Androcide (Intel 1 Book 5) Read online

  The flash-bangs.

  Houston had embedded them in the suitcase, linked them wirelessly to a controller in her hand. How many he didn’t know.

  But enough.

  The explosions of light and sound had incapacitated Zanjani’s bodyguards. As he’d seen on the streets of Tehran, these American killers required only one moment. A moment is death.

  “Vâysâ!” Zanjani stumbled, trying to push away from Lopez.

  Lopez wrenched the Iranian’s arms behind his back, forcing another scream from his lips. The scream was cut short as Houston stuffed gauze into his mouth and sealed it with duct tape. Eyes wide, the arms dealer breathed in spurts through his nose.

  “He’ll hyperventilate. Or worse, vomit and choke on it,” said Houston to Zaringhalam. “Tell him!”

  The hacker pleaded with Zanjani as Lopez lashed the dealer’s wrists with wire. The man panicked.

  “Fuck it,” said Houston. “He’s going under.” She plunged a hypodermic needle into the man’s thigh. He collapsed in Lopez’s arms.

  “And I suppose I get to carry him?” said Lopez, positioning himself underneath Zanjani’s chest.

  “Sorry,” said Houston, turning from the lights of the vehicle and scanning around them through night-vision goggles. “Had to make the call. All’s clear. They didn’t have backup.”

  Zaringhalam startled. “You said you scouted!”

  Lopez inhaled and lifted Zanjani over his shoulder. He gasped. “We did. But the smart move would be to bring them in after a delay. Their tactics were poor.” He trudged away from the warehouse.

  “Tactics?”

  “No way we should have won this, hacker man,” said Houston. “They had all the advantages. They screwed up.”

  “No way they should have won this.” Unbelievable. “You put me in a death trap.” Who were these people?

  Houston smiled. “That’s our calling card. Death traps.” She yanked his jacket, tipping him toward the ground as she followed Lopez.

  “Close your jaw and move.”

  8

  One Small Step

  The 12th precinct morgue spanned a city block. Dedicated rooms kept corpses chilled in rows of refrigerated storage lockers. Crime labs buzzed with forensic scientists sampling DNA, running ballistics, and examining the most minute gunshot residues with an electron microscope. The autopsy suites adjoined the cryogenic storage rooms.

  In one such room, fog and stink rose from a gray corpse atop a stainless-steel examination table. A long, Y-shaped incision split the corpse shoulder to shoulder, meeting at the sternum and extending to the pelvis. Scalpels, saws, and other stained paraphernalia glinted on a tray. The medical examiner had closed the body after inspection, but for the peep-hole in the pelvis opening to the internal organs.

  The three detectives waited by the corpse of Jack Reaper. In front, a thin, older man in a white lab coat gesticulated, highlighting anatomy of the cadaver, the younger detectives writing as he spoke.

  “As you can see, there is extensive bruising across the entire body,” said Sutherland, his eyebrows raised as he moved his index finger lengthwise. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it, actually—the patterns, blood vessel bursting. In fact, there is evidence of deep trauma to internal organs and other tissue, massive internal bleeding. I might not know how to interpret it except for the rather obvious other signs of torture and the cause of death.”

  “Which was, what?” asked Sacker, tiring of the old man’s theater.

  “I’m getting to that,” Sutherland responded. “But as for the bruising, while I can’t say for sure, it is obviously from some kind of blunt-force trauma, perhaps a special torture devised by the perpetrator before killing the victim.” The examiner moved toward the pelvis. “Now, there is no more obvious sign of physical damage to this body than the removal of the genitalia. The clotting and vesicle patterning here clearly indicates that the victim was likely dead when it happened.”

  “Thank God,” whispered Snyder. He swallowed.

  “I said likely. There are other anomalies that complicate interpretation and analysis, but I’ll get to those. The cuts are surgically precise—whoever did this had a very steady hand. It would be required of course that the victim not move for such precision, and indeed we find evidence of harsh restraints on the body, although those may have only been in place for the torture.” Hill shuddered as Sutherland pointed out bruised and raw skin around the wrists, ankles, thighs, midsection, and throat. “Looks like the head was also directly restrained with bolts—there are pressure wounds on the skull. Not invasive, but terribly tight and painful, I am afraid.”

  “He was strapped down and they did all this to him?” Snyder said, a look of horror on his face.

  “Indeed, indeed, yes,” said Sutherland, smiling. “Quite the setup, isn’t it? Our victim seems to have been put out of his considerable misery by asphyxiation.” The doctor walked them around the table to the victim’s head. “Notice the marks around the mouth? A hard-edged object was affixed around the mouth and nose with considerable pressure. This blocked oxygen intake and smothered the victim. Normally, I would look for standard signs of asphyxiation, but the global bruising from the trauma makes it hard to be sure what caused what damage. But the facial marks are continuous, and there is clear cyanosis in the lips and fingers.”

  “What’s cyanosis?” Snyder asked.

  “Dark pigmenting—blue and purple—of certain extremities upon prolonged oxygen deprivation.

  “Why kill someone like that?”

  “Motive is your job, detective, not mine. But the complete helplessness of the victim rendered such a procedure quite feasible.”

  “Anything else?” asked Sacker.

  “Only the lack of other things arises as evidence.”

  Oh, good God. “What does that mean?”

  “Standard procedure is to also check fingernails, teeth, and so forth for skin and other tissue that might belong to the murderer. Usually obtained from struggling with the perpetrator.”

  Pompous asshole. “Yes, something we don’t know?”

  Sutherland sighed. “Usually from these studies we get genome data from the victim, which of course must be filtered from the large background of data from microorganisms. If we are lucky, we also get other human DNA not matching the victim. Sometimes even traces of compounds that help us ID the location.”

  “Microorganisms?” asked Hill.

  “Yes, bacteria, virus, fungi. We’re pretty filthy creatures, you must understand.” He sneered at Hill as if she might be contaminated. “Except in this case, well, nothing. No signs of microbes in sequencing or in culture. No other DNA but that of the victim.”

  “How is that possible?” asked Sacker.

  “To be honest with you, detective, I’m not sure.” Sutherland pursed his lips “Only some kind of extreme sterilization procedure could have achieved this. There is in addition evidence that the body was refrigerated for some time prior to being left on the street. All samples and efforts to date the time of death run into the problem that the biochemistry of decay seemed to have begun in earnest on the evening before the body was discovered. The complete lack of a crime scene, the evidence of sophisticated tampering with the body… We may never know exactly when or where the victim died. At best I can say that it wasn’t more than several months ago.”

  “More questions than answers,” said Sacker.

  Sutherland straightened and looped his fingers together. “Quite a straightforward case for me, actually, requiring no further or more in-depth examination. The cause of death is obvious, with evidence of extreme trauma, mutilation, and death by smothering. There will be no further evidence from this body to link the death to the killer, I am afraid. The challenge in this case, I assume, will be to determine why such extreme measures were taken and obtain other evidence. That, I am afraid, is squarely in your domain, and not mine.”

  The doctor wheeled away. He halted and spun back.

  “Y
ou nearly had me forgetting. The killer left a calling card.” The physician raised a plastic sample bag with a strip of paper inside. Faded letters ran along the ragged surface. “Stuffed in his mouth.”

  “Jesus. What does it say?” asked Sacker, taking the bag and squinting at the paper.

  “One small death of a man; one giant leap for womankind.” Sutherland retrieved the bag from Sacker and returned it to the tray.

  “Now, if you will excuse me, we do have other unfortunate victims to examine today.”

  Sacker shuffled out of the morgue, his mind racing. The case continued to grow stranger and more unsettling as facts rolled in. Hill and Snyder shadowed his steps as they made their way back from the basement to their fourth-floor offices.

  “Does this hurt the theory of a revenge killing?” asked Hill.

  Sacker ran his hand over his close-cropped hair. “I don’t know. Sure doesn’t seem to fit with your average payback. Who would have the expertise for this? Who would go to these lengths, even for revenge? But everything about this case is extreme—the killing, the torture, the public exhibition. I’m starting to think that we aren’t dealing with your average angry Joe or Jane.”

  Hill agreed. “Yeah, it seems like Jack the Reaper tangled with the wrong person.”

  “A real psycho.” He glared at his assistants. “See that none of this gets out of this department. Outside of Ladner, no one is to hear a word until we’ve got a better handle on things. Remember—no one keeps secrets. No one. If you break that firewall once, it’s over. The press is already foaming at the mouth for leaks.”

  They both nodded as the elevator door opened. The three got inside.

  “Meanwhile,” he said, pressing a button, “we need to get a list of all of Reaper’s known victims. Their family members, too. Let’s hope that it was one of them.”

  “But you said we don’t know many of his victims,” said Snyder.

  “That’s right, and the killer could be one of those we don’t. But there’s nothing else to work with. The revenge killing is still the most viable theory we have. It leads us to names and follow-up police work. We need names, locations, and professions of the victims and their family. Any doctors or nurses in the group—anyone with medical training—they are priority one from what Sutherland revealed. Psych profiles, criminal records. Patterns. Anything that might give someone a means beyond their obvious motives.”

  “On it, sir,” said Hill as they exited the elevator.

  Sacker gazed across the busy floor, the image of a corpse lodged in his mind. “Let’s hope we find something soon. I’ve got a bad feeling about this case.”

  9

  Out of Champagne

  The Crown Victoria’s suspension was shot. The car rocked over busted New York City streets, rattling bones on a big pothole and churning stomachs as they surfed warped roads resembling solidified lava. Riding shotgun, Snyder held his hand to his mouth.

  Hill spoke from behind. “With no clear time of death, month of death even, we’re screwed. We can’t narrow any suspects’ locations, test alibis. And now that some jerk’s leaked Reaper’s name to the press, it’s that much harder to operate.”

  A horn blared. Sacker refused to let a shouting cabbie cut him off.

  “Right. We’re at a huge disadvantage, so we’re moving fast. That’s why we’re on the road today. But we do know something about the killing. There’s a damn good chance our killer has medical expertise. Hard to imagine he or she doesn’t. That narrows the list substantially. Now we pray for a miracle, a reveal in the mannerisms, poorly concealed evidence we can glean without a warrant. Anything.”

  “Mannerisms?” asked Hill.

  “Yeah, they don’t teach you that in the academy,” said Sacker. “I’ve broken open as many cases with intuition as I have with evidence. Partly experience. Partly a sensitivity. It’s all about paying attention to what’s in front of you and getting out of your own head.”

  “You have arrived at your destination,” came the soulless voice of his GPS navigator. Sacker switched off his cell phone. Cursed with a terrible sense of direction, even the New York grids confused him. GPS might be embarrassing, but it was required.

  They pulled up to a brick and mortar, World War I-era apartment complex. Scaffolding obscured the facade, workers pummeling the old brick to a fine silt. Sacker imagined the dust worming into the apartments facing the orange cloud. Near New York Hospital, several medical institutions cooperatively owned the building to house staff. Their trauma surgeon lived on the second floor.

  As they approached, Sacker pulled his detectives aside. “Remember, this guy lost his wife six months ago. Suicide. He’s got all kinds of motive, but let’s try to move slowly.”

  The door opened to reveal a disheveled figure in his forties. His eyes were sunken, his face unshaved. Receding, curly hair danced around his head. His features drew tight at the sight of the detectives.

  Sacker removed his hat. “Dr. Russo? Detectives Sacker, Hill, and Snyder. We called earlier.”

  The doctor put his hand on the back of his neck. “Yeah. Right. Look, sorry for all this, but I was in the ER late last night.”

  “May we come in?”

  Russo opened the door and shuffled into his small apartment. He motioned toward a couch and set of chairs. Hill and Snyder sat on opposite sides of Sacker, wide-eyed, scanning the room.

  The apartment mimicked a museum piece, a space once occupied and tended, now frozen in place. Only the layering of dust testified to the passage of time. Sacker spied a narrow kitchen with piles of unwashed dishes. However useful Russo may or may not be in the clinic, he’d let his life go.

  One thing stood out clearly in the disorder: yesterday’s New York Times, front page spread open on the coffee table before them, complete with a mugshot of Jack Reaper.

  Everything in place for one hell of a conversation.

  The doctor returned with a stained coffee mug and dropped into a wicker chair across from the detectives. He spoke over the steam.

  “So, what can I do for you?”

  “We’re here about the Reaper murder.”

  Russo choked back a laugh. “Sorry, I’m out of champagne.”

  Sacker smiled. Might like this guy. “I understand how you could feel that way Dr. Russo. I trust you understand we have an investigation to conduct.”

  “Well, if you find the guy, I’ll buy him dinner. Pin a fucking medal on him.”

  “What we’re trying to ascertain, Dr. Russo—”

  “I’ll save you the tap dance. I didn’t kill the son-of-a-bitch. Search my place; you won’t find anything. I’m logged constantly at the hospital. Working until I drop is my way of avoiding more therapy. I wouldn’t have the energy to chase that monster down.”

  Snyder cut in. “Revenge can often bring a lot of energy.”

  Russo drank from his cup and shook his head. “Not in my nature, I’m sad to say. When I saw Linda in that hospital room—God, her face was a horror show. Swollen-up so bad I could hardly tell it was her. You bet I wanted to hurt someone. But that only lasted so long. I could burn up with it. Or I could take care of my wife. She was never the same. She needed me. I put my energies in healing, detective. That’s my whole life. And it wasn’t enough.”

  “Was your wife in therapy after the assault?” asked Hill.

  “She was raped and tortured for three days. Left to die on the side of the road. What do you think?” He scowled at Hill, who squirmed under his gaze. “We saw individual therapists, did couples counseling. It failed. I failed. Something primitive snapped when my wife became the plaything of an animal like that. I hated myself for it. I tried. We worked hard in therapy. But I didn’t step up, and Linda had a history with depression. She just couldn’t get out of this hole. You can’t imagine the pain she was in.”

  Get this back on track.

  “The reason we’re here, Dr. Russo,” said Sacker, “is that we believe the killer possesses considerable medical training.”r />
  Russo squinted. “The mutilation?”

  “Yes. It’s not the cutting of an amateur.”

  “More like an artist,” said Russo. “But I see where you’re going. You’re rounding up the folks in Reaper’s wreckage zone and picking out those like me.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And that means you’re in real trouble.”

  Sacker winced. It’s always harder with the smart ones.

  Russo waved his hand. “It’s all over your faces. You’re desperate, knocking on doors hoping for a bloody scalpel to fall out of someone’s pocket.”

  Dammit.

  Hill and Snyder glanced between the doctor and Sacker, who put on his best smile.

  Russo laughed. “Well, good luck, detectives. But I don’t think you’re going to find anyone in this little group who’s at all interested in helping you track down Jack Reaper’s killer. He’s our new hero.”

  10

  Serial Killer

  Sacker eased the car into traffic and watched the towers of New York Hospital recede in his rearview. His trainees didn’t speak, their enthusiasm dashed on the heartbreak of a victim’s husband. He decided to break the funk with some analysis.

  “Okay, detectives, pop quiz: your assessment of Russo. Rick?”

  Snyder’s eyes darted between Sacker and Hill. “I dunno. Seemed pretty combative to me, didn’t show you much respect. Maybe he’s hiding something.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “He clearly had motive. He was practically cheering on the murder.”

  Hill interrupted. “And why wouldn’t he? You heard what happened to his wife.”

  “What’s your take, Kathy?” asked Sacker.

  “Objectively, there was no evidence. Not that we searched or anything. But his hate for Reaper—too raw, too open to come from a killer hiding his crime. It just didn’t feel right.”