The figure turned back to the woman and ripped the duct tape from her mouth in a single motion as the national anthem ended, and flipped the silver strip at the television. The room fell silent but for the woman’s ragged, harsh breathing. When she spoke, her voice was a hoarse whisper.
“Please. Don’t do this.”
The figure backhanded her, and the woman’s head jerked to the side from the force of the blow, her hair askew. She blinked rapidly, obviously dazed, and then the background filled with the sound of keening – the ululating of mourning women drifting from off-camera speakers.
A gloved hand reached for something out of the frame and returned with an electrolarynx vocal synthesizer. The figure held it against its throat, and a monotone robotic voice filled the screen.
“You are a child of privilege. You live in a nation of spoiled children. You destroy other societies without a second thought, claiming to bring them freedom or to protect yourself. Now you know the fear of real danger. Today is your day of reckoning.”
The woman shook her head. “No. Please. I beg you. I haven’t done anything.”
The figure held up the cleaver and studied the blade. “That is correct. You have done nothing. Just as the innocents everywhere who are butchered have done nothing. That is the world you have created. That is the world you live in – fragmented, each individual an island, apathetic and uninterested in the destruction your lifestyle inflicts upon others.”
The woman closed her eyes and her lips moved in silent prayer. The figure moved out of the frame. A moment later the background ambiance changed to a wailing clarinet over a bouncing Dixieland jazz melody, and the figure stepped into the scene again, a single red rose in one hand and the cleaver in the other. The woman’s eyes opened and stared down at the flower, which the figure had tossed into her nude lap. She appeared confused, and then her face froze in fear as the figure raised the cleaver above her left arm, pausing dramatically before swiping down in a brutal blow.
A spray of bloody mist dusted the camera lens as the woman’s hand and half her forearm dropped with a thump onto the garbage bags. The bouncing music played on, drowned out by the woman’s agonized shrieks, an otherworldly sound as she howled like a wounded animal.
Five minutes later the screen went black. Three men seated at a battered wooden conference table stared in horrified disbelief at the monitor upon which they’d watched the abomination of the woman’s torture and dismemberment.
The oldest of the trio, his creased face red and puffy from years of hard drinking, sat back and exchanged a glance with the others.
“Jesus God…” he began, and choked on the last syllable.
“Yeah,” the man next to him whispered.
“Well, we know how the body at the school got that way,” the third man, NYPD homicide detective Ron Stanford, said in a hushed voice. A headless, appendage-less torso had been discovered in the schoolyard of an uptown Catholic school the prior day, scarring at least a dozen children for life. The video answered any questions about where it might have come from.
Ben Rollins, the young homicide inspector who’d caught the case, shook his head. “I’ve seen some disturbing crap in my life, but this takes the cake.” He looked to his silver-haired superior. “What do you think, Captain?”
“I think I’m not going to be able to eat dinner,” Captain Elton Larraby muttered. “What kind of sick bastard would kill someone on video? To what end?”
Ron considered the overhead ventilation grill before returning his attention to the blank screen. “Someone who wants his deeds commemorated. Who wants the world to see what he’s done – to call attention to himself. Obviously, there’s some kind of symbolism at work, both with disposing of the body at a school and with the video. He’s trying to send a message.”
“A political message, judging by the footage,” Ben agreed. “We need to get Homeland involved.”
“Why?” Larraby demanded.
Ben looked less sure. “This could be terrorism. All the anti-war rhetoric…”
Ron shook his head. “No, this is the equivalent of a selfie taken by a monster, using the pretense of being anti-war to butcher a young woman. Since when did being anti-war equate to terrorism, anyway?”
“I just thought…”
“This is murder, plain and simple,” Ron said. He sighed. “What do we know?”
“The news broadcast was day before yesterday’s local late news, at eleven p.m. The rest of it, we’re working on,” Ben said. “The video was received by all the major stations this afternoon, sent via the Internet in compressed format.” He paused. “They’re already calling the bastard ‘the Rose Killer.’ Leave it to our press to glorify a monster at every turn.”
“Any progress on the school?” Larraby asked.
“Not yet,” Ben admitted. “No traffic cams around it, and nobody living in the area saw anything. We’re running all the usual tests, but forensics isn’t optimistic.” He shrugged. “There was evidence of recent sexual activity, but no semen.”
“How recent?” Ron demanded.
“Within four to six hours of the victim’s death, at the latest. There are abrasions consistent with rough play.”
Ron swiveled to face Larraby. “At least we have some promising threads we can follow from the footage. First, we can trace the IP of the sending computer. And there’s the electrolarynx – those aren’t exactly common. And then the paint. The brush. The raincoat. The music. The flower. All of it – it’s a goldmine if we can catch a break on even one element.”
The captain frowned. “The networks are going out with this tonight. I argued against it, tried to convince them, but they refused to put a lid on it. Best I could get was an agreement to only show a brief snippet of the beginning, so we can see if someone can identify the woman.”
“Can’t you quash it?” Ron asked.
“Negative. Believe me, I tried. But apparently this is a ratings week, and nobody wants to suck hind tit by censoring themselves. Just be glad they aren’t going to show the whole thing.”
“Which means we’re going to have every nutcase in the city calling in phony confessions by midnight,” Ben spat in disgust. “We’ve already had a dozen from the news on the torso discovery. This will up it to hundreds.”
“Goes with the job,” Larraby said. He rubbed a calloused hand across his face. “Ron, tell me this isn’t the beginning of a serial spree.”
Ron shook his head. “I can’t. My bet is that he’s been thinking about filming this little masterpiece for a long time. The odds that it’s a one-off are slim to none. Sorry.” He eyed Ben. “Obviously, we need to run a search for similar MOs. I’d go nationwide.”
“You think he’s done this before?”
“He came prepared. My hunch is yes.”
Ron Stanford looked suddenly older than his mid-thirties. A career as the NYPD’s floating serial killer and sensational homicide specialist weighed heavily on evenings like this. Even as hardened as the men in the conference room were, the video had clearly unsettled them. They were accustomed to discovering the aftereffects of murder, not viewing a particularly brutal one real-time, and none would sleep that night even though they habitually swam in the noxious waters of death.
“And Homeland? FBI?” Ben asked.
“I’ll run it past them,” Larraby said. “But my guess is Homeland won’t want any part of it. The feds? Right now there’s no reason for them to care.”
“There will be when the next one appears,” Ron stated flatly. “And there will be a next one.”
“The mayor is already freaking out,” Larraby said. “He’s going to call a press conference to get in front of it.”
Ron rolled his eyes. “Oh, good. A press conference. Because those have proven so useful in solving crime.”
Larraby shrugged apologetically. “I know, I know. I’ll do the talking-head routine and keep you out of the spotlight as long as possible. But you know the drill. That won’t last long – he�
�s already demanded a briefing within the hour.”
“What are you supposed to tell him?” Ben asked.
Larraby frowned. “That we’re pursuing all leads and can’t discuss the case at this early juncture.”
Ron nodded. “I don’t envy you.”
The captain grimaced. “Yeah, well, you’ll be up to bat soon enough.”
The meeting broke up, and Larraby left Ben and Ron to coordinate their response. They agreed on a distribution of tasks, with Ben taking the lead – Ron was still embroiled in the trial of a group of thrill-kill teens who’d been murdering homeless men for kicks, so his time was limited until the verdict came in. The attorney general had demanded he be present for the closing arguments so the jury could see his face, which he believed was a colossal waste of time, but he’d been forced to play along. Ron was a minor celebrity in the city after solving several high-profile murders, including the recent Red Cap serial killings that had panicked Manhattan over the summer.
Ben made his way to his cubicle and Ron to his. The day shift was long gone, and the floor largely empty now except for a few detectives finishing up their projects. Ron glanced at the vacant cubicles as he passed and felt a pang of envy at the nine-to-five life most of his peers enjoyed. That had never seemed appealing to him before, but now, after a tough year of emotional roller coaster rides and some of the most challenging cases of his career, there was something to be said for being able to clock out and go home, leaving the job on the desktop until the following day.
He flopped down in his worn chair and reached for his phone, the message indicator blinking a notification with the regularity of a metronome. Ron punched in his password and listened to the voice mails – a call from forensics that his results were in and had been emailed to him; another from one of his colleagues with whom he was putting to bed a grisly stabbing death of a teenage runaway skater chick who’d been killed by her stoned boyfriend; one from Sarah Lieberman, a reporter with the New York Times who’d been hounding him for an interview for an article she was working on that would feature Ron as the new face of the NYPD.
The final call was a voice he hadn’t heard for three months, and he sat up, instantly alert, his heart rate increasing by twenty beats per minute.
A female voice.
“Ron? It’s Tess. Tess Gideon. I…I’m back in town. Got a new cell number. Call me when you have a little time to catch up.”
He jotted down the number and replayed the message, savoring the musical lilt of Tess’s cadence, every word to his ear a promise. He’d all but abandoned hope of ever hearing Tess’s voice again when she left New York to spend time in Europe after her father’s savage murder.
But she was back in the city and wanted to catch up.
To pursue that which they’d agreed to leave unexplored until she was on firmer emotional footing.
Ron smiled to himself and tossed the pen aside. His otherwise bleak evening had just brightened.
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Table of Contents
Books by Russell Blake
About the Author
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
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Excerpt from Fatal Deception
Table of Contents
Books by Russell Blake
About the Author
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
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Excerpt from Fatal Deception
Fatal Exchange (Fatal Series Book 1) Page 34
