Spree

by Michael Morley

  But she felt something. Not a stirring inside her body, but something in her soul. Something she’d never felt before.

  4

  Griffith Park, LA

  “I’m going to kill every motherfucking one of you.” Corrie Chandler screamed the threat down the phone. He stood, shaking, inside an office in the Observatory. Blue veins on his neck twitched like baby snakes. “I mean it, man, I’m gonna take down any cocksucking one of you who tries to come in here.”

  Jake listened impassively on a speakerphone in the armored command truck. He didn’t interrupt. Didn’t hang up. Nor did he try to reason with Chandler or talk him down.

  “You listening to me, cop? I am not fooling.”

  “I’m not a cop.” Jake calmly stressed the last three letters, just enough to separate himself from the perceived “enemy.” “I’m ex-army, Corrie, just like you are.”

  “Then you’re friggin’ nothing. Coz that’s what I am.” There was a whole book of grievances bound in those few words. “That’s how this freakin’ country sees me.”

  “Not true, buddy. Not those who served. They get you. They understand every blunderfuck moment you’re living through.” He stopped and waited for a rant.

  It didn’t come.

  It meant Jake had his attention. There might yet be a way to end this without more bloodshed. He shut his eyes and pictured the scene. “I’m thinking, Corrie, that right now you’ve got the phone trapped between your ear and neck and you’re wondering how the fuck you ended up in this shit. My bet is there’s a weapon cradled in your hands and the safety’s off. You’re probably pressed tight to a wall, squinting out the window, getting twitchy every time the light changes or a bird flies by.” He stopped again. Waited for a contradiction that didn’t come, then added, “They’re gonna come for you, Corrie. Hell, you know that. You’re high up, looking down on everyone, like King Gun on a hill. But you know the routine, don’t you, buddy? Snipers rule the day. Commandos rule the night. Come the blackness they’ll slither in there and bring you down.”

  Jake let the words sink in and listened hard.

  Through the black silence of cyberspace, Chandler’s shallow breaths broke cover. They came out one by one. Surrendered all his hopes.

  “How long did you serve, Corrie?”

  The breaths ran back and hid. Made space for an easy answer. It came in a sad and reflective voice. “Three years, one month, two days.”

  “Notes I’ve got said you were Tenth Mountain. Man, that’s a hell of a unit.”

  “Sure is. Had some good brothers there. Some bad sonsofbitches, too. And you?”

  “Marines, then MARSOC, best part of a decade.”

  Chandler blew out a long sigh of admiration. “Brother, you must have faced some motherfucking times in special-ops command.”

  Jake laughed. “I did, but sometimes it seems a whole world tougher out here than it was in the service. You know what I mean?”

  There was a pause, then came the answer, creaking with pain and emotion. “Yeah, I sure do, man. However Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition it was in there, it’s doubly FUBAR out here.”

  The chat was easy now. Two vets at a bar downing beers. Buddies in the making. “So why’d you quit, Corrie? You were doing damned good with a bang stick in your hand.”

  A pained laugh rolled down the line.

  “I pulled your sheets,” added Jake. “You were A-okay, man. I would have been more than proud to have served with you.”

  “I quit because of a whole lot of shit, but mostly coz the woman I loved asked me. Said she missed me.” He put on a sarcastic emphasis. “Wanted me home. Anyways, I came out and me and Carlyann got married. Took a job working security. Working freaking see-cure-it-eey.”

  “No shame in that, my friend. I’ve done a shift or ten myself.”

  “That’s what I kept telling myself. Said at least it was a job. Something to build on. Only nothing got built. Just the opposite. Everything fell apart and turned to shit.”

  Pryce passed Jake a note. It read: WE’VE TRACED THE ROOM HE’S IN. KEEP HIM TALKING. I’LL GET MEN BLIND SIDE OF HIM.

  Jake nodded.

  Chandler was still venting about the bad old days. “Carlyann—she started wanting more. Had some fancy friends with good jobs. Said I should work hard—like her sister’s husband, Ralph. Fucking Ralph. You know what Ralph does for a living? I’ll tell you. He’s a proctologist. You know what that is? A frigging ass doctor.” Chandler laughed. The kind of laugh that was only an octave away from a hysterical cry. “Then I get laid off. Chopped like liver. Guess how the bastards done it?” Anger started to boil in his voice again. “I’ll tell you. They sent me a text. You believe that?”

  Jake actually couldn’t. “No, man, I can’t.”

  “A freaking text. Then the bitch walked out. One-time ‘love of my life’ said she was gonna find herself ‘a real man.’ One who could provide for her.” He waited for Jake to coax out more of his vitriol.

  The FBI man stayed silent.

  “You still listenin’?”

  “I feel for you, Corrie. More bad luck in a couple of years than most folk get in a lifetime. Seems like everyone’s taken a shit on you and now you’re down and out in the sewer.” Jake let silence lap down the line, then made his play. “You want me to come and get you out of there? No other fuckers. Just me.”

  Jake listened for the shallow breaths.

  None came.

  “Corrie?”

  “I’m thinking on things.”

  Jake knew he couldn’t let the guy dwell on it. Crazy minds quickly went back to crazy thoughts. “I got to press you, man. Your war’s over. Best I can do is come in and walk you out of there without anyone else getting hurt.”

  The silence fattened out. Bloated so much it seemed like it’d burst.

  “Come on, Corrie, it’s decision time. You don’t want SWAT on you. That’s no way for grunts like you and me to sign off. No dignity. No courage. And here’s the rub, some of those guys you might shoot are ex-army, too. Done their time like us. A few of them are even moonlighting security jobs to make ends meet.”

  “I don’t want to kill no one else.” There was remorse in the voice. The adrenaline had worn off. He was starting to think straight.

  “That’s good, Corrie. I’m glad you said that.”

  Jake’s big fear was that Chandler’s mood could swing like a teeter-totter. Tilt one way and he’ll kill himself. Tilt to the other and he’ll go out all guns blazing. Somehow he had to keep him stable. “Give me a couple of minutes, then I’m going to come in the front door, Corrie. It’ll be just me. There’ll be no gun in my hand and I’m hoping none in yours.”

  5

  FBI Field Office, LA

  Angie took her worries and confusion back to her desk.

  She sat in a trance opposite her long-suffering research assistant, a gorgeous geek she’d picked as an intern back at Quantico. Now she and “Chips” were more like brother and sister than colleagues.

  The smart young man had been christened Oscar Edgar Chipstone. But, to his great relief, no one had called him that since kindergarten. Not even his mom and pop, the misguided English teachers who’d thought Oscar, as in Wilde, and Edgar, as in Poe, were cool names to give a kid in a roughneck neighborhood full of Johns and Bobs.

  The tall, thin, lank-haired twenty-four-year-old was predestined to earn the Chips moniker because of his passion for computing and all things technological.

  He was dressed today in the blue jeans and the matching sneakers he always wore. The only thing that visibly changed with Chips was his T-shirts. He had a vast closet of plain Ts, all bearing different slogans he’d made up. Angie’s favorite this week had been IS GOD A CHICKEN OR AN EGG?

  “You okay, Doc?” He looked at her in a way that said he knew she wasn’t.

  As the words fogged across the room, she realized she’d been staring absentmindedly his way. “Yeah, I’m good.”

  “You worrying about Age
nt Mottram?”

  “Guess so. How about you go buy us espresso and ice cream?” It was her panacea for all ills. She pulled her purse from beneath the desk. “As bitter and sweet as you can get.”

  He dragged his FBI sweatshirt off the back of the chair. “Whatcha want, chocolate brownie, tutti-frutti, minty chip?”

  She handed over a twenty. “Sounds good.”

  “Which?

  “The lot. I’m comfort eating.”

  “Gotcha.” He squeezed out a wink and vamoosed.

  Angie turned to the work on her desk and tried to forget everything else. A few days back she’d been called by cops in West LA about a serial rape. They’d finally got round to sending the papers they’d promised.

  The file was phonebook thick. Four women, all Caucasian, all over sixty-five, raped in or near their homes. The work of a true sicko. One she feared would end up as a killer.

  The MO had been so similar the cops hadn’t needed a profiler to tell them it was a Serial. The UNSUB always attacked the women from behind—their dresses or tops were pulled over their heads; then he bundled them to the floor and attacked them. According to the medical reports, there’d been no penile penetration. They’d been violated with a pointed stave of rough wood approximately two inches square and at least a foot long. The docs had settled on the dimensions by combining six inches’ worth of internal injuries with the fact that if the average man gripped a piece of wood the width of his hand, it would take up at least five inches.

  Angie’s expertise was in profiling serial sexual offenders and she always went about it in a highly methodical way. While cops searched first for forensics, she was more interested in signature actions and MO.

  MO she defined as “learned behavior”—what the offender knew he had to do to commit the crime. Signature was not what had been practical and necessary, but what he’d wanted to do to satisfy himself. It gave away his personality and clues to his identity.

  In this case, the signature was not the wood but the penetrative use of the stave. It hinted at possible impotence, sexual inexperience, and most of all a wild anger toward women.

  The TV in her office was still tuned to a news channel but muted. Every minute or two, Angie glanced at the screen, feeding her anxiety.

  A caption crawled across the bottom of frame.

  BREAKING NEWS.

  She thumbed up the sound.

  A young woman with dark hair and a pretty pixie face was at Griffith Park. The dome of the Observatory jutted above her left shoulder. On the other side flashed the word LIVE. She wore a red jacket and vanilla shirt that Angie reckoned should have been buttoned up some more. Another caption slapped onscreen and named her as SOFIE SANDHOLT. She took a cue in her earpiece and started a live shot. “There’s been a dramatic development in the hunt for spree killer Corrie Chandler, who yesterday shot dead his wife, Carlyann, their seventy-year-old neighbor Russell Rayner, and then earlier today fired shots in the Griffith Park Observatory building behind me—the place where he has been cornered by law enforcement.”

  A photograph of Jake hit the screen.

  Angie felt her nerves prickle.

  “Special Agent Mottram, the head of the FBI’s Spree Killer Unit, has been drafted into the hunt to bring it to an early conclusion. The former Purple Heart war hero has been working closely with the LAPD’s newly appointed SWAT commander, Connor Thomas Pryce.”

  Up came video of the blue-suited cop arriving in a black and white cruiser earlier that day. He looked lean and slick. Too slick for Angie’s liking.

  “Pryce and his team are widely regarded as the finest special weapons and tactical firearms unit in the country. Minutes ago he spoke exclusively to me.”

  Angie shook her head and wondered what Miss Pixie Face had promised in return for the scoop.

  The cop came back onscreen, dressed in combat blacks, standing by the open door of an ops truck. Monitor screens flashed in the darkness of the vehicle as he looked beyond the reporter and straight into the camera. “I am confident that this terrible incident will soon be resolved and then we will have the time to pay our proper respects to the families who have lost loved ones today—my heart goes out to them and I know they’ll be in all our prayers tonight.”

  Sofie had a question, and a good one, too. “Can you confirm reports that Mr. Chandler discharged a firearm inside the Observatory and took at least one more life?”

  Pryce didn’t flinch. “I can confirm that a weapon was fired by Mr. Chandler. According to witnesses, at least one person was hit as crowds fled the building. I can’t confirm the state of the victim or whether there have been any fatalities inside the building. You must understand, even if there have been, we will want to try to identify those people and contact their relatives before we talk publicly to you or anyone else about it.”

  “I do understand that and I’m sure everyone watching does, too. Commander, can you give the people of LA any more of an idea of how and when this incident will be resolved?”

  “Quickly—and I hope, peacefully. I’ve just authorized an initiative that I am certain will close this sorry chapter in our city’s history. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go.”

  Pryce peeled away and the reporter did her best not to look too smug as she launched into another direct piece-to-camera. “Well, I recorded that interview just ten minutes ago and since then there has been the significant movement SWAT team leader Pryce promised. Our eye-in-the-sky copter has just picked up these dramatic pictures.”

  Aerial footage hit the screen along with a burst of copter noise.

  The images were shaky but still clear enough to cause Angie to go slack-jawed.

  She closed her eyes and wished she was mistaken about what she’d just seen.

  One thing was for sure: this siege wasn’t likely to end without violence.

  6

  Griffith Park, LA

  The California sun stayed mercifully hidden behind a mess of scrambled cloud as Jake Mottram started his long, solitary trudge toward the Observatory perched high on a hill.

  Eyes straight ahead, he kept a soldierly watch on the row of main-level windows. Somewhere behind the shimmering black panes, Corrie Chandler was looking back at him—down the barrel of a gun.

  The SKU boss had started his approach from way, way back. He wanted to make sure he could be seen to be alone and unthreatening. He guessed Chandler would pick him up as he rounded the Astronomer’s Monument and hit the path that led to what locals called the Solar System Lawn.

  As he closed on the north doors, Jake struck up more of a march than a walk. It was important Chandler saw a fellow soldier proudly and bravely coming to meet him, not an armed cop sneaking slowly his way.

  He kept a steady pace. Didn’t break rhythm. Not even when a copter stupidly circled lower than it had been cleared to. His arms stayed straight and swung high, while his hands remained open-fingered and clearly weapon-free.

  Path dust kicked over the bottom of his black boots and combat pants. There was no weapon tucked into the back of his belt. But down the right sleeve of his black tunic was a throwing knife that could be in his hand and through Chandler’s chest within a second.

  A Kevlar vest covered Jake’s upper torso, but he wore no helmet and no shades. His eyes were going to be key weapons in this skirmish and he didn’t want them holstered.

  The grounds had been cleared by the cops and there was a strange emptiness in the air. Flocks of birds pecked opportunistically on the strangely deserted lawns and pathways as they devoured scraps dropped by tourists.

  Wings rustled as they rose to escape Jake’s advancing feet.

  His eyes fell on the steps in front of him. From this point, he was only seconds away from entering the Observatory.

  The internal plans he’d studied flashed into his mind. He remembered briefly where he’d stood with Angie when they’d visited. The quality of the light, the height of the ceilings, the width of the corridors. With each stride he mentally visit
ed an extra square yard of the Observatory.

  Dark clouds ominously snuffed out the last light of the sun as Jake climbed the steps.

  Somewhere on the other side of the thick stone walls, Chandler would be sliding away from his window. Deciding whether he was ready to surrender or not.

  The big north doors were unlocked.

  He pushed them open and shouted, “Corrie, it’s Jake Mottram. I’m alone—like I said I’d be. I’m coming in, to help you.”

  The entrance hall was cold and eerily quiet for a public building. Up ahead was the gently swaying Foucault Pendulum, a mesmerizing 240-pound sphere of brass on a cable forty feet long, swinging in a constant direction while the earth turned beneath it.

  To the left was the deserted ticket office.

  To the right an unmanned information desk.

  Jake heard the squish of his rubber soles on the hard floor as he rounded the Pendulum.

  On the vaulted ceiling was the Observatory’s greatest treasure: the Hugo Ballin Murals. Images of classical celestial mythology hovered over him. Powerful gods tracked his every move.

  Jake had almost forgotten how damned big this place was. The space made him a sitting duck for any half-decent shot, and Corrie Chandler was dangerously more than half-decent.

  He found the stairs to the lower level.

  As he descended, his hearing heightened and his footsteps lightened. He looked for shadows on the wall as he spidered down the steps.

  Pryce’s team had traced the call to an admin office at the bottom of the stairwell, close to a corridor exhibition called the Cosmic Connection. It was likely he was still there. From Jake’s experience, once Sprees made contact, they more or less settled where they were. It was a stage known as “the root before the shoot.”

  The FBI man reached the bottom of the staircase, stopped and rubbed an itch on his right arm. At least that’s what it looked like. He lifted the knife from its Velcro strap and felt cold steel against warm flesh. He palmed the blade as he raised his hands above his head and shouted again. “I’m coming for you, Corrie. I’m unarmed and my hands are high.”