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.
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.
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:
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.
When she entered the cubicle area where most of the agents worked, the receptionist stopped her and handed her a stack of yellow message slips. Monique had been there for three years and was always a sunny personality, as well as a friend.
“You have a visitor waiting for you in conference room one. Hubba hubba,” she said with an exaggerated wink. Monique was aggressively single and let every male within shouting distance know it. Not a bad strategy, Silver had to admit. Better than hers of playing hermit at home every night with her daughter.
Silver honestly couldn’t remember the last time she’d been on a date — actually, not true. It had been fourteen months ago and ended in disaster. He was an attorney, good looking and smart, but during the few hours of dinner it had become obvious that he was neurotic and self-involved, and he didn’t hold his liquor well. When she’d begged off on a nightcap at a bar a few blocks from the restaurant, he hadn’t gotten the hint and had made a fumbled attempt at kissing her that she’d dodged, but that had sealed the night as a failure.
He’d called the next day to apologize and proposed trying again on another date, but she’d politely shut that down.
“Visitor?” Silver asked, ignoring Monique’s customary lewd innuendo.
“Agent from Financial Crimes in Washington. A hottie. I was going to sit on his lap and keep him company while he waited, but who would answer the phones?” Monique offered.
“That’s mighty hospitable of you, M,” Silver agreed.
“No wedding ring, mid to late thirties, looks like he works out.” She rolled her eyes as if swooning. “Big hands.”
Silver shook her head in wonder. Monique had always been the same. In some ways, Silver envied her single-minded focus.
“I’ll be in there within a few minutes. Got to drop my junk off.”
“If you don’t want him, tell him I’m free for lunch, or dinner, or anything else he can think of,” Monique trilled as Silver wove her way to her small office.
Upon heading up the task force, she’d been upgraded from a cubicle to a ten by twelve box with no window and the most unattractive fluorescent lighting in history, but at least it gave her a modicum of privacy, which she badly needed right now.
She flipped on the lights and tossed her purse and briefcase onto her gunmetal gray credenza and glanced at the row of photos of Kennedy that occupied the shelves of her Ikea bookcase, alongside textbooks on investigation procedures, forensics, and related arcana. Kennedy as a baby, Kennedy as a toddler, and then transforming into her current state, an adolescent goth phase fueled more by boredom and pre-teen rebellion than anything. For the last six months, all she’d wanted to wear was black, and she’d taken to painting her nails the same inky color. Rather than fighting her on it, Silver had been non-judgmental, all the while scouring the web for confirmation that her daughter wasn’t going to become a dope fiend or a schoolyard killer.
At ten years old, Kennedy was frighteningly smart and quick to read people, but with a snotty smart-aleck bent.
In other words, very much like Silver had been as a child.
She supposed that the universe chose its punishments fittingly.
Realizing that she was meandering, she gathered the case file, a yellow legal tablet and her trusty iPad, and strode purposefully to the bank of conference rooms at the far end of the work area.
When she opened the door, Supervisory Special Agent Richard Gale looked up from his notebook, pushed back his chair, and stood. Silver took him in with a quick appraising glance — six, maybe six one, black wavy hair cut
