In Her Name: The First Empress: Book 01 - From Chaos Born (35 page)

Everyone had a part in the investigation, it seemed, except for Dawson. In his hand, he held a plain manila folder that included the information that had been forwarded by the Lincoln field office. It was a preliminary report sent in by the Special Agent in Charge (SAC), summarizing the few known facts of the case. In terse prose, the SAC’s report described the crime scene, the victim, and what had been done by the local authorities before the SAC’s office had been alerted. And there were photos. Lots of photos. If a picture was worth a thousand words, then the ones Dawson held in his shaking hands spoke volumes about the agony suffered by the victim before he died. Because it was clear from the rictus of agony and terror frozen on Sheldon Crane’s face that he had still been alive when–

“I’m sorry, Jack,” came a gruff voice from behind him, interrupting Dawson’s morbid train of thought as Ray Clement, Assistant Director of the Criminal Investigative Division, came in and closed the door. It was his office, and he had ordered Dawson to wait there until he had a chance to speak with him.

Ray Clement was a bear of a man with a personality to match. A star football player from the University of Alabama’s Crimson Tide, Clement had actually turned down a chance to go pro, and had instead joined the FBI as a special agent. That had been his dream since the age of ten, as he had once told Jack, and the proudest moment of his life had been when he’d earned his badge. Jack knew that a lot of people might have thought Clement was crazy. “I loved football,” Clement would say, “and I still do. But I played it because I enjoyed it. I never planned to do it for a living.”

Over the years, Clement had worked his way up through the Bureau. He was savvy enough to survive the internal politics, smart and tough enough to excel in the field, and conformed to the system because he believed in it. He could be a real bastard when someone did something stupid, but otherwise worked tirelessly to support his people so they could do their jobs. He wasn’t a boss that any of his special agents would say they loved, but under his tenure, the Criminal Investigative Division, or CID, had successfully closed more cases than under any other assistant director in the previous fifteen years. People could say what they wanted, but Clement got results.

When he had first taken over the division, Clement had taken the time to talk to each and every one of his special agents. He had been up front about why: he wanted to know at least a little bit, more than just the names, about the men and women who risked their lives every day for the American Taxpayer. They were special agents, he’d said, but they were also special human beings.

Jack had dreaded the interview. Whereas Clement could have been the FBI’s poster child, Jack didn’t quite fit the mold. He was like a nail head sticking up from the perfectly polished surface of a hardwood floor, not enough to snag on anything, just enough to notice. Outwardly, he was no different than most of his peers. He dressed the same as most special agents, eschewing a suit for more practical and casual attire for all but the most formal occasions. His well-muscled six foot, one inch tall body was far more comfortable in jeans and a pullover shirt, with a light jacket to conceal his primary weapon, a standard service-issue Glock 22. While he had no problems voicing his opinions, which had sometimes led to respectful but intense discussions with his superiors, he had never been a discipline problem. He was highly competent in the field, and was a whiz at data analysis. At first glance, he seemed like what he should be: an outstanding special agent who worked hard and had great career prospects.

But under the shiny veneer ran a deep vein of dark emptiness. Jack smiled, but it never seemed to reach his eyes, and he rarely laughed. He was not cold-hearted, for he had often displayed uncommon compassion toward others, especially the victims, and their families, of the crimes he was sent to investigate. But he had no social life to speak of, no significant other in his life, and there were very few people who understood the extent of the pain that lay at Jack’s core.

That pain had its roots in events that took place seven years earlier, when Jack was serving in the Army in Afghanistan. His patrol had been ambushed by the Taliban and had taken heavy casualties before reinforcements arrived. Jack had been badly wounded, having taken two rounds from an AK-47 in the chest, along with shrapnel from a grenade. The latter had left its mark on his otherwise handsome face, a jagged scar marring his left cheek. That had been rough, but he was young, only twenty-six, and strong, and would make a full recovery from his wounds.

What had torn him apart was what happened back in the States. While he lay unconscious in the SSG Heath N. Craig Joint Theater Hospital in Bagram, his wife Emily was kidnapped while leaving a shopping mall not far from their home outside Fort Drum, New York. Emily had her own home business, and they had no children, so no one immediately noticed that she’d gone missing. Four days passed before a persistent Red Cross worker who had been trying to get in touch with Emily about Jack’s injuries contacted the provost marshal at Fort Drum. Two military policemen went to the house, and when they found it empty, they contacted the local police.

The police located her car that same day: the mall’s security center had ordered it towed away after it had sat in the parking lot overnight, reporting it to the police as abandoned. The next day, the fifth since she had disappeared, police investigators found footage on one of the mall security cameras that vividly showed what had happened to her. A man stepped around the back of a nondescript van as she had walked by, laden with shopping bags. With a casual glance around to see if there were any witnesses, he turned as she passed and jabbed her in the back with a stun gun. Scooping her up in one smooth motion, he dumped her into the van through the already open side door, and then collected up the bags that had fallen to the ground. He didn’t rush, didn’t hurry as he threw the bags into the van. Then he climbed into the back and slammed the door closed. After a few minutes the van backed out of the space and drove away.

It had all happened in broad daylight.

Because it was clearly a kidnapping and so much time had passed since the crime had been committed, the local authorities contacted the FBI.

That was when Jack learned of his wife’s disappearance. Immobilized in the hospital bed, still in a great deal of pain, he was paid a visit by his grim-faced commander and a civilian woman who introduced herself as an FBI special agent. His commander told him what had happened, and over the next three hours the FBI agent gathered every detail that Jack could remember about his wife’s activities, associations, family and friends. Everything about her life that he could think of that might help track down her kidnapper. It had been the three most agonizing hours of his life. The special agent had assured him that everything was being done to find his wife and bring her back safely. Jack prayed that they would find her alive, but in his heart he knew she was gone.

His intuition proved brutally prophetic. Her body was found a week later, buried under bags of trash in a dumpster behind a strip mall in Cleveland, Ohio. She had been repeatedly raped and beaten before she’d finally been strangled to death. The FBI and law enforcement authorities in Ohio did everything they could to find her killer, but he had covered his tracks well and was never found.

When Jack was well enough to travel, the Army arranged for him to be flown home, where one of his first duties had been to formally identify Emily’s battered, broken body. He had seen his share of horrors in Afghanistan, and some might think it would have made the trauma of viewing her body somewhat easier. It hadn’t. Thankfully, the family lawyer, an old friend of his parents, who themselves had died in a car wreck a year before Jack had gone to Afghanistan, had made all the necessary arrangements for her burial. Jack simply had to endure the agony of laying her to rest.

After the funeral, Jack had found himself at a loss. His time in the Army was nearly up, and he was tempted to simply lapse into an emotional coma to shut off the pain and the nightmares of Emily’s tortured face.
 

But a cold flame of rage burned in his core at what had happened to her, and the bastard who had done it. He found himself sitting in the kitchen one morning, holding the business card of the female special agent who had interviewed him in Bagram. As if his body was acting of its own accord, he found himself picking up the phone and dialing the woman’s number. The conversation that followed was the first step on the path that eventually led him to become a special agent in the FBI.
 

She had tried to dissuade him, warning him that he wasn’t going to find answers, or vengeance, to Emily’s death. In truth, while the thought of finding her killer was more than appealing, he realized from the beginning that avenging Emily wasn’t what was pulling him toward the Bureau: it was the thought that he might be able to help prevent what had happened to her from happening to others.

When he got to the FBI Academy, one of his fellow agents was Sheldon Crane. Sheldon had an irrepressible sense of humor, and immediately glued himself to Jack. At first, Jack had resented the unwanted attention, but Sheldon had gradually worn through Jack’s emotional armor, eventually becoming the Yin to Jack’s Yang. Sheldon was a self-proclaimed computer genius, recruited to work in the Bureau’s Cyber Division, while Jack’s skills in intelligence analysis and experience in combat made him a good candidate for the Criminal Investigative Division.

Jack had done well in CID, but remained an outsider, something of a mystery to his fellow agents. Most of his supervisors knew his background and were content to let it be, but when Clement took over and began his interviews, Jack had heard that he could be very pointed in his questions. Jack didn’t want to be interrogated again about his experience in Afghanistan or Emily’s murder. He didn’t want anyone’s sympathy. He just wanted to move on.

Clement had completely surprised him. He didn’t talk or want to know about anything related to Jack’s past or his work. Instead, he asked questions about Jack as a person outside of the Bureau, what he liked to do in his free time, his personal likes and dislikes. At first, Jack had been extremely uncomfortable, but after a while he found himself opening up. Clement talked to him for a full hour and a half. When they were through, Jack actually found himself laughing at one of Clement’s notoriously bad jokes.

After that, while Jack couldn’t quite call Clement a friend, he had certainly become a confidant and someone he felt he could really talk to when the need arose.

Now was certainly one of those times.

Clement walked across the office toward Jack, but stopped when his eyes fell on the folder Jack clutched in one hand. “Dammit, don’t you know any better than to grab files off my desk, Special Agent Dawson?”

“Yes, sir,” Dawson told him. “I took it from your secretary’s desk.”

“Lord,” Clement muttered as he moved up to Dawson. Putting a hand on the younger man’s shoulder, he said again, “I’m sorry, Jack. I’d hoped to have a chance to talk to you before you saw anything in that file.” With a gentle squeeze of his massive hand, he let go, then sat down behind his desk. “Sit.”

Reluctantly, still clutching the folder containing the professional analysis of Sheldon Crane’s last moments alive, Jack did as he was told, dropping into one of the chairs arrayed around a small conference table before turning to face his boss.
 

“Why aren’t you letting me go out with the teams to Lincoln?” he asked before Clement could say anything else.

“Do you really have to ask that?” his boss said pointedly. “Look at yourself, Jack. You’re an emotional wreck. I’m not going to endanger an investigation by having someone who isn’t operating at full capacity on the case.” He raised a hand as Jack began to protest. “Don’t start arguing,” he said. “Look, Jack, I’ve lost close friends, too. I know how much it can tear you up inside. But you’re not going to do Sheldon any favors now by screwing things up in the field because you’re emotionally involved. I promise you,
we will not rest
until we’ve found his killer.”

“My God, Ray,” Jack said hoarsely, looking again at the folder in his hand, “they didn’t just kill him. They fucking tore him apart!”

He forced himself to open the folder again. The top photo was a shot that showed Sheldon’s entire body at the scene. It looked like someone had performed an autopsy on him. A deep cut had been made in his torso from throat to groin. The ribs had been cracked open to expose the heart and lungs, and the organs from his abdomen had been pulled out and dissected, the grisly contents dumped onto the floor. Then something had been used to carve open his skull just above the line of his eyebrows, and the brain had been removed and set aside. Another shot that he dared not look at again showed what was done inside the skull: his killer had torn his nasal cavities open.

Another photo showed Sheldon’s clothing. He had been stripped from head to toe, and his clothes had been systematically torn apart, with every seam ripped open. In the background, on the floor next to the wall, was his gun.

Jack had seen death enough times and in enough awful ways that it no longer made him want to gag. But he had never, even in the hateful fighting in Afghanistan, seen such measured brutality as this.

The last photo he had looked at had been a close-up of Sheldon’s face and his terrified expression. “He was still alive when they started...cutting him up.”

“I know,” Clement said, his own voice breaking. “I know he was.”

“What was he doing out there?” Jack asked, sliding the photos back into the folder with numb fingers. “This couldn’t have just been some random attack. What the hell was he working on that could have driven someone to do this to him?”

Pursing his lips, Clement looked down at his desk, his face a study in consideration. “This is classified, Jack,” he said finally, looking up and fixing Jack with a hard stare, “as in Top Secret. The kind of information you have to read after you sign your life away and go into a little room with thick walls and special locks on the door. Even the SAC in Lincoln doesn’t know the real reason Sheldon was there, and the only reason I’m telling you is because you held high-level clearances in the Army and you can appreciate how sensitive this is and keep your mouth shut about it.”