by Ty Patterson
All done, Zeb texted Broker, when he boarded the Air Jordan flight in Baghdad.
Wasn’t expecting anything different. Sarah and the twins think you’re with me, came the reply.
Zeb closed his eyes to catch up on his sleep.
That’s what they should think. I’ll always have their backs.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Meghan walked into their office thirty-six hours later from their Baghdad trip and poked the sleeping man on the couch.
‘Where were you all the time?’ she asked suspiciously when Zeb opened his eyes.
‘With Broker,’ he stifled a yawn and headed to the bathroom. ‘You got what you wanted?’
‘Not quite,’ she replied in disgust, ‘we’re back to square one. He hasn’t kidnapped Cali.’
Later in the day, Beth and she called Jack Minter and relayed the interview to him. They offered to share the polygraph results and said they could recommend experts who could analyze them.
Jack Minter turned down the offer politely. ‘I knew he hadn’t kidnapped my daughter. I also know why you had to go and question him.’ He swallowed, ‘I apologize for my behavior. I’ll apologize to Burke too–’
‘That’s not required, sir. We understand and I’m sure, she does too.’
‘You really think he’ll stop?’
Beth frowned in confusion for a moment till Meghan mouthed, stop the harassment.
‘Yes, sir. We’re very sure of that,’ she reassured the father.
The line went silent and then Jack Minter spoke, hesitantly. ‘That man with you, he’s not really your driver is he?’
Meghan couldn’t help the deep throated laugh that bubbled out of her. ‘He is, sir. Among many other things.’
He’s the most lethal man you’ll ever meet.
The man in Beijing was impatient and tetchy. He was sitting in his study at home going through reports, checking to see everything was still according to plan. Everything depended on him, the idea was his, its success or failure was his. He puffed with pride for a moment which deflated quickly when his wife called him for dinner. For the third time.
He sighed in irritation and glanced at the door when a timid knock sounded on it. His six-year-old son poked his head inside and gestured at him. Coming, he waved and turned back to his desk morosely.
He hadn’t bedded his wife in several weeks because of the pressure. He hadn’t been to his mistress for days. All because of the plan.
However, now all seemed to be falling in place. There were three candidates left in the fray, including the Beijing man’s. All three had requisite muscle and capabilities. The two competitors were tough, they would be hard to beat.
He had planned for their emergence. He polished his glasses and smirked. He, the man from Beijing, had anticipated all eventualities, which is why he had been trusted to execute his own plan.
He rose and shut the door to his study and called the man in Hong Kong. The man’s nasal tone came on and started greeting him.
‘How’re things in the three cities?’ Beijing man was curt. He had to be. He was authority, power. Hong Kong man understood that.
‘On schedule. First shipment’s on the way.’
Beijing man put the phone down and stretched and joined his family for dinner.
Zho knew when the twins and the man flew abroad and when they returned. He had eyes on them continually, either his own, or those of highly trusted men.
The brown-haired man had a name. Zeb Carter. It hadn’t been difficult to find out, after all it was on the consulting firm’s website. Carter had been in the Army, in the Special Forces, and had been on various tours to different countries, explained the website, helpfully. His coworkers were also Special Forces or from elite outfits in the armed forces. The twins came from a cop family.
Zho considered all these as he drank from a bowl of green tea and settled in his battered Ford which was parked within eyesight view of the Columbus Avenue building.
He wasn’t concerned that his vehicle would be spotted. It was registered to a worker in the city’s Department of Sanitation, a man who looked very similar to Zho. The man existed, and was blissfully unaware that he owned the Ford.
Zho had several such identities, he could become a sanitation worker, a doctor, a cab driver, anyone. It depended on who he was shadowing and why.
Zho hadn’t been able to find where the sisters and FBI woman had disappeared to. He knew Carter had flown separately and before them, while the women had taken the Gulfstream. He had tried to find its flight plan, but it had not been readily available from his usual sources.
Zho swallowed and felt the warm liquid go down him. Green tea made everything right. Where they had been to wasn’t important. He knew there was nothing in any other country that could impede their plan.
Zeb was watching the street from his office, knowing the mirrored glass offered no visibility from the outside.
He had gotten Werner to run through camera images of the front of their building for the last ten days. He had gotten it to run through the plates of all vehicles in the front, for the same period.
He had a feeling his shadow was close.
Werner checked out a Chevy Cruze, a five-year-old model, black in color. It had been seen thrice in the ten days and was owned by a retail saleswoman in a downtown department store.
Werner checked out the woman and did the electronic equivalent of tapping fingers on a desk. She earned an average wage for her profession and owned another car. Divorced, one kid. No way could she afford a second car.
Werner checked for camera images of the car, and whistled when it found a blurred image of a face.
Blurring wasn’t a problem.
Werner applied complex algorithms to the image and sharpened it. It was a Chinese face. Male. It ran a facial recognition program that would compare the face to millions in the databases it could access.
If the man was in the database, Werner would identify him.
European Starlings were the most common birds in the city. They were introduced to the country by Eugene Schieffelin, in 1890.
Schieffelin was a member of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society and also of the New York Zoological Society. He wanted to bring all the British birds in Shakespeare’s plays to the city. He released bullfinches, chaffinches, nightingales, skylarks, and starlings in Central Park.
The European Starlings didn’t just survive, they thrived. There were about two hundred million in North America and were so numerous in New York City that the MTA had resorted to drastic measures to control them.
This particular starling was curious and its inquisitiveness had taken it far from its usual feeding ground in Queens Village. It had its nest in an old church in the Village, but the desire to taste juicy worms had made it fly several blocks away.
Another starling had gossiped – whoever said humans alone gossiped was wrong, very wrong – about this particular site that had not just worms but also meat. Best of all, the other bird chirped, it had no humans. Well, there was one, but he hadn’t been seen in a while.
The curious starling decided to venture into the skies and explore. It took several darts and hops and short haul flights before it came to something that resembled the other bird’s description.
It saw several buildings, abandoned, just as the gossipy one had described. No people about. At least not any it could see from its perch on a lamp pole.
The starling cocked its head this way and that way and when it was sure there didn’t seem to be any danger, it flew down to the concrete surface.
Concrete wasn’t good. No place for digging and uncovering worms. Maybe the other bird had been wrong. Or lying. The other bird had a reputation in the flock for being a great teller of tales, few of which were true.
The starling decided not to give up yet. The site was vast and there were several buildings to explore. It hopped towards the furthest one. Columbus hadn’t discovered the New World by playing safe.
/> It flew a level up and found furniture, cobwebs, and other birds who looked challengingly at it. The starling abandoned that floor and flew down. Steps from the ground floor went down and disappeared into darkness.
Dark. The starling didn’t like dark. But nothing ventured, nothing gained.
It hopped down and flew through a crack at the top of a door and struck gold.
The piece of flesh it was carrying was too heavy and a chunk of it fell as it flew back to its nest.
That chunk was discovered by a drunk who was lying in a doorway and figured someone had dropped a bite of burger. He shuffled toward it, not hearing the cursing of passersby as they detoured around him.
He picked it up and squinted. That didn’t look like any burger. That pink bit looked like nail polish.
Nail polish! He gave a hoarse yell and dropped the finger and stumbled back.
Meghan and Beth were practicing throws with the basketball, so far Beth was winning.
Azzi was a case closed. The Chinese connection was a red herring according to Burke. They were scraping the bottom of the barrel for leads on the missing Calliope Minter.
‘You wanna join?’ Meghan tossed the ball in Zeb’s direction who was studying a printout near Werner.
He blocked it with one hand, bounced it once, and threw it back at her.
‘What’s that with you?’
‘Nothing.’ He stuffed the sheet in his pocket and left the office.
‘Mysterious!’ Beth stared after him.
Meghan shrugged. ‘When isn’t he?’
She dribbled to the hoop and was preparing to leap when her cell rang. She let the ball roll away and looked at the caller. Chang.
‘Detective Chang, how can I serve you?’
All levity fled her face when she heard his reply.
‘We’ve found Cain’s hideout.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
A grim-faced Chang and Pizaka picked up the twins an hour later, from their office. Chang called Meghan when they drove up to the front of their building, and didn’t answer their expectant looks when they seated themselves in the large vehicle.
‘Where is it?’ Beth asked Pizaka and got only her reflection on his polished shades, in response.
Chang turned on the lights and siren and traffic melted away as he raced through gridlock and an ocean of honking. He was tight-lipped as he sped up Henry Hudson Parkway and just as Meghan thought he’d take the George Washington Bridge, he turned right.
On to the Cross Bronx Expressway, their radio whispering softly on the dash, riding the concrete and steel structure of Throgs Neck Bridge, and forty minutes later, he pulled up beside other cruisers in Queens Village.
Chang and Pizaka spoke to other cops who looked in the direction of the twins and made way for them.
Meghan ducked under yellow tape and followed her sister and the two cops as they went through a large gate and stopped at the sight of buildings, several of them, arranged around a large yard.
‘It was an asylum at one time,’ Chang waited for her to catch up. ‘For those declared to be insane. It’s now owned by the city, maybe not for long.’
‘The heir of the original owners is claiming it back. Legal battle,’ he explained.
They hurried to join Pizaka and Beth who were making haste across the vast yard, toward a building in a corner.
Building 26, declared a stark sign.
Meghan suppressed a shiver as they navigated crumbling pieces of concrete and stepped inside the building. It was dark, damp, and once lay silent. Now it was flooded with cops, floodlights, and forensic technicians.
Beside what might once have been a reception desk was a flight of stairs. Pizaka took them down to a basement, along a hallway and through several doors and when he opened the last one, stepped aside for them to have their first view.
The room was large and had a high ceiling, for a basement. It looked like it had been a store with pieces of furniture and medical equipment scattered in it.
There was a central table of stainless steel, above which was a naked light bulb. The stench of rat feces filled the room, but even through that, Meghan could detect the odor of human flesh, and death.
A white-coated technician opened a large closet and pointed to the dark stains on its walls.
‘We found a body here,’ Chang came up behind Meghan and showed how the body lay in the closet. ‘We’re still trying to identify it.’
Meghan’s breath stuttered as if she had been punched. She spun on her heels, her eyes widening, seeing the answer in his eyes even before she asked, ‘is it her?’
‘It’s female, that’s all we know for now,’ he answered heavily.
‘A bird dropped a finger, not far from here.’ Chang showed them around the room while Pizaka stood at the entrance talking to other police officers. ‘It took a while for that digit to get to us, but when we did, we searched every alley, every nook. We knew about the asylum, but it had escaped our previous searches for some reason.’
‘This was the killing table,’ he drew them back to the center of the room, to the steel table which gleamed dully under the lights. It was scratched and scarred and on closer inspection, Meghan found it had restraining belts at its bottom.
She fingered one belt, realized suddenly what it had been used for, and dropped it as if it had burned her.
‘Restraints,’ Chang said unnecessarily. ‘Lots of DNA on it, in fact all over the room.’ He stopped avoiding Meghan and Beth’s eyes finally. ‘Lab’s still working. We got here at four am Give them time. Maybe there’ll be traces of Cali.’
Soft murmuring, Pizaka and the cops, was the only sound in the basement for long minutes, before Beth pushed her brown hair back and sighed. ‘How do you know it’s Cain?’
Pizaka came up to them, removing his shades and pocketing them. The grimness left his face, replaced by a lighter expression. Not a smile, but close enough. ‘We found a journal.’
The journal, a notebook whose brown cover was faded, some of its pages falling out, had been found inside a sleeping bag. The sleeping bag had been found stuffed in a cardboard box, which also had a change of clothes, all black.
Another cardboard box held a velvet case. A white-coated technician opened it and revealed knives, scalpels, a small hammer, a saw…Beth closed her eyes, trying to wash away the images the sight of the instruments brought.
‘Are those what I think they are?’
‘Yeah,’ Chang replied. He didn’t look sleepy anymore. The early morning rise, the long hours, didn’t show. He was alert, his suit was crisply ironed, for a change.
Maybe he ironed it at four am knowing this discovery would close a big case, Beth thought inadvertently. A knife caught the light and winked evilly at her. The room is shabby, run down. Not the instruments. He took good care of them.
‘What’s in the journal?’ Meghan asked when the technician had put away the killing tools. She breathed deeply as they left the grisly basement behind, and entered the yard. Flashes caught her eye and she turned to see a phalanx of photographers and reporters at the gate.
The media had turned up, and in force. She turned her back on them and despite the surroundings and the discovery, couldn’t suppress a smile at Pizaka’s actions.
His shades had gone back on his face, his hands were instinctively smoothing his jacket. He can smell interviews in the air.
‘Not much. It’s disappointing. No names. No records of victims. A lot of doodling and drawing that’s meaningless. Just a few lines on a page. Here, you can see for yourself.’
Chang opened the photo gallery app on his phone and selected several images and handed his phone over to the twins.
The first page had a name scrawled on it, confirming the identity of the killer.
CAIN.
The scrawl was strong, and slanted upwards. Thick lines, neat spaces between the letters. Blue ink, probably a ballpoint pen.
‘Yeah, we’ve got ink and handwriting experts on it too,’ Cha
ng sensed Meghan’s question and answered it.
Several pages of aimless lines and random circles followed.
Today’s was good. She resisted a long time.
There was no date to the entry. No reference to the victim. Who they were probably didn’t matter to him. How long they lasted under his knives… a sudden rage swept through her, blinding her, making her hands shake. It disappeared as quickly as it had come and left her cold and empty.
Beth took the phone from her trembling fingers and swiped through more images till she came to the last sentence.
They feed me women.
Chang raised his hand in surrender before either of them could utter a word. ‘Don’t ask me. I’ve no idea what that means.’
Beth handed the phone back to Chang and looked around when a thought struck her, ‘I thought Cain was Bennett and Johnson’s case. Where’re they?’
Chang jerked a thumb at the crowd at the gate. ‘Giving interviews. Zak’s not liking that,’ he smirked.
It was late evening when Meghan got the call from Chang.
They had left the two cops at the asylum after viewing all there was to see. The action had moved to the forensic labs; they would put names to the DNA, wherever they could, and would seek to identify the killer known only as Cain.
‘No match,’ Chang sounded tired and Meghan could picture him pinching the bridge of his nose, his feet on his desk. ‘That body we found is Jane Doe. Her DNA doesn’t exist in the system.’
‘Other DNA findings?’ her voice was taut, fearful of the answer. Beth gripped her shoulder reassuringly as they bent over the phone, waiting for Chang.
‘Not Cali’s.’
A deep sigh left Meghan as she sagged back, the coiled tension in her unwinding slowly. She was aware of Beth asking more questions, Chang responding, but she wasn’t paying attention anymore.