Copyright 2012 by Russell Blake. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law, or in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, contact [email protected].
Table of Contents
About the author
Excerpts from Russell Blake’s novels
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Afterword
Excerpt from King of Swords
Introduction
Prologue
Excerpt from Fatal Exchange
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
About the author
Russell Blake lives full time on the Pacific coast of Mexico. He is the acclaimed author of the thrillers: Fatal Exchange, The Geronimo Breach, Zero Sum, The Delphi Chronicle trilogy (The Manuscript, The Tortoise and the Hare, and Phoenix Rising), King of Swords, Night of the Assassin, The Voynich Cypher, Revenge of the Assassin, Return of the Assassin, Silver Justice, JET, JET II – Betrayal, JET III – Vengeance and JET IV – Reckoning.
Non-fiction novels include the international bestseller An Angel With Fur (animal biography) and How To Sell A Gazillion eBooks (while drunk, high or incarcerated) – a joyfully vicious parody of all things writing and self-publishing related.
“Capt.” Russell enjoys writing, fishing, playing with his dogs, collecting and sampling tequila, and waging an ongoing battle against world domination by clowns.
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Excerpts from Russell Blake’s novels
King of Swords By Russell Blake
King of Swords is an epic assassination thriller set in modern Mexico against a backdrop of cartel violence. Captain Romero Cruz discovers an assassination plot to kill the Mexican and U.S. presidents at the G-20 conference in Cabo by “El Rey” - a super assassin responsible for some of the world's most shocking killings.
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Fatal Exchange By Russell Blake
Fatal Exchange is the story of Tess Gideon, an iconoclastic female Manhattan bike messenger with an appetite for the wild side embroiled in a rogue nation’s Byzantine scheme to destabilize the U.S. financial system. As the body count climes, Tess is targeted for extermination by a rogue nation’s torture squad while being stalked by a brutal serial killer.
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Purchase Fatal Exchange
Foreword
Silver Justice is a work of fiction. Those disturbed by the information presented herein are encouraged to treat it all as storytelling and make-believe. Those interested in where the fiction begins are encouraged to read the material in the Afterword section.
As always, any resemblance between people or organizations, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Chapter 1
“We found it.”
Assistant Special Agent in Charge Silver Cassidy grabbed the radio hooked on her belt, thumbed the transmit button, and raised it to her mouth.
“Where?”
“The sick bastard threw it down the garbage chute.” Special Agent Seth Thompson’s ironic tone was unmistakable even over the radio. “Seven floors. It’s hard to recognize it as a head now. Bumpety bump bump.”
“Nice. Forensics will go crazy for this one,” she said, glancing at the group of agents standing near the bedroom door.
She caught a flash of her reflection in the hallway mirror and paused to plump her dark brown hair. The morning had been a whirlwind, between the early call on the latest murder and trying to get her daughter to school before heading to the crime scene. She knew she looked tired and harried, having had no time for makeup or hair gel in the rush.
That was fine. As the head of the FBI task force hunting this serial killer, Silver didn’t need a glamorous look or a ready-for-the-cameras presentation in order to be taken seriously. She was the no-nonsense presence representing the Bureau leadership on the investigation, so everyone at the crime scene gave her a respectfully wide berth.
A generally good idea before she’d imbibed her second cup of coffee.
Static burped at her from the two-way again.
“You got anything more up there?” Seth asked.
Silver paused, considering possible responses as she turned towards the floor-to-ceiling glass of the living room, taking in the West Side apartment’s magnificent view of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline. Some people knew how to live.
Or in this case, where to die.
“Just more of the same. Body in the bedroom tied to the bed. Evidence of loss of bodily functions and a whole lot of blood…he didn’t go easily. Over.”
Silver shook her head and pursed her lips. This was victim number four for their killer, who had been kind enough to leave a laser-printed calling card that she knew could have been made on any of tens of thousands of HP laser printers that used the same toner.
One of the forensics techs had bagged it after dusting it carefully. She caught Silver’s eye, then shook her head. Nothing. Clean as everything else had been on this frustrating hunt. Still, patience would pay off. They would find something. They just needed to look a little harder…
This was a murderer who reveled in the limelight. He clearly wanted to be known, so much so that he’d been willing to help the process along by contacting the press with photos following the first killing. The papers had gone berserk after that. One of the Florida rags had made the shots of the victim and the calling card the central feature of their front page treatment after the ruthless and sensational slaying. As a publicity grabber the little rectangle was elegant and brief, offering two words on one side.
The Regulator.
The media had immediately picked up on the moniker, and now that was the case name.
The FBI had kept the messages neatly printed on the opposite side to itself – standard operating procedure to ensure there were elements only the real killer could know about. This one said: ‘Cooler heads prevail’. She knew from lab reports on the earlier slayings that the message had been printed at the same time the card had been created. Premeditation wasn’t even in question.
Silver adjusted her belt, shifting the Glock 23 in the hip holster over, already sweating in the navy blue FBI windbreaker she wore over her blouse and slacks. They had taken over the crime scene from the NYPD detectives, who had reluctantly acceded federal jurisdiction given that this was an interstate killer. A few uniformed patrolmen waited in the hall, securing the area, and the two homicide detectives who’d initially been assigned to the case were keeping them company, unwilling to completely remove themselves from the action but finding themselves with nothing to add.
“What do we know, people?” she called out to the remai
ning group, all FBI, mostly male, white, and older than her. At thirty-six she was considered young to be running such a high-profile investigation, especially in the boys’ club that the Bureau continued to be – all the FBI’s marketing photos and insistence on politically-correct diversity notwithstanding. But Silver had earned her position and didn’t make any excuses; she was used to swimming upstream in a man’s world – had been doing so for as long as she could remember. She’d been proving herself since her training days, when she’d graduated second in her class at Quantico – she would have been first had she not annoyed one too many instructors with her independent attitude and been marked down accordingly.
That still stuck in her craw. By rights, she should have been first.
Supervisory Special Agent Sam Aravian, a tall, gangly man with olive skin and an unruly head of black curly hair, emerged from the bedroom and shot her a worried glance.
“This one is grislier than the last. It looks like he was tortured, judging by the lacerations,” he reported, shaking his head. “I’m thinking the killer was trying to get information out of him.”
“Little soon to speculate, don’t you think?” Silver cautioned.
Sam turned his head towards the dining room’s picture window and rolled his eyes, thinking Silver wouldn’t catch his expression in the dim reflection. She let it go.
“Have we got anything from the doorman? Any witnesses? What about security cams? Tell me this isn’t four in a row where the perp’s a ghost…”
“Nothing so far. The maid found him. NYPD is interviewing her with two of our agents, but she doesn’t know much, and she’s still in shock. It isn’t every day you find your employer of six years doing the headless horseman thing,” Sam offered, biting short the rest of his remark when he caught the look in Silver’s eye.
Silver keyed the radio again.
“Seth. What are you going to need to process the downstairs?”
“We have the garbage room sealed off, and two techs are on it. They called upstairs and have someone going over the chute room, too. I’ll be up in a few minutes. But I don’t need to tell you this is going in an ugly direction.”
Silver looked out at the park again and wondered when they would catch a break. It had been six weeks since the first killing, three weeks since the last, and they were no closer to closing in on the killer than when the first victim had been discovered in his car with the calling card stuck in his mouth, stabbed to death and left to drown on his own blood. That modus operandi, coupled with the killer’s contacting the press and promising more killings, had galvanized the Bureau into creating a serial killer task force even before he’d slain his second victim.
Besides the lack of any breaks in his having been seen or caught on camera, she was concerned with how clean the crime scenes were. That implied at least a passing familiarity with forensics, which didn’t bode well for their hunt. This was an organized, patient planner who hadn’t slipped up.
Yet.
But they always did.
That wasn’t completely true, though, was it? an internal voice chided her, reminding her of the ones that had gotten away.
The Capital City murderer.
The Grim Sleeper.
The Zodiac Killer.
The Original Night Stalker.
Every time she was on one of these cases her worst nightmare was that her quarry would turn out to be the next Jack the Ripper or Zodiac and simply disappear into the fog one day after a run of devastating brutality – on her watch. That fear kept her driving hard and had molded a herculean work ethic which had served her well.
“Okay, Sam. Let’s make sure we get statements from everyone who could have potentially seen anything,” Silver said, turning to survey the scene. “We should probably go to the surrounding buildings and talk to anyone who had a sightline on this place. Although that’s a longshot, given the timing.”
“I’m on it,” he agreed and moved back into the bedroom.
Silver had been with the Bureau for thirteen years and had risen through the ranks, starting in Organized Crime before switching to Violent Crime, and since making the move, this was the second task force where she’d been the assistant special agent in charge. The last one, disbanded two years earlier, had stopped a particularly ugly serial killer who’d been targeting prostitutes in the Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York areas. It had taken nine months to capture Tom Rinkley, but they had ultimately arrested him in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where he drove a cab for a living. DNA had proved his undoing – they had managed to get just enough samples from four of the victims to put him away with a clean, unassailable case – so much so that once he’d been told what he was facing, the killer had confessed to a total of a dozen slayings spanning two years, reciting them with clinical precision.
Rinkley hadn’t been a particularly bright man, but he was methodical, at least at first. They had gotten him after he’d increased his frequency and gotten sloppy, which they later discovered was because he was having breaks from reality – vivid drug-induced hallucinatory episodes where he believed he was receiving messages from God to kill unclean women.
Silver had participated in the interrogation. Her skin still crawled as she recalled his gleeful account of how he’d reduced the incidence of AIDS and deterred any women considering the vocation. The interaction had made her want to put a bullet between his eyes right at the questioning table.
“Well, Agent, they were whores. Unclean, polluted vessels for disease, sent to tempt good men and contaminate them with their foulness.”
“Good men? You mean the kind of good men that leave their wives and families at home and go seek out prostitutes in truck stops or near bus stations, like those you targeted? Those kinds of good men?” Silver had inquired in a neutral tone.
“Men are like dogs. They don’t know any better. It’s women who lead them astray and spread the corruption of their bodies and their spirits. Exterminate the vermin and the neighborhood becomes clean over time.” Rinkley had fixed her with cold, dead eyes, smirking as he winked at her. “You should know how filthy women can be, Agent Cassidy.”
Silver had outwardly been unmoved, but that night after crawling into bed, she’d cried for an hour – for her soul, for her daughter, and because the universe produced sick animals that viewed her gender as inferior, and therefore something less than human. She knew Rinkley was atypical, but being in the same room with a man who was so palpably evil strained her composure and tested her inner fortitude.
If she’d had a gun in her hand when he’d winked at her…
Silver snapped back into the present and took a few deep breaths, trying to purge her psyche of the ugly stain the predator had left.
This was her job. This was what she’d chosen, no, fought to do with her life. And sometimes you had to get your hands dirty.
But when she thought of her ten-year-old daughter, Kennedy, growing up in a world where evil like Rinkley’s prowled the streets, a small part of her wondered if they wouldn’t be better off taking these psychos behind the jail and shooting them.
Only that wasn’t the gig. Vigilante justice wasn’t a big part of the FBI curriculum.
Seth walked through the door and approached her, holding out a digital camera. “You want to take a look? It ain’t pretty.”
Silver paged through the photos, her face betraying nothing.
“What’s HQ saying about the financial connection?” Seth asked.
All four victims had been involved in the financial industry – the first had been an investment advisor; the second and third, partners in a hedge fund; and their current object of interest, the president of a software company whose clients were brokerage houses and exchanges.
Silver frowned. “They agree that’s the link, but we’re still at a dead end for now. Knowing of the connection doesn’t help us predict who’s next, or when. And let’s face it – these days, half the country would like to strangle Wall Street…”
“Shall
I add that to the suspect list? Couple of hundred million disgruntled Americans?”
“Ha.”
“What about the regulatory angle? The SEC?” Seth asked.
“That appears to be the only other connection, but they were unrelated investigations.”
The first and second victims had faced SEC charges and had settled with the agency, as in all such cases, without admitting or denying guilt. That was how the system worked – the wording of the settlements was carefully crafted so it wouldn’t open the door to lawsuits from the victims of the scams.
“True. But there has to be something there,” Seth persisted.
“No argument,” Silver agreed. “The question is what? The investment advisor was slapped for funneling clients into unapproved financial vehicles, and the hedge fund manager was accused of insider trading. Both happened years ago. You couldn’t invent two more dissimilar cases.”
“I know. But come on. The killer is calling himself The Regulator, and two of the victims faced regulatory sanctions. Seems pretty clear to me.”
“The younger of the two in the house fire – victim number three – didn’t. If our latest victim also never got into trouble with the SEC that hypothesis is all wet. That’s why I try not to go down a road based on one connection.”
“Can’t argue that,” Seth conceded, then pulled a notebook out of his windbreaker pocket and flipped through it. “Oh – and I forgot to tell you. Yesterday, after you left the office, a supervisory special agent by the name of Richard Gale called for you. Said he was from Financial Crimes.”
“That must be the resource I asked for. I want someone who is focused on the industry. We’re out of our depth if it’s something esoteric connecting the victims. I’m hoping a specialist will see something we don’t.” Silver glanced at her watch. “A supervisory special agent, huh? That’s positive – I was afraid we would get someone two years out of training.” She paused, looking around. “Have you got control of this? Looks like all the excitement is over for moi.”
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