CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Garvey was in a wonderful mood as she and her officers booked the arrested gangsters. "This is the single biggest blow we've dealt to the Georgia Syndicate since I started with the department," she said to the agents with a grin. "Aside from the dogfighting, we've arrested most of Harris's old muscle, and Mr. Kerry is known as one of the go-to people for drug running in the state. He is to drugs what Harris was to prostitution."

"Congratulations," Michael said with a haunted smile.

Faith's heart went out to him. She hadn't had a chance to talk to him about what he witnessed at the warehouse, but from the brief glimpse she had scene, it couldn't have been pretty. In hindsight, it was a good thing she hadn't gone in. She didn't think she would have been able to keep her cool the way Michael did.

"Speaking of Mr. Kerry," Garvey said, "he's ready for you now. We have him in room three. I don't know if you'll get much from him, though. He knows better than to speak against the Syndicate."

"I don't need him to rat out his gang," Faith said, "I just need to know if he's our killer."

"Well," Garvey said, "good luck to you. Either way, he's going to jail for a long time. Maybe you can use that. I'm pretty sure the DA will cut him a deal if he can tell us who the killer is. Of course, if he's the killer, that won't work, but it's always worth a shot."

"We'll see what we can do," Faith said.

She, Michael, and Turk headed to interrogation room three. Roman Kerry was shackled to the floor, the chair and the table. No one was taking any chances with him, considering his size and obvious temper. He glared at the agents when they walked in and said, "So the coward has to tie me up to talk to me."

"If it helps you to think that way about it," Michael said.

"Yeah, you're so above it all, aren't you?" Roman said, "You're so much better than all of us lowly street types."

"If you want to get into a pissing match with me, you can do it after we talk," Michael said.

"I'm not talking to you," Roman said.

"Not even if I use the word deal?" Michael asked.

Roman laughed. "Did that pretty little cop tell you they were gonna offer me a deal? No one's giving me a deal, man. That's just something cops say."

"Well, we're FBI," Faith said, "We outrank the cops. If we say you get a deal, then you get a deal."

"And I should trust you? You got me here because you lied to me. And hey, good job. The game recognizes the game. You got me. But I'm not going to help you get anyone else. Even if I was a snitch, talking to you only gets me killed, inside or outside."

"Well, how about this, then?" Faith said, "You don't have to talk about anyone else. You tell us what you know about the deaths of Harvey Harris and Vincent Mariano. You tell us where to find the evidence we need, and as far as the world knows, we just figured it out ourselves."

Roman shook his head incredulously at the agents. "All right," he said. "If you two just need to hear the sounds of your own voices a bit, go ahead and keep talking, but this is it for me."

"What do you think will happen when your bosses find out that you just screwed up an entire dogfighting ring because you got stupid?" Faith asked. "Not to mention that without Harris, they don't have prostitution and without you, they don't have drugs?"

Roman sat silently, staring contemptuously at the officers.

Faith looked down at Turk. She mouthed, "Be mean."

Turk lunged at Roman, snapping and barking in front of his face, glaring and snarling. The criminal paled a few shades but remained silent, even when Turk leaned forward so close their noses were almost touching.

Faith sighed and called Turk back. She and Michael tried different tacks for a half hour or so, but eventually, they had to accept that they weren't going to be able to get him to talk. They left and met with Garvey behind the two-way mirror. Garvey nodded sympathetically. "Yeah, the street boys will usually break if you lean on ‘em hard enough, but when you get into management, it gets harder to get them to talk. The thing is, Roman's not wrong. His superiors will kill him if he talks. Even if he takes full responsibility for the murders, unless he does it with their permission, they'll waste him."

"Have you learned anything from the others?" Faith asked.

"Well, that pitbull the other organizers were talking about," Garvey said, "Apparently, Roman killed it in front of people. Tied him to a stake and shot him, then gave a speech about not messing with his money. Typical tough guy crap. But we have him for animal cruelty, operating a gambling business without a gambling license or a business license, endangerment, and a bunch of minor charges. We'll almost certainly get solicitation to stick too. Not sure about the drugs. People at his level usually make sure nothing's traceable to them, but we have enough to put him in jail for fifteen years, at least."

"All right," Faith said, "we're going to go get some coffee. If by some miracle he does happen to talk, come get us."

"Will do," Garvey said, "I wouldn't hold your breath, though."

Faith and Michael headed to the breakroom. The coffee was of the sort that Michael would derisively call "hotel coffee," but when Faith handed him a cup, he drank it down in three big gulps, undeterred by the heat or the flavor.

Faith poured him another cup and sat across from him. He stared ahead, his eyes spacy. "Hey," she said softly, placing a hand over his. "You okay?"

He took a deep breath and released it slowly. "I figured out why they wanted Macy."

"Bait dog?"

He nodded. "I don't get people sometimes, man." He chuckled. "I don't even get myself. I mean, I've hunted plenty of people who killed other people, but I've never hated anyone as much as I hated Gaucho and Roman. Everyone there, really. I don't know why, but something about watching the dogfights just seemed worse than anything I've ever witnessed."

Faith nodded. "It's the same reason why people who hurt children are worse to us than people who hurt adults. We see dogs as defenseless." She looked at Turk, who had taken the opportunity to nap for a moment. "Even when they're not, they're just so dependent on us that when people take advantage of that, it just enrages us. There's an unwritten rule we have that you don't attack people who can't defend themselves."

"Yeah," Michael said. "Well, bottom line, I can't wait to get home, and next time, organized crime can handle this. Give me my garden variety homicidal psychopaths over this crap any day."

Faith smiled sadly and squeezed his hand.

The door flew open, and Garvey leaned in, her face deadly serious.

"He talked?" Faith asked hopefully.

Garvey shook her head. "No, but he's not the murderer."

"How do you…" then Faith understood.

***

"Robert Evans," Garvey said. "Forty-three, divorced, lived alone. Looks like a home invasion. The killer forced his way inside, overpowered Evans, slipped the collar on, and… well, you can see the rest."

Evans was in even worse shape than the previous two victims. His body was contorted, his limbs pulled into a fetal position, hands claws and face a rictus of pain. His eyes were glassy and shrunken, an effect of the electricity burning the fluid off. He looked like a horror movie.

"This guy's escalating," Michael said, "the next one's going to look like a burnt hot dog."

Faith couldn't think of anything to say to that. She asked Garvey, "What's the time of death?"

"Coroner says between two and four hours ago."

In other words, when they raided the warehouse. Roman Kerry couldn't possibly be their killer.

Faith sighed. "Did the neighbors see anything?"

Garvey shook her head. "This is one of those neighborhoods where people go to bed at ten o'clock and don't turn their lights on until seven. Everyone minds their own business because everyone assumes no one else has any business to mind. I'm pretty sure this is the first murder this neighborhood has ever seen."

"Then who placed the call?"

"Security patrol. He noticed the front door ajar, and when he went in to check, he found Robert. His supervisor confirms he left dispatch twenty minutes before arriving, so no chance he's the killer."

"Dis Evans own a dog?"

"No. Never has. No connection to the dogfighting ring or the Syndicate in any way."

Faith shook her head. "So why?"

They fell silent. Turk started sniffing around the body, looking for anything that would connect this victim to the previous ones. Other than bootprints that matched the one at the second crime scene, he found nothing.

"So no one saw or heard any vehicles?" Faith asked, "no lights? Nothing?"

"If they did, then they didn't consider it out of the ordinary or important enough to mention," Garvey said.

"So why him?" Faith asked again. "Why any of them? I get the gang connection between Harris and Mariano, but why Evans? The man lives fifteen miles from anywhere the gang operates."

"Maybe he hurt one of the girls at a club," Michael suggested. "You said he was divorced? Maybe we should talk to his ex-wife. Maybe he was abusive, and he screwed with the wrong girl."

"If that's the case, then we're looking at a gang hit," Faith said, "and then I have to wonder why the Syndicate would kill one of their street bosses without a replacement ready."

"Maybe it wasn't one of the Syndicate's girls. Iliev told us that the Syndicate controls all of the prostitution in Atlanta. Maybe the Bulgarians moved their operation to the suburbs."

"Maybe," Faith said, "but why kill a john like this? I could see killing Harris this way to send a message, but a civilian? That's a lot of risk just to kill a nobody."

"Well," Michael said, "it paid off."

Faith supposed he had a point.

"I want to talk with forensics," she told Garvey. "Maybe they have details that can help us narrow down our source."

"Be my guest," Garvey said.

The CSI in charge was a bespectacled man around Faith's age named Guillaume. "But you can call me Gil."

"Well, Gil, what can you tell us?" Michael asked.

"Well," Gil said, "Cause of death is pretty obvious." He pointed to a livid red wound that encircled Evans' neck. A pool of drying blood had settled underneath the wound. "He was shocked so bad that the skin of his neck literally melted onto the collar. The killer took a souvenir home with him."

Turk sniffed at the wound to get the scent, staying a respectful distance away so he didn't compromise the evidence. Faith asked, "Can you tell us anything about the weapon? Any guess on the kind of model?"

"That is beyond my area of expertise," Gil said, "but I don't know if it would help you to know exactly what model it is. Those things aren't tracked by serial number, and even if they were, well, Atlanta's a big city. It's a pretty good bet that there are thousands of those things out here."

"What about the electricity?" Michael asked. "How was that provided?"

"Well, we're looking at something in the range of one hundred twenty milliamps, give or take. That's definitely enough to kill someone, but depending on the voltage you use, it might not kill them right away."

"So he's torturing his victims."

"Oh yeah. Evans here probably took over a minute to lose consciousness and another minute to die. Then our bad guy kept going for… I'd guess another two or three minutes to turn him into jerky." He grimaced. "Sorry. That was uncalled for."

It was, but Faith wasn't concerned with Gil's propriety at the moment. "Any other physical evidence? Fibers, body fluids?"

"No body fluids," Gil replied, "a few fibers. We'll run them at the lab, but I can tell you just from a cursory examination that they're going to come back as twenty-dollar pants and a ten-dollar t-shirt. Once more, the kind of stuff that half the city wears."

Faith and Michael looked at each other. "Thank you, Gil," Michael said. "If you find anything else, please call us."

"Will do."

They stepped away, and Faith said, "So our killer is taking care only to cover his fingerprints but not bothering with the rest of the evidence because it's so commonplace that it might as well be untraceable."

"Hiding in plain sight," Michael said. "Came in through the front door and everything."

"But he's not careless," Faith said, "because he takes everything with him, and covers his fingerprints, which is the only thing he could leave behind that could identify him and not everyone in Georgia."

"So are we thinking law enforcement?" Michael asked, "someone who would know enough to understand what's worth hiding and what isn't?"

"It's possible," Faith said, "it's also possible he just knows very little about crime scene investigation and just didn't think to cover his boots in plastic or wear clothing that wouldn't fray."

"So we're surrounded by a sea of possibilities, none of which leads to certainty," Michael summarized.

"One of them leads to certainty," Faith said. "We just have to figure out which one. I want to talk to the ex-wife. Maybe she'll be more willing to talk about what her husband was into than the gang is willing to talk about what they're into."

"It's certainly worth a shot," Michael agreed.