“So I take it you’re operating under the theory the killer was a non-inmate who took the tongue and the garotte out of the prison with him.”
“That’s correct,” Wills said.
“Which means your chances of solving this are slim.”
For a third time, Wills was looking down at his shoes. “Also correct,” he said.
Heat excused herself, assuring Captain Wills she would contact him if she learned anything in her own investigation that might help theirs.
But as she departed the prison’s offices, two things were already becoming clear to her.
One, Maggs’s death and her mother’s reappearance occurred within hours of each other, which didn’t feel like a coincidence. Anyone on the outside who had wanted Maggs dead for some other reason would have done it long ago. And Maggs didn’t seem to have done anything to attract enough ire from anyone on the inside. This had to be related to Cynthia Heat somehow.
And, two, you didn’t go through the trouble of severing someone’s tongue and then carrying it out of a prison just because it sounded like fun.
The killer was trying to send a message about what happens to people who talk.
Heat stumbled back to her car, then sat heavily inside.
Bart Callan was now the only person on her mind. If Maggs was dead, had someone also gotten to Callan? Certainly, it would be more difficult for a perpetrator to reach Callan at a supermax facility. But Heat didn’t dismiss the possibility.
It was seven o’clock her time, which was five o’clock Colorado time. That might have been a problem if Florence ADX had been the local bank, but the one good thing about prisons was that they always had someone staffing them.
She dialed the number for the prison. After passing through an automated menu, she punched the right sequence of numbers to reach a real live corrections officer. She introduced herself, explained her interest—going with the cold case angle again—and asked if she could arrange a conversation sometime that morning with Bart Callan.
“Callan? Hang on,” the officer said. Heat heard keys clacking in the background, then: “Sorry, Mr. Callan is no longer with us.”
“What do you mean?” Heat asked.
“It says here he was transferred to FCI-Cumberland three weeks ago.”
Three weeks ago. Heat wanted to scream.
“Cumberland?” Heat asked. “I wasn’t aware of a maximum security facility in Cumberland.”
“That’s because it’s medium security.”
“How is it possible a serial murderer like Bart Callan got transferred to medium security?” Heat asked, hearing her voice rising.
“Couldn’t tell you. That’s the B.O.P.’s call.”
Heat somehow doubted she would find anyone at the Bureau of Prisons who would be able to give an adequate explanation. “Okay, thank you,” Heat said, then ended the call.
She immediately dialed the number she found for FCI-Cumberland. She repeated the same number-punching procedure she had gone through for Florence until she found a guard who sounded almost identical to the last one she had spoken with. Again, she identified herself and her concern. She finished with, “What would I have to do to arrange a conversation with inmate Bart Callan?”
“Callan?” the man volleyed back. “Well, first, you’d have to find him.”
For the second time that morning, Heat felt the ice-water sensation pouring over her.
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“Bart Callan escaped from a work detail yesterday,” the man said. “Don’t you watch the news? It was all over the place out here.”
“Apparently, that didn’t make it to New York,” Heat said.
“Yeah, well, he was part of a crew picking up litter on a highway not far from here. We had five CO’s with his group, all of them seasoned men. None of them could explain where Callan had gone. As best we can figure, he got about a half-hour head start before they did a count and noticed he was missing. Since then, we’ve had everything from dogs to drones after him. We’ve done roadblocks, you name it. No Bart Callan. Not yet, anyway.”
Or ever, Heat wanted to say.
“Our boys’ll find him, though,” the man continued. “You can be sure of that. But maybe you can tell your boys to be on the lookout in case he shows up in New York for some reason, huh? And if you find him, send him back our way.”
Heat assured the man she would before she ended the call.
Except, of course, she knew Bart Callan all too well. She had been given a front-row seat to his treachery. He had not simply walked away from that work detail. He had likely been masterminding his flight plan for months. And he had not done it on his own. He’d had help. High-placed, highly capable help.
The authorities could search all they wanted to. They were never going to find him.
Heat didn’t see any more of the countryside on her way back to New York than she had on her way out. Nor did her eyes linger on the mountains. Or the rivers.
This time, it wasn’t because of darkness. It was because she was staring furiously ahead, using the windshield time to attempt to make sense of this chaotic series of events.
In rough order: her mother appeared, Carey Maggs was killed, and Bart Callan disappeared. All within hours of one another.
It was breathtaking. And, clearly, it was connected—coordinated, even?—in some manner. But what was the bigger picture? And who was behind it? And what did it mean?
Up until the previous morning, Heat had thought she understood the entirety of this twisted trail, having walked every step of it. Her mother was silenced because she was going to expose Tyler Wynn, who himself had gotten involved in the wicked smallpox plot of Carey Maggs, who was being aided by Bart Callan. It was…well, not neat. There was nothing neat about it.
But it was over. If nothing else, Heat thought the trail had ended.
Except now there was clearly something new happening. There had been some kind of precipitating incident.
Was it simply that her mother had come out of hiding? Had that been the trigger that led to Maggs’s death and Callan’s flight?
Or was her mother’s appearance the result of something, not the cause of something?
Nikki was every bit as flummoxed at the end of the drive as she had been at the beginning. She parked the unmarked car behind the Twentieth Precinct, then, instead of marching through the back entrance, she walked around to the front. She could barely even admit it to herself, but, yes, she suddenly sensed her mother was there.
It was a hunch. Or maybe just a hope.
Heat scanned up and down 82nd Street. Her gaze lingered on the bus shelter, which was empty. She looked in alleys, behind parked cars, near tree trunks. She looked at every passerby, female or male—she had no doubt her mother could disguise herself as an old man as easily as she’d become an old woman.
But there was no one who raised Heat’s suspicions. She leaned against the brick wall of the precinct, closed her eyes, and tried to put her most fervent wish out to the universe with all the force she could:
Mom, just come in. If you’re in danger, I’ll protect you. If you need something, I’ll help you. Let’s be together again. Like we were when I was a little girl. Like we were on the steps of that Roman piazza. Let’s drink Bolla Valpolicella and solve all our problems together. There’s nothing we can’t conquer if we join forces.
She opened her eyes.
It was the same street it had been. With the same passersby, who were now just a little bit farther along in their journeys.
And Cynthia Heat was nowhere to be seen.
Just like she had been for all but a half second of the last seventeen years.
There were tears beginning to well in Nikki Heat’s eyes. And that was the last thing a commander needed: to be seen weeping on the street outside her own precinct.
So Heat stood, stuffed her concerns about her mother into the most airtight compartment in her head she could find, and walked back inside. Sh
e would have to be a daughter later. Right then, it was closing in on ten o’clock in the morning and she needed to be a captain again.
Her first sight upon returning to the bull pen triggered a strong sense of déjà vu.
It was Raley, sitting exactly where he had been sitting when she’d left him the night before, wearing exactly the same clothes, still with the headphones clamped tight over his ears.
Heat went over to him. “Rales, did you go home last night?”
“No, thanks,” he said. “I just had a cup.”
His eyes never left the computer screen. Heat was next to him now. There was a bit of an odor wafting from him, a stench that told her his twenty-four-hour deodorant had passed the limits of its endurance.
“Hello? Earth to Raley? Please report to your captain. What are you doing?”
“That’s okay, I’m not hungry,” he said.
Heat reached for the front of the computer and pulled the headphone jack out of its port. Raley startled for a moment, then looked at her blankly.
“Hello. My name is Nikki Heat. Your name is Sean Raley. Are you with me?”
“Sorry, sorry,” he said, removing his headphones and stretching out his arms, unleashing more stench.
Heat drew back, though he seemed not to notice.
“Did you sleep at all last night?” she asked.
“Yeah, I hit the couch in your office for a few hours. Don’t worry, I feel like a million dollars.”
“Yeah,” Heat said. “Well, I’m sorry to tell you, but you smell like a buck fifty. And I think the money has been incubating in a homeless person’s mouth all night.”
Raley sniffed his right armpit, then his left. “Huh, I don’t—”
Then he stopped himself. “Oh. Pungent.”
“All right, I’m going to take two steps back now,” Heat said. “But why don’t you tell me what you’ve been up to.”
“Yeah, sorry. I’ve been working the beheading tape like you asked. I focused in on one twenty-second bite where I felt like the audio was pretty clean. I isolated it, then started scrubbing it. How much technical detail do you want to be bored with about the de-filtering process?”
“Very, very little,” Heat assured him.
“Okay, well then all you need to know is this is painstaking…but possible. The trick is you need to work with very narrow bands of frequencies. The best analogy I can come up with is that it’s like making a copy of a painting while only being able to see one tiny little strip of it at a time. Which you can do, as long as you’re very careful and very precise. One strip at a time, the painting comes together. Or, in this case, the recording. And eventually what you get is this.”
Raley clicked the play button.
“There is no greater symbol of your ignorance than your lying puppet media, which only exists to spread the distorted propaganda of your Zionist government. And there is no greater sin than the way your people allow your women to shamefully expose their bodies and flaunt that which ought to be seen only by their husbands.”
Heat instantly recognized the words, but not the voice. It no longer sounded like Darth Vader or Kylo Ren. It sounded more like the deejay at the college radio station, nervous about his first on-air shift.
Just to be sure, Heat asked, “So what I’m hearing is…”
“The voice of American ISIS completely unfiltered,” Raley finished. “To be clear, it’s not the original any more than a copy of a Renoir is an actual Renoir. But it sounds exactly like the original—in the same way a good copy looks exactly like the original. All effects of the audio masking have been removed.
“Now,” Raley continued, “listen to this.”
Raley hit play again, and a familiar voice came out of the speakers.
“Look, I told this to the other guy. I didn’t do nothing. I don’t know nothing about this girl, or no beheading, or nothing like that. Just because I’m Muslim don’t make me a terrorist. Damn. I’m an American, just like you.”
It was Hassan El-Bashir, with his “New Yawk” accent and his baritone timbre—at least half an octave deeper than the one on the American ISIS video, and with completely different inflections.
“I ran those two samples against each other,” Raley said. “It came back as a thirteen percent match. That’s the lowest score I had ever seen for samples that were at least theoretically the same language. Or at least it was the lowest until I ran this one.”
Raley hit play on another file.
“Lawyer. Lawyer. Lawyer. That’s all I’m gonna say, motherfucker, so you might as well get used to it. Lawyer. Lawyer. Lawyer.”
The man pronounced the word “law-yuh,” in true Bronx fashion. His pitch was even deeper than El-Bashir’s.
“That was Tariq Al-Aman,” Raley said. “And he scored an eleven percent.”
“So, just to make sure I’m understanding this properly, there is just barely north of a ten percent chance the men in the video are Tariq Al-Aman and Hassan El-Bashir.”
“No. It’s actually something far worse than that. An eleven percent match means that, from the standpoint of vocal quality, there is only eleven percent of Al-Aman’s voice that overlaps with the other sample. To even begin to consider two samples a match, you need to have at least a ninety percent overlap, if not more.”
“So an eleven percent overlap is…”
“Absolutely, positively, and without a shadow of a doubt, not a match,” Raley said. “I’d testify to it in court.”
“Which means the two men currently in federal custody are…”
“Not our guys,” Raley confirmed.
Heat closed her eyes for a moment. Their entire investigation had just been blown out of the water. Her seemingly ideal suspects—two young men, angry and radicalizing in their devotion to Islam—were nothing more than two foul-mouthed hotheads whose protestations of innocence had actually been real.
Worst of all, she was only minimally closer to figuring out who was behind American ISIS than she had been when she first laid eyes on the video. They had all been running as fast as they could, but unbeknownst to them, they had been doing so in quicksand. It had been an intense effort that had barely gotten them anywhere.
“I’m sorry,” Raley said. “I know this isn’t what you wanted.”
Heat lifted her chin.
“All I ever want is the truth, Rales, you know that,” she said. “But now if you’ll excuse me, I think I have a phone call to make.”
Heat went into her office, picked up her desk phone, and called Yardley Bell’s mobile number. It rang once, twice. On the third ring, Heat heard:
“Nikki Heat. Don’t tell me you’ve found some new excuse why this is your case. Because I can assure you—”
“Can it, Yardley,” Heat said. “You have to cut El-Bashir and Al-Aman loose.”
“And why would we possibly do that?”
“Because they’re innocent.”
“What…What are you talking about?”
“Innocent. That’s a ninety-four cent word that means they didn’t do it.”
“Nikki, I don’t have time for—”
Heat interrupted with a brief explanation of what Raley had uncovered. Bell seemed to be listening. But her response at the end nearly took Heat’s breath away.
“I don’t see how that changes anything from our perspective,” Bell said.
“Yardley, what are you talking about? They didn’t do it.”
“Yes, but ISIS doesn’t know that. As far as they’re concerned, they’re getting the genuine item. The stars of the New York video. I’ve seen their Facebook posts and so has everyone else who matters. Those kids can talk the talk even if they didn’t walk the walk. Hell, once we tell them what our plan is, they’ll probably start taking credit for the video, just for the street cred it gives them with their ISIS homeboys. The point is, they’re a valuable commodity, and we’ll be getting what we need in return. That’s what matters here.”
“You couldn’t possibly be that twi
sted,” Heat said. “Those kids aren’t bargaining chips. They’re human beings.”
“Nikki, don’t go all 4-H club on me. We may be playing in a sandbox over there, but believe me, it’s not kindergarten recess time. Obviously, this is over your head. You just worry about the jaywalkers on 7th Avenue and let us handle the grown-up stuff. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”
“I’ll go public,” Heat said quickly.
Bell went silent for a moment. Heat filled the void with: “I’ve got a friend at the Ledger. He’s Tam’s boss, actually. If you don’t cut those kids loose, I’ll tell him the NYPD has developed credible exculpatory evidence showing the two lead suspects cannot possibly be responsible for the video, and that the Department of Homeland Security is holding them anyway. I’m sure that’ll play great, DHS detaining two American citizens for no reason.”
Bell’s response came out in a growl. “You do that, and I’ll have the US Attorney’s Office on your ass faster than flies on shit.”
“Go ahead and try, Yards. What are they going to charge me with? Administration of justice? Excessive kindness? Protecting the innocent? I’m trying to do the right thing here. Good luck finding a jury who would convict me for it.”
“Doesn’t matter. The US Attorney’s Office can indict a ham sandwich. You know that. And once you’re indicted? Well, the NYPD could hardly have someone under that kind of cloud running one of its precincts. You’d be placed on administrative leave and stripped of your command. And then, you know, the federal courts can be so slow sometimes. A couple of continuances. A change of venue. Then, right before trial, we’d have to switch prosecutors and delay things some more. We could keep you spinning through the system for a good four, five years. By the time you got cleared, you’d be such damaged goods the NYPD could never give you your precinct back. You’d be that Captain Heat. I bet they’d stick you in the quartermaster’s office. Just think how satisfying your life would be, spending your day finding the lowest bidder for paperclips.”
Heat wished she could see Bell’s eyes right then. Because she was sure this was a bluff.
High Heat Page 21
