Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2) (34 page)

As it turned out, it was a serviceable bluff, and Tattar leaned forward and murmured to Yudin, “Take the off-ramp here.”
  Yudin looked a question at him.  Tattar nodded curtly, and Yudin turned around in a kind of you’re-taking-the-fall-for-this-and-not-me kind of way, and put on his blinker.

Rideau glanced out the window.  Since they were crawling through slow-moving traffic, she could see a number of scrofulous homeless huddled around a barrel at the side of the
road, flames leaping out of it as they tossed more wood on.  As folks drove by, they reached their arms out their windows, handing them change.  Rideau smiled.  Her job at Interpol had forced her to look at a great many atrocities; she took any signs of humanity where she could find them.

The snow looked so lovely.  It was deceptive, though.  The snow and ice would also kill a few people before this night was over, maybe more than a few.  Snow and ice did that.  Such beauty, such unrelenting cold.  Funny how some of the most gorgeous things in Nature
could be so destructive.

While watching the city slide by, Rideau blinked in astonishment at something.  A pair of dogs—they looked to be stark black and with slick bodies and thick fur.  “Are those…?”  She trailed off.

Tattar looked where she was looking.  He sighed.  “Wolves,
da
.  Or mutts.  Lots of homeless dogs all around here, almost as many as in Moscow.”  Rideau had heard about the stray dog problems in Moscow—it had been a consistent menace every since the Olympics came through in 1980.  Having forced many people out of their homes to build the new stadiums or else to make the tenements look more presentable on TV, thousands of dogs and cats had suddenly been left homeless.  Those strays had multiplied, and had since become kind of a symbol for the troubles facing modern Russia: left out in the cold, making their own way against all odds.  “It seems like the packs are spreading,” Tattar said, “and some are breeding with the wolves on the outskirts of the city, and then encroaching further and further into the city.”

She nodded, and looked back out the window.

Watching the snowflakes swirl and drop and rise, it took Rideau back a few years.  Christmas in Saint-Malo.  She had been there with a few colleagues at a meeting, holiday party, and an end-of-the-year review.  It was there that she believed she had last seen Detective-Inspector Jacques Dubois.  Tall and ruggedly handsome, recently married, often playing with the wedding band around his finger (as she was presently playing with hers, though she didn’t know it).  They had bumped into one another at the salad bar, talked about kitchens—Dubois and his wife had just moved into a new house, and he had asked Rideau for his opinion on flooring for kitchens, wooden or tile, since he swore he had poor taste and couldn’t be trusted, and his wife was flip-flopping between the two.  Then they had discussed soccer; she was a fan and he had once played all through school.

Later,
there had been a short meeting of the various detective-inspectors, a few closed-door talks and lectures in small auditoriums rented out, where they discussed the headway they had made over the year, some of the bumps they had hit in the road, and the challenges ahead.  Rideau had been asked to speak on liaising between multiple agencies remotely, and how emerging technologies were helping to facilitate this.  If memory served, Dubois had given a terrific speech on new cyber crime detection techniques the American FBI was working on, something already used effectively to help them trace a few members of the elusive hacker group Activ-8 after they crashed some server or other.

And then she remembered h
ow Amsterdam police found him, in the back of an out-of-business butcher’s shop.  Pieces in garbage bags.  An operating table nearby, complete with IV drip, saline, blood packets to match Dubois’s own (A+), and used adrenaline shots.  The working theory was that whoever got a hold of him had wanted him to remain alive, right until the very end.  It was confirmed a week later when a DVD was sent to Lyon, to Interpol HQ, complete with a menu screen and chapter selection—chapters labeled “
TOE REMOVAL
” and “
PLUCKING OUT THE EYES
.”  No one had ever seen anything like it, never in the history of law enforcement.  The camera used to do the filming was a high-grade Sony PMW-EX3, with quality sound and image, priced nearly $10,000 US.  There was a boom mike—a God damn
boom mike
, like they used in Hollywood movies and TV shows—to capture the screams even better.  And, according to the tech guys, the smoothness of zooms and overhead shots indicated they had used a camera jib and steady-cam.  Money, time, effort, and skill had been used in the torture and death of Detective-Inspector Jacques Dubois.

And Rideau had had to watch it.  Again, and again, and again, and again, and again.  Like any video left by a criminal, it had to be studied and analyzed by various experts, all looki
ng for clues that might lead them to the monsters that did it.  Anything from the video timestamp, to the color of the paint on the walls, to the clothing the masked doctors were wearing in the video, to the kind of clock hanging on the wall; all of it had been analyzed.  Rideau had no choice but to watch.  Dubois’s screams had been…

The lieutenant leaned back in his seat with a huff and looked at her.  “It will be about half an hour, maybe more.  Any other day, it would only take
us ten minutes to get there, but this storm…they are calling it the Storm of the Decade.  There have been multiple road closings already.”

“Mm,” Rideau said, half listening.  She took her attention away from the men and women around their fire
, away from the wolf-mutts slinking away down an alley, away from that video and the Christmas at Saint-Malo.  She reached for the file Tattar had given her and opened it again.  After a minute of scanning, she said, “I know most of these names, but not all of them.  Can you bring me up to speed on these here?”

Rental car
, Shcherbakov thought.  He’d spotted it on the way to the cabin, and now on his way back he decided to inspect it.  He put on his hazard lights and pulled to a stop just in front of it.

The
silver Toyota Camry didn’t have rental plates, but those were easy to change.  A screwdriver or a decent knife could unscrew the plates on the back of any car in any parking lot, not difficult at all.  The car was in decent condition, and a quick hotwiring showed that it still worked just fine.  It wasn’t out of gas, either.  No other reason to abandon this vehicle besides the owner wanting to.

With cars swishing by slowly, Shcherbakov rooted around the glove compartment, under the seats, and on top of the dashboard.  All he found was an old receipt in the glove compartment for a meal purchased at Vinechi’s, an Italian restaurant in the city, but the date on the purchase showed that was six months ago and was therefore likely left by a renter before his target. 
He’s cleaned it all out
. 
He doesn’t want anyone to know where this car is from
. 
That means he anticipated
. 
He knew that down the road, police would find it
.  This was somewhat remarkable, since most killers, no matter how professional, didn’t do that much cleanup or preparation.  It revealed a stunning celerity of mind not often found in his targets.

Nothing in Spencer Pelletier’s background (at least the background Shcherbakov and Interpol were aware of) indicated any special training. 
A natural forward thinker
. 
Don’t see many of those in this life
.

Shcherbakov popped the trunk of his car, and out of his bag of tools he pulled a crowbar, and about thirty seconds later he had ripped off a panel on the inside of the Camry’s passenger door.  Using a flashlight, it only took a moment to find the VIN (Vehicle Identification Number), and he took a picture of it with his cell phone.

Behind him, he thought he heard movement.  He turned, aimed his flashlight at the woods.  For one moment, for just a single instant, he saw a pair of glowing yellow embers moving through the trees, maybe another pair just behind them.  More wolves.  There could be no doubt that a large pack was indeed out in force tonight. 
There probably won’t be anything except bones left of Zakhar Ogorodnikov and the others by morning
.

Shcherbakov
stepped away from the Camry and walked to the edge of the road, and gazed into the dark, snow-blanketed forest. 
He parked the car and walked the rest of the way
. 
Driving up to Ogorodnikov’s house would have left tracks in the snow
.  Even if Pelletier had driven in to scope the place out and then left very quickly, Ogorodnikov would have noticed the tracks—careful as he was to hide his little playpen out in the middle of nowhere, how could he miss that? 
And Mr. Pelletier anticipated that, too
. 
He gauged his enemy correctly
.  This also revealed an insightful mind.

And how long must he have waited? 
Zakhar Ogorodnikov was a hunter, a former soldier, and a man careful enough to hold off suspicions from local authorities.  There was no way he walked anywhere unarmed.  Pelletier could have shot Ogorodnikov while walking out his door, that would have been safer, but that would’ve meant killing him, or injuring him to the point that discussion would be impossible.  That meant only one thing.

He wanted information
.  It jibed with the body Shcherbakov had found dragged to the porch and left to cook.

Yet again
, it revealed a patient mind.  Yet, all the evidence also showed a man who could move quickly at the drop of a hat. 
Patient, but with spurts of impulsiveness
. 
A good judge of his opponents
. 
Careful, but violent when necessary
. 
Gleefully so
. 
He enjoys his work
.

That made sense.  The info they had from Zverev’s Interpol connections, and what had been said about him on the news months ago, was that Pelletier was a certified psychopath, and psychopaths got bored easily. 
Anything to stay busy, anything to occupy their highly-functioning minds
.

His phone rang.  Still gazing into the forest, wondering about the path his target might’ve taken,
and always wary of wolves, Shcherbakov answered.  “Have you called the others?”  He knew who it would be.

“Not yet,” Zverev said.
  “Do you think he’s stupid enough to come back into the city?”

“I’ve just found the rental car he abandoned to hunt
Ogorodnikov.  This man is very sure of himself.  He took the guns and the cell phones of all our friends back at the cabin.  He’s a mover, he’s smart, and he knows it.  Such overconfidence, he believes he’s invincible.”

A heavy sigh.  “I’ll call the others, then.  I’ll warn them.”

“Be sure that you do.  I’ve also got a VIN that I want you to run through some of our friends in Chelyabinsk Police.  Don’t tell them what it’s for.  I’m going to send you the picture I took on my phone.  Find out which car rental service owns this thing.  It’s a 2009 silver Toyota Camry.”  Pelletier had changed the plates, but there was no way to go into all the secret nooks and crannies of an automobile and remove all of its VINs, not without a well-equipped chop shop, special books from the manufacturers themselves (so that he knew the secret locations of each VIN), and a week to remove all the pieces to get to each VIN. 
It means he’s in a hurry, or else he would’ve taken his time, gotten them all
.

“I can do that, but w
hat do you want the name of the rental company for?  Whatever name he used with them is probably a fake.  If he made it into the country and he’s renting cars, he must have at least one good fake ID, maybe even supplied to him by our friends in Derbent.”

“That’s so,” the Grey Wolf
agreed, “but this one’s a forward thinker.”

“So?”

Looking at the execution of it all, a surety had risen in his mind.  “So, if
I
were going to come into a foreign area and do what he’s done, I would keep my escape options open.”

“Meaning what?”

“More rentals, at least two more, parked somewhere inside the city in case I had to flee back out of these woods and into this Camry, and in case someone driving by described me and my car to police later,” Shcherbakov said.  “That’s what I would do.  It may be that he did not do that, but a man like this can’t keep moving if he doesn’t leave himself back doors.  We need to close those doors.”

“All right.  What do you want me to do once I have the rental company’s name?”

“They probably have GPS locators on their cars.  The ones rental companies use are very difficult to remove without proper gear and time.  If we’re lucky, he didn’t have time to do all that.  He wanted to get in and out of the city as fast as possible; a little GPS locator wouldn’t mean much if all the police have is a description of him, and if they don’t know that he’s even renting cars.  Like I said, he thinks he’s invincible and he intends to remain constantly mobile.”

“You sound like you know him,” Zverev said.

“I know his type,” Shcherbakov said.  “Call the family, tell them he’s not done hunting, not if he got what he wanted from Ogorodnikov and the others.”