The Nature of the Beast (3 page)

“Don’t believe a word of it,” Craig interrupted. “I knew his mother.”

Truth be told, Bobby Duggan was as urbane as smog and had always used the slow moving country boy façade as an illusion designed to sedate the situation until he had the opportunity to properly calculate the odds.

Daniel Rosen lived up to his reputation for bluntness. “You want to give us a hint here Special Agent Craig? What exactly is going on? What was of sufficient magnitude to cause you to abandon your post and fly back to Los Angeles without orders?”

“I was granted a leave of absence,” Craig said.

“I’m aware of that,” Rosen said disgustedly.

“My father is quite ill.”

“We’re being kept apprised of the situation,” Rosen said.

His tone made it clear that Charlie Craig’s medical condition was being monitored by the company and that he was still waiting for an answer to his query.

“Yesterday’s interagency security briefing mentioned a funeral for former ATF Special Agent Steve Wald,” Craig said.

Rosen and Bobby exchanged ‘elephant in the room’ glances.

“I tried to reach Gilbert through normal security channels,” Craig persisted.

This time they made it a point not to look at one another.

“They were jerking me around,” Craig continued. Bobby started to disagree but Jackson Craig waved him off. “I was born on a weekend Bobby, but it wasn’t
last
weekend. What’s going on?” he demanded.

Rosen didn’t hesitate. “Wald was murdered three days ago,” he said.

Craig sensed another shoe dangling in mid-air. He waited.

Rosen stepped behind his desk, opened the center drawer and produced a plastic evidence tube and a computer print out. He watched fascinated as Craig used his artificial fingers to unscrew the black metal top. His eyes tracked the hand as it poured the chunk of twisted metal out into his other palm.

“Same batch as the original Harry Joyce murders,” Bobby said. “Fired from the same weapon.”

The name froze Craig’s lungs. Harry Joyce. The room wavered. Craig closed his eyes. He could see the sneering face in the service photographs, hear the gunfire and the sirens, see the smoldering pile of rubble covering the street as the gurney carrying the remains of Harry Joyce clattered across the street.

“How can that be?” Craig wondered aloud.

“No idea,” Bobby admitted.

With Harry Joyce, it was easier to say what he wasn’t. Harry wasn’t a serial murderer. The only strangers he killed were for money. He wasn’t a binge killer because, for the most part, he killed people one at a time, including, and this was to prove his downfall, killing neighborhood people who annoyed him in some way or another. To annoy Harry Joyce was to initial your own death warrant.

Harry wasn’t, by any legal definition, a psychopath either. He didn’t hear voices ordering him to do this or that, didn’t line his baseball caps with tin foil or imagine dogs were talking to him. Nothing so prosaic. Harry simply killed people. That was what he did. How many? They had no idea. As Craig recalled, the original estimate had been thirty or so, but who knew? Sky was the limit.

A month of inter-agency surveillance tracked Harry Joyce to what appeared to be an abandoned warehouse in South Chicago. The set-up seemed straightforward enough. Harry Joyce holed up in some dank little cave. An urban Ted Kaczynski. All they had to do was barge in and root him from his burrow.

Turned out Harry not only owned the whole damn building but the buildings on either side as well. He’d hollowed them out, cut four story deadfalls into the floors, poked sniper holes into the walls, interconnected the buildings on every floor, often in several places. It was like a block-long shooting gallery, and they were the targets.

The place was a maze. Ten or twelve separate spaces. Thirty surveillance cameras, inside and out. Bedrooms. Work-out rooms. A library. A satellite TV setup. Satellite telephone antenna. A collection of uniforms and costumes worthy of central casting, including an extensive collection of women’s clothes and unmentionables … in Harry’s size no less. Word later leaked from forensics that Harry Joyce’s corpse had been totally hairless, in any and all respects, as a result of heroic and oft repeated electrolysis sessions.

Craig recalled his partner Gilbert Fowles pointing at the square packets taped to the rafters, his mouth agape, his eyes wide. The place wired with C4, top to bottom. It was everywhere, more of it than any of them had ever seen before. They evacuated the entire block and called for the bomb squad.

By the time they counted noses and realized they were two officers short, several minutes had passed and the sirens of the approaching bomb squad could be heard moaning in the distance.

Peter Amis and Jackson Craig made a mad dash for the door. No way they were leaving fellow officers in that death trap building with Harry Joyce. Peter managed to get one step inside the doorway. Jackson Craig still had his hand on the door handle, when the building went off like a cherry bomb. Peter was killed instantly, vaporized by a pack of C4 directly above his head. Jackson Craig’s left hand was still attached to the handle when they found the twisted steel door later that afternoon. Only the presence of several on-site medical response teams saved his life.

The brass decided to blame it on a leaking gas main, supposedly ruptured during a drug bust shootout, an occurrence as common as the cold in that part of Chicago. That way the CPD could publicly honor Peter Amis and his dead and wounded comrades and they could take their time sifting through the rubble, without the public or the press peering over their collective shoulders. That was the plan anyway.

Problem was forensics found virtually nothing. No weapons other than those Harry was carrying when he was killed, no money, no documentation, virtually nothing personal, none of the things a man in the murder business could be expected to have, nothing to point investigators one way or another.

The task force members got their pictures in the paper and Presidential Commendations. The media was skeptical of course. The chain of command was prepared to fall back on ‘national security’ but, for once, everyone who knew better kept his mouth shut and the story just petered out as all such stories eventually do. The task force was quietly dissolved. Three officers went into their graves as heroes. Jackson Craig began what was to be a painful eighteen month rehab and the rest of the task force went back to their regular assignments.

Had the subsequent murders begun immediately, the agencies involved surely would have taken notice. As it was, an interval of slightly more than two years proved too great for their collective attention span. By the time Justice Department investigators Mark Stren and Nick Brouseau went missing, the Harry Joyce fiasco was little more than a long suppressed memory.

Stren and Brouseau were on assignment in Idaho, working with ATF, looking into illegal arms trafficking by a white supremacist group called ‘The Son’s of Freedom.’ One morning they didn’t show up for a breakfast briefing. Two days later they were found in the trunk of a car with their guns still in their holsters and their throats slit.

When, less than a month later, FBI Special Agent Janice Robertson was shot while fueling her car in suburban Roanoke, Virginia, the Son’s of Freedom hypothesis began to waver. Like Stren and Brouseau, Special Agent Robertson was a Harry Joyce task force alum. At that point, collective anxiety kicked into high gear. Bells and whistles began to sound in earnest; administrative wagons began to circle.

Before the situation advanced beyond the worried whisper stage, Jesus Navarro, Robertson’s FBI partner on the Harry Joyce case was murdered while on assignment in Arizona, stabbed in the chest forty one times, leaving, of the original eight Harry Joyce task-force members, only ATF Special Agent Steve Wald and the U.S. Secret Service contingent of Gilbert Fowles and Jackson Craig still alive.

The bureau found the situation dire enough to put Craig and the Fowles family into protective custody while they assessed the threat and pondered their next move. Likewise ATF with Wald. They needn’t have bothered, as, even in the short term, life in a Beltway hotel held scant appeal for any of them.

Gilbert Fowles and Steve Wald opted to resign from the service, to forsake home and hearth and to allow the U.S. Marshal’s Service to put them into deep witness protection. All in all a wise choice for married men. As Craig recalled, Steve Wald had derisively referred to them as the ‘Three Mousecateers’ in the days before they squeaked off their separate ways.

In an unprecedented move, and much to the chagrin of his superiors, Jackson Craig had opted to remain in the service. To Craig it seemed obvious. Somebody wanted to kill him. That being the case, the service seemed as safe as anywhere else, probably safer, working in the covert end of the business, so they shipped him overseas, and put him to work protecting diplomats and their families, an assignment generally reserved for the soon-to-be-retired or otherwise functionally compromised Secret Service agents.

Bobby nodded at the bullet in Jackson Craig’s hand. “Apparently that projectile in your hand passed through Special Agent Wald before finding its way to the bottom of a municipal swimming pool in Homewell, Wyoming.”

He knew better but asked anyway. “They’re certain?”

Rosen said, “ATF got a flag the minute the local Wyoming cops put the name Bryce Caldwell into the system.” He rolled a wrist to say ‘and so forth’. “Came up U.S.M.S. Witness Protection. ATF took it from there.”

“And you don’t know where Gilbert and his family are,” Craig asked.

“Regrettably, no,” Bobby drawled.

“Assuming the worst regarding Mr. Fowles and his family… “ Rosen began.

“What say we don’t,” Craig snapped. “Gilbert and his family are out there somewhere. We need to find them before this maniac does.”

“I understand your concern, Special Agent Craig, but as I’ve explained, nothing is being spared in our efforts to locate Special Agent Fowles and his family,” Rosen assured him.

Craig turned toward the window in frustration.

“What now?” Bobby asked.

“The question is why now?” Craig corrected. “What’s changed?” Craig pressed. “Where has this person been? What’s he been doing for the past five years?”

“The only thing that changed,” Bobby drawled. “…is your recent request to return to the U.S. of A.”

“How could this person possibly know that?” Craig asked.

This time they exchanged a conspiratorial glance.

“We made a preliminary scan of all relevant data bases,” Bobby said.

“And?” Craig asked.

Bobby took a deep breath. “Someone’s been electronically monitoring both your father’s medical condition and your sister’s phone calls.”

Jackson Craig winced. The fault was his own then. When the two day lag time had proved too much to bear, he’d begun communicating with his sister over her regular phone line. A little voice had told him to stick with Agency protocol, but the company process was so convoluted and cumbersome it made timely decision making nearly impossible. He silently cursed again.

“Have we identified a source?”

“They source it from Florida, “ Rosen said. “They’re working on an address.”

“We’ve got sub-rosa teams on both of them,” Rosen added.

“Thank you,” Craig said earnestly. “My family didn’t sign up for any of this.” He looked from one man to the other. Each indicated his understanding, in a manner sufficiently tacit as to allow for subsequent denial.

Despite the hour, cars swarmed over the streets like urban glow worms. He watched the lights. “I want to see the Wyoming crime scene,” Craig said finally.

“You can’t be serious,” Rosen chortled.

“Do I look like I’m kidding?” Craig asked.

Rosen was somewhat taken aback. Not used to being spoken to quite so directly, he slid his gaze to Bobby Duggan, hoping for Bobby to smooth a little Southern charm over the widening rift. Instead, Bobby went into aw shucks mode.

“He’s got a point Dan. It’s his backside in the buckwheat.”

“There’s no way someone intimately involved with the case could be assigned to participate in the investigation. It violates protocol in more ways than I can count.”

Craig opened his mouth to disagree, but Bobby beat him to the punch.

“Perhaps in an advisory mode,” Bobby suggested. “Something of a liaison between the old and the new investigations…I could see…”

Rosen waved him off. “Absolutely not,” he said.

Craig clamped his jaw hard, otherwise he would have laughed out loud. Now he was certain. These two were giving him the old ‘good cop-bad cop’ routine. If they hadn’t wanted him here, he wouldn’t be denting Dan Rosen’s carpet. They knew he was coming about five seconds after he got on board the company plane. They could have stopped him anywhere along the way, could have turned the plane around and headed right back to Brussels, but they hadn’t. They’d let him come to LA. The question was: Why bother with the good cop bad cop routine? It just didn’t make sense.

Jackson Craig never got a chance to press the issue. Bobby walked over and patted him on the shoulder. His drawl was slow and thick as syrup. “It’s either late or early, depending on your perspective,” he said with a wink and a nod. “We can untangle this here thicket in the morning when we’re all fresh as new mown hay.”

Rosen stayed in character. No…no…he wanted this settled right now…let there be no misunderstandings... Craig kept his mouth shut as Bobby ushered him back into the hall by the elbow.

He leaned in close. “Good to see you again Jack. I wish the circumstances…”

Bobby allowed the rest of the sentence to speak for itself.

Craig hid his annoyance, gave the ops director a non-committal nod and headed for the elevator.

6

No reason to be so spooked. Calm down! Everything went just like he
’
d planned it, right? Right? He
’
d done his duty. Right? So why did he feel as if his stomach was full of ice cubes that wouldn
’
t melt? Why were the images in his mind
’
s eye running at flank speed, making it nearly impossible to concentrate on anything for more than a second or two? He couldn
’
t make sense of it. His head ached.