Chapter 4: Video

"I must admit I share your puzzlement, Mr. Reese," Finch's voice was even more clipped and brief than usual—a sign he was thinking hard indeed.

Reese paced the library, unable to stay still. Yes, this wasn't one of the Machine's numbers, this was Carter's case, and he didn't really have to be involved—but something about this one disturbed him. Or rather, it disturbed Joss Carter deeply enough to disturb him. He just couldn't skim it like he had when she'd tentatively asked for his eyes on it two years ago; she was having a hard enough time right now, she didn't need a cold case from two years ago nipping at her heels. And because this was now their concern. With Root's recent compromise of the Machine, was it possible it was making mistakes, slipping up, missing something? How could it have missed two victims of a serial killer—and the serial killer himself?

"So let's think back on what we do know." Shaw spoke from where she sat on the floor petting a happily-panting Bear.

Finch was staring into space, thinking. "The Machine gives us numbers of those who it believes are in danger. Premeditated danger. If these women simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, it may not have been able to give us their numbers."

"So then why would it not have been able to give us the killer's number?" Frustration sharpened Reese's voice as he leaned over the table, fists clenched.

"Perhaps he doesn't live in an area where the Machine has eyes and can see him going about his business?" Shaw suggested, giving Bear one last pat and getting up to join the guys at Finch's computer desk. "There are some wooded, forested state parks within driving distance of Manhattan."

It made too much sense to Reese—and then Finch spoke in an uncanny echo to those thoughts. "He could be sitting in a wilderness cabin somewhere thinking and planning what he'll do to his next victim, until the itch to kill gets too strong and he has to scratch that itch. What better way to do it than to drive into the city, pick a random victim with whom he has no ties, no personal contact, no previous conflict? It would be a premeditated act, but one that would have, could have, no predictable victim."

"But wouldn't he have a computer, cell phone, some form of electronic contact to the outside world that you could tap, hack? Something that could give us a window into his activities, his world?" There has to be something. For Carter's sake. And for Reese's own, because this was driving him crazy.

"If he was a very paranoid person, or one of those anti-government survivalist types, then no, he wouldn't be so kind as to provide us with an entry," Finch was already typing into his computer. "However, let me see if there is a camera in or near the railyard that can catch any activity there…"

To Reese's absolute annoyance, the cameras at the railyard had been vandalized a while ago, and as it was abandoned, the city's transportation authority hadn't bothered to replace the one attached to the depot building or repair the one halfway up the derelict electric pole overlooking the yard itself. The best Finch could do was a traffic camera across the street at an intersection known to be a favorite deal spot for gangs and other lawless activity. And yes, there was the usual driving traffic; two drug deals, one that John rather suspected was the Russians, and he made a mental note to let Joss know. It might help her in her attempt to bring down HR.

But what caught all of their attentions was the black SUV that pulled into the yard just before midnight, half an hour after the Russians were gone. It disgorged a tall, dark figure, a massively-built male with forearms the size of most people's thighs. He was wearing a ski mask, which disgusted John to no end, but he was wearing a sleeveless shirt that displayed a number of tattoos on his arms from the shoulder of his sleeveless shirt down to his wrists. His hands were gauntleted in heavy black gloves.

Shaw made a disgusted sound. "Not very imaginative in his clothing choices."

"Sartorial elegance notwithstanding, Ms. Shaw, I rather think the lack of sleeves might have somewhat more to do with not being able to fit his arms into conventional sleeves than with personal choice," and Reese had to agree with Finch's dry assessment . It had been chilly the evening before, too chilly for a sleeveless shirt.

Then again, that enormous bear of a man probably didn't have too much of a problem keeping warm—sheer mass alone probably did the trick.

Reese, Finch, and Shaw watched him walk around the back of his SUV and open the rear door. They couldn't see what he was reaching in for, but it became obvious a few frames later when he pulled out a human figure.

Reese froze, watching intently. The camera wasn't in color, but even from here he could see the skin was dark. This was the victim then.

In anguished silence the three of them watched as the man selected two pieces of rough wood—railroad ties—and picked up a few of the nails lying around, using a nearby chunk of concrete to hammer the nails into the wood to form a crude cross. He dragged the woman, who was clearly unconscious, over to it and arranged her on top of it. She was fully clothed, but her jacket—a light jogging jacket, it looked like she'd been grabbed in the process of taking a midnight run—was wrapped around her head, with the arms tied in a knot over her eyes.

He arranged her limbs on the cross and then quietly started winding the rope in the chain hitch around the woman's arms. Reese watched, intent, at the way the hands moved with practiced ease in the complicated over-and-under patterning of the knots; knew, from a sneaked sidelong glance at Shaw, that she too knew what that meant. The clove hitch at each wrist was tied off with casual carelessness, then the man reached into his pocket and pulled out a long nail—it looked like a six-inch roofing nail—and delicately placed the point in the center of the woman's palm, then used the same rock to begin hammering the nail into the hand.

The woman roused to consciousness then; the sudden flailing of her legs, the only free portion of her body since the man was straddling her torso, was unmistakable. John heard a sharp intake of breath from Shaw; he sneaked a peek at her, to see if she was disgusted, repulsed, or sickened at the action, but her expression was unreadable as she focused on the screen. Harold, on the other side of John, was much more affected; he was visibly shaken, and the pallor of his skin showed he wasn't immune to the horror of what this woman must have been feeling, these last few moments of her life. And John Reese realized something, in that moment, that he hadn't considered before; how hard must it have been for Harold Finch, sitting here in his lonely library, looking at the people behind the Machine's numbers dying before his eyes and being absolutely helpless to stop it? To see the evil that could be done to another human being, on a daily basis, but be completely unable to do anything about it? For the first time he understood the desperation that had led lonely, reclusive Harold Finch to recruit a dangerous man like John Reese.

The man on the screen finished with the woman's other hand, but he didn't get up. He remained straddling the woman's thrashing body for a moment, then stripped off that sleeveless vest, leaving his torso bare. Reese barely had time to notice that the torso was heavily tattooed all over, as well, before the heavy fists rose and descended on the jacket-wrapped head.

A right-handed punch snapped the woman's head to the left; then a left-handed punch sent her head careening to the right. Then left. Then right. Then left again. Reese forced himself not to think about what the woman must be feeling at the moment, what she was thinking and experiencing; he was studying every movement the man made, looking for weaknesses, any flaws in the way the man moved. He was equally adept at punching with both left and right, didn't seem to have any physical flaws in his movement that would indicate old injuries. Neither side was dominant, either.

There was no audio, but no one in the library watching the footage on the traffic camera had any problem with imagining the woman's choked screaming. After the first few blows she would have become dizzy, disoriented; as the beating progressed they saw her chest and torso heaving as the agony of the assault made additional intake of air necessary; air that was denied her because of the gag and the jacket tied around her head. Then the man drove a fist into her stomach, and that triggered the heaves; she choked and retched, and John could imagine the frantic struggle her body was making as she aspirated her own stomach acid. By the time the woman stopped thrashing—not dead yet, but certainly unconscious and close to it—Reese's face was a cold, hard unreadable mask as the man pulled two more nails and a large hunting knife from a pocket of the sleeveless vest.

The knife cutting up the inside of the woman's exercise pants didn't elicit a response; neither did cutting off her panties, or cutting the shirt right up the middle of her torso. A feeble movement as he sliced through the front of the woman's bra, laying her chest bare; and Shaw made a single disgusted sound as they saw the man punch the woman's chest a few times. Hard. It seemed to wake the woman up, there was a bit of renewed struggling, which escalated as the knife in the man's hand flashed up, then down, and suddenly there was a spreading pool of blood across the woman's belly, between her hips, as he slashed her lower stomach open. She convulsed for a moment, then the agony of what she was experiencing finally drove her into unconsciousness, Reese hoped for the last time. The killer, apparently deciding to go on with his preparations, grabbed her left foot and turned the leg outward, then used the rock and nails to nail her foot, sole-down, to the cross; then the other. In this position, with the knees bent outward, her lower torso was on obscene display, but she had stopped struggling by then. Dying. And then the final indignity; a small square plastic packet from out of his pocket, opened carefully, and then a zipper being pulled down…

Shaw turned away, but Reese saw her hands clenching and unclenching, as if around the handle of a knife; he could well imagine what Shaw would think of to do to the anatomy on this particular male. Harold pushed his chair away from the table, moving urgently in that jerky way of his, to the bathroom, and moments later Reese heard him getting sick. Fortunately, he himself wasn't feeling the urge to vomit; he was, however, definitely feeling the urge to kill the bastard they had just watched. Carter was right; they had to find out who Ski Mask really was and take him out, because Reese knew he wouldn't stop until someone stopped him. And he had to be off-the-grid—no one who killed like this would have gone unnoticed by the Machine for this long. Finch had told Reese once that the Machine was never wrong, so this was the only possible explanation—the guy had to be completely off-grid.

He reached out, hit the button that would freeze the video, and stared intently at the man who was now carefully packing up, having rolled the trash in the panties of the victim he'd just murdered. Because she was now dead; there was a certain laxness in the way the knees splayed, and the fact that the blood pool between the woman's hip bones was no longer getting larger. The heart had stopped beating. "Who are you?" he wondered aloud, his steely gaze fixed on the ski-masked face. "Tell me who you are." Left unsaid were the words so I can hunt you down and kill you.

"I get him first." Shaw's voice was harsher than usual. "I call dibs on him first. You can have whatever's left after I'm done." She had a knife in her hand, Reese couldn't imagine where she'd been hiding it on her person, and she was sitting coolly back in her chair cleaning out underneath her nails with the tip. Now she stabbed the air in the direction of the monitor. "No human court would ever give a good enough sentence to satisfy justice for that."

"As much as I abhor taking a human life, I find I am inclined to agree with Ms. Shaw in this case," Finch said, returning to his chair with a small glass of water, which he was apparently sipping in an attempt to clear his mouth of the bad taste of stomach acid. "I find it difficult to append the word 'human' to the monster we just saw. I rather hope Detective Carter will not run across this man in the course of her investigation. She will try to take him alive, and after seeing what he just did, I don't believe he deserves to live." He put the glass on the table next to the computer, and sat down. "Let's see if we can figure out who he is."

As the sound of clicking computer keys filled the library, Shaw looked at John. "Didn't Detective Carter get broken back to Officer recently?"

"Yes, she was," Harold and John chorused together.

"So shouldn't we call her 'Officer'?"

"No." Both also at the same time. But it was Harold who turned to Shaw first, and there was a steely glint in his eyes that John rarely saw but that reminded him that Harold was Joss's friend too. "Ms. Shaw, the fact that some corrupt cops decided on a different sequence of letters as her rank does not erase who and what she is. She is a Detective, and nothing will change that. As her friend, I choose to acknowledge and respect that." Tight-lipped, he returned to his computer. "You may do whatever you like."

Shaw was silent for a moment, and despite the grimness of the situation, John had to hide a smile. He knew what Shaw thought of Harold, and he rather had a feeling that her opinion of him might have undergone a slight rearrangement in the last few minutes. And when she finally spoke again, it confirmed his guess. "Does Detective Carter know this footage exists? Has she seen it?"

"The Detective who is currently handling the case, a Detective Robinson, isn't too kindly disposed to her, and I rather get the feeling he wouldn't feel it necessary to share details with her. What he does or does not do is no concern of ours. She is our colleague and our friend and she has earned the right to know what we know about the case." Finch's words were still cold and clipped. "It was, after all, her case to begin with. And it is her determination to get this killer now that will fuel the investigation—not Robinson."

The license plates on the SUV were too caked with mud to read the numbers—in fact, the whole bottom half of the vehicle was heavily caked, and it was hard to tell if it was deliberate or accidental. Finally Finch made a little sound of frustration and took a screenshot of the ski-masked face, isolating it and setting another program to work on the cropped section. "I'll have facial recognition software try to extrapolate details of the face from the shadows and creases on that mask. In the meantime, let's see if we can find the footage from the 2011 case."

The last victim had turned up when they'd only known Joss for about a year, and there had been rather clearer definitions then, a clearer separation between Joss's work and theirs. Over the last couple of years as they went from acquaintances to friends to a solid working team, that boundary had gotten blurrier and blurrier until now it was all enmeshed; her problems were theirs, theirs were hers.

"Finch, didn't you once say that you have an old gym on the lower East side? I'd been thinking lately that I'd like to have somewhere to meet Carter and teach her some hand-to-hand self-defense moves not found in military or law enforcement training manuals." He kept his eyes on the back of Finch's neck, trying to avoid meeting Shaw's eyes—and sharp glare. For someone who swore she herself had no emotions, she sure was good at picking up on other peoples' emotions.

"An excellent idea, Mr. Reese. I will say that I had thought of that myself and I have been quietly having various items of equipment delivered there. When you or Detective Carter have stress to work off, it might be healthier to work that off in physical activity than drowning it in the bottom of a bottle. I certainly would find it infinitely preferable." He turned dark eyes on Shaw. "Ms. Shaw is also welcome to use the gym—not that I could stop her, as she has a predictable penchant for turning up where she is neither wanted nor invited. And I suppose I should extend the invitation to Ms. Morgan as well, as she and Joss are also friends."

"Love you too, Finch," Shaw grinned as the knife she'd been using on her nails disappeared back to wherever it had come from. "Just remember I get first crack at that bastard." She stabbed a finger in the direction of the computer monitor. "I'll even waive my usual fee just for the pleasure of snapping that bastard's neck. After I cut him down to size, of course." And with a last, meaningful look, she vanished.