Tough Justice: Countdown Box Set Read online

  She wouldn’t waste it.

  Maybe it was thinking about her ten-year-old self or maybe it was her location, only a few minutes away, but her thoughts wandered to Jacob. Was he really okay at his foster home? She never got the chance to call Sally back herself to check on him. Although Sally’d been clear that the Gellhorns were okay, Lara couldn’t help but want to check for herself.

  It was still early. She’d just drive by and see if she could see anything. Maybe she would knock on the door if she had to.

  She didn’t have to.

  She found Jacob’s foster home address without any problems. A neat-looking two-family house on a side street away from the main road. Small but in good condition, well kept. Lara drove by it once, saw a bunch of kids playing in the driveway connecting it to the street and circled back around so she could stop and watch without being obvious.

  She picked out Jacob immediately, dark curly hair sticking out everywhere. He was playing street hockey with the neighborhood kids, talking a lot of trash by the sound of it, but obviously having fun.

  He had on a nice red shirt and jeans. New Nikes on his feet—not the ones that cost a whole paycheck, but at least not tattered.

  When someone yelled something and Jacob got right up in his face, Lara’s hand flew to the door handle in case she needed to break up a fight. But then the two boys fell into each other laughing and a few seconds later the street hockey game was back in full force.

  He was fine.

  Lara knew she could sit here for another hour and watch him, but she wouldn’t discover anything different. Jacob was fine.

  She needed to get going before he saw her. That would just be awkward for both of them. But she was glad she’d come by. She’d done the right thing by calling Child Protective Services. Jacob may miss his mom, but at least here his needs were being met.

  Lara drove away, not looking at him again. It was time to go home. And there was every reason to be able to get a good night’s sleep.

  Chapter Nine

  When Lara walked into the Westchester Police Station conference room the next morning with coffee and bagels for the entire team, Nick was even more convinced he’d done the right thing by insisting that she go home. And not just because she was bringing in food.

  She needed it. He needed it. A chance to regroup. He’d sent Ty and Jennifer home, too. There wasn’t anything any of them could do right now until they found Halpert’s hideout. Except for poor Christina. She was still at headquarters working as close to around-the-clock as she could, trying to determine how Halpert was operating. She slept on the couch in Victoria’s—well, his and Lara’s—office when she needed it.

  But having Halpert somewhat on the run had meant there weren’t more bombs. At least not yet. Nick had no doubt the longer it took them to find Halpert, the more time he had to regroup and plan.

  They were barely three bites into a bagel when the desk sergeant rushed in.

  “Agents Grant and Delano, a call came through from the Cougar Mountain State Park rangers. They found a Honda Civic.”

  The man pressed the speaker button on the phone in the middle of the table.

  “Special Agents Grant and Delano. Who are we speaking with?” Nick said.

  “Hello, sir. This is Park Ranger Margaret Lindstrom. We found a Honda Civic matching the details given to us.”

  Lara and James were already rolling out the large paper map of Cougar Mountain State Park the police department had on file.

  “What section of the park was it found in, Ranger Lindstrom?”

  “The southeast corner. Quadrant F2 if you’re looking at the printed park map.”

  Lara found it and pointed at it with her finger so everyone could see where it was.

  “Wasn’t that section searched yesterday and cleared?” Nick asked.

  “Yes, sir. But the car was parked off the road and covered by brush. It must have been missed the first time around.”

  Nick looked over at Lara, who shrugged. Missing something in a park that size wasn’t unusual. Maybe the car wasn’t even Halpert’s. The number of Honda Civics around was pretty staggering.

  But who else would be hiding their car under brush?

  “Okay, we’ll need to send a team out there to check for prints and see if it’s the one we’re looking for. I’ll make sure—”

  “I’m sorry, I probably should’ve said this first. There’s a dead body in the passenger side of the car.”

  Now Ranger Lindstrom had the attention of everyone in the room.

  “What? Damn straight you should’ve started with that.” Lara shook her head and began rolling up the map, already preparing to leave.

  Nick grabbed his files. “We’re on our way. We’ll be there in less than thirty minutes.”

  “Don’t touch anything!” they both yelled before disconnecting the call.

  Every park ranger in a statewide radius seemed to be at Cougar Mountain when they arrived twenty-seven minutes later. They were circling the car like they were a coven of witches about to put a hex on it or something.

  “Great,” Lara muttered. “Probably the most excitement they’ve seen in a decade.”

  “This is Special Agents Nick Delano and Lara Grant with the FBI,” Nick announced. “We appreciate your work here but now need everybody to take five steps back.”

  They did, allowing Nick and Lara to move in, already putting on gloves.

  “Who is Margaret Lindstrom?” Lara asked.

  “I am,” a small brunette stepped forward. “I’m the one who called.”

  Nick shook her hand. “Are you in charge here?”

  “No,” she said. “Honestly, none of us really know who’s in charge here besides you guys. But I’m the one who found the car.”

  “Did you stay away from it like we asked?” Lara, already walking toward the vehicle, looked over her shoulder as she said it.

  “Yes and no,” Ranger Lindstrom responded.

  Lara gave a pointed look at Nick then turned back to the car. He took that to mean she was leaving him to talk to the park ranger so Lara didn’t lose her temper with the other woman.

  Nick turned to the woman. “Which one? Yes or no.”

  “Before I called you, when I first found the car, I did open it to make sure the man in it was dead. But no one has touched it since I called you.”

  Nick nodded. “That was the right thing to do.”

  “I took his pulse. That’s all. Didn’t touch anything else or move him in any way.”

  Nick shook her hand again. “Thank you for keeping the scene as pristine as you could. We may need to interview you again. We know your prints are already on file, for elimination purposes, so for right now, you’re free to go back to work.”

  Nick caught up to Lara.

  “Park ranger lady disturbed the scene as little as possible. Just wanted to make sure the guy was really dead.”

  “Fair enough.”

  The door to the car was still open. The rotting smell could be distinguished when they were still yards away from the car.

  “Definitely been dead more than twenty-four hours,” Lara said, breathing through her mouth.

  “Being shut up in that car didn’t help the smell, I’m sure.”

  The medical examiner would be here in the next half hour and would be able to give them a more accurate time of death.

  Cause of death wasn’t difficult to figure at all. A knife was still sticking out of the man’s chest. It held some sort of note. They couldn’t read it or see the man’s face yet because of the sticks and leaves still covering most of the car.

  “Let’s move some of the brush away so we can at least see what we’re dealing with,” Lara said. “I know we should wait for the CSI photographer, but I want to see if
we can ID this body.”

  “Me, too. We’ll just move as little as we can.”

  It didn’t take them long to move the branches and leaves far enough off to be able to see more clearly inside.

  Touching things as little as possible inside the car, Lara maneuvered her smaller body so that she could read the note attached to the man’s chest with the knife.

  “Well, no more doubt that this is Mitchell Halpert’s car,” Lara said.

  “Why? What does the note say?”

  “‘If only I’d recognized genius when it was right in front of me a lot of innocent people might still be alive.’”

  “O-kay. What does that mean?”

  Lara looked over at him. “It’s signed Beckett Clarke.”

  The man who’d interviewed Halpert at BrainWave.

  Lara took a step back. “I guess we now know why no one could get in touch with him.”

  Both of them stepped back from the car. The probable identification of the body created more work for them to do. Plus they needed to wait until the medical examiner and CSI team got out there before leaving or doing anything else. But they could call off the geo search on that Facebook photo, now that they found Beckett’s body.

  The rest of the CMU team arrived with the medical examiner—a man in his forties named Dr. Ullrich—and the forensic team. Ty and Jennifer took statements of the rangers, particularly Margaret Lindstrom.

  Xander and James worked with the forensic team and medical examiner. Once the initial photos were taken, they cleaned all the shrubbery off the car. Dr. Ullrich got a fingerprint from the corpse and Lara was able to run it.

  Their dead guy was definitely Beckett Clarke.

  Once Dr. Ullrich removed the note from Clarke’s chest, Nick and Lara were able to run it against a writing sample of Clarke’s Christina sent them. Preliminary analysis suggested it was definitely Clarke’s signature and most probably his handwriting for the entire thing.

  Lara shook her head in disgust. “Halpert made him write the note, probably right before he killed him. Sociopath.”

  “Yeah, we’re definitely not dealing with someone who is burdened with much of a conscience.”

  Xander walked over to the hood of Nick’s car where they were working with the computer. “There was another note in the car. Looks like it had been taped to the steering wheel but had fallen. This one was typed.”

  “What did it say?” Lara asked.

  Xander looked down at his phone where he’d taken a picture of it. “‘Rejection and humiliation will not be tolerated. Those found guilty will be put to death.’”

  Nick shook his head. “That was the same thing that was written at the top of all the buildings in Halpert’s computer world where he’d killed everyone.”

  “Even less good.” Lara grimaced as she repeated Nick’s words back from yesterday.

  James walked over. “Westchester PD just showed up.”

  Nick shook his head. “Just what we need, more people. This isn’t their jurisdiction. It’s a state park, so it’s not theirs even if we weren’t already here and on the case.”

  “No, they’re here with dogs. Like their K-9 unit. Dr. Ullrich told them there was enough residual scent or whatever in the car that the hounds might be able to track Halpert.”

  It wasn’t the route they normally went. Trying to track someone in an urban crime would be nearly impossible. But here? Maybe.

  “K-9s aren’t my specialty, but I say let them try.” Nick looked over at Lara.

  “Absolutely.” She nodded. “I’ll take any help we can get at this point.”

  It ended up that the dogs weren’t part of any K-9 unit the Westchester department hadn’t told them about. They were the personal dogs of one of the officers. Hound dogs, no less.

  Lara, Nick and James sat and watched as the Westchester officer brought the dogs over to the car and let them sniff the seat belt on the driver’s side. After a few minutes, they were off.

  “We’re not supposed to chase them or anything, are we? My shoes aren’t going to do very well if we are. I’m not in hiking boots.”

  James shook his head. “I feel like we skipped back a century.”

  Nick turned back to the computer. “They’ll call if they find anything. In the meantime, we’re going to have to get the rest of BrainWave directors into protective custody.”

  Lara nodded. “Yeah, if Halpert is changing his MO and just killing people outright instead of playing games, then they’re all in danger. They’re not going to like it, though.”

  “They’ll like being dead even less.”

  Lara smiled. “True. But they’re trying to keep their company afloat. Every day the computer wiz kids are offline, the more humiliated and less relevant they become. Halpert’s already hit them where it hurts.”

  “Somehow I don’t think that going to be enough for our resident psycho,” James said. “He’ll want to keep twisting the knife until they pay the ultimate price.”

  Nick grabbed James’s shoulder. “I know we don’t have the connection between Halpert and your brother like we do Halpert and BrainWave, but we will. We’ll figure it out.”

  “Trust me, Xander and I have been using every spare second to try to figure out the link. Same for Penelope Porterini, Victoria, and Trevor Dunbar. There has to be a tie between them and Halpert or BrainWave, but we haven’t been able to find it yet. Christina was digging with us, too, before she had Halpert’s computers to go through.”

  “It’s important. The targets were chosen for a reason and if it doesn’t have to do with BrainWave we need to figure out what it does have to do with,” Lara said. “We’ll handle things here, James. You and Xander look through everything again. We’ve got to find that pattern.”

  James nodded. “Okay.”

  Dr. Ullrich joined them. “We’re almost ready to relocate the body back to the morgue. Then the forensics team can have free reign of the car.”

  “Anything you can tell us, Doc?” Lara asked.

  “The victim has been dead roughly thirty-six hours. No surprise, the knife wound through the heart was the cause of death. Victim was moved post mortem, we know by lack of blood inside the car.”

  Thirty-six hours was a long time. Long enough for Halpert to have planned a move on the other founders of BrainWave. Nick glanced over at Lara and knew she was thinking the same.

  “We’ve got to make some calls right now, Dr. Ullrich,” Lara told him. “If we have further questions we’ll get in touch.”

  Lara and Nick were both back on the phone working on the protective detail for Terra Mapson, Kai Aoki and Paul Prentice. At least they were all still alive. Lara called in emergency protection at their homes while they set up more long-term situations.

  An hour later the officer with the hounds called them. The dogs had lost the trail at a river about a mile and a half away.

  Nick and Lara got out the map and studied the direction Halpert had taken after ditching his car.

  “He was going deeper into the park.” Nick drew a line with his finger.

  “That means he has a place in there somewhere. Or did. Maybe he’s already ditched it.”

  Nick’s eyes gleamed. “Or maybe we’re closer to him than we think and he’s panicking. Maybe he’d planned to leave the car much farther away but had to stop for some reason.”

  “I sure as hell hope so.”

  Nicked circled the park rangers and called back as many members of the Westchester police force as could be spared. He told them what had happened and what direction the dogs had tracked Halpert.

  He told them that Halpert’s shelter, whether it was a cabin or something underground, was believed to be somewhere in this general vicinity. That they could have an important role in bringing down a killer before he struck again, t
aking more innocent lives. That today could be the day they stopped him.

  But Nick didn’t have to look at Lara to know she felt the same way he did deep inside. That Mitchell Halpert was long gone from this park.

  He was one step ahead of them.

  Again.

  Chapter Ten

  “Killing Beckett Clarke is in response to rejection,” Dr. Oliviero said to Lara and Nick back at the Westchester Police Department conference room. “The other note he left confirms that. It’s one of the most basic of instincts and one of the most powerful trigger emotions.

  “Humiliation. Rejection.” Dr. Oliviero took his glasses off and rubbed a lens with his shirt. “Both common causes for revenge.”

  “Boo hoo,” Lara said, rolling her eyes. “I didn’t make it into show choir in high school but I didn’t kill all my music instructors.”

  “But that’s not how he sees his situation.” Dr. Oliviero had sets of photos laid out all around him. “You’re definitely correct to put the founders of BrainWave into protective custody. He’ll be coming after them for sure. He believes they refused or were unable to see his brilliance, probably the former. That he offered them his greatest gift—his intellectual ability—and they rejected him. That is unforgivable to Mitchell Halpert.”

  “What about the other targets, Doc?” Nick asked. “Penelope Porterini, the TV personality. The attorney, Trevor Dunbar, and William Walsh. Hell, even Victoria. Why go after them? What sin did they commit against Halpert?”

  “We can’t find any tie between them and Halpert. Or them and BrainWave. They don’t seem to have been a part of his life at all,” Lara continued.

  “My professional opinion would be that Halpert has something against people who he believes managed to rise to positions of power with dubious, dodgy secrets littering their past. William Walsh had a lover and was using taxpayers’ money. Victoria manufactured evidence against Oscar Mackworth. And no doubt Trevor Dunbar’s past is littered with secrets.”

  Lara could see the connection, but she didn’t like it; it was too vague. “Great. So Halpert comes after you if you’ve hurt his feelings in some way or if he feels like you’ve ever done anything wrong in your past to get to where you are. The whole fucking world better stay away from him then.”