by James Hayman
‘Yes. The Hôtel du Midi in Montpellier.’
‘When he was staying there?’
‘November last year. I’m not sure of the exact dates. I left my diary behind in France.’
McCabe took out his cell and hit Tom Tasco’s number.
‘Detective Tasco.’
‘Tom? It’s Mike McCabe. I’m in the car, and I can’t talk long. Do me a favor and check if Philip Spencer stayed at the Hôtel du Midi in Montpellier, France, spelled M-O-N-T-P-E-L-L-I-E-R, last November. If so, try to get the exact dates he was there. Maybe the local gendarmes will cooperate and check it out. If not, go through Interpol.’
‘What the hell was he doing in France?’ asked Tasco.
‘Can’t talk about that now. See if you can get any background. Where he flew from and to. Airline and flight number. Anything else that seems pertinent.’
‘Gotcha.’
McCabe hung up and turned back to Sophie. ‘You said you’d performed three of these operations including the one, when? Last Wednesday?’
‘Yes. In the afternoon.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘No. The way it works is I arrive in Boston a day before the surgery. I’m picked up at Logan by a driver and taken to a hotel. A different hotel each time. This time it was a Ramada Inn near Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I check in –’
‘Using your real name?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who makes the reservation?’
‘I do. Phillipe calls me and tells me to book a flight and gives me the name of a hotel. He also gives me the name of a car service. I book them as well.’
‘Who pays?’
‘I do. With my Visa card.’
‘Okay, so you checked into the Ramada Inn on what day? Tuesday?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘It’s the same each time. I stay in my room. My meals are sent up. A man calls. Not Phillipe. It’s a voice I don’t know. This time I was told to be ready by five o’clock on Wednesday morning. I was picked up and taken to the surgery site.’
‘That’s the phrase he used? Surgery site? Not hospital? Not OR?’
‘The man said surgery site.’
‘Who picked you up?’
‘A driver. I was made to wear a blindfold the whole time we drove until I entered the building.’
‘Could you see anything at all?’
‘No.’
‘How long did you drive?’
‘About four hours.’
Four hours. Maximum radius from Portsmouth about two hundred and fifty miles, give or take. That covered a lot of territory. He needed more to go on. ‘Try to think back,’ he said. ‘I want you to close your eyes and, in your mind, put yourself back in that car. Can you do that?’
She looked at him, not sure where he was leading. ‘Yes. I can try.’ She closed her eyes.
‘Describe the trip for me as best you can remember from the time you started off.’
‘I got in the car. The driver closed the door and got in himself. He closed his door. We drove out of the hotel parking lot.’
‘Did you turn left or right?’
She thought about that for a moment. ‘Left. Then we drove a little way, a minute or two. Stopped and waited for a moment.’
A stop sign, thought McCabe. Or a traffic light. ‘While you were stopped, could you hear cars passing in front of you?’
‘Yes, but only in one direction, left to right.’ Her eyes were still closed. She was doing well. ‘Then we turned right and joined the flow of traffic. We drove for a little while, went around a curve and then onto a big road. The driver accelerated fast as we went onto it. A motorway, I think it must have been. I could hear us passing cars and trucks to our right. Sometimes they passed us to our left. We drove on that road for a long way.’
I-95, McCabe thought. The guy was driving carefully. Center lane. Not too slow. Not too fast. Probably doing sixty-five. Smart. Why attract attention? ‘Were you still on the big road when the sun came up? That would’ve been around six fifteen or so. You would have been driving about forty-five minutes. Could you feel its warmth on your face?’
Again she thought before speaking. ‘Yes.’
‘On your left side or right side?’
‘Right side. I hadn’t thought about that before. We must have been traveling north. It got warmer as we went along.’
He wondered about the tolls. ‘Did the driver slow down or stop at all while you were on the big road? Like for a tollbooth?’
‘Yes. I think he must have had a bowl of coins on the seat next to him. I could hear them jingling just as we slowed. Then he opened his window. I could hear it go down and feel the air on my face as we slowed to a stop. I suppose he threw the coins in a basket. Then we accelerated fast again.’
Exact change lane. Made sense. No E-ZPass records. No toll takers to notice a woman in a blindfold.
‘How long did you stay on the fast road, the motorway?’
‘Several hours. I can’t be sure of the time.’
‘How many times did you go through a toll? Where you could hear the change rattle?’
‘Three times.’
McCabe thought about the pattern of tollbooths along the Maine Turnpike. ‘After the third toll – this is important – did you start going fast again like on a motorway, or was it more like you were on smaller roads? You know, stops, turns, stuff like that.’
‘We stayed on the motorway only a little longer, maybe five minutes.’
McCabe thought about that and guessed they’d stayed on 95 and probably gotten off around Augusta.
‘How much longer did you drive after you left the motorway?’
‘A while. More than an hour. Maybe two. We seemed to be going pretty fast with some stops. A two-lane road, I think. I could hear the whooshing sound of traffic coming the other way. Also, several times the driver pulled out suddenly to pass, accelerated fast, and pulled back in suddenly. The last few miles felt like a poorly maintained road. With many bumps.’
A couple of hours on secondary roads from Augusta. Max of what? Seventy-five or eighty miles. Progressively smaller roads at the end. That narrowed things down a bit. ‘Any sense from the position of the sun or anything else what direction you were traveling in?’
‘No.’
‘At the end of the journey, when you got out of the car, think back to what your senses told you. Put yourself back in that place. Sound. Smell. The feel of the ground under your feet.’
Sophie rummaged in her bag for another cigarette. She lit it and inhaled deeply. She considered his question, her eyes open. ‘I think we were in a wooded area. I could smell pine trees. The ground was soft.’
‘Could you smell the sea? Or hear seagulls? Or other birds?’
‘No. I don’t think so. As I was led toward the building, we were climbing up a rocky area. I tripped once or twice. He held me up. When we got to the building, he opened a door. Just inside the door we went down three rather long flights of stairs. Thirteen steps each. I was careful to count them because I still couldn’t see. He held my arm and told me when we reached the last step.’
Three times thirteen. Thirty-nine. Thirty-nine steps down from the ground level. Thirty-nine steps? Another deliberate movie reference, this time to an early Hitchcock classic? Or was he just being silly? Flights of stairs typically had thirteen steps. Okay. Thirty-nine steps down to what? A basement? An underground surgical center? Somewhere in the woods. With an operating room, a recovery room, dressing rooms. Maybe a prison for the victims.
Sophie began remembering again. ‘I was led to a small room, no bigger than a closet, really.’
‘How do you know it was small?’
‘That’s where I finally took off the mask. I was directed to change into a set of scrubs. I was told to put on a surgical mask and cap before leaving the OR. Then I scrubbed up. There was a sink and antiseptic soap in
the room. I didn’t see the others until we were all in the OR.’
‘Could you see the surgeon’s face?’
‘No. Not really. He entered the room wearing a surgical mask and goggles. So did the assistant surgeon and the anesthetist. Everybody else wore standard surgical masks at all times. We used no names. Each of us was assigned a code name, which was used in the OR. Mine was Catwalk.’
‘Any significance to the name?’
‘None that I’m aware of.’
‘How many people in the room?’
‘Six. The surgeon. An assistant. A nurse-anesthetist. Me. Two other nurses. A very small team for a transplant. I wasn’t sure we’d be able to handle it, but the surgeon was very skilled.’
‘Did you talk to the others?’
‘Only to communicate what was necessary during the operations. No names were used. We kept our masks on until we left the building. We were told this was for our own protection.’
‘It was the same team each time?’
‘No. One of the nurses changed.’
McCabe considered the size of the team for a moment. That made it a fairly wide conspiracy. A lot of people involved. A lot of possible leaks.
‘The team – men or women?’
‘Both surgeons were male. The nurse-anesthetist was female. One of the other nurses was a man, one a woman.’
‘You said one was replaced.’
‘A female nurse replaced a female.’
‘How could you tell there was a change if you were all wearing masks?’
‘The new one was shorter, fatter. The voice was different.’
‘Was Spencer one of the doctors?’
‘I don’t know. He might have been. Right size. Hard to tell about the voice. He didn’t say much.’
‘How about the other surgeon?’
‘He seemed more slender. Slightly shorter.’
‘You were paid a hundred thousand euros for each operation?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who were the patients?’
‘They were all nameless old men. I assume they were all rich.’
They sat silently for a while, Sophie smoking, McCabe thinking.
29
Tuesday. 10:00 P.M.
The bullet from the sniper’s rifle traversed the five hundred yards separating it from its intended target faster than the speed of sound. For this reason, McCabe saw the windshield fracture and blood explode from Sophie Gauthier’s left arm a millisecond before he heard the crack of the shot. Expecting a second shot, he pushed Sophie down onto the seat and started the Bird’s engine. He slammed the gear lever into first, spun the wheel hard left, and floored the accelerator, making the Bird’s ancient innards howl with pain. It occurred to him Sophie was alive only because she’d leaned to the right to flick a cigarette out the window just as the shooter pulled the trigger. Chain-smoking, for once, saved a life.
McCabe pushed the big Ford V8 for all it was worth, and the Bird shot forward. On a straightaway, nothing less than a Corvette was likely to catch them. On a winding road in the dark, escape was less certain. In the rearview, McCabe saw headlights flick on several hundred yards behind, then start moving fast in their direction. The shooter was following. He must’ve seen that he missed and wanted to finish the kill. Still, it’d been a hell of a shot, even with a night-vision scope. McCabe glanced at Sophie. The bullet had struck an artery, and blood was spurting out of her upper arm in a pulsing arc.
Without saying a word, Sophie pressed her right thumb against a pressure point above the wound. The blood that had been coming out in spurts now flowed more slowly, but not slowly enough. She was lying down on the seat. She’d slipped her head onto his lap. She held her arm across her body. She was shivering, probably with shock, perhaps with cold. He leaned over and switched on the heater. He needed to get her to a hospital. He could drive her there. The bullet had punched a hole in the windshield and there was some spidering of the glass, but he could see through it well enough. The problem was that if he was driving he couldn’t apply pressure to the wound, and she’d soon be too weak to do it herself. If he couldn’t help, she’d bleed to death.
Option two was to lose the shooter, pull over, and call for help. He had no way to communicate from the Bird other than his cell. Steering with one hand, he punched in 911 with the other. ‘Officer needs backup. This is Detective Sergeant Michael McCabe, Portland PD. I’m being chased and shot at by a sniper with wheels,’ he shouted. ‘I need an ambulance. I have a wounded civilian in my car. Gunshot wound. Arterial bleeding.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Taylorville Road heading toward Bucks Mill. Meet me there. I’m going to try to lose the bad guy.’
For the moment at least, they were on their own. ‘Try to focus,’ he said. ‘I figure our friend’s about twenty seconds behind us, maybe less. If I can lose him, I’ll be able to help you. In a minute I’ll be turning fast into a side road. I’m killing the lights before we turn. We’ll be moving fast, so brace yourself as best you can. When we make the turn, I’ll pull up on the shoulder to the left. I’ll get out of the car. When I do, stay low. Keep applying pressure to the wound. I’ll help as soon as I can. Do you understand what we’re doing?’
‘Yes.’ Her voice was a guttural whisper. She looked pale. Precious seconds passed. The turn was coming up fast. There were some trees that would provide cover. He glanced in the rearview. The shooter was still following, maybe two hundred yards behind. ‘We’re turning now,’ he said.
McCabe killed the lights, braked, downshifted, and turned hard, almost blind, to the left. The Bird skidded into a ninety-degree-plus turn. McCabe adjusted, hit the accelerator, narrowly missed a tree to his left, and shot forward onto the side road. He pulled onto the left shoulder and killed the engine.
As he jumped from the Bird, he saw the blackened silhouette of an SUV roar past the turnoff. The car’s lights disappeared for a moment. If they kept going, McCabe could help Sophie. If not, he had to be ready for the worst. He opened the Bird’s trunk and pulled out the Mossberg. Through the trees he saw the lights of the SUV stopping and then reversing. The shooter was coming back. Sophie was losing strength, blood oozing out. The SUV backed past the crossroads, turned left, and surged forward.
McCabe shouldered the powerful Mossberg and stepped onto the road. The SUV’s headlights were closing fast, aiming right for him. He pumped and fired, pumped and fired again. Four shots filled with 12-gauge buckshot slammed straight into the SUV’s front end, splintering the windshield, shredding both front tires and shattering the headlights. He leapt out of the way. The crippled SUV swerved first left, then right, finally crashing head-on into a big maple on the opposite side of the road. The air bag deployed. Coolant poured from a hundred holes in its radiator.
McCabe rushed the vehicle. ‘Out. No weapon. Now.’
It was the far side door that burst open. Using the vehicle and the tree to shield him, a man leapt from the passenger side. He was clutching a scoped rifle. He vaulted a low stone wall and ran into the field. Holding his rifle high, he followed a zigzag pattern. Even in the dark, from the rear McCabe could tell it wasn’t Philip Spencer. This man was a couple of inches shorter, with a shaved head and weight lifter’s shoulders. He was moving fast. By the time McCabe could reach the wall and aim, the man was beyond the fifty or so yards that marked the effective range of the Mossberg. McCabe fired off a couple of rounds anyway. The man ignored them and kept running, disappearing into the darkness.
McCabe rushed back to the Bird, laid the Mossberg on the ground by the driver’s door, and climbed in. Raising Sophie’s head, he slipped under it and lowered it into his lap. He pushed the fingers of his right hand against her inner arm above the wound, replacing her fingers, allowing her other arm to rest, applying direct pressure, compressing the brachial artery against the humerus. This effectively stopped the bleeding. Sophie was conscious but pale even in the faint light of a moon-filled night. Her skin felt cool and clammy. He hit r
edial on his cell and told them to hurry.
Following the sniper across the field wasn’t an option. Armed with a shotgun and a pistol, he’d be up against a skilled shooter with a sniper rifle and night-vision scope. More important, Sophie would bleed to death. All he could do was wait for help and hope the shooter didn’t double back to finish them off.
McCabe leaned down and slipped his .45 out of the seat holster. He laid it on Sophie’s chest, where he could reach it in a hurry. He flicked off the safety. Not that it would do them any good. It just made him feel better.
Sophie was still shivering. Without releasing pressure to the wound, he managed to slip off his light summer jacket and drape it over her. They sat there like that for a while covered in drying blood, Sophie drifting in and out of consciousness. He remembered reading it was important to keep a wound victim conscious. So he started singing an old bar song loudly, over and over, his unmusical voice booming out into the night:
She’s got freckles on her butt,
She is nice, she is nice.
And when she’s in my arms, it’s paradise.
All the sailors give her chase
’Cause they love her naval base.
She’s got freckles on her butt,
She is nice.
He sang the words over and over. All the while his mind was on the sniper. A shaved head with broad shoulders. Was he doubling back to finish his night’s work? McCabe imagined himself lit in the green of the man’s night-vison scope, crosshairs steady on his skinny Irish face, an easy target, even distorted by the fractured windshield. He imagined the man squeezing the trigger. The bullet traversing the distance between them. His head exploding. McCabe scrunched down lower and rolled up the driver’s side window.
The rational side of his brain knew the man was more likely running away. He’d have to know his bullet hadn’t killed Sophie immediately. Have to know McCabe would call for help. He probably saw Sophie move as he fired, and saw the bullet strike her arm, not her head. Yet he couldn’t know how badly hurt she was. She might have died from loss of blood. Or he might have simply nicked her and she was lying low to stay out of sight. McCabe kept singing.