20th Victim (Women's Murder Club #20) - James Patterson Page 0,54
was about the love of killing, the high of shooting, of slicing arteries, of stabbing and hacking off body parts, of taking trophies.
Oh, my God. What door to hell had she opened?
CHAPTER 70
CINDY SKIMMED THE new comments on her blog, gobbled them down, then went back to the top of the page and read them again. The posts were about the love of violence and, to her mind, had been written by psychopaths.
Like this one: “Daily life is gray. When you’re a soldier, you’re trained to kill, given direct orders from your CO, and compensated with the guilt-free experience that’s the greatest high in the world. Then you come home, and everything is gray again. If you’re like me, gray is not good enough.”
The post had been signed with a screen name, and the writer hadn’t confessed to a specific killing. Interestingly, he’d gotten dozens of likes.
Other writers had expressed similar thoughts, sending her anecdotes about blood lust that only war could satisfy. Some veterans of foreign wars had detailed the taking of trophies—ears and hands and fingers—spelling out in loving specificity the pleasure of taking body parts, as well as taking photos of piles of the dead. The language used to describe these atrocities was too graphic for the Chronicle to print.
More to the point, the posts were about killings in war.
Nowhere in this avalanche of gory imagery was there a connection to the snipers and the victims in American cities. Cindy kept reading, and finally, at the bottom of the fourth screen, she found a post with a completely different feel, a declaration.
Her vision narrowed. She knew who he was. She read fast, then again more slowly:
There are killers who torture, who revel in taking life, sometimes in rage, sometimes for pleasure. This is not my style. When I kill a drug dealer, I am in control. My fellow travelers and I know our targets long before we fire a gun. They are guilty of ruining lives and of taking them by the tens of thousands as a byproduct of their sales jobs.
I’m proud of the recent work we’ve done. We’ve saved countless lives while only taking a few. I feel no pleasure in the shootings. I feel proud of the results. I’m doing good work. And I stand by it.
The post was signed Kill Shot, and Cindy knew from the cadence and structure of his post that this was the man who’d declared the “new war on drugs.”
She grabbed the phone to call Tyler but stopped because McGowan had appeared in her doorway. She put down the receiver.
“What is it, Jeb? What do you need?”
CHAPTER 71
CINDY STARED UP at the creep Tyler had forced her to take under her wing, wishing that she could make him disappear just by looking at him.
“See how you feel about this,” said McGowan. “I roughed out the profile of the first victim.”
Cindy knew a lot about Roger Jennings, the ballplayer who’d been killed at the Taco King. She and Jeb had seen the car, the pregnant wife who’d been spared, and the hole punched in the windshield by a bullet before it killed the Giants catcher. Thanks to Richie’s friend Sawyer, she had a photo of the word Rehearsal written in the dust of the Porsche’s rear window.
It had been verified that the veteran ballplayer had sold recreational drugs to his teammates. That wasn’t even news. She’d assigned Jeb to writing victim profiles, so now he was saying he’d done it.
It was put-up-or-shut-up time for McGowan.
“Let’s see it,” Cindy said.
McGowan placed a sheet of paper on her desk and stood watching her.
“It’s a first draft,” he said, “but I want your early read on the tone.”
“Be quiet and let me read,” she said.
Jennings’s name was at the top of the sheet.
The text read:
There’s more than one kind of head shot.
Some head shots are close-up photos that can get you a part. Another can drop you to the mat in the eighth round. Others you catch and throw back to the pitcher. Those are known as high, hard ones.
Roger Jennings was versed in high, hard ones. He knew they were coming because he would call them. He didn’t do it often—it wasn’t his style—just when he needed to ruffle a hitter.
As a batter himself, he was quick to react. He could duck or fall flat to the ground. He was seldom tagged as the target of pitches, let alone those thrown at his head.