Sign of Evil (Shannon Ames Book 3) Read online

  Sign of Evil

  A Shannon Ames Thriller

  TJ Brearton

  For the Dolly Sisters. May they be reunited in heaven, in all their humble sweetness.

  JOIN THE INKUBATOR MAILING LIST

  You will be the first to learn about new releases plus the many FREE and discounted Kindle books we offer!

  bit.ly/3fPBwVA

  Contents

  1. Wednesday, September 8, 6:31 a.m

  Chapter 2

  3. Thursday, September 9, 8:08 a.m

  4. Friday, September 10, 6:44 a.m

  5. Friday, September 10, 7:38 a.m

  6. Friday, September 10, 5:44 p.m

  7. Friday, September 10, 9:18 p.m

  8. Friday, September 10, 11:49 p.m

  Chapter 9

  10. Monday, September 13, 10:33 p.m

  11. Tuesday, September 14, 2:33 a.m

  12. Thursday, September 16, 12:03 a.m

  13. Friday, September 17, 4:45 p.m

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  16. Saturday, September 18, 6:01 a.m

  17. Sunday, September 19, 2:19 a.m

  18. Sunday, September 19, 7:04 a.m

  19. Sunday, September 19, 12:22 p.m

  20. Monday, September 20, 12:21 a.m

  21. Monday, September 20, 12:48 a.m

  22. Monday, September 20, 3:11 a.m

  23. Monday, September 20, 7:45 a.m

  24. Monday, September 20, 10:10 a.m

  25. Monday, September 20, 1:56 p.m

  26. Monday, September 20, 3:34 p.m

  27. Monday, September 20, 5:06 p.m

  28. Monday, September 20, 5:50 p.m

  29. Monday, September 20, 7:18 p.m

  30. Tuesday, September 21, 12:39 a.m

  31. Tuesday, September 21, 1:22 a.m

  32. Tuesday, September 21, 1:50 a.m

  33. Tuesday, September 21, 6:18 a.m

  34. Tuesday, September 21, 6:43 a.m

  35. Tuesday, September 21, 8:25 a.m

  36. Tuesday, September 21, 10:05 a.m

  37. Tuesday, September 21, 12:22 p.m

  38. Wednesday, September 22, 6:31 a.m

  39. Wednesday, September 22, 10:11 a.m

  40. Wednesday, September 22, 10:32 a.m

  41. Wednesday, September 22, 1:08 p.m

  42. Thursday, September 23, 6:45 a.m

  43. Thursday, September 23, 2:48 p.m

  44. Thursday, September 23, 5:03 p.m

  45. Thursday, September 23, 6:18 p.m

  46. Thursday, September 23, 7:02 p.m

  47. Thursday, September 23, 7:34 p.m

  48. Thursday, September 23, 8:08 p.m

  49. Thursday, September 23, 8:40 p.m

  50. Thursday, September 23, 8:51 p.m

  51. Thursday, September 23, 9:02 p.m

  Chapter 52

  53. Friday, September 24, 10:12 a.m

  Epilogue

  We hope you enjoyed this book

  Acknowledgments

  ROUGH COUNTRY

  Also by TJ Brearton

  Rights Info

  1

  Wednesday, September 8, 6:31 a.m

  A white sheet draped the dead body. The asphalt beneath was blackened and charred, forming an asymmetrical ring. A motorist who’d called 911 said he’d seen something burning in a parking lot near the highway and smelled a terrible smell. Like a barbeque, but foul. Wrong.

  Special Agent Shannon Ames lifted the crime scene tape over her head. She slipped through and pulled on a pair of blue plastic gloves. There was maybe a whiff of burning smell in the air, but it had mostly blown through, she figured, pushed by the breeze coming off the Harlem River, or masked by the brakes-and-exhaust stink of traffic bustling on the highways and byways that surrounded her.

  She looked around. After more than a year with the FBI, crime scenes were becoming familiar places. You saw lots of the same people – paramedics, crime scene techs, firefighters, and local police. Different faces and names, but the same essential roles. Police response was like the immune system of a society. And right now, somewhere, was a virus that needed to be found.

  But why am I here? Why me, specifically? It was a question she’d been asking herself since her supervisor called an hour ago, telling her she was needed. Why, when her jurisdiction was Brooklyn-Queens, was she at an apparent homicide in the South Bronx?

  But since it wasn’t the most important question – it felt kind of selfish, really – she swept it aside.

  Nearby, two uniformed cops chatted and drank coffee, and one of them laughed at a joke. A group of firefighters hung back in the street, the lights of a firetruck still twirling. Three crime scene techs in white Tyvek suits were packing up their van, having already worked the scene. Yellow markers dotted the ground – signs of their passing. And a female detective in plainclothes stood in proximity, talking on her phone.

  She saw Shannon and ended the call as she approached, extending a hand. “Hi. Detective Mindy Cahill. NYPD Robbery-Homicide.”

  “Special Agent Shannon Ames, FBI. Hi.”

  Shannon was met with a strong grip. Cahill said, “The victim appears to be Jared D’Onofrio, forty-eight years old, from Yonkers. Married, no kids. He manages a Staples business center down in Harlem.” Cahill moved a little closer to the body and crouched. “We don’t have the official identification yet. That will come from the teeth, it’s looking like. We’d be sending the body off to the morgue now, but we got a call you were coming down.” The detective paused. She gave Shannon a look. “He was incinerated, with gasoline as the fuel.”

  “What time?”

  “Well, the first call came in at 3:04 a.m. The medical examiner said that sounded right for time of death. He’s over there in that other van, waiting for the green light to take the body in for autopsy.”

  Everybody was waiting for her, basically. Shannon squatted beside Cahill and lifted the sheet.

  The smell hit hard. An egg-like odor of burned hair, the charcoal scent of torched skin, all mixed with the coppery undertones of iron-rich blood, boiled away. The skin was blackened to coal. Nothing much left of the face but the scoop of an open mouth. The hands were hooked into claws, either side of the head. As if the victim had died screaming and holding his skull.

  Cahill’s voice was quiet. “So is this a series? I heard about someone getting burned like this six months ago.”

  Shannon lowered the sheet over Jared D’Onofrio and stood. “It might be.”

  Traffic trundled overhead on the bridge. More rushed past on the nearby highway. Where they were was a kind of nexus of overpasses and roads. Graffiti snaked around the massive concrete bridge supports. Vining weeds entwined themselves along lengths of waist-high chain-link fence.

  “Well,” Cahill said, “you’re gonna want to check this out.”

  Shannon followed her to a guardrail, and Cahill pointed out a marked item in some weeds. Shannon bent for a closer look: a black Bic lighter with a yellow smiley face.

  “But there’s no gas can,” Cahill said after a moment. Shannon eyed the lighter, then met Cahill’s gaze. Cahill was a head shorter than Shannon, who wasn’t exactly tall at five feet seven. The detective had large brown eyes and voluminous dark hair done up in a bun. Or a chignon. One of those. She wore a gray pantsuit, and the curl of some tribal tattoo just showed on the back of her left hand.

  She said, “What I mean is, I had to give it consideration at first – did this guy torch himself? But then I had the burn specialist here, who checked it all out and said someone poured gas all over this guy and lit him up. I’m thinking the doer tossed the lighter for us to find.”

  The yellow smiley face grinned up at Shannon.


  Hi there. I know something you don’t know.

  Cahill said, “I already made a couple of calls – you can find those lighters anywhere in the city. Plenty sold around here, too.”

  “How many people phoned 911?” Shannon asked.

  “Multiple. I don’t know the exact number. People driving by saw the fire. Later calls mentioned the smell.”

  “But no eyewitnesses of the act itself. Seeing someone dumping gas on another person.”

  “No. We got information on most of the people who called in, and I plan to follow up with every one of them. But the first thing I did was send a team out for eyewitnesses. I knew we’d hit a wall. No one lives around here. We’re in the middle of nothing – roads and ramps and parking.”

  “Was anyone else in the parking lot? Have you let anyone go?”

  “We haven’t had to. There was no one here. See, this end of the parking lot is usually empty unless there’s a Yanks game. Yankee Stadium is a couple of blocks east of us. If there’s a game, and the parking garage is full and the southern lot is crowded, you might see some people here, sitting in their folding chairs, drinking beer, wearing their favorite jerseys. But there’s no game going on.”

  “Gotcha.” Shannon glanced around at the two uniformed cops watching them from the crime scene tape. One cop took a sip of his coffee, his eyes never leaving Shannon. The place was so remote, there weren’t even any onlookers.

  Shannon faced the detective again. “Can I see the vehicle?”

  “Sure. This way.”

  She followed Cahill to a pale blue Toyota Corolla that looked like it had seen better days. Cahill’s hard-soled shoes echoed off all the concrete and steel. “We’ve gone through all the parking receipts for last night. You get a ticket on the way in, pay on the way out. Every time the machine dispenses a ticket, it’s logged into the system. So we went into the system. There were other vehicles here that came and went last night, but this was the last. The machine said 2:47 a.m.”

  Shannon noticed an empty pillbox booth in the distance, and what looked like a small automated dispenser beside it.

  Why am I here?

  Cahill continued, “Of course, I shut down the lot as soon as I arrived. Like I said, there were no vehicles after this one, nobody else here, but we wanted to close it.”

  As they reached the older, slightly rusted Corolla, Shannon said, “You said this lot services the stadium?”

  “This is the Harlem River Lot. People like it because it’s easy on, easy off. You might park here if you work in the area, but mostly it’s for Yankee Stadium, yeah. And Circo Hermanos Vazquez. The circus.” She pointed, but Shannon didn’t see anything besides a layering of more roads, on-ramps, off-ramps, and overpasses. Maybe the striped peak of a tent? The sun was barely up, the sky overcast, so the distance lacked clarity.

  Another uniformed NYPD cop guarded the Corolla. He was young, with thick, expressive eyebrows. He looked at Shannon for a few extra seconds, then stepped aside. Cahill introduced them. “Special Agent Ames, Officer Edward Valencia.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “This is it,” Cahill said. She put her hands on her hips beside her firearm and badge.

  Shannon circled the vehicle. She cupped her hands and looked inside from various angles.

  Cahill said, “We’ll take the vehicle in to print it and do the DNA tests and everything else.”

  The interior appeared typical: slightly messy, but not too. Some fast-food wrappers and cups. Empty soda cans. A black backpack. “Go through the backpack yet?”

  “Just had a quick look,” Cahill said. “But be my guest.”

  Shannon glanced at the two of them just for confirmation, and Cahill gave a nod. Shannon opened the back door of the car. “And it was unlocked when you found it?”

  “Yep. Unlocked.”

  Shannon reached into the backpack, which was unzipped. The car smelled a bit like greasy hamburgers, cigarettes, cologne. Maybe a trace of something else – perfume. Inside the bag, some papers in a binder. A brown paper sack with remnants of a peanut butter sandwich. Two unopened packs of Newports.

  “His wallet?” Shannon asked.

  “No wallet. The ME is pretty sure it was on his person. We IDed him off the car. We used the reg and got a phone number, called his wife. She said he didn’t come home last night.”

  Shannon pulled out of the vehicle and stood. “Did she say anything else?”

  “Sometimes he stays late at work. He’s a store manager, has to do inventory, things like that. I guess he’s got a cot in the office, and every once in a while, he spends the night. So that was the next thing I did – I called the regional manager for Staples and confirmed D’Onofrio worked there. They looked in their system and told me he’d punched out just before two a.m.”

  “How far away is the Staples?”

  “Not far. About twenty minutes, in Harlem.”

  Shannon nodded. Plenty of time to get in his car and drive over to the Bronx.

  She pointed overhead. “Maybe he took this bridge?”

  “Yeah, maybe. It’s a swing bridge; changes positions for boats passing through. It’s a city landmark. No cameras. But he could’ve taken the 145th Street Bridge, or the Madison Avenue Bridge… It depends on what he wanted, where he was going. He could’ve gotten here any number of ways. But I plan to check the cameras on all that. See if anything fits with the timeline.”

  “Great,” Shannon said. “Keep me posted.”

  One way or another, instead of returning home, Jared D’Onofrio had come here. To a spillover lot for Yankee Stadium in a neighborhood where no one really lived. Why?

  Well, it probably had to do with the perfume smell. All Shannon’s supervisor had said was, Possible fourth in a series; need you to check it out. I’ll be there as soon as I can. But Shannon had called fellow agent Jenna Reese on the way in. Reese had told her that the other three victims in the possible series were all johns. Customers of Bronx prostitutes. The senior special agent on the case, working it out of the Manhattan Field Office, was a guy named Brad Gorgas.

  So where was he?

  Shannon returned her attention to Cahill and the vehicle. “As far as you can tell, nothing was taken?”

  “Nothing was taken.”

  “Not his cigarettes, not his wallet, not his car?”

  Cahill shook her head. “No.”

  Shannon took a few steps back, seeking a bigger picture. “He got out of the vehicle. He came over here. Someone doused him in gasoline.” She looked off in the direction of the Bic lighter with the yellow smiley face. “And then they set him on fire.”

  “That’s about the shape of it.”

  She took a breath. “Let’s go ahead and call your people to take the vehicle.”

  As she said it, she noticed a car enter the parking lot and come cruising toward them. She recognized the dark blue Chevy Impala as one of the FBI’s.

  Maybe they would explain what she was doing here.

  2

  “We’d like you to go undercover,” said Mark Tyler.

  They sat in the Impala, which was parked and idling. Behind the wheel was Tyler, the supervisory special agent at the Brooklyn-Queens resident agency. Her boss. Brad Gorgas filled the passenger seat beside him, a senior special agent out of the main office in Manhattan.

  The way it worked, the FBI had fifty-six field offices, or divisions, across the US and Puerto Rico. New York was a big one, with several satellite offices, called resident agencies, of which Brooklyn-Queens was one. Tyler’s job was to oversee the day-to-day operations at the Brooklyn-Queens office. He rarely ventured out unless it was important.

  Shannon blinked at him. “Undercover?”

  “It would have to be your choice,” Tyler emphasized. “But I wanted to tell you, it would mark the end of your probationary period.”

  She let out a small laugh, then covered her mouth. “Sorry, sir – that sounded a little bit like a bribe.”

  “Not at all. It’s
– if you really want to understand it – it’s a legal thing. A paperwork thing. The bureau won’t allow agents still in their probationary period to do undercover work. But it’s not the reason why we’re asking – because we think we can leverage you. You don’t have to do it. And your probationary period is up in three months anyway. This just fast-tracks you. If it matters.”

  She thought a moment. “It doesn’t.”

  Tyler and Gorgas exchanged looks.

  Outside the vehicle, a truck beeped as it backed up. D’Onofrio’s Corolla was being hitched to an NYPD tow truck.

  Gorgas said, “We can talk it through. We just wanted to get to the point, let you know what we’re asking right up front.” He was broad-shouldered with a square jaw and a brush cut. Three moles marked the left side of his face along his jawline.

  “I understand,” Shannon said. It was hard for her mind not to leap ahead. Undercover? Doing what? Where – in an area she knew nothing about? Talking to whom? Hookers?

  Gorgas handed her a thick file. “That’s everything so far, condensed. Another was burned like this. Lawrence Olmos. He was a schoolteacher in the South Bronx. The other two succumbed to multiple blunt force traumas. Even though the MOs are different, the solicitation links them. We can put each of the victims at sex-work hotspots in the region, either through their phones or car GPS. I’m sure we’re going to find the same thing with this last guy.”