Fanatics (4 page)

“I got nothing to hide. Not a damn thing. I want you to get his killer. I'm on your side. All the way. I loved him. I never hated him. And he loved me.”

“Good. Together, we might find something that leads me to that killer.”

“I don't know no one who'd do a thing like this. No one. That clear? I swear to God Almighty, I got nothing to do with people like that. And if I had any ideas now, you'd be the first to know. I want that killer caught.”

Flo found this convincing as far as it went. Celestina might be innocent, and as utterly ignorant as she claimed. Still, a contract killer wasn't entirely out of the question, far from it. Flo paused for a moment, and then: “How did he behave the last time you saw him?”

“Like usual. Full of energy. Eager. Attentive, very attentive. He didn't miss a trick.”

“Did he always come over here at four in the morning?”

“Whenever he was out working. He worked hard. And he had a lot of obligations.”

“Did you also go out with him at night?”

“Of course. Lots of times. Dinner, clubs, shows. I've never been no homebody. He liked taking me out. His wife had to stay back with the kids. And who can blame her, it's a great house they got, huge, with live-in servants and everything over on Montgomery Place, best block in the Slope.”

Flo Ott began to understand the kind of man Owen Smith/Ballz Busta must have been, but she wasn't completely clear about the woman sitting across from her. Flo's mind, her built-in censor, was constantly assessing, rejecting, re-forming the rise-and-fall story she was hearing, but in constructing the outlines of truth, she could absorb only so much, and Celestina Belle was a great deal to absorb.

“How did you feel about sharing him with his family?”

Celestina gave her an amused look. “Actually, I didn't mind. Just check out this place here, he spoiled me. And when we weren't together, I sure as hell never interfered.”

“You know a lot of men here in New York?”

“Here? I got no other boyfriends here, if that's what you mean. Of course, back home, I had boyfriends. But not here. He was very jealous. I wouldn't dream of fooling around, not in New York. Risk my life in this great setup? No way. I'm no hooker. You can just forget about that kind of stuff. Really, I loved him, okay?” Celestina paused and looked Flo Ott straight in the eyes. “And so what'll happen now?”

“People will search this place today. Completely. Just stay here. Remove nothing, destroy nothing. After I leave, there'll be a guard by your door. And I want to come here again and we'll talk some more.”

Celestina leaned back on the sofa and sighed. “Okay. I got nowhere else to go. This is my home.”

Flo Ott rose and picked up her briefcase. She felt Celestina's tired eyes track her to the door. She thought about what the young woman said, her gratitude for the dead man's generosity, and she considered what he got in return for his investment. Owen Smith had set up a comfortable, if complex, life for himself. He had enemies. He paid for protection, and he didn't get his money's worth. He knew he might be killed, yet despite all his millions he still couldn't stop the killer when opportunity struck.

A grim lesson that wasn't lost on Flo.

9:49 A.M.

“Unlike the late Mr. Busta, we don't have millions in our budget to stop killers sworn to strike,” Flo said to Frank Murphy.

They were riding downtown in an unmarked police cruiser, headed back to Senator-elect Cecil King's office.

“Anywhere is a possibility, Flo, except maybe a locked, windowless room.”

“Not much of an option. Not for the senator.”

10:24 A.M.

In Cecil King's office, Flo Ott and Frank Murphy began their first examination of the scenes of past Double-A Committee assassinations.

“This is the only one we got on video,” Cecil said. “The Episcopal bishop in Denver, Colorado. Alejandra Carla Garcia. A gay woman, she lived openly with her partner for about twelve years.”

The murder was recorded on digital video eerily reminiscent of the amateur Zapruder film, that brief visual memento of John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963. But with several significant, updated differences. The murder video opened at the start of an outdoor Episcopal Communion service at which Bishop Garcia was presiding, an uneventful record until that point in the service when she raised the host for consecration and her head snapped sideways, two rounds smashing into the side of her skull.

“Why?” Flo said. “Why is everyone suddenly looking the exact opposite way?”

“A car exploded,” said Cecil. “Perfect timing.”

Bishop Garcia's assassination video was soundless except for the continuous voice-over of the Double-A Committee's charges against her and the intoning of her death sentence. Flo found it almost boring until the moment when the bishop's head snapped sideways, and she collapsed, and the uneventful video became a record of deadpan, ghostly surrealism.

“Nothing much to watch,” Cecil said. “Until that point. And then it all just comes at you, right out of nowhere.”

No, nothing much,
Flo thought, if you didn't already know the climax, all Communion services being predictable events, liturgical movements choreographed centuries before with prescribed precision. The assassins, with only a little homework, would have been in for no surprises. In Flo's view, an ideal situation for a planned killing.

“Where was the bishop's security?” she said.

“The bishop?” Cecil said. “She was a courageous woman. She improved her killers' odds because she refused any special protection for religious ceremonies. A person of God, she placed her faith and her life in the hands of God.”

“So did the assassins,” Flo said.

The killers, on the murder video's looped soundtrack, cited biblical scripture in defense of that sacred institution of marriage, and professed their abiding faith in traditional family, all as justification for the death sentence, and a promise of the approaching end of days. The tremendous brutal logic of history, as they saw it, demanded killing.

Cecil replayed the killing moment.

“As soon as the bishop collapsed,” he said, “a car blew up only a block away. You can't hear it on the video, but that's what distracted the crowd and gave the shooter, apparently firing a long-distance rifle with a scope and silencer, those extra few seconds to get lost. And then a second bomb, the insurance bomb, went off just in case he missed the first time. The second bomb covered the assassin's escape.”

They watched the finale of the assassination video. Around the square, acacia trees swayed gently in a soft midmorning breeze, and altar attendants in red cassocks and white surplices were rushing to the fallen bishop's side.

But in front of the stage at about ten yards' distance, as if one great body, the entire congregation was turning toward the sound of the exploding car.

And at that moment, the stage opened almost directly beneath the altar, pressure waves from the second explosion flinging back the first rows of congregants, folding chairs collapsing and tossed about like toothpicks in a hurricane as smoking gushers of fire rose to a height of about fifty feet. Bobbing on top of the flaming geysers were shattered sections of the altar, a splintered tree, a torso in a red cassock, a bloodied leg, a mass of flaming-bright objects and dark inflammable material raining down on a stunned and terrified congregation.

Here the video ended with
“A foretaste of Armageddon,”
the voice-over's final words.

“There's a sound recording, too,” Frank Murphy said. “A tape of the Communion service made by someone from the bishop's office. The recorder was left on. The Denver police emailed us the audio file. We'll have their forensics reports this afternoon.”

Outside the district attorney's office, an autumn wind whined like a hungry cat scratching at the windows.

Inside, from Frank Murphy's laptop, the fading sounds of the explosion were replaced by screams, desperate cries for help, someone sobbing close to the recorder's mike, another person hysterically shouting curses, before all these human sounds were drowned out by the wailing sirens of fire engines and ambulances.

“Incredible,” said Flo. “And the Double-A took full credit for every bit of this slaughter? Not a hint of shame?”

“I believe in the Lord,” Cecil said, his voice subdued. “But I promise you, I won't ask Him to do your job. He's got enough on His hands. We won't make the same mistake the poor bishop made.”

Again, Flo Ott, Frank Murphy, and the senator-elect watched the last moments of the assassination video. The camera's point of view was somewhere at or not far behind the rear of the crowd. The lens was telephoto. The picture remained steady even during the explosion, so the camera was probably mounted on a tripod.

It was impossible for them to tell if the scene in the square was recorded from a position outdoors, on a low roof perhaps, or with a camera set up in a window.

Of all the killings claimed in the last ten months by the Aryan-American Committee for Defense of Homeland, Family & the Sanctity of Motherhood, Bishop Garcia and her altar attendants were the only deaths preserved on video and propagated over the Internet.

The Double-A's first victim, the Massachusetts congressman, was shot in his bed in Washington's Tabard Inn hotel at about four o'clock in the morning. The Double-A Committee had pronounced his sentence only a few hours before. But no one paid much attention. A crackpot message. In the middle of the night. From a group no one ever heard of before.

Since then, however, the Double-A had more than overcome its obscurity. Since then, the Double-A had run up a record, trumpeted in its boastful announcements, of nineteen assassinations.

Since then, the Double-A vied for headlines with the year's presidential election campaign. And some pollsters and pundits even credited the Double-A for giving the victor her slim-margin ticket into the White House. A default reaction against right-wing extremism.

GOP leadership cried
foul,
of course, although their condemnations of the Double-A Committee, while extant, were far from overwhelming. And some in the Grand Old Party even went so far as to claim, without evidence, that the members of the Double-A Committee were actually left-wing provocateurs financed from abroad.

But none of this political jiggery-pokery figured now in the Brooklyn detectives' view of their assignment. They dismissed the shuck and jive.

“We're dealing with butchers,” Flo said. “Fanatics. And they've got at least one big difference from al-Qaeda crazies and any other Middle Eastern rebels. They get away every time. They make sure of it. They're not about to kill themselves.”

“Right,” Cecil said. “The ultimate contradiction, sane psychos.”

“Cowards, more like it,” Frank said. He released a puff of air through his nostrils. “But you know bastards like these, Flo? I think we got a break. I think we got some edge here.”

“Could be. They want to live, they want to do it again. At least so far. It's an opening.”

11:05 A.M.

Cecil King's office grew silent except for the constant wind whining at the windows, that hungry cat begging to be let inside.

Preventing the promised murder, Flo knew, would be far removed from solving a killing. Loaded with the threat of more evil to come, every step would occur as in a horror movie, unexpectedly, and with full intent to terrify.

Flo and her colleagues wouldn't be retracing the steps of a past crime here but descending into an abyss.

Flo sensed—she would have been inhuman not to—that Cecil King also realized precisely this. And his terror was now her terror, as she and the senator-elect and Frank Murphy were staring into this pit of death and darkness pretty much on their own, without any meaningful federal help or any extra budget from the mayor.

She dismissed the idea of private guards. Who could be trusted? And Cecil King wasn't a rich man. He was no Ballz Busta, not that millions of dollars had helped keep the rap star alive.

Flo considered the assignment—preventing murder—exactly as she considered a homicide already committed, by first examining her own limitations. Otherwise, she couldn't probe the limits of killers, penetrate their minds and maneuver to trap them. Flo's mind was her reliable censor, constantly assessing, rejecting, re-forming the story her mind wanted her to tell or hear.

Her job was to slither up inside a snake, to penetrate and untangle the serpentine knots of a plot hatched in minds utterly unlike hers.

Her record of homicide arrests and convictions was beyond reproach. But the danger with any strong awareness of her own limits, she realized, was assiduous caution, aversion to risk; this particular plus for solving murders was a minus in stopping assassinations.

Just keeping Cecil King alive now would be challenge enough. Stopping the Double-A, and extinguishing its ambitions, demanded that not only the senator-elect, but all of them had to stick their necks out, and this also included the mayor and the police commissioner, regardless of whether or not they were willing to run incalculable risks.

The Double-A Committee wouldn't be leaving them much choice.

Nor would the Double-A, confident in its demented dogmas, obedient to a voice beyond stars, fervent in faith, have any other choice, not as long as a safe homeland and rescuing the American family lay within their grasp, only a few assassinations away.

Flo said, “Senator, I'd like Frank to go back home with you this afternoon to assess the layout. Your family's apartment and everywhere around the immediate area.”

“Let's do it,” Cecil said.

12:40 P.M.

The King family lived in a sixth-floor apartment in an eight-story building on Eastern Parkway opposite the Brooklyn Museum, with a broad, open view over the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and in the distance on the other side of Flatbush Avenue, the Prospect Park Zoo.

A prime location. Frank Murphy's relieved conclusion, on admiring this view:
No close rooftops high enough for snipers.

His assignment from Flo: “Just keep him home the rest of the day.”