On the slope, the carnage wrought by Riley’s bullets on the killer’s body was disguised by scrub and wildflowers. Even under the lights, it was hard to make out the corpse in the knee-deep bed of weeds; once Cooper waded uphill to the spot, though, he felt even worse about the killing of Cap’n Roy, and who it was that might have been responsible.
It fit his developing theory all too well.
“Crap,” he said.
“Yeah, mon,” Riley said beside him, “once I started I kept on-emptied two clips. Twenty bullets. Don’t think a single one of ’em missed.”
“No,” Cooper said. He could see now, taking a look at the body, that Riley had literally destroyed the physical frame of the man who’d shot Cap’n Roy from his sniper’s post on top of the hill. But he hadn’t looked at the body until now, and Riley’s carnage hadn’t been what he was complaining about. “More bullets the merrier. What I’m talking about is who you shot.”
“What-you know him?”
“Not him. Not this one man. But I don’t need to. I know what he is. I know what he does. Christ. Look at him-I could probably take a good guess at some of the places he trained. Maybe tell you right now his top two or three rifles of choice.”
“You see all that,” Riley said, “lookin’ at his bloody remains in the weeds?”
“I see it from his face. From his fucking haircut. His race. It’s like a serial killer-there’s a standard profile. And this motherfucker is it. Crap,” he said again.
“So? Who he be, then? A spook? Like you?”
Cooper shook his head. “Not quite. Probably hired by spooks, though.”
“This mean you no longer thinkin’ Cap’n Roy take down the smuggler and the plane?”
Cooper turned to look at Riley when he said this. He saw, looking at the man, more than a little rage coming back at him, Riley defending the honor of his fallen chief with a measure of bravado. Cooper understood. He held the challenge of Riley’s gaze.
“I’ll have to think about it,” he said.
Riley eased a little closer to him. Close enough so that his chin, which was kind of jutting toward Cooper, nearly touched his own.
“You let me know when you finish up with thinkin’ it through,” he said.
Cooper kept his thousand-yard stare on the lieutenant who would probably soon be chief of police. Then he said, “Why don’t you show me the rifle he used,” and dropped his eyes to let Riley feel like the winner in the contest determining who was defending Cap’n Roy’s honor best. Cooper wasn’t sure whether Cap’n Roy had any honor to defend in the first place, but he was thinking he already missed the son of a bitch as much as anybody else would-including Lieutenant Riley.
Cooper followed Riley over to the rifle, which was still in its place in the weeds where the assassin had dropped it before tumbling a few yards downhill under the onslaught of Riley’s twenty-bullet barrage. Without touching it, Cooper examined the rifle, bending down to get a closer look. When he’d finished, he stood and shook his head again.
“That one of those ‘top two or three rifles of choice’?”
“Yep.”
They had a view of the water from where they stood, Cooper taking a look out across the channel. He was just able to make out the pale yellow safety lights of the Conch Bay Beach Club on its squat little island across the way. Cooper stood there, looking, hands in the pockets of his Tommy Bahama swim trunks. Riley looked too, hands on his hips, one of the hands a little lower than the other because of the holster that rode on his hip.
“Unlikely,” Cooper said, “this’ll be the end of it.”
Riley thought about that.
“Yeah, mon,” he said.
Cooper kept staring out at the black water and sky.
“Goddamn that Cap’n Roy,” he said.
After a long silence, Cooper heard Riley’s barely audible reply.
“Yeah,” he said, all but whispering. “Yeah, mon.”
20
Her seventy-two hours were just about up-a point which Laramie already understood, but which her guide emphasized further with his knock at her door. It was six A.M. when she heard his shave-and-a-haircut sound out; Laramie was already showered, dressed, and blown dry, sitting there at the little round table sipping her second cup of bad coffee while she thought through the things she would lay out for Ebbers. They hadn’t given any number for her to call, or any other means by which to report in, so she’d assumed they’d be reaching out to her, and now they had.
Her guide drove her to an abandoned two-story stucco complex near the municipal building. The name of the strip mall behind which this building found itself was the Brick Walk-named, by Laramie’s guess, after the brick sidewalk that wound its way past the 7-Eleven, nail salon, and computer store to the stucco office building with its chunky sign: SPACE AVAILABLE FOR LEASE.
Inside, her guide pass-keyed their way to a conference room bereft of decoration-unless, Laramie thought, you counted the collection of broken phones and ancient computer monitors stacked against the back wall as interior decor. Her guide unlocked a drawer in a small file cabinet, withdrew an insect-looking device about eight inches in diameter, and plugged it into a jack at the base of the rear wall. He punched the small red button on the lower-right corner of the device and a dial tone blared, the noise sounding like a Who concert in the silent, empty room.
Her guide leaned over the phone and dialed a number he blocked Laramie from seeing by the way he stood. It took two rings for Lou Ebbers’s Carolina lilt to hit them from the speaker.
“I’m assumin’ you’ve got her with you,” he said.
Laramie’s guide nodded as though Ebbers could see him. “Yep.”
“All right, then, Miss Laramie,” came Ebbers’s normally friendly tone, sounding garbled and sinister on the speaker. “You’re on.”
Laramie found herself wishing she’d forced her guide to make a pit stop at the 7-Eleven so she’d have the additional java boost of a third cup-might have helped keep her on her game, and she figured she was going to need all the help she could muster. Without the aid of a bonus cup, she felt an all too familiar sinking sensation-it always seemed to happen this way, and no matter how much time she’d spent arranging her thoughts in the room, it was happening again. She was bold and brave in private, devising her grandiose theories on the evil that lurked in the world-usually while studying satellite images in the lab-but emerge from your motel-room library and the bottom falls out. Her faith in her theories evaporating before she’d even started in on them-Laramie feeling that twinge of fear that her boss would see right through her rookie interpretations and grasp how big a mistake he’d made in hiring her.
Shut up and get going, Laramie. She decided she’d get right to the point, rather than working her way to the punch line.
“As you promised,” she said, “the task force was pretty accommodating. I’m not convinced they showed me everything, but I had access to enough. Enough to tell you I believe the investigation is proceeding under at least two fundamentally flawed assumptions.”
A crackle of static popped from the speakerphone.
Then Ebbers said, “All right.”
The sounds that came from the speakerphone had an odd digital quality to them, Laramie thinking of whatever Cher song it had been that took the singer’s voice and ran it through a synthesizer. Maybe it had been all of them.
“One assumption I’ve made,” Laramie said, “is that you’re not interested in seeing a ‘terror book’ from me-that you want nothing from me in writing. I’m prepared, of course, to put everything I will tell you today, and more, into a report if you so choose. I’m also assuming you know more about this case than I do, or at least just as much. So I’ll keep the background short-even skip it altogether.”