by Randall Wood
“Randall,” he managed to get out through his cottonmouth.
“You awake, Jack?” Deacon asked.
“I am now, sir. We were at it all night. I’m afraid I don’t have anything new to report.”
“Forget that for now. Turn on CNN.”
Jack winced at that, as he reached for the remote and pushed buttons until he had the right channel.
“Am I looking for what I think I am?” Jack asked.
“You got it. About a half hour ago someone put a bullet in the back of Leonard Ping’s head as he walked up the steps of the courthouse. Locals found the shooter’s position over seven-hundred yards away in a building being remodeled. Also, a copy of the letter was left on the table he used. Our boy isn’t wasting time, is he?”
“One a week for three weeks, roughly. I’d say he’s moving to a schedule. I’m getting the story, now.” They both fell silent as Jack watched the report.
Damn, Jack thought. This guy is good. The shot of Ping lying on the steps was brief, but Jack could see the shot had been center-mass, right in the head. He watched the cops around him and saw the grins. That was not going to go over well. The press would use that image for the next week. A quick shot of the street with the building in the distance followed, until the camera panned back to the reporter giving her account. Jack hit the mute button.
“I guess we’re on our way there, sir. Let me get everybody up and I’ll call you from the plane. Do you have a copy of the letter yet?”
“Documents is going over it right now, Jack, but their initial impression is that it’s the same guy. No word from the papers yet, but we have people at the last three locations waiting. I have the crew here putting it all in a fax for you. You want it to the plane?”
“Yeah, that will speed things up.” Jack shook the pitcher of coffee on the table. Empty. “Do you have a decision on the press statement?”
“I tried, Jack, but they chose to hold the information for now. I’ve been told that you have clearance to give press statements, but don’t reveal the true copy of the letter.” Deacon braced for the response he expected.
“Sir, that’s going to do nothing but blow up in our faces. If the public learns we held information which could have prevented copiers, they will crucify us. We need to release it now—not later.”
“I hear what you’re saying, Jack, but the Attorney General stuck his head in, and you know the Director can’t convince him to leave out the politics. We’ll keep trying on this end. Just be careful when you make any statements.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll call from the plane.”
“Okay, Jack.” Deacon hung up.
Jack looked at the phone for a long time. They were letting him make the statements to the press. If it backfired, he would be their fall guy in the court of public debate. As if it wasn’t bad enough that he had a case to solve which was moving faster than they could follow, now he was also supposed to get the work done and play politics at the same time? More importantly, how could he cover his ass in case the walls came down all around him? He thought about this before he picked up the phone and placed another call.
• • •
Danny was talking to a security guard at the MGM and getting nowhere. The man had a good job. The MGM hired people with experience and then sent them to paramedic school on completion of their training program. If you were going to have a heart attack, a casino in Las Vegas was the place to have it. The man actually smiled at Danny as he turned down his questions.
Danny finally nodded his head in defeat and turned away. He was considering trying the guards at Caesar’s when his phone rang. He flipped it open and put it to his ear without looking at the screen.
“Danny Drake.”
“Mr. Drake. You know who this is? We spoke at the airport yesterday.”
“Yes.”
“I need you to get some information out for me.”
“I’m listening.”
Jack explained quickly and Danny scribbled furiously in his notebook to keep up.
“I got it. That all?”
“For now. I’m leaving for California in a few minutes. We’ll talk more when I can, Danny.”
“California? Anywhere in particular?”
“Turn on your TV. I’ll see you there.” The connection broke.
What the hell? Danny wondered. He looked around for the nearest bar and made for it. He walked around its perimeter, looking at the overhead screens until he saw one showing CNN. He only had to wait a few minutes before he saw the story. He made for his room to pack.
The state of Massachusetts holds 10,232 inmates in its prisons.
Approximately 6,855 are repeat offenders.
—TWENTY-ONE—
“Is there an age limit to work for the Bureau?” Sydney asked.
Everyone on the plane looked up from their various piles of paper to give her a quizzical look.
“High or low?” Larry asked.
“Low.”
“I don’t care,” Larry answered with a grin. He was obviously closer to the high end of the scale.
“Why do you ask?” Jack inquired.
“I’m looking at this disc of the crime scene that the chief’s kid did for us. It’s amazing. He has a full three-dimensional graphic of the entire area. I can zoom in and out and change my point of view to whatever I like. I can click on a piece of debris, and the file on that will pop up. There’s a catalog of trace and print evidence. Another of weather reports from the day before the crime to the day of publication. A manufacturer’s blueprint of the car with an exploded isometric. The autopsy report on each body. Another graphic of the bomb before it blew. There’s even an animated video option, but it looks like he ran out of time before he could complete it. I know he looks like he’s twelve, but can we hire him?”
Larry grinned again and looked at Jack. “What do ya say, Jack? Kid’s good, and something tells me he would really enjoy working for Sydney.” The chief’s son had clearly been smitten with her. They had all enjoyed the way he followed her around every chance he had.
“It was certainly entertaining having him around,” Jack played along. “May have to get a note from his mother, though.”
“Very funny, you two,” Sydney said, “but I’m serious. This is some really good work and I think we should grab him before somebody else does.”
“If you’re serious,” Jack said, “we can start a background check on him. I wonder what he did that compelled his exit from MIT? Anyway, let’s worry about that later. Right now, we need to look at anything new from this shooting. Who wants to read the psych profiles?”
“I will.”
Everyone looked at Dave. Always the quiet one. Like most, Dave had never placed much value in the profiles that the FBI Behavioral Science Department produced. Despite what was seen on TV, the profiles had often been way off the mark when the person was caught, or so gray they were not worth looking at. The Maryland sniper case had been so far off that it was an embarrassment to the Bureau. It had proclaimed the shooter to be a white male with a mental defect. This had been broadcast on all the networks in hope of the public aiding in the capture. It had turned out to be the opposite: a black father-son team with a well thought out plan. Since then, all cases had been provided with two or even three separate profiles, in the place of one collaborative effort. While this assured that more theories were heard, they were often very different from one another, which frustrated those who had to read them.
“Are you sure, Dave?” Jack was hesitant. Dave was his best detail guy, and Jack didn’t want him to waste his time if he wasn’t going to approach it seriously.
“It’s about time I took a turn, Jack,” Dave replied. I’ll give it a fair shake.”
“Fine. Just keep your report short, and don’t let it interfere with the other stuff on your plate. Everyone else, please give it a quick look. Take it to the bathroom with you or something.” Jack passed the report to Larry, who passed it to Dave. “What do we have that
’s new?”
“Local P.D. says they may have a witness. A secretary in an adjacent building saw a man leaving the area through an alley behind the building. White male, middle age, six-foot, two-hundred twenty, wearing worker’s clothing and a tool belt. Also a hard hat and sunglasses. Not much, but they’re working on a sketch. She spoke briefly with him. Good English, not enough to hear an accent.”
“Okay, let’s get that sketch as soon as possible, and have it digitized and enhanced by the computer guys. Tell them to run all the options on it, too.”
“Options?” Larry asked.
“The new facial software they have lets you view the face from any angle,” Sydney said, “change hair and eye color, add beards, glasses . . . pretty much anything you can think of.”
“Well, guess I should read the newsletter more often.”
Jack smiled for Larry’s benefit. Larry had admitted to not understanding half of what was in the newsletter the FBI published on any of its new capabilities. Jack kept Larry for his experience and ability to see the whole picture. Something no gadget could replace.
“How about the locals?” Jack asked, to move them along and save Larry some embarrassment.
“They have all the guys who were present waiting for us. They’ve already been interviewed by the local office. Not much to tell. Ping went down along with one of theirs. Then they heard the shot. That was it. They did find the location quickly. People in the building definitely heard it. They got locked out of the stairwell. I’m not too sure about how. They said something about pennies.”
“Pennies, like in one cent coins?” Sydney asked.
“That’s what they said.” Larry looked at his notes. “I don’t get it, either.”
“I guess we’ll find out when we get there.”
“One other thing. We have camera footage from the two stations that were there. Nothing we haven’t seen already on the tube, but we can send it to be analyzed.”
They sat in silence for a minute while Jack thought about their options. They had plenty of manpower on hand. How long did he want to spend on scene? If they stayed too long, his people would tend to get behind on the case; trying to solve one murder before moving to the next. He had locals for that. It was his job to catch this guy, and in order to do that he had to think about where the shooter was going, and not where he had been. He couldn’t afford to get bogged down in California.
“Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do. I want to be in and out of there quickly. Focus on what will allow us to learn more about this guy and where he may be going next. Larry, do your interviews, but focus on description and voice. Sydney, get all the forensic information and send it to the labs immediately. Gather it up, and we’ll go over it afterward. Dave, don’t waste time on the victim. I’m sure we can all agree on why he was chosen. Same with Profit. Let that all go for now. I want to know who this guy is, and what pissed him off. That will tell us where he might be heading to next. That’s our job: find him and stop him before he does it again. Any questions?”
He got a lot of heads bobbing, but no questions. Good. He glanced at the map on the wall. The little plane symbol was right over southern California. The plane started to lose altitude in preparation for landing.
• • •
An hour later and Jack was looking out the window from the shooter’s position. It brought back memories of a favorite book. Day of the Jackal was a popular read back in sniper school. He could see Sydney in the distance, behind the yellow tape surrounding the courthouse steps. He turned back into the room.
Every surface in the room had a coating of volcanic ash in a vain attempt to find a print. Several had been lifted, but none that failed to match those of the work crew. Several smudges and palm prints were found with no fingerprints to go with them. The locals had ventured that the shooter had taped his fingers. Jack had them send everything anyway.
He stopped and looked through the stack of photos again. They had been taken by the first team to arrive and showed several footprints in the dust. The foreman had reported that his crew had not been on that floor for at least a week. The prints had to belong to the shooter. He put them in order and saw that the man had entered and had walked around no more than necessary. The prints were minimal. He had gone to the window and the trash chute, had moved a few items, and that had been all. A very cool customer.
Jack was moving toward the trash chute when he heard a ringing bell. He changed directions to step into the hallway in search of the noise. A young tech saw him and spoke.
“Bells,” she explained. “He taped them over every door.”
“Thanks,” Jack replied, before moving past her to the stairwell and descending a flight. He found a team with a Sawzall about to attack a door.
“Hold up a second,” commanded the senior tech as Jack approached.
“You’re sawing the door?”
“See for yourself,” the man offered. “Your shooter put pennies in the door over the latch until the space was full and then glued the whole mess in place. If we pry it out, we may lose any fibers stuck in the glue.”
Jack knelt down to see the mess. It was very crude, but it could be done quietly and quickly, and that was what had been needed. Jack stepped back and waved the tech to continue. The buzz of the Sawzall filled the stairwell as Jack descended to the bottom, where he found the FBI special agent in charge of the local office looking at the emergency exit. They had met at the front door earlier.
“Looks like your guy used a magnet to keep the latch from closing—simple, but effective. The witness met him right over there, just down the alley.” He pointed. Jack nodded and left the men to their work. He walked to the end of the alley and paused at the sidewalk. He looked both ways up and down the street and ignored the curious onlookers looking at him across the yellow tape. He was too interested in the escape route the shooter had taken.
“What are you thinking?” a voice asked.
He turned to see the agent standing behind him. A man of about fifty, he had been in San Diego for many years. A former bank robbery agent, who had worked his way up the ladder, and had the reputation of a serious law enforcement officer.
“Trying to get in the man’s head,” Jack answered. “Not much luck so far.”
“Always go back to motive. That’s my advice.”
“Yeah, well, despite the letters and what we have so far, all we have is a lot of theory.”
“Well, my team is impressed—I might even call it admiration. One of the SWAT guys said it was an impossible shot. What do you think?”
“Seven hundred meters? Long, but not impossible. Don’t get me wrong; this guy is very, very good. Where did he learn to do it? That’s my main question.”
“You’re checking with the military?”
“Yeah; should have a list soon.”
“Could be just what you need,” the man ventured.
Jack looked down the busy street to the courthouse.
“Maybe.”
• • •
Danny let the shutter snap three more times before he stopped the camera. Jack was talking to another agent in the mouth of the alley. He’d been tempted to call him when his plane hit the ground, but the unspoken rule was that Jack called him—not the other way around. Danny would be patient. Jack needed him for something more. He wasn’t sure what it was yet, but time would tell.
He slung the camera over his shoulder and turned to walk to the courthouse. He would get some shots of the blood on the steps to please his editor. He checked his phone as he walked to ensure he had coverage. No messages yet.
The state of Michigan holds 49,358 inmates in its prisons.
Approximately 33,069 are repeat offenders.
—TWENTY-TWO—
Sam sat in the bedroom he had shared with his wife. Like his daughter’s room, it had changed very little. His wife’s shoes lay piled on the closet’s floor, below all her hanging clothes. Earrings and a few watches competed for space among the various i
tems on the bureau. One of her many purses still hung on the doorknob. The master bathroom was no different. Cosmetics and hair care products dominated every available space and surface. Even the shower held remnants of her with a puffball sponge. At least three types of conditioner took up the one small shelf.
Sam could not bring himself to remove any of it. He rarely, if ever, slept here. Falling asleep without her was only half as hard as waking up with her absence. So the bed stayed made, and the clutter collected dust. Paul would venture in to search for laundry, but he made his visits quickly and never when Sam was around.
As he looked around the room, he dwelled on items: a picture; the movie stubs from their last trip to the theater sitting on a pile of loose change; the decorative pillows on the bed that he had never liked, but had obediently moved to the chair and back with every night’s sleep; her alarm clock which he would still reset after every power outage; the book on dogs she had been reading was still on the nightstand. It was her latest idea: a dog for Katie. Sam had thought Katie was still too young, but his wife had insisted, stating that she’d been Katie’s age when her father had gotten her and Paul a dog. She had been very happy having the constant companion to play with.
They had debated the breed and size for weeks. He was first tempted to buy the largest dog he could, picturing it dragging Katie from the water and tearing the legs off imagined pedophiles. He wouldn’t care if it ate more than he did, as long as it kept his little girl safe. His wife had adopted a more levelheaded approach. After some time and debate, they had narrowed it down to two choices: Sam leaning toward the German shepherd, while she was promoting a border collie. He had been ready to give in that night, but while she was in the shower he had sneaked a look in the book to see what breed she was studying up on: German Shepherd. He had decided to hold out for another day and see if he could win.