These groups were more or less independent but were joined by common views: that the federal government is too intrusive and a threat to individual freedom, lower or no taxes, fundamentalist Christianity, an isolationist stance when it comes to foreign policy, distrust of Wall Street and globalization. While not many militias put it in their bylaws, they also embrace certain de facto policies like racism, nationalism, anti-immigration, misogyny and anti-Semitism, anti-abortion and anti-LGBT.
A particular problem with the militias is that, by definition, they're paramilitary groups; they believe fervently in the second amendment ('A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed'). Which meant that they were usually armed to the teeth. Admittedly some militias aren't terrorist organizations and claim their weapons are only for hunting and self-defense. Others, such as Matthew Stanton's American Families First Council, obviously felt otherwise.
Why New York City should be a particularly juicy target Rhyme had never figured out (the militias, curiously, pretty much left Washington, DC alone). Maybe it was the other trappings of the Big Apple that appealed: gays, a large non-Anglo population, home of the liberal media, the headquarters of so many multinational companies. And maybe they felt the Rockettes and Annie carried thinly veiled socialist propaganda.
If Rhyme totaled the number of perps he'd been up against over the years, he supposed he'd rank anti-social personality disorder doers first (that is, psychos) and domestic terrorists second, far more numerous than foreign plotters or organized crime perps.
Like the couple he was about to speak to: Matthew and Harriet Stanton.
Rhyme was now on the tenth floor of the Stantons' hotel, along with officers of the NYPD Emergency Service operation. ESU had cleared the building and found no other co-conspirators. Rhyme and Sachs hadn't expected any. The hotel records indicated that only the Stantons and their son were staying here. Clearly there was one other perp - the deceased Unsub 11-5 - but there was no evidence of anyone else in New York. After Rhyme and Sachs had determined that the Stantons had been involved in the terror attack they and Bo Haumann had put together a tactical op to nail them.
The hotel manager had arranged for the elevators to bypass the tenth floor and had moved his staff elsewhere while the police evacuated the floor's legitimate guests. Then woman ESU officers donned cleaning jackets, tossed their MP-7s into laundry carts and hung around the elevator until the family showed up.
Surprise ...
Not a shot fired.
The Bomb Squad had cleared the room - no booby traps; in fact not much of anything left. The terrorists had traveled light. Sachs was presently running the scene there.
Lincoln Rhyme was now scrolling through his iPad, reading reports sent to him over the past half hour from the FBI based in St Louis, the closest field office to the Southern Illinois home of the Stantons and the AFFC. The group had been on the Bureau's and the Illinois State Police's radar - members were suspected in attacks on gays and minorities and of other hate crimes but nothing could ever be proven. Mostly, it was felt, they were bluster.
Surprise.
The authorities in the Midwest had already arrested three others within the AFFC for possession of explosives and machine guns without federal licenses. And the search there continued.
No longer in her crime scene coveralls, Amelia Sachs joined him.
'Anything left behind?' He looked at the milk crate she carried. It was filled with a half-dozen paper and plastic bags.
'Not much. Lot of bottled water.'
Rhyme grunted a laugh. 'Let's see if our friends'll be willing to have a tete-a-tete.' A nod toward a linen room, where the Stantons were being held until the FBI showed up; the feds were taking point on this one.
They walked and wheeled into the room, where the prisoners sat handcuffed and shackled. The parents and son - their only child, Rhyme had learned - gazed back with a hesitant resolution. They were flanked by three NYPD officers.
If the Stantons were curious as to how Rhyme had figured out they were the associates of the unsub and that this was their hotel, they didn't express any desire to learn the answer. And that answer was almost embarrassingly mundane, involving no subtle analysis of the evidence whatsoever. Unsub 11-5's backpack, recovered beside his body near the water main pipe, contained a notebook called The Modification, a detailed list of steps in the plot to get poison into the New York drinking water. Inside that was a slip of paper with the address of the hotel. They knew the Stantons were staying there; Harriet had told Sachs this fact. So the couple and the unsub knew each other. The 'attack' at the hospital wasn't that at all. The unsub had probably gone there to visit his ailing colleague, Matthew Stanton, in the hospital's cardiac care ward.
On reflection, there were clues they'd discovered that might have led to the conclusion that the Stantons were connected. For instance, the writing on the bag at the Belvedere holding the implants said No. 3, suggesting that the attack on Braden Alexander was the third one. But if the assault on Harriet Stanton had been legitimate, the bag notation would have read No. 4.
Similarly, they'd found trace evidence of Harriet's cosmetics in places where the unsub had been. Yes, he'd grabbed her in the hospital and there might have been some transfer of the substance, but it would have been minimal. More likely he'd picked the trace up by spending time in her company. Also, Rhyme recalled the back and forth of the bootied footprints at the crime scenes; that suggested that an accomplice had brought the lights and batteries in after the tattoo killings. A check with the hotel here revealed that the Stantons had been accompanied by their son, Josh, a young, muscular man who could easily have carted the heavy equipment in after his cousin had finished his lethal inking.
But sometimes fate short-circuits.
A slip of damn paper with an address - found in the perp's possession.
'You know your rights?' Sachs asked.
The officer behind Harriet Stanton nodded.
His long face pale and with a matte texture, Matthew Stanton said, 'We don't recognize any rights. The government has no authority to grant us anything.'
'Then,' Rhyme countered, 'you won't have any problem talking to us.' He thought this logic was impeccable. 'The only thing we need at this point is the ID of your colleague. The one with the poison.'
Harriet's face brightened. 'So he got away.'
Rhyme and Sachs shared a glance. 'Got away?' Rhyme asked.
'No, he didn't escape,' Sachs told the Stantons. 'But he didn't have any ID on him and his fingerprints came back negative. We're hoping you'll cooperate and--'
Her smile vanished. 'But then you arrested him?'
'I thought you knew. He's dead. He was killed by the stream of water after he drilled the hole. Because the pressure was never shut off.'
Absolute silence descended. It was shattered only a few seconds later when Harriet Stanton began to scream uncontrollably.
CHAPTER 68
'It's over,' Pam Willoughby said, practically leaping into Seth McGuinn's arms.
He was at the front door of her apartment building in Brooklyn Heights. He stumbled back, laughing. They kissed long. The sky finally was clear and the incisive sunlight, ruddy from the afternoon angle, poured onto the facade of the building. The temperature, though, was even colder than in the past few days, when sleet pelted from the gray sky.
They stepped inside the hallway and then walked into her apartment on the first floor, to the right. Even a glance at the basement stairs, at the bottom of which Seth had nearly been killed, didn't dampen her joy.
She was buoyant. Her shoulders were no longer knots, her belly no longer tight as a spring. The ordeal was over. She could return home, at last, without worries that that terrible man who'd attacked Seth would come back. According to Lincoln Rhyme's message, the unsub was dead and his colleagues had been arrested.
Pam had noted immediately that Amelia wasn't the on
e delivering the news.
Fine with her. She was still angry and wasn't sure she could ever wholly forgive Amelia for trying to break up her relationship with her soul mate.
In the living room Seth pulled off his jacket and they dropped onto the couch. He cradled her head and pulled her close.
'You want anything?' she asked. 'Coffee? I've got some champagne or, I don't know, bubbly wine. I've had it for a year. It's probably still good.'
'Sure, coffee, tea. Anything warm.' But before she rose Seth took her by the arm and studied her carefully, looking her over with a face of both relief and concern. 'You all right?'
'I am. How about you? You're the one who was going to get a tattoo from that crazy guy.'
Seth shrugged.
She could see he was troubled. She couldn't imagine what it had been like to be pinned down like that, knowing you were about to be killed. And killed so painfully. The news reported that the poisons the killer had used were picked because of their agonizing symptoms. At least he didn't seem to blame her for the attack any longer. She'd been cut deeply to see him pulling away afterward. Walking away from her, not looking back ... that was almost more than she could stand.
But he'd forgiven her. That was all in the past.
Pam walked into the kitchen and put water on to boil, readied the drip coffee-maker.
He called, 'And what exactly did happen? You talk to Lincoln?'
'Oh.' She stepped into the doorway. Her face was grave and she brushed her static-clinging hair from her face, twined it into a rope and let it fall on her back. 'It was terrible. That guy? Who attacked you? He wasn't a psycho at all. He'd come here to poison the water supply in New York.'
'Shit! That was it? I heard something about water.'
'One of those militia groups, like my mother was in.' She gave a wry smile. 'Lincoln thought that the killer was obsessed with the Bone Collector. But, get this, it wasn't that at all; he was interested in the attack my mother planned here years ago. He was trying to figure out how Lincoln and Amelia would conduct an investigation. Oh, he wasn't very happy he missed that. Lincoln, I mean. He gets pretty mad when he makes mistakes.'
The kettle whistled and Pam ducked back into the kitchen and poured the boiling water into the cone. The crisp sound was comforting. She fixed his the way he liked it - two sugars and one dash of half-and-half. She drank hers black.
Pam brought the cups out and sat beside him. Their knees touched.
Seth asked, 'Who were they exactly?'
She tried to recall. 'They were with, what was it called? The American Family Council. Something like that. Doesn't sound like a militia.' Pam laughed. 'Maybe they had a public relations team work on their image.'
Seth smiled. 'You ever hear of them when you and your mom were hiding out in Larchwood?'
'Don't think so. Lincoln said the people doing this were from Southern Illinois. It wasn't far away from where my mother and I were. And I remember my mother and stepfather would meet with people from the other militias sometimes but I never paid any attention. I hated them all. Hated them so much.' Her voice faded.
'But the tattoo guy, the killer, he's dead and the others got arrested.'
'Right. A husband and wife and their son. They still don't know who the guy in the tunnel was, who was killed. The tattoo artist.'
'You're still not talking to Amelia?'
'No,' she said. 'I'm not.'
'For now.'
'For a long time,' Pam said firmly.
'She doesn't like me.'
'No! That's not it. She's just protective. She thinks I'm this fragile doll. I don't know. Jesus.'
Seth put down the coffee. 'Okay if we talk about something serious?'
'Sure, I guess.'
All right, what was this?
He laughed. 'Relax. I've decided we need to hit the road sooner. Right away.'
'Really? But I don't have my passport yet.'
'I was thinking we could stick to the US for a while.'
'Oh. Well, I just thought we were going to see India. Then Paris and Prague and Hong Kong.'
'We will. Just not now.'
She considered this but then looked at his intense brown eyes, staring into hers. And she said, 'Okay. Sure, baby. Wherever you are, that's where I want to be.'
'I love you,' Seth whispered. He kissed her hard and she kissed back, embracing.
Pam sat forward, sipped coffee. 'Munchies? I could use something. A pizza?'
'Sure.'
She rose and walked into the kitchen again, opened the refrigerator door, pulled out a pizza and set it on the counter.
And sagged against the wall, feeling her gut churn, heart rate pound.
Thinking: How the hell did Seth know about Larchwood? She desperately thought back to their time together. No, I never mentioned it. I'm sure.
You need to tell Seth everything about your time underground.
No, I don't.
Think, think ...
'Need a hand?' his voice called.
'Nope.' She made noise, ripping the pizza box open, banging the oven door down.
This can't be happening. There's no way he could be involved with those people.
Impossible.
But Pam's instincts, honed by years of survival, took over. She eased to the landline phone and picked it up. Held it to her ear.
Hit nine. Then one.
'Making a call?'
Seth stood in the doorway of the kitchen.
Keeping a smile on her face, she turned, forcing herself to move slowly. 'You know, we were talking about Amelia. I was just thinking. Maybe I will apologize. I think that'd be a good idea, don't you? I mean, wouldn't you, if you were in my place?'
'Really?' he asked. Not smiling. 'You were calling Amelia?'
'Yeah, that's right.'
'Put the phone down, Pam.'
'I ...' Her voice faded as his steely dark eyes bored into hers. The same shade of brown. Her thumb hovered over the one button on the phone. Before she could hit it Seth stepped forward and pulled the phone from her hand, hung it up.
'What are you doing?' she whispered.
But Seth said nothing. He took her firmly by the arm, pulling her back to the couch.
CHAPTER 69
Seth walked to the front door, put the chain on and returned.
He smiled ruefully. 'I can't believe that I mentioned Larchwood. I knew you and your mom stayed with the Patriot Frontier there. But you never mentioned it. Stupid of me, a mistake like that.'
She whispered, 'It was one of the things Amelia and I argued about. She asked if I'd told you about my life there. I said it didn't matter. But really? I was afraid to tell you. And now ... You're one of them, aren't you? You're working with the people who tried to poison the water.'
He picked up the remote to turn the TV on, presumably to see the news. Pam took the chance to leap from the couch, shoving him back hard. When he stumbled back she sprinted for the door. But she got no more than two steps before he tackled her. She went down hard, her face bouncing on the wood. Pam tasted blood from a split lip. He grabbed her by the collar and dragged her roughly back to the couch, virtually tossing her onto it.
'Never do that again.' Leaning close, he dipped his finger in her blood and drew something on her face.
Whispering, he told her, 'Body markings're windows, you know. Into who you are and what you're feeling. In some Native American tribes using paint - which is just a temporary tattoo - was a way to tell everybody what you were feeling. Warriors couldn't express emotion through words or facial expressions - not part of the culture - but they could use painted mods to show they were in love or sad or angry. I mean, even if you lost a child, you couldn't cry. You couldn't react. But you could paint your face. And everyone knew how sad you were.
'On your face, just now? I wrote the marks that mean Happy in the Lakota tribe.'
Then he reached into his backpack and took from it a roll of duct tape and a portable tattoo gun.
&nb
sp; When he did this, his sleeve tugged up and Pam found herself staring at a tattoo. It was red. She couldn't see it all but the portion exposed was the head and upper body of a centipede, whose all-too-human eyes stared at her just as Seth's did now: The look was of hunger and disdain.
'You're the one tattooing those people,' Pam said, her voice a frail whisper. 'Killing them.'
Seth didn't respond.
'How do you know that couple? The terrorists?'
'I'm their nephew.'
Seth - but no, not Seth; he'd have a different name - was assembling his tattoo gear. She stared at his arm, the tattoo. The insect eyes stared back.
'Oh, this?' He tugged his sleeve all the way up. 'It's not a tat. It's just a drawing - water-soluble ink. The sort some artists use to do outlines.' He licked his finger and smeared it. 'When I was the Underground Man - out on the prowl - I'd draw it on my arm. Took ten minutes. When I was your friend Seth, I'd wash it off. It only had to be good enough to let witnesses see it and for your police friends - and you - to be happy that the new man in your life, me, wasn't the killer.'
Pam was crying.
'Lip hurt? You tried to run.' He shrugged. 'A busted lip is nothing compared with--'
'You're insane!'
His eyes flared and he slammed a fist into her belly. The room burst yellow and she whimpered under the pain. Controlled the nearly overwhelming urge to vomit.
'Do not speak to me that way. Do you understand?' He grabbed her hair and brought his mouth inches from her ear. He shouted so loud that her ears stung. 'Do you?'
'Okay, okay, okay! Stop please,' she cried. Then, 'Who, who are you?' she whispered, but tentatively, afraid of another blow. He seemed capable of murder; his eyes were possessed.
He pushed her away. Pam collapsed on the floor. He pulled her roughly onto the couch, duct-taped her hands behind her and rolled her over on her back.
'My name is Billy Haven.' He continued to set out some jars and assemble his tattoo gun. He glanced at her and noted the look of utter confusion.
'But I don't understand. I talked to your mother on the phone, she ... Oh, yes, yes: It was your aunt.'
He nodded.
'But I've known you for a year. More.'
'Oh, we've been planning the attack for at least that long. And I've been planning to get you back into my life forever. My Lovely Girl.'
The Skin Collector Page 33
