Dagon Rising(37)

“Okay, you gotta level with me,” Tony said, fresh drink in hand, his spirits jovial. “I’m dying to know this out of curiosity. Holdover from my days as a professional whacker myself, so I gotta ask you. Those eight RNC people you did. How’d you do it so law enforcement hasn’t connected them with each other?”

“Many of them aren’t even ruled as homicides,” Clark said. He cast his gaze around coach. The Black Lodge agents were still absorbed in whatever it was they were doing. Besides, who cared if they heard anything this late in the game? Onyx already told him everything about him and then some. “One of them’s a suicide, two are accidents, one is being attributed to a serial killer in Los Angeles, and the others are being attributed to either cases of domestic disputes, robberies gone bad, or simple random assaults.”

“No shit? Suicide? How the fuck you do that?”

“Convincing a chronically depressed woman to commit suicide is easier than you think.”

“Damn, that’s cold!”

Clark shrugged. “The woman in question was a big influence on the RNC’s special investigation. She was getting too close. She also had the ears of a lot of important people in Washington. Another few weeks, she could’ve opened an official inquiry that would have really nailed me.”

“So it was either you or her.”

“Fuck yeah.”

“I’m down with that. What about the accidents? They hard to stage?”

“Very. That’s why I was only able to make two of them look accidental.”

“How’d you make one look like they were done by a serial killer?”

Clark shrugged. That one had been the hardest. Clark had been sick for a week after, but the situation had been perfect. The RNC underling in question had resided in an area of Los Angeles where a notorious serial killer dubbed as the Eastside Butcher had resurfaced after a long hiatus. An afternoon of research on the case at the library and the internet, and Clark’s personal knowledge of his victim, specifically that he was into rough S&M, provided all the ammunition he needed. He’d tailed the man to an underground bondage club one night and knocked the man out with a simple pressure point touch in the parking lot, when the lot was completely deserted. Within a minute, the man was tied up in the back of his car. He’d tied the man up tightly, stuck a ball gag in his mouth, and once in the privacy of the seedy motel he’d rented, he’d decapitated him in the bathtub with a large butcher knife. He’d disposed of the decapitated body in a vacant lot and buried the head in the desert. The FBI still thought the Butcher killed him.

“That’s really fucking brilliant,” Tony said as Clark gave him a brief rundown on how he’d dispatched the roaches who kept poking into his shit, threatening to take him down. “And the only reason they’re on to you in the first place is due to the shell casings found in the White House?”

“Yeah.” Clark had given Tony the basic backstory of events that had led to the mess that was his current life. “Their ideology demands that Tyler was a saint. Therefore, somebody did him in, even though the FBI and Secret Service have already exonerated me.”

“Why haven’t they just gone to the press?” Tony asked. “You know, smear your name in the tabloids and shit.”

“That could happen at any moment,” Clark said. “What’s kept the press out of it so far is the clandestine secrecy of this investigation. The powers-that-be in the RNC…they have no idea that some of their members are even participating in this investigation. This is all very hush-hush. It’s so secret, the leader of the RNC has no idea it’s going on. The Republican Party got bitch-slapped in the last election, and the Tyler Administration damaged them so badly that to go public with their theory would just make them look as stupid as Jessica Simpson debating the theory of relativity with Einstein. That’s why they took this underground. They think if they can get solid physical evidence, they can get a federal prosecutor interested in looking at the Secret Service’s handling of their dismissal. In short, they can make everybody from the Pentagon to the Livingston Administration itself look as corrupt as them. And if they do that, they can erode some of the negative flack they’ve gotten, maybe even woo some of their support back.”

Tony shook his head. “Politics. I’ve never understood that fucking shit.”

“Yeah. It’s nothing but a snake pit.”

“What were you? A Democrat?”

“I’m a non-partisan Progressive.”

“The fuck is that?”