Flash Point Page 4

  It’s a performance. Acts of terror are performances designed to play to an audience.

  ‘Practical reasons?’ Dodd suggested. ‘Knives are attained more easily, so younger assailants had access, maybe.’

  ‘These people weren’t all killed with hunting knives or kitchen knives,’ Saleda said, glancing reflexively toward one of the dismembered bodies. ‘Many are using big, unusual weapons. Machetes, big game knives.’

  ‘Not all, though,’ Teva said, ‘Wounds vary in type and degree of damage from victim to victim. Only consistency is blades, it seems.’

  And if the masterminds chose blades, then what was the reason? Came back to what their performance was intended to achieve. The message of the show.

  Tell the cops they should treat all trivial things in life very seriously, Ashlee had quoted the killer’s message.

  ‘Tell them it’s important to be earnest,’ Jenna said under her breath. ‘Quoted from Oscar Wilde’s play. If the group left us a note to let us know they’d strike again, why leave someone behind to give us this message, too. Has to be part of the performance. I’m just not sure what it means yet.’

  ‘So, The Importance of Being Earnest,’ Saleda said. ‘Any other thoughts based on what we’re seeing here?’

  ‘God, I don’t even know,’ Teva said. ‘It’s been a long time since it was required reading in high school.’

  ‘Hmph,’ Jenna said. ‘Ages for me, too.’

  ‘Seeing as how I could have fathered you all … heck, grandfathered half of you … I don’t think I need to tell you how long it’s been since I was in school,’ Dodd said.

  ‘OK, back to the scene for now, but be thinking about the literature references and who you might know who could help us other than your high school English teachers, since obviously they didn’t do much for any of you,’ Saleda said.

  The color of store-bought vanilla ice cream flashed in. Jenna shook it away for the moment, knowing it was related more to Saleda’s quip than the crime scene even if she hadn’t let it linger long enough to define it.

  ‘The literature, the note promising another attack. That rules out revenge attack, like in Oklahoma City. There, McVeigh’s crime was his statement. No warnings. The messages here are a more common terror MO: fear. They want something,’ Jenna said.

  ‘And usually when they want something, the fear they want to cause is tied to it. Hence the target is tied to it. Extreme pro-lifer bombs abortion clinic. Wants to stop abortion,’ Dodd said. ‘Even if you’re at the clinic for condoms or a cancer screening, you’re going down with the docs performing the abortions.’

  ‘Along with any fetuses still in-utero inside the building at the time.’ Teva frowned. ‘Killed like the people they wanted to punish for harming them. Doesn’t make sense, though, because it’s not like this is a pro-choice bank, operates inside a rainbow building, or has fur rugs and only hunters for employees.’

  ‘You’re right, Rookie. But you’re thinking only about the want something part. Stop thinking about who they want dead, and think about the other half of the equation. Who do they want to fear them? Not the dead …’ Dodd said.

  ‘People who are alive to see the results,’ Teva replied, nodding.

  Sure. And after an abortion clinic bombing, that meant something. Scare the types of people who made abortions available at those clinics. But this wasn’t a medical clinic or even some giant corporation raking it in on Wall Street.

  But to the killers, it symbolizes something.

  Jenna took another long look from one side of the room to the other, the crime scene in her vision like something she only wished were part of an action movie set.

  Her gaze settled on the body of a young, white male splayed face first on the shiny wood floor. She wandered toward him, squatted beside his still frame. He was exactly where he’d fallen, according to the M.E. The first responders had left the initial scene completely intact for the FBI.

  Jenna’s gaze drifted from the back of his closely-cropped hair the same color as the darkest roast coffee she had in her cabinet at home to his neck, torso. He’d fallen face first into a decent-sized puddle of his own blood, and yet, the puddle he was in was closer to his stomach. The stab wound to the side of his neck – his carotid artery – wouldn’t have produced that much blood and definitely didn’t make sense with where the pool was in relation to where he’d fallen.

  She crouched so her head was as close to level with the floor as she could get it, squinted at what she could see of the man’s shoulders, chest. Soaked red down his front. She sat back, glanced at the wound to the side of his neck that most likely had finished him despite the plethora of contenders for the honor. A bit of spatter from that stab on his right shoulder, but just residue. What she’d expect.

  Bending again, Jenna squinted to see his blood-soaked front. No way a jab to the carotid had soaked the collar and all visible portions of the guy’s white button down. She turned her head toward where the victim’s nose had cracked against the polished wood, leaned even closer. Sure enough, a deep slice stretched from under his chin across to at least his Adam’s apple. Still forcing herself to tune out her colleagues’ conjecture behind her, Jenna hopped to her feet and circled to the victim’s other side, though she had a feeling she’d see that his foe had carried that knife swipe cleanly across his trachea, left to right.

  Throat slit and his carotid. Guy had a really, really bad day.

  Jenna blinked, sat back on her feet. The sounds in her ears buzzed as a shade of ochre flashed in. The same shade she’d seen when her dad had confronted her at age twenty about how she resisted any and all dating. She’d sat on the couch, afraid to tell him the reason she’d never wanted to go to prom or to the movies with a boy in high school, never brought a guy home to meet the family in college was because she was terrified of making the wrong choice. Of picking a mate who ended up being a psychopath. She didn’t want to tell her dad that life with Claudia had caused her not to ever want relationships of her own because she was scared she’d make the same mistake he had.

  The two scenarios that caused the ochre couldn’t have been more different, but the jab to the victim’s carotid that killed him and her father’s relationship with a psychopath diminishing her urge to date had one thing in common that she associated the color with: Cause and effect.

  She cocked her head, staring at the neck of the victim from this side. The carotid jab made no sense.

  The killer had not gotten bored and decided to end it quickly. The victim would have suffocated from the cut trachea shortly anyway. It wasn’t because he’d met a particularly vicious killer who wanted to stab him three times instead of two.

  It would seem a different killer with a different style had come by and ended it a lot quicker. Different blades, styles. Lots of bloodshed … different people from all walks of life …

  Jenna jumped up, surged back toward the team. ‘Using blades had to be deliberate. But they clearly all had different blades, some of which had to be hard to obtain, so it wasn’t a convenience choice. Maybe the leadership chose blades because people hear about bombings and shootings on the news every single day now,’ Jenna said.

  Porter tilted his head, considering. ‘Blades are definitely unusual in a mass killing.’

  ‘And, in a way, scarier to imagine. You’re right. Explosions. Gunfire. They’re on TV every day,’ Teva added.

  ‘On cable,’ Saleda said, reaching to her back pocket to grab her phone. She glanced at its face. ‘Got to take this.’

  She stepped away, and Jenna glanced back toward the white-collared victim. ‘And usually, they’re visible, important targets. The World Trade Center collapsing is imagery burned into America’s collective psyche, but the mental picture of people dismembered while still alive in a bank is statement-making scary, too. The goal is to get people to listen. We need to know what they want us to hear. We need to know their cause. We profile every single individual, every single victim, we try to profile their
leadership, like always. But I think what might tell us most about the statement they’re making is that damned Oscar Wilde quote.’

  ‘Yes, but we already went through this, Doc. We’ll all old, amnesiacs, or stoners,’ Dodd said.

  ‘Well, we need someone who isn’t. Linguistics expert at Quantico?’ Porter said.

  ‘Not going to work. We need linguistics, but we also need literature,’ Jenna replied.

  Teva chuckled. ‘I left all my college professors in my other pants pockets today.’

  Jenna closed her eyes, hung her head as her teammates threw out names of contacts, suggestions that might work. She rubbed her temple slowly. Not this.

  They had plenty of ideas, but none were as good as hers. And she wasn’t going to be able to ignore it even if she would rather hack off her own foot with her car key than call her. Riddles, word games. Mind games. Between Isaac Keaton and Claudia, surely she’d met her lifetime quota for this particular brand of bullshit.

  ‘I know someone,’ she said, soft but sure. ‘It’ll take me a day or so to track her down, even with Irv to help, but I’ll get him on it. She’s who we need. I’m sure.’

  The rest of her teammates stared at her, faces blank. Geez.

  She raised her eyebrows, nodded to them as if to prod any of them into saying something. Anything.

  ‘Right. So, Jenna’s on the lit angle then, so we should …’

  Porter had tried valiantly, but his trailing voice said it all. They didn’t know how to move forward with this efficiently because it wasn’t as easy as profiling the killer and moving from there. They’d try to go about usual routine, examining bodies, attempting to profile killers. That was, if they had any chance of matching up bodies to killers when, so far, all they had was the goriest room she’d ever seen and the knowledge that their terrorists all had knives, the desire to scare people, and memory retention from high school English.

  Goriness to make a statement. A statement to people who lived.

  Again, attention-seeking redwood flashed in.

  The other thing they knew: the killers must have an allergy to media, because any terror group hell-bent on achieving statement-making scary like this bank job had to want the public to hear about what they’d done. This hit was designed to have psychological ramifications on people who didn’t die inside these walls that morning. You can’t scare people if no one knows about it.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Jenna muttered.

  ‘The blood, the literature, the note, the live witness, the body parts, or something else?’ Porter asked.

  ‘Well, all those, too, but the media. Terrorists exploit the media. Manipulate it. Lure it to their little ‘projects’ like setting the dogs out for fresh game. But not a peep from the press,’ Jenna said.

  ‘That just changed,’ Saleda said, returning from where she’d been talking in hushed tones on her cell phone. ‘That was the press liaison’s office at Quantico. They just patched a call from a CNC investigative journalist all the way through to Kate Balthazar herself.’

  ‘Must be big,’ Porter remarked, eyes wide in genuine surprise.

  The curiosity mixed with shock in his voice was universal amongst the group. For a call to be sent from the gatekeepers through to the press liaison’s office itself meant it had teeth, but to make it to the director …

  Saleda’s jaw set in a firm line. ‘Big. Bad. Maybe unprecedented on our soil?’ She started walking toward the door, and her voice had been so grave, the rest followed without question, though she didn’t keep them in suspense.

  ‘They weren’t not alerting the media. Turns out they were just giving them the exclusive.’

  Seven

  Inside the bulletproof trailer set up outside the bank as FBI on-site headquarters, Jenna rested her elbows on the Formica countertop built into the side wall of the trailer as she stared up in horror at the footage playing on the forty-inch flat screen mounted on the rear wall.

  The black and white figures darted in and out of the frame, trying to survive … or kill. The knowledge that the chaos she was watching had been the last few minutes of life for the people now lying inside the bank a few feet away made it the most frightening spectacle Jenna had ever viewed on a television monitor.

  Spectacle.

  Russian violet returned. The color of theatrics had confused her when she’d seen it earlier, but now it made sense. The perps hadn’t left a witness, a message, and taken the tapes without involving the media; they’d just given the media an engraved invitation. With the mystery of the missing media solved, the live witness and the written message troubled Jenna even more. She was sure she was right in thinking the attackers wanted the general public to fear them, for the brutal attack to root itself so deeply into every mind that when their agenda came out, its success would, to some degree, already be won. Giving the tape to the media played to that strategy.

  But if you want the media to show the public how it all went down frame by frame, why the other two messages?

  Jenna’s gaze followed the black figure with the machete-style blade. First inside the bank doors, he rushed toward the glassed-in privacy room. He entered, and with a swipe, chopped the stocky woman cowering inside almost cleanly in half. Jenna winced.

  The Machete UNSUB exited the privacy room, dodging people now. From the moment he’d entered, he’d been the aggressor any time he crossed paths with someone, but suddenly, he was falling back. Letting the others do the dirty work. Why?

  Jenna squinted. Machete UNSUB moved in a definite direction, not lost or dazed. No. He had a clear intention. She just had no clue in hell what it was.

  Back at the bank door where the group had entered, he joined another black figure carrying a long sword. The two ventured right, out of view of the cameras.

  Jenna jumped up and gestured at where they had exited. ‘Where are they going? The two who were just here?’

  ‘Which?’ Porter asked.

  ‘Shit,’ Teva said. ‘So many damned moving pieces. I’ve been following the same one since it started … the guy who looks like he stepped out of the 1800’s. So I don’t know who you’re talking about.’

  ‘Well, you should,’ Saleda said. ‘Because I’ve been watching Machete Kills since he went in first, and the sword guy just left off camera with him.’

  Saleda’s instinct seemed to have been the same as Jenna’s: watch the first person in. He was bound to be the group’s leader.

  The tech running the footage paused it, backed it up. Pressed play again.

  Jenna looked away at the exact moment she knew the lady in the privacy room was about to be cleaved in two. No need to see that moment twice.

  She returned her gaze the following second though, ignoring the horrible machete scene in favor of locating the figure with the sword prior to his meeting up with Machete. Amidst the flying knives and falling bodies, she spotted the Long-Sword UNSUB on the right hand side of the video behind the teller counter alongside another attacker. The two black-clad assailants each took on one of the two tellers, the one Jenna was watching wielding his sword toward the counter and downward. The video’s angle didn’t show the death that resulted, but Jenna knew the victim to be the slender black female teller found lying face-first on the carpet underneath the employees’ side of the countertop. Jenna had noted during the crime scene walkthrough that it appeared she had tried to crawl toward the exit when she was first knocked under the counter during the skirmish, because her initial fall landed her only a foot or so away from where her pretty blonde co-worker had taken her last breaths. But she didn’t make it far. She was stabbed multiple times in her torso and thighs.

  A golden color flashed in, though Jenna couldn’t readily identify it.

  She let it go, since it didn’t match the other, more important thought in her head.

  ‘He passes right by where Ashlee had to have been crawling under the counter toward the staircase,’ she said. ‘Back it up one more time.’

  The tech obliged and,
again, the team watched the screen as the Long-Sword UNSUB lashed at the teller the angle didn’t show, then stood and exited from behind the counter. He joined up with Machete on the left side of their screen, not far from where the attackers had entered the bank, and they moved out of the frame’s visibility.

  ‘The staircase is on that side,’ Dodd noted. ‘Someone did have to escort Ms Haynie down, give her the message, and lock her in the safe, after all.’

  ‘One person, though. Not two. She said one guy,’ Teva replied.

  ‘Doesn’t mean they didn’t head off together at first then split up. One had a separate task while the other scared the daylights out of our favorite living witness,’ Porter said.

  Jenna cringed at Porter’s words. They all tended to kid at times in ways that would make anyone not in their line of work assume they needed etiquette lessons and a Bible, but for some reason, calling the one person who’d survived the carnage ‘favorite’ highlighted for Jenna why surviving might end up being worse for Ashlee Haynie. She’d never escape the images in her head, the screams burned in her memory.

  Another color tried to break forth, but Jenna forced it back. She needed to think not get bogged down.

  Then again, this sickening second by second, blow-by-blow chronicle of the deaths of twenty-one people would soon be etched in the memories of millions. CNR might’ve had the good judgment to keep it off the air and inform the FBI, but unfortunately, Jenna had no doubts that the terrorists had passed the footage on to other journalists, too. The FBI could yank feeds, keep it at bay as long as possible, but in the age of the hungry Internet and even hungrier media, all it would take before anyone with a broadband connection could see it would be one foreign server.

  ‘They swiped the security footage to give to the media but left it intact,’ she whispered.

  ‘What?’ Saleda asked, turning to face her.

  Jenna shook her head, trying to make sense of it all. ‘We thought they stole the security footage because there was something on it that would show us more to these attacks … something that might differ from the picture they were leaving the note and the witness to paint. But here’s the footage. Obviously, it cuts off the moment they yanked the tapes, so we can’t know what happened after everyone was dead and they left the building, but otherwise, it’s seemingly in full and untampered with. So their sole reasoning in taking it was to deliver it to media directly, but why?’