A shotgun lay beside the body. It also had Ford’s prints. And there was a minute oil stain on Anselmo’s shirttail — a stain of gun oil. No other weapons in the room.
The second report went into great detail about the warehouse, with its six bodies and cocaine processing laboratory. Murray flipped through it uninterestedly.
He settled on the report concerning Freeman McNally’s house. One body in the living room. Fifty-one-year-old white male named Vinnie Pioche. Shot three times, 9-mm slugs, two that entered the back and one that penetrated his right side, apparently while he was lying down. According to the coroner Pioche had been dead when the third shot struck him — no bleeding.
Then this ringer: the pistol that fired the slugs that killed Pioche was in the weapons room and contained no prints.
The report carefully detailed where each of eighty 9-mm rounds had struck in the lower floor of the house. Refrigerator, TV, bathroom — it was quite a list. There were diagrams and Murray referred to them several times as he read.
Cars outside the warehouse. One of them contained stains of human blood on the backseat. The blood matched Pioche’s. The ignition key for this car had been recovered from Harrison Ford’s pocket.
Now Freddy Murray went back to the report on the warehouse. He looked again at the coroner’s detail of Freeman McNally’s injuries. Scrotum partially ripped from the body, severe injury to the right testicle incurred just before death stopped the heart. Death caused by a bullet through the heart, a shot fired into his back from about four feet away.
Ruben McNally — half strangled and severely beaten, but the cause of death was internal bleeding in the brain caused when his nose bone was shoved into the cranial cavity.
Billy Enright …
Freddy sat back in his chair and whistled softly. Jesus. That was the only word that described it. Jesus!
He was still making notes an hour later when Tom Hooper came into the office and sagged into a seat.
“McNally?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you think?” Hooper asked as he took off his shoes.
“Well,” Freddy said slowly as he watched Hooper knead his right foot. “I’m struck by the many points of similarity between the McNally mess and the massacre over at Teal’s.”
Hooper didn’t look up. “Bullshit,” he said.
“No, I mean it, Tom.”
Hooper dropped his right foot and worked some on his left. Then he put them both flat on the floor and looked at Freddy. “No.”
“I admit there are a lot of dissimilarities too, but it really looks to me like another gang wipeout. We are just damned lucky our undercover officer survived with only one bullet in the back.”
Hooper pointed at the pile of reports. “Look at the one for Ford,” he said. “Read me the analysis of the clothes the emergency room people took off him.”
Freddy took his time. He found the passage, perused it, then said, “Okay, there’s some blood, three different types, some brain tissue—”
“Now where in hell do you suppose he got that on him?”
“Tom, in places in that warehouse it was on the walls and in puddles on the floor. He rubbed against it somewhere.”
Hooper put on his shoes and carefully tied the laces. That chore completed, he said, “You and I both know that Ford went into that warehouse and gunned those men. He beat one to death with his bare hands. He went there to do it. No other reason.”
“Now you listen a minute, Tom. We got a ton of facts here but no story. A clever man could string all these facts together to tell any story he wanted to tell. I guarantee you that the lawyer Harrison Ford ends up with will be a damn clever man. If he gets indicted, even I am going to contribute to his legal defense fund.”
Hooper said nothing.
Murray charged on. “You think it isn’t going to come out that the bureau sent him in undercover? Ha! The defense is going to make us out to be a bunch of incompetent paper pushers who couldn’t prosecute Freeman McNally and are now trying to hang our own undercover operative. My God, Tom! The next hundred people we try to recruit to go undercover are going to laugh in our faces!”
“Cops and FBI agents gotta obey the law too. Harrison went over the edge.” The irritation was plain in Hooper’s voice. “Why are we having this conversation?”
“Ford’s mistake was not being in bed sound asleep when Tony Anselmo came calling with his sawed-off shotgun. Then he could have just died in his sleep and none of this mess would have happened.”
“I know he killed Anselmo in self-defense,” Hooper growled. “Nobody’s suggesting charging him for that.”
“You think that fight at the warehouse wasn’t self-defense? My God, Tom. He’s got a bullet in the back.”
Hooper got out of his chair and went over to the window. He ran his fingers through his hair. “So what are you suggesting?”
“I think Harrison Ford has done enough for his country. I’m suggesting we close the file on the McNally case and let Ford go back to Evansville.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
Hooper stood looking out the window.
“We should have busted McNally in September,” Freddy said, more to himself than to his boss.
Tom Hooper had spent twenty-six years in the FBI. He thought about those years now and the various tough choices he had had to make along the way. Freddy irritated him with all this crap about September. They had handled this case right all the way, and circumstances beyond everyone’s control had intervened. His thoughts turned to Ford — the man was not a good undercover agent. Oh, sure, he could think on his feet and he was brave as a bull, but he had too much imagination. He thought too damn much.
He stood at the window tallying Ford’s sins. Goddamn that asshole, anyway. “Ford was planning to gun McNally and all the rest of them, then go back to his room at Quantico. He was going to call us and claim he and Anselmo had struggled and he had been knocked out. That’s why he changed guns at McNally’s house. We’ve got no proof that he killed Pioche. None! It’s plausible that Anselmo killed him before he went to kill Ford. If Ford hadn’t been wounded at the warehouse we might not have been able to place him there. All we would have had is a bunch of corpses.”
“You think?” Freddy said behind him.
“I know! I can read that man’s mind. He’s no cop! He thinks like a goddamn jarhead. Attack! Always attack.”
Hooper turned around. Freddy was perusing the lab reports.
“You listening to me?” he asked Freddy.
“I heard.”
“Ford and McNally. They’re just alike. Screw the law! The law is for those other guys, all those guys who can’t get away with breaking it. They both think like that!”
Freddy folded the reports and stacked them neatly. He took his time with it and examined the pile to make sure it was perfectly aligned, with the files in proper numerical sequence. When he finished he spoke slowly, without looking at Hooper:
“McNally’s out of business. Permanently. That, I thought, was our ultimate goal all along. And the government isn’t going to have to spend a nickel trying him. No board and room in a heated cell for the rest of his life at the taxpayers’ expense. No appeals. No claims of racial bigotry or oppression. It’s all over.”
He picked up the stack of files and held it out for Hooper. “Close the case,” he said.
Just then the intercom buzzed. “Yes,” Freddy said into the box.
“There’s a call for Mr. Hooper from New Mexico. Another identification of that artist’s drawing of the assassin.”
“Tell her I’ll take it in my office,” Hooper told Freddy. He picked up the files and put them under his arm.