Authors: Thomas Perry
He could see the place on top of the desk where the Boyfriend must have positioned the rifle. The bipod had been down, and when the rifle was fired it had scraped backward in the recoil. The Boyfriend had been sitting on a chair by the left side of the desk, then stood up when it was time to put his right shoulder to the weapon. He had raised the butt of it, letting it rest only on the bipod; aimed very carefully; and fired.
With his cell phone Till took pictures of the top of the desk, the foot depressions in the new carpet, and a place on the floor where the Boyfriend had set something about five feet long, probably the rifle case. Where was he now?
The Boyfriend had fired three times, then once more at the police car. He had apparently put the rifle back in the big case, then left the office. Till hurried to the elevator and hit the button marked “L.” The man must have parked his car in the lot below the building.
Till reached the lobby level, then made it out to the street-level entrance to the garage. As he stepped into the cavernous entrance he had both hands in his coat pockets with his index fingers in the trigger guards of the two LC9 pistols. He went down the ramp far enough to be out of the street noise, then stopped and listened.
He heard the sound of a car coming up from the lower parking levels. The engine was running at high rpm, because it was climbing the incline, and the tires gave faint squeaks with every turn. He selected a car parked near the entrance to the parking lot, crouched behind it, took out his two pistols, and watched the place down the ramp where the car would appear. He flicked off the safety catches on his pistols.
The car was approaching the bottom of the straight ramp. Till steadied his aim and tightened his grip on both pistols. The front of the car slid into view, then rose up slightly on the slope. He stared at the man in the driver’s seat, studying his face as he came closer.
The man saw Till and reacted instantly, hitting the gas pedal hard. The wheels spun, and Till fired. The nine-millimeter bullets hit the driver’s door, but penetrated only the thin outer sheet metal. There had to be a steel reinforcement behind it. He fired at the side window, but the bullets ricocheted, leaving only a few smoky impact marks in the glass. Till’s ears told him the spinning tires were about to catch, so he changed his aim. He fired both guns at the left front tire, and then at the left rear tire.
The wheels caught against the pavement, and the car shot forward, the tires already beginning to flap on the left side as the car lurched out into the street. Till fired at the rear window, but the bullets made the same white impact marks in the glass without breaking through. The car squealed out of the shadow of the building and turned to roar up the street.
Till stuck the pistols into his coat pockets as he ran to the lot entrance, but the Boyfriend’s car was out of sight already. He ran across the front of the building to the alley where he had left his rental car, and got in. He had no room to turn it around, so he backed up as quickly as he could toward the street he had just left.
A big Cadillac Escalade with a pearlized paint job appeared in the entrance to the alley behind him and the man inside honked his horn. Till gestured to him to back out again. Instead, the Escalade began to move ahead toward Till’s car, its horn blowing incessantly now. Till got out of his rental car and walked quickly to the Escalade.
The man in the Escalade had a look of anger on his face. He moved forward toward Tills car, leaning on the horn.
With speed that surprised the man, Till was at the side of the Escalade with a gun in his hand. He said, “You’re keeping me from capturing a man who just committed a murder. If you pull back out of here fast enough, you can keep going. If you do anything else, you’ll never see home again.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll go,” the man said.
“Do it.”
The man pulled back, hooking to the left so he could pull forward at an angle and edge into traffic.
Till got into his rental car and executed the same maneuver. He turned right at the first corner, but there was no sign of the killer’s car ahead. He drove several blocks, but still saw nothing.
He dialed 911 and said to the dispatcher, “The sniper used a fifty-caliber long-range military sniper rifle from a tenth-floor office at 7557 Wilburton. He’s driving a white Toyota Camry with two flat tires on the left side.” He hung up.
As Till drove, he took the battery out of his prepaid cell phone so it wouldn’t keep broadcasting his GPS location, removed the SIM card, then waited until he was stopped at a light. He tossed the phone into a sewer grating, and then drove on.
Joey Moreland was still feeling panicky and hyperalert. He had driven the damaged car a few blocks and made a couple of turns so he was going in the opposite direction a few streets away from his office building, and now he had to ditch it. As he drove toward a big building he could see that it had a wide parking lot entrance.
He swung the damaged car into the underground parking entrance, took a ticket from the machine, and watched the barrier rise in front of him. He drove down two floors so his car wouldn’t be the first thing people saw when they entered the lot, got out, and looked at the car. He had toyed with the idea of trying to fix the flat tires, but the doors on the left side had about six bullet holes, each a puncture with a halo of bare steel where the sheet metal had been pounded in and the paint had disappeared. The quarter-inch steel plates in the doors had stopped the bullets from hitting him, but not from ruining the car. The windows looked opaque in places; there were white spots where the bullets had bounced off the bulletproof glass.
That plainclothes cop who had shot at him as he’d left his office building might very well guess that he’d doubled back. If so, the cop wouldn’t be too far behind. Moreland had to abandon the car and try something else.
He opened the trunk, took out the two-wheeled dolly, set the long cardboard box containing the rifle case on it, and wheeled it up the ramp and out to the sidewalk. In the distance he heard sirens, but they seemed to be passing on their way to somewhere else. He walked along trying to look like a successful salesman delivering some piece of equipment, but his eyes were searching the area for opportunities. He passed a restaurant that looked inviting. It had freshly painted exterior woodwork and a gray stone facade. A small marquee with gold filigree letters read ETIENNE DE CHAMBORD. There was a movable sign on an iron stand that read VALET PARKING $5.00 against the side of the building in the narrow driveway to the parking lot, not at the curb in front of the building. He figured it was too early for the valet. It would be a while before the dinner customers came.
Moreland looked around him. There was no direct view from the dining room of the restaurant to the spot where he stood. He could see that the traffic on the street was moving steadily. He glanced at his watch. It was close to five o’clock. He walked up the driveway a few feet. Beside the valet sign there was a small wooden cabinet. It had a door on it, and when he opened it, he could see little gold hooks for car keys, and numbers corresponding to parking spots. There were no keys. He could see that the lot was empty, and there was no sign of a parking attendant.
He placed his dolly at the side of the building, tilted the iron stand, and rolled the sign to the curb, so it could be read from the right lane of the street. He pushed the cabinet to the curb beside it, leaving his dolly and the disguised rifle case beside the building. He stood by the cabinet for a few minutes, looking expectantly at the passing cars. He decided he would keep trying for another five minutes, and then move on.
A minute later, a black BMW pulled up in front of the restaurant. An elderly man got out of the driver’s seat, and Moreland stepped up to open the door for the passenger, an elderly woman. It occurred to him that he had forgotten something. He opened the door in the lower part of the cabinet and found a roll of tickets. He tore one off and handed it to the man.
As the couple walked toward the front door of the restaurant, Moreland pulled their car into the driveway, loaded his dolly and rifle into the backseat, and drove it the rest of the way into the lot, intending to turn it around and leave; but then he saw that the lot opened onto an alley on the far end. He drove to the alley, turned into it, and then followed it out to another street.
He drove three blocks, then turned right to head for Massachusetts Avenue. He reached it and headed for the bridge over the Charles River into Cambridge. He exhibited no urgency, took no chances to gain ground in the evening traffic. Soon he was on the bridge, passing over the wide, calm river. On the other side he turned left, and slowly made his way with the commuters moving out of the most congested parts of the city. He would cross the river again upstream, and get onto Interstate 90. Boston was over for him.
He allowed himself to drive the stolen car for only two hours before he stopped at a large apartment house where the parking spaces were in a row of carports at the back of the building, and nobody could see into them from a window. He removed a set of license plates from a car and traded them with the set from his stolen BMW.
Next he stopped at a Target store and bought a large suitcase. He went to the backseat of the BMW, removed the rifle case from the cardboard carton, opened the case, and disconnected the upper and lower receivers of the rifle. The scope remained attached to the upper receiver. He removed the twenty-nine-inch barrel, so the rifle was in three pieces. He carefully set them in the new suitcase, then added the extra magazines, earphones, and cleaning kit. He emptied his old, smaller suitcase into the new one.
He put the old suitcase into the Dumpster behind the store, then drove on for a few miles until he found another Dumpster behind a fast-food restaurant. He left the dolly beside it, drove a few miles farther to another restaurant Dumpster, and put the rifle case in its cardboard carton far down under some unpleasant-smelling food.
He was headed toward Hartford, Connecticut, which was two hundred miles from Boston. Crossing state lines was good, because bulletins were generally only statewide at first. As soon as he crossed the state line, he stopped in a quiet neighborhood to steal the license plates from a car that had been pulled into its garage for the evening. He hoped that before anyone looked at the car again he’d be on his way out of Connecticut.
He drove to Hartford and found the big Hilton hotel on Trumbull Street, which he remembered from a visit about two years ago. It was the right size, with about four hundred rooms. He parked the stolen BMW, now bearing stolen Connecticut plates, in the lot and walked along the side of the building to the front entrance where taxicabs waited. He stepped up to the first one and looked in the window.
The driver looked up, got out, and lifted Moreland’s heavy suitcase into the trunk. “Where to?”
“Bradley airport, the main terminal.”
The terminal was only about twenty minutes away, so there was little need for small talk. The driver asked when his flight was. Moreland said, “Don’t worry, I’m early. It’s a red-eye.”
When the cab arrived at the Bradley airport terminal, Moreland waited for the driver to pull away, and then walked inside the entrance near the arrival areas. He went to the shuttle bus desk and paid for a ride to New Haven. He had to wait only a few minutes before the driver came to the desk and called for his riders. He and three other people got into the shuttle. He made sure to get into the back of the van so the general conversation didn’t have to include him, and nobody would spend enough time looking at his face to remember him. When he arrived at New Haven, he called for a different shuttle company to take him to JFK airport on Long Island.
When he got into a room at a hotel near JFK airport, he was exhausted. He had been moving constantly but slowly since morning, winning a race by being unnoticed. As he lay on the bed he reviewed his progress and evaluated it. He had checked out of the hotel in Boston without leaving any prints or having any memorable encounters. He had performed his job in Boston impeccably against terrible odds, and then had a car shot out from under him. He had stolen the BMW at the restaurant, driven two hundred miles in it, and left it with in-state license plates parked in a huge hotel lot. Then he had done two stints on shuttle buses and two in taxis without leaving much of an impression, and had paid cash for everything. The best anyone could do would be to trace him through the stolen car to the Hilton in Hartford. Through guesswork and luck, his pursuers might get some exceptional person who remembered him to pick him out in surveillance tapes at the airport, but they could not connect him to a flight because there had been no flight.
He took off his clothes and stepped into the shower. When he was drying off, he noticed that the recoil of the heavy rifle had bruised his right shoulder. And he was worried again. There was a cop who had tried to shoot him on his way out of the office building lot. And there was still the man—detective or FBI man—who had shown Kelly the pictures of all of the girls. If those two got together he would be in real trouble. He lay on the bed and tossed fitfully for two hours, and then fell asleep.
When Moreland awoke, he was alone. He wasn’t used to that yet. He had killed the girl—he stopped himself before thinking
again
—and he was starting at the beginning. He had a huge worry. He had used the girls to make him invisible, but he had made the mistake of choosing a series of girls who were too much alike. He had not ever thought of himself as creating a pattern. He had simply scanned the long list of ads for escorts, clicked on one to see her photographs, then clicked on another, until he had found one who attracted him. He searched for a better word.
Attracted
was true, but not adequate. He had stopped when he had found the one who had
titillated
him the most. Each time, it had been a girl who had seemed to him not only the best choice, but the obvious choice.
But he had definitely created a pattern. The detective or FBI agent who had tried to get Kelly to betray him had seen the pattern, and shown it to Kelly. She had seen it too, agreed with him completely, and started right away to bug Moreland about it.