Chapter 4: MANCINI

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 database 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."

***

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, and 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.