Designated Target - Chapter 10

“Let me guess. ‘Bonnie,’ is it?” Taylor said.

“We can go with that name for now. I have to say, you are about the most persistent cop I’ve ever dealt with. I was sure you’d run out of steam well before now.”

“I don’t run out of steam.”

“I can tell. As fun as it is to watch you fumble around, I think it’s time you stopped looking for me.”

“Or what? You’re going to shoot me like you did my partner?”

“You’re smarter than that, John. I know you figured out that I didn’t aim for your partner, and I’m betting you figured out I went out of my way to not kill him.”

“Have me all figured out?”

“I’ve done my research, although with you it isn’t that hard. You do like to get your name in the paper.”

“I wouldn’t say I like it,” Taylor said.

“No, I guess you don’t, although for someone who hates it, you sure do put yourself into the position of having it happen a lot.”

“I guess. So why didn’t you kill my partner and me when you had a chance, if us being on your tail bothers you that much?”

“Call it practicality. I don’t kill someone unless I’m being paid to do it. Heck, I made sure I didn’t even permanently injure him. It was a clean shot and he should recover in a few months. That being said, my policy of no killing for free has its limits. I can’t have you digging into my life like this.”

“You’ve done a good job of covering up your tracks. So what? Your next stop is getting rid of poor old Mrs. Beacham.”

“I’d never hurt her,” the woman said, her even, unemotional tone finally breaking.

It wasn’t shocking or surprising to find a cold-blooded hit woman could also be sentimental, but it did add a piece of information to the slowly developing picture he was building of her.

“So you draw the line at old women, but not senile old men?”

“I wouldn’t weep too hard over Randazzo. Before he became the harmless old man who barely remembered his name, he was just about the most ruthless man I’d ever met, and I spend most of my time with ruthless men. Did you know he had a brother and when he was just about to branch off, he was the one who pulled the trigger when the family decided his brother was a liability? He invited his brother over for dinner, had a full meal with him, and shot him while they ate dessert. Trust me, that bullet had been coming for him a long time before I fired it.”

“Fine, you’re a bringer of justice, fighting for the little guy.”

“I didn’t call you to trade barbs and I couldn’t care less what you think about me.”

“Then why did you call me? Just to tell me to stop trying to find out who you are? Did you really think that was going to work?”

“I called to give you a chance. I don’t like killing people I’m not getting paid to kill, but that doesn’t mean I won’t do it.”

“Then I guess it’s time to find out how good of a shot you really are,” Taylor said, hanging up.

Setting his phone on the table in front of him, Taylor sat there, considering. The call itself was interesting, since it made absolutely no sense. Even if he assumed the ‘I don’t like to kill people I’m not being paid to kill’ thing was true, and he doubted someone like her would draw that kind of line, it didn’t follow that she’d call to warn him off her trail.

Clearly, he was getting somewhere, but if that really was a problem for her, then it gave her more reason to come for him, not less, and warning someone you planned to assassinate that you were going to assassinate them was a pretty bad strategy. It’s possible she hoped that he’d make a mistake and make himself vulnerable, except there was no reason for her to need him to make a mistake for that.

They’d had no warning when she’d shot Randazzo. She could have just as easily shot him as the old man, and there would have been nothing he could have done about it. She’d probably been watching him at Mrs. Beacham’s house and there was plenty of opportunity to shoot him coming or going from the house. It was incredibly hard to keep someone from being sniped and the only real defense was to always stay under cover or to use counter snipers, hoping to take the sniper out before he could get a shot off.

That’s why they’d taken Finley out through the garage. That’s why the guy she killed in Vegas hardly ever went outside. She’d shown with that kill that she could get to someone who took precautions. She could have taken Taylor out dozens of times since this whole thing started. Sure, maybe she was only concerned about his chasing her now that he was getting close, but why call and warn him?

If she was hoping to throw him off her scent, it did the exact opposite. He knew a lot more about her now than before she’d called. Nearly everything about her so far had been conjecture. He now had confirmation she existed, for starters. Sure, someone shot Randazzo, but he now had proof that she’d done it to keep Taylor from finding out who she was. She’d also proven that she was the one after Finley, since she’d also confirmed that she’d been watching him, which only made sense if it started with his current case.

She’d also proven that she was a woman. All they’d had so far were the ramblings of an old man. Worst of all, for her, was that the call confirmed that she was the ‘Bonnie’ who had stayed with Mrs. Beacham. Knowing that she existed and even that she was a woman was backed up by facts, but believing that she was Mrs. Beacham’s boarder, and the boarder of the other two addresses from Internet Crimes, had been an assumption from which he was trying to build other assumptions.

That shaky of a foundation could have led Taylor to abandon this line of thinking if he started to hit too many roadblocks. Now that he knew it was solid, he’d be more tenacious than ever. If she’d researched him, like she seemed to have, and she was as good as he thought she was, then she should have figured that out.

All of which made the call that more confusing.

Taylor put a pin in that line of thinking. It was definitely something to chew on, but he didn’t have enough information to explain it, and just sitting around thinking about it wasn’t going to move the case along.

What he did have was a strong confirmation that he was on the right track, which meant visiting Ronald Reagan High School. Unfortunately, the visit to the school was less helpful than he’d hoped.

The timeline for ‘Bonnie’ to graduate high school would have been between twenty and twenty-five years before, which left a total of two people in the building who would have worked in the school at the time she went there. Neither could remember anyone matching ‘Bonnie’s’ description, or rather, they remembered too many people matching that description, which wasn’t a surprise. Mrs. Beacham had been very helpful, but without some kind of distinguishing mark, it was hard to give a good enough description to make one student stand out among five-plus years of kids seen decades ago.

The yearbooks were equally unhelpful. Angular-faced, dark-haired girls appeared dozens of times in each yearbook, with well over a hundred people over the five years meeting the rough description. Taylor was sure once he started looking up these people, he’d be able to whittle that number down, based on the few things he knew about her, but that wasn’t going to be enough to make it a manageable number, especially since he couldn’t use things like death to rule out people.

Taylor already knew she wasn’t living this life under her real name, so she very well could have faked her own death to keep someone from doing exactly what he was trying to do now. That meant he’d have to spend just as much time chasing down dead students that matched the description as living ones, just to confirm they were, in fact, dead.

This was all doable, but it would mean calling Joe Solomon and bringing in a bunch of agents to do the leg work. Aside from his abiding dislike for working inside the lines the Bureau liked to draw, Taylor was concerned that might make ‘Bonnie’ decide this job was too much and disappear. Right now, she knew he was looking for her, which meant either she didn’t think he’d find her, or thought the payoff of him leading her to Finley was worth the risk.

Once he brought in other agents, he might lose his chance to catch her, leaving Finley hanging in the wind for someone else, or even ‘Bonnie’ being more patient and out waiting him. Taylor had a few more things he could do on his own. If that didn’t work, he’d have to bring in some help to run down all these people, assuming he could convince Joe to go along with it. Taylor thought his reasoning for being here was sound, but Solomon didn’t believe in hunches and intuitive investigating. If he couldn’t be shown a solid piece of evidence for a lead, he tended to discount it.

He talked to the admin people at the school and when they balked at giving out the personal information of the man who’d been principal when ‘Bonnie’ would have gone there he pointed out how much more of a disruption they’d have if he had to come back with other agents. If anyone knew who she was, that was his best bet. As Taylor understood things from Kara, these days, vice-principals did all the work with students, but when Taylor was a kid, any trouble kids would end up in the principal’s office, who’d get to know the problem students well. Taylor was betting that someone who started murdering people for money as a young adult would probably have disciplinary issues as a teenager, above and beyond the issues normal teenagers had, of course.

Irving Clark, the former principal, was in his late seventies and unfortunately not as sharp as Mrs. Beacham. He wasn’t as far gone as the senior Randazzo, but it took almost five minutes of the phone call for Clark to understand who Taylor was and why he was calling. It might have been easier in person, but like a lot of retired senior citizens from the Northeast, he’d headed south to spend his retirement in the much warmer conditions in Florida, meaning the best Taylor could do was a phone call.

“Which student did you want to ask about again?” the old man asked when he finally understood Taylor was asking about a former student.

“I don’t know her name, unfortunately. I’m pretty sure she went to Ronald Reagan sometime in the late nineties. She would have had dark hark and a very angular face, with high, well-defined cheekbones. She would have been, unusual. You might remember her as a bad kid, but she wouldn’t have been a problem student in your office all the time either. Her teachers would have remembered her as very cold and calculating. She didn’t show a lot of emotion, although she could be very violent when pushed. She probably only had one or two incidents with other kids, probably early in her high school life, when she was challenged, and she would have reacted very violently, probably significantly out of proportion to what happened. Teachers would remember her being unemotional even after these events. She might have ended up with the school counselor several times over the years out of fear of some kind of abuse, caused by a difficulty with making friends and a complete lack of any visibly strong emotion. She might have been impulsive and would lie regularly. She might have gotten into trouble using threats of violence, usually graphic threats, to control other students.”

Before coming to the school, Taylor had called one of the Bureau’s psychological consultants that he and Whitaker had used on a previous case, trying to get a sense of how someone able to work as a contract killer for twenty years would have acted as a child. The word psychopath came up a lot. The psychologist had said that ‘Bonnie’ was most likely not a true sociopath, since to remain hidden this long, she would have had to at least fake relationships in order to maintain a cover of a normal life.

While similar, the biggest difference between a psychopath and a sociopath is that a psychopath can understand they are different from others, and can copy the attitudes of those around them to blend in. Sociopaths, on the other hand, would have extreme difficulty even pretending to care what others thought and would be

unlikely to maintain the veneer of a regular life.

The thing that made Taylor agree with the doctor’s distinction was when she described sociopaths as hot-tempered and quick to anger and how they differed from psychopaths, who were cold-blooded and violent, with even the violence being done in a calculated way to help achieve whatever goal they wanted.

Having dealt with a serial killer in the past, who was almost compelled to murder to fill some void in himself, Taylor’s one qualm was how she’d managed to stay on the reservation so well. As far as he could find, all of her kills were because she’d been paid to do it, and she’d even avoided killing Robles. That kind of attitude did not match his past run-in with a true psychopath who’d given into his impulses and hadn’t been able to stop murdering, even when it brought attention to him for his actions.

The psychologist had said that, while she couldn’t be sure, the most likely reason was because ‘Bonnie’ had an outlet for her aggression and a structured way of dealing with it. Whatever had caused her to become a contract killer had probably been the difference between her current attitude and her becoming a serial killer herself.

While the psychologist had added lots of caveats about true psychopaths being both rare and very different from each other, and that she couldn’t guarantee any of these generalities without talking to the subject, the description fit enough of what he’d seen of ‘Bonnie’ to make him feel confident using those generalities as a way of describing her.

Apparently, the principal felt it fit as well, because he came up with a name almost instantly, despite his earlier confusion.

“You’re asking about Chelsea Marsh,” he said as soon as Taylor finished his description.

“Are you sure? It was a long time ago and some of the things I described could be hard to spot.”

“Mr. Taylor, I was a principal for more than twenty years and spent ten years before that teaching English literature. I have seen a lot of kids over the years. Good ones, bad ones, apathetic ones. Kids who were abused, kids who were loved, kids who were afraid of everything and kids who were the bravest people I’d ever met. In all that time, I was only truly afraid of one student. Chelsea Marsh. She was like you said, cold-blooded and calculating. I was a principal in the post-Columbine era, so we talked a lot about potential dangers. About students full of rage who might one day boil over and do something unthinkable. There were several kids every year that we kept an eye on, because they fit that profile. Chelsea was like them in almost every way, except she had too much control over herself. When she was angry, she didn’t fume, stomp, scream or punch. She thought. You could see the wheels turning as she worked out how to get her revenge on whoever she was upset with. She was cold as ice, that one.”

“Do you know what happened to Chelsea after high school? Did she go to college? Do you know where her parents are living?”

“She dropped out part way through her senior year and disappeared. She had no real friends, so no one really asked about her or tried to find her. I think both of her parents have since passed, although I didn’t keep tabs on them once Chelsea left us. I’ll be honest with you; I didn’t really want to keep track of her. I was just glad to be rid of her.”

“Did she ever do anything to make you happy she was gone, or was it just that feeling about her?”

“Nothing we could ever pin to her, but anyone who ever crossed her ended up having something bad happen to them. Broken bones, damaged homes or vehicles, even a food poisoning. Nothing that could be traced back to the girl, but it wasn’t hard to see the pattern. I was just happy she’d gone without ever killing any of the other students.”

It said something that a man who’d been so confused and befuddled at the start of the conversation but remembered this girl so specifically. After thanking the man, Taylor pulled out the yearbooks that he’d borrowed from the school and looked up Chelsea Marsh. She matched Mrs. Beacham’s description to the letter. After returning the yearbooks to the school, Taylor went back to Mrs. Beacham for her to confirm it, which she did.

Taylor now had a name for the shooter.

Taylor retraced his steps back to the local Bureau offices and pulled up all of the records he could on Chelsea Marsh. His excitement at finding the woman he’d been looking for was short-lived, however. She had hardly any presence at all, which made sense when any record of the woman stopped the same year she dropped out of high school. The mid-nineties were well before the current push for parents to fingerprint their kids, usually done to make sure they could be identified if they were ever lost or abducted, so no prints for her existed.

Taylor found records of her being enrolled in the Jersey City public schools, which got him the girl’s social security number, birth certificate and addresses early in life, and he found records for her parents and the two jobs Chelsea had in high school, but that was it. In spite of her possibly being a psychopath, there were no arrest records or records that she’d had interactions with the police in any way. Beyond the two high school jobs where she’d paid payroll taxes, she’d only been listed as a dependent on her parents’ taxes, never filing anything on her own. There was no further employment history, no military records, insurance records for things like premiums, hospital stays or the like. She hadn’t even had a speeding ticket.

The girl had turned eighteen and a few months later dropped off the face of the earth. The only thing that stood out was that her parents hadn’t filed any kind of missing persons report on her, which could mean a lot of things. Chelsea wasn’t a minor when she dropped out and it was possible her relationship with her parents wasn’t good enough for them to care she disappeared. Potentially they could have even kicked her out, which would have set off the chain of events leading to her disappearing in the first place.

The next obvious step was to go talk to the girl’s parents. The father died a few years after Chelsea’s disappearing act, but the mother still lived here in Jersey City. Before doing that, Taylor wanted to do a little more digging, because he didn’t want to tip her off that he knew who she was yet. He was fairly certain Chelsea was still following him, and he was conscious that if she was worried about his uncovering her identity, a stop at her mother’s house would kick things up to the next level.

After spending some more time digging through records, Taylor went to his normal fallback.

“Any luck?” Whitaker asked when he called her.

“I know who she is,” Taylor said.

“Really? How’d you find her?”

“Luck, mostly. One of the addresses Internet Crimes gave me was good. It led me to her old landlord, and some clues there got me to her high school, which got me her name.”

“That’s good news,” Whitaker said.

“Not as good as I’d hoped. She dropped out of high school her senior year, ran away from home, and vanished off the planet.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. No work history, arrest records, or anything else. She just vanished. Her mother’s still alive and lives up here, so she’s my next stop, but I’m baffled how an eighteen-year-old with no criminal record managed to disappear like that.”

“She could have just gone off the grid. That would have been somewhat easier in the nineties, before everything was computerized and interlinked.”

“I don’t think so. I know three years later she ended up living with Mrs. Beacham. She was paying her cash every month, she had a car, and was paying for internet every month. Some of that would be doable off the grid, but she would have had to keep the car registered. Either a traffic stop or registering the car would have required some kind of identification and Chelsea Marsh isn’t in the system with either.”

“She could have had a fake identity.”

“How? How does an eighteen-year-old with no criminal associations I can find, forge an identity?”

“The internet was a thing in the nineties, and you said the Internet Crimes guy said people were pushing illegal services more or less in the open. She could have made contacts there we don’t know about. Again, it would have been easier to steal or create an identity back then than it is now. The right contact and she could have pulled it off.”

“Maybe. I’m still a little baffled by it, though. Anyway, if her mother ends up being a dead end, I’m not sure where to go next. I could use some help.”

“I’ll start searching for her, but we need something to tie her to whatever her current identity is. She’s managing to follow you back and forth across the country so she’s getting on a plane, and that means she has an ID of some kind good enough to get her through TSA and onto an airplane. She’s out there with an identity, we just need to find it.”

“It’s going to be hard without her current fingerprints.”

“True. No one cuts everything off completely, though. She’d already dropped her real identity when she ended up with Mrs. Beacham, and you found her and were able to backtrack her from there to her mother, so she didn’t cut everything off.”

“That was dumb luck. If she hadn’t continued wearing clothes from high school, staying in the same city she grew up in, and if Mrs. Beacham didn’t have a memory like a steel trap, I would have never made the connection.”

“Dumb luck is how most cases break. You get lucky or the bad guy does something dumb. Just keep digging. We’ll find her.”

“I wish I had your confidence on that,” Taylor said.