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

something—according to the agents’ report—was slightly off about the evidence: “Agent in charge should consider the possibility of fabrication. Motivation of suspect unclear and unusual. Source of newspaper clippings is indeterminate, seems beyond suspect’s capabilities to accumulate.”
    To Chaudry, Steinkamp was an odd choice for a stalking target. He was older, quiet, and did not have a high-visibility job. He was neither rich nor, outside of a small subset of finance geeks, particularly famous. Chaudry knew that stalkers were, by definition, irrational, but when they picked targets, they weren’t usually bureaucrats—balding, married bureaucrats at that.
    None of Bachev’s neighbors knew much about her; she’d only moved into the apartment two months ago. Before that, her name didn’t show up on a lease, rental agreement, or bank account in the New York City area going back four years. She’d essentially been homeless. And broke. Which raised the question of how she had obtained the murder weapon, a nine-millimeter SIG Sauer P226. SIGs were expensive weapons. This one had been bought at a gun shop in Vermont three years ago by a collector, who reported it stolen six months later. It hadn’t shown up in any robberies or crimes since. That made it black market, but even black-market guns were pricey.
    And then there were Bachev’s reported last words before she turned the gun on herself: Garrett Reilly made me do it.
    Chaudry sipped at her coffee and puzzled over this.
    Garrett Reilly?
    Chaudry flipped through the stack of reports on Reilly. He was a fascinating character. Born in Long Beach, California, the son of a Mexican immigrant mother and a dad who worked as a janitor for the LA Unified School District, Reilly had shown an early aptitude for numbers. A genius for them, actually. He had been recruited to Yale by a mathematics professor named Avery Bernstein and had earned nothing but A’s at the school before he dropped out. He’ddropped out the day after his brother, a marine lance corporal, was reported KIA in Afghanistan. Reilly appeared to have moved back in with his mother in Long Beach and spent the next six months pestering the Army Bureau of Records for information about his brother’s death. He’d made more than 120 phone calls to their DC offices. Later that year, he’d gone back to school at Long Beach State, but his grades had been indifferent, and he was cited twice by the administration for disrupting class and then getting into a fistfight with a fellow student.
    Bernstein, his Yale math prof, seemed to have tracked Reilly’s progress and brought him back to New York to work on the bond desk at Jenkins & Altshuler, a Wall Street trading house that Bernstein had taken over. There, Reilly had thrived. Thrived until a day in late March, a year ago, when a car bomb exploded in front of the Jenkins & Altshuler offices.
    Chaudry remembered the day well. It had been a sensational terror attack, but no one was killed, and then no one was charged in the bombing. The FBI hadn’t worked on that case—it had gone straight to Homeland Security, which was odd in its own right—and was still an active investigation, unsolved and very much open. Conspiracy theories still swirled around it.
    To compound the strangeness, Garrett Reilly had disappeared that very day. He seemed to have enlisted in the army for a while and been under the supervision of the Defense Intelligence Agency, but he quit two months later, honorably discharged, and then went back to his old job at Jenkins & Altshuler, which he kept even when his mentor, Bernstein, died in a car accident soon thereafter.
    The threads of Reilly’s life were odd and disparate, and none of them quite meshed.
    When Chaudry had called the DIA right after the shooting, a general named Kline had seemed reluctant to answer her questions, citing national security concerns. It