Cold Jade (5 page)

C
harles Starkey was
a long way from his plumbing supply business in New Jersey.

But he was alive in a way he’d never felt before.

This was not his first trip to The Store, by any means. He’d performed several transactions already, but each one was special.

This purchase had been no different.

Starkey had been one of the Store’s first customers. In what felt like a very brief amount of time, he had spent the vast majority of his wealth on products from this exclusive outlet.

Now, sitting in one of the “kill cabins” as he thought of them, Starkey surveyed the swath of destruction he’d cut in the little cabin’s main room. Every muscle in his body, every particle of oxygen in his blood bubbled with a life force he’d never felt before.

But with the smallest hint of disappointment, he realized that the ecstasy he’d felt in the past was fading faster. And each of his purchases had been completed with less time between them. On one level, he realized that it was becoming increasingly difficult to stay satisfied. At the same time, he knew he could never stop.

The boy he purchased two weeks ago was now dead. Starkey had made sure of that.

His victim was facedown on the bearskin rug in front of the fireplace, partially dismembered.

Starkey giggled at the recent memory of his frenzy; he had literally climaxed when he’d felt the boy’s death shudder, and he’d begun tearing him apart.

Despite the faint stirring of disgust and regret that always hit him immediately after one of these ‘projects,’ Starkey felt himself getting aroused again. He checked his watch. They were getting the private plane ready to take him back to New Jersey. His bag was packed, and the limo would be picking him up in ten minutes.

He began to head back toward the boy.

He giggled again.

The more he enjoyed his purchase, the better the value he got for his money.

He figured he had time for a quickie.

M
ack looked
across the confined space of Arichbald Spencer’s study at Hopestil Fletcher, Deputy Director of the FBI. She had arrived in Des Moines hours earlier and requested an immediate meeting with Mack and Spencer.

Hopestil Fletcher was a tall, imposing woman with broad shoulders, a long angular face, and blazing blue eyes. They had narrowly missed each other at the Bureau, but Mack had heard nothing but good things about her. The word was she was extremely tough but fair.

Now, those eyes were coolly appraising Mack.

“You’re going to Colorado,” she said.

“Why?” Mack and Spencer simultaneously replied.

Back when he was still with the Bureau, Mack used to accept these assignments with a whirlwind of enthusiasm and questions. And a spine tingling sense of adventure, an eagerness to dive into a case and come out with the solution.

Now, he simply thought about his sister.

Luckily, he knew she would be in good hands with Adelia.

“The local cops pulled three bodies out of the ground in a park 120 miles or so from Denver,” Fletcher said. “All of them were children.”

“What the hell does that have to do with my daughter?” Spencer asked. Agent Bullock, who had been standing near the entrance to the room, backed away. Smart move, Mack thought. You never want to hear your boss spoken to in a certain way.

“Maybe nothing,” Fletcher said.

“Then why are you sending Mack?” Spencer demanded. “I just flew him up here for Christ’s sake.”

Mack wondered that, too.

Fletcher looked around the room. It was just the three of them now.

“Look, this is highly classified,” she said. “But we have been investigating a disturbing pattern of children abductions. The problem is, there is some doubt on whether or not it’s a pattern at all. However, some Internet traffic involving two abductions was traced to several broad locations in the West. However, one of them was Colorado.”

“So you have a hunch,” Mack said. He was a big believer in hunches.

“Not necessarily,” Fletcher said. “But the fact that we have another abduction here that at least initially seems very professional, and the discovery of several deceased children in what may be an area of other abductions, does seem to convey a sense of symmetry.”

“I think you’re right,” Mack said.

“Go to Denver. Meet with SAC Kunzelman, he’s expecting you,” Fletcher said. “They are already investigating so by the time you get there you should be able to make a quick assessment of the situation. Report back to me right away, and then I’ll probably have you come right back. You could be back in Iowa in 48 hours.

“Arch?” Mack asked his friend.

Spencer nodded. “If whatever’s out there has anything to do with Rebecca, you might be more valuable working that end of this situation.”

Fletcher turned to Mack. “Report back to me the minute you have some conclusions. I’ll be here with the Senator, he’ll be in good hands.”

“Got it,” Mack said. Fletcher’s phone rang and she reached for it. Mack stuck out his hand and Spencer took it.

“Hang in there,” Mack said. “We’ll find her.”

Spencer nodded.

“Damn right we will,” the Senator said. “Do what you have to do, Mack, then get your ass back here.”

M
ack thought
they should change the nickname for Denver from the “Mile High City” to “Miles from the Airport.” It took nearly forty-five minutes for Mack to get from the airport to the city.

He had been to Denver several times and always enjoyed the sight of the city, with its postcard-quality setting in front of snow-capped mountains.

Mack looked at his cell phone. He had debated calling Fletcher, but he had thought about it on the flight and wanted more information on the leads she hinted the Bureau had been investigating.

He felt a little blind going into the situation.

The FBI offices in Denver were on Stout Street and Mack quickly found the building, showed his identification, and was whisked up to a large conference room on the second floor with spectacular views of the city and the mountains beyond.

There were more people in the conference room than Mack had expected. It must be the entire office, he thought. The twenty or so agents sat around the long conference room table or stood by a variety of easel displays with maps and photos of the crime scene.

A few of them turned and looked at him when he was brought in.

A tall man with dark hair approached Mack.

“Mr. Mack?” he asked.

Mack nodded.

“I’m Kunzelman. Glad to have you here,” he said. He turned to the group. “Everyone, I’d like to introduce Wallace Mack from D.C. This case is right up his alley, you’ve probably heard of some of his exploits.”

A variety of people nodded at Kunzelman’s assumption, others simply stared at Mack. Kunzelman turned back to him.

“Mack, I’m going to have each person who’s in charge of a clear aspect of the case to brief you, it should take about two hours. Once you’ve been briefed, I assume you will want to go to Locust Springs and see the crime scene firsthand.”

“Yes, definitely,” Mack said.

“Okay, then, folks, let’s get this man up to speed.”

It took closer to three hours, and by the end, it was clear that they didn’t have much to go on.

With his laptop open before him, Mack quickly perused an email with attached documents Director Fletcher had forwarded to him. He had been reading through them as the Denver team briefed him.

Now, they all looked at him, expectant expressions on their faces.

“Who here has some cybercrime expertise?”

It caught them off guard.

Finally Kunzelman said, “Uh, that would be Jerry.”

Mack looked around the room but no one reacted.

“Uh, he isn’t here. In the room, that is,” Kunzelman explained. “I can have you taken down to his office, if you’d like.”

“That would be great. And then I’m going to need a car and directions to the crime scene.”

Kunzelman nodded, and a young agent took Mack down to the office of Jerry Renfro, a middle-aged man with a handlebar moustache. The younger agent made the introductions, and then Mack opened up his laptop, clicked open the documents Fletcher had sent him, and began asking questions.

T
here were days
, and today was one of them, where he felt less like a man with an addiction and more like an addiction that resided in the body of a man.

Everything in his life could be traced to it.

His rotten childhood. His tortured life as a young man. His inability to hold steady work. And his current station in life.

He was Owner of The Murder Store.

And wanted by the FBI.

His name was Terry Piechura and he always wondered if it was his addiction that drove him to develop a genius-level intellect when it came to computers, or if it was his amazing skill in the cyber world that ultimately facilitated his extremely divergent sexual compulsions.

It didn’t matter, of course. What did matter was that as a tertiary supplier to a non-classified government entity, he had hacked his way into the national criminal database and had expunged his name from every law enforcement computer in the country.

This allowed him to get his passport and travel to the Far East for his hobby.

Ultimately, however, he had left a breadcrumb or two and that hadn’t gone over well with law enforcement.

But he was getting his revenge now.

And boy was he having fun.

Piechura went into his office and logged into his bank account. He saw that one of his best customers, Bernard Evans, had pulled the trigger on young Rebecca Spencer. The quick photos Butterfly had taken of the girl weren’t great, but they had obviously struck a chord with Evans. Piechura smiled. He had seen Evans’ name all over the place as a software genius and billionaire. Well, that may have been true, but Piechura knew that Evans had the same kind of interests he had. And satiating those thirsts was an expensive proposition.

The Owner of The Store confirmed the deposit, immediately transferred it through several shell accounts, and then split it into dozens of small amounts, and funneled them separately into his main account in the Bahamas.

He then picked up his satellite phone, punched in the number for the remote router located in his supercomputer in the San Fernando Valley, and placed a call to his associate.

“Hello, Butterfly, my love,” he said. “I have your next assignment.”

R
ebecca Spencer was a pendulum
. One minute she was terrified, ready to scream and cry at the same time, the next minute she was angry and prepared to fight to the death.

She had been consumed with hope when the van stopped. Her mind went on an image sprint: the driver abandoning the truck, Rebecca hearing the sound of voices. And then she was being dragged from the van.

The first thing she saw was the dead man. There was no doubt he was dead. There was a gaping wound across his throat and his shirt was covered with blood. His face was white and frozen, his eyes wide and staring into nothing.

“What are you doing?” Rebecca screamed at the woman.

The woman ignored her, and pushed her into the truck, and tied her in place.

Minutes later, the smell of gasoline filled the air around her.

An engine started up, and then an explosion, and they were driving once again.

At that point, her hopes had gone up in flames with what she assumed to be the van. Rebecca figured that her captor had probably switched vehicles and for some reason had set the abandoned vehicle on fire. Probably to destroy evidence.

Rebecca thought about the dead man. She had never seen a dead person before, except for her grandmother at a funeral home, and that hadn’t even looked like the woman she had known. But now, seeing that dead man who had just been alive moments before? Rebecca wanted to vomit, in fact, she felt the bile rise in her throat but she fought it back down.

Who was this woman? Rebecca thought more and more that her kidnapping might be political. Usually, men kidnap young women to rape and kill them. But this woman had knocked her out in the ladies room at the mall. Which convinced Rebecca that the dead man had probably been an innocent bystander. Unless he had brought the truck so her captor could switch vehicles.

She desperately wished for her mother. For some reason, even though they fought a lot, it was her mother who she couldn’t stop thinking about. How much she wanted to hug her Mom and be home in her own bed.

Tears slipped out and ran down her cheeks.

Think, Rebecca, think.

She told herself to stop being such a big baby. In the novels she read, the heroine was always resourceful. Well, she could be resourceful, too.

For instance, she recognized that this vehicle was a lot different than the other one. This one’s engine sounded bigger, and the ride was rougher. It was a truck, and a rugged one. Was that a clue to where they might be going?

The window between the cab of the truck and the bed was cracked slightly, probably so the woman could keep an eye on her, but Rebecca was glad, because she felt like she could at least get some idea of what was going on.

For instance, when the phone rang, and she heard the woman’s voice, she could tell that the woman sped up almost immediately.

Rebecca wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or bad.

At this point, all she could do was hope.

I
t wasn’t
until he was on the plane, heading back to New York, that Charles Starkey felt the buzz begin to wear off. At first, he alternated between giddy flash memories of what he’d done to the boy in the cabin, and then he would snap to images of walking in the door of his home.

Back to his wife.

And back to his bank account.

Or what was left of it.

He’d gotten pretty creative with his accounting – transferring balances from the family business to fake suppliers before funneling them into a separate personal account he used for his hobby.

It had taken a long time for him to save the money he had to pay for this latest boy, but he didn’t regret it. Not one bit.

Still, when he thought about some of the things he’d done, it made him a little nervous. He owed money, through the business, to some people. The kind of people you didn’t want to owe money. And certainly not the kind of people you wanted to be late in paying.

For some reason, they had seated him in an exit row on the plane, and he had the crazy idea to rip open the door and jump out of the goddamn plane.

But he couldn’t.

But with each minute he flew back east, it seemed the intoxicating euphoria of what he’d done wore off a little bit more and was replaced by a gnawing fear of what all of this was costing him.

It was bad enough he owed a lot of money to people that he should never associated with in the first place. But he had also drained most of the plumbing business’s money to fund his excursions.

Not only would his family be extremely angry with him, but he would probably go to jail for the creative bookkeeping he had been employing. Most of what he’d done was highly illegal.

Prison or death?

Those couldn’t be his only two options.

He just had to get creative.

And even though he told himself this before, he simply couldn’t afford The Store anymore. This boy would be his last.

If he could stop spending money, he could build back up some of the money he had taken. To pay it all back was out of the question, but at least he could hide how much he’d taken.

The key would have to be to control himself.

Something he had not been very good at lately.

What it really came down to was the choice between three things.

Prison.

Death.

Or no more purchases at The Store.

A shadow passed over his soul. A shadow that felt a lot like truth.