Crossfire (3 page)

Scattered amid the smaller grave markers in that garden of stone were several large tombs the shooter could have hidden behind. Unfortunately, it didn’t appearthat the cops had sealed off the cemetery, thus risking contaminating what could be a crime scene.

One of the detectives glanced up, registered their arrival, said something to his partner, and came ambling down the steps toward them.

‘‘Well, well, this is a surprise,’’ Lonnie Briggs drawled. ‘‘Having the fibbies consult on my case.’’

‘‘Our case,’’ Angetti shot back before Cait could respond.

Terrific. That’s all she needed, another turf war. Fighting over a parking spot was one thing; this was another. Having been on the other side of jurisdictional battles as a cop, Cait had planned to smooth things over with a little finesse. A word that wasn’t in Angetti’s vocabulary. Nor Briggs’s either, apparently.

‘‘That so?’’ The detective’s lips, beneath a mustache the color of a rusted-out skiff, twisted in a sneer.

‘‘Didn’t the captain call you?’’ she asked.

‘‘I’ve been a little busy to take calls,’’ he pointed out. ‘‘Handling a homicide.’’

‘‘Well, you won’t have to worry about that now.’’ Angetti plowed forward. ‘‘Because you’ve just been removed from the case.’’

‘‘Like hell I have,’’ Briggs countered.

‘‘It’s nothing against SPD, Lonnie.’’ Cait’s conciliatory tone masked her distaste for the detective, who, in her mind, wouldn’t even still be in the department were it not for the fact that his uncle was a politically connected captain on the city’s south side. ‘‘But while all law enforcement’s overextended these days, JTTF still has more resources.’’

‘‘You’re kidding.’’ His brows rose, like furry red caterpillars, up toward his bald, bullet head. ‘‘Are you suggesting the FBI thinks some muckety-muck ASMA guy getting shot after indulging in a nooner is terrorism?’’

‘‘I didn’t say that.’’

Odds were the general’s death wasn’t related to terrorism,but that hadn’t stopped her from jumping at the opportunity to handle a homicide.

‘‘Told you it was probably about sex,’’ Angetti said smugly.

He grinned at Briggs, the two former antagonists suddenly morphing into a couple of cops bonding over a body. Then, as if their heads were connected, they both looked over at the porch, where Briggs’s partner, Detective Derek Manning, continued to interview the woman whose short red silk robe wasn’t exactly late-afternoon attire. Perhaps she’d been getting ready for a night on the town with her husband and had just gotten out of the shower when the general dropped by.

Yeah. Right. And Cait had just been elected Pirate Queen.

‘‘I take it the weepy blonde’s not the vic’s wife?’’ Angetti said.

‘‘Nah,’’ Briggs responded. ‘‘The general’s housekeeper says his wife’s in California. We’re trying to track her down. Meanwhile, we’ve got a BOLO out for the blond chick’s husband, who conveniently isn’t answering his cell phone.’’

‘‘Do me a favor?’’ Cait asked.

‘‘What?’’ Briggs replied.

‘‘Don’t call her a chick.’’

The detective looked at her with the lack of understanding he might have revealed if she’d asked him to recite Einstein’s theory of relativity. No big surprise. Back when she’d been on the force, whenever Briggs got to pick the lunch spot, he invariably opted for the harbor-front Hooters. Which was why no one in homicide was surprised when his fifth marriage broke up.

‘‘Whatever,’’ he said, slapping at a mosquito on the back of his neck. ‘‘Along with being an assistant basketball coach, Hawthorne teaches a course in computer science at the academy.’’

‘‘Captain Ryan Hawthorne?’’ Cait asked.

‘‘That’s the guy. Why?’’ The distractingly mobile critters dove toward his nose. ‘‘You know him?’’

‘‘Yeah. At least, I did.’’

Cait had long ago come to terms with the fact that one of the givens about living and working in the city where she’d gone to high school was that she would occasionally run into old boyfriends.

But never in her wildest dreams—or nightmares— had she expected her former prom date to be involved in a high-profile murder case she was investigating.

‘‘How long ago?’’ Briggs asked.

‘‘Twelve years, give or take some months.’’

‘‘So you haven’t seen him in all that time?’’

‘‘As a matter of fact, I ran into him last week, when I dropped by the academy to take Dad to lunch.’’ Her father, a retired vice admiral, taught military history. ‘‘He seemed fine,’’ she said in answer to the question she knew would be next. ‘‘We only chatted for a minute or so.’’

Until she got a handle on the case, she decided, there was no point in adding that Ryan had suggested they get a drink some evening after work. It was probably exactly as he’d said, just an opportunity for two old friends to catch up on each other’s lives.

‘‘So, did you find the slug?’’ she asked, looking around at the ground.

His eyes narrowed at her not-so-subtle attempt to change the subject.

‘‘Yeah.’’ He glared up at the news helicopters hovering overhead. ‘‘It fragmented, but what came out the back of the guy’s skull is a .223.’’

‘‘Well, that narrows it down.’’ Cait’s tone was dry.

A .223 bullet was small and fast, designed to expand on impact, causing severe, usually fatal damage. They were common, used in both hunting and assault rifles. They could also be shot with a high degree of accuracy from as far as two hundred yards by a reasonably skilled marksman. Farther by someone who’d been trained to kill.

‘‘You really need to cordon off the cemetery,’’ she said.

‘‘We’ve got the slug,’’ he argued.

‘‘But there’s more to a crime scene than a body and a bullet. There’s a good chance the killer shot from over there. Maybe left some clues that are already being compromised.’’

Knowing him to be surprisingly thin-skinned for a cop, she tried not to sound as if she were giving a Homicide 101 lecture. ‘‘This is already high profile, Briggs. Playing it by the book is going to look a lot better not only in the press, but it’ll cover your ass when the brass jumps in and starts playing politics.’’

‘‘Shit.’’ He dragged a hand down his face. Took out a roll of antacids, thumbed two off, and popped them in his mouth. ‘‘I had my department physical the other day.’’

Cait had a feeling she knew where the seeming non sequitur was headed. ‘‘And?’’

‘‘My blood pressure is off the charts. I’ve got acid reflux and the start of an ulcer. And most of the time it feels like some maniac is tightening a piano wire around my skull.’’

‘‘Typical Buccaneer Days syndrome.’’

‘‘Yeah. But I’m getting too freaking old for this shit. Which is why I put in an application to be police chief in this small town out west. In Oregon, where I figure the worst I’ll have to deal with will be jaywalking, barking dogs, and the occasional beaver chewing down trees.’’

‘‘Sounds nice.’’

Actually, it sounded excruciatingly boring, and Cait allowed a moment of sympathy for the citizens of whatever town ended up with Briggs heading their police department.

She was just about to suggest that Angetti take some uniforms and start clearing the cemetery, when her cell phone began to play the theme song from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

She dug it out of the pocket of her capris and flipped it open. ‘‘Cavanaugh.’’

The curt message on the other end was not what she needed to hear. ‘‘We’ll be right there,’’ she said, wondering if Briggs had an extra roll of those Tums. She closed the phone.

‘‘We’ve got another body down,’’ she told the two men. ‘‘At the academy.’’

The shooter was an expert at camouflage. Sure, killing in a city wasn’t the same as it’d be on the battlefield, but the theory was still the same. The most deadly weapon ever invented, whether the battlefield was in Bumfuck, Afghanistan, or some pretty American city in the South, was a single well-aimed shot.

The key was to blend into your surroundings, to become part of the landscape. Which was why today his ‘‘hide’’ was a discreet brown—described by the salesman as ‘‘pebble beach’’—Nissan Altima.

He’d done his research online before going shopping, and the 15.3 cubic feet of trunk space—even more when the split backseat was lowered—ranked among the best in its class. And in the event he did end up getting spotted, the 270 horses beneath the hood could come in handy in making his getaway.

Movement. Mobility. Aggressiveness. All were imperative in the sniper business.

He’d positioned himself in the parking lot of a Winn-Dixie, a convenient seventy-five yards from the Admiral Somersett Military Academy parade ground. Although those shit-ugly stone buildings surrounded the grassy square, from this vantage point he could sight in down the tree-lined Commander’s Drive, past the uniformed guard at the gate, to focus on his target.

He knew that despite all the hedonistic temptations of the festivities taking place throughout the city, insidethe walls of the two-hundred-year-old buildings, the mood would be grim and unrelentingly serious as one more class of college freshmen discovered that ASMA was to Animal House as the shooter’s M16 was to a water pistol.

The rifle was a popular military weapon of choice for countries ranging from Australia to Cameroon to Ghana to Uganda to Vietnam.

The Colt name added cachet to its cold efficiency. If you were going to waste the enemy, it was a helluva lot cooler to go with the gun that won the American West.

Wild Bill Hickok had killed more than a hundred bad guys with his famous ivory-handled Colt revolvers; Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp took Colts to the gun-fight at the O.K. Corral; Patton had carried his Colt across Europe and Africa while defeating Nazis, and although John Wayne wasn’t a real cowboy or soldier, his movies were practically a love story to the brand. More recently, American troops had carried variations of this Colt M16 from Vietnam to the Persian Gulf.

The shooter set up the weapon he’d named Thunderer—after Doc Holliday’s favorite Colt—on a bipod set on the floor of the trunk. The two-legged stand would steady Thunderer, allowing for optimal ‘‘target acquisition,’’ as the military euphemistically described a sniper’s role.

‘‘Target in view,’’ his spotter’s distant voice announced in his ear. ‘‘Drop the son of a bitch.’’

The crosshairs were jumping and the target in the shooter’s scope seemed to pulse with the same cadence as the suddenly out-of-control beat of his heart.

He took a deep breath. Then another.

Forcing himself to focus on the task at hand, he used the screen of the optical gun sight to fix the man watching this year’s class of cadets marching to a cadence the shooter was too far away to hear.

The Colt jumped. Added its loud crack to the roar of cannon fire from a mock sea battle on the harbor as it sent its copper-coated bullet flying toward the parade ground.

The acrid scent of burned gunpowder filled the steamy confines of the car trunk. The shooter watched as the bullet ripped through bone.

Pink mist filled his scope as the target dropped to the dark green grass.

A perfect, surgical strike.

He made another mark on the Colt’s stock. ‘‘Two down,’’ he said with the satisfaction of a job well done. There were more targets waiting. But this was a damn good start.

As the Altima pulled out of the parking lot, adrenaline, mixed with sweet, heady anticipation, surged through the shooter’s veins.

It was funny how things worked out, Quinn McKade thought as he left his office in the academy’s Admiral Hall. Mostly funny ironic, but occasionally he had to laugh at the twists and turns his life had taken.

There were times he wondered if his father, one of the country’s most famous or, depending on your point of view, infamous war protesters, was able to watch his only son’s strange journey. Was it even possible for atheists to end up in heaven? Or hell?

Or was Daniel McKade residing on some other plane, spending his eternity the same way he’d lived his life—challenging authority, creating unrest, and eventually proving himself an ultimate hypocrite, a pacifist who used violence as a weapon against war.

Those who live by the sword die by the sword.

And wasn’t his old man proof of that? Though in reality, it’d been a perfectly aimed round from an FBI SWAT team sniper’s rifle that had taken Quinn’s father’s life that long ago summer’s evening.

Quinn, who was eight at the time, figured he’d be hearing the crack of that bullet until the day he himself died.

Now here he was, twenty-five years later, not only a decorated war vet but a writer-in-residence, teaching the occasional creative writing class at one of the nation’s premier military academies.

‘‘If you wanted to keep me out of uniform, you should’ve stuck around, Pop,’’ Quinn muttered as he walked past framed graduation photographs of cadets who’d been killed in various wars over ASMA’s two-hundred-year history.

Too many were recent, making Quinn wonder what would happen when the academy ran out of walls. Because he’d bet any potential royalties on the book he was currently writing that the world wasn’t ever going to run out of wars.

He hadn’t realized he’d spoken out loud until he noticed that the kid he’d just passed, a wet-behind-the-ears cadet who didn’t look old enough to shave, was looking at him funny, as if he was having a hard time picturing the guy in a plain white T-shirt, faded jeans, and sneaks belonging in these hallowed halls.

Heat hit like a sweaty fist as he left the building, headed toward the parking lot on the far side of the parade ground.

It was dog days in the Lowcountry, that steamy, somnolent time of year when any guy who had the sense God gave a gator would be kicking back in a Pawleys Island rope hammock beneath the spreading limbs of a moss-draped oak, a sweating glass of sweet tea or an icy brew on his bare stomach and a dogeared paperback nearby.

Which was exactly what Quinn intended to do when he got home, where a bottle of Sam Adams and an unfinished James Lee Burke novel were waiting for him. Maybe he’d pick up some blue crabs on the way.

Unlike so many of the imitation antebellum structures that were so popular throughout the Lowcountry, there was nothing romantic or graceful about the buildings of ASMA. They were all gray stone— massive, imposing, fortresslike, without architectural adornment. Facing inward, they resolutely turned their backs to the three-hundred-year-old town framing the parade ground where, every Saturday afternoon for nine months of the year, cadets marched in full dress uniforms for an audience of locals and tourists.

The rest of the South may be in summer mode, but apparently the drill instructor hadn’t gotten the memo that heat kills. An entire plebe class, currently 395 strong men and women (which attrition would narrow down to around 350 by graduation), was marching up and down the square green space in the staggering humidity, their ranks a little ragged but their shouted cadence strong and enthusiastic.

Pausing on the sidelines to watch, he was breathing in the scent of fresh-mown grass when the unmistakable sound of a rifle shot shattered air thick enough to drink.

Reacting on instinct, Quinn hit the ground just in time to hear the bullet whizzing past his head.