FADE TO BLACK - Thrilling Romantic Suspense - Book 1 of the BLACK CATS Series Read online

  “They’ll try to take this case as soon as word gets out,” Brandon added.

  “You’re right, so what? It’s not ours; it’s the local PD’s. You should give them the file and let them do the investigating. If they want the bureau’s help finding this sick bastard, they can ask the NCAVC like everybody else.” He glanced at the screen again, noting the ferocity of the crime, doubting they were dealing with any kind of normal killer. “Or the BAU.”

  The way things went at the Behavioral Analysis Unit, however, they might not get help. That department was overworked, overbooked, and able to assist in only a fraction of the cases local jurisdictions asked them to come in on.

  Brandon’s chin jutted out in visible determination. “You’re wrong, and I’m about to prove that. And then, together, we can make sure Wyatt has absolutely no doubt that it’s legitimately ours to investigate.”

  Frowning, and not sure he wanted to know, Dean narrowed his eyes. A sudden fear that he understood made him say, “She’s not the only victim.”

  When the other man shook his head, Dean slumped onto an empty chair, figuring he’d need to sit for whatever Brandon had to tell him.

  “There are more, spread across four states.”

  Damn.

  “And every one of them has a Web connection.”

  Double damn.

  Now he understood Cole’s determination to keep the case, and why he wanted Dean’s help. Getting Wyatt Blackstone completely on board was the only way their group would not be steamrolled out of the investigation. The videos were aired on the Internet; some would say that didn’t mean the Internet was actually an integral part of the case. And that the NCAVC, which contained both ViCAP and the Behavioral Analysis Unit, was the better department to coordinate the investigation.

  They might be right. Dean couldn’t deny that he wouldn’t mind if it played out that way. He hadn’t clocked in for this. He’d left his secure job in ViCAP to join an experimental team, hoping for a little normalcy, some stability so he could go back into court and fight his ex-wife for more time with his seven-year-old son.

  It wasn’t that Dean didn’t feel a stirring, deep inside his law enforcement core, that demanded the privilege of taking this bastard down. But his transfer had been about getting away from that dark shit so his ex could no longer use his job against him. It wouldn’t work if he began hunting a serial killer who could teach Dahmer a thing or two about causing pain.

  It’s what you do. What you do best.

  “How many?” he asked, needing to know.

  “Eight, going back almost a year and a half.”

  Eight.

  Eight victims. Eight people brutally murdered, their last painful moments captured on film. Had they all, Dean wondered, been tortured before their deaths and mutilated after them, as this victim appeared to have been?

  A dull throb began to pound inside his skull, and his stomach churned. He closed his eyes, a series of faces appearing in his mind: his sister’s, his parents’, his son’s. Each of them replaced the face of that woman on the video until he felt almost physically ill.

  And finally, he simply couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “All right. Let’s go find Wyatt.”

  They did, and within an hour, the entire team was sardined into their boss’s small office. After watching the video clip and asking a few pertinent questions, Wyatt had called everyone together to get the details on the case all at once. Now, they were all watching the tape, Dean for the third time. At this point, it was imbedding itself frame by frame into his brain.

  “Anybody need to see this again?” Brandon asked as the horror faded to black.

  “No way,” said Special Agent Jackie Stokes. “Come on, Cole, it’s fake, right?”

  Stokes, a striking forty-something-year-old African-American woman whose forensic skills were matched only by her talent with a keyboard, stood beside Dean, rigid with disbelief. Tension rolled off her lean, muscular form.

  “It’s not. And I also hate to say it, but this is just one of the videos I’ve found.” Cole leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms, looking up at each person in the group, all clustered tightly around their boss’s desk.

  “There’s more?” snapped Special Agent Kyle Mulrooney. “Tell me we’re not gonna have to pop some popcorn and watch a whole afternoon of this filth.”

  Mulrooney, a barrel-chested agency man who’d been around since the Bush I years, shook his head in disgust. His usually smiling, round face held no hint of surprise—as if he’d long since lost his ability to be shocked by anything his fellow man could do.

  Dean wasn’t quite sure whether he was going to like working with Mulrooney yet. The older man was a little too jovial to work well with someone who’d often been accused of having no sense of humor at all. Well, his ex-wife had accused him of that. And where she was concerned, he really didn’t have much of a sense of humor. Who would?

  “Sweet Jesus, just when you think the species can’t go any lower,” Mulrooney muttered, proving he and Dean were on the same page, at least today.

  Wondering what their second IT specialist was thinking, Dean turned to gauge Lily Fletcher’s reaction. What he saw didn’t surprise him. Lily stared blankly at the screen, her pretty eyes widened in horror. Also a computer geek, with more years on the job than Brandon, she was still untried, with no field experience. Right now, she looked ready to throw up.

  Standing behind them all, arms crossed, face expressionless, stood Supervisory Special Agent Wyatt Blackstone. Their leader. The man who’d talked Dean into giving up a pretty good gig with a prestigious department for an experimental one here. One that was supposed to be a whole lot more normal and a whole lot less bloody.

  Huh.

  Even aside from the brutal case he might soon be working, the jury was still out on whether he’d made the right call. The fact that all of them were crowded into Wyatt’s office, since they didn’t even have a usable conference room, said a lot about how the team was viewed.

  “We’ll need to see the rest.” Wyatt, as if sensing the tension in the room, added, “But let’s talk for a while first. I need to hear why you think this case is ours, Brandon, and why I shouldn’t pick up the phone and hand it over to NCAVC.”

  Brandon’s eyes gleamed with confidence. “It’s ours. Trust me.”

  The enigmatic team leader’s expression revealed nothing. “You’ll have to convince me.”

  Hearing the note of censure in his tone, Cole nodded, getting the point. That was all it ever took with Wyatt. The man never raised his voice, never issued threats, never looked uncomfortable in his black suits or strangled by his dark, conservative ties. Never a hair out of place or a sheen of sweat on his brow. In fact, he never appeared affected by anything the job threw at him, not even getting ostracized as a whistle-blower.

  “Can we take a break? I think I need to go splash bleach in my eyes before the second feature,” Mulrooney said.

  Nobody laughed. They all felt much the same.

  Cole swiveled in Wyatt’s chair. “It’s not a double feature. I’ve found eight so far.”

  Wyatt put a hand up, halting the conversation that erupted after Cole’s bald announcement. “Let’s take five, then meet back here when we’ve all regained our focus.”

  Leaving the tight office, Dean finally felt capable of drawing a clean breath of air. Or at least as clean a breath as one could get in this stuffy, stifling old suite of crappy rooms at FBI headquarters. Only the computer equipment was top-of-the-line. Everything else had been handed down to the team by other departments: desks, chairs and worktables that had been gathering dust in their own storage rooms.

  Wyatt’s requisition for office equipment had been stalled. And their so-called conference room was stacked floor to ceiling with dusty boxes full of ancient files.

  “What the hell did you get yourself into?” Dean asked himself aloud as he grabbed a bottle of water from a small fridge somebody had stuck in the hallway betw
een two rickety bookcases. He took it into his office and sipped it slowly, savoring the clean, cool relief that seemed to wash away some of the ugliness of the morning. When he was finished, he headed back into the lion’s den.

  Entering his boss’s office, Dean found the others already there. They were seated in folding chairs around a small worktable somebody had set up at the end of the desk. Wyatt sat behind it, Brandon to his right.

  Brandon, suitably subdued, didn’t volunteer any new information. He quietly waited for their boss to ask him for the exact details he wanted to know.

  Blackstone picked up right where they’d left off. “Are all of them bad as the one you showed us?”

  The young I.T. specialist shrugged. “Define bad. If getting buried alive is nicer than being ripped in half, I suppose some are worse than others. They’re all pretty awful, by any definition.”

  Buried alive. God in heaven.

  “How do you know they’re connected?”

  “The unsub himself. He’s got a portfolio, I guess you’d call it.”

  “Hold up,” Dean said, not willing to accept the brief answers a chastened Brandon Cole might offer. He wanted the whole story, start to finish. That might not be Wyatt’s style, but the Supervisory Special Agent wasn’t a field guy; he hadn’t been for a long time. He was used to running an office, being briefed along the way—succinctly and concisely.

  Dean knew from experience, however, that succinct and concise didn’t cut it at the start of an investigation. They needed to know every detail, as ugly as those details might be. Learning the minutiae would allow all of them to watch for patterns, to hunt for mistakes. And bring them closer to nailing this sick bastard.

  Besides, something this distasteful had to be built up to, not just gulped down in huge bites of information.

  “Start at the beginning, Cole. Who the hell is this guy, and how’d you find him?”

  “I got a tip from an old friend,” Cole said. “He’s a gamer. D&D, Second Life, Zanpo. Guy lives a virtual existence; I don’t think he’s seen the sun since 2010. He heard rumors about a very secretive site, an international one, where things don’t just get realistic; they’re downright bloody.” Cole tilted back on the rear two legs of his chair, like some kid in science class. “It’s called Satan’s Playground, and from what my friend said, that’s a pretty good name for the kinds of things going on there.”

  “Never heard of it,” Dean said.

  “Considering it’s been around for a couple of years, you’d think there’d be more whispers about it among that circle, but the people who run the site are smart, and they’re secretive. Nobody gets in without an invitation and five ‘references.’ The whole thing’s hosted overseas, with members in probably two dozen countries. Redundant servers, constantly changing passwords, encryption, layer upon layer of security.”

  Dean might officially be part of the Cyber Division now, but he had only the most basic knowledge of computers, so he didn’t even try to understand the technical details Brandon rattled off. Mulrooney, he already knew, was the same way.

  That was another thing that made their CAT unique—having a good mix of experienced field agents and IT specialists. It was, of course, the only way a group formed to solve Internet-related murders could ever work. They needed both skill sets. Make that the best of both skill sets. Which was exactly what Blackstone had told Dean when he’d recruited him.

  “Sounds sophisticated for a bunch of bored losers with no real lives,” Lily said.

  Brandon shook his head. “I don’t think that’s what we’re looking at. Judging by the money involved, and some of the conversations I’ve seen, we’re talking about normal people with careers, families, wealth. It’s much more like a pervert’s secret worldwide club than any gaming universe for teenagers with no social skills and no jobs. Accountants by day, cyber S and M masters by night.”

  “So, Brandon, how’d you break in?” Jackie Stokes asked, her tone challenging. Stokes was the unique one in the group, straddling both lines. She’d done forensic work in the field early in her career, but had started working cyber crimes several years ago when her kids were little. Now that they were older, she seemed itchy to get back out there, traveling, getting her hands dirty. Though Dean doubted she’d ever pictured them getting this dirty. “I don’t suppose you got an invite. And if you did, I have serious questions about these friends of yours.”

  Brandon shrugged, a tiny smirk on his mouth. The guy was cocky. Maybe as cocky as Dean had been when he’d started with the Baltimore PD fresh out of college a lifetime ago.

  “Let’s just say I came in through the unattended back gate of the Playground.” Then the young man focused his attention on Wyatt. “Satan’s Playground doesn’t exist anywhere but in cyberspace. Sounds to me like it’s exactly our type of case.”

  Wyatt didn’t reply, appearing to mull it over.

  Wanting more, Dean prodded, “Okay, we’ve got the backstory. Tell us what you discovered when you actually made your way inside.”

  “I discovered that animated people can have all kinds of wild, nasty sex and can do the most violent, degrading things to each other.” Brandon spoke quickly, as always, expecting everyone to keep up. “Rape, pedophilia, S and M, incest, whatever your kink, there’s an area of the playground for you. Including a big hellhole under the sliding board for those who like to enact murder scenes, to the cheers and adulation of others.”

  “Virtual murders,” Dean clarified.

  “At first. But then, almost a year and a half ago, something changed. This new guy appeared on the scene. Calls himself the Reaper.”

  How original.

  “His avatar is this black-cloaked dude with a skull face; a totally off-the-rack, Grim Reaper Halloween-costume look. And he invites people to join a new club within Satan’s Playground. A club for those who want to see people really die.”

  Dean would like to think such a club would have very few members. But he knew better. After twelve years in law enforcement, God, did he know better.

  Still needing to work off the nervous energy that always enveloped him, Brandon began to tap his pencil on the table, keeping an underlying staccato beat—a sense of urgency in the rhythm. “His first one was a freebie, just to show he could do it.”

  Dean wanted to be sure he had things straight. “Was that the one we just saw, with the woman pulled apart?”

  “No. That came later. From what I can tell, the first was uploaded a year ago last April, and it showed a naked woman tied to a tree and slowly sliced to death. Like I said, a free sample, just to show he was for real. New videos have followed, one every two or three months, and after that freebie he started charging people.”

  Lily tsked in disgust. “For the privilege of watching?”

  Brandon shook his head. “Not at first, though he’s doing that now, too.”

  “So what was he charging for?” Mulrooney asked. He leaned back and crossed his big arms across his beefy chest. “Whether this vile crap’s in color or black-and-white? Murder on demand? Kill-per-view?”

  “That’s closer to the mark.” Brandon stopped tapping and glanced at every person there, as if to stress that they’d reached the most important part. “He’s holding auctions so other members of the club can participate in the kill. Within seventy-two hours of every auction, another ‘feature’ title goes up on the marquee of the drive-in theater.”

  “This playground has all the perks, huh?” asked Jackie.

  “Right down to an ice-cream parlor where you can lure little kids.” He quickly got back to his point. “The lucky members drive up in their stupid cyber cars and park in front of the screen. They chomp their fake hot dogs and popcorn, and then see a five-minute preview. If they pay the full price for their ticket they get to stay for the full show. Only there’s nothing cyber about it. It’s all the real thing, just like you saw.”

  Mulrooney almost growled. “Lousy prick’s probably getting rich as well as making himself infamou
s. And getting his personal kicks.”

  “Given the auction amounts and the ticket prices, I’d say that’s likely.”

  Immediately zoning in on what Brandon hadn’t told them, Dean asked, “So what’s the purpose of the auction? How, exactly, is this thing audience participation?” Something occurred to him, which could make catching this guy easier. “Are you telling us people are buying the services of a virtual assassin to kill their real-life enemies, or unwanted spouses?” If they could nail a single customer, they could nail the Reaper.

  Brandon shook his head. “Nothing that simple.”

  There wasn’t anything simple about it, in Dean’s view.

  “He’s not auctioning off the right to choose a victim. In fact, the auction winner has no say about who gets killed.” Sighing heavily, disgust evident in the posture, the other man finally got to the bones of it. “He’s auctioning off the right to choose the means of death.”

  A silence fell as everyone absorbed the words. Then Wyatt slowly spoke. “So, anyone with a proclivity for a certain kind of death can, for a fee, have that type of execution carried out for his personal viewing pleasure. And the pleasure of others who will pay to watch.”

  “That about sums it up.”

  Dean swallowed, now definitely not looking forward to watching the remaining videos. The excesses of a bunch of deviant human minds given an outlet for their violent fantasies promised to be among the most disturbing things he’d ever seen. But the videos were the starting point in stopping the killing. There was no other choice.

  He suddenly realized he was no longer wondering if he was going to work this case. Something deep inside him, something that rebelled against the very concept of what this Reaper was doing, demanded the right to work it. Jurisdiction didn’t matter. The reason Blackstone’s CAT had come together didn’t matter.

  More visitation time with his son still mattered. Yeah. That mattered. But right now, all he could think about was nailing the sick monster who was making this world a whole lot uglier for his child. For everybody’s children.