Eye of Vengeance

by Jonathon King

  “Yeah, it serves its purposes.”

  Hargrave took a sip of the whiskey and said, “Cameron tells me that some other reporter from your paper contacted him this evening for update information on the Michaels shooting.”

  Nick took a silent few seconds to pour two fingers of whiskey into his own glass, but remained quiet.

  “In our business we’d call that being bounced off the case,” Hargrave said, this time turning to look at Nick. “Are you off the case, Mr. Mullins?”

  “I haven’t been told that officially, but since I quit this afternoon, it’s probably a good guess.”

  This time Hargrave simply held his glass near his face, letting the blue-green light blend with the deep red of the whiskey to form a color that seemed oddly cartoonish.

  “Just because I’m not doing the story for the Daily News doesn’t mean I’m not doing it as a freelancer,” Nick quickly added.

  “They’re going to call you a material witness,” Hargrave said, again with the official tone.

  “My ass,” Nick said, though it would only take a minute of sober thought to know it was true.

  “Oh, what fun it would be to see a journalist up there on the stand like the rest of us when the real mud wrestling begins,” Hargrave said, now actually grinning, no attempt to cover.

  Nick let him enjoy his shot, for thirty seconds, then scraped his own chair forward. “The names, Detective. What did you come up with?”

  Hargrave put his glass down. The grin was gone.

  “Of the names we decided on from your stories, four are dead, seven are still in prison and two are out on probation, but I still haven’t been able to contact their parole officers to find out where they are. Last record had one guy over on the Tampa side and the other up near Pensacola.”

  Nick didn’t have to say the obvious: that this information didn’t bring them any closer than they’d been.

  “How about Canfield? Any luck talking with the SWAT guys?”

  “No one’s seen Redman but you,” Hargrave said, emphasizing the you. “Far as they know, he’s off the face of the earth. Canfield even checked with the managers of the firing range where Redman practically lived when he was with the unit. His parents are dead, of natural causes, mind you, up north somewhere, and he doesn’t have any siblings. The lieutenant said he wasn’t surprised no one had seen him. He said Redman had become isolated even before he left for Iraq.”

  “The goddamn editorials,” Nick said.

  “Yeah, I read up on those,” Hargrave said.

  Nick eyed him over the rim of his glass, reminding himself to never underestimate this guy.

  “So what’s his reasoning? What’s Redman’s motive for putting ex-cons in his target zone?” Nick said, thinking out loud even if the thinking was a bit clouded.

  “Could be a combination,” Hargrave said. “Public humiliation, death of his partner, post-traumatic stress from Iraq.”

  “Might even be enough to put the Secretary of State there,” Hargrave said. “She’s the one who sets policy, the one with the President’s ear when shit hits the fan over in the Middle East. He already killed the man who killed his partner, maybe he just considers this a job undone.”

  “Jesus, Detective, you’re siding with Fitzgerald now?” Nick said.

  Hargrave shook his head and blew out a long breath.

  “Now, there’s a fed with some major responsibility pushing on his sphincter,” Hargrave continued. “But the secretary is coming to town and it would be a hell of a venue to make a statement.”

  Nick took another drink, like he thought the booze was going to make things clearer. “OK, so you’re following the theory that you can never say never, but I can’t see it. I don’t see a man like Redman targeting his own country’s leaders. That’s not who he’s after.”

  Hargrave matched Nick’s feat of emptying his glass and sat back like he had given up and was just staring into the pool. Then he said in a clear, matter-of-fact voice, “How about Mr. Walker, Nick?”

  He let the question and the name hang in the night air, not looking to see the reaction in Nick’s face like he would if it were a question posed to some arrestee in the interview room.

  “What were Redman’s words again, Nick? Do you a favor?” he said just as clearly. “This one’s just for you? How about killing the man who put your family in the ground?”

  Nick wondered if the detective could hear the sound of his heart, impossible to ignore with the way it had started thumping in his ears. The detective had not trusted his explanation for the last name on the list. Hell, he might have recognized it right off. Why wouldn’t he have been briefed on Nick’s background before they gave the reporter such access? Why wouldn’t he see immediately that a name that starts with W fits perfectly with the alphabetizing of Redman’s own victims list?

  “Yeah,” Nick finally said out over the glow of the pool. “How about him?”

  Chapter 28

  Michael Redman was working the rooftops in the predawn hours of his last week in Florida. No operation he’d worked had ever come off so smoothly. Targets identified. Intel right on the mark. Clean shots. Perfect regress and four confirmed kills. This one should be no different.

  He had done reconnaissance on the target, just like the others. He’d mapped out the probable movements and used the sight lines from the street to pick two spots that his experience told him would work.

  Today he was up top, checking out the closer of the two. He’d used the height of a Dumpster behind the building to gain access to the second floor and then jimmied a simple half-moon lock on the sash to get into a stairwell. The door to the roof opened from the inside and he used a piece of gravel from the tarred deck itself to wedge it open. If anything happened, there would be no evidence left behind. At the east roof edge he raised the night-vision goggles to his face and scoped the front of the target building. Firing from here would be nearly a six-hundred-yard shot. His optimum distance. Easily done. Sure and clean.

  He knew that this detective Hargrave, Mr. This Is a Democracy, would be scratching his head after this one, trying to figure out how it came out of left field at him. But such was the way of statement killings. There was a purpose to them. In Iraq they were the only targets he had considered true.

  He recalled the recruiter, the Iraqi who intelligence knew was luring or intimidating Sunni men and boys into the insurgency. You watched him and he watched you during the days in the marketplace. You standing with your rifle slung across your arm while smiling dumbly at the people. The recruiter acting like he was just a local, moving about, slipping into conversations among groups on the corner or in lines where the real citizens waited for U.N. food handouts. When he left, you never followed him. Instead you followed the young men he’d talked to and then had an Iraqi CI follow them to a meeting place in one of the neighborhoods. Then you set up a spot not unlike this, and when the recruiter stepped outside … smoke check.

  When word spread that the recruiter himself was not safe, those who had been willing to join him would quickly change their choice of the insurgent life. Statement killing. Mullins would understand this, Redman thought. Mullins had done his job as a spotter and deserved to be thanked and rewarded. Redman was sure he would understand without explanation because after this last shot, Redman would be gone.

  A blinking of small lights and a far-off bing, bing, bing of bells pulled his attention to the north. Only in the early morning quiet would the sound carry this far and he watched with the scope as the Seventeenth Street Causeway Bridge dropped its barricades in preparation to open. Redman thought of his exit route. He had calculated traffic for early morning. It would be heavy, but most of it coming east on the bridge to the oceanfront while he would be going west. But he had not figured in the possibility of a bridge opening. He took one more look down the firing line and decided he would check the shooting nest farther back. An eight-hundred-yard shot would be technically more difficult, but he had done it before. He pulled
back from the roof edge and went through the door, kicking away the blocking stone as he went.

  Nick was up at eight. After Hargrave left, he’d drunk a quart of water with his two aspirin, and the preemptive strike against a hangover that had worked for years in the past worked again.

  The fact that he’d not learned to clean up after himself, however, resulted in a partially empty whiskey bottle and two glasses on the patio table. He gathered and hid the evidence in the garage. While he made coffee for himself, Elsa came out to make breakfast and did not say good morning to him, just looked with a coolly raised eyebrow at the kitchen clock. When Carly got up and sat down at her place to eat, she picked up on the frigid atmosphere and whispered to her father, “Is Elsa mad because we made fun of her last night at Pictionary?”

  “No, sweetheart. It’s a woman thing,” Nick said. He knew Elsa had probably seen the bottle and the glasses before he moved them, and immediately regretted the remark. When Carly left for school, Nick followed her out to the driveway and hugged her a second longer than usual before waving her off to the bus stop.

  On his way back he picked up the newspaper, wrestled it out of the plastic bag and only scanned the front page centerpiece story about the OAS meeting. When he flipped the paper over he was met by the headline:

  VIGILANTE SNIPER

  GUNMAN USING NEWSPAPER’S

  COVERAGE TO SELECT TARGETS

  The story ran two columns below the front-page fold and Nick stood reading it in the middle of his driveway.

  By Joseph P. Binder, Staff Writer

  A marauding killer, armed with a powerful but silent sniper rifle, is hunting ex-convicts and criminals in South Florida and sources believe he is using the Daily News to select the worst of the worst in his deadly spree. According to this newspaper’s research, five men, each killed by a single bullet to the brain, were prominent subjects of Daily News stories that documented their heinous crimes at the time they wreaked havoc on citizens and loved ones and may be the victims of the serial sniper.

  The story listed the names of Chambliss, Crossly, Ferris, Kerner and Michaels as the suspected targets of the sniper along with brief descriptions of their crimes and their recent deaths. The fact that the former M.E. and Kerner were not killed in South Florida was conveniently ignored to help boost the local angle. When he opened the paper and continued to read, Nick felt a sickness in his stomach and knew it had nothing to do with whiskey.

  Broward sheriff’s homicide detective Maurice Hargrave, who earlier said the dead convicts had been “gunned down in the streets” by the vigilante, is heading the investigation and has been using the Daily News’ database to collect information on the sniper’s next target, according to computer research and documents.

  Hargrave was not available for comment yesterday, but sources say ballistics experts have matched the deadly bullets from the most recent killings as coming from the same high-powered rifle commonly used by highly trained snipers.

  “Shit,” Nick said out loud. Had they somehow tracked the e-mail from Lori to Hargrave’s private e-mail account? They easily could have snatched the printouts off Nick’s desk and made assumptions about the link between the five victims. A trickle of sweat caught enough gravity to cause it to slip down his back and Nick realized he was still standing on the concrete in front of his house in the direct morning sunlight. He went inside and sat at his kitchen table, laying the newspaper out in front of him.

  They’d cribbed the partial quote from Hargrave off Nick’s earlier story. But where the hell did they get the ballistics match? He scanned the rest of the piece—not a single named source other than a boilerplate quote from Joel Cameron saying “the investigation is continuing.” Nick was trying to re-create his earlier stories on the first two shootings and recalled writing the vigilante angle and the bullet match in his notes but then deleting them when he put the pieces together. But as he knew, that wouldn’t stop them. As he feared, they’d used their unrestricted eavesdropping in the editorial computer system. Cops would need a court order to listen in to a citizen’s conversations or read that person’s mail. But in a newspaper’s offices, management could electronically watch a reporter write with impunity. Work product, they would argue. It belongs to us. You’re just an employee.

  Nick went back to the front page to reread the story. Every scrap of information was his, no matter how they’d juiced it up and delivered it. Poor Joe Binder just followed orders and had his byline slapped on it. Then Nick noticed he’d missed the “Interactive news” box on his first reading. Below the line that said “continued on 12A” was a shadow boxed teaser inviting readers to go to the newspaper’s Web page and vote in a poll question: Do you think the vigilante sniper is wrong for targeting former killers? Yes or No? Jesus, Nick thought. I gotta get out of this business.

  Chapter 29

  The traffic on 1-95 seemed incredibly heavy. Nick wasn’t used to being on the interstate so close to the lunch hour. When he pulled off onto the Broward Boulevard exit he had a decision to make: Turn right and drive to the Sheriff’s Office headquarters and talk with Hargrave, or turn left and go to the newspaper office to clear out his personal stuff and take the chance of letting his short fuse get him to the jail-house in the back of a cruiser.

  What the hell, he turned left.

  When he parked in the employee lot, Nick was surprised that his staff I.D. still worked and automatically raised the barricade arm. He grinned at the little victory and purposely left the badge in his car in case they asked him to turn it in. But as he got off the elevator on the tenth floor, Jim, the security guard, was as vigilant as ever.

  “Good afternoon, Nick,” he said, looking at Nick’s shirtfront. “Got your I.D. with you?”

  Nick and Jim had greeted each other nearly five days a week for the past eight years. The guard had commented on Nick’s stories, had even congratulated him when he’d bought a new car three years ago. Yet after 9/11 all employees had to wear a badge identifying themselves. The first time he’d misplaced his I.D. and Jim made him sign in, Nick joked about joining al-Qaeda after eight years as a staff reporter, but the look the guard had given him was scary.

  This morning Nick just shook his head and signed in.

  “Try to find it, Nick. Or you’ll have to buy a new one,” the guard said.

  Nick looked up at him. “How did you know my name without it, Jim?” he said and walked away.

  Down in the newsroom the usual din was running. Most of the reporters were out on their beats. But folks on the daytime copy desk were in their nose-to-the-grindstone mode. While he worked his way through the back of the maze, Nick kept his eyes down, trying to be low-profile. Get in, get your stuff and leave. Simple as that. He ducked into a back room where they stored supplies and picked out an empty cardboard box and then made it to his desk.

  The computer he’d used for the last several years was gone. Even the monitor. The only thing left was a pattern of dust where it once sat. When he tried the drawers of his desk, they’d been locked. He tried his key. No go, as he had figured. Even the belly drawer, which only held pencils and paper clips and stale breath mints, was locked. On the desktop the documents that Lori had delivered to his desk were predictably gone, used no doubt to put together this morning’s story. His personal dictionary, a thesaurus and a copy of Bernstein’s The Careful Writer were still stacked on one corner. There was a clay sculpture of a green-and-blue dog that his oldest daughter, by three minutes, had made and given to him on a Father’s Day several years ago. The family photo, showing the four of them, was lying face down, apparently knocked over during the hasty removal of his computer. Nick could feel eyes on him when he picked it up and, refusing to be emotional, he slid it into the bottom of the box and then piled the rest of his stuff in after. On his way out Nick avoided Joe Binder’s desk, even though he could see the back of the reporter’s head, bent low as if he were studying some newly installed hieroglyphics on his keyboard. Carrying the box, he took t
he back way to the research center and when Lori saw him she got up from her terminal and walked straight to him. Her eyes were red-rimmed when she stepped up to the counter.

  “I’m sorry, Nick. Really, I tried to call you and—”

  Nick reached out and touched her hand. “It’s OK, Lori. I shouldn’t have put you in a bad position. It’s all on me. Please. You’re the best,” he said and then hugged her to him, longer than he needed to, but not as long as he wanted to. “I’ll call you. I’d like to see you, you know, off campus.”

  He smiled at the joke as he walked away, somewhat mystified that a moment that should have been sad had somehow left a lightness in his head.

  Chapter 30

  They met under the shade of a bottlebrush tree, gathered at a picnic table that was set up behind the county’s fire and paramedics warehouse. It was a short walk for Canfield and Hargrave. Nick needed only to take the short drive from the newspaper he’d passed on earlier.

  The meeting place was suggested by the detective after Nick called him on his cell. It was eighty degrees in the shade and the lieutenant in uniform was sweating twice as much as the two in plain clothes.

  “It’s out of the pattern. It’s out of the sequence of logic. And you two are out of your minds,” Canfield was saying to both of them but looking directly at Hargrave, who, for the first time since Nick had laid eyes on him, was appearing unsure.

  “What, you’re going to call this ex-con Walker and tell him some sniper might be targeting him because his good friend Mr. Mullins has an angel of death killing the subjects of his stories?