It was here that it first hit him. A strangeness, a premonition, his subconscious telling him to pay attention. He didn’t like it. He didn’t want to make a discovery, see a clue, a trace of some other hand. It made his own and everybody else’s life so complicated. He wasn’t sure he could face it.
But still, that feeling would not go away: what am I missing? He could feel he was missing something. Something was not right. It was so obvious that no one had seen it; he could feel it, sense it, almost touch it in the empty space of the Major Case working room. It was in the Xs. Each diagram of each body bore an X to designate an entry wound and an exit, four Xs doubled for a total of eight Xs, carrying the inadvertent meaning of pornography, but something else too, X the unknown, X the mystery. He stared at the Xs, advancing even to Mitch’s, and looked for a pattern in all eight… but then it was gone.
Feeling frustrated, he turned to poor Mitch Greene, least important of the four comrades in arms. Mitch would have called them “comrades in holes, see?” Always the joker, Mitch, even in death; from the first photo, he looked like he’d passed out and puked, sort of lolling on the chair behind the podium of the Cleveland-area Borders, with a spew of blackness from his slack jaw. You could look at it and almost laugh, calling up the memory of the man and his antics.
The back view, dead-on, told the truth, however. The lower part of his skull, directly behind the mouth, had been blown out, including, perfectly, the joinery between spine and brain. His head looked like a cantaloupe, with a broad scoop where the seeds and pulp had been dug free. Another great shot-didn’t disturb teeth or tongue but simply plowed through the back of the mouth into the lower cranial vault.
Bob shook his head and turned quickly to the remaining morgue photos and the autopsy report, finding nothing particularly illuminating about them. They showed the crater, scrubbed, and the doctor had colored in a little patch on the generic diagram to document the missing skull and brain matter, at the center of which, of course, was the X signifying exit. In that case too, the bullet had been recovered, this time from beyond the wall behind Mitch, where it had bored through into the Borders’ staff break room, touching no one and extinguishing its flight in the padding of an old sofa. Slightly deformed by its journey, it had turned out to be yet another Sierra 168-grain boat tail match hollow point, like the others, straight out of the Federal casing found in Carl’s van in the motel parking lot. Four shots, four kills, just like the book said. It was sniper warfare at its best.
Bob sat back. Pain in his head, pain in his hip, pain everywhere. Lord, he needed a drink; too bad that wasn’t in the cards. He’d essentially finished and he had nothing, not a goddamn thing. It was all as the experts from the Bureau said it was, tight as a drum. Carl had-
He hated it, but there it was. Carl had-
Well, Carl certainly hadn’t forgotten how to shoot. As pure warcraft, you had to say, great shooting.
He sat back in his chair even further, wishing to be far away. He ought to run through it again and again, just to make sure he hadn’t missed a thing. He didn’t think he had, but sometimes you do, and he wasn’t as sharp as he’d once been.
He snatched a sheet of paper from the yellow legal pad on which he’d been writing notes-there weren’t many, the only interesting one being “No beveling in Strong-Reilly; why BTHP bullets go through glass without beveling? Did shooter move gun? Why?”-which had led nowhere. He crumpled it, thought he’d go to the hotel early this evening, maybe take in a movie, have a nice booze-free meal, something like that. He pivoted in the chair and spotted a wastebasket fifteen feet away, and like nine out of ten American men would, he immediately brought the crumpled puff up in two hands, riding the line up the lapel of his jacket while he fumbled for the right touch, found it, and as his arms flowed upward, he arrived at the point of release, so he launched toward the basket, which had become an orange hoop ten feet above an arena’s wooden floor as the last shot had come to Bob Lee Swagger, shooting guard, with but a second left on the clock as the Razorbacks, down two (91-89) in the NCAA final against, who, oh yeah, Duke, they’re always good-
The gods of small, airborne, crumpled paper balls were kind. The thing rode a perfect parabola, floated on nurturing air currents and eddies, and at the apex began its descent. He swished it. Perfect. Three. The buzzer sounded, the crowd cheered, Arkansas wins. Dead center, didn’t even rustle the net.
His little guy drama come to an end, Bob turned back to-
Say now. Perfect shot. Couldn’t do that again in a million years. Or could he?
He quickly crumpled another paper ball, turned, and went through the same ritual. Arkansas still won, 92-91, and guard Bob Lee Swagger was still the nation’s hero, but this time on the descent the paper ball caught on the rim of the basket before falling in. He shot three more times, made two of them, but came nowhere near the freak dead-center perfection of the first shot.
What does that tell you? What does that tell you?
9
They were adults and professionals, so it was ridiculous that on those very few occasions when the director, jacket off, sleeves rolled up, tie askew, entered a room, everyone tensed. Yet it happened, always.
So when the great man strode into the Major Case working room, instant silence fell upon the workaday chatter, where Chandler-now called “Starling” after the Jodie Foster character in Silence of the Lambs because she was young, blond, and extremely attractive-sat with Ron Fields and a couple of other senior special agents assigned to Task Force Sniper, grousing good-naturedly about the “situation.”
The “situation” was that nothing much was happening except re-checks, double checks, and then triple checks. It was Starling’s responsibility to maintain the time line, to chronicle the input of the investigation, to make certain every piece of evidence was logged, its source, chain of custody, and disposition kept pristine, all lab reports properly annotated and summarized, all physical evidence cataloged. She had written the first, rough draft of the report that, polished and expanded, would announce the end of Task Force Sniper and the closing of its case.
But of late, even the hyperbusy Starling was not overworked; she’d even taken a full half hour for lunch, not the usual twelve minutes, and got home to her fiancé, a star photo analyst at a notable but unnameable government entity located in Langley, Virginia, before ten.
“It’s eerie,” she was saying. “I keep checking and checking-”
“Now, Starling,” said Fields, “this is the rhythm of a major investigation. It goes and goes and goes and then, poof, it goes away. You just have to get used to it. And you have to understand that one of the things the Bureau pays you for is to wait until a genius consultant speaks his piece.”
“Say, who is this guy anyway?” asked Bob Martin, assigned to the case as the best investigator from the Shaker Heights Police Department.
“He’s supposedly some big gun guy. Not just in theory but in operational terms too. It’s whispered by I-don’t-know-who that Nick may have put him undercover in Bristol and that’s how he brought down the Grumley crew.”