Silver Justice

by Russell Blake

  The bolt on the door slid open, startling Kennedy out of the half slumber she’d fallen into. She’d busied herself killing any spiders or other bugs she could find in the room to avoid a repeat performance once the lights were turned off again, but had exhausted the pursuit hours ago and was now left to her thoughts. She was no longer thirsty, but the headache was still bad. The breakfast bar had helped, but not to the point where she felt normal.

  The door swung open, and the man stood looking into the room. Kennedy met his gaze.

  “Bathroom time.”

  She stood and dutifully moved ahead of him.

  “Five minutes. You know the drill.”

  She nodded and went in, closing the door behind her.

  The window was far too high to reach, even if she could somehow balance on the toilet tank, which didn’t seem like a great idea. It looked old and decrepit and was fixed haphazardly to the wall. She studied the empty room with defeated resignation. There wasn’t much promise she could see from a toilet and a sink, and there were no cabinets or any junk lying around she could use. He had obviously sanitized the area of anything before bringing her there.

  When she came out, he had a sandwich wrapped in plastic and a liter bottle of water.

  He held up the sandwich. “Peanut butter and jelly.”

  She eyed it distrustfully.

  “It won’t kill you. I ate one a few minutes ago, and I’m still standing. Now come on. Back to the room.”

  She clumped to the doorway and then stopped. “What are you going to do with me? Why did you take me?”

  “None of your business. For now, be glad you’re getting food and water and being allowed to use the bathroom. I could feed you to the dogs, and nobody would ever know about it.”

  “I don’t hear any dogs. And you don’t have any dog hair on your clothes. My friend has a dog, and she always has dog hair on her.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed. “What are you, Sherlock Holmes? I don’t go near the dogs. They’re too vicious. I just push food out through the mail slot, and they devour it.”

  “Sher…Sherlock who?”

  “Sherlock Holmes. What the hell do they teach in school these days?”

  “I’ve heard of him,” she insisted unconvincingly.

  He snorted. “He’s a detective. The greatest detective of all time. I can’t believe you don’t know that.”

  Kennedy didn’t say anything.

  “That’s it for now. I’ll be back later to let you use the bathroom again.”

  A tear trickled down her cheek.

  “How long are you going to keep me here?” she asked and then snuffled. She wiped the tear away with a trembling hand.

  “As long as I need to. But you’re alive, aren’t you? I haven’t killed you or fed you to the mutts. So it could be worse.”

  “Why did you take me?”

  “That’s not your concern. I had my reasons. That’s all you need to know.”

  Kennedy decided to try a different tack. “My mom is an FBI agent. She’ll be going crazy to find me.”

  “I expect she will. I would.”

  That wasn’t the response she had been expecting. “Then you know about that. So why am I here?”

  “To give me an entertaining hobby. Now go in the room and keep quiet. There’s no escape, so don’t hurt yourself trying to come up with one, or you’ll be sorry. Just behave yourself, and you’ll be okay. That’s all I’m going to tell you.”

  “Will you leave the light on?”

  “If you’ll promise to be good.”

  “There’s not many ways I could be bad in an empty room.”

  “That was the whole point.”

  “What if I have to go to the bathroom before you come again?”

  “Hold it. Or do you want me to give you a bucket? It would be easier than me coming down here every five hours.”

  So he was coming down from somewhere. That confirmed her feeling that she was in a basement. She’d never really been in one before, but had seen them on TV in police shows.

  She gave him a dirty look. “I’ll try to hold it.”

  “Do that.”

  The door closed with a metallic clunk.

  Silver drifted back into Kennedy’s room and touched random items on her desk, silently agonizing over the ordeal she must be going through. She wasn’t hugely religious, but had found herself praying, promising any kind of bargain if she could only have her daughter back safe. A part of her was afraid to imagine what could be going on — she’d spent far too much time looking at crime scene photos of innocents who had been subjected to unspeakable horrors by sick animals masquerading as normal people. She understood all too well the violations, the depravity that people were capable of. But it would do no good to allow her imagination to run away with itself.

  Her eye caught something she’d missed earlier. In the closet. There were three empty hangers. She did a quick scan of the dirty clothes basket in the bottom but couldn’t find the clothes she was sure she had hung up.

  What were they?

  She was almost positive there were two stretchy tops and a pair of jeans.

  Her pulse quickened, and she moved to the dresser, opening each drawer to see if anything was missing.

  There. Panties and socks. She wasn’t sure how many, but there were fewer in the drawer than before.

  A cautious flicker of hope glimmered to life within her. If the kidnappers had taken clothes, then they were planning on her needing them — which meant that they were planning on keeping Kennedy alive. At least for a while. There was no other reason to do so.

  She ran to the living room and grabbed her phone and called Art’s cell. He listened patiently and agreed that was indeed positive. But beyond that agreement, it didn’t change much.

  Still, it was a reason for optimism. And at this point she’d adopt it.

  It meant that her little girl’s chances of being alive were better than she’d believed an hour ago.

  Silver made her way to her computer by her bedroom window and sat. She quickly made a series of keystrokes and logged into the FBI network, then searched through her recent messages. There it was, from Seth. A series of files was attached to the main body.

  The search results were collected in several batches, with precise instructions for modifying the parameters to change the searches. She opened another window and studied the reports of the interrogations, and then followed the step-by-step directions Seth had left, and created a new algorithm, looking for decapitations that were geographically-proximate, as well as in any way related to their three likeliest suspects.

  She knew from Seth’s warning that the results would take some time to churn out — it wasn’t like the movies, where the super-sleuth agents waved their hands over the touch screen wall monitor and the processing power of a small sun yielded answers in nanoseconds. In the meantime, she busied herself reading the interviews with the two who hadn’t run headlong into a truck, searching for the smallest inconsistencies.

  The Regulator was killing methodically, and his schedule, while accelerating, didn’t seem erratic. Most of the time when a serial increased the frequency, it was because his impulse control was breaking down, which was how they tripped up — they started making mistakes, cutting corners because they were in a hurry. But this killer hadn’t made any she could see, other than allowing himself to be photographed by the traffic cams — assuming that was even him.

  The photos.

  She opened Seth’s folder and studied the face — hard to make out in the shadows, even with the image enhancement. With all the facial hair and the cap, it was tough to be sure, but he looked older than the average psycho — which pointed to their Brooklyn possibility. Assuming her idea that the current killings were mirroring earlier incidences was even valid — a conviction that was rapidly fading. She pushed back from the keyboard in frustration — she was getting nowhere.

  After pacing a few lengths of the living room, Silver moved into the ki
tchen and opened the refrigerator, searching for something sweet. She was reaching for the box of emergency chocolates when a thought struck her with the force of a blow.

  This serial was highly intelligent and had left nothing to chance. Did it make sense that type of meticulous planner would simply not notice, or ignore, the traffic cameras that even cursory research would have revealed? They had been working under some assumptions, and one of those was that he hadn’t known about them. But what if he had? What if he’d planned on being photographed because there was no way around it, and disguised himself to throw them further off the scent?

  She hurried back to screen.

  Pulling up the driver’s license photos of the three possibles, she ruled out the Pennsylvania PI. He had a round, cherubic face, and the man in the photos had a longer face. But it also still didn’t look much like either of the remaining two. Was it possible that her hunch was that far off?

  Silver opened the secure e-mail browser and sent the images to the technicians, asking them to do their best to remove the facial hair. Also, to put a beard and long hair on their two driver’s license photos and to modify the noses to match the traffic cam shots. And to run facial recognition software to see if it could spot any similarities that her naked eye couldn’t.

  She’d be lucky if she got those back by the next morning, but she wasn’t in a huge rush — it wasn’t like she had places to go. And what if one of the two looked like the traffic shot?

  She understood why Sam was pushing in a different direction. The odds were against her theory holding water, but she couldn’t shake her feeling, so she resigned herself to putting in a few more hours before giving up. It would be worth seeing what the image experts could do, and check if any decapitations came up over the last ten years that could be connected to the fires.

  In the end, it was going to be a marathon, not a sprint.

  Chapter 21

  Kennedy heard the footsteps before she registered the scraping of the door bolt. Her water bottle was three-quarters gone, so it was in the nick of time. She’d managed to sleep, but she was still thirsty almost all the time as she recovered from the effects of the drug.

  The door creaked open on its rusty hinges, and the now-familiar man stood waiting in the doorway.

  “Rise and shine. It’s bathroom time again.”

  She swung her legs off the bed and stood, feeling stronger now. He stepped back, and they repeated the trip to the john. She’d been thinking of ways to reach the window but hadn’t had any breakthroughs. She did know that she didn’t want to make her captor angry. She wasn’t sure what he was capable of and didn’t want to find out the hard way.

  When she was done, she emerged to find the man coming down the stairs at the far end of the oblong space, carrying a flat cardboard box, a bottle, and a backpack. Her nose quivered at the aroma.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “What does it smell like? Pizza, I’d say.”

  “What kind?”

  “Whatever kind you want, assuming you’re thinking pepperoni.”

  She made a face. “I normally eat cheese. My mom gets cheese.”

  “I’ve heard the secret to modifying pepperoni into cheese is a multi-step process. First, you remove the pepperoni. Next, you eat the remaining cheese pizza, now without pepperoni.”

  He held up the plastic bottle. “Orange juice.”

  “What’s in the backpack?”

  “Let’s go back to your room, and I’ll show you.”

  She hesitated. “How long are you going to keep me here?”

  “You already asked me that.”

  “You didn’t really answer.”

  “As long as I have to.”

  “Are you going to hurt me?” she asked in a small voice.

  “Have I hurt you so far?”

  “You’ve locked me in a room with spiders.”

  “But I haven’t hurt you, have I?”

  She considered him. “No. Not today.”

  “Look, I didn’t plan on hurting you at your flat, either, but you were putting up such a fight I had to subdue you somehow. So that was more your fault than my intention. If you don’t cause any problems for me, I don’t have any reason to hurt you.”

  “Then why do you have me locked up?”

  “Believe me, I wish I didn’t. This has complicated my life a lot.”

  That wasn’t the answer she expected. “Then why?”

  “You’re an insurance policy.”

  She didn’t understand. “What?”

  “I needed something to distract the FBI. You’re it. It’s nothing personal. It will be over soon, and then I’ll let you go. Now back in the room.”

  “What will be over?” Kennedy asked as they walked back to her little area.

  “This. In a few more days. Then you can go home, and you’ll be famous — all over the news. So will I with any luck at all.”

  She stepped into the room. “Why will we be famous?” she couldn’t help but ask.

  “Never mind. Now, what do you want to do with the pizza? I left you two slices. Big ones. You want to take the pepperoni off or eat it with it on?”

  “Pizza and orange juice sounds like it will suck.”

  “Don’t complain. The correct response would be: ‘thank you for not making me eat dog food out of a bowl’, not speculations about whether or not you’d prefer a different beverage with your dinner.”

  “What’s in the bag?”

  He reached in and extracted three books — battered paperbacks from a bygone era.

  “Sherlock Holmes. You can improve your mind while you’re here. Presuming you can read. Do they still teach reading in school?”

  She looked offended. “I read at an eighth-grade level. Even though I’m in fifth.”

  “Congratulations. Then these will be perfect. They’ll help you pass the time. Let me know when you’re done, and I’ll see if I can find you some more.”

  “I prefer vampires or zombies.”

  “And I prefer kids who are grateful and not complaining.”

  They stared at each other.

  “Why are you doing this? You don’t seem like a bad man,” she said honestly.

  “I’m not. I’m a good man who is having to do bad things. But in the end, I guess it’s the same as being a bad one.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  He paused, appraising her again. “When did you become Freud?”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind. Enjoy your books. I’ll be back one more time for a bathroom break, and then it’s time for you to sleep.”

  “What if I’m not tired?”

  “Then you’ll have to try to read in the dark.”

  For the first time during the discussion, her composure slipped. “I’d rather if you didn’t turn off the light. There are spiders and bugs in here.”

  He looked around the room, and then nodded. “There probably are. I’ll think about it. Meanwhile, eat your pie and enjoy your books. I’ll be back later.”

  The door closed behind him, and she sat down on the bed, cross-legged, and opened the pizza carton. It actually looked pretty good and was still warm. No restaurant name or address on it, though, so no new information — just an artist’s generic rendition of a steaming pizza.

  Kennedy examined the first of the small paperback books, featuring a depiction of some sort of monster in the background and a man wearing a curious hat while smoking a pipe in the foreground. She flipped to the first page of The Hound of the Baskervilles, happy to have something to take her mind off the tedium of sitting, staring at the walls, wondering what was going to happen next.

  The onscreen window blinked green — the search for decapitations within fifty miles of any of the most likely fires was finished. Silver scrolled through the list and counted seventeen in the last decade. Most of the results were newspaper articles with associated police reports, which would make for slow reading.

  She resigned herself to sorting through
them and began with the first — a forklift accident in Pennsylvania eight years ago.

  Two hours later, she’d read all the documents and was numb. Nothing had jumped out. Car accidents, industrial accidents, one solved murder attributed to a drug-crazed ex-boyfriend. If she was expecting an obvious connection to any of the fires, she was sorely disappointed. At first glance, there was nothing there.

  Silver got up and paced, the new information orbiting her brain as she considered her next step. She supposed she could do another search, this time for suffocations, but that would be a much, much longer list. Thousands. She wasn’t looking forward to having to sort through a mountain of accidental deaths but didn’t see any other way to proceed. Until the photos came back, she was dead in the water.

  For the first time that day, she faltered. Maybe Sam was right, and the terrorist link was pertinent. Certainly it was curious that the software victim’s partner was so proximate to terrorist financiers — and now their fifth victim was mob-connected, as was Masenkoff, which by extension made the first victim also at least peripherally mob-affiliated. Maybe the entire series of killings was some sort of criminal syndicate retaliatory strike against a rival network?

  If that was the case, then Sam would get to the bottom of it, she had no doubt — if for no other reason than solving the case by taking it in that new direction would guarantee him a promotion to Silver’s rank. She could tell he wanted that more than life itself, and she had every faith that he would work tirelessly to discover the truth.

  She padded to the kitchen, grabbed a soda, and considered another chocolate, but then thought better of it — a brief mental image of the paramedics finding her in a sugar-induced coma, lying on the floor amid a heap of candy wrappers flitted through her imagination. She smiled at the visual.

  Just before dinner time, Richard called.

  “Hey. Any progress? Anything come in today?” he asked.

  “Nope. Completely quiet. But I made a discovery. The kidnapper took some of Kennedy’s clothes, so it looks like he planned to keep her alive, at least for a while.”

  “Did you tell Art?”