“That’s good,” said Nick. “That’ll give us a place to start winnowing. All right, what I’m seeing is someone paying ‘them’ back for their treason. To feel that all these years later, he had to be there all those years before. Kids today don’t care much about Vietnam; most of them don’t even know what it was. But whoever he is has borne a grudge for a long time. And now, maybe realizing that he himself has limited time left, he’s decided to get the rifle out of mothballs, put on his camos, and go off into the boonies on one last stalk and kill.”
“Makes sense,” said one of the others and politely no one bothered to point out that this interpretation violated the premise by which the Bureau would run the investigation. That was because all of them were now attached to it, and all of them would prosper if it prospered.
“All right,” said Nick, “then as Ron says, let’s find our best people and jump-start this thing by testing the theory. Let’s eliminate the large category of possibles for what we think is a smaller category of probables. I’m thinking former Vietnam snipers. Marines, Army, maybe CIA; they had a lot of paramilitary operators over there. I think it was called SOG, their little commando unit. Did the Air Force have snipers?”
“They would have had air policemen sniper-trained for perimeter security. Also, the Navy always has a designated marksman shipboard for mine disposal. Guy hits ’em at long range, makes ’em go boom. Those are two off-the-wall possibilities. I don’t think the SEALS had a sniper program that early. They were more Delta cowboy gunfighters than precision takedown specialists.” That was Ron, always good on sniper stuff and hoping to become head of Precision Marksmanship, the FBI sniper training unit, at Quantico.
“I’m sure by noon tomorrow everyone on this investigation will be an expert on the arcana of military sniping, circa 1965 to ’75. Get ’ em going. Stay with ’em. I’ll be going to the autopsy tomorrow and I’m waiting to hear from forensics on the Greene bullet. I’m sure it’ll be another 168.”
Thus it was that the FBI, very early in the investigation, became aware of Carl Hitchcock.
Carl’s name actually arose almost simultaneously from two sources. The first was the sergeant in charge of training and special operations for the North Carolina State Police, their SWAT guy, in other words. He’d been reached at home by a young special agent in the major case working room of Task Force Sniper in the headquarters building in Washington. She was making inquiries on the subject of good law enforcement shots who’d recently displayed instability. The sergeant abjured knowledge of such, and the phone call was brusque, abrupt, and professional, and almost short. But-
“I hate to do this, young lady, but there is one name that comes up.”
“Yes sir,” said the agent.
“Carl Hitchcock.”
The young woman had no idea who that would be. She had no response.
“The name familiar?”
“No sir, can’t say it is.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Okay, then. For a time, Carl Hitchcock was the most famous sniper in America. Someone wrote a book about him on account of all the kills he got in Vietnam. Marine sniper, you know, in the boonies, hunting bad guys one at a time.”
“Yes sir,” said the investigator, writing the name down.
“He was known as the leading sniper with something like ninety-three or -four kills. He had magazine articles written about him, he had a book published, and for years he went around to gun shows and sold autographs, just like an old baseball player. There was talk of a movie, and a lot of smaller products, you know, an authorized poster, a special brand of ammo, some rifles that bore his name. Carl got a little action off each one.”
“He’s now in your area?”
“He retired down here in Jacksonville, like a lot of old marines do. It’s right outside Lejeune. He had a little house here. He liked to garden. His wife died a year or two back. But his health hasn’t been too good lately.”
“How do you know him?”
“He had a consulting business where he’d drop by and do some informal training days for police departments on their shooting programs. He helped our boys and was an exceptional coach. He made everyone shoot better and, more important, think better. He’d put a lot into snipercraft. He even had a license plate that read SNIPR- 1.”
He spelled it out for the young woman.
“And something’s going on with him?”
“Well, it gets dicey here. This is why I’m reluctant to share. But yeah, something. Something. Don’t know what. Carl’s not the sort of man who talks a lot about how he feels. He prides himself on not feeling a thing. But I could tell. His voice was dead on the phone. He canceled his visits. Just something and it depressed the hell out of him. Classical. Maybe just old age, the realization there were a lot more leaves on the ground than on the tree. It hits different people different ways. I don’t know.”
“So when was the last time you saw Carl Hitchcock?”
“A month ago. I’m just talking a feeling. Seemed lonely, I suppose.”
“Was he infirm?”
“He wasn’t able to play basketball, no, but for a gent close to seventy, he was spry enough. Walked with a limp, had pain from some burns, that sort of thing, but he got around all right.”
“Do you have an address?”
“Well, let me look it up for you. Would you want me to-”
“No sir,” said the young woman, who knew that a local gumshoe suddenly asking questions might be just what the doctor didn’t order. “I’m going to run this by my superiors and we will be back in touch soonest.”
“Ma’am, I hear that all the time when I work with feds, and ‘soonest’ is shorthand for ‘neverest.’ ”
“I apologize for that, sir, but I do mean ‘soonest’ this time.”
The young woman, excited, raced in to see the legendary Nick, who waved her into a chair while he finished a call.
And the young woman heard him say, “You spell that H-I-T-C-H-C-O-C-K, just like the director?”
Source number two was the police department of Hendrix, Arizona, whose chief Nick had just been on the phone with. The chief had said the following:
“This old gal sat in our lobby for six hours and I will say she got the runaround. But finally a detective came by to take her complaint and it turned out that her sister was a former beauty queen named Mavis O’Neill Hitchcock, of Jacksonville, North Carolina, which is a town just outside the big marine base at Camp Lejeune. Mavis died, but her husband was a combat-injured retiree named Carl Hitchcock, who had been famous for a while as the marines’ number one sniper in Vietnam. It was a good marriage. Both were old dogs, both had been around the block, and Mavis’s first husband, Howard, had also been a marine sergeant, and he and Carl had been friends. Anyhow, for a long time Carl was a kind of a god to the marines and to lots of law-enforcement officers and the like. It was a life he liked very much and he enjoyed talking to the young snipers and so forth. But about the time Mavis took sick, something went sour. Belly-up. Don’t know what. Now, the sister went out to Jacksonville as Mavis’s condition worsened, and she could tell that something wasn’t right with Carl. ‘Carl, what’s wrong?’ Carl wouldn’t say a word. Wasn’t a talking type; all the lonely time he spent in Vietnam probably cured him of a need to talk. He tells her he was the champion. But now it turns out he wasn’t the champion. There was another fellow, a few years earlier, killed more bad guys. ‘Why would you let a thing like that upset you?’ ‘I feel like I’ve been living a lie,’ Carl said. Anyhow, Mavis dies, Carl is all broken up, and the sister has to go back to Hendrix and her own life, but she tries to keep in touch. Several times she calls, he’s too drunk to talk. Sometimes he himself calls, drunk. One day he breaks a hip and that takes a hell of a lot out of him. Then he just stopped answering the phone. Now this, and she wonders, could Carl… It’s not like Carl… Carl was such a good, brave man, such a wonderful marine… but could Carl?”