by Cole McCade
“Previous crime scene indicators from past case studies would indicate so, yes.”
“But an extremely stable one.” Malcolm braced his hands against his hips and the small of his back, arching with a groan until Seong-Jae caught an audible pop. “Unstable behavior would have gotten him transferred to a higher-security facility. If he’d been brought in for dark triad behavior in the first place, he wouldn’t have been locked up here. So he’s likely a repeat offender for something more minor…but still exhibiting traits of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism.” Malcolm let his arms drop with a deep sigh, shoulders slumping. “This is going to be one weird fucking profile.”
“Probably one of the weirdest in FBI history,” Aanga interjected, drawing closer and snapping his own gloves off so he could push his glasses up his nose and rub the peak of it. “But I think we’ve pulled together as much as we can from this hot fucking mess. Let’s let forensics do their work and parse the data. We can’t really get started until everyone’s accounted for, and we know who and how many are missing.” He tossed his head toward the door. “So let’s go review the security footage, and see what we’ve got.”
[6: YOUR HEAD WILL COLLAPSE]
MALCOLM CROWDED INTO THE SECURITY station next to Joshi and Soeng-Jae, and stared at the bank of monitors.
He wasn’t sure if he didn’t understand what he was looking at, or if he just…
Didn’t want to.
Didn’t want to believe that all it took was someone with the drive and desire to do this…to make something like this happen.
That it could be so simple.
But all it took was one man wearing a rubber rabbit mask to catch one guard by surprise, take his baton, leave him bleeding…
And suddenly an entire prison block had been liberated, revolted, and herded into that office.
He thought the singing would haunt him forever.
That echo. That demand of “Ring around the rosey” followed by that trembling, frightened chorus of “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!” while inmates held prison guards at gunpoint and the guards trembled, prayed for their lives.
At least he knew the identity of the headless man, now.
The warden.
The first to die, before the man in the white rabbit mask played a sick game of choosing one after another prison guard to execute in a frenzy of violence, beating each of them to a pulp while the others cowered, mostly naked, and tried to make sure they wouldn’t be next.
He dug the knuckle of his thumb beneath his lower lip, folding his arms in tight to his chest as he swallowed and made himself watch it again, as a tight-faced Joshi leaned forward and replayed the tape whose black and white desaturation did nothing to reduce the grisly terribleness of the blood splashing and flowing; the tinny whimpers and pleas emitting from the screen.
“Something isn’t right here,” Malcolm said. “How did he get the mask? How did he get free to assault the guard?”
Over his shoulder, Garza said, “Feels like somebody set this up. Just not sure how.”
Seong-Jae leaned in, rewinding the video to the very beginning and squinting at the screen. “Right here, at the beginning.” He tapped one short, blunt fingernail against the hallway, as the man in the rabbit mask came into view. “Where is he coming from? Why is there no surveillance footage?”
“That’s the solitary block,” Garza answered tightly. “And I have a guess as to why there’s no footage, but you’re not going to like it.”
Malcolm lifted his head, meeting her hard-snapping eyes, her mouth set in a thin line. “I can guess. Solitary means poking the animals in their cages. Letting the guards blow off some steam.”
Her jaw ground and clenched, barely-restrained anger ticking in a muscle against her cheek. “You fucking got it.”
Malcolm closed his eyes, reaching up to pull his hair free with a sigh, relieving some of the tension pulling on his scalp and giving him a fiercely painful headache. “So we have essentially useless surveillance footage, because…”
“Because he wanted it that way,” Joshi said. “This is all a staged performance.”
Even as Joshi spoke, Seong-Jae played the video forward at rapid speed until the end, a macabre nightmare unfolding in fast-forward with jerky movements and dark splashing gouts everywhere, twitching limbs, mouths open on screams turned to digitized squeaking noise…until it stopped.
As the man in the rabbit mask stepped beneath the camera mounted in the warden’s office, craned his head, peered into it significantly…
Then reached up with a gloved, wet-dripping hand and smeared it over with dark liquid, blacking it out.
Malcolm was almost grateful.
It meant he didn’t have to watch the work that came after.
The cutting, the draining, the stitching over and over and over again.
Again and again, on multiple screens, it happened—the man in the white rabbit mask skipping into the scene, smearing the camera over with blood, until there was no sign of what happened, nothing save for the meaty thwock of impact against flesh and the horrible sounds of human suffering.
He would have to assume those were the other ancillary crime scenes, and the other seven bodies.
He shuddered, looking away. “What about the exits? Did we see anyone leave?”
“Just this,” Garza said, and pushed Seong-Jae aside to pull up another video.
The same entryway they had passed through came up, only there were no guards.
As if she’d read his mind, Garza said, “The on-duty staff responded to the call of a riot after this, which left him free to just…walk right the fuck out.”
And walk right the fuck out he did, high-stepping jauntily, his jumpsuit bagging around his thin frame and the rabbit mask bobbing.
He stopped, though.
Stopped, and looked toward the camera again.
And waved, tilting his head side to side to make the rubber ears on the mask flop.
Before he turned and walked away, skipping and twirling once before vanishing out of frame.
“Well,” Malcolm said flatly, “there’s the narcissism on display.”
Joshi swore softly. “This was a clusterfuck. I know it’s minimum security, but if they’d just responded according to protocol—”
“I don’t want to hear shit about protocol,” Garza snapped. “I don’t care if this was a fucking CIA training facility, nobody is prepared for that. And I don’t want to hear your high-and-mighty bullshit when you’re just going to write a report and leave us to clean up your mess.”
Joshi’s head jerked toward her, his eyes narrowing. “Our mess? I don’t see how—”
Garza cut him off with a swipe of one hand. “You know this case. Which means you let him get away once, and he ended up in our system. So as far as I’m concerned, every dead body in there rotting in puddles of their own piss and shit is on you.”
A hush descended, Joshi and Garza staring at each other flatly, until Seong-Jae interrupted.
“Five foot eight,” he said softly. Distant, that sort of detached emotionless quiet that said he had retreated to puzzle out the problem inside his own head. “Perhaps five foot nine, based on his build. I would assume he is what he considers symmetrical, or he would already have harmed himself to correct any discrepancies.”
Malcolm lingered on the preoccupied line of Seong-Jae’s profile. “Seong-Jae…?”
“I am simply trying to begin to narrow down a description,” Seong-Jae murmured, peering at the screen. “Caucasian. Likely dark hair, if indicated by the arm hairs on the thin band of his wrist exposed between the gloves and the sleeve of his jumpsuit, but I would not be certain considering the resolution of the video and the lighting of the scene. I would estimate, from his posture and movements, as well as the particular ropy muscularity, that he must be in his late forties to mid-fifties.”
Joshi scrubbed a hand over his face, looking away from Garza and focusing on Seong-Jae. “That’s a start. Tha
t’ll help us narrow things down once we have a list of escapees, who was in solitary yesterday at the time of the incident, who was incarcerated in two thousand and one. We can at least figure out who we’re dealing with. Take a look at his record, build a history, figure out where he might go. He’s already had over a day to head in any direction, so we’re going to have to be smart. Smarter than him.”
With a frown, Malcolm studied the frozen image of the suspect. “How do we know that’s even him?”
“Pardon?” Joshi asked.
“I mean,” Malcolm said, “someone smart enough to take advantage of the right moment for this kind of break would also be smart enough to make sure the man we see in one video isn’t the man we see in another.”
Seong-Jae pulled from his near-trance, looking at Malcolm. “What are you thinking?”
“Just piecing together a timeline in scenes we haven’t seen,” Malcolm said. “He gets the mask, whatever else lets him escape, assaults a guard, liberates the prisoners in solitary, and takes advantage of the deliberately disabled security system to round up more guards and the warden in the warden’s office. We’ve got…possibly hours, then, as he goes through his routine, tortures people to death, mutilates their bodies. Timed between lunch and dinner blocks, according to the timestamps, so no roll call checks. I’m guessing people assume the warden’s working late, don’t even bother to look. Then he finishes his handiwork, leaves, commits several other assaults on his way to freedom, triggers the alarm for a riot…and while the guards are scrambling, he swaps the mask with someone with a similar build and sends him ahead as a decoy. Just in case not all the guards responded and he needed a sacrifice.”
Joshi twisted his lips. “So you don’t think that’s him, leaving through the front door.”
“I don’t know.” Malcolm dragged his hair back from his face, frowning. “I’m speculating, honestly, and it may not even be relevant. I just…don’t know anything about this. It’s…too much.”
“Unnecessary,” Seong-Jae added. “That is what makes this so jarring. If he simply wanted to escape, all of this was unnecessary. He put himself at risk at every turn, especially since even if that may or may not be the suspect on the screen, we must still at least assume an older man due to the timeline from his first to last known criminal activity, and assume that he would not have developed the strength or physique during his time in prison to be physically imposing. All of this was unnecessary, over the top, risky, dangerous. And he did it anyway.”
“Ego again,” Malcolm said. “And that Machiavellian need to orchestrate everything, no matter how much it might put him in danger. The danger was likely more the thrill of it than the murder.”
Joshi’s eyes narrowed, and he shook his head. “So we have a dark triad stable enough that he can go undetected for over fifteen years in a minimum security prison…but so thrill-seeking that he sets up these kind of risks, presumably with very little advance planning. That doesn’t match up. Something this violent is…erratic.”
“But it is not,” Seong-Jae said. “He is unhurried. Calculated. Save for that initial violent outburst, we never see him rushed, never see him nervous. He is calm and in control of each of his decisions. So we can only assume the risks were not impulse, but instead a conscious choice for gratification.”
“I,” Joshi proclaimed, “have a fucking headache.”
“No kidding,” Garza added with a snort.
Malcolm tugged irritably at his hair, then tied it up again, just to give his hands something to do. They almost itched, restless and needing to do something to distract his mind from his circling, rabbiting thoughts and the wall he kept slamming up against trying to make sense of all of this.
That had been his limitation as a psych professor, too.
Trying to tell his students why people did this, trying to make sense of it…only to finally admit that often there was no sense to it at all.
That people with the neurological programming that made them capable of such viciousness, such sadism, such raw, emotionless cruelty…
They were operating by drivers that often, people without the same programming couldn’t possibly understand.
It was a different template, and trying to fit his mind into it…
Malcolm could shove himself into that box, temporarily.
But it was never a comfortable fit, and he never quite made himself at home enough to truly understand.
Just enough to find the pattern that would lead him to a suspect.
He supposed in some ways that safeguarded him. Kept him from immersing too deeply.
He didn’t think Seong-Jae had those defenses.
And the glassy look in his partner’s eyes was really starting to worry Malcolm.
He glanced at Joshi. “Do we have any more footage, or should we walk the other scenes and then get out of forensics’ way until we get more definitive information on our escapees?”
“I think our hands are tied without that information,” Joshi said. “As much as I hate feeling helpless…”
“None of us are a one-man army,” Malcolm said. “And we’ve got to let the experts do their thing before we can do ours.”
“Yeah.” Joshi eyed Garza, then asked warily, “You’ll give us free access to the facility until we’re done?”
“As long as you don’t make a bigger mess, I don’t really have a choice,” she bit off, but the venom was gone from her words, just leaving a brittleness too close to the verge of snapping.
Honestly, she looked as weary as Malcolm felt—as all of them looked. No single person in the room didn’t look somewhat gray, haggard…as if the past few hours had sapped the life from all of them, leaving them drained and only half connected to the world of the living.
Joshi looked at each of them, before catching Seong-Jae’s arm. Seong-Jae lifted his head as if he had just been startled from a waking dream, blinking at Joshi so slowly that Malcolm worried he’d hit his head harder than he’d let on.
He knew the real reason Seong-Jae was so distant, though.
It was the only way to keep moving.
He just…needed to get his omr-an away from this.
Somewhere safe, where he could stop trying to hold himself together with bands made of numbness and nothing more.
But he still barely bit back a snarl when Joshi leaned in a little too close to Seong-Jae, murmuring into his shoulder. “I booked you a room at the Doubletree,” he said. “You can check in under your own name, but…” His gaze flicked to Malcolm. “I wasn’t able to find another room for you on such short notice. Do you need help finding a—”
Malcolm forced a tight smile. “I think I can manage my own accommodations for the night, thanks.”
Garza whistled softly. “Slasher flick and soap opera all in one crime scene. I think you just got shot down, Joshi.”
Everyone in the room stared at her flatly.
Before Seong-Jae sighed, tipping his head back to the ceiling and grinding the heel of his palm against one eye. “May we just…go? I cannot endure the smell of this place a moment longer. And we still have to look at the other scenes.”
“Yeah,” Joshi said, letting Seong-Jae’s arm go—but not without a last significant look for Malcolm. “I’ll have the car brought around so it’ll be here when we’re ready.”
But as he turned to leave the room, as he brushed past Malcolm in the cramped space, the security monitors reflecting back dim ghosts of all of them overlaid atop the frozen tableaus of horror on every screen…
He stopped.
Just for a moment.
Just long enough for a soft subvocal to drift to Malcolm, less than a whisper but clear enough.
“You’re too soft for him,” Joshi said.
Before walking away, his shoulders and spine stiff, but something in his stride promising a challenge.
C
SEONG-JAE DID NOT REMEMBER THE drive back to the hotel.
He did not remember many things about this day, and he
only hoped that would not affect him negatively on the case later.
When he had woken up from passing out…
He had felt as though he were viewing the world through a frosted window.
As if the parts of him that made up Seong-Jae had completely vacated the premises, burrowing down deep inside himself to hide until nothing could touch them, harm them, stain them dark when he felt as though he had spent his entire life trying to wash them clean.
And only just barely begun to scrape away the surface of years upon years of sin-black tarnish.
He remembered staring at dead bodies.
He remembered analyzing the precision of the skin cutouts.
He remembered seven additional crime scenes, cameras smeared with blood, bodies left dispatched with neat precision and sprawled in uncomfortable contortions, blank empty eyes, forensics teams already done taking their photographs and marking pools of blood and declaring cause of death to be blunt force trauma from a guard’s baton.
He remembered almost being angry that the sheer disrepair and lackadaisical incompetence of the facility and its staff had allowed for an entirely preventable tragedy, when only a moment’s more vigilance might have…
He did not know.
His anger had no place.
Anger would not bring back people who died needlessly.
People who, in the end, were victims less of negligence and more of one man’s destructive malice.
No.
Not one man.
This could not have been one man alone.
He stared at the Phoenix skyline through the window of the SUV as it pulled up in front of the Doubletree; he was not sure how long they had been driving, when it felt as though only two seconds ago Malcolm had rather ferociously positioned himself in the middle of the back seat, his bulk a wall between Seong-Jae and Aanga.
Seong-Jae had been rather grateful.
He had not missed Aanga’s posturing, and he could not deal with it in this moment.
But between that moment and this one, he had been caught up in his own thoughts, lost in time, drifting in this gray eternity walled off by that muddled glass, that shadowed mist that made the world seem an unreal place outside the box that dulled his vision, slowed his thoughts to sluggish molasses, filtered sounds down into tinny hazes that he almost recognized as voices.
