Ragman, page 4
Now it was time to call his brokerage firm. Once the ushabti completed its task, there’d be some big changes in the stock market, changes he intended to take advantage of.
When he finished, he retired to his apartment, smiling at the thought of tomorrow’s headlines.
He never noticed the shadowy figure peering out from the room across the hall.
Leslie Prescott was nothing if not sensible. Tom Reardon had given her a list of safety precautions to follow, including keeping security personnel around at all times and never being alone in a place without two exits. Rather than pooh-pooh them off as many of her friends would have, she’d followed them to the word.
Now it was paying big dividends.
A shaken Charles Oliver had shown up shortly after eight for their meeting. When he’d told her about the messages from Henry Gordon, she’d immediately looked through Shaun’s private email accounts and found identical threats, threats that seemed far more menacing given what had happened to him and Roger. After a brief discussion, during which Charles told her he’d insisted to Shaun and the others that they take Gordon seriously and report everything to the police, she’d agreed they’d been foolish not to listen to him, her own husband included.
“We’ll speak to the others first thing in the morning. It will be better if we can present a united front when we take this information to the police, but even if they choose not to join us, we will still go.”
Then they’d moved on to the business at hand, the real estate joint venture they’d been negotiating before Shaun’s death. They were still ironing out the last few details when the gigantic man appeared in her study.
How he’d gotten past the guards downstairs without triggering any alarms, she had no idea. But the moment she saw him, his hulking form wrapped head to toe in gray, filthy strips of cloth, she knew it had to be the man who’d murdered Shaun. Never one for hysterics or hesitation, she hit the alarm button under her desk and ran for the walk-in closet she’d long ago modified into a panic room, shouting for Charles to follow if he wanted to live. The steel-reinforced door closed tight before their attacker made it halfway across the room. She didn’t bother contacting the police – the alarm did that automatically – but she did place a call to Tom Reardon, telling him she was in trouble and to hurry his ass over because if she died he’d be back guarding a warehouse by the river.
On the other side of the wall, a deep, raspy voice intoned two words: “Charles Oliver.”
“Bloody hell! He knows who I am.” Charles stood in the center of the room, his hands shaking and lower lip quivering like an infant’s.
“Shut up, Charles. It can’t get in here.” Not for the first time, she wondered how such a spineless man managed to run a multinational empire.
“You don’t think that’s the same—”
“I damn well do.” Leslie pointed at the screen. “That’s the man who killed Roger and my Shaun. Henry Gordon sent him after us.”
“Then let’s call him and give him what he wants.” Oliver took out his phone but Leslie placed her hand on his.
“Over my dead body. You really think he’d let us live even if we pay? We’ll just stay here until the police arrive. He’ll never get a red cent from me now, and he can spend the rest of his life in jail thinking about that.”
On the video monitor, the security team burst in and opened fire.
“Good lord,” Oliver said, backing away from the screen.
The intruder, unfazed by the barrage of bullets, attacked the three guards like a crazed bear, using its hands to rip limbs and smash bones. Body parts and blood flew in all directions, the carnage no less revolting in grainy black and white. Mercifully, the screen went dark when a random bullet hit the ceiling camera.
Which was why they never saw the intruder collapse into a pile of rags that fluttered like dead leaves before falling to the floor. Or the pieces of woven fabric that slid in tapeworm fashion under the door.
Until the first cloth tendril touched Leslie’s leg.
She let out a scream that was highly out of character, then kicked at the undulating strip before dancing away.
“Don’t just stand there!” she shouted at Charles, as more pieces of fabric appeared. “Do something!”
“What?” Oliver stared down at the grayish-yellow lengths of heavy gauze that wove and twisted like a living thing. One lunged at him like a viper and he scurried to the far end of the room with a shriek.
Mrs. Prescott feared her time had come to join her husband. Whatever Gordon had sent after them wouldn’t be denied. But she refused to go without a fight. In a drawer under the monitor was a small pistol. She grabbed it and fired at the creature as it coalesced into human form. It turned toward her, its empty eye sockets emanating malevolent intelligence. Enormous hands gripped her arm and tore it from her body. It dropped the spurting limb, lifted her up, and threw her across the small room. Brittle bones shattered and there was a moment of excruciating pain before her entire body went numb. She sank to the floor, paralyzed from the waist down, while the creature headed for Oliver.
“Charles Oliver,” it intoned.
Oliver cowered in the corner, whimpering like a frightened child. The creature placed its hand against his chest and he screamed, his cries deafening in the confined space.
Blood ran in a river from the gaping hole in Mrs. Prescott’s shoulder and she knew she only had moments to live. But she’d be damned if her murder went unsolved. While the monster methodically tore Oliver apart limb by limb, she reached out with her remaining hand and dipped a finger in her own blood, praying there’d be enough time to complete her task.
Moments later, she drew her last breath and her hand went still.
For Charles Oliver, death brought no end to his agony.
Dan and Joanna arrived at the Prescotts’ apartment building less than ten minutes behind the first patrol cars. They’d been on their way to a late dinner when the call came over the radio. As they crossed the street, Joanna had an excited sparkle in her eyes, and Dan knew why. Up until now, her position in the NYPD’s Crime Scene Unit involved lab testing and sample cataloguing, and nothing more. She was still waiting for her promotion to the CSU field team. Until then, she remained stuck in the Hair and Fibers lab, except in cases of emergency.
I guess this qualifies.
Praying neither of them would get reprimanded for Joanna’s unauthorized presence at a crime scene, Dan flashed his badge at the officer in the lobby, who pointed to the bank of elevators.
“Go on up,” the man said. “From what I hear, I hope you haven’t had dinner.”
Remembering the scene in Prescott’s office, Dan wasn’t sure he was up to another gore-filled room. He glanced at Joanna, who didn’t seem fazed by the warning.
“You sure about this?” he asked, while the elevator carried them smoothly toward the penthouse.
“I’ve seen dead bodies before,” she reminded him. “You just keep your big feet out of my evidence.”
The penthouse doors were open when they arrived, two uniforms standing guard in the spacious hallway. Dan flashed his badge again.
“Detective Reese and CSU Reese.”
The cops nodded. One of them handed Dan a tube of menthol jelly. He dabbed some under his nose and handed it to Joanna. A bad sign. Dan steeled himself. Halfway through the gigantic area that served as a formal living room and dining room, he caught his first whiff of death.
The crime scene was even worse than he’d imagined, the study no longer recognizable as the same place where he’d talked to Mrs. Prescott. Arms and legs were scattered everywhere, turning the once museum-quality room into an abattoir. Pools of blood covered the ancient hardwood floors. Rorschach sprays of red painted the walls and furniture in abstract designs. Dan and Joanna accepted blue shoe booties and latex gloves from an officer near the door and then found themselves hopping from one unsoiled section of floor to another to avoid leaving impressions in the blood. Smudge marks showed places where other officers were either unlucky or just not careful.
“ME’s on the way,” said Fred Schreiber, the senior uniform officer on the scene. “But I think it’s safe to say the cause of death was dismemberment.”
Dan looked around. Three torsos, all wearing the same white shirts and blue jackets as the security guards he’d seen during his last visit. He found himself wondering if Tom Reardon was among the dead, and hated himself for not being sure if the idea bothered him or not.
“Where’s Mrs. Prescott?”
“Panic room.” Schreiber pointed to a wall behind the desk. “Alarm company said that’s where it’s located. We knocked on the wall and called for her, but there’s been no answer. Tried her cell, too. Nothing. But she had to have been alive at some point. She’s the one who set off the alarm.”
“Where’s the video? These things always have a camera. Does she even know we’re out here?”
“Up there.” Schreiber nudged his glasses up on his nose and indicated a compact camera dangling from the ceiling, an obvious bullet hole in one side. “Looks like it either caught a stray or the perp took it out on purpose. Whoever’s in that room can’t see anything going on out here. And they probably can’t hear us, either.”
“Shit. So she could be dead or dying while we stand around holding our dicks.”
“Someone from the alarm company is on the way. Said he can open the door. Should be here in ten minutes.”
“Great. What about witnesses?”
Schreiber shrugged. “When the alarm went off, the three guards responded. The elevators and stairs were locked electronically from the guard station. No one came in or out until we arrived.”
“I’m going to document the crime scene,” Joanna said.
“Okay.” Dan looked around the room again, frustrated. He hated waiting but it looked like the only thing he could do until the panic room got opened was watch Joanna dance from one body part to the next, snapping pictures with her phone while she waited for the CSU team to arrive.
“Holy fuck.”
Dan turned, relieved and then annoyed as he recognized the voice.
Tom Reardon stood at the entrance to the study, slipping on a pair of gloves. Despite the late hour, he looked fresh and alert, his dark brown eyes scanning the room, his Citadel Protection uniform wrinkle-free.
“What are you doing here?” It came out harsher than Dan intended.
“My case, too, remember? I was in the shower and when I got out there was a message on my phone from Leslie Prescott. She sounded scared but not terrified. Said the man who killed her husband had shown up and she knew who sent him. Then she hung up. I tried calling back but it went straight to voicemail.”
“That’s all? You’d better not be holding anything back, because—”
“That was the whole call. Twenty seconds at best. I saved the message for you. So where is she?”
“Panic room,” Schreiber said. Dan shot him a dirty look and the tall, stocky officer quickly found something else to do.
“Behind that wall.” Dan jerked his thumb at it. “Their tech’s on the way to open it.”
“Damn.” Reardon moved through the study, picking his way like an acrobat through the gore and splatter on the floor.
He hasn’t lost his touch at a crime scene, I’ll give him that.
“A lot of gunfire,” Reardon said, eyeing the shell casings littering the floor. “At least a dozen shots.”
“So where are the bullets?”
Both men looked at Joanna, who knelt next to a man whose head was twisted at an unnatural angle so that it stared at his left arm, which sat several feet away.
Dan glanced around the room, searching for holes in walls or furniture.
“Just like Prescott’s office,” he said, more to himself than the others. But they still heard.
One of Reardon’s eyebrows went up. “You’re right. Shots fired and no slugs recovered, only casings.”
“This time there’s one in the camera.” Dan pointed it out to Reardon.
“Still. Whatever Shaun Prescott and these poor bastards shot at, they hit it.”
“What kind of person can take a dozen or more hits at close range without going down?”
Reardon frowned. “Jacked on drugs? Wearing a vest?”
Dan shook his head. “I don’t care how good a vest you’ve got, that kind of gunfire’s gonna do some damage. And no drug in the world lets you run away with a dozen holes in you.”
“Maybe he wore body armor under his clothes?”
“How do you know it’s only one?” Dan asked.
“Look at the footprints.” Reardon indicated a set of large, smudged tracks leading through the blood toward the wall separating the panic room from the study. “One guy. Pretty large feet. Fights with the guards, kills them, and then heads right for the panic room.”
Dan shook his head. He’d seen the same tracks but figured it was because only one assailant had stepped in the blood. He simply couldn’t accept that a single person could take out three armed guards, no matter what the evidence said.
No, not take out. Rip apart from limb to limb. While getting shot multiple times.
“He does all this and doesn’t leave anything for us to go on?” Schreiber asked.
“He left something,” Dan said. “Perps always do. It’s just a matter of finding it.”
“Well, we can start with this.” Reardon knelt down by the panic room and nudged something on the floor with a gloved finger. “Looks like a scrap of cloth. It’s stuck between the door and floor.”
“Maybe the perp was right at the door when it closed,” Dan said.
“Or he got inside.”
“Shit.” That explained the absence of tracks leading away from the wall. Dan imagined the perp holding a gun or knife to Leslie Prescott, waiting for the door to open. Or worse, her dead and him poised to attack the moment—
“I’ve got something.” Joanna pointed at the floor. “Some kind of powder. Not dirt. Almost like sawdust.” She took an envelope off the desk, scraped some of the powder into it, and sealed the flap. Just then three men entered the room. Dan recognized the first one as Lee Thomas, a heavily bearded night shift coroner from the ME’s office. The other two wore blue CSU windbreakers and immediately accosted Joanna about breaking protocol.
“I didn’t break protocol, I followed it,” she said, then explained what she’d done since arriving. Dan smiled at her no-nonsense tone.
Good for you!
“The lady did right,” Thomas said, nodding a quick hello to Dan and Reardon before beginning his examination of the first body. The two CSUs frowned but didn’t argue. Instead, one of them began placing yellow evidence markers next to the scattered shell casings, while the other took the envelope from Joanna and transferred it to a plastic evidence baggie.
“Oh, my god.” A man stood by the door, his face pale as death. Dan was about to tell Schreiber to get him the hell out when he noticed the Metro Alarms & Security label on his jacket.
“You! Over here!” He motioned to the man, whose nametag read ‘Carl’. “We need to get this open as fast as possible.”
“I’m on it.” He went to enter the room but one of the officers stopped him and handed him boots and gloves. The man stared at them a moment before catching on. After donning the protective gear, he did his best to avoid stepping in any blood and made his way to the back wall, where he slid open a panel to expose a keypad. He plugged an electronic device into it and pursed his lips as it began running through code combinations. Dan readied himself for a long wait, but the keypad light turned green in less than a minute. Carl reached for the Enter button, but Dan stopped him.
“Please, back away.”
Dan drew his gun and motioned for Officer Schreiber to take the left side while he took the right. He touched the Enter button and then pressed himself against the wall as the reinforced panel slid aside.
A leg fell out onto the floor.
Schreiber yelped and jumped back.
Two bodies lay at the back of the room. Dan recognized Leslie Prescott crumpled in a corner, one arm severed and the other outstretched as if pleading for help. Her flesh had gone as white as her hair, but even in death she still held the same grim look of determination he’d seen on her face when she’d ordered him to work with Tom Reardon. Congealed blood covered the floor and walls. In the opposite corner was the torso of a man, his shirt torn open to reveal the by-now-familiar circle and star symbol burned into his flesh. His limbs were strewn across the room and his head rested next to his body, face contorted into a rictus of terror, mouth open in a silent scream, his eyes bulging from their sockets.
“Son of a—” Dan slammed his hand against the wall in frustration. “How the hell did he kill them and get out?”
“Christ.” Reardon peered over Schreiber’s shoulder, his normally dusky skin several shades paler. “That’s Leslie Prescott.”
“Yeah.” Dan let his gaze travel the room, looking for anything that would help them. He found it on the floor next to Leslie Prescott’s hand. Two words, written in the blood.
Rags Man
“Rags and man? What the hell’s that mean?”
“Well, the rags part is obvious.” Joanna had joined them. “There’s another scrap of cloth wrapped around the other victim’s disarticulated leg. It looks the same as the one Tom found.”
“So, what? She saw a man dressed in rags? He attacked them with rags? It doesn’t make sense.” Reardon’s frustration was evident in his furrowed brow, and mirrored Dan’s own.
“None of this makes sense. How could the perp kill the guards, get in here, kill Prescott and this other guy, and get away, all without being seen?”
“And with a shitload of bullets in him,” Reardon added.
