Текст книги "Hidden Order: A Thriller"

Автор книги: Brad Thor

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

CHAPTER 35

Harvath gave Wise a full rundown of everything that had happened. The man took copious notes on the other end of the phone. When Harvath was done filling him in, Wise was in full clinical mode.

“So what does all of this tell us?” he asked rhetorically. “Our man is professional, at least when it comes to his work. As far as we know, there were no clues left at the Marcourt murder scene on Jekyll Island, or at the Penning murder at the Liberty Tree Building. But in what we’ll call his personal life, he’s appearing impulsive, less careful. Perhaps he is even losing control.”

Harvath let out a long breath.

“What is it?” said Wise. “You disagree?”

“Not necessarily. I’m just trying to process all of this. Listen, I don’t like to underestimate anyone, especially someone this dangerous, but I also don’t like to overestimate them, either.”

“You think I’m giving him too much credit?”

“What I think is that the guy screwed up. Whether he is a sociopath or a psychopath or whatever, I’m not a doctor and I don’t care. What I know is that as good as he’s been, he’s finally made a mistake. Is he losing control? Maybe, but when he grabbed that girl’s wrist in the Granary Burying Ground, I don’t think he could have known that he would go on to kill that night, that he’d kill a friend of the girl he grabbed, or that we’d tie it all together.”

Wise agreed. “That makes sense, but keep in mind that not only are we potentially dealing with someone who is not rational and who does not make sense, but he’s now killed three people. If I’m right and he is losing control, he may become more dangerous.”

“He may also make another mistake,” Harvath replied. “Speaking of which, what do you make of how the body of the young girl was left in the Charles River? Does that tell you anything?”

“It tells me several things. The first is that this was likely an impulsive crime of opportunity. The woman made herself available to him and he struck. Once he did, though, he had a decision to make. Presumably, he could have left her right where he killed her. But instead, he risked the added time to steal the things he needed, weigh her down, and then drop her in the water.”

“Which means what?”

Wise took a few moments to reflect before answering. “Whoever this girl was, I think we can safely assume he hadn’t come to Boston to kill her.”

“But he cut her ears off like he had with Claire Marcourt. Why?”

“Without interviewing him, it’s hard to say for sure. He may have simply enjoyed it and wanted to relive it, or he may have rushed Marcourt’s murder and wanted to take his time with the prostitute. Remember, for a lot of these killers, the act is all about the power they wield over their victims.”

“And weighing the body down in the Charles?” Harvath asked.

“Perhaps he was ashamed of what he had done and wanted, symbolically, to be rid of it, or maybe he realized on some level that this impulsive act was a mistake that could not only jeopardize him, but also his operation. Therefore, he had worked to cover it up as quickly as possible.”

Processing information from Bill Wise was like drinking from a fire hose. Harvath was still trying to wrap his mind around the fact that there could be even a remote CIA component to the attacks. Circumventing alarm systems like the one at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, as well as looping CCTV footage, though, was straight out of the Agency’s playbook.

“Could the killer have weighted the body down simply because he needed to buy time?” Harvath asked.

“For what?”

“He killed Marcourt in Georgia then came up here for Penning. Maybe he’s traveling by air and didn’t want the body to be found until after he had made it safely away to wherever he was going next.”

As he waited for the man to respond, Harvath ran the list of remaining kidnap victims through his mind: Betsy Mitchell—Seattle, Jonathan Renner—San Francisco, and Peter Whalen—Chicago. Since getting the call to come to Boston, he had been racking his brain trying to zero in on locations in the remaining kidnap cities that would be symbolic for the group behind the killings. The only thing he could come up with was that they all had Federal Reserve branches. But would the killer be that obvious, especially after the choices of Jekyll Island and the Liberty Tree site?

“There is another possibility,” Wise said, interrupting Harvath’s train of thought. “What if you’re right? What if the killer was trying to buy more time, not to get out of Boston, but rather because his work in Boston wasn’t complete?”

Harvath was about to comment when his other line rang. “Bill, I have another call. Stand by for second.”

“Will do.”

Harvath clicked over to the other line. It was Cordero back at police headquarters.

“The crime lab just called,” she said. “They finished processing the wrist cuff.”

“Did we get any prints?”

“We did. It looks like a thumb and a partial that may be an index finger. They’re working up the report now. How soon can you get back here?”

“I’m only a couple of blocks away,” he said. “I’ll be there in less than five minutes.”

“Ten-four. Hurry up. As soon as we get the prints, we’re going to start running them through the databases.” With that, she said goodbye and hung up.

Cordero and the FBI could run every database she had access to, but he doubted she was going to get a single hit. If this guy was who Harvath was beginning to think he might be, there was only one place that would have a record of him and even then it would be guarded like Fort Knox.

He clicked back over to Wise. “We got a hit on the wrist cuff from the girl accosted at the Granary Burying Ground. We believe it’s a thumb and a partial index finger.”

“That’s terrific.”

“Do you think your Swim Club pal, Gage, can do anything with it?” asked Harvath. He could sense Wise’s hesitation before he even responded.

“At the CIA when you’re gone, you’re gone. They watch you clean out your desk, and then they go through everything, and I mean everything, before you’re escorted off the property. All of your access is canceled and the only information you’re leaving with is what’s between your ears. He’s not going to be sitting on reams of data, much less the jackets of the people Swim Club was spinning up to place in the field. There were a bunch of them and most were freelancers with lives entirely separate from the Agency. They just got called up when Langley needed them.”

“Wait,” said Harvath. “You’re telling me they can lead normal lives? How the hell is that even possible?”

“Think of them like alcoholics. Some were exceptional at hiding their illness. With treatment, they were quite functional.”

“And the others?”

“With time, the others lost the fight and fell over the edge.”

It was a chilling analogy. Harvath wanted as much information as he could get. “Reach out to Gage,” he said, “and lean on him as hard as you can for whatever he can give you.”

“How much are you comfortable with me revealing to him?”

“Right now, limit it just to the killer,” Harvath replied. “You can use the partial description we have and feel free to talk about his MO as much as you want, but keep the names of the victims and any mention of the Fed out of it.”

“Understood,” said Wise. “Email me the prints and I’ll let you know if I find out anything.”

“Sounds good. There’s just one last thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Be very careful who else you talk with beyond this Gage fellow. And make sure to keep a pair of eyes in the back of your head.”

“Same goes for you,” Wise said. “Our killer isn’t done yet. Not by a long shot. He not only likes to kill, he’s compelled to. And if he did come out of Swim Club, he’s very, very good at it.”

“So am I,” said Harvath, ending the call and slipping the phone back into his pocket.

Stepping out into the rain, he opened his umbrella and headed back toward 1 Schroeder Plaza and Cordero’s office. As he walked, he was haunted by several of the things Bill Wise had said, not the least of which was that their killer might still have work left to do in Boston.

CHAPTER 36

Detective Cordero was on the phone trying to make child-care arrangements when Harvath hung up his coat and set the umbrella she had lent him in the corner.

“Okay, I understand. Thank you,” she said and then hung up. Looking at Harvath she stated, “I’m definitely in the wrong business.”

“Why?”

“The day-care center where I have my son charges a dollar a minute for every minute after five that you’re not there to pick him up.”

“That’s pretty steep.”

“It is, but I understand. Too many parents are irresponsible these days. If they didn’t have some sort of penalty, people would be leaving their kids there until midnight. What about you?”

“What about me?” asked Harvath.

“Are you married? Do you have any kids?”

He smiled. “No.”

“Divorced?”

“No.”

“I knew it,” she said. “The haircut and suit were a dead giveaway.”

“A dead giveaway to what?”

“Don’t be so defensive. Boston’s a very progressive city. We’ve got a few gay cops on the force here.”

Harvath laughed. “I’m not gay. And by the way, this is a Brooks Brothers suit and I’ve had the same haircut since college.”

Cordero looked at him for several seconds.

“What are you looking at?” said Harvath.

“You’ve gotta be what, in your mid, maybe late thirties?”

That was a heck of a compliment and one he had no intention of correcting her on. “Give or take,” he replied.

“So what’s your problem? Never grew up? Peter Pan syndrome?”

Boy, is she direct. “Just never met the right girl.”

“Your first mistake,” said Cordero, “was looking for a girl instead of a woman.”

Brutal, too. “And my second mistake?”

“Allowing yourself to get to this age without realizing you’re the problem.”

“Wow. This is turning into a heck of a beating. I hope your paramedics respond faster than your crime lab.”

Cordero smiled. “What? No defense of your lifestyle? Isn’t right about now the time you’re supposed to stand up for confirmed bachelorhood? You know, trot out that old don’t hate the player, hate the game line?”

“My bad,” Harvath replied. “I didn’t know there was protocol for this sort of guy-bashing. Speaking of which, why isn’t Mr. Cordero helping you figure out picking up your son?”

The smile faded from her. “Because he’s deceased. He died shortly before Marco was born.”

Harvath felt like a total asshole and winced at her response. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“It’s not your fault,” she replied, attempting to bring back a small smile in order to take the sting out of the exchange. “How could you?”

“Was he a cop?”

“No, stockbroker. We’d known each other since grade school.”

“So Cordero is your married name?”

“It’s my maiden name. He had this long Eastern European name with a billion consonants that nobody could ever pronounce. I decided to keep my name.”

“Marriage is all about give-and-take. That’s what they say, right?” said Harvath.

Cordero rolled her eyes. “I know nothing about you, yet I get this sense—and I hope I don’t hurt your feelings, but—you’re a real idiot. You either have yourself convinced that it’s easier to just drift from one casual thing to the next in a state of perpetual adolescence, or you’re looking for that perfect ten. That sort of thing doesn’t exist. If you’re hitting on five out of six cylinders, or even four out of six with someone who truly cares about you, you should run, don’t walk, all the way to the bank with it.”

“If it’s that easy, how come you’re not remarried?”

“I never said it was easy,” she corrected him. “It’s hard work, but along with raising a child, it’s the most rewarding hard work you’ll ever do. Even better than being a SEAL, if only you knew how to swim.”

“And if I was—”

Cordero rolled her eyes again. “And if you were smart enough. I got that part the first time, too.”

“Any chance we can talk about something other than my love life?”

The detective slid the crime lab report across her desk.

Harvath skimmed it and eventually said, “So based on the elimination prints they used from Brittany Doyle’s arrest record, the crime lab is certain this other full and partial print belongs to our killer?”

“No. That’s not what they do. That’s our job. All they can tell us is the two prints we have been given do not belong to Ms. Brittany Doyle of Southie. The additional prints belong to someone else.”

“So what’s the next step?” he asked, knowing already what her answer was.

“We begin searching the databases. We already sent a copy of the prints to the FBI, so we’ll start with state and local. If we don’t come up with anything, we’ll go international. Sound like a plan?”

“I think I’d rather go back to getting lectured about my love life.”

“Don’t worry. I can walk and chew gum at the same time. We’ll do both.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Harvath replied. “Listen, as much as I enjoy discussing my shortcomings with people I’ve just met, why don’t we bifurcate our work? You take the state and local databases, and if you give me a computer, I’ll work on the international. That way, we’ll be twice as fast and hopefully get you to your little boy by five o’clock. Make sense?”

Cordero smiled. Whatever his problem was, a healthy sense of humor and what appeared to be a decent sense of compassion weren’t part of it.

Once again, she found herself attracted to him. More unsettling, though, was her growing feeling that whatever was wrong with him relationship-wise, she could fix it. But then there was her rational side. Through years of counseling brokenhearted girlfriends over countless glasses of wine, she knew what a dangerous proposition that was. You couldn’t fix something that was intent upon staying broken.

After showing Harvath to an available computer, she pushed her romantic notions from her mind and returned to her desk so she could begin scouring the databases.

In any other circumstance, Harvath would have smiled and watched a woman like Lara Cordero as she walked away. Not now, though. Now all he was focused on was catching a killer, and catching him before he could kill again.

CHAPTER 37

Harvath went through the motions of searching all the databases he had access to, but he knew he wasn’t going to find anything. Even if their killer had a prior record, it would have been scrubbed clean. An operation this sophisticated, regardless of who was behind it, would not roll the dice on everything falling apart because their lead hitter had his prints on file in a law enforcement database somewhere.

That didn’t mean, though, that his prints didn’t exist somewhere. If the man was indeed part of some black-ops program, the Agency was going to have a full dossier on him. Accessing that dossier, though, was going to be very difficult, particularly if the powers-that-be at Langley were trying to keep the program secret. Based on what he had heard about Swim Club, if the guy they were looking for was a part of it, Harvath would have a better chance locating Jimmy Hoffa than the man’s personal information. He decided to turn it over to the Old Man. Monroe Lewis wanted regular updates and he owed Reed Carlton a situation report anyway.

Typing up a brief synopsis, Harvath transmitted it to Carlton via a secure server they used. Attached to the email were photos from the crime scenes as well as scans of the prints the Boston PD crime lab had isolated from Brittany Doyle’s wrist cuff. He asked him to please forward the materials along to Bill Wise. With the two of them working on the prints, there was nothing else he could do in that arena and he logged off the computer.

Pushing his chair out from the desk, he stood and walked back to Cordero. “Any luck?” he asked.

“Nothing. You?”

Harvath shook his head.

“You knew we weren’t going to find anything, didn’t you?”

“I had a pretty good feeling,” he replied. “Whoever this guy is, he’s a pro.”

“A professional psychopath,” Cordero replied. Looking at her watch, she said, “I’ve got to pick up my son. Are you staying in Boston tonight?”

Harvath hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I’m not sure. It depends.”

“On whether or not the killer is still here?”

He nodded.

“Five victims from five different cities,” she said. “For all we know, the killer has already left Boston and is on his way to the next.”

“That’s the problem. He could be anywhere. I’ve got no idea.”

“Any reason at all to think he may still be here?” she asked.

Harvath thought back to what Wise had said. “There may be a slim chance. A very slim chance.”

“Based on what?”

“I spoke with an expert back in D.C. Call him a profiler. He thinks one of the reasons the killer weighted Kelly Davis down and sunk her in the river, rather than leave her body wherever he killed her, was that he needed to buy himself more time.”

“You don’t seem convinced,” said Cordero.

“My question is what would he be buying more time for? To get out of town and get to one of those other cities? Or is it something else?”

“What does your profiler think?”

“He thinks maybe the killer still has unfinished business here.”

“You’re the guy who paid attention in history class,” she stated. “If this guy was going to stage another murder in Boston, where would he do it?”

Harvath had already thought about that and had been doing a little research online. It could be any number of locations. But there was no reason, apart from Wise’s speculation, to believe that the killer hadn’t already left.

Cordero glanced at her watch once more.

“Go pick up your son,” said Harvath.

“What about you?”

“I’ll be fine. I’ll probably hang around here a little bit longer to see if anything breaks. Maybe the FBI will get lucky. If not, I’ll head back to D.C.”

“And what if the killer is still here?” she asked.

“Then I guess you and I’ll see each other again.”

Cordero and Harvath shook hands, holding on a fraction of a second longer than they should have.

“Stay safe, Annie Oakley,” he said as she let go of his hand and brushed past him to pick up her umbrella and a small plastic bag with a box in it.

“You, too,” the detective replied.

As she reached the door, the answer to the question she had asked him popped into his mind and he said, “Fort Hill.”

Cordero stopped and turned around. “What?”

“You asked me where I thought the killer would stage another Boston murder if he was still here and the answer is Fort Hill.”

“The water tower in Roxbury?” she replied as her partner entered the office and walked past her.

“Water tank,” the male detective corrected her, drawing out the words in his heavy Boston accent as he sat down at his desk.

“Excuse me, water tank.”

“No,” said Harvath. “We’re talking about two different things. It’s a fort.”

“It was a fort,” Cordero’s partner said. “When the town of Roxbury was annexed by Boston in the 1800s, they put a water tank on Fort Hill made to look like some fairy princess tower and renamed the area Highland Park.”

Cordero looked at her partner. “Where the hell did that come from?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Other than arcane Red Sox trivia, I’ve never heard you mention one historical thing about Boston.”

“I guess you just don’t know me.”

She stared at him, half in disbelief and half with the conviction that he was not telling her the full truth.

The male detective looked at Harvath and said, “Do you want to tell her why Fort Hill is significant, or should I?”

Though Harvath didn’t know the man from Adam, he was equally stunned by his sudden fluency in Boston history and chose to let him keep the floor.

“By all means,” Harvath said. “Please.”

The male detective looked at his partner and said, “After Penning’s murder this morning, I decided to do a little research.”

Cordero was going to be late picking up her son, but this was more than worth a dollar a minute. “Do tell, Sal.”

“I’m a smart guy, with an even smarter smartphone,” he said with a smirk. “So I researched what happened after they hung Andrew Oliver’s effigy from the Liberty Tree.”

“And?”

“The mob ginned itself up and ended up tearing down the dockside warehouse Oliver owned. Probably because that’s where he was storing all the stamps from King George.”

“What does that have to do with Fort Hill?”

“Oliver lived at the foot of Fort Hill. The mob set the effigy up in front of his house, chopped its head off, and set it on fire.

“When local law enforcement showed up and tried to calm things down, they got showered with rocks. The crowd then looted Oliver’s house and set it on fire. The next day, Oliver resigned his commission from King George, but the colonists weren’t done with him. They made him march down and publicly renounce his office beneath the Liberty Tree.”

Cordero’s partner shifted his gaze to Harvath and said, “Correct?”

Harvath hated to hand it to the guy, but he had done his homework. “That’s right,” he replied.

“So, let’s pass that along to the FBI and beef up patrols around Highland Park and the water tank just in case. We’ll see what happens.”

“Sounds like a plan,” said Cordero, who then looked at Harvath and asked, “How about dinner?”

“What about your son?”

“My parents live in the apartment above mine. They’re older. They don’t drive anymore. But they can babysit after I get Marco put to bed. If the killer is still here, you want a crack at him, right?”

“Of course,” Harvath replied.

“Good,” she said, as she turned to walk out the door. “So do I. I’ll text you in an hour and we’ll pick a place to meet. In the meantime, have Sal help you find a hotel. If you’re lucky, he’ll put in the good word with his sister. She’s one of the assistant managers at the Four Seasons.”

As he watched her leave, Harvath looked at the male detective and realized that he probably had a better chance of having the killer walk right into the police station than he did of having Cordero’s partner put in the good word for him anywhere, much less with his sister at the Four Seasons hotel.