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
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.