Silver Justice

by Russell Blake

  She opened the lid and looked inside — not a lot of trash — mainly empty bottles, the usual wrappers, and a pizza box. Silver was preparing to lower the lid back into place when she noticed several fingerprint smudges on the outside of the box — grease, or tomato paste.

  Small smudges. Like a child’s.

  The blood drained from her face.

  Maybe Howard had a grandchild, or a nephew or niece? She struggled to remember, but thought it had been just the wife and the daughter. With a trembling hand, she withdrew her phone and took several photographs of the garbage can sitting outside the house, and then a few close-ups of the box in the trash. The time/date stamp would confirm that it pertained to this visit.

  Now she needed to retrieve the box without contaminating it. A part of her brain was thinking about evidence chains, due process, and reasonable cause, but another part was shrieking that her baby might be inside, only a few feet from where she was standing. The internal struggle lasted until she picked up a branch and cautiously lifted the box out, holding one side with a tissue she’d fished from her jacket pocket, her breath catching in her throat for fear of dislodging it.

  A light breeze tugged at a corner of the empty carton and she watched in helpless horror as it tumbled out of her grasp and landed on the dying lawn, flipping open in the process. She moved to retrieve it but a gust blew it another few feet away from her, shaking three pieces of pepperoni loose from the bottom and sending them tumbling onto the grass.

  Silver stooped over to retrieve the container and then froze. She slowly drew her Glock and turned to the back door.

  Inside, the slices of congealed meat had fallen away, revealing four unmistakable letters scratched into the cardboard.

  The wind pushed the box, now forgotten, towards the far wall, where it stuck in the hedge, propped open by the breeze, the message visible from a few feet away.

  Silver thumbed her phone and dialed headquarters, but it still went directly to Sam’s voicemail. She stabbed another number, but Art’s line was busy. At least she had tried, she reasoned. Then her instinct to save her daughter’s life preempted any others, and she kicked in the rear door, the lock shattering on the second blow.

  Across the meager backyard, the sun glinted against the glistening tomato sauce that had been used to increase the legibility of the four letters scratched into the carton bottom. They were unmistakable, etched in a child’s shaky script.

  HELP

  Chapter 24

  Silver stepped into the narrow rear hall, the splintered shards of the doorjamb crunching underfoot. Her Glock 23 was clenched in both hands, pointed in front of her. She stopped in the kitchen, tilting her head to detect any hint of movement in the house. A creak sounded from the second story. A few seconds later, another. She couldn’t be sure whether it was the breeze or someone overhead, but she steeled herself to find out.

  As she stood motionless, a third creak sounded, and she began to believe it was the wind — the sound came from the same area each time at the front of the house. She turned so that she would present as small a target area as possible and cautiously eased into the hall between the small combination dining/living room and the stairs leading to the upper level.

  The floor plan was typical of the older row homes in the area — a modest downstairs forty feet deep by twenty feet wide consisting of the living area, and two or three bedrooms up, usually two, one in the rear and the other facing the street, with a landing and hall between them. She confirmed that nobody was downstairs and then carefully put weight on the first stair tread as she began ascending to the upper floor.

  At the third step, the wood beneath her foot emitted a squeak. She stopped, her heart pounding in her ears. Her finger caressed the Glock’s trigger, ready to empty the weapon at anything that moved. She stood like that for a seeming eternity and then heard the creak from the front bedroom again — same as before. She was almost positive it was the wind now, but she still moved with stealthy deliberation as her head, and then her body, moved into sightline of the second floor landing. Both bedroom doors were closed, although the single bathroom between them had its battered door ajar. Now she was faced with an impossible choice — which bedroom to search first?

  The front bedroom creaked again, and she realized it was the door — every time a draft moved through the house, it stirred it just enough to coax a protestation. Taking a deep breath, she made two rapid strides and threw herself flat against the wall. A single bead of sweat trickled from her hairline, down her temple, and then ran to the corner of her mouth, where it hung before she flicked at it with her tongue.

  She took another step, and then another. Once she was alongside the door, she slowly dropped her left hand from its position on the pistol butt and gripped the worn pewter knob and turned it, trying to make no sound. When she felt the mechanism disengage, she flung the door ajar, pausing a split second before moving into the doorway in a crouch.

  The second bedroom’s door burst open, and she spun, training her weapon on it, ready to fire. The door bounced against the wall and then swung shut again, with a slam that shook the house. She froze, momentarily paralyzed as she processed what was happening, and then felt the wind on her back.

  She turned and peered into the master and saw that one of the two windows was open eight inches, causing the draft responsible for the creaking. The bedroom was otherwise empty except for the closed closet door and a neatly made bed. Opening the master must have created the breeze that had blown the guest bedroom door open. As if congratulating her for her deduction, it slammed again. The lock was either ill-fitting or out of adjustment — it wasn’t holding the door shut.

  Now that she’d made enough noise to alert the entire neighborhood to her presence, she inched towards the closet — the final area in the master that could conceal anyone. Silver threw the door open, to be confronted with a tidy display of hanging shirts and pants. Her eyes took in the outline of a hatch in the ceiling leading to the attic, but the condition of the dust and cobwebs told her that it hadn’t been opened for a long time, so any possibility of an assailant hiding up there existed only in her mind.

  The second bedroom door slammed again, and she turned to face it, ready to tackle the other possible upstairs hiding place.

  Step by step she moved from the master to the rear bedroom, both hands steadying the Glock in a combat grip. When she reached the door she hesitated, listening, but detected nothing. Without warning she burst in, weapon sweeping the room. No closet, just a chest of drawers and a cheap armoire too small to hide in.

  A sound echoed from downstairs.

  Adrenaline coursed through her veins as she stiffened. Satisfied that the upstairs was secure, she pulled her phone out of her pocket and called Seth, but that call too went to voicemail. She left a terse message — a whispered advisement that she was in Howard’s house and to send backup immediately — that she believed the killer might still be inside, and that she was in pursuit.

  Now the question was whether to wait, or go get her daughter. If anyone was inside, there were only two places they could be — the single-width garage or the basement. She hadn’t seen a car in the driveway, so she was guessing that if anyone was home, their car was in the garage. That left the basement.

  Silver moved down the stairs, taking care to place her weight on the outer edges of the steps to minimize any noise. She’d learned that lesson on the ascent.

  Once in the ground floor hall, she moved towards the front of the house and stopped at the only door along the span — the basement entry. There was little in the way of places she could hide, so she pushed the door open. A shaft of light stabbed down the concrete stairs to the dark expanse below. She listened, but didn’t hear any movement — just a dim hum of machinery in the gloom.

  Groping along the wall with her left hand, she fumbled for a light switch. Her fingers felt the familiar shape and flicked it up.

  Nothing happened.

  After pausing for a mome
nt, she reached into her purse and searched around until she found her keys. She had a miniature flashlight secured to the ring — a red anodized aluminum trinket she’d bought to make it easier to see her deadbolts at night. She flicked on the beam and winced as the keys jangled, then braced herself for the descent into the basement. The small beam of light seemed woefully inadequate, but it was better than nothing. She held the keys and flashlight in front of her and pointed her weapon down the stairs, carefully feeling with her feet for the next tread in the series. Step by step she moved lower, her pulse booming in her throat from the accumulated tension.

  She was three-quarters down the stairs when something moved in the periphery of her vision. The door above her slammed shut. The next thing she knew, she was falling; a spike of white hot pain lanced up her spine, and her head slammed against a step with a crack. The last thing she registered was the sound of her now-useless gun hitting the concrete basement floor next to her flashlight, which extinguished with a pop as it skidded to a halt.

  Silver regained consciousness to pain. Her back felt like someone had slammed her in the kidneys with a lead pipe, and her head shrieked in protest as she tried to open her eyes. Then she heard the most beautiful sound in the world and forced her lids wide.

  “Mommy. Mommy. Don’t try to move,” Kennedy warned, her voice a distorted tremolo amid the ringing in Silver’s ears.

  She tried to sit up, but the room swam dangerously. From the soft resistance beneath her, she concluded she was on a mattress with her head in her daughter’s lap. Something cold was being used as a pillow. Everything looked fuzzy, and she blinked a few times, trying to clear her vision. On the third try, she could make out the walls of a room — unpainted concrete.

  “Sweetheart. Are you okay? Are you hurt?” Silver asked, her voice a croak.

  “I’m fine, Mom. But you aren’t. It took a while to stop the bleeding, and I have to hold the ice on your head, or it could start again.”

  Her face leaned over Silver’s, a look of clear concern on it.

  “Where did you get ice?”

  “The man brought some after he put the butterflies on your head. He said that head wounds bleed a lot so you need to stay quiet.”

  Silver stiffened. “The man?”

  Just then the door rattled and then swung open. A figure stepped in from the darkness outside. The man who had been watching her from across the street. She could see that his hair was trimmed in a buzz cut and the mustache was gone, but it was him.

  Howard Jarvis.

  He approached the bed, and she flinched as she tried unsuccessfully to raise her arms. She saw the tie wrap around her wrists a second later.

  “I apologize for the drama. I didn’t know who was breaking in, so I had to take steps to defend myself. It wasn’t my intention to hurt you.” She struggled again, and he held up a hand. “Don’t. You’ll just make it worse. It took ten minutes to stop most of the bleeding. I’m afraid you have a concussion — hopefully no internal bleeding. I wouldn’t risk any sudden movements.” He held up a large freezer bag. “I brought some more ice. We need to keep the area cold for a while.”

  She studied him. He looked ten years younger than his sixty years, but his face looked drawn and gray.

  “You’re never going to get away with this,” she said, wincing with the effort.

  He nodded. “No, I’m sure I won’t.”

  Kennedy’s hand brushed her forehead, and he handed her the bag, taking the melted soggy one from her. The white towel wrapped around it was bloody, but not as bad as she supposed it could have been.

  “The blow to your skull will require an MRI. So will your spine. And you’ll need some stitches in your scalp. I doubt you’ll be teaching any gymnastics classes in the near future,” he said, his tone conversational.

  She needed to keep him talking until backup arrived. “So you’ve got me now. What’s your plan? And why did you kidnap my daughter?” she asked.

  Most criminals, especially egocentric narcissists, which she assumed he was from his pursuit of media attention for his Regulator alias, wanted to brag to someone about their exploits. Motive was always a good place to start. When they were caught, they invariably had a story they had to tell — something that they needed their captor to understand. Only this time, she was the captive. She didn’t want to dwell on that for the moment.

  “My plan? Why, can’t you guess? As to your daughter, that was an improvisation, and in hindsight, while a necessary one, it’s something I deeply regret for the anxiety it must have caused you both. If there had been any other way, I would have skipped it.”

  “An improvisation? What do you mean?”

  “You were getting too close, too soon. I was forced to expedite my plan, but even so, I was afraid you would tumble to my identity and shut me down before I was done. I couldn’t afford that, so I created a distraction. Kennedy was it.”

  “I don’t understand,” Silver said.

  “The deductive leap that connected the killings to past events. You were identified as the driving force in the paper, so from there, I simply needed to find an answer to the question: ‘how do I keep her mind off it so she’s rendered inefficient?’. A kidnapping was the best I could come up with.” He shrugged.

  “Why did you kill all those people?” Silver asked.

  Howard looked at Kennedy with an air of caution and then shrugged again. “I remember reading a story from the Old West. Years ago. I don’t remember what paper it was from, but I do remember it was a town where a bully who had been terrorizing everyone wound up shot, but when the marshals showed up to investigate the murder, they met with zero cooperation from the townspeople. The only statement they ever got was from an old woman. Her response was: ‘he needed killing’. My response is the same. I have a long version, but the short version is: ‘they needed killing’.” He smiled at the thought. “Indeed they did.”

  “I don’t understand. Why? How are they all connected? And are you admitting that you killed them all?”

  “Absolutely. Of course I did. I intend to give you a full confession. What’s the point of playing coy? Yes, I killed them, and my motivations were simple. Revenge and justice.”

  “Justice? You killed six men to get justice?”

  “And revenge. Retribution, actually.”

  “Retribution.”

  Howard glanced at his watch. “I’ll tell you a story, and then I’m going to end this painful little chapter. I’ll turn myself in, surrendering to you.” He lifted his hands into the air. “Ya got me. As I said, I’ll give you a full confession. But while it’s still just us, I’ll tell you the details so you understand the why. Nobody else will care, or believe it, for a while at least. But I have a captive audience, so I’ll tell you the story.”

  He cleared his throat. “It starts with a fire. My wife was suffering from multiple sclerosis, and when the housing crash happened in 2008 and the stock market fell by over fifty percent I was wiped out by margin calls, and the pension I was relying on vaporized when the company’s fund became insolvent. Within a matter of months, we were close to being destitute — I’d gone from having comfortable retirement prospects to barely surviving on social security. The bank was quick to foreclose on the house, and they were going to take possession of it. My wife went over the edge and decided that nobody was going to get her home. So she committed suicide, and through an ugly set of terrible coincidences, our only daughter died in the blaze trying to save her. You probably already know all this if you connected the fire to the killings.”

  Silver nodded, then regretted it as pain spiked through her head.

  “Over the next couple of years, I watched as the devastation from the financial crisis claimed the lives of my friends and neighbors. One wound up drinking himself to oblivion and dying in a car accident — the decapitation. Another was forced to move to a terrible neighborhood and got killed in a mugging; stabbed to death for twenty dollars in his wallet. Another couldn’t take a life where h
e’d lost everything, so he turned on his car one night and sucked on the exhaust. My best friend resorted to crime and was shot to death outside of a liquor store he robbed with an unloaded gun. The Korean owner had a Beretta and years of target practice. What all these people had in common was that their deaths were brought about by an event that’s caused millions around the world to have their lives forever changed for the worse. That event was the financial crisis.”

  Howard glanced at the floor, kicking at the concrete absently with the toe of his boot as he collected his thoughts.

  “What most don’t realize is that event wasn’t an accident. It was deliberate, avoidable, and engineered as deliberately as a film explosion. I spent years researching why it happened and who did it. Once I understood, I was able to target at least one of the groups responsible. That group is my victims list. A list of untouchable players who would never serve a day in jail, even if all facts were known.” Howard hesitated, studied the ceiling, then continued. “Because the money behind them is the real power here — the silent power that pretends very hard not to exist. That money decides who gets elected, and which lobbyists do which politicians favors, and what laws get passed and enforced. But the money stays in the shadows. Once I understood those responsible would never be brought to justice no matter what the circumstances, I came up with a plan.” Howard cleared his throat again. “I invented The Regulator and devoted what’s left of my life to executing my plan.”

  “Let’s say you’re right,” Silver said, “and that these men somehow did cause the crisis. I don’t see how, but let’s assume they did. What good does killing them do? They’re dead. So now what? To what end?”

  “I thought you’d never ask. The idea was never just to kill them. The point was to kill them in such a fashion as to build notoriety for The Regulator, so that when he revealed the full story people would be interested in why he’d done it. I understood that most have no grasp as to how they’ve been robbed, or are so apathetic they mistake irony for vitality. But if I became a notorious serial killer then an entire nation would want to know the reasoning — the why.”