by Dan Ames
Not like now.
The mind was like a callus. The more pressure and abrasion, the tougher it became. Too long without it, and the callus grew soft.
Mack was soft now, he knew that.
“Do you have a written report?” Mack asked, interrupting the coroner. The man nodded to his assistant who gave Mack a thick folder.
“Is there contact information for me to call you if I have any questions?” Mack asked.
“It’s all in there,” the coroner said. Mack sensed irritation in the man’s voice.
Mack followed the agent out the parking lot where they parted ways. He got into his rental car and headed for the general direction of his hotel.
The fresh air had done him some good.
And now, the feeling of sick helplessness was gone.
It had been replaced with anger.
28
For the gazillionth time, Rebecca Spencer’s hand reached for the cell phone that she no longer had.
“Stop doing that!” she yelled at herself. Her thin voice echoed in the empty room. Every time she did it, out of habit, it made her want to cry because it slammed home that her life as she had known it was being changed forever.
She didn’t have her phone. She didn’t have her parents. And she had no real idea where she was. Or who had taken her.
The urge to scream overcame her but she fought it down. She knew there was no one else out there. At least no one who would help her.
It would be wasted effort.
What she did have was a fairly good idea of why she’d been taken. Her Dad was a Senator, had a lot of money, and would pay anything to get his daughter back.
For a brief moment, she considered the possibility that it was a political kidnapping. A terrorist act. Rebecca knew that America had a lot of homegrown terrorists and that most of them saw the government as the enemy. An evil empire that had grown too powerful and was going to take away everyone’s individual freedoms.
But the more she thought about it, the more she discounted that fact.
It just didn’t feel to her like she had been grabbed by some kind of crazy group of political fanatics.
This felt like a very focused, motivated individual.
And her guess was that it was all about money.
So Rebecca had been kidnapped, and she was guessing that a ransom had been demanded.
And she knew her Dad would pay.
She also knew that her father would never rest until he caught the bastards who had taken her.
Rebecca had read plenty of news stories about her Dad, and she knew that he had a reputation for ruthlessness, even among the cutthroat back stabbers of Washington.
Everyone said that she took after him in looks…and disposition.
So Rebecca knew what her parents would say to her. That she needed to do what the kidnappers wanted. Don’t cause trouble, they would say to her.
Well fuck that.
Her mouth was still dry and she stunk. The assholes had drugged her!
She wasn’t going to play nice.
She was going to fight.
Right then, Rebecca Spencer decided that up until now, her captors had experienced the easy part of their mission.
From here on out, she would make things a lot more difficult for them.
She vowed to make these cocksuckers earn their pay.
29
Charles Starkey was having a tough time with the eggs.
This morning, seeing how pale and wan he looked, his wife had ordered him to eat two eggs she made for him. They were accompanied by two slices of toast and a glass of orange juice.
He had choked them down, barely. What he had been unable to do was make any sort of coherent conversation with his wife. He had mumbled, lost his train of thought, broken out into a cold sweat.
Eventually, she suggested he go back to bed as it was obvious he was under the weather.
Instead, he went into his home office, shut the door, and slid the deadbolt.
Now, seated at his desk in his office, the eggs were threatening to come back up and out.
Like everything else he had experienced that moment, he just swallowed it back down.
He spread his hands out on top of his desk and braced himself in his office chair.
For a crazy moment, he felt like the captain of a ship that was veering in all directions and he was powerless to gain control. Starkey laughed at the idea. The sound came out of his mouth less like a chuckle and more like a small dog stifling a bark.
With a feeling like he was disembodied, he raised his hands and watched them tap out the password to his computer.
The screen came to life.
Somehow, he managed to log onto his bank account.
This time, there was no denying what he was up against.
The double whammy walloped him. The first was an up-to-date balance sheet showing last month’s profits, all of which had been funneled into a private account for his recreational tryst in the mountains of Colorado.
The second part of the blow was a series of urgent messages sent to his work email, his personal email, and his business cell phone, which he now held in his pale, shaking hand.
He didn’t even remember taking it out of his desk drawer.
All of the messages were from some less than desirable “businessmen” associated with Newark’s underworld. The emails were coded, but the message was clear.
Starkey’s eyes shifted from the balance sheet that seemed to pulsate like a monster’s eyeball in a horror film, to the messages.
He couldn’t help but notice that the messages had arrived over the course of several days and with each message, the tone had changed. Initially, the communication was clear, but not overtly threatening.
The last message, however, had dropped all pretense.
It had been a simple missive.
Time was up.
Suddenly, Starkey bolted from his chair and rushed to his private bathroom, the eggs charging up toward freedom with astonishing urgency.
He made it just in time.
30
Mack went to his hotel, checked in, unpacked, slipped into a T-shirt and sweatpants and cracked a cold beer from the minibar.
He sat at the desk, put the coroner’s report in front of him, and waited until he’d finished his first beer, then poured himself a second, then reached for his cell phone.
He called his home phone in Florida and Adelia answered.
“Hey Adelia, it’s me,” he said.
“Mr. Mack, how is Iowa?” she asked.
“It was good, but I’m in Colorado now.”
“You sure do get around,” she said.
Mack could hear the sound of soft reggae music in the background. Both Adelia and Janice loved reggae, and so did Mack. Janice found it especially calming.
“How is she doing?” Mack asked.
“Just fine, just fine,” Adelia said. “We spent a long time in the pool today and now she’s tired.”
As was his habit, Mack fought the urge to ask Adelia to put Janice on the phone. It was pointless. She was only confused by the sound of his voice, especially if she was unable to realize who he was, which was most often the case.
“When are you coming home?” Adelia asked.
Mack looked down at the autopsy reports in front of him. He let out a sigh.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “This is a bad one.”
Over the years, Adelia had become much more than a caregiver to Janice. She and Mack had become a partnership of sorts, and at this point in his life, she knew him better than anyone else.
It was not a romantic relationship as Adelia was happily married. Besides, Mack was not about to risk losing the best thing that had ever happened to Janice since she’d been diagnosed.
Adelia was, and continued to be, a lifesaver for both of them.
“You do what you have to do, Mr. Mack,” she said. “You know I believe you were put on this Earth to do good by stopping those who do bad. So you do your j
ob and come home when you’re done. We’ll be waiting.”
Mack laughed, thanked her, and disconnected the call.
He set his empty beer in the hotel’s wastebasket, and got another one out of the fridge.
From his briefcase, he opened his laptop and a new document in which he could type out his notes and thoughts as he went through the reports.
At long last, he couldn’t put it off any longer.
He opened the first page of the first report and began to read.
It was worse than he could have imagined.
31
Ordinarily, it took almost no time for Bernard Evans to pack. He usually threw in a few Hugo Boss shirts, some dress pants, a pair of jeans and he was good to go.
But today was different.
Today, everything took five times longer than usual.
Because this trip had to be perfect.
He had bought the perfect girl and now he wanted everything else to be just as flawless. Plus, he wanted to savor every single moment of this entire experience. It wasn’t just about getting his money’s worth, although that was a big part of it.
It also gave him ample opportunities to visualize. For instance, his pants. What pair of pants did he want to have on when he had the girl tied up and ready to begin his fun? Which zipper would he pull down so he could–
He stopped himself before he went too far. He didn’t have time to jack off right now.
In the end, he took an entire extra suitcase, to give himself every possible option for his attire. He also threw in some unusual implements that he didn’t take on normal business trips.
Bernard Evans drove his Bentley 8 to the private airstrip where a jet was waiting. It wasn’t his own aircraft, the one he used for nearly all of his business trips. No, this one had been leased through a shell company and all of the papers were forged with false signature and passenger details. Should the authorities ever try to find his name on any kind of manifest, it would be nowhere to be found.
Even the plane’s eventual destination had been doctored. According to the flight plan, a group of three women, executives at a steel manufacturing plant in Pennsylvania were flying to Canada for a company summit.
He laughed. Money could buy anything.
Evans gave his bags to one of the flight personnel who promptly stowed them, and then he climbed on board.
He settled himself into the deeply luxurious leather seat and poured himself a thick glass of scotch. Evans closed his eyes and relaxed. He heard the boarding door close and he took a moment to buckle his seatbelt.
The pilots closed the door to the cockpit.
The plane’s engines rose in pitch and they taxied down the runway.
Evans felt his own heart race to match the revving of the engines. They took off and as the jet rose above the California foothills, Evans drank the booze from his glass until it was empty. He quickly poured himself another.
He knew the flight would be short, less than an hour, and that he would land in Colorado. There, he would take a rented car to a second airport, and get picked up by someone from The Store.
Evans stretched his legs out in front of him.
He thought of the beautiful girl from Iowa.
Soon, he thought. I will see you soon.
LOYALTY REWARD PROGRAM
32
Butterfly placed the bodies in the back of the truck, drove out the gate, reset the alarm systems, and took off. It would take her six hours to reach the state park just across the border with Wyoming. It would take her another three or four hours to find a spot and bury the bodies, and then another six hours to drive back to the compound.
That would be just in time to prepare for the arrival of the next guest.
She checked the satellite phone on the seat next to her. There were no messages just yet.
She longed to hear his voice, even if it sounded tinny through the extreme security measures she knew he took in his communications.
Her job was lonely, but important.
Butterfly never resented her work.
She did it for him, mostly. And for the charred remains of her past.
They had come together in their teens and both recognized the perfection of how they fit. Two puzzle pieces instantly locked together.
It had been murder that brought them to each other. Butterfly’s kill, his knowledge of what to do in the aftermath. Both skills came with such a natural ease that neither one of them had to think about what they were doing. They just did it.
She had been in trouble all of her short life, but when the man who ran the orphanage took things too far, she had simply stabbed him to death with a letter opener. She had become curious about killing and so she took her time with him. Dispassionately slicing and probing, judging blood loss.
He had barged in on them. Butterfly remembered looking into his eyes, expecting reproach, but instead saw love and acceptance.
Immediately, he shut and locked the office door. Deleted any trace of them from the computer and stole their files.
From there, they left.
Started a new life together.
He had suggested they pick new names. She watched as he built a computer from scrap parts and began hacking into databases, erasing what they both wanted to destroy and creating a new future for them.
Still, he wanted a name.
It was one of her earliest memories. An island somewhere near a lake with quaint streets and brightly painted houses. A hill with an old church.
And something called a butterfly house.
She remembered going inside, sitting on a bench and watching as hundreds of butterflies floated around her. It was like a cocoon. Beautiful and strange.
Later, when she was forced to do horrible things, she often retreated into the butterfly room and waited until it was over.
Oh, he gave her a different name for the computer stuff.
But from then on, she was someone totally new and different from anything anyone had ever been before.
Butterfly.
33
Mack didn’t have nightmares when he finished reading the autopsy reports on the children’s bodies found in the ground in the woods outside Locust Springs.
He didn’t have nightmares, because he didn’t sleep.
Mack read the coroner’s report at least five times, highlighting and rereading certain sections another dozen times. When he at last closed the folder, most of the beer he’d bought at the liquor store down the street was gone. He walked to the hotel room’s small loveseat and turned on the television. There was a travel channel, featuring a host with a lisp who was backpacking through Norway.
The light from the television caught his face and he may have slept, or at least faded into unconsciousness and back again. In his near wakefulness state, Mack saw the bodies of the children. He saw the way they had been treated, what had been done to them, and eventually, how they had been killed.
They were horrible crimes.
But what also troubled Mack wasn’t the similarities of their deaths, it was the differences.
The nine-year-old girl had been tortured. There were burn marks over most of her body, obviously done in a systematic pattern. And she had died of strangulation.
The ten-year-old boy had been beaten to death. A vicious and thorough punishment that had occurred in a matter of minutes.
The other victim, a seven-year-old girl, had been stabbed to death in a wild frenzy of violence. Nearly all of the wounds had been inflicted post-mortem.
Aside from the cruelty, and the unimaginable pain the victims must have gone through, Mack kept going back to one conclusion, and it was what troubled him so much, knowing what he was up against.
He was certain that all three children had been murdered by different killers.
34
The next morning at Denver FBI headquarters, Mack let SAC Kunzelman begin the meeting with the latest.
“We put a rush on all of the forensics and got a lot of hits. The
first victim’s identity is Chris Velasquez from Miami, Florida.”
Other agents were rapidly pinning information to the victim charts placed around the room.
Victim number two is Emily Lu from San Francisco. Chinatown, to be exact.”
“Last seen?” Mack said.
“A sporting goods store.”
“Are we getting copies of everything, the detective’s reports, witness interviews?” Mack asked.
“It’s all on the way,” Kunzelman said. “We’ve also put out a message to all law enforcement agencies, asking about possible recent abductions/missing persons cases.”
“There has to be a link somewhere between these kids,” Mack said. “There has to be.”
“I agree. There has to be a pattern, a reason these kids were selected,” Kunzelman said.
Mack looked at the photographs on the wall. He had them seared into his memory, as well as the police reports on the abductions.
“You know, it’s interesting,” he said, as several random thoughts clicked into place.
“What is?” Kunzelman said.
“Stereotypes.”
“Uh-huh.”
“If you told me a kid was abducted in Miami, what ethnicity would I think the kid was, based on general statistics?”
Kunzelman thought about it. “Well, I believe Latinos are the majority in Miami, right? So that would be my guess.”
“And if a young girl was abducted from a mall in Iowa, what ethnicity would you guess she was?”
“Again, if you were playing the odds, you would say a white girl, a farmer’s daughter.”
Mack nodded.
“We all know that these days just about every ethnicity is present in every city across the country. But at first, I thought, well, it makes sense that a Latino was taken in Miami, a white girl was taken in Iowa, because statistically, those are the best odds, right?”
Kunzelman nodded. “Statistically speaking, yes.”
