Fatally Bound

by Roger Stelljes

  “It’s a step, a big one … and a good one.” Dara was a fan of their relationship. She liked the two of them together and wanted it to stay that way.

  They continued walking, enjoying the peace and quiet, the sound of birds singing in the trees and the sun warming them. In the distance they were able to watch the others carefully ride the horses, amused at the sight of Lich, a cowboy hat on his head and his rotund body bouncing along. “That poor horse’s back may never be the same,” Mac quipped.

  “Will they be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together if he falls?” Wire wondered jokingly.

  They both steered clear of the case; neither wanting or willing to talk about it yet, the shared experience of it enough for them at this point.

  “Did I hear a phone call from Martin?” Mac asked with a smile.

  “You did.”

  “You should go see him. Let him make you feel better.”

  “I will,” she replied, “after we find this bastard. We are still going to try and find him, right?”

  “Does a bear shit in the woods?”

  “Yes he does.”

  “There are more rounds left in this fight.”

  They reached a fork in the path where they could go left or right. Looking back, they were a considerable distance from the house. “Should we turn around?” Wire asked when Mac’s cell phone started ringing.

  He looked at the display and frowned.

  “What?”

  “Are you butt dialing me?”

  “Huh?”

  He held up his phone. Dara Wire was calling him. “Maybe you don’t know how to use that new phone of yours.”

  She pulled out her new phone from her back pocket, “I’m not calling … you… Mac,” a panicked expression overtook her face. “Mac?”

  “He took your cell phone,” Mac answered, using the speaker function: “McRyan.”

  “Is this Mac McRyan?” a deep, eerie voice asked.

  “Yeah. Who’s this?”

  “Oh I think you know who it is,” the Reaper teased in a low ominous voice. “How does that arm feel?”

  Mac paused for a moment, but the anger welled up inside him. Through gritted teeth he asked, “What do you want?” Wire had already peeled off, dialing Gesch.

  “I wanted to know how you are feeling.”

  “Never better.”

  “Oh come now, Agent McRyan, or is it Mac? Do you mind if I call you Mac?”

  “Sure, if you tell me your name, asshole.”

  “Oh I don’t think so, Mac. But you know you talk awfully tough for someone who suffered such a severe beating. And your friends in the media are so concerned for you and Ms. Wire, and they have absolutely no idea where you are,” he mocked.

  “Like Dick Cheney, I’m at an undisclosed location.”

  “Mac, are you and Dara Wire hiding?” he asked in a light, whimsically evil teasing tone.

  “I’ll tell you what. I’ll come out if you come out from under your rock. Name the place and time I’ll be there, you and me and nobody else. One-on-one and we’ll finish this thing.”

  The Reaper’s voice turned cold, “That’s not something you want, McRyan. If I were you, I’d stay right where you are. Where you’re safe and can’t be harmed.”

  “Really? You don’t know me very well then. I’m coming for you.”

  “I’d think twice about that. You’re lucky to be alive,” he said coldly. “I made a mistake. I could and should have finished you when I had the chance. It won’t happen again.”

  “Is that right?”

  “It is,” the Reaper answered deeply. “I am nearly done. This will be over very soon. Let me finish what I’ve started and you and Wire will not be harmed. My battle is not with you.”

  “You know we can’t do that.”

  “Final warning, Mac. If you and Wire get in my way again, I promise you, you both will die.”

  The line went dead.

  • • • •

  He took the SIM card out of the burner phone and tossed the phone into the river and jogged back to the panel van and pulled away down the dirt road, a mile back to the state highway.

  The right arm was feeling better although there was still pain and he didn’t comfortably have full range of motion, but overall it was improving. Mostly it was the cut through the skin and the rudimentary stitches hidden under his light long-sleeve shirt that pained him, both of which would heal and eventually disappear.

  As he turned left onto the highway, he rewound the conversation with McRyan in his head.

  Was McRyan bruised and battered? Yes.

  Was he putting on false bravado? Yes.

  Was he down for the count? No.

  McRyan and his pal Wire would still be coming for him.

  Rarely in life do people live up to their press clippings. However, McRyan and his friend Dara Wire were doing just that. In many ways, he was lucky to get away from Kelly Drew’s. McRyan had several shots at him. Had the man not been seeing double and giving chase with a severely damaged left arm, he may well have finished the job.

  But McRyan didn’t get it done.

  Now, the job was there waiting to be finished.

  He was ready to leave the country. The documents, the identity, the way out were all in place and he could just slide away now and never be heard from again. He told himself he might have to run at a moment’s notice when it all started. In the two years that was spent planning his mission, identifying the people to be punished, of processing that night two years ago when the vengeance first rose up and took over in him, brought him to the place he was now. He knew the plan could fall apart, that he would have to run before he finished his mission and avenged Rena’s death.

  Had he just started, he could have walked away. Maybe let the investigation settle down and fade from memory and then come back later. But now, so close to the end, just days away, there would be no stopping now.

  The threat he made to McRyan would be unlikely to shake the man, not if his past was any indication. McRyan may hesitate, he may take some time before he came after him, but keep coming he would. The phone call was confirmation of that.

  The concern was the FBI, McRyan and Wire knew how he identified his victims, or at least four of the five. The question was did they know who was left to be punished?

  What he needed was to throw off McRyan and Wire.

  He drove along the highway with light rock music playing over the radio, thinking things through. Thinking about what would come next and how he could finish with McRyan and Company after him and beginning to understand him.

  What he came to realize was that there was a flaw in his plan.

  He’d become predictable.

  If McRyan and Wire were going to keep coming, he had to change up and had to take the fight to them as well.

  As he drove through the Maryland countryside, an idea began percolating in his mind. The idea was extremely risky in one sense, requiring him to go back to a place he left, but in another, the payoff could be big. It could give him another chance to hurt, if not finish off, McRyan and Wire.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “Every conspiracy has a leader.”

  Gesch traced the call back to a burner phone and the call was bounced off a cell tower near Keymar, Maryland. “We have no traffic cameras and no real way of tracing the burner. Chances are, if he has half a brain, which we know the sadistic bastard does, he dumped the phone the minute he was done and the burner didn’t have any sort of GPS tracking or anything like that. So other than the cell tower, we got nothing.”

  “It was worth a try,” Wire replied.

  “What I can’t figure is why he took Wire’s phone to begin with?” Gesch asked.

  “To torment me,” Mac answered, “or based on today’s call, to warn me or us off. He could have killed Dara and Kelly Drew and then haunted me with it, calling me, taunting me, reminding me of how I’d failed. That’s what the call was to a certain degree. It was a warning, telling me he’
s not done.”

  “But he’ll be done soon,” Wire added. “And he’s saying that we should just leave him alone to finish and he’ll let us live.”

  “Are you going to leave him alone?”

  “Oh hell no. Question is, Aubry, what is our role here?”

  “When you two are ready…”

  “We’re ready right now,” Mac answered hotly, but winced. His headache was not gone.

  “No you’re not. You’re better, you both are. I can hear it in your voices. But I can also hear in your voices that you’re not healthy enough yet. Maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after, and then when you are ready, we’re going to get back to how we originally had this structured. Remember, you were running a side or parallel investigation and that kind of merged into what we’re doing.”

  “Now wait a minute, Aubry…”

  “Easy, Mac. That’s nobody’s fault and it is not a criticism. It just kind of happened based on what was happening with the case and depending on how things go, it may well happen again. But for now, Director Mitchell is pushing the reset button and getting us back to the original structure. I’m running point, you and Dara parallel, playing your own angle. You just need to figure out what that angle is and I’ll get you whatever you need.”

  “I feel like we’re being shoved aside,” Mac persisted.

  “No,” Gesch answered assuredly, “we’re doing just the opposite. What we’re trying to do is give you room to maneuver. You two are pretty hot right now and the minute you start showing up, it’ll end up being news, you’ll have a tail and your movements will be watched. That will hamper your effectiveness and we can’t afford that.”

  “The media is just a bit riled up at the moment,” Wire said in an understatement.

  “Have you seen it today? Can you say feeding frenzy?” Gesch replied with a little chuckle. “For two people as supposedly media shy as you two, you’re all the rage at the moment.”

  Mac understood what Gesch was saying and nodded, “I’m all for keeping a low profile.”

  “Good,” Gesch answered. “So when you’re ready, we want you to go back to working this thing from the outside. So think about how you want to do that, what your next move is. Mac, you had a bad concussion, a broken wrist and last I saw you, you looked like Floyd Mayweather did a tap dance on your face. Get yourself right and come back to work.” Gesch hung up.

  Mac was steaming, not at Gesch, not even at being relegated back to the parallel part of the investigation. Working in the shadows was fine by him and what he wanted really.

  Wire suspected she knew where the white smoke was coming from, “The call?”

  “I had eleven shots at him, Dara. Eleven fucking shots! How do I not hit the son of a bitch at least once?”

  “Mac, you were all beat to hell. Your wrist was broken, your eyes were half shut, you had a concussion …”

  “Bullshit. I had chance to finish it and I choked. You can’t miss eleven times, you just can’t. And now that motherfucker is calling me, taunting me, threatening me, threatening you.”

  Riley came into the room and immediately recognized the mood. “Oh, I’ve seen that look before,” Riles noted, taking in the vibe of the room and Mac’s demeanor. He and the others knew about the call from the Reaper.

  “So here’s what we’re going to do.” Pat, a master of the act of blowing off steam and clearing the mind, took control. “Mac, we’re going to eat dinner, a big massive huge dinner, and once we’re done, we’re going to pretend this place is Patrick’s Room. We’re going to get the beer flowing and the bullshit roaring and you two are going to walk us through the Reaper case.”

  Mac was about to object but Riley wouldn’t have it, holding up two fingers. “Two things. One, we’re all curious as hell to learn about it, and second …”

  “And second?” Mac asked, perturbed.

  “Yeah, you little shit,” only the six-foot-three hulking Riles could get away with referring to Mac that way, “the second thing is maybe we can help. Need I remind you that you were brought into our little home invasion case as a second set of eyes. Turnabout is fair play.”

  “Point taken,” Mac conceded.

  “Come on, man, let’s party,” Riles exclaimed, throwing his arm carefully around Mac’s neck and leading him to the kitchen.

  After the dinner plates were cleared and the staff retired for the evening leaving a tub full of beer on ice, Mac brought his backpack containing the Reaper file into the kitchen and everyone got really quiet, which Mac noticed and quipped with a grin.

  “Guys, it’s not like I’ve got the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant in here. Relax, breathe, talk.”

  The estate was occasionally used for corporate retreats and therefore had on hand the necessary supplies for meetings, including rolling dry erase whiteboards. Rock wheeled two such boards into the spacious dining area while Mac and Wire laid out the various folders, notepads and pictures from the case on the table. Mac pulled out his laptop and started it up and connected it to a projector so that he could project onto one of the whiteboards. He looked over to Wire. Two nights ago was still raw with both of them and Dominic quietly told him about her night terrors. So before he started he wanted to make sure she was okay: “Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

  “No, but let’s do it anyway,” she answered while holding out her fist which Mac bumped back. “That phone call means he’s still out there and is going to kill some more. I disagree with Gesch. We don’t have any more time to get better. It’s go time.”

  “True that.”

  Everyone was taking a seat, opening beers and settling in. “Rock, beer me,” Mac bellowed, still pounding away at the keys on his laptop.

  “Are you sure?” Rock asked with his hand deep in the cooler. Mac was still on pain medication.

  “If I’m talking about this shit, I’m having a beer.”

  Wire gave him a stern look.

  “Not a word to Sally.”

  The beer tub was full of local Virginia microbrews. Rock tossed him a Starr Hills Jomo Lager. He opened it and took a long sip of the light amber ale. Why not start with a shocker, he thought, “What you guys don’t know, what nobody knows yet, is that the Reaper is not a serial killer.”

  “Not a serial killer?” Riles asked.

  “No. At least not a serial killer in the typical sense you would think of.”

  “What is he then?” Rock asked.

  “We think,” Mac gestured towards Wire, who nodded, “that he’s a killer out to avenge the death of this woman.”

  Wire held up a photo of Rena Johnson and put it up on the left whiteboard.

  “Dara and I think this is what this case is all about,” Mac stated.

  “I haven’t seen any of this reported at all,” Riles noted, taking a pull from his beer. “Is this the FBI’s operating theory?”

  “I would say … one of them,” Wire answered haltingly, taking a sip of her own beer.

  “Meaning?” Riles pushed.

  “They haven’t necessarily gone all in on it, they’re investigating all possible theories,” Mac answered, but then looked Riley right in the eye. “Wire and I have gone all in.”

  “Then you better start from the beginning,” Riles answered as he got up and fetched a beer from the tub. “I suspect this might take a while.”

  “Then let’s start from the beginning. The first victim is Melissa Goynes …” Mac and Wire tag teamed the explanation of the first four victims, Goynes, Janelle Wyland, Hannah Donahue, Sandy Faye and finishing with how they ended up at Kelly Drew’s. Mac’s buddies and Wire’s brother were professionals. Riley was right, a second opinion was a good idea. A second opinion only worked if he and Wire gave them all the facts. As a result, it took a good hour to work through all the details. The boys popped in a few questions along the way but they mostly listened.

  “We had no connection between the victims until we were going through Faye’s personal effects, records, financials and photos, whe
n I ran across this photo from the American Academic Honor Society Camp from seven years ago,” Mac stated, projecting it onto the whiteboard. In the picture, the heads of Goynes, Donahue and Faye were circled. “I noted Goynes and Donahue first and then a minute later we found Faye.”

  “That doesn’t just happen, not in nature,” Lich said, studying the photos. “How is that picture of …” he pointed towards the board.

  “Rena Johnson?” Wire asked.

  “Yeah, who is she and how does she fit?” Lich inquired, twirling one end of his bushy mustache while taking a look at the picture. “I don’t see her in this picture.”

  “She’s not,” Mac answered. “She wasn’t at that camp.”

  “Then what’s her relationship to the victims?”

  “We’re not exactly sure yet, other than she’s the catalyst for all this, I can feel it,” Mac suggested, taking a sip from his beer. “Short story is she was killed in a hit-and-run car accident on August 17th seven years ago on a county road outside of Auburn, New York, after having apparently left a rave party that took place at an abandoned farm. Seven years ago there was a big problem with such parties in the area, particularly around Auburn.”

  “And your three murder victims, the ones in the picture, fit in how? Close the loop for me here?” Dominic Wire asked.

  “They were involved in her death somehow,” Mac replied. “We think they, and perhaps others, such as Kelly Drew, were at that party as well and were somehow involved in her death. Johnson’s toxicology report showed Ecstasy in her system, among other drugs, and a blood alcohol of .23 when she was hit while walking along the side of that road.”

  “And the Reaper?” Riles asked.

  “The Reaper, whoever he is,” Mac answered, “is out avenging Johnson’s death.”

  “How do you make that connection?” Rock asked, looking over Lich’s shoulder. “I know you like your leaps in logic, but this seems like the Grand Canyon.”

  “Yeah, the FBI thought that too until the other night at Kelly Drew’s,” Mac answered. “It’s connected.”

  “How?” Riles asked.

  “I have a theory.”

  “We have a theory,” Wire admonished with a smile.