Silver Justice Read online

  “Beats the crap outta me. I say we write it up, take a statement from the guard, and get the hell outta here. If they were trying to rip the place off, they picked the wrong area to work in. That piece of iron looks older than you. What the hell is it, anyway?”

  Mike swiveled and cupped his hands, facing the way they’d entered. “Yo. Buddy. Come down here. We need your help,” he called to the guard. They saw the man’s light bouncing off the hallway walls, and then he was standing in the doorway.

  “This look like it’s from when they closed the place down?” Bobby asked him.

  “I don’t know. I don’t come down here hardly ever. Maybe the auction guys were in here inspecting the equipment?”

  “Yeah. That could be. All right. Is there anything more to see?” Mike asked.

  “Some more machines over in the far rooms.”

  “Okay. Let’s wrap this up, then. Hey, buddy, what do they call these things, anyway? For the report?”

  The guard shone his light up at the wall sign in the area’s foyer.

  “Says ‘Linear Accelerators’.”

  “I better write that down. No way I’m gonna remember.”

  Silver’s phone rang as she negotiated the late morning New York City traffic. She stabbed the speakerphone button on as she pulled to a red light.

  “Cassidy.”

  “Silver. It’s Eric. Did I get you at a bad time?”

  Silver counted to three…slowly. She fought to keep her tone neutral.

  “Don’t you dare flake on her tonight,” she warned.

  “Why do you always assume the worst about me?” Eric demanded, offended.

  “Because it’s usually right. Now tell me that you’re going to honor your commitment to your daughter and spend the time you promised to with her.”

  A pause settled over the line.

  “I think you may reconsider when I tell you the reason for my call,” Eric said.

  “Spit it out. I’m knee deep in alligators on this investigation.” The light changed, and she goosed the gas.

  “Of course. Because the job always comes first.”

  Silver realized that he was being even more abrasive than usual but said nothing, wondering why her ex was calling. He never got in touch with her unless he wanted something.

  “I’ve filed for custody of Kennedy,” Eric said.

  She almost slammed into the car next to her.

  “You miserable piece of shit. What’s going on in your head? You’ve never done a thing that wasn’t self-interested. You don’t have a moment for your daughter most of the time, anyway. Why would you want to fight me for custody of her, especially given your track record…?” Silver seethed.

  “I’m concerned that her mother isn’t providing the sort of home environment that is optimal for her development,” he stated, somewhat smoother than had been rehearsed.

  “Over my dead body. This discussion is over.”

  “Silv-”

  She punched the off button. Seconds later, it rang again, and she let it go to voicemail. Whatever had she been thinking when she’d married this bastard?

  Silver paged through her phone numbers and placed a call.

  A receptionist answered. “Renkin, Larrabee and Winters.”

  “Is Ben there?” she asked.

  “One moment, please. May I ask who is calling?”

  “Silver Cassidy.”

  Music on hold jangled her nerves before a deep baritone voice came on the line.

  “Silver. Long time no talk. Do you need another divorce?” Ben had handled the parting of ways between Eric and her.

  “No. I’m afraid I’ve got a real problem, Ben.”

  The attorney’s voice became instantly serious. “What happened?”

  Two minutes later, Ben had agreed to meet Silver whenever she had time over the next day, and in the meantime would check on recent filings to get a running start on whatever her ex had cooked up. Ben remembered Eric. Smooth talker, highly intelligent, a corporate turnaround expert wholly lacking in empathy, who treated Silver like a possession rather than a loved mate. Their story hadn’t been an uncommon one — once the baby came, Silver was juggling her duties between the Bureau, her new child and her spouse; something had to give.

  Eric had adapted to her workload and the challenges of raising a family by having an affair with one of his young assistants. When Silver put two and two together on why he was increasingly distant and unavailable, it had been child’s play for an agent with her skills to catch him in the act.

  The only good news had been that Eric had deep pockets and was willing to be generous to keep matters civil, although she’d always smelled a rat in how easily he’d given in. His capitulation had surprised her — Eric played hardball in all negotiations regardless of the stakes; it was just his nature. But his admission that he’d been unfaithful, which Silver had the presence of mind to capture on tape, painted an ugly picture, so it had been prudent for him not to contest anything and simply give her what she wanted, which in the end had only been what she’d needed to provide for her daughter.

  Now, five years later, he was going in for the kill. Any infidelity in the marriage would be ancient history, and he’d waited long enough so that he could frame concerns over her lifestyle as a hard-charging FBI agent without having his past conduct examined too closely.

  Silver knew this was his way of getting back at her. He’d never gotten over being made a fool of with the tape — he’d stammered out four different lies before admitting his infidelity, his pretense of civility momentarily slipping to reveal raw hatred.

  He’d successfully hidden his true colors for their first three years together, but after that, following a difficult pregnancy, his real personality had emerged little by little. Silver had initially attributed it to stress from work, but he grew increasingly dismissive and cold as time went by, except when he wanted sex. Towards the end of the relationship, Silver came to believe that being around his family was a concession he’d made in order to appear to have a respectable home life, for display at the frequent business-related events he took them to — and later, when he was making the preparatory moves to enter the political arena.

  Perhaps that was the other part of what this was all about. Being a devoted father who was raising a daughter under his custody would be a surefire winner at the polls.

  She was still shaking from fury when she pulled into the lower East Side parking structure adjacent to her office at 26 Federal Plaza.

  If it was a fight Eric wanted, he had grossly underestimated her.

  There was no way he was getting Kennedy.

  No way in hell.

  Chapter 2

  “I want her dead.”

  The speaker was gaunt, with skin permanently jaundiced from nicotine and cirrhosis, a blue knit longshoreman’s cap pulled over his head. He kept his arms around his food tray, a reflexive posture learned quickly in prison which made it harder for other inmates to grab your food. Not that any would try with Rob Bollinger, who was standout dangerous, even in a facility that housed some of the most violent offenders in the state. “And her partner, too.”

  “Like I said, it’s already in play. Although snuffing her is going to be harder than getting him. We’ve had to contract out for the hit on her,” his lunch mate disclosed, his eyes roving around the room. Carl Lexington was Rob’s number two man inside and coordinated all the day-to-day operations — drug distribution, assaults and killings, and communications with the outside world when commissioning the occasional special request from Rob.

  “I’m never getting out of here — I’ll be rotting in the joint for the rest of my life, and it’s because of them.” Rob’s whisper increased in volume as he spoke, rage broiling below the surface. He’d been inside for six years, serving four consecutive life sentences for his role in the leadership of Seventh Sons, one of New York’s most violent motorcycle gangs.

  Once his appeals had been exhausted and he’d been incarcerate
d for good, Rob had shifted into operating a profitable prison drug-smuggling business, subsidized with a sideline of contract killings on other inmates. It had been rough at first, competing with the white supremacists, the Mexicans and the other gangs, but after he’d proved himself an absolutely vicious adversary, he’d been able to secure a foothold, and now ran twenty percent of the trafficking racket.

  But he would never see the free world again, and Rob harbored a grudge against the cops who had led the investigation that had resulted in his brother being shot to death outside of an industrial supply warehouse in upstate New York, leaving Rob severely wounded, having taken two slugs in the torso and one in the leg, which pained him every day — and always would.

  Shots fired by the agent who had somehow gotten one of his most loyal street soldiers to roll on him.

  “Silver Cassidy and Andy Teluride.” Rob pronounced their names with distaste. “I hear she’s in the city now. No longer upstate, although he still is.”

  “Security is tight at FBI headquarters, so we have to be careful and patient. But we’ll get her.” Carl spat a piece of gristle on to the floor. “He’s a done deal — dead man walking. Probably within the week.”

  Rob scowled impatiently. Decades of meth and heroin use had destroyed any elasticity in his skin; he resembled a hairless Shar Pei more than a human. Except for the eyes, which burned with a feverish intensity.

  “Who’s going to do it?”

  “Jeb’s gonna dust him,” Carl whispered. “He’s already been practicing — it’s been a while since Iraq, but he still reckons it will only take one shot. We’ve contracted with the Russians for her. I don’t want this traced back to us. Being in the city, she’s a higher risk proposition — anything goes wrong, we have a world of problems if it’s one of our crew. The Russians will do anything, and they don’t care who they’re taking out if the money’s right — most of the time they don’t even wanna know who it is…”

  A typical contract killing cost fifteen grand on the street from someone competent. A gang bang shooting went for five. But to take out a cop, much less an FBI agent, had cost fifty from the Russians after considerable negotiations.

  One of the Mexican gang members three tables over spent a little too long glaring at Carl before averting his gaze, prompting him to lean in to Rob and mutter, “We’re going to have a war in here before much longer. The beaners are looking to grab the rest of the heroin biz, and they don’t wanna share. It’s been the buzz for the last few days. You might wanna stay out of the yard till I can get it cleaned up. Could get messy,” Carl concluded, making a mental note of the young, tattooed man’s face. Staring Carl down like that was a sign of disrespect — you didn’t disrespect the Seventh Sons and live to talk about it. That this punk had dared to indicated just how out of control things were getting.

  Rob nodded. “I’ll get sick for a week. I can pay off the block guard to leave me be or get me into the infirmary until it’s over. You need anything?” Rob asked, mopping up the last of the unidentifiable stew with his bread before popping the soggy mess into his mouth.

  “Nah. I got this. But it’s gonna be ugly. Watch your back.”

  Carl stood, prompting three members of his entourage at the next table to follow suit. Another three waited to escort Rob back to his cell. While it was unlikely anyone would move on them in the cafeteria, they were taking no chances. Rob counted over forty inmates loyal to him, each one indebted to him in ways they could never repay. He wasn’t worried about a little scuffle with some Mexicans who were mistaken about how easy it would be to encroach on his business. Once a few of them had been carved and left to bleed out, they’d get the message. That was a universal language everyone understood.

  Rob finished his apple juice and smiled to himself, revealing a mouth filled with discolored teeth — another legacy of his taste for meth.

  He pushed back from the table and was almost immediately encircled by his bodyguards — heavily muscled bikers with full-sleeve tats and numerous knife and bullet scars. Even in the joint, in a jungle of vicious and hardened criminals, these men stood out as menacing.

  Rob nodded at the tallest man, deeply tanned with a shaved head and an elaborately styled beard, and the group moved to the exit, where four guards stood watching impassively, though wary of any aggressive moves. They’d heard the rumors, too. Something was going to go down, and they didn’t want to get caught in the crossfire.

  There was a lingering atmosphere of imminent violence as the inmates walked by, radiating danger with every step.

  The Mexicans across the room glared at them, their gaze a promise of death.

  Rob sneered, and then the group was out of the mess hall.

  Just another breakfast of champions in Attica.

  The killer hummed to himself as he studied the blueprints on his flat-screen monitor. He pushed the little work lamp to the side and moved a few tools to the right corner of his computer desk, clearing space for a bottle of water. He was tempted to turn on the television or the radio, or scour the Internet for some mention of the latest killing, but opted instead for patience.

  A wave of dizziness washed over him, and he closed his eyes, suddenly fatigued. Unbidden, a hazy image came to the forefront of his awareness — a house ablaze, fire engines battling to contain the out-of-control inferno, orange flames licking the night like a hungry lover. A kaleidoscope of impressions flooded his psyche: ambulances, body bags, hands gripping his arms.

  He shuddered at the memory and opened his eyes. Going down that road never led anywhere good.

  Returning to the screen, he clicked an icon and zoomed in on the blueprint, having caught something that might prove helpful. He used a draftsman’s pencil to scribble a note for further research then glanced at his list of names. Four had been crossed off.

  The next one was going to be a pleasure for him, not that the act of killing the targets gave him any titillation. On the contrary, other than pride in a job well done, he felt flat after each operation. But number five was different. He was an especially loathsome example of humanity. The head of a small, boutique brokerage firm, he had rocketed to notoriety during the 2008 financial crisis, after miraculously making a fortune as the economy tanked. He’d briefly been a headline name, calling the financial meltdown correctly and having taken auspiciously-timed bets that the markets would tumble.

  The killer rubbed at the stiffness in his neck. He’d only gotten a few hours of sleep. There had been too much adrenaline coursing through his system after slipping through the service entrance of the latest victim’s building shouldering a black nylon backpack containing his blood-spattered clothes and tools of the trade.

  Distracted from the blueprint, he slid his phone out of his shirt pocket and plugged it into an adapter, then downloaded the photos he’d taken the prior night. He would send a few choice ones to the papers to ensure maximum headline value. Some wouldn’t print them, but there would always be one or two that would, even if they censored them. Trick was to choose ones that were sensationalistic, but not too gory.

  His face broke into a pained grin, then he succumbed to a coughing fit. It was time to take his meds again. He’d been so engrossed in the blueprints and his tangent down memory lane that he’d forgotten.

  He padded across the scarred hardwood floors to the ancient kitchen, where he pulled a plastic storage container from a top cabinet and set about sorting his morning doses.

  Routines were important, even if this one was a distasteful necessity. He needed to stay fit to finish this job — forgetting his meds could be disastrous. Wouldn’t do to drift off or overlook things due to pain or fatigue.

  Perhaps the definition of being truly nuts was believing you were sane, even though you had embarked on a murder binge, he mused.

  But if he was crazy, then lunacy was the appropriate response to a world run amok. He had not an iota of doubt that he was on the right path; at no point in his life had he ever been more sure of anything.
r />   One night, shortly before making the decision to become The Regulator, he’d read a quotation by Edmund Burke on the Internet that had synthesized his jumbled thoughts into a cause: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Those words had forced him to think deeply about his situation. While the eighteenth century politician and philosopher probably wouldn’t have endorsed his murdering a group of parasites, the killer was comfortable with his decision.

  If nobody would punish these men, then his new hobby would be dragging them to accountability in his own crude court. Maybe they were protected by a system they controlled, but there was no escaping the rough justice of The Regulator.

  Coughing again as one of the pills caught in his throat, he took another sip of water before returning to his computer to study the blueprint in more depth.

  There was so much to do, so little time remaining.

  He would have to work very smart to accomplish everything he had set out to.

  Which was fine.

  He was a very smart man.

  Chapter 3

  Silver emerged from the stainless steel double elevator doors at the Manhattan FBI field office and moved through the lobby to the employee entrance, where she endured the redundant security checkpoints with thinly disguised impatience. She was still off-balance from Eric’s call and was struggling to maintain her composure. The question of why he’d decided to make her life hell now, fully five years after the divorce, weighed on her. And with her running an important task force, the timing couldn’t have been worse.

  The first order of business would be to find out what sort of stalling tactics Ben could mount to buy maneuvering room. Silver quietly debated whether to cancel his visitation with Kennedy that night — he was taking her to the ballet — and decided that it would be unfair. She would be punishing her daughter to send him a message. Kennedy had been talking about nothing but the performance for the last week, and Silver knew how much she was looking forward to it.