The Skin Collector(Lincoln Rhyme)

Chapter 67





Mention the word ‘terrorism’ and many Americans, perhaps most, think of radicalized Islamists targeting the country for its shady self-indulgent values and support of Israel.

Lincoln Rhyme knew, though, that those fringe Muslims were a very small portion of the people who had ideological gripes with the United States and were willing to express those views violently. And most terrorists were white, Christian card-carrying citizens.

The history of domestic terrorism is long. The Haymarket bombing occurred in Chicago in 1886. The Los Angeles Times offices were blown up by union   radicals in 1910. San Francisco was rocked by the Preparedness Day bombing, protesting proposed involvement in World War One. And a horse-drawn wagon bomb outside J.P. Morgan bank killed dozens and injured hundreds in 1920. As the years went by, the political and social divisiveness that motivated these acts and others continued undiminished. In fact, the terrorist movements grew, thanks to the Internet, where like-minded haters could gather and scheme in relative anonymity.

The technology of destruction improved too, allowing people like the Unabomber to terrorize schools and academics and to evade detection for years, and with relative ease. Timothy McVeigh manufactured a fertilizer bomb that destroyed the federal building in Oklahoma City.

Presently, Rhyme knew there were about two dozen active domestic terror groups being monitored by the FBI and local authorities, ranging from the Army of God (anti-abortion), to Aryan Nations (white, nationalist neo-Nazis), to the Phineas Priesthood (anti-gay, anti-interracial-marriage, anti-Semitic and anti-taxation, among others), to small one-off, disorganized cells of strident crazies called by police ‘garage bands’.

Authorities also kept a watchful eye on another category of potential terror: private militias, of which there’s at least one in every state of the union  , with a total membership of more than fifty thousand.

These groups were more or less independent but were joined by common views: that the federal government is too intrusive and a threat to individual freedom, lower or no taxes, fundamentalist Christianity, an isolationist stance when it comes to foreign policy, distrust of Wall Street and globalization. While not many militias put it in their bylaws, they also embrace certain de facto policies like racism, nationalism, anti-immigration, misogyny and anti-Semitism, anti-abortion and anti-LGBT.

A particular problem with the militias is that, by definition, they’re paramilitary groups; they believe fervently in the second amendment (‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed’). Which meant that they were usually armed to the teeth. Admittedly some militias aren’t terrorist organizations and claim their weapons are only for hunting and self-defense. Others, such as Matthew Stanton’s American Families First Council, obviously felt otherwise.

Why New York City should be a particularly juicy target Rhyme had never figured out (the militias, curiously, pretty much left Washington, DC alone). Maybe it was the other trappings of the Big Apple that appealed: gays, a large non-Anglo population, home of the liberal media, the headquarters of so many multinational companies. And maybe they felt the Rockettes and Annie carried thinly veiled socialist propaganda.

If Rhyme totaled the number of perps he’d been up against over the years, he supposed he’d rank anti-social personality disorder doers first (that is, psychos) and domestic terrorists second, far more numerous than foreign plotters or organized crime perps.

Like the couple he was about to speak to: Matthew and Harriet Stanton.

Rhyme was now on the tenth floor of the Stantons’ hotel, along with officers of the NYPD Emergency Service operation. ESU had cleared the building and found no other co-conspirators. Rhyme and Sachs hadn’t expected any. The hotel records indicated that only the Stantons and their son were staying here. Clearly there was one other perp – the deceased Unsub 11-5 – but there was no evidence of anyone else in New York. After Rhyme and Sachs had determined that the Stantons had been involved in the terror attack they and Bo Haumann had put together a tactical op to nail them.

The hotel manager had arranged for the elevators to bypass the tenth floor and had moved his staff elsewhere while the police evacuated the floor’s legitimate guests. Then woman ESU officers donned cleaning jackets, tossed their MP-7s into laundry carts and hung around the elevator until the family showed up.

Surprise …

Not a shot fired.

The Bomb Squad had cleared the room – no booby traps; in fact not much of anything left. The terrorists had traveled light. Sachs was presently running the scene there.

Lincoln Rhyme was now scrolling through his iPad, reading reports sent to him over the past half hour from the FBI based in St Louis, the closest field office to the Southern Illinois home of the Stantons and the AFFC. The group had been on the Bureau’s and the Illinois State Police’s radar – members were suspected in attacks on gays and minorities and of other hate crimes but nothing could ever be proven. Mostly, it was felt, they were bluster.

Surprise.

The authorities in the Midwest had already arrested three others within the AFFC for possession of explosives and machine guns without federal licenses. And the search there continued.

No longer in her crime scene coveralls, Amelia Sachs joined him.

‘Anything left behind?’ He looked at the milk crate she carried. It was filled with a half-dozen paper and plastic bags.

‘Not much. Lot of bottled water.’

Rhyme grunted a laugh. ‘Let’s see if our friends’ll be willing to have a tête-à-tête.’ A nod toward a linen room, where the Stantons were being held until the FBI showed up; the feds were taking point on this one.

They walked and wheeled into the room, where the prisoners sat handcuffed and shackled. The parents and son – their only child, Rhyme had learned – gazed back with a hesitant resolution. They were flanked by three NYPD officers.

If the Stantons were curious as to how Rhyme had figured out they were the associates of the unsub and that this was their hotel, they didn’t express any desire to learn the answer. And that answer was almost embarrassingly mundane, involving no subtle analysis of the evidence whatsoever. Unsub 11-5’s backpack, recovered beside his body near the water main pipe, contained a notebook called The Modification, a detailed list of steps in the plot to get poison into the New York drinking water. Inside that was a slip of paper with the address of the hotel. They knew the Stantons were staying there; Harriet had told Sachs this fact. So the couple and the unsub knew each other. The ‘attack’ at the hospital wasn’t that at all. The unsub had probably gone there to visit his ailing colleague, Matthew Stanton, in the hospital’s cardiac care ward.


On reflection, there were clues they’d discovered that might have led to the conclusion that the Stantons were connected. For instance, the writing on the bag at the Belvedere holding the implants said No. 3, suggesting that the attack on Braden Alexander was the third one. But if the assault on Harriet Stanton had been legitimate, the bag notation would have read No. 4.

Similarly, they’d found trace evidence of Harriet’s cosmetics in places where the unsub had been. Yes, he’d grabbed her in the hospital and there might have been some transfer of the substance, but it would have been minimal. More likely he’d picked the trace up by spending time in her company. Also, Rhyme recalled the back and forth of the bootied footprints at the crime scenes; that suggested that an accomplice had brought the lights and batteries in after the tattoo killings. A check with the hotel here revealed that the Stantons had been accompanied by their son, Josh, a young, muscular man who could easily have carted the heavy equipment in after his cousin had finished his lethal inking.

But sometimes fate short-circuits.

A slip of damn paper with an address – found in the perp’s possession.

‘You know your rights?’ Sachs asked.

The officer behind Harriet Stanton nodded.

His long face pale and with a matte texture, Matthew Stanton said, ‘We don’t recognize any rights. The government has no authority to grant us anything.’

‘Then,’ Rhyme countered, ‘you won’t have any problem talking to us.’ He thought this logic was impeccable. ‘The only thing we need at this point is the ID of your colleague. The one with the poison.’

Harriet’s face brightened. ‘So he got away.’

Rhyme and Sachs shared a glance. ‘Got away?’ Rhyme asked.

‘No, he didn’t escape,’ Sachs told the Stantons. ‘But he didn’t have any ID on him and his fingerprints came back negative. We’re hoping you’ll cooperate and—’

Her smile vanished. ‘But then you arrested him?’

‘I thought you knew. He’s dead. He was killed by the stream of water after he drilled the hole. Because the pressure was never shut off.’

Absolute silence descended. It was shattered only a few seconds later when Harriet Stanton began to scream uncontrollably.