Sigma Curse - 04 (19 page)

Sally-Jo believed she had a knack for reading people. And from what she’d seen of Special Agent Frances Rickenbacker on TV, during the press conference, she thought the woman was ambitious, and had pride. Sally-Jo sensed that Rickenbacker was forced to play second fiddle to the main FBI guy, Teller, and didn’t like it. So, appealing to her vanity might work. If Rickenbacker could be offered the chance to break the case on her own, she might take it.

Sally-Jo knew the woman wouldn’t be so dumb as to waltz in without any kind of protection whatsoever. Which was why she and Frank had set up the rendezvous as a decoy. Frank had told Rickenbacker to come to an apartment building Sally-Jo had chosen a few blocks away from her own garret, and to ring the bell of number five. There was no number five in that brownstone. The whole purpose was to allow Sally-Jo to look out for any backup Rickenbacker might have brought along. She did so from the shadows under an awning over a shop front. When she was as satisfied as she could be that there were no other FBI personnel hiding in the vicinity, Sally-Jo crept toward Rickenbacker’s car, was pleased to find it unlocked, and slipped into the backseat.

Then the shit had hit the fan.

Sally-Jo had been hunched down in the rear of the Camaro when Rickenbacker opened the door and dropped into the driver’s seat. She’d moved fast, as she knew she’d have to if she were to have any chance at all of taking the woman down, and had reared up behind her and grabbed her hair and with her other hand jammed the needle into the woman’s neck. She’d been practising on a tailor’s dummy on which she’d carefully sketched the jugular veins, using an anatomy textbook to get the position right, and although it was a crude representation, she felt a jolt of triumph as she hit the spot and pressed the plunger and felt the contents of the syringe slide into Rickenbacker’s circulatory system.

Rickenbacker reacted immediately, thrashing and twisting, but Sally-Jo had hold of a bunch of her hair near the roots and clung on tightly, like a jockey gripping a horse’s reins. For an instant, Sally-Jo though Rickenbacker was going to tear herself free, but she began to flag with startling suddenness, and almost before Sally-Jo was ready for it the FBI agent slumped against the closed car door, her head lolling.

Sally-Jo had gotten the anesthetic agent off the internet, accessing the dark web. She’d selected it – propofol – because what she’d read about it indicated that it was commonly available and fast-acting. It was also short-lived in its effects, but that didn’t matter.

She was crawling between the front seats, heaving Rickenbacker aside into the passenger seat so she could get behind the wheel, when she saw the blur of movement through the windshield.

Saw the woman advancing at a stoop, her hand moving inside her jacket and emerging with a gun.

Sally-Jo thought:
cop
.

Without pause she reached into Rickenbacker’s own jacket and found the grip of the woman’s weapon and drew it out, surprised to see not a standard law enforcement pistol but an old-fashioned looking revolver. Sally-Jo had never fired one of those before, but there wasn’t time to worry about that because the cop on the pavement was taking aim.

Sally-Jo kicked open the door and fired over the frame.

The cop had flattened herself and the first shot went wild. The woman was rolling, her gun arm extended. Sally-Jo took a second to aim, and fired again.

The cop jolted, a rope of blood flicking from her neck. Sally-Jo’s second shot hit her in the torso. The cop dropped flat.

Whether she was dead or not, Sally-Jo had to get out of there, because there’d likely be others around and closing in. She dropped back into the seat and slammed the door even as she hit the ignition.

As the car howled away from the curb, she heard another shot. From the corner of her eye she saw the cop shifting on the pavement.

In the rearview mirror, the woman lay still.

Sally-Jo drove a little aimlessly at first, heading vaguely north but letting the one-way streets suck her in and turn her left or right, as the adrenalin took control of her system and she coasted on it. She waited for the sirens, the cop cars to screech across her path, blocking her flight. But they never came.

She was clear, for now.

Gradually she began to breathe again, not normally but more regularly. Her heart continued to hammer away, and her senses felt heightened, so that the city, with its abundance of sensation, became almost a cartoon landscape, a maelstrom of light and noise and dazzle.

Beside Sally-Jo, Rickenbacker half-sat, half-lay against the back of the seat, dead weight. The breaths shuddered out between her parted lips.

After five minutes or so, Sally-Jo began to slow, and to look more closely where she was driving. Her intention had been to subdue Rickenbacker, spend a little time ensuring the coast was clear, and then take the woman up to the garret apartment a few blocks from where she’d overpowered her. But that wasn’t an option now. The entire area around Gramercy would be a hive of police activity by now, and there was no way she could sneak back in without being stopped, far less lug a body upstairs.

She’d have to get out of the city. Somewhere nobody was likely to stumble upon her. Fortunately she’d brought her rucksack along, so she had the equipment she needed and wouldn’t have to go back to her apartment to fetch them.

The woman started to stir beside Sally-Jo, and she glanced at her. Rickenbacker’s eyes fluttered, and a low mumbling began in her throat.

There was more of the propofol in the syringe, if needed. But it was going to be impossible to administer it without stopping the car, and Sally-Jo didn’t want to do that just yet.

Rickenbacker’s right hand groped vaguely along her leg, then up her front. Sally-Jo wondered if she was instinctively trying to find her gun, even while semi-conscious. She’d jammed the revolver into the door compartment beside her, on the other side from Rickenbacker and well out of her reach. What if she had a backup piece, though?

Her phone.

The realization hit Sally-Jo like a physical blow. Rickenbacker’s cell phone would be traceable.

She had to get rid of it right away.

The Camaro was headed up Madison Avenue into Harlem. No sign of any police activity nearby. Sally-Jo turned left down a side road and pulled in at the curb. The pavement was busy with people heading in both directions, but there was no particular reason why anybody would take a close look inside the car.

She cut the engine and leaned toward Rickenbacker. The woman was still less than half awake, unable even to wriggle herself into a comfortable position in the car seat.

Sally-Jo lowered the window on her side, then reached inside the woman’s jacket and felt around. She found the cell phone in a pocket.

She was fumbling with the battery cover at the back when Rickenbacker’s hand shot out and gripped her wrist.

The grip wasn’t particularly strong, but Rickenbacker imparted a twist to it that made Sally-Jo’s fingers open reflexively. With her other hand Rickenbacker grabbed the cell phone and lobbed it though the open window on Sally-Jo’s side.

The move caught Sally-Jo off-guard. Not just the unexpected lunge of Rickenbacker’s, but the fact that she’d thrown the phone out the window. Sally-Jo recovered quickly and slammed her fist into the side of the FBI agent’s head. Rickenbacker was more awake than she’d been letting on, but she was still woozy, and she didn’t dodge the blow at all. Her head rocked sideways and she gave a soft groan and sagged in the seat once more.

Sally-Jo peered through the windshield. People continued to pass by on the sidewalk, oblivious. Quickly she picked up the syringe from where she’d left it on the backseat and pushed up Rickenbacker’s sleeve and found a wormy vein and slipped the needle in again. She injected only a little of the propofol, because she wasn’t an expert in anesthesiology and she didn’t want to risk killing the woman with an overdose.

When she was satisfied that Rickenbacker’s slow, even breathing indicated genuine narcosis, Sally-Jo looked out the open window on her side. The traffic flowed past, not heavy but regular. She couldn’t see the phone.

She understood suddenly what the woman had done. She’d had the presence of mind to get rid of the phone before Sally-Jo could wipe it clean of prints.
Her
prints, Sally-Jo’s.

Panic seized Sally-Jo, gripping her heart and squeezing it into a knot. For a few seconds her vision swam.

She couldn’t get out the car, leaving Rickenbacker unconscious there, and scrabble about on the street looking for the phone or whatever fragments of it remained, all the while dodging cars from both directions.

No. She’d just have to press on, and trust luck, and get this done.

Because if Rickenbacker didn’t disappoint her, if she turned out to understand Sally-Jo, then this would all stop. No more killing. And Sally-Jo would be able to get on with her life.

With her
new
life.

She took a deep breath, started the engine once more, and took off.

––––––––

T
he fingerprint guys were two brash hipsters named Ferris and Watson, and they were in their element. Teller had summoned them immediately and they’d arrived at the office quickly, toting a couple of suitcases of equipment.

The patrol cops from Harlem brought in the remains of the cell phone shortly afterward. Venn looked at the battered item, its screen smashed, its battery case missing. One corner was completely crushed where a tire had run over it.

The fingerprint analysts set up their equipment and set to work.

Venn paced around the office, hyped up, frustration and anger threatening to boil over within him. He kept looking at his phone to see if there was an update from Beth or from anybody else at the hospital, but the screen remained blank.

An APB had been put out on the Camaro. It would be found sooner or later, but Venn knew it too would be ditched, and most likely destroyed. Still, the potential for finding something useful inside it, some piece of trace evidence, was there.

Teller came over to him. “There’s a record on Fran’s phone of a call made to that cell number the man gave her,” he said. “A few minutes afterward. No other contact, though.”

“You’re running the man’s call through your voice-recognition program?” said Venn.

“Yeah, Joe.” Teller’s tone was wry. “We’re the FBI.” He shrugged. “It didn’t sound like he was using any kind of voice-distorting device, just talking quietly. So if there’s a match, we’ll find it.”

After an hour, Ferris and Watson called the others over. The pair of them looked a little deflated.

“Crappy prints, man,” said Ferris. “In fact, no complete prints at all.”

“Nothing?” said Teller.

Watson said, “Well, there’s a couple of partials. But no minutiae, no core and delta features. We’re running them through the database, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you.”

“Damn,” said Venn. The FBI had something like 50 million sets of prints on their database. But without decent-quality samples to compare against the database, it was useless.

He wandered away again. Teller joined him.

“So we’re assuming now that somebody, the killer, lured Fran into a trap,” said Teller. “Harmony found out about it, and surprised them, which was when she got shot.”

“Yes,” said Venn. “I figure Harmony suspected Rickenbacker of being the killer, just like I did  until recently. She probably tailed her there.”

“And we know now there are two of them,” Teller said. “The woman, and the man who made the phone call.”

“Looks that way.”

Teller fell silent for a moment. Then: “Why Fran? Why did they want her in particular?”

Venn turned to him. “It all goes back to the question: do the victims have something in common? Or, as Rickenbacker herself said, is looking for a connection between them a waste of time? Are they all just random victims?”

“Unlikely,” said Teller. “Why go to all the trouble of targeting a particular FBI agent?”

“I’ll get my guy on it,” said Venn. “He’s good at pattern recognition stuff. Can you let me have Fran’s personnel file? I need as much detail about her as possible.”

He called Fil, who was still at the office, and asked him to put Rickenbacker into the cross-referencing system along with the previous victims.

“I called the hospital,” said Fil, before they ended the call. “Harmony’s still in surgery. Likely to be for a while yet. But they’ve stabilized her.”

*

T
wo things of significance happened in the next hour.

The first was a discovery.

The second was an idea which sparked in Venn’s mind, and expanded rapidly into an elaborate plan.

Venn was hunkered down on his own in one corner of the office, drinking his sixth or seventh cup of coffee and thinking about heading out for a drive, or a walk, or anything, just to combat this crushing feeling of inertia, of
powerlessness
, when Teller came over, looking excited.

“We’ve got a possible voice match on the caller,” he said.

Venn tossed the half-empty plastic coffee cup in a wastepaper basket, slopping some, and hurried back to the work area. Abbot was seated at a computer, fine-tuning a voice print on the monitor.

“Listen to this,” he said.

Venn knew the FBI’s voice database wasn’t as extensive as the one they had for fingerprints, but even so it included a wide range of samples, not just from convicted criminals but from members of the military as well as public figures such as politicians. One reason was so that in cases of kidnapping, they could verify the identity of victims who were put on the line during ransom demands.

A man’s voice issued from the speakers.

“My name is Franklin Douglas Gray. I am a sergeant in the United States Army.”

“Now this,” said Abbot. He ran the recording of the caller who’d spoken to Rickenbacker.

“Again,” said Venn.

He listened. There was...
some
resemblance, he had to admit. But the caller’s voice was quieter, raspier.