The Schwarzschild Radius (38 page)

Joules dialed the 20
^th
precinct in Manhattan and asked for Detective McKenna’s cell number. He got through and told him what he had found.

“Where’s Rachel now?” asked the detective.

“No one knows. I just came back from her house and her parents told me she was there last night and went to bed. She was gone in the morning. I just left a voicemail on her cell. Let me try again.”

The detective looked at his watch. Eight o’clock in the morning.

“Still no answer,” said Joules.

“Can you send me what you’ve found?” He gave Joules his email address.

The detective stared at the images and only his lower lip reacted.

“How did you get these?”

“I decrypted it off a PC Rachel hacked into.”

“Whose PC?”

“The priest. Father Massey. I also realized that Rachel was doing this hack without changing her IP address.”

“What does that mean?”

“Whenever you do a hack, you should use IP anonymizing software. That changes your IP address, so that it looks like you’re hacking from Poland or Hong Kong or Argentina. If you don’t do this, it would take ten seconds to geolocate your PC. Just plug the IP address into ip2location.com and a map with your location comes up. It even has precise latitude and longitude.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“It gets worse. Rachel was having problems finding the files she was looking for and thought her firewall was the problem. So she disabled it. With her firewall disabled and her IP exposed, she became the target of a counter hack. And it succeeded.”

“He hacked into her PC?”

“Right. At that point he knew exactly where she was and who she was.”

he sniper perched on the rooftop of the apartment building had a clear view of the street below and the events that would shortly unfold.

McKenna could see the perimeter unit at both ends of the street consisting of marked police cars to seal off escape and keep bystanders out. The surveillance team made a final pass of the house in the unmarked car and in the distance, the raid team’s caravan approached.

Massey’s Bensonhurst home was deserted when police broke down the door, but a phone number led them to a realtor and this Richmond Hill house.

In a few moments, the raid team would storm the building. There hadn’t been much time to plan this operation, but the SWAT guys were used to working on short notice. Just a few hours earlier, they had received authorization to carry out this mission after evidence had been presented pointing to Massey as the killer of Kirsten Schrodinger. Given the viciousness of the murder, this raid was classified as extremely dangerous despite the absence of any known accomplices.

If the Wallen girl was a hostage, it would change everything. It would mean waiting, negotiating, a siege.

A raid on Transcendence House came up empty a few minutes before. Thank God for that. No one wanted a hostage situation with fifty or sixty kids involved. Another damn Waco incident.

The teams performed a final check of their Browning High Power pistols and H&K MP-5 submachineguns. In their Metro-vests, Nomex hoods and Bolle goggles, they looked like divers, and McKenna thought that was appropriate. Some of the creatures they went after came from the depths.

The vans stopped two houses away. Instantly the doors flew open with explosive power. Each team of six men took up their positions in the front and rear of the structure. The metal grille door was ripped out with a Ram-it. The device was then reversed and with two men swinging it, slammed into the wooden door, leveling it. In the rear, two men entered through a window assisted by a ladder.

The men poured into the house, quickly securing the living room, kitchen, and dining rooms. The second floor team gave the clear sign for the bedrooms, bathroom, and stairwell. The team on the first floor descended to the basement. Instantly, the Sure-fire lights on their weapons illuminated the darkness.

The place was barren. No furniture, no people. It was like someone had just moved out. Broom clean. The final Code Four was announced and the assault team withdrew.

McKenna, who had been following the assault by radio, moved in with the search team.

There was no sign of a violent struggle, just the echo of their footsteps. There hadn’t been enough time for a security leak. Massey must have simply figured he was getting a visit. He’d have no place to run, that was certain. The guy had made the cover of Newsweek, for crying out loud.

Detective McKenna returned upstairs. At least no one had gotten killed here.

But just as he was letting himself relax, he noticed a small smudge of blood on the gray carpeting. There was another a few feet away and by the dining room, there was a third. He signaled his men.

Then McKenna passed a window and saw two of his men lifting black plastic trash bags in front of the house. The bags seemed to have a bad weight to them and McKenna’s stomach told him something. When he got outside, the men were already inspecting the contents.

There, in three plastic bags, were the dismembered remains of a body.

etective McKenna felt sick at the thought of calling the Wallen parents to tell them he had found their daughter chopped up and distributed among three Hefty garbage bags. He had glanced inside the bags, but they were a dark, bloody mess, and had sent them on their way. Now it was the long wait for confirmation from the lab. There was nothing he could do to make himself forget this for even five minutes. He’d been at this job for twenty-one years and now wished he’d retired last year.

One of the cops had asked why the killer would be so stupid as to leave bags full of body parts in front of the house. McKenna shook his head and answered the question in his own mind.
Not stupid. Arrogant
.

They found Massey’s car in the garage of the Richmond Hill house. No trace of anything inside, except for the trunk lined with a plastic drop cloth. The airports had been alerted to detain him if he tried to fly.

They recovered Massey’s laptop from the Bensonhurst home and gotten a court order to get into his Yahoo account. Now, he and his men were combing through hundreds of emails for some clue to his whereabouts.

They checked out the realtor and the landlady of the Richmond Hill house. They were clean. Massey had obviously rented the place out to serve as an execution chamber.

He opened Massey’s Yahoo Messenger. He had a dozen aliases. Newyorkerboy, Crush007. This guy spent a lot of time online. McKenna printed out the address book contact list. Most of these people had to be kids. What adult sits for hours and chats with other grown men? Christ.

Chat archiving was enabled for all his contacts, so McKenna was able to read the exchanges. The conversations sounded like two thirteen-year-olds talking. Movies they had seen. Parents. School. Lousy teachers. They all started out the same and all ended the same―with sex talk.

Some of the chats referenced photos that were sent. He correlated those dates with the dates in the “sent” folder to find the pictures, but they were all gone. They could be recovered from the Yahoo servers. Nothing ever got erased.

“Check out every person on this list.” He gave the paper to Aldo Marchese.

McKenna’s cell went off. He held his breath.

“We did a cross check of the art dealer’s phone calls and Massey’s office number came up,” the voice said.