Silver Justice

Chapter 22

Red and blue lights flickered off the glass storefront, the cheap neon sign overhead adding a carnival quality with its blinking, stylized, 1930s-era, tuxedo-clad cartoon figure waving a liquor bottle. NYPD had called in the FBI when The Regulator’s card was spotted clutched in the corpse’s bloody hand. A substantial contingent of agents had since gathered, waiting for the crime scene to be processed.

Sam looked like he’d been roused from a deep sleep, which was in fact the case when his jangling cell phone had jarred him awake an hour ago. He’d listened to the voice on the other end for a few moments, asked two or three groggy questions, then leapt into reluctant action, calling the lead members of the task force as he pulled on clothes and headed for the scene.

“What do we know about him?” Seth asked.

Sam pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment. “Not a lot. ID says his name is Stewart Corbess, address over on the West Side in one of those twenty-million and up buildings over by Columbus Circle.”

“He’s a little far from home, isn’t he?” Seth commented as he looked around the dilapidated parking lot, deep within the confines of Hell’s Kitchen. Even with the gentrification of Manhattan there were some areas that were unsafe after dark, and this area near Javits Convention Center was high on the list.

“Hey, you never know how a guy’s going to try to find his stimulation, right?” Sam countered.

Seth didn’t smile. “NYPD got a call, shots fired. Looks like he took three to the chest. Dead before he hit the ground.”

“Do I want to know what the card says?” Sam asked.

“Rough Neighborhood.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes. Only that. Although he could have saved himself the trouble. I think most everybody agrees this isn’t a five-star block.”

Sam nodded. “The predators do enjoy their nighttime haunts, don’t they?”

“Hey, we have some data coming in on him…holy shit. This guy is a bigwig. Shows up as owning half of New York. Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but still — he’s in the same ballpark as Trump. Oh — hey, guess what he did for a living?” Seth was reading off his iPhone as the feed uploaded.

“Bus driver?”

“Close. He’s the top dog at one of the biggest hedge funds on Wall Street. As in mucho billions.”

“How can I have never heard of these guys, and yet they’re worth as much as the average midsized city?” Sam complained.

“I guess you need to travel in different circles,” Seth advised, immediately regretting his words when Sam threw him a dirty look. “He’s got another address up in the Hamptons and one in Connecticut. This isn’t the kind of guy you’d expect to be looking for some street action in Chelsea, that’s for sure.”

Sam approached the blanket-draped corpse, stopping just beyond the crime scene tape.

“It’s going to be a long night. Get everything you can find on the victim. And call Richard. Get his ass out of bed, too. He’s the financial expert. Maybe he’ll know something about him.” Sam paused. “How old was he?”

“Fifty-seven. I think he’s on the Forbes richest A-hole list.”

“Didn’t really buy him a nice exit, did it?”

Seth shrugged. “Can’t take it with you, they say.”

“Not with three rounds in your chest, you can’t.”

Seth began making calls. It had only been a few days since the last killing, and the frequency was now completely unpredictable — any pattern theories could be thrown out the window. Maybe Sam was right after all — Seth had never heard of any serials who diverged in so many ways from their stereotype.

Seth looked at his watch and noted that it was now two thirty a.m.. He’d been up since one, which meant he’d get a whopping two hours of sleep today. He rubbed the beginnings of stubble on his chin and pressed the talk button on his two-way.

A lot of agents weren’t going to be happy.

The next morning, Silver took a careful sip of her steaming mug of coffee and logged back into the FBI network, anxious to see if anything had surfaced while she’d slept. She’d stayed up till one before taking a sleeping pill to force herself back onto a normal schedule. She’d woken at nine, surprised it was so late — she was usually up by six thirty every morning, ready to do half an hour of yoga before starting her day. The pill had worked better than expected.

She threw the drapes open and winced as the pale sunlight streamed in. A quick glance at the sidewalk below found no stalkers — the prior evening’s false alarm now seemed silly with a few hours of rest under her belt. That was one of the problems with sleep deprivation and nerves: imagination could easily distort reality, and a man admiring the turn of her leg suddenly became a ninja killer in waiting.

Her computer beeped, and she quickly navigated to her e-mail, then noticed that her phone was blinking. She thumbed through the menu to her voicemail and held the phone to her ear as she simultaneously scanned the e-mail messages on her system.

Two messages on the phone — first one from Seth, time-stamped that morning at six thirty. His voice sounded uncharacteristically tired.

“Hey, it’s Seth. The Regulator struck again. This time a shooting. A hedge fund bigwig. Three shots. No witnesses. You’re probably still asleep like any sane normal person, so I’ll try you back when I get a chance. Sam’s on the warpath and called an all-hands meeting for nine, which will last hours. In the meantime, I’ll forward what we have to your box. Check it at your leisure. Ciao.”

The second message was from Richard at eight o’clock. Same basic information.

She put the phone down and opened Seth’s most recent missive before spending the next twenty minutes reading the preliminary crime scene report. This killing was unlike any of the others, with the exception that the victim was in the financial industry and had been investigated by the SEC five years earlier, but with no charges brought. He’d been subpoenaed, and then the investigation had died. A one-sentence statement from the SEC last year had confirmed that there was no investigation active, so, whatever the suspicions, they had been put to rest. The only reason anyone had even known about it was because he had disclosed the subpoena in his quarterly letter to his investors.

She read further and saw another paragraph on his investment notoriety of late — he’d been one of a blessed few who had made a fortune from the 2008 crash, when betting against the real estate boom. She remembered reading something about that, so she switched to the Internet, opened a new window, and typed in the victim’s name. A slew of articles proclaiming him to be a financial genius appeared, most of them based on his remarkable performance during the crash, when fortuitous bets had made him close to a billion dollars. Others had made far more, with some funds seeing three or more billion in profits, but he had been one of that group — a savvy operator exploiting an engineered fever of madness in the markets.

But why a shooting? If the killer was going to use a gun, why not kill all his victims with one? It made no sense.

Unless she was still missing the symbolism.

Her other e-mail was from the tech she’d sent the photos to. She opened it and read the two-sentence response promising more to come later during the day, with preliminary edits attached.

Silver opened the first in the series and stared at the rendering. It was the New Jersey suspect with a beard superimposed over his driver’s license photo and his mug shot. It didn’t look like the traffic cam man. The second was the driver’s license photo of the old guy. Her breath caught in her throat. Not because of the photo, which didn’t really look much like the traffic footage either. No, because of the eyes. Something about the eyes and nose. She wasn’t sure why, but her heart rate had increased.

She kept staring at his photo, but the elusive sense of being right on the verge of a breakthrough slipped away the more she studied it. Frustrated, she pulled up the traffic cam photo and put it alongside, but other than the two men being male she didn’t see much to go on. She’d been hoping for something more definitive, not the sense that it could have been either of them, or neither.

The more she looked at the images, the less certain of anything she was. It was defeating the purpose.

She switched to her prior evening’s research, and then stopped cold.

The address on the license. It looked familiar.

She flipped back and then ran out to the front room, where the papers were still strewn around the dining room table.

Midway into the pile she found what she was looking for. She approached the screen and held up the photocopy of a three-year-old article about a man who had been decapitated in a horrific car crash; the victim of his own reckless behavior. His blood alcohol had been almost triple the legal limit when he’d plowed into the back of a parked semi-rig, its lift gate acting as a guillotine and severing his head like a hot knife through butter.

Parker Rose. Age fifty-nine.

Parker Rose’s address was two numbers different than Howard Jarvis’ before the fire had taken his wife and daughter from him. Same street.

They had been neighbors.

And possibly friends?

The coincidence was too large to ignore. Although it hardly constituted proof of anything, it was a thread. A substantial one. And she had solved other crimes with slimmer threads than this.

She quickly pulled up the interrogation file on Howard from earlier in the week and jotted down his information before calling Sam’s office. His phone went to voicemail. She left a brief message, then hung up in frustration. His cell went to voicemail too. She left the same message:

“Sam, this is Silver. I think I may have discovered something of significance on the ‘Regulator’ suspect in Brooklyn. It’s convoluted, but a search for decapitations turned up an article on his neighbor being killed in a freak accident…I think there’s something there. Call me as soon as you get this.”

Even as she hung up, she realized how odd her call sounded. She could imagine Sam’s derisive response, “Wow, Silver, his neighbor drove into a truck and killed himself while wasted, and his wife was a psycho and burned their house down? Cuff him!”

She tried Brett’s number, but his secretary reminded her that he was in Washington, out of phone contact until the evenings.

Her frustration mounted. If she was still running the taskforce, she could have put a dozen men on scouring the records for more background, looking for the links she was now sure would be there. It was only a theory, but it was a powerful one — of course it was personal. The significance was now clear. He’d lost friends and loved ones in the same manner as he was now killing his victims.

Silver caught another glimpse of the driver’s license photo with the beard and was again struck by the feeling of unease. Why? What was she sensing unconsciously that she wasn’t picking up when she studied it?

She flipped to the un-doctored photo and downloaded it, then opened it in Photoshop. Using the clone stamp function, she eliminated the mustache. No, that wasn’t it. Although…

The hair. Something about the hair.

She next erased first the top, then the sides, mimicking a very short cut.

Silver froze.

That face.

She closed her eyes and concentrated, straining to recall the brief glimpse she’d gotten. Her eyes popped open, and she gasped.

It was him.

The man in black from yesterday.

She was sure of it.

Or almost sure.

That was the problem with post-traumatic stress disorder, a small voice inside of her cautioned. After killing a man and then having her daughter kidnapped, black could seem like it was really white, and she could talk herself into believing that the laundry man across the street was really the Pope, or Hitler, or a trained assassin. Lots of crazies went round the bend on killing sprees because they saw the devil in the faces of others, clear as day. It puzzled them why nobody else saw what was obvious to them.

Am I losing it?

She considered the question dispassionately. No, you’re not losing it. You might be tired and distraught, but you’re not crazy as a shithouse rat. Yet.

Although you have been eating dinner with a loaded Glock as your companion. Not everyone had a forty-caliber dining guest.

The doubts faded the more she stared at the photo she’d modified. It was him. And he had been across the street. Which meant he knew where she lived.

Like the kidnappers, who had never bothered to call, knew where she lived.

The final piece fell into place. If she was right, he could not only be the killer but also could have her daughter. A serial killer imprisoning her ten-year-old.

The thought catalyzed her, and she sprang into action. Everyone else might be too busy to take her calls but that didn’t mean she was helpless. She had over a decade of field experience and was one of the best.

Silver glanced at the time as she strode purposefully into the bedroom.

She pulled her hair into a ponytail and briefly considered calling Art and telling him about her breakthrough, but then hesitated. Put simply, it sounded crazy, or at least highly implausible. He would probably be polite and listen patiently, and maybe send a team over to chat with the nice old man again, but that wouldn’t be the same as him coming face to face with Silver. They would have to follow a host of rules of engagement and would be deeply skeptical of her intuition, which could tip him off in a number of ways. He was obviously extremely smart, and he’d already been through one round of questioning with nothing to show for it.

No, that wouldn’t do any good.

She would need to handle this herself.

Five minutes later, she was taking the stairs to the street, two at a time, anxious to get to Brooklyn as quickly as possible.