Текст книги "Penance"
Автор книги: Dan O'Shea
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Lynch felt the hammer in the Beretta click down on an empty chamber. Instinctively, he thumbed the clip release, the top note of his brass still tinkling off the cement as the empty clip clattered down the cement stairs. Lynch tore the spare clip from his belt, slapped it into the Beretta, pulled back the slide, and brought the gun back to bear on the target.
The man was crumpled in the corner of the stairwell, a short-barreled revolver on the cement near his left leg. Lynch went down the stairs carefully, keeping the Beretta level, then flicked the revolver away from the man with his right foot. Lynch could smell blood, could see it beginning to spread around the man. The man’s hand moved a little, and he heard the man trying to say something. Lynch leaned down.
“Fucking chink,” the man said, the words rasping and bubbling through the blood that spilled out of his mouth and down his chin. “Fucking chink.”
Lynch sat on the gurney outside the rear of the ambulance. The EMTs had bandaged his leg where a bullet fragment had punched through his calf, wrapped a turban around his head and taped a piece of gauze over his right eye. Another bandage was on the right side of his neck. They’d cut his right pant leg open past the knee and stripped off the sock and shoe. The pant leg was soaked with blood. Lynch had also bled down the right side of his jacket and shirt. One of the EMTs gave him a blanket. Lynch draped it around his shoulders. Rain had stopped, but it was getting colder.
“You’re gonna need to get some shit picked out of your face, get that leg wound cleaned out, get everything sutured up,” one of the EMTs told him. The guy peeled off his latex gloves and started packing up his material. “Somebody’s got to take a good look at the eye, too. I’m not messing with that. You should be OK. Face is gonna look like shit for a while.”
“Hey,” Lynch said. “You should see the other guy.”
“I did. His face looks fine.”
Captain Starshak walked over. “He about ready to go?”
“Yeah,” the EMT said. “Soon as you guys say, we’ll take him in.”
“OK,” said Starshak. “Give us a second here.”
The EMT walked around to the front of the unit.
“How you feeling, John?”
Lynch shrugged. “Like I got shot a couple times and mainlined some adrenaline.”
“You’re a lucky son of a bitch, you know it? Looks like the guy got four rounds off from about six feet inside a cement box, and all you picked up were some fragments.”
“Yeah. Remind me to grab some Lotto tickets on the way home.” Lynch gave a little grunt, shifted on the gurney. “The OPS guys happy?” Lynch had already given a quick statement to the office of professional standards investigators who looked into all officer-involved shootings. They had his gun.
“Far as I know,” said Starshak. “Hard to see where they can have a problem. Priest backs up your story, crime scene matches up. They wondered a little did you have to shoot the guy so much. You put eight rounds into him between his belt and his collarbone.”
“Yeah, well, he was shooting at me. I got a little excited.”
“What I told em. Right before I told em to go fuck themselves. You know who you popped?”
“Didn’t get a great look. Dark down there, and he was spitting up a lot of blood.”
“Jose Villanueva.”
“The second-story guy?”
“That’s him.”
“He’s doing churches now, boosting chalices? Seems a little low-rent for him.”
“Wasn’t after the chalices. Had a baggie in his pocket with some hi-tech crap in it. Priest told me what you were thinking about the confessional being bugged. Looks like you were right.”
“The electronics point anywhere?”
“Sending them down to the tech weenies, see what they can make of them.” Starshak let out a long exhale, his breath clouding in the cold, damp air. “Fucking cold. You don’t figure he shot old lady Marslovak? Coming back to pick up his stuff?”
Lynch shrugged. “Toss his place, I guess, see if you find a long gun. Be for-hire if it’s him, but I don’t remember him doing anything like this. And he would have had to learn to shoot somewhere. He ex-military?”
“Slo-mo’s checking.”
“More likely somebody hired him to clean up.”
“You mean after they hire somebody else to pop the Marslovak woman?”
“Yeah.”
“Lotta hiring. Jose didn’t work cheap, either.”
Lynch nodded. “He said something right before he died. Said ‘fucking chink.’ Said it a couple of times.”
“So?”
“So somebody says fucking chink in this town, who do you think of?”
“Paddy Wang?”
“Yeah. Did I tell you he turned up where I was eating a couple nights back? Picked up my tab, told me I gotta show up at the Connemara Ball this year.”
“Think we should haul him in, shake him up a little?”
“Shake up Paddy Wang? With what? A nuke? Nah. Let me think on it. I’ll figure some way to come at him.” Lynch saw Father Hughes and Liz Johnson standing across the street by the curb. Her face was red and her eyes looked puffy. She gave a little wave, uncertain. He waved back, smiled, which made his face hurt.
“OK, Lynch, get yourself patched up. I’ll see what we can make of Villanueva. So that the blonde from McGinty’s?”
“Yeah.”
“Think now that your face is all messed up she might be looking for a replacement?”
Lynch flipped him off. Starshak smiled, clapped Lynch on the shoulder, and gestured to the EMTs. They came back, strapped Lynch to the gurney, and rolled it inside the unit. Lynch watched through the back window as the ambulance pulled out, the flashing lights washing through the rain-dampened branches of the trees and into the sky, staining everything red. Lynch was tired suddenly, and feeling empty. And cold.
At Northwestern, the ER docs irrigated and sutured the wound on his leg, picked nine bullet and cement fragments out of his head and neck, and removed a shard of cement from his eye. It was almost 3am when they were done.
“All right, detective. We’re going to have to keep an eye on that leg, make sure we don’t get an infection.” The doctor handed Lynch two bottles of pills. “The antibiotics should help. You’ve had some here. Take four when you wake up, then two every four hours until they’re gone. The other bottle is for pain. No more tonight. We’ve shot you up pretty good. You’re going to hurt in the morning, though. Same deal, two every four hours. Also, you need to keep that eye covered for at least three or four days. Any questions?”
Lynch shook his head. He felt groggy. His leg was throbbing faintly. He couldn’t feel it clearly. It was more like a premonition. The side of his head was still numb from the local they’d injected before they went to work.
“You got a ride home? Got somebody to stay with you tonight?”
Lynch tried to focus. “One of the uniforms’ll get me home, I guess.”
“OK,” the doctor said. “You’ve got some people waiting for you out front.”
A nurse wheeled Lynch to the waiting area. Starshak and Bernstein were standing by the door. Johnson was sitting in a chair.
“He gonna be OK, doc?” Starshak asked.
“Lucky man,” said the doctor. “The fragment in his neck came real close to his carotid, and the eye could have been a lot worse.”
Bernstein squatted down next to the chair. “How you feeling?”
“How do I look?” Lynch asked.
“You look like shit.”
“Feel worse,” Lynch said.
“You want me to get you home?” asked Bernstein.
Johnson stood up. “I can get him home.”
Bernstein looked at Johnson, then looked back at Lynch.
“Yeah,” said Lynch. “Thanks anyway, Slo-mo, I got a ride.”
The doctor walked over to Johnson. “Can you stay with him tonight?”
Johnson looked at Lynch, he nodded. “Sure,” she said.
The doc pulled her aside. “He’s a macho guy, isn’t going to ask for help. Keep him warm. Keep him quiet. Liquids are good – orange juice, water. No booze. Food is fine in the morning. This probably hasn’t all hit him yet, but it will. Be there for him for that.”
“I will,” she said.
Johnson got Lynch home and stripped the ruined clothes off him. She found a big mixing bowl in the kitchen and filled it with warm water. She got a washcloth and some towels and soap from the bathroom. She laid the towels out on the big easy chair in the living room and helped Lynch into it. Then she carefully washed the blood and sweat from his body, drying him gently. She found an old Boston College sweatsuit in a closet and helped Lynch put it on. Then she slipped her arm under his and helped him walk back to the bed. She tucked him under the covers and pulled a chair up next to him.
“Guess I ruined your date,” Lynch said.
She shook her head. “I can wait on dessert.”
“Good thing,” Lynch said. “Kitchen’s closed for repairs.”
Johnson started to laugh, but cried instead. “I was so scared,” she said.
“Me too.”
She nodded. Tried to speak, couldn’t.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said.
She kissed his hand again, held it to her. “You sleep,” she said. “I’ll be here. I’ll be right here.”
Johnson slept in the chair, waking as Lynch tossed. Around 5.00, he bolted up in the bed, throwing off the blankets and lurching to his feet. His eyes were wide and panicked, and his face glistened with sweat. He swung his right arm wildly, then stumbled on his bad leg, banging into the wall near the door. He was shouting something, but the words were choked and garbled. He froze for a moment, his eyes seeming to clear, then staggered toward the door, panting, starting to retch.
Johnson ran after him to the bathroom. Lynch was down on his knees, his forearms along the sides of the toilet seat, as he vomited violently into the bowl. Johnson knelt next to him, her arm across his back. He stopped, finally, collapsing against her, a string of mucus hanging from his chin. She wiped it from him with her hand and held him against her. She felt his head pressed against her breast. She felt him start to shake. She stroked his hair and held him to her tightly. Finally, the rigidity left him. His body slackened and he sank into her. Johnson sat on the tile floor with her back against the wall with Lynch curled like a child in front of her, his head on her lap, and he wept.
CHAPTER 24 – RESTON, VIRGINIA
In the generic conference room at the back of InterGov’s suite, Weaver was trying to be patient while Tom Paravola, InterGov’s technology director and research guru, ran down what he had thus far unearthed. Ferguson, Weaver’s top ops guy, was at the table along with Chen and Nancy Snyder, chief witch doctor from the PsyOps group.
“We’ve hacked into all the major credit card issuers, and we have a program sorting through all cards issued based on applications received since Fisher’s family was killed,” Paravola droned. “We’re sorting them by the demographic parameters Fisher could likely use. White, male, age range forty to sixty-five just to be safe. That’s still way too many cards. OK, we also have in place programming that cross-references these cards with existing credit histories. Here’s how that works. We assign algorithms to–”
Weaver waved a hand. “Tom, could you skip the tech wizard shit? We don’t care, and we don’t understand. Skip to the bottom line, OK?”
Paravola looked disappointed. “OK, but this is some pretty elegant stuff we’ve done, and it’s got some great potential applications–”
“Paravola, you’re starting to piss me off. I’m sure it’s great shit. That’s why we pay you what we do. It’s also why you’re here and not doing time for that child porn rap we got your ass out of. Now give me some fucking data.”
Paravola blanched and took a swallow of water. “OK. We’ve got about 51,100 new cards that make sense. Of the ones that have been used, most have heavily localized usage patterns away from the north-south line we’re focusing on, and many have been used at dates and times that coincide with Fisher’s known activities, but in locations far removed from those actions.”
“You mean while he was blowing people’s hearts out through their spinal columns,” said Weaver.
“Yes, then. That still leaves better than 20,000 cards. Most of those haven’t been used at all, so those don’t help. OK, that leaves 735 cards that have been used on or near Fisher’s line at least once on dates that fit our profile. Of that set, 541 have other charging patterns that eliminate them from consideration, and 107 others have charging patterns that put them within five percent of being eliminated by our current probability matrix. Of the remaining 83 cards, one interesting pattern has emerged.
“A Paul Reynolds, forty-seven, used a Discover card in and around Door County, the first shooting scene, for two days before and on the day of the shooting. That card was not used before nor has it been used since. Charges include a hotel room, meals, and some clothing.
“A Joseph Huss, fifty, used a MasterCard in the northern suburbs of Chicago, again for three days, two before the Marslovak shooting and the day of the shooting. Room, board, and gas. Again, not used before or since.
“And, the pièce de résistance, a Bill Wilson, forty-six, has used a MasterCard for the last three days, first to check into a Motel 6 in Kankakee, Illinois, and to eat at a Denny’s, then to buy some shoes at a local sporting goods store, and, just this morning, to buy breakfast at a diner in Onar–”
Paravola stopped talking to duck the water glass Weaver had thrown at his head. The glass shattered against the white board behind Paravola.
“You dumb fuck.” Weaver was standing now, leaning toward Paravola, his hands on the table. “You waste our time with your goddamn algorithms and charge-pattern run-downs when you have something close to real-time intel? When did you develop this?”
Paravola was shaking. “Just in the last hour. The last charge was only made a few hours ago.”
“What’s that town again?”
“Onarga.”
“Fergie?”
Ferguson already had a map up on his laptop. “On our line, boss. Maybe an hour or so south out of Kankakee.”
“You ready to roll?”
“Got my team,” Ferguson said. “Me, Lawrence, Capelli, and Richter. Gave Chen my load-out list yesterday.”
“Everything is at the hangar, sir,” Chen said.
“Four guys enough?” Weaver asked.
“Best we can do, unless you want to call Langley, get some extra bodies,” Ferguson said. “Figured you’d want to keep this in house.”
“You figured right. Fergie, get out to Andrews. Beep your team. I want you wheels up ASAP. Get set up in Effingham. You already made arrangements there, Chen?”
“Yes, sir. Ferguson has the details.”
“Good deal. Chen, I don’t know what we can do in the way of local stringers in central Illinois, but if we have some or can get some, get them out. Hotels, gas stations, you know the drill. Get somebody into Kankakee, see if we can get a make and model on whatever Fisher’s driving.”
“Yes, sir. Can I contact any other agencies?”
“No. We need to contain this, people. Fisher is our guy. He’s our problem. It’s a post-9/11 world. Already a lot less handwringing on the Hill when our more legitimate friends need to color outside the lines a little. This is not the time to be calling Langley or the feebs looking for help. This sort of outside-the-box shit is why we exist. If we can’t clean this up, what good are we. Anything else?”
Dr Snyder, who had spent the meeting doodling on a legal pad, looked up.
“Actually, Colonel, if you have a moment, you and I should chat.”
“Your office,” said Weaver. “Rest of you get moving.”
The higher-ups at InterGov were left to their own devices when it came to decorating their offices. Most emulated Weaver’s spartan army-surplus look. But Dr Snyder’s office was damn near opulent.
Two walls were covered by bookcases. The cases were full, and Weaver had no doubt Synder’d read all that shit. An exquisite hand-tied rug from northern Afghanistan covered most of the floor. The pattern was dense and intricate, with red the predominant color. It had been darker red the first time Weaver had seen it because Ferguson had picked up a body the lab needed to look at and had used the rug for packaging on the flight from Islamabad to DC. Thing was, Fergie’d had to put a couple 9mm slugs through the body in order to convince it to lie still, so the body had a couple of leaks. They were going to toss the rug, but Snyder had asked if she could have it. She got some restoration friend of hers at the Smithsonian to clean it up. Still had some stains, but you had to know where to look.
Weaver sat down in one of the wine-colored leather wingback chairs that flanked a butler’s table with brass accents. Snyder was futzing around in the back.
“Would you care for a cup of tea, Colonel?” she asked.
“Doc, every time I come down here, you ask if I want a cup of tea. Every time you ask, I tell you no.”
“I’m going to have some tea, Colonel. Propriety demands the inquiry, even given your predictable response.” Dr Snyder settled into the other chair, setting a small white china cup and saucer on the table.
“So you unscramble Fisher’s eggs for me, doc?”
Snyder smiled. “Alas, like the lamented Humpty Dumpty, Mr Fisher’s eggs cannot be put back together again. I do believe, however, I can offer some insight into what might be on his menu.”
“Gimme,” said Weaver.
“First, Mr Fisher, like most of the gentlemen in your operations department, evidences numerous psycho– or sociopathic tendencies – lack of empathy, lack of guilt, considerable cunning.”
“For Christ’s sake, we have you test for those qualities when we recruit. Look, Doc, I understand if you’re running the local Walmart those qualities might put you off a candidate. But they’re all big pluses for me.”
“True. Mr Fisher is an interesting case, however. He did consent to examination after his family was murdered. I had expected him to be enraged and focused on revenge. Psychopaths generally hold grudges and do not bear insults of any kind lightly. Fisher was curiously unaroused. In response to questions in this area, he indicated that his family was in paradise. They had all been to the Catholic sacrament of confession that morning, so Fisher was convinced they had died in a state of grace and were thus ensured immediate entrance into heaven. I understand that his father was devout as well?”
“Zeke? Yeah. I did a job in Kenya with Zeke, back during the Mau-Mau shit. Son of a bitch got me out of the rack at dawn one Sunday so we could drive through the bush for better than an hour so he could make mass at some cholera-trap mission.”
“So a paternal bond, our Mr Fisher sharing his father’s spiritual and vocational faiths. As to the issue of this geographic line that so interests you and Mr Ferguson, that smacks of ritual. Now, mental illness is a maddeningly esoteric affair, so such rituals are often very difficult to decipher. However, if Mr Fisher has become a serial killer, although I suppose one could argue that he has been one for years after a fashion, but if he has become a serial killer operating on an agenda other than the one which you control, then there is almost certainly a ritual involved. In his case, I would guess that this ritual will have religious, specifically Catholic, underpinnings.”
“You gonna give me any more guidance on that, or am I just supposed to operate on the assumption that he’s become some kind of religious whack job?”
“We are well into the area of supposition, Colonel. But not, I don’t think, wholly unfounded supposition. Let me ask you, how many people has Fisher killed?”
Weaver gave a shrug. “Couldn’t say for sure. Specific targets on missions I assigned? Better than a hundred. Collateral deaths in those missions? Maybe another hundred. There was Vietnam before that.”
“And how would you characterize the men Fisher killed?”
“Scumbags, mostly. Terrorists, drug dealers, third-world thugs. Why?”
“Colonel, Fisher is not, I don’t believe, what you would characterize as a primary psychopath – not utterly remorseless, certainly not incapable of forming real attachments. His attachments to his family were authentic and quite strong. I believe he is a secondary psychopath. Ordinarily, the only hope for anything like a cure for a psychopath is an epiphany of some kind. Some event that so undermines their egocentric worldview that they ameliorate or even repolarize their behavior of their own volition. I believe that watching his family die was such an event for Mr Fisher. Unfortunately, the shock of this event was such that it did not redirect Mr Fisher into more normal channels. Instead, it has redirected him into another pathology entirely. As I said, one psychopathic characteristic that Mr Fisher evidenced was a lack of remorse. He was capable of killing in cold blood without allowing his conscience to interfere with his ability to continue to do so. When his family was killed in front of him, when he had his epiphany, the cumulative guilt attendant to all those previous killings must have been extraordinary, compounded by the guilt of not being able to save his own family. He was able to exonerate himself of the latter guilt by taking refuge in his religion – by assuring himself that his family was in paradise. If he had found no mechanism to relieve the guilt of failing to prevent – and, really, since the act was almost certainly targeted at him, of likely causing – the death of his family, the death of the only persons with whom he had an authentic attachment, I don’t believe he would have been able to function. Therefore, he has not only found refuge in his religion, he has become imprisoned by it. However, Catholicism compounds the guilt attached to his prior bad acts. The men he killed, by the standards of Fisher’s religion, were almost universally evil. Thus, he not only killed them, by killing them when they were not in a state of grace, he damned them. God, in his church’s teaching, desires that all souls find their way to him. Fisher had, thusly, subverted God’s will.”
Weaver leaned back in the chair. He’d learned long ago that you couldn’t rush Snyder. She’d get to her point when she got to it. He wasn’t sure what would happen if he threw a glass at her, but he was pretty sure she wouldn’t wet her drawers like Paravola.
“This is all real interesting, doc, but where’s it get us?”
“Colonel, don’t you see? The two people he’s killed so far were both killed immediately after being absolved of their sins by a Catholic priest. Fisher purposely killed them while they were in a state of grace. He sent them to heaven.”
“Christ, doc. You telling me he’s trying to balance the books?”
“I believe so, yes.”
“Then he’s got a couple hundred people to go.”
Dr Snyder tilted her head a little, looking amused. “That, dear Colonel, is your problem. There’s one more thing, Colonel. I happened to take a peek at that map Mr Ferguson accessed. Your assumption is that the killings will be roughly equidistant from one another along this north/south axis?”
“It’s a stretch, but it’s all we’ve got.”
“If you look just south of Effingham, you’ll see a town called Moriah.” Snyder paused expectantly.
“And?”
“Think of your Old Testament, Colonel. When God calls on Abraham to sacrifice his only son, he tells Abraham to take him to a place called Moriah and to make the sacrifice on a height that God will point out. I think the symbolism will be compelling to our Mr Fisher.”
“God stops Abraham before he offs the kid.”
“Yes,” said Snyder. “Abraham sacrifices a ram in the child’s stead.”
“Not much chance of that happening this time.”
Snyder just raised her eyebrows and took another sip of her tea. Weaver got up and headed back up the hall.
An hour later, Weaver stood in a closed hangar at Andrews Air Force base watching Ferguson oversee the former Air America guys as they loaded his team’s gear into a Gulfstream IV.
“What are you bringing, Fergie?”
“Got the Remington 700s for me and Lawrence. Scoped 16s with the extended mags for Capelli and Richter, let them handle any hose jobs. Suppressed H&Ks in case we need to take things inside. Everybody’s got their personal weapons. Also, I’m bringing a couple of the Barretts.”
The Barretts were .50 caliber weapons with ten-round magazines and an effective range of almost a mile. They could shoot through walls, through cars. They could throw armor piercing slugs, incendiary rounds, you name it.
“Jesus, Fergie,” Weaver said. “The fucking Barretts?”
“A lot of open country down that way, boss. Might catch him in a vehicle. Frankly, I want to have the bastard out-gunned. Gets to a shooting match, I’ll feel a lot better if we’re out of his range. Anyway, better to have it and not need it–”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Than need it and not have it. OK, Fergie, it’s your show. Just try to keep us off Nightline.” Weaver clapped Ferguson on the back. “Hey, Chen around?”
Ferguson nodded up at the Gulfstream. “Already on board.”
Chen was sitting in the back of the cabin looking at her laptop.
“Playing solitaire, Chen?”
“I had Paravola link me into his tracking program. I’m running a few alternative searches. Will you be joining us?”
Weaver walked down the aisle and sat in the seat facing Chen.
“Yeah. Got some good shit out of Snyder. You heard about Villanueva?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Not your fault, Chen. I told you to send the spic. My call. Anything heating up there?”
“The detective on the case has identified the spot where Fisher took the shot, and another investigator is asking military and law enforcement contacts for names of snipers. We have to assume Villanueva had the electronics on him when he was killed, but I haven’t seen anything regarding those in their system yet.”
“What’s this detective’s name?”
“John Lynch.”
“He any good?”
“He has an excellent clearance rate on his cases,” Chen said. “This is also the second time he has been involved in a gun battle. When he was a rookie, he killed two men and was wounded when he and his partner were ambushed in a housing project.”
“So this Lynch guy could be a problem.”
“It is possible, sir.”
“You think on that then, Chen. Let me know if it looks like we’ve got to make his life interesting.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Pull up your map for a second,” Weaver said. Chen pressed a few keys and turned the laptop so both she and Weaver could see the screen. “Snyder thinks Fisher will head to a town called Moriah. Some biblical bullshit.”
“It’s here,” said Chen, moving the cursor.
“Gimme some detail.”
Chen zoomed in on the town.
“Jesus,” said Weaver, “Welcome to Mayberry. They got a Catholic church?”
Chen switched out of the map program and into a local directory. “Holy Angels. Hill Street.”
“When they do confessions there?”
“The next scheduled time is 3pm tomorrow.”
“Go back to the map, show me the church. Switch to topo,” said Weaver.
Chen pressed another key, bringing up a topographical map of the area. Weaver took one look at the dense concentration of curved contour lines and let out a low whistle.
“Fergie’s gonna love this,” he said.
Richter popped into the cabin, followed by Ferguson, Lawrence, and Capelli. Weaver got up. He went to clap Chen on the shoulder, habit, just what he did with the troops. But he stopped. Every time he touched her, he felt like he’d just put his hand in a snake pit and gotten away with it.
