The 7th Victim

The evil had to be purged. Had to be. Had to.

He lifted the serrated knife and felt its weight—its power—in his hand. Melanie Hoffman had paid dearly, for sure. Just payback for an unjust crime.

It was, it was, it was.

Like a master painter inscribing his name at the bottom of a canvas, he brought back the knife and drove it through Melanie Hoffman’s left eye socket.

She must not see.

She must not.

She must.

two

What is it with me and banks?

Supervisory Special Agent Karen Vail’s weapon was aimed at the loser, who just stood there, his .38 Special pointing right at her. Sweat pimpled his greasy forehead, matting dirty black hair to his skin. His hands were shaking, his eyes were bugged out like golf balls, and his breathing was rapid.

“Don’t move or I’ll blow your goddamn head off!” Vail yelled it a bit louder than she’d intended, but the adrenaline was pumping. She wanted the message to get through the perp’s thick skull that she meant business. The frightened patrons of Virginia Commonwealth Savings Bank got the message. Those who were still standing hit the ground with a thud.

“Drop the fucking gun,” the man screamed back. “Drop it now!”

Vail smirked. That’s exactly what I was going to say to him. As he shuffled his feet and held the hostage in the crook of his left arm, Vail flashed on Alvin, a skel she’d busted sixteen years ago while a member of the NYPD. It wasn’t Alvin—he was doing time at Riker’s Island—but, nonetheless, she thought he could be the guy’s twin.

“I’m not putting my gun down till you put yours down, pal,” Vail said to the perp. “That’s the way it’s going to work.”

“I call the fucking shots here, bitch. Not you!”

Great, she thought, I got one who wants to fight. It’d been six years since she’d been a field agent, eleven years since she’d camped behind a detective shield. Though she still trusted her instincts, her skill-set was in the crapper. It wasn’t like putting on pantyhose every morning. Dealing with hostage situations took practice to know you’d do the right thing under pressure, without thinking. As Vail had often been kidded by the others in her squad, the “without thinking” part came naturally to her.

“Since you won’t tell me your name, I’m going to call you Alvin,” she said. “Is that okay, Alvin?”

“I don’t care what the fuck you call me, just drop the fucking gun!” He shuffled his feet some more, his eyes darting from the left side of the room to the right, and back. As if he were watching a table tennis match.

Alvin’s hostage, a thirty-something stringy blond with a sizable rock on her ring finger, began whimpering. Her eyes were bugged out, too, but it wasn’t from drugs. It was raw fear, the sudden realization that, FBI or not, Vail might not get her out of this alive.

And Vail had to admit that so far it was not going well. She’d already blown protocol about as well as any rookie could her first day on the job. She should’ve yelled “Freeze, scumbag, FBI!” and he would have then just pissed his pants and dropped the gun, surrendering to law enforcement and ending the nightmare before it started. At least, that’s the way it always happened in the old TV shows she watched as a kid.

But this was reality, or at least it was for Vail. For the Alvin look-alike standing in front of her, it was some speed-induced frenzy, a dream where he could do anything he wanted, and not get hurt.

That was the part that bothered her.

She kept her Glock locked tightly in her hands, lining up Alvin’s nose in her sight. He was only about twenty feet away, but the woman he was holding, or rather choking with his left arm, was too close for Vail to risk a shot.

The other part of protocol she’d screwed up was that she should’ve been talking calmly to Alvin, so as not to incite him. But that was according to the Manual of Investigative and Operational Guidelines—known throughout the Bureau as MIOG, or “my-og.” In Vail’s mind, it should’ve been called MIOP, short for myopic. Narrow-minded. And if there was one thing Vail was sure of at the moment, it was that the guy who wrote MIOG didn’t have a crazed junkie pointing a snub-nosed .38 at him.

So they stood there, Alvin twitching and shuffling, doing what looked like a peculiar slow dance with his hostage, and the level-headed Karen Vail, practicing what was sometimes called a Mexican standoff. Was that a politically correct term? She didn’t know, nor did she care. There was no backup outside, no tactical sniper focusing his Redfield variable scope on Alvin’s forehead, awaiting the green light to fire. She’d just walked into the bank to make a deposit, and now this.

She let her eyes swing to Alvin’s left, to a spot just over his shoulder. She quickly looked back to him . . . making it seem as if she’d seen someone behind him, about to sneak up and knock him over the head. She saw his eyes narrow, as if he’d noticed her momentary glance. But he didn’t take the bait, and for whatever reason kept his ping-pong gaze bouncing to either side of Vail. She realized she needed to be more direct.

She turned her head and looked to his left again and, reaching into her distant past as a one-time drama major, shouted (deeply, from the abdomen), “No, don’t shoot!”

Well, this got Alvin’s attention, and as he swiveled to look over his left shoulder, he yanked the hostage down and away, and Vail drilled the perp good. Right in the temple. As he was falling to the ground in slow mo, she was asking herself, “Was this a justified shooting?”

Actually, she was telling herself to get the hell over there and kick away his weapon. She couldn’t care less if it was a justified shooting. The FBI’s OPR unit—Office of Professional Responsibility, or Office of Paper-pushing Robots—would make the final call on that. The hostage, though frazzled and rough around the edges, was alive. That was all that mattered at the moment.

Once Vail knocked aside Alvin’s weapon, she took a moment to get a closer look at his face. At this angle he didn’t look so much like Alvin. Could’ve been because he had the blank deer-in-headlights death mask on, or because of the oozing bullet hole on the side of his head. Hard to say.

Vail suddenly became aware of the commotion amongst the tellers and security guards, who had emerged from their hiding places. The hostage was now shrieking and blabbering something unintelligible. A man in a gray suit was by her side, attempting to console her.

“Don’t just stand there,” Vail yelled to the closest guard. “Call 911 and tell them an officer needs assistance.”

It wasn’t entirely true, but it wasn’t exactly a lie, either. Still, she thought the cops would come faster if they thought it was one of their own who needed help instead of an FBI agent. Sometimes they don’t like fibbies much, the locals. But with banks, the police had to share jurisdiction with the Bureau, so she didn’t anticipate much of a tiff over it.

As she stepped away from Alvin’s body, her BlackBerry’s vibrating jolt made her jump. She yanked it from her belt and glanced at the display. Her intestines tightened. Her heart, still racing from adrenaline, precipitously slowed. The brief text message sucked the air from her breath.

She had hoped she’d never see another day like this. She had hoped it was over.

But the Dead Eyes killer had claimed another victim.

three

In six years as an FBI profiler, Karen Vail had not experienced anything quite like this. She had seen photos of decomposed corpses, eviscerated bodies, bodies without heads or limbs. Seven years as a cop and homicide detective in New York City had shown her the savages of gang killings and drive-by shootings, children left parentless, and a system that often seemed more interested in politics than in the welfare of its people.

But the brutal details of this crime scene were telling. A thirty-year-old woman lost her life in this bedroom, a