The 7th Victim - Alan Jacobson [0]
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Dedication
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Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
ALSO BY ALAN JACOBSON
False Accusations
The Hunted
For my grandmother, Lily Silverman, ninety-seven at this writing and still climbing the five flights of stairs to her apartment . . . still refusing to take the elevator. Lily is an inspiration to everyone who’s ever met her, a woman who at ninety stood in front of a New York City bus and refused to move until the driver opened the door to let her in. Spunk. Wisdom. And a heart of platinum (apparently, literally). For now, we continue to celebrate your life. But when your time passes, you’ll be immortalized by those who knew you and were touched by your soul.
I love you the whole universe.
“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
“A profiler puts himself into the mind of the killer to see things as the killer saw them, to understand why he immersed his entire emotional and physical being into the fetid stench of human depravity. When a profiler explores the minutia of pain and death, he’s wading knee deep in the blood and guts, and there’s only so much he can take before it begins to affect him.”
—Mark Safarik, FBI profiler and Supervisory Special Agent (Ret.)
“To know the artist, study his art.”
—John Douglas, The Anatomy of Motive
prologue
SIX YEARS AGO
QUEENS, NEW YORK
“Dispatch, this is Agent Vail. I’m in position, thirty feet from the bank’s entrance. I’ve got a visual on three well-armed men dressed in black clothing, wearing masks. ETA on backup? I’m solo here. Over.”
“Copy. Stand by.”
Stand by. Easy for you to say. My ass is flapping in the breeze outside a bank with a group of heavily armed mercenaries inside, and you tell me to stand by. Sure, I’ll just sit here and wait.
FBI Special Agent Karen Vail was crouched behind her open car door, her Glock-23 forty-caliber sidearm steadied against the window frame. No match for what looked like MAC-10s the bank robbers were toting, but what can you do? Sometimes you’re just fucked.
Radio crackle. “Agent Vail, are you there? Over.”
No, I left on vacation. Leave a message. “Still here. No movement inside, far as I can tell. View’s partially blocked by a large window sign. Bank’s offering free checking, by the way.”
Vail hadn’t been involved in an armed response since leaving the NYPD five years ago. Back then she welcomed the calls, the adrenaline rush as she raced through the streets of Manhattan to track down the scumbags who were doing their best to add some spice to an otherwise bland shift. But after the birth of her son Jonathan, Vail decided the life of a cop carried too much risk. She eventually made it to the Bureau—a career advancement that had the primary benefit of keeping her keester out of the line of fire.
Until today.
“Local SWAT is en route,” the voice droned over the two-way. “ETA six minutes.”
“A lot of shit can