Criminal Minds (Fox Meridian Book 4) (12 page)

‘Imaginative,’ Fox commented, grimacing. ‘I don’t suppose you can dig up any more on these people from LifeWeb or something? BlueBlooded too.’

‘I’ve already started searching. It is, unfortunately, laborious. We have got an interview with Mister Bent, however. Tomorrow at thirteen thirty.’

‘Okay, get me everything we have on Bent. Did the case files come through?’

‘This morning.’

‘Good. I want those, the forum transcripts, and everything you’ve compiled. I’ll go through it all before our visit to Rikers.’

~~~

Fox was in the kitchen preparing her evening meal when the call came through from Nathan Shark. It was just after seven and she had spent long hours poring over the data on Bent, and she was tired and not up to dealing with the vid producer, but she let the call connect anyway.

‘Something’s happened,’ Shark said without preamble.

‘Something? I’m tired, Nathan, I don’t need cryptic.’

‘The channel got an email through to one of the general mailboxes a few minutes ago. They’re going live with a breaking report stream in fifteen, but a friend on the news desk sent me a copy because he thought I should know about it. I’m forwarding it to you now.’

‘IB-Nineteen has to get a billion messages a day. What’s so special about this one?’

‘It’s signed “Jack the Ripper.”’

‘Shit. Does NAPA know about this?’

‘They’re contacting them now. For comment. They want to put it on a stream fast before NAPA can get it pulled.’

‘NAPA will be pissed off. And they’d better be careful what they say about this. You know Scotland Yard received various letters supposedly from the original Jack back in the day?’

‘And a news agency and some vigilante group or something. I did pay attention to the research Adrian did. Most people think they were fakes, but that’s where the name came from.’

‘Well, probability is that this is a hoax too.’

Shark’s image nodded. ‘I told my friend they should be careful, but the news desk here is… a little sensationalist.’

An icon appeared in Fox’s visual field indicating that mail had been accepted for her. ‘Okay, and thanks for the heads-up.’ As Shark’s image vanished, Fox opened the mail, and then the attachment within it, and read.

Dear Sirs,

I am bak and at my work.

The whores an harluts will be cleansed from this metro.

The useless guards will not catch me, as they fayled to do before.

No one can catch me.

Signed,

Jack the Ripper.

‘It somewhat resembles the “From Hell” letter sent to George Lusk in eighteen eighty-eight,’ Kit commented.

‘It’s really badly written if that’s what you mean. That one came with part of a human liver.’

‘I’d imagine transmitting an organ by email would be quite difficult.’

‘Yeah. NAPA are going to be all over this, and I’m guessing this
is
a hoax, but send it over to MarTech and see whether anyone can do any analysis on it. Text, structure, whatever.’

‘I’ll get right on it.’

‘And send something to Sister Naomi. Warn her this is coming. Even if it is a hoax, this is going to step up attention.’

6
^th
October.

There had been some form of correctional facility on Rikers Island since it had been bought by New York City’s Commission of Charities and Corrections in 1883. The island had been smaller then: they had added landfill to expand the surface area in 1954. Sixty years later, it had become one of the worst prison facilities in the United States and held around a hundred thousand prisoners. Things had changed.

The entire island was now surrounded by a twenty-metre-high, reinforced wall with sentry guns mounted on top. No one came or left by water now: access was through Block One, a half-kilometre-high tower linked to the similar Block Two by a single bridge which could, in case of dire emergency, be blown in half by explosives. Block One housed administration, the necessary computer and utility functions, high-security courts, and housing for one hundred thousand prisoners classified as low risk. Block Two had a capacity of five hundred thousand, ranging from petty thieves to murderers, and the worst of them were held in the highest-security region, which was underground.

Fox thought of Rikers as a Hell hole, beaten for severity only by the Cold Harbour facility on the Moon, but there were some people who got themselves locked up there rather than living in the Sprawl. Inside, you got food, education, and a roof, which was more than could be said for some parts of the metro. Fox stepped off the transport vertol which had carried her over from the precinct 17 HQ tower, which was used as the main hub for staff and visitors. She was immediately met by two men in suits.

Frederik Ungar she knew. He was an aging, fairly short man with a lot of muscle on a small frame and no hair to speak of. He had been a pretty good detective in his day, but his day had come to an abrupt midnight when he was caught in an explosion, a bombing in the Tribeca area set up by UA. Fox knew his right leg was artificial as a result. He had been promoted to captain and put in charge of Rikers as a ‘reward’ for surviving. He still had hard, grey, cop’s eyes and, she bet, a sharp mind.

‘Inspector Meridian,’ Ungar said as she approached them. ‘Your request came as something of a surprise. I wanted to be sure you knew what you were getting into.’

‘It’s just Miss now, Captain,’ Fox replied, smiling and reaching out to take the offered hand.

‘I heard. That screw-up Canard should be lynched for chasing you out.’

Fox shrugged. ‘If people keep making dumb voting decisions, I might take his job off him.’

Ungar smirked an unprofessional sort of smirk and turned to the other man. ‘This is Earnest Prank, the psychologist who keeps an eye on Bent.’

Fox took Prank’s hand. It was a little like shaking hands with a lettuce. Prank was not young, maybe in his forties, or maybe a little younger, and suffering from having to deal with deranged criminals every day. There was grey showing in his short, blonde hair, his muddy-green eyes had a watery quality, his face was thin and drawn. If he had ever exercised in his life, it had been a long time ago. ‘Miss Meridian,’ he said, acknowledging her, and his voice, at least, was good: warm and soothing, Fox thought.

‘Do you prefer Doctor or Inspector?’ Fox asked. She knew he would have an inspector’s rank because that was the way the system worked.

‘Doctor. I’ve had it pointed out that I didn’t earn the rank and some of my subjects get agitated when faced with police officers. Bent does not. He rarely gets agitated with anything.’

‘I read the case files, including the psychological analysis following his arrest. Everything my PA could dig up on him, which included an interview with an INN reporter two years ago.’

‘And you still want to talk to him?’

‘No,’ Fox replied flatly. ‘No, I don’t
want
to talk to him, but he may have information pertinent to the case I’m working so I’m going to do it anyway.’

‘Well,’ Ungar said, ‘it’ll take us thirty minutes to get through the security checks on the way to the high-security section, so we have that long to persuade you to turn around.’

Fox understood their concerns, because she
had
been through everything Kit had been able to gather on Silas Bent. Not that that was exactly a complete picture. There were no records of his birth, but he claimed to have been born in 2002 in Houston, Texas, though he had also claimed the date was 1998 and the place was San Francisco, California. His mother had been a prostitute, a defrocked nun, and a TV star who refused to own up to her son. He had never claimed to know his father. The first solid record of his existence was in 2018 when he had been arrested for sexual assault on a nine-year-old girl and, at that time, his parents had been noted as deceased, but he had claimed in his interview on INN that his mother had beaten him with a rubber hose until he was twenty-four.

What was known for sure was that he had spent a long time in the Southern Protectorate having vanished off the grid in the 2030s. It was suspected that his actual tally of victims was far higher than the seven he had been imprisoned for and that he had fully developed his criminal pathology in the twenty or so years he spent in the dustbowl and the Sprawl regions of the south. He had popped up on NAPA’s radar a couple of times during that period, both being cases of sexual assault on prostitutes, both dismissed for lack of evidence. In the aftermath of his arrest, NAPA had done some due diligence but had been unable to find either of the women involved, though missing persons in the protectorate were not uncommon.

The psychological analysis carried out prior to sentencing had been unable to come up with any distinct diagnosis of Bent’s state of mind. His story would change depending upon whom he talked to. His mother had beaten him; his mother had smothered him with affection; his mother had forced him into sexual acts he came to think of as deplorable. He had, according to him, always been a hit with the girls, but his social skills left a lot to be desired and the sexual assault charges suggested that his assertions of popularity were lies. He denied necrophilia, but met the criteria for that paraphilia. Kit had found a 1958 study by Klaf and Brown which suggested that the majority of necrophiliacs desired a partner who would neither reject nor resist them, while a significant minority had self-esteem issues. Bent appeared to fit both groups, but he had one other notable characteristic which had taken longer to be detected: he delighted in the perception of power over women.

Ultimately, Bent asserted that power by killing them, slitting their throats, and raping them while they died. However, deprived of the opportunity for that, he had enough skill at manipulation to find a way to hurt any woman he was exposed to in some other way. The psychologist who had pinned it all down had spent three months working with Bent in prison, and had then had a nervous breakdown during which she had attempted to commit suicide.

‘If you’ll pardon the unprofessional language,’ Prank said as they made their way to the interview room where Bent was waiting, ‘he’s a twisted son-of-a-bitch and I wish to God they’d ship him out to Cold Harbour and I could be done with him.’

‘We don’t normally allow women near him,’ Ungar added. ‘No female guards on his block, no female visitors allowed. Of course, he’s denied conjugal rights due to the nature of his crimes.’

‘Women
want
to see him?’ Fox asked.

‘You’d be amazed.’

‘It’s the redeemer fantasy,’ Prank said. ‘Hybristophilia, if you want to be technical. They think they can get him to turn around and be an upstanding gentleman, or they think there’s a lost little boy in there they can nurture. If there was ever a lost little boy in Silas Bent, Bent strangled him in his sleep.’ They stopped at the door to the interview room and Prank gave it one last try. ‘Are you
sure
you need to interview this guy? Are you ready for this?’

Fox closed her eyes and, briefly, saw Joshua Sandoval’s grinning face on the inside of her eyelids. She pushed the image aside and reached down into herself. Down into the black part of her mind she only used when she had to walk into battle. The Army had done the usual aggression training on Fox and it had been fairly useless. Bayonet drills, VR sims designed to provoke violent reaction, drill instructors with the temperament of a starved pit bull, they had tried them all, but the only result had been to make Fox realise that she needed to be able to submerge her own nature to do the job. She had to do it for one person, Suzy Linekar, who had died at the hands of UA thugs in 2045 and given Fox her purpose in life. Fox had learned that caring about Suzy and the other people who would follow in her footsteps meant
not
caring, and she had found the dark place, where the anger was.

Letting the black reach up and consume everything else, Fox opened her eyes and looked up at Prank. The psychologist let out a soft gasp and took an involuntary step back. ‘I’m ready,’ Fox said.

Silas Bent sat on a metal chair behind a metal table. There was another metal chair across from him which, like the other furniture, was bolted to the floor. Fox ignored it, examining the man as he took his time examining her. She had elected to go back to basics for the visit: bodysuit, leather jacket in battered purple, black jeans tucked into solid, heavy-duty combat boots. Bent was in the standard-issue orange jumpsuit which every prisoner wore, black epaulets marking him out as a lifer. His hands were manacled to the table, his ankles to the floor. A hobble chain ran between the ankle cuffs and a thick belt held him locked to his chair. He was not powerfully built, but there was something about him which suggested speed. Fox decided he relied on that, probably attacking by surprise and disabling his victims before they had time to react. Only two of his victims had had defensive wounds; the rest had not known they were about to die until the blood was spewing out of their necks. He was, Fox thought, an entirely average man approaching sixty, bald-headed, blocky featured, with a flat nose. But then you saw the eyes, pale and blue, and sharp, hard. There was a sparkle in them now as he saw her, but she could see the dead behind it.

‘Please,’ Bent said, ‘sit. I get so few visitors, and
very
few so attractive.’

Fox settled into the seat, sitting upright, hands in her lap. She saw the slight twitch at the corners of his lips and knew he thought she was nervous. ‘Do you pay attention to the news feeds, Mister Bent?’

‘No introductions?’

He knew who she was: they had had to go through official procedures to get her in and, since she was no longer with NAPA, that had included asking Bent if he would accept the meeting. Like he was going to refuse. ‘I’m Tara Meridian. I work for Palladium Security Solutions.’

‘I watch the news feeds, Tara,’ Bent said. ‘I know you do a little more than working for Palladium.’

‘I’m head of the investigation division. You’ll have noticed that someone’s taken up killing prostitutes.’