KISS THE WITCH (26 page)

I pressed the hanky to my wound. She winked
and sprinted away. Two more units screeched to a stop in the
parking lot. By the time I joined the party, we had half the
precinct squeezed into Howard Snow’s room. I hiked my thumb up over
my shoulder and kicked everyone but Carlos and Spinelli out.

Snow sat on the edge of the bed, still in
his underwear, his hands already cuffed. His wife, clad only in a
hospital gown, occupied a stuffed chair in the corner. The boys had
not cuffed her. Didn’t need to. She seemed as inanimate as the
chair she was sitting in. Her eyes, glazed over white, stared
blankly at the floor. Drool dripping down the side of her mouth
collected on her left breast, saturating a patch of gown the size
of a grapefruit. Her skin looked paler that pale. Carlos said
earlier that she looked like death warmed over. I could not see it.
Nothing about her looked warm to me.

I walked over to Howard Snow and took a seat
on the edge of the bed opposite his. Our knees nearly touched. He
looked spent. Deflated. I said to him, “You all right, Mister
Snow?”

His eyes appeared fixed on the TV screen. It
was not on, but the charcoal images in the glass reflected the
movement of police uniforms outside. Still, I doubted he saw it. I
doubted he saw anything.

“
Mister Snow. Do you want
to tell me what is going on here? Why is your wife
here?”

He raised his head. His gaze followed a path
to his wife as if tethered on a string. “My wife?” he said, and
nothing more.

“
Yes, Mister Snow. Your
wife. You told us she was dead. What happened?”

He shook his head slowly. “They told us we
were working on a cure.”

“
They?”

He nodded.

“
You mean Biocrynetix
Laboratories?”

His lips were dry and chapped. They barely
parted when he spoke. “Cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s.
We were going to change the face of modern medicine.”

“
Mister Snow. Did you take
the compound? Did you take the QE647?”

“
It was the government,
you know. They funded the project. They didn’t want us finding out
what it was. We worked in separate groups. Only Ferguson knew. And
even he didn’t have all the pieces. But I figured it out. I put the
pieces together.”

He rolled his eyes up at me. They looked
tired and bloodshot, like he had not slept in days. He tried to
smile, but his cracked lips prevented that.

“
We were working on a
secret military project,” he said in a hush. “A project researching
bio-reanimation in complex life forms.”

“
And you succeeded,” I
said. “Didn’t you.”

He nodded faintly. “We succeeded, Mark,
Rick, Melvin, Jake and me. We made QE647 a reality.”

“
You took it, too. Didn’t
you? You took the compound and gave it to your wife.”

His eyes wandered back across the room to
her. “Yes. I gave it to her.” He shook his head. “She was too far
gone. She had been dead an hour. You can reanimate the tissue, but
the brain….” His eyes fell away again. “The brain must be fresh.
Look at her. She’s a zombie. She doesn’t know where she is, who she
is.”

He dropped his head into his hands and
buried them in his lap. “Dear God. What have I done?”

I didn’t know what to say to him. I looked
up at Carlos and Spinelli. They didn’t know either. I put my hand
on his bare shoulder. He felt cold, maybe as cold as his zombie
wife. After a bit of silent sobbing, Howard Snow raised his head,
sniffed through the tears and asked me, “What now?”

“
Now?” I took my hand off
his shoulder. “For starters, you can give back the research
material you stole.”

He looked at me, puzzled. “No. I didn’t take
the research material.”

“
But you
said––”

“
I said I took the
compound, and only a small amount of it, but I never touched the
research.”

“
You didn’t?”

“
Detective, when I left
the laboratories, all the documents, data and samples were
intact.”

“
Then who took
them?”

He gave me the look Lilith gives me
sometimes when the answer is staring me right in the face and I am
too stupid to see it. “The government, of course. The same people
who are out to kill me.”

“
Mister Snow,
listen.”

“
No. You listen. They want
you to think Williams and Delaney deaths were accidental, along
with Brookfield’s, Gerardi’s and McSweeney’s. They were not. Mark
Williams called me just hours before he fell from his balcony. He
told me men from the government were coming to see him, and that he
was scared. As well he should have been. This was after
Brookfield’s supposed accident on the escalator and Gerardi
drowning in his pool.

“
After Williams called me,
I called Rick Delaney. I was on the phone with him when he stopped
at that railroad crossing. The man was in a panic. He told me
someone in a van was behind him, trying to push his car onto the
tracks.”

“
What did you do
then?”

“
I told him to get out of
the car and run. Next thing I knew, the phone went dead. That’s
when I slipped back into the research center and stole some of the
compound. I was not looking to sell it or anything. I only wanted
to get my wife, make her better and then get the hell away from
here. Start a new life together. You can understand that, can’t
you?”

He looked at his wife. Carlos Spinelli and I
did the same. We all knew she would not be starting over with him
anytime soon. Least not in this world.

“
I blew up my house,” he
said, warranting our full attention again. “I knew they would come
looking for me next.”

His gaze returned to the TV screen. Two of
the black and whites had already left. In their place, an
ambulance. We let the paramedics in to look at Mrs. Snow. Her lack
of a detectable pulse had them chattering like monkeys. Howard Snow
continued.

“
It seemed obvious they
intended to kill everyone associated with QE647,” he said. “It’s
the Kennedy assignation all over again. You know that every key
witness in that investigation died a sudden and untimely
death.”

“
It’s the conspiracy
theory,” I said.

“
Yeah, well it’s too
coincidental to be coincidental if you ask me. That’s why I blew it
up.”

“
The house.”

“
Yes.”

“
Last time we spoke, you
said they blew it up.”

Of course I did. What else could I tell you?
You would have brought me in if I told you the truth.”

I thought about it. He was right. I would.
“We could have offered you protection, Mister Snow.”

He shook his head. “There is no protection
from them. That’s why I had to make them think I was dead, so they
would stop looking for me.”

“
But they knew
better.”

He nodded. “Yes. They always know better. My
mistake was dragging poor Lenny into this.”

“
Lenny?”

“
Dwyer,” said
Spinelli.

“
Right. The
roommate.”

“
I didn’t know they would
kill him. All I know is I spotted these two staking out the house,”
he gestured toward Carlos and Spinelli. “I thought they were Feds.
Lenny figured he could throw them off my trail. He put my raincoat
on and ran out to my car. He was going to lead them on a goose
chase around the neighborhood while my wife and I slipped out the
back door, taking his car to the motel.” He shook his head and
buried his face in his hands again. “Poor Lenny. Poor
Lenny.”

I said to Snow, “I talked to one of the
government men. He told me they don’t have the compound or the
research documents. Ferguson said he doesn’t have it either.”

“
Someone has it,” he said,
and he gestured a sweep of his hand around the room. “Look around
if you like. You will see I don’t have it.”

“
Maybe a fourth party took
it.”

He shook his head. “Maybe.”

“
You know, if they have to
start all over, they will need you. You are the only one in the
world who can put all the pieces together. It is all up there in
your head. We can put you in a witness protection program, you and
your wife. And maybe with more research, you can help your wife get
better. What do you say? Will you work with us?”

Snow raised his head. His eyes were dry, but
for the lack of tears, I knew the pain he felt was real.

“
Yes,” he said. “I’ll work
with you.”

“
Good.” I stood and
motioned for Carlos to help me get Snow on his feet. “Dominic, why
don’t you see if the paramedics have an extra blanket for Mister
Snow?”

“
Got it, Tony.”

They were just finishing loading Mrs. Snow
in the ambulance when Spinelli returned with the blanket. I wrapped
it around Howard and started him toward the door. Carlos
volunteered to go back and gather Howard’s clothes while Spinelli
ran ahead to open the rear door on the cruiser.

A crowd of onlookers had gathered across the
parking lot. Some pointed at Howard and me as we stepped from the
room. The sun hit my eyes then, washing the faces of the spectators
away in a wave of orange and yellow. I squinted tightly, raised my
hand to shade my eyes and nudged Howard in the direction of the
car.

I did not hear it. Not at first. I only felt
it. A kick to the chest so hard it knocked me back into the room. I
fell onto the floor. Howard Snow fell to the pavement outside the
door. Screams from across the parking lot told me something awful
had happened. I looked out onto the sun-drenched walkway. Spinelli
was there, his weapon drawn. He had assumed a shooter’s stance,
though clearly he did not know where to steer his aim. Corporal
Olson and her partner had also taken cover behind the ambulance,
their weapons drawn on the dispersing crowd, unable to isolate the
threat.

I started to rise, when Carlos scooped me
under the arms and dragged me away from the open doorway.

“
You all right, Boss?” he
said. I felt him patting my chest looking for a wound. “I see
blood. Where are you hit?”

“
I’m all right,” I said.
“I’m wearing a vest. That’s Snow’s blood. Go help him.”

He slapped my chest, which hurt like hell,
and scurried in a crouch to the door. I managed to my feet, drew my
weapon and offered him cover. He dragged Howard Snow into the room,
but we both could see it was too late for him.

We scuttled out the door and took up a
defensive position behind the ambulance with Spinelli, the
paramedics, Olson and her partner. “Where did the shot come from?”
I asked.

“
There,” said Olson,
pointing to a warehouse rooftop across the marshy flats on the
other side of the railroad tracks. “I think it came from
there.”

“
The
warehouse?”

“
Yes.”

“
No. That’s….” I paused to
calculate the distance. “That’s got to be eight hundred meters
away.”

“
More like eleven,” she
said.

“
Damn,” Spinelli remarked.
“Eleven hundred meters? That is no ordinary sniper range. That’s
military snipping.”

I holstered my weapon. “Then we’re
good.”

“
What are you
doing?”

“
Dominic, he hit his mark.
That sniper is long gone by now.”

“
I don’t
understand.”

I gestured toward the hotel room. “Call in a
crime scene crew. Get them out here and over to that warehouse
rooftop. Start collecting evidence. We have another homicide on our
hands.”

After turning over our crime scene to the
CSI crew, Carlos, Spinelli and I drove out to the warehouse where
the shot that killed Howard Snow came from. There on the rooftop,
as Corporal Olson predicted, we found evidence of a makeshift
sniper’s nest, consisting of a sandbag muzzle rest and camouflage
netting designed to look like roof gravel. No shell casing. No
weapon. Nothing else remained.

With Spinelli’s binoculars, I could see
clearly across the marsh to the motel parking lot, including the
room where the CSI team was still busy collecting evidence. An
expert shooter with the sun at his back, a calm wind and a serious
sniping rifle would have had little trouble scoping in a kill shot
from such a vantage point.

“
This smacks of a
government assignation,” Carlos remarked. “I don’t know where we
turn next.”

“
We call in the Feds,” I
said.

Spinelli scoffed at that. “Sure, like
they’ll do something about it.”

“
Doesn’t matter,” I told
him. “We have to call them. This is no longer our case. It’s
theirs.”

“
Why?”

“
This warehouse is on
Federal property. It sits along the marshlands extending to the
Parker River National Wildlife Refuge. So, technically this is a
Federal crime scene.”

“
This warehouse is part of
the preserve?”

“
Yup.”

“
But the Marsh flow
doesn’t even flow that far.”

“
Oh, but it does. It gets
skinny, but that’s where it eventually ends up.”

“
What about the rest of
our case? What about Delaney’s murder at the railroad tracks? The
car bomb at Dwyer’s? Isn’t that still ours?”

I shook my head. “What case? All we have is
a morgue full of dead bodies. And with Dwyer, we don’t even have
that. No body. No blown up car. We cannot even prove a crime took
place.” I shook my head. “Without Howard Snow, we have
nothing.”