Whisper Death (7 page)

The music in McGuire's head, harmony and melody, became sharp and slashing, music no longer.

Something flew by McGuire's ear, catching the light from the neon sign as it passed. A small stone. Children throwing small stones?

There was a wetness on McGuire's face. Too late, his instincts, riding the softness of the air and the melody in his mind, began to rouse themselves.

A woman seated at the restaurant window was watching them casually as McGuire began to fall, forced by Crawford's weight. Her dinner partner had just made her laugh. Attractive, McGuire noticed. And slim. Like Janet.

Innes cursed and shouted. Instinct told McGuire to slip his free hand inside his jacket, and for half a heartbeat he searched for a weapon that wasn't there.

The second shot struck Innes and he shouted again, one arm flailing the air, the other trying to yank his revolver from its holster.

Crawford was still falling against McGuire and McGuire's hand was still inside his jacket, clawing across his chest for a phantom shoulder holster. The prisoner's weight shoved McGuire off balance and blocked his view of Innes.

Another shot. McGuire sensed the bullet strike Crawford, felt Crawford's body jerk against him even as they struck the ground together, chained like links in a bracelet. McGuire squeezed himself against the grass behind Crawford as more bullets struck the prisoner's body and Innes screamed in pain and fired, again and again, into the dark shrubbery where the sniper had waited. McGuire tried to burrow below the surface of the ground as the fear solidified within him, like plaster setting.

There were more screams, hysterical sobs and cries of panic. But the shooting ceased. No longer did bullets enter the body of Bunker Crawford, McGuire's shield of flesh and bone.

McGuire lifted his head and saw traffic gliding past on Palm Canyon Drive, saw Ralph Innes rolling on the grass in agony, saw the gaping hole in Crawford's skull where the first bullet had shattered bone and scalp and brains, hurling them into the soft evening air like stones tossed by young children.

The horizon was aflame.

On the far side the street, the low lines of the Palm Springs Municipal Building began to emerge from darkness. Shrubs and lawns faded from grey to green.

McGuire watched the dawn arrive, seated on a bench near the manicured walk leading across the lawn to Palm Springs Police Headquarters.

He had been staring into the darkness for the past hour, refusing to sleep and willing the sun to rise, remembering the chaos at the motel. The hysterical screams of women and children. Ralph Innes squeezing his eyes against the pain and repeating “It hurts. Christ, it hurts.” The arrival of squad cars and ambulances, unfamiliar faces performing familiar, reassuring activities; professional calm washing away chaos.

Riding with Ralph in the ambulance as it howled its way to the hospital, he had watched as paramedics injected fluids into the wounded police officer and cursed his wounds, their equipment and themselves.

“It'll be a few hours before he stabilizes,” the doctors told McGuire at the hospital. “Why not wait outside?” they suggested.

“Yes,” McGuire replied.

Instead, he returned to the motel, where the murder site had been secured by uniformed police officers and broad yellow tape. With daylight, the grounds would be scoured for evidence, but nothing could be learned in darkness. Nothing more than what was already known: four 38-calibre bullets struck Bunker Crawford, three more than necessary; another two had entered the body of Ralph Innes, one passing through his abdomen, the other shattering his left forearm.

McGuire's instincts had been dulled by disuse and derailed by his anger at Bonnar. Another McGuire, a younger one perhaps, would have recognized that the motel's setting provided the killer with a choice of several escape routes. Down the path to a car in the parking lot, shielded all the way by shrubbery. Straight ahead to the lighted pool area and into shadows beneath the balconies of the motel. Up the stairs to the open second-floor walkway, to become just another horrified spectator attracted by the screams and hysteria.

At the murder site, McGuire gave his statement and eavesdropped on the witness interviews. Finally he hitched a ride in a marked police car returning to Palm Springs Police Headquarters, where he poured himself a coffee and wandered outside to sit alone in the warm desert evening.

The same questions repeated themselves over and over, riding circular paths through his mind like carved horses on an endless carousel. Had he done the right thing, taking custody of Crawford from the Palm Springs police? Could he have found a way to secure the motel area? What choices did he have, attached to a dying man, unarmed, exposed?

McGuire pictured himself shielded by Crawford's still-warm corpse as the restaurant patrons watched. Praying for the shooting to end. And counting the shots. Two into Crawford. One into Ralph. Another into Crawford. Another into Ralph.

Jesus.

What else could he have done except cower behind Bunker Crawford's barrier of flesh?

What else could he have done but survive?

Twenty years ago, he told himself, he would have done something. Something foolhardy, perhaps. Something more than surrender to fear and murmur prayers into the dirt.

Twenty years ago, he had more of life to lose. Yet he would have risked more.

Twenty years ago, he would have ignored the possibility of being struck by the bullet. Now he knew the likelihood.

Had he been a coward? He didn't know. But clearly, he hadn't been a hero.

Bonnar arrived with the first light of dawn. The police captain, driving a large grey sedan, began to turn into the parking lot. Then, seeing McGuire on the bench, he wheeled the car to the curb and sauntered across the lawn, scanning the sky as he walked. He wore a pink golf shirt, pale blue slacks and penny loafers with no socks. Aviator-style sunglasses, unnecessary in the weak early light, hid his eyes.

“He'll make it,” Bonnar said, resting a foot on the end of the bench. “Hospital just called me. Out of surgery, pretty doped up and his spleen shot to hell. But they figure he'll come through.” He squinted into the half-circle of the sun visible over the low municipal building across the street. “Where the hell were you? Why weren't you there waiting for news about him?”

“I'm no doctor,” McGuire replied. He stretched his arms along the back of the bench and leaned back, watching the sky change to a glorious blue. “Nothing I could do.”

“He was your partner.”

McGuire nodded. “And I thought he was going to die. I didn't want to be trapped there when the news came. I wanted to be outside. I wanted to handle it on my own if I had to.”

Bonnar shoved his sunglasses to his forehead and studied McGuire as though he were a rare animal, unfamiliar and unseen until now. Birds sang in the greenery behind them. A breeze stirred the palm trees across the way. McGuire watched a low cloud approach the sun, the only blemish on the face of a perfect sky.

“I got the goods on you, McGuire,” Bonnar said after several moments. He leaned forward, resting an elbow on his uplifted knee. “After you left yesterday I asked for your records from Boston. You're a real cowboy, aren't you? When you're not getting your ass kissed for being a smart cop, you're getting it kicked for being a jerk. You have a habit of running like a lone wolf, you and that guy who used to be your partner. 'Course, it wasn't much of a partnership, way it looks to me. First chance your partner gets, he grabs his pension and drops you like a bad habit.”

“Where were you?” McGuire's voice was quiet. Curious, not demanding. He was still studying the sky.

“When?”

“Last night. When the shooting started. Where the hell were you?”

Bonnar withdrew his foot from the bench. He rolled his shoulders forward and leaned in to McGuire as though prepared to seize him. “Do you want to tell me what you're insinuating?” he hissed. “Or do you want me to guess for myself?”

McGuire turned to face the other man. “Somebody scared the hell out of Crawford,” McGuire said. “You knew where we were taking him. And what we planned to do. So who did you tell? Did you get somebody to wait for us behind the bushes? It wouldn't be you. It would be somebody who owes you something. Or maybe you owe them something. Like the two federal guys who interviewed him. So who was it, Bonnar?”

McGuire watched the other man's jaw tighten like a vice and his eyes narrow.

“You son of a bitch,” Bonnar said, his voice barely above a whisper. “You move out of here now. Just get the hell off police property. And if I see you anywhere around here again, I'll charge you with trespassing and slander and impersonating a police officer and anything else I can think of.” His voice erupted into a shout. “Get out of here!
Now!
”

“How bad?” Fat Eddie asked.

McGuire leaned against the headboard of his motel bed, the telephone at his ear. “Pretty bad. But he'll come through. Ralph's tough.”

“How long will you be down there?”

“Two, three days,” McGuire lied. Outside he could hear doors slamming and vehicles arriving and departing. Police cars, identification experts, photographers, cops doing their job. “Unless they get lucky and somebody turns up. But I can't see it.”

“Was it a hit?”

“Could be. Whoever did it was very smooth or very lucky.”

Fat Eddie sighed. Now he was two detectives short. “Who's directing things down there?”

“Guy named Bonnar,” McGuire replied. “He's okay,” he added. Let's not have Fat Eddie worrying about teamwork, McGuire told himself silently.

“You're there just for the preliminaries, right?” Eddie Vance asked. “That's all they need you for? After all the statements are in, they're on their own. Is that how it's going to work?”

“Something like that,” McGuire assured him.

“And you're back here when? By Friday?”

“That's the way it looks, Eddie. Listen, you need any paperwork from me? Or something from Bonnar?” A calculated bluff.

“No, just keep me posted. And let me know if there's any change in Innes's condition.”

“Sure. Sure thing.”

The telephone jerked him awake less than five minutes later.

“How is he?” No hello, no formalities. Only the strained voice of Janet Parsons.

“He'll pull through.” McGuire rubbed the side of his head. He had to get some sleep.

“What happened?”

His voice was weary. “Janet, you already know. We were escorting a prisoner into our room for interrogation and we were ambushed.”

“And you didn't do a thing.”

“I
couldn't
do anything, Janet. I'm not armed, for God's sake!”

He listened to her breathe over the line from Boston. “Fat Eddie won't let me come down there to see him,” she said finally.

“What could you do if you were here?”

“At least as much as you did.”

McGuire shook his head sadly and hung up.

When he awoke at noon, he lay without moving and confronted the events of the previous evening.

He had hidden from death behind another man's body.

Of all the preconceptions the world had of Joseph Peter McGuire, the street kid from a lower-working-class neighbourhood in Worcester, none fathomed the depths of his moral sense. Though he never analyzed it, never defined its limits and exceptions, McGuire nevertheless nurtured an absolute sense of right and wrong. He had a massive capacity for moral outrage, and it seethed constantly within him.

It was McGuire's moral sense that had been the foundation of his decision to become a police officer. And it was McGuire's anger at inequity and hypocrisy, his extreme response to moral grievances, that also fuelled the antisocial side of his behaviour and powered his personality.

Thus, McGuire could use the self-serving machinations of Eddie Vance to his own advantage in locating a young killer of priests, as he had done a year earlier. The murderer had been found, the case had been closed. And Fat Eddie had suffered only a mere hiccup in his rise to captain. More important, a moral debt had been paid.

And McGuire could ride his moral outrage against the entire Boston police organization, slashing his way through files of unsolved crimes, decrying sloppy procedures that excused incompetence and enabled murderers to walk free.

What then, McGuire pondered, is the moral position of a man who cowers behind the body of another human being to protect himself from gunfire?

McGuire didn't know.

Nor could anyone tell him.

There would be answers and redemption only when McGuire determined who had shot at them from the shrubbery and silenced Bunker Crawford forever.

McGuire didn't believe that Crawford had murdered a man on his own doorstep in a fit of insanity. It was an act of desperation, like Crawford's flight to Las Vegas and his arrival in Palm Springs. He came here for a reason, McGuire assured himself. His murder proved it.

McGuire would find that reason. On his own if necessary. And he had three, perhaps four days to do it.

He began by calling the best analytical mind he knew.

“I heard,” Ollie Schantz said through his speaker phone. “Hell of a thing. You okay?”

“Not a scratch,” McGuire replied. “I had a shield. My prisoner's body.”

“Any port in a storm. Besides, sounds like he was a dead man from the first shot. Might as well stop four bullets as one.” Ollie paused. “What d'ya think, Joe?”

“They wanted Crawford, not me or Ralph. We were just in the way.”

“Ideas?”

“Only some I don't like.” McGuire explained how Bonnar and his staff had known where he and Innes were taking Crawford. “And he let a couple of federal guys interview the prisoner. Without recording their names or having a local officer present. He even let the Feds take away a videotape of their interview. What the hell kind of operation is that?”

Ollie Schantz ignored the question. “You check Crawford out on the federal files?” he asked.

“Didn't have a chance. But I tried to run a search on Amos, the guy he shot in his doorway. Had Matt Kennedy do it. Matt came up against all kinds of security blocks. Said he'd never seen anything like it for a lousy postal inspector.”

McGuire heard Ollie Schantz grunt through the wire. He pictured his former partner in his Revere Beach home, watching the late afternoon sun kicking diamonds from the waves of Massachusetts Bay.

“Let me give Matt a call, see what he can match on Crawford and this Amos guy for you. I'll call you back later if I get anything.” His voice dropped. “Ralph going to be all right?”

“He'll be all right,” McGuire said. “But he won't be the same.”

“You're welcome to go in, but there's nothing to learn.” The ward physician at Palm Springs Memorial Hospital glanced briefly at McGuire's badge and returned his eyes to his clipboard. “He's heavily sedated and progressing as well as can be expected,” the doctor said.

“I'd like to see him,” McGuire said. “I'm his partner.”

The doctor angled his head toward Ralph's room and walked briskly away.

McGuire showed his badge to the two Palm Springs officers flanking the door. One nodded and led McGuire into the room.

Ralph lay among electronic apparatus that was more alive than the patient it monitored. A jagged green line traced his heartbeat across a small black screen. Gauges moved in response to his blood pressure. Red lights blinked, fluids dripped, circuits hummed, Ralph breathed.

McGuire watched him for several minutes, the Palm Springs cop behind him clearing his throat and shuffling his feet impatiently.

McGuire nodded and left.

Via Linda curled up a gentle rise at the western end of Vista Chino. For the first hundred yards, the scrubby desert on either side of the road was broken by small gullies carved into the hills by rainwater. But where Via Linda turned into itself to form a cul-de-sac, three low houses sat amid separate green oases.