Black Jack

by Diane Capri

  Kim considered the woman many believed had been found dead in a bathtub of olive green paint on Friday. By all accounts, Jodie Jacob was a brilliant lawyer. Not all lawyers were good at problem-solving, but very few of the ones Kim knew totally sucked at the skill.

  “Maybe you’re right. Let’s see if we can help each other. Are you representing the Petrosian gang?”

  “No,” Jodie mouthed without sound like she’d swallowed a bale of cotton. She raised her water glass with a shaky hand and tried again. “How are the Petrosians involved in all of this?”

  “Farid Petrosian owns the Garrison house now. That’s where Deerfield found the woman’s body in the tub filled with olive green paint. The woman Deerfield believes is you.”

  The hand she raised to push her blonde hair behind her ears shook. She seemed incapable of speech.

  Kim glanced around before she asked, “Is there any chance that Samir or Tariq Petrosian owns this house?”

  Jodie’s face blanched whiter than the new snow falling outside.

  “What we need to do now is get away from here, Jodie. We need to do it before daylight. Are you up for that?”

  Jodie didn’t move a muscle. She looked like a beautiful, frail statue, frozen in her chair.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Sunday, January 30

  10:35 p.m.

  Upstate New York

  After Otto had trudged up the stairs into the house, Terry “Reed” Poulton pulled off his cap and ruffled the red hair responsible for his nickname. None of those names were accurate, but he’d used them all his life.

  His first name was Terrence, not Terry, and the last name, Poulton, was complete fiction. Family lore claimed that an ancestor broke out of prison in England and acquired the surname when he misunderstood the U.S. immigration agent’s request for his birthplace. Once the surname was erroneously recorded, it couldn’t be changed, he was told. A long line of Poulton progeny followed, amused by their fictional small village heritage where the Saxons had declared “reed” the appropriate nickname for a redheaded boy.

  Reed drove the Mercedes around the house to the garage, jockeyed the vehicles around, and backed the Mercedes into place. He reached into the back seat, grabbed the magazine and two essential parts of Otto’s gun, and dropped them into his pocket.

  Without another glance toward the Mercedes or the house, he started his FBI vehicle and pulled it onto the driveway to warm up while he punched the code into the keypad to lower the big garage door.

  Sure, it would have been easier to kill both women. He could have dumped the bodies somewhere, and they’d have kept until spring, at least. He had no love for lawyers in general or these two in particular, but neither Otto nor Jacob had crossed the line between righteous and scumbag. Not yet. Not that he knew about, anyway. And Terry “Reed” Poulton was not a guy who killed for his own convenience. Those guys were the Petrosians and others like them.

  Ten minutes after he’d dropped Otto at the farmhouse, he was on his way back to Garrison. He was due at the surveillance house to relieve Brice at 0100 hours. He checked the clock on the dash. Plenty of time for a bite of dinner first. He’d find an eatery closer to the interstate.

  Reed settled into the quiet drive. His thoughts returned to the bathtub victim, the one who started him down this path. He shook his head. Almost two weeks and no one had been asking official questions about her yet.

  Valerie Vance, formerly known as Valerie Webb, had been due to report to work after a week’s vacation seven days ago. That idiot CEO or another colleague should have reported her missing by now. Somebody would put two and two together eventually.

  Webb and her pro bono lawyer actually looked a bit alike. He remembered thinking at the original trial that Webb and Jodie Jacob could have been cousins. Blonde, thin, single. Both married to their work, apparently. So far as he knew, that’s where the similarities ended. Jacob was a law-abiding citizen. Webb? Not so much.

  He’d long wondered how an angelic looking creature like Webb could be so evil. It no longer mattered. Webb had escaped justice for at least ten murders originally and seven more over the past six months. Justice might have caught up with her someday, but Reed was almost out of time. Which meant Webb was out of time, too.

  Lady Luck had helped him find Webb again by pure serendipity. Which was only fitting since a tragedy of errors had allowed her to kill again.

  Which was a crime in itself, as far as Reed was concerned. A different kind of guy would have made her lawyer pay. But Jacob wasn’t the only one to blame, and Reed was not that kind of guy, either.

  He fumed every time he thought about the prosecutors who said Reed’s team hadn’t collected enough solid evidence to support multiple convictions. One count of criminal negligence was all they could prove, they said. But they promised one count would be enough to keep her in prison. They were wrong.

  Reed had been swamped with work and his divorce at the time. After the trial, Reed lost track of Webb. Lost track of her lawyer, too.

  When overcrowded prison conditions and Webb’s “good behavior” resulted in her unbelievably early release, Reed had not heard about it. Webb served fewer than five years. She changed her surname to Vance and moved to a new community, but she was the same sick killer she’d always been and always would be.

  The data was clear. Once a serial killer, always a serial killer. Rehabilitation was not possible. The only way to stop a serial killer was to end her life. Take her off the planet where she could do no more harm.

  Oak Valley was chronically short-staffed, and management felt lucky to have a well-qualified nurse like her. The CEO said anyone could make a mistake and Vance had paid for hers with five years in prison. She would find work somewhere, he said, so why not Oak Valley?

  Reed figured the CEO didn’t know about the ten babies Vance had killed. Reed had delivered the horrific news to the parents and stared at the tiny caskets at their funerals. All these years later, the memories were chilling.

  Vance had always been a master at playing the long game, even when the dead babies were hard to explain. But at the assisted living facility, where murders can remain undiscovered, Vance had found an environment where she could operate for years and years without suspicion.

  She’d still be killing if he hadn’t stumbled upon her again. When a friend’s uncle died unexpectedly, she’d asked Reed to help her make decisions about the funeral plans. They’d met the uncle’s nurse. His friend had hugged her, teary-eyed. “My uncle said you were such an angel to him.”

  Out of context, years later, Reed hadn’t recognized the bitch at first. But something about her seemed off. Later, he did a fast background check on the new Nurse Vance, which came back too short and too clean. He dug deeper and discovered her conviction under her real name.

  Vance was no angel. She was an angel of death, that’s what she was. Reed identified seven Oak Valley patients who had died of respiratory failure during her brief six-month employment, a sharp spike in mortality.

  Reed kept digging, but she was cunning and sly, and she’d learned to be even more careful over time. Vance was smarter about using the powerful new drugs that had been developed while she was in prison, too.

  Despite his best efforts, Reed could find no hard evidence sufficient to arrest her again. The evidence he’d gathered wouldn’t support a warrant to exhume the bodies and prove his suspicions. Reed’s anger had boiled over.

  He put the empty hours watching the Garrison house to good use. He’d monitored her internet use and tracked her movements and listened to her conversations. His opportunity came when she scheduled a winter vacation in Jamaica.

  On the day she was scheduled to leave, Reed watched from across the street while Vance waited for a taxi that would never come because he had canceled it. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, glanced up and down the street, checked her watch, more anxious about missing her flight with every passing second.

  When he judged that she
felt desperately late, he pulled his car up to the curb. “Aren’t you going to miss your flight? Can I offer you a ride?”

  “Oh, yes! Thank you!” She’d seemed pathetically grateful.

  “Hop in. I’ll stow your bags in the back.” He’d retrieved the syringe and the chloroformed mask from the back before he placed her bags inside.

  She was buckled into the passenger seat when he’d slipped in behind her and put the mask over her mouth and nose. He’d forced her head back against the headrest until she stopped struggling. The chloroform was a kindness she hadn’t deserved but made his work easier.

  Off the main road, he’d found a winding two-lane and then a fire trail. Parked behind a stand of trees, well out of sight of any potential witnesses, he’d unlocked the front passenger door with the remote.

  He removed her boot and sock from her right foot and injected the massive neuromuscular blocker overdose between her third and fourth toes.

  Because she was already unconscious, she didn’t feel herself suffocate. A kindness she’d denied all her victims. She’d deserved the pain and horror of fighting to breathe until the very end, but he simply couldn’t torture another human like that. Even her.

  He tossed the empty syringe along with her boot and sock into the footwell and pushed her leg inside. Less than five minutes had elapsed since he’d pulled in behind the stand of trees. Storing the body in a cold place had also been ridiculously easy, given the weather in January.

  Reed felt no guilt in killing Vance. The guilt he felt was for the innocent lives not saved because he hadn’t killed her sooner.

  A raccoon ran across the road, snapping him out of his reverie. His headlights flashed and eerily reflected the animal’s eyes in the dark night. Reed shivered as if he’d awakened from a trance. He saw familiar landmarks along the roadway, but he took almost a full minute to comprehend where he was and how he’d arrived there. He wasn’t far from his destination.

  The surveillance base was only a couple of houses north and across the road from the target. Assistant Director Deerfield had set up the place. He’d called in a favor from the owners, who spent winters in Grand Cayman.

  Reed glanced at the clock a couple of miles before he reached Garrison. He was too early. If he showed up now, Brice might ask questions Reed didn’t feel like answering. The experience with the raccoon had spooked him. Maybe the cancer had moved to his brain or something.

  He stopped at a chain restaurant and went inside. He washed up and ordered but didn’t eat because of nausea, which often flared at the most inconvenient times. He sipped black coffee and waited for the time to pass.

  He’d be on duty alone this shift. Which was against policy, but everything about watching the Garrison house was against policy. The Special Operations Division and the Special Surveillance Group were not running the surveillance, partly because that level of expertise wasn’t necessary here, Deerfield said. There were other reasons, too.

  Budget tight, necessity slim to none, resources had been reallocated after a couple of fruitless weeks. The word came down the food chain from the top. Only two shifts, twelve hours each, one man. Anything happened, call for backup. They’d worked like that for a while, too. Which suited Reed fine.

  He had volunteered for the night detail. His wife had left him long ago, and he’d be sleeping all night anyway. Figured he might as well get paid for it. When Brice found Webb’s body, Deerfield modified the schedule again. Not that it mattered anymore.

  This was the last shift. Everything would change today, one way or the other.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Sunday, January 30

  11:15 p.m.

  New York, New York

  Gaspar was sound asleep when the house phone rang. He reached for the receiver. “Yes.”

  “This is room service. Do you still want your order, sir? He’s outside your door now.”

  “Yes, thank you. Sorry.” He struggled off the bed and staggered to the door. When the waiter pushed the table inside he held out two padded manila envelopes as well. Gaspar thanked him and added a generous tip to the bill, which smoothed out the problems.

  He poured coffee with cream and sugar and swigged two big mouthfuls before he opened one of the envelopes, turned on the new cell phone and pushed the redial button.

  The Boss picked up immediately. “I thought maybe you took a vacation.”

  “No such luck,” Gaspar replied, swigging more coffee to wake up. “Something wrong with the phones we had?”

  “Unclear. Easier to start over. You’ve heard nothing from Otto?”

  “Correct.”

  “Finlay?”

  That was a test question. If Finlay had called, the Boss would already know about it. “I was sleeping until two minutes ago. Want me to check?”

  “Later. First, I have new intel to give you.”

  Gaspar forced himself to concentrate through his sleep fog. “Ready.”

  “Deerfield has had Farid Petrosian in protective custody for two weeks. Farid refused to talk until his family was set up in WITSEC and Farid’s immunity order was entered by the court. That happened on Friday morning.”

  “Ah.” The situation was coming into clearer focus. Farid wouldn’t have told Deerfield everything until his conditions were met. So Deerfield learned new information on Friday morning that dropped an opportunity in his lap and started things in motion. “Farid told Deerfield about the woman in the bathtub.”

  “He also told Deerfield that a man brought her inside and placed her there. He said she was already dead. What he didn’t know was the identity of either the victim or the man.”

  “How did Farid get this information?” he asked.

  “He has eyes inside and outside the house.” Cooper paused. “Particularly on the master suite. For obvious reasons.”

  “Ah.” He’d been told the electricity was turned off at the house. Battery operated surveillance cameras with motion sensors weren’t reliable. Among other issues, the batteries didn’t last forever. As they weakened, the motion sensors became erratic. “Does Farid have recordings?”

  “Deerfield claims not.”

  “Before he paid you a visit in Phoenix, you’d have believed him. Now you don’t.”

  “Precisely. Deerfield is—let’s call it agile around the facts.”

  “He worked quickly after Farid told him about the body, I’ll say that.” Gaspar refilled his coffee, but the first cup had done its job. All senses were on full alert.

  The Boss said, “I sent you new files. Info on the victim. Here’s a news flash. It’s not Jodie Jacob.”

  “Good news for Jacob. Who put the body in the tub?”

  “He says Farid doesn’t know. Couldn’t even give an accurate description because the guy was covered crown to sole, including a face mask because of the oil paint fumes.”

  Gaspar said, “You think Deerfield has seen the recording and knows who it is.”

  “Of course,” the Boss replied.

  Gaspar said nothing.

  “Only three possible members of Deerfield’s team could have placed the body. Brice. Poulton. Smithers. I sent those files as well.”

  “You have a best guess at this point?”

  Cooper said, “I don’t want to influence you. Look at the materials, we’ll talk again.”

  “What about Otto?”

  “Deerfield says he doesn’t know where she is. Finlay says the same. We’re all working on it.” Cooper paused briefly as if he might say something else. And then he simply signed off. “Get up to speed and call me back.”

  Gaspar set up the laptop, connected to the secure server and downloaded five files. One for each of the three agents. One for Jodie Jacob. The last one was labeled Valerie Vance a/k/a Valerie Webb. He refilled his coffee, snagged a sweet roll, and began with Webb, the victim in the tub.

  Valerie Webb’s file consisted of three photos and a short bullet point list of relevant facts. He looked quickly at the photos and then put them
side by side on the screen with Jodie Jacob’s photos. The two women could have been sisters, but the human genome often produced lookalikes. Hell, Jacob’s father, Leon Garber, was no saint. He might easily have fathered both kids. Not that it mattered why the two resembled each other.

  Gaspar moved on to the bullet points. He read through them quickly. Valerie Webb was a suspected serial killer. At least ten infants under her care had died of respiratory failure when she’d worked as a nurse in Albany. Resources for criminal investigations and overcrowded judicial systems being what they were, Webb was only tried and convicted on one count of criminally negligent homicide.

  Two of the bullet points in this section were highlighted. The first was Webb’s pro bono lawyer’s name. Jodie Jacob. The second was the investigating detective. Terrence Poulton.

  Webb served almost five years and was released for good behavior due to prison overcrowding. She changed her name and moved to work in an assisted living facility called Oak Valley not far from Garrison. During six months of employment, seven unexplained respiratory failure deaths were reported. None were the subject of a criminal investigation, even after the on-site pharmacy discovered high doses of mivacurium chloride, a powerful drug used to temporarily paralyze a patient’s ability to breathe, had gone missing. Webb had left for a one-week vacation on January 17th and failed to return to work.

  The only highlighted bullet point in this section explained that an overdose of mivacurium chloride, a neuromuscular blocker, caused suffocation by the inability to breathe and the victim remained conscious until death.

  Gaspar shuddered. One of his daughters had asthma, and every attack terrified him. Few things in life were worse than being unable to breathe. Only a depraved killer would torture victims like that. He couldn’t work up an ounce of sympathy for her. Whoever killed Valerie Webb did the world a favor.

  Jodie Jacob’s file was short and sweet. It contained nothing Gaspar didn’t already know.