The elevator dropped him to the underground garage, where his red Nissan Z waited in its assigned space. The license plate read DEFY F8.
Defy Fate. Jack liked the sentiment. To his way of thinking, Fate was just one more mark to be conned.
He slipped behind the wheel and eased out of his space, thumbing the remote control to lift the automatic gate. Wilshire Boulevard swept him to the freeway on-ramp. He gunned the engine and hurtled onto the northbound 405.
Traffic was surprisingly light. Slicing deftly from lane to lane, he fed a disc into the CD player and cranked up the volume. Springsteen poured out of the four coaxial speakers, howling “Thunder Road” in his raspy, street-worn voice.
Jack rapped his knuckles on the steering wheel and sang along.
Bruce was an old story to him. Jack had listened to his LPs as a high-school student in Montclair, New Jersey, twenty years ago, long before the Born in the USA album made the Boss a national celebrity. He liked the anger and violence of the early Springsteen, the scrawny kid wounded by the world and snarling back at it in furious despair.
On a humid August night in 1978, he’d listened to Springsteen for hours, huddled in his bedroom in his parents’ house, headphones bracketing his ears, till he’d gotten up the nerve for his first kill.
He had been eighteen then. At the time he hadn’t thought of it as a first kill. It was the only murder he was contemplating, the one he had fantasized and rehearsed for seven long years.
Meredith had deserved it, too. That bitch.
A chill moved through him as he remembered the ecstatic pleasure of slamming her head into the concrete rim of the swimming pool, then holding her, unconscious, under the surface till her lungs were waterlogged sacs.
Afterward, he’d been free of any impulse to kill for a long time. Having exacted his revenge, he felt liberated, unencumbered by the past.
Except that he exhibited a curious reluctance to date women who reminded him of her. He preferred brunettes and redheads. He stayed away from blonds, most particularly blue-eyed, fair-skinned blonds.
He made it through his twenties without violence. But in his early thirties he did a thirteen-month stretch at Lompoc for a bank-examiner scam. His confinement gave him time to think, too much time, and the frustration of enforced abstinence from sex seemed to draw other, darker needs to his surface.
It was then that the feelings started.
He knew no word to describe them more exactly than that. Not sexual urges, not homicidal impulses, not sadistic tendencies-yet a little of all these, mixed with something else, something indefinable.
He had always been smooth with women. He could have a one-night stand whenever he liked. But it seemed that ordinary sex just wasn’t enough anymore.
He kept remembering the reflexive muscular twitches of Meredith’s body as he held her submerged, the pops and jerks of her shoulders, the sudden heaving of her chest as she inhaled water. And once she was dead, the wet blond hair wrapping her face like ribbons of kelp, the glazed emptiness in her eyes when he peeled back the lids.
It had been the supreme moment of his life, more satisfying than any con. And he wanted another triumph like it. And another. And another.
But he was determined to do it right. He’d made a small but potentially serious mistake in carrying out Meredith’s execution. The cops had been suspicious, and he’d spent some sleepless nights before her death was finally ruled an accident.
This time there would be no sloppy screw-ups. Thirteen months in a cell had been long enough; he would never go back.
He delayed his plans until he settled on the perfect strategy-the killing of strangers in random cities far from home-and the ideal method.
His discovery of the method was pure luck. During a routine medical checkup, the nurse left him alone in the examination room for a few minutes. Restless, he looked through the drawers and found a box of unused disposable syringes. One of them went in his coat pocket, never to be missed.
Being plastic, with only a thin steel needle at its core, it could be hidden in his suit jacket and carried through an airport metal detector without triggering the alarm. It was quick and sure, bloodless and silent, and above all, intensely satisfying. He loved watching the women’s convulsions, their rolling eyes and flapping limbs.
Ronni Tyler’s death throes had been particularly gratifying. He had kissed her when she was finally dead, murmuring in her ear: “I hope it was good for you, too.”
The 405 rocketed him to the eastbound 101, where traffic was heavier and progress slow. He had nearly finished the Springsteen CD by the time he reached the strip mall in the North Hollywood district of L.A. He pulled into his parking slot at 9:25.
Of the eight business establishments in the modest L-shaped complex, Consolidated Silver amp; Gold Investors, Inc., had the largest office but the smallest sign. It was not meant to attract customers off the street.
A clamor of voices calling out buy and sell orders assaulted him as he stepped into the boiler room. The impression of frantic activity, like everything else about the operation, was a scam, a cheat; there was no mob of traders here, merely a tape loop playing sounds of a busy commodities exchange over four speakers bolted to the walls. A corny ruse, but it kept his salesmen wired while they worked the phones, and it served well as background noise during the pitch.
Jack paused just inside the doorway and surveyed his kingdom. Gray short-nap carpet, painted plywood walls, extension cords stretched along the baseboards. Half a dozen cheap metal desks and swivel chairs flanked by wastebaskets filled with old newspapers and takeout food containers. The wide front windows had been covered with Venetian blinds, now partially open to let in stripes of sun that complemented the frosty glare of fluorescent panels.
Three of his four men-he only hired men; women couldn’t sell; it was an article of faith with him-were already on the phones, pressing hard for the first deal of the day. They greeted him with smiles and waves, and kept talking. The smiles were genuine; his men respected him and liked him. Behind his back, but sometimes within earshot, they called him The Master.
Jack poured himself a mug of coffee, then sat at his desk in a rear corner, away from the glare of the windows. He wondered, not for the first time, what his men would think of him if they knew how he spent his weekends.
Perhaps they would despise him for it. But he didn’t think so. There was an undercurrent of boiling violence beneath the average scam artist’s smooth exterior.
He would never know for certain, but he liked to believe that if his men did learn the truth about him, they would respect The Master that much more.
5
Jack Dance’s arrival at his place of business was observed and recorded by four FBI technicians in a green van parked across the street. Video and still cameras captured his brief walk to the office door. The same cameras, their telephoto lenses focused on the front windows, caught glimpses of him through gaps in the Venetian blinds. Only once he sat at his desk, away from the windows, was he lost to sight.
“He’s in there,” the camera operator said. “If he follows his routine, he won’t come out till noon.”
The communications technician radioed a transmission on a VHF band. The signal was unscrambled, necessitating a coded message.
“Weather Central, this is Tracking Post A. Storm front has moved in.”
Peter Lovejoy’s voice crackled over the technician’s earplug: “Continue monitoring the system’s progress. We’re placing additional resources at your disposal.”
Jack’s first call of the day was to a Mr. Pavel Zykmund of Downey. Mr. Zykmund’s name had come from a
