Fanatics Read Free Page B

during sex crimes or, far too often, for the furious drink-driven, drug-driven hell of it.
    At first thought, the Double-A, to Flo’s mind, most closely resembled murderers who killed for the furious hell of it, except Double-A killers were permanently intoxicated not by drink or drugs, but by delusions. Unshakable believers in their own self-deceiving dogmas. Armed with information, money, and expertise, they could plan, publicize, and execute at will.
    Double-A Committee assassinations, as Flo saw it, were like all terrorist acts of violence, cruelties committed by people feeling intense humiliation, most often delusional, warped individuals suffering perceived impotency, for whom killing was a reassuring proof that somehow they counted, whether they were killers who were simply psychotic garden-variety wackos like John Lennon’s assassin, Ronald Reagan’s failed murderer—or ruthlessly fanatical men and women possessed by all-embracing coherent if grandiose visions, ignorant of doubts afflicting those unable to blind themselves to reality.
    And why not?
So little discouraged killers like them. They could announce their victims in advance and count on applause from at least some quarters, and they were guaranteed attention. Possessed by dreams that justified sacrifice—the sacrifice of others—they were so far driven to murder with impunity for the Double-A Committee. They called themselves “a quiver full of arrows.” And God—they claimed—was their legitimate authority, ordering them to commit justified killings. And they were good at killing; they had either military training or a great deal of criminal expertise. They didn’t live in the same area as their victims, as they struck almost anywhere, which made them less likely to be thwarted by local law enforcement intelligence. By evading justice so far, and in spite of their YouTube videos, they existed in the shadows almost like ghosts, impossible to build a concrete picture of them as individuals despite the particularities of their victims. For Flo Ott and Frank Murphy, this was a kind of killer they hadn’t encountered before in Brooklyn. The best hit men, the ones who got away—and a third of New York homicides went permanently unsolved—were so adept that the death of their victims raised little or no suspicion of any specific killer and more often seemed to be simply the result of natural causes. The most successful killers didn’t broadcast themselves, much less publicly announce their targets in advance.
    The traitor Cecil King will die before Christmas…
    The target judged.
    His sentence passed.
    A timeline set.
    Only the killing field remained to be discovered.

Victim ID
    7:47 A.M.
    Frank Murphy stayed busy on a cell phone call to Sergeant Marty Keane, the third member of their homicide team.
    Flo Ott sat in the backseat next to Senator-elect Cecil King.
    Frank turned around. “You all right back there?”
    “Yes,” Flo said. “Why?”
    “Just got a hit. Nothing to do with the Double-A Committee, Senator. But it’s near you, Flo. Some crazy perp right around the corner from where you live. Bashed a guy’s head in on Twelfth Street. You know the factory condos?”
    “Sure.”
    “In the courtyard, maybe four, five o’clock this morning. The body was discovered at five-thirty by a lady going early to work. A bond trader.”
    Flo said, “Senator, how about we drop you back at the office and meet you there later? A lot of people we got to talk to on Twelfth Street. And they’re going to be very pissed off. They all want to get to work. Not to mention what a bashed-in body does to their condo values.”
    “Who was he?” Cecil said.
    “Owen Smith,” said Frank. “Anyway, that’s his legal name. His business name was Ballz Busta. You know that rap guy in the Russian vodka ads? Him. A star. He lives, or lived, up the other end of Park Slope with his wife, three kids, and her mother. In a big brownstone on Montgomery Place. Servants,