Designated Target - Chapter 8

The whole way back to the LA office, Taylor was still bothered about how she could possibly be tailing them. It seemed impossible. She couldn’t have known which vehicle the local office would have loaned them, so she couldn’t have put a tracker on the car.

It was possible she picked them up at the AUSA’s office, although that then led to the question of how she knew that’s where they were going in the first place. It was probable she hadn’t been on them when they dropped off Finney, otherwise she’d know where he was, and wouldn’t need to follow them. She might not be able to get to Finney on the army base, but she would have known where he was and known that all she needed to do was wait until he left.

No, the only thing that was clear was that she didn’t know what Taylor had done with Finney, and she was trailing him in hopes of finding her target.

Until he found out who she was and learned more about how she operated, it was unlikely he was going to figure out a way to stop her from tailing him. He was still doing all the things Whitaker had taught him in the early days when they started working together, checking for trailing cars by making unexpected turns, looping back on his own path and noting distinctive markings on any cars following him, but something told Taylor that wasn’t going to work.

He had a plan and, as little as he liked doing more research, it was what he was going to go with. Of course, deciding to do that was the easy part. Back in DC, most of the case files going back decades had already been digitized. They even had a whole department devoted to it, pulling in old case files and getting them scanned into the system so they could be searched in whole batches. They were even taking investigators’ notes from current cases and putting them in the system.

The field offices, sadly, weren’t as far ahead. Los Angeles wasn’t some backwater field office, but they still didn’t have the budget that the Bureau headquarters had, and it showed. Most of the time frame Taylor was looking for hadn’t been digitized. Taylor supposed he should be thankful this office was large enough to have a well-organized record room and procedures for storing any notes, files or records connected to a closed case, but it still meant hours of digging through dusty stacks of paper to find what he was looking for.

For a while, Taylor found nothing, or at least not what he was looking for. There were lots of killings in the early days of the Randazzos’ rise to power. Shootings, stabbings, men and their mistresses found dead in hotel rooms, and a string of disappearances, but nothing that suggested any kind of skill.

While it was possible some of these were the work of the shooter in her early days, before she learned finesse, Taylor didn’t think so. He’d worked back from the last killings he was pretty sure he could attribute to her, and he expected some kind of progression. Nothing happened in a vacuum and a killer didn’t go from being a novice to someone capable of what this woman had been doing overnight. He was looking for those in-between stages, the growing pains of a killer working her way up to her prime. Maybe attempts at a killing masked as natural causes that didn’t quite go undetected, or a botched shot.

Had she been a man, Taylor would have considered the possibility of her learning period happening in some professional capacity, say with the CIA, KGB or some other government-funded wet-work team. As a woman, it seemed unlikely.

Not that spy organizations had a problem with women assassins. There’d been a long history of those organizations hiring women who could blend in, and easily be written off by men as nothing more than service staff if they acted unobtrusively enough. The reason Taylor discounted that was that, yes, she would have learned to kill using poisons and the like, but it wouldn’t explain her being able to make the shot on either Randazzo or Bartolini. The CIA preferred to get their shooters from Delta or the SEALS, likening them to be rough and tumble with battle experience.

Someone able to both shoot and be knowledgeable in more untraceable methods would have had to learn their trade on their own either apprenticing to another hitter, which would be fairly uncommon, or through trial and error. Of course, figuring out by trial and error from run-of-the-mill gang violence was nearly impossible without some kind of other corroborating information. Taylor had been confident he could find it using what he’d learned about the Randazzo family and its rise to power, but the more he looked, the less confident he was that she’d learned her trade with the Randazzos.

After almost five hours in the record room, skimming through file after file, Taylor shifted to the computers, pulling in what records he could from Vegas, since that was where the Randazzos had come from, but continued to come up empty. He was about to call it quits and start trying to think up another option for finding her when something caught his attention.

It was a note about a killing in Vegas involving an associate of Randazzo Sr. The killing itself was so open and shut that Taylor had almost skipped it entirely. It involved an associate retaliating for an attack on his younger brother by what looked like a fairly corrupt cop on the payroll of a rival group. The associate had ended up running across the cop in a convenience store and, after an exchange of words, the associate pulled a gun and shot the officer.

Besides the clerk and a guy paying for gas, the incident had been caught on video, leading to a very open and shut case. The DA had gone for first-degree murder, citing the man’s desire for revenge for the assault on his younger brother by way of pre-meditation. The defense, knowing they didn’t stand a chance of getting off at all, put all their efforts into getting a conviction for second-degree murder instead, which would have taken the death penalty off the table.

Part of their reasoning was that the guy had, in fact, thought about killing the cop, going so far as looking for someone to do the job for him, before deciding against it. Apparently, the defense of ‘I tried to hire a hit man before deciding not to and then just happened to shoot him later’ didn’t sell the jury, who sent the guy to the electric chair. What interested Taylor were the details around the hit man the guy was trying to hire. The hitter was selling their services online, and had been used once by someone the guy on trial knew.

In one place during cross-examination, the guy said ‘she’ when referring to the hitter. It was possible that was a slip of the tongue, except in every other place, the guy had used gender-neutral terms, which was telling in of itself. Nearly every hitter Taylor had heard of was a man. Until Randazzo had said the person was a woman, Taylor had just assumed this one was too. So had Robles and Whitaker, all three of whom had been referring to a ‘hit man.’

Organized crime wasn’t exactly the most progressive environment, especially not in the late nineties when the case Taylor was reading about happened, which was before gender and whatnot became something people talked about.

The only reason someone like that would avoid saying ‘he’ or ‘hit man’ was because he knew the hitter wasn’t a man at all, which meant the ‘she’ was a slip, but not a slip of misidentifying the hitter’s gender. The mistake was in correctly identifying the hitter as a woman. Someone who’d shoot through an FBI agent to keep from being identified was not someone this guy would have wanted to give any information about, even if it was simply to confirm she was a woman.

It was interesting, but this was the sole mention Taylor had seen in all the records he’d read of the woman he was trying to find.

“Excuse me,” Taylor said to the agent working in the record room. “I’m trying to find something on a woman selling murder-for-hire services over the internet in the late nineties. I’ve only seen one reference in the areas I’ve looked. This is a long shot, but have you seen anything like that?”

“Nope. Have you talked to anyone in Internet Crimes?”

“No. I just found the reference a little bit ago.”

“I mean, you could keep looking, but without something identifiable you’re just hoping to get lucky. Those guys have been tracking that kind of stuff for decades now. If anyone is going to know, they will.”

“All right, thanks,” Taylor said.

Taylor was still a novice when it came to Bureau hierarchy, but as far as he knew, Internet Crimes wasn’t a regional division, which should mean it was located back in Washington. He was surprised to learn that LA had a section of that division located in their offices. In hindsight, it made sense. With so many tech companies in Silicon Valley and around the state, a lot of the systems and people the department regularly needed to interact with were here, thousands of miles away from the main Bureau headquarters. Since LA was the largest office in California and coordinated with a lot of the smaller offices in places like San Francisco and Sacramento, it made sense they’d be located here.

Taylor made his way up one floor from Records to their offices and poked around a bit until he found someone still working. He’d spent the entire day in the record room digging through files, so he counted himself lucky to find anyone at all. Field agents might work around the clock, but specialty departments like this tended to hold banker’s hours unless they had something urgent happening.

“Could you help me out for a second?” Taylor asked, sticking his head into the guy’s office.

The guy gave Taylor’s badge, which he was wearing on his belt since he kept getting asked if he was supposed to be in this area or not, a once over and waved Taylor in.

“I can try.”

“I was down in Records and found references to a woman selling her services as a hit man online when looking into some cases in Las Vegas in the late nineties. The ads don’t specify that she’s a woman and, as far as I can tell, most of the people involved didn’t know it either, but everything else fits what I’m looking for. I couldn’t find anything else on these, I guess I’d call them ads, and the lady in Records suggested I come talk to you guys about it.”

“It doesn’t sound familiar, but it’s possible. In the late nineties, the internet was the Wild West. These days people wanting to sell illegal services, be it drugs, stolen identity documents or murder for hire, have to go to lengths to hide anything identifiable, using VPNs or Tor to post on dark websites. Back in the nineties, they were posting up in the clear on Usenet or regular websites. Usenet was essentially just classified ads and a message board for the internet. It didn’t take any special knowledge or skill to post or find ads. Hell, they’d even put a phone number and an email address on the ad.”

“They would just put up an ad offering to kill someone?”

“Yep. I guess it wasn’t as blatant as that. They used code words for everything, but it wasn’t that hard to work out what they were talking about. It evolved from posting in the back of trade magazines, probably because it was easier to reach an audience. The code language moved with them to the internet, so we didn’t have to strain ourselves much to follow them.”

“Were there a lot of these kinds of ads?”

“For this kind of service? Yeah, although that doesn’t mean a lot. We’re talking handfuls, not hundreds, operating at any given time.”

“Okay, were you tracking anyone offering hits in the late nineties or early two-thousands? They might have offered to get hard-to-reach targets or to do it in ways that were hard to detect.”

“I can do some checking. Just here in LA and Las Vegas?”

“I know she operated out here, but she could have been from anywhere and she now has connections in New Jersey, so it’s possible she got her start out there. She worked mainly for organized crime, and a lot of the families out here traced their roots back to New York and Jersey, so check there too.”

“Okay, but this could take a while.”

Taylor went back to Records to continue searching, although he knew he wasn’t going to have much luck, since he’d already checked everything he could think of the first time. Now he was just throwing darts and hoping to get lucky, which he didn’t.

The guy in Internet Crimes called while Taylor was still digging through the records. He’d found lots of investigations that never identified the shooter, but none of them felt right. There was an outside chance one of the killings could have been an early attempt by the shooter, before she became more comfortable with her methods, but it didn’t feel right to Taylor.

“I think I have something,” the guy said. “Everything seems to match what you were looking for. Our division got kicked a case about murder-for-hire in Vegas where the target was on the run from one of the larger New York families. They came out here, I guess hoping the less established families wouldn’t be able to touch them, and spent all their time in a penthouse with the windows closed and under heavy guard. This guy had money and was in the process of buying one of the older casinos, I assume so that he wouldn’t ever have to leave the building again. The killer got him through the blacked-out window of his limousine when he lowered the middle divider to talk to the driver while heading down Las Vegas Boulevard. The shooter had set up in a hotel room with a good view down the Strip towards where this guy was living, and waited until he went out. It was a hell of a shot. Anyway, no physical evidence was left behind and, while they were pretty sure they knew the family behind the hit, they couldn’t pin it on anyone. Around the same time, one of our guys was monitoring some message boards that were being used as places for people to arrange for illegal goods and services and he found some notes back and forth in the missed connections section that looked to match the offer to hit this guy.”

“I thought you said they operated in code?”

“They did, but no one took security on the internet very seriously back in those days, especially the people who didn’t really know much about the internet. Because they were posting widely to people they had no connection to, in the beginning the code had to be simple enough that anyone reading it could figure out what they meant. Over time, a language evolved on its own, but it did so out on the internet along with everything else, so it wasn’t hard for anyone who was paying attention to keep up with that evolution.”

“So you could read what they were saying,” Taylor said, getting the point. “I will admit, that shot does seem like her, although I’m surprised to find her making those kinds of shots so early in her career.”

“Well, this was late in the time frame. The killing I’m talking about happened in 2002, shortly before this kind of communication moved to Tor, which was essentially the beginning of the dark web. The reason I pulled it was because the killing itself seemed to match so closely with what you were describing. The thing is, we were actually tracking this user for a while before this event. Even though everyone was being pretty brazen about selling their services on the internet, there weren’t that many professional hit men doing it on the web. The old school professionals were still either using magazines, even though most were starting to go out of print, or word of mouth the way it had been done in the old days. Your girl is part of the generation that grew up with the technology and hadn’t made a name for themselves before, so they were the ones out on the internet. There were only a handful of them ever in circulation, and most only lasted a year or two before disappearing, probably because they ended up dead or in jail. That’s what made your girl stand out. It was before my time, but when I started asking around, this person was who everyone thought of, although they all assumed it was a man.”

“It still could be,” Taylor pointed out. “I’ll agree it sounds pretty close to what I’m looking for, but let’s not jump to conclusions. You said they’d been tracking her for a while. How far back?”

“The first time this person popped up was ninety-four in New Jersey, the other reason I thought of her. They advertised their services, underbidding a lot of other contractors, I guess trying to gain a foothold. The hit itself wasn’t really noteworthy in any way. A restaurant owner who refused to pay whatever extortion was in those days. He was locking up his place and someone shot him in the back five times. There were a handful of witnesses, including a homeless guy and a couple driving by, but none got a good look at the shooter who wore a baggy hoody, dressed in nondescript clothes that made it hard to pin down even the person’s gender. Most agreed the perp was white, and had a more or less slim build, so it could have been a woman, but all the notes I pulled from the detective suggested they thought a man had done the deed.”

“If it was so clumsy and in another state, how did you connect the shooter to the one in Vegas?”

“A person’s internet presence is like a fingerprint, especially in specialized circles. They might hide their identity, jump IPs, use VPNs or Tor, so we can’t show on a piece of paper it’s the same person, but if you see enough of these you can nail it down. Our team made the connection back around the time of the Vegas shooting, along with a handful of others. None of it would hold up in court, but they’d hoped it would at least put them on the ID of the person they were looking for.”

“I don’t suppose I’m lucky enough that they identified her?”

“Nope. Like I said, until today everyone assumed this person was a man. They also more or less dropped off our radar shortly after the Vegas job. I dug through the records, but I couldn’t find any other jobs that we were able to connect to this hitter or ads from them after that.”

Almost certainly because that hit had been enough for her to get the attention of the family controlling Vegas at the time, then the Randazzos and finally the Amatos. She didn’t have to advertise anymore since she’d become the go-to woman for a successive run of organizations.

“So you never got anything on her at all?” Taylor asked.

It was hard for him not to despair. This was as close as he’d gotten to her, putting her in Vegas at the same time as the Randazzos and then back in Jersey. Losing the trail now was rubbing salt into the wound.

“I didn’t say that,” he said. “We do have a couple of leads, but all of them are terrible.”

“I’ll take literally anything I can get.”

“The guys back then pulled multiple IPs on your shooter each time they posted. Like I said, this was before wide use of VPNs, masking, Tor and all the other stuff people do to keep themselves from being tracked on the internet. They sent someone out to all the locations used to look into it, but none of them panned out. It’s possible your shooter was ahead of the curve and spoofed these people’s IPs, which is why nothing panned out, but it’s also possible the investigators back then missed something. Like I said, terrible leads.”

“But you have physical locations for all of these?” Taylor asked.

“Yes. One was a really old duplex on the outskirts of Vegas, but I checked it already, and it along with all the rest of the buildings on that block were torn down to make way for a new highway. The rest of the addresses are back in New Jersey and look to still be standing. Of course, these leads are all ten to twenty years old so the odds that anyone who would know anything still lives there isn’t great, but it’s what we’ve got.”