Remote, p.2
Remote, page 2
Nikki finished off the bottle of water, then walked around Jack to face him. “Yeah, I get that. Somebody manages to channel the biggest fucking tragedy in their lives into their art, uses their pain to make something beautiful—that’s a win, right? That’s the kind of thing the six o’clock news runs as an example of what human beings are capable of.” She eyed the same sculpture Jack had been studying. “But we know better. We know that was the plan the whole time. The whole process—shock, grief, creation—was just them running a maze set up by a psycho.”
“They used their art to transcend the worst thing that will every happen to them,” Jack said. “They deserve to know the truth. But how am I supposed to tell them that? How can I, when the truth might destroy their accomplishment, might even destroy them?”
“I don’t know, Jack.” Nikki shook her head. “Questions were always your specialty, remember?”
CHAPTER TWO
Homicide Detective Terrance Laramie studied the woman sitting across from him in the interview room. Thirty years old, attractive, married with two kids. Working professional with no criminal record. Didn’t seem crazy, just a little stunned; he supposed he would be, too, if he’d just killed a guy while working on his teeth.
“So, Ms. Klein,” he said, his voice gentle. “Let’s go over this from the beginning, all right?”
“All right.” Her own voice was subdued, a little shaky. Scared, but there was something else, there, too. Relief?
“Mr. Hampton came in for his appointment. You’d seen him before, right?”
“Yes. He’d had a few other procedures done. The last time I saw him was to make some final measurements for the diamond I was insetting.”
“Ah, yes. The diamond. Pretty big rock, huh?”
“It was . . . sizeable, yes.”
“That present any problems?”
“Not really. The enamel surface was large and uniform. I had to grind an indentation to properly seat it, but I didn’t get anywhere near the nerve.”
“Take me through it, step-by-step.”
Her breathing had evened out and her voice had lost its quiver; she was on firmer ground now, discussing the technical details of her livelihood. “I administered a shot of xylocaine to his upper gums to numb them. Once it had taken effect, I used a dental handpiece with a tungsten carbide burr to grind out the setting.”
“Sounds painful.”
She frowned. “No, he didn’t feel anything at all. As I said, the area was completely anesthetized.”
“Okay. And then?”
“I isolated the tooth with cotton, then applied an etching agent of 37% phosphoric acid. I blotted that up after ten seconds—“
“Only ten seconds? Strong stuff. Must burn like hell if you get it on someone.”
“Not really. It’s quite weak for an acid—it’s actually used in Coca Cola. It might cause some mild irritation if applied directly to the skin, but that’s all.”
“Okay. Go on.”
“I rinsed and dried the surface, then repeated the procedure. I applied a thin layer of sealant, then exposed that to a curing light for around twenty seconds. I added sealant to the base of the diamond, used a wax-tipped rod to place it in the setting, then light-cured it again. I added more sealant to even out the edges, cured them, then added several more layers for strength, curing between each one. One final rinse and I was done.”
“Aren’t things like rinsing usually done by an assistant?”
She hesitated. “I’m . . . between assistants. I had to let the last one go, rather abruptly.”
“Oh? Why is that?”
“Just a personality clash. I didn’t get along with him.”
“Your assistant is the one that would usually administer the gas, right?”
A much longer pause. “Yes. That’s right.”
“But not today. Today you did it yourself.”
She swallowed. “Yes.”
“How long was it before you noticed Mr. Hampton was no longer breathing?”
“I’m . . . I’m not sure.”
“I’m assuming it was after you’d finished the procedure.” He smiled. “I mean, you’re not going to keep on going once you’ve noticed he’s dead, right?”
“No. Of course not.”
“And what did you do then?”
“I turned off the gas.”
“The oxygen, too?”
“Yes. Both are flammable.”
“Sure, that makes sense.” He paused. “It’s this next part I’m having a little trouble with.”
“I needed some time to think.”
“Uh-huh. So you went outside, got into your car and drove to Santa Monica. You went straight to Marina del Rey, where you rented a small boat and took it out around fifteen miles into the North Pacific. You weren’t there for very long, and came right back—all the way back to your clinic, in fact. Where your staff had already discovered the body and the police were waiting, as you must have known they would be.”
“I—yes.”
Laramie shook his head. “Why’d you come back? Don’t get me wrong, you would have gotten caught anyway—the boat had a GPS transponder—but you might have made it to Mexico.”
“I wasn’t running away. I just needed some time to think, to clear my head. That’s all.”
“Uh-huh. You know, I find it hard to believe that a professional such as yourself could perform an entire procedure on a patient and never once notice that he’d stopped breathing. I mean, nitrous oxide isn’t even supposed to produce unconsciousness, is it?”
“No. It’s not a general anesthetic, it’s just there to relax the patient. We mix it with oxygen to prevent--” She broke off.
“Accidents. Yeah. But accidents happen, right? Like a dentist turning on one tank and not the other. Like a famous wife-beater asphyxiating to death in the chair of his female dentist while she’s gluing his late wife’s engagement ring to his grin. Right?”
“I had no reason to wish Mr. Hampton any harm,” she said softly. “I have a family, a career. Why would I throw all that away? I never knew Mrs. Hampton. What happened to her was horrible, but a jury found her husband innocent. I’m no . . . I have no right to judge. It was just a mistake, a stupid mistake.”
“Yeah, it was.” He shook his head. “I just wish I was sure which mistake you actually made . . .”
***
The Patron wasn’t the only killer Jack had caught. But the last five had been different; Road Rage, the Gourmet, Djinn-X, Deathkiss and the Patron himself had all belonged to an online community of serial killers that called themselves the Pack. Jack had killed the webmaster, Djinn-X, and took over his dedicated site, the Stalking Ground. Posing as Djinn-X himself, he’d used the site to lure and trap its members, one by one.
They were all dead now, but Jack hadn’t taken the site down yet. Nobody but a member of the Pack could access it—but Djinn-X had set up a series of other sites linked to it, designed to attract potential recruits while weeding out wannabes. The final test, simple but foolproof, was guaranteed to eliminate the possibility of infiltration by anyone not willing to murder a stranger: Djinn-X would visit the city of a possible recruit, obtain the fingerprints and business card of a hooker, then send the recruit after her. If Djinn-X received a severed hand matching the prints at a mail-drop within a few days, the Pack would have a new member. If not, they would change all their security protocols and the recruit would never hear from them again.
The Stalking Ground itself sat within the computer tower beside Jack’s desk. It held no secrets for him; Djinn-X had given him the access codes to each and every encrypted file, and Jack had read them all. The sheer amount of evil contained within them was staggering; from graphic descriptions of murder and dismemberment to a list of body dump sites swapped between members like trading cards, from long rants against their victims to cold, calculated methods of hunting and killing prey, the Stalking Ground probably held more insight into the minds of human predators than anything else in existence. Jack planned to donate the entire thing to a criminal psychology institute when he was done with it.
But not just yet.
He sat down and turned the thing on, the first time he’d done so in a week. When it had run through its start-up protocols and connected itself to the web, it told Jack there was a message waiting for him.
The heading sent a cold shock through Jack.
I KNOW WHO YOU ARE.
He opened it, hoping it was a bluff.
It wasn’t.
No, I don’t know your real name, nor do I care. What I do know is that you are not Djinn-X, the original webmaster of this site. I believe that he is dead, as are more than one of his acolytes.
You’re the Closer. You’re the one that killed them.
Please believe me when I say I hold you in the highest regard in respect to this fact. I am not here seeking vengeance, nor do I have any interest in reporting your actions to the police. This is, I suppose, a fan letter, though one I hope you consider to be from a peer as opposed to simply an admirer.
Let’s get the hero-worship aspect out of the way first, shall we? Deducing the presence of an online community of serial killers took a great deal of intelligence, but devising a way to isolate and kill them was true genius. Though I came to the same conclusion about the probable existence of a site such as this, it took months of exhaustive searching to find it. Even then, just as I was preparing to try to infiltrate it, it abruptly became inaccessible.
By that point, I knew what had happened, of course. You had gotten to them first.
I bear no grudge for this. In fact, the reason I was searching for this site in the first place was, I admit, simply to impress you. I thought I could offer it to you as an audition of sorts, a means of proving myself. The fact that you got here first means I have much to learn.
But still, it does solve one problem handily, that of finding a means to communicate with you directly. As you might have gleaned, I’ve been following your career avidly for some time—but short of pinning a note to the back of a psychopath, I wasn’t really sure how to contact you. Now we have a safe venue to converse.
In case it’s not already clear, I both understand and agree with what you do. You rid the world of infections, of diseases that walk on two legs. You take tremendous personal risks to make the world a safer, better place, with the full knowledge that the only acknowledgment you are ever likely to receive is to die in prison or by the hand of a monster. The dedication and nobility you show is amazing; I salute you, sir.
And I want to help.
The message was unsigned, but it had been sent from the e-dress remote@cerebral.org. Jack stared at it for a long time before he put his hands on the keyboard and composed a reply.
Remote: I don’t know you and you don’t know me. Anybody can be anyone online: killer, cop, or conman, there’s no way to tell. Nothing you’ve said suggests anything more than a series of guesses connected by circumstantial evidence. Maybe you’re who you say you are, maybe not. The same goes for me. Either way, you’re going to have to do better if you want this conversation to go anywhere.
He hesitated before sending it off. Remote’s email sounded exactly like the kind of thing a cop would use in a sting operation, and there was more than enough evidence on the Stalking Ground itself to put Jack behind bars. The website was supposedly untraceable, but Jack wasn’t the one who’d set it up, and he couldn’t exactly ask the one who had.
He hit send, anyway. Thinking back on it later, he really wasn’t sure why he had—but he kept remembering something Djinn-X had said while Jack was interrogating him.
Everybody needs their tribe, man. I knew mine was out there—all I had to do was find them.
Had somebody else just found Jack?
***
The reply came back sooner than he’d expected, no more than twenty minutes later. Jack activated the site’s chat function so they could send instant messages back and forth.
You’re right to be suspicious. After all, you must have deceived the genuine members of this site, so I could certainly be trying to deceive you. I take no offense.
Now, as to the matter of authenticity: I surmise the members of this site all had to do something to prove their bona fides, and it’s not hard to guess what that something must have been. Our problem is thornier, because we do not kill indiscriminately.
Yes, I said “we”. I am not without my own successes.
However, I think you’ll find that we have very different approaches. While your methods have become the fodder of tabloid speculation, mine are subtler; in fact, what I do is virtually invisible. I take no credit for my results—not publicly—but they are indisputable, nonetheless.
I induce others to kill for me, from a distance. Mind control is a much more efficient tool than torture, don’t you think?
Jack let out a deep breath he hadn’t even been aware he’d been holding in. “Just another crazy,” he muttered to himself. He felt almost—what?
Disappointed?
I suppose it would be. How exactly do you accomplish this?
Jack resisted the urge to tack on a list of possible methods—telepathy? Hypnosis ray? Implanted behavior chips in the brain?—because he wanted to gauge just how crazy his admirer was. The response surprised him.
I don’t want to give away all my secrets at once. But, as you said, on the Internet one can claim virtually anything—so I’ll give you what you want. Hard evidence.
There’s a lawyer in the San Francisco Bay area named Vaughn Rycroft. He’s well-known, if not well-respected; one of his clients is a gang called the Black Triangle. They specialize in human trafficking, bringing young women from Eastern Bloc countries to the US and making them pay the freight by working as prostitutes in their new home. Mr. Rycroft is fully aware of these activities.
In three days he will kill the leader of the Black Triangle and several of his top lieutenants, though there will be no evidence to prove this. Then we’ll talk again . . .
CHAPTER THREE
From the Oregonian, November 21, front page:
PORTLAND—a prominent local lawyer narrowly escaped death in a hail of gunfire yesterday afternoon, as several members of the Black Triangle gang were targeted for execution on the top level of a parking garage.
“I heard the gunshots.” Trent Walters, the attendant for the garage where the shooting took place, was on duty at the time. “Nobody came out the front, not in a car, but they could have took off through the stairwell. There’s a security camera in there, but it’s busted.”
Three men are dead: Vasily Cherchenko, Andor Pohznoi, and Leonid Krasnov. Cherchenko was the purported head of the Black Triangle, while Pohznoi and Krasnov were two of his upper-echelon soldiers.
Vaughn Rycroft, the only survivor of the attack, is resting in the hospital under police guard. He was apparently meeting with members of the gang in his capacity as their legal representative. His injuries, while serious, are reported to not be life-threatening. Police won’t say if they have any suspects yet, but the detective in charge of the case, Sgt. Lawrence St. Collins, did admit the members of the gang “didn’t have any shortage of enemies.” The investigation is ongoing.
Jack read the article again, start to finish. “What the hell?” he muttered.
Nikki, sitting across from Jack at the breakfast table, sighed. “Yeah. I thought he was full of crap, too.” She blew on her mug of coffee. “I mean, that mind control stuff is obviously bullshit, but he showed some balls taking on the Black Triangle like that.”
Jack shook his head and tossed the paper onto the table. He looked out the window at the gray Vancouver sky, clouds threatening rain later in the day. “That’s not what he said he was going to do. He claimed Rycroft was going to be the triggerman, but there wouldn’t be any evidence to prove it afterward. What I just read doesn’t contradict that.”
“Doesn’t prove it, either. I mean, Rycroft would have had to shoot himself, then gotten rid of the gun afterward.”
“Or the story is a plant. In which case the police and the press are involved and this is an elaborate sting.”
“So the cops have found the Stalking Ground? Could be.” Nikki took a long sip of coffee, considering it. “Doesn’t make sense, though. If they were going after the Closer, they wouldn’t bait the hook with some kind of psychic bullshit--they’d just pose as another serial, maybe offer some forensic photos as street cred. What this Remote guy is saying—“ She shook her head. “Know what? It doesn’t matter.”
“What do you mean?”
“If he’s a fake, we stay the hell away from him. If he’s for real—” She shrugged and stood up. “Then more power to him. Mind control or machine gun, I don’t really care--those Black Triangle guys were major assholes. Whether Remote actually got their own scumbag lawyer to off three of them or whether he did it himself, good for him. Either way, he’s not someone we need to get close to.”
Nikki headed off to have a shower. Jack stayed at the kitchen table, thinking.
***
Remote: I take it you’ve seen the results of my work?
Jack: I have. How did you do it?
Remote: All in good time. Do you believe me now?
Jack: I’m not convinced. A single event could have another explanation—inside information, for instance. You could have shot those gang members yourself.
Remote: But I didn’t. Vaughn Rycroft did. He did so because I told him to—and he wasn’t the first.
Jack lifted his hands from the keyboard and crossed his arms. “Have you, now?” he said softly. He thought he knew what was coming. He’d done a little research on schizophrenia, and what Remote was claiming was actually fairly common—the delusion that events far away were being influenced by a person’s thoughts. People who suffered from the condition often cited news articles as evidence, as if the fact that an event occurred proved they had caused it.
