Whorl

by James Tarr

  The parking lot was asphalt and very well-maintained. It looked like it serviced a very fancy strip mall, and Mickey could see signage for the Scottsdale Gun Shoppe. The shadows of the small decorative trees were shortening in the morning sun. “Why are we here, exactly? You’ve brought an arsenal….”

  Dave got out of the Cherokee and stared at Mickey over the roof. “Seriously? Okay, first, never mind the fact that the FBI—the F-fucking-B-I—just tried to kill us both, exactly what constitutes an arsenal in your world? More than one gun? Between the two of us we’ve got two pistols, a rifle, and a shotgun, which, when you consider what we’re up against, ain’t shit.”

  “And a zillion bullets and magazines,” Mickey said defensively.

  Dave just sighed and shook his head. “You’ve spent too much time on the East Coast,” he told Mickey, and then shrugged off the button-down shirt he’d been using to cover his Glock.

  Mickey looked around the parking lot in a panic. “What are you doing?”

  Dave smiled. “This is Arizona, dude. You don’t need a permit for concealed carry, and open carry is legal too. Hell, it’s legal in a lot of states, Michigan too, but nobody who lives there knows it. In Arizona, things are different. Welcome to America. You ever even been in a gun store?”

  Mickey thought about that. “No.”

  “Well, I’ve never voted Democrat, so I guess we’re even. Come on, let’s bust your cherry.”

  “Wow. Are all gun stores this nice?” The interior of the Scottsdale Gun Shoppe was all almond and cherry wood and chrome trim. All the shelving was new, and the place was huge, much bigger than it looked from the outside. There were only a handful of customers in the store, as it had just opened for the day. Mickey was dazzled by all the military-style weaponry on the walls. Were they machine guns? He just didn’t know enough to even ask. He’d called Dave’s rifle an “assault rifle” early that morning, and been treated to a ten minute harangue on the historical origin of that term, and how no semi-auto rifle sold commercially in America fit that technical definition.

  “Semi-auto…that’s a machine gun, right?” Mickey had asked.

  Dave looked at him in horror. “No! Oh my God, are you serious? How can you know nothing about guns and work in the FBI lab? Shit, you’re a forensics guy, don’t you deal with guns all the time? No, semi-auto means you get one bullet every time you pull the trigger. Fuck.”

  Dave looked around the gun store. “No. This one’s actually pretty well-known around the country, it’s bigger and nicer than just about anything you’re going to find anywhere else. They’ve got a public indoor range, and a private range only for members that has an honest-to-God retinal scanner. Looks just like the ones you see in the movies. Well, shit, where you work, you probably know what one of those looks like.”

  “Yeah.” Mickey lowered his voice. “But seriously, why are we here? Don’t we have enough ammo?”

  “You can never have too much ammo, but that’s not why we’re here.”

  Mickey followed Dave up to the counter. One of the clerks in their red polo shirts and pressed khakis walked over. “Can I help you gentlemen?”

  “Yeah, I’m wondering what you have in night vision,” Dave said to him, looking around. “And do you carry Turnerite? I’ve got a lot of family coming into town for a big birthday celebration, and they all love to shoot.”

  “How the hell is a binary explosive legal?” Mickey asked once they were back in the car.

  Dave shrugged. “I’m not sure. You’ve got to mix it, plus you can only set it off by shooting it. Bullet has to be travelling at least two thousand feet per second, so you’ve got to shoot it with a rifle.”

  Mickey violently shook his head. “That shouldn’t matter. C4 and other traditional explosives, you can’t set them off without some sort of electrical current or blasting cap, how is this different?”

  “I don’t know, but the ATF says it’s legal.” Dave had first seen Turnerite at a big charity match the year before. After it, the teenagers with cancer to whom the proceeds were going to be helping got to shoot at various objects—oil drums, refrigerators, even junker cars—packed with the explosive. Upon seeing the huge explosion, and feeling it in his chest, Dave had had the same reaction—how the hell was it legal for commercial sale? But it was, and it wasn’t much less powerful than good old-fashioned dynamite. “I guess because it’s sold un-mixed, and it’s a low order explosive as opposed to a high explosive, like black powder. Most of the gun laws in this country were made by people who don’t know anything about guns, and don’t make any sense, why should laws about explosives be any different?”

  “Where’d you get all the cash?” The Turnerite had been hundreds of dollars because Dave had bought it in bulk for his “birthday party”, but the night vision scope Dave had purchased had cost ten times as much. And Dave had paid cash. Mickey had known better than to ask any questions while they were inside the store.

  “Rainy day fund.” Otherwise known as his inheritance slash retirement fund. Not much need for that now. “Let’s go get some groceries, I’m starving.”

  “Okay, what do you have for me?” Smith asked. He sat down in the chair across from Colman.

  “I’ve got a high priority target for you. Currently don’t have a location on him, but when we do we’re going to want you to move on him. Quickly. So you need to assemble a team.”

  “How many guys? And do I need any specialists? Language skills?” John Smith was a compact man, with veins bulging in his biceps and grey starting to appear at his temples. He was deeply tanned, but could never be mistaken for anything other than pure Caucasian. Everybody who’d ever worked with him assumed that “John Smith” was an intentionally unimaginative pseudonym, but he’d actually had it placed on him by his Lutheran parents—John James Smith. If anyone lacked imagination, it was his parents.

  Colman thought about the question. While most cops did not have a combat mindset, Anderson had gone up against four experienced SWAT officers and walked away without a scratch. SWAT cops weren’t the same thing as true operators of course, but that was still pretty impressive. And this problem, which he’d inherited, needed to be taken care of promptly and properly. “Six man team. Language and looks aren’t important, as this is going to be a home game. I’ll get you some sterile domestic commercial hardware.”

  He pushed a flash drive across his desk with the eraser end of a pencil. “Here’s everything we know about him so far. Was living in Michigan, but he seems to have rabbited within the last few days. He’s not a pro, though, so I know we’ll track him down pretty damn quickly. I’d like you to have a team picked out in twenty-four hours. Keep them on a two-hour standby until I tell you otherwise.”

  “He driving a car with OnStar or anything like that that you can track?” Smith picked up the flash drive and stuck it in his pocket.

  “No. Cell phone’s dropped off the grid, and he hasn’t logged on to email or Facebook in days. We’ve actually got the FBI doing field interviews of all his friends and co-workers, and I’m reading their reports as they upload them. We’re all over everybody’s phones, if he calls anybody we’ll know about it.”

  “The FBI? Do they know they’re working for you?”

  Colman just smiled. “No, but they can be so very helpful at times.”

  “What’s their interest in this?”

  “It’s in the file. Let’s just say that you’re not the first team to get this assignment, but you’re the first pros. The amateurs have made quite a mess of things, and it’s our job to tidy them up.”

  “Great.” Smith got up to leave. “Any special instructions when we find him?”

  “If you can destroy his fingerprints, when the time comes, that would be wonderful. If not….” He shrugged.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Cashman had a pounding headache, and neither the six aspirin he’d swallowed, nor the coffee he was washing and keeping them down with was making a dent in the dull pain behind his ri
ght eye. Probably shouldn’t have stayed up so late watching the Tigers go into extra innings, or had that extra beer (okay, maybe two), but hell, he’d gotten five hours of sleep. Maybe he was just getting old. Or maybe it was just this case.

  He hit Backspace again as what he’d meant to write in the report ended up gobbledygook—shit, if he had a stroke maybe he could go home early—and then just cursed. Too many questions and not enough answers, and what he was doing was just make-work, status updates. There hadn’t been anything new in the case since the autopsies yesterday. Now those had been….interesting.

  Bodies that had been dead so long they’d started to bloat and rot were bad. Dead kids were the worst. Four dirty cops who’d died in a shootout with a civilian and a fellow deputy, now that was interesting as hell.

  The Oakland County Coroner’s office had scheduled all of them for the same day, Monday, two days after the shooting, and the Medical Examiner, Dr. Eichstadt, did them all himself. That had been a long day for the doc, and just as long for everyone else in attendance. Cashman had been there for all four, although Linklater, his partner, had come and gone. The detective from Troy had stayed for the duration, as had three grim-faced detectives from Detroit. Cashman, for one, didn’t know how to act around them. He’d nodded to them, but what the hell do you say? It’s not like their guys had died in the line of duty. They were dirty cops who’d died trying to gun down a P.I—and a deputy. An FBI agent was there too, being uncharacteristically friendly.

  The bodies themselves weren’t that bad. Cashman had seen a suicide by train, and more than one suicide where the person in question had stuck a rifle or shotgun in their mouth and given the room a new paint job. He’d seen a minivan full of kids after it had rolled down an embankment. An autopsy on a three-week-old rotting corpse so foul the stench wouldn’t come out of his shirt and he’d had to throw it away. Compared to those, these bodies were nothing. Just a quartet of adult black males who were in pretty good shape, or had been. Most of the bullet holes—at least the entry wounds—weren’t even that easy to see, because the kid had been using a .223. A .223 caliber bullet was small in diameter, but very fast, so the entry wounds were tiny and sometimes almost invisible from more than a few feet away in the cops’ graying skin. Where they’d exited, though, there were often large chunks of flesh missing.

  Anderson had shot the hell out of three of the officers. There was no other way to accurately describe it.

  Eichstadt found at least nineteen separate and unique entrance wounds in the three men Anderson had killed. Two of the men also sported what Cashman thought of as shrapnel wounds, bits and pieces of car metal and plastic in their skin from the bullets hitting them after they’d gone through car doors or bumpers.

  Considering they’d found twenty-four empty rifle cases at the scene, those SWAT cops—who’d all been armed with pistols, pistols that had been matched to ejected cases found at the scene, so they were shooting too—had been seriously outgunned. Shit, Cashman had to admit, they’d been outmanned. Jim Bonniker had fired eight rounds from his department-issued SIG P226 from a distance of eight yards, and only hit Paul Wilson four times—and one of those was a superficial arm wound. If the kid had been shooting like that, there was a good chance he wouldn’t have survived, not against 4-to-1 odds. Cashman wasn’t putting it all on his fancy scoped rifle with its hair trigger, like some of the guys working the case. He knew he couldn’t shoot a rifle that well, even one with that thousand-dollar scope, and Anderson had done it with four people shooting back.

  Since the autopsy, all their efforts had turned up was a big fat pile of nothing. He growled as his phone range for what had to be the fifteenth time that morning, but politely said “Cashman.”

  “Yeah, I’m told you’re the lead detective on the…well, I don’t know what you guys are calling it, the ‘SWAT team shootout’ that happened over the weekend?”

  “Yes sir, can I help you?”

  “Detective Billy Dixon with West Bloomfield Township. I’m working a case that may involve one of your people, and I’m hoping we could share a little information.”

  Cashman checked the caller ID on his desk phone, but nothing had come through. That was a good sign that this was a detective calling from his blocked office phone, but before he started talking about his case with someone who called out of the blue….“West Bloomfield Township? You in your office right now?”

  “Yeah, you want to give me a call back?” Dixon knew the score.

  “Yeah, Dixon? Give me a minute.” Cashman disconnected the call and used his computer to Google the phone number of the PD—it actually was quicker than digging out his county-issued directory of all the police departments in the state, in part because he didn’t know where that was. Google, he could find.

  He dialed the main number first, then asked for Dixon by name. “Dixon.”

  “Cashman. Okay, what do you have?”

  “News reports are that the Detroit officers were shot by a David Anderson. I’m wondering if he’s the same David Anderson who’s a person of interest in a case I’ve got.” He gave Cashman the date of birth.

  “Hold on.” Cashman pulled up his report, and looked up Anderson’s info. “Yep, same DOB. What are you looking at him for?”

  “A hit and run. I actually have nothing to tie him to the crime, but the guy who was killed in the hit and run, just about a year before that killed Anderson’s parents in a drunk driving accident. Third offense.”

  “And he wasn’t in jail? The drunk driver? How the hell did that happen?”

  “Because he is—was—Paolo Bufonte.”

  “The name’s….familiar.”

  “Big Paulie. Son of Pietro Bufonte. Think Sopranos, Godfather….”

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah, I remember that, I heard about the accident on the news. I think I assumed it was some sort of mob hit on him. I mean, what are the chances, with him getting hit, that it was really an accident, you know? Wasn’t he out walking his dog or something?”

  “Yeah. Which he did pretty regularly. What we didn’t release to the press was that it looked like that whoever hit him then backed up and ran over him again.”

  “Soooo, probably not an accident, then.”

  “Nope. Not a scratch on the dog. And like I said, about five months prior to that Paulie skated out of any jail time. The judge threw out the case due to irregularities in the arrest. That happened with the guy who killed my parents because he was a serial drunk driver, I know how I’d feel.”

  “Anderson ever make any threats?”

  “Nope.”

  Cashman thought. “Didn’t this happen like a few years ago?”

  “Yeah, just about three.”

  “And you’re still working it?”

  “Do you know how many unsolved murders we have in this town? None. Well, one, this one. And the fact that I haven’t been able to close it has been bugging me for years.”

  “You get a description of a vehicle, or….”

  “Yeah, sort of. Two neighbors remember seeing a car on the street, maybe parked, right around the time of the accident. Nobody saw the accident, though, or anybody in the car. You know what our neighborhoods are like. Big houses, set way back from the road, usually walls or hedges along the street. The vehicle description I have is a green or black or blue Crown Victoria or Impala or Taurus. A dark colored full size sedan, basically. No plate info.”

  “And he was walking his dog in the street?”

  “We don’t have sidewalks. Sidewalks are for the poor neighborhoods.”

  Cashman smiled. A cheap house in West Bloomfield went for about half a million bucks. “And Anderson didn’t own a dark-colored full size sedan?”

  “I checked him, his family members, any friends I could track down, co-workers. Put out an alert to any body shops in the area if they got in any vehicles with front end damage. Checked with all the rental car companies. The family put out a reward. Nothing panned out.”

  “Alibi?”

&n
bsp; “Home alone for the evening. Watching a movie. Says he went out jogging, and I found a neighbor who thinks they remember seeing him jog past.”

  “Any other suspects?”

  “No. And I’ve got nothing to tie him to this, but after all this time, his motive’s the only thing I’ve got. I like him for it, but liking him isn’t enough.”

  “Honestly, though, he can’t be your only suspect. I mean, somebody kills the son of a mobster—”

  “Only son,” Dixon interjected.

  “Yeah, that just makes it worse. Kills the only son of the top mob guy in Detroit. I mean, aren’t there a lot of suspects? In theory?”

  “In theory. But as for solid names and faces, all I’ve got is him.”

  “How much you question him?”

  “Just enough to get his alibi. He wasn’t having any of it. ‘Why the hell would I talk to you? You’re trying to prove I killed someone,’ I believe is what he said.”

  “Yep. He’s not dumb, I’ve talked to him a little on this one. Not that he’s really talking to us either, he’s lawyered up. So what you’re telling me is that you’ve still got nothing, and you’re calling me because you’re grasping at straws.”

  “Basically. I’ve been sitting on this one for months with nothing new. You got anything weird going on with yours that maybe might help me with mine? I mean, just what the hell happened out there?”

  Cashman sighed. “Near as we can tell, exactly what we’re telling the press. Kid was doing a surveillance, just a suspicious wife thing, sitting in a neighborhood, watching the husband while she’s out of town, and those four Detroit officers roll up on him in two cars and try to take him out. Just start shooting. He peels out, they chase him to his local shooting range, and they get into a gunfight.”