“Barnes?” He sounds surprised. “Wow, that’s an old one. About six months or so. Killed and mutilated five women. And I mean mutilated. To be honest, it was a grounder for us. Someone noticed a smell and reported it. Cops went into his apartment, found one of the dead women, and him with a self-inflicted hole in the head. Case closed.”
“I have news for you, Bob. It wasn’t self-inflicted.”
A long pause. “Do tell.”
I give him a synopsis of Jack Jr. and the package he’d just sent us. The video. When I’m done, he’s quiet for a while.
“I think I’ve been doing this for about as long as you have, Smoky. You ever run across anything like this before?”
“Nope.”
“Me neither.” He sighs. It’s a sigh I find I recognize. An acknowledgment that the monsters just continue to mutate, and seem to get worse every time. “Anything I can do?” he asks.
“Can you send me a copy of the case file on Barnes? I doubt anything’s there. My guy is very, very careful. But…”
“Sure. Anything else?”
“Just one more thing. Out of curiosity. When did Barnes die?”
“Hold on.” I hear him tapping on a keyboard. “Let’s see…body was found November twenty-first…. Based on decomp and other factors, the ME estimates he died on the nineteenth.”
I feel like the air has been sucked from my lungs. My hand on the phone is nerveless.
“Agent Barrett? You there?”
“Yes. Thanks for the help, Bob. I’ll look for that file.” My voice sounds far away to me, and mechanical. He doesn’t seem to notice.
“I’ll courier it out tomorrow.”
We hang up, and I stare at the phone.
November 19.
I can’t believe it.
While Ronnie Barnes was destroying that girl, Joseph Sands was destroying my life. That very night. Not just the same date a year or a decade later, but that very same day.
Was it a coincidence? Or was there some other meaning there, something I couldn’t see?
34
THE REST OF the day passes like a dream. Callie has come back; Marilyn is fine. Sergeant Oldfield lets me know before leaving that there is no way he’ll let Jack Jr. do to Marilyn what we saw Barnes do on that video. Everything is set up for the delivery of Jack Jr.’s package tomorrow. We continue to do what we do.
But I am wobbly as I drive toward Alan and Elaina’s. I keep coming back to the coincidence of those dates. I feel like I’ve been put into a time warp. Knowing that as Ronnie Barnes was smiling at the camera, I was screaming, and Matt was dying. That as he put a knife to that poor woman’s body, Joseph Sands was putting a knife to my face.
As it was happening, Jack Jr. was already hard at work.
And he already knew about me.
This is perhaps the thing that rattles me the most. How long have I been on his mind? Is he going to be another Joseph Sands?
I’m afraid. I admit this to myself. I’m terrified.
“God damn you!” I scream, and pound a hand on the steering wheel, hard enough to numb my palm. My whole body is trembling.
“That’s better,” I growl, even as I tremble. “Hold on to that, Smoky.”
So I keep feeding that rage, making myself more and more angry at him for making me feel that fear.
It doesn’t dispel the fear completely.
But it’ll see me through the moment.
35
I HAD TAKEN Alan and Elaina up on yesterday’s offer of dinner. I needed some normality, and Elaina did not disappoint. She was looking better, closer to her old self. She got me to laugh more than once, and, most important, she drew multiple smiles from Bonnie. I could tell Bonnie was falling in love with her. I knew just how she felt.
Elaina is getting Bonnie ready to go home with me, and Alan and I are sitting together in the living room, waiting. It’s a companionable silence.
“She seems to be doing good,” I say.
He nods. “She’s doing better. Bonnie’s helped.”
“I’m glad.”
Bonnie bounds into the living room, ending the moment, with Elaina behind her. “You ready to go, honey?” I ask her.
She gives a smile and a nod. I stand up, hug Alan, hug Elaina, give Elaina a kiss on the cheek.
“Alan told you we’re starting early tomorrow?”
“He told me.”
“It’s going to be okay if I bring Bonnie by at seven?”
She smiles, reaches down, and ruffles Bonnie’s hair. Bonnie looks back up at her, eyes adoring. “Of course it’s okay.” She kneels down. “Give me a hug, honeybunch.”
They exchange hugs and smiles and we head out the door.
“Go up to bed, honey,” I tell Bonnie. “I’ll be up in just a minute.”
She nods her head and patters up the stairs. My phone rings.
“It’s Leo.”
“What’s up?”
“Alan and I got the warrant for Annie King’s subscriber list,” he says. “Didn’t have a chance to tell you that before you left. I got in touch with the company. They were cooperative.”
“So you have it?”
“I’ve been going over it for the last four hours. Just came up with something too.”
“Tell me,” I reply, hopeful.
“It turns out that your friend had a fairly extensive list of members. Nearly a thousand. I thought it would be worth a try to set the search parameters for names that relate to the whole Jack the Ripper scenario. You know, London, hell, that kind of thing.”
“And?”
“I found it right away. Frederick Abberline. The name of the inspector who’s most famous for hunting our old buddy Jack back then.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“Because I’m not done yet. Think about it. It’s too obvious. They wouldn’t give up a real address that easily. I checked it anyway. It’s a post-office box.”
“Damn,” I say.
“But it’s still a lead,” he says. “I’m also following up on it from another angle. Whenever someone signs up using a credit card, their IP number is logged.”
“Which is…what?”
“Everything that exists on the Web, whether it’s a dot-com or your dial-up connection, has a number behind it. That’s an IP, or Internet Protocol number. Anytime you are surfing on the Web, you have an identity—you are your IP number.”
“So when you sign up for something using a credit card, that number gets logged.”
“Yes.”
“Where is that likely to lead us?”
“That’s the problematic part. There are two ways that IP numbers can be related to your Internet connection. One is good for us, one is not so good. The IP numbers are owned by the company providing your access to the Internet. In most cases, each time you dial up or connect, you are assigned a different IP number. No continuity.”
“That’s the one that’s not so good for us,” I say.
“Right. The other kind is an ‘always on’ connection. Your IP is actually assigned to you by the service provider and always remains the same. That’s good for us, if that’s what he used. Because that number is specifically traceable to an individual.”
“Hmmm…” I muse. “I could be wrong, but I think our guy is smarter than that.”
“Probably,” Leo replies. “But maybe not. Even so, it’ll be helpful. The Internet service provider he used will have logs showing when the IP numbers were used, and you can get a general location from that. Maybe even an exact location.”
“That’s good, Leo. Good work. I want you to follow up on this aggressively.”
“I will.”
I believe him. I hear the excitement in his voice, and I doubt he’ll be getting any sleep tonight. He smells blood, the hunter’s intoxicant, irresistible.
I head to bed, Bonnie, sleep.
I have a dream. It’s a strange one, disconnected from the others. This one is a true memory.
“Soul like a dia
mond…”
This is something Matt said to me once, in a fit of anger. I had been involved with a case that had stolen all of my time for a period of three to four months. I almost never saw Matt or Alexa. He bore this for the first three months, being supportive, not saying anything. One night I got home to find him sitting in the dark.
“This can’t go on,” he’d said. I could hear the poison in his voice.
I was dumbstruck. I had thought that things were fine. But that had always been Matt’s way. He’d be stoic about something that bothered him until it boiled over and exploded. It was always unfortunate when it happened, because it was always like it was at that moment: from no hint of a storm to a full-blown hurricane.
“What are you talking about?”
His voice had been taut, trembling with anger. “What am I talking about? Jesus, Smoky! I’m talking about you not being here. One month, okay. Two months, not good, but okay. Three months—no fucking way. I’ve had it! You’re never here, and when you are, you don’t interact with me or Alexa, you’re snappish and irritated—that’s what I’m talking about.”
I’ve never dealt with direct attacks well. In lazy moments I ascribe this to the Irish side of me, but in truth, my mother was a testament to patience. No, this personality trait is all mine. Back me into a corner, and concepts of right or wrong go out the window. All I care about is getting out of that corner, and I’ll fight as dirty as I have to to make it happen. Matt had his fault: letting his anger simmer. It didn’t go well with my fault: attacking without hesitation or thought of consequences if you put my back against a wall. This mismatch never resolved; it was one of the imperfections of our relationship. I still miss it.
Matt had shoved me into that no-escape dead end, and I responded as I always did when left without an exit: I delivered a sucker punch, well below the belt.
“I guess I should tell the parents of those little girls that I don’t have time to catch the guy who did it, huh? I’ll tell you what, Matt, I’ll get onto a nine-to-five schedule. But the next little girl who gets killed, you get to look at the photos, and you get to talk to the parents, and you get to try and balance that with doing right by our family.”
The words were cold, cruel, and horribly unfair. But that is the cruelty of what I do, I had thought in my rage, and at that moment I hated him for not understanding it. If I sit at home with my family, I leave a killer free to roam. If I devote myself to the pursuit of the killer, I leave my family angry and alone. It is a constant balancing act, forever draining.
Matt’s face got red, and he muttered, “Fuck you, Smoky.” He shook his head. “Soul like a diamond, that’s what you have.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I asked, exasperated.
He’d scowled at me. “It means you have a beautiful soul, Smoky. Beautiful like a diamond. But it can also be hard and cold like one.”
These words were so hurtful and vicious that my anger rushed away from me. It was not like Matt to play the card of cruelty. That was always my specialty, and I found it devastating to receive. I also felt something deep inside me: fear that maybe, just maybe, he was right. I remember staring at him in open-mouthed shock. He had looked back at me, the smallest hint of shame beginning to dance across his face.
“Fuck this,” he’d said, stomping off upstairs, leaving me in the dark of our living room, heart aching.
We made up, of course. We got through it. That’s what love is about. I came to understand this in the deepest recesses of self. Love is not about romance or passion. Love is about a state of grace. You experience it when you accept the absolute truth of the other person, both the cruel and the divine, and they accept these things in you, and you find that you still long to share a life with them. To know the worst in another and still want them with all your soul. To know that they feel the same.
It is a sense of security and power. And once you have arrived at this, the richness of romance and passion that appears is not blinding. Instead, it is invulnerable and forever.
Forever, that is, unless they die.
I don’t awake from the dream screaming. I just wake up. I feel the tears on my cheeks. I let them dry where they fell, and listen to my own breathing until sleep claims me again.
36
EVERYONE LOOKS LIKE I feel. Leo looks even worse.
“Didn’t go home, did you?” I ask him.
He gives me a bleary-eyed look, and mumbles.
“Your own fault. So listen,” I address them all. “Callie and Alan, you’ll be with me in the parking lot. Leo and James, I want you to continue with what you’re working on.”
They nod in reply.
“Let’s go.”
The bomb tech holds up his badge. “Reggie Gantz.” He appears to be in his late twenties. He has a bored look and steady eyes.
“Special Agent Barrett. Show me what you got.”
He walks me over to the back of the bomb-squad van and opens it up. He grabs a laptop and what looks like a large movie camera. “First thing is this. It’s a portable digital x-ray machine. Displays the contents of the package on the laptop screen. Since you said the box is being delivered by a third party, we don’t have to worry about it being motion-activated. He wouldn’t want it to go off on the way here.”
“Makes sense.”
“This’ll take an x-ray. Then I’ll use the Sniffer. I’ll rub the package with some cotton swipes. They’ll go into the Sniffer and it’ll use spectrometry to detect trace elements, if they exist. Between the two, we should be pretty sure about it being a bomb or not.”
I nod in approval. “We don’t know when it’s coming, so you’ll need to settle in for a wait.”
He tips his fingers in a salute and walks back to his van without another word, Mr. Laconic.
I run through things in my head. The driver would arrive to deliver the package and would be detained while we printed him. The package would be examined by Reggie, and once he gave it an all-clear, Alan and Callie and I would rush the package into the crime lab. They would search for prints on everything and use a vacuum to collect any and all trace evidence. Photographs would be taken. Only then would the contents be turned over to us.
This insistence on process is one of our advantages and one of our disadvantages. Something it takes a perpetrator only minutes or hours to do can take us days to process. We are always slower. But we also find everything that the perpetrator leaves behind, down to a microscopic level. Our ability, in this day and age, to interpret even the smallest piece of evidence is truly frightening. Criminals would need to wear a spacesuit to ensure they left nothing behind for us to find. Even then, we might well figure out that they wore a spacesuit.
Even the absence of evidence tells a tale. It tells us the perp has at least a passing knowledge of police and forensic procedure. It gives us insight into the methodology and psychology of the killer. Is he or she intelligent, composed, and patient, or frenzied, passionate, and insane? Evidence or its absence tells this tale.
“Hey,” Alan says, pointing. “I think that’s it.”
I see a package delivery van moving toward us. The van pulls up in front of the building and stops. I can see the driver, a young man with blond hair and a peach-fuzz beard, looking at all of us with more than just a little bit of worry. I don’t blame him. He’s probably not used to seeing a contingent of serious-faced, somewhat scary-looking people waiting for him to arrive. I walk over to his side of the van, motioning for him to roll down his window.
“FBI,” I say, holding up my Bureau ID. “You have a package for this address?”
“Uh, yeah. It’s in the back. What’s this about?”
“The package is evidence, sir. Mister…?”
“Huh? Oh, Jed. Jedediah Patterson.”
“I need you to step out of the van, Mr. Patterson. That package was sent by a criminal we’re pursuing.”
His mouth drops open. “Really?”
“Yes. We need to fingerprint you, sir
. Can you please step out of the van?”
“Fingerprint me? Why?”
I force myself to remain patient. “We’re going to be looking for prints on the package. We need to know which ones are yours and not the criminal’s.”
Light dawns. “Oh…yeah, I get it.”
“Can you please step out of the van?” My patience is waning. Rapidly. Perhaps he senses this, as now he opens the door and gets out.
“Thank you, Mr. Patterson. Please see Agent Washington; he’ll print you.”
I point to Alan as I say this and watch as Jed Patterson gives him a wary look. “Don’t worry,” I say, amused. “I know he’s big, but he’s only dangerous to the bad guys.”
He licks his lips, still looking at the man-mountain. “If you say so.” He walks over to Alan, who takes him inside for fingerprinting.
Now I can focus on the package. Reggie Gantz is already standing near the delivery van, carrying his equipment. He still looks bored.
“Ready to roll?” he asks.
“Go ahead,” I tell him.
He moves toward the back of the van, opening the doors. We’re in luck; there are only three packages back there. He finds the one we want immediately. It’s addressed to me.
I watch as he starts up his laptop and powers up the mobile x-ray device. Moments later, we are looking at the contents of the package on his laptop screen.
“Looks like a bottle of something…and maybe a letter…and something else, flat and round. Could be a CD. And that’s it. I need to fire up the Sniffer. Make sure that liquid isn’t anything dangerous.”
“Is that likely?”
“Nah. Just about all liquid explosives are unstable. The package would probably have blown up on its way here.” He shrugs. “But we don’t assume anything in bomb tech.”
I’m glad Reggie is here, but I think he’s crazy to do the job he does. “Do it,” I tell him.
He pulls out a swatch of cotton cloth and proceeds to swipe the package with it. I watch as he feeds it into the Sniffer. Once inside, the spectrometry goes to work. Within minutes, he looks up at me. “Looks all clear to me. I’d say it’s safe to open.”