Chapter 16

After Tom and Mark had returned Mia to Tom's apartment, Mark running interference to insure that no one saw Tom carrying a full body bag into his home, they drove to the station to develop their new information.

Fortified with the station's vile coffee, they laid out a map and protractor on Tom's desk. After a few minutes of bickering over the proper method to do so, they placed their baseline coordinates and used the compass bearings from Tom's notebook to draw lines from each coordinate to the edge of the map. Both men stared at the point at which the lines intersected.

Tom sighed in frustration as he leaned back from the table, "That can't be right. Why would he be smack dab in the middle of nowhere thirty miles south of the city? We must have fucked this up somehow."

They quickly repeated the work with identical results.

"Well, shit," Tom said, "we're going to need another bearing. This really can't be right."

Mark grunted in agreement before saying, "Still, it can't hurt to check it out. I'll call the location over to the chief of police of the town of Elizabeth and ask him if he can send someone to take a look."

"Okay, Mark. While you're doing that, I'm going to go prepare our ambush at the Old County Jail. I don't know that it'll be necessary anymore, but..."

"Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it," Mark finished for him, before adding, "I'll swing by maintenance and grab some chains, too."

"Sounds good. See you later."

The Old County Jail, which had been diverted from its original purpose years before and turned into a warren of courtrooms and administrative offices, was a massive granite fortress that sat within sight of the Monongahela River. Tom had chosen this place as the site of the ambush as most of the building was surrounded by a thick stone wall and, even where it was not, the first floor windows were far to narrow to admit a man. The building only had two first floor entrances, each capable of being sealed by gates of strong steel bars. One of those entrances breached the thick stone walls of the building directly below an enclosed, arched stone bridge with high, narrow windows that connected the building to the courthouse proper across the street. Passing through this doorway, Tom entered a narrow hallway that ran roughly fifty feet before opening up into a large room that had once been used to process incoming prisoners. Standing in the middle of the high ceilinged room, Tom looked it over carefully before deciding that it was perfect.

Making the preparations took a good bit longer than Tom had hoped; it took several calls from the chief before the frantic building administrator allowed Tom to commandeer the maintenance personnel and use them to clear the room of its clutter of desks, computers and other office furniture. It had then taken Mark's arrival and expert bullying before the administrator permitted Tom to have a huge wooden chair, specially commissioned by an especially corpulent former judge, carried to the room and bolted securely to the floor adjacent to the wall opposite the entrance hallway. When they told the distraught functionary what they planned on doing to the water reservoir for the sprinkler system, the man had thrown his hands up in the air in disgust and stalked off.

Once the chair was in place, Tom called the members of his task force and had them assemble in the large room. The group then spent several more hours perfecting the tactics they would use should the ambush take place.

Tom closed the training by briefly addressing the group, "I know it's not easy accepting the nature of our adversary. His very existence goes against everything we thought we knew about this world and our place in it. But he does exist and, for so long as he continues to do so, he poses a threat to every last living man, woman and child. We have each taken an oath to protect those people and, by your presence here, I know you take that oath seriously. This is not going to be an easy fight; some of us probably aren't going to make it. But I have every confidence that in the end, thanks to your courage, dedication and strength, you will be able to look into a mirror and know that you prevented thousands of murders in the future and avenged thousands more from the past. Dismissed."

After the sober faced men and women had filed out of the room to return to their regular duties, Mark walked up to Tom with a grin, "Real inspirational, boss. Should you manage to outlive me, please turn down any requests to speak at my funeral; my family will be traumatized enough by the event without you adding to it with shitty rhetoric."

With a shrug of his shoulders, Tom replied lightly, "Bah. Your mom never complains about my oral skills."

Mark shook his head in mock sorrow, "Ha. Funny."

Leaving the jail, Tom and Mark drove to the strip district and purchased several garlic presses, several mesh bags and every last whole clove of garlic that they could lay their hands on. A half hour later, they were sitting by Tom's desk crushing garlic cloves into a bucket when an officer from CSI approached.

"I have the preliminary results of the investigation of last night's incident, Detective," said the officer as he approached Tom's desk with a thick folder.

Tom replied, "Can you give us a quick summary?"

"Sure. From the amount of blood present at the scene and the degree to which the bodies that were recovered were drained, we estimate that between twelve and twenty people were completely bled out. We're running blood tests now to see if we can get a more accurate count. Running the plates of the cars in the parking lot produced the names of fifteen men, including those of all five of the bodies recovered. We have a shit load of fingerprints, but, given the public nature of the place, I doubt that will lead anywhere. We also found out that the bartender on duty was one Alicia George of East Liberty. We contacted her husband, but he said that they have been separated for months and he hasn't seen her in weeks. We also took a K9 tracking unit down to the scene to see if the dog could follow the scent of those tracks that led from the bar. The dog took one whiff and tucked its tail between its legs."