by Vince Vogel
“Really?”
“Yes. It’s much better than last year. Daddy let us put some in a jar and keep in our room.”
“So long as I don’t wake up covered in frogs one day.”
The little boy giggled and the warm air felt even fresher, the light above the graves bursting into life. Feeling wonderfully tranquil, Detective Sergeant Victoria Sharp gazed nonchalantly at her wing mirror and saw a tall figure walking up along the road. She didn’t think anything of it. Even when he stopped in front of the door.
She never saw his face. Never even bothered to look up, the sounds of her son giggling in her ear. A shadow came across her midriff. She looked out the door window and for the first time saw the gun.
It exploded with furious anger and noise. Roaring into the car. She felt like a bull had hit her in the abdomen, goring its horns into her with all its weight, the seat creaking underneath her as she ricocheted up and landed back down with a thud. She was still alive. Panicked. Breathing frantically. A fire burning in her torn guts. She glanced about the inside of the car as she shivered, her body going suddenly cold. It was as though she was looking for something. She’d thrown her mobile phone into the footwell.
“Mummy?” called back from it. Then her husband came on. “Vicky? What was that explosion? Vicky?”
Her whole body was trembling and each breath became harder to catch. She felt so terribly cold as the blood drained out of her, slipping down the seat and into the footwell. She looked up out of the windscreen and saw the man walking away toward the building. The sound of her husband calling her name got farther away with every second. By the time the man was pounding on the door of the apartment block, she’d lost consciousness and slipped quickly into death.
A hatch slid to the side near the top of the door and a pair of eyes looked out at him. He quickly shoved the gun through the gap and pulled the trigger. He then pointed the gun down at the lock of the door and blasted it away with several shots, the wood splintering and spilling out as though it had been hit by a cannonball. He finished the job with his foot, the door swinging in. The first man lay dead on the floor about three meters back, the top of his head no longer there. Another man dressed in a black suit came out of a door farther up a narrow corridor. His eyes widened at the man standing over the body and he attempted to get something from his jacket pocket.
The Shooter marched straight up to him and grabbed hold of his arm before he managed to reach his gun. He held the magnum to the man’s fat belly and blew him back several feet, the arm bursting out of the Shooter’s grip.
Something hit the wall next to him, an explosion of plaster scattering white dust all over him. He threw himself into the room the other had just come out of. A girl no older than twelve sat shivering under the covers of a bed, a drugged look to her anemic face, naked underneath the sheets.
“Are you here to rescue us?” she asked him, her frightened eyes studying the stranger hiding by the door.
He turned to her, aimed the gun and said, “I’m here to free you all.”
She never even knew she’d been shot, her body blown off the bed and onto the floor. He reloaded the magnum, snapped it shut and burst out the door, firing a volley of shots down the corridor. The other man managed to get off two shots himself, narrowly missing before taking a hollow point in the left leg and then another in the chest. He was dead before he even hit the deck.
The Shooter stood in the corridor for a moment. In the background, he heard screams coming from the other floors. Rapid footsteps jogged over his head. In the rooms, he could hear windows being opened. Frantic screams. A door burst open behind him and he turned sharply. A woman aged around thirty came out.
“I don’t know what this is, but—”
He shot her in the chest and she hit the doorframe, falling back into the room. Someone darted out from behind her. Another young girl. He shot her between the shoulder blades as she reached the door. She flew onto her front as though he’d driven a car into her.
Again he stood and waited. No more doors opened on the ground floor. All he heard was the wheezing of the man he’d shot in the stomach. He walked over and stood gazing down at him as the man held the huge wound to his gut. He was wearing a look of utter hatred on his pale face.
“You’re my slave now,” the Shooter said, aiming the gun and shooting him in the head.
He left that floor, traveling up a narrow staircase to a landing that ran along the front of the building. All the rooms were off one side of it. When he reached the top of the stairs, a man carrying a baseball bat ran at him with the thing waving about over his head. He died holding the bat. Never let go as he was blasted backwards the way he’d come.
The Shooter shot anything that moved. Girls and women burst out of rooms and died in the corridor, or were caught cowering inside. In some, the girls hung from windows and dropped down. This was okay on the first two floors, but those on the top, who heard the explosions and screaming downstairs with utter terror gripping their hearts, faced too far a fall.
One girl on the third floor decided to hell with it. She hung from the ledge and let go. She felt herself falling backwards through the air and tried to correct it. This meant she fell straight on one leg. Feeling it break just above the knee, she screamed out as she was thrown sideways onto the concrete ground.
She looked up at her mates just in time to hear them scream and watch them rush away from the window, a scattering of blood hitting the pane after another explosion. Determined not to die and to escape this place, she got herself up and dragged the broken leg along with her down the alleyway she’d landed in.
Inside the block, the Shooter was finished. He didn’t care about the ones that got away. It kept to his credos. Always leave a witness. No story is ever told unless there’s someone to tell it.
Around him, some of them were still alive, murmuring and whining on the ground. But he didn’t have time to go around putting extra bullets into whoever squirmed, so he left the building, passed the dead cop in her car, and got to his own, which was parked a short distance behind her.
Opening the trunk, he took out a large jimmy can of gasoline and walked back to the building. He then went around throwing the fuel on the bodies, some of them still moving, and along the floor between them. Once he’d finished on the third floor, he lit them and heard some screams coming out of the flames. He watched it burn for a little while and then went down to the floor below and lit that fire, finally ending with the downstairs fire, which he lit by the front door.
Leaving the place, the fire growing behind him and smoke rising out of the roof, he stopped by DS Victoria Sharp’s car. He took a hunting knife from his belt and began etching something into the paintwork of the door.
Having finished with that, he got back in his own car and drove out of there. As he passed along a road of abandoned houses, he found a girl hobbling along, one of her legs being dragged behind her. She was holding onto a fence to keep herself upright.
He slowed down beside her, aimed the gun across the car out of the passenger window and fired, sending her into the fence. With a mighty smile on his face, he put his foot down and roared out of there. The sun was still bright enough to call it day.
57
“They say you arrested someone today for it,” the constable was saying to Jack as they walked through Boreham Wood.
The sun was low and a deep blue shone between the trees, a thin sheet of cloud gleaming red above their heads. The constable escorting Jack to the site was one of the officers placed on watch at the crime scene.
“They brought him in for enquiries,” Jack replied. “Nothing more than that.”
Alice had contacted him not long ago informing Jack that she wasn’t sure if David Burke was actually their man.
“But what about this journalist guy and the letter, too?” the constable went on. “Sounds like a complete nutter.”
“He’s troubled, I’ll give you that.”
“But what do you
think he’ll do next?”
The guy had chewed Jack’s ear off ever since he’d parked and come over to the cordon.
“If I knew that,” Jack replied in a grumbling tone, “I wouldn’t be walking through this poxy wood at eight at night.”
He’d looked annoyed when he’d said this and the constable took the hint. For the few remaining minutes they walked to the campsite and lake, there was an uneasy silence between the two.
When they reached the ghostly site, the three tents and the long extinguished fire facing the lake, Jack first checked the tree they’d found the body of the boy hanging from. He inspected the bark of the trunk, pulling some ferns to the side as he did.
“What is it you’re looking for, anyway?” the constable asked, unable to keep quiet any longer.
“Confirmation,” Jack replied curtly as he stood up and went to the next tree, having found nothing on the first.
It would be in an obvious place, he told himself. It always was before.
Not finding anything on the next tree, he gazed at the three tents that stood like ghosts. A tall Scottish pine stood right between their three entrances. The detective went to it. Checking the bark directly opposite the tents, he quickly found what he was looking for at the base of the trunk.
A diamond with a cross going through it. It had been there the whole time, but either no one had thought anything of it or they hadn’t noticed it at all. The killer had marked it. Marked the place as his. They were his and this was his place. These woods. This lake. They would always be some sort of spiritual home for him.
“You check the place out much?” Jack asked the constable.
“You mean come out here?”
“Yeah.”
“A few times a night, we do a run of the perimeter, but we don’t come all the way here. Forensics don’t like us getting too close in case we mess something up. But we get close enough to keep an eye on it.”
He’s probably been back here already, Jack thought. We should have set up cameras. He loved revisiting the fires before. We used to find fresh symbols scratched into the soot days afterwards. And it had to be him. We never released the symbol to the public, and when we searched it with regards to existing graffiti, we found no connections to existing or known tags. It was never found anywhere other than the fires. Now it was here and on a bullet sent to a man whose family he murdered.
Jack stood thoughtfully gazing at the symbol when his phone went off. It was Jean.
“Babe?”
“Are you nearly done?”
“Yeah, why? What’s up?”
“We’ve got a visitor.”
58
When Alice and Lange drove into the road, they found the firemen hosing down the front of the blazing building, the raging orange flames reaching up into the black sky, the sun now gone. A telescopic platform shot out the back of a fire engine, two men on top of it spraying a thick jet of water at the burning bricks. Across the road, the gravestones shimmered in the gloomy light.
Getting out of the car, Alice couldn’t help gazing through the iron fence at those glimmering stones, then at the glimmering car that stood twenty meters before the building. A barrier of police tape surrounded it and two forensics operatives worked there, one taking photographs and the other examining the body from the passenger side.
“Is that her?” Lange inquired as he came beside Alice.
“Yeah.”
They walked over to the car. The photographer was crouching by the door, photographing it. When the detectives came behind him, they saw that someone had scratched a symbol into the paintwork. A diamond shape with a cross going through it like the crosshairs of a gun.
Raising her eyes, Alice looked inside.
Victoria Sharp was slumped in the seat with a blood-covered midriff, hands holding onto the wound as if she believed she could hold in the life, eyes open and staring out, a somewhat peaceful look on her pale face, as though she hadn’t expected death at all. The phone was still in the passenger footwell. It had been her family who’d called the police originally. It was the responding officers who discovered the fire.
“He’s shot her from a standing point by the window,” a female operative said, pulling down her mask beforehand.
“Same weapon as before?”
“Yes. The .44 magnum. Hollow-point.”
Lange recoiled as he imagined getting hit by a weapon of that caliber from point blank range. It must have been terribly painful at the end. Or maybe she lost blood so quickly that she never even felt the pain before death. Either way, George Lange felt terribly sorry for his former colleague.
“What about in the house?” Alice asked.
The operative looked over at the burning shell before turning back to the detective.
“Won’t know until we get in there,” she said. “Several girls handed themselves into police stations nearby. Apparently they escaped out of the windows. They claim a man came in and started shooting everyone. Girls, men, women. Everyone. We found one body on a road nearby. She had a broken leg and had been shot in the side. Bled to death on the pavement.”
“So it’s him?”
“Oh, it’s him, alright. God knows how many he’s killed this time, though.”
As she said this, George Lange’s phone went off and he walked away to answer it.
“He knew we’d be here,” Alice mused out loud.
“He certainly didn’t waste any time killing DS Sharp. I hear her family were on the phone to her when it happened.”
“Yes,” Alice answered in a hollow voice, gazing at the flaming building. “Her five-year-old son heard it all.”
“That’s terrible.”
While Alice stared at the flames, she recalled her experiences with DS Sharp. Victoria Sharp had worked under Alice for two years and was a proficient police officer. Good at legwork and gifted with an astute copper’s mind. But where Alice attempted to think about DS Sharp in a human sense, she found nothing. They’d never shared anything. Never chatted about the weekend. Heck, Alice never even knew she had children until George Lange had stated it earlier when informing her that the woman’s son had been on the phone. Alice realized—well, always knew—that she wasn’t the type of woman other women share things with, including pictures of their children, and it hurt to know that there was always a barrier between her and everyone else. She felt sad for the loss of her colleague, but also for the fact that she never knew the woman behind the badge. Because it made it harder to grieve for someone you only ever knew through the job they did.
Lange came beside her, placing the phone back in his pocket.
“You’ll never guess who owns that building,” he said.
“Tommy Lewis,” she replied without removing her eyes from the flames.
“Give that girl a prize.”
“But why?” Alice said next. “Everything appears at first glance to be random. But then when you think about it, George, nothing is. And everywhere we look, we see Tommy Lewis. If only we’d been able to get to him alive, we might have been able to get to the bottom of this.”
“Perhaps he was never meant to live in the first place.”
“Maybe. But what’s next in this game? All we know is he was once a truck driver, has some connection with Tommy Lewis, has an affinity with Robert Kline, has killed ten victims in the past, was infatuated with his first murder victim, and is pretty much insane and willing to kill until he’s killed himself.”
“I think he’s aiming for a suicide by cop, ma’am.”
“I get the same feeling, George. The very same feeling.”
They continued to stare into the flames, both feeling that it suitably represented the killer’s rage. A burning inferno of rage and fury.
59
Jack was nearly home, waiting at a junction for a set of lights to go green. Alice had called earlier about the murder of DS Sharp and the fire.
“I guess it proves it’s not David Burke,” she’d said.
“You pul
led him in too early,” he’d replied.
Jack had gone on to tell her about finding the symbol at the campsite and what it meant to the Fire Starter. She’d told him about the symbol scratched into Victoria Sharp’s car door. He didn’t mention seeing Col, but he did tell her about his experiences in the Fire Starter case. How the killer had followed a certain trajectory—a career arch, if you like. Nothing mattered more to him than killing. The prestige. The attention it got him. The feeling of power and control over his community. The kill itself. The getting away with it. The game of cat and mouse with the police. He also told her about his feelings toward Robert Kline.
“I’ve requested an interview,” she’d told him, “but he’s refusing to talk. I don’t want to go up there if he’s just gonna mess us about.”
“He’ll talk when he wants. Trust me.”
They’d then said their goodbyes.
Now, while he stared indifferently at the lights, the points of the case flowed though his head like the waters of several rivers hitting into each at the mouth of a delta. The Fire Starter had built a cocoon and inside it, he’d transformed into the Shooter. He would take the city hostage and hold a gun to its collective head. There were already reports of vigilante groups patrolling the neighborhoods, gangs of men going about threatening anyone suspicious. There’d already been several assaults on innocent men.
The light turned green. Jack was about to pull away when a large four-by-four suddenly pulled around him and stopped right in front so he couldn’t pass.
“What’s this?” Jack moaned as he went to put the car in reverse so he could maneuver around it.
But as he did, another four-by-four stopped right behind him so that he was pinned between the two. Jack swiftly gathered what was happening and slumped back in his seat.
Eventually, knuckles rapped on the passenger window and he unlocked the door. Harry Dunn got in and immediately ordered Jack to drive as the vehicle in front pulled away.
They parked around the corner on a residential road, one of the four-by-fours parking nearby. They sat in silence for a moment, neither man looking at the other.
