Part 1

Part 2

An isolated incident – Part III

It was several hours after the stop had been called in before the first investigative unit arrived at the scene. All radio attempts to raise Bladen and McGee had been met with only silence. The Waze app had marked the police unit for the last couple of hours, after traffic had resumed when the utility vans had re-opened the highway. Within minutes more units came screaming in and the highway was shut down again, this time by law enforcement.

The scene was crawling with responding agencies, and the senior leadership of the state agency. Initial reports indicated a probable need for federal support as well, and leadership was all too happy to pass the buck to them.

Special Agent Frank Regan was on a flight the very same day. He was the fourth generation of Boston law enforcement but the first to be a federal agent. He had planned to skip police work, getting his J.D. from Northeastern, but his grandfather had a favor to call in with one of Massachusetts’ Congressional representatives and that led to the FBI. It wasn’t terribly overt, but there was a thumb placed on a scale in his favor; and after all, that is how things get done in DC and Boston for that matter. Frank was smart enough to show respect to the Congressman for the favor, also without being overt, and his party in general.

He had been schooled by his father, an Army veteran and veteran cop with the maxim that once is happenstance and twice coincidence, three times is deliberate action. This wasn’t an isolated incident, though that had been kept quite quiet even in law enforcement circles (who usually gossiped like old villagers over tea). The previous incidents having occurred in entirely different states had helped, and the deliberate masking of the cases, particularly the second, had worked to keep even LEOs ignorant of it. Beside the bare pattern itself, officers working asset forfeiture, clues were accumulating – the perpetrators making a point of offering more information at each killing. The basic pattern was: officers seated in the patrol vehicle immobilized, and hands cut off. Body cams and dash cams gone. This was the work of a team, not a single person. In this case, there was also the grisly matter of the police dog, a severed head sitting between the officers with rolled up hundred dollar bills stuffed in its nostrils. And there was the note taped to the dash of the squad:

the wages of sin

lead to corruption and death

Corrector Novus Occidentis

The first note had only included the first line, the second note added a line, both times with no attribution. Regan understood this represented a methodical approach, one with real thinking behind it equal to the sheer malice. He couldn’t yet understand how quickly it must happen, and in utterly public places with not a witness, not even a hint of anyone seeing anything and no surveillance. The scenes varied, but the results were similar, and given the geographic and temporal distances, though it was a pattern it gave no indication of where or when the next strike would happen. Regan caught himself – the next strike. Yes, there was no denying, this wasn’t ending any time soon. It would be important to get the proper narrative into the media, but was this the right time? There was still so little known and it certainly appeared the killers would reveal more information next time around. Mind you, Frank thought to himself, that’s an expensive way to learn. Even though he had attended parochial schools through high school, his Latin (and Roman history) needed a little help.