Terrorbyte

by Cat Connor

“On a break?” Lee offered.

  I shook my head. “As if.”

  Lee agreed, “They’re not paid to take breaks.”

  I nodded. I knew the security firm we used. Their reputation was impeccable. We checked the exterior thoroughly. The crime scene tape was intact. The door was still sealed. There was nothing untoward, no suggestion of foul play. It was possible there’d been some sort of communication meltdown and a guard hadn’t been assigned.

  “Everything’s still sealed, so unless anyone has any objections, I’d like to carry on as we’re here and it would be a shame to waste this time. Give me a minute to call the security firm now and find out why we don’t have a guard posted.”

  I scrolled through the contacts in my phone and clicked on the security company. The phone rang and rang, eventually flicking to voice mail. I left a scathing message about the lack of guards on our crime scene and made sure they knew it was going in my report. That’d make them work harder when their contract came up for renewal.

  Sam tapped my shoulder. “Come on Chicky, let’s do this.”

  The first thing I noticed as we re-entered Marie Kline’s home was that the smell hadn’t improved in the absence of her body. The rotting garbage brought stinging tears to my eyes as it assaulted my senses.

  Lee and Sam looked around the rest of the house while Mac and I checked out the kitchen.

  “What do you see?” I watched Mac’s face. I saw concentration and brow furrowing.

  We were standing next to each other in the middle of the filthy, creepy-crawly infested room. Things scuttled out of sight. Shadows made noises. Dark recesses filled with garbage moved inexplicably. Our shoulders touched and without warning, Tammy Wynette popped into my head and belted out ‘Stand By Your Man.’ It was impossible to hold back a smile.

  “I’m drawing a blank here, babe,” Mac said and turned his face to mine. “You’re smiling.”

  “I’m standing by my man.”

  He laughed. “Tammy’s joined the party, huh?”

  The song stopped. Without warning, heavy footsteps ran from the house.

  Lee hollered, “Sam’s down!”

  Everything faded to gray as I ran towards Lee’s voice with my phone open in my hand, stopping abruptly in front of them both near the back door. It was as filthy as the rest of the house. Sam was sitting on the ground clutching his side, Lee was kneeling beside him.

  “You get a description?” I asked Sam and Lee.

  “Neither of us saw anything,” Lee replied.

  I had Comms on the line and told them to advise all police to be on the lookout for someone running away from the scene. Without a description there wasn’t a lot anyone could do, except hope that someone saw the Unsub leave the premises, or noticed a stranger in the area.

  I hung up and turned my attention to Sam.

  “Sam?”

  “It’s nothing – a flesh wound.” He winced as Lee opened the jacket Sam was wearing. “He hit me from behind, all I saw was a flash of steel in my peripheral vision.”

  Gray became red, deep velvet red, as it spilled through Sam’s cream shirt.

  “Your nothing is bleeding all over,” I replied and made a decision to get him the hell out of there. We could make better time than an ambulance. Especially since emergency services were stretched to capacity by the storm. “Can you move?”

  The dirt around us was a great motivator; the less time our wounded friend spent in the disgusting house the better.

  “With help,” Sam replied.

  Lee applied pressure to the wound. I saw dark, almost black, blood ooze through Lee’s fingers. I looked for Mac. He was in the doorway examining something substantial.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “A knife.”

  I didn’t hear him properly over the pounding rain above us. “Say again?”

  Mac gloved up, then carefully lifted the object so I could see. “As I said: a knife.”

  “Jesus. That blade must be a good eight inches long and,” I squinted as light reflected off the surface, “one and a half across.”

  “Yeah,” he replied, dropping it into an evidence bag and handing it to me. “Looks military to me.”

  Sam groaned, “Good to know I wasn’t wounded by some feeble kitchen knife, Chicky Babe.”

  Lee looked at me and said, “He could have a liver laceration, Ellie. Let’s get him out of here.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You know this?”

  “Medic, Gulf War,” Lee replied, by way of explanation. “And I saw plenty of black blood in the field.”

  The things you learn.

  “How serious?”

  “It’s way up there. You have the knife in your hand, it could easily be worse than I think.”

  Mac swooped in next to Sam. He looked at Lee waiting for orders.

  “Let’s move,” Lee said. “Lift him to his feet.”

  Mac and Lee hooked their hands under Sam’s armpits and hoisted him to his feet, trying not to spill too much of his blood in the process. With support, he managed to walk to the car. I slammed the door to the house and ran after them. I hurried by them and opened the car. Lee and Mac settled Sam in the backseat.

  I dropped the bagged knife on the floor in the front. I leaned down, reached under the seat, pulled out the first-aid kit and gave Lee all the wound dressings we had. The blood was more black than red, as it dripped from Lee’s hand when he grabbed the packets and opened a hemostatic sponge. I slid into the front passenger seat. Lee packed the sponge into the wound and applied pressure. Sam groaned.

  Mac drove. Visibility was one and a half car lengths at best and the rain came down in sheets. The torrential rain drowned out all external noise and plunged the whole world into the depths of a thick gray murk. We had no idea what the traffic was like. I hit the lights and reached for the radio. A flick of my wrist changed the frequency to an open channel.

  “This is FBI Special Agent Conway requesting all available cars for traffic assistance. Officer down! Cut us a path from Vale to Fairfax Hospital on Gallows … We’re in a black Expedition, grill lights active.”

  The airway flooded with replies. Less than a mile later a police cruiser slipped in front of us. Flashers lit the interior of the car, sirens wailed in the wind. In the wing mirror I saw another cruiser slide in behind.

  The radio chirped and a voice burst forth, “Agent Conway, stick to my bumper.” The brake lights flashed on the car ahead.

  “Will do. And you are?”

  “Officer Rich Edwards. Mac, you okay?”

  Mac and I smiled at each other. He was an old family friend. Their fathers worked together for thirty years. I depressed the talk button for Mac, “I’m okay, Rich. I’m halfway up ya tail pipe. Go ahead and put your foot down.”

  I was so glad Mac was driving. Aquaplaning was a definite possibility and not one I relished.

  The radio crackled. “All roads are wide open. Traffic stopped to get you through. We’ll take you all the way. Hospital notified.”

  “Ten-four.”

  I curbed the urge to add ‘Rubber Duck’; C.W. McCall’s ‘Convoy’ played through my head. What was it with the country music?

  Lee whistled from the back. “Damn, Ellie, you don’t mess around, huh?”

  “The longer he’s in the company car … the bigger the cleaning bill.”

  Sam managed a laugh. “You’re all heart, Chicky.”

  I settled back into the seat. Lights flashed even brighter against the gray wet background, causing my head to pound in time with each pulse from the flashers ahead.

  I puzzled over Sam’s stabbing. Why would our Unsub go back to the scene? Did he leave something behind? I drifted back to the house. My eyes closed as the scene rolled out. I’ll just bet there’s a country song there somewhere. Couldn’t think of a song about a filthy dump of a house, so I moved further into the memory bank, examining everything about the yard and house.

  The outside: mud patches on weed-strangled lawn;
overgrown flower beds under the front windows, long since choked with weeds. Closed curtains, ripped and hanging in droops from the top. Initial impression: those who resided there didn’t care much for their surroundings. This dank hole shouldn’t exist in middle-class America. The cracked glass panel in the front door seemed to fit with the rest of the unkempt exterior. I walked through the door, and it didn’t smell any better in my memory. The spartan furnishings were possibly thrift store purchases and had definitely seen better days. A book stack grabbed my attention. She read Stephen King and John Grisham. I walked on.

  Why did he go back? I stood in the center of the kitchen. What did I miss? I took careful stock of my surroundings. The poem written around the walls; body; ribbon; bourbon; black Sharpie pen. Whoa! Back up. A black Sharpie on the counter, half-hidden under debris, as if it’d rolled away.

  I jabbed at my phone. My fingers hit buttons before my mind caught up, searching for the number for Charlie Coleman, who headed up our forensics team.

  “Charlie, it’s Ellie Conway; did you process the Vale scene?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Did you see a black marker pen?”

  “I picked one off the counter, ma’am. Strange writing on it … foreign … Russian maybe.”

  “Process that A-sap.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “We have a knife for you, too. Looks military, has Sam’s blood on it. Can you have someone meet us at Fairfax Hospital to pick it up.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Sam okay?”

  “He will be.”

  “Good to know.”

  ‘Yes, ma’am’ flowed so easily. I knew it didn’t mean ‘Yes, ma’am!’ It meant ‘We’ll get to it as soon as we can, ma’am. No promises. Might not even be this month, ma’am.’

  I felt the corners of my mouth turn up. Finally, we had something useful, not just another body. Bad enough that the assailant stabbed Sam from behind and none of us saw anything.

  Until the marker pen discovery, this had looked like a very grim day. Now we had caught a break – maybe even a fingerprint or two. We also had a knife that might reveal more pieces of the puzzle. I crossed my fingers that the evidence would be processed quickly. That answers would be forthcoming.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Have A Nice Day

  We placed Sam in the capable hands of the Inova Fairfax Hospital emergency surgical team. Competent as they were, it didn’t diminish the worry or the waiting time. I paced the emergency room waiting area. Lee and Mac leaned on a wall, away from the ill and injured, watching me and talking quietly.

  A doctor hurried from behind the double glass automatic door and beckoned to me – Lee and Mac came too. He confirmed Sam’s injury was a liver laceration and told us he would go up for surgery as soon as they had a theater available. He was otherwise healthy and strong, which the doctor assured us would work in his favor.

  Hospital emergency departments are huge time-sinks. It was late when Charlie sent Adam, a member of the forensics team, to meet us a few minutes after two theater nurses wheeled Sam away to the surgical suite. I handed over the knife and watched as Adam signed the evidence receipt. Satisfied the chain of evidence remained intact, I sent him back to the lab.

  Sam’s parents were waiting for him in recovery, making our presence unnecessary. Part of me wanted to stay, despite Mac insisting that I would be better off getting some rest at home.

  I’d never had to talk to the parents of a colleague before; well, I had, but not to tell them their son was seriously wounded. It sucked out loud and then some.

  God, is this what it’s like for Caine? A horrible sense of guilt when anything shitty happens? A gut-wrenching need to do penance started eating at my soul, gnawing away on the decision I’d made that led to this unfortunate outcome. How does he deal with this?

  “I need a minute.”

  “You okay?” Mac looked worried. Good going; that was exactly what Mac needed: to worry about me even more than he did already.

  “I just need a minute, Mac.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  When I stopped walking, I was staring through a window into the dark wet parking lot. Lights illuminated large puddles. Wind caused small waves in some of the bigger pools of water. Every now and then, I caught sight of my own reflection. Not pretty. I called Caine.

  “It’s me. I got a question.”

  I imagined his face as he spoke, “Yeah, me too. You first.”

  “How do you deal with the guilt?”

  “First you accept that you cannot control other people’s actions.”

  “My actions put Sam in danger.”

  “No, Ellie, your actions took you all back to a cleared crime scene. The Unsub made a decision.”

  “But …”

  Caine interrupted me, “But nothing. Would you have done a damn thing differently, if there was a do-over?”

  “I would’ve swept the place before going in.”

  “Well, maybe you learned something tonight.”

  “It’s one shitty fucking lesson.”

  “You’ll never do it again,” Caine seemed quite sure. “You think you’re the only one who has ever made a mistake?”

  I couldn’t imagine Caine ever making this type of fucktarded screw-up. Sam was in surgery. This was big.

  “I should’ve looked for the guard and not proceeded until I’d found him.”

  “Did anything look out of place? The tape? The seals?”

  “No.”

  “And earlier, did you sign off the crime scene and turn it over for cleaning?”

  “No, I turned it over to the bomb squad; they turned it over to crime-scene investigators. I ordered a guard so we could get another look.”

  “Was there a general duty guard posted?”

  “Yes. I told bomb squad to organize the guard. To my knowledge a general duty guard was posted.”

  “That will be in your report. Obviously we have a competency issue with the security company we’re using, or someone didn’t relay the instruction.”

  He had a valid point. I still felt guilty and it was all on me. But he did have a valid point.

  “The first thing I was going to do once we’d finished at the house was call the company again and find out where my guard was. Then Sam …” Saying what happened was more of a struggle than I expected it to be. I braced myself and forced the words out. “Then Sam was stabbed. Everything else went out the window. I did call before we went in but there was no reply.” I cleared my throat. “I left a message but have yet to hear back from the guard or the company.” My conscience smarted. I couldn’t help wondering if the guard had fallen victim to foul play and no one knew.

  Caine handed out some decent advice. “Chase it up when you can. If you think he is somehow involved then get to it A-sap.”

  “Okay. What was your question?”

  “Do you need to replace Sam?”

  Oh, man. I hadn’t even considered replacing him. “I can’t make that decision yet. I want to wait on the outcome from his surgery.”

  “Let me know.” His voice softened a little, “You okay, Ellie?”

  “Yep.”

  “You’re sure? I can lend a hand if you want.”

  Absolutely not! “I’m okay, Caine. Thanks.”

  “Keep in touch, kid.”

  “Have a nice night.”

  Rain hit the windowpane, making the evening seem even bleaker than before. I let Caine’s words settle; I knew he was right; I knew I could deal with it.

  I called the security company and left another message, this time for the boss to get back to me with information on the wayward guard. I felt the prickle again and really hoped nothing bad had happened. This was a company that had a large slice of federal pie; we all used them to guard scenes. The owner, Sean O’Hare, was the twin brother of the Director of the FBI, but that’s not why we used the firm. We used them because Sean O’Hare was ex-CIA and really knew his shit.

  Before I’d put my ph
one away it rang in my hand. I glanced at the screen before answering. Sean himself.

  “You fielding queries these days?” I said.

  “Only for you. I heard. How’s Sam?” So my messages did get through.

  “In surgery,” I replied. “Where’s the guard?”

  “Dead. We found him twenty minutes ago. Throat cut, body stashed in a nearby alleyway.”

  “I’m sorry.” I was. Now I knew why Sean was talking to me at this hour, instead of putting his kids to bed. He would be notifying the man’s next of kin.

  “Take care, Agent Conway.”

  “You, too, Sean.”

  I stuffed my phone in my pocket.

  It didn’t take me long to walk back through the hospital and find Mac and Lee stationed by a coffee machine outside the surgical suite.

  I told them about the guard and we headed off.

  Rich had waited for news out in the emergency department. Mac gave him an update and promised to buy him a beer for his help. Translation: he’d throw a few hundred dollars on a tab at O’Reilly’s bar for the officers at the Fairfax Police Department, then whip his ass in a game of poker and my money was on it being Texas Hold ’em. I think I’ll be busy that night. A good book and a bubble bath sounded inviting.

  The day had been a long one; long and tiring. The ongoing torrential rain threatened to wash Northern Virginia away. Streets were flooded, gardens were swamped, with houses held fast behind walls of sandbags – and a serial killer who preyed on the mentally ill.

  It was too much of a coincidence that all our victims suffered from some form of mental illness. It looked as though this was the crucial factor. Man, that sucked out loud.

  Lee came home with us: he didn’t have much choice. Our cars were sitting in the driveway and he was our ride.

  Night darkened, torrential rain gave way to persistent dripping under building thunderclouds and tornado watches.

  “Stay, Lee. It’s too dangerous to drive all the way out to Alexandria this evening.”

  Lee nodded. He looked as tired as we did. I made up the bed in the guest room and put fresh towels in the bathroom. Tonight I am supervising-special-agent-Chicky-Babe-hostess extraordinaire.

  Mac cooked us dinner. It was good steak and even better salad. We ate like ravenous animals, not stopping until our plates were empty.