Masked Prey

by John Sandford

  He was a full minute from his car, but unless he was unlucky, the feds, if they were there, wouldn’t be aware of the shot for at least that long; and if they were aware of it, they wouldn’t be aware of where it came from.

  He settled into the new spot and checked his watch. Ten minutes to seven—forty minutes or an hour to wait. Now, if the kid only showed. After the previous attempt, maybe he wouldn’t.

  * * *

  —

  A FEW KIDS began straggling onto the playing field at 7:30. More came behind them, waiting for the first bell. He picked out a boy who seemed to be about McGovern’s likely height and counted bricks on the wall behind them—three courses of bricks with concrete joints were about eight inches high. He counted eight three-brick courses up the school’s brick wall above the boy’s head and marked the height in his mind.

  Then McGovern showed up.

  At ten minutes to eight, the boy ambled around the corner of the school building with two other kids. He was wearing a ball cap, but his lower face looked right. Had to be right. Quick white smile, that square jaw. He was wearing a black Patagonia jacket and a blue shirt over dark slacks.

  Dunn was breathing harder now, struggled to control it, but the adrenaline was on him. He pulled on plastic kitchen gloves, got the gun from under the shed, unzipped the case, took the rifle out, fumbled the magazine but then got it seated, jacked a shell into the chamber, put the gun on top of his jacket. He used the binoculars to spot the kid again. He was still standing with two others and they were looking toward the hospital and the kid jerked a finger at it and laughed.

  He was standing still.

  Dunn went to the scope, found him. Thought about windage—but there was little or no wind at all, not even enough to stir the leaves on the trees. Without moving his eye from the scope’s eyepiece, he fumbled the binoculars back into the camera case. He clicked the safety off, steadied the gun, holding five feet over the kid’s head.

  Said to himself, Ready, set . . .

  He breathed out, and the gun seemingly fired of its own volition, a sharp crack and a light punch to his shoulder. Less than a half second later the kid folded up like a broken kite.

  And Dunn was moving: gun and the case shoved under the shed, ten seconds gone, ten more seconds gone getting the concrete block perfectly back in place. He rolled up the rest of his gear, duckwalked into the scrubby trees, then got to his feet and jogged through the saplings toward the street. He stopped a few yards before he got there, then strolled casually out of the cemetery, up the hill and around the corner to his car.

  He opened the driver’s-side door, threw the camera case onto the passenger seat, started the car, and was gone.

  He’d never looked back at the school, never looked to see if the kid was really down. He’d find out soon enough, he thought: now the problem was moving quickly and safely away, turning corners out toward the freeway, then getting back down south. If he hurried, he’d be at work in half an hour, building an alibi . . .

  Calm, he thought. Needed to be still, calm, isolated during the day, to ask no questions about news.

  But now he pounded the steering wheel with the palms of his hands. In his heart, he was thrilled.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  The phone rang at the wrong time and Lucas snapped awake, already feeling the dark vibration: “What?”

  “Somebody shot a kid at the same goddamn place the guy got caught yesterday,” Jane Chase shouted at him.

  “What senator?”

  “No senator—the senator’s kid is hiding out. This was another kid, nothing to do with politics.”

  “He gonna die?”

  Long pause. “He’s dead.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS, BOB, AND RAE got to the school thirty minutes later. Bob and Rae had already been up, Lucas pulled on jeans and yesterday’s shirt and ran out the hotel room door and down the stairs to the garage, where the other two were waiting for him.

  Lucas talked to Chase again, but she was also on the way, from farther out, and hadn’t yet gotten to the school when they arrived. Lucas called Elmer Henderson, who was on his way to his office, and told him. Henderson made loud and meaningless noises and then told Lucas he would call Porter Smalls.

  When they got to the school they found the playground taped off, students leaving down a funnel of rifle-armed local cops, to be picked up by a line of cars driven by panicked parents. The cops didn’t care about late-arriving marshals and directed Lucas to park a block away, in a dirt turnout next to a six-foot-wide creek.

  When they got back to the school, nobody had time to talk. Lucas couldn’t even discover who was in charge, if anyone was, and Lucas got on the phone to Chase again. She was still twenty minutes out. Lucas said, “Call somebody here. Tell them to talk to me, for Christ’s sakes. They won’t even talk to us.”

  “One minute,” she said.

  One minute later, an FBI agent hustled up and asked, “Who’s Davenport?”

  Lucas raised a hand and the agent said, “I’m temporarily the number-two guy here. I got people crawling out of my ass: what do you want?”

  Lucas: “You got the shooter? Got any leads?”

  “No and no.”

  “Where’d the shot come from?”

  “Not the parking structure.” He pointed. “That’s where the Secret Service guys grabbed the shooter yesterday. They were up there again, but never even heard the shot. They didn’t know anyone at the school had been shot until they were called and told about it.”

  “So you have no idea where the shot came from?”

  The agent waved impatiently across a wide arc of low hills and shrugged. “The kid was hit in the chest with an exit wound through his spine right between his shoulder blades. We don’t know how he was standing. He was in a circle of kids who were talking, moving around, changing positions. We’ll figure it out when we find where the bullet hit, probably in the ground behind him, but you know what that’s like. It’s gonna take a while. We got metal detectors on it, and so far we’ve found three pennies and a dime.”

  “Hospital window?” Rae asked.

  The agent looked toward the long row of windows on the hospital, as if nobody had even thought of it. “Can you get the windows open?” he asked.

  Rae said, “I don’t know, but there are a heck of a lot of places in a hospital where you could hide a gun. With all the crap that comes in and out of those places, day and night . . .”

  “I’ll ask,” the agent said. He took a long look at Rae, creator of this new and difficult possibility, then said, “I gotta get back.”

  “Let’s go look,” Lucas said to Bob and Rae.

  They drafted on the FBI agent’s urgency, staying close in a convoy, and nobody asked who they were or tried to stop them. Behind the school, the body was covered with a black plastic tarp, the kind only used to cover dead bodies. There were agents all over the place, but nobody was looking at it, except the three of them and the body was like a black puddle in the grass and seemed isolated and lonely.

  Bob said quietly, “Bullet didn’t come from the hospital,” he said. “The guy would have to be crazy.”

  “The guy is crazy,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, but . . .” Bob scratched his head. He and Lucas were both looking past the hospital, at the top of a hill well behind the hospital.

  “The hill,” Lucas said. “Too far?”

  “It’d be a hell of a shot,” Bob said. “Must be at least four or five hundred yards. Maybe longer.”

  “Could explain why he shot the wrong kid,” Lucas said.

  “And these guys are gun nuts,” Rae said. “Boone’s place yesterday—that was like a shooting school. He might be a hell of a shot.”

  * * *

  —

  AT THAT MOMENT, a short blond woman in jeans and
a raspberry blouse struggled round the corner of the school where she could see the black tarp and she screamed, “Jamie! Jamie!”

  She was struggling because a female FBI agent had her by the arm, but the woman slashed at the agent with her fingernails and wrenched free and sprinted across the grassy swale between her and the tarp. An agent tried to get in her way but she eluded him and got to the tarp and snatched it away and Lucas could see the boy’s face: he lay faceup, pale, rigid, sightless, eyes half-open, lips bloodless, and the woman shrieked and went to her knees, hands in the air, a long vibrating aaiiiieeee . . .

  Lucas took a step toward her but Rae caught his arm and whispered, “No!” and then the female agent caught up with the woman and went to her knees as well and wrapped an arm around the woman’s shoulders as the woman continued the echoing wail and some agents seemed unable to look away, and others seemed not to be able to look at all.

  Lucas was caught by the sight of the kid’s paper-white face. Rae asked, “Lucas . . . you okay?”

  Lucas mumbled, “He looks like my boy. He looks like Sam.”

  Rae tugged at him: “Lucas, c’mon. C’mon.”

  Lucas turned away and said to Bob and Rae, “There’s nothing here for us.”

  “And I can’t look anymore,” Rae said; tears were running down her face, and behind them, the mother’s wail continued to vibrate around the schoolyard.

  “Let’s go look at that hill,” Bob said.

  * * *

  —

  THEY WALKED BACK TO THE TAHOE, drove out two blocks, took a right up the hill, drove past the hospital, farther up the hill, and another right, and yet farther up the hill to a cemetery that looked to be abandoned, spotted with a few healthy trees, some that were dying, and a rash of saplings among the knee-high weeds. They got out of the car and walked across the cemetery, past the old crooked tombstones, their shoes wet from dew, to the edge of the hill looking down at the school.

  “This is where I would have been,” Bob said. Bob was sniper-qualified.

  “Where?” Lucas asked.

  They looked and Bob pointed farther up the slope. “Closer to those little trees. Good for exfiltration, plus you couldn’t be seen from the street.”

  They walked that way, along the edge of the slope and, halfway to the trees, Bob put his hand out, slowing Lucas and Rae.

  “Somebody was sitting here—see? Where the weeds are crushed down? There’s no dew on them, so it was this morning.”

  “Let’s get the feds up here,” Lucas said. He took his phone from his pocket.

  “C’mon, man,” Rae said. “We’re the feds, too. Don’t be a fuckin’ bureaucrat. This is ours. Give it ten minutes anyway.”

  Lucas didn’t have to think about it. He stuck the phone back in his pocket and said, “It looks like he went that way, up toward that shed . . .”

  “He was crawling,” Bob said. To Rae: “Go run to the equipment bag, bring back some of those flags and some tape.”

  “Yes,” she said, and she jogged off toward the truck. She was back in a minute, with a roll of yellow plastic tape and a bunch of playing-card-sized yellow plastic flags stuck on foot-long pieces of stiff wire. With Bob directing traffic, they laid the yellow tape along their own tracks through the weeds and pinned it with the flags. When they got to the shed, Bob pointed at a larger, round crushed spot in the tall grass next to an old cottonwood.

  “He set up here.”

  He moved to the right, bending over the weeds. “There we go.”

  Lucas looked: a single brass .223 shell was nestled down in the grass.

  They looked down the hill. The school seemed to be a long way away, maybe five or six football fields, though it was hard to tell exactly because of the change in elevation. The agents on the field looked about the size of ants, when seen by a person standing upright. “What he did was, he was up here more than once, he figured out the exact distance to the back wall of the school,” Bob said. “Then he looked up some ballistics tables and probably fired some test shots out in the woods to confirm bullet drop at that exact distance. With a good steady setup here . . .”

  Lucas looked back and could see another, thinner trail going through the screen of trees toward the street.

  “He ran out there with the gun on his back?”

  “Down his back, maybe,” Bob said. “If you hung it on a loop and down your back, nobody would see the gun if they were looking at you from the front. With a jacket over it, they might not even see it from the back.”

  “But he wouldn’t have parked his car right at the curb, too many people would have noticed it. He’d park it up the block, where there are some other cars,” Lucas said. “He walks up there with a rifle banging his butt?”

  Bob said, “Could have.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS GOT ON HIS PHONE: “Jane? Where are you?”

  “Coming up to the school. It’s like a carnival. Where are you?”

  “Can you see the hospital?”

  “Yes . . . are you there?”

  “No. We’re on the hill behind the hospital. We found the shooter’s nest up here. There’s nobody here but us marshals.”

  “God . . . bless me. All right. I’m coming. I’ll get our crime scene people moving that way . . . in a few minutes.”

  Lucas got off the phone and Rae said, “You guys look here, behind the shed. Look at the grass. He was messing around doing something here, you can see knee prints.”

  They looked, and Lucas made a wide step around the knee prints, squatted, and said, “That brick’s been moved.”

  “He dumped the gun,” Rae said. “The gun’s under there.”

  “From your mouth to God’s ears,” Bob said.

  * * *

  —

  THEY MOVED AWAY from all the trampled grass, marking their own movements with the tape. Two minutes later, Jane Chase pulled up in a red Mazda MX-5 convertible.

  “Who knew?” Rae muttered. “I had her figured for a Prius. A brown one.”

  Chase was wearing jeans and a Barnard College sweatshirt; her hair was perfect. “Tell me,” she said.

  “Where’s everybody?” Lucas asked.

  “They’re a few minutes behind me,” she said. “I sorta wanted to . . . be here first. After you guys, of course.”

  “Naturally,” Rae said.

  “I mean, I didn’t mean . . .” Chase said, momentarily flustered.

  “Don’t worry about it, boss lady,” Rae said.

  “Ignore her,” Bob said to Chase. “She likes to stir the shit. Anyway, let me ’splain this to you.”

  As they walked her across the site, Lucas could see a caravan of cars suddenly burst up the streets leading to the hill, all of the vehicles running their flashers.

  “Exactly when did you call them?” he asked Chase.

  “Two minutes ago,” she said. “When I got here.” She pointed to a tombstone. “That’s pretty beaten down, don’t you think, Bob? It looks like somebody was sitting there for quite a while.”

  “Using the tombstone like an easy chair,” Bob said. “Maybe sat there all night. Saw the Secret Service guys going into the hospital. Shot over their heads. He’s a cold motherfucker.”

  “It’s that Linc guy,” Chase said. “Lucas, we gotta run him down.”

  “He’s next,” Lucas said.

  * * *

  —

  THE FEDS SWARMED THE PLACE, agents in white environment suits pulling up grass and swabbing tombstones, looking for DNA, bagging the diminutive .223 shell. Another two guys, in full suits, coveralls, booties, and gloves, removed the brick at the bottom of the shed, bagged it, and peered under the shed with a LED light as powerful as the sun.

  “We got a gun,” one said, laconically. “And we got a case.”

  Chase looked at Lucas: “If the
gun still has a serial number . . .”

  Lucas glanced at Bob and Rae, who simultaneously shrugged. Bob said, “I wouldn’t get my hopes up, honey. This guy is not stupid. I doubt he’d go to a gun store and sign all the papers and then use the gun to shoot a kid. And then leave it behind.”

  “But we’ll look, huh?” Chase said.

  They did; and they found a serial number. Chase sat in her car on the telephone, then came jogging back: “The gun was sold to a guy named Lee Wilson. Lives near Richmond. He has a federal firearms license, but he’s in North Carolina, Charlotte, right now. Says he has been for three days. With witnesses—he’s at a wedding. We’ve got some people from the Charlotte office on the way to interview him.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS SAID, “This changes everything. Listen, the guy who got caught with a rifle in the parking garage—you still have him in the federal lockup?”

  “Sure.”

  “Is he cooperating?”

  “Not really. If he . . . thought he might even catch a tiny break, he might talk,” Chase said. “Like the letter, the content of it, he’ll talk about that, because we all agree it was sent anonymously. He won’t talk about much else.”

  “I’d like to see him. Right now. Can we get his PD over there?”