Bob thought, that’s why he took them in the alley. To give the team time to penetrate, search, tidy, and disappear. No one would notice the search team, because of course it wasn’t a crime scene yet, charged with that special energy of such a place, that charisma. He kills them, the team enters and finds and—
Or maybe it doesn’t find.
Or maybe it finds but it leaves traces of what it found.
“Is this of any help?”
“It’s a great help, Detective Washington. Listen, I see now I’m going to have to come to Chicago. Can I call you? Can you help me?”
“When will you get here?”
“I’m already late.”
18
Nick groaned. “What’s the policy on this?”
“You can meet him or not meet him. It’s up to you. I should be there to ride herd.”
“You’re sure it’s necessary?”
“You tell me. He said one word. He said if I said the one word to you,” Phil Price continued, “you would want to meet with him.”
“And the one word was ‘Tulsa’?”
“Yeah. I checked the records. I know what it means.”
Nick sat in Price’s office, nicely appointed, on the third floor. Price was Special Agent in Charge of Public Information, but unlike most “public information” hacks in fancy offices all through DC, Price was more agent than reporter suck-up. He’d done street time in New York, LA, and San Francisco, had taken a round in his hip on a raid (a friendly round, no less, from a poorly trained SWAT moron), and now finished out his time in Public Information, cordially hating the reporters who bedeviled him even as they cordially hated him. The subject was a proposed meeting with a New York Times reporter named David Banjax, who was the Times’s man on the still-hot sniper story.
“I hate these guys,” said Nick.
“I hate ’em too,” said Price. “But that’s neither here nor there. What’s here and now is this guy is levering for a meet, off the record. He’s angling for a scoop, and the Times always feels entitled to scoops, so he wants his so he can get sent to the London Bureau or something.”
“Agh,” Nick said again, his gorge full of bile.
“Nick, in case you’re wondering, let me tell you he didn’t get this out of Public Information. We do not release background on special agents, not ever, certainly not in the age of terror. So I don’t know how he got it.”
“I do,” said Nick. “It seems I’ve displeased Joan Flanders’s big-foot ex-hubbo Tom Constable, that is, ‘T. T.’ Constable. His guy tried to nudge me in a certain direction, and I wouldn’t play. So this is their first move, and this guy, this David Banjax, he’s just a rube, a pawn, being run by a guy named Bill Fedders. Banjax doesn’t know how he’s being used.”
“Don’t tell him that. He’s Harvard, Harvard Law; he thinks he’s important.”
“Ugh,” Nick said. “Now I really hate him.”
“But they do hold cards, Nick. I can’t tell him to fuck off. I’d love to, then raid his crib for the ’ludes and pot he probably has stored in a waterproof baggie in the toilet, convict him, and send him to some hard ugly federal hotel where he and his new fiancé LeRoy could live happily ever after in anal cowboy bliss, guess who’s the gal? But I can’t do that. I have to play nice. And you can see how it might look. It could look bad or at least questionable. It could reflect poorly on the Bureau. And that’s what they pay me to watch.”
Nick shook his head. “Tulsa,” he said again.
He remembered being in an office window in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1992, his second year on the street. He was crouched behind and held securely a then state-of-the-art Remington 700 sniper rifle in .308, on a Harris bipod. He watched reality through a ten-power Leupold scope as a crackhead skank bank robber named Nathan Bowie rode down an empty street in the back seat of a convertible. Unfortunately, surrounding him were three women, cashiers in the Tulsa State Bank and Trust Morgan Avenue branch, while the bank manager drove slowly. Nathan was tripping wilder and wilder, waving his pistol around, addressing God, the whole evil white race, the Martians who spoke to him through his dental fillings, the various bitches who’d left him before he was done kicking the shit out of them. He was going to go firecracker at any second and it was Nick’s duty to put a 168-grainer into his cranial vault before that happened.
But Nick also had an FBI agent in charge in his earphones, a guy, now long gone, named Howard Utey, and Howard was one of the worst combinations: he wanted you to do exactly what he told you, except he didn’t know what that was, and if he told you one thing, he could very easily change his mind, and it was your fault you didn’t quite get that he hadn’t meant “Shoot” when he screamed “Shoot,” he’d really meant “Don’t shoot.” Any idiot would know that.
Howard was as flippy as Nathan Bowie, as the tapes later revealed, not that it mattered, because Howard had contacts on the Seventh Floor and was supposedly headed up there.
“Are you ready, are you ready, get ready, Nick, I can’t hear you, tell me are you ready are you ready, do you have him, do you have him, wait till he stops moving, now no not now, no, no the one on the left she moved, she’s crying, why the hell won’t she shut up, what is—”
Nick should have thrown the earphones with their little microphone on the pedestal, all cool SWAT TV-like, across the room and just buckled down, cinched in, made the fucking shot. But he didn’t; that wasn’t Nick. Howard was authority, and Nick had been drawn to, had respected and believed in the church of authority. Howard was boss, he was agent in charge, he was day-to-day a very decent guy, if a little moody when he thought he wasn’t moving fast enough, but he got good results out of his people and he was well liked, if thought a bit callow and overambitious. But he was—and this was well known—absolutely no good in an action situation.
“Do you have him, I can see him, Nick, acknowledge please, I have to—”
“Howard, the girl on the left, she’s—”
“Take him down, take him down!”
“No shot, Howard, goddamn, it’s not clear.”
It had to be clear. No other SWAT people were on call, the state police team couldn’t get set up in time, the city people were in their usual sullen fit about being overruled (by Howard) in their own town, so it was a mess, and behind him, nobody was quiet, there was a lot of moving around and chatting.
“You have to shoot!” Howard screamed.
But Nick couldn’t. There wasn’t gap enough between the two girls, one of whom kept leaning over, as if she was losing bodily control, so great was her fear, and her head kept swimming into Nick’s sight picture and the car would be turning in a second and he knew, he knew he had to shoot.
“Shoot, shoot, don’t shoot, don’t shoot, shoo—”
Nick thought he had it. The crosshair quadrasected Nathan’s head just behind the ear and it was clear. His finger did what it had been trained to do. He fired, the buck of the rifle, the largeness of the shot, it felt good, and when the scope came down—
“Oh God oh God you missed oh God he’s shooting stop him!”
—Nick saw one of the girls twisted left, blood on her back, her body in a heartbreakingly broken posture. Nathan Bowie shot the girl on the right, then shot the girl in the front, then put the gun in his mouth and blew the roof of his head off.
That was it. Med techs and cops with guns drawn raced to the vehicle, and from his perch Nick watched as the med team worked the fallen. He wanted to puke. He felt a surge of depression melt the strength out of his bones and fill his brain with self-loathing and remorse. Howard was there yelling, “Nick, Nick, my God, why did you shoot, didn’t you hear me? I told you not to shoot, God, it’s such a tragedy.”
God, what a fuck-up. What a total disaster. Nick had thought he’d be the guy with the strength and the coolness and the good decision. But no. He had to play the goat, the mistake, Quantico’s shame.
Poor Myra. He’d hit her in the spine, the bullet actually passing through her arm
first, bouncing laterally off the metal of the car and clipping her spine. It paralyzed her in an instant. She never walked again and spent the next few years in her motorized wheelchair. She had deserved so much better than Nick and the FBI had given her that day, and he tried to give it to her, to somehow make amends, by marrying her. He discovered her to be a wonderful person, bright, funny, without a shred of self-pity. Once her father had gotten drunk and accused Nick.
“Why? Why did you do that to my baby girl? Oh, Nick, why, she didn’t—”
“Daddy, you stop that. I’ve said many a time that if the only way I could have met Nick Memphis was to get shot by him and lose my mobility, I’d take it even with that foreknowledge, because Nick is the best man I’ve ever met, kind and generous and gentle and honest and moral. You cannot blame Nick. You blame Nathan Bowie or the man who sold him the crack, but do not blame Nick. He was only doing his duty.”
Of the other two girls, one died, the other recovered and moved away. The bank manager recovered but died the next year, early, of a heart attack. Really, what had it proved? You take the shot and the shot goes off. It’s so amazing how much pain can be released into the world by the little six-ounce press of the trigger, how it changes everything, totally and forever.
Nick sat back.
“You can see how it would play,” said Price. “ ‘Sniper investigator had bad sniper shooting in background,’ that’s how it’ll read, and the implication is that maybe someone who had been a sniper, who’d had bad luck—”
“—Who’d fucked up.”
“—who’d fucked up, maybe he shouldn’t be in charge of an investigation involving a sniper. Maybe his judgment was clouded, maybe he was prejudiced. Maybe that’s why the investigation, which was going so well, has now bounced off in a strange new direction.”
“So is he threatening me, is that it?”
“They don’t work like that. He wants to meet you, develop a relationship. Tulsa will come up, sure. But just give him the idea of working with him, play him a little, buy us some time. That’s what the Bureau needs. Meet him for lunch. It’s just lunch.”
“Arggggh,” said Nick.
19
It was in the middle of the block on Fifty-third off Blackstone, what was called a row house from an earlier century, strange to the eyes of a man who thought of houses as being miles apart from each other. But it was still magnificent, with a broad stairway leading to a broad porch and vast oak door, its windows wide and deep, its gables peaked. It had the look of castle, something from Olde England, built with refined money in a neighborhood full of refined money, where everything old had been made new again, with the best in modern design, plumbing, lighting fixtures, and the best in burnished old wood and brick. Hyde Park, in southeast Chicago, in the shadow of the Museum of Science and Industry, all that remained of a White City where a hundred-odd years ago they had celebrated science, industry, and progress. A steady wind rushed in off the cold lake, throwing torrents of fallen leaves about.
“What do you expect to find?” Detective Washington asked Bob, who sat in the front seat of Washington’s unmarked Impala a couple of doors down from the Strong-Reilly house, now darkened in the falling light.
“I don’t know,” said Bob. “Evidence of penetration, I suppose.”
Washington, in his forties, 240, exceptionally black and full of unconscious tough-guy mannerisms with a sheen of graying hair that looked like gunmetal, said, “You sure you want to do this? You could get yourself in a peck of trouble, me too, and for something you ain’t even sure exists. Don’t sound like a good play to me. You could do it official and save us both time in jail.”
“I’m just looking at options,” said Bob. “If we go the route the law requires, I have to talk your department or the FBI into doing something nobody’s ready to do. Time passes. Then even if they say yeah, they got to get warrants, assemble a team, dot the i’s and cross the t’s, and that’s more time. Time is not on our side. My position is the guys we’re investigating right now—”
“If they exist.”
“Yeah, if they exist, they would have been the ones to toss the house that you picked up on, so at some level you think they exist. The point is now, they think they got away clean. They’re not taking any precautions, they think they’re so smart; this is when we have to go aggressively against them. If they sniff our interest, they’ll go into a much harder defensive position, double-check, begin to erase clues or witnesses, move against us. This is the sneaking-up part snipers are famous for.”
Washington shook his immense, wise head. “Gunny, okay, but answer me this one, then. Say, for example, you’re right. These guys had to get something, something physical, out of that house. So why do they need to go to the trouble of killing not only Strong and Reilly but also Joan Flanders and Mitch Greene? If they’re professional enough to put something like that together, they’d certainly be professional enough to hire some burglar who could take the house down, locate, and remove whatever it was.”
“Well,” said Bob, “he wants them dead. But in a certain way. If they sell everybody on the idea that crazed sniper Carl Hitchcock, fucked up from Vietnam, killed these four people, and all of that seems to add up, then that’s as far as you go, right? You got it all there—motive, opportunity, means, time frame. It’s so tempting. Everyone wants this thing solved, and there’s the solution, plain as the nose on your face. What you don’t do then is look into the lives of the victims. You don’t see what they were up to, what they had going on, who they were, what connections they had, what moves they were making. All that stuff’s off the board. So I’m putting it back on the board. My read is that something Strong and Reilly did or were planning to do got them whacked hard. The other two went down as smokescreen. Strong and Reilly were the target. If whoever he is kills just them, he knows their lives will be investigated, and such an investigation would lead to him. He needs a way to kill them in which their deaths are seen as unimportant, marginal, an afterthought, while all the focus goes on Joan. So if there’s an answer, it’s somewhere in Jack and Mitzi’s lives in the last few weeks, so I’m going to take a look-see. I’m going to shake the tree and see what falls out.”
“I got no argument except to say it doesn’t happen that way. Not hardly. Nothing’s ever that clever, that well planned, that secret in the real world. It’s just drunks getting pissed or going nuts, whacking the innocent. That’s what I see time and time again. Or some hothead kid fighting for his corner of Blackstone when Willie done took it, so he pops Willie with his nine-em and thinks he’s a hero. That’s the reality, man; you in James Bond land.”
“Even if you don’t buy it, and maybe I wouldn’t either if I’d seen all the people murdered with beer bottles and ball-peen hammers and twenty-five Brycos that you have, I hope you’ll indulge me a little, Washington. I can’t do this alone.”
“I wouldn’t do this for a guy without USMC tattooed on his arm, Gunny,” said Washington. “Okay, we’ll drive around back, and you peel out right behind the garage; there’s no crime scene tape anymore. Can you get through the back gate latch?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, how about into the house?”
“Well, if my theory is right, one of the basement windows has already been opened. That’s how they got in. Hell, the team may have even been in the house before Jack and Mitzi left; they got in at night. That would save them time and exposure. They work the house, that office particularly, while the bodies are outside. When the cops come, guess what our team is dressed as? Cops. In ten minutes the place is jammed with cops. They emerge from wherever, join the crowd, mill, then slip away. Who’s to know? Did you recognize everyone there on the crime scene?”
“A big murder draws more gawkers than a new Star Wars movie. You always see strangers there, at least in the beginning. You got people from all different agencies, all different departments; you got brass, you got brownnosers and suck-ups, you got press assholes, the more the merrier. Ye
ah, I recognized about fifteen percent of the faces.”
“Well, there you go.”
“All right, Gunny, let’s play the game. When you’re done, you slip out the same way, call me on the cell, and begin to walk down the alley and I’ll pick you up.”
“Got it.”
“When do you think that will be?”
“About three a.m.”
“Three a.m?”
“Three a.m. Wednesday.”
“Three a.m. Wednesday! This is Monday!”
“I need to go through the house carefully. I need to get a read on their life. I have to find out who they were, what they were into, what they were planning, why this happened to them. You don’t learn that in an hour.”
“Just don’t get caught.”
Bob slapped the backpack he carried.
“Infrared gear. I can see in the dark. No lights will show on the outside. If anyone comes into the house, I’ll go to ground. Nobody’ll see me. I can be real still. The sniper thing again. I’ll call you when I’m done.”
It was a different America. He hadn’t seen this America. He’d been in the America of the United States Marine Corps, in mud and jungle and slatternly, jerry-built outposts and tempos, under monsoon weather or baking heat, and only glimpsed this America on the TV in the squad room, if there was a squad room. But everywhere in this house the late sixties and early seventies still lived, like some sort of Camelot, some sort of holy time when we were young and green and firm and the world was filled with possibility. Mr. and Mrs. Strong were narcissists for sure, in that they had dozens of photographs of themselves and their actions on the walls, as well as souvenir front pages—pentagon bombed, thousands disrupt downtown, campus admin building occupied, cops use teargas on demos, two killed in bank robbery, and finally wanted couple freed—as well as political campaign buttons, flyers, gas masks, anything that spoke of the realities, and maybe the fun, of the Movement.
A Bob Lee Swagger eBook Boxed Set: I, Sniper, Night of Thunder, 47th Samurai Page 77