by Tom Barber
Shepherd stared grimly at the phone as everyone in the room fell silent.
‘I spoke to the team down on Rivington who told me what you guys found over there in the bathroom. I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear.’
Pause.
‘OK. Thanks.’
Ending the call, Shepherd paused for a moment. Then he looked at April.
‘I’m sorry.’
She nodded. ‘Deep down I already knew, I guess.’
Beside her, Archer swore. ‘Why the hell did they kill the women? I can’t figure it out. This isn’t mindless serial killing. There’s a purpose here.’
His face dark, Shepherd looked at him for a moment then turned and studied the faces of the two killers on the screen, the suspects in a list of homicides that seemed to be growing by the hour, up to fourteen by his reckoning; ten women, Valdez, Carvalho, Goya all flushed down a tub and Santiago on the way before they intervened.
‘Where the hell are you, you sons of bitches?’ he muttered.
Inside her room at St Luke’s, Alice Vargas was fast asleep.
She was lying under a sheet in a hospital gown, her head turned to one side, her eyes closed, the room quiet apart from the sound of her heart monitor, which was providing a slow, constant beep. Her black hair was a stark contrast to the white gown and sheets, her breathing rhythmic, her face expressionless but peaceful, a small white dressing on the side of her neck.
Wearing their stolen porter’s uniform and doctor’s coat, Henderson and Tully stood side-by-side next to her bed, staring down at her, Henderson having just come up in the elevator with the gurney after Tully called and told him they were on. Glancing to his left, ignoring the body of the second cop who Tully had just shot, Henderson lifted away the sheet covering the gurney, five of their lye canisters lying on the top.
Walking past the dead cop and easing back the door to the bathroom, Tully checked inside then glanced at his partner and nodded before walking back across the room and letting himself out quietly. He needed to secure the closet with the two dead bodies and make sure there were no other cops lurking before they got to work.
Now alone with the woman, Henderson stared down at her as she slept; he had a flashback to Nina taking the shotgun blast from this bitch’s boyfriend and his anger rose.
Less than an hour from now, there wouldn’t be a trace that she’d ever existed.
As he looked down at her, his phone vibrated in his pocket with an incoming message. He pulled the cell out, checking the screen and seeing it was a message from the fourth member of their operation, wanting know what was happening with the Russians.
He tapped in a reply, the only movement in the room Henderson’s fingers as they hit the keys. However, with his head down he didn’t notice something.
Vargas’ eyes opened.
It took her a few seconds to register the large figure standing there beside her bed, his head down as he concentrated on his screen.
Blinking from the effect of the sleeping pill she’d been given, it took her a few moments to focus. She studied the large man at the end of her bed, seeing a silenced pistol tucked into his belt.
Then the beeping of her heart-rate monitor suddenly increased in speed.
Henderson heard the change and looked up from his phone. Reacting immediately, Vargas’ hand lunged for the emergency call button but she wasn’t fast enough and Henderson just managed to get there first, blocking her. Vargas tried to roll out of the bed the other side and escape into the adjoining bathroom, but was too weak and fell to the floor as her legs gave out under her, knocking things off the bedside table as she fell, an IV ripped from her hand.
As she hit the floor she saw a cop facing her against the wall; he’d been shot in the head, blood pooling under him. Shocked, Vargas opened her mouth to shout for help but Henderson was already on her and clamped his hand over her mouth, stifling her scream.
Tully suddenly re-entered the room, having heard the crash of the table going over, and drew his pistol. However, as adrenaline pulsed through her for the first time in weeks, Vargas found new strength. She bit down on Henderson’s hand as hard as she could, drawing blood, then hammered her elbow back into the side of his jaw, sending him reeling back.
Scrambling forward, she desperately tried to make it to the bathroom but Tully stepped forward and hit her over the head with his handgun, stunning her. As she fought to stay conscious, he quickly overpowered and restrained her by zip-tying her wrists behind her back. After ripping off a strip of duct tape and pulling it over her mouth, Tully started dragging her into the bathroom as Henderson got to his feet.
‘Bitch!’ he hissed, drawing his pistol and moving over to the door, taking a quick look outside in case anyone had heard the noise.
Inside the bathroom, Tully let go of Vargas when he reached the tub, turning the knob to lower the metal plug. Then he picked up one of the canisters, unscrewed the lid and quickly started pouring the lye solution into the bath.
However, as he worked the dead cop’s radio suddenly burst into life across the room.
‘Hudson, Cornell, report.’
Tully immediately paused in what he was doing, looking at Henderson.
‘Hudson, Cornell, report.’
The two men looked at each for a long moment; then Tully continued to fill the tub, tossing the canister aside when it was empty and opening up another one.
Bound and helpless beside him, Vargas heard the unanswered transmission from Dispatch repeat for a third time as she watched the man in the doctor’s coat in confusion, trying to work out what he was doing.
Then her eyes started to water as a strong chemical smell filled the room.
THIRTY FOUR
Two hours behind New York City, the sun was just starting to go down in Colorado, Lieutenant Jack Rosario of the Denver Police Department watching it through the blinds as he sat alone in his office.
Fifty one years old with short grey-hair and a slight paunch that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere in the last couple of years, Rosario was extremely well-liked and respected in the Department, a distinguished career behind him with the finishing-line of retirement now in sight. He’d been a cop for twenty nine years and was in charge of four Homicide squads, was paid a good salary and thoroughly enjoyed his work. However, there was one case that he’d never managed to solve, something which even now several years later still bothered him.
Eight people who’d disappeared without a trace six years ago and who neither Rosario nor the Department had ever been able to locate.
It’d begun with a woman who’d come to the District 2 station where Rosario worked, to report that her boyfriend hadn’t come home in five days. Given that he’d been a relatively high-profile pimp based on East Colfax with a bad history and lot of people who would have been only too happy to hear that he was dead, no-one had been particularly surprised or interested.
However, when reports of two more missing men came in within a week, Rosario’s Precinct had started to take notice, concerned they had some kind of gang war starting on their patch.
Over the next two weeks, three more were added to the list, all of these people linked, and squad cars had patrolled Colfax, looking for any sign of trouble. But everything had seemed pretty normal. Officers had located two low-level pimps who were associates of the missing men, but they said they didn’t know what had happened and didn’t seem to care either.
Rosario knew a number of his colleagues had regarded the vanishing of the six gang members as a blessing, feeling their time and resources were better spent assisting law-abiding citizens rather than the scum of the city. However he’d felt differently. To him a missing person was a missing person, no matter who they were; a detective couldn’t pick and choose the cases to work. It looked highly likely someone on his turf was taking these people out and that wasn’t something he was prepared to tolerate.
So he was the exception in the 2nd District when the six guys had been reported missing.
In the weeks and months that followed, the Department had moved on but the family members of those missing sure as hell hadn’t. In the early days of the investigation a couple of girlfriends and a mother of two of the missing men had made a habit of coming to the station to ask if there’d been any progress, but there hadn’t and they’d been told they’d be contacted if there were any developments. They never received that call.
And just when they thought everything had settled down and whoever was responsible for these disappearances had either left town or settled their score, the last two low-level pimps associated with the missing men also vanished.
The general view in the Department had been that a rival gang had whacked them but Rosario had never bought that. No gang member he’d ever encountered had managed to avoid leaving evidence; murdering someone was a messy business. Guns, blades or bats were usually the weapons of choice, all of which left traces of blood, DNA and often fingerprints, not to mention a body. However, whoever had been responsible for these pimps’ disappearances hadn’t left so much as a hair fibre. Street cameras had revealed nothing and witnesses were non-existent.
Curious and frustrated in equal measure by the lack of progress, Rosario had pursued the case in his spare time. He’d worked with Forensics, the lab, a criminal psychologist and even tried to get the missing persons shown on America’s Most Wanted which had nearly cost him his promotion, his Lieutenant at the time livid that Rosario had almost announced to the nation that the Department had eight open case-files from a potential serial killer that they were nowhere near close to solving.
Forget they ever existed, he was ordered.
However, he hadn’t. Sitting at his desk, he turned back to his computer and tapped away on the keypad, bringing up the NCIS database and preparing to perform a ritual which he’d done every few days for almost six years.
Crime-scene reports had stated that traces of lye had been detected in the bathtubs of all the victims’ residences; apparently lye was quite common when killers try to dispose of bodies, a method drug cartels were known to use. However, that particular concoction had never been seen before. If the bodies had been disposed of in that way, it indicated that the disappearances had been carefully planned and meticulously carried out. These were no random killings.
Since then, Rosario had searched the NCIC every now and then to see if any similar cases had shown up anywhere in the country. If whoever was responsible had done this eight times on his patch, Rosario was sure they’d do it again.
And he’d been correct.
There’d been a spate of similar incidents in Chicago last year a thousand miles east, the top guys of a particular gang disappearing over a period of ten months, three at the same time and two lower-level pimps months later. He’d flown out there on his own dime and time; being a police Lieutenant, albeit from another city, he had some clout and had received access to the missing persons’ files. He’d questioned the girls who’d been run by the missing men, but just like back in Denver they hadn’t been able to tell him anything.
If Rosario was correct in thinking the same people were responsible, the number of suspected victims was now in double digits. Still no clearer as to motive, he’d been optimistic when he’d picked up that trail last year, but since Chicago it had gone cold. The killer, or killers, had either stopped or moved on, but it wasn’t in Rosario’s nature to give up.
About to finish for the day, he saw the search taking place on the screen and leaned back in his chair, looking out at the setting sun.
A few moments later, a series of beeps got his attention.
Swinging round, he read the results in front of him and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up.
‘Holy shit.’
Crime-scene reports with a lye concoction being found at the scene of a suspected missing person had been filed today, one in Pennsylvania and a spate of them in New York.
All reported within the past hour.
A note on the screen told him the NYPD had requested three files from the San Diego Police Department, one of whom was for a woman who’d been killed on the site of one of the lye discoveries in an East Village apartment in New York. According to the note, she’d been disposing of a body at the scene, working with two other men called Nicolas Henderson and Sebastian Tully, all born in Pittsburgh with previous in California.
San Diego to Denver was a thousand miles, the same as Denver to Chicago. A methodical procession eastwards, where the three of them had been born. He stared at the dead woman’s photo, Nina Lister, then searched for Henderson and Tully’s files, the system quickly producing results.
He spent a moment examining the faces of the people who could very well have eluded him for over half a decade. Not a gang; a large man, a smaller one and a hundred and thirty pound woman.
Then he snatched up the phone on his desk.
*
Inside the NYPD Conference Room on the other side of the country, Archer, April and Ethan were sitting in silence, looking at the ten new female faces that had joined Santiago, Goya, Valdez and Carvalho on the screen. Only three of the girls had been arrested in the past; the others had had their photos pulled from either the DMV or Covenant Housing records.
As he sat there, Archer suddenly realised he hadn’t called St Luke’s in a while to check on Alice. Drawing his cell, he scrolled for the number but then Shepherd suddenly reappeared in the doorway, his phone to his ear.
‘Can you send them over?’ he said, clicking at Ethan to get his attention and pointing at his laptop. As Ethan responded, Shepherd continued to listen to the call. ‘I’ll keep you posted. Thanks, Jack.’
Ending the call, he pocketed the phone, looking over at Ethan who was opening some files he’d just received.
‘Put ‘em up,’ he said.
Ethan tapped several keys and hit Enter.
A beat later, thirteen new mug-shots appeared on the main screen.
‘I just got a call from a detective in Denver who’s had an unsolved multiple missing persons file for six years,’ he said. ‘This is a case-file that’s spread across three different states, from Denver, Chicago to here. Henderson, Tully and Lister left a trail.’
‘How do we know it’s the same crew?’ Marquez asked.
‘Forensics. The specific lye concoction found at the residence of each missing person was an exact chemical match to the shit we found at Santiago’s and what SWAT found in Scranton. And there’s another link.’
‘Every guy on this board was in some way involved in the sex trade,’ Ethan finished, reading the file on his laptop.
‘Twenty seven unsolved homicides?’ Archer said, looking at the thirteen faces on the screen and the fourteen on the Victims board. ‘Are you kidding me?’
‘Across three cities and three thousand miles,’ Shepherd said. ‘And this was inner city work too. South-side Chicago, Five Points in Denver, the East Village here in New York. This was done right under the noses of the cities’ police forces but they were never caught; the Denver PD Lieutenant said until today he’d never even had a suspect profile.’
‘So Henderson, Tully and Lister are serial killers,’ Ethan said. ‘Randomly targeting people in the sex trade.’
‘This isn’t random,’ Archer said. ‘These people were deliberately targeted. There’s a purpose here. In ninety nine percent of murder cases in the sex industry, serial killers target the girls, not the pimps controlling them.’
‘So?’
‘Look at those guys.’ He pointed at the thirteen new faces, all hard-faced, tough-looking men. ‘They look like the kind of people you’d want to piss off?’
Ethan didn’t reply.
‘Why mix it up with them if this was just about stacking up bodies or feeding a fetish?’ Archer continued. ‘Why not just target the girls? They’d be a hell of a lot easier to take out.’
‘So they get to New York and start killing the girls too?’ Marquez said. ‘Why suddenly change their MO? Before, they only killed the male
members of the three gangs.’
‘Make that four,’ Hendricks said as he walked into the room, having been absent for over thirty minutes.
‘What are you talking about, Jake?’ Shepherd said.
‘I went to visit our Russian friend at the hospital,’ Hendricks replied. ‘And he just started talking.’
THIRTY FIVE
Across the East River at St Luke’s, Josh was sitting in the recovery room with Michelle. She was still sedated after the operation to repair the damage to her arm and sleeping peacefully. According to the doctors, all had gone to plan; she’d been clipped by that initial burst but none of the rounds had stayed inside her tricep. She’d been out of the OR for fifteen minutes and he was waiting for her to wake up, wanting to be there when she did. He’d been shot a few months back and knew how much he’d appreciated her support at the time.
Leaning back in his chair, he sighed. It was only 9:35pm but it had been a whirlwind of a day. Towards the end of Michelle’s surgery he’d received a call from Marquez telling him his kids were all safe at the Bureau and their address had been the first name on a list that had contained their whole team. She’d also told him about April Evans and their suspicions about the ten missing women; thinking back to how they’d found Alex Santiago, Josh had put two and two together. It wasn’t a nice image.
It had been thirty minutes or so since they’d spoken. He was torn between staying beside his wife and wanting to re-join his team immediately to get to work on this case and find out just who’d done this to her. He withdrew his cell to dial Archer and let him know he’d be on his way just as soon just as his wife came to, then suddenly remembered Vargas was also being treated here, up on the 14th floor. No doubt Archer and the others would appreciate an update; now Michelle had been shot, Josh had a much better understanding of how his detective partner had felt.
Squeezing his unconscious wife’s hand and only intending to be gone for a few minutes, Josh rose and walked to the door, shutting it behind him quietly. Moving down the corridor, he headed towards the elevators and pushed the button.
