Page 4 of Catch Me If You Can (The Mancini Way)

“What, what’d I do?”

“What did you do, drum sets? You gave a three and a four-year-old drum sets, the fuck you think has been going on in my house?”

I laughed my ass off.

“Get outta here, I’ll be by sometime this week, I think lil Jeff said he wanted a python.”

“I’ll fucking kill you you do that shit bro, I’ll be doing the bureau a favor.”

“I’ll tell ma you said that shit.”

“Mean, just dog mean.”

“Later lil brother.”

“Later bro.”

Fucking FBI, those fucks stay on me like a lion on a rhino’s ass, one of these days they’re gonna piss me the fuck off for real and I’ll give their bitch asses something to cry about, dumb fucks. So far I’ve mostly been playing with the different agencies foreign and domestic that try keeping tabs on me, it was fun outwitting them at every turn but they’ve all learnt in some capacity or the other not to go too far. I valued my freedom too much to have them trampled by a bunch of blowhards who were sometimes almost as corrupt as the fucks they were supposed to be putting away.

I opened up my laptop and typed in the series of numbers needed to get me into the FBI data base undetected, these fucks were so busy hounding my every step that they’d left their left flank unprotected. It was comical how fucking easy it was to breach their security. I’ve been accessing most if not all of the delicate top-secret information of most government agencies for the better part of eight years ever since I’d learned the fine art of hacking from a master.

You see the thing with me is that I’m a one- man team I like working alone as much as possible when handling a job. If I needed information I would rather be able to get it myself as opposed to having to wait on someone else to get it for me. So I’d trained with the best and picked up some of my own tricks along the way. Now these days I’m better than my teacher but not only that since I’d mastered the art of hacking I’d learned how to safeguard myself against the same. It’d take them years to crack my codes and by then I would’ve changed them once more so they’d just have to start all over again. I’m sure it was a great source of frustration for them. Dumb fucks.

I went through the now familiar channels that I used whenever I was spying on them spying on me. Jaxxon had given me her name so it was no hardship finding her in their database. I felt the jolt but didn’t think anything of it, just a quick hit to the heart and gut that was too fleeting to really register.

“There she is, fuck me…come to daddy.”

Chapter 3

Cierra

I made it; hard to believe after all the ups and downs and turmoil but I’m finally where I wanted to be. It’s been an uphill battle but all worth it; now I can fight for justice for those who deserved it and fulfill a childhood promise made so long ago on a lonely hilltop in Maryland all at the same time. I pulled my thick black curls back and secured them at my nape, my hair is a bloody nuisance half the time but I could never go much shorter than shoulder length, maybe because that’s how I remember mom wearing hers when I was a kid, before she was taken so suddenly and horrifically from me.

“So what do you think Cierra is this our guy?” The voice breaking into my little trip down memory lane brought me back to the present and the task at hand. The room was close and just a little stuffy, as most rooms of its ilk tend to be, there were men scattered around a long table with computer screens up and running, papers scattered haphazardly over every available surface. The peeling walls really could do with a touch up and the floors were scuffed but for some reason this was my place of solace. It was in this room and others like it here on the farm where I got to hone my skills. This is where my dream of justice drew closer to reality.

Not many knew of my true purpose for being here, at least I hoped not and I wouldn’t want them to find out that might stand in my way, others might not understand and I couldn’t risk that. My mind is my greatest asset, my handlers have taken to calling it their secret weapon, I don’t know how or why it works the way it does I just know that it fits in perfectly with what I had to do, the one thing of importance in my otherwise bleak world.

I took my time and studied the subject again; couldn’t be too rash here, a mistake now could mean the difference between life and death.

Frank Connell had already murdered eleven people or so it appeared; the profile suggested our perp was a loner between the ages of thirty and forty-five who probably still lived at home with his mother, had poor social skills and an intense hatred of women. Profiling had been in existence for decades now and anyone with a grain of sense knew that there was always room for human error or they should. I guess one of the reasons I was being hailed as the next best thing to pass through these vaunted halls is because I’d turned profiling on its ear. Instead of going with the textbook I went outside the box and worked my way back in.

I’ve studied plenty cases where the profiler had been wrong; I’d even been the catalyst that led to the freeing of two men who had been wrongfully convicted and sitting on death row. This was all while I was still in school and working as a volunteer for an organization that specialized in reviewing questionable convictions. That’s why I’m here well one of the reasons anyway; it was passing strange that on my quest to imprison the guilty I started out by freeing the innocent. The fact that I’d gone on to correctly profile and bring about the capture of both actual guilty parties is what had fast-tracked me to Quantico. I’d caught the attention of my intended target; it’d just been a few years earlier than I’d anticipated.

Now I studied the man on the screen as he’d sat in interview being grilled by two of our best. I watched body language, eye movement, perspiration levels I looked for any nervous twitches and listened to the intonations in his voice and how he responded to certain questions. I wasn’t feeling it; the others had already passed judgment; my fellow profilers were sure that this was our guy but something just wasn’t ringing true for me; there was just something missing I guess and I’ve learned to follow my instincts no matter what was the most popular opinion. We’ve been working on this particular case for a few weeks already and everyone wanted to be done with it, but not at the expense of a human life, a man’s freedom was at stake, a rash decision by the ones who were supposed to be the keepers of justice’s gates would not only be unjust it would be criminal in the extreme.

Not every middle-aged man who lived at home with mom was a maniacal murderer and what our guy had done to those women took not only time and planning but a heavy dose of hate; that kind of hate was not as easy to hide as the perpetrators thought. When in close proximity you could almost smell it coming off of them; in observation I saw it in the eyes, the eyes became almost feral after shedding that much blood, at least that’s what I saw. I had no way of knowing what my colleagues saw or how they went about drawing the conclusions they did, so I just focused on what my brain was telling me and shut out all the white noise around me.

Like any wild animal that hunted once they tasted of human flesh they craved it and actively sought it out henceforth, it was the same with the human predator, once he or she had gotten a taste for murder or whatever their crime of choice happened to be it was hard for them to stop. With the animal you could tell the difference by the change in their behavior it was the same with man; this was my secret a little kernel of truth that had come to me during the darkness of night one long ago night. I’d still been a young impressionable girl, still the lost child who was alone in the world. I stayed up nights afraid to close my eyes, afraid of what the darkness would hold. Not because of the boogeyman no, my nightmare had been of a different nature. It was at night that I realized I couldn’t remember their faces, gradually they were fading away from my memory. I’d had no mementos left, no keepsakes. In the chaos of being spirited away in the dead of night from the home of the friend I’d been staying over with that night no one had thought to even ask. Then as the weeks went by when it wasn’t certain who had been the target of the massacre and if I was still in danger all thought of such things got lost in the shuffle. So it was that while others my age were out having fun and doing the growing pains thing, going to parties with friends enjoying the normal teenage proclivities, I’d been studying human behaviors. I taught myself to look beyond the expected, to push my mind harder. It was as though I went to a different plane of existence where everything became clearer, it was almost like pieces to a puzzle that had been scattered about haphazardly and I had to painstakingly put it all back together. When I first noticed that nine times out of ten I’d been on point I decided to use that as my passport into the bureau. From that first compulsion I made it my mission to hone my skills. I ate slept and lived anything to do with crime solving, I had no idea then what a profiler was, had no idea where I would fit; I just knew I needed to be here where I had access to the information that might come in handy and so I’d pushed myself in every way. That’s why today I’m being touted as the best new brain to hit the farm in decades. Some were even saying I was the best ever and I guess there was some truth to it since I was offered a position that usually took years of hard work to achieve. I didn’t let accolades go to my head though, that’s not why I was here my purpose had never changed, not once in all these years.

So I’ve stayed true to myself and focused on my goals, I’m not in this for praise and recognition; truth be known if I could be left alone to do what I do with no one looking over my shoulder or critiquing I would be happy; but that’s not the way it works. I’ve been vetted, studied, interrogated, all but put under hypnosis to extract my secrets. One enterprising scientist even joked that he’d like to get a look inside my brain; too bad I’d have to be dead for that happy occurrence to take place.

The others were getting restless waiting for my answer, they’d learned by now that I wasn’t one to be rushed but that didn’t stop them moaning and groaning. I looked up and around the table at the faces gathered there, a sea of male faces; some of them I knew resented my presence here, some saw it as unfair that I’d been moved ahead there’d even been rumors of me sleeping my way here which had all been quelled when my skills were made evident in exercise after exercise.

“It’s not him.” I’d known the answer for quite some time now, I’d gone over the case relentlessly and every time I came back to the same thing. Yes he fit the profile, too perfectly and as I’ve said before profiles can be wrong; they’re compiled by human beings after all and contrary to what the movies portray no one is right a hundred percent of the time, not unless he’s also capable of walking on water.

“Aww come on Stone; we got the guy dead to rights. He fits the profile to a T. All roads point to him. We even found his DNA at the last scene.”

“Stodgy DNA at best and we know he knew the victim so even that could’ve been explained; but what of the others? He had no known association with any of the other women that we could find, not a scrap of evidence puts him anywhere in their vicinity either at the time the crimes were carried out or at any other time.”

---