Every Deadly Kiss

by Steven James

  With Simone’s phone, he sent a text to the person with the screen name Snowball4, then snapped a photo of Simone for himself.

  The last one.

  In a way, the photograph reminded him of the famous picture of Regina Kay Walters taken by Robert Ben Rhoades after he’d abducted her, cut her hair, and made her wear that black dress and those heels in the barn before killing her. It was one of the most memorable final photographs taken by killers that was floating around the Internet.

  For all the world to see.

  And now, here it was: the last picture anyone would ever take of the ex–swimsuit model—until the crime scene was eventually processed and her remains were photographed for the case files.

  He walked out the bedroom door.

  “Where are you going?” Simone gasped. Again, he heard the clang of the handcuffs as she tried futilely to pull free.

  “I think that, considering what you did to that young man back when you were in college,” he called through the doorway, “you being here is a form of justice. It’s poetic, in a sense. Things coming full circle.”

  “No, don’t—”

  He returned, carrying his duffel bag. “You could have helped him. Instead, you just stood by and let him die. If you hadn’t told me that story, I might have ended this for you quickly with the box cutter, but I think I’ll let you choose how things play out, give you ample time to contemplate what you did—”

  “Time?” She caught on. “No, no, no. Don’t go.” More rattling. “Don’t leave me here!”

  “Justice for what happened in the past. Isn’t that what matters most?”

  He opened the duffel bag and removed the grenade.

  “What is that?” she asked, but he suspected she already knew.

  “This one has a time delay. The striker lever, here, it’s held in place by this pin. When I pull the pin, as long as that lever is still depressed, we’re fine. But after it’s released, with this type of grenade, we’ll have four, maybe five seconds to get to safety.” He gestured toward the cuffs. “And that’ll be a bit easier for me than for you.”

  Being prudent not to release the striker lever, he pulled the pin.

  “Open up now.”

  “That’s not real. You’d never blow up your cabin.”

  “Secret number two: this is not my cabin.”

  In her surprise, she instinctively opened her mouth, but when he attempted to insert the grenade, she clenched her teeth in an act of intransigent defiance. Rather than fight her, he pried the fingers of her right hand back, then placed the grenade into it with the striker lever secure against her palm.

  Wrapped her fingers around it.

  “Careful now.” He let go of her and stepped back. “As I said, I’ll leave the end of the story up to you. When you’re ready for this to be over, just open your hand. You’ll have five seconds to make peace, to ask for forgiveness for your sins. Five seconds to find redemption. The couple who owns this cabin will be out of the country for another two weeks. If you manage to survive that long, you deserve to live and you’ll have earned the right to tell the authorities about me. Good luck.”

  Just as he always did with the women, he leaned in and placed a tender kiss on her cheek, even as she tried in vain to twist her head away.

  After collecting his things, he stepped outside into the chilly Minnesota night.

  Finally, he had a city.

  At last, a place to start.

  Detroit.

  He climbed into the car and pulled onto the long, winding drive that led to the edge of the property.

  After parking just beyond the swinging gate to the county road, he walked back to padlock it shut.

  As he was snapping the lock, he heard the scream, bright and shrill and slicing like a long, narrow blade through the night. A moment later, the explosion from the cabin rocked the forest, its echo reverberating restively across the lonely, black waters of the lake.

  And so, Lady Justice had found her way through the years and placed her feet firmly in the present. Just as she was supposed to do.

  With thoughts of Scarlett and all that was to come, he drove south through the star-sprinkled darkness.

  Toward Motor City.

  2

  Wednesday, August 1

  17 miles outside New York City

  1:01 P.M.

  Given the opportunity, my friend Special Agent Ralph Hawkins never passed up a chance to kick in a door.

  And today, for tactical reasons, FBI SWAT Commander Torres was offering it to him.

  Four members of Torres’s team surrounded us. Normally, they would use the Halligan bar to breach the door and gain access to the house. Today we had Ralph’s boot.

  That would be enough.

  Faster than the bar.

  Through his headset mic, Torres confirmed that the snipers were in position, then said, “On my count.”

  Ralph readied himself. A former Ranger and knuckle-tough, when he entered a room, the other alpha males would take one look at him, then quietly find their seats, fold their hands in their laps, and wait for instructions.

  I don’t mind the rush of adrenaline myself, and in another life I might have even signed onto Torres’s team, but in this one I would let these guys go in first.

  “Three . . .” Torres whispered.

  I’d track the offenders for them instead. One team. Different roles. Different cogs.

  “Two . . .”

  If Blake really was in this house, they were better trained to deal with him than I was. Now, a dynamic entry to—

  But before Torres could say, “One,” Ralph shouted “FBI!” and kicked the door brutally open, shattering the lock and sending the panel smacking with wood-splintering ferocity against the interior wall.

  Torres and his men curled in from both sides of the doorway, buttonhook formation, and disappeared into the darkened home.

  Assistant Director DeYoung had been clear: agents Ralph Hawkins and Patrick Bowers could be present but we had to let the SWAT team clear the residence. So, for the moment, we stayed outside. I wasn’t thrilled by the idea, and knew Ralph wasn’t either.

  We stood to the sides of the doorway to get out of what law enforcement personnel call the “fatal funnel.” Offenders shoot through doors, not so often through walls.

  “You really Hawkinsed that door,” I told him.

  “You made my name into a verb?” His rumbling voice was just short of a growl—but it wasn’t harsh. All authority.

  “Your life is a verb.”

  “You could have used my first name.”

  “Probably better to say you ‘Hawkinsed’ it than you ‘Ralphed’ it.”

  “You might have a point,” he acknowledged.

  The team called out as they moved through the home: “Clear.”

  “And once again,” I said to Ralph, “you didn’t wait for ‘one.’”

  “Two’s the loneliest number.”

  From inside the house: “Clear.”

  “I thought one was?”

  “Naw. Everyone always counts down to one. It’s the default climax. Two was feeling slighted.”

  “So you didn’t want to diss two.”

  “No, I did not.”

  Another affirmative shout from one of the SWAT guys.

  “That enough for you?” Ralph asked me.

  “Plenty.”

  We entered, weapons in low ready position.

  These days, policy dictates that agents carry Glocks so I’d had to jump through some hoops and fill out a mountain of paperwork, but in the end I was able to keep the .357 SIG P229 that’d served me so well in the past.

  Sometimes efficacy requires you to extend the leash of protocol.

  All of the lightbulbs in the windowless room had been removed, so apart from the sm
udge of light that filtered through the doorway behind us, the lancing beams of our flashlights were all that intruded on the darkness.

  I last saw Blake in June in a warehouse near Jamaica Bay, and I’d been tracking him ever since. He and his mountainous bodyguard, a guy who looked big enough to give even Ralph a run for his money in a fight, actually helped save the lives of an NYPD detective and a Port Authority officer.

  Despite their assistance, however, because of their connection with organized crime and their links to violent extremists and the human trafficking of minors, we weren’t about to make any deals. They were the kind of people you have nightmares about. Terrorists come in many forms, and sometimes they look just like the guy next door.

  And so it was with Blake. Early fifties. European descent. A distinguished yet unpretentious demeanor. Clear, calm eyes.

  Because of his size, his associate was a bit more obtrusive.

  We were going to bring these guys in and they were never going to see the light of day again.

  I still didn’t know why they hadn’t let the officers die that night, but if they hadn’t acted, neither Tobin nor Naomi would have made it. And I might not have survived the night either.

  Afterward, Blake and his human tank slipped away.

  Our latest intel placed them here at this house, and DeYoung gave us the green light to move in.

  Although no subjects were in the living room, stationary figures populated the room, standing all around us.

  Nine female mannequins, all wearing lacy lingerie.

  “What the . . . ?” one of the SWAT guys muttered. “What is this about?”

  “The silent ladies,” I said. “It’s Blake’s deal. The first time I met him, he had mannequins just like these in his office. Then later, there were more at that warehouse the night he got away.”

  Blank faces. Unblinking eyes. A solid gaze that somehow bore the ghostly vestige of intelligence.

  The mannequins left the impression that there’d been a striptease cocktail party and all the women had suddenly been transformed into identical, expressionless mimes before being frozen permanently in place.

  “It’s a little disturbing.” The guy was eyeing them suspiciously, as if they might suddenly come to life.

  “I second that,” Ralph said.

  “So he was here?”

  “Or someone wants us to think he was,” Ralph replied, echoing my thoughts.

  Since 9/11, the FBI’s primary mission has shifted from law enforcement to counterterrorism, so anything dealing with domestic terrorist threats falls under our auspices. However, in this case, because of Blake’s involvement in drug smuggling, the DEA was involved in the investigation as well.

  The human trafficking brought ICE into the mix.

  NYPD was involved because of the location.

  It was a classic example of jurisdictional overlap and, although in instances like this the agencies do their best to work together, it’s not always easy to delineate who’s in charge of what. Toes get stepped on. Egos get wounded. Communication isn’t all that it should be. And worst of all, vital details have a way of slipping through the cracks.

  Ralph was here to make sure that didn’t happen.

  Typically, he and his team at the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime only provided investigative consultation, profiling, and case analysis, but he got things done and he wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.

  Which is why DeYoung assigned him to this case.

  Torres appeared in the hallway. “We’ve got a body in the garage.”

  “Blake?” I asked.

  “Not unless he’s aged twenty years in the last two months. It’s this way.”

  3

  Ralph knew how I felt about this part of my job, so as we followed Torres, he shot me a quick glance.

  I gave him a nod: All good. I’m fine. Don’t worry.

  It wasn’t queasiness.

  It wasn’t uneasiness.

  It went deeper, coming from a place that the woman I was currently dating referred to as “the cursed blessing of empathy.”

  I’ve certainly seen my share of the dead during my last eight years in the Bureau—and the six before that working homicide for the Milwaukee Police Department—yet seeing corpses still wrenches up deep emotions for me every time I go through it.

  However, I was thankful that working these cases had never become simply routine or mundane. I wanted the pain to be fresh and tender and real. It helped me remember why I do what I do. To dispassionately view evil without emotion is a sign of psychopathy, not professional impartiality.

  Anger and justice were in my blood.

  And that was okay by me.

  Maybe it all stemmed from the first time I saw a corpse, back in high school, when I found the body of an eleven-year-old girl who’d been abducted on her way home from school. The killer had sexually molested Mindy before strangling her and leaving her body in an old tree house beside a marsh near our town.

  It was a rainy autumn day when I found her.

  Cold, gray tears in the air.

  Dead, drenched leaves underfoot.

  The isolated location and tracks on the dirt road nearby had led me to believe she might be in the tree house. At the top of the ladder, I paused momentarily, then crawled through the tree house’s entrance.

  And saw her.

  Mindy’s body was propped against the wall. Motionless. Facing me.

  Death was no longer just something out there distant and amorphous that other people had to cope with. It was something I could see just ahead of me on the trail, peering back over its shoulder with a grin that was all teeth and restless hunger. And yet, somehow at the same time, it’d found a way to sneak up on me from behind. A panting beast, never content and always on the prowl, coming at me from both sides at once.

  At us all.

  In the hallway, Torres said, “By the way, Pat, aren’t you supposed to be on a plane to Detroit?”

  “Flight doesn’t leave for another four hours.”

  Then he turned to Ralph. “You didn’t wait for ‘one.’ Again.”

  “Pat already pointed that out.”

  “And?”

  “Two was feeling slighted,” I said.

  “Huh.” Torres pressed open the door to the garage.

  We followed him inside.

  A man’s body hung from a taut, yellow, braided nylon rope tied to the rafters. Though the noose had grooved into his skin when it tightened, it was still visible. A kicked-out chair lay on the floor near his feet.

  The man’s pasty, cyanotic face left no question about whether he was alive.

  And so the feeling came. Sorrow tainted with rage.

  There’s nothing beautiful or lovely or elegant about death, and the more of it you see, the more you know this is true. No matter how you spin things, there’s no Hollywood glamor to a corpse. We don’t just pass away. As soon as we stop breathing, as soon as the blood stops feeding the brain, we begin to rot.

  Meat on bones. Dreams of eternity wrapped in a sloughing cloth of skin.

  Gaviola, one of Torres’s team members, and the one who’d been the first in the garage, nudged the dead man’s leg with the tip of his MP5 to turn him so that we could more clearly see his face, but I stepped in and pressed the gun barrel aside out of respect for the deceased.

  “Would you treat him that way if he was your dad?” I said.

  “I . . . Sorry.”

  I repositioned myself so I could see the victim more clearly.

  Caucasian. Gaunt. Six foot, maybe six-one. Early to midseventies.

  “You know him?” Torres asked.

  “No.” I shook my head. “Never seen him before.”

  A faded tattoo of an alphanumeric code marked the back of his left hand.


  Ralph gestured toward it. “Russian. That upside-down h and backward R? I’ve seen this kind of identification before. The Soviets used it to differentiate their scientists who worked in their bioweapons programs and germ warfare units back in the Cold War. No names. Just numbers and letters. For anonymity.”

  “A bioweapons scientist,” Torres muttered. “That cannot be good.”

  The other SWAT members arrived as I studied the garage.

  Two more mannequins were poised nearby. One had a whiskey glass in her hand. “When the ERT gets here,” I told Torres, “have them check under the victim’s fingernails.”

  “For DNA? In case he might have scratched someone?”

  I walked toward the mannequin. “For fragments of rope. In suicide by hanging with this type of rope we almost always find tiny filaments of it caught beneath the person’s fingernails.”

  “Instinct,” Ralph noted. “Self-preservation. People claw at life even if they’ve decided they want to die. They can’t help it. If the fingernails are clear, that’s usually an indicator that—”

  “It might not have been a suicide.” Torres finished his thought for him.

  “Exactly.”

  I examined the whiskey in the glass. Three unmelted ice cubes glistened in it. No moisture on the outside of the glass.

  “This ice is still square,” I told them. “No air-conditioning out here. In this heat that ice wouldn’t take long to melt. And the glass isn’t even sweating yet.”

  “He was just here,” Gaviola exclaimed.

  “He’s close,” Torres announced to his team. “Check every house on this block. Go!”

  As one, in swift, well-coordinated crisscross formation, they swept out, and a moment later Ralph and I stood alone in the garage.

  I wanted to check the ice, but at this point, since it had at least been in the whiskey since the SWAT guys entered the house, I doubted that any prints on it would still be identifiable. However, it was possible.

  “Ralph, check the freezer in the house.” I scoured the drawers beneath the workbench for pliers. “See if there are any ice trays.”