Agents and Angels Ch. 02

"No doubt about that." I said under my breath.

"But there's nothing new on Brooke." Nash continued. "If we don't get something on him by tomorrow morning, we're probably flying home to the City."

I nodded. Our food arrived, and we ate in silence. The televisions behind the counter were turned down, but I kept seeing flashes of a marina with boats, then homes, then what may have been a crime scene with Police cars in front of a home."

"What's going on there?" I asked, directed their attention to the television screen. We couldn't really see, so we resumed eating.

A few minutes later we were done. As we went to pay our bill, two men came into the diner. One was Strait, and the other was his cousin in an LEO uniform.

"Hey guys!" Strait said in his sometimes-too-loud voice. "Glad we caught you!"

"Tell us quietly what happened." I said, keeping my own voice down.

"Oh, right." Strait said, making sure to lower his voice. He turned to his cousin to give us the news.

"Apparently there's been a murder at one of the gated subdivisions near the marina." said Cousin Strait, naming the marina and subdivision. The television scenes now made sense.

"Let's get over there." I said.

Part 8 - Red Brooke vs. Red Crowbar

As we got to the area, it was chaos. I was in the Mooresville PD car with the Straits, and we were let through immediately. The FBI vehicles behind us were stopped and IDs checked, slowing them down. I told Strait's cousin to not wait for them, and we went on ahead.

"They're down near the docks!" I heard someone yell as we pulled into the country club front parking lot area. "They've got him cornered!" We ran down along a path that led to a grassy yard, with the water of a finger of Lake Norman in back, and a fence separating the property from I-77 to the left (east).

One Police officer was lying on the ground. With people all around, the Deputy trying to nab Red Brooke couldn't use his gun. He'd tried his TASER, to no avail; Brooke had on some kind of cloth armor under his clothes that stopped the TASER needles from getting into his skin and preventing the electric current from flowing.

I got my first look at this dangerous serial killer. He was tall, 6'3", one inch shorter than me. He was lean, which made him look even taller. He was fit and even muscular, but his shoulders were not as broad as mine, giving further credence to his slender-ish look. His hair was a flaming red, not auburn but darker than my strawberry-blonde hair.

And he had one of the meanest-looking countenances that a human face could have. His eyes were dark and piercing, and his mouth was set in a deep frown.

"Stay here!" I shouted to the Straits, and I took off after Brooke, my crowbar drawn and ready for battle. But I was too late: as I ran up, Brooke had executed a vicious martial arts kick into the chest of the Deputy, then grabbed the Deputy's head and violently twisted it. I heard the sickening *SNAP!*, and knew Brooke had broken the man's neck, killing him.

Brooke turned to me as I ran up. "Oh, another idiot." he said, his voice a medium sound, but cold and harsh. "Bring it on, sucker!" But I did see that he had reached down and gotten the Deputy's billy stick, with which he could oppose my crowbar.

*WHANG!*

I hurled into the attack, trying to break the billy stick with a powerful blow. But it held. Brooke was holding it 'properly', as Officers do, holding the handle with the stick running along his forearm. He parried my blow, then swung the billy stick at me backhanded. I parried that blow, and we both regrouped for a second.

"So what do we have here?" Brooke was saying, and I knew he was verbally probing me. "Not gonna look after your fellow LEOs, there?"

"Not until I have you in cuffs... or dead." I growled, my voice low and menacing. Brooke absorbed and processed that information, then parried my next couple of blows.

Then he struck at me, whirling around, and attempted to deliver a vicious martial arts kick to my groin or wherever he could land it. Unfortunately for him, and lucky for me, I'd seen that move... executed by one Cindy Ross in the Police Boxing Matches. I sidestepped the blow, and he barely intercepted the vicious swing of my crowbar right at his head.

He was definitely shocked that I'd not only parried his move, but almost used it to defeat him. His dark eyes flashed evil fire as we exchanged more blows. People around us were watching, instead of doing the smart thing: running like hell away from this dangerous killer and the dumbass redhead with a crowbar that was actually engaging him in personal combat.

And then, damn it, I saw his eyes change again... in recognition of what I was doing. I was not attacking him, and therefore was not giving him any openings to attack me; I was just containing him. And he realized that I had slowly maneuvered him back towards the lake, keeping him restricted and his escape cut off until help could arrive.

"Well met, whoever you are." he said. Then, with very fast speed, he dropped the baton as he pulled something out of his back pocket. It was a hand grenade! "Here, catch!" he said as he pulled the pin and tossed it to me, and then began running down the path along the side of the lake.

"Aw, shit!" I exclaimed as I caught it. I threw the grenade as hard as I could towards the lake. It barely had hit the water and sunk when it went off.

*POOM!*

As the geyser of water shot up, I looked around. Red Brooke was running like a frickin' gazelle down that lakeside path. He was at least a hundred yards away as he ran to a boat, got in, started the motor, and burst out of the docks like a bat out of hell onto the lake, leaving me in his wake...

As I came back to the grassy area, the Straits and Detective Alison Ames were checking on the fallen Officers. "They're both dead." said Detective Ames.

"I'm sorry." I said. Two LEOs had given their lives to stop a serial killer. I knew the pain their families would feel, and that their fellow LEOs would feel at their sacrifice, and I felt that pain, as well.

As EMT and Coroner personnel came up, I went back towards the clubhouse. The FBI Agents were massed there, along with a lot of other LEOs.

"Someone send out an alert along the entire lake." I called out. "Brooke got away by boat."

"We already did." said a North Carolina State Highway Patrolman.

"Nash," I said, "we need to go to the scene of that house where Brooke murdered those two people"

"NO!" shouted Page. Everyone whirled to look at him, and he said "You have no business here, Troy. Stay out of our way!"

"He's with us!" replied Jefferson loudly. "And he's coming with us!" We all left, leaving the LEOs at the scene to wonder what the internecine FBI battle was about...

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I brought Strait with me, and asked him to watch Page and make sure I didn't catch a bullet in the back. Strait nodded, already stunned at the turn of events of this morning. Things like this did not happen in Coltrane County... unless I was around there, too.

We came into the house, which had local LEOs and FBI Agents there already.

"Who are these guys?" asked one FBI Agent, whom I did not know.

"The redhead with the red crowbar is an FBI Consultant with our team." said Jefferson. "The other guy is related to a local LEO."

"And he's with me." I said. "Let's look at this crime scene, Strait." Getting him out of the scrutiny of the FBI Agents, we went into the main room, where we saw the objects of everyone's attention:

In front of the fireplace a man was lying on his side, still tied to a folding chair, his hands tied behind the back of the chair. His eyes had been gouged out, and he had several deep cuts on his skin in several places on his chest. The cause of death was his throat being slit wide open.

In front of the sofa on the other side of the room was a table that one could pull the top up and eat off it while sitting on the sofa. Tied to that table, her chest pressed into the tabletop and her knees on the floor, was a woman. Her jeans had been pulled down her thighs, and there was evidence she had been raped. Her throat was slit, as well, but she had no other outward injuries. A blood-soaked 'Rambo' knife was lying on the floor beside the table.

Both of them were in their 50s, and pictures around the house attested to the fact they were a married couple with now-grown kids. A local LEO gave us their names, and said that he was a semi-retired former CEO of a software company that served the big banks in Charlotte. I was fiddling on my Police iPhone as I listened in and watched everyone examine the bodies.

"Well," said Page, "it's obvious that she was tortured and raped in front of her husband."

"Just the opposite." I said loudly. "He was tortured in front of her."

"How the hell can you say that?" snarled Page. "She was raped in front of him."

"He was likely dead when she was raped." I replied. "And his eyes were gouged out already, for sure. Isn't that obvious?"

"Oh, I get it." said Julius Jefferson. "He's got all the torture marks on him... cuts, eyes gouged. She was tied up, made to watch that, and then Brooke raped her before killing her too."

"How in the hell can you say that?" said Page angrily. "There is nothing to suggest it's not the other way around."

"Sure there is." I said loudly. "Observation, deduction, and the third tenet of Detection: knowledge. I have the knowledge------"

"Yes, I'm sure you do. Four hundred years of knowledge."

The familiar voice came from behind us. Into the room walked FBI Special Agent in Charge Jack Muscone.

Part 9 - Red Secret Revealed

Jack's face had a look of fear and resignation on it... resignation that I was here, and figuring this out, and fear of the consequences... and of Red Brooke's evil intentions.

"What knowledge is that?" asked Martin Nash. I answered before Jack could stop me.

"The knowledge that this woman was a Federal Marshal until she retired last year. I looked up her name as soon as we got here and I learned it. Several of Brooke's victims were Marshals or related to Marshals."

I turned to Page and said accusingly: "You know that as well, Page, but you've been holding back that information, haven't you?"

"What?" gasped Nash. "Is that true, Page? You been holding out on us?"

"Hell no." said Page. "I don't know anything that you don't know."

"I will apologize if I find out your BAU superiors withheld that knowledge from you, Page." I said. "Though I think it's more likely you do know. Anyway, Brooke wanted information from the woman, and tortured her husband in front of her to get that information. Looks like she held out if it got to his eyeballs being gouged out, and maybe she told him nothing at all."

"Anyway," I continued, "at the end, Brooke helped himself to the woman sexually. I suspect he raped her to leave semen at the scene, which would be DNA-matched to him, and let us know he was here. In other words, he was leaving his calling card by doing that. He left his fingerprints on a card when he murdered those two co-eds in Winston-Salem. But the delay in doing that allowed us to catch up to him, and almost capture him."

"Why is he doing that?" asked Conrad.

"Don." said Jack Muscone before I could answer. "Why don't you and I have a little talk before we say anything further"

"Commander Troy," said Detective Alison Ames, "I need to get your statement of your fight with Brooke before anything else."

"Yes, let's do that now." I said.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

After giving my statement in the kitchen, the LEOs and FBI Agents listening were astounded. "Commander," one FBI Agent, who was from Virginia, said, "no one has ever fought Red Brooke to a standstill in personal combat before. Just how well trained are you?"

"I've taken Aikido since I was a young child." I said. "And my Captain of Detectives back home has two black belts, so I have to work hard to keep up." Nash chuckled at that one. He knew the real story, and of the Police Boxing Matches.

"But to be honest, I was a bit lucky." I said. "Brooke did things I had seen before, and I don't think that was his full repertoire of moves. He didn't know who I was, either."

"Commander," said an older FBI Agent. "I'm Special Agent In Charge Sigmund Harris, and I run the BAU unit that's in charge of the Brooke case. First, I apologize for Special Agent Page's attitude towards you. And second, what can you tell us of Brooke that can help us deal with him psychologically?"

"No offense to you, sir," I said, "but from what I saw of Brooke, he's out of all of our leagues. He has tremendous personal combat skills, and he has the psychological skills and knowledge behind them. He is brutally dangerous. I know those two dead LEOs out there thought they couldn't use their guns while all those people were out there, and Brooke has taken precautions against TASERs. But if I'd had a gun myself, I'd have blown him away no matter the risks and the consequences. He's too dangerous."

"Is he anticipating our moves to try to catch him?" asked Harris.

"Sir, again no offense," I said, "but he not only is anticipating you, he's playing with you. He's leaving his prints and his semen all over the place to goad you."

"What can we do?" asked the FBI Agent from Virginia.

"Stop trying to outsmart him, because you can't." I said. "Be dumb, deliberately. Play dumb. Do it by the book. Give him nothing to react to. Okay, sir, I need to talk to Jack Muscone..."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

"How much do you know?" asked Muscone as we sat in his car outside, with Nash in the back seat, and my bug-killer full on. It was a cold enough day that we were not too warm inside the car.

"Enough to tell you that it's you he's after," I said, "and doing it the way Thomas P. Cook attacked me... through family. He's going for your family, isn't he? And he's trying to find them by torturing U.S. Marshals that took them into hiding."

Muscone nodded. "Let me give you the full story, from the beginning. Six years ago, just months before I met you, my wife left me, and took our two daughters. She'd said that it would be amicable and everything would be okay. But... she's a lawyer, and a very good one. I hired a divorce attorney, and he said it would be okay, that I'd get some custody rights, and my wife would have to keep the kids in our State."

"Well," Muscone said, the pain in his voice evident, "I got ripped a new one. My wife moved away, took the kids out of State. I got no visitation rights, nada, nothing. I didn't have to pay alimony, but that was the only silver lining in the cloud."

"My divorce attorney didn't even contest anything, and he only seemed interested in his bills being paid." continued Muscone. "My wife tried to get a restraining order against me, which would've destroyed my FBI career. My divorce attorney didn't turn his hands to contest it, but fortunately the Deputy Director saw what was going on and sent an FBI attorney in to fight that, and the judge refused to issue the restraining order. Because of that, among other things, I hired another attorney to sue my divorce attorney for malpractice. It ended up that I didn't have to pay him, but I got nothing from him, and I still had to pay the other attorney."

"In addition," Muscone said, "my kids were interviewed by so-called psychologists. These bozos were not the quality of your wife, and they knew where their bread was buttered. My daughters refused to admit that they were abused by me in any way, despite my wife's attempts to get them to say something. But my younger daughter said she was scared I would die because I was an FBI Agent, and that was enough for the judge to deny me any visitation rights."

"My wife moved away, to Virginia, D.C. area." said Muscone. "Over time, my daughters wanted to know who their father was, and wanted to see me. So I was able to see them a few times when I was in Washington, D.C. I think the Deputy Director was behind a lot of that."

"He was." said Nash. "Don't tell him I told you."

"Anyway," said Muscone, "about three years ago, while you were starting to dig around Westboro, Red Brooke allegedly sent the FBI a letter saying that he was going to kill my family in retaliation for me capturing him------"

"How did you capture him?" I asked.

"I did what you just suggested to those guys." said Muscone. "I played dumb. He liked to abduct couples, rape the wife or girlfriend in front of her guy, then he would them both. I acted like I had no idea what Brooke was up to, said he was too smart for me. He got a little careless, and when he went after what he thought was a couple in the backseat of a car in a park, we were there to nab him. I used a TASER on him, so he didn't get a chance to kick me in the nuts, or anywhere else."

"Sorry to interrupt, but I needed to know that." I said. "So, the FBI got a note?"

"So I was told." said Muscone. "The Marshals took my wife and kids into what is essentially witness protection. At first, I thought my ex-wife had ginned up the whole thing, so that I'd be denied seeing my kids, and she'd have an excuse to tell them why they couldn't see me anymore. And after all, Brooke was in Supermax."

"And then he miraculously escaped Supermax." I said, my voice full of acid sarcasm. "And he somehow got on the trail of your wife and daughters. And he somehow knows which Federal Marshals hid your wife, and knows where they are."

"Thing is," said Muscone, "Dana Fox was questioned about it, about the whole Red Brooke thing. He said he had no knowledge of any of it, other than the FBI's manhunt for Brooke. He said he wasn't involved in anything to do with Brooke."

"He's probably telling the truth on that." I said. "I'm sensing an outside agency in all of that... in the Senator Russell and BigAgraFoods thing, finding Larry Wheeler as the whistleblower and then killing him, some elements of the whole Kendra Luskin false rape thing, Dana Fox going after Callie Carrington and her company in California... and now Red Brooke going after your family."

"So who can we trust and not trust in the FBI?" asked Martin Nash.

"I dunno." I said. "Gotta keep our heads on swivels about that. I'd keep an eye on Peter Page, for sure."

"So what do we do now?" asked Muscone.

"You gotta take this to the EAD." I said. "He'll have to push it upwards, to Washington. They're going to have to know where your wife and children are, and protect them, maybe move them."

"My wife's a stubborn bitch." said Muscone. "What if she says she doesn't want to move again?"

"Commander," said Nash, "even if they do go to the Marshals, who may not cooperate, they're not going to tell Jack or our team where his family is."

"I know." I said. "That's where... 'The Friends of the Iron Crowbar' come in. You do believe in Crowbar's Angels, don't you Jack?"

"I'd damn well better." said Jack. "I'm all but ready to ask one of them to marry me..."

Part 10 - Manhunt

"This is Bettina Wurtzburg, KXTC Fox Two News!" shouted the lovely redheaded reporterette from in front of the Federal Building at 7:00am, Monday, February 26th. "Fox Two News has learned that serial killer Red Brooke has struck again!"

Bettina: "Brooke tortured and murdered a family in North Carolina, north of Charlotte, then killed a Police Officer and Deputy Sheriff that attempted to apprehend them. He was then engaged in personal combat by an FBI Consultant, but managed to get away by boat on Lake Norris. The boat was recovered many miles from the site of the crimes, and Brooke is at large again."

"And in State news," Bettina said, "that rumble you heard was the sound of the slightest bit of progress being made in the Legislature, and it's on the Law Enforcement bill, specifically the SBI portion of the bill. Both Republicans and Democrats agree that the current SBI Reserve program should come to an end. The current program of calling up local Officers in each region and district of the State will be discontinued if the new law passes. There are still details to be worked out, such as having any SBI Reservists at all, and hiring new full-time SBI Agents to fill the numbers gap."