Once Hunted. Blake Pierce

peered at Riley with interest.

      “But Riley – is it OK for me to call you Riley? – you told me on the phone that you’d actually visited him, that you’d gotten to know him. He must be quite fascinating.”

      Riley thought she actually detected a note of envy in the woman’s voice.

      Kelsey rose from her chair.

      “But listen to me babble, while you’ve got a bad guy to catch! And who knows what he might be up to, even as we speak. I’ve got some information that might help. Come on, I’ll show you everything I’ve got.”

      She led Riley and Bill through a hallway to a basement door. Riley’s nerves quickened.

      Why does it have to be in a basement? she thought.

      Riley had harbored a slight but irrational phobia about basements for some time now – vestiges of PTSD from having been held captive in Peterson’s damp crawlspace, and even more recently from having taken out a different killer in a pitch-dark basement.

      But as they followed Kelsey down the stairs, Riley saw nothing sinister. The basement was finished as a comfortable rec room. In one corner was a well-lighted office area with a desk covered with manila folders, a bulletin board with old photographs and newspaper clippings, and a couple of filing drawers.

      “Here it is – everything you could want to know about ‘Shane the Chain’ and his career and downfall,” Kelsey said. “Help yourself. Ask if you need help making sense out of it all.”

      Riley and Bill started looking through folders. Riley was surprised and thrilled. It was a fascinating, even daunting body of information and a lot of it had never been scanned for the FBI database. The folder she was looking through was crammed with seemingly unimportant items, including restaurant napkins with handwritten notes and sketches pertaining to the case.

      She opened another folder that held photocopied reports and other documents. Riley was a bit amused to realize that Kelsey surely wasn’t supposed to have copied or kept them. The originals had surely long since been shredded after being scanned.

      As Bill and Riley pored over the material, Kelsey remarked, “I guess you’re wondering why I just won’t let this case go. Sometimes I wonder myself.”

      She thought for a moment.

      “Shane Hatcher was my one brush with real evil,” she said. “During my first fourteen years with the Bureau, I was pretty much window dressing here in the Syracuse office – the token woman. But I worked this case from the ground up, talking to gangbangers in the street, taking charge of the team. Nobody thought I could bring Hatcher down. In fact, nobody was sure that anybody could bring him down. But I did.”

      Now Riley was looking through a folder of poor-quality photos that the Bureau probably hadn’t bothered to scan. Kelsey had obviously known better than to throw them away.

      One showed a cop sitting in a café talking to a gangbanger. Riley immediately recognized the young man as Shane Hatcher. It took her a moment to recognize the cop.

      “That’s the officer that Hatcher killed, isn’t it?” Riley said.

      Kelsey nodded.

      “Officer Lucien Wayles,” she said. “I took that photograph myself.”

      “What’s he doing talking with Hatcher?”

      Kelsey smiled knowingly.

      “Well, now, that’s rather interesting,” she said. “I suppose you’ve heard that Officer Wayles was an upstanding, decorated policeman. That’s what the local cops still want everybody to think. Actually, he was corrupt to the very bone. In this picture, he was meeting with Hatcher hoping to make a deal with him – a cut of the drug profits for not interfering with Hatcher’s territory. Hatcher said no. That’s when Wayles decided to do Hatcher in.”

      Kelsey pulled out a photograph of Wayles’s mangled body.

      “As you probably know, that didn’t work out too well for Officer Wayles,” she said.

      Riley felt a tingle of understanding. This was exactly the treasure trove of material she’d yearned for. It brought her much, much closer to the mind of the youthful Shane Hatcher.

      As she looked at the photo of Hatcher and the cop, Riley probed the young man’s mind. She imagined Hatcher’s thoughts and feelings at the moment the picture was taken. She also remembered something that Kelsey had just said.

      “You know, he had a strict code, even as a gangbanger.”

      From her own conversations with Hatcher, Riley knew that it was still true today. And now, looking at the photo, Riley could feel Hatcher’s visceral disgust at Wayles’s proposal.

      It offended him, Riley thought. It felt like an insult.

      Small wonder that Hatcher had made such a gruesome example of Wayles. According to Hatcher’s twisted code, it was the moral thing to do.

      Thumbing through more photos, Riley found a mugshot of another gangbanger.

      “Who’s this?” Riley asked.

      “Smokey Moran,” Kelsey said. “Shane the Chain’s most trusted lieutenant – until I busted him for selling drugs. He faced a long prison sentence, so I had no trouble getting him to turn state’s evidence against Hatcher in return for some leniency. That’s how I finally nailed Hatcher.”

      Riley’s skin prickled as she handled the picture.

      “What became of Moran?” she asked.

      Kelsey shook her head with disapproval.

      “He’s still out there,” she said. “I often wish I hadn’t made that deal. For years and years now, he’s been quietly running all kinds of gang activities. The younger gangbangers look up to him and admire him. He’s smart and elusive. The local cops and the Bureau have never been able to bring him to justice.”

      That prickling feeling grew. Riley found herself in Hatcher’s mind, brooding in prison for decades over Moran’s betrayal. In Hatcher’s moral universe, such a man didn’t deserve to live. And justice was long overdue.

      “Do you have his current address?” Riley asked Kelsey.

      “No, but I’m sure the field office does. Why?”

      Riley took a deep breath.

      “Because Shane is going there to kill him.”

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      Riley knew that Smokey Moran was in great danger. But the truth was, Riley’s heart didn’t exactly go out to the vicious career thug.

      Shane Hatcher was what really mattered.

      Her assignment was to put Hatcher back in prison. If they caught him before he killed Moran for the old betrayal, fine. She and Bill would drive to Moran’s address without giving him any advance warning. They would call the local field office to have backup meet them there.

      It was about a half hour drive from Kelsey Sprigge’s home in middle-class Searcy to the much more sinister gang neighborhoods of Syracuse. The sky was overcast, but no snow was falling, and traffic moved normally along the well-cleared roads.

      As Bill drove, Riley accessed the FBI database and did some quick research on her cell phone. She saw that the local gang situation was dire. Gangs had grouped and regrouped in this area since the early 1980s. Back in the era of Shane the Chain, they had been mostly locals. Since then national gangs had moved in, bringing with them heightened levels of violence.

      The drugs that fueled this violence with their profits had gotten weirder and much more dangerous. They now included cigarettes soaked in embalming fluid and paranoia-inducing crystals called “bath salts.” Who knew what even deadlier substances would turn up next?

      As Bill parked in front of the rundown apartment building where Moran lived, Riley saw two men wearing FBI jackets get out of another car – Agents McGill and Newton, who had met them at the airport. She could tell from their