Splicer (A Thriller) Read online

  Copyright 2013 Shaylee Press

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, companies and incidents are fully the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, establishments or events is entirely coincidental.

  TITLES BY THEO CAGE

  SPLICER (2013)

  BUZZWORM (2014)

  SATAN’S ROAD (2014)

  CRISPY CRITTERS (2014)

  THE WOMAN IN THE TRUNK (2014)

  ON THE BLACK (Early 2015)

  ROOM 101 (2015)

  SPECIES Z (2015)

  CRISPY CRITTERS 2 (2015)

  RAY GUN (2016)

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  OPENING STATEMENT

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  CHAPTER 68

  CHAPTER 69

  CHAPTER 70

  CHAPTER 71

  CHAPTER 72

  CHAPTER 73

  CHAPTER 74

  CHAPTER 75

  CHAPTER 76

  CHAPTER 77

  CHAPTER 78

  CHAPTER 79

  CHAPTER 80

  CHAPTER 81

  CHAPTER 82

  CHAPTER 83

  CHAPTER 84

  CHAPTER 85

  CHAPTER 86

  CHAPTER 87

  CHAPTER 88

  CHAPTER 89

  CHAPTER 90

  CHAPTER 91

  CHAPTER 92

  CHAPTER 93

  OPENING STATEMENT

  My name is Rusty Redfield and I didn't do it.

  Just wanted to get that out of the way before we went any further. Most people don't believe anything you say once you've been arrested for murder - like wanting someone dead automatically makes you a liar too. I’d like to set something else straight. I’m thirty-six years old, not the thirty-nine the Toronto Star claimed in this morning’s edition.

  Now you might think that missing the point by a lousy three years is not something to launch a major lawsuit over. But to me, it all just smacks of that glorious public sport of playing loose with the truth. And that’s been my sad story this past year and I’m sick of it.

  I’m also sick of half-truths, faint lies and lame excuses. After all, can’t someone at the newspaper do a simple calculation involving taking a birth date and subtracting it from the present and arriving at thirty-six for God's sake? From my own personal experience with newspaper stories, and I’ve had a few, I’m guessing they have some guy employed over there - some Journalism graduate who’s related to the Sports Editor - who’s only job is to go around on a daily basis and randomly screw up the simple facts in headline stories. It’s as if reporting a story correctly by a tabloid is a mortal sin or contravenes Federal statutes.

  The Star also has me listed as an unemployed salesman; a label only two notches above alleged child molester. Sure, I don’t have a job at this exact moment and for a brief time sold software for a startup called Great Barrier Systems but my training makes me a programmer and I’m damn good at it. The fact that the Star reported me as unemployed though, and people are basically circumscribed by what they do - has relegated me to ‘nothing’ status today - a ghost wandering through a splashy murder story on the front page.

  Speaking of jobs, if I would have been a bartender or a landscape gardener, things would have been a lot different. I never would have met Jeffrey Ludd, the man they say I murdered. That would have saved me a lot of grief and about $100,000 in legal fees. I also would never have met Shay (the ubiquitous ex-wife) and subsequently experienced the prolonged agony of having her walk out on me. I also would never have met Malcolm Grieves, the psychotic who started everything.

  And of course, I wouldn’t be in jail right now waiting for two detectives to come back and introduce my face to the floor.

  What kills me about cops, is they believe everything they read in The Star. About me being 39. Even the part about me being arrested for Fraud two years ago despite the fact that one of them was in on that pinch. They forgot to mention the charges had been dropped but they didn’t fail to make the connection between Jeff Ludd and myself, how Jeff had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to right a wrong (translated- hounding me to the ends of the earth because he was afraid I had stolen something from him; something he never had and subsequently it was ripping his heart out).

  Now Jeff 's just a corpse. And he’s still getting his way, which I understand is common for a billionaire. Even a dead one.

  The room I’m sitting in is the shittiest little interview room I have ever seen, the walls dull grey and thick with paint the penal system must order by the truckload. It’s depressing. Even the graffiti is listless and half-hearted. I’m waiting for my lawyer feeling like a kid about to meet the school principal - a lawyer who was far too expensive for an unemployed salesman/programmer, who never asked or cared if I was guilty or innocent and who would do this case for half-price just to get a share of the TV spotlight.

  When she enters the room, she doesn’t even look at me. Maybe she thinks she would laugh. I’m such a mess - some drunk had vomited on my shoulder in the lock-up and after three hours of disjointed sleep my hair is as unruly as sagebrush, and my eyes are dark with anxiety. I am the definition of forlorn – and distracted by what sounded like a mother crying somewhere. Probably mine.

  “You’re a celebrity,” was all she said, her smile reproachful, but hiding some satire she felt the world was redolent in. She was a lady after my own heart - someone who could relate to my skewed sense of reality. “Don’t weep i
n the flowers,” my Dad used to say, “laugh in the outhouse”. He should have explained that one better. I might have turned out different. My old man was a strange bird.

  “Want my autograph?” I asked.

  “Right here, pal.” She stuck some papers under my nose and a fat fountain pen with a gold tip. She smiled, showing perfect white teeth I had helped pay for.

  “This my confession?” I asked, signing dutifully, ever aware that missing even a line or a period might keep me in here five minutes longer than I needed to be. Only idiots felt brave in jail.

  “Ten more minutes and your two buddies, Koz and Otter, would have had you signing off on global warming. I saved you from that.” Koz was a stringy old bird of a detective, flapping around in oversized clothes, his Adam’s apple bouncing up and down in his scrawny blue neck - his eyes as hard as ball bearings.

  Otter was his partner - a big blocky looking guy in an expensive suit and shades. They had picked me up at the office I worked at for less than three days, arrested me right in front of the secretary’s desk, and stuffed me in an elevator I shared with two other employees. When you’ve only worked somewhere for three days and they arrest you for murder on company property, prospects for career advancement look dim.

  My lawyer sat down carefully in a bent steel chair. Judging by its wobbly architecture, I wondered how many heads it had bounced off.

  I stared at her for a few minutes as she perused the docket. She was all I had now. My parents were dead, my ex-wife moved in with another man, my ex-business partner in jail. Oh yeah, I forgot - I was also broke and unemployed. Not my best moment. But I had a feeling somehow it was going to get a lot worse before there was even a faint hope of things getting better. And that hope was slim based on something only I knew about Jeff Ludd.

  CHAPTER 1

  You never know ahead of time what kind of day it’s going to be.

  That’s how the man in the parking garage felt. Here it was about eight o'clock in the evening and he might as well be hanging from the ledge by his fingernails, counting down the seconds.

  This morning over coffee, he was thinking seriously about how he needed a new pair of running shoes. Or something equally inane. Then boom.

  You’d think these kinds of things, matters of mortality and death, would telegraph themselves to you - give you the big wake up call. Obviously all that psychic bullshit was just wishful thinking. If there was such a thing as intuition it should have hit him around noon. Like a baby grand from eight stories up. But it didn't. Not even a shiver.

  He was standing now on the third level of a downtown parkade, behind an unpainted concrete support column, watching a man in a car pound at his driver side window with a wet fist. It was either wet with blood or perspiration. He couldn't tell. He guessed blood. But he smiled anyway.

  For the sake of a chronically weak stomach that was so jittery he felt the bile rise in his throat every time he so much as saw road kill, he definitely shouldn't be enjoying this so much. But he was. Then he told himself, wiping his lips, it was the smell that always set him off. Not the sight of something disemboweled, even if it was only imagined, like an orange blur on the highway at passing speed. But this particular death he was witnessing, a human sacrifice of sorts, and well-deserved, had the promise of coming off totally odorless, masked by the stink of a decade of diesel fumes, most of it pricey Audi and Benz exhaust.

  The Toronto President’s Club, perched above the parkade, had an annual membership cost of about twenty five thousand dollars. So an over-priced hunk of German automobile just seemed to go naturally with the place. There were dozens of them in rows. He imagined members sucking up the oily exhaust the way a connoisseur might nose a fine sherry. Then he put his hand up against the cement and watched a man being garroted with a thin piece of wire, a man with enough money to buy a thousand Mercedes.

  He wished he could see the billionaire in the car more clearly. He watched him thrash about in the front seat of his Chevy Volt. He could be sitting in a Rolls Royce or a loaded Tesla if he wanted to. He could afford to drive anything. But Ludd just thought cars were extravagant and wasteful. That was one of his many well-known idiosyncrasies.

  For the moment, the billionaire appeared to be struggling half-heartedly. The man watching in the dark had a suspicion the victim was distracted by how easy it was to slice through skin and cartilage with a fine wire. Like party cheese. And look how neatly a finger became detached. Again this was typical of the billionaire's analytical nature; always, even to the end, trying to work a buck out of chaos.

  The watcher saw him kick once weakly, fight for air which wouldn't come, his mouth open like a fish on a hook - then kick again, feeling the wire cut deep into his throat with what must have seemed like icy persistence. Then he stopped, a stubborn kind of hesitation that surprised the murderer, as if his victim were gathering strength. As if he had all the goddamn time in the world.

  But the guy doing the dying was thin and gawky and his murderer had no doubt that this job would go quickly and with as little fuss as possible. After all, he was a busy man. The killer saw the billionaire look down at his fingers, which were sticky with blood, and then he heard a grunt, a sound like air leaking out of something wet, like something had finally given in. Then everything seemed to be sliding away from the man in the front seat; the man with copious amounts of fresh blood on the front of his Wal-Mart dress shirt.

  :

  The billionaire reached up, felt his hands bump against the rubbery surface of the steering wheel. Then hesitantly, like a reluctant lover, he touched the warm ruin of his neck. Lights flashed somewhere in his head. Then everything faded.

  Just last summer, a time that seemed decades away in the past, he had made the international Who's Who, bought an obscenely expensive new home, ten thousand square feet of glass in the Beaches that filled him with nervous guilt. And The Financial Times just last week guessed that his shares in the company he owned were worth over a billion dollars. Imagine that. A billion. Not bad for a guy from the north end. A guy whose dad used to manufacture dentures out of a broken-down little shop on the edge of Chinatown.

  Now he'd give it all up for one lousy breath of parking garage air.

  His last thought wasn't of his wife, his growing business, or his Japanese Yen languishing in foreign money accounts - but of Kim Soo. Exotic Kim Soo and her long buttery thighs, tiny anxious mouth, tattooed breasts.

  And he puzzled over this, struggling to martial his impressive mental resources to these curiously wicked images. Then he thought of nothing again.

  CHAPTER 2

  The programmer watched Dante unfold his wings and dive. In an instant he was out of sight, gone from the screen. But Grieves could still hear him - could still imagine the sound his wings might make if they were actually beating their way down a corridor that was a fiber-optic cable. He pictured him swooping down through a junction, racing at nearly the speed of light across the American landscape, the hiss of the ether roaring in his ears. But this wasn't actually happening of course - because Dante was just a computer program.

  And the little bat was just a clever piece of animation Grieves created for his own amusement.

  In the time it took Grieves to blink, Dante had arrived at the East Coast. He pulled in his imaginary wings and touched down. He stared up at a familiar doorway – a locked entrance known as a firewall - a security device designed to keep hackers like Grieves out of private computer systems. Or if not out, track and destroy the intrusive program once it was inside. And find out where it came from.

  But Dante was built smart. It sniffed trouble. It raised its virtual head and a faint siren alerted Grieves at his laptop, which smiled now, sensing that all the long work was finally paying off. This particular firewall wasn't there yesterday. But Grieves expected as much. Someone had spent tens of thousands, possibly hundreds, just to keep nasty little programs like Dante, and clever programmers like Grieves, from having their way with corporate secrets. Or more
importantly, dirty little personal secrets hidden somewhere in a morass of files and computerized ledgers, never expected to see the light of day again. But now Dante sits and waits, at the side of the road, watching the electronic traffic stream by, infinitely patient.

  Within minutes, a visitor shows up. A packet of data - sent by some other computer system - screeches to a halt at the threshold of the fire door. It issues a password correctly, then streams through. Grieves shakes his head because he knows that Dante has been listening. That's its job. But how could the firewall know that? The simple act of parking an infonaut like Dante, a bundle of software instructions, really nothing more than a program that can move around like a guided missile through the Internet or sit beside a known firewall like some hitch hiker, would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Hell, it's unthinkable even today, thought Grieves. But someone has to dream these things up. They don't invent themselves. At least not yet.

  And just like that, Dante's in. And once inside, he'll start his search through a myriad of files like a tireless bloodhound on the scent. And then once he has what Grieves is looking for, he'll flash back across the continent and roost back in his home base computer and no one will ever be the wiser.

  That's not to say that Dante never leaves a trail. Sometimes that adds spice to the game. Creates fear too, in the right people. And that's why; in this case, it's clearly part of the plan.

  CHAPTER 3

  The coroner lifted a flap of grayish skin with her gloved finger.

  "See here?" She pointed, looking bored. "See the multiple lacerations?" The older cop bent over, grunted, wondering how many times he'd stood here in one of these rooms over a corpse. His partner nodded, the ceiling lights glowing off the shiny dome of his head.

  The coroner ran her finger across the ragged line on the neck of the deceased. "Sorry to keep the two of you awake, but that's why I think your murderer is an amateur," she added.

  "You'll testify to that?" yawned the older cop.