Authors: Diane Capri
Gaspar said, “Wife and three kids shot in the head with a .38 while they slept in their own civilian beds around midnight on a Wednesday. Ballistics on the gunshots?”
“It was the wife’s gun. First responders found it on the bed still loosely gripped in her hand. Army wives learn to shoot for self-protection and she was damn good at it. In this case, looks like she didn’t get the chance to fire.”
“Reacher concluded there’d been no intruder?”
“House was in a good, safe South Tampa neighborhood, but shit happens sometimes.”
“Not in this case?” Otto asked.
“Right.” He nodded. “No forced entry, no identifiable evidence of a break-in. Front door locked and alarm system activated. Family dog asleep in the kitchen.”
“The dog slept through the whole thing?” Gaspar asked.
Danimal nodded. “That’s what it looked like.”
Gaspar had to agree. Dogs don’t sleep through break-ins. Not unless they’re drugged, or deaf. Or they know the killer. And sometimes, not even then.
“Say Reacher was right. No intruder,” Otto said. “Normal conclusion would be murder suicide. Yet the locals ruled that out and Reacher agreed. Why?”
“No motive, for starters.”
Gaspar nodded. Women usually need a reason to kill, even if it’s a crazy reason.
“By all accounts, she was a wonderful mother, decent wife to a difficult guy. Kids were great, too. Good students. Lots of friends. No substance abuse.”
“All-American family, huh?” Otto asked, glancing again at the photographs on the stage.
Danimal shrugged. “Zero reported difficulties.”
Which was not the same thing as no problems, exactly. Gaspar was forming a clearer picture of Reacher’s analysis of the crimes. “Suspects?”
“No.”
“She have any enemies?”
“None anyone could find.”
“How hard did Reacher look?”
Danimal shrugged again. “Not too hard, probably. He knew Weston. We all did. Guy had plenty of enemies. We didn’t need to spin our wheels looking for hers.”
“Where was Weston at the time of the murders?” Otto asked.
“Alibi was weak from the start,” Danimal said. “He claimed he was drinking with buddies at a local strip joint until the place closed.”
“Devoted family man that he was. Alibi didn’t hold up, though?”
“No confirming surveillance available in those clubs, for obvious reasons. Nobody remembered Weston being there after his buddies left about two a.m.”
Gaspar said, “Meaning Reacher focused on the most obvious suspect.”
“Pretty much,” Danimal said. “Reacher wanted Weston to be guilty, sure. But the rest of us agreed. Reacher wasn’t completely wrong.”
“Roger that,” Gaspar said.
“What happened next?” Otto asked.
Danimal looked uncomfortable for the first time. “That’s a little…vague.”
“Let me guess,” Otto said, sardonically. “Weston was hauled in looking like he’d been run over by a bus, right?”
Danimal shrugged and said nothing.
“What persuaded Reacher to abandon charges against Weston?” Gaspar asked.
Silence again.
Otto asked, “So what happened after Weston’s arrest?”
“Case was over, as far as we were concerned. The situation moved up the chain of command, out of Reacher’s purview. He returned to his regular post.”
“Where was that?”
“Texas, maybe?” Danimal said.
“But that wasn’t the end of things, was it?”
“Pretty quickly, local detectives concluded Weston’s family had been killed by a cheap hit man.”
“How cheap?” Gaspar asked.
“Five-hundred dollars, I think, for all four hits.”
“Anybody could have paid that,” Otto said. “Even on Army wages.”
Danimal didn’t argue. “They couldn’t tie Weston to the killer, so charges against Weston were dropped. Reacher had no say in the matter. Even if he’d still been on base, the result would have been the same.”
Gaspar said, “Reacher had to love that.”
Danimal laughed. “Exactly.”
Otto tilted her head toward Jess Kimball, who was still sitting with the press off to the opposite side of the stage. “Reporter over there says Weston’s family was killed to send him a message. Any truth to that?”
“Probably. But that made him a victim, not a suspect. We couldn’t prove anything more,” Danimal replied.
“How hard did you try?” Gaspar asked.
“If the evidence was there, Reacher would have found it. He was a good cop and he did a good job on the case.”
After thinking a bit, Otto said, “After Weston was released, Reacher kept looking for evidence, didn’t he? And he let it be known. He hounded Weston, figuring he’d crack. Or do something else Reacher could charge him for, right?”
Danimal said nothing.
Otto said, “A few of your guys maybe helped Reacher out with that project.”
Danimal still said nothing.
Weston was a scumbag through and through. Reacher wouldn’t have let that go. Gaspar wouldn’t have, either.
“How’d it end?” Otto asked.
“Weston was arrested frequently. Jaywalking. Spitting on the sidewalk. Whatever,” Danimal replied.
“Didn’t matter as long as Weston was getting hassled and locked up for something and sporting a few bruises, right?” Otto asked.
He shrugged. “When Weston came up for his next promotion, he got passed over. His CO suggested he’d be better off outside, away from, uh, constant surveillance.”
“So Weston retired,” Otto said.
“Yes.”
“And then what?”
Danimal replied, “And then he got worse.”
Gaspar figured Reacher had been counting on that. Reacher had sized Weston up and concluded he was a scumbag. Guys like Weston don’t get better with age.
While Danimal was briefing them, Gaspar had been preoccupied with Reacher and not watching Weston closely enough. For Gaspar’s assignment, Weston was a source of information and nothing more. After he told them what they needed to know, Weston could stand in front of a firing squad and Gaspar wouldn’t have cared. Because he agreed with Reacher. Weston killed his family, one way or another. Weston was not the victim here.
Until he was.
6
The service concluded. The chaplain returned to the microphone and asked everyone to stand and bow their heads. Weston, his wife, and the others on the stage did so, along with the audience. Hushed whispers from the respectful crowd stopped. The only noises Gaspar heard were muffled by distance. The chaplain began his benediction.
A split second later, the first gunshot shattered the quiet. Automatically, Gaspar’s gaze jerked toward the sniper nests he’d located—was that a rifle’s glint he saw snugged up against that HVAC unit?—then back to the stage. He counted two more rapid shots. Like a crazy break dance, Weston’s body lurched forward, propelled by the force of each impact from behind, not from any identified nest. Had Gaspar imagined the rifle’s glint?
After the third shot, Weston crumpled like a marionette whose strings were abruptly severed.
When Weston fell, he opened a window for the fourth shot, which hit Samantha Weston.
The fifth bullet struck the chaplain.
Gaspar and Otto were already rushing the stage with their weapons drawn after the third shot, but their sightline behind the stage was still obscured. They’d left Danimal behind with his own weapon drawn, scanning the crowd for the shooter as he got on his radio.
Like a brief time delay on live television, the audience began screaming and chaos erupted just as Otto reached the stage with Gaspar half a step behind. As Gaspar followed her around the left side of the stage, he counted five additional, rapid shots originating from the parking lot behind. Followed by no further shooting.
When they reached the parking lot, two men were down and two more stood over the bodies.
The chaos became choreographed as moves practiced during countless drills were automatically performed almost simultaneously as Danimal’s base security took charge.
Weston was approached, triaged, and rushed into one waiting ambulance. Mrs. Weston was rushed to a second ambulance.
The chaplain’s injuries were either fatal or minor, judging from the medics’ lack of urgency when they reached him.
More security personnel arrived. Two men were confirmed dead.
Within minutes the entire base was locked down. The voice came on the speaker advising everyone to “shelter in place.” Meaning hunker down until the situation was secured.
Otto and Gaspar hung back from the working professionals.
“We should go,” Otto said, her attention focused on the crime scene. “Those two authorized FBI agents will be around somewhere, maybe calling backup. We can’t be caught here.”
Though Gaspar agreed, he told her to wait there a minute and slipped around the edges to reach Danimal, who was questioning Weston’s bodyguards. The same bodyguards who’d failed to protect their boss. Danimal stepped aside to give Gaspar a brief account of the shooting according to the first witnesses.
“Looks like a lone shooter. That guy,” he pointed to one of the two dead men. “No ID yet. He approached the back of the stage about halfway through the service as if he was authorized to be there. When Weston stood for the benediction, he pulled his pistol and shot Weston in the left shoulder, and both legs. Mrs. Weston was shot in the right femur. The other victim is one of Weston’s bodyguards. These two guys say the shooter killed their buddy and then they killed him.”
Gaspar reviewed the crime scene briefly, then nodded. “It could have happened that way,” he said. “Where did they take Weston?”
“He requested Tampa Southern,” Danimal said. “Call me later and I’ll fill you in. I’ve got to get back to work.”
“Thanks,” Gaspar said, then approached the two bodies for a closer look.
The bodyguard lay face down, lifeless, unmoving in a lake of his own blood. Black hair. Bulky guy. Maybe six feet. Maybe 200 pounds of pumped-up shoulders and biceps. Big, but not big enough to stop bullets fired dead on target at close range.
Less than three feet away, the scrawny shooter was face up on the tarmac, one glassy eye still open and the other covered with a black patch. Like several others attending today’s memorial, grotesque scars from a healed wound gouged his forehead. One cheek was sunken because half the upper jawbone had disappeared some time ago. His Army BDUs were well worn and oversized for the wasted body inside them. Boots polished but old and scuffed as if he’d had trouble lifting his feet to walk. His deformed right hand still gripped the FN Five-seven pistol he’d meant to use to get up close and execute his target.
Brain injuries manifested in unpredictable ways. It was possible the shooter had been unable to control his homicidal impulses and simply lashed out at the nearest targets, but the whole scene felt darkly, undeniably intentional to Gaspar. Shooting Weston in the back. Shooter knowing he’d die trying to kill. Hitting Weston three times before the two wild shots injured others nearby. A crowd of military families and personnel watching.
It felt very, very personal.
No question the shooter was a man with vengeance on his mind.
But he wasn’t Jack Reacher.
Gaspar wondered if Reacher would experience a pang of regret for having his unfinished business with Weston finished for him by this damaged, deranged soldier.
After he’d absorbed all he could about the situation, Gaspar returned to Otto and said, “Let’s go.”
They slipped weapons back into place and merged with the audience as security herded them to their cars and eventually exited the base though the nearby Bayshore Gate.
While they waited in the long line of traffic, Gaspar told her about the glinting rifle barrel in the sniper’s nest, the bodyguard, and the shooter.
“The shooter’s definitely not Reacher?”
“Definitely not. Although it could have been him in the nest. Impossible to know.”
Otto nodded, thinking. “So. Disabled veteran? Maybe served under Weston’s supervision?”
“Iraq has been Weston’s location for long enough. They could have crossed paths there, even if Weston wasn’t the guy’s CO,” Gaspar said. “The shooter was disabled, for sure. Likely a vet. But if we’re betting, I’d say he was focused and lucid when he planned and executed this plan.”
“Why?”
“Two reasons. First, logistics. Getting close enough to Weston to shoot him required stealth and cleverness, but also logic and planning. He had to get on base, locate the best shooting position, have a weapon, and a long list of other things. None of that could have been accomplished if he’d suffered from a significant mental deficiency.”
Otto nodded, considering. “Maybe. One thing we know: the number of vets who suffered head injuries during both Iraq and Afghanistan is staggering. In earlier wars, they wouldn’t have survived wounds like that. We can keep so many more alive now, but the treatments aren’t great and definitely don’t fix the damage.”