The Assassin

by Rachel Butler

  He finished off the roll of film, then studied the clearest footprint while reloading the camera. It looked to be about a size eleven—his own size—and unremarkable. A dress shoe, probably, with no markings or obvious defects. Too bad it wasn’t a running shoe with the fancy tread patterns common to that type. That would make it easy to identify the brand and style.

  On the other hand, probably ninety percent of the population in northeast Oklahoma wore running shoes, including all three victims. The size-eleven-dress-shoe group was significantly smaller.

  “I’m gonna talk to the kid outside,” he said, peeling off his gloves and trading the camera for a notebook and pen as Simmons raised a hand in acknowledgment.

  As soon as he stepped off the porch and took a breath, Tony realized just how bad the air inside was. His rough guess was that the bodies had been closed up in the house a day or so. With the temperature expected to hit the mid-nineties, after another twenty-four hours, they probably would have been able to catch a whiff of the stench at the station downtown.

  The patrol officer had regained some color. Tony leaned against the car next to him. “First homicide?”

  The kid nodded.

  “I’m Tony Ceola.” He stuck out his hand, and the kid shook it, mumbling his own name. “What brought you here, Petry?”

  “A neighbor reported a suspicious vehicle parked in front of the house. Said the place has been empty for years. Kids use it to party, but they usually don’t stick around during the day.”

  Tony was surprised anyone had bothered. This was a rough neighborhood in a tough part of town, the houses so shabby that it was hard to tell the abandoned ones from those still occupied. It wasn’t an area where it paid to show too much interest in what went on.

  “So you came over and . . .?”

  “Walked up on the porch. The door was partly open. I called out, but no one answered, and I was about to go inside when I smelled . . .” His face took on that puke-sick tinge again, and his Adam’s apple bobbed. “Anyway, I decided to look in the window instead, and I saw . . .” He finished with a limp gesture.

  “You didn’t go inside?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Have you touched anything inside or out?”

  “No.”

  “Talked to anyone? Seen anyone?”

  Petry shook his head.

  “Okay. If we need anything else, we know where to find you. You can clear and go 10-8.”

  Grateful, the kid pushed away from the car, got in, and drove away. A white van pulled into the space he’d vacated and the driver jumped out. Pete Wolenska was an investigator for the M.E.’s office—tall, lanky, with a cast-iron stomach and thick glasses that gave him a bug-eyed look. He’d made it as far as the second year of medical school before deciding the doctor route wasn’t the way he wanted to go. He’d taken a temporary job with the medical examiner while he figured out what he did want, and had been there ever since. “Hey, Chee. We got three D.B.s?”

  “Yeah. Small, medium, and super-jumbo size.”

  “Shit.” Wolenska pulled a gurney from the back of the van, tossed three body bags and a tackle box on top of it, then started pushing it toward the driveway. “I should’ve let the geek take this one. I’ve already met my quota this month.”

  “The geek” was the M.E.’s newest investigator, and it was an apt description. The guy was short, scrawny, and personality-free. It was like the pot calling the kettle black, though, when Wolenska was nothing but a taller version himself.

  They hadn’t made it halfway up the drive when the crime-scene unit arrived. Tony would have preferred to let them all go inside while he started canvassing the neighborhood, but pronouncing the victims would take about ten seconds, CSU would take their pictures, and then it would be time to move the bodies. Everyone would be royally pissed if he was off chatting up the neighbors instead of helping.

  Wolenska left the gurney at the bottom of the steps, walked through the door, and stopped to sniff the air. “Yup, they’re dead.”

  “And it took you six years of college to figure that out?” Simmons called from the living room.

  “Fuck you.”

  “Sorry, Wo, you’re not my type,” Simmons retorted.

  “Who is?” That came from a crime-scene tech, a cute little blonde named Marla.

  As Tony stepped into the room once more, the stench struck him anew, making his throat tighten and his breathing go shallow. He forced himself to ignore it and began filling out evidence tags while Wolenska bent over the first body.

  “Definitely dead. Twenty-four hours maybe, no more than forty-eight. You want the hands bagged, Chee? The way he’s starting to putrefy, we might not get anything, but it’s your call.”

  “Yeah, bag ’em.” The M.E. could test for gunshot residue, which would tell them if any of the victims had fired a weapon recently. These three had liked guns and their ability to frighten, intimidate, and destroy.

  “Grover Washington, Mykle Moore, and Walter Banks.” Marla stood beside Tony and took the evidence tags from him to slap on the paper bags Wolenska was securing over the victims’ hands. “Can you think of three more deserving victims?”

  “Not offhand.” He filled out the last set of tags— case number, victim’s name, left hand, right hand—then glanced at Marla. She barely reached five-feet-six on her tiptoes and hardly cast a shadow in the bright June sun, but she was tough, tenacious, dedicated, and smart as hell—all the qualities he admired in a woman. Too bad it took more than good times and great sex to satisfy her.

  “When are you and What’s-his-name getting married?”

  “His name is Richard.”

  “Oh, yeah. Dickless.”

  “The wedding’s at the end of the month.” She tilted her head. “Why? You want to make a better offer?”

  “We couldn’t agree on what constituted ‘better’ two years ago. What makes you think anything’s changed?”

  “Because in the future you’ll be thinking of me longingly as the one who got away.” Neither her tone nor manner changed as she gestured around the room. “What do you want pictures of?” she asked, then chimed in with him. “Everything.”

  “Smart-ass,” he added.

  “Anything in particular you want us to pay attention to?”

  “Footprints in the dust over there. I think the shooter was hiding in the corner and surprised them. Here’re the pictures I took. I’ll stop by and pick them up later.” He handed over the film. “Also, check the window frames for prints. If he was waiting inside, he might have looked out to watch for them.”

  “Our vigilante’s been a busy boy,” the other crime-scene tech, Flint, remarked. “How many does this make?”

  “Six,” Wolenska said at the same time Tony answered, “Seven.”

  Silence settled in the room as everyone looked at him. It was no secret that he was the only one in the department who thought Bryan Hayes’s murder was also the vigilante’s handiwork. Hayes had been the fourth to die, killed the week before, but beyond his involvement in the drug trade, the circumstances were completely different. The others had been killed in locations like this—empty buildings, abandoned houses—while Hayes had died at home in midtown Tulsa. Calling cards had been left with the other bodies, but not with Hayes’s. The others had been shot with a large caliber weapon while Hayes’s wounds had come from a .22. The other crime scenes were short on evidence, while they had a witness and a possible partial tag number in the Hayes case.

  Despite all that, Tony’s instincts said Hayes was another of the vigilante’s kills, even if everyone from the chief on down thought he was wrong.

  With a shrug, Flint turned away and focused his camera on Mykle Moore. “At the rate he’s going, no one’s gonna need you Homicide guys anymore.”

  “Speak for yourself.” Marla made sure everyone saw the big smile and wink she gave Tony. “I have a lot of needs.”

  Tony ignored the laughter and lewd comments from the other guys as he studie
d the scene. Who was their shooter, and why had he taken to murdering drug dealers in the past two months? The obvious theory was also the popular one—that the killer was cleaning up the streets, taking care of the scum the police couldn’t keep under control. Most cops thought he’d lost someone he loved to drugs, probably a kid, maybe a sibling, and was using his grief to ensure it didn’t happen to anyone else. Some thought he was a fanatic, out to punish wrongdoers, obeying orders sent straight from God—an idea that tied in neatly with the cards calling for repentance.

  Tony didn’t buy either theory. Each time one of these lowlifes died, his share of the drug business went up for grabs. There had been no shortage of drugs coming through Tulsa in the past two months, so someone was doing the grabbing. There was a lot of money in the drug trade, and it stood to reason that people would kill to get a share of those profits.

  The room was too small for five people—eight, if he counted the bodies. Tony removed his suit coat, loosened his tie, pulled on a pair of gloves, and went to work in the least crowded area, the rubbish heap in the corner.

  They didn’t need every piece of trash, but anything that appeared to have been dumped fairly recently would go to the lab. If his guess was right and the killer had been waiting for his victims to arrive, he might have brought food, had a drink, or smoked a cigarette to pass the time. Tony discarded the condoms—it wasn’t likely the killer had brought a woman, as well—and the wrappers and cans coated with dust, leaving him with a small pile. He was tagging the last item when Wolenska spoke.

  “Did everyone have their Wheaties this morning? ’Cause it’s time to gift wrap Chubs here and carry him outside.”

  Everyone groaned except Marla, who flashed a simpering smile. “I’m a girl. I don’t lift bodies.”

  “Bullshit,” Flint retorted. “I’ve seen you bench-press your own weight.”

  Marla turned. “Honey, I can bench-press your weight, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna help.”

  “Isn’t it enough we have to look at him and smell him? Now you want us to touch him, too?” Simmons scowled as he laid his clipboard aside and removed his jacket. “Man, getting ol’ Grover here into a body bag is gonna be like stuffing five pounds of sausage into a one-pound casing. Three-hundred-plus pounds of dead weight. Shit.”

  Just getting Washington onto his side took a hell of a lot of work, and they had to hold him there while Marla retrieved the pistol holstered in the small of his back. With a maximum of effort and obscene complaints, they got the body bagged, zipped, and outside to the gurney. It was sweaty, messy work, and for a time they just stood there, recovering from the exertion.

  “Man, why couldn’t our vigilante be a firebug, too?” Simmons grumbled from his seat on the top step. “This place would have gone up in a flash, and we still would’ve known who the bodies were without having to go through any of this hassle. I didn’t sign up for this kind of shit.”

  “What did you sign up for?” Wolenska asked. “The shiny badge, the cool gun, and all the doughnuts you could eat?”

  “Hey, at least I don’t spend my days with dead bodies like you do.”

  “No, just your nights.”

  Turning out the insults, Tony fixed his gaze on the scene ahead. Farther down the block, houses lined both sides of the street, but here there was a wide stretch of overgrown grass, separated from another street that curved past beyond a steel guardrail. The killer could have parked around the bend and walked back to the house. Easy access and, in the middle of the night, the neighbors wouldn’t notice a thing.

  In the middle of the night in an area like this, it didn’t pay for the neighbors to notice a parade of elephants dancing down the block.

  “In this hot weather, you really should wear short sleeves.” While the others continued their banter, Marla came to stand beside him, touching a dark smear of blood on his sleeve with her gloved hand.

  “I’d rather have Grover’s blood on my sleeve than on my skin. I’m not sure there’s a disinfectant powerful enough to make me feel clean again. Besides, I don’t like short-sleeved dress shirts.”

  “And you don’t mind sweating.”

  Not for the right reasons. In their months together, the reasons had always been right.

  “Will you come to my wedding?”

  “Will I get to kiss the bride?”

  “You don’t have to come to the wedding for that.”

  He studied her for a moment—sleek blond hair, golden tan, blue eyes, and full mouth. Excellent for smart talk and kissing and other, more carnal activities. Did she look like a woman in love, a flirt, a tease, or someone seriously looking for a little premarital fun? Fine detective that he was, he didn’t have a clue.

  “You know, Marla, if I thought you were serious, I’d—”

  “What?” she asked. “Take me up on it? Or run the other way?”

  “Maybe both.” But that wasn’t true. He didn’t have a lot of rules—no, that wasn’t true, either. He did, and not screwing around with married or almost-married women was at the top of the list.

  She opened her mouth to reply, but Wolenska interrupted. “Hey, you two, break it up. I can’t leave Chubs sitting here or he’ll pop before I get him to the lab. Let’s get the others so I can get out of here and get them under refrigeration.”

  Gesturing for Marla to lead, Tony climbed the steps and headed back inside the house. Bagging the other two corpses was easy. Any one of them, even Marla, could have carried Moore without help, and Banks wasn’t much heavier. Once the bodies were gone, the smell of decay dissipated a little, but it was still enough to give Tony a headache. Spending the next two hours talking to neighbors who didn’t know nothin’ ’bout no killin’s didn’t help any.

  After getting the door slammed in their faces for the fifth time in as many houses, Simmons gave Tony a sour smile. “Sometimes this job is just too much fun, isn’t it?”

  William Davis stood at the window in his second-floor study and gazed across the vast expanse of lawn to the west. Riverside Drive fronted the property that had been in his family since the early years of Oklahoma’s oil boom. A few yards from the far side of the street flowed the Arkansas River, and occupying the narrow strip of land in between was the city’s River Parks. Though the temperature didn’t reflect the fact that the sun was setting, there was no shortage of people in the park—joggers, cyclists, walkers, neighbors taking a stroll with their dogs and parents doing the same with their children. With its amphitheater, open grassy spaces, and the Pedestrian Bridge—an old railroad trestle bridge converted when the tracks were rerouted— the park was a popular spot.

  Shifting his gaze from the peaceful scene, William studied the cigar he’d taken from the inlaid teak box on his desk. There was no better way to relax on a quiet evening than with a Cuban and a glass of fine old cognac. The cognac waited on the desk, but the cigar remained in its protective wrapper. It had been a week since he’d lit up and savored the rich aroma and the smooth, sweet flavor. A week marred by doctors’ visits, tests, and—yes, he could admit it, now that it was over—fear.

  The physical had been purely routine, nothing more than official confirmation of what he already knew—that he was as healthy as a man half his age. But instead of the usual banter—I’d wish all my patients were this healthy, but then I’d go broke—the doctor might as well have lapsed into a foreign language. Hilar nodes, parenchyma, adenoma, sarcoidosis . . .

  The fear had been foreign, as well. In all his life, William had never been afraid of anything . . . except dying as his father had, slowly, the pain excruciating, the cancer destroying his lungs and his body before taking his life.

  But this afternoon, after yet another round of tests, the doctor had given him a clean bill of health. The thickening in his lungs was likely due to aging, smoking, or everyday pollution. It wasn’t cancer. He’d even given the okay for an occasional cigar.

  It wasn’t cancer. Amazing how powerful those three words were.

  But it wa
s a wake-up call. He had let important issues slide, had put off certain goals. He didn’t have unlimited time. He was sixty-two years old. Old enough to be thinking about retirement. To start planning for the future. To deal with any problems that might interfere with those plans.

  He heard the sound of a board creaking, a hand turning the doorknob, moments before he saw movement reflected in the window. Footsteps crossed the room, louder on the marble tile than the faded Aubusson rug. They stopped on the opposite side of the desk he’d brought back from a long-ago trip to France, but still he waited, one minute, two, before turning.

  Damon Long was his right-hand man—thirty-five years old, a few inches under six feet, muscular, and solidly built. Presently his hair was blond, his eyes blue. Dressed in the proper clothes, he could pass as the most well-bred and aristocratic of men. In truth, he came from the toughest, most lawless neighborhood in a tough and lawless town south of the Mexican border. The only child of a crack-addicted whore, he’d had an extensive criminal record by the time he’d gone to work for William. It had been a profitable twenty years for both of them.

  Crossing to the desk, William returned the cigar to its box, then settled into the luxurious leather chair before speaking. “She’ll be here on Thursday. Is everything ready?”

  Damon shifted his weight but didn’t move toward the twin chairs that fronted the desk. He wouldn’t do so without an invitation, and William chose not to offer one yet.

  “Christine has a cleaning crew coming in tomorrow morning. The utilities are on, and the phone company is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon.”

  “What about the package?”

  “She’ll deliver it herself.”

  Christine Evans was the owner of a small but successful real-estate agency. She specialized in top-dollar properties, like his own, and understood the value of discretion. Her price was hefty, but her services, according to Damon, were worth it.

  “Can she be trusted not to open it?”