New York was on fire. Maybe it always had been. Maybe the only difference to this building screaming up in a whirling golden flame was that they couldn’t shut their eyes to it anymore. There it was, out in the open, set ablaze in the public eye.

This wasn’t your everyday kitchen fire. This was arson, no doubt about it. The fire plunged out from the inside and crawled down the surface of the Federal Records & Accounts building in a long arcing curve. The curve tracing a path from the top to its base, spelling out a giant letter ‘C.’

Heather Chase stood there basking in that blaze, mesmerized by its infinite power; she lent her face to the smoldering heat warming her like the rays of a violent and dangerous sun. She knew it had begun again, this fight that threatened to escalate to full-blown war. She didn’t waste time fighting the truth, because she knew that nothing from now on would be as obvious or easy as this. Someone had learned to control the fire in this town. The C had. And that made them capable of anything.

The C. That’s what they called themselves now, the organization wreaking crime across the city in a series of bizarre and senseless acts. Word on the street was they were the remnant elements of C-60, the terrorist group Chase herself had helped put away; the group that the Bureau and the NYPD had pulled out every stop to take down. That Chase had risked her life for. Yet not long after they’d taken down their leader, the crime wave started all over again.

After more than a month of seemingly random media-related crimes, they’d upped the ante. They’d started writing their name in fire.

As they finally damped down the blaze, Chase approached an exhausted firefighter in a charred yellow fire-retardant jacket sitting on the back of his truck.

“I’m Special Agent Chase, FBI. I need to enter that building.”

“Don’t bother,” the firefighter said, his face eclipsed by a layer of soot. He was breathing heavily and his extreme fatigue shone through his bloodshot eyes. “Nothing was preserved on the floor where the fire was set. They used some kind of petroleum jelly—the sprinklers couldn’t put it out.”

“I don’t understand,” Chase said. “Wouldn’t such important documents have been kept in fireproof storage units?”

“Right—the thing is, the units themselves malfunctioned.”

“They—malfunctioned? Is that normal?”

The firefighter shrugged absently and looked at her with yellowing eyes through a mask of ash. He’d just walked through fire; soon it would be Chase’s turn to do the same. But she couldn’t feel what lay ahead this time. Her mind felt fuzzy, clouded in the same smoke that wafted up from the broken husk of the Federal Records building. Everything was concealed behind that thick suffocating gauze. She couldn’t feel what this firefighter felt, couldn’t see what he saw. What she did feel was off her game. And she’d been that way for a while now.

She’d been that way since they went after Bucky, the leader of C-60. Although Bucky is dead now, his demise didn’t bring closure or conclusion—all it did was open more mysteries to contend with.

The first mystery was that of Bucky himself: Who was he? Everything had pointed to him being an ex-participant in a series of unethical clinical trials conducted by the now-deceased Professor Sherman of NYU. Except that upon scouring through all available records, there was no trace of Bucky ever having existed in the system. They hadn’t been able to get a lock on his prints or dental records. ‘Bucky’ had clearly been a fake name—short for Buckminster, the inventor of the compound C-60 which Bucky had figured out how to weaponize.

Back again in a circle to C-60. Who were they? In the mad dash to prevent Bucky’s plan to cause anarchy, Chase hadn’t really stopped to think about it: Who even were the others involved in C-60? How many of them existed? The Bureau had discovered two bases supposedly belonging to them— the abandoned camp of dome structures hidden in Wake Forest, and the single large dome situated outside Poughkeepsie. The domes created in the geodesic shape of the C-60 molecule: Bucky again. It all came back around, all seemed connected, yet nothing connected at all.

The fact of the matter was, there was no trace of anyone besides Bucky being in the ‘group’ that was C-60. Because Bucky had exploited various delivery services to launch his attacks, there had been no one actually connected to him. And as for the ‘evidence’ of other people living in his vicinity in the two bases—that could have been faked too. They hadn’t arrested a single other person. They hadn’t seen anyone else. The only other witness they had was a mental patient in Bellevue named Elliot who later was revealed to have a history of confabulation. Elliot himself confessed to having lied about everything.

At the time Chase had been glad for that—she thought if it all began and ended with Bucky then his death would be the end of it. It hadn’t been. This new group came out of the woodwork calling themselves the C, and they’d already managed to hijack two streaming services and one local TV station and made them play their propaganda message. And now they’d started this game of fire graffiti.

Finding no luck with the tired firefighter, Chase reluctantly hovered by the NYPD. No one she knew was around, which came as a relief. She wasn’t in the mood for their chit-chat.

“Agent Chase, FBI,” she said, holding her badge. The cops there barely glanced at it, just gave her a sour look. They were uniforms there to take the basic facts and get out of there. Helping the feds was above their pay grade. Cop think.

“What’s the situation?” She asked one of them—a short guy with his holster belt hanging a touch low. A round face and beady cop eyes peered back at her blankly. She elaborated. “Did everyone get out alright?” Blank face. “The building, Officer. Did everyone get out of the building?”

“Evacuation went uh—smoothly. On account of it being so early, not many were around. No serious injuries—we got one or two slight burns, ain’t that right Sarge?” He turned around to a flat, pale-faced cop in the back who barely grunted an affirmative.

“That’s good,” Chase said. “Then no one was in the room that went up either.”

“That blew up, you mean, agent.”

“It didn’t blow up—from what I understand, gasoline jelly was used to start the fire.”

“Potato, potahto,” said the cop. “The dumb scumbags still freakin’ ripped the place. A federal building no less. Must have some kinda death wish, eh?”

“You’d think,” Chase said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m not too clear on their motives, Officer. Not yet.”

“Yeah. Course not. They’re crazy sons of bitches is why. Just want to burn everything to the freaking ground. I hope you feebs round them all up and lay ’em on the chopping block as an example. Then maybe this town will stop going so gaga.”

“I’ll keep your suggestion in mind. If you want to expedite our investigation, you could start by telling me something. Did your men find anything in the wreckage?”

“We don’t got diddle,” ‘Sarge’ said. “We’re canvassing the area now but as far as the building itself,” he gestured to the crumbling, smoking husk before them. “Zilcho.”

“Security tapes?”

“All fuzzed out,” the sarge said. “Some kinda malfunction.”

“Seems to be a lot of that going around. What about the C?” Chase said.

“What about them? Sure they probably did it. It’s got their name written all over it.” The sarge grinned. He was being blasé about the whole affair—to him, it was just a necessary fact, another thing to write down before he went to Dunkin Donuts and ordered a box of a dozen glazed.

“Not the group,” Chase said, holding back her frustration. “I mean the letter itself. On the face of the building.”

“Ah, that. Yeah. They used a kind of flammable paint. Same MO as the other buildings, right?”

“Same MO,” Chase said.

An awkward silence passed between the three of them. Chase felt herself desperately trying to get a read on these cops—she generally didn’t have to try so hard to tell what someone was thinking. It wasn’t that she’d only just met them—she just felt trapped in thick brain fog. The smoke rushed into her airwaves and she could feel the toxic air enter her bloodstream. A pressure was forming in her head, the beginnings of a real doozy of a headache…

“I heard that the files up there weren’t protected properly,” Chase heard herself ask.

“Oh yeah,” the officer said. “It all went up. Whoosh. There’ll be hell to pay to some poor schmuck up the ladder. Probably didn’t close the cabinet properly or some such.” The cop scratched his face absently. He couldn’t give less of a shit if he tried.

“Didn’t close the cabinet. Right. What was the nature of those files, any idea?”

“Beats the hell outta me. Some official government crapola. You’re gonna have to talk to uh—the guys in charge or whateva… So, are we good here?”

“As you were, Officer.”

She pushed down the frustration and tried tapping another officer who seemed a bit more serious. He had a close-cropped crew cut, a dark mustache, and shaded wayfarers on.

“Anything you can tell me about the fire?” She asked him.

“Nothing so far, agent. Uh—we did check the security tapes.”

“Did you get anything?”

“You know it’s the strangest thing. They’ve all got this weird static on them.”

A flash sparked through Chase then, but instead of starting in her brain it came out in her gut and made her lurch. Screwing with camera equipment was also the C’s MO. They had control over the airwaves. They got to decide what was projected.

“So—no leads then?” Chase said, feeling dismal and sick.

“Not a one so far. Ah—but maybe we’ll find a way to clean up that security video and…”

They wouldn’t. Chase knew that much. Bucky had developed some kind of technology that could replace a video feed—she’d seen him use it in Times Square to replace every screen there with his own twisted hypno-garbage. But if the C had that technology—didn’t it just further point to them being legitimate successors of C-60?

The C was the next step. They were something new. Something fluid and fragmented and completely dangerous. She couldn’t figure out their motive yet, but she knew they couldn’t be ignored. If Bucky had been the initial blast, the C was the fire that followed.

And they’d targeted a federal building this time. It felt like they were picking a fight with the FBI. It almost felt like they were picking a fight with her, personally.

But the problem with bombs is that they tend to erase their own evidence if you make them right. Forensics had barely come up with anything useful. The fire inside had been propagated by gasoline jelly, but they had no clue what was used for the ignition. All they really had to go on was their calling card: At every fire so far they had left a letter C. In the first building, a local cable station, the wall of the lobby had been scorched. In the second building, the Herald News Group, a giant C had been burned into the front lawn. And now, finally, at the Federal Records & Accounts, they’d escalated to burning it into the entire outside of the wall. They’d grown more brazen over time.

They were painting with fire. Sending a burning message—playing God.

But Chase wouldn’t fall for their theatrics, not this time. Nor would she get sucked into a meandering trap. It was time to stop playing by their rules. Time to use the full extent of the Bureau’s power and get ahead of these punks. This time she would stop the C, and stop them for good.

Chapter 2

The C had been scurrying about town unimpeded for long enough. It was time to see about building a better mousetrap. A gust of air conditioner wind blew through the Data Analysis Team’s crusty office, knocking over ramen cups, candy wrappers, and half-eaten subway sandwiches… Chase stood in the doorway looking over a group of six special agents all of whom looked like they hadn’t slept in a month.

“Been cracking the whip again, Bookman?” Chase asked her former partner and current SSA of Data Analysis, Bob Fairfax. He didn’t seem like he’d had much sleep himself, his wrinkled but usually glossy face looking particularly dull and pale on this visit. He looked like a xeroxed version of himself.

“Good morning to you too, Chase,” he said sleepily, draining the cold dregs out of a vending machine coffee cup. If she didn’t know any better he seemed almost hung over. “And yes I’ve been ramping things up around here. If the C really are connected to C-60 then there’s no telling what they’re capable of. You remember what happened last time, after that pirate video broadcast they orchestrated. Half the city went haywire.”

“About that. The more I think about it, Bob, the more I’m convinced that ‘C-60’ was a hoax. The work of Bucky alone.”

He sighed. This wasn’t the first time they were having this discussion. “So, we’re back to the lone nut theory? I seem to recall you being against that. Now that Bucky’s dead and buried you want to bring it back into play?”

“The context is completely different, Bob. All we have of the supposed C-60 now are two empty locations. The findings of the forensic teams we sent out there are inconclusive. There’s no real evidence anyone but Bucky himself was ever involved.”

Bob smacked his lips and looked around his table in vain for a bottle of water. “Your theory before was—and correct me if I’m wrong on this, Chase—but you seemed to think that the scope of his operation was too big to have been carried out by just one man.”

“Certainly. It wasn’t carried out by just Bucky.”

“Wait, so—what?”

“That still doesn’t mean that C-60 was an actual organization. Think about it. How does he send the first bomb to the hotel? Courier, right? Same for the second bomb. And the third too. Each time Bucky went through some kind of service. It was like the gig economy of terrorism with him. Why even use a group? If you can manipulate people, even temporarily—” Bob flashed her a knowing look.”—then forming and maintaining a group is just a useless liability. More people to rat you out, more people to turn on you. It makes more sense to go it alone.”

“Okay, so Bucky uses gofers for the whole operation,” Bob said, hypothesizing. “Uses day laborers he picked up outside of Home Depot to build his big Whack-o-Dome, let’s say. Doesn’t that still leave a massive paper trail? We’ve been looking at the data for five or six weeks now—nothing of that sort is out there. If there was, we’d know about it.”

“From illegals? Bob, they don’t leave a paper trail. They don’t even pay taxes. It’s the perfect crime.”

“Maybe. It doesn’t explain how one individual actor was able to wreak so much havoc, however. We only caught him because he got greedy and gave away his location.”

“The problem is, we’ve been looking at Bucky as an everyday citizen,” Chase said. “Maybe that’s why we’re stuck on this. Think about it, Bob—he didn’t even exist. You think every day Joe America can live completely off the grid like that? No prints on file, no dental, no DNA. No medical history. Hell, we never even found out his real name.”

“Chase—” Bob sat halfway off his seat, leaned in, and whispered. “Surely you aren’t implying—you suspect Bucky was a government agent?”

Chase just returned the question with a noncommittal shrug. “I don’t know what he was. All we can say for sure is that he was no amateur, that he wasn’t just some disgruntled loon off the street out for revenge. Our one lead was Elliot, and now he’s catatonic. I wouldn’t even discount that being intentional either.”

“Intentional as in—you think someone got to him? Fried his brain?”

Bob was giving her those eyes—the ones that said in so many words, here’s Chase going off the deep end again.

“There’s something else,” Chase said, almost as a means of diverting his attention. “Something’s been gnawing at me lately, something that wakes me up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.”

“What is it?”

“What if the guy we caught in Times Square wasn’t even the right guy?”

Bob’s face fell so hard that it nearly hit the floor and went rolling around. His tired eyes hung wide open, his dry mouth. “I don’t, I don’t understand what you’re saying, Chase.”

“Think about it—why would Bucky let himself get caught like that? It makes zero sense. He went to all that trouble, kidnapped me, evaded and killed an entire tactical squad, and got away squat free. He could have disappeared right after that and we’d never have caught him. Yet he appears right in the middle of Times Square of all places.”

“But that was so he could use that weapon of his. To hijack the screens in the square. Not that we even know what that was all about.”

“Exactly, Bob, he used a weapon. But in all prior instances, we know that Bucky utilized third parties as a vector to send out his weapons.”

Bob cleared his throat, went over to the next desk, and nabbed another agent’s water—the agent looked pretty annoyed about it. Sucking down a mouthful, Bob sat back in his chair, pondering what Chase was saying. “But Chase, if this was just some third party then we’d have figured out who the hell he was.”

“I know that. That’s why. I don’t know. I don’t know anymore. Nothing seems to add up.”

“Anyway—you were kidnapped by the guy. You should know. You’re telling me you can’t recognize his face? Bucky wasn’t wearing a mask when he nabbed you, was he?”

“No, he wasn’t.”

“Then you did see his face.”

“Sure.”

“Then why don’t you know if the unsub killed in Times Square was Bucky or not?”

She bit her lip. “It was him. The guy I found in the dome, that is. But if that was Bucky then why is the C still around?”

“Right. That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“Let’s move on,” Chase said. “What about the other media crimes this month? Get anything off them?”

“Nothing substantial,” said Bob. “The C Channel’s hijacking seemed like it would give us something—but we really don’t even know what happened. The problem is that whenever something like this happens we get no security footage. They have the ability to—”

“Scramble it out. I know. But someone at the cable station still had to have seen the suspect or suspects.”

“You’d think. But all reports on that are negative.”

“First Channel 60 then the C Channel. At this rate, any TV outlet with the letter C is going to consider changing their name.”

“We had the same kinda idea,” the other agent said, the one whose water Bob stole. “We actually set up a trap on the other networks, any station with C. CNN in Midtown, NBC over on Long Island, and uh, what were the other ones?”

“CBS, WABC…” Bob said; then added, “This is Agent Ray Kelly, by the way. He just made GS-8.”

Agent Kelly looked to be still in his 20s; he had a stiff brush of black hair atop a hard, flat forehead, long narrow knotted eyebrows that crossed under the brow above the long curve of his nose, a prominent chin, and slits on either side of his mouth that years from now were prime candidates for jowls. His ears poked out sharply on either side like a fox, and his eyes were also fox-like, tear-shaped and glistening, and gunmetal gray. On his narrow neck, a big blue vein stuck out visibly. There seemed to be a vague hunger in him, but in Chase’s muddled state, she couldn’t see much more than that.

“Welcome to the big leagues, Agent Kelly,” Chase said dryly. “So—by trap you mean?”

“You know, like hidden cameras, additional surveillance, this type of thing.”

“And no hits yet?”

“Nothing as of yet, Agent Chase.”

Chase sighed. “The problem is that there isn’t much of a pattern outside of the pattern they allow us to see. Until we grasp what they’re really up to, there’s no way to predict where they’ll strike next.”

“Generally Chase,” Bob said, “this is where your uh—intuition kicks in and points us in the right direction.”

“I know,” Chase said. “But it’s telling me nothing this time around. We’re just going to have to do things the hard way until we can get something more substantial. Agent Kelly, do you have any ideas?”

“I mean—we were hoping the trap would spring,” Kelly said. “The thing is their motives are too unclear. Without catching them in the act, how do you figure out what they’re up to? It’s a whatchamacallit—a Catch-22.”

“He’s right,” Bob said. “At least back in the Channel 60 hijacking, the video Bucky had them play explained his motive. It let us build a profile of where they were coming from. But the C doesn’t do that—when they perform a channel hijack they just play static or random AI-generated images in a meaningless sequence. It feels more like they’re aiming for pure chaos than Bucky ever was.”

“So, that’s that then,” Chase said. “A month later we’re still at square one.”

“Not precisely,” Bob said. “We do have one lead to follow up on.”

“Which is?”

“Chase, you really aren’t on the ball here.”

“I suppose not. Are you going to gloat or are you going to tell me?”

“The Federal Records & Accounts management. We still haven’t interviewed them. I scheduled a meeting tomorrow at nine.”

“Oh,” Chase said, feeling her head crushing down a little harder on her brain. “That’s good. Good work, Bob.”

“Until then, I think you should get some rest.”

“He’s right, agent,” Kelly said. “You look pale, like you could pass out at any second.”

“Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.” Chase didn’t say anymore. She felt so fatigued she couldn’t even muster the strength to get annoyed by the comment. And the worst part was she had no idea why.

Continue Reading See the Fire

A sea of wrinkled umbrellas were blocking the street. Puddles lit up in slick mirror images of headlights in rain. Blue plumes tumbled over a crowd which had huddled together in fear and confusion. They were confused but they couldn’t hold it back, that fatal recognition that something was starting up again.

When smoke billows out of an upscale hotel in Lower Manhattan, you get a glimpse of something. It’s the cracks in the edifice—the first groaning creak of the construct. You can try and shut it out, pretend, pray, try and endure it. You can walk the street with your head down looking at your feet. But it never makes it all go away. In the end it gets to you. And everyone there knew it too: The cycle had begun again. Evil had woken up, and maybe this time would be the time no one could put it back to bed.

And then there was Heather Chase, FBI Special Agent, who’d tucked evil in more times than she cared to imagine. She slid through a mass of blue uniforms and crisis-porn journalists, and the remaining rubberneckers who’d managed to squeeze inside the lobby of the Beekman Hotel. The place was rumbling with the voices of gossip and outrage. A bunch of wet people were just standing there and babbling, as she drenched the rain out of her dark auburn hair and looked up at the floors above. Repeating balconies, visible from the first floor, receded up infinitely in concentric rectangles. It felt like looking up from the Inferno. On the way over here, Chase considered if this was ASAC Hogan, her boss, playing a poor taste joke on her. The hotel was only a couple blocks from the Field Office after all. She would come here, see it was a false alarm, then go back to find him laughing his ass off. But no, it was no joke. Even before she’d seen the smoke billowing out of the fifth floor window she’d known it was real. She felt it in the air, that charge of anticipation and the bitter, pickled odor of fear that tasted like licking a battery.

And the taste grew only riper and stickier inside her mouth as she made her way up to the floor in question, the air still thick with burned decor and the particles of exploded body she tried not to inhale. She breathed in enough of the dead in her job. She didn’t need more of it. Paramedics in white suits rushed back and forth, as firefighters in their yellow charred suits stood around pointing and surveying the damage.

Inside, the uncharred part of the room was made up of pastel pink terracotta ceiling and original exposed brick. Something else exposed was the victim’s gray matter, which leaked in a runny silver fluid over the elegant mahogany table and spring colored rug. The thick stink of burn hung in the room, like kids had been setting off fireworks or someone had left their toast in too long. But it wasn’t gunpowder. That, she could tell right away. The odor was a curious molten plastic smell she couldn’t quite place.

The exploded man hung stiff on the chair beside a long oval oak conference table. The other chairs were empty, but a pile of notes and spilled drinks left there suggested at least two others had been present. The dead man was still clutching his chest, a final act that seemed redundant given that he was missing his head.

Chase wondered for a while what that head may have looked like, tried to get a feel for the victim, but it was difficult without a face to put on the rest of the body which was spilling out like hot sauce onto his pants. Now it was just so much meat. You couldn’t get a trace from that. Maybe Forensics could, but Chase didn’t work that way. She needed life, with all its intricacies and lies and dark secrets and betrayals. That was the kind of thing she sank her teeth into. It was the kind of thing that didn’t wash off in New York rain.

“We got an ID on the vic?” Chase said, turning at last to the cops in the room. NYPD Homicide. She never really got along with them—not even at the start of her career, and certainly not after she busted one of New York’s Finest in his attempt to frame a local property magnate for killing his wife. But that was all in the past now. She looked for a familiar face in the crowd and found none. This was the First Precinct, and she should have recognized someone at least. She couldn’t find anyone. She was wading in smoke, ashes, and strangers. She needed something, someone to help her back to shore. To pull her into reality. She found someone then—her wandering vision fell on a pair of strong, calm eyes in a square, dependable face. Clean shaven, but not in uniform. Likely a detective. He was wearing a long black leather coat over a pale yellow floral shirt and gray chinos. The attire was somewhat out there for a cop. But the way he stood with his hands on his hips in the center of the men suggested cop for sure. His eyes were the most striking thing about him, dark and discerning, and currently looking straight through her. Looking, no doubt, for a reason to get her out of the NYPD’s staked territory.

“No ID yet,” he called over. His voice was low but clear. It didn’t have that crackliness to it that most cops got from yelling all day. That probably meant he hadn’t been in a leadership position for long. It was patently obvious he was the leader though, based on the deferential way the others stepped around him.

Chase made her way over to him, stepping past debris and forensics hunched on the floor. “I’m FBI. Special Agent Heather Chase.”

He gave her a subtle once over and said, “I figured the Bureau would send someone. But you came sooner than I thought. The smoke’s barely cleared from the room.”

“In my experience, Detective, the fresher the crime scene the better.”

“I’m a lieutenant, actually. Lieutenant Henry Acre.” He touched the gold-on-blue shield fixed to his belt. He was built of a powerful frame and had large, strong hands that made him look incredibly sturdy. His thin lips hung together as those penetrating eyes took in the scene. And even as he gave her his attention, she got the feeling his mind was still fixed to the burned husk sitting a few feet away from them.

“What about the murder weapon?” Chase said.

He raised an eyebrow at her—angular, and thick at the end. “No one’s saying it’s murder yet, Agent.”

She cocked another look at the stiff: Burn marks down the side, damage inflicted in a highly charged impact into the victim’s face. He’d gone kaboom alright. Parts of him had been thrown across the room. A chunk of his nose by the window, his teeth spilled like a broken charm bracelet over the table, part of his hair sticking to the ceiling fan.

“I’d say it’s pretty cut and dry,” Chase said. “You don’t get blown up by accident in a hotel suite. At least not in this neck of the woods. Maybe the Lower East Side on a bad day.”

“Fine,” Acre said. “Let’s call it a murder weapon. Well, since we’re going there, there was a device of sorts. Remains of packaging on it.”

“Packaging?” Chase froze—suddenly the room and its spectacle warped around her and stopped being a supermarket frozen meat aisle. Life hit her in the face at a hundred miles an hour. “A mail bomb? You’re saying it was a mail bomb.”

Acre shrugged, squeaking inside his jacket. He pointed to an evidence bag sitting on a nearby NYPD cart. Chase picked it up without asking permission—there was a burned side of a square wooden box, some fragments of glass, a charred corner of packaging. A sweet smell to it she just couldn’t put her finger on.

“There’s nothing much left here, Lieutenant.”

“Right. ‘Cause it blew up.”

“No but—don’t these bombs have to be in a container of some sort? You’d expect metal piping, this type of thing.”

“Yeah, well not this time. Forensics swept the place. The bomb kinda—well—disintegrated. We’re thinking it was a glass tube.”

“Remarkable.”

The lieutenant shot her a strange look then, but only slightly. His focus was fixed on the other homicide cops in the room, who bungled about taking notes on reporter notebooks and trading off color remarks about their home lives. “My wife burned the stew again last night,” one was saying. Not really the place or time to be talking about that, but NYPD cops weren’t exactly experts in tact. Chase sorted through the evidence and glanced at the notes found on the table—nothing really stood out as meaningful or really even intelligible. All marketing babble like public outreach, sustained interest, technological innovation, maintaining attention, and funding opportunities. Yada, yada, yada.

“The others in the room,” Chase said. “Who were they?”

“No clue.”

“But there were others in the room at the time,” Chase said. “Three coffee cups at least on the floor here, plus the chairs have been knocked over to the side. If it had been the blast that pushed them they would have been knocked straight backwards, not sideways. That means they got pushed over in a panic.”

“Heh, looks like we got ourselves a real Sherlock here.”

“Well?” She said impatiently. “Any record of who the others were? This is a hotel, after all.”

“None whatsoever. Apparently the meeting was pretty hush hush. No signing in, no one stayed the night.”

“Then what did they look like? And what were they doing here?”

“Dunno, Agent. But whoever they were, they had enough dough to get the cameras turned off when they came in here.”

“Excuse me? You’re kidding.”

“Oh, I ain’t kidding, baby.” He tugged at his collar. “We requisitioned it first thing we came in here, the footage. No dice. Diceless. The lobby, the elevator, the corridor cams all got switched off when these guys entered the building. Pretty freaking convenient, huh?”

“But the bomb didn’t blow the dead guy’s prints off. So, who is he?”

“Yeah. Good point. Let me check that now, the results should be back.” Acre swiped through his phone to get the report. “Hmm, looks like some former geek from academia. Dr. Atlas Sherman, NYU Psych Department. Sounds like a real boffin. A research professor, or used to be.”

A chill passed up Chase’s spine at the suggestion of another dead professor. “I wonder if that’s relevant.”

“Put together with the other evidence, I’m thinking yeah. Very freaking relevant.”

“How do you figure, Lieutenant?”

“Like the fact the bomb was sent in the mail, for example. University plus mail bomb. What does that tell ya, Miss Feddie?”

“You don’t actually think we’re dealing with a copycat of you-know-who?”

“Stranger things have happened. Plus, I mean mail bombs aren’t really even a thing these days, on account of they’re so stringent about checking for them. It’d make the most sense if it was someone recreating an old crime. And yeah, at this point I’m thinking the nut probably jerks off with a printed copy of Ted Kaczynski’s Manifesto.”

“A charming image, Lieutenant, but it doesn’t entirely add up. Copycats tend to be obsessive fans who have to get every detail right, wouldn’t you concur?”

“Generally, yeah. So what?”

“So, the details are wrong. Kaczynski started out with wooden boxes packed with black powder and set off by match heads, but he didn’t use lethal volumes of explosive until late in his career, some two decades after he started. And he didn’t switch to explosives that could decapitate his victims until near the very end. By that point, he’d moved to a more malleable package. He’d dropped the wooden box approach entirely…”

“I don’t see the problem,” Acre said. “So, the copycat is just focusing on his late career. So, he’s not following the crimes chronologically, big whoop? Plus here’s another thing, Agent—this ain’t the 1970s anymore. Anyone with an internet connection can download all the information they want on making high-grade explosives.”

Chase shook her head. “No, the point is—a real copycat is driven by obsession—they wouldn’t make such a mélange of the details. The early style container paired with the later explosive? It’s sloppy, disrespectful to the source material. This isn’t a copycat killing, it reads more like someone’s idea of what a mailbomb should look like. But it’s just a simulacrum. A facsimile.”

“Uh huh,” Acre said absently. He was looking around the room for a way out of the conversation. He found one.

“Hey L.T.,” one of the homicide cops said. “I think we got something.” He brought over another evidence bag containing a scrap of metal. A nail had been used to poke some kind of marking into it.

Acre dispensed Chase with a hearty grin. “Still think it’s not a copycat? This is Unabomber 101.”

Chase folded her arms, staring at the metal. “Okay. That moves it up a notch. But I guess now the question we have to ask is—what the hell does C mean?”

Chapter 2

So, someone had bombed a meeting in a hotel. So, what? That wasn’t the major thought that bubbled up inside Chase as she made her way back to the Field Office. No, the thing that spoke within her now—the whispers of murder—they spoke of something else. Something more. There was a secret lying amidst all that broken glass and charred flesh. And in the percussion of her heart, she caught the melody of that secret—it was something deeper, darker, and more rotten. ‘C’ was out there somewhere playing a tune, and it was up to her to catch its rhythm before more deaths occurred.

She huffed in the acrid scent of poison smoke, black strings slipping up into her air supply through the AC vent, and she knew if she tugged on them she could maybe tear the whole world apart. The rain crashed down through the steam and the bitter smoke scolding the hood of her burgundy Chevy Malibu like fat flashing in a pan, delivering chills from the tip of her nose down to her numb feet. She bathed in the sensation for a while, followed the slick shimmering puddles that led down dark streets calling to her, like saucers of milk to a starving cat… They beckoned her down their depths with flattering and cajoling voices. The want in her spilled out into those streets, where the murk reached and told her to keep going down, slip down murky crevasses she had no business being. Giant TV screens on skyscraper sides played advertisements that flashed bright colors, but it was all a shifting blur through the curtain of rain.

Her whole life had been a blur since coming back from Trash Island, since playing that death game with the triad boss Uncle Bing. It all seemed like a foggy dream of a world that didn’t belong to her. She’d clung to something back then and brought it back with her. She really hadn’t been the same since. Just going through the motions at work, still doing her job, still catching suspects. But something had turned dusky inside, and its dull edges rubbed at her consciousness the way the TV lights rubbed at her eyes through the overcast sky.

She’d stumbled onto something here, too. What, exactly, she didn’t have the first faintest clue. But already the darkness was calling the shots again. That was the price you paid for giving your all to this job. Her hand fell to her side automatically and felt the scar where Bing’s knife had pierced her. It hadn’t made the voices any quieter. The more she stayed idle, the more they scolded her, like spits of grease from a crackling fire. And she was drawn into that fire like a soul to a dream, and it shook her from deep inside and flushed its hot fervor down her thighs.

She kept driving the wrong direction entirely, snaking through the Lower East Side’s dilapidated back alleys and past clanking garbage trucks, honking horns, slamming doors, yelling pedestrians… Past dripping wet fire escapes and crumbling stoops and people in soaked plastic who shoot glowing eyes through the rain, puffs of breath exiting through clenched teeth like damp exhaust. People going on with life just because they had to, not out of ego or courage or even through a misguided hope—but just too distracted to die. And therefore forced to obey. People who’d spent their whole lives obeying something—other people’s expectations of them, mostly. Their personality configuration had been thrown onto them at birth, like dice to a green felt table. And whatever number came out was their lot, and if they scored low they were permanently screwed. You were in one group or another—the winners or the losers. Some people were destined to be geniuses, CEOs, property magnates, financial wizards; others sent to the howling bowels of this city and thrown into a used refrigerator box to soak up rain until they croaked someday, in pain, alone.

And standing in the middle of all that injustice, drawn by both ends like a trembling box car winding its way up to a mountain, was the Law—was Heather Chase, who’d been thrown a bad hand too—and she’d spent the rest of her adulthood up to this point trying to overturn that hand. Trying to gain some sense of due process from a god who didn’t seem to give a damn about what was fair. There was only the roll of the dice and its probabilities; and it was a fair game in that sense, because no one was spared from its calculating karma.

She drove through hordes of wage slaves crunching New York concrete and saw the strings that pulled them, divining the evil that would come to this city to screw up their lives further. Like a boot, like a knife, like a bomb.

And she was caught in the blast now, like it or not. Whoever this C maniac was, he’d hoisted her up out of the smoky water and set her in a dizzy dash across town towards or from what she could not say. But as she rushed down Broadway on her run, she felt she would understand, at the end of all this, just what her whole fight had been about. She felt she might, this time, find her match.

…

Back at the FBI’s New York Field Office, Criminal Investigations Division, Violent Crimes Unit, Chase slumped down at her desk and asked a simple question: Why there? Why the hotel? Whoever had sent the bomb had known how to package it in a way Dr. Atlas Sherman was sure to open it. So, why choose the meeting and not his home? The bomb had exploded fully, so it wasn’t a misfire. And yet it hadn’t been powerful enough to take out everyone at the meeting.

If it had been intentional then the obvious answer was simple: To send a message. To tell the others attending they were next. Then the message was more important than the medium in this case. It was the panic that the bomber wanted to induce, and not just the end of Sherman’s life. That’s not to say the others weren’t in danger: They almost surely were. But there was no way to protect them unless they could be found first. There lay the rub of the hour.

She opened the window, stifled by the office’s central heating, the stuffy air, the smog of voices surrounding the three walls of particle board making up her cubicle. You didn’t get to have such luxuries as your own office when you constantly went against orders and barreled headlong into danger on a hunch as often as Chase did. The higher ups tended to regard such behavior as insubordinate and disorderly. They sure didn’t complain when she caught her suspects though. And they had no qualms pointing her at the Bureau’s dead end cases like a rabid junkyard dog and letting her chomp her way through until something came out at the other end. They had no problem, either, when she clutched onto situations right on the brink of becoming national scandals and hoisted them back under control. No, that was all fine. That was her doing her job. But if you don’t kiss the right asses? You can forget four glass walls and a door with your name on it.

It wouldn’t matter either way, Chase knew. It’s not as if an office could stem the rushing tide of thought and voice that came up about her now from every corner of the room. She was burning inside. There were some feelings you just couldn’t bottle up, couldn’t put in a cage. Not one made out of particle board, not even one made of thick glass. They wanted to burst out. They wanted to burst out and decapitate the idiot playing Pandora.

Chase stuck her head out the window and let the rain spatter over her face. It felt cool, stimulating. It tasted dirty, like the city. Somewhere out there he was out there—C was out there. She hadn’t tried to do much background checking on the name. She knew nothing would come up. Too generic. Just a letter. C Bomber came up with a duck egg, too. But she didn’t have to go through the books this time. This was her case and hers alone. No partners, no NYPD up her tail. She could go it her way for once—start at the end and trace backwards. The way she worked best.

So, what was at the end?

She felt it would be this: A kind of creativity. A re-synthesis of everything they’d seen so far into something new. A familiar motif brought into a new arrangement. A remix, you might even call it. The cops would undoubtedly look at this work and scratch their heads, call it a copycat, call it a knock-off of a villain who had become all too well known now, a part of the zeitgeist, a thread in the public fabric. But maybe that was the whole point. Maybe C knew exactly what he was doing by putting that wooden box in there, which wasn’t at all necessary to the bomb’s workings. Chase was beginning to feel a kind of artistry in the work. The glass had shattered around this strange, sweet plastic smelling substance. It wasn’t gunpowder, not nitroglycerin, Forensics had confirmed. The explosive, this killer—they spoke of an unruliness she could relate to, that refused to fit into a neat category and led anyone who tried to pigeonhole them down a dark alley, which led to a dead end.

So then, what was the next lead? This case would likely move forward after they’d ascertained the link between the victim and his other friends at the meeting. She’d given her old partner Bob the Bookman the task of tracing them from nearby street cameras. She didn’t want to play the data game anymore. It always just blocked her from seeing the truth of the matter. Ultimately, the data would make sense, but Chase knew it would only just give backing to something that had already been conveyed from this very first attack. Because buried in the mundanity of the cliché mail bomb was a character separate to what the unsub was mimicking. And Chase also knew she would accelerate the case by a large margin just by figuring out what that character was. But this wasn’t profiling, it wasn’t really a personality she was searching for. It wasn’t a bunch of boxes to tick, a set of attributes, an income level, marital status, the length and color of his hair—all of that was so much window dressing. It was the NYPD’s job to construct that kind of store window dummy, to go hunting in Anarchist bookshops for weed-baked crazies and yank one a long haired hippy out of the garbage to show to the press, loudly exclaiming to the public it’s safe to open your mail again. Chase wasn’t interested in any of that, not one jot.

No, outside of the window under New York’s dirty rain Chase was looking for something more intrinsic, more essential to who this person was. She was searching for the ghost of C. And she’d caught the first taste of it, and it mushroomed inside her mind now like the greatest bomb of all, and she felt her grip falling from the window ledge, felt herself jerked off in a rushing gust and flying now, through the dwellings of the sick and the damned. Felt herself disobeying again—but this time, not the orders of ASAC Hogan or even the head of Violent Crimes who had reluctantly handed the case off to her. She was going to disobey, completely, the false path the bomber wanted them to seek.

Until proven otherwise, she wasn’t even going to treat this like a copycat. She would treat C as something new entirely. Investigate the whole damn thing from scratch with no preconceptions.

Her legs picked her up from where she stood, her damp hair running cold beads down her shoulders. She’d caught the scent now, and it was the same scent as had leaked all over the dead Dr. Sherman. Another dead professor, another school. She knew where she had to go next.

Continue Reading Hunting C-60

Special Agent Bob Fairfax was no spring chicken, that much was true. In fact, his chicken was about to be roasted. Not that he had ever really been a career man, instead content enough to whittle away at the edifice of crime from the comfort of a field agent’s desk for his near twenty years at the Bureau. But he’d at least had prospects, a trajectory. A vague notion he’d someday be promoted. But that was all set to change when he was handed a case with the potential to ruin his career for good.

“Just solve the case, Bob,” ASAC Hogan had said. “And it’ll fast track you to the big leagues.”

A little problem with that, though: The case was a swirling black hole and everyone in the NYC Field Office knew it. On its surface it was just a simple bank robbery, this small joint out in Long Island where all their money had gone poof. Except that you looked at the case for a few minutes and quickly discovered it was anything but simple. Not only was it a potential scandal waiting to happen, but also practically unsolvable. The more he delved into the data, the more it swallowed him up. Hell, Bob couldn’t even find the boss of the damn bank yet. He’d just up and vanished.

Just who had he scorned to be handed this landmine? He couldn’t figure it out. He’d always kept in his lane, made sure to toe the line, to preserve the fragile egos surrounding him. He’d always kept his head in the data, the facts. It’s what had earned him the nickname Bookman. He hadn’t cared about the ridicule, the general perspective around the office that he was a lightweight, a desk jockey, a total nerd. Bob had continued to do things by the book regardless, playing the game he was meant to play. And look where it had gotten him. He’d finally been branded a black sheep.

He knew the reason why, too. It was guilt by association. Association with one Special Agent Heather Chase, who had gone out of her way to piss off every agent in the Bureau. He worked with her just that one time and now he was branded for life as a troublemaker, even after transferring out of Violent Crimes into Financial Crime to best employ his skills at data analysis. He’d still been given a wide berth. Bob just had to come to terms with the fact he was a pariah. Hell, he had come to terms with it. But that wasn’t going to help solve a case where hundreds of millions of dollars had evaporated without a trace, along with the bank’s boss Frank Lehrman.

Bob stood in the doorway for a second and sighed, adjusted his red satin tie over his not-entirely-pressed white shirt. He tugged off his French coat and flattened his hair down. Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity, he muttered to himself, the words sounding ironical now. Switching off the internal monkey machine in his mind, Bob adjusted his face into a professional smile that made the creases of his face stand out. He walked into the room like a prisoner on death row. He was just going to tell it like it was, that’s all. No exaggeration, no polite omission. No icing on the cake. If he had to swallow it, so did they. Just tell ‘em, Bob. Give it to ‘em straight.

The room contained six heads including Bob’s—which was now turning numb and fuzzy like TV static. You had ASAC Hogan and his smarmy grin at the head of the table on the left. Across from him at the right end, two agents from Cyber Division probably ranking around GS-10, and one other from Financial. These agents bore a similar smarminess to ASAC Hogan. What did they have to be so smug about? They were regular special agents just like Bob; in fact, Bob was GS-12, putting him at a decent pecking order among his colleagues (in theory, at least). ASAC Hogan was Assistant Special Agent in Charge which is GS-15, and he ran the four investigative units of the NYC Field Office, only answering to the New York SAC above him but basically running the show on his own volition, on account of the fact the SAC was a political go-getter and spent most of his time eating lobster dinners over in Washington D.C.

Then tying off the ensemble, sitting at the middle of the table across from Bob, his direct supervisor Financial Crime Section Chief Jim Stanhorn. Bob’s initial intuitions had proven correct: He’d walked right into a firing squad.

“Take a seat, Bob,” ASAC Hogan said. His square-jawed face stood like an Easter Island head atop his black crepe Ralph Lauren suit. Bob considered updating his initial summation of heads in the room to eight: Hogan’s alone was worth two heads, at least.

He was finding it increasingly difficult to disregard the multitude of eyes fixed on him. Bob didn’t particularly enjoy being the center of attention to begin with, especially not like this. He would have dressed better had he’d known. He surveyed Section Chief Stanhorn’s single breasted blue pinstripe suit that was flattering to his broad chest and stealthily hid his middle-aged paunch. It even somehow made his white mop of curls look distinguished. Bob silently cursed himself for not re-ironing his own shirt that morning: He looked like a bum off the street in comparison. Internally, he placed ‘outfits’ under the list of reasons he hadn’t made supervisor yet.

The venetian blinds in the room were mostly shut and artificial ceiling light launched long ugly shadows over every item on the surface of the conference table. Coffee cups rose like black monoliths, stacks of files morphed into Aztec ziggurats. The theater of investigation was a show of shadow puppets and its warped display spread under Bob like an elaborate grave.

Bob cleared his throat. “Should I begin my preliminary report—?”

ASAC Hogan’s giant head nodded his assent, his neck creaking under the stress.

Bob cleared his throat again, shuffled his papers and began.

“I’ll start at the beginning so that we’re all on the same page.” He glanced around the room at expressionless faces that gave away nothing. It felt like a poker game—except that the others were penny ante and he was betting his whole damn career.

“As you may have heard, gentlemen, the sum funds of RVC State Bank have vanished. The boss of said bank, one Frank Lehrman, has also disappeared without a trace.”

“Seems pretty cut and dry who took the money,” Section Chief Stanhorn said, folding his arms snug.

“Motive-wise, he’s a key suspect,” Bob said, feeling his insides turn gray and weak. “The only problem is, there’s nothing tying Lehrman or anyone to the stolen money.”

A low mumble as the room traded perplexed whispers.

“But—er—Bookm—that is, Bob,” ASAC Hogan said, “Any kind of financial transaction has to leave a paper trail. You’ve been dissecting the data behind the robbery for a week now.”

“That much money doesn’t just up and disappear,” Stanhorn said. “We’re talking how much again?”

Bob cleared his throat and said hoarsely, “$250 million.”

“Two hundred—” Stanhorn’s voice trailed off, as if it was his first time hearing it.

“Agent Fairfax, you know,” the other Financial agent in the room said. “That’s a quarter billion dollars. It’s very difficult for so much money to just… Vanish.”

“Yes.” It was also the reason Bob was toast.

Stanhorn adjusted his seat, leaned forward on the desk, his arms bulging inside the blue sleeves. “You’re telling us a quarter billion dollars disappeared and there’s nothing—not a single trace showing where it went?” He leaned back in his seat again, his eyes milky and gleaming with confusion and anger.

“There’s a trace,” Bob retorted. “But the trace doesn’t lead to anything substantial.”

“How is that even possible?” The other Finance agent said.

“Okay, hold on,” ASAC Hogan said congenially, his perfect row of teeth gleaming under the office light. “Let’s focus on the heart of the matter here. Where has the money gone, Bob?”

“Well ASAC, it’s—everywhere,” Bob said, his voice becoming harder and harder to project past his larynx. He wasn’t making sense and he knew he wasn’t making sense, but he was also finding it difficult to make himself make sense.

Hogan’s left eyebrow cocked a notch higher on his broad forehead. “Define everywhere.”

“Okay so look. What happened was this. The bank’s internal funds were used as collateral in a series of microloans. Each loan was reportedly so small that it didn’t trigger automatic security measures.”

“Loans?” Stanhorn said. “Then that would mean the bank’s funds increased, would it not?”

“I’m getting to that,” Bob said. “That was the second part of the heist. If you want to call it a heist. Each individual loan only increased the total sum of the bank’s money, such that the security measures didn’t realize when more and more of the funds were being sent out to escrow as collateral for new loans. Think of it as a chain of transactions, where bit by bit, the money in the bank was being replaced by money that the bank did not, in fact, own.”

Stanhorn sat there scratching his white curls, but the three special agents were nodding.

“Elegant,” one of the Cyber agents said.

“It’s like that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark,” the other Cyber agent said. “Where Indy switches out the artifact for a bag of sand.”

The special agent from Financial said nothing for a while, then muttered in a low voice, “What happened next, Agent Fairfax?”

“Nothing,” Bob said. “Nothing had to. It was already over.”

“Meaning?” Stanhorn said.

“These microloans,” Bob went on. “They’re designed for traders to exploit arbitrage opportunities. It’s not like the loans you take out to start a business or buy a house. They’re expected to be paid back within minutes, sometimes seconds. You borrow the money, a trade goes through, you get your original sum back with profit and pay back the loan. Algorithms do this all day long.”

“But you said RVC did nothing,” the Financial agent said.

“Right. The bank didn’t pay the loans back. They defaulted on every single one of them.”

Silence pervaded the room then. The tension was rising to visibility, like a heatwave in the desert. It was starting to click with them.

“Bob,” Hogan said, still maintaining his amiable voice but unable to hide the subtle clenching of his oversized jaw muscles. “Am I understanding this correctly? The bank defaulted on all of its loans—then all of its money went to the money lenders to pay off the accrued debt, correct?”

“Correct, ASAC Hogan.”

“So then, what you stated earlier isn’t exactly true, is it? That you don’t know where the money is. The money all went to the lenders.”

“That’s the thing, ASAC. The lenders aren’t an organization; they’re not linked in any way. They’re just other random financial entities who lend out money through these systems.”

“How many uh, random entities are we talking here, Bob?” Hogan said, his face growing even more stone-like and solemn.

“Hundreds of thousands of them. The money was broken up into infinitesimal amounts.”

“And spread like dust over the whole planet,” the Financial agent said. “Like money laundering turned up to the nth power.”

“Right,” Bob said. He calmed a little, now that he’d managed to convey the situation. But it was a false calm, like the settling of the wind inside of a tornado. All you could hear was the small whisper of the A/C and distant voices from other offices down the hall.

Stanhorn chewed on his pen. “That would be somewhat—difficult to pin down.”

Bob felt relief flooding through his muscles, his heart unclenching. So, it wasn’t just him. He had been secretly scared to death that he had overlooked something entirely obvious and that he was just being inept. But the others in the room seemed equally at a loss—and these were no slouches either. You had high ranking agents from both Cyber and Financial in here. The case was just that much of a landmine, and this fact broke in the room like the ugly purple sun over the Hudson River.

“Any suggestions?” Hogan said, looking around the six others at the desk. The Cyber geeks exchanged some whispers, shook their heads. The other Financial agent mumbled something about waiting until some of the money got spent, but this was quickly shot down. The money wasn’t connected anymore—that was the killer. It didn’t matter if someone spent one cent or one million dollars of it: It didn’t mean a thing. The money had been obliterated, torn into shreds and thrown out the window of a Manhattan skyscraper to the people below. It had become untraceable. Even if Lehrman was spending increments of the money on some tropical island somewhere, he wouldn’t be stupid enough to do it in a way which connected the dots back together. It was a total blow out. They had all this data, all this transparency, yet it revealed nothing.

“There is one other way to approach this,” Bob said, already regretting saying anything, but also resigned to the knowledge that at this point there was little other option.

“Shoot,” ASAC Hogan said.

“We could try finding Lehrman himself. A man is liable to leave more of a fingerprint than his washed money—at least in this case.”

The others at the desk exchanged looks.

“We were thinking something similar,” one of the Cyber agents said. “Suspect recognition technology has reached maturity now—whether it’s an appearance offline or on. Sooner or later he has to pop up on the grid. Unless he lives like a savage in the jungle.”

Stanhorn chewed his pen and traded some kind of psychic transmission with ASAC Hogan. Hogan then turned to Bob, his eyes somewhat softer, his jaw less clenched.

“It strikes me, Bob, that you’re proposing we go ghost hunting…”

Bob’s eyes widened at this phrase. His mouth dried up. He knew where this was going. He also suddenly felt like he’d been set up. He was meant to fail at catching the trace of the money: This had just been a prelude. Hogan’s real purpose for giving the case to Bob became all too clear.

“…In which case,” Hogan went on, his grin alligator-wide. “I think I know the perfect candidate who can help you.”

“Sir?” Bob said, his voice only a croak now. “Who?”

“Bob, as of this moment I’m assigning you back to your old partner: Special Agent Heather Chase.”

Chapter 2

The next day, Bob found himself driving into Brooklyn to pick up his partner. Apparently she was living over in Gravesend now, this little neighborhood north of Brighton Beach. Mostly red brick apartments and houses sided the road, two or three stories tops. Bodegas on the corner of the block. A quaint little place as long as you didn’t go too far east. Bob looked at his GPS, which was pointing at him to continue east.

He drove his stuttering Taurus onward, the engine rattling as he accelerated. It needed looking at, he just hadn’t had the time or spare funds to get it serviced. Alimony, child support, dining outside when he didn’t have time to cook: It all added up. Across another couple of crossroads now, the storefronts getting grungier, the fire exits rustier. Ugly block-lettered graffiti in pastel blue and cinnamon red sprawled across permanently locked shutters on stores that had gone under half a decade ago. Ratty lawns behind chain link fences painted orange with rust. Finally the GPS’s comforting voice told him it was safe to pull over now, in a street buried under construction scaffolding and green chipboard barriers, the road was blocked on one side by blue skips full of dirt. He got out and breathed in the rising wood chip dust coming off the building under repair, the thud of the drill echoing through his skull. It was near noon now, but the weak February sun did little to warm the chill in him. Bob looked across the street at Chase’s apartment; another red brick joint set on the second floor above a clothing store with its shutter down too, unclear if it was closed for good or the owner just on vacation. The tag painted on the front of the steel shutter read: Eat at Joe’s.

He felt himself stalling. He really didn’t want to go up there and start this all over again, watch Chase go barreling into danger on a whim as he struggled to keep up with her mad logic and spur of the moment intuitions. The last time was exhausting, and that had only been a simple murder case. Now they were dealing with millions of dollars missing and a case that totally perplexed.

The truth was, Heather Chase remained a specter that had never really left Bob’s mind. It had only been one case they shared, but that one case had radically altered Bob’s position in the Bureau and made him reevaluate his entire career. It’s not as if Bob had ever treated his job frivolously, in fact he was the type to still be glued to his seat staring at figures on a computer screen long after all his coworkers had gone home to their families. But Chase took obsession to a whole other level.

In the FBI, you had two classes of people: You had the kind who met the cruelty of criminal society with a hard skin, who developed the ability to stop caring and this became their whole source of strength. With this kind of person, every feeling was experienced buffered, as if through a dense filter and every face they showed the world was a mask. On the other hand, you had whack-a-moles like Heather Chase, who was pants-on-head, balls-to-the-wall crazy when it came to the job. They threw themselves so deeply into their work that it poisoned them from the inside out. It meant they couldn’t walk one side of the line anymore. They became as much robber as cop, murderer as victim. You always got the feeling they were split right down the middle, that they would just snap one day, go on a shooting spree and start nailing every suspect they felt was culpable.

Bob had always considered himself the first of these two categories. He had numbed himself to overdosed drug addicts and executed gang members, the bloated bodies the PD fished out of the East River, the grieving families and the confused victims coming to terms with an innocence permanently lost. But even when you shut it out, Bob now realized, sooner or later it all starts to take its toll. It eats you up even when you don’t show it.

So Bob’s answer had been to turn to data. Cold hard numbers on a screen. You deal in statistics, in times, dates, places. GPS coordinates on a map. You don’t have to look in the eyes of someone who just lost the one most valuable to them and tell them you’re sorry—all the while trying desperately not to be sorry, because if you ever did feel that deeply about it you wouldn’t be fit to do the job.

But something had changed in that case last fall, working the murder of Deborah Doyle. He had been flung together with Agent Chase under the pretext of keeping a loose cannon in check. At first he had stood back and watched things unfold, tried to dissect the case in the way his 18 years at the Bureau had taught him. All he could do was watch as the case slipped through his fingers like a wet tablecloth. It wasn’t that Bob was doing his job incorrectly: In fact, any regular agent working that case would have been totally blindsided by the forces at work behind the scenes. But not Chase. She had latched her claws into the case like a starving dog to a T-bone steak, from the very start suspecting anyone and everyone involved, even law enforcement. It led to uncovering a massive string of corruption in the NYPD that had gone on unhindered for a decade.

The fact was that Chase was possessed of a kind of uninhibited madness to which others couldn’t allow themselves to fall, simply because they always had to think of the consequences: They thought of what might happen to their career, their friendships, their personal lives. By the time Bob had gotten to the end of the Doyle case, he found that he himself had slipped into Chase’s mindset that personal lives were just another unnecessary barrier to getting the truth.

He didn’t want to think about what had happened since then. He didn’t want to think of the legal documents sitting at home announcing the end of yet another marriage, another alimony bill to pay, the foreclosure on his house. He didn’t want to think about his estranged kids. Bob searched out Chase’s window, on which the drapes were still drawn. He glanced at his watch: 12:35 p.m. His phone rumbled inside his pocket with a notification. Another nag message from his creditors.

“To hell with them,” Bob said, flinging his phone into the dash of his Bureau-owned Taurus. Just as well he had no car of his own. Just more collateral for the bank to take when they felt like it. He skipped across the street and up the stoop, panned the street behind him for threats automatically. Hitting the buzzer to Chase’s 2B was returned with dead silence.

“Come on Chase,” Bob muttered. He hit the buzzer again, slipped his hand inside his pocket for the phone which was no longer on him. Sighing, he hit the buzzer a third time. Then hit a few other random buttons. The speaker crackled with a young man’s voice. “Yo, Scotty, that you dawg?”

“Yeah,” Bob said, far enough away from the speaker to mask his voice. “Buzz me in, bro.”

The door gave off a sharp buzz and Bob let himself in, took the stairs to Chase’s floor and started knocking on her door. “Agent Chase? Open up. It’s me, Bob. Chase are you in there?”

About a minute passed before the sound of shuffling feet finally came from inside the door, mixed in with an incoherent grumbling. He wondered if he had the right place or if Chase had moved again, if she’d forgotten to update her employee record. Bob heard three different deadlocks being unbolted before the steel apartment door opened to a pale, heart-shaped face mostly hidden under a tousle of dark auburn hair, her amber brown eyes barely open. Chase was wearing blue Quantico sweats and her bare toes curled inward as a cold draft spilled into the room.

“Hi, uh, were you asleep?”

“What d’you want, Bob?” Chase said grumpily.

“Right. See there’s this case and—”

“Can’t help you.” Chase slammed the door.

Bob stood there with his mouth still hanging open. He should have known this wasn’t going to be easy. Nothing ever was. He knocked on the door again once, twice. The door opened. Chase’s black-rimmed eyes peered out. “Can’t help you even if I wanted,” she said, slamming the door again.

“Your suspension has been lifted,” Bob called through the door.

“By whom?” She called back in the hoarse, dry voice of someone who’d taken pills to sleep.

“ASAC Hogan personally released you back into active service.”

“Phooey,” Chase said.

“Beg your pardon?”

“Hong Kong Phooey. Huey, Louie, and Phooey. I’m going back to bed.”

“Aren’t you even curious why he wants you back?”

“No, Bob. The reason’s obvious.”

“So, tell me.”

“You’re desperate.”

Bob worked his mouth, then shut it again. Then opened it to retort before Chase fell into another doze. “Chase, it’s more complicated than that.”

“Complicated? It’s always complicated, Bob. That’s why we’re the FBI.”

“Look, we have to find someone before they vanish forever. He’s made off with a lot of money.”

Silence for a few heartbeats. Then Bob heard footsteps treading back and forth across a polished wood floor.

“Who?” Chase asked.

“The name’s Frank Lehrman. The boss of RVC State Bank.”

“RVC State Bank? Never heard of it.”

“RVC as in Rockville Center.”

“Rockville Center.”

“As in Long Island.”

“I know where it is, Bookman. But Rockville Center’s not even a real town. It’s like—a strip mall and a church and that’s it. The hell’s it doing with its own bank?”

“Yeah, well the complications start there. It’s one of those neobanks.”

“A what?”

“You know, like digital. Does away with the brick and mortar aspects, all the traditional high costs, etc.”

Chase pondered this for a while, her half-asleep brain seemingly struggling with the new set of facts it had been given to chew on.

“Bob, if it’s digital only, it’s not a State Bank, it’s just an IT company.”

“Uh—see there’s the thing. Technically it’s not just a neobank. It’s a hybrid.”

“A hybrid.”

“Yeah. Like the Toyota Prius.”

“It’s the Toyota Prius of banks, you’re saying.”

“Right, Chase.”

“And the boss has done a legger with all the bank’s money.”

“Yep.”

“How much?”

Bob said nothing, just awkwardly looked down the unlit corridor.

“Bob, how much was stolen?”

“A quarter billion. US dollars.”

“It’s too high profile. Bob I hate to tell you this, but you’re a patsy.”

He gritted his teeth. She wasn’t necessarily wrong about that.

“Look, you don’t have to commit to anything, just talk to me.”

She opened the door again. Her eyes bored into Bob like two spinning drill bits.

“I mean, come on Bookman, what the hell was a tiny bank in Long Island doing with a quarter billion dollars? The whole thing stinks like a Philadelphia flophouse.”

Bob, who had been looking into just that question for the past week, could only shrug in response. “It’s—I dunno. It’s perplexing. They had customers all around the country as well as overseas. They were dealing with more than just grandma’s pension check here.”

Chase teased her hair back from her face and extended a hand expectantly. For a split second Bob hallucinated that she wanted to shake with him, but the angle of her hand was wrong—it was facing upwards.

“Oh,” Bob said, going into his bag and sifting through it, then coming up with a thin plastic folder. Chase took it, eyed the few pages inside which amounted to the articles of incorporation of the Frank Lehrman Corporation and some brief details taken off the bank’s website.

Chase glared at him. “What the hell is this? Where’s his real file?”

“There isn’t one.”

“Excuse me?”

“The fact is, there isn’t much to tell.”

“Why not?”

“Frank Lehrman, I’m thinking, is an alias. No registered passport, education, credit record, no criminal history, no prints, never seemed to have been outside the country. Also the face they use on the website, I analyzed it but it seems computer generated. So, not his real face, which means can’t run it through the facial recognition server.”

“Bob, he owns a bank. A state bank. You can’t do that through an alias… Can you?”

“He’s the CEO of the RVC company, not the owner of the bank. The owner of the RVC Bank is a corporation.”

“The Frank Lehrman Corporation.”

“Right.”

“And who owns that?”

“Well, a bunch of parent LLCs.”

Chase sighed, pushed her hair back over her ears. “This sounds like a cluster fudge of epic proportions, Bob. The more I hear the more I don’t like it. What do you possibly think I could do here? This is your game. I hunt down killers and kidnappers, remember?”

“You hunt ghosts, Chase. ASAC Hogan and I believe the best route in solving this case is by apprehending the man known as Frank Lehrman. We believe, since the data is so obviously tainted, that the best method here is in fact to go the old fashioned route. Like through the bank’s employees and so forth. It wouldn’t be too far beyond what you’re used to.”

“I don’t think you quite know what I’m used to, Bookman.” She shuffled through the files some more. “Hold on a second. This bank is an FDIC member?”

“Right.”

“You gotta be freaking kidding me. Wouldn’t the FDIC have vetted this Lehrman character?”

“They would have vetted the parent corporation, which is backed by so many Wall Street firms it kind of has the halo effect behind it.”

“Uh huh. The halo effect.”

“Like you know how these things work in big business, Chase. The chain of trust…”

“More like the chain of greased palms.”

Bob stared at her. “You think bribery was involved? At the level of the Federal Government?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, Bob, you tell me.”

He thought about it. It was a small possibility. Tiny, in fact. But one he had shut out until now—simply because it had seemed so unthinkable. That was wrong of him. He had exhausted all the thinkable possibilities, and now the unthinkable ones were exactly where he needed to return. Crud, he thought. He really did need Chase after all.

“Chase,” Bob finally said, throwing his pride out the dusty window. “I don’t think I can do this alone.”

Chase just looked at him, her sleepy eyes still half-open, but burning hotter now, like old bulbs slowly flaring up in their sockets.

“So, basically,” Chase said, “we go after Lehrman. It’s a manhunt then.”

Bob smiled meekly. “What can I say, you have a reputation for these things.”

“Yeah,” she said. “And look where it’s gotten me.”

Took the words right out of my mouth, Bob thought.

“So, are you in?” Bob said. “It’s gotta beat lying in bed all day. I have a meeting scheduled with the bank in half an hour.”

Chase looked drowsily back at her unmade bed, the clothes scattered across her floor, the stack of unwashed dishes in her kitchen sink. Suddenly it seemed like this was the last place in the world she wanted to be.

“Fine,” Chase said. “But I have one condition.”

“Shoot.”

“You’re driving. I need to take a nap on the way.”

Continue Reading Chasing Dragons

It was somewhere between midnight and morning when Chase tore through the thick gray shroud and came up on the last road into Binghamton: A total zipsville town upstate, home to secrets, lies, and dead people. Her black Lincoln moved silent and smooth through the sleet. Well oiled, well tuned. The FBI was meant to work that way. The government was meant to work that way. In a perfect system, in a perfect world.

Heather Chase didn’t live in a perfect world. Nor did she work for a perfect government. They had been caught with their pants down, and it was her job to pull them back up before anyone noticed.

She watched a silent icy road slip by in the rear view, then saw her own pale, heart-shaped face framed by dark auburn hair in a ghost-like silhouette. Her dark brown eyes reflected tired blue in the low light. The road rumbled underneath. She wondered what time it was. Well after 4 am now. The wipers hypnotized as they struggled to cut through the opaque mask over the windshield. How could anyone live out here? Maybe it was easy. Maybe it was just as easy as dying out here. Bare trees lined an empty road, where the only source of light were her two high beams that lit up a dance of sprinkling snow.

The road wound around the side of a mountain and finally entered city limits. This place was a dying echo of a past war, where some defense companies were still holding their breath for the Big Red Threat to rear its head again. Hell, they practically prayed for it to happen. Their daily prayers to the blood gods had not gone unanswered. They’d gotten blood alright. They’d gotten it all over their nice school carpet. The professor it came from wouldn’t be needing it anymore: They’d found him with a red ring around his neck, sprawled over his desk.

That had been nearly 20 hours ago. That meant Chase was playing catch up. She hated being served a stale crime scene. The first 48 hours of a homicide are the most crucial—you lose that, there’s a less than 50% chance you’ll solve it. It had been why she opted to drive all the way up here from the city at three in the morning after ASAC Hogan dropped the case on her. Because who needed sleep anyway?

The bleak expanse of hostile nature loomed at the edges of the ersatz city and its mismatched architecture: Gothic buildings, Colonial buildings, big boxes of concrete. The town was practically dead at this hour. Chase didn’t mind. She could use a break from the rush and charge of bustling city life, the steel crumple of Manhattan traffic, its tornado of hollering horns and morning fury. What she hoped, desperately, was that this newfound silence wouldn’t give her inner demons the message to come out and play.

The Lincoln Continental’s slick wheels strained to cling to the iced-over route. But she kept her speed, powered through the warm orange glow of street lights and traffic lights, rippling in melted gutter snow. She penetrated deeper downtown, crossed south over the Susquehanna River. The murky water reflected a dead sky, its clouds so low you could breathe them in. The car rumbled over the rusty bridge onto Conklin. Thickets of evergreen trees lined the road as she turned onto Glenn G. Bartle Drive and neared Binghamton University. The office she wanted was buried deep inside its confines. A quaint path ran into the school grounds in a long sloping curve sided by lawns dotted with park benches and stylized lamps. Then came a series of low rise red brick buildings of three floors a piece, each of them capped with snow like gingerbread houses, a warm yellow glow coming from some of the windows. The joint looked like it could be printed on a tin of Christmas cookies.

To Chase the place didn’t smell like cookies. It smelled like Death.

She was sitting there in her parked car watching her breath stream out like fog when she heard a sudden rap on the clouded door window that made her heart jump from her chest. She rolled down to see a short, pudgy man with uncombed hair and a bright red face.

“Hello—are you the agent from the FBI?” He puffed out in fat steaming smoke signals.

He’s not the killer. The message rushed through her mind like an express train.

“Yes, I’m Special Agent Heather Chase from the New York Field Office.”

“Ah, perfect, perfect. I’m Mullin, the dean of this humble establishment. You came in plenty of time before the first class. Let’s go on up. Did you manage to have a nice drive? You must have come up through Scranton I suppose? At this hour you didn’t—”

Dean Mullin’s words drifted in and out like a cool morning mist as Chase crunched across the iced lawn and beelined to the teacher’s offices. Mullin could effectively be ruled out from the investigation. She didn’t know why she knew, she just did. Sometimes she caught an answer straight off the airwaves. Not always though. She had come alone this time, which certainly helped. Being around too many people made her second guess herself—made her inhibit her own intuitions subconsciously, knowing they would not be accepted by those around her. In the past she had tried things their way. She had traded her insights for hard evidence, fact and rigor, step-by-step deduction. Where had it gotten her? A dead end, that’s where. And almost a dead partner to boot. Bob Fairfax hadn’t been a total obstruction of course—in fact his command of facts and data had grasped them a crucial link in their last case. But if Chase had been given the freedom to perceive, to intuit, to feel—she likely would have known the killer the moment she stared into his cold gray eyes, eyes that had peered out at her from a place of pure darkness. She knew that darkness well. She had been forged by it. It was where she had developed her nose for the violent disposition.

“And now we’re on the third floor,” Mullin was saying. “The uh—area in question is just down the hall.”

“The body was discovered yesterday morning, correct?”

“Yes, at around 8:15 am by a cleaning lady.”

“Was this building sealed off after that?”

Mullin chewed the right side of his lip and looked away. “Well, the third floor, yes. And most of the second floor. But the first floor classrooms…”

“You mean to say you still had classes here yesterday? With a dead body in the building?”

“Well no, of course not. That would be crazy.”

“Okay, thank God.”

“The body was taken away by the police before we had any classes in here.”

Chase froze over like the windows outside.

“Something the matter?” Mullin asked meekly.

“Oh nothing,” Chase said. “We just have a crime scene that’s been contaminated by an entire campus of students.”

“I’m terribly sorry, you see we aren’t an overly large institution. It was a nightmare just relocating the third floor classes. There was simply no space. And as for rescheduling classes—on that much short notice, it proved an impossibility.”

“They told you that you could do it? The police,” Chase said.

“Of course.”

“Then it’s not your fault.” Chase withdrew her laser gaze from the man, whose pale blue eyes and doughy cheeks momentarily softened her. “The police should have told you to seal the building until it could be examined. It’s their screw up.”

“If it’s any consolation, Forensics did do a sweep of the place.”

It wasn’t. Chase knew not to trust the dinky forensics teams of local PDs. Especially not in a town of this size. This conversation wasn’t over. There was just no point having it with the dean.

“Anyway, let’s take a look at the scene.” Chase said. Standing around wasn’t going to get her anywhere. She had to see where it happened, breathe it in. From there, everything began. From there, she would start to know the killer on an intimate basis.

They made their way across a carpeted floor that felt springy underneath. The floorboards likely hadn’t been replaced since the building was first constructed. The place had the same incongruent mix of old and new as the rest of the town. It was still black out there behind the windows, but that purplish black when the night finally gives way to dawn.

Chase took a deep breath at the door to the room.

“Do you want me to come in with you?” the dean said.

“No thanks,” Chase said. “I prefer to be alone.”

Chapter 2

Heather Chase stepped into the room of a dead man. It was your standard teacher’s office: Somber colors, reds, and deep mustard yellow. A heavy wooden desk in the corner, book-lined shelves running the wall. A high pile beige colored rug in the center of the room. Three chairs total: Two mahogany backed, almost ornamental. One leather-backed exec chair behind the desk that didn’t fit the decor. Built for comfort, heavy duty. The desk was stacked with various files and folders. A big screen monitor stood in its center. BenQ. No cheap Samsung junk. A quality display for long hours of reading.

The place was lived-in. It smelled like stale sweat, tobacco ash, and even carried the faintest trace of a microwave meal.

“Professor Claybourne,” Chase muttered. “This had been your hideaway. Your home.”

But these were all surface aspects. Chase had to go deeper. Had to touch upon the victim—only then could she touch upon his murderer.

She stepped closer to the desk. Underneath the chair, the rug had been stained dark crimson. A yellow crime scene marker noted it as ‘four.’ Chase kicked it out of the way. She wanted the scene as it had been before the cops had run roughshod over it. She wanted to see the deed happen before her. She reached out with a shivering hand and touched the leather back of the chair: Cool, hard, shiny. Her fingers slid down the surface, ran over its various indentations, and landed on the seat. This time a warmth came through her fingers. All those hours spent sitting here had sunken into the seat permanently. The dead lived on posthumously through the items they left behind. Their essence permeated into things over time.

This was enough. Chase took off her shoes, then her socks. Felt the thick, comforting softness of the rug under her bare feet. She took a step closer to the chair. Then another. She was standing right where the professor had been at the time of his death. The deep red fibers tickled her soles. Her hands brushed the leather. A hot frisson jumped inside her, her mouth opened wide, her head tilted back. The shiver shot down her spine and spread hot-and-cold over her forearms, making her break out in gooseflesh. She sucked in an icy breath, swiveled around and dumped herself into the chair.

“I was sitting here working,” Chase murmured in a low droning voice. “And I am about to die.”

Her stomach jumped: Here it came. The moment.

There’s moments like that. Moments that come only when you’re free of interruption. When your mind is clear as an open field and even the air you breathe rushes through you so freely you can taste it at the bottom of your lungs, and behind your eyes is infinity, and all boundaries slip away. As if the limits had only ever been shadows, obscuring something more permanent, more tangible. Something that had always been there waiting for you to grasp it.

Chase grasped it.

And blood pumped through her body, through her thick, strong arteries down to her narrowest of capillaries. Her brain sparked and popped like an electric chair. Her mind and body blended. Present and past unsplit. This space and time was no longer a link in a chain that ran in one direction. Here was an entire web, a universe spread out beneath her bare feet like a map. Things in the here and now became just part of the always and everywhere. When the dirt runs off the windows, when the smoke clears from the glass, see inside. She saw.

But something inside was wrong. She couldn’t find the real man. A man died. Why? Where? Who? A mark around his neck. A wire around his neck. The slamming of his veins in his ears and his mind going white as the lights blinked out forever. But it was wrong, something was wrong. A man had died but not like this. Not like this. Who or what or why, something wrong.

The boom of the deadman’s blood in Chase’s ears made itself a distraction. It moved her away from the image she needed to see. It had meant to bring her closer to the killer, let her see his fear and desire, smell the murderous odor on his body. But instead the pounding made her look elsewhere. Made her look away from the blood, which was his, no doubt about it, but somehow wrong.

It was then, sitting barefoot in the professor’s leather chair, and sensing death leave her, that Chase knew she was in trouble. If asked she wouldn’t be able to articulate why. The way it worked for her was that the actuality of a thing came first, and the rest was just a series of viewpoints on something she already knew. She didn’t know what she knew, nor what it meant. But that pounding in her ears didn’t leave her. It was the sound of a great oak door slamming on the truth.

And that pounding would stay in her ears, lower, less distinct, but present. It would stay there playing back over the low burble of the Susquehanna and through the hot heaving wheeze of the heating pipes. It would hide behind the drip-drip of snow down the eaves and mingle in the crunch of frozen ground. It would never quite disappear in the rustle of the wind in the trees, it would lurk in the chirping of blue jays and thump inside the shuffle of feet in daytime streets. The deadman’s blood would throb through Chase’s mind right up until the end, until she set right this injustice.

Space bulged like an apple and split down the middle. She opened her eyes in spite of herself and saw the detritus of coffee mug stains and pastry flakes over dogeared printouts. When you think of government-funded researchers, you expect meticulous men with crew cuts and square frame glasses, stiff white shirts, crossed ts and dotted is. This guy had been a slob. She cleared her throat—looked up to find the dean staring blankly at her. Expecting her to explain herself, or explain anything.

“He would have been slightly overweight,” Chase said. “Frazzled by the coming and going of students. Chronic smoker—place stinks like an ashtray.” She walked over to the ventilator and ran a finger inside—it came out black. She showed it to the dean. He nodded. “You landed here just as the defense industry was going broke, didn’t you, Benjamin?” Chase went on. “Your career was meant to be on the up and up but this one bad move set the tone for your entire career. But you were resourceful. You still had your old school ties. You didn’t stay here out of necessity. You wanted to be here. Why ? Something else. Something secret. This whole messy desk is only half of you. A front. It’s your needled brush, you hedgehog. But you had your needles stuck in deeper than anyone could have imagined. Anyone, that is, except the guy who slit your throat…”

Dean Millner stepped in place, awkwardly shifted his gaze between Chase and the room.

Chase went on. “So, he didn’t want people screwing with his work, he locked himself into this building, into this room. Not the big research compound down the road from here. He did the bulk of his work here. He needed the peace and quiet. He needed to work under the radar. When he finished his mandatory classes and powered through office hours, he sat there at his—”

Chase turned, her eyes heavy, but wide. She stared at the desk again. The 21 inch screen monitor sat there silently, unplugged, its HDMI cable dangling in the breeze.

“Where’s his computer?” Chase said, her voice louder now. “Did Homicide take it?”

“Uh,” the dean said. Chase wasn’t psychic, but she was capable of putting two and two together.

“It’s missing, isn’t it?”

The dean shrugged, his head lowered apologetically. “It appears so.”

“And Professor Claybourne was working on some pretty heavy material, isn’t that correct?”

“If you mean important research, then yes. He was the star of this college, academically speaking.”

“So, do you have some kind of GPS tracker installed?”

“Uh,” the dean said, pondering the question. “I’d have to check. We had no mandatory rule enforcing that on personal laptops, but it’s possible Professor Claybourne took those measures himself.”

Dean Millner stared at her some more. “Anything else, Special Agent Chase?”

“Yes. I want to know why he was in this room using a personal laptop to work. Doesn’t that break protocol? If he was working on sensitive research. He was allowed to take it out of the research building?”

The dean grimaced. “Well, Ben was rather particular about his surroundings. We had to bend the rules for him a touch.”

“What you didn’t tell the police,” Chase said. “Was that Claybourne was connected to something of incredible value—perhaps even more value than his own life.”

Millner’s eyes opened like a flood gate. But he kept clammed. He knew the trouble he was in.

“Dean Millner, there’s a glaring factor about this crime scene that says one thing and one thing only: The murder wasn’t the real crime. We’re looking at potentially high security information being snatched right out of here. Well—at least that gives us motive.”

The dean brightened a little. “Does that mean you can find who did this?”

“There’s no guarantee of anything at this stage.” Chase said. But she’d woken up now. The animation of each possibility playing in her periphery, like floaters after staring into a bright bulb.

Millner leaned forward, his round, innocent eyes glowing with wonder. If he was playacting, he was damn good.

“There’s one more thing I can tell about this scene,” Chase said.

“Yes?”

“The PD didn’t bag and tag the place. Everything aside from the body itself has been left in its exact place. The markers only go up to four. Meaning the body and maybe some effects. There’s only one reason for a homicide team to do that—if they were given explicit instruction. The scene was preserved.”

“Incredible,” Millner said. “You’re completely right, Agent Chase.”

“So, what I want to know is, who told them to preserve it?”

The crack of the door yanked Chase out of her focused haze and threw her back into grungy reality. “That’s some impressive deduction,” a non-specific male voice came from the doorway.

The owner of the voice was of medium height, medium build, perhaps a little on the skinny side. He had generic short blonde hair and a somewhat snub nose on a plain, pale but not too pale face, with medium-sized eyes under generic glasses and medium bone structure. Chase guessed that all of his clothes came strictly in M. This man was so average you could lose sight of him if he was standing right in front of you. He was the most nondescript man she’d ever seen: He seemed to barely exist at all.

“You did me a favor by not spoiling the scene,” Chase said to the man. “Now perhaps you can do me another.”

“Of course,” the plain man said, the bare curve of a smile playing on his regular-sized lips.

“You could tell me which agency you work for.”

Continue Reading Frozen Justice

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