Authors: Thomas Perry
He had to end that pattern now. If he broke the pattern, that detective who had found Kelly could waste his time searching the country for women with reddish blond hair and light eyes. He wouldn’t catch Joey Moreland doing the same. He got up, walked to a large CVS store near the hotel, and bought a prepaid cell phone for cash.
On the way back he called the Broker. After one ring the Broker answered. “Yeah?”
“Hi.”
“I thought it would be you.”
“That thing in Boston is done.”
“I know. Where are you calling from?”
“A prepaid cell phone. I’m not in Boston anymore.”
“Good. I know about the Boston thing, because it’s been all over the TV news. You really had to do it that way?”
“The only place you could tell me where he’d be was City Hall, and I couldn’t find anyplace else. Once he was inside, there wouldn’t have been much I could do. The place is a fortress. I’d never get another glimpse of the bastard. The neighborhood around it was full of cops. All I could do was go out farther, and pop him from there. I shot him twice to be sure he wouldn’t survive.”
“Survive? Jesus Christ. They were picking up pieces of him. You painted the wall and the fucking mayor with him.”
“I figured the kind of enemies a Mexican prosecutor had might do that.”
“Right. They might. In fact, they’re the ones who hired you to do it for them.”
“Okay. So what’s the problem?”
“They hired a pro to do it because they didn’t want anything that dramatic, which would make them the only suspects.”
“Seriously?”
“How you do a job is important. You don’t want to draw attention to it. Mexican drug guys kill Mexican cops and politicians all the time, but they don’t do it using a bazooka.”
“It’s a fifty-caliber sniper rifle.”
“That either. Don’t you see? In the United States this Salazar was a little guy. Page thirty-two, four sentences in the corner of the paper. In Mexico he was a little bit bigger than that, but just not coming home from Boston isn’t a very sensational story by their standards. Boston City Hall is a lousy place to kill anybody, and using a military weapon there is even worse. The customers are not happy.”
“I wasn’t thinking about public relations. I didn’t want to get surrounded and taken down by cops.” He paused. “Look, I don’t want an argument. I’m just calling so you can transfer the pay into my account.”
“I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“Are you saying they won’t pay?”
“I’m saying I don’t know what they will do or won’t do. Call me again in a few days. Maybe I’ll know then.”
“Look. I—” He stopped and looked at the display on his new cell phone. The Broker had hung up.
Moreland walked back toward the hotel feeling a growing outrage. The Mexican drug guys were pissed off. Whenever they wanted to get a politician or a police official, they always seemed to have ten guys block his car and fire machine guns into it from all sides until it looked like a sieve. If that was their idea of a good hit, fuck them. They should be delighted at the news that the guy was dead, and even more delighted that it had been done so efficiently, so far from home. When their enemies heard about it, they’d seem smarter than they were. How could they possibly be pissed off? But maybe they weren’t pissed off. Maybe the Broker was just trying to steal Moreland’s pay for the job.
He went back to the hotel; wiped off all the surfaces to remove fingerprints, as usual; and checked out. Then he took a cab to Penn Station. From there he took the train to Philadelphia, and checked into a hotel near the center of the city on Chestnut Street. He bought a
Philadelphia Inquirer
and looked at the car lot ads. He took another cab to the area where most of the lots seemed to be, and began to search. He found the right sort of used car after a couple of hours. It was a Toyota Maxima, and it was the gray titanium color that had been popular a couple of years earlier. It was the sort of nondescript car that he needed. Ever since the night he’d killed Kelly, he’d felt that detective who had been following him getting closer and closer. He wanted to keep moving, get far away from this part of the country, and then lie low for a while. He paid for the car in cash.
As he drove it away, he began thinking about money. He was going to need more money soon, and the person who owed him some was the Broker. Even if the customer was giving the Broker problems, they were the Broker’s problems, not Moreland’s. Whether the broker got paid or not, Moreland had money coming. If he had to, he would go take it. But that was a problem, because Holcomb had never told Joey the Broker’s real name or his address. Maybe it was time to go visit Holcomb’s ghost.
Till was in Boston police headquarters. The man across the table from him was a homicide detective named Mullaney. Beside him was Detective Rafferty from Vice, but Till knew he had been included only to give Till a false sense of security. If Till showed signs of being uncooperative or defensive, they’d try some other method.
“So let’s go through this guy’s description again,” Mullaney said. “How old is he?”
“He looks about twenty-two or twenty-three to me,” Till said. “But I’ve only seen him through tinted glass in cars moving fast, and once from a distance in Phoenix. He was wearing sunglasses that time. I have a hunch he’s older. Maybe twenty-seven or so.”
“Why is that?”
“He’s definitely young and good-looking, with dark hair that looks kind of wavy. He seems young and slim, in very good shape. But he’s really good at manipulating the escorts he’s lived with.”
“Manipulating them how?”
“They let him live with him. He tells them some story or other, never that he’s a professional killer, of course. They all seem to buy his story, at least as long as he needs them to. He’s also good at killing, and good at disappearing. Those are things that take a while to learn, so I think he’s probably older.”
“But you managed to follow him all the way across the country.” “He has a really strong preference for strawberry blonds. I noticed that some of the girls wore the same two pieces of diamond jewelry in their escort ads. I got in touch with jewelry companies, designers, stores, even pawnshops in the cities where the girls were killed, then in other cities. They all say the jewelry is custom-made. So whenever I saw an ad with a girl wearing the jewelry, I knew where he had been.” “What happens if the pattern ends?” “What usually happens. I’ll lose him for a while.” Till had been through this many times when he was a cop. After months of studying a killer and learning his habits and quirks, the homicide cops lost him. The killer got scared—scared of himself, in this case. After that he tried to do everything differently. The smart ones simply closed up shop for a while, and waited until all the attention had turned in other directions. The cops got busy hunting other killers, and potential victims stopped looking over their shoulders. Then the killer would come out again.
“You think he’s a contract killer. Who do you think paid for the hit on Luis Salazar?”
“I don’t know. If I were to guess, I would say it was one of the people or groups that he was prosecuting or had sent to prison in Mexico. I would ask the bodyguards who came with him for a list. Then I’d try to find out if any agencies, here or there, have a record of the phone calls between that suspect and anyone in the United States.”
“Yeah, the FBI is working on all that.” He paused. “But you’ve been after this guy for months, right?” “Right.”
“Do you have any idea how he operates? How does he get the jobs? How does he get paid?”
“I’ve never gotten anywhere on that. The victims are all over the country. They seem to be people you might expect to have enemies, but the police in the cities where I think he’s done jobs haven’t told me anything that forms a pattern. In Phoenix it’s two city councilmen who voted on hundreds of questions a year. In New York it was a rich man who owned an art gallery. None of the victims have anything to do with each other. So I think there’s probably a middleman who takes the contracts and passes them on to the killer.”
“Okay,” said Mullaney “Any guess on where that middleman would be?”
“None,” Till said. He spoke carefully. “Do you think I could talk to Salazar’s bodyguards and ask them a few questions?”
“Not a chance,” Mullaney said. “You’re not a cop anymore, Till. You have no official standing, and the federal agencies are all waiting in line ahead of you. And unless you’re crazy you’re not going to head for Mexico to look for the client anyway. The best thing you can do is remember some detail that will help us catch the shooter.”
Till said, “I told you everything I knew or suspected yesterday. If it’s useful to you, I’ll stay in Boston as long as you want. But I’m pretty sure he’s left.”
Mullaney said, “You’ve been cooperative. That was nice of you, considering the whole issue of what you were doing discharging illegal firearms in the middle of the city. That’s been made to go away, at least for now.”
“I appreciate that,” Till said. He watched Mullaney for a few seconds as Mullaney brought himself to be reasonable.
“Don’t get me wrong. I took a look at the guy’s car, and I had to admire you for having the balls and the presence of mind to open up on him like that. If it hadn’t been a tricked-out car you’d have killed him, and we could all go home. I guess we know everything from you that we’re going to get. You can go. If I change my mind, I’ll call you. And if I do, I’ll expect you to head for the airport to get back here.”
“I’ll do that,” said Till. “Thanks.” He stood up and shook hands with Mullaney, then with Rafferty.
Rafferty said, “Come on. I’ll walk you out.”
The two left the interrogation room and walked down the hallway. It was lined with office doors so close together that Till thought the rooms must be the size of closets. “Thanks for all your help,” said Till.
“I wish it were going better. I don’t usually get involved in anything like this. My usual interest in these girls is making their business inconvenient enough so they quit. But this guy is really evil.”
“Yeah,” said Till. “He is.” They came to the lobby. “Well, if anything comes up, please give me a call.”
“I will,” said Rafferty
Till went to his hotel, called the airline, collected his belongings, and then drove his rental car back to the airport. Late tonight, he’d be in Los Angeles. Tomorrow morning he would start over again, looking at ads, calling contacts, and exploring new avenues. There couldn’t be too many .50-caliber rifles around, and there were probably a limited number of places where the Boyfriend could have practiced firing one without having someone notice him. The Boyfriend had lost his car, and would be buying a new one. He would be looking for a new girl.
A week later, Joey Moreland approached Holcomb’s ranch in daylight. He drove up the freeway to Antelope Valley, and then took the smaller road north and east, watching the cars thinning out, the sudden absence of big trucks, which were replaced by pickups. When he turned off onto the second county road he saw that the weeds growing in the cracks of the pavement were more prevalent this year. They generally died off in full summer. A couple of real Southern California hot days were enough to do it. He passed a few rural mailboxes he remembered at the entrances to dirt roads. After another fifteen minutes of driving he made it to the Holcomb mailbox, an oversize galvanized one with a red flag and a rounded top.
Out of curiosity he looked inside it when he got out to open the gate. There were some yellowed ads from stores, but whatever else Holcomb had received by mail must have stopped long ago. He used his pick and tension wrench to open the padlock, swung the wide steel gate open, drove in, and then closed the gate again.
He drove very slowly along the dirt road onto the ranch. He didn’t want to kick up a lot of dust that could be seen from a distance. He was eight or nine miles from the nearest habitation he knew about, but being on Holcomb’s ranch made him more careful. Hartmann’s death had been solved at a glance, but Holcomb’s had not. Since Holcomb had been killed and the police had driven all the way out here to see who and what he had been, things might be different now. All Moreland would need would be to come face-to-face with a state cop who had been assigned to see if anyone still came around to Holcomb’s ranch and what he was up to.
He drove with his windows open at the speed of a man walking so he could hear or see anyone on the ranch a few seconds early. As he bounced along the dirt road, he could hear mockingbirds warbling to one another between the low California oak trees. There was a smell coming from the weeds, where wild lantana and goldenrod were swirled by the breeze into a mixture of pollen. He associated that smell with his killing lessons with Holcomb. He had not missed the scent, had not remembered it, but now that he smelled it again he loved it. The smell brought back the days of diving onto the ground, shouldering the .308 rifle, aiming and firing as quickly as possible without moving the brush around him, cycling the bolt and firing again at the distant target Holcomb had stuck on a post. The smell of burned powder and gun oil had mixed with wildflower and weed and dirt, and had made an indelible mark in his memory. When they had gone out at night, sometimes the wind was still and the smells were even stronger because the plants seemed to exhale more heavily into the hot, motionless air.
He stopped a hundred yards before the house and pulled his car in among the twisted trunks of the short, thick oak trees. The canopy of dusty leaves was only five or six feet above his head, but it was dense and almost impervious to the fierce sunshine. His car sat in deep shadow.
Moreland left his suitcase in the trunk, but he took the flashlight he had in the glove compartment. He had his nine-millimeter pistol stuck into the back of his belt under his shirt, but he didn’t reach for it. He walked at a steady, leisurely pace toward Holcomb’s two cinder block buildings, keeping both hands visible in case some future dead man was watching him from a distance. He resisted the temptation to speed up when he got close enough to the bigger cinder block building to relish the idea of being beside it and able to take cover. Instead he scanned the nearby brush and the high hillsides for any movement, and kept listening for sounds—a heavy foot on stony dirt, the slide of metal on metal.