by Alex Kava
“Did the receptionist make it?”
“We’re crossing our fingers, but she’s in bad shape. She slid under the desk after she was hit. May have saved her life. They couldn’t see her good enough to know if they’d killed her. It’s a head shot, so don’t go getting your hopes up for a witness.”
“You said the teller was last. Why?”
“Oh, yeah. This you gotta see. Don’t have a fucking hemorrhage, though, okay?”
“Why would I have a fucking hemorrhage?”
He led her around the counter, both of them stepping carefully over the old man. Grace noticed his tweed suit, shirt collar buttoned, the tie in a perfect knot. It had to be a hundred degrees out today when you figured in the humidity, and yet this guy had probably dressed up for his regular weekly trip to the bank. She was still thinking about the old man when Pakula knelt down beside the teller, gently lifting her head, the blond hair matted with blood sticking to her face, almost making it impossible for Grace to see the entrance wound. Until Pakula lifted the chin. Then she could see it, a small smudged black hole at the lower left jawline. The shooter would have had to have taken time to shove the gun up under her chin.
Grace met Pakula’s eyes and now she understood. They both recognized the wound as a trademark, the signature of a killer who purposely shattered his victims’ teeth so it would take longer to identify them.
“It’s not possible, is it?” Grace asked.
Pakula just shook his head.
CHAPTER 21
6:05 p.m.
It must have been close to six o’clock when Andrew first heard it. Out here in the quiet the whirl of the helicopter blades seemed amplified, the sound echoing off the trees and water. At first he thought it might be the Life Flight—maybe there had been a car accident, some medical emergency. Except this wasn’t a pass by, or even a low sweep to find a landing. No, this copter seemed to be circling, flying low over the treetops.
Andrew saved his file, closed the program and shut the lid of his laptop. He had been trying to use the laptop, discouraged and frustrated by the blank notebook pages, so white, so empty, staring at him. He left everything on the metal table in the screened-in porch, then searched for his shoes, sliding them on without doing up the laces.
It had taken only a few minutes to locate it, but now outside the cabin he could see the helicopter hanging a right to come back over the park. What in the world was it doing? Surely it wasn’t checking out the storm? Was it a rescue unit or a pilot in trouble? There was nowhere to land—too many trees and even the pasture that bordered the park was too hilly with ravines and brush. On the other side stretched the Platte River—not much of a choice. If this guy had some sort of emergency, he’d picked a hell of a spot to try to land.
Andrew watched the helicopter almost scrape the trees, and this time it flew low enough that he could see the letters on its side: POLICE.
What the hell was the Omaha police helicopter looking for? Or rather who was it looking for? He wondered if this had anything to do with the call that made Tommy take off.
Andrew hurried back into the cabin. He pulled out the nine-inch TV he had brought with him. Rarely did he turn the thing on. Reception was awful out here. If he was lucky he could sometimes get one channel and that was with masterful manipulation of the bunny ears. He plugged in the set, turned it on and began to twist and turn, finally having some luck with Omaha’s Channel 7.
He glanced at his wrist—no watch—but it looked as though the six o’clock news was still on. He turned up the volume, a crackled sound track to accompany the rolling lines that blurred the station’s anchors. Julie Cornell and Rob McCartney looked a bit purple and outlined in orange but it didn’t matter. They were talking about a search for two suspects. Andrew turned up the volume once more.
“Again, that’s south on Highway 50. Two male suspects in a late-model sedan,” Julie explained as a map graphic showed the route. “The two men allegedly robbed the Nebraska Bank of Commerce late this afternoon. Police chased the suspects south on Highway 50. Details are still sketchy. We’ll have more as information continues to come in.”
Andrew shut the TV off. A high-speed chase on Highway 50? That was an accident waiting to happen. Maybe that’s exactly what had happened. He didn’t need to hear the media’s speculation.
He glanced back out at the laptop and notebooks on the porch’s table. Several loose sheets had blown off into the corners, probably gathering spiderwebs. One was stuck up against the screen, having impaled itself on a broken screen wire. The wind had picked up. The storm was getting closer.
Andrew grabbed another Diet Pepsi from the refrigerator and headed back to his work. He shoved aside the laptop. He picked up one of the empty spiral notebooks, opening it and watching the breeze try to flip the pages. In the distance the whirl of the helicopter now competed with the rumble of thunder. Andrew shook out a Uniball pen from the freshly opened box of a dozen, and for the first time in a long time he began to write, adding the scratching sound of pen on paper to those sounds already around him.
CHAPTER 22
6:11 p.m.
Grace took her place beside Pakula in the cramped confines of the van. Special Agent Jimmy Sanchez from the Omaha FBI office and Pakula’s partner, Detective Ben Hertz, were also huddled inside.
Darcy Kennedy, one of the Douglas County crime lab techs, slipped one of the bank’s videos into a VCR slot. The panel of instruments and equipment didn’t look anything like a home entertainment center. The video display screen was a small computer with a keypad.
“I can’t do much to it here,” Darcy reminded them. “This is the camera shooting the entrance. Keep in mind, there are three cameras in the loop. This one on the entrance, one shooting the teller’s counter and another one on the bank’s vault. They take turns. Even though it’s a video, it’s sort of like quick snapshots. Camera number one clicks, then two, then three. It’s continuous but there is a three-second delay. Three seconds may not sound like much, but when you consider we only have slices of the big picture, every second counts.”
The black-and-white picture barely resembled the bank lobby. No surprise to Grace, especially after a week of viewing crappy convenience-store videos. She put on a pair of reading glasses, but nothing could improve the jerky static.
“I’ve isolated their entrance. It’s coming up.”
It seemed to take forever, and Grace finally wedged her way out from between Pakula and Sanchez enough that she could breathe. Despite the cranked-up A/C in the van, it felt like a sauna. And the three men—Pakula’s short wrestler’s build, Sanchez’s tall hunched back and Hertz’s potbelly—took up every possible inch of the mobile crime lab.
Finally two figures appeared on the screen, but they were gone as quickly as they appeared. Darcy Kennedy pushed some buttons to rewind and stop the picture. She tapped the keyboard and the two figures filled the computer screen again. Grace took mental notes but there wasn’t much to distinguish them—dark-colored jumpsuits, some sort of mask over their lower faces, handguns held down at their sides.
Darcy tapped again on the keyboard, blowing up a view of their faces.
One man looked off to the side, but the other stared directly at them, blurred, static-riddled eyes visible between the mask and dark cap.
“He’s looking directly at the camera.” Pakula said out loud what Grace was thinking. “Almost as if the asshole wanted his picture taken.”
“Are those kerchiefs around their faces?” Sanchez asked. “They look like some fucking Wild West bank robbers.”
“A modern-day Jesse and Frank James,” Hertz laughed.
“We have their exit on tape. It’s about as exciting as the entrance. That’s all we have on this one.” Darcy clicked more buttons then ejected the tape. “The camera on the bank vault has nothing as far as I can tell. The one focused on the teller windows has a few interesting tidbits.”
She pushed in the next video. Immediately Grace could make out th
e long counter, only one person behind it and the old man in front. Already the three-second delay proved annoying, the figures jerking like in an antiquated Charlie Chaplin movie. Then one of the masked men appeared in the corner of the frame. The next frame showed the old man down on his knees with his hands behind his head as if he had been instructed to do so. Suddenly the masked man was on the counter, caught in midjump, bright white tennis shoe clear amidst the grainy static. Three seconds later, and the next frame showed him shoving the gun against the woman teller’s chin, this camera’s angle catching her wide eyes. By the next frame, she was gone, somewhere down behind the counter, probably under the killer’s hunched-over back. Three more seconds later and he was looking over his shoulder, but now the old man was lying on the floor. Another three seconds and the masked man was gone.
“That’s it,” Darcy said, rewinding and freeze-framing the teller’s last seconds of life.
“We don’t have anything of the others?” Pakula asked.
“Nothing. The reception desk and that side office are out of view of any of the cameras.”
“From what we’ve got, it’s hard to tell what the hell went wrong.” Hertz pulled out a cigarette and began tapping the tobacco end against his hand as if he couldn’t wait the extra second to take it out when he escaped the van.
“From what we’ve got,” Pakula followed up, “it looks like he fucking meant to kill that teller.”
“Jesus, these cameras are shitty,” Sanchez said. “The public hears we’ve caught the robbers on video and they think it’s an open-and-shut case. In truth, we have diddly-squat.”
“Not quite diddly-squat.” Darcy pressed a few buttons and brought up the frame of the masked robber jumping over the counter. “We’re taking a shoe print now. With some video enhancement I should be able to read the funny little emblem on the side. By tomorrow morning we’ll be able to tell you the make and the shoe size. There was some residue in the grooves, which was left behind on the counter. Mostly dirt but some little blue pebbles with flecks of gray in them. They’re actually pretty.” She lifted a plastic bag of what appeared to be dirt with tiny bits of colored rock. “I dusted this off the counter earlier. Who knows, I might be able to tell you where he was today before he stopped by.”
Pakula took the bag and held it up in front of him, close enough for Grace to get a good look, as well.
“Wait a minute,” Grace said. She took the bag and fingered the pebbles through the plastic. Her stomach did a flip despite her attempt to not jump to conclusions.
“What is it?” They were all staring at her now, waiting.
“I think I recognize these. They look exactly like the pebbles I just had put in my backyard walkways.”
CHAPTER 23
6:17 p.m.
Melanie’s chest ached. It hurt to breathe. And every labored breath tasted of gasoline.
She heard moaning then a rumble. Maybe it was only thunder. Everything else was quiet, even the car’s chassis had finally stopped creaking and the engine had stopped hissing. She reached to unbuckle her seat belt, and then realized she didn’t have it on. That was why her chest hurt. She vaguely remembered crashing into the steering wheel. The air bag hadn’t deployed. She was lucky she hadn’t gone through the windshield.
She heard another moan and looked beside her to find Jared gone, his car door wide open. Then suddenly the panic returned and she spun around, climbing over the seat.
“Charlie? Are you okay?”
He lay crouched on the floor, his legs twisted under him, his back facing her.
“Charlie, are you all right?” she asked again, hanging over the front seat and touching his shoulder. No reaction. She tapped, then shoved him before she got a response. Another groan, only this time he pulled himself up off the floor and rolled onto the back seat. That’s when Melanie saw the blood on his coveralls, dark splatters as if someone had shaken a Coke bottle before opening it and sprayed it all over. For a minute she worried the blood was his own. When she realized it wasn’t, there was little relief. The streaks of yellow vomit, however, were his.
“What happened, Charlie?” she asked, hanging across the front of the seat. “What the hell did you and Jared do?”
He wouldn’t meet her eyes. Not a good sign.
“Charlie, I asked you a fucking question.”
“We gotta go.” Jared startled her, suddenly appearing in the open car doorway. He was out of his coveralls, the stocking cap and kerchief gone, too.
“I wanna know what the hell happened back there,” she demanded of the two of them even though it felt as if there were knives poking into her chest whenever she took a deep breath. Her cap was gone, her hair a tangled mess, and she batted it out of her eyes so that she could stare down Jared. Not that it ever worked. “Tell me what the fuck happened. I have a right to know.”
“We need to get the fuck out of here, now.”
He pulled open the back door and to Charlie said, “I’m sick of this crybaby act. Get the fuck up.”
But neither Melanie nor Charlie moved. She had never heard Jared talk that way to her son. Obviously Charlie had never heard it, either. He stared at Jared with glassy eyes, looking as if he had just been awakened from a deep sleep rather than been flung through the air and bounced around the crammed confines of the Saturn’s back seat.
“Get those coveralls off, too,” Jared told him.
“But you said—”
“Shut the fuck up and get moving.”
This time Charlie did as he was told. Melanie stayed still, watching her son wrestle out of the coveralls, ripping the kerchief off and flinging it out the car door. He scrubbed his face with his hands, digging his fingers into his eyes with such force that Melanie wondered if it was an attempt to erase what he had seen.
When he was finished, his face looked striped, the fake suntan rubbed off in streaks. She wanted to wipe his face, a mother’s instinct. She also wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him—another mother’s instinct.
“Hurry up,” Jared yelled again. He was on the other side of the car, crouched down, burying something in the dirt between the smashed cornstalks. It was only then that Melanie realized she could see nothing but cornstalks, the rows too tall to look over. Other than the path their car had sliced through the field, they were surrounded by nothing but yellow-green cornstalks and dark gray sky, the bottom ready to drop out at any moment. The rumble of thunder grew closer. The wind had picked up, whistling through the rows, setting the long leaves and tall stalks waving. They were almost ready to harvest, more yellow than green, dry enough that the wind caused them to rustle and crackle.
Beneath the darkening sky, that sound gave Melanie a chill. Maybe it was only the breeze against her damp body. Yet she couldn’t help remembering that their mother claimed there were certain sounds and sights that warned of bad luck. Birds were on the top of her list. Melanie listened to the crows, a black cloud of them flew overhead, their caws sounding like scoldings. But then they were gone, quickly replaced by the low growl of the approaching thunder and the increasing whirl of the wind. Except it wasn’t the wind Melanie was hearing now.
“Shit!” Jared yelled, making her jump even before she recognized the sound of the helicopter. “We need to get moving. Into the fucking field and stay low.”
When Melanie didn’t move, he shoved her from behind, almost knocking her to the ground. She saw Charlie disappear ahead, half crawling, half running in the ditch between the rows of stalks. She followed, trying to mimic his moves, Jared prodding her forward. The ache in her chest competed with the pounding in her head and the vibration beneath her feet. And somewhere in the back of her mind she remembered that crows were an omen of misfortune and death.
CHAPTER 24
6:25 p.m.
“It’s Barnett.” Grace only said out loud what both she and Pakula were thinking. “And he’s been in my fucking backyard.”
“We don’t know that,” he insisted.
�
��Vince special-ordered those pebbles from some landscape place on the West Coast.”
“We don’t know it’s the exact pebbles. They looked like fish-tank rocks to me. Why don’t we wait until you get a sample to Darcy and she checks it out?”
“I know it’s him.”
“There’s no reason for him to do this. And there’s no reason to try to hide the victim’s identity by blasting her teeth to pieces.” Pakula leaned against Grace’s SUV, his arms crossed. He wasn’t buying her theory, or else he was making her work at convincing him.
“Maybe this time it wasn’t to destroy evidence or identity. Maybe this time it was simply to thumb his nose at us. You know, let us know it was him.”
“He just got out less than two fuckin’ weeks ago.”
“You said yourself he got away with murder once. Why wouldn’t he be feeling invincible?’’
“Invincible, maybe, but stupid? I don’t think so.” He shook his head, but his eyes were still watching the bodies being brought out.
Grace looked at the sky and glanced at her watch. On the drive here she had heard they were in a severe thunderstorm watch. She wanted to pick up Emily before the lightning show. Her little tomboy had recently declared her fear of lightning. And now Grace had created yet another fear…a shadow man.
“So, why even do it?” Pakula asked, bringing her back. “It looks like they didn’t even take any cash.”
“Start checking out the victims, and I’ll bet you’ll find some connection.”
He looked at her, meeting her eyes and holding them there as if he wasn’t pleased with her telling him what to do. Had she nudged him too far? “Isn’t that what you’re always telling me?” she defended herself.