Killer Instinct Read online

  Because all perfect murders have one thing in common.

  They never look like murder.

  BOOK ONE

  NOTHING IS SACRED,

  NO ONE IS SAFE

  CHAPTER 1

  THERE’S NOTHING quite like walking into a room packed with more than a hundred students and not a single one is happy to see you …

  If I didn’t know any better, I’d almost take it personally.

  “Good morning, class,” I began, “and welcome to your final exam in Abnormal Behavioral Analysis, otherwise known as Professor Dylan Reinhart messing with your impressionable minds for a little while in an effort to see if you actually learned anything this glorious spring semester. As legend correctly has it, I never give the same test twice, which means that all of you will be spared any repeat of a previous exam, including my personal all-time favorite, having everyone in the class write and perform an original rap song about Sigmund Freud’s seduction theory.”

  I paused for a moment to allow for the inevitable objection from the brave, albeit delusional, student who thought he or she might finally be the one to appeal to my better judgment, whatever that was.

  Sure enough, a hand shot up. It belonged to a young man, probably a sophomore, wearing a rugby shirt and a look of complete consternation.

  “Yes, is there a question?” I asked.

  He was sitting in the third row, and best I could tell, it had been three days since he last showered. Finals week at Yale is hell on personal hygiene.

  “This isn’t fair, Professor Reinhart,” he announced.

  I waited for him to continue and plead his case diligently, but that was all he had to offer. There was no rehearsed speech on how all the other professors give their students a study guide or at least explain what they should expect on the final.

  “That’s it?” I asked. “That’s all you’ve got for me? This isn’t fair?”

  “I just think we should’ve had a chance to prepare for this test,” he said. “The only thing you told us was that we all had to bring our cell phones.”

  “Yes, I see. Clearly a miscarriage of justice,” I said. It was a little early in the morning for the full-on Reinhart sarcasm, but sometimes these kids left me no choice. I turned to the rest of the class. “With a show of hands, how many of you agree with your esteemed colleague here? How many think that what I’m doing is unfair?”

  Literally every hand went up.

  I so love it when they make it easy for me …

  “Wow, that’s pretty impressive,” I said, looking around the room. “You’re all in agreement. All for one and one for all. Kumbaya!”

  Mr. Rugby Shirt in the third row all but pumped his fist in victory. “Does that mean you’ve changed your mind, Professor Reinhart? You’re postponing the test?”

  Silly rabbit.

  “No, it means the test has already begun,” I said. “Now everyone please take out your cell phones and place them directly in front of you. It’s time to see how united you all really are.”

  CHAPTER 2

  I WATCHED and waited a few seconds while everyone took out their phones. Note to self: buy more Apple stock for Annabelle’s college fund.

  Then I went to the blackboard behind me, picked up a piece of chalk, and began writing. It was my cell number. Nothing more.

  “Okay,” I said, turning back around to the class. “I want you all to pick up your phones and text me the grade you’d like to receive on the final exam. You can choose between an A or a B. Whichever you text me is the grade you’ll get.”

  I wiped my hands free of any chalk, gave a tug on the notched lapel of my navy chambray suit jacket, and started walking blithely toward the exit.

  “Wait!” came a chorus of voices. “WAIT! WAIT! WAAAAIT!”

  I stopped. “Yes? What’s the problem?”

  “That’s it?” they all asked. That and numerous variations on the same theme. “That’s all we have to do?”

  I smacked my forehead. “Gosh darn it, you’re right. There is one other thing I forgot to mention. Actually, two other things,” I said. “The first is that I’m afraid I can’t give you all As. Ten of you will have to choose Bs.”

  Cue the chorus again. “That’s not fair!”

  “We’re back to that again, huh? Fairness?”

  “Why would anyone choose a B?”

  “That’s the other thing I forgot to mention,” I said. “Perhaps this will make it easier for you all. If at least ten of you don’t choose a B, then you all get Cs, each and every one of you, the entire class. I repeat, a C. All of you. No exceptions.”

  It was as if I’d just told a roomful of five-year-olds that there isn’t a Santa Claus. No, worse. That I had killed Santa Claus—and his little furry friend, too, the Easter Bunny. Shock. Anger. Disbelief. We can’t believe you’re doing this to us, Professor Reinhart!

  It was beautiful.

  Sorry, Sigmund, I now had a new favorite final exam. The setup had gone perfectly. All I had to do was wait for the emotional dust to settle. They would all start to think. First as individuals, then together as a group. It would begin with one simple—

  “Question?” I asked, pointing at Mr. Rugby Shirt in the third row. He’d raised his hand again.

  “Yeah, I was wondering,” he said. “Are we all allowed to talk to one another before we each text you our grade?”

  I pretended to think it over for a few seconds, even scratching my chin for added effect. “I suppose I’ll allow that,” I said. “In return, though, I’ll need to put a time limit on any deliberations. Ten minutes should be enough.” After a few groans from those who wanted more time, I glanced at my watch. “Make that nine minutes and fifty seconds.”

  The groans stopped and everyone scrambled like mad to huddle up.

  Later, they would learn how they were subjects of an experiment for my next book, and that the tiny cameras and microphones I had installed around the room were recording everything they said and did.

  Would they be pissed? Sure. Right up until I announced that they were all getting an A on the final for being good sports. In fact, I could already hear the cheering.

  But that was then. For now, they were a group of more than a hundred ultra-competitive students at Yale deciding collectively who would sacrifice for the greater good. How would they decide? Could they decide?

  Would the best of human behavior prevail?

  I headed for the exit again so they could all talk freely. I didn’t want anything to affect the outcome, especially me. There could be no distractions, nothing to derail the experiment.

  And nothing would—I was sure of it.

  Silly rabbit.

  No sooner had I reached the door than I heard the first ping. Then immediately another, followed by a few more. Everyone’s phones were lighting up with the breaking news. Including mine.

  Something terrible had happened. Just dreadful. The absolute worst of human behavior.

  New York City, my home, had been attacked again.

  CHAPTER 3

  I WAS redlining even before I hit the highway. One hand was maxing out on the throttle of my old ’61 Triumph TR6 Trophy; the other was trying for the umpteenth time to reach Tracy. The wind was whipping past me, my cell plastered tight against my ear. To hell with my helmet.

  Again the call went straight to voicemail, and again I hit Redial. Please, please, please! Pick up, Tracy! We should’ve never ditched our landline. I couldn’t even try him at home.

  The news alerts and tweets lighting up everyone’s phones in class reported that multiple bombs had gone off in Times Square. A couple hundred were feared dead, if not more.

  Like everyone else, I felt the initial shock up and down my spine. Then came an even greater jolt, straight through the heart.

  Tracy had told me in the morning that he was planning to take Annabelle to the Disney Store—right in the middle of Times Square. Our adopted daughter from South Africa was only a little over a year old, and yet she was so
mehow totally smitten with the place. The music, the colors, the characters she didn’t even know the names of yet. It all made her smile from ear to ear. She loved that Disney Store more than her binkie, bubble baths, or the monkeys at the Central Park Zoo.

  At eighty miles an hour, I started to cry.

  Weaving in and out of traffic, riding like a maniac, I could feel the anger in me taking over. My time in London, my years with the CIA. All of it had been dedicated to fighting a war that could never be won, only contained. Terrorism isn’t merely a tactic of the enemy; it’s the root of their ideology. They believe in destruction. They want death. And there are no innocent victims. Not to them.

  Only to us.

  A half hour into the ride, I gave up on trying to call Tracy. A half hour after that, I saw the flashing cherries of patrol cars at the entrance to the Henry Hudson Bridge. Lined up grill to bumper, the cruisers were barricading all three southbound lanes. No one was getting in.

  No one was able to make a call either, I was told. At least not on their cells.

  “All the carriers were forced to shut down their networks,” said the second cop I approached after getting off my bike.

  The first cop had all but ignored me. He was too busy directing traffic in what had become a three-point-turn festival with all the southbound cars that had been heading into the city needing to do a one-eighty. Making those turns even tighter were the piles of torn-up pavement from some recent jackhammering. For once can there be a bridge into Manhattan that isn’t under construction?

  “They’re saying the terrorists used cell phones to detonate the bombs,” the second cop explained. “For all we know there might be more to come.”

  “I need to get into the city,” I said. “How do I do it?”

  He looked at me as if I were deaf. Did I not just hear him? “You don’t,” he said. “No one gets in.”

  No, you don’t understand, officer. I need. To get. Into the city!

  I stared at him for a few seconds, hoping he might recognize me. It had been less than a year since I’d had my fifteen minutes of fame by helping to rid Manhattan of a serial killer named the Dealer. In the process, I had gained a couple of nicknames myself, including Dr. Death. For a while I was getting stopped on the street at least once a day. Hey, aren’t you that guy …? Now it was maybe once a month.

  All glory is fleeting, said General George Patton.

  So much for staring at the cop. He didn’t recognize me. I could’ve tried to refresh his memory or begun pleading my case, telling him about Tracy and Annabelle, but there was no point. He had his orders. The guy was merely doing his job. Besides, I’d already made up my mind on what I would do.

  Time was wasting.

  CHAPTER 4

  I WALKED quickly back to my bike. Running would’ve been too obvious. The helmet went on, and the license plate got ripped off and stuffed inside my jacket.

  I flipped on the petcock, checked the kill switch, turned the key, squeezed the clutch, and started her up. One quick zig to the left, a sharp zag to the right, and I had the clear path I needed. Now I just needed the speed.

  Jamming the throttle, I was redlining again within seconds.

  The first cop didn’t know what the hell was happening as I blew by him. The second cop, the one I had spoken to, knew exactly what I was about to do but couldn’t do anything about it. He looked at me in utter disbelief before turning to the pile of torn up pavement about ten feet in front of the cruisers blocking my way.

  One man’s rubble is another man’s ramp.

  I hit the pile hard, pulling up on my handgrips even harder. There would be no style points. It was ugly. Steve McQueen made it look so easy on the same bike in The Great Escape.

  My back tire barely cleared the hood of the first cruiser, and I could hear my axle practically snapping as the front tire slammed the pavement. I nearly wiped out—I should’ve wiped out—but somehow I kept my balance.

  There was no need to look over my shoulder as I raced onto the deserted lower deck of the bridge heading into Manhattan. Those two cops weren’t going anywhere. I was already too far gone. At most, they were radioing ahead to wherever the roadblock was for the northbound traffic, but that would only be to cover their collective ass instead of catching mine.

  At the first exit, I peeled off the parkway onto Dyckman Street and into the Upper West Side. Tracy, Annabelle, and I called the neighborhood home. All along, I couldn’t stop thinking the unthinkable, that the two most important people in my life—the two I could never imagine living without—were suddenly gone. Christ, this can’t be happening.

  The rest of the ride was a blur as I shot between all the traffic while completely ignoring red lights. In the distance I could hear a slew of ambulances, each one louder than the next, and all of them echoing in my head. It was the soundtrack of a living nightmare.

  Finally I reached the front of our apartment building, ditching my bike in the middle of the sidewalk. I sprinted into the lobby and straight for the elevator with no intention of stopping until I saw the doorman, Bobby, sitting on an upholstered bench along the wall. He was completely engrossed in his cell phone. I could tell he was watching news coverage of the bombings.

  “Have you seen them?” I asked, half out of breath.

  He looked up at me, confused. “Who?”

  I would’ve been confused, too. “Tracy and Annabelle,” I said. “Have you seen them this morning?”

  Bobby—who everyone called Lobby Bobby, albeit not to his face—acted as if I’d just asked him to explain quantum physics. The fact that I was so panicked only made him more flustered.

  “Oh. Um … no, I haven’t seen them,” he said. “No, wait, I did see them. They went out earlier this morning, before the first—”

  “Have you seen them since? Did you see them return?” I was talking a million words a minute.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “Is everything okay?”

  But by then he was talking to my back. I was halfway to the elevator. I needed to see for myself. I needed Bobby to be wrong. He was distracted. He usually was, after all. He was often talking to some other tenants or signing for a package. That’s what happened.

  Tracy and Annabelle had returned home. They were safe. I was going to open the door to our apartment and call out as I always did, Where’s Anna-banana? Then I’d wait and listen for that glorious sound, the pitter-patter, her little feet shuffling along the floor around the corner of the foyer as she came running into my arms.

  But there was no sound when I opened the door. No pitterpatter. The apartment was empty.

  Tracy and Annabelle were gone.

  CHAPTER 5

  “WHAT THE hell are you doing here, Needham?”

  Elizabeth stared back at Evan Pritchard, wondering if perhaps she’d misheard her new boss of only two days amid all the chaos. No such luck. The guy was actually pissed off to see her.

  “I’m here to help,” answered Elizabeth. What the hell do you think I’m doing here?

  “If you wanted to help me,” said Pritchard, “you’d still be up in Boston, where you’re supposed to be. Where I sent you.”

  Is this guy serious?

  Elizabeth turned slowly to look at the devastation surrounding the two of them in Times Square as if maybe that might knock some sense into the guy or at least make him ease up. This was the worst attack on US soil since 9/11 and it happened in the same city—their goddamn backyard, for Christ’s sake.

  Times Square was no longer Times Square. It was a war zone. A coordinated series of C-4 explosions had reduced the stores and theaters to hollowed out shells of twisted metal and shattered glass. It had taken hours to tend to and clear the hundreds of wounded, which meant the dead were still everywhere, covered with bloodstained white sheets. There were too many to count, and yet that’s exactly what needed to be done. That and a gazillion other things as part of the investigation. Surely it was all hands on deck for the elite New York–based field unit of
the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Including its newest pair of hands, Special Agent Elizabeth Needham.

  “Sir, as soon as I heard the news I just assumed that—”

  “Of course you did,” said Pritchard. “You thought you knew best. That’s the rap on you, Needham. You always think you know best.”

  For a split second, Elizabeth regretted the last three and a half hours of her life, or roughly how long it took her to drive like a maniac from Boston down to Manhattan. But it took only another split second to realize that she’d do it again if given the chance, a hundred times out of a hundred.

  This wasn’t about her. It was about Pritchard. The guy was bitter. Big time. Six feet plus and roughly 220 pounds of resentment. Worse, he wasn’t trying to hide it, not even on the heels of a massive terrorist attack. Her new boss wanted her to know that she wasn’t wanted. His elite field unit was handpicked by him, always and without fail. That is, until the mayor got on the phone and told him that the FU, as they loved to call themselves, was being assigned someone new. Detective Needham was now Agent Needham. Pritchard had had no say in the matter. It was a done deal, and Elizabeth knew the guy couldn’t stand it. So naturally he couldn’t stand her. It was as simple—and effed up—as that.

  But Elizabeth held her tongue and the dozen or so jagged-sharp comebacks that were on the tip of it. She knew what she had to do with Pritchard. Go along and get along, or at least get the hell through this miserable, horrible, tragic day. Tell the prick what he wants to hear and then figure out a way to help. Do anything. Do something. Search for survivors. Search for bomb fragments.

  “I apologize, sir,” said Elizabeth. “All I wanted to do was—”

  “I get it,” said Pritchard. “But look around you, Needham. Look at all the Bureau and Task Force agents who are already here. They’re all trying to figure out the same damn thing: Who did this? And do you know what they all have in common? Not a single one of them was able to prevent it, including me. So if you really want to help, go back to Boston. Even if there’s only a one percent chance your investigation leads to something, it would at least be something we might actually be able to prevent.”