Russell Blake - Silver Justice

Her face leaned over Silver’s, a look of clear concern on it.

“Where did you get ice?”

“The man brought some after he put the butterflies on your head. He said that head wounds bleed a lot so you need to stay quiet.”

Silver stiffened. “The man?”

Just then the door rattled and then swung open. A figure stepped in from the darkness outside. The man who had been watching her from across the street. She could see that his hair was trimmed in a buzz cut and the mustache was gone, but it was him.

Howard Jarvis.

He approached the bed, and she flinched as she tried unsuccessfully to raise her arms. She saw the tie wrap around her wrists a second later.

“I apologize for the drama. I didn’t know who was breaking in, so I had to take steps to defend myself. It wasn’t my intention to hurt you.” She struggled again, and he held up a hand. “Don’t. You’ll just make it worse. It took ten minutes to stop most of the bleeding. I’m afraid you have a concussion — hopefully no internal bleeding. I wouldn’t risk any sudden movements.” He held up a large freezer bag. “I brought some more ice. We need to keep the area cold for a while.”

She studied him. He looked ten years younger than his sixty years, but his face looked drawn and gray.

“You’re never going to get away with this,” she said, wincing with the effort.

He nodded. “No, I’m sure I won’t.”

Kennedy’s hand brushed her forehead, and he handed her the bag, taking the melted soggy one from her. The white towel wrapped around it was bloody, but not as bad as she supposed it could have been.

“The blow to your skull will require an MRI. So will your spine. And you’ll need some stitches in your scalp. I doubt you’ll be teaching any gymnastics classes in the near future,” he said, his tone conversational.

She needed to keep him talking until backup arrived. “So you’ve got me now. What’s your plan? And why did you kidnap my daughter?” she asked.

Most criminals, especially egocentric narcissists, which she assumed he was from his pursuit of media attention for his Regulator alias, wanted to brag to someone about their exploits. Motive was always a good place to start. When they were caught, they invariably had a story they had to tell — something that they needed their captor to understand. Only this time, she was the captive. She didn’t want to dwell on that for the moment.

“My plan? Why, can’t you guess? As to your daughter, that was an improvisation, and in hindsight, while a necessary one, it’s something I deeply regret for the anxiety it must have caused you both. If there had been any other way, I would have skipped it.”

“An improvisation? What do you mean?”

“You were getting too close, too soon. I was forced to expedite my plan, but even so, I was afraid you would tumble to my identity and shut me down before I was done. I couldn’t afford that, so I created a distraction. Kennedy was it.”

“I don’t understand,” Silver said.

“The deductive leap that connected the killings to past events. You were identified as the driving force in the paper, so from there, I simply needed to find an answer to the question: ‘how do I keep her mind off it so she’s rendered inefficient?’. A kidnapping was the best I could come up with.” He shrugged.

“Why did you kill all those people?” Silver asked.

Howard looked at Kennedy with an air of caution and then shrugged again. “I remember reading a story from the Old West. Years ago. I don’t remember what paper it was from, but I do remember it was a town where a bully who had been terrorizing everyone wound up shot, but when the marshals showed up to investigate the murder, they met with zero cooperation from the townspeople. The only statement they ever got was from an old woman. Her response was: ‘he needed killing’. My response is the same. I have a long version, but the short version is: ‘they needed killing’.” He smiled at the thought. “Indeed they did.”

“I don’t understand. Why? How are they all connected? And are you admitting that you killed them all?”

“Absolutely. Of course I did. I intend to give you a full confession. What’s the point of playing coy? Yes, I killed them, and my motivations were simple. Revenge and justice.”

“Justice? You killed six men to get justice?”

“And revenge. Retribution, actually.”

“Retribution.”

Howard glanced at his watch. “I’ll tell you a story, and then I’m going to end this painful little chapter. I’ll turn myself in, surrendering to you.” He lifted his hands into the air. “Ya got me. As I said, I’ll give you a full confession. But while it’s still just us, I’ll tell you the details so you understand the why. Nobody else will care, or believe it, for a while at least. But I have a captive audience, so I’ll tell you the story.”

He cleared his throat. “It starts with a fire. My wife was suffering from multiple sclerosis, and when the housing crash happened in 2008 and the stock market fell by over fifty percent I was wiped out by margin calls, and the pension I was relying on vaporized when the company’s fund became insolvent. Within a matter of months, we were close to being destitute — I’d gone from having comfortable retirement prospects to barely surviving on social security. The bank was quick to foreclose on the house, and they were going to take possession of it. My wife went over the edge and decided that nobody was going to get her home. So she committed suicide, and through an ugly set of terrible coincidences, our only daughter died in the blaze trying to save her. You probably already know all this if you connected the fire to the killings.”

Silver nodded, then regretted it as pain spiked through her head.

“Over the next couple of years, I watched as the devastation from the financial crisis claimed the lives of my friends and neighbors. One wound up drinking himself to oblivion and dying in a car accident — the decapitation. Another was forced to move to a terrible neighborhood and got killed in a mugging; stabbed to death for twenty dollars in his wallet. Another couldn’t take a life where he’d lost everything, so he turned on his car one night and sucked on the exhaust. My best friend resorted to crime and was shot to death outside of a liquor store he robbed with an unloaded gun. The Korean owner had a Beretta and years of target practice. What all these people had in common was that their deaths were brought about by an event that’s caused millions around the world to have their lives forever changed for the worse. That event was the financial crisis.”

Howard glanced at the floor, kicking at the concrete absently with the toe of his boot as he collected his thoughts.

“What most don’t realize is that event wasn’t an accident. It was deliberate, avoidable, and engineered as deliberately as a film explosion. I spent years researching why it happened and who did it. Once I understood, I was able to target at least one of the groups responsible. That group is my victims list. A list of untouchable players who would never serve a day in jail, even if all facts were known.” Howard hesitated, studied the ceiling, then continued. “Because the money behind them is the real power here — the silent power that pretends very hard not to exist. That money decides who gets elected, and which lobbyists do which politicians favors, and what laws get passed and enforced. But the money stays in the shadows. Once I understood those responsible would never be brought to justice no matter what the circumstances, I came up with a plan.” Howard cleared his throat again. “I invented The Regulator and devoted what’s left of my life to executing my plan.”

“Let’s say you’re right,” Silver said, “and that these men somehow did cause the crisis. I don’t see how, but let’s assume they did. What good does killing them do? They’re dead. So now what? To what end?”