White Star

by James Thayer

  "And the telltales told him that," the detective concluded.

  "Them and this scope. Take another look."

  Coates bent over the scope.

  Gray said, "By focusing the scope on the target and rotating the eyepiece a quarter to a half turn counterclockwise, a mirage will appear short of the target."

  "What kind of a mirage?" Coates asked.

  "It's the shimmer, the ascending waves you see over a hot road in the summer. Wind bends those waves in the direction of the air flow. On a clear day, like it was when De Sallo was killed, the mirage would have been pronounced."

  Coates fiddled with the eyepiece.

  Gray went on: "If the mirage is flowing from the right, which it would have been that day, the wind is coming from either one, two, three, four, or five o'clock. The rifleman would have turned the scope slowly to the right. As the scope turns the mirage will boil. When it does, the direction in which the scope is pointing is the direction from which the wind is blowing."

  "So the wind was coming from the rifleman's three o'clock, out of the south," Coates said. "And then how does he estimate how fast it's blowing?"

  "The flatter the mirage waves, the faster the wind. That day there would've been some undulation to the mirage, but not much, not with a twelve-mile-an-hour wind."

  Gray looked again at the NWS printout. "The humidity that day was close to one hundred percent. The rifleman would have also known that from the mirage waves. The thicker the waves, the more humid it is."

  "Why was the killer worried about humidity?" Coates asked.

  "As humidity increases, air density increases, which slows the bullet and lowers its point of impact. The marksman would have had to raise the rifle to compensate for the sticky weather."

  "So the rifleman would have made adjustments to his scope to account for the wind and humidity?"

  "There were undoubtedly elevation and windage turrets in the scope assembly. He would have presighted on the spot directly behind the microphones, but he wouldn't have had time to tune them when the target appeared. So he would have compensated for the breeze and humidity by aligning the barrel to his right."

  "How much off-target did he sight?" Coates asked.

  "In a twelve-mile-an-hour wind over twelve hundred fifty feet, about thirteen feet."

  Coates's chin came up. "Thirteen feet? I was standing about that distance to De Sallo's left when he was killed. And I was up six or eight courthouse steps from him."

  "That's right." Gray smiled thinly. "The killer probably had your head in his sights when he pulled the trigger."

  The detective was aghast. "What if the wind had suddenly calmed?"

  "Then you'd have been . . . " Gray paused. "What's the word I'm looking for?"

  "Tattooed."

  "That's it," Gray said.

  Coates blurted, "Maybe the killer was after me. I mean, maybe he knew nothing about wind and humidity. He just got my face in his crosshairs and pulled the trigger, hoping I'd go down."

  "He had no interest in you," Gray calmed him. "Just De Sallo. From everything we've seen—the setup of his firing position, the telltales, the shot—the guy was an artist."

  Coates laughed sharply. "Is that how you snipers think of yourselves? Artists?"

  "I don't think about it at all anymore," Gray said.

  "You shipped ninety-six guys to the big pachinko game in the sky and you don't think about it?" Coates cackled. "I can die happy now because I've heard everything."

  Coates padded around the room. After a moment he said with glee, "Well, lookee here." He pointed to the edge of the mattress covering the main window. A spent cartridge was balanced there.

  Gray bent for a closer look. "That's not the fatal bullet's cartridge."

  "We'll run a neutron activation analysis on it," Coates said.

  "You can tell by looking at it," Gray replied.

  "And we'll do an atomic absorption spectrophotometry on it. And we'll do a scanning electron microscopy/energy dispersive X-ray analysis on it."

  "Maybe you'll find the red paint on it by then." With a finger, Gray indicated a narrow ring of red just above the cartridge's extractor recess.

  Coates peered closely at the shell. "Looks like fingernail polish to me. What's it doing on a shell?"

  "It's the rifleman's sign. He carries an empty red shell and leaves it behind as a signature."

  "Like your paper star? Any chance you know the rifleman? A sniper who leaves a painted cartridge?"

  "Never heard of him," Gray answered. "But I've been out of the business awhile." Gray looked at his watch. "I'm going back to my kids. Maybe we'll get to the zoo yet today."

  Gray followed the police detective toward the door. Two crime-scene investigators entered the apartment. One wore a salt-and-pepper goatee and had a jeweler's loupe attached to his spectacles. He carried two carpenter's toolboxes. The second CSI detective had a bunched face and a leprous complexion. A camcorder hung from his shoulder.

  The bearded detective asked as he passed, "Smell anything, Coates?"

  "Not until just now." Coates pointed to the empty cartridge, and the investigator opened a box to pull a plastic sack from a roll.

  Detective Coates started down the hall. Gray followed. The superintendent had disappeared.

  Coates said, "Christ, a paper star and a red shell. Cases for an insane asylum somewhere. And from what I read in your service file, you came close."

  "Not that close," Gray said.

  "You got pretty damn close to the loony bin," Coates insisted.

  "Not that close." Gray felt like he was arguing with his son, John. "Give me a piece of paper from your notebook, will you, Pete?"

  The detective lifted a small spiral binder from his coat pocket, tore out a page, and passed it to Gray.

  Coates said, "Speaking professionally as a policeman, I can understand how giving the doughnut to ninety-six guys could put you on Valium by the truckload."

  Gray's hands worked rapidly. The slip of paper seemed to leap into life.

  When they reached the elevator, Gray handed the paper back to Coates. "A little souvenir."

  An instant passed before the detective recognized the white star in his palm. He recoiled and his hand flew to his side. The star fluttered to the floor.

  The elevator opened.

  "That scared the crap out of me, Owen," he said huskily.

  "I'm a sensitive type." Gray smiled thinly. "I don't like talk about the loony bin."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Faces flashed in the circle quickly, one after another like cards dealt onto a pile. Children's faces, laughing and whooping at the end of the school day, a cascade of faces as boys and girls walked down the school building's steps, faces falling into the ring, then out again, each face just a fleeting glimpse, inside the circle an instant, then out. To the top of the site post, then down and away.

  Red Army sniper scopes use a pointed aiming post rather than crosshairs. As the children descended the steps, one face after another slid down the aiming post, beaming smiles, gap-tooth grins, ponytails and ribbons, innocent eyes, shirts and pants and skirts of wild colors, all in animation, spilling into and out of the circular frame, all flowing down the aiming post.

  Hazel flecks on a green iris surrounding a flat black pupil. Frozen and unchanging, neither blinking nor altering distance to the front lens, the eye behind the telescope might have been part of the scope's optics. Even the pupil was still, neither expanding nor contracting. The eye was locked in position as firmly as the scope was fixed to the rifle. Colors and smiles flickered before it.

  Then a long swath of gray rippled down the circle. A pant leg belonging to an adult. Owen Gray's face dropped into the circle. And now the scope moved fractionally, keeping Gray's face atop the aiming post. Owen Gray. White Star. Only then did the eye blink, and only once. Tight black curls, a few lines around the eyes, pale skin, a wise smile, then lips moving soundlessly, Gray's face turned to speak to someone, the aiming post ju
st under his nose, following him smoothly. White Star. Once more the eye blinked.

  The circle slowed, and Owen Gray slid out of the ring. Next came a kaleidoscope of colors—green and red and yellow and blue, an exotic scarf wrapped around a woman's head. The aiming post came to rest below her nose. Her skin was brown and burnished. Her eyes were narrowed as she laughed. Bits of metal—a necklace—danced in the sunlight, tossing back shards of light. The circle lingered on her a moment, an image of whirling colors and glittering light. Then the ring found the boy with one arm accompanying Gray and the black woman as they moved east along the sidewalk.

  The aiming post returned to Gray, his head in profile as he walked east. Owen Gray.

  The circle went to black when the eyelid behind the scope slowly lowered and stayed closed. White Star.

  Gray met Pete Coates at the Columbus Park Gym at the edge of Chinatown. They had begun their workout skipping rope and had moved to a heavy bag. Gray wore lead-lined bag gloves. The detective held the bag from behind while Gray jabbed and crossed.

  Coates asked, "What's Frank Luca got you working on?"

  "He wasted little time," Gray answered from behind his fists. He was breathing heavily. "On returning to work Monday, he handed me sixteen files, all of them thin. A Mann Act, an interstate flight, an illegal pen-register, and the like."

  The bag bounced against Coates as he said, "Real piddlers."

  "The De Sallo prosecution took forty file cabinets and eight hundred megabytes of our mainframe. All my new cases wouldn't take a single cabinet drawer and a hand-held calculator."

  Early in the De Sallo investigation the detective had suggested that Gray join him at his gym for a workout. Gray had never heard of the place, and had expected the usual Nautilus equipment, stationary bicycles, Precor step machines, tiny chrome dumbbells, and all those unnaturally happy, muscled, spotless youths paid to urge him on.

  The Columbus Park Gym was over the Three Musketeers pawn-shop, up a narrow, squeaking flight of stairs to an ill-lit space that at the turn of the century had been a shirtwaist plant. A boxing ring filled most of the room. Everlast speed bags and heavy bags hung from frames on one wall and an assortment of Olympic free weights were along another.

  The gym was owned by Sam Owl, who was in his seventies. Owl opened and closed the gym every day and spent the entire time in between teaching boxing. He referred to himself as a fistic scientist. Owl had trained welterweight champion Marco Genaro and the lightweight champ Kid Raynes, and the old man knew more about boxing than any man in New York.

  The gym was last painted when Eisenhower was president. Paint chips and plaster regularly fell to the hardwood floor. All the equipment, from the bags to the ring ropes, was faded and frayed. The only bright spot was one wall decorated with a reproduction of Lord Byron's screen depicting battles for the English championship between Tom Johnson and Big Ben Brain in 1791, between Johnson and Daniel Mendoza in 1788, and many others. The floor-to-ceiling reproduction was painted by an artist in exchange for membership in the gym.

  Most of Sam Owl's clientele were club fighters with ring talents far superior to Gray or Coates's. That first day in the gym Gray had been ensnared by the rhythms of the workouts—the loud tattoos from the speed bags and jumping ropes, the scuffing of black shoes on the ring mats, and Sam Owl's incessant jabber at the boxers. Gray grew to love the scents of leather and sweat and the body ache after a workout with ropes and bags, followed by a three-round match. Gray began appearing at the club almost every noon with Coates. The prosecutor and the detective had invariably briefed each other on the De Sallo investigation during their workouts, talking through their mouthguards.

  Coates released the heavy bag and stepped up to a speed bag. Both men wore running trunks but no shirts. Coates's white terrycloth band on his forehead was dark with perspiration.

  Gray followed him to a nearby bag.

  The detective nodded at Gray's fists. "New gloves?"

  Gray's gloves were bright red Surefits rather than the brown Everlasts he usually wore. "Borrowed them from Sam. I misplaced mine. Or John took them to school. So tell me about the lab report."

  "You've got to admit," the detective said over the pounding of the bag, "there're some mighty interesting things in your personnel files. Coming to New York City after being raised in Nowhere, Idaho, for one." He pronounced it "Eye-Day-Ho."

  "Actually it was Hobart, Idaho." Gray's pattern on the bag included fists and elbows, all moving in a circular whir.

  "How'd you end up out here?"

  "After the service I got into NYU law school and met my wife there. She was from New York and loathed everywhere else, so I stayed. What about the lab report on the cartridges?"

  "You said a sniper has to have hunting or tracking experience." Coates's voice boomed over the staccato of the speed bags. "Where'd you pick up yours?"

  "My father owned a lodge north of Ketchum, a hunting lodge. He'd take hunters into the mountains to find deer and goats and, in the early days, cougars. I learned from him."

  "You a good tracker?"

  Gray paused in his workout to wipe his forehead with a towel that hung from the waistband of his shorts. "I was leading four-man parties into the mountains when I was thirteen years old. I'd be out there for a week, and we'd usually come back with game strapped to our mules. So you could say I was pretty good."

  "You had a tough couple of years after you got out of the Marines."

  Nearby old Sam Owl barked at a black middleweight who repeatedly threw left crosses at a heavy bag. Sam Owl's bifocals rested high on his head, and every time the fighter brought back his hook Owl tapped his elbow, reminding the fighter to keep his arm tight to protect his ribs.

  Gray began a new pattern on the bag, using fists and backhands. "I'm not the only person in history to have a little clinical depression. Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, for example."

  "But they both died, so maybe you're in worse shape than you thought." Coates chuckled, but Gray wouldn't join in. "The doctors didn't jolt you with electricity, did they?"

  "My therapy consisted of counseling and a few modest medications."

  The detective left the speed bag and walked to a rack of equipment on a wall. He donned a headguard and shoved his hands into sixteen-ounce gloves, brushing the Velcro straps across the wrists. Gray did the same. Coates left his spectacles on the wood bench. They bent through the ropes into the ring. They sparred lightly, bobbing and ducking, blocking most blows with their fists. Gray once determined that during the De Sallo investigation he and the detective had boxed over fifteen hundred rounds with each other. Their sparring had become choreography.

  "Your file said you tried to zonk yourself," Coates said, breathing heavily. He launched a right jab that grazed the pad over Gray's ear. "How long did that urge last?"

  Gray gestured, a nonresponse, letting Coates snap his head with another jab. "It never entered my drugged-up mind after that one time."

  "You think it was your sniping that caused the depression?" The detective stepped back to wipe sweat off his forehead with the back of a glove.

  "Hell, no." Gray's voice was too adamant. He sent a smooth combination at Coates, the left cross catching the detective in the ear. "I was a soldier."

  "Ever been back to the hospital?"

  "Not in ten years." Gray grinned baitingly, showing his mouthguard. "But—the strangest thing—all my dreams are still seen through crosshairs." Good effort, Gray thought. Making a small joke of the horror. He sounded fairly normal.

  Coates came straight at Gray, throwing four jabs, then a right straight, finding Gray's nose. "One of your victims was a woman, I read."

  "She was a Viet Cong major who had cut off the testicles of two Marines." Gray backstepped, his breath coming in gulps. "You could have done her, too, believe me. You know, Pete, you are out of character this morning, what with all this polite chat. No cracks about the loony bin."

  "Not from this lovable guy."

&n
bsp; "And this pleasant chat has a professional scent. You on the job right now?"

  Coates jabbed, but Gray slipped it and found Coates's chin with a right. The big gloves resembled pillows, and the blows had little effect.

  The detective said, "I'm trying to learn how a sniper thinks. You're the only one I've ever met. Thank God."

  Sam Owl and the middleweight stepped to the ring. The fighter said, "Look at those two white pussies, Sam. For Christ sake, looks like the Michelin Man versus the Pillsbury Doughboy."

  Without taking his eyes off Gray, Coates called, "I'll take care of you, Joe, once I'm done with this victim."

  The middleweight chortled. His name was Joe Leonard, one of Sam Owl's promising youngsters. He had eighteen professional wins, twelve by KO, and no losses, and was ranked eighth in the country by Ring magazine.

  Sam Owl said, "You two guys hurry up with your patty-cake. Bennie'll be here in a minute for Joe's workout and I want the ring free."

  Bennie Jones, Brooklyn Golden Gloves welterweight champion for three years, had won his first six pro fights and was Leonard's regular sparring partner.

  Owl led Leonard to a mat and lectured him about his crouch.

  Gray jabbed and said, "I've got a plea-change hearing this afternoon and I want to hear the results of the lab work. Are you done interrogating me?"

  Coates was huffing and dropping his guard, tiring. "Is our killer married, you think?"

  Gray spread his gloves. "How would I know?"

  "Is it possible for a woman to be married to a sniper?"

  "It wasn't possible for Cathryn to be married to me." Gray jabbed lightly, catching Coates's forehead. Perspiration gathered in the folds of Gray's tracheotomy scar and pooled in the other shallow scars on his arms. Other puncture scare—purple and deep—stitched both of Gray's legs.

  Leonard called, "Two marshmallows fighting, looks like."

  "Shut the hell up, Joe, or I'll arrest you for impersonating a fighter," Coates called, backpedaling. Sweat ran down his face in steady rivulets. "So what happened?"

  Gray moved in again, jabbing, finding Coates's chin twice with light jabs. "I was carrying too much freight. That was her term. Too much freight."