The Prophet (7 page)

Vasques made her way into the house through the sliding glass door and stopped to listen. She heard movement on the second floor and headed toward the stairs, taking aim at the railing above her head. Her weight automatically shifted forward, and her arms locked straight out. Her heart rate pulsed, and her index finger twitched against the trigger guard of her .45 caliber Sig Sauer 1911. Situations like this never seemed to get any easier.

She crept up the stairs and cursed them as they cracked and popped beneath her feet. At the top, she paused again to listen. Footsteps sounded from the victim’s bedroom, the same room where the killer had left his signature.

This could be him. Killers often returned to the scene of a crime in one way or another in order to relive the events of the crime or re-enact their fantasy. The Anarchist could be less than twenty feet away.

Breathing in deeply, she pressed forward down the hall and nudged the bedroom door open with her right foot. Inside the room, she saw a man in a gray button-down shirt and khakis staring at the pictures resting on Jessie Olague’s oak dresser. He was turned away from her.

In a calm but firm voice, Vasques said, “Put your hands on your head.”

He complied and raised his arms slowly. But something wasn’t right. Too late, she sensed a presence behind her.

She spun toward the second intruder, but he was already on top of her. She caught only a flash of him from the shadows as he lunged forward. Black hooded sweatshirt, leather jacket, blue jeans.

He caught her gun hand in a strong fist, and with frightening precision, he twisted her wrist and wrenched the weapon from her grasp. Before she could react, he thrust out a palm into her breastbone, driving her through the doorway of the bedroom.

As she fought to regain her balance, she immediately regretted not waiting for backup.

From behind her, she heard the man in the khakis say, “I think it’s your turn to put your hands up.”

The man in the hallway stepped into the light of the bedroom and aimed her own weapon at her chest. He was slightly larger than average size, maybe six foot one, and had dark brown hair. His clothes fit loosely, but she could see the ridges and contours of firm muscles hiding within the folds of cloth and leather. He had bright, intelligent eyes, but cracks of red cut through the whites. She wondered if she’d stumbled onto some kind of robbery. Maybe these guys had heard what had happened and didn’t expect anyone to be coming home anytime soon. Society was full of parasites like that, waiting in the wings to take advantage of someone else’s pain.

Vasques raised her hands and placed them against the sides of her head.

The man holding her gun surprised her by ejecting the magazine and jacking back the slide to remove the shell loaded into the chamber. He caught the ejected bullet, slid it back into the magazine, and tossed it along with the .45 onto Jessie Olague’s bed. Without a word, he reached into his front pocket and held up an ID that read
Department of Justice, Special Agent Marcus Williams
.

Her hands immediately dropped from her head, and she jammed a finger into his chest. “What the hell are you doing here? This is a crime scene. You never go to a crime scene without first contacting the agency conducting the investigation. Of all the stupid things to do. I could’ve killed the both of you.”

Williams actually rolled his eyes. Vasques wanted to kick him squarely in the balls. That would have wiped that smug look off his face. “I’m sure we’ll all lose sleep over it,” he said.

“Who do you think you are? Since when does Justice investigate cases like this? You have no right even to be here.”

Agent Williams stepped forward, closing the distance between them to inches. “We’re special investigators ordered here by Thomas Caldwell himself. You’ve heard of him, right? Attorney General of the US. Highest-ranking law-enforcement officer in the country.”

“I don’t care who sent you. That doesn’t give you the right to bypass the proper channels and ignore protocol.”

Willams’s eyes narrowed to slits. “There’s a woman’s life on the line. I don’t have time to stand here and listen to you blow smoke. You can take your proper channels and protocols and ram them straight up your—”

The man in the khakis cut into the conversation and stepped between them. “Okay, well, I’m Special Agent Andrew Garrison, and we’re very sorry that we didn’t follow protocol. We were coming through this area and wanted to save some time, but you’re right, we should have called ahead.” Williams rolled his eyes again and stepped away. Garrison shot him an irritated look. “We’ve been sent here to consult on the investigation. I think we might have gotten off on the wrong foot, but same team and all, so no reason we can’t start fresh. How would that be? And I don’t believe we got your name.”

She started to tell Garrison that they didn’t need any help, but she knew government bureaucracies well enough to know that it wouldn’t do any good to shut them out. If they really had been sent by the AG, then these two were about as well connected as anyone could be. “Fine. Special Agent Victoria Vasques, FBI. What were you doing here, anyway?”

Williams said, “I wanted to get a look at the crime scene without all the distractions.”

She remembered her own motives for coming there and then realized that Belacourt had called in other officers. She swore as she grabbed for her phone and canceled the backup units. Then she gestured toward the hallway and said, “Since we’re already here, I guess I might as well give you the grand tour.”

Ackerman punched a key on the laptop to bring up the command-line interface. Then he activated the back-door Trojan that would give him access to a workstation located within the office of the Director of the Shepherd Organization. The Trojan was a small program embedded within the actual operating system of the host machine and, according to his expert, it was virtually undetectable. He had used his special skills to kidnap the sister of a renowned hacker and force the man’s cooperation. The hacker’s skills had proven well worth his trouble. Ackerman had always found it easy to get what he wanted when he was willing to cause pain or take life to achieve his goal. And he was an expert in pain.

He pulled up the active case files for Marcus’s unit and began to read about this man the media had dubbed
The Anarchist
. The more he read, the more impressed he became. He admired the Anarchist’s work. This fellow knew about the hunger. Ackerman could tell that for sure.

He closed the laptop and gathered his things. Chicago. He could easily be there by morning.

His gaze found the clock on the nightstand, and his mind calculated the travel time for any police units in the area. The cheap hotel room had wi-fi included with the price of a night’s rental. He had routed his activity through remote nodes and proxy servers as his hacker friend had shown him—mainly through those located in foreign and less than friendly countries like Belarus, nations that would be unlikely to cooperate with US government investigations. But, as an extra precaution, he never stayed in the location where he accessed the files. He got in and out quickly like a ghost in the machine, as though he had never even been there. Then he simply slipped away into the night. They had tried to track him through his calls to Marcus, but he was too careful for that. And he was too careful to be caught by his computer access as well.

The walls of the hotel room were blank and white. Pictures had been hanging there when he had first entered but he had removed them all. Ackerman had spent his childhood in a tiny cell being tortured by his father. After that, he had spent several more years in mental institutions and prisons. He had become accustomed to a lack of possessions and decorations, and it made him feel strangely uneasy to sleep in a room with pictures hanging on the walls. In fact, he preferred a room without furniture of any kind, and he often slept on the floor.

He considered putting the pictures back but decided against it. He needed to get on the road. Marcus would soon be needing his special brand of help.

Vasques watched Agent Williams with suspicion as his stare crawled over every inch of the crime scene. He seemed to be lingering on and absorbing every minute detail. She checked her watch and tried to fight down her growing anxiety. She said, “The killer’s very careful. He leaves virtually no evidence behind.”

“Everywhere you go, you take something with you, and you leave something behind. Locard’s Exchange Principle,” Williams said.

Vasques replied, “I had that class, too. Of course he’s left behind traces. Unfortunately, this guy hasn’t left behind anything to tell us where to find him. He’s left shoe prints, size ten and a half, but he changes the shoes after every scene. The shoes he wears are as common as you can get. They can be picked up at any Walmart. We’ve found talcum powder on the door handles.”

“Latex gloves.”

“Right. No hair samples or skin cells that we’ve found. No fingerprints. He drugs the women so there’s no struggle and no blood left behind. He—”

Agent Williams held up a hand to stop her and said, “I’ve read all this in the files. I really just need you to be quiet. I’ll let you know if I have any questions.”

His rudeness and audacity struck Vasques speechless. She fought for words. “What exactly is your specialty at the Department of Justice,
Special
Agent Williams?”

His mouth curled into a lopsided grin. “Call me Marcus. And that’s classified.”

He stepped past her and headed toward the back door. She was dumbfounded. She turned to the other agent, the one who had introduced himself as Andrew Garrison. She gave him an
is-he-always-like-this?
look to which Garrison answered with an awkward
sorry-about-my-partner
shrug.

She followed Williams out the sliding glass door, furious that she had to babysit these idiots instead of catching a killer.

Marcus exited the Olague house and made his way through the backyard. The snowfall crunched beneath his feet, and the cold irritated his cheeks. He reached the alley and released a deep breath. It hung in the air as a puff of white vapor. His eyes closed, and he tried to shut out all the distractions and center himself. Somewhere in the distance, he heard Vasques complaining to Andrew and Andrew playing the role of the diplomat, but he ignored them.

He reached down inside and felt the hunger churning in his gut. It waited for him down in the depths, in the dark place, and he called it to the surface.

When his eyes opened, he was ready. He looked at the house with new awareness.

From his vantage point, he could see into part of the kitchen and dining room but not clearly enough to know when Jessie Olague had gone to bed. They had left the lights on. He could see many of them burning in the windows, but from the alley, he couldn’t see her bedroom window on the far side of the house. Maybe from the front? No, a large hard maple tree blocked the view from there.

The killer would want to see her. That was part of the game, part of the excitement. To violate her privacy. Watch her and then own her, possess her.

The alleyway was on a slant. Maybe farther up it? Marcus walked up the slight incline and turned round. From here, he would have had a better view of the kitchen and some of the other rooms if he’d used binoculars. Marcus flipped on his flashlight and scanned the ground, looking for anything out of place—cigarette butts, candy-bar wrapper, coffee cup. But no such luck.

It still didn’t feel right. This woman hadn’t been chosen at random. She’d been selected for a reason, and every aspect of the crime was planned out carefully. He would want to see her, Marcus thought again. Maybe even know her, or at least feel as though he did.

“What the hell is he doing? It’s freezing out here,” Vasques said to Andrew.

Marcus ignored her and moved back to his original position. He would have wanted to know the lay of the land in order to ensure that he wasn’t seen as he approached the house. He was very careful. Every movement calculated, analyzed. Marcus made a mental note that the killer might work with numbers or variables, but he knew that was pure conjecture at this point.

As he examined the area—the alley, the position of the Olague house, viewpoints from the homes of neighbors, fences, trees, obstructions—the killer knew that there would be no way to make sure that no one saw him or his vehicle. He took them in the night, so most of the neighbors would be sleeping, but that couldn’t be guaranteed. Too many variables, not a risk he would take.

He would wear a mask or hood, obscure his face and hair in some way. And he would have taken precautions to make sure that his vehicle was untraceable.

Marcus moved toward the house, following the path the killer would have taken, until he reached the back porch and the sliding glass door. The porch was just an elevated concrete slab with an awning over the top. It provided no cover from watching eyes. A credit card wouldn’t work in a sliding glass door. He could pick the lock—as Marcus and Andrew had done earlier—but that would leave him very exposed. If someone was observing, he would want his entry to seem casual, not like a burglary. Picking the lock was risky, especially if the back-porch light had been left on. It would’ve been best to have a key.

“No signs of forced entry, right?”

“Oh, so you’re talking to me now?” Agent Vasques said.

Marcus shot her a withering glance and waited. After a moment she gave up on the staring contest and replied, “No forced entry.”

He nodded. Then he felt round the door but found no box for a hidden key. His gaze traveled across the small porch. There were a few potted plants scattered around. There was also an area on the outside of the porch filled with small rocks of assorted colors and dried-up flowers covered in snow. Red landscaping bricks surrounded the sectioned-out area and separated the rock from the grass. A key could have been hidden beneath any of the bricks, but that would have made getting to it more difficult. It would have been filthy, covered in dirt, surrounded by bugs and worms.

He walked over to the potted plants and started tilting them over. Beneath the third pot sat a small black box with white letters on it spelling out the words
Hide-a-Key
.

“Has this been dusted for prints? Maybe we’d get lucky. Maybe he forgot to put on the gloves until after he had the key.” Marcus doubted it, but everyone made mistakes.

Vasques said, “They might have checked it already, but I’ll find out for sure.”

Marcus pulled open the back door and stepped inside. He took in the red and white kitchen, the dining room, the living room. He absorbed the smells, the sounds. A few typical pops and groans. A faint trace of something in the air. Butterscotch. A candle showing signs of recent use sat nearby on an old oak hutch. The plain white label on its face read
Maple Valley Candles
.

He followed the path through the living room and up the stairs to the bedrooms. The stairs creaked loudly beneath his feet. He tested each step to find which ones made noise. He wondered if the killer would have known this as well. Was he that good?

At the top of the stairs, Marcus moved to Jessie’s bedroom and imagined her sleeping peacefully in the bed. The files and notes he had read climbed to the front of his mind. The killer drugged them to make sure there was no struggle. Marcus imagined inserting the syringe, scooping her into his arms, and humming softly to keep her feeling calm and safe.

But how did I know for sure that she would be asleep?
he thought.

The Anarchist was too attentive to every detail to leave that to chance. If he opened the door and she was reading a book or had worries weighing on her mind that kept her from getting to sleep, there would be a violent struggle. She would fight him. She would scratch and bite. She would run, throw things at him. But that had never happened at any of the abduction scenes.

More questions came to mind. How did he know her husband wouldn’t be home? How did he know that no one would be stopping by to disturb them? What time did she go to bed? What time did she have to be at work in the morning?

The answer was simple. The killer knew those things because he had studied her. He knew all her habits and routines. He was a highly organized offender. Calculating, leaving nothing to chance.

But it still seemed as if he was missing something.

How did I know for sure that she would be asleep?

Marcus’s gaze centered on the three-foot-tall red capital letter A within a circle written in spray paint on the wall of the bedroom. It was the killer’s signature, his calling card, and it had earned him his nickname.
The Anarchist
.

Marcus imagined carrying the girl through the doorway, down the hall, down the stairs, to the back porch. At that point, he would once again have had to move exposed through the backyard.

“Have there been any witnesses at all?”

“We put the time of all the abductions and killings at around three in the morning. Most people are asleep. We did have one guy on the previous set of murders that went out for a smoke and saw a car pulling down the alley. It was a dead end. The best one was from the scene of the last girl’s abduction. A woman saw a guy park in the alley and approach the house. But she didn’t think anything of it at the time, so she couldn’t give us many details beyond what we already know.”

“I’d like to talk to her myself.”

Vasques pressed two fingers against her temple and rubbed. Then she took a piece of gum from her pocket and shoved it into her mouth, adding it to at least two other pieces already there. “Whatever,” she said. “I’ll arrange it. Are we done here? I’m going to turn off the lights and lock up.”

Marcus glanced around the room and then nodded. “Yeah, we’re done.”

As he stepped into the cold on the back porch, he fought down a wave of despair. He had learned a few things, gained a few insights. But it wasn’t much. The Anarchist was a pro, and Marcus had a terrible feeling that there was no way to stop him before more innocent people died.