down and winked at him. “You know me, most awesome daughter of the year and all.”
He grinned back at her and gave her a loving squeeze on the shoulder. His fork shot out to the plate of pancakes and stabbed the first of the heap.