Page 6 of Go Under

Marcus was grateful to be able to focus on work. It was the only thing that… Well, it didn’t make sense, but it made less unsense. If that made sense.

“Not much yet. We’ve got a victim in Philadelphia with hallmarks of ritualized killing, and a cipher present. That’s all I know. We’re hooking up with an agent from the Philly office. PD wants nothing to do with this. They hot-potatoed it straight to the FBI, so we’ll be working in house again.”

Kate nodded. “Do we think this is Cox himself, or do we think it’s a disciple?”

Marcus tapped the steering wheel. “I think we’ll figure that out as we go.”

She nodded. “All right.” She looked at him as though seeing him for the first time. “How are you?”

He smiled drily. “About the same as you.”

She sighed. “Yeah, I figured.”

The two partners completed the journey to Portland International Airport in silence. Whether to the end of the road or just another bend in the road, they couldn’t say.

Either way, they were caught once more in Cox’s web.

CHAPTER THREE

It was a short hop from Portland to Philadelphia, so it was only mid-afternoon when Kate and Marcus landed. Marcus got them a car while Kate texted Winters to let her know they had arrived. It was a good idea to check in with the boss frequently, so she knew Kate wasn’t losing herself out there.

The car secured and the boss texted, the two of them drove to the inner-city neighborhood where their victim awaited. Traffic was as close to awful as Kate had ever seen. The snow carpeting the road didn’t help, nor did the three accidents they passed. It took almost an hour to make the twelve-mile journey from the airport to the rowhouse. By the time they arrived, mid-afternoon was hovering close to late afternoon.

Philadelphia was the rowhouse capital of the nation, with over half of their residential homes consisting of the tightly packed, uniform homes. Marcus had mentioned to Kate once that rowhouses came about during the industrial revolution when factories needed housing for the glut of workers rushing to their cities. Now, in the information age, the houses lingered as either a quaint reminder of times past, a chic statement of urban lifestyle, or the place you stayed in because it was where you ended up and you couldn’t afford to leave.

The street where their victim lived was definitely one of the latter. The houses here were faded and dirty, not quite rundown but very close to it. The cars crowding the street were equally faded, mostly old Toyota and Nissan sedans or Dodge minivans, at least one out of every five with peeling paint or dented bumpers. Philadelphia in general didn’t have the same poverty problems that other major cities had, but there was a bottom of the barrel in every locale where those who couldn’t rise to the top through some combination of bad luck and bad decisions sank to the bottom.

“Thought there’d be more of a crowd,” Marcus mentioned, pulling the vehicle to a stop.

Sure enough, despite the presence of an FBI cruiser in front of the residence and an imposing and serious-looking agent in uniform standing on the porch, none of the neighbors felt a need to stop and stare. The one person who was outside—a bald man with a prodigious beer gut and a stained wifebeater—only spared Kate a callous glance as he waited for his dog to do its business in his compact front yard.

“A neighborhood like this sees cops every day,” Kate said.

“Yeah, but we’re not the cops.”

“Same difference. We’re the fuzz. Seeing us here is no big deal for them.”

“If you say so,” Marcus replied.

“Also, they’ve been here for several hours already. The novelty’s worn off.”

“Ah. That makes sense.”

The serious-looking, imposing agent was a tall, well-built African American man with intense brown eyes and an almost ostentatiously masculine frame.

He extended a hand. “Special Agent Darnell Okoye, Philadelphia Field Office.”

“Kate Valentine,” Kate replied, taking his hand.

“Marcus Reid,” Marcus added.

Darnell’s grip was firm but brief, almost perfunctory with both of them. Thus greeted, he thrust his head toward the door. “The body’s in the kitchen. Watch your step. There’s some blood.”

A man of few pleasantries was Darnell Okoye.

They stepped inside, and Kate decided that Darnell was also a man of understatement. There was a pool of blood three feet past the door, enough that the edges congealed. A trail led across the linoleum toward the kitchen where another puddle lay in front of the kitchen table.

The victim sat in a chair at the head of the table, hands dangling at his sides, head lolled to the left, so he faced the agents. His eyes stared dully at them, as though accusing them of letting this happen to him.