The Third Coincidence (24 page)

“How does that sit with you, Colin?” Jack asked. “I’ll go along.”

Jack tapped the flip chart. “What about these others?”

Rachel repeated her position. “We had good reason to conclude LW worked alone. I’ve heard nothing that argues to the contrary other than LW’s own claim.”

Rachel moved to an empty chair near the flip chart, and sat on one shoeless foot. With the motion of leaning in, her breasts swelled to fill the opening at the top of her blouse. “Is there any support for any of these other possibilities?”

“Let’s talk some more about why it’s reasonable to conclude LW has no militia,” Frank suggested. “I know we talked before about the descriptions we got in Cleveland, in Oregon, and elsewhere, but our conclusions weren’t solid then, they still aren’t. Our thinking on this has been like nailing Jell-O to the wall. Is there something else that supports LW being a loner?”

Millet stood and scratched his belly with both hands. “Can I take over for a minute?”

“It’s all yours, Millet.” Jack put down his marking pen and sat at the table.

“You guys are the investigators,” Millet began. “Let me throw

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out a question and you all react to it. Okay, here’s the deal: each of you is LW and you have a militia.”

Millet began prowling around the table, talking faster as he circled. “Your self-appointed mission is to eliminate the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and the governors of the Federal Reserve System. Are you going to dink along as LW has, killing one every week or so? If not, what’s your plan?”

Millet stopped circling near the head of the table and fixed them with a professorial glare. “Come on! Participate! Think out loud. You’re LW! You’ve got a militia! What’s your MO?”

“I would’ve used my militia to shorten the early-stage surveil- lance work,” Colin said to start the discussion. “That would also make the information from each surveillance more current when I needed it. Once the killing plans were set, I’d proceed like the Amer- ican Mafia did to eliminate the old Sicilian Mustache Petes. I’d kill them all within a couple of days, if possible the same day. I’d assign each target to the member of my militia who surveilled that target.” “That’d shut them both down immediately, Frank added. “The

Fed and the Court. And all the killing would be done before—” “Before security could be enhanced,” Colin said, to finish the

thought.

“Exactly,” Frank said. “I don’t need to call for these officials to stand down. I could send one communiqué with my demands, threatening to kill any replacements.”

Both Frank and Colin, who had tag teamed the theory, threw Millet self-satisfied looks.

“And,” Nora added, “I’d be out of the country before Jack Mc- Call has been appointed to catch me.”

Rachel, who had sat quietly nodding her head like a bobble doll, said, “We know LW is intelligent. If he had a militia and he didn’t do it that way, he’d have to be a fool. LW is a lone wolf, whatever the hell the initials stand for.”

“Anybody?” Jack asked. No one spoke.

182 David M. Bishop

“Okay, we continue to treat LW as a lone wolf until we have a reason to think otherwise. And when and if we have a reason, it will be our reason and not something LW puts out.”

It was nearly midnight when LW grabbed a pair of scissors and a flashlight, and left his home. Despite the hour, he knew where he had to go before he could sleep. Thirty minutes later, he was kneel- ing beside his father’s gravestone.

“I thought you’d like to know that we’ve eliminated seven aris- tocrats and forced one to resign. That’s eight down and eight re- maining. The other casualties were necessary to dial up the terror. The protection around the aristocrats has increased. If they don’t start resigning soon, I’ll kick up the terror by adding in some of their grand kiddies.”

He set the lighted flashlight on the ground and began using the scissors to clip the unruly blades of grass that were assaulting the base of his father’s grave marker. His previous hand pulling of the rebel- lious strands had left a clumpy look. Mom had always kept the house neat for Dad.

Before he left, he stooped, struck a match and cremated the fake identification of George Marks, the assassin of Fed Governor Harry Capone.

Your birthday’s coming soon, Father. I have something special planned. A surprise.

CHAPTER 37

LW has Wall Street in a free fall, the Dow has dropped over 400 points since his first killing.

—CNBC

It had been another early morning followed by a long day, and Jack saw fatigue on the faces of his squad. Colin had dark circles under his eyes. Rachel’s hair had the look that came from trading styling time for a few extra minutes in bed. Only Millet, who always looked disheveled, looked normal—normal for Millet.

As for himself, when Jack felt exhausted, the lines in his face that had developed from a lifetime of laughter and sorrow, deepened. His sexy neighbor, Janet Parker, had once told him that lines on a man’s face added character, while on a woman they were simply wrinkles. Millet and Rachel continued to work their passenger lists while Colin brought his timeline current to include the Capone killing and the place from which LW had sent his most recent commu- niqué. The logistics still supported the thesis that this was a one-man

operation.

It was after seven, and Jack stood at their paper graveyard, chal- lenging himself to figure another way to configure the victim’s pic- tures to suggest a different chain of thought.

Rachel came over to tell him that Frank and Nora were on their way back from Texas. “They landed at Bolling,” she said. “They’re on the George Washington Parkway right now.”

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“Shit,” Millet said, “they just left late last night.”

“I didn’t even know they’d gone,” said Colin. “I walked out last night with Nora. I thought she went home.”

“Frank called me last night,” Jack explained. “He suggested they fly to Dallas so they could be at Capone’s house first thing this morn- ing.”

Thirty minutes later, Frank and Nora were reporting on their trip to Dallas.

“Capone was taken out by a rifle shot from about five hundred yards,” Nora said. “For obvious reasons no initials were carved in his forehead, but we found no reason to conclude other than what we did yesterday: LW shot Capone.”

“Did you find anybody who saw anything?” Jack asked.

“We spoke to a Mr. and Mrs. Converse,” Frank told them. “The Converses live in a house across the street from the back side of the hill from which Capone had been shot. They saw a man coming down the hill carrying what looked like a blanket.”

“We separated Mr. and Mrs. Converse,” Nora added. “Each of their descriptions agreed with what we had from our earlier wit- nesses.”

“Bingo,” Rachel said. “He’s a loner.”

“Not to change the subject,” asked Frank, “but what’s happening at the Harrelson house?”

“Forensics called from the bureau,” Jack said. “They’ve finished, and found nothing. Another dead end. The observation team re- mains in place watching both the chief justice’s home and the Har- relson house in the hope that LW returns.”

“Let’s not get off Dallas just yet,” Colin protested. “Did the guy who was carrying the blanket walk off or drive? What about the make of the car?”

“He drove away, all right,” Frank said. “But neither Mr. nor Mrs. Converse are car buffs. They could only remember that it was a dark- color, not new, but not more than a few years old. Mr. Converse thought it was a coupe.”

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Colin scowled. “Great. That narrows it to only a couple million cars in Dallas. Did the agents at Capone’s see anything?”

Frank shook his head. But before he could open his mouth, Nora interrupted. “One more thing,” she said, grinning. “Both the Converses said the man coming down off the hill wore . . . anybody?”

“A red baseball cap!” the team chorused. “Bingo!” Both Frank and Nora said at once.

Frank said, “The Dallas FBI office is trying to trace the Tango and the Winchester shell case. They had both been wiped clean. The Dallas Police Department and the FBI are coordinating an ef- fort to check the retail stores hoping to find a clerk who sold a boom box with a remote control. A buyer with a different description would suggest LW has some kind of help.”

“What’s been going on here?” Nora asked, taking off her earrings.

Pointing his water bottle at Millet, Jack said, “Update us on your lists.”

“Rachel and I are walking on his shadow,” Millet began. “Ain’t that a cool way of saying it? I heard that last night watching one of those old movies you dig so much, Jackman.”

“Millet. The lists.”

“Okay. Okay. Lighten up. We’ve shaved the passenger lists for the Oregon and Cleveland killings down to six and eight.”

He passed a copy to each of them. “Those passengers made this list based on two things: The height, weight, and age details we found for these passengers generally fit the sketchy details we’ve got- ten from the witnesses, and we have been unable to confirm their whereabouts at the times of the killings. The names with asterisks appear to be phonies.”

Colin glanced up, “Any names on both lists?”

“No, but each list has one passenger we suspect is bogus.”

Colin pointed, “These two? Kimble in Oregon and Campbell flying into Cleveland?”

“Way to go, Superfly,” Millet said. “I just told you the phonies are the ones with the asterisks!”

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Jack turned to Nora, “Call that reservations woman you spoke to at the resort on the Oregon coast. Find out if she recognizes the name John Kimble.”

Colin and Millet watched Nora as she walked to her desk, her jacket draped back over one shoulder. Jack cleared his throat loudly to recapture their attention.

While Nora made the call, Jack had Colin call Rex Smith to re- port the twelve remaining names, including the times for establish- ing their whereabouts. Also the two phony names to see if the bureau could scare up anything that would establish those two were real people.

“We’ve got a winner,” Nora declared hustling back to join the others. “Peggy Fallow says that a John Kimble called her a couple of times. Kimble told her he lived in Southern California and wanted the honeymoon cottage the same days the Breens had it reser— ”

”Yeah,” said Colin, “sure, he wanted to confirm the Breens had arrived.”

“You got that right,” Nora said. “This Kimble told Peggy Fallow he’d come to see the honeymoon cottage, but he never showed. She has no phone number for him. She’d chalked him up to just another sales lead that petered out. She promised not to repeat our conver- sation to anyone.”

“That gives us three aliases,” Rachel said. “Barry Jones rents the house across from Chief Justice Evans, John Kimble in Oregon where Mr. and Mrs. Breen were killed, and Robert Campbell in Cleveland when the hit was made on Taylor and his family.”

“Let’s not get too proud of ourselves just yet,” Jack cautioned. “This only means something if we can parlay these aliases into one real man. Colin, have Rex Smith check California and Oregon for a marriage license or a wedding announcement for a John Kimble to marry anyone. This could be a coincidence and Kimble could be legit.”

Jack looked into the bleary eyes of each member of his team.

the third coincidence 187

“We’re creeping up on this guy. We’ve got to suck it up and stay in our full-court press.”

There was no need to go into any detail about what might hap- pen if they didn’t. They all knew. He could see it in their faces, and he was also aware that in the end, everything depended on him.

A little after six, Rex Smith stormed through the door and joined the others at the table. “Turns out the forensic guys did find something at the Harrelson house,” he said. “LW had applied a heat-generating chemical around the jambs of the front and back doors. When we opened the door, we disturbed it. He could have only seen that stuff through an infrared scope.”

“The army developed that scope for our special forces,” Colin explained. “The planners called it FLIR for forward-looking infrared. It’s part of the equipment package being developed for the digital soldier of the future.”

Rex frowned. “Do you want me to shut down the stakeout of the Harrelson house? We could always—”

Jack interrupted him. “What’s the current status?”

“We’ve applied new chemical to try and make it look like it did before,” Rex answered. “With the cooperation of a second neighbor we’ve established sight lines to the areas LW would need to be po- sitioned to check that chemical using a FLIR scope. Given his trip to Dallas, LW may have been too busy to recheck the Harrelson house since we found it.”

“Stay with it. Give him no avenue of escape.” “That’s how it is now.”

“Good work, Rex. We were about to call Director Hampton. Colin’s got the details on another assignment I’d like you to ramrod. It’ll require the help of some FBI research people for a few hours.” “Already approved. My orders are that you’re my only assign- ment. I have high-priority access to whatever resources I might need