Androcide (Intel 1 Book 5) Page 6

  Concerns have been raised about the ability of the NYPD to handle the investigation. The example of Jack Reaper himself was raised, a rapist who terrorized women and their families for years before he was finally caught with the late intervention of the FBI.

  Jennifer Riley, the presumed challenger to the mayor in next year’s election, voiced her concerns at a separate press conference, accusing the mayor and former police officer of “appointing cronies” to high-level positions at NYPD.

  “We can expect the same level of incompetence from this investigation of these horrible crimes as we have seen from Mayor Johnson’s other debacles. His cronies and lobbyist friends have corrupted our city governance for too long, and it’s time for a change, for a new face to come in and clean house.”

  However, not everyone was so disturbed by the killings. Sanitation worker Fredo Labriola was all smiles. “So what? This dude’s rubbing out rapists? Cry me a river. The killer’s doing us a favor. I hope we keep finding them with the other trash.”

  14

  Zanjani

  Reza Zanjani screamed.

  Houston tossed the duct tape to the ground in the dank Tehran basement. Small patches of skin stuck to the adhesive. She angled the bright light into his eyes. The businessman-turned-arms-dealer squinted and turned away.

  “We’re going to ask some questions, Reza. And you’re going to answer them truthfully,” she said, straddling a rickety chair behind the bright light, her features a blurred shadow.

  “Motevajjeh nemisham,” he croaked, squinting at Houston. His eyes darted in several directions, avoiding her glare and the light.

  Zaringhalam spoke from the back of the room, his voice strained. “He says he does not understand.”

  A knife whistled through the air and embedded itself in the wood of Zanjani’s chair between his legs. Again he screamed, eyes wide, his arms struggling against the restraints behind him.

  “Yes, you do,” whispered Houston. “We don’t have time for dancing, so let’s get to the point: Mirnateghi.”

  Zanjani gasped.

  “We need her location. And you’re going to give it to us. Or else.” She glanced at the knife.

  Sweat flowed from the gelled curls above Zanjani’s raised brows.

  “No. I can’t,” he hissed. “I’ll be a dead man!”

  Lopez’s deep voice rolled out of the darkness. “You already are, Reza. She knows we’re here. Soon she’ll know we have you. That’s a death sentence. Your only hope now is to get out of Iran. We can help you with that.”

  Zanjani squinted but could not see the source of the deep voice. Only Houston’s darkened face danced behind the blinding light.

  “But there’s a price,” she said. “Mirnateghi. We know she’s here. Tell us where. Who knows, maybe we’ll remove your problem. Do you a favor.”

  “You fools! She is powerful beyond your small minds.”

  Houston laughed, startling the dealer. “Don’t you know why we’re here? You don’t think we drove her back to Iran, destroyed her global organization, only to leave her time to regroup? We’ve come to finish the job.”

  “You’re mad.”

  “This is your last chance.” She reached over and yanked the knife from the wood. The metal glinted in the spotlight. Zanjani looked away. “Die here now, by our hand or hers, or tell us what we want. Run to live another day.”

  Zanjani’s body slumped, his will broken. He whispered, staring at the ground.

  “Azadi Tower.”

  Zaringhalam exclaimed behind Houston.

  “Nemeeshe! Impossible.”

  Zanjani said nothing.

  “The giant monument?” asked Houston. “At the entrance to the city?”

  “Yes. Beneath the tower are structures, underground buildings and tunnels. The government is ignorant.” He exhaled. “She is there. Her base of operations.”

  Lopez spoke again from the darkness. “You’ve been there? Underground?”

  “Once only. I was blindfolded. But not even Sonbol imagined that I carried a hidden GPS. They never found it.”

  “Sonbol?” asked Lopez.

  “A flower,” offered Zaringhalam from the back. “You call it hyacinth.”

  “My God!” said Houston. “The flowers on the dead agents. All hyacinths.” She cocked her head at Zanjani. “Why do you call her Sonbol?”

  “She gives us the name.”

  Lopez grumbled. “Lady has a lot of names. Why flowers at kills? A softer side to Nemesis? Why am I skeptical?”

  The corner of Houston’s mouth twitched to a half-smile. “Trust your instincts. Hyacinths are beautiful. They’re also poisonous.”

  “As is our Sonbol,” said Zanjani.

  Houston leaned back and spoke to Lopez. “Azadi Tower? That’s like Times Square. How the hell are we supposed to pull that off?”

  “You can’t,” said Zanjani. “As I have told you. Only fools would try.”

  Houston turned back to the arms dealer, her brow furrowed.

  “We need to phone home. Infrared sat scans, verify what he’s saying.” She rose from the chair, staring down at Zanjani. “But if there is a lair under Azadi Tower, we’ll find its weak points. And we’ll hit it hard. She’s within striking distance.”

  Zanjani shook his head. “Khodā margam bede.”

  Lopez and Houston turned to Zaringhalam.

  “He ridicules your plans,” he said. “And asks God for death.”

  15

  Gone Fishing

  Grace Gone blew over her tea before sipping. Her left arm trembled holding the white china cup to her mouth, her eyes gazing forward at the slew of online articles about the new serial killer in New York. The aroma of lemon and spices danced around her face. She placed the cup down without drinking.

  I’m doing this.

  The general press ran with the Post’s headline: the Eunuch Maker. She coded scripts for web searches related to the killings, culling thousands of photos from news sites, crime and sexual forums, the major social media sites, piping the data flood into a homemade image processing program. She tweaked the parameters, filtering images by the GPS coordinates of the photos and dead bodies, trashing those with signs of digital manipulation, low resolution, or dates outside the last week.

  Tens of thousands of snapshots from the cell phones of bystanders and reporters piled up in a folder. The program sorted them into unique angles and distances through a pattern recognition algorithm. She was left with fifty unique shots of the victims at moderate to high resolution.

  Hours passed as she scanned through the photos manually, organizing them based on certain attributes and clarity. She developed three special categories of images. The first highlighted the unusual purple and black patterns across the skin of the corpses. Not tattoos or birthmarks, to her they resembled blood vessel trauma, bruising and hemorrhaging, with no location on the bodies free of them. The second was the crotch where the genitals were removed. The third was the mouth. In several photos, she noticed extensive bruising or blueness near the mouth and lips. Examining related views, she saw evidence of trauma to the same area, fitting the shape of an edged object placed over the victim’s face.

  Typing on a dual-alphabet keyboard, she recorded her notes in Mandarin. Paranoia perhaps, or a comforting reminder of a life lost, the Chinese characters marched across the screen along with embedded images and videos of the police and crime scenes.

  Her face darkened, her body bent in half over the screen, the hated pout asserting itself. Dashing across medical websites, she blasted through pages of criminal autopsies. Cases upon cases of physical abuse, torture, mechanical trauma. Her searches led her farther and farther afield, scanning multiple medical reports from the FBI, CDC, and the WHO. Phrases like subcutaneous hemorrhaging, carbonic anhydrases, and multiple organ dysfunction recurring in her scans.

  She straightened into the backrest of the chair, hair whipping backward. Her eyes blazed into the distance.

  I need to see thos
e bodies.

  But how? To see the bodies required a miracle, break through the wall between police and PI. It almost never happened. It certainly wasn’t going to happen with a nobody gumshoe from Queens. Might as well buy a lottery ticket.

  Gone switched the keyboard back to English and brought her browser to the NYPD home page. She scrolled through page after page, cross checking with numerous articles about the case. She queried online forums and search engines. After several minutes of searching, she pounded her keyboard.

  Damn, they aren’t making this easy. Time for my black hat.

  It wasn’t impossible to hack the NYPD. The deep web hoarded reams of data. She navigated through encrypted tunnels, scouring sites listing governmental emails, logins, and passwords. All illegally obtained.

  And here we go.

  A handful of entries were logged over the last few years for the 12th Precinct. All targeted jobs, not low hanging fruit from the security breaches of large companies like Adobe and Yahoo. And someone had put these up without a price tag. Hackers bragging. Mounting heads like trophies.

  Several entries matched names on public records. There was little need for anything more than some moderate extraction work to get the addresses.

  “Okay, let’s see—Ladner, Sacker, and the medical examiner Dr. Sutherland.” She opened her agency email and typed in addresses for the three men. The cursor dropped to the subject line and she typed, “Eunuch Maker Killings”. The department was likely getting hundreds of emails about this, but she doubted many were addressed to the cops involved in the case. Not to their internal email accounts. The cursor blinked in the body field of the program, waiting for her to begin the message.

  What would she say? “Hi Cops, need a look at your morgue. Sincerely, nobody PI.” She couldn’t open the message asking for anything. She had to dangle something they wanted. Ideas or deductions they might not be making. Judging from the lack of any noise on the bruising, she doubted her worst suspicions had been considered.

  Short, to the point, carrot.

  That was the what she would write. The question now was, who?

  Gone considered the faces and comments, positions and body language of the people involved gleaned from her media searches. Ladner—a hard ass, aggressive to the point of harassing, likely territorial. Bull dog. Sutherland—too remote, self-absorbed, and arrogant. Asshole. No, it had to be Sacker, the detective. He looked troubled, concerned, bright enough for deductive work, maybe open to crazy ideas. Of course, none of them would be easy, her bad leg squashed in the door.

  But I have to try.

  She had to hook them with something. This case could be her breakthrough.

  Her fingers sped over the keyboard.

  “Dear Detective Sacker....”

  16

  Gone Postal

  The criminal psychologist droned on.

  “So, in my assessment, you have a ritualistic serial killer. And I say ritualistic because he repeatedly kills in the same way, with great precision, displaying signs of a serious obsessive compulsive disorder and a need to reenact the same crime again and again. This almost certainly stems from a long-suppressed trauma, likely sexual abuse, which dovetails nicely with the sexual mutilation observed and the choice of sexual predators as victims.”

  “You keep saying ‘he,’ doc,” said Hill. “What about a woman?”

  Tall and thin, the psychologist stooped, rectangular eyeglasses framing an angular face. His hands jerked and he avoided eye contact, acting more neurotic than many mental patients Sacker had known.

  “Yes, well, it might seem that a female would be a likely suspect. These were rapists who targeted women. But you must understand that statistically, men are the predominant multiple count killers. Indeed, men are more likely by very large margins to commit any violent crime. Therefore, the odds are that it was a man.”

  Hill shook her head. “Those are general stats not looking at any particulars. We have a very specific set of particulars. I think we should keep both genders in play as suspects.”

  Enough already.

  Two hours of psychobabble was his limit. “Let’s thank Dr. Monroe for his time. We’ve got a lot to chew on. Let’s regroup and look at the data with fresh eyes.”

  His team shuffled out of the conference room. Sacker engaged in the expected pleasantries with their criminologist consultant. But it was a sham. There wasn’t much to chew on. No new data needing fresh eyes illuminated by the noble doctor.

  Empty words.

  They had zero leads, only an MO, and a developing PR nightmare. Meanwhile, Ladner continued to demand a speedy resolution to the case. Each summoning to the chief’s office more browbeating than the next.

  Sacker got it. Jobs and careers were at stake.

  Not to mention lives.

  He fell into his desk chair with a grunt and slid another nicotine strip between his gum and cheek. Whoever banned smoking should be shot. He clicked on his desktop, entered a password, and checked his email.

  “Well, hello.”

  Clever lady. He wasn’t sure how she did it, but whoever this Grace Gone was, she’d gotten his protected email address. He might have been intrigued by her finesse if she hadn’t blown it with the subject line: “Eunuch Maker Killings.” Crass, but it did get his attention. Sacker sighed. Another gumshoe looking to cash in. His finger hovered over the delete key, eyes roaming the body of the email.

  Interesting. He sat up in his chair. Check for internal organ hemorrhaging? How the hell had she suspected that? He read the email in earnest.

  Dear Detective Sacker,

  You don’t know me and I don’t know you but I can help you solve this case. I’m one of hundreds writing and offering services right now. I can’t show you a list of cases I’ve worked on, unless you want to count the recent spate of alien abduction inquiries.

  Clever smartass. He continued.

  So let’s see if this gets you interested. I recommend that your forensics coroner makes a careful and biosafe study of the internal organs of the victims. Look for internal hemorrhaging beyond the skin bruising. Also, check the mouth pH. Perhaps it’s more acidic than you might have expected, above even death-related acidosis.

  Sincerely,

  Grace Gone

  Gone Investigating, LLC

  Sacker scratched his head. Mouth pH? Biosafe? What was the woman talking about? He pushed it to the side and turned his mind to the organ bleeding. Sutherland hadn’t explained that to Sacker’s satisfaction. Had the trauma that caused the skin bruising also damaged tissues deep in the body? He couldn’t imagine how the vic could have survived such an ordeal. Baseball bat to the entire body? The killer had to be the damn Hulk. No one would ever have suspected the kind of internal damage they found. It was the stuff of traffic accidents and high-rise suicides.

  So how’d you guess, Ms. Gone?

  He leaned back in his chair, shaking his head. A very wild guess, no doubt. How many wacko theories would pour in over the next few weeks? If one in a thousand had a bit of luck, that’d explain it. And the craziness with mouth pH—who’d ever heard of something like that? The woman was likely unbalanced.

  Still....

  He opened his web browser and looked up the agency. Gone Investigating. Little play on her name. Well-designed webpage, looked professional, attractive photo of perky Asian chick right under the banner. Grace Gone. Sounded like a piece of noir fiction. Queens office, bit of a run-down neighborhood if he remembered correctly. Nothing else on search engines. No consulting for big agencies or on any important cases. He tapped into the business databases. Jesus. Her license wasn’t a year old. A complete rookie.

  Still....

  He rose and walked across the buzzing floor to Ladner’s office. The captain banged a phone receiver down and waved him in.

  “What’s up, Sacker? Make it quick. I’ve got Internal Affairs coming by in fifteen.”

  Broad and insulated, Ladner’s office dwarfed the space allotted to his d
etectives. The room visually connected to the floor by a set of large windows. Ladner brought an old-fashioned sensibility with lots of wood and brass, his wrestling trophies displayed, his hunting photos prominent. Sacker dropped into one of the two leather chairs facing the captain’s desk.

  “You check your email? See this one from some PI named Gone?”

  Ladner cocked his head to the side. “You here to waste my time with some PI? Hell, Tyrell, I don’t even check my email anymore. Diminishing returns in my position.”

  “Look, Mike, this should be a quick delete issue, but something’s nagging me. First, she got our work emails, which means she’s serious and able.”

  “Hackers do this stuff for minimum wage, these days.”

  “Point taken. But she also tells us to check for internal organ damage. As far as I know, that hasn’t gotten anywhere beyond the confines of the forensics report.”

  Ladner ground his teeth. “Dammit! I’m going to personally shit-kick the leakers. Once these IA folks finish the yearly sermon, I’ll check down with the morgue. They better be keeping things tight.”

  “It’s Sutherland, Mike. Things are as tight-assed as is humanly possible.”

  “And?” asked his boss.

  “So, just hypothetically, what if the report hasn’t gotten out? What if she knows something that we don’t?”

  “Like what? What’s there to know? The perps got worked-over like we’ve never seen at the hands of some whack-job killer. Stuff broke. Stuff bled. End of story.”

  “When did you ever see that kind of damage, Mike? Even in a bad beating? I never have. Not like that, all over the body. That’s been bugging the hell out of me. So here comes Ms. Private Eye and drops the observation like she’d figured it from something.”