The 20th Victim (Women's Murder Club #20)(47)

The man wanted exposure. He had proven that he had inside knowledge. He wanted to get the word out that he and/or others were eliminating drug dealers, one piece of crap at a time.

He’d obscured his identity, but he wasn’t being coy.

His message to drug dealers was twofold: Do you want to live? Or do you want to “spin the wheel”?

The final draft of her email to him was short and simple. “I am sympathetic to your cause and have an idea for spreading your message. Please write or call me again so we can discuss.”

In fact, she abhorred frontier justice, but if she could be this man’s conduit to the worldwide press, he might give her the key to the whole shooting match. She would love to draw the killers out of their hidey-holes and into the hands of the SFPD.

But she was impatient. She felt a breeze. It was the passage of time. The clock on her computer screen read a couple of minutes after noon. Where was the mystery man right now? Was he at his computer, reading the news, basking in the growing public praise for what he was calling the “new war on drugs”?

Cindy sent her two-sentence email. Got the Message sent notification. And now she was on the hook, waiting for his reply.

She turned her mind to other things. She spoke with Claire, who told her she’d never been so bored in her life. They laughed when Cindy added, “Better bored than dead.”

She texted Richie to say, Can you tell me ANYTHING?

Ah. No.

Screw you, buster, she responded, forcing herself to add, Kidding! She got up, made a wide counterclockwise circle around the newsroom so that she could avoid not only McGowan but Tyler as well. The lunch wagon was in the outer corridor near the elevator. She bought an egg salad sandwich and a bag of pretzels, then took the long way back to her desk.

She checked her email, hoping that the man of the spinning wheel had replied in the ten minutes since she’d invited him to be her confidential informant.

Nope. He hadn’t. And he hadn’t called, either.

So she opened her crime blog, skimmed the new com ments on her original post, and found a thread she was least expecting. It was about the love of killing, the high of shooting, of slicing arteries, of stabbing and hacking off body parts, of taking trophies.

Oh, my God. What door to hell had she opened?





CHAPTER 70





CINDY SKIMMED THE new comments on her blog, gobbled them down, then went back to the top of the page and read them again. The posts were about the love of violence and, to her mind, had been written by psychopaths.

Like this one: “Daily life is gray. When you’re a soldier, you’re trained to kill, given direct orders from your CO, and compensated with the guilt-free experience that’s the greatest high in the world. Then you come home, and everything is gray again. If you’re like me, gray is not good enough.”

The post had been signed with a screen name, and the writer hadn’t confessed to a specific killing. Interestingly, he’d gotten dozens of likes.

Other writers had expressed similar thoughts, sending her anecdotes about blood lust that only war could satisfy. Some veterans of foreign wars had detailed the taking of trophies—ears and hands and fingers—spelling out in loving specificity the pleasure of taking body parts, as well as taking photos of piles of the dead. The language used to describe these atrocities was too graphic for the Chronicle to print.

More to the point, the posts were about killings in war.

Nowhere in this avalanche of gory imagery was there a connection to the snipers and the victims in American cities. Cindy kept reading, and finally, at the bottom of the fourth screen, she found a post with a completely different feel, a declaration.

Her vision narrowed. She knew who he was. She read fast, then again more slowly:

There are killers who torture, who revel in taking life, sometimes in rage, sometimes for pleasure. This is not my style. When I kill a drug dealer, I am in control. My fellow travelers and I know our targets long before we fire a gun. They are guilty of ruining lives and of taking them by the tens of thousands as a byproduct of their sales jobs.

I’m proud of the recent work we’ve done. We’ve saved countless lives while only taking a few. I feel no pleasure in the shootings. I feel proud of the results. I’m doing good work. And I stand by it.

The post was signed Kill Shot, and Cindy knew from the cadence and structure of his post that this was the man who’d declared the “new war on drugs.”

She grabbed the phone to call Tyler but stopped because McGowan had appeared in her doorway. She put down the receiver.

“What is it, Jeb? What do you need?”





CHAPTER 71





CINDY STARED UP at the creep Tyler had forced her to take under her wing, wishing that she could make him disappear just by looking at him.

“See how you feel about this,” said McGowan. “I roughed out the profile of the first victim.”

Cindy knew a lot about Roger Jennings, the ballplayer who’d been killed at the Taco King. She and Jeb had seen the car, the pregnant wife who’d been spared, and the hole punched in the windshield by a bullet before it killed the Giants catcher. Thanks to Richie’s friend Sawyer, she had a photo of the word Rehearsal written in the dust of the Porsche’s rear window.

It had been verified that the veteran ballplayer had sold recreational drugs to his teammates. That wasn’t even news. She’d assigned Jeb to writing victim profiles, so now he was saying he’d done it.