London Bridges - James Patterson [8]
The next photograph showed the man turning in the direction of the climbers. He actually began to walk toward them, or so it appeared on film. I wondered if he’d spotted one of them taking his picture. He seemed to be looking their way.
That was when I saw his face, and I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. I recognized him. And why not? I’d been chasing him for years. He was wanted for more than a dozen murders here and in Europe. He was a vicious psychopath, one of the worst of his kind still on the loose anywhere in the world.
His name was Geoffrey Shafer, but I knew him better as the Weasel.
What was he doing here?
Chapter 11
THERE WERE A COUPLE more crystal-clear shots as the hateful Weasel got closer to the photographer.
Just the sight of him sent my brain reeling, and I felt a little sick. My mouth was dry, and I kept licking my lips. What is Shafer doing here? What connection does he have to the bomb that leveled this small town? It was crazy, felt like a dream, completely unreal.
I’d first come across Colonel Geoffrey Shafer in Washington three years ago. He’d murdered more than a dozen people there, though we could never prove it. He would pose as a cabdriver, usually in Southeast, where I lived. The prey was easy to grab, and he knew D.C. police investigations weren’t as thorough when the victims were poor and black. Shafer also had a day job—he was an army colonel working inside the British embassy. On the face of it, he couldn’t have been more respectable. And yet he was a horrible murderer, one of the worst pattern killers I’d ever come across.
A local agent named Fred Wade joined me near the helicopter I’d come in on. I was still studying the climber’s photos. Wade told me he wanted to know what was going on, and I couldn’t blame him. So did I.
“The man who videotaped the explosion is named Geoffrey Shafer,” I told Wade. “I know him. He committed several murders in D.C. when I was a homicide detective there. The last we heard of him, he’d fled to London. He murdered his wife in front of their children in a London market. Then he disappeared. Well, I guess he’s back. I have no idea why, but it makes my head hurt just to think about it.”
I took out my cell phone and put in a call to Washington. As I described what I’d discovered, I was reviewing the last few photographs taken of Colonel Shafer. In one of the photos he was climbing into a red Ford Bronco.
The next was a rear shot of the Bronco as it rode away. Jesus. The license plate was visible.
And that was the strangest thing of all so far: the Weasel had made a mistake.
The Weasel I’d known didn’t make them.
So maybe it wasn’t a mistake after all.
Maybe it was part of a plan.
Chapter 12
THE WOLF WAS STILL in Los Angeles, but reports were coming in from the Nevada desert on a regular basis. Police arriving near Sunrise Valley . . . then helicopters . . . the U.S. Army . . . finally the FBI.
His old friend Alex Cross was out there now, too. Good for Alex Cross. What a good soldier.
Nobody understanding a goddamn thing, of course.
No coherent theory about what had happened in the desert.
How could there be?
It was chaos, and that was the beauty of it. Nothing scared people more than what they didn’t understand.
Case in point, a local L.A. hot shit named Fedya Abramtsov and his wife, Liza. Fedya wanted to be a big Mafiya gangster, but also lead the life of a movie-star type in Beverly Hills. This was Fedya and Liza’s house that he was staying in now, but really, the Wolf thought of it as his house; after all, their money was his money. Without him, they were nothing but small-time punks with big ambitions.
Fedya and Liza hadn’t even known he was at their house. The couple had been at their place in Aspen and finally got back to L.A. at just past ten that evening.
Imagine their surprise.
A powerful-looking man sitting by himself in the living room. Just sitting there. So peaceful. Rhythmically squeezing a rubber ball in his right hand.
They had never seen him before.
“Who the hell are you?” demanded Liza.