Sterling Quinn stood at the edge of the penguin habitat with her arms crossed and a frown on her face. She leaned over the rail that kept visitors from falling into the penguins’ home and sighed in aggravation.

She was the first field agent on the scene, and about 20 feet beneath her lay a dead body ironically dressed up in a tuxedo and looking like the penguins’ leader. The body was surrounded by a little over two dozen penguins that seemed perplexed by the intruder in their midst. The birds waddled around like little macabre pallbearers, and sometimes, they stopped to shake their little rear ends in excitement. Each time they passed the body, they seemed to take delight in grabbing the deceased’s clothes in their beaks, attempting to tear the fabric to shreds.

Agent Quinn drew her hand over her face and stifled her desire to scream. Whoever created this scene needed a sharp kick in the rear end, and she was feeling fed up enough to deliver it.

The squawking and high-pitched braying sounds made Sterling desperately wish for a pair of noise-canceling headphones. She performed a massive eye roll while trying to come up with a better strategy for rounding up all the waddling renegades. While Sterling watched from the catwalk above the penguin habitat, her hand flew up over her mouth, and she made little gasps while the tiny creatures continued to stomp all over her crime scene along with the blundering techs meant to round them up.

Deep down, Sterling understood that they were just wild creatures avoiding capture and following their instincts, but she swore it looked like the little cretins were doing the penguin stomp on purpose. Unfortunately, the crime scene techs weren’t having much success with the little critters, and Sterling tried counting to 10 before she blew her stack but quickly reached her limit and had to start over. Her fingers pinched the bridge of her nose, and she shook her head while closing her chocolate brown eyes and willed this to be someone else’s crime scene. Anyone else’s crime scene.

Never in all her years of bureau training did Sterling recall a case of skittering penguins ruining the evidence at a murder location. While recalling all her manuals that covered unique crime scenes, Sterling was positive that penguins were not found in any of her textbooks. Tossing her loose honey-blonde hair behind her shoulder, she flagged down one of the techs that she recognized from several other cases. It was hard to tell who was who while they were dressed in their hazmat suits. Their manner of dress always reminded her of kids wearing bright yellow slickers with matching booties. What was his name? Thomas? Daniel? Joseph? No, wait, it was Robert, wasn’t it?

Stopping one of the flustered crime scene techs, Sterling asked, “Robert, where’s Anne?”

“It’s Oliver, Agent Quinn. You didn’t hear?” he responded, pulling down his mask. “She took a job as the new coroner for New York City and left the bureau with little notice.”

Sterling grimaced. Her inability to recall the tech’s name was embarrassing. Her long-time boyfriend, ADA Malcolm Grant, was always telling her that she should be more invested in the people surrounding her. Even though she had always been a bit of an introvert, people sometimes mistook that for being aloof. The last thing Agent Quinn wanted was to give the rest of her coworkers the wrong idea. Sterling certainly didn’t look down on them and had always felt that the techs worked hard at a thankless job.

There had been several changes at the bureau recently, and Sterling felt a lot like the coyote that had chased the roadrunner off the edge of the cliff and looked down to find that she was running on air, only to plummet.

Internally, Sterling grumbled and swore, but when she met the gaze of the crime tech, it was apparent that her complaints weren’t as silent as she believed. He looked frightened of her, so she gave him a forced smile to reassure him that she wouldn’t shoot him on the spot.

“Did anyone think to tell me that Anne had left?” Sterling vocalized loudly, and hearing the peevish tone in her voice, she cringed.

“It was in an email,” Oliver replied meekly. From the heated look he received, the tech quickly turned his back on Agent Quinn while scuttling off to join the others in trying to round up the elusive penguins.

“Well, that’s something you don’t see every day!” a male baritone said beside her. There was something about his voice that was smooth and reminded Sterling of cascading silk. After a slight pause, a crinkle formed at the corner of his eye, and he added, “But they’re kinda cute, aren’t they?”

Sterling turned to her right to see a man handsome enough to be a model standing there before he casually leaned over the railing for a better look at the scene below. His Texas drawl was unmistakable, and she stared at him, narrowing her eyes despite his friendly intonation.

“Sir, this is an active crime scene,” Sterling stated from between clenched teeth, her cheeks turning crimson with annoyance.

“I can see that,” he replied, nodding and smiling without taking his eyes off the stubborn birds flopping around below, evading all attempts to corral them. When he turned to face her, there was a twinkle of mischief in his dark brown eyes, and then he dared to wink at her.

The unspoken darlin’ hung in the air between them, daring Sterling to take the bait. While the stranger’s look was a tad smug, there was a certain charm that radiated from him, and Sterling felt more irritated as the seconds ticked by. She could almost picture him tipping the brim of a cowboy hat even though he wasn’t wearing one.

“Sir,” Sterling repeated, trying hard not to blow her temper, “I have no idea who you are, but you can’t be here.” Sterling stared the man down and swore he was attempting not to burst into laughter. She bit her tongue before saying something that would get her in trouble with her director, Peter Wolfe. He’d made it clear that she had been skating on thin ice lately and that she needed to keep her nose clean.

Without a partner to help keep her grounded, Sterling had been warned that she was beginning to stray from department protocols, and one more altercation would end with her being suspended without pay. Despite her protests, Wolfe had insisted on assigning a new partner during Alexander Hoff’s sabbatical, and the last thing she wanted was another partner to tiptoe around.

“Oh, I think I am supposed to be here,” he replied while pointing his index finger at the floor beneath his feet.

“Unless you’re the new coroner,” Sterling continued, eyeing him up and down. “Which I sincerely doubt, considering you’re wearing a Brooks Brothers original black navy suit. I’m afraid you’ll have to leave.”

A playful smirk tugged at the man’s lips showing his amusement, and his hand cupped the edge of his suit at the chest level while reaching for his interior pocket. “I have to admit,” he said. “You’re good. There aren’t many that can tell one suit from another.” While reaching inside for his identification credentials, he moved his jacket aside long enough to allow Sterling to eye the gun he wore in a custom, hand-tooled shoulder holster.

Sterling looked alarmed and went for her firearm, causing the man to raise his hands with one of them holding out a wallet she recognized. It was an FBI identification holder, and she relaxed and returned her firearm to its holster. “You might have opened with that,” she said crossly. Craning her neck to read the card, she could finally make out his name while the badge rocked back and forth like a sign banging in a windstorm.

“Drake Archer?” Sterling asked, then paused while waiting for an answer. When none came, she had to ask him, “And you are?”

“Your new partner.” His answer was blunt, yet there was still that annoying hint of charm in his tone that set Sterling’s teeth on edge. She was outraged. How dare he patronize her!

“No,” Sterling replied vehemently, reacting to Drake’s know-it-all smile. “My partner is Alexander Hoff, but he’s…”

“On extended leave,” Drake said, finishing her statement. “Hoff and I are old buddies from academy days, and he requested that I fill in for him until he can come back.” The unspoken if hung in the air making their exchange more uncomfortable.

After being paired with bad partners, Alexander Hoff had come with his own problems, but for some reason, he and Quinn had always clicked, and neither one of them could figure out why their chemistry complimented each other. Not too long ago, shortly before partnering up with       Quinn, Hoff met his future wife, Jessica, and had toed the line since that introduction.

It wasn’t long before they ran off and eloped in Vegas, and that’s when Hoff found out that his wife was loaded, not with alcohol, but with money. Lots of money! Jessica was a super rich sugarcane heiress with a home office in Honolulu. It sounded like an excellent place for a honeymoon, but a couple of weeks had turned into months, and Sterling secretly wondered if he’d ever come home. While Hoff was in Hawaii living the life, Sterling was stuck with another new partner and an annoying one at that.

“I’m working alone until Hoff comes back.” As hard as she tried, Sterling couldn’t keep the irritation out of her voice. Her partner’s departure had left her with abandonment issues, although she understood why he’d left.

“The director and Hoff said that since they don’t know when that might be, they want you to work with a partner. I got the impression that it wasn’t a request.” Drake paused while waiting for his new partner to object again. When Sterling didn’t reply, he added smugly, “That’s where I come in.”

“Doesn’t anyone feel that they have to tell me anything?” Sterling practically shouted, making the techs flinch and freeze in place while the penguins continued to flop, waddle, and squawk over and around the dead body. Her hands covered her forehead and eyes while she massaged her temples with her thumbs, willing her migraine to recede. She muttered, “This is a nightmare.”

“Hey!” Drake yelled while trying to gain the attention of the techs below. When that failed, Drake stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled shrilly, loud enough to pierce the sounds of mayhem below. They all froze and turned to investigate what was going on, and the current silence was quiet enough to hear a pin drop. It had worked, perhaps a bit too well.

The new agent muttered a huh under his breath, and an embarrassed smile crossed his lips, leading to a nervous chuckle. After all, no one here knew him. Why should they pay attention to a stranger? Drake leaned over the railing to address the techs in the pen below. “Grab a couple of pails of fish. The smell and the promise of food will get those little guys out of the area and back into their pens.”

Sterling stood there with her mouth open. Did this interloper just take over her crime scene? She opened her mouth to give the new agent the tongue-lashing of his life when she noticed that his advice was working.

A couple of the techs closest to the back room disappeared and reemerged quickly with pails of a stinky fish stew composed of sardines, smelt, herring, and anchovies. Shaking the buckets and holding their noses, the techs were relieved that the penguins began to respond. With some techs leading and the rest bringing up the rear and shooing, the penguins started to retreat from the crime scene.

Like the Pied Piper leading the rats from the city of Hamelin, the penguins began to willingly follow the techs back to their enclosure. Sterling eyed Drake suspiciously, and her mouth fell open.

“How?” her incomplete question trailed off into silence.

“Oh, um,” Drake coughed into his hand. “Yeah. When I was a kid, I worked at SeaWorld in San Antonio for several summers. I was up every morning at five and was on my way to work by five thirty. Every morning, I was greeted by a mountain of frozen fish and it was my job to sort them into the appropriate buckets. Then, I weighed each of them to ensure they were given the correct amount and that the fish was high quality. It was a filthy job and by the end of the day, I stood in the shower for hours, but it still didn’t remove the stink.”

“But, I…” Sterling began indicating his manner of dress. “I mean…”

“Oh, well, ah,” Drake stuttered. “Ahem. My old man insisted that I understood what real work was. He built his fortune with his own two hands.” Drake leaned against the railing and added, “I’m sure that any of the handlers here would have told you the same if they hadn’t been sent to the locker rooms to wait for their interviews.” He shot her an innocent look that was meant to be charming, but the look she gave him in return intimated that she had his number and that he wasn’t fooling anyone, especially her, with his boyish charms.

Sterling’s eyebrows were furrowed so deeply that they almost met in the middle. She couldn’t decide if she hated Drake or was in awe of this self-confident agent that had invaded her life only a few moments ago.

Magically, a couple of the techs appeared with more bait buckets filled with fish, and the penguins honked and cooed in contentment while they single-file followed the crime techs into the back holding pens. Their little wings were held away from their bodies in excitement while their short, squatty legs waddled, trying to keep up with their new handlers. The birds that had been lingering in the water made for shore and fell in line behind the others.

Sterling watched in amazement as the chaos of only a few moments ago disappeared. Without turning to face Drake, she muttered, “You should have gotten here sooner.”

“I just flew in on the red eye this morning,” Drake said. “I was thinking I would like to take in some of the sites here in Boston. The aquarium was on my list, but seeing all this, I think I’ll pass.”

“Hmm, pity,” Sterling said unsympathetically. “Murder does tend to ruin the magic.”

“Hoff said you’re a tough cookie,” Drake replied, giving Sterling a knowing sideways glance. He turned to face her while leaning on the railing. “I can respect that.”

Below, the techs made a final sweep to make sure that they hadn’t missed any birds, and when they came up empty, they ushered a slim figure wearing a white coverall into the area so that she could examine the body. Carrying a medical bag, the woman knelt and began to examine the dead man.

“The new coroner, I presume,” Sterling said to no one in particular under her breath. Turning to Drake, she asked, “Know anything about her?”

“No, why?”

“Well, you seem to be a fountain of information. I just figured you’d know all about her, too,” Sterling added sarcastically.

As if on cue, the new coroner marched toward the agents and lowered her hood, revealing a head of golden hair that was complimented with piercing blue eyes.

“No, but I’d like to,” Drake mumbled.

Chapter 2

Sterling couldn’t help but notice the significant differences between this coroner and her predecessor. Anne had been a top-notch forensics expert, complete with frizzy hair and a rounded gut from socking away too many brewskis with the guys during football parties. In short, Anne was a bit frumpy but she was tops in Sterling’s eyes since she had come up with some minuscule pieces of information that broke many of her cases wide open. Anne had been a genius, complete with coke bottle bottom glasses and zero sense of humor.

Heading toward them was a woman that was at least half Anne’s age and was so thin that it would have taken four of her to fill Anne’s smock. The new coroner would have looked more at home on a designer’s runway, wearing flowing gowns of organza and silk, rather than her white hazmat suit.

“Kristin Miller,” the new coroner said, addressing the agents above her.

“Ah, welcome,” Sterling replied. “I’m Agent Quinn and this is Agent Archer. It looks like we’re going to have a tough first case for you.”

Glancing over her shoulder at the mayhem, Kristin couldn’t help but nod in agreement.

“Is it possible that he just fell in?” Drake asked. “It’s a pretty big drop.”

“Considering that he’s way over there,” Kristin said without looking back at the dead body or Agent Archer while hitching her thumb in the general direction of the corpse. “I’d say that he was placed there or lured there. The penguins took care of any footprints, so we may never know definitively how our victim arrived at his final destination.”

“So, not death by penguin,” Drake said, tongue in cheek.

“I think we can rule that out,” Kristin replied, meeting his gaze for the first time and adding a flirty smile. Her blue eyes sparkled for a moment and then she turned to face Sterling. “It’s unfortunate that the penguins destroyed your crime scene, Agent Quinn, but I’ll see what magic I can perform. I’ve been known to pull one or two rabbits out of my hat when cases look bleak. My initial check of the body points to murder since there seem to be a lot of inconsistencies. Still, I’ll have to hold my final judgment until I can perform the preliminary autopsy back at headquarters. Do we have an ID on the victim?”

“Unfortunately, not yet,” Sterling said with disappointment. “No one seems to know who he is, so my guess is that he’s not tied to the aquarium in any way. Our crime scene techs have been too busy herding all the penguins out of the area to spend much time on the deceased.”

Kristin peeled off her latex gloves, revealing meticulously manicured nails that were painted fire engine red. “The tox screen will tell us more, but I noticed a patch of skin that is bluish-purple surrounding what looks like an injection site,” Kristin pointed at the back of her own neck to indicate where it was located on the deceased.

“I can’t help but think I’ve heard of something like this before,” Drake blurted out suddenly.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Sterling replied. “A dead body surrounded by penguins seems like something out of a bad made-for-television movie.”

“No…” Kristin interjected, looking up at Drake and boring her blue eyes into his as if willing him to read her mind. Breaking off their moment, she blinked a few times while deep in thought. Then she pointed at him in agreement. “You know… you’re right, I have heard of this before.” Her index finger covered her mouth while the rest of her hand cradled her chin. She pondered the scenario for a few moments and then her eyes lit up like a firecracker when it suddenly all made sense.

“Spencer Manning!” Kristin and Drake said in unison.

“Spencer Manning?” Sterling asked. “Is he our victim?”

Kristin looked over her shoulder and then back at Agent Quinn. “No, Spencer Manning is considerably younger than our victim. And thinner. This guy is a little chubby.”

A blank look filled Sterling’s face since she had no idea who Spencer Manning was.

“Spencer Manning is a murder mystery author that bases his books in his hometown of Boston,” Kristin began. “He’s written a murder series featuring a hardcore female detective named Aurora Hardcastle who chases down serial killers.”

“I knew this looked familiar!” Drake exclaimed, snapping his fingers. “I can’t believe that I didn’t see it sooner. This is a perfect representation of his first book, Swimmin’ With the Fishes.”

“Oh,” Kristin exclaimed in a tone that was a cross between thoughtfulness and dread.

Sterling looked at her blankly and repeated what the coroner had said, “Oh?” she paused, praying that there wasn’t more bad news. “Oh, what?”

“If the killer is copying Manning’s first murder mystery, then there should be another body in the aquarium,” Drake responded slowly, reading the new coroner’s mind. “There wouldn’t happen to be a giant ocean tank here, would there?”

“As a matter of fact, there is,” Sterling answered slowly, her tone filled with worry. “It’s four stories high with lots of places to hide a body.” Pointing at the tech she’d spoken with earlier, she motioned for him to approach. “Robert.”

“Oliver,” he replied with annoyance. He’d worked on three of Agent Sterling’s cases and was perturbed that Sterling couldn’t remember his name.

“Sorry,” Sterling said, finding that she genuinely meant it. Malcolm always told her that she needed to get to know the people she worked with better. Sterling hated to admit it, but he was right; she had to stop being so hyper-focused on the case that she ignored conventional etiquette. This case was in its infancy and already Sterling felt like everything was running off the rails. “Can you find someone in charge that can take us to the back of the giant ocean tank?”

With a curt nod, the tech quickly disappeared and returned a few minutes later with the aquarium manager.

“Agent Quinn, this is Margaret Johnson,” Oliver said.

Sterling found herself looking at a frail, older woman who appeared nervous. She was wearing a sophisticated purple dress that showcased her unique silver hair and lavender eyes. In her youth, Mrs. Johnson had likely been exceptionally attractive. The fragrance that she wore was unmistakable… Cinnabar by Estée Lauder.

Sterling inhaled the spicy mix of jasmine, orange flower, clove, and patchouli, and for those few moments, it brought back a feeling of home. While the scent was no longer in production, Sterling recalled that she had borrowed it without permission from her mother’s perfume tray more than once when she was younger. Even though it had been her mother’s prized perfume, she never minded sharing it with her only daughter, and Sterling recalled that she’d always turned a blind eye to her daughter’s harmless thievery.

“How may I be of assistance?” Margaret asked.

“We need access to the giant tank,” Sterling requested. “We have reason to believe that there may be a clue or a second victim inside.”

“Oh, dear, that will ruin the chemistry in the exhibit’s filtration system,” the older woman replied, wringing her hands. “This way, please.”

“Oliver,” Sterling said carefully so that she didn’t call him the wrong name again, “could you please make sure that they bag the body in the penguin habitat and send it back for Kristin to examine? And please escort our new coroner up here to accompany us while we search for another body.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You’ve obviously read these novels,” Sterling said while turning toward the new coroner, “which will give us some helpful insight while we search for another possible victim.”

Nodding in agreement, Kristin quickly followed Oliver back through the penguin housing, only to emerge a few minutes later on the catwalk so that she might join the other agents.

“Wow,” Sterling said, holding the back of her hand over her nose after the coroner joined them. “That’s a really fishy smell.”

“You get used to it,” Drake supplied. “I’ve smelled a lot worse.”

A flustered Margaret Johnson led the trio to the guts of the aquarium center. Behind her, Kristin merely chuckled in amusement while she followed the small entourage behind the scenes of the giant aquarium tank carrying her coroner’s bag.

“Well, this is huge,” Drake announced when they arrived in the backstage area of the four-story tank.

“The deepest point of the tank is 23 feet,” Margaret replied. She was nervous and acted like a tour guide since providing specifics about the exhibit gave her something to say. “It’s 40 feet wide and holds 200,000 gallons of salt water heated to between 72 and 75 degrees for its inhabitants.”

“Look at that great turtle,” Kristin exclaimed as a green sea turtle swam by.

“That’s Myrtle, our star resident,” Margaret said proudly. “She’s lived here since June of 1970.”

“What else is in that tank?” Sterling inquired, wondering if there was anything dangerous residing inside the vast habitat.

“Oh,” Margaret began and then paused while she mentally took an inventory. “There are moray eels, barracuda, stingrays, a few smaller sharks, loggerhead sea turtles, and some colorful reef fish.”

“Is that a body?” Kristin asked, pointing to a diver’s suit she’d spotted on the bottom of the tank.

“No, that’s just a dummy inside a diving suit placed among the coral reef for representation,” Margaret responded. “We nicknamed him Henry.”

Sterling watched as a small hammerhead shark swam by. She gulped and then made an exasperated sound. This killer was making her life hell. “We’re going to need a professional diver.” Flipping her shoulder-length hair behind her, Sterling began to punch in the director’s number to see if he had any recommendations. After only one or two rings, a hand reached for her phone and turned it off.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Sterling remarked, “We need a diver to search the tank.”

“There’s no need,” Drake said quietly. “I’m an accomplished diver.” He then looked down at his prized suit with unspoken worry.

“Don’t worry, hot stuff,” Kristin said, sporting a dazzling smile. “I’ll make sure that nothing happens to your precious suit.” The coroner paused and crossed her heart. “I’ll even place it in an evidence bag and seal it tight.”

Drake winked at her and asked the aquarium’s director to help him find a wetsuit to wear into the tank.

As Margaret led Drake to the back, Sterling could hear her telling him to be careful with their coral exhibit since it was handmade and painted by local artists.

Sterling didn’t need to see her new partner’s face to know that he had just directed an eye roll behind the back of the older woman in silent response to her request. It wasn’t long before Margaret returned, handing the suit to the coroner. Kristin chuckled and took the offered clothing off the older woman’s hands.

“Ah, a man and his suit,” Kristin joked. “The unspoken love affair.”

In the silence that filled their time together, Margaret spoke up hoping to fill the uncomfortable void as they waited for Agent Archer to suit up and enter the tank and begin his search. “Did you know that our giant tank was built first, and then the rest of the aquarium was built around it?”

“It’s an interesting design,” Kristin replied while taking in the architecture surrounding them.

“Why are there so many framed windows?” Sterling asked. “Most tanks I’ve seen are just one large panorama view.”

“The designer did that on purpose,” Margaret stated proudly. “This way, each time someone stands in that single frame, it’s like they have a personal window to interact with the inhabitants.”

Before the aquarium manager could interject with any more fun facts, all of the women had their attention drawn to Agent Archer, who had entered the tank with a noticeable splash. He used strong but swift movements to explore the tank and began a grid search similar to those the agents used on the ground.

Sterling felt uneasy and fought the urge to begin pacing back and forth in front of the giant tank. In reality, Drake had only been in the water a couple of minutes, but it seemed like hours. She was beginning to think that this case would be a career killer and wondered if it was too late to follow another vocation—something quiet yet fulfilling, like a mad scientist out to destroy the world.

***

Drake methodically checked every nook and cranny while staying out of the way of the eels and small sharks. Thankfully they’d all been fed recently, so they paid little notice to the diver who invaded their world. So far, everything looked relatively normal, but in reality, Drake wasn’t sure if he was looking for another dead body or just a clue. What he was looking for could technically be the size of a postage stamp and reminded him of the saying, looking for a needle in a haystack.

Fighting the urge to glance toward his new partner for direction, Drake pressed on. He didn’t have to look to know that Sterling was either tapping her foot, standing with her hands on her hips, or fidgeting with her hands. What Sterling did really didn’t matter because finding whatever he was looking for would take as long as needed.

Making his way to the bottom of the tank, Drake saw something that looked out of place. He already knew that the diver was a prop, but there was something off about its positioning. Obscured by a school of colorful fish, Drake peered inside the diving suit and was startled by what he saw, but there was no denying it, this man was no dummy and, without a doubt, he had been murdered.

Drake swam toward the top of the tank and then flashed Sterling and the others a thumbs-up to indicate that he’d found something.

Margaret led Sterling and Kristin to the staging area so they could talk with Drake after he returned to the tank’s surface. On the way there, Sterling passed the sea dragon exhibit and took one moment to embrace the calm beauty of the magnificent little creatures. Their fluttering wings were hypnotic, and Sterling allowed herself a moment to collect her thoughts while marveling at how colorful they were. Each dragon had a long proboscis which was spotted and dark purple and bled into a yellow collar that, in turn, melted into iridescent blue and purple stripes.

They reminded Sterling of creatures from a fantasy novel as they gracefully glided through their tiny habitat with their small leafy appendages. For that one moment, Sterling was at peace, and she took a deep breath and steeled herself for what was to follow. If only she’d known how complicated this case would become, she might have stolen a few more moments to enjoy the grace of the little sea dragons.

Agent Archer remained in the water with his muscular arms folded over the top of the tank. Sterling was surprised at how well-defined his muscles were, and his suit jacket had hidden how physically fit her new partner was.

“Well?” Sterling asked and silently prayed that there wasn’t anything in the tank.

“Oh, there’s a dead body, alright,” he replied.

“Are you sure?” Margaret asked, seemingly unaware that the agents didn’t need to answer her questions.

“I’m pretty sure,” Archer replied, addressing the agents while answering the civilian’s question. “We’ll need an extraction team to get the body out of the tank.”

“Is that really necessary?” Sterling asked. “It’s impossible to collect evidence from the bottom of the tank, but…” looking at Kristin, “Perhaps the filtration system?”

Kristin nodded in agreement.

“The guy’s wearing cement overshoes, so he’s going to be too heavy for me to lift out of here,” Drake said. “We’re going to need some sort of winch to lift him out.”

“Excuse me?” Sterling responded, “Did you say cement overshoes? Like how the mafia from the 1920s would kill someone and encase their feet with cement?”

“The very same,” Drake responded.

“Can we tell if the victim was alive when he was placed in the water?” Sterling asked.

Drake shook his head. “Our new coroner has her work cut out for her. He’s encapsulated in some sort of clear bag under the diver’s suit, and his face… yeesh, what a mess.”

“Sorry,” Kristin said while shrugging her shoulders. “At this point, based on what Agent Archer has provided, there’s no way to tell until I autopsy him.”

“Aren’t there cameras back here?” Sterling asked the aquarium manager.

“Oh, I’m so sorry. We are replacing the surveillance system next week since the last one stopped working a few days ago,” Margaret said, her voice trailing off once the coincidence hit home.

“Well, that’s mighty convenient,” Drake replied while climbing over the side of the tank and beginning to towel off. “Any chance the system was sabotaged?”

Sterling was silent. Director Wolfe wasn’t going to be happy that this day had turned into one big dog and pony show. The answers were going to take a lot of time to find, and she feared they were just getting started. Perhaps they could procure a lead after interviewing the staff.

“I better make a few phone calls,” Sterling muttered. “We’re going to need a pretty extensive extraction team.”

“How about Kristin and I handle the extraction team,” Drake offered, “while you start interviewing the staff?”

While Sterling wasn’t a fan of giving up control of anything having to do with her cases, Agent Archer had a point. If she tried to handle everything herself, it would be days before she could go home, all the employees would be stuck there all that time, and Director Wolfe would accuse her of not being a team player. Wolfe had made it clear that she needed to allow others to assist her in crime scene processing so he would be pleased that she had relinquished control to her new partner. If his actions messed up the case, then Wolfe could put Archer’s head on a stake instead of hers. It took her exactly 30 seconds to nod in agreement. What Archer didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

While she walked away from the area, Sterling could hear a small chuckle escape from Agent Archer. She fought the urge to go back and tell him what a manipulative bastard she thought he was, but that would make her look like she wasn’t a team player.

Director Wolfe wasn’t the only one that kept telling her that she couldn’t expect to ride shotgun over every little detail. Sterling’s significant other, Malcolm Grant, had also been telling her that being a control freak wasn’t healthy and that he wished she would be as invested in their relationship as she was in her cases. His assessment didn’t seem fair to Sterling. Malcolm knew that she was a workaholic when they first met. Her habit might have become more intense over the years, but she had always been overly involved with her cases.

Malcolm’s observations had been a tough pill to swallow, and Sterling admitted that she had been the one having trouble maintaining the commitments they shared. With a promise to do better in their relationship, Sterling had been working hard to feel empathy toward others. Even with a partner to take some of the heat off, Sterling found that giving up even a little control made her irritable. The last thing she wanted was to go home tonight and take that sentiment out on Malcolm.

Her phone buzzed with a notification, and Sterling frowned at the screen. Malcolm! It was as if he had a sixth sense when she was experiencing control issues. It contained one simple word.

Malcolm: Dinner?

Her heart felt heavy, and she knew that she couldn’t possibly make it home in time for dinner. She’d be working late for sure, probably an all-nighter, and she hesitated to respond, knowing that he would read too much into it.

Sterling quickly sent her reply.

Sterling: Sorry, darling, caught a rough case, and I’ll be working late with my new partner. Ugh, don’t get me started! Raincheck?

Sighing, Sterling put her phone in her jacket pocket. Malcolm deserved better and this wasn’t the first time she’d wondered why he stayed with a crazy woman.

Continue Reading The Blank Note

The idea of visiting the grave still seemed unreal. It was a dreamy feeling that started when she and Malcolm parked the car just outside the wrought iron gates—at the stone wall that bordered the cemetery. The dread grew worse when Sterling got out of the car and the autumn chill bit at her cheeks.

She dug her hands into her pockets and listened to Malcolm shut the driver’s side door behind him. The trees on the other side of the gate, which would have been lush and green only a month and a half ago, were partly orange in some places and mostly dead. The branches were skeletal fingers that writhed and curled in the wind.

Malcolm placed a hand on her shoulder. It was comforting. She nuzzled her cold cheek against it and waited for him to sigh, which he did, like clockwork.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

She wasn’t, of course, but saying it out loud seemed disrespectful. If someone, somehow, was watching her from beyond the grave, they’d want her to be confident instead of what she was: horrified and scared.

Sterling Quinn had to put on a good face, so she took the first step into the cemetery.

Abigail’s grave was in the far corner across from the entrance. Behind it was a long expanse of farmland—deathly quiet at this time of day. It made a tranquil backdrop to the headstone, which was still shiny and polished.

Sterling’s breath hitched when she was close enough to read the name, the birth date, and the death date. Malcolm reached for Sterling’s hand but she’d already pressed it up against her lips to repress a whimper.

Abigail.

She stopped a mere foot or so from the grave and let the cold wind blow her hair all around her face. That dreamy sensation had only gotten worse. Apparently, in dreams, things that were written down tended to change when you looked away from them. A clock might read 3:45 p.m. one second, only to be 1:09 a.m. a second later. Same with names.

Sterling let her eyes fall upon Malcolm. She stared hard at the hunched angle of his body—the way his shoulders bowed in.

When she looked back at the headstone, the name was still the same.

Abigail.

“It’s not a dream,” she said. “Is it?”

“An elaborate one. Maybe.”

“A dream that won’t let us leave?”

“But it will. Eventually.”

“If we’re dreaming.”

His eyes glazed over. Where did he go? A memory, no doubt. But which kind? A happy one to distance himself from the moment? Or a sad one where he was forcing himself to remember?

For her, happy memories were a fictional retreat. They had happened but they weren’t what was currently happening. What was happening was pure horror. Anguish. In that way, the sad memories were more real. And to remember them was to do penance.

Abigail was, after all, her daughter.

The saddest memory played through Sterling’s mind.

She parked the car in front of the school. When she looked over, she saw that Abigail was in the passenger’s seat, as quiet and withdrawn as she’d been all morning. On the far side of her, students clambered up the stairs and into the school, their voices combined into a prolonged din.

For most kids, the next move would have been to open the door and walk up the steps to go to school. But not Abigail. She sat as still as a statue, eyes focused on some point between her feet.

“What’s her name?” Sterling said.

“Whose name?”

“The girl who’s bullying you.”

Abigail rolled her eyes. “There’s no girl.”

“You don’t think I can—”

“Why does it have to be that? Why can’t it just be—”

“Abigail…”

“Hold on. Why can’t it just be that I don’t like school? Maybe, you know, I’m flunking biology.”

“Are you flunking biology?”

“No. I’m just saying—”

“If you were,” Sterling said, “flunking biology—you’d tell me, right?”

“Probably not.”

“So, are you?”

“No.”

Sterling almost said, “So you are,” but stopped herself.

“Maybe,” Abigail said, “the teachers are creepy.”

“But you won’t tell me which one it is.”

“Which reason is that I don’t wanna go?”

“Right.”

“I mean, I’d rather not…”

“Okay,” Sterling said. “You’re afraid I’ll come after her. Is that it? You’re trying to protect her?”

“No.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s too big for anyone to solve.”

“No thirteen-year-old girl is a problem too big to solve.”

“Well, this problem isn’t a thirteen-year-old girl.”

“Then what is it?” Sterling said.

“I don’t wanna tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Because…”

“Jesus, Abigail, because why—”

“Because it’s everybody.”

There was real pain in the way she said that. Everybody. She meant it. She didn’t mean it in some exaggerated sense. She meant everybody was part of the problem.

Words failed Sterling. They jumbled up on her tongue and fell out in a kind of gargle like someone had pulled a stopper out of a drain. She could only center herself in a literal way, by facing out the front window and placing her hands on the steering wheel.

“Is it because you’re adopted?” Sterling said.

Abigail, sotto voce: “Yes.”

Middle schoolers were cruel. Insecure. They’d latch onto whatever gave the slightest appearance of weakness and drag you into the dirt with it. Most of them probably came from broken homes. Maybe they wished they’d been adopted by someone who cared for them. This was their way of diminishing someone who had the life they wished for.

But what was the point of playing psychiatrist? Sterling didn’t know what made young people tick any more than anybody else. They were a mystery— a devilish enigma.

For a second it looked as though Abigail might weep. There was a thing she did with her face. The spot between her eyebrows would crinkle. She’d bring her right hand up to her forehead and place her left under the opposite elbow.

She did that and Sterling went to put a comforting hand on her, but she withdrew when her phone rang. That wasn’t a problem. She could let it go. Abigail wanted her to. She was sneaking glances over to see what Sterling would do.

“Abigail…”

The phone continued to ring. It was annoying. Buzzing. The name on it was Wolfe, which meant some god-awful thing from work was intruding on her time with her daughter.

“I’m—”

The ringing continued.

She gripped the phone so tight she thought it might crumble. This was followed by a slight but pregnant moment of silence, during which Abigail put her hand on the door and went to open it.

“Wait,” Sterling said.

Abigail did. She held still against the endless buzzing of the phone.

“Are you okay?”

Abigail nodded.

“Can we talk about this when you get home?”

Abigail nodded again. She left the car with as defeated a posture as Sterling had ever seen. For someone so young, she looked like she was carrying an immense weight on her shoulders—heavy enough to nearly snap her slight frame in half.

Sterling pinched the bridge of her nose and answered the phone.

To this day, she couldn’t remember what the phone call from work was about. But she did remember that that was the last time she saw Abigail alive.

***

When Sterling had first adopted Abigail—only six months or so earlier, once she’d learned Abigail had been in the system her whole life and never had any takers— Sterling had made a habit of picking Abigail up from school and taking her home. Once Abigail’s desire for independence had taken over, the agreement changed. In effect, Abigail walked herself home, so long as she maintained the habit of punctuality.

Abigail had never wavered from this agreement. She’d always shown up on time unless they had agreed otherwise. So, when she failed to show up later that day, Sterling knew for certain that something was wrong.

The street she and Malcolm lived on, Beat Street, was filled with parents. Filled. All their kids went to the same school. All those kids, as seen through the front window, walked home at roughly the same time. Every single weekday.

They walked up their driveways. Their mothers greeted them. Some mothers did so with smiles. Some with their hands on their hips.

At the end of the cul-de-sac, Sterling’s driveway was empty.

Maybe something had come up. That wasn’t impossible, was it? Sterling had thought, trying to calm herself. Someone asked Abigail for help and Abigail—

But what about the conversation we had in the morning? It’s everybody. Who would have asked her for help?

An hour later and the driveway was still a ghost town. Sterling tried calling Abigail’s cell phone—probably ten or more times before she gave up. Then she called the school.

The principal gave her the runaround, which wasn’t unusual. Those sycophantic scum-suckers were always wary of a lawsuit and masters of creating sentences with no meaning. So, it made sense when he said things like: “The premises are vacated in a timely fashion, at which time the students are given the task of ensuring their arrival within an appropriate time frame, as determined by the guardians of said child.” It was like talking to a legal brief.

Luckily, Sterling had been trained to deal with such people. She broke through to him eventually, at which point he said, “I saw her heading out the back door. I’m assuming to avoid the other kids. They’ve been mean to her; I don’t know if you heard…”

Sterling got in her car and drove through every inch of road around the school. She spoke to everyone she saw, showed them a picture of Abigail, and quickly moved on when she didn’t get a positive response.

That yielded nothing. She went home to see if Abigail had shown up. She waited for Malcolm and then the two of them went around knocking on doors.

Nothing.

At that point, she filed a missing person’s report. The police opened a case and put their best guys on it. Malcolm organized his friends at the DA’s office; Sterling used hers at the FBI.

And yet, no matter the work she put in, how many hours she dedicated to finding her lost daughter, there was a quiet voice somewhere in her that told her it was hopeless. Utterly so. No wonder she tried to quiet it down. No wonder she pretended it wasn’t there.

As time went on, she couldn’t pretend any longer. It got louder, and angrier, and screamed at her in the night. The voice followed her around like a parasitic shadow, sucking the life out of her. She could be out at dinner, trying to listen to a friend or a colleague, and the voice would tell her she’d seen cases like this before. She’d known families who’d gone through what she was going through.

How many times did the kid turn up alive? How many 13-year-old girls get kidnapped by a stranger and don’t wind up in a ditch somewhere?

But, then again, maybe it was doing her a favor. Because when she got the call that Abigail had been found, at least she wasn’t surprised.

***

“Your phone’s ringing.”

The words cut through the memory as though Malcolm had hacked at them with a machete. The scene in her mind split down the middle and revealed the grave, the farmland, and the dull overcast sky.

“What?” she said.

“Your phone’s ringing.”

The wound from the hacked memory remained. She should stitch it back together. Not answer the phone and accept this new reality. Stitch it back together and return.

But Wolfe was calling. As always. As usual.

It could have been important. It could have been nothing. She hesitated, looking at the phone screen like she was staring down the length of that machete, aimed no longer at the memory, but at her and threatening her life.

“It’s okay if you need to answer it,” Malcolm said.

“Wolfe’s trying to pull me away from here. I know it. Away from her.”

Malcolm didn’t respond because she assumed he knew there was no point. She always wanted to nestle herself into that cold, unforgiving memory. But when duty called, she was helpless.

She stepped away and answered.

“Where have you been?” Wolfe said. “I’ve tried calling—”

“I’m at the grave.”

“Whose grave?”

“The grave.”

Silence. It lasted almost a full minute. No doubt Wolfe was scolding himself.

“I need you to come in,” he said. His voice sounded worn. As though something had gotten the better of him. “There’s been a murder. It’s a big one.”

Chapter 2

Walking through the doors to the FBI office was like coming back to a broken home. Some parts reminded her of finer moments in her life: cases solved, other agents consulted, friendships forged. But mostly there were memories of when things had gone wrong. And in the FBI, when you got put on a job, it was because something had gone very, very wrong.

She knew the way to Director Wolfe’s office so well that could get there with her eyes closed. As she opened his door and knocked on it on the way in, she could already see the layout in her mind’s eye. Where the desk was. Where the chairs would be. Hell, she could even remember the way it smelled.

All of these fragments came back to her as she opened the door. Nothing in that room had changed.

“Sterling,” came Wolfe’s voice. “Come on in; you’re early.”

Wolfe was sitting with his feet propped up on the desk. In that usual, “I was born handsome” way. His hair was shorter than it had been the last time she saw him. Other than that, he was the same.

Someone else was in there though. Someone sitting in one of the guest chairs, with his back facing Sterling.

She took the seat next to this strange man and snuck a look at him. About her age. Broad-shouldered. He had a square jaw that made him look like an old movie star.

“Who’s the muscle?” she said.

“This is Special Agent Jordan Mitchell.” Wolfe smiled. “I’ve been telling him all about you.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Mitchell said. “Any leads on who did it?”

Sterling shook her head and avoided eye contact with the man.

“We’ll get him,” Wolfe said. “Meantime we’ve got—Mitchell, maybe you should fill her in.”

Mitchell faced her. The way he made and broke eye contact, it seemed like he was calculating his moves. Like he was someone who’d been trained on how to be personable and appear trustworthy.

“You heard of a place called Townshend Falls?”

“East of here, no?”

“That’s right. Idyllic. Worst crime in the last fifty years was when someone poisoned a farmer’s dog.”

He grabbed a file from Wolfe’s desk and handed it to her. Inside was a report from the local police department about a homicide.

“Someone killed the judge?” she said.

“Oliver Greene was the guy’s name. Nice fella. Fair but firm. You know the type.”

“Except this report’s—what, four years old now? And it looks like nobody found the killer. So, I guess you got new evidence.”

“There’s been another murder,” Wolfe said. “Same MO. Whoever did it covered the body in rose petals.”

“Who bit it this time?”

“Local guy.” Wolfe gestured toward the file. “It’s all in there. Reggie Velmer. Last seen at the local watering hole. Was supposed to come home to his pregnant wife. They are not super wealthy but well-to-do by local standards. Anyway, he never came back and the next morning they found him in the tall grass. Nearly had his head hacked off.”

“Hacked?”

“By the looks of it.”

Sterling looked over Velmer’s picture and held it side by side with Judge Greene’s.

“What do these two have in common?” she asked.

“Well.” Mitchell shuffled in his seat. “That’s the thing. Greene was tied down, gagged, and kicked in the stomach until the goddamn thing burst. He was also found at the bottom of an outhouse.”

“So, the methods are different. They don’t have the same hair color, body shape—nothing.” Sterling thought for a second. “The rose petals could be there just to throw us off.”

“That’s why we called you in,” Wolfe said. “We were hoping you could figure this out for us.”

It would mean weeks at a motel. Eating takeout every day. Getting strange phone calls early in the morning. She’d done this long enough to know the ropes and how to live and breathe her assignment.

But despite Wolfe’s appearance of asking her permission, he was just being polite. He was the director. That meant he was calling the shots.

“Could you give us the room?” she said to Mitchell.

Mitchell registered this as a strange request. He shuffled uncomfortably in his seat. Looked to Wolfe for his cue.

Wolfe gave him a nod and he got out of his seat and quickly went through the door. Sterling didn’t say a word until she heard the click of the latch.

“I know what you’re gonna ask,” Wolfe said. “The answer is no.”

“You have no idea what I’m gonna ask.”

“‘You’re about to say, ‘If I go through with this, I want to be put on Abigail’s murder. And, I’d like to have Hoff as my partner.’”

“So, I’m guessing that’s a no? Why not?”

“Because,” he said, “we don’t let agents investigate their own family affairs. And, Hoff is not back. He’s still enjoying the Hawaiian beaches and sunshine. Last time I spoke to him, it seemed like he’s not coming back anytime soon, maybe never.”

“Family affair?”

“You know what I mean. You’re too close. You remember—what the hell was his name? Short guy. With the hair.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Dave…”

“No, no. Daniel. Last name started with an S.”

“Well, whatever,” Wolfe said. “Somebody defrauded his mother out of her life’s savings. We told him at the time we’d put somebody else on it. He decided that wasn’t good enough and nobody could get the job done as well as he could.”

“What happened?”

“What do you think? He had it in his head he knew who the guy was. Nabbed the wrong man. We had to work double time convincing a judge to let him off with a suspension.”

“Daniel Sallust.”

“Yeah, that was the guy. Anyway, you see my point.”

She leaned back in her chair. What would happen if she decided to call an early retirement? Let me run this case or I work somewhere else.

Maybe he’d grumble a bit. Wrap his fist around his thumb. Stick his tongue into his cheek and say, “Fine. But I’m gonna need you to play this straight.”

Then she’d gallivant off into battle, find the man who’d killed her daughter, and bring him to justice. Just like in a Clint Eastwood movie. Dirty Harry, or something like that.

Hell, that’d never happen. To begin with, he’d never believe her. She needed this job. Not for the money—although the money was good, of course. And didn’t everybody need a job with benefits? The benefits at the FBI were enough of an enticement on their own.

No, she needed the job because if she wasn’t doing it, she would go squirrelly. Her brain started to misfire. She got antsy.

“Look,” Wolfe said, “if it makes you feel any better, I’ll find some way to keep you in the loop. You won’t be on the team officially but you won’t just be an idle spectator.”

“And that’s the best you’re gonna give me?”

He nodded. It was a quick little thing, where he lowered his head once before setting it back to resting position.

It’d have to do. For now.

“I wanna know about Mitchell,” she said. “How’d he get a hold of this thing?” She gestured to the file.

“He’s leading the investigation. Had a bit of a mishap with his previous partner.”

“What happened there?”

“Goddamn car accident, if you can believe that. Anyway, he’s in the market for someone to ride shotgun with him. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s ready to take you along.”

“So what?” she said. “I’d be following his lead?”

Wolfe smiled. “We both know how much you like that.”

“I work better when I’m in charge.”

“Don’t we all?”

“Then maybe you should find someone—”

“Listen.” Wolfe let impatience into his voice for the first time. “I know you wanna look for Abigail’s killer and I know you wanna run this investigation, but that just ain’t gonna happen. Now I’m still Director so why don’t we just cut the—”

She smiled. “Alright,” cutting Director Wolfe off.

“Alright, what?”

“I was just thinking it might be nice to get back to work again.”

“You were, were you?”

“Yeah. So, why don’t you put me on the job?”

Wolfe looked like he’d grind his teeth down to nubs if he didn’t stop himself. Instead, he stuck his fingers into his mouth and whistled for Mitchell to come in.

But in a strange turn of events, Mitchell opened the door a split second before Wolfe produced the whistle. The seeming coincidence of their timing drew a smile on both Wolfe and Sterling’s faces. Wolfe even seemed ready to comment on it until he and Sterling noticed the severe expression Mitchell wore.

He was staring at something on his phone.

“What is it?” Sterling said.

Mitchell spoke to Wolfe, almost like he was ignoring her. “She’s in?”

“Why don’t you ask her?” Wolfe said.

“Okay because we have to—”

“Mitchell.” Sterling stood up when she said this. “What’s going on?”

“Get your things. We’re leaving.”

“Leaving—”

“There’s been another murder. Two, to be specific. And whoever did it left more roses on the bodies.”

Continue Reading The Last Witness

“I’ve been thinking,” Harrison Fisher said, breaking the silence while tapping his forefinger pensively on his upper lip.

Layla gripped the steering wheel hard enough to turn her knuckles white. Thankfully, it was dark, and her lover wouldn’t notice her reaction. Are we finally going to have the talk? Mentally, she crossed her fingers that he wouldn’t bring up the subject of divorce. She wasn’t ready to accept the responsibility that she was a homewrecker. Someone just like Layla had torn her world apart as a young girl, and she’d never forgiven the woman. At least Harrison has no children to destroy, she thought.

“You should live closer to me so we can see each other more frequently,” he responded. “I miss you.”

“Don’t you think your wife might become suspicious if you’re suddenly gone more often? You’ve often complained that she creeps around a lot, spying on you. What if she decides to hire a private detective to follow you?”

Reaching over to fondle the base of her neck, Harrison continued. “Look, it’s not just the sex, although I’m always open to a bit more of that,” he chuckled, “but I truly enjoy spending time with you. Take tonight for example, I’ve always wanted to drive through Lake Gibhot, and Renee will never venture somewhere new.”

“Harrison, it’s dark out,” Layla commented, bristling at the mention of his wife’s name. “It’s not like we can enjoy the scenery or stop and have a picnic.” She loved Harrison but hated being reminded he was a married man fooling around with a much younger woman. When he got like this, it made her worry that Harrison was indulging in a mid-life crisis.

“That’s not the point.”

“What exactly is the point?”

“You’re adventurous and open,” Harrison replied. “I’ve never met someone with your imagination and drive. We could do anything together.”

“I think it’s a bad idea,” Layla said and bit her lower lip. “It’s certainly not in my budget to live in the city, and if you think you’re going to pay for it, remember that if she starts to snoop, a regular monthly payout is going to be noticed and send up a bunch of red flags.”

“There are secret accounts she doesn’t know about,” he muttered.

“If a lawyer digs deep enough, they’ll find them.”

“Who said anything about lawyers?” Harrison squeaked, dropping his hand from Layla’s shoulder-length auburn hair.

“You do know you aren’t the only one that might hire one, right?”

Harrison sat in silence. He’d never actually considered that mousy Renee might be the one to call an end to their marriage.

“All I’m saying is that we should just leave things as they are,” Layla said quietly, “for now. It’s not like you’re planning on moving in with me anytime soon. There’s no rush.”

Jealousy reared its ugly head, and before Harrison gave much thought to his response, ugly words just tumbled out of his mouth. “Are you too busy all the nights we aren’t together? Do I have to worry about you seeing someone else?”

“First of all, NO!” Layla exclaimed, her voice escalating. The hitch in her chest felt as though Harrison had stabbed her. The last thing she wanted was to fight. Growing up, the Johnson household had been filled with knock-down-drag-out arguments that had led to Layla leaving at an early age. It was rather ironic that her home life had become broken by both of her parents seeking love in the arms of others. “And even if I was, you go home every night to your wife. I don’t even have a cat!”

Layla felt dizzy and upset, which caused her to look away from the road for only a moment and lose track of how fast she was driving. It only took an instant while the car sped around a bend in the lane, causing neither of them to see the broken-down vehicle until it was too late.

“Look out!” Harrison exclaimed.

With Layla’s reaction time delayed, the car couldn’t escape running into the back of the disabled Honda which blended in perfectly with its surroundings.

Layla’s eyes were wide with fear while she stomped on the brake with all her might, trying to avoid the inevitable collision. Her panic-filled screams echoed through the car, and she felt as though her lungs would burst. Her attempts to slow the Maserati were unsuccessful, and when it seemed helpless, Layla raised her arms in a futile effort to shield her face. The initial impact, the crunching of the metal, and the breaking of glass were only the beginning of her descent into a nightmare.

When Layla dared to open her eyes, she frowned, her mind enveloped in a fog. No longer seeing the other car, she allowed her right hand to cradle her head. Her airbag hadn’t deployed, and Layla could feel something wet trickling down her forehead. Daring to check on Harrison, she could see that his airbag had worked and he seemed dazed from the collision.

“What—the—hell—just—happened?” Layla panted in between quick, shallow breaths. Without realizing it, she whimpered in response to her pain and panic. “Where did the other car go?”

Opening his car door, Harrison fought with his airbag to escape and check out the damage. After a fair amount of struggling, he managed to break free. Harrison felt disoriented, and for a moment, the world swung around in a disturbing and distorted sensation, making him wonder if he had a concussion.

Staggering to the front of his car, he placed a hand on each side of his forehead after an initial inspection of the damage to his car. How was he going to explain all this damage? Between the dented fender and the torn-off bumper, his beloved Maserati appeared to be totaled. Turning left, he caught sight of the other vehicle just as he lost his balance and stumbled against the front of his car.

“Oh, my god,” he whispered, then turned toward Layla, still frozen in panic behind the steering wheel. “Are you hurt?”

Unable to form words, Layla’s only response was a long string of sobbing and nodding.

“Just stay put,” Harrison ordered. “I’m going to check on the other car.”

Carefully descending the steep incline, Harrison silently prayed that the car they hit was empty and the driver had already been picked up by a friend or, better yet, an Uber. The hill was steep, and with every step, little rocks dislodged to create a miniature landslide. Just when Harrison thought he’d mastered his balance, his right knee buckled, and he slid down the slope, momentarily catching his leg on the stubborn roots sticking out of the soil in the dark.

Righting himself by hanging onto the side of the prone vehicle, Harrison fumbled to retrieve his phone from his pocket to use it as a flashlight. While they had hit the broken down car from behind, rolling down the hill had caused additional damage, and Harrison frowned at the wreckage.

Just as Harrison was about to lean through the driver’s window to check inside, he became startled by the sound of twigs snapping. Turning around to face the direction of the road above, he noticed Layla gingerly making her way down the incline.

“Don’t come down here,” he hissed.

“I can’t stay up there alone,” she whined. “Is there a driver? Are they okay?”

Nature’s answer was to grant them with the passing of a dark cloud previously covering a full moon, and Harrison suddenly felt as though he was standing in a spotlight. “I was just going to check.”

Flashing the light over the interior, he could hear the car’s metal creak as it slid another inch or two down the slope. Startled, he jumped back from the heavily damaged car and held his breath as if it would stop the vehicle from sliding further forward.

“Stay where you are,” Harrison commanded, holding his hand toward Layla.

Shining the light inside of the little Honda micro-car, he froze. “Damn,” he whispered.

“Oh my god!” Layla uttered, holding her shaking hand up over her open mouth. The young woman inside looked to be a teen, maybe twenty-ish tops. The victim’s front was drenched in newly spilled blood, the flow originating from her nose and mouth. Her white blouse was full of wet, crimson flowers, and a sickening white bone protruded from her arm. If she had been conscious, she would have been screaming in pain.

“I thought I told you to stay away,” Harrison muttered, flashing his light at his mistress. “We’re in big trouble.”

“What are we going to do?” Layla quietly replied. Tears pooled in her eyes, and she started to sob. “We need to call the police and get this woman an ambulance.”

Careful not to touch the driver’s door, Harrison reached in and checked for a pulse. Finding none, he turned and shook his head at Layla.

“Noooo,” she wailed and collapsed into a heap on the ground.

“Ssssh.” Harrison comforted Layla and rubbed her back while trying to get her to calm down. Layla was breathing so erratically that he feared she would hyperventilate, and then he would have an entirely new set of problems.

“I killed her,” she muttered as she sat up and buried her face in her trembling hands. “I—I—I killed her.”

“Layla, snap out of it,” Harrison ordered gently.

No scenario ended well as Harrison ran through each one. Whatever choice he made would make the headlines, destroy his business, and end life as he knew it simply because he’d had an affair.

Staring into the night sky, an idea began to form. Harrison played it over and over in his mind until it was the only way it made sense.

Gently pulling Layla up by her arms, he made reassuring shushing noises while stroking her hair. In order for his plan to work, he was going to need Layla’s help. Without it, they were both screwed.

“What are we going to do?” Layla asked in a trembling voice.

Wrapping his arm around her, Harrison tried to be supportive. If Layla lost it now, he could never pull this off alone.

“It’s late, but we have to hurry in case someone drives by,” Harrison began while silently thanking the heavens that it was so late at night that any chance of traffic and potential witnesses was minimal. “Do you see how the car is facing the lake?”

Layla silently nodded, her cheeks damp and filled with mascara smears.

“We’re going to take advantage of the I-95 Seaboard Killer.”

Widening her eyes in horror, Layla shook her head and clamped a hand over her mouth.

“Look, she’s already dead,” Harrison reasoned, “and the serial killer the feds are searching for has already killed a bunch of women. This extra death will only add one more to his list of kills. No one will know. I doubt even he will by the time she’s found.”

“We will,” she whispered and gulped. “I don’t know if I can live with that. Can you?”

Harrison felt like he was inside an elevator in freefall. Could he live with it?

The alternative was ugly, and Harrison wasn’t sure he could survive the scandal. When looking at his trembling mistress, he wasn’t sure if she could withstand this, no matter which path they chose. At least this way, they had a chance to live the rest of their lives. Their only other option would destroy them both.

“I can,” he lied, trying to be strong and make her believe that she, too, could live through this. Trying to convince himself, Harrison added, “It was an accident.”

Tearing off his shirt, Harrison quickly wiped down every surface of the micro-car he’d touched. After that, he tore strips out of it and wrapped both of their hands in the fabric so they wouldn’t leave any fingerprints when they both attempted to hide the car and its dead occupant.

“C’mon, Layla,” Harrison assured her. “We have to hurry if this is going to work. If we get caught, we’ll end up in prison for the rest of our lives.”

Once the damaged car got rolling, it wasn’t long until gravitational force pulled it into Lake Gibhot, and at first, the car looked like it was going to float instead of sink. It entered the water with a quiet bloop and swoosh noise, and Harrison released the breath he’d been holding, thankful that the car had been quiet upon entry. After all, he’d never done this before and had no idea what to expect.

Layla dug her fingers into Harrison’s arm, her voice filled with a new sense of panic. “Why isn’t it sinking?”

“It will,” Harrison assured her. “It’s a lighter car, so it will take longer to sink. Don’t worry. Now, let’s get back to my car.”

With a sharp intake of air, Layla panicked. “What will we do about your car? It’s got a lot of damage.”

“I’ll take care of that,” Harrison assured her. Suddenly, he was very thankful to have a storage unit in the middle of nowhere. First, he’d store the car and then figure out what to do next. Underneath his overnight bag in the trunk, he found some bungee cords to tie up the sagging bumper, and within a few minutes, they would be back on the road with Harrison behind the wheel and sporting a fresh shirt.

Quickly checking out the homes that he could see through the treeline, Harrison breathed a sigh of relief when he didn’t spot any telltale lights shining. This area was predominantly a retirement area for those who coveted peace and solitude outside the big city hustle and bustle.

He froze when he heard a dog bark. Cautiously, Harrison drove off and went as far as he dared without any headlights to draw attention to their position.

Layla was curled up in the passenger seat, softly rocking herself back and forth while trying to find comfort.

“Tomorrow, this will all seem like a bad dream,” Harrison assured her. He said this to convince Layla and himself that it could be months or years before the police found the car.

If we’re lucky, it will never be discovered, he thought.

Chapter 2

“Is something wrong?” Janice Schumacher asked in an annoyed tone. “Your hand is shaking, and I don’t want to lose an eye.”

With a frightened look, Layla gulped and redoubled her efforts to ensure that her wealthy client got the makeover she had come to expect every morning. She needed the income but was distracted and unable to shut out the local news story currently playing on Janice’s television.

“S—s—sorry,” Layla stammered. Last evening’s events were still etched in her mind, and she felt understandably shaken. If it hadn’t been for the dwindling funds in her bank account, she would have never left home this morning. It’s not every day that you make a criminal mistake, kill someone, and then try to pin it on the local serial killer.

Layla kept repeating her mantra: I’m not a bad person. I’m not a bad person. But she knew she was lying to herself. Luckily, her client was far too interested in her trashy magazine to notice her makeup artist’s face becoming ashen and pinched with worry.

There was too much fearmongering and misinformation fed to the public for Layla to ever give news reports the time of day, but now they had her full attention. It was about her and what she had done. Until this morning, Layla believed them to be a cover-up of what was really going on. A sleight of hand, if you will, but wasn’t that what she was doing now?

The local anchorman shuffled his papers and turned to face the camera prompt light, his expression grim. He took a moment to clear his voice before delivering bad news to his audience.

“In local news, it seems that a young local woman has become the latest victim in a series of killings attributed to the I-95 Seaboard Killer. Unlike many of the previous victims, twenty-one-year-old Olivia Evans was found within hours after her car had been pushed into Lake Gibhot.

“Officials believe they may have a break in the case because the car failed to sink completely like other victims, creating a more accurate window of opportunity to extract evidence from her murder.”

Swiveling, the anchor stared into the next camera, and continued his report.

“It was fate that a local man happened to be walking his dog in the secluded area when he spotted the roof of a car above the water level.”

A video clip appeared on the screen over his shoulder depicting law enforcement, and other investigators on the scene before a woman’s hand appeared over the lens, informing the news crew to move back behind the crime scene tape.

“The FBI has recently been called in to investigate this multi-state murder spree.”

“It’s about time they called in the FBI,” Janice shouted, gesturing angrily toward the television screen. “Our local police force is about as clever as a turkey in a driving rainstorm.”

Layla stared at her employer, her mouth opened, feeling frightened. She panicked, wondering if Janice had already figured out she was guilty.

Staring at her assistant in the mirror, Janice squinted in annoyance. “You know, because turkeys are so stupid that they look up in the pouring rain and drown.”

“O—0—of course,” Layla replied, mouse-like.

After delivering a few seconds of disturbing information, the broadcaster moved on to the weather and the upcoming heat wave about to descend on the Eastern seaboard. Disinterested, Janice delved back into her magazine, wondering what the Kardashians were up to next.

Shattering the silence of the moment, Layla’s phone blasted “Treat Me Right” by Pat Benatar from within her pocket. With fumbling fingers, she raced to get to it and turn it off as she’d meant to do earlier. Mortified, she met Janice’s disapproving gaze.

“You’re not paid to take personal calls,” Janice reprimanded her.

“I forgot,” Layla replied breathlessly. From the ringtone, she knew Harrison was trying to call her, and he’d be upset that she’d sent him to voicemail. It wasn’t much of a stretch to guess that he’d just seen the same news broadcast she had.

Harrison had been a huge mistake, probably the biggest one in her life. Layla had sworn that she loved him, but that was before last night. His coldness regarding that poor woman made her reassess how she felt about him, and Layla was paying for her rashness now. It was too late to take her decisions back. No matter how much she regretted them, there was no way to go back in time and set things right. She was tied to Harrison whether she liked it or not.

Pasting on a smile to mask her fear, Layla moved on from Janice’s hair to applying foundation and the rest of Janice’s makeup. Layla dreamed of working in Hollywood or Broadway as a makeup artist to the stars, yet here she was, stranded on the East Coast, struggling and failing at everything she touched.

“Remember, heavy on the concealer,” Janice reminded her. “I’m not as young as I used to be, and I can’t have someone noticing these bags under my eyes.”

“Going somewhere important today?” Layla asked, trying to take her mind off her panic.

“Oh, you know, just lunch with the girls at Movello’s.”

Layla knew exactly what that meant—a seafood lunch with several bottles of wine split between four ladies reliving wild tales of their youth. Whether imagined or real, the ladies probably didn’t know the difference anymore because no one called them on their bullshit, no matter how imaginary it might be.

Janice’s husband was often out of town on business, and Layla was beginning to understand why. However, at that moment, she would give anything to trade places with her client. Janice may have been a bore, but she had a safe life with piles of family money and no one to answer to.

If she lived through this, Layla vowed to make better decisions and no more married men. Nothing good could ever come of it, and the proof of that was being blasted all over the news for her benefit.

***

“Darling, have you seen this?” Renee Fisher said from behind her husband’s turned back.

Understandably, Harrison’s mind had been elsewhere. Pounding down his second cup of coffee, he had been reliving the events of last night, wishing that he could banish the outcome from his memory. Because of being so wrapped up in the previous evening’s cataclysmic aftermath, Harrison barely heard Renee calling his name.

“Harrison? Harrison?” Renee called with each repetition gaining in intensity.

Harrison was met with his worst nightmare when he turned to look at the screen. They had found the car sooner than he’d imagined. Without enough time passing, would there be trace evidence left behind? Did he wipe everything down enough after touching the dead woman’s car? Had he managed to pick up any pieces of his car that might have been left behind? It was dark, and he couldn’t be positive that he’d succeeded. He knew that her car would be found sooner or later, but he prayed for later. Watching their tragic mishap broadcast on live television caused his heart to pound and his brow to break out in a cold sweat.

“Are you feeling okay?” Renee asked her husband, concern filling her eyes. She crossed the kitchen and held up the back of her hand to check for a fever. “You’re burning up. You must have caught something at the hotel this weekend. Were any of your business associates ill?”

“Huh?” Harrison froze, recovering from his initial shock. “Oh, they were fine,” he assured her.

Renee absently reached out to smooth her husband’s ruffled bangs and was taken aback when he pulled away from her touch.

“Didn’t the meeting go well?” she asked, still stunned by his rejection.

Knowing that their marriage had problems, Renee attempted to open communications with her husband, but he rarely responded the way she hoped. Little did she know that his meeting was all part of a cover for his weekend liaisons with his mistress.

While it was true that Harrison wanted to grow his realty business, the tales of expanding his borders past Boston would, for now, be only a ruse. There was no sense in building his business only to lose half of it in a divorce settlement. It did, however, provide an excellent cover for him to be away from home without raising any suspicions.

“I hope they catch him. What a vile man,” Renee exclaimed.

“Hmm, what?”

“Seriously, Harrison! It’s like you’re on another planet. This serial killer is doing horrible things to good people.”

“Yes, awful,” Harrison agreed absently. “Excuse me.”

“Where are you going?” Renee asked.

Grabbing the bag out of the trashcan, Harrison held it aloft. “Just taking out the garbage, dear.”

Quickly, he tied up the ends and made haste toward the garage so that he could get away from his wife. Once, they’d been in love, at least he thought they had, but then she became needy after her miscarriage. The way she hovered reminded him of a relentless, blood-thirsty mosquito.

After their loss, Renee hadn’t expressed any interest in sex, which had driven a solid wedge between them. Harrison could simply leave. There were no children to have a custody battle over. The sale of the house could be split between them, and Renee was free to have all the belongings she wanted. He could always buy new stuff.

There were lingering memories of happier times. Things that Harrison wasn’t quite ready to relinquish, such as recollections of how Renee would playfully laugh at him when he loaded the dishwasher wrong or when they’d read a book together in bed before making love.

Now they slept in separate bedrooms and spent more time apart than most enemies. The only communication he usually received from her was checking on him to see if he was really golfing. Their relationship had become stifling, and shortly thereafter, he met Layla, kept a burner phone, and left town on adventures he craved. He justified his actions by blaming Renee for it all, refusing to see that it took two to destroy a marriage.

“Damn it,” he swore under his breath when it became obvious that Layla rejected his call. When he tried again, it went straight to voicemail and he knew she’d turned her phone off.

Stifling the urge to curse loudly, Harrison rapidly sent her a text.

Harrison: We NEED to be on the same page about what happened.

Harrison angrily shoved his burner phone into his pocket after ensuring it was turned off. He couldn’t have it ring around Renee. That would be a disaster. It had been a stroke of genius to blame the accident on the I-95 Seaboard Killer. After all, what was one more death when you already have at least 20 deaths to your name?

The fact that Layla wasn’t answering her phone made him worry that she’d grown a conscience. Has she already gone to the police? Is she giving us both up? Harrison thought.

Closing the trash lid, he returned to the house to give Renee her expected peck on the cheek and grabbed his travel mug of Jo.

***

Disoriented, Sterling Quinn arose from a troubled slumber. When she reached for her boyfriend, she expected to find him still in bed. She was startled to discover that he wasn’t there, and his side of the mattress was cool to the touch.

She and her boyfriend, Malcolm Grant, had just purchased the home of their dreams a couple of years ago, purposely situated as the last house on a beautifully manicured cul-de-sac. There wasn’t much known about the previous owner who had disappeared mysteriously, allowing the house to become bank owned.

Sterling had fallen in love with it because the echoes of the house made her feel secure. After she and Malcolm had bought the house, she found an inconsistency in the blueprints and discovered a secret room. The presence of a safe room had done a lot to confirm her fascination with the place. Between them, they had seen horrific cases that would haunt the most seasoned law enforcement personnel, and this hidden feature bolstered her sense of security.

The master bathroom door swung open, and for a moment, she had to stop and admire Malcolm’s good looks. When she looked into his steel blue-gray eyes, she didn’t see the acting ADA, who had a reputation in court for being a shark. Instead, she saw the caring and protective man that had stolen her heart. She had to pinch herself sometimes to check if she was dreaming about the existence of their relationship. It was too perfect at times.

“Nervous, darling?” he asked with a hint of mischief in his gaze.

“Of course, I’m nervous,” Sterling replied. “It’s not often you get a second chance at the bureau. It’s practically unheard of.”

“I’m sure you can put that all behind you. Director Wolfe assured me you’d receive fair treatment.”

“Yeah, sure he will,” Sterling snorted. She and FBI Director Wolfe had worked together before, and she knew that there was going to be plenty of animosity between them.

Malcolm sat down on the edge of the bed and kissed her deeply.

Inhaling his cologne, Sterling felt a twang of arousal and regretted not taking another week before restarting her career.

“Oooh,” she groaned while playfully grabbing at the top of his charcoal paisley power tie and running her fingers down to the pointed end. “Mr. Grant, come back to bed. We can start our new jobs tomorrow, can’t we?”

“As tempted as I might be, no can do, darling,” he responded. “This I-95 serial killer case has been dropped right into my lap, and I’ve got to get out ahead of it before the good citizens of Boston crucify us. And you have some higher-ups to win over with your built-in grace.”

“What was I thinking?” Sterling whined while regretfully emerging from bed. “Do you think they are going to turn a blind eye to the hornet’s nest I stirred up? Law enforcement never forgets when you bring down their own house in a mushroom cloud that flattened the city and my career along with it.”

“Now, now,” Malcolm replied, patting her bottom. “They got what they deserved! Let’s not forget that they tried to kill you to keep you quiet.”

“Pretty sure they’re sorry they missed.”

“You may think that now, but one day you’ll look back on this and laugh,” he said. “Meanwhile, you better grab a quick shower while I get your breakfast started.”

While Sterling was still thinking up a quick retort, Malcolm grabbed his jacket and made his way down the stairs and into their kitchen.

Towel drying her honey-blonde hair, Sterling inhaled and closed her eyes in ecstasy. Malcolm was making his famous cinnamon French toast. If she hurried, it would still be warm. Making record time while combing her hair and putting on her silken robe, she arrived in the kitchen just as the hot food graced her plate.

The small kitchen television was on and tuned into the news. Malcolm was watching it with a burning interest. Without taking his eyes off the screen, he reached over and tapped Sterling on her arm to gain her attention.

“This guy never stops, does he?” Malcolm muttered. “Another victim so quickly on the heels of the last discovery. He must have been in a hurry to be this sloppy.”

“Maybe this will be the break needed to solve the case,” Sterling agreed. “See you after work?”

Malcolm looked her up and down. “My love, wild horses couldn’t keep me away.”

Continue Reading Behind the Mask – (2^nd Edition)

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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