The Killing League (16 page)

Nicole realized that for a few slight errors in Jeffrey Kostner’s planning, she too would have been another news story of a murder victim.

She closed the laptop.

The cops had better find the man responsible for the killing. There were witnesses who said Venuta had last been seen with a man described as thin and long-haired but no one had a name.

Nicole hoped for the family of Andrew Venuta that the cops had someone like Wallace Mack on the case. Someone who would chase down every lead and not rest until the killer was caught.

Nicole let Sal back in the house from the backyard. Then grabbed her keys and purse. It was time to head to Thicque, and push away all thoughts of murder. She had spent more than enough time in her life contemplating violent crime.

That part of her life, thank God, was over.

64.

Robertson State Prison

Leonard Goldberg sat in his prison bed, eyes wide open, staring straight ahead. He’d been that way for the best part of nine solid hours. He hadn’t slept a single minute.

He got up and brushed his teeth for the third time, sat at the makeshift desk in his cell and stared at it. It looked so different. He had torn nearly everything he couldn’t take with him into small strips and flushed them down the stainless steel toilet. Notes, letters, postcards, photos torn from magazines, all gone. For the first time in years, his desk was neat and clean.

Goldberg stood and paced. The nervous energy was bubbling out of him. He wanted to run, shout, throw something. But he couldn’t. It could all be a joke. A horrible, cruel joke.

This guy calling himself The Commissioner could just be some sort of hacker with a particularly sadistic sense of humor.

The message he’d received late last night had shocked him to his very core.
Deborah Nahler dead? The fucking bitch who had put him away for life?

It had to be true. He’d found the news story online. Still, it was beyond his wildest imagination. He’d practically jazzed in his pants. He’d fantasized about killing that vicious cunt, along with Wallace Mack. Those two had worked together to put him here. They’d probably been fucking each other, laughing about their evil plans for poor little Leonard Goldberg. Well, the Nailer had been nailed. Yeah!

And then the message had gone on to give him instructions for getting out of the prison the very next morning! Goldberg thought that might be a joke, and a highly cruel one at that. Somehow, though, he didn’t think the man who had defeated the prison’s security software, initiated contact with him, and given him the tools to get out of prison once and for all, wouldn’t go through all of that for a joke.

The man who called himself the Commissioner just didn’t seem the type.

The door to Goldberg’s cell slammed open and he glanced at the clock. 6 o’clock on the nose. He walked out the door and it took every fiber in his being not to pause and look back at the little shithole that had been his home for the past seven years. Give it the finger, scream with incoherent rage at what it had done to him.

Instead, he walked straight and purposefully toward the laundry area where his job duties for the day typically began. But today he walked past the industrial-sized washers and dryers, down a small hall, to another hall where a guard stood waiting by a door.

Instantly, Goldberg knew the Commissioner had gotten to the guard. Goldberg glanced at the man, saw the dark circles under his eyes, the thinly concealed fury visible in his clenched jaw.

Goldberg watched as the guard swiped a key card through a slot and the heavy steel door swung open. The guard pulled a laundry cart out from behind the door, pushed it down the dim hallway. When they turned a corner, he turned to Goldberg.

“Get in,” he said.

Goldberg vaulted into the laundry cart and was soon covered in sheets and towels.

Now in darkness, he listened as the guard swiped his card again and another door opened. Goldberg felt fresh air, and the smell of exhaust. He heard another door open, this one sounding like a roller door on the back of a truck. He was plunged back into darkness, heard the door roll back down.

And then he was moving.

65.

Mack

Mack watched Reznor. He was still seething inside, but vowed that whatever happened next, he would not lose it again. He would not let Whidby get him riled.

Reznor glanced down at the notepad in her hand. “Mack made a request three months ago to the George Trucking Commission for information on registered drivers in the state,” she said. “Mack made specific requests based on age, race and other personal factors. He received an answer that someone would work on his request and give him a timely response. The response never came.”

Reznor flipped to a second page. “Mack also made a request to the Charleston Municipal Hospital. It, too, requested information on employee based on age, race and other personal factors. He got a prompt response that someone would look into it and get back to him. No one did.”

She looked at Whidby. “I did some digging, and with more official firepower, found out that those requests were never received, despite the proof I had from Mack. I showed them the responses and both organizations admitted that it looked like someone responded, but they couldn’t confirm it.”

Whidby motioned with his hands for Reznor to hurry along.

“It didn’t seem realistic that two different organizations, completely different, in different parts of the country, would be conspiring to keep information away from Mack,” she said.

“Since when did reality enter into the equation here?” Whidby said, laughing.

Reznor ignored him. “On a hunch, I had Mack’s home computer analyzed by a tech from the computer lab.”

Mack felt his stomach tighten.

Reznor looked directly at him. “There was a shadow program installed.”

Whidby groaned. “That’s fucking great,” he said.

“Basically, everything was duplicated on his computer, all his files, documents, and correspondence,” Reznor said. “Every keystroke he entered was shadowed and sent along to its identical twin.”

“Where?” Mack said.

Reznor shook her head. “According to the computer geeks, no way to tell. It went into a server, was broken apart, sent a million different places, then reassembled somewhere else.”

Whidby stood. “So what do you want from me?”

“We need this case given top priority,” Reznor said. “We need people to pore over the crime reports, compare them to some of the other cases Mack was working on-”

“Are you out of your minds?” Whidby said. “You’ve got nothing. No witnesses. Only two cases that have flimsy links to two other cases. The other four have nothing. This is another Wallace Mack pipe dream.”

He walked to the door. “And now you’ve made me late.”

Mack stood, raised his voice. “There are going to be more killings,” Mack said. “A lot more.”

Whidby looked over his shoulder at Mack and Reznor as he walked out of the room.

“Prove it.”

66.

The Commissioner

He loved that a serial killer like Leonard Goldberg would be willing to follow his instruction so implicitly. They were already a half mile from the prison, and the escaped convict stayed beneath the towels in the laundry hamper, unwilling to risk even a peek. As he had been instructed.

The Commissioner turned onto a lesser used highway, and followed it to an even more remote dirt road.

It made him chuckle. A serial killer following
his
rules. Just like the rest of them. It was funny. A bunch of maladapted psychopaths who refused to follow any kind of laws, whether they be society’s laws or moral laws.

But they obeyed
his
laws, to the letter. He was fairly certain that most of them back at the Holiday Inn in Omaha had believed that the cheesy actor he’d hired to play the part of “The Commissioner” was actually him.

More than outsmarting his contestants, he loved the control. The challenge to exert and maintain power over this pack of soulless jackals.

Take Goldberg, for instance. The guy had raped and tortured children. The crazy fucker had built a rack, staked the kids to it, then slowly torn them apart, all while jacking off on them every hour on the hour.

It was partly why he’d chosen Goldberg for his Round One target. He just didn’t like the little bastard. But also, this one was the toughest of all the targets. He had given himself the most difficult assignment in Round One, but that only seemed fair. None of the others had the means to figure out how to get this turd out of prison to kill him.

But he, the Commissioner, knew he would find a way. And he did.

An intersection appeared ahead. Calling it an intersection was really an exaggeration. A two-track crossed the dirt road so he turned left onto the two-track until he was hidden in a depression between two small hills.

He killed the engine, got out, shut the door and went around back.

He lifted the truck’s big roller door and stepped back.

“Come out, come out, little piggie,” he said.

The sheets were thrown back and Leonard Goldberg emerged from the laundry hamper, the look of fear on his face. He wasn’t sure if he should run or fight for his life.

“Where are we?” he said.

“We are in the land of freedom,” the Commissioner said.

Goldberg stepped out of the hamper, and came to the edge of the truck’s bed. He walked unsteadily, his arms out to sides of the truck for support.

“Who are you?” he said. “Why are you doing this?”

“I told you, I’m the Commissioner.”

“Of what?” Goldberg said.

“The Killing League.”

“What the fuck is that?”

The Commissioner smiled. “A little competition among friendly rivals.”

Goldberg looked over the Commissioner’s shoulder. His tiny head swiveled on his long neck.

“So what now?” he said.

“Now?” the Commissioner said. “Now, I have some very bad news.”

He drew the gun and fired once, the bullet entering Goldberg’s left eye and exiting the back of his head, carrying with it a good portion of the convict’s brain. Goldberg’s body landed in a heap on the truck’s floor.

The Commissioner walked away from the truck to a small stand of trees. He pulled branches away to reveal a late-model Chevy Caprice.

He got in and drove away.

67.

Mack

They regrouped at a coffee shop not far from FBI headquarters. Mack took a large black coffee, Reznor some frothy iced drink. She held up her drink.

“As long as the calories have caffeine, I don’t consider them ‘empty,’” she said.

Mack smiled. “That was fun. Some things never change, do they?”

Reznor sucked from the big green straw buried in her iced coffee. She pulled the drink away from her mouth and swallowed. “All that tension. It reminded me of just about every waking minute of my marriage.”

Mack waved away the comment like it was drifting cigar smoke. She never talked about that particular relationship. He knew she was trying to cheer him up.

“It was worse than I expected,” he said. “But the general attitude was the same,” he said, pulling out a notepad and pen.

He took a drink from his coffee. “This fucker was using my computer, and maybe other ones, to monitor big, unsolved multiple murder cases across the country. Of the serial variety.”

“Right,” Reznor said.

“But Part Two of this case demonstrates that he’s more than that.”

“Way more,” Reznor said.

“He is somehow getting information only we know, and then using that information.”

“Probably blackmail,” Reznor said. “Let’s just say he used your investigative notes in the Charleston hospital case. He deleted your request, did some digging of his own.”

“Maybe the illegal kind,” Mack said. “He obviously is willing to go to extremes. Maybe he went to Charleston. Broke into the homes of the people I profiled. It’d be easy to figure out who a serial killer is if you don’t have to play by the rules.”

Reznor nodded. “They fucking suspected John Wayne Gacy for like, years, before they finally got a warrant to search his place.”

“So he figures out who they are…” Mack said.

“And then he blackmails them. Tells them they can play his game or he’ll turn them into the cops. Play or pay.”

“It means he has access to everything we do,” Mack said. “Probably more than just what was on my computer. He would want to access the case information located on VICAP in order to research those cases…”

Reznor finished the thought. “If we compare the access logs to all these different cases, there should be only a small handful of people who have looked at them all,” she said.

Mack said, “Even if he hacked his way in, he had to leave some kind of trail.”

Reznor sucked the last of her iced drink. Several people seated near them looked at her. She slammed her empty plastic cup down on the table.

“I know just who can help us,” she said.

68.

The Commissioner

He looked over the Round One results. All of his players had succeeded. He was pleasantly surprised by their victories. He had guessed there might be one hiccup. Despite his providing flawless intelligence, money and opportunity, there could have been a wild card somewhere.

But Round One was complete and everyone had eliminated their target.

He knew better than anyone how easy it was to kill someone. Anyone can be killed. Sure, political leaders are difficult. Movie stars. Professional athletes. The extremely wealthy. But even they can be killed without too much effort. In those cases, the killing is easy. It’s the getting away with it that’s a bit more problematic.

But the average, unsuspecting citizen?

Ungodly easy. Fish-in-a-barrel easy.

His players had just proven that, beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Using his encrypted laptop, he updated the “scores” on his electronic ledger. He analyzed the murders, having received full reports from the parties involved, and adjusted the odds, only slightly.