Cyn slept better beneath the frilly white canopy now that Leopold was gone. Her bears were still tight within her grasp each night, and her weapons always tight within the bears. Leopold had been necessary, the other man who had shown up at her house that night when she was eleven had died in a hit when she was seventeen.
While it was fitting that his own people had turned against him and hired someone just like him to take him out, it was also deeply disappointing. Each night Cyn had prayed that Leopold would live until she could get to him. And she was thankful that the gunman had let her have the kill. She wouldn’t have wanted to fight him for the privilege. There was something else there, some other thought pushing at the back of her brain, but she pushed it down. She still didn’t know his name.
In the six months since she had seen him last, she’d followed her usual routine. She wasn’t finished. And, like an athlete, had no plans for what to do when she did finish. So she worked. Leopold had been the big fish to her. But there were others. Higher up. Other hit men. She’d been picking them off, using them as practice.
She’d taken out a Korean man who ran a kidnapping ring, selling boxes stuffed with live children off the docks in Baltimore. There were two boxes and twenty men lingering on the docks the night she’d managed to end it. Winding her way around and through the loaded crates, she’d taken out individual dock workers as she went. None offered any real resistance. All were too surprised by the sudden presence of a girl on the docks, and she had killed each one with cold calculation and a quick precise slice or stab.
A few she had taken from behind. If they didn’t turn when she came within three feet of them, she had simply pulled her sai and quickly slipped it between ribs. A downward pressure with her palm used ribs as a fulcrum and opened lungs and heart. The man would be falling, dead, before she could even pull the weapon out. It was also fairly painless. By her count any man working the docks that night could hear the sounds from inside the crates and deserved what he got.
The leader she had toyed with. But he required no serious effort, not like Leopold had. The dark-haired Asian man had turned as she approached, more aware and more wary than his workers had been. He aimed his gun at the girl on the docks with absolutely no remorse. She had taken it off him with just as little.
He had pulled a knife on her then, seeing that she didn’t have a gun of her own and that she had tossed his against the black hull of the ship, clanking it against the metal and banking it into the dark water below. Cyn pulled her own knife in response and he seemed startled that she was armed at all. She’d wanted to laugh. The knife was nothing.
And he was a fool with his. She knew it the instant he pulled it, holding the blade upward like a housewife would. Like her mother had tried with her kitchen cleaver against Leopold. Cyn had learned quickly after that to hold the blade out and down. This man wasn’t smart enough to see her lethality and run. He swung at her. In three swipes of his knife, she had countered and managed to get her own against his inner arm.
When his tendons severed themselves against her blade, his hand had gone slack and so had his face. He folded, crumpling under his own fear more than anything she had done to him. Yet.
He sold the children into brothels overseas. Cyn knew. Of everyone her blades had ever touched, of every drop of blood she had spilled, none had been innocent.
So she took him out‒piece by piece. Her kamas sliced him, as well as the two men who tried to jump her from behind while she worked on the Korean. Bullets had flown at her once, but she’d pulled his still live body in front of her and let him take a few before they stopped. A few knives thrown rapidly in return had yielded more than one grunt and thud.
The others left her alone after that. Their boss wasn’t worth it. He was clearly on his way to dead, and part of that was due to bullets from their own guns.
Cyn finished him and fitted him with a tag and bow, before prying open the two crates.
She stayed just beyond the shadows until the cops showed and gathered the children. Then she’d gone home and cleaned, stitched her weapons back into her teddy bears, and slept like a baby.
She’d also, finally, gotten that campus rapist in Oklahoma. She’d read about him in the papers and traveled up every time she had a few days off. She hung out in the parking lots where he struck, driving rentals in and out of the darkened structures at night when there were few cars and fewer people around. She walked with her shoulders and head down. She put in ear buds and turned her music up loud enough that anyone would think she was completely unaware of her surroundings.
It had only taken five months and fifteen tries. But finally, someone had come out at her just beyond the dark empty parking lot exit. A hand had closed over her mouth and dragged her back into the shadows of the nearby trees. He’d even grabbed her by the ponytail she’d hung out like a sign.
Cyn had only struggled enough to make it seem real. It didn’t matter that he controlled her head by her hair or that he held a hunting knife to her throat. When he got her down and tried to slit her jeans off her he got something else.
She folded in half, the denim taking a good portion of the brunt of the knife. Her bound hands came together to dig fingers into his shoulder and he lost the ability to hold the blade. She rolled onto it and grabbed it, coming back over and holding the blade straight out from her stomach as he jumped at her. He impaled himself on the knife, and Cyn reminded him that if he had just left, he would have lived. She told him this even as she had pulled upward with the long blade, hot blood gushing over her hands and torso.
She put the bow on him while he was still alive. She set out the tag and tacked the articles into his skin with her stars. She’d done almost too thorough of a job of killing him, as his blood soaked through a handful of the articles, many of which were crime logs from the school paper, and the local police station.
He’d expired while she stood over him, this time using her dusting rag to wipe blood off herself. She’d pulled garbage bags from the trunk of the rental car and changed there in the parking lot before covering the seat with more bags, and climbing in. She’d showered the mess down the motel drain and added the second set of clothes to the garbage bag. She scrubbed out the tub. Washed her hair again. She drove one rental car out to another city and threw the clothes into a restaurant bin then ate a big breakfast at a Waffle House rip-off. She returned the car in a different city from where she’d rented it, and took the train back to campus. She checked out then turned in the second car and took a cab back to the motel. From there she climbed in her own car and headed home. As she drove out of town, the radio was already breaking the story that it looked like the campus rapist had been caught. They didn’t mention the bow, just that his face looked like the one on the pictures and that police had strong reasons to believe this was the guy.
Cyn smiled. She held her teddy bear closer, enjoying the dark brought by her blackout curtains. She killed people in her dreams. She planned her next hit. And since she was going after another of the Russian mafia men, she wondered if the gunman would be there.
Owen rubbed his temples. He could hear Bean yelling at him like a skipping CD. “Dunham! Two more!”
Why didn’t Bean yell at Blankenship? Owen already knew the answer. Yelling at Blankenship was even more useless than yelling at a brick wall. At least the wall bounced the sound back at you.
And his Agent in Charge had only been stating facts at a high decibel. The grudge ninja was escalating. Serial killers did that. It fit the profile. They got taken over by their urges. The need to kill came more frequently as they broke down psychologically. They got more cocky with each kill. That meant they made mistakes. And mistakes were Owen’s friends.
He was going to catch the grudge ninja. But what happened to the ninja once he was caught was anybody’s guess. Owen didn’t think there was a jury alive that would convict him. The people this guy took down were all far worse than the ninja, but it would be better legally if he left his victims alive. Although Owen had never heard of a serial . . . what? kidnapper? More like bounty hunter. And people who went to court got off with hotshot lawyers or out early for good behavior. Nope, the ninja was doing society a favor. But playing God wasn’t allowed‒even if you were good at it.
The Korean had been selling kids into prostitution. Then the ninja had gotten the campus rapist. From the evidence it looked like he’d caught the guy in the act. There were long brown hairs at the scene, and it looked like a smaller female form pressed into the ground at one point. But, whoever she was, she was scared or she had developed some serious amnesia about the attack. She hadn’t come forward.
Owen stood over the broken ground. Blood had coagulated in a pool in the spot where the body had been. The body had finally been moved, just a little while ago by the lab guys; the cops hadn’t touched it. Every officer in America had been told not to move a hair on a body with a big red bow on it. These guys had done their work, even though they’d wanted the capture of the rapist themselves. Little had been touched except by the college joggers who’d found him that morning. They’d actually walked all over the scene and the male had put his fingers to the neck to feel for a pulse.
A sigh pushed out of Owen’s throat as he thought of the smears left by the student. What a fucking moron. The body had its belly sliced open. The chest didn’t move and he had god damned newspaper articles tacked to his skin with throwing stars. And the idiot checked for a pulse? There was no accounting for what a person would do in shock. At least, that’s what Owen told himself to keep from going medieval on the guy’s ass.
Yellow tape bordered the scene and little flags stuck out of the ground in several different colors. Four in fact, for each footprint, each tread they had ID’d. There’d be two less if those idiot college students hadn’t-
But they had, and there were. It was just the way it was.
Blankenship was interviewing them. Which Owen thought was a good task since the two knew nothing of value. Nguyen was on the scene as well with his tricked out lab semi. He was playing with his broken hair strands in the trailer. The body was laid out on the table in the middle. The FBI would take him away. This was the eighth victim they could tie to the ninja.
There was none of the fake ninja hair here. But there had been some at the scene on the docks. A few strands laid by the body. They still didn’t know who it belonged to, but Nguyen swore he was able to identify it on sight. He hadn’t been wrong yet.
The footprints were bothering Owen. He just didn’t know why.
His phone vibrated in his pocket and he hoped it was Annika. He wouldn’t be able to tell her anything while he was here. The line was likely tapped anyway. Owen didn’t trust the Bureau not to do it. But he wanted to hear the sound of her voice. To be soothed and comforted and reminded of why he did this.
He recognized the number, but it wasn’t home. “Dunham.” Speaking his own last name upon answering the phone was another habit that made him a throwback to an earlier time. It was his FBI cell. It lived in his pocket. Who the hell else would be answering?
Bean had already evolved past the need to identify himself. “What are you doing?”
He’d rather his boss had asked what he was wearing. Even something that creepy and twisted would be better than this. “I’m staring at the scene with the body removed.”
“Not falling asleep on your feet.”
Whether it was intended as statement or question Owen couldn’t be sure. He answered. “No. There’s something I’m missing.” He didn’t add, maybe if I just keep staring at it . . .
“Go do something else.” Bean hung up. He’d checked in. Done what he needed to do. Owen had been slapped around and told to get his ass in gear. Enough said.
Something was wrong. The footprints didn’t add up. Four flag colors.
Owen walked the scene.
Nguyen came out and casted all the footprints. As soon as it dried, he picked up the ninja’s and showed it off to Owen. Sitting there in his white paper cover-alls he examined it from several angles, a frown marring his perfectly black brows. Nguyen’s hair grew stick straight and hung from his head like it was weighted. It was the only thing Owen knew of Nguyen. He didn’t think he’d ever seen the man’s clothes, he was always covered in sterile disposable lab suits. And for a moment his sleep deprived brain wondered if Nguyen was naked under all that paper.
That would be a laugh. The scientist worked with a handful of field agents, doing lab work and collaborating on cases. They were well trained and truly great detectives. Nguyen would be the best got-you ever if he were naked under there all the time and none of them discovered it. And of course they wouldn’t. It wouldn’t occur to them to even look for it.
Which made Owen think there was something here at the scene he’d be able to solve if he just thought to look for it.
Still squatting and turning the plaster mold, Nguyen looked up, aiming the captured tread Owen’s way. “Something’s wrong with it.”
“What?”
His head shook, his heavy hair lacking the inertia to move with it. “That’s just it. I’m not sure.”
“Is this the first time it’s been wrong?” Owen scrubbed his hand over his face and wished he was driving Charlotte to school. They would have to abandon the site in a few more hours. They could only maintain it for so long; the location and the price of security was not cost effective.
“No, it’s been wrong all along.”
“Of course.” His brain took off on a different track, denying him the focus he wished. Charlotte was having her first sleepover the next night. He wanted to be home to see it. Three friends were coming. He needed to help ease some of the burden from Annika. Four eight year olds meant no sleep for the weary.