Silent Night

Book 5: Victor Loshak

by L.T. Vargus

Genres: Literary Fiction; Horror; Police Procedurals; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

No one is safe.

A mass-shooter rages through Chicago in the days after Christmas. Brutal. Efficient. He etches a path of destruction through the city.

Shooting up the mall. Opening fire in traffic. Rampaging through a movie theater.

That's just his opening act.

FBI profiler Victor Loshak heads to the windy city to investigate and finds himself swept up in a frenzied manhunt. This killer will strike again -- it's a question of when not if -- so every second becomes critical.

As always, Loshak must enter the shadowy mind of the perpetrator to help catch him -- understanding the shooter's psychology will be the key to predicting his behavior, the key to stopping him.

The city veers toward panic. The killer seems invulnerable, always one step ahead.

And then there's the blizzard moving in.

Endless snow. Wind. Frigid temperatures.

The shooter and the elements will combine to test Loshak like he's never been tested before. But can he find the answers in time?

This pulse-pounding thriller will have you holding your breath until the final page. Fans of Michael Connelly, John Sandford, and Lisa Regan should check out the Victor Loshak series.

The books in the series can be read in any order, so grab Silent Night and get started today.

Release date: April 5, 2020

Publisher: Smarmy Press

Print pages: 391

Sample

 

 

Prologue

 

The after-Christmas shoppers were out in droves. Pointless and plentiful. Teeming swells of them crashed into the storefronts, overwhelmed the food stalls, flooded out into the thoroughfare of the mall.

An ugly lot, he thought. Pocked faces and flabby trunks. Smiling like chimps, teeth the shade of butterscotch.

He watched the thickest segment of the mob congregate at the food court — the Dining Pavilion the signs called it. All the sheep gathered in one place. Loitering at the feeding trough, at the watering hole, Cinnabon gloop smeared around their mouths like semen.

He shifted in his seat, the metal bench unforgiving, probably leaving a steel mesh imprint on his ass even now. But he didn’t take his eyes off the mob of consumers flitting around the food court.

Waiting. Waiting for the pills to kick in, for the other stuff to kick in. For that metal to come ripping out of his laptop bag.

Yeah, he had a little something to show them all. Soon.

The sun had already been down by the time he crossed the parking lot toward the mall’s main entrance. Trudging through slush, sleet coming down, the black of night descending. Oh, the Christmas lights blinked red and blue back at the gloom, strands of the things wrapped around the stone columns out front and strung through the decorative bushes along the building’s facade, but their tiny glow was no match for the dark. Not tonight.

Even with the baby messiah holiday over, the place was packed. Swarming with shoppers of every race, color, creed. All the people. Somehow they all looked the same to him.

The return lines backed up halfway out of the stores, spilling out into the concourse. Kind of funny, he thought. It was December 26th. Imagine all those shitty gifts shoved right back from whence they came within 24 hours. Exchanged, whenever possible, for cold hard cash, though store credit was acceptable if mandatory. Ah, to bask in the true spirit of Christmas.

He imagined the camera in his head zooming out. Seeing the bigger picture, the full scale of the scene as though viewed from above.

The crooked lines of people snaking away from the Return desks with sweaters and turtlenecks slung over their arms. The swarming throng of food court idiots gibbering away at each other as they shoved giant cinnamon rolls down their gullets.

He watched them all. Watched them through his sunglasses, a layer of darkness that kept him separate, kept them from knowing which way his eyes were pointed.

It gave him a little thrill to walk among them undetected. To sit on this bench, the mindless herd swirling around him. They didn’t have a clue.

He could feel the accelerated pulse banging away in his neck now. The uppers were coming on strong. The weird stuff sometimes took longer.

He checked the time on his phone. Could be five more minutes or it could be forty more minutes. Soon.

One hand reached up to touch the winter hat bunched atop his head. The other moved down to confirm that his laptop bag still lay at his feet, that the hard bulk inside remained, ready and waiting. Good.

Movement caught his eye. Pulled his attention back to the mob.

An older couple fussed over a dropped slice of pizza outside of Sbarro. The man, angry, threw up his hands, both he and his wife looking down on the giant wedge of pizza lying face down on the terrazzo floor, grave expressions etched into their faces. Grief, he thought. They were grieving the loss of a slice of XL pepperoni.

A nervous chuckle pulsed out of him as he watched the scene, but the laughing made him uncomfortable. Self-conscious.

He licked his lips. Felt his tongue touch the sharp edges of his teeth, the tiniest little bumps evident on the bones as though his incisors were serrated.

Finally the old man stooped to peel the fallen pizza off the tile floor. Wads of cheese came free, sliding off the crust, lumpy piles of mozzarella sagging into his cupped palms. He stuck his whole hands into the trash can to try to rid himself of the mess, fingers coming back red with sauce.

He had to look away from the scene to keep from laughing again. Eyes swiveling to the people closest to him. Reading their faces. Expecting to find one of them watching him. Squinted eyes scrutinizing him.

No one looked his way. No one noticed him at all.

He shifted in his seat again. Paranoia intensifying? That must mean it was starting.

He smeared sweaty palms on the thighs of his pants and tried to push the antsiness down. Tried to calm himself.

Instead the weird anticipation grew. An overwhelming physical anxiety entered his body, shuddered through him, all of his torso electric with it. A quake in the abdomen. An intestinal throb. So intense it almost felt like he might spontaneously shit. Or puke. Or both.

Too much. Too much energy. Too much life inside him thrashing like something wild, trying to bust its way out, expend itself. Too much spirit for this meat shell to contain.

He swallowed. Hard. It was always that way just before the acid kicked in. Like it hit the body before it touched the mind, sent shrill warning signs that the intensity knob was about to get cranked all the way up. Energy maximized. Overloading. The human soul verging on nuclear meltdown.

And as that drug-induced energy swelled, so too did his feelings of separation, isolation. He felt more and more outside this crowd of people bustling around him. Apart. Alone and foreign here.

Alienation. Estrangement from humanity.

Every trip was a journey inward, a striving toward something. Some kind of hidden truth that lived only in this altered mindspace. Something primal, fundamental to existence. What would he find there today? His heart stuttered a little, then ratcheted up another couple notches, almost like it was eager to find out.

Kids rushed past him then, a blur of red and navy blue winter coats, a pair of 10-years-olds chasing each other. Their mother lingered somewhere in the distance, calling after them in a strange muted-yell like the mall version of a stage whisper.

His eyes sought her, found her, elbowing her way through the congestion, something very odd about her face. The snout elongated, he thought. The lines of her jaw and cheekbones going smeary around the edges, jiggling just a little like a custard that wasn’t quite set.

It was happening. The drugs. Finally.

All the faces in the crowd started to change, to shift, to look strange to him. Something about the proportions of the jaws warped so the shoppers all looked like chinless pigs. Hideous. Alien. Naked in some way. No longer quite human. Like docile apes someone had shaved and taught to walk upright.

They bumbled about, looking for the next shiny object to go chasing after, perpetually dim expressions shimmering out from behind their eyes.

Tame. They were all so fucking tame.

Like house cats, stuck inside permanently. Convinced that all of reality existed within the walls of their home, this soccer mom jungle they were the kings of by default.

These domesticated animals from the suburbs thought the same of their little worlds. Believed that reality consisted solely of their tract in the subdivision and their stainless steel appliances and their little slot in the faceless machine and their water-activated gel cleansers.

He tongued the edges of his teeth again. Felt his heart hammering in his chest. Staring into all those alien faces. Disturbed.

And rage surged through him at last. Animal heat lurching up the walls of his skull. Hatred. He trembled with it. Arms quivering.

His reality came out of the barrel of a gun. Had a way of wiping all those lesser realities away.

Blood and bone and metal. Those were real.

The house cats could never understand that until they saw the bloodshed and death first hand. Until their hideous fates came clear. Until death came ripping.

The mob of idiots squirmed like one many-tentacled being before him now. Writhing and throbbing and moving Cinnabon Stix to all those wet maws. Something erotic in the undulations. Something grotesque.

He leaned forward. Dug in his laptop bag, his fingers finding the cool metal they sought, settling the grip in the crook of his hand and plucking it free.

He stood. Pulled the bunched up winter hat on top of his head down, the ski mask now covering his face, bulging around the sunglasses.

He stepped forward into the crowd. Some tendon or vein trembling down the length of each arm.

The voice in his head screamed before his finger even found the trigger. No words. Just something aggressive breaking loose inside, given a voice. Unharnessed at last.

The voice swelled in volume until it drowned everything out. Until all of his being was this singular aggression. Overwhelming. About to be unleashed.

And he was alive. Awake. Real. For the first time.

Becoming.

All that energy glistened on his skin, sizzled behind his eyes, lurched and spit in the depths of his stomach.

Ready for catharsis. Ready to detonate.

With the Uzi leveled at the mob, he opened fire.

 

 

 

Chapter 1

 

“Go!” Jan stage-whispered, shoving Loshak at the door. “I think Chad’s coming back. Go!”

Loshak glanced over his shoulder toward their abandoned table.

“His name was Etienne.”

“Yeah, right, and I’m Jasmine.” She poked him in the back. “Go before he sees us.”

They squeezed through the Boxing Day dinner crowd, giggling like teenagers, two slightly tipsy fifty-somethings in a crowd of trendily dressed yuppies all waiting for their reservation.

The Edison bulbs sticking out of every sconce shed just enough light to be completely useless in escaping.

“Jan, I lost the door,” Loshak said over his shoulder.

She punched him in the arm.

“Vick, you asshole, if he catches us—”

“I left him a C-note.” He smirked at his own use of the slang and heard Jan giggle behind him.

He should try to throw around a few more. Find an opportune moment to slip in a What up, doe? and really get her going.

“Our drinks were probably only half that,” he added.

Loshak made it to a wall, then a hallway. But that was also packed with people waiting for their reservation, and between their heads he could see restroom signs. He turned around.

There was the door to the foyer, on the opposite side of this mass. Loshak grabbed Jan’s hand and pulled her through the crowd. A group of young professionals in suits and respectable black pea coats and trenches had just shoved their way in out of the cold. As he and Jan approached, the group turned and tried to push back against the wall to let them pass. One of the women held the door.

Loshak nodded graciously at her.

“What up, doe.”

Behind him, Jan let out a shriek of laughter, then slapped her hand over her mouth. So maybe they were more than a little tipsy. But Chad-Etienne had just kept bringing more drinks. Really skimped on the free bread, though.

They stumbled out onto the sidewalk, leaving behind a foyer full of serious, professional, confused young adults in formal wear.

“Oh, God, it’s freezing out here,” Jan said.

She grabbed her bare arms, white clouds puffing from her lips with every word.

“Here.”

Loshak unhooked Jan’s coat from his arm and put it around her shoulders. The icy cold wind felt nice on his burning face after the stuffiness of the restaurant and somewhere between three and eight scotches, but then he was in a three-piece suit and Jan only had on a slinky black dress.

He tried to come up with something else too young and hip for a fifty-three-year-old FBI agent to say, something about how her dress would look warmer on the floor of his bedroom, but he was a couple drinks past clever.

“We need food,” he blurted out.

Jan gasped and grabbed his arm, her eyes wide.

“Onion rings,” she said.

•  ·          ·

Twenty minutes later, they were sitting in a Denny’s with an appetizer sampler piled high between them.

“Now this is food,” Jan said, dredging an onion ring in chipotle ranch sauce. “Not that pretentious crap Chad was trying to force down our throats.”

“That, I’m pretty sure, was Fancy Feast,” Loshak said.

Jan snorted, hurrying to put a hand over her mouth before she spewed breading and sauce everywhere.

“Seriously,” Loshak said. “I’ve seen those exact servings on commercials. They bring out the dainty little lump of pâté sprinkled with microgreens on a white plate and this smoosh-faced white cat starts chowing down. A Himalayan, I think. Whatever those snoutless cats are. Flat noses. Just two slits under the eyeballs like Voldemort or something.”

There were tears in Jan’s green eyes from trying not to laugh. She swiped at them with the back of her hand and swallowed.

“I think you’re right,” she said. “When I was in the supermarket the other day, I saw Cheddar and Crab Soufflé on one of those cans. And Salmon with Accents of Parsley. Isn’t that what Chad was trying to sell us as tonight’s special?”

Loshak picked up a fried mushroom. “To be honest, I stopped listening after my third drink. I think it was pretty clear from the time Chad mentioned artisan ketchup that he and I weren’t going to get along.”

The breading popped when he bit down, filling his mouth with piping hot mushroom and grease. Two weeks fighting to get that damn reservation. Jan flying all the way to Virginia from Santa Fe. And now here they were in a greasy chain diner.

“Sorry your birthday dinner was crap,” he said.

“You idiot.” Jan grinned and flicked a bit of broken-off of breading across the table at him. “This is the best birthday I’ve had in…”

At first, he thought she’d trailed off because she knew that “drunk the night after Christmas in a twenty-four-hour diner” wasn’t the best time to start talking about your dead daughter and broken marriage. Not when you were trying to rebuild it.

But then he realized her eyes had focused on something behind him. Her lips parted, mouth easing open.

“Vick,” she whispered, pointing.

Dread turned the fried mushrooms in his gut to stone. Loshak twisted around in the booth, following the direction of her finger.

There were TVs mounted around the interior of the Denny’s. A few tuned to sports, the rest to news. The one Jan pointed at showed footage of a ravaged mall food court. Crime scene tape. Police and paramedics. Stretchers and body bags.

The sound was off, but closed captioning scrolled by at the bottom of the screen.

Thirteen confirmed dead so far in a mass shooting at Woodfield Mall in suburban Chicago. The shooter is still at large.

 

 

 

Chapter 2

 

Jaw clenching, heart thundering, he exited the mall and ducked into the dark of the back parking lot. A cold blast of wind battered at him, not quite able to touch the heat now saturating his flesh — some fever of rampage turning him on like a furnace, rolling its swelter off of his body in waves.

The sky spit down snow, tiny and sparse, the little crystals twirling in the air around him. More like ice chips than flakes.

His ears rang. Shrill wails inside muting the world around him. Echoes of gunfire reverberating in his skull.

Somewhere far off, sirens screamed as if they were answering the howling in his head. Closing.

Not soon enough. He’d be long gone by the time they got here.

He stopped at an overflowing trash can and stripped off the glasses and outer layers of his clothing. He jammed them down into the can, just out of sight, the jagged plastic lip of the lid scraping the inside of his wrist like a row of teeth.

Without a coat and sweater, the chill reached right through his t-shirt and smeared itself against his sweaty body. The wet skin thrummed at the cold’s touch. Felt like ice was forming instantly in the hollow of his back and along his pits, but it couldn’t touch the fire inside.

He jogged across the little strip of grass to the adjacent parking lot and unlocked the getaway vehicle. Climbed in.

The hush inside the car moved him. Made him shudder a little.

Shelter. Warmth.

He started the car. Backed out of the parking spot. Fell in with the mob of cars streaming out of the lot. Already indistinguishable from the rest of the crowd.

The memories flashed in his head. Dark dreams. A string of sensory details that made his skin contract.

The popping thunder of the Uzi, rounds pumping in time with his heart. Wild. Concussive.

Blood spilled. Tile shattered. The exploding glass as the panes screening off the tops of the food court dividers came apart and flung their shards everywhere.

All of those people scrambling in cinematic slow motion. The writhing mass of humanity, bodies all crashing into each other like an angry sea.

Some of the shoppers flopped to the ground. Inert. Lifeless. Staring up at nothing like the gutted fish behind the glass case in the meat department. Others escaped mysteriously unscathed.

And the sound of them. A weird moan rose from the crowd as their shock and terror found a voice, a sound that reminded him somehow of a frightened cat — a whole choir of them singing out of key.

Red and blue lights flashed in his rearview, shooting past toward the mall. The first responders. Faster than he’d expected them.

Time to get a move on. He’d take a left at the intersection. Head for the highway. Head for freedom. Just needed to wait his turn in the line of cars exiting the parking lot.

He drummed his hands on the wheel a few times as the cars before him cleared. Almost gone. Almost out of here.

Finally, he was up. The tires juddered over hardened slush as the car ducked down the ramp. And his skin contracted once again. He half expected something to block his path.

Some police barricade.

Some convoy of law enforcement rolling up.

Some chopper deployed to take out the latest mass shooter, shining down a spotlight so bright.

Something. Anything.

Instead he pulled out into the traffic, out into the open. Unobstructed. Unblocked. Anonymous. Another face in the endless, pointless crowd of them.

Nothing. Nothing.

A new wash of adrenaline surged through his limbs and into his fingers and toes. He did it. He got away with it.

A whisper of guilt slithered into his consciousness, asking how he could do this, why he would do this. The bullets. The blood. The loss of life. The magnitude of the tragedy stark and striking against the utter pointlessness of it, the meaninglessness in the random nature of the deaths.

The bullets pierced the crowd without specific intent. Picked some strangers out of the mob. Some lived. Some died. No reason.

And yet it somehow felt more real than anything else in his life. Violence. Bloodshed. Crossing that line from life to death. Those were real. Those made him feel alive.

He could have done more damage. A lot more. The Uzi had jammed, as they were prone to. He’d considered clearing the jam — something that would have taken just a few seconds — but the string of digital beeps from his phone stopped him.

All told, the fuck-up cost him maybe 20 seconds, but he wondered how many lives that would work out to. Licked his lips at the thought.

He turned south, heading out of the suburbs and into the real Chicago. More cops whipped past going the opposite direction, their sirens doing that elongated Doppler Effect scream, moans shortening and then lengthening as they passed.

Locking down the area. Finally. Way too late.

Six minutes from the start of shooting until his departure, that was the plan. Just like a smash and grab burglary.

These days, burglars didn’t give a shit about alarms or dogs. If they knew you weren’t home, they’d just kick in the front door in broad daylight, grab whatever they could in three to five minutes, then hit the road. So long as they got in and out fast enough, the odds of getting caught approached zero.

With his six minutes, though, he left things instead of taking them. Hot nails spit out of his gun. Cold bodies bleeding on the floor. Chaos.

Violence was the primal truth of existence. It sliced right through all the shallow bullshit. Peeled back the skin and laid the meat bare. Cut out all the little stories people told themselves, extracted all the ways they ignored the emptiness all around them. Surgery performed with a chainsaw.

Yes. All the social rules disappeared in the face of savagery. Torn away. Lopped off. The line between life and death suddenly made small and razor-sharp.

All those people at the mall, all their lives? Empty. Positively brimming with nothing. It poured out of them. They talked about nothing. Dreamed about nothing. Stuffed their faces with empty calories. Shopped for junk, the objects themselves inconsequential. What they really shopped for was a feeling to fill up the hollowness inside, meaning to block out their empty lives.

Vapid. Shallow. Meaningless. That was the life of a domesticated ape, stuck in its pen all day until it forgot how to even dream about life outside the fence.

All that fluff magically disappeared when you were staring down the business end of a gun. Real fuckin’ quick.

Nothing was more real than a human body opened up by hot flecks of metal. In those final moments, while your life drained out of the brand new holes in your abdomen, you could see once and for all that the world didn’t work the way you thought it did. Never had. You’d just been too fucking dumb to see the truth all along.

That was the reason war raged somewhere on the globe at all times. Because real power was up for grabs. Truth born of aggression, boldness, ferocity. Forged in conflict. Honed by killing, dominating, destroying. Taking lives.

The fierce ones maimed the tame ones and ate them. Just like in the animal kingdom. The circle of life and all that shit.

He leaned forward, watching out the window as he merged onto I-90. Finding a gap among the headlights streaking past.

Where would his story end? It seemed like most shooters these days killed themselves or waited around so long at the scene that cops ended up doing the job for them. Suicide by cop. Not him. He wouldn’t go out like that. He had so much more to do, so much more left in him.

By now all the cops for miles would have converged on the mall. He could picture them. Barricades in the lot. Lights twirling everywhere. The SWAT team storming in the big front doors like soldiers.

Too late.

 He tore ass down the interstate, headed into the heart of the city. Tons of steel and glass and vulcanized rubber sped alongside him, driven by an army of unsuspecting apes going about their lives of petty delusion.

With all the cops converging on the mall, the herd was unprotected.

He rolled down his window, icy wind whipping his hair at his eyes and burning his cheeks with the cold. He fumbled with the Uzi, cleared the jam, then inserted a full clip. Stepped on the gas until he pulled even with a red Kia.

He peered through the driver’s side window. Wanted to see who drove the little red car. Some woman talking on her phone.

Ready. Aim. Fire.

The Uzi barked. Snorted flame.

Her window shattered, the tempered glass raining down like spray from a waterfall. It sounded strange with the wind howling all around them.

The Kia veered hard right as her dying spasm jerked the wheel.

Metal crunched. Horns honked. Tires squealed.

But he was already pulling up on his next target, a tired-faced guy in a pickup loaded down with ladders and tools. The guy peered over his shoulder at the pileup. Never saw it coming.

Another Uzi bark. Another muzzle flash.

This time he saw the blood. Saw the skull come apart. A jagged shard of bone peeled up from the top, bringing a flap of scalp up with it. Looked like a hairy puzzle piece coming loose.

The killer laid on the gas. Pressed deeper into the throng of traffic. Picking off apes one by one as he went.

 

 

 

Chapter 3

 

Loshak rubbed his eyes as the television flashed through images from the two crime scenes: black and whites and ambulances surrounding the mall, drone shots of the carnage on the interstate, interviews with panicked witnesses. Whatever alcohol he’d had in his system when they walked into the diner felt like it was long gone now. The pleasant little jaunt into a carefree night was over.

He’d moved over to Jan’s side of the booth, and they both sat silently staring at the screen, the greasy basket of fried appetizers and dipping sauces forgotten. Thirteen confirmed dead and eight injured at the mall. Interstate closed after a second shooting, possibly connected. Suspect or suspects at large.

Bits and pieces of the cases with the DC and Georgia shooters echoed in his head. Here they had a mall as the first target, an interstate the second. Could it be two shooters in what was supposed to be a coordinated attack or one trying to take out as many people as possible before the cops shot him down?

For a brief second, he toyed with the possibility that their suspects were teenagers. But no, teenagers didn’t even go to malls anymore. The statistics on mall closings across the nation tried to surface, but he couldn’t remember the specifics, just that the demographics had shifted to favor wealthy, middle-aged women and young suburban parents with children under five. Something about teenagers doing all their hanging out online nowadays. In any case, a kid would target the place where they felt the most hostility and aggression, and nine times out of ten that was going to be school or home.

So, who would attack a mall? Someone with an anti-consumerism manifesto. A disgruntled employee. His mind ran through the encyclopedia of profiling statistics stored in his skull. Some college education probable. Perhaps a pseudo-intellectual type who fancied himself a bit of an anarchist. Some guy who figured the holiday season was the best time to bring his nihilistic philosophy into reality.

If that was the case, then the interstate would symbolize something, too. Travel, interconnectedness, the way you could be surrounded by other commuters for hours in traffic but completely alone, everyone stuck in their own little world of steel and glass. Someone lonely, who couldn’t connect even when they were surrounded by people. Maybe he’d thought the holiday would connect him to someone, and when it didn’t, this was his response.

Loshak took a breath to say something and turned to Jan, but when he saw her face, the words died in his mouth. She stared straight ahead at the television, her lips pressed together as if she were biting them closed. Her head angled down a touch, with her chin toward her chest, and she was breathing in shallow little breaths.

Shit.

Grab her hand or stay back? He wasn’t sure which would make the situation worse. He settled on covering her hand with his, giving it a small squeeze.

“They won’t need me,” he said. “Guys like this get taken down in a matter of minutes. Hours at the most.”

Unless they were like the Georgia shooters and managed to evade the police for days, slaughtering their way across the city.

“It’s fine,” Jan said.

She didn’t look at him.

“Most of these are open and shut. They’re trying to get caught. Nobody’s going to—”

“Really. It’s fine.” She forced a smile and finally met his eyes. “So. Who are they looking for?”

Loshak let out a huff of a laugh.

“Right now, my money’s on late twenties to early thirties current or former mall employees.”

“Not a postal worker?” Jan asked.

“What is this, the nineties?”

That made her laugh again, and this time it was sincere. A little of the tension bled from Loshak’s shoulders.

Then his pager went off. For a split-second, he wished he’d left the damn thing at the house. He fished it out and checked the burner number Spinks had sent him.

Beside him, Jan raised an eyebrow.

“Speaking of the nineties,” she said. “Since when did you go back to carrying a pager?”

Loshak shook his head. “You know how Spinks is. I’m going to go outside and call him. See what he wants. I’ll be right back.”

Instead of going outside, though, Loshak hunted down their waitress and asked if he could use the diner’s landline. Usually, when Spinks paged him, he was supposed to get an unused burner phone, call Spinks’ burner, then immediately destroy his burner afterward. The reporter had really gone down the rabbit hole on this conspiracy ever since Kansas City, insisting on all sorts of outlandish security measures. Only recently had his paranoia been proven right when an ASAC in D.C. had confronted Loshak about his and Spinks’ investigation.

 “We’re not supposed to let customers use the phone,” the waitress said. “But there’s a payphone at the bodega next door. Probably the last one on Earth. When people ask to use our phone, I’m supposed to say to go over there.”

“Thanks.”

Loshak stopped with his hand on the door and glanced back at Jan. She was still watching the screen, the channel rolling through the same five or six clips of law enforcement personnel, the front of the mall, smashed cars on an interstate, and yellow tape cordons over and over again. Fried foods congealed on the table in front of her, and her date was about to walk out of the restaurant. It didn’t matter that he would be right back. This was still a shitty way for her to have to spend her birthday.

He pushed the door open and headed out into the cold.

•  ·          ·

Like most bodegas, the place across the street was crammed ceiling to floor with junk food, alcohol, prepaid phones, chargers, pet food, and other convenience items. The payphone the waitress had promised was out of order, so Loshak bought one of the burner phones and brought it back to the foyer of the Denny’s. At least Jan wouldn’t think he’d abandoned her completely if she tried to look for him.

Spinks answered on the first ring.

“Have you seen anything about the active shooter situation in Chicago?” He was talking in that breathy voice he got whenever he was excited. Halfway between a guy who just finished sprinting and a kid about to open Christmas presents.

“We were just watching the report,” Loshak said.

“We who?”

“Jan and me. Did you want something?”

“Don’t think for a second that we’re not going to talk about that when we’ve got the time, partner. For now, though, hold onto your butt.” Spinks did one of his dramatic pauses. “I think we may have a connection to our Kansas City case.”

Loshak blinked. “How?”

“Well, the police are still IDing victims at the scenes, and they probably won’t be releasing names for hours yet, but I’ve got some friends in the press there, and they’ve got pretty solid connections with the Chicago PD. Totally off the record, a couple names have already come out.”

Loshak frowned but didn’t say anything. This was the kind of leak that let the press get ahold of names of victims before the next of kin did. It almost always resulted in a devastated family member finding out second-hand either via the news or a pushy reporter rather than from the local police — sometimes they even found out from social media. How’s that for a trending topic? Your loved one is dead. #thoughtsandprayers

“I can hear your disapproval,” Spinks said. “Just listen to this. One of the names is George Whitley.”

Against his will, Loshak’s ears perked up. So far, their under-the-table investigator had linked a list of twelve names to the human trafficking conspiracy in Kansas City, and George Whitley was one of them.

Before he could ask, Spinks went on.

“We don’t know if it’s our George Whitley yet,” the reporter said. “He’s still trying to make the connection, but…”

“But if it is our guy, what do you think it means?” Loshak asked.

“I don’t know!” Spinks sounded like he was on the verge of exploding with exhilaration. “What if this means the whole shooting, this whole elaborate killing spree, was really about taking one guy out? Kill a bunch of folks, make it look random. Whoops, one less loose end.”

In a way, it wasn’t as far-fetched as it sounded. A lot of the deaths in Kansas City had been made to look like suicides, some of them practically in front of witnesses. Hell, Spinks had been in an adjacent room when one of their leads had been taken out.

But as he thought through it, Loshak shook his head.

“It’s too elaborate, putting on a mass shooting to cover up murdering one guy. It would contradict everything they did in Kansas City. They didn’t care who knew; they were taking out people left and right, not trying to hide anything. Why go to all this trouble and make national news when you could stage a suicide that’ll get buried in the middle pages of the local paper?”

“OK, well, yeah,” Spinks said, and Loshak could picture the reporter nodding along as he spoke. “You could be right. It definitely sounds crazy. But then, so would everything about Kansas City if I hadn’t been right smack in the middle of it. I still think you should offer to help out, see if they need a profiler.”

Loshak opened his mouth to protest, but Spinks went on before he could get a word out.

“Connected or not, this’ll give us a chance to dig up some dirt on George Whitley without having to sneak around about it,” the reporter said. “Maybe we’ll find a link, or maybe we’ll find out that this isn’t our George Whitley. Even that would be something. What do you say, partner?”

Through the glass of the foyer, Loshak caught sight of Jan looking over her shoulder at him. When their eyes met, she smiled and gave a little wave, then turned back around in her seat. Suddenly, all the cheap fried mushrooms and high-dollar scotch felt like they’d coagulated in his stomach.

“It’s Jan’s birthday,” he said, then stopped. He wanted to explain to Spinks how this had always been a thing when they were married, making a big deal out of the celebration since everyone else just lumped her in with the Christmas festivities, how he was really trying to make this work, and how there was no way it would if he was just one more person pushing her to the side on her birthday, but what came out instead was, “I’ll make some calls tomorrow and see what I can do, but I can’t work tonight.”

“Yeah, no, don’t even think about it tonight,” Spinks said, overcompensating on the reassuring tone. “If you’d just told me, I would’ve said that from the get-go. Loved ones have to take precedence. One hundred percent agree. Tomorrow’s plenty of time. You two crazy kids go have your fun. And tell Jan I said happy birthday.”

“All right. I’ll call you tomorrow and let you know what we’re doing.”

Loshak didn’t have any tools on hand to smash the burner phone, but after he hung up, he took the phone apart, pulled the card out, and snapped it in half. He leaned out the door and chucked one half into the trash can on the sidewalk, then stuck the other half in his pocket for disposal later. Spinks would probably say it wasn’t enough, but that would have to do for now.

Jan was sipping a coffee when he got back. Steam curled up from the cup, disappearing into the red glass light fixture overhead. She set it on the table and wrapped her fingers around it as if to warm them.

Loshak slid into his own side of the booth, staring at her hands. For most people, heat was associated with comfort and security.

“You’re analyzing my body language.” Jan was one of the few people who could always tell he was doing it, even when he was being discreet. And she hated it.

“No, just thinking you look cold.”

He grabbed his coat off the seat and got up, slipping it around her shoulders. She let him.

When he sat back down, she guessed, “You have to go.”

Loshak put his hands around hers, molding them to the cup, hoping it would help hold some of the heat in.

“Not tonight.”

 

 

 

Chapter 4

 

On the flight to Chicago, Loshak ended up with the last seat in the very back, beside the engine. Usually the endless drone was enough to put him to sleep, even at ten in the morning, but Spinks had managed to book himself on the same last-minute connection. The woman who’d been next to Loshak when he first boarded was all too happy to trade Spinks for an aisle seat a few rows up. The reporter was now flipping through the file on the shooting case and giving a play-by-play commentary as he went.

“An Uzi,” Spinks muttered. “That’s mighty ’80s of our guy. Somebody’s been watching too much Scarface. Or Terminator.” The reporter paused a second and thought about it. “The Basketball Diaries? Or was that the ’90s?”

Loshak looked up from the file on Whitley that Spinks had brought with him.

“An Uzi’s smaller,” he said. “Easier to conceal than a rifle.”

“You think he went for the pragmatic choice over the cinematic?”

“Maybe. We don’t have a lot of information to go on yet.”

Spinks grinned and rolled his eyes. “And the great special agent doesn’t want to jump to any conclusions without the evidence to back it up. I get it.”

Loshak stared down at the file the reporter was holding open. The truth was Loshak didn’t have much of a feel for the shooter yet. The case was so fresh that they still only had scraps of information. The file the Chicago field office had sent over was hardly more than bloody crime scene photos and names of the seventeen confirmed dead and thirty-one wounded, a few grainy screenshots of the shooting from an outdated mall security camera, and a preliminary report that stated the caliber of the slugs used in the food court matched the caliber of the ones on the interstate. Odds were good they’d been fired from the same gun, but that hadn’t been confirmed yet.

Looking at the stills from the security footage, though, he had to admit the images were strikingly movie-like. A ski-masked figure standing and firing into the mob. The hazy footage was too indistinct to help identify the guy, but it still grabbed something in Loshak’s gut. Most cases he worked didn’t come complete with in-progress snapshots of the murders.

He turned back to the Whitley file Spinks and their investigator had put together. Their initial investigation into a string of murders in Kansas City had revealed that one of the victims — Neil Griffin — was himself a serial killer. A member of at least a dozen community groups and charities, Griffin also dabbled in murder and human trafficking, burying the bodies in the crawlspace of his house. A forensic audit of Griffin’s financial records had turned up a series of mysterious donations coming from a shell corporation, five in total,  and each in denominations of ten thousand dollars. Tracing those donations had led them to George Whitley.

They had considerably more information on Whitley than they did on the shooter. Forty-four, unmarried, executive for a major banking firm. Loshak’s brows went up as he read. Apparently, Chicago was the third most competitive financial center in the country — and seventh in the whole world. They even had their own stock exchange. That seemed to be Whitley’s main reason for moving to the city.

After graduating from Cornell, Whitley had made the rounds working stints at half a dozen other major financial players in the Chicago area. Interesting choice considering Whitley had made a fortune during the financial crisis of 2008, essentially betting against the banks and winning.

In his free time, Whitley was a major art collector. Their investigator had turned up receipt after receipt from prestigious auction houses like Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Bonham’s. The only artist names Loshak recognized were Picasso and Peter Bruegel the Elder, but the other artists must have been a big deal to draw the amount of money Whitley had laid down on their works.

Whitley was also part of an Ultimate Frisbee league which the investigator had noted as “strangely serious.” Loshak could’ve told their investigator that it came with the territory. From what he’d observed lately, Ivy League grads going into the financial sector were pretty much required to be way too into the game.

No family or close acquaintances besides work and Ultimate Frisbee. Whitley had never married, and as far as the investigator could find, there was no evidence of a serious relationship in the last five years. Both parents had already passed. He had a brother living in Chicago, but the investigator indicated that they weren’t close.

“Hmm.”

Spinks looked up from the preliminary ballistics report. “What?”

“I was just looking at the info on Whitley’s penthouse,” Loshak said. “Fourteen thousand square feet, and nobody but himself to use it. Not even a goldfish.”

“Hell of a bachelor pad, huh?” Spinks flipped the shooting file shut and used it to point at Loshak. “You’ve got to admit that’s a little suspicious. What was one guy doing with all that space?”

Loshak shook his head.

“Not that suspicious. Sometimes in a major metropolitan area like that, space becomes a status symbol.”

“It also doesn’t hurt if you need privacy to hide your sex trafficking victims.”

Given Spinks’ theatrical tone, Loshak decided to ignore that comment for the time being.

“What is suspicious, though, is the fact that he didn’t have a housekeeper or a maid.” Loshak thumbed through a few pages of financials and notes from their investigator. “It doesn’t fit with the status symbol hypothesis. Whitley grew up in an upper-class household. He would’ve been used to house staff doing stuff for him. Even if it was an undocumented worker or under the table, our investigator would’ve seen them coming and going.”

Spinks slapped Loshak on the arm with the shooting file. “Unless they weren’t allowed to come and go.”

That still sounded far-fetched to Loshak. But he did want to get a look inside that penthouse. See if they could find anything concrete to tie this George Whitley to Kansas City.

“While we’re there, we should get in touch with the brother,” he said. “See what shakes loose.”