Backlash

by Paula Gosling

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  Paula Gosling

  BACKLASH

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  Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

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  ALSO BY PAULA GOSLING

  A Running Duck

  The Zero Trap

  Loser’s Blues

  Mind’s Eye

  The Woman in Red

  Hoodwink

  Cobra

  Tears of the Dragon

  Jack Stryker series

  Monkey Puzzle

  Backlash

  Ricochet

  Luke Abbott series

  The Wychford Murders

  Death Penalties

  Blackwater Bay series

  The Body in Blackwater Bay

  A Few Dying Words

  The Dead of Winter

  Death and Shadows

  Underneath Every Stone

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  One dead last night.

  Maybe another, tomorrow.

  The killer smiled.

  Mirror, mirror on the wall –

  Who’s the cleverest one of all?

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  The gun lay on a white cloth below the window, its parts dismantled, ready for cleaning.

  The killer stood beside it, waiting for the day.

  In the dark streets below, traffic lights blinked red, yellow and green over empty intersections. No cars passed. Department store windows glared their wares at one another across the long, silent avenues. A newspaper skittered by in the gutter, caught by a sudden, secret breeze.

  Somewhere in the park a bird sang.

  The day was coming.

  Gradually, the rising light revealed the surrounding buildings, standing like a silent crowd of alien, angular beings. Hundreds of blank windows reflected stratified clouds riding high over the horizon, their undersides incandescent. The snaking curves of the river that cut the city in two slowly turned to old mercury, hazed and dully gleaming.

  Suddenly, from the far side of the city, a jumbo jet knifed upward, seemed to hang motionless for a moment, then turned away in a long, graceful curve, trailing a spider’s thread of white vapour that caught fire from the rising sun.

  Now the light was stronger, brighter, filling the apartment. It glowed back from the polished surfaces of the furniture, the rich colours of the upholstery, the glass in the photograph frames, the silver trophies on the mantelpiece, the other guns in the wallrack, and the empty circle of the mirror above the carved mahogany desk.

  The killer went to the mirror and gazed into it.

  The face within was bland, unremarkable.

  That was what made it special.

  Nobody knew, nobody even guessed.

  ONE

  Stryker watched the plane lift from the runway, so big, so heavy, that it seemed impossible it could break from the earth and soar free. But soar it did, until it became a small dot curving away into the sky. For a moment there was a glint, a spark of sunlight from it, and then it became dull, dark grey, and – nothing.

  Gradually he became aware of the airport around him – shops, ticket counters, seats for the weary and the waiting, restaurants, snack bars, and the constant flow of human beings from place to place, restless with the sense of travel that permeated every corner of the vast building.

  ‘Heraclitus,’ he muttered.

  ‘Go on,’ Tos said, beside him, in that flat tell-me-another voice he had begun using lately whenever Stryker spoke some impenetrable and pseudo-academic piece of rubbish. ‘Him? Never.’

  Stryker looked up and grinned, ‘said the world and everything in it was in a constant state of flux, changing and flowing.’

  ‘No kidding. What with going bald, changing my underwear every day, and having to cut the lawn regularly, I never noticed. Is there a cure or do we just have to put up with it?’

  ‘He didn’t say.’

  ‘That’s the thing about those old Greeks,’ Tos said. ‘All questions and no answers.’

  ‘A bit like police work?’

  ‘I was just going to say that.’

  Stryker nodded. ‘I thought you were.’

  They moved away from the observation windows and started across the concourse, dodging the darting children, the occasional suitcase corner, and the uniformed flunkies with clip-boards who scuttled from one place to another to relay more very vital statistics.

  Half-way across they met Pinsky coming the other way.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Tos asked. Pinsky looked grim, and was sweating slightly, as if he had been running.

  ‘Kate get off all right?’ he asked Stryker.

  ‘I’m afraid so – despite an impassioned last-minute plea,’ Stryker said.

  ‘Mostly about dirty shirts and how to load the dishwasher,’ Tos put in. ‘It was very moving.’

  ‘Moving is what I came to get you about. We’ve got another one.’ The other two waited. ‘Plain-clothes, this time,’ Pinsky went on, quietly. ‘In the parking lot outside his own precinct house.’

  ‘Like the others?’ Tos asked.

  Pinsky nodded. ‘Like the others. In the head.’

  It had started about ten days before.

  First victim, a cop named Richard Santosa, shot in the head while investigating a prowler report in a perfectly respectable neighbourhood. His own precinct detectives began investigating the case – following up Santosa’s private life, looking into recent arrest involvements, anything that might give them a reason for his murder. This was the reasonable pursuit of routine.

  The second victim, Merrilee Trask, was shot while calling in an abandoned car licence number. Different precinct, opposite side of town, and their detectives began to pursue the same routine and proscribed course as their colleagues were following in the Santosa murder.

  Until Ballistics paired the bullets.

  The two precincts liaised, gingerly at first, co-ordinating their investigations and pooling information. What was the link between Santosa, a good-looking bachelor, and Trask, a divorced woman? The obvious connection – that they had been seeing one another off the job – was quickly discounted. Santosa had a steady girlfriend, and the two victims had never met.

  And then the killer hit again. Third victim, Sandy Randolph, was shot while returning from investigating an arson report. His partner had been hurt when their car went off the road and hit a telephone pole, and so had not been able to pursue the killer, who had fired from a passing car.

  Randolph was nearly thirty, black, had been married a year, and was about to leave the uniformed branch and train in computers with an eye to either working with them or teaching trainee cops to do so. He liked police theory, but not street work.

  Yet another precinct, yet another professional ‘family’ involved. Although this killing had been done with a handgun – the first
two had been rifles – there was a general agreement that the three might be connected. They all seemed to be motiveless murders, all were head shots, all cops.

  The case was turned over to Central Homicide.

  The task that faced them was monumental. That there was a common killer seemed probable. But was he killing at random, or was there a deeper reason behind the murders?

  If it was random, there was nothing to be done but increase their vigilance, follow up all the tips and rumours that came in, check out gun shops for new or unusual sales of weapons or ammunition, go over files of known cop-haters and other assorted psychos.

  And wonder about all the others that weren’t on the files.

  If, on the other hand, there was some motivating factor, some pattern to the killings, what was it and where could they find it? Where could they begin to find it? All they had to work with were the victims themselves. They put the computer to work, looking for an answer. It came up with thousands of possibilities. Each one had to be followed up. There were only so many officers in the Department. As many as could be spared were put to work checking out the leads the computer threw out, which left the rest to keep up with the day-to-day work that faced them whether they were being shot at or not. Of course, in the interest of public safety and to avoid private anguish, they would have liked to keep all this activity to themselves.

  Unfortunately for the Department, police reporters are not deaf and they are certainly not dumb. The minute the papers put it together and began screaming ‘Cop-killer’, the already over-stretched Departmental ranks began to waver and wane.

  Randolph’s partner, Frank Richmond, had been severely shocked by having his partner’s head blown apart while they were driving quietly down the street, and had quit the force shortly after leaving hospital.

  He was not the first.

  Those in the Department who had been uncertain of their vocation suddenly became terribly interested in selling real estate, taking up plumbing, going back to school to study law, agriculture, or applied art. Even old hands, good hands, found themselves whistling in the dark, looking over their shoulders, and watching the high places.

  Those civilians who had been toying with the idea of joining the police decided maybe something else, such as sky-diving or professional football, would be the safer alternative.

  The reason for the growing panic was simple, and had little to do with closing ranks or seeking revenge. It had to do with simple logic.

  A person who would kill a cop respects no-one.

  A person who would kill a cop would kill anyone.

  Anyone.

  TWO

  The car park was gritty asphalt, surrounded by high walls and overlooked by buildings on all four sides. Fat clouds in the sky overhead cast occasional shadows, so the scene continually flickered from bright sunlight to momentary dusk and back again. Police cars, both marked and unmarked, were herring-boned into the limited space. Added to them now was a constantly shifting population of on-lookers, both uniformed and plain-clothes. In the alternating brightness there was a constant putting-on and taking-off of sunglasses. Nobody wanted to miss a thing.

  The centre of activity was at the far corner of the car park – a figure in sports coat and flannels, face down between a Chevy station wagon and the high wall, what was left of his head surrounded by a halo of blood, brain matter and bone fragments. Beside him crouched Bannerman, the Medical Examiner. It was fortunate he was so tall and bony, otherwise it would have been difficult for him to get near the body. As it was he had to stand up fairly frequently to avoid cramp. Every time he did, the other members of the team would start to get out of his way, thinking he was finished, only to filter back when he crouched down again.

  Stryker squinted up at the surrounding offices and apartment buildings. This was not a rich precinct, neither was it a slum. As the cancer of inner-city rot spread wider and wider, so it would engulf this area as it had many others. Already he could see blank windows of empty offices, and the occasional torn curtain of an abandoned apartment. There were loungers on the streetcorners, now and again a drunk slept in a doorway. It was coming, but it wasn’t here.

  ‘These buildings been checked out?’ he asked.

  Captain Corsa looked at him, his black eyes glinting over his fat olive cheeks, like animals watching from cover. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Stryker said.

  Corsa scowled. ‘He must have been lying there most of the night, nobody noticed him until the dawn shift came on.’ Corsa rubbed his face and pinched his nose and sighed. ‘We had a beer over at Whistles when we came off shift last night. We did that sometimes. Then he said he had to get home, he’d been sleeping bad, and wanted to get his head down.’ Corsa paused, swallowed, continued in a flat voice. ‘He has a wife and three small kids. He was a decent cop – about to take his lieutenant’s exams. Also a friend.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Stryker said, again.

  Corsa nodded. ‘Yeah, aren’t we all? He’s the fourth, isn’t he? Fourth or fifth?’

  ‘Fourth,’ Tos said.

  ‘It stinks,’ Corsa said, turning away and staring at the tops of the buildings opposite. ‘What have you got on this?’

  ‘We have four dead cops in four separate precincts,’ Stryker said, grimly. ‘Three uniformed and now Yentall, here, in plain-clothes. The first three never served together. They were all different ranks, different ages, different descriptions, different everything. Yentall might make a match with one or all of them. Maybe he won’t. So far, it makes no sense.’

  ‘Same gun?’

  Tos shook his head. ‘First two, rifle. Next one, handgun, probably a thirty-eight, although the bullet fragmented so they aren’t certain. What they have in common is that they’re ail cops, they were all shot in the head, and nobody can figure out the motive. Maybe this one is different – maybe he had gotten threats, or had a known enemy, whatever. We’ll go into that with you. That’s all we’ve got. One thing – the first two were picked off from over five hundred yards, the other from a moving car.’

  ‘Marksman,’ Corsa observed.

  ‘A lot of them around,’ Stryker said. ‘These days.’

  This time, when Bannerman stood up, he was finished. He edged out from between the car and the wall and came toward Stryker and the others. ‘This one was different. Done from close up,’ he said.

  ‘Same gun as before?’

  Bannerman shrugged. ‘Not my department, but I’d be surprised if they could tell anything except the calibre. Definitely a handgun. It went through him and hit the wall – a lump of lead is all there is. Maybe a thirty-eight.’ He hefted the little grey lump in its labelled plastic bag, then put it in his pocket. ‘You want a look before we take him away?’

  ‘No thanks,’ Tos said, going a little pale.

  Bannerman looked at him and half-smiled. ‘You’ve got to get over that sometime, Tos, if you want to get promotion.’

  ‘I’ll stick,’ Tos said. ‘Thanks just the same.’

  Stryker sighed. ‘I’ll go.’

  It was not an edifying sight, and he took in as much as he could as fast as he could. Maybe Toscarelli’s weak stomach was catching. Or maybe it was just anger that wrenched at his stomach when he looked down on a fellow officer who had been slaughtered for no apparent reason. One of the photographers took another shot, and the flash rebounded off the wedding ring on the victim’s left hand.

  Stryker glanced up at the sky and thought of Kate, by now high above the ocean, going to England for a literary conference. He hadn’t said much to her about the first three cop-killings, but she read the papers like everyone else. She hadn’t said anything about them either – she didn’t have to. It lay between them, as it had from the beginning – every time he went out the door it could be for the last time, and she didn’t want to bring kids up on her own. He always tried to point out that a p
lain-clothes officer was far less likely to get killed than a uniformed one – but what would he have told her if she’d been waiting at home for him tonight? Detective Phil Yentall lay at his feet, tweed jacket, grey flannel slacks, pale blue shirt, no tie, no uniform. Casual as they come.

  Mrs Yentall would be bringing up three kids alone.

  He went back to Corsa and Tos with less than the usual spring in his step. ‘Bastard,’ was all he said.

  He didn’t mean Yentall.

  Partners are funny things.

  Especially when they’re cops. If you’re a cop you don’t have to like your partner (although it helps), but you sure as hell have to trust him or her. You have to know.

  Lt Jack Stryker and Sgt ‘Tos’ Toscarelli had been partners for some years. It was not a formal or permanent assignment – police partnerships never are. But it is a foolish captain of police who does not quickly realise which men work well together, and their particular captain – although he had his failings – was not a foolish man. Even when Stryker moved up to Lieutenant, the relationship between Toscarelli and himself had remained firm and productive.

  Some people wondered how Stryker put up with Toscarelli’s affectionate bullying – they said Tos was a classic case of ‘Jewish mother’, despite the fact that he was a devout Catholic and attended Mass regularly. Stryker’s hair was curly, receding, and had recently gone prematurely white. He claimed this was a result of the traumatic experience of falling in love, but it was a family trait. It gave him a specious appearance of maturity. The fact was, he needed a mother and he knew it. He moved fast and his mind moved fast – sometimes so fast it went right by things like raincoats, meals, and sleep. He didn’t like to clutter up his brain with himself.

  He loved and lived with Kate Trevorne, a professor of English at the university. At home they shared the chores of living as some couples do – she did most of the work and he appreciated it. But it was still left to Tos to make sure he didn’t fall into rivers or miss too many meals while on a case. What would happen when Toscarelli eventually married and had kids of his own only time would tell.