Wild Card

by Mark Henwick

  “Serial killers are rare. Prolific serial killers are even rarer. Long-term prolific serial killers…The odds against having more than one operating undetected in Denver are huge.” She frowned. “Although I grant you, that’s an argument for this being some kind of a cult.”

  “If this isn’t speculation, there must be a pattern you’re working on?”

  We walked on a ways as she thought it through.

  “I started with three types,” she said. “The apparent canine attacks, attacks involving ritual and attacks with evidence of almost uncontrollable rage. Then I added the canine to the ritual, because those bites are evidence of a ritual in themselves. Finally, I added the ones involving rage, because I believe the rage was caused when something went wrong. That’s the weak point. I’m not a profiler, I’m a forensic scientist, and it frustrates the hell out of me that I can’t find a link to prove that gut feeling.”

  She saw my frown.

  “The ones I labeled rage died without any indication of a ritual or bite marks. My theory is they died too early, and the killer went berserk. There was evidence of 140 stab wounds, all post mortem, on one body.”

  That was a chilling image of rage. Not uncontrollable, not out on the street, but pent up and discharged in hiding. But I needed to focus on the big picture, not this one bizarre element.

  “Melissa, you are speculating. Is there a provable common thread, apart from the fact that none of them have been solved?”

  “That fact is part of it. The killer is fanatically methodical and highly knowledgeable about modern forensic science.”

  “But there’s nothing in the news. This wasn’t even a topic of speculation in the police last year.” I’d listened out when I worked patrols for the PD. Admittedly, I hadn’t been listening for this kind of case, I’d been listening for any hint of vampires, but still, I would have registered this.

  “The ones we’ve found are the marginals. No one’s interested. No one is pushing for them.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing, Amber. You know how it works. The PD doesn’t want to link up murders because it would highlight that it should be solvable. If they say the murders are all unrelated then everyone can just throw their hands in the air and spout about how awful society is becoming when there’s all this random violence. And the politicians encourage them. No politician wants to go to the polls with a serial murderer rampaging through the city. But random violence, hey, part of modern America. They set up some useless outreach initiative to show they care, and get on with winning their election.”

  It was on the extreme side of cynical, but it wasn’t without basis.

  “And the thing that will blow it all up,” she said, “is if we find one, just one, of the high profile missing cases and link it in.”

  “We?” I raised an eyebrow.

  “The question you need to ask yourself isn’t whether you use me or not, it’s how to make best use of me.”

  “There are some huge assumptions in there. I’m a PI. Why do you think I’m responsible for hunting down this murderer? You say you don’t speculate and yet you’ve linked up cases by picking facts that fit your theory. You’re just guessing.”

  “I’m right though, aren’t I? You are working on it.”

  “You’re crazier than I am.”

  “Maybe. But I have files and files that I know you want to see. Stuff that isn’t even in the police records. Ideas on where and how. Contacts with people who’ve looked into this.” She saw my sudden sharp look. “Not the FBI.”

  We reached the Country Club and stopped. Melissa would be heading back to the parking garage behind the mall. I would be going around the club to get back to Manassah.

  “Don’t forget, I am a trained forensic scientist as well, if you should come across some evidence. And I have all the equipment we would need.”

  I looked skeptical.

  She shrugged. “They update their equipment in CSI every couple of years. They sell the old stuff for a song.”

  “What do you want from this, Melissa?”

  She gave an awkward half-laugh. “You weren’t listening. I need to know.” She turned her face away, looked down at the creek. Her voice was strained. “I need to know like some people need their fix. I need it to be me that finds out.”

  I needed all the help I could get. I’d contemplated hiring her when I heard she’d been suspended, but I wasn’t sure if this was the help I wanted, given the problems that came with it.

  It was dangerous territory; Barbara Green’s murder and the message that sent to me made that plain. Having Melissa work with me meant I would have to look out for another person.

  But if I wasn’t working with her, and she did stumble across proof of the paranormal secrets on her own, there wouldn’t be anything to stop her from broadcasting it. I’d have failed the paranormal community and, according to David and Pia’s predictions at the Assembly about uncontrolled Emergence, the whole world.

  And there was one other thing that I’d need to be sure on with Melissa: I wasn’t hunting the killer to prove his guilt and hand him to the justice system. I was hunting to kill. What would she think of that?

  There was a lot to consider.

  “I’ll call you,” I said, and trotted off home.

  Chapter 23

  Back at Manassah, in the study, my mind was in a whirl as I looked at the maps. It felt as if they’d grown since this morning, like some strange mold spreading across the walls. Their blankness was accusing.

  They needed to be covered in pins, according to Melissa. Could I trust her? Would her ‘evidence’ just confuse everything?

  How could he get away with this for so long?

  By being very clever, and incredibly careful.

  I had to be cleverer, painstaking and quick. And I had no idea where to start. No feeling for it.

  Overwhelmed by how much needed to be done, I distracted myself checking my emails. Full of trash as usual. There was even one that was gibberish—letters and numbers. My finger hovered over the delete key.

  The colonel hadn’t been in touch, and this was one way he used.

  I ran my eyes down it. Embedded as randomly scattered digits was a phone number. Possibly. Or I was seeing things.

  I swapped my sim card for an unused one and called, wondering if I’d started to get delusional. I hadn’t. Yet.

  “Hi,” he said. He sounded very tired.

  “We have to stop speaking like this. Why don’t you come on over?”

  “I would love to. We better keep this short rather than cryptic. I don’t know what they have in the way of scanners, but I’m running out of time.”

  “Okay. Where are you?”

  “A couple of hours east of you, hiding in an old barn a few miles off US 36.”

  He was out on the high plains, where you can see in every direction for miles, but to be hiding, there had to be a reason beyond visibility.

  “They know where you are?”

  “Roughly. They got a hit on me somewhere near the Nebraska border. They know the car and they’re patrolling the roads. They know I’m somewhere between I-70 and I-76. Of course, they know where I’m heading now as well.”

  “That’s a lot of area to cover. And you know all this how?”

  I could hear him snort gently. “I picked up a TacNet node when I left, and I’ve got all their codes. I’m listening to them.”

  I grunted. The TacNet would link in with their Ops 4 group radio command circuit, as long as it was provided the right codes. They couldn’t have known that the colonel had the hardware itself, but they were being sloppy if they hadn’t realized their codes were compromised .

  Or maybe they were being rushed. The pressure from the FBI had to have rattled them. Their behavior in Denver—killing their own team members—indicated they were panicking.

  “They can’t cover every little road coming in from the east.”

  The farmland had a grid of blacktops and dirt roads that ran
like dusty veins between endless fields under a cobalt sky. There were too many to patrol. Sure, dirt tracks would kick up dust and attract attention, but he could always move at night.

  “Got a couple of problems,” he said quietly.

  I kicked myself. I was thinking like a civilian again. This wasn’t some gang of badasses out to get the colonel. This was Ops 4-16, the Nagas. A military unit, who’d be thinking like the military.

  “They got eyes aloft?” I guessed.

  “Yeah. Couple of light aircraft during the day. That’s all they need. They can see every car that moves out here for fifty miles around. But they’ve brought in a helicopter for night.”

  “What have they got?”

  “I don’t know, they aren’t giving specs out.” Snapping at me was a sign of how wearing this had to be for him. On his own, he would have been a ghost to them, but taking his wife along for the ride must have limited his choices. Now it was close to getting him caught.

  He gathered himself and sighed. “The Ops 4 group has access to two high spec birds. The Chinese Z10 and the Apache.”

  Oh, shit.

  “They have a Naga flying those?”

  Neither machine was the sort of thing you retrained a grunt to fly. At least, not if you wanted them to fly it twice. Flying any helicopter was a handful. Flying at night made it worse and the control systems in these super-helicopters pushed it even further.

  “No,” Colonel Laine said. “They’ll have someone seconded from a flying unit.”

  “That’s a weak point.”

  Possibly.

  “I wouldn’t want to depend on it.”

  No, I wouldn’t either. With the colonel pinned down in the high plains, it was up to me to come up with a way to get him to Denver, whatever the Nagas threw up to stop us.

  “I’ll arrange something tomorrow,” I said. “Maybe I can get the FBI to close the airspace down. If they haven’t got spotter planes to coordinate their cars, they won’t be able to concentrate their patrols. We should be able to get you out.”

  “I don’t know, the TacNet reports make me think they’ve got enough people here that they’re doing ground sweeps during the day, checking any hiding places like this one.” I’d never heard the colonel like this before. He sounded so beaten down. “I haven’t got a detailed map, but I reckon they’ll find me tomorrow if I don’t move.”

  Damn. Nothing like pressure. It had to be tonight.

  My mind raced. There are ways to take on an attack helicopter from the ground and win, most of them involving lots of Stinger missiles. Lots. I had a problem with that on a whole load of levels.

  This was the US. Stingers that missed the helicopter might select some other heat source to lock on and end up targeting a family car on the road. And if I did manage to take the helicopter down, I wasn’t killing Nagas, just some pilot and gunner who’d been seconded from the Cavalry and thought they were following legal orders. Oh, and on a practical level, I couldn’t go out tonight and buy a dozen Stingers in downtown Denver anyway.

  All of those were good arguments for not attacking any military helicopter. There was one other point. If it was the Apache, it had a counter-measures weapon system that could backtrack and target multiple Stinger launch sites.

  It wasn’t a real healthy option taking on an Apache, but I had to plan for the worst case. I had to assume it would be the Apache. And I had to assume that, as a last resort, they’d forget coordinating cars to come pick us up and would try and blow us away.

  I needed to counter the Apache’s advantages.

  The pilot would be looking at synthetic vision—a composite picture that combined images from a low light camera and an infrared scope and overlaid it on whatever he could see out the window. Like a werewolf, he would be able to see humans in the night from their body heat. Even on a moonless night like tonight. In Ops 4-10, we thought of Apache pilots as no longer completely human, which felt horribly ironic to me now.

  The gunner’s weapons system had the same vision capability. He could fire missiles that would lock onto a car’s heat signature, and he had an armor chewing machine gun that was slaved to the movements of his head.

  The Chinese Z10 wasn’t anything like as capable, but shared a lot of the same abilities. Either of these damned helicopters were capable of hunting coyote in the night desert. Humans and cars would be too easy.

  All of which left me with options I’d devised as a purely theoretical exercise in Ops 4-10. The assignment had been to find the minimalist solution that could be used to escape from a hunting helicopter at night, but minimalist still required a truckload of equipment.

  “You’re going to have to leave it with me, Colonel. Thank God, there’s no moon tonight.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Set the ball rolling. Then I have to go party. But don’t worry, after the party I’ll gear up and come get you.”

  “Your sense of humor is going backwards.”

  “Yeah. Keep this cell handy, I’ll call you.”

  Damn. I had two plans. One was to sneak out like a mouse, relying on the hunters to be too confident in their electronic systems. The other was the fallback. I really didn’t want to go there, but there was supposedly a way to even up the odds.

  I needed a combat team. I needed equipment. I needed more time.

  Joking with the colonel aside, I was going to have to miss the reception at Haven. Bian was going to kill me, but it was that or save the colonel.

  Jen chose that moment to arrive home, preceded by Julie and followed by David and Pia, who were laughing at something.

  “What’s up?” she demanded as soon as she saw my face.

  “A list of things to do and no time to do them.” I’d promised to tell her everything, so I explained the colonel’s position, as briefly as I could. Jen would understand that our visit to Altau would need to be cancelled. That would have to be my first call, to Bian, as soon as I finished talking to Jen. Then I’d need to find that truckload of equipment. In a couple of hours. At night.

  “And this list of equipment?” Jen picked up a pad and a pen.

  I huffed. This was just delaying me. Pia was starting to look agitated, and I made myself calm down.

  “Nightscopes and a tactical comms system from Victor. The man himself. A couple of his men and an SUV. Your helicopter.” I swallowed nervously, but she didn’t even blink. “A motorbike. Er… survival blankets and dark-colored, lightweight blankets, paramedic first aid kit, half a dozen powerful LED torches, a couple of laser pointers, photographer’s tripod…” I ran through my list, all the way down to: “…and duct tape, lots of duct tape.”

  “That’s it?”

  “No,” I said. “There’s one thing I can’t imagine anyone will be able to provide in a hurry. Maybe I’ll need to rig up an alternative—”

  “Enough already and tell me.”

  I sighed. “An infrared communications laser. Preferably something with juice like a satellite system.” I scowled. It had been a long time since I’d done the evaluation on this kind of equipment. “And Matt, for an hour, to help put it together,” I added.

  “There are firms here in Denver that make satellite comms equipment,” said David.

  “Maybe I’ll have to break in somewhere…” I slowed to a halt. Jen was looking smug and reaching for the phone.

  “Jen? Who’re you calling?”

  She smiled. “I’m starting with your friend and mine, Mr Campbell Carter. Who, by the way, is just desperate for me to help organize his fundraising campaign.”

  “But—”

  “He owns Merrow Technologies,” Jen said, “and they are the majority shareholder in AdAstra Communications.”

  “Who supply satellite comms systems to NASA,” David finished off and punched the air. “Touchdown!”

  “And I’m sure he could arrange a loan at very short notice. What shall I say it’s for?” Jen asked coyly.

  “Ahh…an experiment with short, urgent m
essages to a vehicle.”

  “Well, he won’t have any idea anyway.” She pointed me to the hallway. “This is going to take a few hours to put together, during which time we will be at the party. Go change. All of you.”

  “But I have to—”

  Pia grabbed me and started to pull me out.

  “You don’t have to sit here and organize everything,” Jen said. “That’s what I’ve got secretaries for.”

  “But—”

  “Go. Your dress is on your bed. We are not going to be late.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

  “Wow.” Jen said, when I reentered the study.

  I was scrubbed and changed, with my hair braided and my face made up by Pia as I fretted. I was still tugging the dress to see when—not if—it was going to fall off. It defied gravity and the tugging.

  Lisa had done her magic again. Even distracted as I was, I loved the gold dress. It fit like a glove up my front, just covering my breasts and dramatically swooping down to my lower back. From the level of my thighs, the material was light and layered, gathered towards my left leg. As Lisa had said, dramatic as a flamenco dress.

  Jen’s reaction swept away any lingering worries about the outfit. It was worth it just to see the way she looked at me. She came over and inspected me, her blue eyes checking me up and down, and her fingers smoothing a ruffle here and there.

  “I approve,” she murmured. “I’d better go catch up.” She planted a kiss on my cheek.

  My Athanate stirred comfortably as she sauntered away, glancing back over her shoulder for a last look at me.

  An intercom call from the guards at the gate brought me back down to earth; Alex had arrived. With Ricky—I’d forgotten that little complication.

  This is going to be fun. Not.

  ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

  I got Alex first, leaving Ricky talking to Pia and David in the living room.

  His dinner jacket was superb, the black cloth complementing his light brown hair and the cut emphasizing the broad shoulders and snake-slim hips.