Spectrum (The Karen Vail Series) (39 page)

59

Battery Park was only a few blocks away, but by the time they reached the street level of Katherine Stavros’s high-rise, ESU had already deployed near the park’s Harbor Patrol station.

Arriving moments later was an NYPD mobile command unit, ESS-1, formally known as the Emergency Services Squad for Lower Manhattan. A white truck the size of a city bus packed with the latest communications and computing technology, it enabled officers in the field to conduct a large-scale operation on the fly.

As part of the CRV, or critical response vehicle, a dozen patrol sectors swarmed the scene, lights and siren off, to avoid a highly visible, candy-colored presence against the night sky. The last thing they wanted was for Officer Niklaus Prisco to suspect something was wrong as he navigated his boat back to the dock.

Vail and Russo waited behind an unmarked police sedan, night vision binoculars pressed against their faces as they peered out into the dark Hudson River and Upper New York Bay.

“You sure Robby doesn’t mind waiting in the car?” Russo asked.

“He had some calls to make. And with all the firepower we’ve got, he figured he’d just be in the way, especially with a bum arm.”

Vail moved the binoculars an inch away from her face. “What about an air unit?”

“Not necessary. His boat’s got GPS. And we don’t want him to know he’s a person of interest.”

Person of interest? He’s a goddamn killer.

Vail stepped onto the blue stairs below the side door of the mobile command truck. She poked her head into the interior and found the ESU lieutenant, who was talking with an inspector.

“Have we got a GPS lock on Prisco’s boat?”

The man glanced at one of the large wall-mounted LCD screens. “Stationary at Ellis Island.”

“Of course.” She turned to Russo and relayed the position.

“Part of his normal patrol?” Russo asked.

“Maybe. But I bet he’s checking to see what we took, if we found his stash.”

Vail poked her head back into the truck. “Where exactly is the boat stopped? New Jersey side at the dock in the back of Island 1, or near the front of Island 3, by the hospital buildings?”

“Island 3,” the lieutenant said.

“There’s a bridge off Island 1 that leads into New Jersey.”

“Got it covered. We’ve coordinated with Jersey state police. They’re sitting at the other end, prepared to stop any vehicle that crosses over from Ellis.”

“Perfect.” She thanked the lieutenant, then rejoined Russo.

He was silent for a long moment. Then, while still peering through his binoculars, he said, “That was good work. Back at the apartment. The earring.”

“Nothing good about it but luck.”

“You gonna argue with me again?”

Vail chuckled. “I think we’ve done enough of that today.”

“You know, if you are right about Harris, and it looks like you are, I owe you an apology and—”

“Let’s first see if I’m right. If Prisco behaves like he’s guilty, we’ll pretty much have our answer. But we’re not there yet. And breaking him, if it comes to that, won’t be easy.”

“You’ll be in the room with me. We’ll tackle him together.”

Vail smiled. It felt great to be back in his good graces. As she looked out into the restless waters of New York harbor, she realized there weren’t many people whose validation she needed.

“I’VE BEEN THINKING about some of the stuff that Agent Safarik told me back in ’06.”

Russo pulled his eyes away from the lenses and glanced at Vail. “About what?”

“Motive. About why Prisco does what he does to these women. When I put it together with the things Prisco’s done with his recent victims, it gives me a better understanding of things.”

“Such as?”

Vail thought for a moment. “Remember when we were at the Monica Glavan crime scene a few years ago? I told you about MO and ritual.”

“All I remember is that MO changes and ritual doesn’t.”

“Right. Serial killers exhibit two primary behavioral manifestations—MO and ritual, which is need-driven behavior. Since MO is all about successfully committing the crime and killing their victim, they change it to meet their needs. But an offender’s ritual never changes, no matter how many years pass. Ritual is deeply rooted psychologically or emotionally.

“These ritual behaviors—like cutting off a body part, writing on the vic, posing the body, shoving things into an orifice—they come from some vulnerable or fragile moment in their lives when there was a fusion of violence, sexual arousal, and a particular act—or the use of a particular object. They may not understand why they do these things to the vics; they just know they like doing them. They
need
to do them. Ed Gein dug up graves and removed body parts from women that he made into wearable items, like a belt made of nipples and vulvas.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“It’s hard for us to understand that kind of pathology, but the need is so deeply embedded that it manifests in some way in all their crime scenes.”

“You mentioned sexual arousal,” Russo said. “You think Prisco was sexually abused?”

“No. But an offender can partake in sexual activity that serves nonsexual needs or he can engage in nonsexual activity that serves sexual needs. Prisco’s behaviors appear to be driven by the nonsexual activities of stabbing the vic and cutting her eyes. It’s not a sexual act, but in my experience, he’s sexually aroused by doing it.”

“I take it that rape would be an example of a sexual act that serves nonsexual purposes.”

“Exactly. Even though it’s a sexual act, the offender rarely does it for sexual gratification. He does it to exert power, control, and dominance.” Vail moved her binoculars left and began scanning her grid pattern again. “But I’m now certain that Prisco’s motive is revenge. His need for it, and the way he gets it—slicing the eyes, stabbing the neck, posing the body—it all got fused together with some act of violence or betrayal when he was a kid. He blames all his problems—whatever those may be—on the woman who ‘caused’ them. In his case, a Greek woman.”

“So he thinks Greek women are responsible for his troubles?”

“Yes. And this is his way of getting back at them. Based on his postmortem ritual behaviors, it’s obvious he considers them to be whores. Not only is he out to make them pay for their transgressions, but he poses their bodies and hands in sexually provocative ways to show others what he thinks of them.”

Russo glanced at her again. “Since we haven’t been able to dig up a connection between any of these victims—other than ethnicity—it looks like he doesn’t care who he kills so long as she’s Greek.”

“He’s not angry at the victim as a person. She’s just a representation of the woman he hates. His vics are surrogates, substitutes. He’s targeting a class of people, not individuals.”

“With the exception of Crinelli. And we know the deal with that: pure, personal revenge.”

As Vail peered into the darkness, her peripheral vision caught a blur of movement. “I see something. A boat—I think it’s him.”

Russo pulled his face away from the binoculars. “Where?”

“We have a fix on Officer Prisco’s boat,” the ESU lieutenant said across the radio. “His course is directly at us, as expected. Looking good. Hold steady.”

Vail, face against her night vision glasses, kept her eyes riveted to the boat with its minimal light signature as it steered toward them. “My heart’s racing.”

“Mine too.”

“At your age, can it take the pounding?”

“Go to hell.”

She wanted to laugh but did not want to risk losing the boat on the highly magnified view.

“One thousand yards,” the lieutenant’s voice blurted over the two-way. “Check in.”

“Team Alpha ready.”

“Beta ready.”

“Charlie. Ready.”

“Wait—” Vail said. “What the hell? He’s veering off. He’s veering off!”

“All units, suspect has made us, he changed course, swung left toward the Hudson.”

“Shit on rye,” Russo said.

“Must’ve been monitoring the radio.”

He pulled the glasses away from his face. “Why would he think to do that?”

“Because his scrapbook’s gone. He knows we took it. And maybe—who knows—maybe that earring spooked him more than I thought. He was being extra cautious and he started scanning the encrypted tactical channels.”

“Still got him on GPS,” Russo said. He leaned toward the command center and looked in. “We do have him on GPS, right?”

“Affirm.”

“He may be monitoring the radio,” Russo said.

“Not only that, he’s probably figured out we’re tracking him.”

“And he knows all about the Domain Awareness System. Which means he’s going to try to defeat it.”

“Here we go,” the ESU lieutenant said. “Boat’s stopped near Watts Street.” He turned toward his men. “Pack it up. We’re moving!”

Vail started backing away. “C’mon.”

“Where we going?” Russo asked.

“You heard the man,” she said as she began running toward their sedan. “Watts Street.”

60

They reached Russo’s car and pulled open the doors simultaneously. Robby was in the act of dialing but quickly hung up. “This doesn’t look good.”

“Drive,” Vail said. “West Side Highway.”

“Yeah, can you be a little more specific? Don’t know my way around.”

Russo, in the front passenger seat, directed Robby and seconds later they were headed north.

“What’s this domain awareness thing you mentioned?” Vail asked.

“Something the department developed with Microsoft. Hardware and software. The software’s what makes it unique. The engineers built it based on months of meetings with us. Detectives and investigators. We told them the kind of stuff we needed to know and when, and they devised this surveillance system of real-time video cameras, license plate readers, radiation sensors, and nuclear detectors.

“The sensors are mounted on helicopters, boats, trucks, light posts—even officers’ duty belts. They’re all regularly taking air samples, giving us a pretty good reading on the state of things all over the city.”

“Awesome system,” Robby said.

“We’re selling it to other cities, so you’ll probably come across it on your DEA ops.”

“But,” Vail said, “if someone calls 911 and reports a suspicious package on Fifth Avenue, what does it actually do for you?”

“We can pull up that package at the command center in seconds, look at it from different angles, remotely sniff it for bombs or chemical threats, and get the correct unit over there to deal with it ASAP.”

“And Prisco?”

“If someone sees him, we can locate him on the network, follow him.”

“But he knows about this system,” Robby said, navigating around a pothole. “He’s gonna do his best to hide from it.”

“We’re starting to roll out facial recognition. Once we lock on his face, the system would track him automatically. And if we told the system we’re looking for him, it’d scan faces and alert us when it finds him.”

“But it’s not quite ready?” Vail asked.

“No.”

“And if he goes underground, or into a building—”

“Even without facial rec, we’ve got cameras all over the place, thousands of them, public, private, and ours—every single one is tied into DAS. I’m not saying it’s impossible to hide, but we’ve got eyes on a lot of the city. It’d be tough to escape. ”

Robby reached Watts Street. “We’re here. Now what?”

“Pull over. We’re unmarked, so we might see him before he sees us.”

Russo called up a photo of Prisco on his phone and showed it to Robby.

As Vail peered out the window, she asked, “You said some officers have those radiation sensors on their duty belts?”

“It gives us a mobile presence throughout the city, 24/7.”

“What about Harbor Patrol?”

“We’ve got a TRACS boat—and you’re gonna want to know what that stands for. Uh, tactical radiological acquisition and characterization system, I think. But it’s possible Harbor’s officers have sensors on their belts too. Cover a lot more ground that way. So to speak. Let me make a call. The Lower Manhattan Security Initiative command center.”

Russo got Chief Terrence Bradley on the line and after asking him the question, Bradley reported back a few moments later with the answer. Russo put him on speaker.

“Affirm, Officer Prisco is one of the officers outfitted with a radiological sensor.”

“Chief, this is Karen Vail, FBI. Is there any way we can tap into that sensor, use it like a GPS?”

“There’s no GPS device in it, so that’d be no.”

“Who’s your best tech guy there?”

“You don’t believe me?”

Robby turned around and gave Vail a look. It said, “Careful, Karen.”

“Of course I believe you, chief. But if you can connect me with him or her, I can toss some ideas out. They may all get shot down, but it can’t hurt, can it?”

“Hold on.”

A minute later, a man picked up the call. “This is Isamu John—”

“Isamu, Karen Vail, FBI. Chief Bradley was just telling us there’s no GPS signal we can track on Officer Prisco’s belt sensor.”

“That’s right.”

“Is there
any
signal that we can latch onto to track him?”

“None I’m aware of.”

“All right, thanks. Do me a favor and text your phone number to this cell in case I have other questions.”

“On its way.”

Russo disconnected the call.

“What are you thinking?” Robby asked.

Vail winked at him while she dialed her BlackBerry. Three rings later, just as she feared it would bounce to voice mail, it was answered by FBI Supervisory Special Agent Aaron Uziel.

His voice was drowned out by boisterous laughter in the background. “Uzi.”

She curled a bit of red hair behind her ear. “Uzi, it’s Karen.” She put the call on speaker.

“Karen! Caught me at a good time. We’re in an OPSIG meeting—Director Knox, Secretary McNamara, and about ten other intelligence chiefs and generals. So much brass the shine is blinding. We just broke for fifteen. Oh—and Hector’s here.”

“Hey,” DeSantos’s voice boomed in the background, “How’s my London bedmate doing?”

Robby’s head whipped around. “
What
was that?”

Vail cleared her throat but didn’t answer.

“Uh-oh,” Uzi said. “Are we on speaker?”

“Tell Hector I owe him a kick in the bollocks. He’ll know what I mean.”

“You can tell him yourself. You’re gonna get pulled into this mission soon enough.”

“Well, until that happens, I’m chasing serial killers and I’m hot on the trail of one I’ve been after for nineteen years.” She explained the situation with Prisco when he stopped her.

“The DAS. Domain Awareness System.”

“How’d you know?”

“Karen, should I be insulted? High-tech gadgetry like that sweet system, deployed in a major city, and you think I don’t know about it? Not to mention, I’m head of the Joint Terrorism Task Force in DC. Remember?”

How could I forget?
“Guess I took a stupid pill this morning. So is there a way to hack into that sensor and turn it into a GPS device?”

“Nice thought, Karen. For a second, you actually sounded like you knew what you’re talking about. But you don’t. If it doesn’t have a GPS receiver, you can’t get a GPS position.”

“That’s what the DAS techie said.”

“And you didn’t believe him?”

“I thought that if there was someone who could figure something out, it’d be you.”

“And you thought right. That device is an expensive detector, so it’s got RFID built in for asset tracking—that’s radio frequency identification. RFID is a wireless way of using radio-frequency electromagnetic fields to transfer data. It’s totally passive until a specific radio frequency hits it. If you’re close enough, your tech could amp up a unit and listen for a response. There may be a number of RFID devices that could respond, but if I remember right, the unit uses a proprietary frequency protocol. Problem is, you’ll have to filter an ocean of responses looking for the correct one.”

“But of course you have a solution.”

“Of course. They can use an algorithm to filter out all other responses and then ping the target RFID repeatedly and triangulate based on the strength-of-response signal. Sort of like sonar. No network, no hacking, no Wi-Fi nets, no special doodads, just the good guys upgrading their detectors and using a filtering algorithm to leverage a feature already built into the sensor.”

“Honestly, I’m not sure—”

“That’s okay, you don’t have to understand. Point is, I should be able to make it so that you can triangulate a location if the sensor’s within range. It may not be pinpoint accurate—”

“Uzi, I don’t care. Just get us the asshole’s position.”

“Will do. And?”

“And what?” She waited, then said, “Oh. You’re awesome, Uzi. Not sure what I’d do without you.”

“You
know
it. So who should I contact at the command center?”