by John Lutz
Repetto brushed his hands together to dry them. “The dark hair you spotted caught in the door latch in the apartment the Sniper used—it turned out to be synthetic, just as you predicted.”
Meg felt a flush of satisfaction. “So our guy wears a hairpiece or wig.”
“Looks that way, though he wouldn’t necessarily wear one all the time.”
Meg thought about Alex and his military buzz cut. Ideal hair to wear beneath a wig.
Repetto wasn’t finished with his good news. “You were right about the mud in the apartment, too. He must have tracked it in from some place in the neighborhood, or more mud would have come off his shoes before he entered the building. Mud on the lobby floor, incidentally, suggests that’s how he got into the building. He must have simply walked in when the doorman was occupied and wouldn’t notice him. Easy then for him to take the elevator to the top floor and make his way onto the roof. From there he dropped by rope to the terrace outside the apartment. There were traces of mud there, too, where he would have knelt or sat in order to shoot.”
“That mud could have been tracked out onto the terrace by me or Birdy, or one of the uniforms who got there before us.”
“Possibly,” Repetto said, “but Weaver said she was the only one who went out there after spotting the forced lock on the French window, and she was careful.”
“She would be.” In the corner of her vision, Meg saw Repetto glance over at her.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Huh? “Weaver’s ambitious, is all.”
“What is this, catfight time?”
Meg grinned. “You know me better than that. I think Weaver’s a solid cop. It’s just that she has ... ambition.”
“Like you don’t?”
Does this guy want to argue? “You’re the one—”
“Okay,” Repetto said. “Enough. The mud matches, and Weaver’s sure she didn’t track any out on the terrace. And you’re right—I shouldn’t compare. You and Weaver are two different people entirely.”
Meg said nothing. She was irritated mostly at herself. Sure, Weaver was ambitious. So what? It wasn’t lack of ambition that had kept Meg down in the ranks. It was resistance to playing the political game.
And something else.
Maybe in comparing her to Weaver—Weaver of the flirtatious grin and the reputation for merriment and sleeping around—Repetto was trying to tell Meg that she, Meg, was too cynical. The male chauvinist might be saying the Job, on top of a rough marriage and divorce, could make a woman too hard, if she let it. Her mind, her thought processes, could become too rigid.
He might be right. Or she might be making too much of a chance remark.
Not that Repetto made many chance remarks.
Meg looked over at him and modulated her voice. Make-nice time. “Maybe this is a good morning to see if we can find similar mud in the neighborhood, someplace where water might stand for a few days and leave mud even during a short dry spell.”
“It’d be better to wait till tomorrow, when it’s not supposed to rain and most of this mess has dried up. Then we can go on a mud hunt.”
“True,” Meg said. At least I found the synthetic hair.
She braked for a school bus, breathing the yellow monster’s exhaust fumes that made their way into the car.
“Smells like Lora describes my cigars,” Repetto said.
Meg was watching half a dozen kids about the same age—eight or nine—emerge from an apartment doorway and trudge toward the waiting bus single file and perfectly spaced, like ducks in the rain.
They all looked glum; they were on their way to school. What did they know from real worries?
To be a kid that age again . . .
A memory dropped like a coin in the back of Meg’s mind. It took her a few seconds to realize what it meant.
“Meg?”
Repetto was nudging her shoulder. The school bus had pulled away.
A horn blared behind Meg, and she spun the unmarked’s tires on wet pavement as she tried to get up to speed.
It was still raining when they reached the precinct house. They trudged through the area in front of the desk, then the detective squad room where a cluster of plainclothes cops sitting or leaning around a computer glanced over at them. A couple of uniforms guided a dejected-looking guy handcuffed and with arms covered with tattoos outside to drive him to Central Booking.
Repetto led the way downstairs to their basement office. It smelled mustier and more oppressively than usual this rainy morning. Former Police Commissioner Kerik, in his framed photo on the wall, appeared moody and depressed by the weather. The green mold in the corner up near the ceiling had thrived and was now about six inches down one of the walls. Meg wondered sometimes if they were in a race to solve the Night Sniper case before the mold took over the office.
Birdy must have just arrived and was finishing hanging up his wet raincoat as they entered. He used his hand to brush drops of water from it onto the floor. While Repetto briefed him on the hair and mud news, Meg examined the Night Sniper murder files. She wanted to make sure she was right about what she suspected after seeing the school bus and kids had jogged her memory.
Birdy slapped a hand to his forehead, as if he’d just remembered something himself, then went to a desk and opened a white paper bag. The scent of coffee wafted over to Meg, chasing away some of the mustiness. Birdy got three Styrofoam cups from the bag, handed one to Repetto, then walked over with another for Meg.
“The next Night Sniper victim will be low on the economic ladder,” she said casually, accepting the coffee and nodding her thanks.
She removed the cup’s plastic lid, waiting for Repetto to come over to her desk, knowing he’d overheard what she said to Birdy. If you think the synthetic hair was impressive . . .
He was standing there giving her one of his level looks, as if he were a master craftsman trying to line up something delicate.
“Explain,” he said, taking a careful sip of his coffee.
She took a sip from her own cup. No need for caution. It was lukewarm. “Our Sniper is very much into playing games.”
“What he lives for,” Birdy said. “And Repetto is his opponent, at least in his mind.”
“And his mind is what we’re trying to get into. He gets his jollies planting clues, leaving us riddles to solve.”
“And you solved one?” Repetto asked.
“I just checked the murder files to make sure,” Meg said to both men. “If, in the Sniper’s mind, the game actually began when Repetto came to the case, the first victim was Vito Mestieri.”
“Sniper pretty much made that game thing clear,” Birdy said. “It started with Mestieri.”
“So to this point the victims are, in order, Mestieri, who owned and operated an appliance and TV repair shop. Ralph Evans, buyer for a chain of men’s clothing stores. Candy Trupiano, editor and National Guard corporal. Kelli Wilson, who sometimes spent the night on her boat docked in the city. And Lee Nasad, millionaire author. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man—”
“—poor man, beggar man, thief,” Repetto finished for her.
Meg nodded. “Child’s play.”
33
1990
Strong Ranch was 590 acres of flat, arid land roughly between Phoenix and Tucson in the Arizona desert. It was bisected by an arroyo that ran with water about twice a year during unusually heavy rainstorms. On one side of the arroyo was the main ranch house, the boys’ barracks, and various outbuildings including a tractor shed and hip-roofed barn. On the other side was the smaller, girls’ quarters, a scaled-down version of the boys’ stucco-and-lapboard one-story structure with rooftop air-conditioning units and solar panels.
The barracks were divided into separate cubicles that afforded some privacy, and it was in one of those cubicles that Dante Vanya spent most of his time alone after being transferred to Strong Ranch. Being by himself was what he wanted, or told himself so, and the ranch wasn’t the kind of place w
here friendships were easily formed.
In the dining area, Dante ate alone at a table away from the other ten boys currently at the ranch, his fellow ... he wasn’t sure if they were prisoners or patients.
With each passing day, Dante became more determined to go it alone at Strong Ranch. The others might have their problems, but none of them had Dante’s disfigurements.
On the third day, a hulking fifteen-year-old named Orvey tried to pick a fight with Dante by perpetrating a shoving match. Instead of shoving back, Dante kicked him hard in the shin, then advanced on him. Dante wasn’t angry, and not at all frightened. He was obviously resigned to taking a beating from the much larger boy, but determined to give back what he could.
The fight didn’t last long, and Dante was saved from a serious trouncing when two of the older boys separated the combatants out of fear the confrontation would draw attention and result in punishment.
From then on the other boys, including Orvey, granted Dante his privacy. They also respected him. They recognized toughness born of hopelessness and knew that whatever they started, the quiet boy with the sparse hair and hideous left profile would match them in meanness.
The week after Dante’s arrival, a commotion outside his cubicle made him curious. The other boys were obviously pleased by something, judging by their loud voices and laughter.
Dante ventured out to see what was going on.
A tall, broad-shouldered man with curly blond hair stood in the center of the main room. He was wearing a western-style tan shirt, cowboy boots, and jeans with a big silver belt buckle.
When he saw Dante he smiled. “Ah! Our newest arrival!” He walked over to stand near Dante, seeming even taller. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here to meet you, but I had to be in Europe on business. I’m Adam Strong.” He extended his hand.
Dante took it, and they shook. Strong’s grip was firm but he didn’t squeeze Dante’s hand like some people who tried to establish that they were in charge.
“This is Dante Vanya,” Strong said, releasing Dante’s hand and straightening up. He formally introduced the other boys, one of whom, Kerry, was bald. Dante learned later he’d lost his hair because of some kind of cancer treatment.
“What we do here,” Strong said, “is let you continue to recuperate, if you arrive with physical problems, and we help you find yourselves, no matter how you arrive.” He grinned. It scrunched up his cheeks and made his pale eyes tilt so he looked like a cat. “No doubt you’ve heard that ‘finding yourself’ malarkey before. What it means here at the ranch is that you learn what you like to do, then learn how to do it well.” He looked directly at Dante. “This is a working ranch, so we expect something in return for your stay here. There’ll be chores. You’ll act and talk like gentlemen. And we expect you to take part in activities.” The grin widened. “But don’t let me scare you, Dante. The main idea is for you to learn how to live, and to enjoy living.”
Strong looked at his wristwatch. It was big and seemed to have been made from a gold coin. “I’ve got work to do now. Vic will assign chores for the day.”
Vic was an older boy, about eighteen, who slept in the main house and also dressed like a cowboy. Dante thought he looked something like the gunfighters he’d seen on TV, only without the guns.
Vic read from a wrinkled sheet of paper. Nobody complained when they heard what work they were assigned, whether it was cleaning stables, milking cows, or helping to dig a new well. Dante drew kitchen duty in what everyone called the mess hall. In the biggest kitchen Dante had ever seen, a fat woman named Allen, even though she was a woman, gave him a paring knife and sat him down to peel potatoes for lunch. It would be a month before Dante learned that Allen was her last name and that her first was Lil.
Dante still kept to himself, but after a while he didn’t much mind being at Strong Ranch. The routine was morning chores, then various activities, and in the evenings reading or sometimes movies for both the boys and girls.
One of the girls, a redhead named Verna, was pretty in a storybook princess way, and Dante wished he knew her better, but after one look at his burned face she didn’t seem interested. He heard that her father was dead and her mother had sold her for crack money when she was six years old, to a man who’d kept her prisoner in a trailer court until she was nine. “Poor Verna can’t ever love anyone,” Dante overheard Lil Allen say one day, “’cause she can’t trust anyone. Not all the way.”
Dante could understand that. What he didn’t understand was that Verna must also betray everyone.
After the first month at the ranch, the school year began, and boys and girls together rode a bus every day into Nailsville, a small town about twenty miles away. There, with a lot of other kids, they attended school in a long, flat-roofed brick building with narrow, horizontal windows.
Despite having missed a grade, Dante found school easy enough, especially math. One day his math teacher handed him an envelope with instructions to give it to Adam Strong. Dante thought he might be in some kind of trouble, and since the envelope was unsealed, he opened it and read the note inside. His gaze fixed on the word amazing. The teacher thought he might be some kind of genius at mathematics.
Genius. Dante didn’t know what to make of that. All he knew was that he comprehended what he was taught, especially in his math class. It made sense, so why didn’t everyone comprehend it?
Early one evening, instead of the usual softball or soccer exercises, or track and field competition, Adam Strong had something different in mind. He drove up in his dusty white Ford pickup to where the boys were assembled, then lowered the tailgate and stood there with his fists on his hips. In the truck’s bed was a folded blue blanket. When the boys had all walked over to him, Strong unfolded the blanket to reveal a dozen rifles.
“We’re going to target shoot,” Strong announced. “Shooting’s a sport I used to be good at, and I know it’s a fine sport, no matter what you might think of guns, or what other people have told you.”
“I’m gonna join the army!” a tall, skinny kid named Charley announced loudly. Not meaning it. Smarting off in a way that had gotten him in trouble with Strong before.
“Not a bad choice,” Strong said. “They’ll know just what to do with you.”
When the other boys were finished snickering, Strong continued. “These are not new weapons. In fact, they are quite old. They are army surplus M1 rifles, and you need to understand them before you use them. Before we actually shoot, I want to show you how these rifles work, how to take them apart and put them together, and most of all, how not to accidentally shoot yourself or anyone else.”
“The girls gonna shoot?” one of the boys asked.
“They were told they had the opportunity,” Strong said. “They all chose other activities. That’s okay. They don’t like guns.”
More snickering.
Strong ignored it. He picked up the nearest rifle and handed it to Charley, then gave out the other rifles. When he handed one to Dante, Dante hesitated, remembering the gun his father had used.
But this wasn’t like that. This was another kind of gun. A rifle. And Adam Strong wasn’t his father. He accepted the rifle but knew Strong had noted his reluctance.
When everyone was armed with unloaded rifles, Strong sat down on the truck’s open tailgate, a rifle across his lap, and said, “Gather round.”
They spent the next three days learning about the rifles, how they were different from shotguns or handguns, and how to aim them, allowing for wind and distance. They learned how to lead a moving target. It struck Dante that shooting a gun wasn’t so complicated. It was mathematical, a matter of angle, speed, time, and distance. And variables like wind and the rhythms of motion and momentum.
He also learned from Kelly that Adam Strong had been an alternate small-bore rifle shooter on the 1976 U.S. Olympic team that went to Montreal. He hadn’t actually shot in competition there, but he’d been ready.
On the fourth day, Strong gathered the boys around the bac
k of the pickup and said, “Today we shoot bullets. I have targets set up beyond the barracks, against a safe backdrop. Vic will lead the way, and I’ll follow in the truck, where we’ll leave the rifles for now.”
When they reached the new target range ten minutes later, Dante saw that the tractor sat nearby and now had a scoop on it like a bulldozer’s. It had been used to create a bank of earth about eight feet high. In front of the banked earth were bales of straw, and on each bale was a sheet of paper with a target on it, a series of circles around a red bull’s-eye. At intervals Dante later learned were twenty, fifty, and a hundred yards were low stakes in the ground with twine strung tautly between them, marking lines for the boys to shoot from.
They shot first from a distance of twenty yards, using the standing position Strong had taught them. Dante sighted carefully, squeezed the trigger gently as instructed, and felt the rifle’s stock buck against his shoulder. He winced, and his ears buzzed from the explosive bark of all the rifles firing almost at once.
“Not bad,” Strong said. “We’ll examine the targets later.”
Beginning with his second shot, Dante tried to factor in all the conditions he was shooting under. It wasn’t difficult, since it was a calm day and wind had little effect. That left the simple geometry of sending a predictable moving object toward a stationary one. He held his breath and felt an unexpected connection with the target, as if a wire were strung between it and the gun barrel, and squeezed the trigger, ready this time for the bark and buck of the old M1.
He felt a rush of excitement. He knew that this time he’d hit the target. And could do it again.
Every boy fired from standing, sitting, and prone positions at varying distances, a total of twenty rounds of ammunition.
Strong walked out and collected the targets while Vic and the boys stood and watched.
When Strong returned, he held all the targets but one in his right hand. In his left hand was Dante’s target.