A Blood Thing

by James Hankins

  “He put something into my hand and said, ‘Shake hands with the governor, and when you do, give him this.’ It was a cell phone. He said, ‘When you give it to him, you have to say something to him, something very specific, so listen carefully. You have to get this exactly right or . . . well, you know.’ He actually said that. ‘Well, you know.’”

  “Do you remember what he wanted you to say?”

  “Word for word. I was terrified of getting it wrong, so I made sure I got it right. I’ll never forget it.” He paused, then said, “I was supposed to hand the governor the phone and say, ‘Keep that phone with you at all times, Governor. And keep it secret. You’re going to need it after the arrest.’ And I did it just like that. I handed him the phone and said those exact words. I had to. For my family. I didn’t know there was anything wrong with it. Was it illegal? Did I aid and abet anything? Am I an accomplice or something?”

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Rafferty. We don’t blame you for doing what you did. You’re not in any trouble.”

  The man’s relief was palpable. His entire body seemed to relax. “I was so worried,” he said. After a pause, he added, “I’ve been wondering . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Is this about the governor’s brother?”

  “I can’t discuss that. Sorry.”

  Rafferty frowned. He seemed to be thinking about something; then his eyes widened a tiny bit, and Henry figured he had just remembered Henry’s last name and connected the dots.

  “I understand, Lieutenant,” he said. “I get it. Listen . . . do you think my family is in any danger now? I’ve been beside myself. We have an appointment on Wednesday to have a home security system installed, but that’s two days away.”

  “A security system is never a bad idea, but I think your family is safe. You gave the man what he wanted. He has no reason to harm any of you. My guess is that once you served his purpose, he forgot all about you.”

  “I hope so. I . . . haven’t told my wife about any of this. I didn’t want to scare her. And, in case anything terrible happened . . . well, I didn’t want her to know I had any part in it.”

  “That’s understandable. Mr. Rafferty, can you tell me anything about the man based on his voice? Age? Race? Education? Anything at all?”

  Rafferty thought hard for a moment. “I was pretty scared, I have to admit. And he was sort of half talking, half whispering, you know? It made it hard to pick up on anything.” He thought a moment longer. “Honestly, I don’t think his voice told me anything about him. It was a man, I’m sure of that. But . . . that’s about it.”

  Damn.

  Henry stood and gave Rafferty his card.

  “Please call me if anything else comes to you. Anything at all.”

  Rafferty promised that he would, then said, “Lieutenant? I hope everything turns out okay. You know, with your brother.”

  “Thanks,” Henry said, while thinking, Join the club.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Wyatt Pickman sat in his basement, at the desk in his war room, as he thought of it, his eyes on the beautiful mosaic of photos, threads, papers, and sticky notes covering one entire wall. His mind was elsewhere, though. He was thinking of Tyler Kane’s arraignment, which he had witnessed from the back row of the courtroom’s gallery. He’d been surprised when the judge granted bail, even with the requirement that Tyler wear an ankle monitor. Pickman hadn’t expected that, had thought it unlikely, in fact. But he had anticipated it, of course. He anticipated everything.

  He walked over to a row of file cabinets and stopped in front of the first one, which held files for his most recent jobs, including his current one. These days he took only one job per year. He could afford to do that because of all the money he’d made during the first two decades in a profession at which he excelled, though he would have had difficulty describing to anyone exactly what that profession was. He had killed people for money, but he wasn’t a hit man. Killing, when necessary, was sometimes his main objective, and other times it was incidental to the primary purpose for which he had been hired. He also blackmailed people, but he wasn’t just a blackmailer. And he framed them, utterly ruining them. So he was something of a jack-of-all-trades. In his mind, what he did was make wishes come true—the wishes of those who hired him—though he had to admit that those wishes were, without exception, extraordinarily dark.

  Years ago he would take the highest-paying jobs, regardless of what they entailed. He would do anything, literally anything, for the right price. And he took as many jobs as he could handle and still execute to his exacting standards. These days, though, given how profitable the wish-granting business had been for him over the years, he didn’t need to base his decisions solely, or even in large part, on his remuneration. As long as a minimum monetary compensation threshold was met, he accepted the jobs that seemed the most interesting.

  And because he restricted himself to one assignment per year at most, he could put his absolute all into it, devote himself utterly and entirely to it, plan it to the last and most minute detail, then watch with immense satisfaction as everything played out exactly as he had envisioned. It was his passion. His art. Really, it was the only reason he had for getting out of bed each morning. The only reason he bothered to breathe and eat. He had nothing else. What else was there? He had no use for companionship. People bored him. He couldn’t remember the last person he’d met worth his time, with whom he could converse without feeling disdain. Travel? To travel, he’d have to mingle with countless others for whom he felt nothing but contempt. He had neither the desire nor the patience. Sex? He had always been able to satisfy himself more fully than anyone had been able to do for him.

  No, he lived for his jobs, thankful that he was in a position to give each the attention it deserved. He could plan it meticulously and execute it with precision. Like Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, lying on scaffolding, paint dripping into his eyes, blinding him, for more than four years. Every color, every brushstroke, absolute perfection.

  With his hand resting on the file cabinet drawer, his mind wandered to last year’s job. As always, it had gone exactly as he’d planned. Every gear turning when he’d wanted, all the actors in the play he’d choreographed unaware that they were doing his bidding, believing their choices were the product of free will when, in fact, their behavior had been scripted by him months before. He’d put things in motion, and the people involved reacted as he’d known they would. And in the end, the powerful CEO of a Fortune 500 company had been laid low and was serving thirty years in federal prison for his part in an international child pornography ring. It didn’t matter that the man had never exhibited even the slightest unhealthy interest in children, or even pornography in general. All that mattered was that his wife wanted to see her husband punished brutally for some transgression about which Pickman didn’t care, and that she could pay handsomely to see that accomplished. What attracted Pickman most to the job was that the wife left the punishment entirely to him. He loved when that happened, when he could let his creativity soar. So he’d spent months laying the groundwork, planting seeds on the Internet, hiding files on the CEO’s computers at home and in his office. For good measure, Pickman had broken into several homes where young children lived and stolen underwear from their hampers. Only a pair or two from each house, not enough to alarm anyone. Just before he was ready to involve the police, he hid the garments in the CEO’s expansive walk-in closet at home, on a high shelf, in a box containing dozens of photographs that were highly illegal to possess. Then he sat back and watched it all unfold exactly as he had meant for it to.

  His favorite job, though, had been seven years ago. It was actually two jobs in one. A wealthy woman in Boston who’d had a long-term affair with a well-known local television newscaster wanted him dead after he had, in her opinion, used her and tossed her aside. And a high-powered lawyer from the tony city of Weston, Massachusetts, a dozen miles from Boston, wanted to punish his wife for infidelity and
wanted her out of his life for good, but he didn’t have the stomach to have her murdered. So Pickman took both jobs, was paid well for both jobs, and murdered the Boston newscaster and pinned it on the Weston wife.

  Now, that job had been interesting. He’d had to fabricate evidence of a relationship between two people where none had truly existed. Notes, flowers, motel receipts, everything lining up with both of their schedules. He could have taken care of either of his client’s requests separately in a matter of weeks, perhaps even days, but where was the excitement in that? Where was the artistry? So instead, he laid the groundwork over a period of seventeen months, and when he finally shot the newscaster to death, and all of his meticulously crafted evidence came to light, the jury voted in less than three hours to convict the wife. It was sublime.

  Pickman had waited years for the chance to do something like that again, something truly worthy of his skills. And then this job came along, and he immediately saw its potential. It would be his best work yet. He knew the level of planning that would be required. He foresaw the challenge and the potential pitfalls. He understood how many players would be involved, how many moving parts he would have to track and guide, how many juggling balls he would have to keep in the air. He envisioned how the numerous pieces would have to be crafted to mesh together perfectly. And he’d known almost immediately that he would take the job. How could he not? It would be beautiful. He’d been so excited about it, in fact, that he had agreed to do it for a mere $325,000, well below what he would normally charge for any job, much less one that he’d known would be as complex as this one. Then again, that complexity was the reason he’d taken the job in the first place.

  He pulled open the file drawer, found a thick folder labeled Tyler Makes Bail, and carried the contingency plan to his desk, where his bible lay open. He flipped through the book to Part IV, Section B, Subsection 3, labeled Tyler Goes to Jail, and removed the entire section, replacing it with the pages from the folder, pages he had already run through a three-hole punch.

  With Tyler awaiting trial on home arrest instead of behind bars, the revised overall plan was far more complicated. And riskier. And bloodier. But, he admitted to himself, it was also far more interesting.

  He wondered idly if Andrew and Henry Kane had found Alexander Rafferty yet. He figured they would, eventually. Did they know that the voice on the other end of their phone call had never heard of Alexander Rafferty before that morning? That he had chosen him as he’d exited his Hyundai, then called a source at the Montpelier PD—whom he had secured through blackmail years earlier—to run Rafferty’s plates and obtain his name and address? Then found Rafferty online and obtained everything he needed right from his various social media accounts? All in a matter of minutes as he sat in his vehicle four parking spots away from Rafferty’s car? He doubted they’d figured all that out, but he wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d been able to identify Rafferty through photographs or video. Pickman had expected that, of course, and it didn’t trouble him in the least.

  He knew he should probably email his client with an update, give an assurance that Tyler Kane’s house arrest wouldn’t impact the plan, but Pickman wasn’t interested in hand-holding. He’d been hired for his expertise, and his client would simply have to trust in it.

  He reached for the burner phone on his desk, though, and for the voice-changing device beside it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Andrew stood outside one of the five-story apartment buildings known collectively as the Rutland Projects, located on the outskirts of the city that gave them their name. The projects were an embarrassment to the state, a scar on its face, and Andrew was sick to death of them. Every meeting in which the subject of them came up grew heated. Every time they were mentioned by the media, a new storm of controversy raged for a week. Every press conference in which Andrew was asked about them grew tense, despite his best efforts to avoid that.

  The seven buildings were big, dilapidated, graffiti-decorated eyesores. Worse, inspections had revealed them to be structurally dangerous. Their only occupants for the last dozen or so years had been squatters, drug users, and prostitutes. More crimes were committed inside the abandoned apartments than probably occurred in the rest of Vermont combined. Other than the people using them illegally, most folks agreed that the projects had to be torn down and the land repurposed. The problem was that no one could agree on what its new purpose should be.

  According to a city councilman, the citizens of Rutland wanted a new shopping mall. A city planner, purportedly speaking on behalf of the city’s mayor, said His Honor wanted a new sports complex. A lobbyist advocating on behalf of local business owners was pushing for high-end apartments, which would bring hundreds of upper-middle-class families into the area, families who would spend money in their establishments. A major campaign contributor, who had been trying for two weeks to get a meeting with Andrew to discuss the issue, had ideas of his own on how the properties should be used, ideas that he had yet to share with Andrew but that would no doubt benefit the contributor far more than anyone else. No one seemed to want what Andrew wanted, though, which was to replace the old, run-down, crime-ridden low-income housing with new, safe, affordable low-income housing.

  “This place really does suck,” the woman beside Andrew said.

  He looked over at Louise Landry, Vermont’s commissioner of housing and community development, who was staring up at the building in front of them with something bordering on horror, as if she feared it might topple over at any moment and bury them in rubble.

  “I can’t argue with you on that,” Andrew replied. No doubt Landry registered his slight emphasis on the final word of his sentence. He and Landry had been clashing over this issue, among a few others, for months. She concurred on the need for more low-income housing but disagreed that it should be located here. Andrew hoped he was wrong, but he harbored suspicions about the basis for her opinion, specifically about whether it had been paid for. Probably by Clifton Barnes, he figured, a wealthy property owner and developer with reputed connections to organized crime. Barnes’s representatives had been among those pushing for high-end apartments to be built here and additionally for Barnes’s company to build them.

  “I want to go inside,” Andrew said.

  He’d asked his security team to take a handful of cops through this building a few hours ago, and to do so loudly, knowing it would clear the place out for this visit. Since then, officers had stood guard at each corner of the building to make sure no one slipped back in until they were gone again.

  The two state troopers comprising today’s security detail led the way into the building. They each turned on a powerful flashlight and handed one to Andrew and to Landry. Electricity to the buildings had been shut off years ago.

  They stepped through the front doors into the vestibule, where the dim light spilling in from the outside illuminated a wall of mailboxes, several of which were missing their little bronze doors. With a tilt of his head, Andrew indicated that he was ready to move on, and the security team walked farther into the building, crossing into the dark lobby. Flashlight beams sliced through the darkness, crossing and recrossing as the group directed the light at their surroundings. The walls and both elevator doors, which were closed, were covered with profanity and gang symbols spray-painted in a variety of garish colors. Andrew’s beam found a used condom, an empty Rolling Rock bottle, and a syringe with a needle attached.

  “Lovely,” Landry said.

  Andrew turned to Greg Ramos, today’s security team leader. “When you cleared the place earlier, did you go inside any of the apartments?”

  He nodded to the other member of the security team and said, “Paul and I each went through quite a few of them personally. Maybe a third. Local cops did the rest.”

  “Was that safe?”

  “Probably not.”

  “And what did you see?”

  “Same as in here. Graffiti. A lot of empty bottles. Too many used needles to co
unt. Some rooms had dirty mattresses in one corner and a bucket with used condoms in another.”

  “Any people living here?”

  “Looks like it. At least a dozen apartments seemed occupied. Piles of clothes, boxes and cans of food, buckets with human waste in them. You could tell that people had been there not long before we started knocking on doors. We could hear footsteps in the stairwells. People trying to be quiet. We left them alone, per your instructions.”

  “I hope this doesn’t sound insensitive,” Landry said, “but thank God they’re finally starting demolition next month.”

  The buildings had become so unsafe that the civil engineers brought in to assess them had determined they needed to be completely razed, and the sooner the better.

  “No disrespect intended, Governor, I swear,” Landry said, “but please remind me why we’re here.”

  “We’re here because I wanted to see this with my own eyes. And I thought you might want to see it, too. And I wanted to see the surrounding community. We need to make a decision on what we’re doing with this land, Louise. It’s time to settle this. The people here need to know—”

  One of the cell phones he now took with him everywhere vibrated in his pants pocket—his right one, where he kept his personal phone. He pulled it out, saw that Henry was calling, and said, “I need to take this. Sorry, folks. I think we’ve seen enough. Why don’t you head on outside. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  The security guys hesitated.

  The phone buzzed again.

  “Guys, I really need some privacy here.”

  “Umm . . .” Ramos said.

  The phone buzzed yet again, and Andrew said, “I’ll be fine. I just need a minute. You can stand right outside and watch me through the glass.”

  Louise Landry left the building. Reluctantly, the security guys followed, leaving Andrew in the dark elevator lobby with nothing but his flashlight for illumination. The phone was in mid buzz when Andrew answered. “Please tell me you got him, Henry.”