Primacy of Darkness (15 page)

“The person who attacked me is not the same guy who did this. That’s all I can tell you.”

“Come on, Leo. Castillo is a damn good cop and now she’s suspended and damn near got killed because of you and your bullshit.”

“She got what she got because she wouldn’t listen to good advice. Don’t make the same mistake. How is she anyway?”

“Do you care?”

I shrug. “A little. Like you said, she’s a good cop. I respect good cops.”

“She’s banged up, but she’s tough and will recover. At least from the explosion. Her suspension and her obsession with exposing whoever—whatever you are is another thing.”

“Whatever? Don’t tell me you’re buying into her monster conspiracy too.”

The doors open and we step out. “I didn’t, but with all this shit, I just don’t know. I feel like I don’t know anything anymore.”

“All you need to know is that you’re a good cop and I am not your enemy. I am going to find this lunatic and put him down.”

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”

“Good idea.”

CHAPTER 19

“What the hell was all that about, Trinh?” Carol demanded.

Trinh punched and kicked the mattress strapped around the support post hard enough to make the floor vibrate. “I’m sorry. I made a mistake.”

“Your mistake almost killed a cop.”

“I lost my objectivity. I won’t let it happen again.”

“You said that the last time. You need to get your shit together.”

   Trinh felt an unusual surge of anger. She stopped striking the mattress and fell into a meditative trance. After more than forty years of practice, it came easy to her. She wanted to blame Dr. Birch’s serum on her mood swings, but she knew that had little, if anything, to do with it.

To be so close to Malone a second time and to fail again infuriated her. What made her even angrier was her disregard for the cop’s safety. She had never accepted collateral damage in any of her previous exterminations.

Trinh felt more than just anger. There was fear, more so than on any of her previous hunts, with the exception of the first one. She was never devoid of fear. It was impossible to banish the emotion when you hunted a creature superior to you in every way. It was like hunting lions with a spear. One mistake and you were someone’s meal. What she felt when she got near Malone was different. It was more than the anxiety of battling a powerful opponent. The same terror she experienced as a child returned with full force.

She was no longer that little girl, and Malone was not the same either. He was not the savage animal he once was. Somehow, he had become more human. Trinh wondered if that made him less or more dangerous. In a straight-up fight, she would much rather face this tamer Malone. But civility brought with it the capacity for rational thought, something she was sure he was devoid of back in Vietnam. Thought led to emotion. Emotion led to hesitation and mistakes, mistakes she could exploit.

“Have you been able to pick his tracker back up?”

Carol opened the tracker app on her computer. “Nope. The explosion must have damaged it.”

“Shit. He’s probably gone to ground now and will be looking for us. It was bad enough when we were the ones doing the chasing. I don’t like the idea of being on the other end of the hunt. We need to get our hands on something we can use as bait, to draw him out onto a field of our choosing.”

“If we can’t find Malone, maybe we can find someone who knows him well enough to lead us to him,” Carol suggested.

“Do you have any idea where to start looking?”

“The person who modified Malone’s security system firmware was called Mo’ Money.”

“Sounds more like a rapper than a computer nerd.”

“Mo’ Money used to go by the name Black Cyberlord. He was a pretty big deal in the hacker world. Shortly after he changed his moniker, he kind of dropped off the net, but I remember seeing his name in some of the dark web’s vampire channels right around the time we picked up Malone’s trail in Pennsylvania. Maybe he’s just a fanboy, but with his fingerprints all over a vampire’s security system, the coincidence starts getting stretched pretty thin.”

“Can you find out who he really is?”

“I can try, but these dark web types work very hard to keep their identities secret.”

“Get into the forums and see if he is active in any of the channels. If you find him, maybe you can get him to lower his guard and, I don’t know, trace the signal or something back to him.”

Carol crooked an eyebrow and wrinkled her nose. “Trace the signal?”

“I don’t know how this crap works. Just try to find out who he is and where he lives.”

“Then what?”

“Then we snatch him up and make him tell us what he knows about Malone.”

“You’re talking about kidnapping.”

“I’m talking about finding Malone and putting him down!”

“We are supposed to be the good guys, and good guys don’t go around snatching people off the streets and making them talk, as if they’re the Gestapo!”

“If he knows what Malone is and works for him, then he is no better than a vampire. He is at least an accessory to murder.”

“So, what, are we going to start killing friends of vampires too? Where does it end?”

Trinh gave Carol a tight frown. “I didn’t say we were going to kill him. We are going to find him and ask him what he knows about Malone.”

“What if he doesn’t know anything, or what if he knows something but refuses to tell us?”

“I’m sure I can convince him.”

“You can’t kill him.”

“I won’t, but he doesn’t have to know that I won’t.”

Carol crossed her arms and stared at her screen. “Fine, but if I tell you to back off, then you back off.”

“All right. Why are you suddenly getting so uptight about all this?”

“Because I think being close to Malone has made you crazy. I don’t want you to do something you will regret, and I know that if you hurt someone who doesn’t deserve it, it will destroy you.”

Trinh leaned over Carol and hugged her from behind. “You are my little conscience angel.”

“Yeah, and if your conscience devil gets out of line again, I’m going to cunt punt the little bitch right off your shoulder.”

***

Angel watched Leo walk away, leaving him with more questions than the hundreds he already had before he arrived. He dialed the medical examiner’s office.

“Hey, this is Detective Angel Lopez. I’m calling about a woman and three men brought to you this morning.”

“I’m sorry, Detective, but we haven’t received any bodies this morning.”

“That’s not possible. I have half a dozen uniforms that watched four stiffs put in body bags and loaded into two of your wagons an hour ago near the Upper West Side. The woman’s name is Gertrud Fleischer.” Angel read the other three names from his notepad.

“They didn’t come here. Maybe they went to another office?”

“Can you check for me?”

“Hold on.”

The worker at the medical examiner’s office tapped at his terminal. “There have only been three bodies brought into any of the medical examiners’ offices in the greater New York area in the past six hours. One was a stabbing victim in the Bronx, a homeless man who died of, as yet, unknown causes, and some drug dealer who got his throat cut, and none of them were anywhere near your location.”

“All right, thanks.” Angel ended the call, looked up at the towering statue of a female angel cradling an infant, and made the sign of the cross. “
Dios te salve, Maria
.”

***

Castillo crossed the police cordon with little more than a glance from the uniforms tasked with keeping the public at bay. It was not a difficult job. Ever since 9/11, most people had stopped running toward suspected terrorist attacks and gave the building a wide berth in case there was more to come and it should come crumbling down.

She spotted her partner standing in the lobby beneath the enormous statue of an angel. Shattered glass crunched underfoot as she walked through the blown out doors.

Angel turned at the sound of her approach. “Sergeant, you probably shouldn’t be here. Stark is upstairs overseeing the investigation personally.”

“Let him have fun with that until the feds come in and take over, probably within the next hour if he isn’t ignoring the phone calls already coming in to order him off. What do we have here?”

“A fucking lunatic and possible terrorist hijacked the window-washing scaffold, ambushed some businesswoman, and threw her and two others out of the top-floor window. Then he took an elevator to the lobby, set off a bomb we think he left at the security desk earlier, and stabbed a bunch of cops on his way out when they responded to the bodies falling from the sky.”

“Malone was here.”

“Yeah, but I’m sure it wasn’t him.”

“I know it wasn’t him. He was in Brooklyn at the time, I assume checking out a new home.”

Angel’s eyes widened. “Are you following him? His lawyer wasn’t kidding around about that restraining order. You are going to get fired if you don’t stay away from him.”

Castillo locked her jaw. “You know I can’t do that. What was Malone doing here?”

“The guy who runs this building, a stuffy, creepy Brit, says he contracts Malone as a private investigator sometimes.”

“Do you think this is the same guy who killed our two brothers in Queens?”

“The Brit?”

“No, the one who did all this.”

“I’m almost sure of it.”

“We find Malone leaving the area that night and now he shows up here after someone blows up his loft. Do you still think I’m crazy?”

“I never thought you were crazy, Sergeant. I just thought you were obsessed with Malone and had some misplaced suspicions.”

“How about now?”

“Now…I’m thinking maybe they aren’t so misplaced.”

“Did you talk to Malone? What did he say to you?”

“He warned me not to get too involved like you did.”

“Was it a threat?”

Angel shook his head. “Naw, I don’t think so. It was more like the kind of warning you give someone when you don’t want to see them get themselves into trouble, but you can’t tell them what the danger is.”

“You can’t possibly think he’s one of the good guys,” Castillo said.

“No, but I don’t think he’s one of the bad guys either, at least not in this.”

“Maybe not, but he knows a hell of a lot more about what’s going on than he’s willing to tell us, and his keeping secrets is costing people their lives.”

A shout interrupted Angel’s response.

“Castillo, what the hell are you doing here?” Captain Starks shouted as he strode toward them.

“I heard the call on my radio. Being suspended doesn’t mean I’m not a cop.”

“We’re doing just fine here.”

Castillo looked around the damaged lobby. “Yeah, looks like it.”

“Is your ego so great you think we can’t do our job without you? Let me tell you, you are a good detective, but you are just a spoke in the wheel of justice. The department is the axle. You revolve around it, not the other way around.”

“Careful you don’t lose too many spokes or your wheel is going to collapse,” Castillo said as she turned and stormed away.

“You just stay the hell away from Malone! I have enough shit to deal with without you stirring up more.”

Castillo stiffened her back to absorb the verbal blow. Starks did not understand that keeping tabs on Malone was how she could help take down the cop killer. She knew she should feel a little bad about caring far more for the two cops he killed and the others he injured than for the half dozen or more hookers he had murdered, but she had been a cop for too long and seen too much to work up more than a minimal amount of empathy for them.

She returned to her car and lifted the screen on her laptop. It looked as though Malone was headed back to his new home, so she put the car in gear and headed toward Brooklyn. Malone’s new domicile was not as isolated as his loft was, but it was still in an area free of traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian.

A shipping container, likely the same one Leo used as a garage, which was next to his loft, now rested alongside the building near a side entrance. Malone appeared from within it lugging a large, plastic container: the green ones with a padded interior the military often used to store and transport weapons or delicate equipment. Castillo yawned. She hadn’t slept for at least thirty-six hours.

She set an alarm on the tracking program to alert her if Malone moved more than a block from his present location. She then closed her eyes and fell asleep in the front seat of her car.

***

Jack had spent the day at a tailor’s shop getting fitted for a new suit. His clothes would not be ready until tomorrow, but he would not have been wearing them now anyway. He walked through the Brooklyn police station’s glass doors with his wide-brimmed hat pulled low. 

The desk sergeant glanced up at his approach before returning his eyes to the paperwork in front of him. “Can I help you?”

“Yes, I would like to report a double murder.”

“Do you know the name of the victims?”

“Yes, I have them right here.”

Metal clunked onto the desk. The sergeant looked up from his paperwork and read the names off the two badges Jack had dropped.

The sergeant’s eyes went wide as he recognized the face from the videos and witness sketches. “Holy shit!”

“Wrong on both counts,” Jack said and then leapt over the desk, sword poised to strike.

***

Trinh landed another hard kick against the padded steel beam. “Any contact with this Mo’ Money character?”

“He posted a bunch of stuff about the fight you and Malone had. There isn’t much more than what everyone else is saying after watching the video, except his comments aren’t full of idiotic conspiracy theories. Can you stop kicking the pole before you bring the roof down?” Carol clicked a new thread in the forum. “Oh, now here’s something.”

Trinh stopped punishing the makeshift punching bag and leaned over Carol’s shoulder. “What is it?”