The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller by Drew Chapman Read Free Book Online Page A

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 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 As 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