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Marc’s eyebrows rose in amusement. “Do I get a corsage?”
“You get to play a video surveillance game with me, from setup to stakeout. Interested?”
“Sure.” Marc rose, looking down at his T-shirt and jea
ns. “At least I don’t have to change my clothes. I hate playing dress-up.”
“Just bring refreshments,” Ryan advised. “We’re going to get bored, cramped and hungry. But I’m hoping it’ll pay off.”
“Lead the way.”
* * *
It was 3:00 a.m. Most of New York was fast asleep, other than the occasional car and private sanitation truck removing garbage from West 116th Street before the restaurants opened.
Marc and Ryan blended right in. They looked like construction workers getting an early start to the work day. Across the street from the meat market was the building Ryan had selected. It was under construction—the perfect place to mount one of his video cameras.
He and Marc got immediately to work.
Marc picked the padlock on the construction fence. That done, he and Ryan went inside and climbed the makeshift stairway to the roof. Squatting down, Ryan mounted his camera to the building wall. The camera had a large battery pack attached, and a solar cell on top. That would ensure it had adequate power to stream video wirelessly to the FI van, which Ryan had parked on West 115th Street.
And, just for kicks and to make sure no one disturbed his setup, Ryan affixed a Department of Homeland Security decal on the camera, with a warning that tampering with the equipment was a federal offense.
Marc chuckled at the forged decal. “Nice touch.”
“Hey,” Ryan said with an amused shrug. “People will believe anything if it sounds official and is spelled correctly.”
With that, he went back to work. He used his iPhone to remotely access the video server in the van, which was recording the camera feed. He made sure he could clearly see the meat market and would have no trouble checking out who entered and exited.
Everything was a go.
Marc and Ryan left the building, locked the construction entrance and returned to their van on West 115th Street.
It was going to be a long, long night.
* * *
Casey and Hutch drove through the institutional gates of Auburn State Correctional Facility at 9:45 a.m. The prison was almost two hundred years old—the second oldest state prison in New York—with twin guard towers on either side of the building and an American Revolutionary War soldier atop the apex. Stringent security measures were in place, and Casey and Hutch presented their proper ID before they were frisked and allowed to proceed to the cold, barren visitors’ room.
They took a seat at a table, waiting. Ten minutes later, the door opened and a guard escorted Glen Fisher in.
The instant Casey saw him, a jolt of fear shivered up her spine. She fought the urge to flinch, instead commanding herself to hide her trepidation behind a composed veneer. It had been months since the trial, when she’d last seen Fisher. She’d submerged the memories—the soulless evil in his eyes, the cruel angle of his jaw, the arrogance of his stance. It all flooded back now, along with the memories of his hands on her as he tore at her clothes, the knife at her throat as he threatened to slit it—the entirety of what had happened in those moments before Marc burst into the alley, tore Fisher off her and slammed him against the wall, practically choking the life out of him.
Part of Casey wished Marc had succeeded.
The damned case hadn’t even been FI’s. The police had come to them at the last minute and requested their help in a setup. They’d already identified Glen Fisher as the perp. But they needed proof. And what better way to get it than to catch him in action? Fisher’s victims were redheads. Casey was a redhead. She was also the president of a maverick investigative team, with a great track record, that was known to push boundaries and to take risks.
So Forensic Instincts had come on board at the eleventh hour. They’d arranged to have Casey pose as a lonely college girl at a bar—one where Fisher chose his victims. She’d timed her departure from the bar perfectly, and then walked “home,” taking a route that took her right past the alley where she knew Fisher was lying in wait. The rest had played out just as planned.
And they’d brought down Glen Fisher.
Casey had brought down Glen Fisher. She’d become his first and only failure, and the last pair of terrified eyes he’d looked into before being roughed up by Marc and cuffed by the cops.
From that moment on, she’d become the embodiment of all his internal rage. She’d seen it in his stare when he looked at her during his trial.
He blamed her for everything, even the things that went deep into his past and made him the monster he was today.
Yet, in spite of all that, Casey was about to face him.
