“Yeah,” Folger agreed with offhand sarcasm. “Yeah. That’d be a shame.”
A venison tenderloin sizzling on the grill. Kudrow could hear it, could smell it. But he could not see it. All his mind’s eye could manage to conjure at the moment was the face of the FBI agent he’d seen in a photograph transmitted from one of the field teams. A black man, a serious, hard looking man, with careful eyes and determination cut into the jaw line.
A smart man.
An uncompromising man.
“He’ll have to be removed,” Kudrow said to the distant treeline.
“As in gotten rid of, done away with, eliminated,” Folger observed. “You suggest it like it’s no harder than lighting a cigar. Do you really think it’s that easy?”
“Removal through less than lethal means,” Kudrow explained. “It is possible. Quite possible.”
“And how is that?”
Kudrow had been considering how it might be done before Folger’s interruption, and there was one, and only one, course to follow to that end.
“I’m going to run it by Rothchild,” Kudrow said. He looked to his assistant to measure his response. Folger had one hand over his quivering right eye, the other cast toward the ground. Without a word he showed Kudrow his back and walked away.
Conrad Cabral, in thirty years on the Seattle Police Department, sixteen of those working homicide, could not remember seeing an arm bent at the angle it had been on the body of this male. At least they were reasonably sure it was a male. No genitalia had been found as yet, and the face was no help, chopped and even bitten as it was. There were no breasts, but then the chest had been opened with a rough X cut from each armpit to the opposite hip bone, making certain determination doubtful until the medical examiner got a look.
But the damn arm. As the police photographer’s strobe pulsed, Cabral stared at the limb from his vantage point aside the queen bed in room 1312 of the downtown Seattle Hilton. It was the only one of the four limbs not bound, and it was twisted around at least once, wrinkling the skin and underlying tissue near the shoulder. The distorted hand at its end was shoved into the bloody cavity opened across the sternum, as if reaching in for something.
“Three stooges,” Cabral said aloud, drawing the attention of his partner, Zack Norris, scratching notes a few feet behind.
“Huh?”
Cabral turned back to Norris. “The arm. Moe used to grab Curly’s arm and twist in around and around until it would look like that, you figured.”
“I thought he twisted Shemp’s arm,” the photographer interjected.
Cabral thought. “Coulda been Shemp, I guess.”
Norris put his notebook away. “You ever see one like this?”
“Nope.”
An evidence technician exited the bathroom, stepping over a pronounced blood trail. Norris looked his way and asked, “You find the dick?”
The evidence technician shook his head and held up a clear bag that contained bloody towels. “Just these. Someone cleaned up. Showered and all. Even dried their hair. Long and black.”
“Have the toilet pulled and the plumbing checked,” Cabral directed. “It could be stuck in the pipes.”
Norris came around the bed, his eyes sweeping the walls spattered with red, marveling at the amount of blood both there and on the bedding. “The mattress acted like a sponge.”
Cabral nodded and thought quietly to himself as the photographer burned through two more rolls. “Zack, does this look like some fun gone bad?”
“It looks like something bad gone bad.”
Rage, mutilation, revelry in the corpse, positioning of the body after death (God, please, after death, Cabral hoped). It was a textbook serial murder, the most important word being ‘serial’ in this case. “This wasn’t their first time.”
“Nope,” Norris agreed, pulling his notebook again, ready for his partner’s direction.
“Run the method through NCIC,” Cabral instructed as he bent forward to examine the feet. The toenails were gone. “Be real specific.”
Norris made a few notations. He would take care of the paperwork and fax the request to the National Crime Information Center as soon as they got back to the office. And considering the nature of the homicide, it was likely there’d be a quick ‘hit’ if any at all. Some killers left their signatures at crime scenes, and some crime scenes were signatures in themselves. Norris was betting on the latter.
“Give me that desk receipt,” Cabral said, and Norris fished it out of a pocket and handed it over.
“Susan Pu,” Cabral said, reading from the credit card impression.
“Long black hair,” Norris offered.
Cabral passed the receipt back, impatience welling. “Go do the NCIC paperwork now.”
“Right now?”
Cabral looked at the body. “Yep.”
Chapter Eight
The Fixmeister
Sixty feet below the Headquarters-Operations Building of the National Security Agency, in an office lost amidst a vast subterranean labyrinth, a man who did not exist sat before several computer terminals and schemed as the need arose. That was his job.
Those few who had access to him called him Rothchild.
He was a man of unimpressive features, slightly below average in height, slightly above in weight, and somewhere shy of forty in years. His thinning hair was a dark brown, and he favored gray slacks and button-up long sleeve shirts, but no tie. Ties were out. He had nightmares about being hanged from a creaking gallows while magpies stared at his swinging body. The thought of anything looped around his neck brought on cold sweats. Yes, ties were definitely out.
He had no driver’s license, no social security card, no recorded fingerprints, no information of any kind pertaining to him stored anywhere in any file cabinet or electronic databank. No pictures, no birth certificate, no medical or dental records. He was not married, had no children, subscribed to no magazines or newspapers, did not enter the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes. Once each month an envelope with 200 fifty dollar bills was delivered to his office. His ‘salary’. If he needed more, he knew how to get it. He lived in a modest apartment for which he paid the rent in money orders each month. Gas and electricity were paid for by the landlord.
He did have a phone, but not from traditional sources.
Rothchild had not ‘been’ anything traditional for seven years. Not since G. Nicholas Kudrow had had him killed.
Of course death, like existence, was little more than the manipulation of information. One could become dead at any time and continue breathing. It was simply a matter of ability, and, sometimes, resources. Death certificates could appear from laser printers and be affixed with official signatures that would never be questioned. Accident reports in the computer system of a large police department could be ‘corrected’. Rothchild, in his previous life, had once gone boating on the Chesapeake and never returned. Lost at sea, another inexperienced sailor swallowed by the waters. That was what the records said, and records didn’t lie.
And so Rothchild was now just Rothchild, either last name or first, employee of no agency, department, or entity. Rothchild existed as vapor, and performed as a tool, taken out when something needed fixing. And something again needed fixing.
There was no knock before the door opened. Kudrow entered quickly, with some haste Rothchild noted, and planted himself a few feet away, hands folded behind his back. The room was dim, the light of the displays washing it a pale blue and bringing a near black tint to the Deputy Director of COMSEC-Z’s glasses. Rothchild sipped from a can of Pepsi and swiveled his chair toward Kudrow.
“It’s Jefferson, isn’t it?” Rothchild asked with full confidence that he was right.