The King of Fear by Drew Chapman Read Free Book Online Page A

moved past the car bays and machinery to the entranceway—and froze. The door to the street was open, its window smashed. Garrett crouched low, expecting a blow from behind, but none came. He turned to scout out the rest of the waiting room, but it was empty.
    Garrett straightened and took a deep breath. What the hell was going on? Then he heard it—footsteps from above, up the stairs, in the bedroom. Without thinking, he raced back across the work bays, yelling as he ran, “Mitty!”
    He sprinted up the stairs, fists clenched, and stumbled into the spare bedroom. The light was on; Mitty was sitting up in bed, rubbing at her eyes.
    â€œDude, what are you yelling about?” She winced in the light. “I was asleep.”
    Garrett searched the room. Other than for Mitty, it was empty. The window was open, but Mitty had opened it when they first came in. Everything else seemed untouched.
    â€œSomeone broke into the shop. Front door is open. Window is smashed.”
    â€œNobody steals used tires. Trust me. You can’t give ’em away.”
    â€œThey weren’t looking for tires. They came up here. To this bedroom.”
    Mitty shook her head. “You’re high. Go back to sleep.”
    Garrett sat in the chair at the desk in the corner of the room. CNN was still playing, muted, in the corner. Maybe Mitty was right. Maybe he was high, the mixture of Motrin and Schlitz jumbling his brain.
    He glanced at his computer. A word program had been opened. He hadn’tbeen writing anything—and he never used Word. Someone had typed three short sentences onto the screen. Garrett read them and grunted in surprise.
    One man.
    A Russian.
    He is en route.
    HM

L OWER M ANHATTAN , J UNE 15, 2:15 A.M.
    I n the New York field office of the FBI, Special Agent Jayanti Chaudry was considered straight talking and intensely ambitious. She was usually in the running for the best, and most high-profile, homicide cases, and if she got one, she almost always closed it. An intuitive crime-fighter, meticulous, and frighteningly persistent, she saw her relentlessness as an outgrowth of her life story: daughter of immigrant shopkeepers who spent their life savings to start a business, the first one in her family to go to college, and the first female Indian special agent in the Manhattan office. Actually, now that she thought of it, since Agent Hawani had been transferred to Denver, she was the only female Indian special agent in the Manhattan office. Or the entire Northeast.
    Not that it mattered. To Chaudry, there were two types of people in her world: those who helped her solve crimes, and those who got in the way. She knew she had a chip on her shoulder; she was, after all, dark-skinned and female in a white man’s world—but she refused to let those issues derail her. Race, gender, and birthplace were simply distractions, and distractions only slowed you down. Chaudry never slowed down.
    She checked the clock above her desk—it was nearly two thirty in the morning—and considered the case before her. New York Federal Reserve president Phillip Steinkamp had been shot and killed while walking to work yesterday morning at approximately 8:25 a.m. The shooter, Anna Bachev, thirty-eight, a Bulgarian immigrant who had lived in the States for the last fifteen years, had a history of mental illness and drug abuse. She’d had multiple stintsat Bellevue, in the psych lockup, as well as two arrests for possession of cocaine. She’d already been granted citizenship at the time of her arrests, so no deportation proceedings were set. Her work record was spotty, almost nonexistent, and Chaudry guessed Bachev had spent time hooking to support herself.
    Two agents had searched her apartment in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx, a filthy studio in a rotting building on Bryant Avenue, and had found multiple articles about Steinkamp. Bachev had clearly been stalking the Fed president, but