“It’s hard to imagine that working,” Hu said.
“Really?” I said. “If someone told you to murder a co-worker or they’ll kill your whole family, you wouldn’t pop a cap in one of your lab assistants?”
“No way. My folks are in China, and my brother is a total asshole.”
“Okay, imagine if you had a soul instead of a big empty place in your chest.”
Hu actually smiled at this. “Sure. But how do you make a leap to that scenario?”
“Let me read the note I found at Plympton’s apartment.” I dipped into the shared case files and sent it to the main screens. I read the note aloud and then reread a few key lines. “‘I know that what I have done is unforgivable … . But at least what I have done here in our home will save you both from greater horrors.’ That’s significant.”
“I agree,” said Rudy. “And it’s reinforced by the last line: ‘I am only the monster they made me.’ This is a man driven to extremes. He’s guilty, certainly, but only after the fact. He’s not apologizing for anything done prior to what he clearly considered a mercy killing.”
Hu thought about it for a moment and gave a grudging nod.
I said, “We see similar things in the case of Dr. Grey and the staff at Fair Isle. And we know for sure from the deposition of Amber Taylor. The extortionist has to bring a lot to the game, though. He’d have to already know something about how staffing and procedures work at facilities of this kind. You can’t just Google that. On the flight from Pennsylvania I had the opportunity to interrogate the surviving shooter from the Starbucks hit. His name is Danny Sarducci.”
I uploaded his military ID photo and Sarducci looked every bit the punk he was.
“Twenty-nine, from Trenton, New Jersey. Lot of stuff in his jacket. Four arrests for armed robbery as a juvenile. A judge let him join the Army instead of going to jail, which means the Army taught him how to fight and use better weapons. He was brought up on charges of sex with a minor in Afghanistan. The girl’s family didn’t call it rape, though from his commanding officer’s report that’s what it was. After Sarducci was kicked out, he was picked up by Blue Diamond Security.”
“Ugh,” said Dietrich. “Those assholes.”
Blue Diamond had made the papers as often as Blackwater and had been the first mercenary group thrown out of Iraq for a laundry list of offenses.
“Yeah, those assholes,” I agreed. “Sarducci went off the radar six years ago. Now jump to this morning and he was crew chief of a team of well-equipped shooters assigned to kill Mrs. Ledger’s favorite son.”
Aunt Sallie and Hu both snorted at that.
“Sarducci gave us the names of the other shooters, and they all have similar backgrounds. Low-level muscle who went off the public radar a few years ago. Half of them have military backgrounds, but it was mostly one tour and out. One deserter who ran to keep from getting recycled by ‘stop-loss.’ I asked Bug to hack Blue Diamond’s records.”
“I got nothing, Joe,” said Bug. “They’ve been using a closed system. No hardlines, no Wi-Fi. Paranoid as shit. They probably know about MindReader and are taking no chances. Everything is intranet, which means we’d have to go and physically tap into their wires.”
“Maybe we should,” I said.
“That would be a bitch of a job,” said Aunt Sallie. “They’re based in Honduras and their compound is more fortress than military base. It would be easier to destroy it than infiltrate it.”
“Works for me,” muttered Dietrich.
“Who hired Sarducci?” asked Frost from the Denver office.
“Santoro. Sarducci described him as an adult Hispanic male, about forty. Slim but very fit. Looks like a wrestler. Fast hands and extremely good with a knife, which jibes with Dr. Grey’s experience. I gave the physical description to Bug and he’s running it through MindReader.”
Bug frowned. “Don’t get your hopes up, Joe. That description fits about forty million Hispanic males, but we’re cross-referencing with key words.”
“Sarducci knew that Santoro was part of the Seven Kings,” I said, “but he didn’t actually know what the Kings were beyond some rah-rah rhetoric. He said that Santoro talked about the Kings all the time. How they were going to reshape the world. How they were the personification of Chaos on earth—not his kind of phrasing, of course, so he was probably quoting Santoro. He said they pay well and in cash. Sarducci and his crew did several jobs for them, and Bug’s cross-referencing the names and dates.”
Dietrich asked, “Did he give you anything else? Like why he wanted to kill Marty Hanler?”
“They weren’t after Hanler,” I said. “They were after me. And, I think, Circe.”
Circe’s eyes flared. “What?”
I tapped a key to replay one of Sarducci’s comments. “The Seven Kings are going to rip your world apart, Ledger. You and the rest of the DMS. You, that psychopath Church, that cunt O’Tree, these ass clowns here—all of you are already dead and you just don’t know it yet.”
“Sorry for the vulgarity, Doc. His words, definitely not mine.”
Church leaned forward and looked hard at me. “Sarducci threatened Circe?”
“Yes.”
It’s weird, his expression did not really change, but somehow his blank face suddenly conveyed a degree of menace that I have seldom before experienced. The others in the room must have sensed it, too. Everyone turned to look at Church.
He sat back and brushed cookie crumbs from his sleeve.
“Interesting,” he said softly. “Please continue.”
His eyes were fixed on Circe, who colored and turned away.
“Sarducci was very forthcoming with threats.”
“Anyone else make his greatest-hits list?” asked Dietrich.
I ticked my chin toward Aunt Sallie. “Not by name, but he used a few vulgar gender-specific racial epithets. This bozo is not a fan of Affirmative Action or women in the workplace.”
Aunt Sallie smiled thinly. “Nice to be noticed here at the back of the bus.”
“I got nothing else useful from him. He’s a lowlife piece of crap and I hope we find a hole and drop him into it.”
“Count on it,” murmured Aunt Sallie. She wrote something on a slip of paper and slid it across to Church, who read it and gave her the tiniest of nods.
“By the end he was rerunning the same stuff. The DMS is going to fall; we don’t stand a chance; the Seven Kings will rule; we’re all going to die; rivers of blood will sweep us away. That sort of thing.”
“More rivers of blood,” Dietrich said. “The fuck is it with these guys and rivers of blood?”
“Maybe they really had their hearts set on the Fair Isle cluster fuck going south on us,” said Auntie. She gave me a look that seemed to say that with me at the helm she was surprised it didn’t.
I manfully restrained myself from throwing my coffee cup at her. “There was one other thing Sarducci said,” I continued. “It came out kind of sudden and it was clear that he didn’t want to say it. He went off on a tangential rant to try and hide it.”
“What was it?” asked Church.
“He said that Santoro had a worse hard-on for the DMS than the Kings had for the Inner C.”
“The Inner C?” Dietrich frowned. “Is that a gang name?”
“No,” said Church. “And that is very interesting, Captain. It ties into something my informant told me when he called yesterday. He said that the Kings ‘want to break the bones of their enemies and suck out the marrow.’ ‘Bones’ is the operative word.”
“Wait!” said Circe suddenly. “I have something on that, too.” She gave everyone a quick recap of the Goddess posts she had been tracking for months. She scrolled through her data and then put a Twitter post on the screen. “One of her posts mentioned bones.”