Chapter 1

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.

 

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