The Hunter Inside (24 page)

Once inside, he grabbed the white file
that Mayhew had given him earlier at the Coffee House.

This way is better
, he thought,
less
chance of anybody seeing what I’m reading
. He felt that if somebody did see
what he was reading, they would think him mad. An FBI Special Agent who needed
to turn to crazy off-the-wall theories in an effort to solve murders was not
something the public at large were likely to place their faith in, and he
satisfied himself that there was nobody in the vicinity that might take an
interest in his actions, before settling back into the driver’s seat of the car
and skipping past the title page he’d seen earlier.

He scratched his forehead as he read
the second page of the file. It spoke of the various parts that make up the
human soul, and the interaction between different parts of the soul during life
and after death.

For O’Neill, a not very spiritual man
of the Western world, it made little sense. The terminology and the theory was,
literally at times, a foreign language to him, and as quickly as he had read a
paragraph he found himself looking back at it, trying to determine its
significance in terms of the spirit of Shimasou. It was not until he reached
the end of the third page that Shimasou was actually mentioned, and O’Neill saw
that Mayhew had simplified what he had read considerably when explaining it to
the Special Agent.

The fourth page of the file covered
most of what Mayhew had told him, describing how Shimasou, once awoken, would
take on human-like form, and seek to obliterate good in the world, bringing
about evil by forming links with the minds and souls of those that it killed.
By affecting the souls of these individuals, it would affect the souls of their
blood relatives and begin to control them; using them for its own purpose and
growing stronger and stronger, as it fed off their minds and eventually their
bodies and souls.

The fifth page of the file explained
how the spirit of Shimasou stood for evil and was totally separated from good.
Therefore, it only took evil and badness from the soul of its victims but,
because of its huge and growing strength and its status as a spirit, its
thoughts, outlooks and actions would be one hundred fold those of its victims.
Any morsel of hate in the victim would ensure that Shimasou was fed with enough
hatred to wipe out a whole city. Any sense of guilt would not be even
considered by Shimasou as that would be relative to its opposite; Shimasae, and
without Shimasae being summoned to fight against Shimasou nothing would be able
to stop it from taking over the world, as it forged links with more and more
people as a direct result of its actions.

This is damn serious stuff
, O’Neill thought to
himself, magnificently understating the significance of such a spirit if it
were allowed to carry out its objectives. As he continued on, looking at a
drawing of the statue that was said to hold the banished spirit of Shimasou, he
actually felt himself beginning to take it more seriously.

Mayhew had said that Wayans’
grandmother had brought a statue with her from China, and here was a drawing of
a statue that was similar to the one he had described. Mayhew had also told how
the spirit of Shimasou had tortured the grandmother of Paul Wayans. It had
taken over her mind and driven her to suicide, such was its hunger to achieve
its goals. Things matched up between the file that he read and Todd Mayhew’s
story, and O’Neill could finally begin to employ his police training.

When things matched up, there was a
benefit in following up a lead, no matter how ludicrous it may sound. There was
only one course of action that he could take. He would drive to the main FBI
headquarters in Brooklyn, and check out John Riley’s family history. If he
could find a link between the murder of Riley and Mayhew’s story, then the
evidence would be compelling; he would have no option other than to fully
believe Mayhew’s story.

The second thing that he had to do was
speak to Sandy Myers.

If what the contents of the file said
were true, then she was at great risk from Shimasou. If, on the other hand, it
was O’Neill’s second theory that was correct, then others might be at risk from
Sandy Myers. At least by considering the former option first he could either
rule it out or begin to build up a wider picture of the case. He would be glad
of either outcome. The case was stretching his resolve and, as he started the
engine of his car and put it into gear, all that O’Neill really wanted to do
was sleep. But he couldn’t sleep, and he was pretty certain that anybody else
who was directly involved in this case would not be sleeping either.

He turned out of the lot of the fast
food restaurant and followed a sign that past experience told him would take
him on the straightest route to Brooklyn. He paid no attention to the other
motorists on the road; such was his concentration on the task in hand, and as a
result received several angry honks of horns as he put his foot down and weaved
in and out of the early afternoon traffic. This did not bother Special Agent
O’Neill. He paid as much attention to the horns of cars he cut up and left
seething in his wake as he did to the sparse scenery that was intersected by
the asphalt that stretched out in front of him.

O’Neill had only one thing on his
mind. That was to reach Brooklyn in as quick a time as possible and this he
achieved; slashing the time it would normally have taken in half, due to his
take-no-prisoners style of driving.

Both O’Neill and the car in which he
had traveled were more than a little flushed by the time they arrived in
Brooklyn. He pulled into the parking lot at the rear of the building and got
out of the car before walking towards the front of the building, leaving it
sizzling in his wake.

If things ever settled down, he would
get a new car; he thought he might as well spend some of his savings if he
could not get any time off work to do anything else.
One with air
conditioning would be nice
, he thought to himself as he pushed open the
door and walked into the three-story building he usually avoided as much as
possible due to his ongoing ill feeling towards his boss.

Much to O’Neill’s distaste, it was
Lineker whom he saw first as he attempted to blend into the surroundings of the
busy room. It contained between twenty and thirty people, all actively chasing
up leads or information on the many cases that they were currently working on.

All were overworked, including
O’Neill, despite his position, and he wondered what it must be like to be a
sheriff in a small, quiet town in the middle of nowhere, as his red-faced boss
came hurrying towards him across the office, knocking a stack of files from the
hands of one of the secretaries without pausing to look back, and accosting
O’Neill with a high pitched cry of, ‘Where have you been?’

The superiority complex that Lineker
had presumably gained from sitting in an office all day annoyed O’Neill, and
the demanding tone in his voice made the big agent want to punch him. He looked
away from the expectant gaze of his boss, and said, ‘Thinking’.

‘Thinking? You haven’t got time to
think, O’Neill. Why did you send Hoskins back here?’ His voice again assumed a
high pitch, and O’Neill looked back at him, noting his unusually red face.
Normally he would have enjoyed seeing this, and would strive to wind him up as
much as possible, but there were other things O’Neill needed to do.

‘I didn’t think he could help me at
the time,’ O’Neill replied, intending to brush aside any aggravation by
assuming a dull and non-confrontational tone. If Lineker thought he was being
cocky he would have to suffer a twenty-minute lecture about working as part of
a team that would almost definitely include a phrase like: ‘Collaboration
ensures successful operations across our nation’, and he wasn’t sure that he
could listen to a new millennium kind of assessment on working practices from a
man who had not done any real field work in twenty years due to his devotion to
a desk. He had his own idea of working practice that went something like:
‘Actions speak louder than words’, and he was pretty sure it was his assessment
that would ensure progress and maybe even a result on this case. That was if
they ever let him get on with it.

Hoskins had by now made his way over
to where the two men stood looking at one another, and waited to see what Lineker’s
reaction was to O’Neill’s flippancy.

‘Right, O’Neill. Let’s get one thing
straight here. Hoskins is working on this case with you whether you like it or
not. He is not your personal assistant who looks after your vehicle for you.
You got it?’

Hoskins dropped his gaze in time to
avoid the hateful stare O’Neill flashed in his direction as Lineker continued,
‘I want him with you every step of the way on this. As from now.’ He turned and
stormed across the room and into his office, slamming the door behind him
almost hard enough to break the glass. He was not prepared to listen to
protestations from O’Neill.

O’Neill looked back towards the
blushing face of Hoskins and muttered, ‘Asshole’.

Hoskins, determined not to have a
confrontation with
his
boss, ignored the comment and said, ‘What can I
do for you, Chief?’

The last thing O’Neill wanted was
Hoskins looking over his shoulder while he searched the database for details of
John Riley’s relatives. He didn’t want him asking questions that he couldn’t
answer, and the only way to get rid of him and ensure he could sneak out of the
door when he had finished, was to send him to the depository where paper
records of old files were kept.

‘I want you to go and find me the
files for any murder from the last ten years that holds any similarities to the
recent murders of John Riley and Paul Wayans. Anything from the surrounding
areas, anything where a knife was used, or anything that went unsolved.’

‘But Chief…that’s gonna take hours.
Wouldn’t the computer…’ O’Neill cut off Hoskins’ pleading in its infancy. He
was always annoyed by agents who wanted only the glamour of working on big
cases without the hard work that went with cracking them. ‘Hoskins, I’m going
to be using the database to do some research myself. It’s either gonna take me
hours, or it’s gonna take you hours to trawl through those files. So tell me.
What’s it gonna be?’

Hoskins knew this was a loaded
question, regarding whether or not the next six months of his working life were
going to be made hell by the bastard standing in front of him. He nodded,
before beginning to make his way towards the musty room that always gave him
the spooks. The narrow bays between the high shelving made him feel
claustrophobic, and the dust got up his nose and on his chest. His afternoon
was not going to be a pleasant one.

Neither was O’Neill’s.

While Hoskins felt hard done by having
to look through paper work, O’Neill would be placing himself directly at risk
in his efforts to solve this case. If Hoskins knew about Shimasou he would
probably be grateful to Sam O’Neill. If what O’Neill had read was true then he
was, after all, trying to save the life of Hoskins.

O’Neill waited until Hoskins was out
of sight, before heading for the computer terminal placed in a cramped corner of
the room. With Hoskins out of the way, and Lineker presumably chewing a valium
in his office, he stood a good chance of being able to check the database
without anybody taking an unwelcome interest in his actions.

The office was such a beehive of
activity that people did not have time to stop and wonder what he was looking
for, and O’Neill pulled up a chair and sat down in front of the monitor that
was almost permanently ready to assist fellow officers.

For O’Neill, the FBI database was the
best officer they had. Besides being crammed with knowledge it was also
trustworthy. He didn’t feel as though he had to watch his back as far as the
database went, and this was something he felt with no other officer he came
into contact with. Everybody was always thinking about their future and their
prospects. He thought that maybe this knowledge had helped
him
get to
where he was today.

He tabbed down the inventory of
options on the screen in front of him until he got to ‘Victim Search’. He
pressed the Enter key and received a second list, which he scanned before
tabbing to ‘Search By Name/Date’ and pressing Enter again. Before entering any
details, Special Agent O’Neill glanced around quickly to make sure that Lineker
was still in his office. When he saw that he was, he quickly typed in the word
‘Riley’ and the year ‘1990’ before using the mouse on the right of the keyboard
to click on the ‘OK’ option and waiting as a box in the center of the monitor’s
screen informed him that the search was in progress.

After a ten second interval the words
‘Search Complete’ flashed up on the screen in front of him, and a list of the
twenty nearest matches was shown, split onto two pages. O’Neill scanned up and
down the first page and saw that there was no Riley present on the list. This
disappointed him somewhat, as he expected any match to be at the very top of
the list, and he used the mouse to click on the icon marked ‘Next’, revealing
numbers eleven to twenty. His heart sank as he read through the second page of
results. He was coming to the end of the list, and still hadn’t made a link
between John Riley and a relative that would support the information given to
him by Todd Mayhew.