Vail 01 - The 7th Victim

For my grandmother, Lily Silverman, ninety-seven at this writing and still climbing the five flights of stairs to her apartment . . . still refusing to take the elevator. Lily is an inspiration to everyone who’s ever met her, a woman who at ninety stood in front of a New York City bus and refused to move until the driver opened the door to let her in. Spunk. Wisdom. And a heart of platinum (apparently, literally). For now, we continue to celebrate your life. But when your time passes, you’ll be immortalized by those who knew you and were touched by your soul.

I love you the whole universe.

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil

“A profiler puts himself into the mind of the killer to see things as the killer saw them, to understand why he immersed his entire emotional and physical being into the fetid stench of human depravity. When a profiler explores the minutia of pain and death, he’s wading knee deep in the blood and guts, and there’s only so much he can take before it begins to affect him.”

—Mark Safarik,
FBI profiler and Supervisory Special Agent (Ret.)

“To know the artist, study his art.”

—John Douglas,
The Anatomy of Motive

prologue

SIX YEARS AGO

QUEENS, NEW YORK

“D
ispatch, this is Agent Vail. I’m in position, thirty feet from the bank’s entrance. I’ve got a visual on three well-armed men dressed in black clothing, wearing masks. ETA on backup? I’m solo here. Over.”

“Copy. Stand by.”

Stand by. Easy for you to say. My ass is flapping in the breeze outside a bank with a group of heavily armed mercenaries inside, and you tell me to stand by. Sure, I’ll just sit here and wait.

FBI Special Agent Karen Vail was crouched behind her open car door, her Glock-23 forty-caliber sidearm steadied against the window frame. No match for what looked like MAC-10s the bank robbers were toting, but what can you do?
Sometimes you’re just fucked.

Radio crackle. “Agent Vail, are you there? Over.”

No, I left on vacation. Leave a message.
“Still here. No movement inside, far as I can tell. View’s partially blocked by a large window sign. Bank’s offering free checking, by the way.”

Vail hadn’t been involved in an armed response since leaving the NYPD five years ago. Back then she welcomed the calls, the adrenaline rush as she raced through the streets of Manhattan to track down the scumbags who were doing their best to add some spice to an otherwise bland shift. But after the birth of her son Jonathan, Vail decided the life of a cop carried too much risk. She eventually made it to the Bureau—a career advancement that had the primary benefit of keeping her keester out of the line of fire.

Until today.

“Local SWAT is en route,” the voice droned over the two-way. “ETA six minutes.”

“A lot of shit can happen in six minutes.”
Did I say that out loud?

“Repeat, Agent Vail?”

“I said, ‘A lot of sittin’ for the next six minutes.’” The last thing she needed was to have her radio transmission played back in front of everyone; she’d be ridiculed for weeks.

“Unit Five approaching, Queens Boulevard and Forty-eighth.” Mike Hartman’s voice sounded unusually confident over the radio. Vail was surprised Mike and his new partner were responding to this call. She’d worked with Mike for six months and found him decent enough, but a marginal agent in terms of execution. At the moment, she’d take marginal execution . . . the more firepower the good guys had, the more likely the gunmen inside the bank would be intimidated, and the greater the odds of resolving this in the Bureau’s favor. Translation: she’d come out of this in one piece and the slimeballs would be wearing silver bracelets . . . tightened that one extra notch—just enough to make them wince when she ratcheted them down around their wrist bones, for all the trouble they caused her.

Dispatch replied: “Roger, Unit Five.”

Mike’s unit was a block away and would be here in seconds.

With her eyes focused on the bank’s windows, she heard Mike Hartman’s Bureau car screech to a stop to her left, about thirty feet from the front door. But as her head swung toward the BuCar to make eye contact with Mike, she heard the clank of metal on metal and she pivoted back toward the bank—

—where she saw the three armed men in black sweats blowing through the front door, large submachine guns tucked beneath their arms, and damned if she didn’t think she’d called it right, they were carrying MAC10s. But in the next split second, as she ducked down and as glass shattered and rained all over her back, she saw, out of the corner of her eye, Mike Hartman lying on the ground, face up, his right arm tracing the pavement as if searching for something. A glimpse of his face showed raw pain and she knew instantly that he’d not lost anything but rather
gained
something—a few rounds of lead in his body. Still, Mike fared better than his partner, whose head hung limp, slumped back over the seat.

The bank robbers, machine guns and all, were arrayed in a triangle but not going anywhere, strategically positioned behind a mailbox and a row of metal newspaper dispensers, a pretty damn good bit of cover and a huge stroke of luck for them. But they’d just killed a cop—why weren’t they getting the hell out of Dodge?

Lying on the ground, with a bird’s-eye view of the pavement and Mike’s writhing body, Vail spied the cockeyed tires and sky blue rims of another vehicle, to the left of Mike’s BuCar. A local NYPD cruiser responding to the call.
And where the hell was SWAT? Oh, yeah, six lonnnng minutes away. What did that make it, another four before they showed up? I told them a lot of shit can happen in six minutes.

Rounds continued popping all around her. Vail tried to stand—probably not the smartest thing to do while projectiles were zipping through the air at 950 feet per second, but she needed to do something.

As she rose, a couple of thumps struck her in the left thigh. The deep burn of a gunshot wound was instantly upon her, and a wide bloody circle spread through the nylon fibers of the stretch fabric of her tan pants. She didn’t have time for pain, not now. She grabbed the back of her leg and felt two tears in the fabric, indicating the rounds had gone right through. Assuming they didn’t hit a major artery, she’d be okay for a bit. But shit, right time or not, it sure hurt like hell.

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