Total Mayhem Read online

  “He liked the shooting way too much.”

  “Holy shit,” Gail said through a laugh. “That’s coming from you?” Boxers had a well-earned reputation for being exceptionally lethal.

  Boxers feigned insult but laughed in spite of it. “Yeah, well, that tells you something, doesn’t it?” He looked back to Jonathan. “You remember Scarlet Tendril, right? Some kingpin—”

  Jonathan snapped his fingers. “Got it. He posed for pictures with the bodies.”

  “Bingo.”

  “Good Lord,” Venice said with a wince.

  “Yeah, exactly,” Jonathan said. “That got him transferred to a different squadron.”

  “Got him kicked out,” Boxers corrected. “Nobody wanted him. Sicko.”

  “Mass-murder-level sicko?” Gail asked.

  “So it would seem,” Jonathan said. “Ven, I don’t suppose you’ve been able to pull up any pictures of this guy?”

  “Right now,” she said. The lights in the War Room dimmed as the projector in the ceiling descended and the 106-inch screen at the far end of the rectangular room revealed itself from a bank of shelves. The image of a stone-faced soldier appeared. He wore the black beret of an Army Ranger, and yes, he looked remarkably like Opie Taylor of the old Andy Griffith Show.

  “That’s the guy,” Boxers said.

  “Makes me sick to see him in that uniform,” Jonathan grumbled.

  “Will somebody tell me why I need FBI credentials and a badge?” Venice said. “I don’t work in the field.”

  “Great way to talk yourself out of speeding tickets,” Gail said.

  “I don’t like it,” Venice said. “And what’s with the new name? Constance DuBois? Sounds like a character from a James Agee play.”

  “I’ll pretend I know what that means,” Jonathan said.

  “I drew Gerarda Culp,” Gail said. “Is this Wolverine being funny?”

  “You’re asking that to Cornelius Bonner,” Jonathan said. “I’d go by Jerri if I were you.”

  “Got it, Corny.”

  “I think we’ll make it Neil,” Jonathan said. “What about you, Big Guy? What name did you draw?”

  Boxers grumped, “Just because she runs the Feebs doesn’t mean we can’t beat her up.”

  “Come on,” Jonathan prodded. He already knew what it was, but he’d been dying to hear Boxers say it.

  “Xavier Contata.”

  The War Room erupted in laughter.

  “I know I can beat you people up,” Boxers said.

  “I’m thinking Professor X,” Gail said.

  “How about Zave?” Venice offered. “You can name your autobiography Save Zave.”

  As much as Jonathan enjoyed the moment, his read on Boxers was that it was time to back off. It was one thing if Jonathan rode his ass like a horse, but he’d earned the right. The ladies, maybe not so much. “Okay, back to the task at hand,” he said. “Madame Director said she was going to send us some files.”

  “We got them,” Venice confirmed. “But I’ve got to tell you they’re hard to look at.”

  “What are they?”

  Venice tapped the keys at her command center. A world-class tamer of electrons, she could do with a computer keyboard what Mozart could do with a piano. The screen filled with a mosaic of images.

  “I’ve only scanned these briefly,” Venice said, “but I warn you that there’s a lot of gore.”

  “Crime scene photos?” Boxers asked.

  “I believe so,” Venice said. “Of all of the Black Friday incidents.”

  “Five high schools?” Gail asked.

  “Six,” Jonathan corrected. “Total of one hundred thirty-seven dead, over a hundred wounded, many of those crush injuries during the escapes.”

  “I can’t imagine the horror,” Gail said.

  Jonathan cast a glance to Boxers, who flicked an eyebrow. Oh, they could imagine. That, and a lot worse, because they had seen it all.

  Venice hit a button, and for the next twenty-five minutes, they looked at horrific photos of the dead. The photos followed the same pattern: the establishing shot from a distance, and then the same gruesome victim from ever-closer distances, and then from additional angles. Jonathan didn’t pay attention to the personal details of names and ages, because he didn’t want to know. He didn’t need to know. His job required focus on the tactics deployed, not on the mechanisms of death. The local homicide detectives would take care of that.

  After only a few minutes, Venice clacked more keys, spun around in her chair, and stood. “I can’t watch these anymore,” she said. “Call me when it’s done. I’ve got the timer set for four seconds per image. Note the number in the upper corner if there’s something you’ll want me to bring up again.” As she got to the War Room door, she said, “I might have to go home and take a shower.”

  Many, but not all the victims were children, perhaps fewer than half. If Jonathan guessed right, the oldest was easily in her seventies, the youngest under ten. Truly, it was awful.

  Rivers of blood.

  “Are you noting the marksmanship?” Boxers asked.

  “I am,” Jonathan said.

  “Head shots and upper torsos,” Gail said. “Pretty high caliber. For sure five-five-six or better. Maybe seven-six-two.” The 5.56-millimeter round was arguably the most popular caliber in the world, certainly in the United States, and it was the staple of the AR15 rifle, also the most popular platform in America. The 7.62-millimeter round was a common choice for snipers and game hunters, and it was also readily available on an AR platform.

  “Single shots,” Jonathan said. “Aimed shots. This is not spray and slay. These shooters are good.”

  “From as far back as nine hundred fifty meters, if the news reports are right,” Boxers said. “Adds credibility to Wolverine’s theory. These shooters are marksmen.”

  “I think we need to look for trends,” Gail said. “Other than the marksmanship and the sheer tonnage of bodies, we need to find commonalities between all these different scenes.”

  “The cops,” Jonathan said. The images continued to churn.

  “What about them?” Boxers asked.

  “They’re one hundred percent kill ratio,” Jonathan explained. “There’s not a lot of security at games like that, and when you get way the hell out into Butt-scratch, I don’t know how much security they can actually provide, but our attackers didn’t take any chances. Every cop at every game was killed in the initial volleys.”

  “Are you sure?” Gail asked. “I mean, there are a lot of dead cops, but how can you say for sure that it was a hundred percent kill ratio?”

  Jonathan held up his smartphone. “As soon as I thought I saw the pattern, I texted Wolfie. She confirmed.”

  “And here I thought you were bored and playing a game,” Boxers said. He pointed to the screen. “Either of you know how to turn that shit off? I’m tired of looking at them.”

  Jonathan reached to the phone on the table and pressed the intercom. “Hey, Ven, we’re ready to watch a different show. Can you come back to the War Room, please?”

  Fifteen seconds later, she was there. “You really don’t know how to turn off a PowerPoint presentation?”

  Boxers held up his hands and splayed his fingers. “You really want these sausages messing with your keyboard?”

  “You’re not the only one in the room,” she said as she made the screen go dark.

  Jonathan said, “Well, I pay your salary, so . . .” He sold it with a smile. “One hundred percent of security forces killed. What does that tell us?”

  “It tells us that they know what they’re doing,” Boxers said.

  “Tell me I don’t hear admiration in your tone,” Venice said.

  “Admiration’s the wrong word,” Boxers replied. “That infers approval. Maybe recognition is a better word. I recognize that they knew what they were doing.”

  Jonathan explained, “The hardest part of any large-scale hit-and-run op like this is the running part. Any asshole with a
gun can sneak in undetected and take his shot. It takes a higher level of planning to spray bullets and then get out.”

  “Okay, how would you do it?” Gail asked. “I mean, if you were the shooter—if this was an op you were planning, how would you do it?”

  Venice squirmed in her seat. “Oh, my God, I’m not comfortable with this.”

  “You’ve got to think like your enemy to get to know him,” Jonathan said. “Ven, can you pull up the establishing shot of the Nebraska site, the aerial one?”

  “Why Nebraska?” Gail asked. “As opposed to one of the others?”

  Jonathan said, “Because that’s where Logan Masterson was one of the shooters. He’s the one we’re going to get a chance to talk to.”

  The screen switched to a honeycomb of tiny images, a digital proof sheet of what they’d already seen. Venice clicked on one, and it filled the screen. “Here,” she said.

  The image changed to an overhead shot that might just as easily have been printed from one of the commercial satellite websites. The gray, flat roof of the school itself dominated the upper left side of the image, and the football stadium occupied most of the rest. Parallel banks of bleachers flanked an oval track. A water tank could be seen in the lower part of the photo. Little arrows and numbers indicated evidence markers.

  “I need to see it for real,” Jonathan said. “We need to visit the school.”

  “I don’t understand,” Gail said. “Why?

  Jonathan stood. “I figure we get one chance to talk to this guy. If I were him, I’d just shut down and say nothing. The second-best choice would be to lie my ass off to misdirect people from the truth. The more I know, the more I’ve seen, the less manipulatable I’ll be. I’d like you to come along. I can use all the observation power I can get.”

  Gail bobbled her head as she thought it through and said, “Sure, why not? Big Guy, too?”

  “I always go,” Boxers said.

  Jonathan winked. “Somebody has to drive the plane.”

  * * *

  Indian Spear, Nebraska, population 5,500, sat almost exactly in the geographic center of the state, about 190 miles west of Lincoln. Jonathan didn’t know what industry kept it thriving, but there was no denying the charm of the place. As in so many Midwestern towns, a one-block-square patch of real estate defined the center of activity, with dozens of businesses lining the perimeter of the square and a bandstand gazebo in the center of the square itself. There was nothing touristy about any of it, though if a filmmaker wanted a location for quintessential Middle America, this place would do perfectly. At a glance, Jonathan saw a hardware store, a grocery, a barbershop, two cafés, and a string of Somebody & Somebody storefronts that he could only assume were law firms.

  Jonathan guessed that two weeks ago, this little burg would have been the dream of many Americans who wanted to simplify their lives and return to the basic values of God and community. But that dream had been shattered, and the collective grief felt palpable as Boxers piloted the rented Suburban through the streets. Black bunting draped every door and archway. Flags hung at half-staff, and of the few people walking the streets, none smiled.

  “In a town this size, everybody lost somebody,” Boxers said.

  “I can’t imagine the emptiness,” Gail said. “How will they ever stop mourning?”

  “When they find out the bastards who did this are stopped or dead,” Jonathan said.

  Acts of terror were more than physical acts of violence, more than death and destruction. They were acts of psychological warfare. People who lived in New York and Chicago and Washington, DC, lived with a constant expectation of violence. They didn’t dwell on it, but there was an awareness among residents that they existed as juicy targets for jihadists and assholes with a cause. It was baked into the social contract. Consequently, public safety organizations had established protocols to mitigate the physical, medical, and psychological aftermath of terror attacks. In places like Indian Spear, where the PTA meetings and fire department bingo events were populated by the same folks who attended meetings of the Board of Supervisors and the church social, those mechanisms didn’t exist. In a place like this, everyone was family.

  And large-scale violence stripped them of a kind of innocence. It wasn’t that small-town people didn’t see hardships and suffering—three-quarters of every Army division in the world consisted of men and women from towns such as this—but rather that long-held presumptions of safety were shattered. It was hard to tell your children that going to a shopping mall or to a movie theater was dangerous after it had never been so.

  This was why Jonathan wanted to visit Indian Spear in the first place. Having spent so much of his life in harm’s way, doing awful things to people who inflicted even greater awfulness on others, it was too easy for him to surrender to the cynicism.

  “You okay, Dig?” Boxers asked. “You look . . . far away.”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “I’m right here. The very opposite of far away.”

  “You getting your hate up?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “What does that mean?” Gail asked.

  “Just what it sounds like,” Jonathan said. “If things go the way I hope they do, we’re taking a big fight to some very dangerous people.”

  “Hate drives passion,” Boxers added.

  “It also blinds reason,” Gail said.

  Jonathan waved that off. “Not with me. Anger blinds reason, not hatred. Hatred provides focus. Keeps me inspired to finish what I start.”

  “So, let’s start,” Big Guy said. “What’s the first step?”

  “Let’s go to the high school.”

  George Armstrong Custer High School seemed to divide Indian Spear between the residential and industrial centers. While it officially sat in the 1200 block of 7th Avenue on its eastern border, it occupied an enormous footprint that spanned all the way to 11th Avenue on the west and ate up the equivalent of ten blocks north and south.

  “Venice puts the school population at just over eight hundred students,” Gail said from the backseat.

  “From a population of five thousand,” Jonathan mused aloud. “Must have kids bused in from the county.”

  “Thus spreading the trauma even farther,” Gail said.

  “There’s the football stadium,” Boxers said, pointing through the windshield. It was an enormous complex, far larger that the footprint of the school building.

  “Drive to the other end,” Jonathan said. “Let’s get as close as we can to the water tower.”

  The fence surrounding the school was clearly designed to mark territory, not to keep people out. An easy hop would take you from the street onto school grounds.

  “Looks like the place is back to normal operations,” Boxers observed. “No evidence markers or police tape.”

  “I think it’s good to bring normalcy back to children as soon as possible,” Gail said.

  Jonathan wasn’t sure that he agreed, but he kept his thoughts to himself. Normalcy bred complacency, and that was what allowed this awfulness to happen in the first place.

  Boxers parked the Suburban at the far western end of the field, where the chain-link fence for the stadium joined with the chain-link fence for the water tower. Jonathan planted his hands on the top rail of the fence, pushed himself up, and then swung his feet. Gail was next, and he resisted the urge to help her over. Chivalry was fine on date nights, but not at work. For Boxers, the climb was more like a big step.

  Ahead and to the left, a fifteen-foot section of fence appeared to have been trampled by something. It lay far over on its side, nearly touching the ground on the water tower’s property.

  “I wonder if panicked people did that,” Jonathan mused aloud.

  “I’m guessing vehicle,” Boxers said. He pointed to tire tracks in the dirt.

  “Maybe the emergency responders,” Gail said. “Now that we’re here, what, exactly, are we looking for?”

  “Just general observations,” Jonathan said. “I’m hoping
we’ll know what’s important when we see it.” He craned his neck to look up. “Y’all ready to climb?”

  “I think I’ll find my observation inspiration down here,” Boxers said. “See that cage around the ladder way at the top?” He pointed.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m just eyeballin’ but I’m not a hundred percent sure I wouldn’t get stuck in that.”

  Jonathan and Gail both laughed.

  “And I’m not giving you two the satisfaction,” Big Guy finished.

  Truth be told, Jonathan thought he’d made a good point. He turned to Gail. “You?”

  “I’ve been feeling better every day,” she said. “But the thought of a straight vertical climb like that without someone chasing me, makes me hurt.” Several years ago, Gail had been badly injured during an op, and it had been a long slog for her to return to work. It hadn’t been that long since she tossed her cane away.

  “See what you can see, then,” Jonathan said. “I’ll be down in a few.” He looked to Big Guy. “Give me a leg up to that first rung?”

  Boxers made a stirrup with his hands and when Jonathan got his foot set, Big Guy damn near launched Jonathan onto the ladder.

  “Sorry,” Boxers said through a chuckle. “I keep forgetting how tiny and tender you are.”

  Jonathan went to work. The climb wasn’t difficult so much as it was awkward. And, for the first thirty feet or so, scary. Gravity was an unrelenting bitch. A misstep would mean a fall, and the higher he climbed, the more devastating the consequences of the impact.

  When he reached the landing, just a couple dozen feet below the walkway that surrounded the tower, he paused and offered up a small prayer. He knew from the reports that Irene had sent him that this was the spot where the Good Samaritan had died and from which he had inflicted the wound that got Jonathan’s team wrapped up in this in the first place.

  “You done good,” he whispered. “Whoever you are, however you’re remembered, at this spot on that night, you done good.” He started climbing again.

  Finally, he reached the top, and he pulled himself up through the hatch in the floor of the walkway. Bits of police line tape still clung to the rail, tiny tails of granny knots vibrating in the breeze. As he stood to his full height, Jonathan white-knuckled the railing. Notwithstanding countless parachute jumps in all kinds of crappy conditions, he’d never been comfortable with heights. Being in an enclosure was fine, and free falling was fine—the parachute made that fall not really a fall at all, but rather a flight—but standing ninety feet above the ground, with only a rusty guardrail between him and his maker, he felt . . . vulnerable.