Silver Justice

Chapter 24

Silver stepped into the narrow rear hall, the splintered shards of the doorjamb crunching underfoot. Her Glock 23 was clenched in both hands, pointed in front of her. She stopped in the kitchen, tilting her head to detect any hint of movement in the house. A creak sounded from the second story. A few seconds later, another. She couldn’t be sure whether it was the breeze or someone overhead, but she steeled herself to find out.

As she stood motionless, a third creak sounded, and she began to believe it was the wind — the sound came from the same area each time at the front of the house. She turned so that she would present as small a target area as possible and cautiously eased into the hall between the small combination dining/living room and the stairs leading to the upper level.

The floor plan was typical of the older row homes in the area — a modest downstairs forty feet deep by twenty feet wide consisting of the living area, and two or three bedrooms up, usually two, one in the rear and the other facing the street, with a landing and hall between them. She confirmed that nobody was downstairs and then carefully put weight on the first stair tread as she began ascending to the upper floor.

At the third step, the wood beneath her foot emitted a squeak. She stopped, her heart pounding in her ears. Her finger caressed the Glock’s trigger, ready to empty the weapon at anything that moved. She stood like that for a seeming eternity and then heard the creak from the front bedroom again — same as before. She was almost positive it was the wind now, but she still moved with stealthy deliberation as her head, and then her body, moved into sightline of the second floor landing. Both bedroom doors were closed, although the single bathroom between them had its battered door ajar. Now she was faced with an impossible choice — which bedroom to search first?

The front bedroom creaked again, and she realized it was the door — every time a draft moved through the house, it stirred it just enough to coax a protestation. Taking a deep breath, she made two rapid strides and threw herself flat against the wall. A single bead of sweat trickled from her hairline, down her temple, and then ran to the corner of her mouth, where it hung before she flicked at it with her tongue.

She took another step, and then another. Once she was alongside the door, she slowly dropped her left hand from its position on the pistol butt and gripped the worn pewter knob and turned it, trying to make no sound. When she felt the mechanism disengage, she flung the door ajar, pausing a split second before moving into the doorway in a crouch.

The second bedroom’s door burst open, and she spun, training her weapon on it, ready to fire. The door bounced against the wall and then swung shut again, with a slam that shook the house. She froze, momentarily paralyzed as she processed what was happening, and then felt the wind on her back.

She turned and peered into the master and saw that one of the two windows was open eight inches, causing the draft responsible for the creaking. The bedroom was otherwise empty except for the closed closet door and a neatly made bed. Opening the master must have created the breeze that had blown the guest bedroom door open. As if congratulating her for her deduction, it slammed again. The lock was either ill-fitting or out of adjustment — it wasn’t holding the door shut.

Now that she’d made enough noise to alert the entire neighborhood to her presence, she inched towards the closet — the final area in the master that could conceal anyone. Silver threw the door open, to be confronted with a tidy display of hanging shirts and pants. Her eyes took in the outline of a hatch in the ceiling leading to the attic, but the condition of the dust and cobwebs told her that it hadn’t been opened for a long time, so any possibility of an assailant hiding up there existed only in her mind.

The second bedroom door slammed again, and she turned to face it, ready to tackle the other possible upstairs hiding place.

Step by step she moved from the master to the rear bedroom, both hands steadying the Glock in a combat grip. When she reached the door she hesitated, listening, but detected nothing. Without warning she burst in, weapon sweeping the room. No closet, just a chest of drawers and a cheap armoire too small to hide in.

A sound echoed from downstairs.

Adrenaline coursed through her veins as she stiffened. Satisfied that the upstairs was secure, she pulled her phone out of her pocket and called Seth, but that call too went to voicemail. She left a terse message — a whispered advisement that she was in Howard’s house and to send backup immediately — that she believed the killer might still be inside, and that she was in pursuit.

Now the question was whether to wait, or go get her daughter. If anyone was inside, there were only two places they could be — the single-width garage or the basement. She hadn’t seen a car in the driveway, so she was guessing that if anyone was home, their car was in the garage. That left the basement.

Silver moved down the stairs, taking care to place her weight on the outer edges of the steps to minimize any noise. She’d learned that lesson on the ascent.

Once in the ground floor hall, she moved towards the front of the house and stopped at the only door along the span — the basement entry. There was little in the way of places she could hide, so she pushed the door open. A shaft of light stabbed down the concrete stairs to the dark expanse below. She listened, but didn’t hear any movement — just a dim hum of machinery in the gloom.

Groping along the wall with her left hand, she fumbled for a light switch. Her fingers felt the familiar shape and flicked it up.

Nothing happened.

After pausing for a moment, she reached into her purse and searched around until she found her keys. She had a miniature flashlight secured to the ring — a red anodized aluminum trinket she’d bought to make it easier to see her deadbolts at night. She flicked on the beam and winced as the keys jangled, then braced herself for the descent into the basement. The small beam of light seemed woefully inadequate, but it was better than nothing. She held the keys and flashlight in front of her and pointed her weapon down the stairs, carefully feeling with her feet for the next tread in the series. Step by step she moved lower, her pulse booming in her throat from the accumulated tension.

She was three-quarters down the stairs when something moved in the periphery of her vision. The door above her slammed shut. The next thing she knew, she was falling; a spike of white hot pain lanced up her spine, and her head slammed against a step with a crack. The last thing she registered was the sound of her now-useless gun hitting the concrete basement floor next to her flashlight, which extinguished with a pop as it skidded to a halt.

Silver regained consciousness to pain. Her back felt like someone had slammed her in the kidneys with a lead pipe, and her head shrieked in protest as she tried to open her eyes. Then she heard the most beautiful sound in the world and forced her lids wide.

“Mommy. Mommy. Don’t try to move,” Kennedy warned, her voice a distorted tremolo amid the ringing in Silver’s ears.

She tried to sit up, but the room swam dangerously. From the soft resistance beneath her, she concluded she was on a mattress with her head in her daughter’s lap. Something cold was being used as a pillow. Everything looked fuzzy, and she blinked a few times, trying to clear her vision. On the third try, she could make out the walls of a room — unpainted concrete.

“Sweetheart. Are you okay? Are you hurt?” Silver asked, her voice a croak.

“I’m fine, Mom. But you aren’t. It took a while to stop the bleeding, and I have to hold the ice on your head, or it could start again.”

Her face leaned over Silver’s, a look of clear concern on it.

“Where did you get ice?”

“The man brought some after he put the butterflies on your head. He said that head wounds bleed a lot so you need to stay quiet.”

Silver stiffened. “The man?”

Just then the door rattled and then swung open. A figure stepped in from the darkness outside. The man who had been watching her from across the street. She could see that his hair was trimmed in a buzz cut and the mustache was gone, but it was him.

Howard Jarvis.

He approached the bed, and she flinched as she tried unsuccessfully to raise her arms. She saw the tie wrap around her wrists a second later.

“I apologize for the drama. I didn’t know who was breaking in, so I had to take steps to defend myself. It wasn’t my intention to hurt you.” She struggled again, and he held up a hand. “Don’t. You’ll just make it worse. It took ten minutes to stop most of the bleeding. I’m afraid you have a concussion — hopefully no internal bleeding. I wouldn’t risk any sudden movements.” He held up a large freezer bag. “I brought some more ice. We need to keep the area cold for a while.”

She studied him. He looked ten years younger than his sixty years, but his face looked drawn and gray.

“You’re never going to get away with this,” she said, wincing with the effort.

He nodded. “No, I’m sure I won’t.”

Kennedy’s hand brushed her forehead, and he handed her the bag, taking the melted soggy one from her. The white towel wrapped around it was bloody, but not as bad as she supposed it could have been.

“The blow to your skull will require an MRI. So will your spine. And you’ll need some stitches in your scalp. I doubt you’ll be teaching any gymnastics classes in the near future,” he said, his tone conversational.

She needed to keep him talking until backup arrived. “So you’ve got me now. What’s your plan? And why did you kidnap my daughter?” she asked.

Most criminals, especially egocentric narcissists, which she assumed he was from his pursuit of media attention for his Regulator alias, wanted to brag to someone about their exploits. Motive was always a good place to start. When they were caught, they invariably had a story they had to tell — something that they needed their captor to understand. Only this time, she was the captive. She didn’t want to dwell on that for the moment.

“My plan? Why, can’t you guess? As to your daughter, that was an improvisation, and in hindsight, while a necessary one, it’s something I deeply regret for the anxiety it must have caused you both. If there had been any other way, I would have skipped it.”

“An improvisation? What do you mean?”

“You were getting too close, too soon. I was forced to expedite my plan, but even so, I was afraid you would tumble to my identity and shut me down before I was done. I couldn’t afford that, so I created a distraction. Kennedy was it.”

“I don’t understand,” Silver said.

“The deductive leap that connected the killings to past events. You were identified as the driving force in the paper, so from there, I simply needed to find an answer to the question: ‘how do I keep her mind off it so she’s rendered inefficient?’. A kidnapping was the best I could come up with.” He shrugged.

“Why did you kill all those people?” Silver asked.

Howard looked at Kennedy with an air of caution and then shrugged again. “I remember reading a story from the Old West. Years ago. I don’t remember what paper it was from, but I do remember it was a town where a bully who had been terrorizing everyone wound up shot, but when the marshals showed up to investigate the murder, they met with zero cooperation from the townspeople. The only statement they ever got was from an old woman. Her response was: ‘he needed killing’. My response is the same. I have a long version, but the short version is: ‘they needed killing’.” He smiled at the thought. “Indeed they did.”

“I don’t understand. Why? How are they all connected? And are you admitting that you killed them all?”

“Absolutely. Of course I did. I intend to give you a full confession. What’s the point of playing coy? Yes, I killed them, and my motivations were simple. Revenge and justice.”

“Justice? You killed six men to get justice?”

“And revenge. Retribution, actually.”

“Retribution.”

Howard glanced at his watch. “I’ll tell you a story, and then I’m going to end this painful little chapter. I’ll turn myself in, surrendering to you.” He lifted his hands into the air. “Ya got me. As I said, I’ll give you a full confession. But while it’s still just us, I’ll tell you the details so you understand the why. Nobody else will care, or believe it, for a while at least. But I have a captive audience, so I’ll tell you the story.”

He cleared his throat. “It starts with a fire. My wife was suffering from multiple sclerosis, and when the housing crash happened in 2008 and the stock market fell by over fifty percent I was wiped out by margin calls, and the pension I was relying on vaporized when the company’s fund became insolvent. Within a matter of months, we were close to being destitute — I’d gone from having comfortable retirement prospects to barely surviving on social security. The bank was quick to foreclose on the house, and they were going to take possession of it. My wife went over the edge and decided that nobody was going to get her home. So she committed suicide, and through an ugly set of terrible coincidences, our only daughter died in the blaze trying to save her. You probably already know all this if you connected the fire to the killings.”

Silver nodded, then regretted it as pain spiked through her head.

“Over the next couple of years, I watched as the devastation from the financial crisis claimed the lives of my friends and neighbors. One wound up drinking himself to oblivion and dying in a car accident — the decapitation. Another was forced to move to a terrible neighborhood and got killed in a mugging; stabbed to death for twenty dollars in his wallet. Another couldn’t take a life where he’d lost everything, so he turned on his car one night and sucked on the exhaust. My best friend resorted to crime and was shot to death outside of a liquor store he robbed with an unloaded gun. The Korean owner had a Beretta and years of target practice. What all these people had in common was that their deaths were brought about by an event that’s caused millions around the world to have their lives forever changed for the worse. That event was the financial crisis.”

Howard glanced at the floor, kicking at the concrete absently with the toe of his boot as he collected his thoughts.

“What most don’t realize is that event wasn’t an accident. It was deliberate, avoidable, and engineered as deliberately as a film explosion. I spent years researching why it happened and who did it. Once I understood, I was able to target at least one of the groups responsible. That group is my victims list. A list of untouchable players who would never serve a day in jail, even if all facts were known.” Howard hesitated, studied the ceiling, then continued. “Because the money behind them is the real power here — the silent power that pretends very hard not to exist. That money decides who gets elected, and which lobbyists do which politicians favors, and what laws get passed and enforced. But the money stays in the shadows. Once I understood those responsible would never be brought to justice no matter what the circumstances, I came up with a plan.” Howard cleared his throat again. “I invented The Regulator and devoted what’s left of my life to executing my plan.”

“Let’s say you’re right,” Silver said, “and that these men somehow did cause the crisis. I don’t see how, but let’s assume they did. What good does killing them do? They’re dead. So now what? To what end?”

“I thought you’d never ask. The idea was never just to kill them. The point was to kill them in such a fashion as to build notoriety for The Regulator, so that when he revealed the full story people would be interested in why he’d done it. I understood that most have no grasp as to how they’ve been robbed, or are so apathetic they mistake irony for vitality. But if I became a notorious serial killer then an entire nation would want to know the reasoning — the why.”

“The why?”

“And the who and the how.”

“Which is?”

He checked his watch. “My guess is we have maybe twenty minutes before the SWAT team comes through the door, so I’ll give you the abridged version. The 2008 crisis was caused by a concerted effort of organized criminals, rogue governments, terrorists and financial predators — enemies of the U.S. that figured out that it was unnecessary to declare conventional war or crash planes into buildings. Nowadays if you want to bring down a nation you crash its economy, and that forever alters its population’s existence without firing a shot. They’ve been testing and refining their techniques for at least a decade, but the basics are simple.”

“So you say.”

“I do. First, you have your people design the guts of the system so you have backdoors for all the electronic trading and can manipulate everything. Next, you create a network of brokers and money funds that will participate in an organized attack, using those backdoors when you pull the trigger. Third, you lobby to keep the identity of the money in the funds anonymous — can’t have anyone know who’s providing all the liquidity in the market, because some people might think it’s a bad idea to have every criminal element and enemy of the state in the world investing in the largest funds. Next, lobby to remove all the safeguards that were put in place after the 1929 crash so it can happen again. Because the real profit in all markets is made when they crash, not when they go up. In the ’29 crash, fortunes were made. Same in 2008.”

“It can’t be that straightforward.”

“Of course it isn’t. You need a lot of time, and to spend billions lobbying lawmakers to pass favorable legislation and to ban any regulation of the mechanisms you plan to use. Your Ponzi scheme cronies write the trading regulations so you have loopholes you can exploit. You send your kids to Harvard and Wharton and they get MBAs and go to work with the biggest financial entities, and eventually they’re fifty and running them. All the time, you’re putting the building blocks in place. But the final piece is to convince the entire country to put its money into the market you plan on crashing. That’s the hard part. The test run was the dot com crash. A lot of money was made pulling the rug out from under the system, but not nearly enough to end the U.S. as a global power within a generation, which I believe was the ultimate goal of this crash. To weaken it sufficiently so the population will allow the unthinkable to happen.”

Howard coughed alarmingly, then composed himself, but his eyes were still streaming as he continued.

“That’s where the big banks came in. Everyone was told for seventy years that the one safe investment was real estate. So how do you destroy the value of the one thing everyone agrees is a wise investment? Easy. Create an industry that turns the mortgages into securities that can be manipulated. Then have your mob associates set up loan companies that will give anyone with a pulse a million dollars to buy a house, and have your friends at the central bank drop interest rates to nothing so there’s a ton of liquidity available for gambling on home values. That creates a bubble where everyone becomes a speculator with all the easy cash. Just like all the easy money that led up to the 1929 crash. There are no new ideas.”

“I remember reading a lot of articles about how ridiculously easy it was to get loans for about four years.”

“Yup. A golden retriever could get a loan with no documentation. It got insane, but nobody would stop it — for good reason. Everyone was getting rich, and the big money was preparing to kick the chair out from under the market.” Howard rubbed the moistness from his eyes. “Then one day, at the height of the mania, you pop the bubble. Because you know when you plan to pop it, you’re in position to make hundreds of billions when you crash the market, and the ensuing devastation not only makes you a fortune, but guts the country and plunges it into an inevitable downward spiral. That’s it.”

“That’s impossible. There are safeguards…”

“Are there? Really? Like what? Did you know that some of the biggest Wall Street firms created billions and billions of dollars of securities they knew would fail? Such toxic junk there was no way they couldn’t fail? Of course, they didn’t tell their customers that. They sold the securities to trusting customers all over the world. But did you know they allowed the big money managers who were betting on a crash to select the mortgages that went into those securities, which they had sold short? In other words, they let those who would make billions from the mortgages failing to custom-design pools that were guaranteed to fail.”

Howard spat through the door into the basement.

“And you know how many people have gone to jail for defrauding the entire world and causing the largest crisis in history? None. Not one. Nobody has, and nobody will. Because the interests that destroyed the U.S. economy are too rich and powerful to prosecute.” Howard looked disgusted.

“I still don’t get how they made money doing it.”

“Many ways. Through credit default swaps, which are like insurance policies that pay you if whatever they’re insuring drops in value. The industry lobbied to keep those unregulated, so a company could sell hundreds of billions of dollars of them, but not have to actually possess the money to pay on them if the market collapsed. That would be illegal to do if credit default swaps were called insurance. But by calling them something else, presto, it’s legal. Look, it’s illegal to take out insurance on your neighbor’s house and then burn it down to collect the payment. But if you call that insurance a credit default swap, and you get your former CEO to run Treasury so it will step in with the taxpayer’s checkbook when your neighbor’s house burns down, you have a winning recipe to profit handsomely from destruction.”

Howard reached into his jacket for a small bottle of water and took a pull before continuing.

“Another way is by short selling. My second to last victim? His brokerage was one of several that came from nowhere to account for a ton of the trading in the markets every day during the 2008 crash — most of it short selling. The vast majority of the selling never had any shares delivered, so whoever sold those millions and millions of shares never had to come up with any — they were literally selling shares that didn’t exist, getting paid as if they had delivered them, and if the company went belly up, they never had to deliver — ever. Do you see how creating unlimited supply of a commodity during a panic could dump the price, no matter how much buying took place? It’s simple supply and demand.”

“But surely that’s illegal…”

“Don’t you get it? Since when has fraud not been illegal? But do you see any criminal cases being brought against anyone who was known by the government to be committing fraud on a daily basis? No. Why? Because they’re ‘too big to fail’. That means they’re too powerful to prosecute. That’s the simple truth. All the regulators would have to do is look at who sold ten times as much stock as existed in a bank like Bear Stearns — a deliberate fraud that destroyed the economy — but nobody dares. Nobody is curious about who was trading that twenty percent of the total market through a couple of tiny brokers.”

Howard stopped to catch his breath, then glanced at the time. “I need to go get something. I’ll be right back.”

He walked out of the room. Silver and Cassidy listened as he mounted the stairs.

“Sweetheart, see if you can get my wrists free. If I can use my hands, we have a better chance.”

“Mommy, you were bleeding really badly. It scared me. He closed the wound and stopped the bleeding, but he said if you moved around it would be really dangerous. He told me to just wait until help came. Maybe we should listen…”

Silver tried to move and realized that her head was worse than she’d originally thought. Even the slightest attempt to move blinded her with pain. Before she could argue, they heard the sound of Howard’s boots descending the steps and approaching.

“Sorry about that. So where was I?” he asked.

“You were telling me how the crisis was a deliberate event. Although I still don’t buy it — there are protections that would keep it from happening the way you say.”

“Really? You mean there are rules. Well, guess what — nobody enforced them. The people who were supposed to stop the barbarians at the gate were instead lining their pockets, looking the other way.” He retrieved his water bottle and took a final sip. “How can you tell a population that the system that’s supposed to protect it has allowed the worst miscreants in the world to plunge it into a depression that was a hundred percent engineered, and that it happened because not a single group that was supposed to do its job even tried? What would happen if the average person understood that? It would be anarchy. Nobody could get elected. People would stop paying their taxes. There would be massive social unrest. The only way you could maintain order would be to become China and start shooting anyone who didn’t follow your rules. It would be the end.”

“I just have a hard time believing any of this is possible,” Silver said.

“Of course you do. Because you were raised to believe that the systems are there to protect you. Why? Because you were told they were by the schools that teach whatever is printed in history books by the winners of wars. The media repeats over and over that the system works and that nobody is above the law, and because we want to live in a world that’s safe, we believe it. It’s a comfortable lie. It makes us feel good, so we’ll fight to insist it’s true.”

Silver had no rebuttal.

He gave Silver a hard look. “You’re a fed. You’re part of the machine that enforces the law. But what if you discovered that there was a whole system that didn’t obey it? What if you discovered there were two worlds — one where you had to obey the rules, and one where the people with real power ran the systems for their own enrichment and didn’t observe any of them? If you let that leak out, what would your job be like? How would you maintain control? Wouldn’t that create a society where you have to keep order with the point of a sword?”

“You’re describing a conspiracy theory. Not reality.”

“Sure I am. Anytime someone calls it like it is, it’s described as a kooky conspiracy theory — because the powerful understand that the best defense against understanding is to label the truth as nuttiness. Just have all your pundits say it’s nutty and absurd. Lenin knew that — he said to just repeat a lie until it became accepted as truth. That’s why a few small groups control the media and why this story will never, ever get printed. Because the same group that engineered the greatest transfer of wealth in history runs that machine, too.”

“So your solution was to kill these six men? How did that help anything? How did it change anything?”

“It cut off one of the heads of the hydra. One of the groups that carried it out. There are others. Much more powerful others. But I can’t get to them. I don’t have the time, or the means. But what I do have is my legacy. The ugly reputation of The Regulator. People will want to know why I killed these very rich men. I intend to explain why and to name names. That was the whole point. To create a set of events that would get even the apathetic titillated enough to want to read about why I did it. Why I killed these seven men, and how they were part of an evil that’s perverting the basics of the society we live in. Because as strange as it sounds, I believe in good and evil — and they were part of something that can only be described as evil.”

She looked at him strangely. “Six men. You’ve killed six men. You said seven.”

He glanced at his watch. “Did I? Well, when you take my statement downtown, I’ll tell you about number seven. Now let’s get you untied and properly armed so you can arrest me and stop this senseless killing spree, shall we?”

“You’re serious.”

“Absolutely. I surrender. You solved the case, you captured me dead to rights, and I will make a full and complete confession. Hold still, and I’ll snip the ties off your wrists. Sorry I had to do that. I needed to keep you out of trouble until your team could make it here.”

“My team?”

“Silver. May I call you Silver? Do I look stupid? Of course you have a team on its way. Now hold still, and I’ll give you back your Glock — loaded, of course — and if you don’t have a team coming, you’ll be free to call one and get it here. Time is running out for me, so there’s no point in delaying. I suppose if all else fails, you could call 911.”

Howard walked over to her and flicked open a pocketknife, then severed the ties with its razor-sharp blade before closing it and flipping it aside. She watched in dumfounded amazement as he walked out the door and returned a few moments later with her weapon and her purse. He handed her the gun, which she pointed at his head as he reached into her purse and withdrew her phone and a set of handcuffs. He dutifully placed them on his wrists and locked them before tossing her phone onto the mattress.

“There. Now let’s see if we can get me processed without getting shot by one of the good guys, shall we?” he said.

The sense of surrealism she had been experiencing intensified as she watched him calmly walk to the far corner and sit down, smiling as if without a care in the world.

“Honey, did he hurt you?” Silver asked Kennedy.

“No, Mom. Although he did make me read a lot.”

She squinted at him and then checked the Glock to verify it was indeed loaded.

“What do you mean, your time is running out?” she asked softly.

“I’m dying. I mean, we all are, but I’m dying a little sooner. That’s all. That’s why the rush.” He shrugged.

“You’re going to make it this easy? It’s over, just like that?” she asked unbelievingly.

“I was actually planning to go into your headquarters this afternoon and surrender. You just saved me the trouble. And this is more dramatic, I think you’ll agree.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“I gave your daughter some books. One of the favorite expressions of the hero, Sherlock Holmes, is also one of mine. Something to the effect of: when all other explanations are proved false, what’s left, no matter how unbelievable, is the truth. You’re out of all other explanations. Which leaves you with me…and the truth. Now make a call so we can get out of here. You look like shit and could pass out at any minute if you’re not careful. And I’m not getting any younger. Come on. Chop chop.” Howard smiled, and for a moment, she felt an altogether inappropriate emotion. “It wouldn’t look too good if I was brought to justice by a ten-year-old, would it? Call in the cavalry. I’m going to get a little rest while we wait. Kennedy, keep the ice on her head until we’re rescued. Don’t be a slacker.” Howard leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, a look of peace on his face.

She felt the ice bag press against her head a little harder as her daughter endeavored to be attentive.

Training her weapon on Howard’s now-resting frame, still dizzy from the concussion and Howard’s revelations, Silver powered on her phone and pressed her speed dial.

Eighteen minutes later, the first agents made it down the stairs.