Why the Devil Stalks Death

by L. J. Hayward

  “Yeah. If he was that close to me, no way he would have missed what I was doing. We got the Messiah, so no one warned him off.”

  Lewis got his deducting face again. “Fabian, did you get the first lot of photos from the police servers? Or did you find where they originated from?”

  “I had to get them from the New South Wales Police server first so I knew what I was looking for. Then I found them on a server in Jakarta, which is where the police got them from, as well. But they didn’t originate there. I haven’t traced them back to their original upload site yet.”

  “When were they uploaded to the Jakarta server?”

  “4:22 p.m. on the sixteenth.”

  “Two days. And how hard was it to find them?”

  “Any mid-level analyst could find it.”

  “They were planted,” Lewis said to Jack. “Clearly and deliberately planted for the police or some other interested party to find. Like say, someone who wanted to buy a ticket on you. Do you believe me now? This is about the Judge.”

  Jack ran his hands over his face. “Fuck. You’re right. Whoever it is, though, they’ve been planning this since Bangkok. Since our second week in Bangkok, when I started hunting the Messiah. Two weeks before I was seconded to the strike force. We need to find out who pointed Phelps towards me when she went looking for a consultant.”

  “The first two murders in Sydney both happened before we went to Bangkok,” Lewis mused. “Infinity was formed three days after they found Morrissey and systematically blocked and derailed over the next three weeks until they put in a request to the ISO for SSA Jack Reardon, as soon as he was back in country.”

  Jack’s hands curled into fists. “It was all a delaying tactic. They didn’t want Infinity making any headway until I was there and fucking incriminated myself with every bloody thing I did and said.”

  Christ. Not again. Jack hated being manipulated. The anger was growing with each second. After everything he’d gone through in the desert, then in this fucking building, thanks to Ethan, McIntosh, and Harraway, he’d sworn he wasn’t going to be used like that again. Yet, here he was.

  How many of the other coincidences over the past several weeks had been deliberate? Fuck. How could he trust anything now?

  “Um, excuse me?”

  Jack opened eyes he hadn’t realised he’d closed and found Fabian looking at him.

  “I didn’t even get to the interesting bit,” Fabian said.

  Lewis looked like he was going to say one thing but then changed his mind and simply asked, “And what’s the interesting bit?”

  “The digital signature of the images.” Said like it was plainly obvious from the start. “The images weren’t captured on a camera. Or least, not a mechanical one.”

  Jack’s guts shifted uneasily. “What do you mean?” Though he had an inkling.

  “They came from a processor attached to an optic nerve.”

  The person following Jack hadn’t been taking actual photos. They’d simply been looking at him and taking shots with a neural implant. Just like Jack did.

  Jack was both disappointed and happy to find Ethan dead asleep the next morning. The lack of morning sex was balanced out by knowing Ethan now felt content and secure enough to sleep in Jack’s apartment. Whatever had caused his hesitation the night before had been smoothed over. Fingers crossed they could get on with this wild experiment in living together now.

  With no personal delays, Jack was back at the LAC right on eight o’clock. Adam was late again, leaving him alone with Steph, which he didn’t mind. She put him to work within moments of the impossibly tall Constable Toomey once more dropping him off at the room.

  Steph sat him at one end of the table and gave him a stack of blueprints, schematics, digital 3D renditions of the Williams scene, staff schedules, security checklists, witness statements pertinent to the ingress and egress of their offender, and a pile of secondary information she put to one side in case she had missed something he might need.

  “Since you’re here in the capacity of a security expert, we should actually have something to show for it,” she explained apologetically. “If you could at least jot something down, I’d really appreciate having something to show Dumay. Then I’ll let Adam pick your brain about the Morrissey scene. Is that okay?”

  “Happy to do what I can to catch this creep.”

  She smiled brightly. “Such a refreshing attitude in someone from the military. I was starting to think everyone even vaguely associated with them were all uptight, arrogant, condescending little . . . little twerps!”

  Jack laughed. Twerps? So like Ethan, whose deadliest curse was “blast.”

  Not really looking it, Steph said, “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I’m feeling a bit ambivalent towards them myself, these days.”

  “I read in your file you were discharged on medical grounds.”

  Sufficiently open-ended, he could expand on it or ignore the subtle invitation to share. Jack didn’t like talking about his final days with the service. There was precisely one person outside of those involved Jack had told about it, and there were days he regretted spilling it all to Ethan in the desert. Yet, there was the urge to tell Steph something more, something to explain his own bitter feelings about it all. He managed to shove that thought aside and pass on her comment with a shrug and gratitude that Adam hadn’t been there to witness it.

  The problem, he realised as Stephanie considered him with a sympathetic expression, was that there was no distance. There was no insulating persona to buffer him from the demands of the job. This, where he was a single, thin pretence away from being himself, was too close for comfort.

  “Do you have everything you need?” Steph asked instead of pushing.

  Jack swallowed the discomfort. “Enough to get started, at the very least.”

  “Don’t hesitate to ask if there’s anything you need.” She retreated to her end of the table, letting him get busy.

  By the time Adam rocked up, looking tired and nursing an extra-large coffee, Jack had appropriated half of the table and had it covered in blueprints and schematics. His “employment” as an SSA might be a cover, but the technicalities of the job weren’t. He was expected to be able to prove his qualifications at the drop of a hat and did actually use it as part of his real work, as well. He wasn’t just pretending to help Steph, and he did think he would be able to give her what she expected. Still wasn’t certain how it would help overall, but he wasn’t going to do a half-arsed job for her.

  Absorbed in his process, Jack barely spared Adam a “good morning.” He was, however, peripherally aware of the profiler watching him for a while. Adam sat, coffee in front of him as he flicked idly through his phone, keeping a surreptitious eye on Jack’s work.

  Aware of the fault in his walls, Jack worked to shore them up, putting a professional distance between him and these people he had to work with for now. Once, it wouldn’t have got to him so easily. Once, though, was before the desert, where so many things had been broken. His ability to compartmentalise all the distasteful, horrible things he saw—and did—in the process of getting the job done had been tested and shattered out there. Building it up again was a slow process, but he was getting there.

  Unlike the Melbourne victims, Williams had been killed at his place of work, in the IT department of an internet-based company that provided design and printing services. He’d been discovered on the floor of his section in the main building by the early-morning staff. Killed in the shower in the men’s toilet, then posed. The building had been fairly secure, especially after hours, but it hadn’t been foolproof. Jack highlighted several possible ingress points for the killer, which had already been picked up by the police.

  In an effort to actually be helpful, Jack extended his study beyond the obvious and into the realms of “highly trained operator” and looked for ways he would have used if an Office job had required him getting into the building undetected. Then he looked for ways Ethan would have
used. Those two searches overlapped and showed Jack a small window in the building’s security. The timing would have to be exact, but once found, Jack knew it was how the Judge got in and out without leaving a mark on the security.

  Pleased with his efforts, Jack looked up and discovered himself alone with Adam. Steph’s workspace was tidy and her laptop missing.

  “Her day to pick up the grandsprog from day care.” Adam answered the unasked question as he gathered up his few things. “Let’s call it a day, too.”

  Slightly disappointed he couldn’t do a big reveal, Jack settled for making a detailed note on the Williams file and emailed it to Steph. Adam waited, slightly impatiently, and as he was escorting Jack out of the building, declared, “Drinks tonight. No excuses.”

  “Sorry, but I don’t mix business and satisfactory pleasure.” Jack enjoyed watching Adam’s comically aghast response a bit too much.

  “Come on,” Adam pleaded. “Just a drink. Two work colleagues getting to know each other a bit better over a beer or two. Don’t say no, Nishant.”

  No one on the team had been able to come up with a reason for Jack pursuing his personal connection to Adam, but neither had anyone decided it might be damaging to the job. Either way, going for drinks with the man wouldn’t be personal. Even knowing each other’s proper names, what was happening between them now was less real than the hook-ups had been. Back then, the attraction had been honest at least. Jack was still attracted to Adam, but nothing was going to come of it, not now he and Ethan had solidified their arrangement. But encouraging a friendship would be a lie. All part of the job Adam wasn’t aware of.

  Telling himself it was to protect Adam, Jack said, “I actually have dinner plans tonight. Sorry.” Well, he was hoping he did.

  Adam schooled his expression into a bland smile, but not before he let slip a touch of his disappointment. “I understand.”

  Determined to not apologise again, Jack simply said, “See you tomorrow,” and got on his bike to go into the Office.

  After a substantially shorter debrief than the day before, Jack was leaving the operations room when someone called, “Reardon!”

  Jack spied Jesse Feitt approaching through the mostly empty cubicles in the centre of the room. Since Ethan had directly involved himself in the Office’s operations, it had been decided they had to find out everything they could about him. Under the guidance of the new Intelligence director, Special Investigator Jesse Feitt had been given the unenviable job of finding every skerrick of information out there on Ethan Blade. Seen as the resident Blade expert, Jack had been sought out for his opinion and knowledge several times. He always felt a little creepy talking about Ethan with Feitt, especially if the subject of the investigation was currently in his apartment.

  “Sorry to bother you on your way out,” the special investigator said. “I would have waited, but Director McIntosh said you’re on a UC case at the moment. It won’t take long.”

  With no excuse, Jack followed Feitt down to the sixth floor, Intelligence’s main hub. Feitt’s small operations room was empty at this time of day, just a couple of screens on the table glowing in the dim lighting.

  “We found some evidence I need you to confirm,” Feitt explained. “We’re not one hundred percent, but I think we might have a real piece of Blade’s history here. I was hoping you could say yay or nay.”

  Jack sat before the indicated screen. “I’ll give it a go.”

  Feitt sat at the other screen and tapped at the keypad. “I’ll warn you, it’s not pretty. The guy who discovered it has ten years of investigating mass killings and he threw up.”

  “Fuck. That bad?”

  “That bad. If you want, we can skip the worst part of the video. The actual details aren’t that important.”

  Second-, third-, and fourth-guessing his offer to help, Jack let Feitt bring up the video on the screen in front of him. It opened on what was either an apartment or very expensive hotel room. The view was from across a street and through a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. The room it looked into was plush with several soft couches, glass coffee tables, and a dining suite big enough to have an annual general meeting around. Lit with soft yellow light, everything appeared burnished and smooth.

  A man sat on a couch, laptop beside him. Dressed in a designer suit, he sprawled back, legs spread, tie loosened, the top buttons of his shirt undone, showing a thick patch of chest hair. He was dark-complexioned, with a Mediterranean cast to his features. A snifter in one hand, idly swirling an amber liquid around the bowl, he flicked through images on the laptop. Jack couldn’t make out the pictures, but it had to be porn of some sort, judging by the prominent tent in his pants.

  “Athens.” Feitt wasn’t watching the video but sitting back in his chair, as if distancing himself from the images. “During the constitutional amendment eighteen years ago, there was a proposal for the total separation of state and church. A lot of public protests and arguments. Even more private disagreements and threats. The man in the video is Stefanos Moraitis, a self-made man of rather substantial numbers. Mostly through legitimate investments, but there was some insider trading going on, some under-the-table deals. He was one of the most vocal voices calling for the separation. Didn’t mind throwing an awful lot of money at the cause, either. Made himself a few enemies along the way.”

  Getting a sense of where this was going, Jack asked, “Married?”

  “Divorced. Publically, it was amicable, but only because privately he paid his wife a whole heap to keep quiet about his extramarital activities. Had an addiction to paid companionship. Male, female, didn’t matter.”

  On the screen, Moraitis put the snifter down and blatantly rubbed his dick while checking his watch. A moment later, he looked over at the door, and the smile he gave it was enough to make Jack grimace. It was all predator, and not a predator looking for food, but for something to play with. The subject got up and went to the door, opening it. A man in a plain black suit spoke to the subject for a moment, who nodded impatiently, handed over a wad of cash, and beckoned someone into the room.

  Jack swallowed hard. The boy was fourteen or fifteen at most but dressed to look younger. His hair was cut short in back but long at the sides, so it swished over his face as he came into the room, hesitant and wary, shoulders hunched, head bowed. Once he was inside, the subject shut the door and locked it. When he looked at the boy, his expression was pure hunger.

  Wanting to skim already, Jack forced himself to watch as the boy was encouraged to go sit on the couch. The subject followed the kid closely, touching him constantly, on his shoulders, his back, his head, a seemingly accidental bump of his groin against the boy’s lower back. Over the next twenty minutes, the subject plied his prey with Sugar, a synthetic amphetamine pressed into little cubes and dropped into a drink strong enough to cover the flavour, usually highly alcoholic. It was frustrating because the kid kept his face down, hair a shield, even as he gulped down booze and Sugar. When he was sufficiently doped, the subject got him naked and pulled him onto his lap.

  That was when Jack saw it. The boy’s back was striped with red marks, from his shoulders down to his hips. Long lash marks, scars barely healed.

  “Shit,” Jack whispered.

  “That’s what flagged it for us,” Feitt said just as softly. “If Blade was telling us the truth about his age, he was fourteen there. Fifteen at most. It gets worse.”

  Jack’s stomach churned. Watching any more of this would make him puke, and they hadn’t even got to the really bad part yet.

  On the screen, the boy was a pliant toy for the subject. He was lifted and turned, touched and posed, head a loose weight on his neck. As it went on and on, Jack thought there was very little left that could make him any more horrified and furious than he already was.

  He was wrong.

  The subject put the boy on his knees and opened his mouth.

  Jack shut the screen down. Sat for several minutes in complete silence. He was numb, inside and o
ut. It was good, because if he felt anything right then, he would probably be arrested with no hope of parole.

  “Do you think it’s him?” Feitt asked.

  It was difficult, but Jack managed to get most of the footage into the deepest, darkest drawer in the filing cabinet in the back of his head. He sealed it shut knowing it wouldn’t stay that way.

  “Yeah.” His voice was rough. “Pretty certain. The scar patterns match. Age is right. Triggering trauma.” Jack shoved away the memory of Ethan saying he would never fellate him.

  “I can tell you what happens, if you’d rather.” Feitt’s tone was sympathetic.

  “No. I’ll watch it. Make certain it’s him.” Jack turned the screen back on. The footage was still playing. He focused on the time bar at the bottom. “Where do I skip to?”

  “About ten minutes further.”

  Jack slid the bar across to the right time and the image jumped to one nearly as rage inducing. The subject stood at the window of the room, looking almost directly at the camera. He had another glass in his hand and a satisfied smirk on his lips. Behind him, on the floor, the boy was lying facedown, head turned away from the camera. From the utter slackness in his limbs, he was either asleep, or more likely passed out. The subject slowly savoured his drink, and Jack hoped that whoever had set up the camera had a sniper rifle as well. It would be the only fitting end.

  Just as Jack was considering moving the video along again, the boy pushed up to his hands and knees. There was no hesitation, no softness about him. He moved with sure, efficient motions as he got into a crouch. Hair still covering his face, he reached for the empty cognac bottle on the coffee table. Standing, he flipped the bottle and caught it by the neck, then slinked around the table and came up behind the subject.

  The subject had no idea. Didn’t hear a thing, didn’t suspect anything. The boy came up directly behind him so as to show no reflection in the window. Once he was in place, it went so fast Jack barely caught it. Smashing the bottle on the window frame. Catching the subject around his face. Pulling his head back. Stabbing the broken bottle into his neck.