Exponential
Page 42
*
Enrique sat parked across the street and chuckled as he saw a woman join the cop. Enrique really had only one lead to go on. That was the cop. If Mara had any intelligence at all, she wouldn’t come near her place or the office if she didn’t want to be found. But since she went to the police, she was likely not finished with them. All Enrique had to do was watch the cop and wait for the girl to show up. He saw her when she walked up to the diner, but wasn’t looking for a blond. Now he laughed out loud as he looked at the photo again and compared it with the woman in his mind’s eye. Yes, she was the one. Different hair, but the same one.
What was she up to? She disguises herself, yet goes to the cops. This cop must definitely be working with her. She was wanted by the police, yet here they were, bad girl and the cop, eating breakfast together.
‘Cops were so stupid’ he thought to himself. They always thought about sharpening their skills when it came to surveillance. They never gave thought that it just might be them who was being watched. Keeping an eye on the cop was easy. Now he had to be more careful when stalking her. She was used to watching her back. He could simply walk in, shoot her as she ate breakfast, and leave. But that always meant a murder investigation along with witnesses to the crime. Murder investigations were ugly and his clients didn’t like them. He was able to charge very high prices for his service because he was a professional. He took care not to leave bodies. With no bodies… no murder investigation. Yes, there would be a case of someone ‘missing’, but not dead.
That was really the hard part. Getting rid of the body. There were lots of places to hide a body: buried, sealed inside a waste drum, weighted down and tossed into a convenient body of water, but they usually were found – eventually. Even a vat of acid or a wood chipper, while seeming like a good ways to lose a body, still left fragments of remains that forensics could use to determine that a murder had taken place.
Long ago, he had solved this problem. It was so childishly simple, yet no one had discovered any of his victims, at least not that he knew of. His assignments took him to cities all over, but in each there was usually a funeral facility large enough to host a crematorium. All he had to do was break in at night while there was no activity, dump the body of his victim in a wood box destined for the furnace and set the machine’s automated cremation cycle to start. What could be better – a machine designed to get rid of human bodies.
Sure, there were remains, the ashes. But, usually the machine even took care of that. If it were discovered that an unauthorized use of the machine had occurred, so what? It was too late and with no remains but ashes, nothing left to identify the victim. He just had to ‘clean’ the victim of lose any jewelry and such before running the machine.
There was also the option of industrial incinerators. Many companies had them and often were in the same state of quiet disuse at two o’clock in the morning. So if a crematorium wasn’t handy, he did have other choices.
That made the problem of assassination a little more challenging. He couldn’t simply kill someone and leave. Using sniper techniques or poison would be so easy, but then again, there was that problem of the remains along with the ensuing investigation. He had to get his targets alone, so they would just appear to simply vanish without a trace. Now that he had her within his grasp, he only had to wait for the opportune moment.
Plus there was the fact that this particular job also had a very unique feature. One that he had never had to face before. The ‘mark’ was not some dough-faced, bloated, crooked politician but, rather quite pretty and relatively defenseless. What an opportunity! A little ‘fun on the job with this one’ he thought to himself. He couldn’t suppress the grin on his face.