Why the Devil Stalks Death

by L. J. Hayward

While Ethan padded silently around the darkened room, Jack got comfortable again, watching as clothes were removed and neatly folded onto the recliner.

  “You can use the wardrobe.” He liked the idea of Ethan’s clothes hanging next to his. “And we can reorganise the tallboy to fit your undies in.”

  All movement stopped, and Jack’s stomach tightened. What had sparked Ethan’s fight-or-flight mode? Before he worked it out, Ethan moved again, drawing in a deep breath and letting it out, then finished unbuttoning his shirt.

  “You wouldn’t mind if I did?”

  “Of course not. I thought this was what we were doing. What we talked about. You being here for more than a flying visit. Staying here.”

  After a long, strained moment, Ethan nodded. “I suppose I wasn’t sure if that was still what you wanted.”

  Tension uncoiling in his gut, Jack groaned. “Jesus, Ethan. Just toss your clothes in the laundry basket and get your stupid arse in bed.”

  Ethan chuckled as he balled up his shirt and threw it blindly over his shoulder. “As you wish, Jack.” A second later, he landed on the bed, momentum rolling him right to Jack’s side.

  Grunting at the impact, Jack shoved him away, then made his own attack. They play wrestled and laughed and tickled until at some shared signal, it turned to caresses and moans and kisses. Jack got Ethan pinned on his belly, wrists cuffed by one of Jack’s hands at the base of his spine. He kissed and nipped his way from one straining shoulder to the other, nuzzled into the dark hair, teased his entrance with a couple of fingers. Then he spent a while tracing the scars on the pale skin, letting the anger and protectiveness they inspired wash through him. It dulled the edge of his arousal enough he let Ethan’s hands go and lay down, covering him like a blanket, as if by being here now he could somehow deflect the whip that fell twenty years in the past. Under him, Ethan relaxed into the mattress.

  “I do hope that eventually you will do something a little more productive while you’re there,” Ethan murmured.

  “Eventually.” Jack pressed his lips to the back of his neck.

  “Just don’t go to sleep first.”

  “It was a long, disturbing day. Sleep might not actually work for me tonight.” Jack heaved himself up onto his elbows, taking some of his weight off Ethan. “What did you do today?”

  “Hmm, nothing terribly scintillating, I’m afraid. I spent the morning giving Victoria a thorough going-over. It’s been some time since she was driven. This afternoon I had some other matters to attend to. What was so disturbing about your day?”

  Jack could spot a subject change when it all but clobbered him over the head. He decided to give Ethan this one, knowing the man wouldn’t be able to stop dissembling cold turkey, no matter his good intentions.

  “This new job I started.” He rolled off Ethan and onto his back. “It’s not a normal job. Not something I’m used to.”

  Turning to his side, head propped up on one hand, Ethan stroked Jack’s chest. “You said this morning you were going undercover.”

  Normally, Jack’s job wasn’t pillow-talk material, but this was Ethan, the one man Jack had been with since joining the Office who knew not only exactly who Jack was, but what he did for a living. Also, this was Ethan Blade, a man who could probably do Jack’s job better than he did. For once in his career with the Office, he’d found someone who could listen and understand.

  “Yeah. It’s not a regular undercover job, though. No assumed identity, no fake history. I’m just SSA Jack Reardon, ex-soldier, advising on a case the Office usually wouldn’t touch. It doesn’t feel . . . right.”

  “I can understand that.” Ethan traced patterns over Jack’s body, soft and smooth and tingling. “Will it be a long case, do you think?”

  Gaze following the mesmerising vision of pale fingers framed against tan skin, Jack muttered, “Too soon to tell. I hope not, though. After Bangkok, I feel like I need a break. A week, even a couple of days, but this job came up and . . . Christ.” Succumbing to his rising arousal, Jack grabbed Ethan’s hand and hauled until the man was pretty much right on top of him. “Quit teasing and just get on with whatever you want to do.”

  Laughing, Ethan squirmed into a better position. “As you wish, Jack.”

  When Jack found Lydia, she had gathered all available team members in their operations room and left him a place at the head of the table. Considering he’d once thought he would become a teacher, like both of his parents, Jack didn’t have issues with talking in front of people. What he did worry about was the subject matter. He’d been working the case for close on a month, spending so much time with Adam it had been hard not to absorb more information about serial murders than he ever would have wished to know. Still, this wasn’t his area of expertise, and he dreaded any of the questions the team might throw at him.

  After making sure Lydia had lined up the crime scene photos in order, Jack took his place at the head of the table. The screen in front of him linked to the large wall-mounted one at the far end of the room. Flicking the first photo to the big screen, Jack began.

  “Three years ago, two murders in Melbourne pinged on the national database as a possible serial.”

  A dozen keen expressions turned to stare at the picture of the first victim. Jack had stared at it so often over the past weeks he was numb to the instinctual reactions of horror and sadness, but he gave the team half a minute to deal with their own feelings, then continued.

  “The murder happened in the woman’s bathroom—in the shower, so most of the physical evidence was washed away. Eleven stab wounds, all with the same six-inch blade. The attack was methodical, not erratic, and fast, giving the victim no time to defend herself. She was then moved to the bedroom and posed as you see here. The killer left a note with the body. A passage from the Bible.” Jack flicked to the picture of the note, and read, “‘Parents are not to be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their parents; each will die for their own sin.’ He’s saying that this woman committed a sin and he’s punishing her for it.”

  “What did she do?” a tech from halfway down the table asked. They all had comprehensive files on the victims, but it would be quicker for Jack to answer.

  “Nothing wrong,” Jack said grimly. “In our opinion. To her killer, though, she represented something he hated.”

  “A woman?” a young female tech asked.

  “All but one of his other victims are male,” someone else reminded her. “Gender isn’t a link between them.”

  “Correct,” Jack said. “But this woman’s crime against her killer was something she was just as powerless to change. She had a son who suffered from schizophrenia with violent tendencies. He was convicted of manslaughter after pushing a woman in front of a car during one of his bouts. Our victim’s only sin, in her killer’s eyes, was to ‘create’ a damaged child. The killer knows he’s not normal, for want of a better word. There’s something wrong with him, and he blames someone else for it. Popular opinion about serial killers is that their mental illness is a result of childhood trauma. It excuses their actions, rather than forcing them to take responsibility for them. This is our offender saying it’s always the mother’s fault. Or the abusive father’s. Someone else is to blame, not me.”

  As he carried on to the next victim, “A middle-aged man, killed in the same manner. A drug dealer and pimp who’d get young girls addicted and then force them to hook for their drug money.” He realised he was all but repeating Adam’s words from Jack’s first day on the strike force. It gave him some solace to think that even if Adam was dead, at least his work was still being done.

  “This one’s pretty straightforward,” Adam said in his memory, and Jack echoed it aloud. “The Bible passage reads, ‘But the eyes of the wicked will fail, and escape will elude them; their hope will become a dying gasp.’ Basically, the only hope the wicked have is death. At the same time, our offender is showing us he isn’t wicked, because he’s doing our job for us.”

  “
Cocky bastard,” a man at the far end of the table muttered.

  Jack smiled sadly, recalling Adam proclaiming him an “armchair profiler” after saying pretty much the same thing.

  “All right,” he said gruffly, moving past the moment. “On their own, the first two victims make sense. The Judge is punishing them for their crimes, real or imagined. He’s, in a sense, trying to prove that his desire to kill is justified. Then we get the next victim, Brandt Williams. Not only is he in Sydney, but he’s also much younger than the other two. He’s got gainful employment in a legitimate field. He doesn’t have a criminal record and, apart from some slightly unusual porn on his home computer, is so vanilla he fades into the background. He was killed and posed at work. The Bible verse left with him should be recognisable to most of you. ‘And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’”

  Every head around the table nodded, but it was Lydia who spoke up.

  “The verse itself is pretty self-explanatory, but how does it fit with the victim?”

  “We don’t know. Adam couldn’t find a connection that felt right to him. We simply do not know why the Judge chose Williams.”

  The team tossed ideas around for a while, most of them centred around the porn—which featured furries—while Jack listened patiently. Adam had gone down all these paths, and many others, over the weeks, and still not come to a conclusion he was happy with. It had frustrated him no end, wondering just what temptation or evil death was saving Williams from, or stopping him from committing.

  When the speculation had tapered off, Jack moved on to the fourth victim.

  “Captain Shane Morrissey, Australian Defence Force Intelligence Corps. He’s the victim who facilitated our inclusion in the case. ADFIS refused to share information with the strike force and actively worked to stop them from investigating Morrissey’s death. So the strike force leader had to go outside of the box to get the expertise they needed.”

  “Namely, you,” Lydia said. “However, we have more access to military records than the police do. More than some of the higher ranks in the military wished we had sometimes. Everyone here is well-informed on Morrissey’s personal history and career.”

  “Which, again,” Jack continued, “we couldn’t quite reconcile with the Judge’s apparent agenda. His verse was ‘You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.’”

  “Corruption,” was one tech’s immediate response. “Salt stops corruption in food. The Judge is saying that Morrissey was corrupted somehow, and that killing him was the only way to stop him from doing whatever he was doing.”

  “Or,” another piped up, “killing him was the only way the Judge could see to make him pure again.”

  Both ideas Adam had toyed with, but again, hadn’t been able to find a suitable conclusion.

  “We looked into Morrissey weeks ago,” Lydia interjected. “There’s no hint of corruption in his career. He was perfectly committed to his job.”

  Silence for a moment, and then Jack said, “Adam also thought it may have meant someone else had corrupted Morrissey. Not necessarily in his work, but in his private life. He was gay and had no known partner, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t someone. Perhaps Morrissey cheated on him.” His stomach tightened reflexively. Was that what Ethan thought? That Adam had corrupted Jack? Or maybe that Jack had corrupted Ethan?

  “But if we don’t know or can’t find out about a possible partner, how would the Judge?” someone asked.

  Putting Ethan in his own drawer in the filing cabinet, Jack shrugged. “Who knows. It’s possible the Judge was stalking Morrissey for weeks before killing him. He could have seen things that no one else did. Morrissey was an officer in the Intelligence Corps. If he wanted to keep something a secret, he would know how to. And we’ve already shown that the Judge is an above-average operator. Basically, anything is possible.”

  The fifth victim, Brenna Luntz, had been murdered the day before Jack was arrested and was so similar to Williams Jack could have just “dittoed” everything he said for the young man. Single, young, employed, no criminal record, nothing remarkable about her on the surface, other than being targeted by the Judge.

  “Her verse was ‘Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”’ As with Williams, this appears to be about temptation. The investigative team was still compiling information on her when . . . well, they were still working on it yesterday.”

  After the team threw out a few ideas, one of them asked Jack and Lydia, “Do we know what verse was left with the last victim at the LAC?”

  Lydia fielded it. “No. So far, we have no information other than the victim was either Dr. Adam Quinn or Senior Sargent Stephanie Phelps. Kate, you keep working on trying to get us more information from the police. Ryan, your group is now on Morrissey, and Mel, yours is on Williams and Luntz.”

  While Lydia continued to assign tasks, Jack put Adam’s last version of the profile up on the main screen. Hopefully it would help spark something in the team as they kept digging into the lives of the various victims. Jack’s only real hope right then was that with his firsthand knowledge combined with the collective IQ of the room, progress would be made, sooner rather than later.

  Maybe if the Office had done this from the start instead of just monitoring Jack and the case peripherally, they wouldn’t be here now. Adam would still be alive and maybe Ethan would be at home, and happy.

  Jack returned to his schematics and blueprints in the corner. His mildly freshened mind might see something he’d missed earlier. As he worked, various team members came over with questions about bits of information they found, or asked his opinion on their burgeoning theories. Around midnight, Lydia forced Jack out of the room with half of the team so they could get some sleep. Grumbling but thinking he could use the time to let the cognitive model finish, Jack went. He was asleep the moment his head hit the pillow, however, and only woke up when the alarm set by the tech in the top bunk went off.

  Sleepy-eyed, Jack trundled into the tearoom for coffee. He was blinking confusedly at the clock on the wall which said it was now nearly 10:00 a.m. when Lewis burst into the room.

  “Jack! Come on, we’ve caught a break. Hurry up!”

  Instantly awake, Jack left his coffee behind and followed his quickly moving friend. Lewis, like Jack, clearly hadn’t been home for a shower or change of clothes, but he looked surprisingly energised. Which was probably due to the crinkles pressed into the side of his face from where he’d slept on his shirtsleeve.

  “What’s going on?” Jack demanded as they came to a stop at Lewis’s desk.

  A skinny guy sat in Lewis’s chair, fingers flashing over the keyboard as he muttered to himself, mostly about how slow the system was and how could anyone ever work with just the one screen?

  “Jack, this is Fabian Haggedo. . . Hagglethorne. . . Haggis?” Lewis frowned at him. “Sorry, how do you pronounce it again?”

  Leaving off his typing with a resigned sigh, Fabian said patiently, “Heggenhougen.”

  “Him,” Lewis finished, gesturing grandly to the guy. “He’s from Ex Mon.”

  “I guessed.” Jack held his hand out to Fabian. “Jack Reardon. Pleased to meet you.”

  Fabian gave his hand a slightly perplexed look, then turned back to the computer screen. “I was told that finding out where the contested images came from was top priority and to not give up until I knew everything about them. It took me fourteen hours, but I did it.”

  Behind the man’s back, Lewis made drinking motions and mouthed, “Red Bull.”

  “Great.” Jack leaned over the back of the chair. “Can you show us what you found?”

  Another weary sigh from Fabian. “I can’t show you anything new. Unless you know how to interpret digital signatures of different image capturing systems.” The way he just
barrelled right on meant he clearly didn’t think they could. “I can tell you what I found. External Monitoring didn’t royally screw anything up. The images the police have didn’t come from Bangkok CCTV systems. I checked feeds from all the cameras around the entrance to the hotel, and the angles don’t match. It’s close but not exact.”

  Jack’s guts went cold. “Someone was physically tailing us.”

  “They obviously weren’t there for anything other than pictures,” Lewis reasoned.

  “And only for pictures of him.” Fabian pointed at Jack.

  “What? But we’re both in them,” Jack said.

  Fabian gave him a partly patient, partly exasperated look. “It’s obvious. The centre of each image is you. Thomas is incidental. Besides, there are the other pictures, too.”

  Lewis nudged Jack. “See. I told you. This has nothing to do with me. It’s all about you.”

  Scowling, Jack asked, “What other pictures?”

  “These ones.” Fabian brought up the new images.

  Jack at a poker table in a bright, glittering casino. He was grinning and flipping a chip to a waitress. Jack leaning against a marble wall, having his cigarette lit by the same waitress, who was biting her lip sexily. Jack outside a slightly less ornate building, head close to a small Thai woman’s, listening as she spoke with her hands. Jack, at another table, this one bare of green felt but with higher stacks of chips. A final one of Jack across the street from the brothel he would later drag Lewis to.

  There in crisp, clear images was his search for the Messiah.

  No wonder he’d picked up a ticket. He hadn’t thought he was being careless, but clearly he had been if he hadn’t noticed someone following him around Bangkok every day for two weeks. Every second person there had a camera. And those who didn’t have the big obvious ones hanging around their necks used their phones. It would have been hard to spot a tail in that environment, but from the angle of the pictures and the variety of places, this person must have been on Jack’s arse like a boil.

  “One thing’s for sure,” Lewis said seriously. “Whoever it was isn’t working for the Messiah or his Disciples.”