The Schwarzschild Radius (34 page)

Massey hadn’t slept. He was waiting for a phone call from a computer expert he had called last night when his firewall alerted him of a penetration. He then noticed that many of his files had been accessed at one in the morning. He had been told to run several commands, take screen shots of the output and send them.

Though he had deleted his incriminating photos, he had put one thing back on his PC that could send him to jail for the rest of his life. It was an icon to login to a child porn site. The priest’s mind was short-circuiting. Who had violated him? He expected the police to come bursting through his door at any moment. Massey had envisioned getting caught in several ways, but this wasn’t one of them.

The phone rang.

“I tracked down the intruder,” said the voice.

“Is there any way of getting their identity?” asked the priest.

“Oh, I have their identity. They were still logged into your machine when I was able to penetrate their PC. The firewall was disabled―pretty careless. I downloaded a bunch of files. I’ll encrypt them and send it now. You have the decrypt key, right?”

“Hang on. I haven’t used it in a while. I do have it. So it wasn’t police?”

“Nope. It was a chick. Looks like a student. I geolocated her IP address to 125th Street and Amsterdam Avenue.”

“I owe you one.”

Massey was relieved and at the same time intrigued. A few moments later, the email arrived. When decrypted, one file revealed a word document with a student schedule for Columbia University. A picture of the girl appeared. His eye scanned the page until it fell on a name:

RACHEL WALLEN

Massey had just a few hours to do the killing.

nd what will you be hunting, sir?” asked the kid behind the counter.

“Big fish,” answered Massey. “Tarpon down by the Keys. But I want to be prepared in case I run into something bigger.”

“Sure. Well, we carry pneumatic and band spear guns, several sizes.”

“I’m new at this. What are the advantages of each?”

“Pneumatic guns are compact, not much recoil and have a little more range. But they’re noisy and need more maintenance than band guns. Band guns are nearly silent, accurate, and you can increase the power by using more bands―up to three.”

“And what are the ranges?”

“Accurate to about fourteen feet. In murky water or below a certain depth, you’re not going to see much farther than that.”

“Let’s go with band. I’ll take two.”

He paid cash for the weapons, so there would be no record of the purchase. Massey loaded the gear into his trunk, then proceeded to steal two license plates. Next stop was Home Depot. He disguised himself with a mustache, sunglasses, and baseball cap, remembering that police often use the security cameras of stores to prove that a suspect was buying the things they would need to dispose of a body. To camouflage his purchases, he also bought a gallon of white paint, rollers, work gloves, and twenty feet of rope. He was never in this Home Depot and it was at least five miles from his house, so it’s unlikely they would ever check there.

Handling the guns with the deer skin work gloves, he loaded each and set up a target of Yellow Books at one end of his basement. Fourteen feet, the kid said. He paced it off, took aim and fired. The recoil was surprising. The spear entered the first Yellow Book and embedded itself about half-way through. He carefully removed it and added a band to the spear gun. This time he missed altogether due to the recoil. Under water you could support the weapon with a single hand because of the buoyancy. On dry land, it was different. He fired again, this time holding the weapon with both hands. It went clear through the first book and stopped about an inch into the next one. That would go well into a human body. Three bands and the spear traveled clear through both Yellow Books. The recoil was substantial. Massey loaded the other gun with three bands and fired several times until he got the feel of the range and could hit the target consistently from twenty feet. It had a lot more range in air than under water and was very quiet. Good. He had considered getting a gun to be on the safe side. He knew enough street people who could arrange that for him, but it would leave a clue, and guns were too easily traced.

He went on Mapquest and prepared the routes he would take. To create an alibi, he signed up for a real estate seminar at the Meadowlands Hilton for the next day and booked a room. This would jive with his recent real estate searches on the Internet when he was researching places to retire abroad.

Massey put on the black turtleneck and black pants that would make him invisible until the last moment. It was remarkably similar to what he might wear as a priest, except for the collar. In his study, he sat for a moment collecting himself. He read a passage from
The Seven Storey Mountain
as he often did before violating the laws of God.

When he was ready to go, he loaded his purchases into a large athletic bag: a large plastic drop cloth and thick rubber gloves, a box of contractor grade plastic garbage bags, and a hacksaw.

he vehicle tooled down the block, stopped, then backed up until it was directly in front of Rachel’s home at 114 North Cyrus Street in East Northport. It then proceeded around the block, returned, and parked with the engine off some fifty yards short of the address.

The driver reviewed Rachel’s class schedule and personal information. Heavy course load. Biomedical Engineering major. He reviewed her transcripts from Northport High. Straight A’s, early admission to Columbia, Intel Award.

He read the essay she had written in her admission application. It was entitled, “The Purpose of My Life.” Moving. Even more so, as that purpose would never be fulfilled. He usually spoke at length with his victims before slaughtering them. The more he knew about his prey, the more aroused he got. Unlike Mafia hitmen who killed dispassionately, he made the greatest effort to get close to the doomed, to give them the most hope, so that he could then take away that much more. It was the crushing of desperate hope that he so loved.

This was a quiet neighborhood and there were only three major highways out of Long Island―the Southern State, the Northern State, and the Long Island Expressway. That didn’t give him the options he liked. And these cops had absolutely nothing to do with their time, so an abduction or killing would bring out every lawman within thirty miles.

He flipped through the printouts of all the chat sessions he had downloaded from Rachel’s PC. She had chat archiving enabled, so he could read word for word what she said to her newly found sister―Achara. Touching story. Of course, Olivia had already told him about Achara in her interrogations. Valiant effort she was making, trying to get her sister out of the whorehouse. And feeling so guilty that she herself fell into whoredom. And this one, Rachel, now posing as Olivia and trying to rescue her. But this kabuki dance had to come to an end now. Those files she had stolen were traceable to him. She had violated him and she would be violated. He had to kill her before she realized what she had taken.

He circled the block again and thought how a home invasion would go. Only the kid and her parents. Father’s an accountant. Wouldn’t expect much resistance from him. A triple murder would be a big deal in this town. They might find some way to get the Feds involved. No, he needed something cleaner, more surgical.

He got back onto the Northern State toward the city. An hour and twenty minutes later, he was in front of Columbia University on Broadway. Nice looking girls walking around. And brainy. The campus must look nice in the spring with the girls all wearing summer dresses, tube tops, and shorts.

He fired up his laptop, googled Furnald Hall, Columbia University and got:

Layout

Furnald is ten stories high with 187 singles and twenty-four doubles. Each floor contains a separate men’s and women’s bathroom that the residents must share. In addition, a large lounge is situated on every floor that has a sitting area with a cable television on one end, and a kitchen with two ovens and two sinks on the other end. There is also a spacious main lounge on the first floor.

Using the floor plan, he located her room on the eighth floor. He went over the class schedule again. Assuming she wasn’t cutting class, she would be crossing the campus several times a day. Heavy academic load too. He would relieve her of that burden. This wasn’t going to be easy either. Not many escape routes out of Manhattan. The car circled the campus several times as the killer contemplated the problem.