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Dean walked toward the body, Goh on her heels. She knelt before the dead woman. The body had been disturbed, half pushed onto its side, probably by fighters bumping into her. The grime on the floor of the alley was scuffed with boot marks where big, heavy men had battled.
“Are we done taking pictures of the body?”
Goh nodded toward the crime-scene photographers. “They’ll be taking her to forensics in a few minutes.”
Dean sighed. “I’ll look around here and try to get a feel for the crime scene.”
Goh tilted his head. “You seem to have a feeling already, Melissa.”
Dean swept the alley, drifting off for a moment, looking at the pockmarks from weapons, smelling the stink of urban warfare and serial murder all sewn up into a tiny corridor of stone and garbage. It was a claustrophobic place where men had tried to kill each other, and one presumably innocent woman lost her life.
The vibes given by the scene were strange.
If enigmas had a scent, Melissa Dean now knew how to recognize it.
Sometimes, if you’ve been to enough murder scenes, you developed a taste for what it was all about. Some were madness. Some were fury. Fueled by jealousy, betrayal, loneliness—she’d had felt them all.
This was different. There was no emotion in this.
The body was too perfectly filleted, too neatly placed. Just how the other Ripper kills were set up.
But the addition of Westerbridge’s killer…that was a new twist.
How could it not be? The kind of firepower used doesn’t show up more than once a year in London’s back streets, she thought. Now twice in one night?
There’s no such thing as coincidence.
Dean shook her head. “Where are you heading now?”
“Back to the station. Need a lift?” Goh offered.
“I have my own wheels,” Dean replied. “But I’ll meet you there.”
The mental images of two horrors, one a century and a half old, and one thoroughly modern formed an amorphous blob of murder and mayhem in the middle of the city she was sworn to protect. The burden hung on her, troubling her on the drive back.
4
Try as he might to put aside his theories and memories about the previous night’s murder, Mack Bolan couldn’t shake them. But he wasn’t completely left cold.
As he showed up at the offices of London’s Metropolitan Police Homicide East unit, the Executioner felt the usual tingle he felt whenever he entered a police station while on a mission. Hal Brognola had arranged credentials that were so far above reproach they could bounce a small nuclear warhead. But none of that gave Bolan the impression that he was truly safe. The gulf that stood between the lone soldier and the forces of law enforcement was one that was hard to cross without the sense that he was walking a tightrope.
There were just too many variables for him to truly feel comfortable working inside a system—the possibility of dealing with corruption, of losing brave allies, of being too constrained by the rules and allowing his enemy to slip away to cost more lives…
Bolan took a deep breath. He had no patience for those who got away, literally, with murder. And so, he spoke to those killers in their own bloody language—regardless of laws.
He reached the watch commander, a sturdily built, square-shouldered, full-faced woman with long, once black hair shot through with streaks of silver. She was in her fifties, no longer the fresh-faced youthful beauty she had once been, but something shined through the crow’s-feet and smile lines. She had a sharp eye as keen and hardened as any beat cop. She looked down on him with a matronly glower.
“Can I help you, sir?” she asked.
“I’m here to see Detectives Dean and Goh, Homicide East.”
She pursed her full lips, studying him for a moment, disapproval crossing her face. She cleared her throat. “Their desks are on the second floor, in the Homicide East squad room. They’re expecting you, Detective Cooper.”
“Thank you,” Bolan replied.
He followed the desk sergeant’s directions and was soon at the desk of an unlikely couple of lawmen sitting at face-to-face desks, paperwork and foam cups littering them, computer screens displaying crime scene reports.
Goh looked up at Bolan, dark eyes taking him in with a single glance as his raven hair fell in sheets off his collar.
Dean had short blond hair that stopped at her collar and piercing, pale blue eyes that almost mirrored his own. She studied him as well, her gaze penetrating, trying to cut through the layers of pretense he was hiding behind. While Goh was offering his hand in greeting, she was holding back, tense and withdrawn, in observer mode.
Bolan took Goh’s hand.
“Matt Cooper,” Bolan offered.
“Kevin Goh.” The detective’s flawless East End accent indicated he was London born and raised, or at least raised. His grip was strong and firm. “This is Melissa Dean.”
“Pleasure,” she said, but making no effort to act like it was.
“Likewise,” he answered. He was sincere about it, but wondered how far behind he was on his rapport with these two.
“So you’re interested in the latest run of Ripper killings?” Goh asked.
“Yeah. I was interested in the case. Meredith Jones-Jakes, about five months ago, was the last one I’d heard about,” Bolan explained. “Then this morning, there was supposedly another one?”
“You seem to have learned about it pretty quickly,” Dean spoke up in a stinging broadside. “Coincidence?”
He met her gaze unflinchingly. “There’s no such thing as coincidence.”
“So what are you doing so far from the colonies?” Dean pressed.
“You have the paperwork sitting on your desk.”
Dean pushed it aside. “Administrative leave from the Boston Police Department. That’s the reason. What’s the story?”
“I’m set to testify in three months,” Bolan told her. “And I’m under a gag order about anything else.”
Dean’s eyes narrowed. “A mobster?”
“Make of it what you will.”
“That’s why you’re traipsing through a Met station packing a hand cannon under your jacket? The Mafia doesn’t have roving hit squads around the world, Detective.”
Bolan was tempted, for half a heartbeat, to tell her that she was wrong. Early on in his career, he’d run into more than enough heavily armed gangsters in Soho, giving him his first experiences with the awesome Weatherby Mark V and the efficient Uzi 9 mm submachine gun. And only a few hours previously, he could have shocked her with the level of hardware at Sonny Westerbridge’s Rotherhithe warehouse.
Instead, Bolan remained diplomatic. “It’s not a cannon. And it’s cleared.”
Dean’s jaw set firmly. “I just don’t want to see it unless we come under fire from the entire Peruvian Third Naval Commando unit, all right?”
Bolan took a notebook and pen from the pocket of his gray windbreaker. “Is that only the Peruvian Third Naval Commando unit, or is that indicative of the level of opposition?”
Dean sighed heavily. “We’re going to check out the body at the morgue, smart-ass. Are you going to join us, or are you going to try and join the cast of Dead Ringers?”
“Melissa, as much as I’d love to see you get into a catfight, I think you’d have to have it with a woman,” Goh said. “I’m sorry, Detective Cooper. She’s not usually like this.”
Bolan looked Dean over. “I’m not offended. If a foreigner was going to step into one of my cases, I’d be uptight too.”
Dean stood, grabbing her brown leather jacket, flipping it around her slender shoulders. Hard eyes met his. “Uptight? Try suspicious.”
The Executioner watched her as she was leaving the squad room. She stopped halfway to the door and glared back at Goh and him. “Are you two coming?”
Bolan looked to Goh, who could only shrug. “We’re coming, Melissa.”
The two men followed the detective.
AS THE IRATE Vincent Black strode to his car, his two men fell into step behind him. He spent a moment checking the .50-caliber Desert Eagle he had in a shoulder holster, then waited for Sal to open his door while Tony stepped around to the driver’s side.
Black ducked his head and got into the back seat.
The old man was a pain in his ass, calling him out on jobs whenever he felt like it, but in a way, that pain helped Black along.
After all, Black was in the business of hurting people.
And he was good at it.
“Just watch whoever’s going into the Met today,” De Simmones told him. “We’re looking for a tall man, six-three. Black hair, blue eyes. Someone who looks hard and businesslike.”
Black settled in comfortably for the surveillance. Being caught with an unlicensed handgun right in front of the police station would land him in more trouble than he was willing to pay his lawyers to get him out of. He shrugged, flattened his coat lapel with the palm of one hand, and watched from across the street.
It wasn’t long before the man matching the description De Simmones had given him drove into a parking garage next to the police station, then headed inside. Black checked the guy out.
He was big, but he was lean and proportional, moving with the facile grace of a panther. He also had confidence, layered under an alertness not based on paranoia, but on the kind of awareness you only got when you walked into some hard places nobody expected you to walk out of.
Black could identify with the guy. He’d been in a lot of traps, and he bore the knife scars and more than a couple of circular bullet scars from close encounters with men who had tried to be as bad as he was.
Black still walked. They didn’t. Some of them didn’t even smell fresh air anymore.
I’d like to see this big bloke in action, he thought. And when it’s all over, I’ll put a single .50-caliber slug into the middle of the stranger’s face and blow out his brains.
THOUGH HE COULD HARDLY be considered squeamish, the Executioner rarely went to a morgue. He rarely needed to, and he had seen enough of the people he loved and respected laid out under cold white sheets on flat metal tables. Too many soldiers on the same side, too many beloved, too many family members, all cold and on a slab, never to move again. Posing as a detective, though, he had no choice.
Bolan looked at the familiar face, staring up. Her eyes were still open, and he was tempted to ask why they had been left that way, but he knew particulate matter sometimes showed up on the cornea, which would provide some clues as to who killed her or how she died. It was often the little details solved a mystery. Sometimes looking into the eyes of a dead woman could give a moment of insight into her murder.
He was leaning over her, examining her more closely when the medical examiner, a balding man with a hooked nose and gunmetal gray hair, cleared his throat.
“Are you in any way a forensic technician, Detective Cooper?” the ME asked.
Bolan shook his head.
“Then kindly piss off.” The irate glower dissolved into a friendly wink. Bolan snorted, an abortive laugh in these dreary, desolate surroundings, but at least it was a moment of wry humor on the part of the examiner. “I’m Dr. Felix Randman.”
“Matt Cooper.”
“From New Hampshire, aren’t you?”
“You’re pretty good at catching accents,” Bolan said. However, for the purposes of his charade, for the purpose of working with the local British homicide cops, he was reverting to how he spoke when he grew up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. For a long time, he had sublimated his accent, having learned to speak with a more anonymous tone, akin to the voice that the network news anchors called “Midwest neutral.”
“I spent a year at MGH,” Randman stated. He came around the table and looked down into the dead girl’s eyes.
Bolan looked serious. “One of the first graduates?” he asked.
Randman glanced up at Bolan, then grinned at the soldier. “You give as good as you get.”
“What’s that mean?” Dean asked.
“Massachusetts General Hospital is the third oldest hospital in North America,” Randman explained.
“So he called you a dried-up old fart?” Dean asked.
Randman narrowed his eyes at her. “Yes.”
“I may like you yet, Cooper,” she said with a hint of approval.
Bolan nodded. “Now that we’ve broken the ice, you were going to show us something about her eyes?”
“Yes. They were dilated prior to her demise. She was in a drugged state,” Randman said.
“Well, the insides of her thighs were a mass of track marks, according to your report,” Goh spoke up.
“Small problem. All the track marks were clean and uniform and about the same level of scarring, meaning they were almost the same age,” Randman explained.
“Was this the same as with the other women?” Bolan asked.
“You catch on quickly.”
“Someone wanted it to look like these girls were just off the street, full of smack and doing their tours,” Dean said, walking around.
“On top of that, she has none of the long-term effects of heroin abuse,” Randman stated. “Her legs show a lot of track marks. But she has no collapsed veins, no signs of bacterial infections or abscesses. The heart looks perfectly fine, uninfected and no damage to the valve or the lining. I’m betting that once I saw her skull open, I’m not going to find any neurological trauma.”
Bolan frowned. “And what is that circular scar on her stomach, just poking out of her navel, see it?”
Dean and Goh looked for it. Randman pointed it out with the tip of a probe. “You’ve got sharp eyes, Cooper.”
“It looks like someone performed laproscopic surgery on her,” Randman stated. “Something was inserted.”
“And that someone took it back,” Bolan answered. “The whole Ripper reenactment would just be a smoke screen.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Goh answered. “Some historians believe that the Ripper murders weren’t so much a serial killer at work, but someone covering up a conspiracy.”
