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He pointed out several light blotches on the front of his coveralls and said, “I think maybe your dog smelled the bleach and the scent just angered him. I’m very sorry. I’ll have it replaced, I promise.”
“That’s fine, Ernesto,” Faith said. “You’re free to go.”
“I’m … are you sure?” he asked, staring fearfully at Turk. “He won’t get mad again?”
“No, you’re fine,” Faith said. “Sorry for the confusion.”
“That’s okay,” he said, “I’ll, um … bye.”
He rushed off, glancing over his shoulder a few yards away to make sure Turk wasn’t following him. Faith sighed and pressed both of her hands to her temples.
What was she missing? Why would Turk be alerted by bleach? Bleach wouldn’t heighten the smell of phenol, it would mask it.
It masked it.
Her eyes snapped open. A janitor. It was for sure a janitor. Pure phenol had an overwhelmingly sweet and pungent odor. Even in amounts far less than what was needed to kill a man, the smell would be unmistakable.
Unless, of course, the odor was masked by industrial strength cleaning chemicals. That would explain the false positives Turk found earlier. If what he was smelling was phenolandcleaning chemicals, then he could possibly be thrown off by the presence of one but not the other.
She started back toward the platform, scanning for the janitors she had seen earlier. There were several dozen janitors employed at the terminal, so there was no guarantee that her killer would be one of the one’s she’d seen earlier, but if nothing else, she had narrowed their pool of suspects even further.
She caught sight of one of the janitors, standing at the very back of the crowd next to a bucket of mop water. He leaned on the mop and stared ahead at the crowd, a small smile on his lips. As Faith drew closer, she recognized him. He was the same janitor she had seen at the back of the crowd gathered around Everett Richardson’s body.
Turk growled low in his throat, and Faith said, “Quiet, Turk. We’re going to do this nice and easy.”
She looked away from the janitor, keeping him in her peripheral as she passed him and entered the crowd. She and Turk made their way slowly through the massed throng until they were directly in front of the janitor. She allowed the crowd to slowly jostle her back until she was close to him. Then she turned and before the surprised janitor could react, she reached him.
“Good afternoon,” she said. “FBI. Can I talk to you for a moment?”
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
He really must be invisible. He had killed this woman in broad daylight and sat her on a bench mere yards from the boarding platform, and not one of the hundreds of people around had noticed him, even when he struggled to carry the portly woman to the bench and carefully positioned her.
He recalled how it used to frustrate him as a child when people ignored him. He would play hide and seek, and inevitably, the other kids wouldn’t find him. They would walk right past where he was hiding, sometimes even meeting his eyes, and move on without so much as a second glance.
And now, though hundreds—or by now thousands—of people pushed and shoved almost violently past each other, none of them noticed him. They bumped and jostled him but didn’t seem to realize they had hit anything. Those that did, glanced around, their eyes traveling over him but never landing on him before they moved on.
He obviously wasn’t invisible all the time. After all, his supervisors could see him when they needed to assign him a task, and cars stopped for him when he crossed the street in the quiet, residential neighborhood he lived in. Still, this morning, his supervisor had called him into his office to chastise him for missing a morning meeting only to learn that he had, in fact, been at the meeting and seated in the very front row.
Perhaps his invisibility was selective. He would be visible when he needed to be and invisible when he needed to be. He lifted his hand and flexed his fingers. He could see himself clearly, but he could see himself clearly when he killed the woman now sitting behind a cordon of police and security, so that wasn’t an adequate test of his power.
He turned to one of the other members of the crowd and waved his hand in front of her. She didn’t so much as flinch.
“Hey!” he cried. “Hello!”
His voice was softened by the noise of the crowd but still clearly understandable. Still, the woman didn’t react. He grinned widely and clapped his hands next to her ear. She waved her hand absently as though shooing a mosquito but didn’t even turn his way.
He laughed and looked away from her, leaning against his mop. He briefly considered killing her, too, but he was in a great mood right now. He didn’t feel a need to kill her.
He smiled and watched as the police struggled to fend off the crowd. Now they noticed. Now they saw. They had their spectacle, and his victim was finally as important and attention-worthy in death as she thought she was in life.
He scanned the crowd and found he no longer felt the same hatred toward them. It used to infuriate him how no one noticed him, how he could work there day in and day out, cleaning up other people’s shit and sweat and spit and garbage, and they would treat him as no more worthy of attention than the cans where he would dump binfuls of discarded gum, wrappers, bags, bottles, cans, and occasionally even needles.
A momentary flash of anger coursed through him. Used needles! He had thrown away used needles! He could have died of any number of diseases had he ever been unlucky enough to prick himself with those needles. In fact, hehadpricked himself with a needle once and spent several days in terror that he might come down with AIDS or some exotic as-yet-undiscovered illness thanks to some random junkie who couldn’t even be bothered to dispose of his paraphernalia in one of the many clearly marked bins.
That was what prompted him to start killing. It was what had led him to choose a needle and poison to punish the transgressors he deemed worthy of punishment. He had purchased the needles from a pharmacy, pulling them off of a shelf full of syringes marketed toward those with diabetes.
The phenol had been harder to come by, but he had managed to find a chemical plant that didn’t ask too many questions and purchased a fifty-five-gallon drum of the poison under a false name. That drum would last the rest of his life and possibly longer in case some other invisible agent of justice decided to pick up where he left off.
