The Warriors Series Boxset II

by Ty Patterson

  The Thirteenth and Nineteenth of February.

  Those were the dates for the HOF’s first acts of terror in the Great Satan.

  Omar and The Ghul had chosen the dates for their very insignificance. On the first day, two members of the cells would carry out a ‘dry run.’

  The dry run would be wet, since the two cell members would kill as many infidels as they could. A week later, the rest of the cell would go down guns blazing in a more busy location.

  That second day, as the rest of the cell wreaked havoc and bloodshed, The Ghul would execute a chosen American. He would upload the video to the internet, lie low for a few weeks and then fly back to London.

  He issued new instructions when he reached Masood’s apartment. ‘This is the last night you spend here. From tomorrow, you will have new identities.’

  He handed out packets to them the next day. They contained their new legends.

  Each folder had a driver’s license, ATM card, bank account history, and back story, everything needed to maintain an elaborate cover. The Ghul had arranged for the legends before he landed, using a trusted HOF man in the U.S.

  He had also rented five separate apartments for them.

  He continued. ‘All of you will split up now. Each one of you will stay separately. You will not communicate with each other. You will not disclose your identity to the other members.’

  He tossed them throwaway phones.

  ‘Those phones are only for interacting with me. None of you will reveal to the others your identity.’

  He pinned each one of them down with his killing gaze.

  ‘If you do, I will know of it. I will kill you and feed you to pigs.’

  They met his eyes with clear gazes and nodded.

  They believed him. They had seen him in action in the Middle East. Only a fool would cross The Ghul.

  He led them back to his vehicle.

  Once they were seated, he blindfolded them and secured their hands to various fastenings. They had no means to slip off their blindfolds.

  He drove them back to their various apartments in that manner. No cell member knew where the other stayed.

  He gave each member a task.

  Each one would scout locations – even though The Ghul and Omar had some possibles in their minds - for the two dates. Places where there would be a high concentration of infidels, where there would be maximum impact.

  Escape routes weren’t necessary. None of the cell members planned to survive their killing spree.

  All locations had to be in New York. He alone would decide the final venue and that would be told to the two kill teams only on the days of the attack. He would decide who would be in the two kill teams. That too would be revealed to them just before the day.

  He was personally checking out apartments for his role on nineteenth. The cell would never know where it was.

  Omar wanted him to kill in some place like Times Square, but The Ghul had dissuaded him of that. It was safer to kill in an apartment and then escape.

  The Ghul looked outside the window of his apartment in the Bronx, and through the distance he could see people putting up festive lights on the street.

  It would be the last Christmas for many Americans.

  Teresa Stark will not see Christmas.

  The killer scrolled down the list in his black diary and circled Stark at random. The list was fifteen names deep, four of them were crossed out.

  Stark would be the fifth.

  He knew the lives of the fifteen women inside out. He knew where they worked, where their homes were, the security set up at their homes, their daily routines.

  He even knew them!

  Stark was an architect and had her own practice near the mayor’s office, downtown. The killer had been to the office a couple of times and when he had put together the list, Stark was a natural fit. Young, blonde, gleaming white smile, the mother of two had graced the covers of a few architecture magazines and was one of the hottest stars in that world.

  He was looking forward to skinning her alive.

  The Flayer’s experiments in killing had started a long time ago, when he was a child, in his parents’ home. Dogs, cats, and rabbits began to mysteriously disappear and if his folks had bothered to search closely they would have seen loose mounds of earth appear whenever an animal disappeared.

  The killer had a very normal childhood; his father was a dentist, his mother an attorney.

  Can’t blame them for my killing, he smirked.

  It’s just me folks, not them.

  It was when he was ten that he had accepted that he was different. He didn’t have many friends in the private school he went to and not many at college.

  He had killed for the first time when he was eighteen.

  His folks and he were on vacation in Florida and one evening when he had stepped out alone, he had seen the drunken woman in the alley.

  Something had come across him. Molecules re-arranged themselves in him and settled down.

  He had looked around.

  He was alone, the alley was dark, no cameras.

  He crouched beside her, wrapped his hands in a newspaper and squeezed her throat. She came out of her stupor and thrashed, but he was strong and with one hand over her mouth and one over her neck, he made short work of her.

  He sat back on his haunches when she died and felt like he was on top of the world.

  The next day cold reality had set in and he lived in a constant state of fear till they returned to New York.

  He killed three more when he was living with his folks. All his victims were the forgotten people of the city, those who wouldn’t be missed.

  Drug addicts, drunks, homeless people. He killed all of them by strangling.

  He started working after college, in a place he hated. But hey, his mom had recommended him so he tried. He wore his best threads, charmed a few people, but his heart wasn’t in it.

  He quit that job and trained for a profession that would specifically put him in contact with women. Armed with new skills, he found a new job soon enough. That glib tongue of his had never let him down.

  By then he was living alone and enjoying his independence.

  Digs weren’t a problem.

  What were Pops and Mom there for?

  They bought an apartment for him, had set up a trust fund for him. He had made one good friend with whom he hung out, smoked pot, talked about women, rape, and other interesting stuff.

  His friend shared some of his interests and the Flayer had harbored a vision of the two of them embarking on a killing career.

  He studied all the serial killers in American history, the mountains of research on them, what made them tick, and had come to the conclusion that he just was.

  He sold the Manhattan apartment for a good sum that enabled him to buy the two houses in the Bronx. By then he had ended all contact with his folks.

  You did the best you could, Pops, Mom. Now it’s time to move on.

  We have drifted apart. I am a killer. You are salt of the earth. North Pole and South Pole.

  And yeah, thanks for the apartment and the trust fund. Without those, I would probably be a burger flipper.

  He had a vague idea of how he wanted to go about being a proper serial killer. The two houses in the Bronx seemed like a good base. He had bought them carefully, making sure there were layers of anonymity.

  A lot changed after the accident. He lost his friend. He bore scars.

  But it was later when he was under the surgeon’s knife, his plan crystallized.

  This will work.

  With a brand new identity, he roamed the country and it was in Texas that he started testing some ideas.

  Making the kills last.

  Killing in that pattern he liked.

  Left.

  Right.

  Left.

  Right.

  That night in Austin when he had idled on a dark street doing nothing but enjoying the dark shapes of the night, Janice Morales stepp
ed out from her office.

  The instant he saw her, he knew. Something inside him moved.

  This was where he was going to start as a professional serial killer.

  I was an amateur before, folks.

  I was killing on a whim.

  That’s the truth, your honor. Something used to come over me and I went into the killing mode.

  But when I saw Morales, I decided I would be the baddest serial killer our great country has ever known.

  My version of the American Dream.

  Without conscious thought he had moved out of his car.

  She had heard the door slam and had looked back startled, and then he was on her. One arm cupping her mouth, another across her throat.

  Her struggles were futile.

  He dragged her to the car, tied her with his shoe laces, tore her dress and gagged her. He had driven randomly and when it had been deep in the night, he had spent hours parked outside town playing with her.

  First shallow cuts.

  He still remembered the way her eyes had widened and her body had thrashed.

  Then deeper cuts.

  Then a toe.

  A finger.

  He hadn’t any weapons with him but used a sharp stone to scrape her facial skin off.

  The sounds she made. The way her eyes changed. How she had screamed. He had muffled her of course, but the sounds she made were so glorious.

  Then a part of her skin on her belly.

  Another finger.

  He read.

  He consumed tomes about the human body. He read about the Nazi concentration camp experiments. He was fascinated by skin too. As a child he had skinned animals and he now wondered what it would be like to skin a human.

  How long would they live? How would they struggle?

  Not just any human.

  Women.

  He didn’t know what it was in him that drew him to women. He knew he had contempt for them. All the research pointed out that he had some serious issues.

  He snorted back a laugh.

  Yeah. That explains it.

  To skin a woman and have her alive at the end of it.

  He practiced some more on three other women and when he thought he was nearly there, he returned to New York.

  He found a job easily. He was not only good at it, but was also very good at putting up a front and charming the women.

  His job enabled him to find his targets. He didn’t start killing immediately. He spent a year just making contacts with women, developing a professional relationship. A second year to make them trust him.

  He then took a stake in his business, became his own boss and delivered a personal service to the targets he had cultivated.

  He planned.

  Planning was important.

  That’s what lets serial killers down. They don’t have the patience or the ability.

  Unlike me.

  He had bayed like a wolf that night in Austin.

  He had done just that in the confines of his laboratory when McCallum lay across his operating table. He dumped her body in a parking lot that he had identified.

  Planning.

  Krantz and Kohler followed.

  He became a seasoned veteran. But even veterans practiced and improved. They discarded bad habits and cultivated good ones.

  He stopped killing in the criss-cross pattern.

  He knew there was a chance that McCallum’s body would be compared to those in the other parts of the country. But it was a very remote chance. Even if connections were made, he had taken enough care to leave no trace behind.

  Saunders was the first woman he skinned using all the skills and experience he had acquired.

  How glorious that had been. The feel of it in his hands.

  Her face as he removed the layer.

  He hadn’t been able to contain himself and had sent the cops a gift.

  Then the press.

  The Flayer stopped his musings and shook out another knife from its wrapping. He brought it to his nose and smelled the cold steel deeply. These days, watching the cops chase their tails gave him as much of a kick as the abduction and the killing.

  Well, not quite, but not far off either.

  He turned on his computer and ran through the Baseball Bat Killer case again. He knew the mistake BBK had made. He’d gone after Zeb Carter and his team personally.

  I won’t make that mistake. But just how good is this Carter? Wouldn’t it be something to test him?

  He thought for the next hour and something stirred in him.

  You go after him, you’re changing the game.

  He parked the thought, but another idea came to him when he turned on the news and read the running caption.

  HOF plans attacks in city.

  ‘We can rule out any connection to that show. The latest victim, Diaz, didn’t go to any viewing.’ Zeb told the others in the aircraft. They were still an hour away from the city, scheduled to land at 8 p.m. They used the time to thrash out all details of the case.

  The taskforce had come up with several leads, one of them being security camera images of Diaz talking to a man outside a discount store.

  They studied the images on Chang’s phone, of Diaz looking up to a man of average height, a baseball cap over his head, it’s bill low and deep, covering his face.

  Meghan swiped to another photograph, another angle that caught the back of the man and Diaz’s side.

  ‘He knows there are cameras about, no part of his body exposed.’

  ‘Any images from inside the store?

  ‘Nope. Looks like he waited for her outside. Cameras caught Diaz inside the store, but no male in her vicinity that looks like him.’

  ‘He could be a colleague,’ Beth commented.

  ‘He isn’t.’ Pizaka replied confidently. ‘Diaz left the office alone. Moreover, our guys spoke to every man in her office, must have taken hours, and have crossed out every male employee. That man with her is most likely our killer.’

  ‘She knows him! They are standing closer than strangers would.’

  ‘Thank you, Ms. Obvious. We would have missed that.’ Sarcasm dripped from her sister’s voice. ‘Jerry, I guess your men looked into friends, acquaintances?’

  ‘Yeah and we got zip. Here’s something else.’ Chang brought out his tablet computer, opened the email application and selected one.

  ‘We got shipping addresses for Formalin, and for those instruments from various manufacturers and distributors in the country. We narrowed down to two hundred, all in the city, over a four-year period. We then eliminated the obvious ones, big companies, hospitals, laboratories, and ended up with fifty addresses.’

  Zeb skimmed through them and pointed to ten addresses. ‘Ask them to check these first. Some of them seem to be service providers who take in stuff for you and store them. The others feel as if they are some kind of business centers. The instruments could well go to one of those.’

  He handed the tablet back. ‘It’s also possible the killer collected directly from the manufacturers.’

  Chang nodded and fired a text message.

  A thought struck Zeb; he leaned forward and looked at the images again over Meghan’s shoulder. ‘She has several shopping bags in her hand. Some are beside her on the sidewalk.’

  ‘Yeah, she was something of a shopaholic.’ A look of distaste crossed Pizaka’s face. He was in and out of stores in less than half an hour. He knew which brands he wanted, none of this browsing and window shopping for him.

  ‘How did the killer take her? Cab? His car? Her car?’

  More scrolling on the tablet, more head shaking by Chang. ‘Not her car. She used the subway. No reports of any cabs –’

  He looked up and the sleepy eyes widened. ‘His car! Parking lot or parking meter!’

  He grinned and sent another message to the task force. ‘I’ll get my guys to question the meter maids, traffic cops. Maybe they saw something. Maybe he even got a ticket, if he was hanging around for a while.’ />
  Pizaka turned on the TV and selected a news channel as the jet commenced its descent at Teterboro Airport and the ground rushed up to greet them.

  Zeb eyes grew bleak as he took in the bulletin.

  HOF releases chilling message. New York is its next target.

  Chapter 12

  November 5th -11th

  First stop, back in the city, was to be One PP to drop the two cops.

  They had to make an unscheduled stop before that.

  Zeb exited Holland Tunnel, circled St. John’s Park and entered Beach Street when the disturbance ahead caught his eye.

  He swung hard to the left, ignored the exclamations from around him, a raised what-the-fuck from Chang and came to an abrupt halt beside a grey-colored Chevy.

  Out of the SUV, before the others took in what he had seen, dodging other people, leaping over the hood of a Toyota that was nosing out. He landed on the sidewalk, took a long stride to balance himself and sprinted toward the disturbance.

  Twenty meters away, a blonde woman grappled with a masked man.

  Pedestrians gave them a wide berth. One old man tried to help; the man clubbed him viciously with something that gleamed in his hand.

  Gun? Knife? Club? Too far to tell.

  Can it be the Flayer?

  Ten meters away, sound faded, only vision remained.

  The two at the center of his sight, everyone else at the edge.

  People appeared and disappeared as faceless blobs.

  Gun needed?

  No. Will cause chaos.

  A lamp pole came and swerved out of his way.

  Five meters away, the assailant felt Zeb’s gaze, his mouth opened in a silent shout, one hand came up, another around the woman’s neck.

  Club.

  The club came slashing down toward her exposed neck and then Zeb’s hand was on it, guided the swing down and away from the woman.

  Guided so far back that the man’s arm bent, and then his shoulder dislocated with an audible pop.

  The assailant’s other hand released the woman.

  A hand flashed, Zeb’s, gripped her coat and hauled her up.

  A knee went in the assailant’s groin, he went down.

  Air moved, Zeb took a step back and to the side, a hand inside went inside his jacket, gripped his Glock.