While McCord looked over the bodies, Lynch slipped a pen through the trigger guard of one of the pistols and sniffed the barrel. Fired recently. Tried the other. That one, too. He checked one of the pieces of brass on the floor. 9mm.

“Sure nobody got shot? Somebody got off a few rounds in here. Cement walls, had to be like a fucking pinball game.”

“No gun or knife wounds on these guys. Number four, clearly a broken neck. Way broken, completely dislocated. Number two here? Got some blood from the nose but not much. You’ve heard of that shoving a guy’s nose into his brain shit? Think somebody may have done it. This nose is way out of whack, and that should have bled like hell. Unless, of course, you die and somebody lays you on your back. Bet I find a mess of blood in his sinuses. Number three here, he almost looks like a strangulation. You got your cyanosis and such, but no ligature marks on the neck. Do got what looks like blunt trauma to the throat, though. Somebody may have crushed his trachea for him. Number one here? Not a clue. I don’t see a thing.”

“Somebody threw some shots down here.”

“We’ll test these guys for residue. Maybe they were shooting while your guy was busting them up.”

“Some guy walks in here, takes on these four – and they all look like they’ve been in a few scrapes – snaps the one guy’s neck, shoves the other guy’s nose up his head, crushes a trachea, and, what, scares this last guy to death, and they’re shooting at him, and he walks out?”

“I keep telling you, Lynch, I just do the science.”

“You wanna switch jobs?”

“That mean I get to date that reporter chick you took home last night?”

“That on CNN or something?”

“Or something.”

“No. I keep the reporter chick.”

“Fuck it, then.”

Lynch stripped off the gloves and shoved them in his pocket. “OK, I’m outta here. I’ll tell Novak to go ahead and process the room. Once you get anything solid on our friends here, let me know.”

CHAPTER 16 – RESTON, VIRGINIA

“Fisher’s first mistake,” said Chen, handing Weaver a manila file.

“He doesn’t make them,” said Weaver.

“The Post Office’s mistake, actually,” said Chen.

“OK. What have you got?”

“We found a bill for a post office box rental from a UPS store in Fredericksburg at Fisher’s house.”

Weaver shook his head. “That’s a plant. Fisher wouldn’t leave anything he didn’t want us to find. And he stopped his mail service before he took off.”

“This item was delivered to the wrong address. One of Fisher’s neighbors found it in their box and dropped it in his slot after Fisher stopped his mail service.”

“You check the envelope?”

“Prints and DNA. Fisher never touched it.”

“OK. So what did we get?”

“We checked the box in Fredericksburg. Fisher closed it the day he left town, but it has not been re-rented. One piece of mail was left in the box. Based on the postmark, we believe it was delivered the day Fisher closed the box. A promotional mailing from American Express to Thomas McBride. This is not an identity Fisher pulled together in recent weeks to support his current activities. He has been building McBride for years. It is his failsafe.”

Weaver flipped through the file. McBride owned a townhouse in Reston. He had an account with Citibank. He’d filed tax returns for the past eleven years. He had the Amex card and a Visa. Virginia drivers license and a US passport, both with Fisher’s picture on them. Some activity on the Visa after Fisher’s disappearance but prior to the Wisconsin shooting. Nothing recent on the Amex. But Fisher had made electronic payments to keep the accounts alive.

“He hasn’t been using these since the shootings started. He has to be using something.”

“Paravola theorizes that Fisher has established some one-offs, accessing the cash lines for some, using the others for one or two days, then switching. We are researching that now.”

“But if he feels us getting close, he’ll switch to McBride.”

“Yes, sir.”

CHAPTER 17 – CHICAGO

 

Lynch stopped by Bernstein’s desk. “Getting anything?”

Bernstein looked up. “I’ll give you a printout, pictures of semi-auto sniper rifles. Helps that it’s semi-auto, because as far as I can tell most of these things are bolt action. Germans have a few, couple different H&K models. Swiss have a couple Sig Sauer models. Then you’ve got your Israeli Galils, and there’s a Russian gun, Dragunov, though these last two are maybe less likely. Accurized assault rifles, not sniper rifles per se. Anyway, you’ll know what you’re looking for. I’m pulling up a list of guys who have won this or that for target shooting at your range or better. Probably a waste of time, though. I mean, you’re still thinking this is some kind of hit, right? For-hire job?”

“Best I can do for now.”

“I can’t figure somebody who hires out wants his name on a trophy.”

“Still…”

“Yeah, I know. Gotta run it out. Also getting you a list of anybody official that uses this kind of talent. FBI HRT guys, Special Forces, SEALs, Marine scout/sniper. Overseas you got your SAS... Hell, you start looking overseas, and we’ll be at this awhile. Of course, most of the semi-autos are from overseas.”

“Any restrictions on these or can anybody buy one?”

“None of them are fully automatic, so as far as I can tell, you got your FOID card and you know where to shop, you can pick one up. I don’t think you’re going to find any of these up at Farm and Fleet, though.”

Lynch nodded. “OK. Let’s start with the domestic groups. Find out who to call. See if anyone washed out or got pushed out for being hinky.”

“OK.”

“What about Marslovak?”

“Did get some interesting shit there. Couple years back he finished a big-ass roll-up in the waste hauling industry.”

“What is this roll-up crap? Heard him say that on the phone.”

“Find an industry with fairly standardized operations but that’s segmented geographically. Waste hauling is perfect, right? I mean, picking up garbage is picking up garbage. Do it the same in Miami as you do in Seattle. You start buying out a couple big players in major markets, consolidate your back-office functions – HR, marketing, finance. Probably set up an HQ somewhere and shut down admin facilities everywhere else. Now you’ve got economies of scale, so you start undercutting the market on price, even working at a loss at first if the Feds don’t get after you for going predatory. Cripple all the local mom-and-pops cause their cost structures are top-heavy, then you buy them out cheap. Also inverts all your vendor relationships. Suddenly, GM or whoever is selling you a thousand trucks instead of two. So you get to beat them up on the price. Once you own the market, you ratchet your prices back up where they were, and bingo. Guy like Marslovak? He’s not interested in running the thing. Face it, operations is too much like work when you’re used to being the house in a roulette game. Probably sells as soon as he hits critical mass.”

“So you make a pile and put a lot of other people out of business and out of jobs?”

“Not quite that simple. Companies that catch the wave early usually sell at a premium, so they do OK. But yeah. Basically you’re driving inefficiencies out of a fragmented national or regional market model, one of those inefficiencies being people’s jobs. You also wipe out a lot of companies.”

“So that’s gotta piss some people off.”

“In this waste hauling gig, it’s interesting who he might have been pissing off, too. People equal garbage. Businesses equal garbage. So the Big Apple is sort of the Shangri-La of trash. Biggest market in the country. Also, mobbed up to its frontal lobes. Cost structures there were completely out of whack because mostly you had the mafia taking out your garbage, and they don’t work cheap.”