Point Blank

by Catherine Coulter

  “The guy’s an alcoholic on top of everything else?” Agent Jim Farland was pretending to speak into a cell phone.

  “Well, I don’t think so, no. I’ll tell you later about his drinking habits.”

  Agent Jim Farland said into his cell phone, his voice loud enough to be heard ten feet away, “Hello, Mom. Yeah, we’re going to go over to section twenty-seven, where all the former slaves are buried. . . . Yeah, that’s where all the pre-Civil War dead were buried again after 1900. Listen, Mom, I’ve gotta go, a funeral is expected in twenty minutes. See you soon.”

  Ron said to Connie, “They put this op together so fast I’m not sure I’m clear on all the details. We’re supposed to hang out here acting like tourists until Moses Grace and Claudia show up, for whatever reason we don’t know, Pinky Womack in tow?”

  “Yeah, that’s what the psycho snitch told me. Ruth said Rolly’s never let her down. He’s reliable and we’ve got to go with that, until we know for sure. The only reason I’ve got her cell phone is because I’m a woman and Rolly doesn’t relate well to guys. Anyway, time for us to get ourselves moving.”

  Ron said with a smirk, “I like that pillow tied around your belly, Ashley. Hey, how many kids you got?”

  Connie waved both of them off and paused to rub her back. It wasn’t just for show. She’d been walking around the cemetery for almost two hours, stopping to listen in at a funeral, speaking briefly to other agents, all of them dressed as tourists strolling through the huge cemetery. She’d read in her brochure the astonishing fact that more than two hundred and sixty thousand people were buried here. She wondered if she’d walk by every marker and monument and memorial before she was through. She thought of Ruth, hoped she was having a better weekend than she was. She would have liked to be in the wilds of Virginia with her rather than here, waiting for a crazy old lunatic to appear. Many of the agents and all of the snipers were from the Washington, D.C., field office, the snipers posted wherever they could find cover in the cemetery, in position since eight o’clock that morning.

  Savich stood by the Memorial Gate in section 30 speaking on his cell to Deputy Assistant Director Jimmy Maitland, his boss. “There’s no sign of them yet.” Just as there hadn’t been an hour before when he’d reported in, but he didn’t say that. “There aren’t that many real tourists around, understandable given the weather, and that’s good since we can’t do anything about it in any case. We’re keeping an eye on them, while we all try not to do anything Moses Grace could spot easily.”

  Maitland sighed. “One of my boys is playing basketball today, his first time starting as Maryland’s forward, and here I am sitting in a damned van waiting for a psychopath crazy enough to detonate a bomb on top of my agents in a frigging motel to show up here in the nation’s biggest cemetery. I doubt Pinky’s still alive. You agree, Savich?”

  “You’re right, not likely. Anyone who would pull that stunt at Hooter’s Motel wouldn’t bother to keep Pinky alive. I didn’t tell that to Ms. Lilly, though. She’s still hopeful. Pinky’s such a piece of work, no harm in him, not really, just a big mouth, always saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. I’ve got an incoming call I should get. I’ll call you back in an hour with a status report. Can you get your basketball game on the radio?”

  “I’m counting on it, Savich.”

  Savich raised his face to the steel-gray sky, breathed that fresh wild air deep into his lungs. He could feel Moses Grace was close. He punched up the incoming call. “Savich here.”

  “Hello, boy. This here’s your nemesis. Ain’t that a grand word? Claudia read it to me out of a book, said that’s what I am to you.”

  Savich stilled, his mind working furiously. He knew, he simply knew. “Who is this?”

  “Why, this is the poor old man you’re trying to hunt down and kill, and bury real deep, Agent Savich. I saw you on TV after our fun at Hooter’s Motel—on a local channel, real early this morning. I’ll bet you didn’t get much sleep, did you? I’ll tell you, I was impressed, no question about that. But you see, you’ve got all these rules and you stick to them like a stupid lemming. That’ll do you in when it’s crunch time between you and me. But hey, you sure talk good, boy, all cool and calm for someone who almost got himself blowed up. Too bad you didn’t break your damned neck when you jumped off that balcony at old Ray’s motel. Would have been easier. Claudia, that sweet little girl of mine, said you was an athlete, made her want to jump your bones. Flat-out embarrassed me the things she said she wanted to do to you. As for Pinky, I wouldn’t say he’s in such good shape now.”

  “What about Pinky?”

  “Let’s say the little schmuck is where he deserves to be.”

  Savich felt disgust, his belly slick with nausea. He wanted to squeeze the life out of this man, to shut up that illiterate drawl. “And where is that?”

  Moses Grace’s scratchy laugh made Savich’s flesh crawl. Could the evil old monster be watching him now?

  “Well, it’s like this, Agent Savich. Pinky is already underground. Why don’t you find Private Jeremy Willamette’s gravestone; young fellow died in Korea, aged eighteen. Exactly Claudia’s age. She’s the one who picked the spot where Pinky would reside until you guys hauled his carcass off to cut it up.”

  “How did you get my cell phone number?”

  “From Pinky, of course. Turns out Ms. Lilly gave it to him, and guess what?”

  Savich remained silent. He was thinking of Pinky, how he’d probably been dead since they hauled him out of Hooter’s Motel. They buried him with a soldier?

  “You want me to spell it out for you, boy? Well, here it is. No one beats me, particularly a loser cop like you.” He laughed and Savich could hear the spittle hurtling out of his mouth. “You know Rolly, that little pervert who snitches to your agent Warnecki? I think you’ll have a much harder time finding him.

  “I hear that little redheaded agent who’s standing over there is your wife. I told Claudia those cops had more guts than brains but she wasn’t listening. Too excited about all this and who can blame her? Looks like you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to catch me, and I really appreciate that. It makes me feel important. How many of you are there? Twenty? Forty? All for me and Claudia.”

  The words were out of Savich’s mouth before he could begin to censor them. “You’re right about one thing, you crazy old man. I’m going to kill you and bury you real deep.”

  The old man guffawed and cleared his throat. Savich could hear a sticky liquid sound. Was he sick?

  “Nah, you wouldn’t shoot me for revenge, that’s one of your dumb-ass rules. You’d take me in all polite and proper. You’d even help me get a nice ACLU-type lawyer who’d claim I heard the voice of my long-dead mother who locked me in a cellar until I was sixteen, and so I’m not responsible for anything. You wouldn’t want to be cruel to a mentally disturbed person, would you? I might even end up in a nice hospital with a bunch of cute little nurses swinging their asses in my face. My, I do believe this sounds familiar, almost like day-ja vou.

  “Thing is, boy, you don’t have the guts to kill me, yet. Hey, would you look at your wife, so serious and alert, all that lovely red hair, thick and real soft, I bet. Claudia doesn’t like her at all. Maybe I could fit her right in with Pinky once Claudia was done with her.”

  Then there was silence. Moses Grace had punched off.

  Savich called Sherlock, who was checking the names on the markers against a list she was carrying, a pencil in her hand. Moses was looking at her. She’d walked away from the Rough Riders Memorial in section 36, stopped to study the markers around her. Not three yards from her was a real tourist all bundled up in the cold morning, blowing on her hands as she stood in front of a marker and stamped her feet.

  Savich was so scared he wanted to puke. Sherlock was a perfect target for anyone with a clean shot and a scoped rifle. He didn’t doubt for a second that Moses had both. He didn’t doubt that Moses could shoot. How far away were they and where? Savich never took his
eyes off of her as her cell phone rang.

  “Agent Sherlock.”

  “Sherlock, down! Find cover right now!” But from where would a shot come?

  In under a minute Sherlock was surrounded by agents in Kevlar body armor. A few minutes later, Savich, with Sherlock in lockstep beside him, walked quickly toward section 27, where the cemetery records showed that Private Jeremy Willamette was interred. To Savich’s surprise she hadn’t questioned him when he first told her to get down. And now she accepted the impenetrable shield of men and women surrounding her, all of them with guns drawn and held at their sides. When they’d quickly assembled, Savich looked at each of them and said, “Moses Grace called me. He’s here and he’s crazy and I’d bet the farm he’s got a scoped rifle. We’ve all got to be careful. And he talked to me about Sherlock, threatened her.”

  Savich didn’t think he’d ever been more hyperalert in his life. He was aware of every sound, every footstep, everyone around him. And Sherlock walked beside him, her eyes continuously scanning, assessing. At least there would be no more playing tourist in the cold; they could all move and focus on finding the monstrous old man and Claudia.

  Savich said to his wife, “Mr. Maitland sent the ME over along with a forensic team and another dozen agents to canvass the whole area again. He knows Moses Grace is here and he’s as worried as we are.”

  Sherlock nodded. “If they carted Pinky in here early this morning, they didn’t have much time. Maybe they left something,” she said as her eyes searched the horizon, just as his were.

  The agents ringed the grave of Private Jeremy Willamette. The marker was identical to thousands of others. There were big carved letters that read:JEREMY ARTHUR WILLAMETTE

  BELOVED SON

  PRIVATE U.S. ARMY

  KOREA

  May 18, 1935

  September 10, 1953

  No one said a word, but each felt the death of the young man so many years before, each felt he was one of their own.

  Agent Connie Ashley, who’d removed the pillow from around her middle, said, “It looks real fresh.”

  Savich looked down at the loose snow-dusted black dirt with an obscene bouquet of wilted red roses lying squarely on top and felt a moment of sadness. He’d wanted to save Pinky, but that wasn’t going to happen now. He picked up the roses, tied with a big gaudy gold bow. Another couple of degrees and the roses would freeze. He handed them to Agent Don Grassi. “Find out where Moses Grace bought these roses. He could have picked them up from another grave, but check with the florists nearby.”

  Agent Dane Carver said, never looking away from the loose black dirt, “Do you think Moses Grace and Claudia can still see us?”

  Savich nodded slowly, scanning every tree in the area. “There are too many places to hide around here. It’s two hundred acres—full of trees, memorials, buildings, monuments.” He said to Agent Ollie Hamish, his second in command, “Ollie, call Mr. Maitland, tell him I’d like to saturate this place. Tell him to ring Fort Myer, get soldiers here to help.”

  “Do you think Pinky’s under there?” Dane had asked the obvious, brought it out in the open. Every agent standing there knew Pinky Womack was under that black dirt, but no one wanted to be slapped in the head with the gruesome reality they knew was waiting for them. No one answered. They all stood silently.

  Savich realized they were waiting for him to direct them, but the thing was, he couldn’t get his mind off that old monster threatening Sherlock. He met her eyes over the grave.

  “I’m so very, very sorry about this, Dillon. Poor Pinky.” Sherlock suddenly leaned down. “Would you look at this? It’s a ball of chewed-up gum.”

  Savich remembered the small red bowl filled with chewed-up balls of gum on the counter at Hooter’s Motel—all that gum hadn’t been there because Raymond Dykes liked to keep his jaw moving. Moses Grace had deliberately left it there, just as he’d left the gum here.

  Savich said, “He left it for us, to taunt us, some private joke perhaps. It probably won’t matter, but let’s do the works on it, run it for DNA.”

  Savich watched Dane slip the gum into a Ziploc bag. Two of his agents led a crew of cemetery workmen forward.

  They found Pinky Womack’s body in the coffin with his eyes wide open, a bit of shock his only recognizable expression. He was lying on top of the uniformed skeleton of eighteen-year-old Jeremy Willamette.

  It looked from the bloodstains like Pinky had been stabbed in the chest, probably the heart, so his death had been fast, at least Savich prayed it had. He didn’t see any signs of torture, but it would take Dr. Ransom’s autopsy to be sure of that.

  Savich called Ms. Lilly at the Bonhomie Club right away to tell her. After she had absorbed the news, she said to him, “Poor Pinky. He wasn’t bad, you know, Dillon? He could even make Fuzz the bartender laugh once in a while. Not often, mind. I’ll tell his brother Cluny myself, don’t you worry about that. Oh, Dillon, I hate this, I really do.”

  As he slipped his cell phone back into his coat pocket, Savich knew it would take him a long time to get Pinky’s face out of his mind. He wondered where his wife had slipped off to.

  He heard the sharp crack of a rifle, heard yells, saw agents running, guns drawn. He found Sherlock, once again surrounded by agents, kneeling over a fallen agent, her palms pressing hard into her shoulder. Savich shouted her name. She looked up at him, her eyes dilated, her face white as his shirt. “Connie wasn’t standing two feet from me, Dillon.”

  She was all right. Thank God she was all right.

  But Agent Connie Ashley wasn’t. He was relieved she was conscious. When he came down on his knees beside her, she whispered, “Don’t freak out on me, Dillon, I’ll survive.” Blood oozed between Sherlock’s fingers despite her pressure. He gently shoved Sherlock away and pressed his wadded-up handkerchief against Connie’s shoulder and put his weight on it. “Yes,” he said, “you’ll be fine. I’ll freak out until the ambulance arrives.”

  Sherlock said, “I think the shot must have been fired from over there—the northeast, right through those trees, maybe from the second floor of one of those apartments.”

  Savich had her go over the exact position of both her and Agent Ashley at the moment the shot was fired. He nodded. He put the angle a bit higher, but said, “Close enough. That’s quite a distance. Okay, let’s see if we can’t find them.” He gave out assignments and yelled as the agents dispersed, “Everyone be careful!”

  He knelt down again beside Connie Ashley. “We’ll get him, Connie, don’t you worry about that.”

  Sirens sounded in the distance. The snow began to fall more heavily.

  Savich watched his wife wipe Connie’s blood off her hands on the fresh-fallen snow.

  Tourists were gathering closer now. He knew the media would be there in force at any moment. He hoped the ambulance would get there first.

  He watched his wife as she held Connie’s hand until they arrived.

  CHAPTER 7

  MAESTRO, VIRGINIA

  SATURDAY AFTERNOON

  RAFE CHUGGED DOWN half a glass of iced tea, swiped his hand over his mouth, and said to his father, “Madonna told me about this woman Rosalind Franklin who did a lot of the work on DNA and they gave her research away and she didn’t even get recognized or win a Nobel Prize.”

  “Hmm.”

  “She died when she was a little bit older than Mom when she left. Isn’t that something, Dad?”

  “Yeah, Rafe, it sure is. You wonder what she would have done if she’d lived longer.”

  “That’s what Madonna said. She said Rosalind Franklin was the one who actually took the first blurry picture of what the double helix molecule looks like.”

  Dix wondered why he’d never heard of Rosalind Franklin, but didn’t say anything. He set a bowl of chicken noodle soup on the table in front of his son, then set another on a tray and took it to the living room. Madonna was propped up with three cushion pillows, Brewster on her chest, his face on his front paws. His eyes
fluttered closed as she stroked his head. Dix would swear her eyes were brighter than an hour before.

  He moved Brewster to the coffee table, set the tray on her lap, pulled up a chair, and sat beside the sofa. “This is Campbell’s best. I hope you like it, my boys sure do. How many miles do you run a week?”

  “Not more than fifteen miles a week, you don’t want to blow your knees out and—” She slapped her spoon on the tray. “I’m a runner and my name is Madonna. Just great. Swell. Hey, maybe I’m even rich since it looks like I own a Beemer, you think?”

  “Could be. I try not to run more than fifteen miles a week either.”

  She ate some soup, set her spoon down. “Sheriff, is there anything of interest around here? You know, tourist interest? I guess I’m the outdoorsy type. Is there something I could have come to see?”

  “Beautiful scenery, which means you could have come to hike, or camp out, or maybe you came to go antiquing in some of the towns around here. If you do drive one of those SAV Beemers it’s got lots of room to lug stuff around in it. The only thing is, this snowstorm has been forecast for a while now. I can’t see you wanting to hike in a blinding snowstorm.”

  “No, I suppose not. So that’s not why I was here.” She finished her soup, sighed, and set down her spoon again. Dix put the tray on the coffee table and patted his knee. Brewster jumped up on his lap and nuzzled against his hand. Madonna turned to look out the wide window across the front of the living room. “I don’t think it’s going to snow anymore.”

  “Don’t bet the Beemer on it. I was just outside and the clouds to the east are nearly black, really fat, and rolling this way. I think it might actually be pretty bad later on tonight. You warm enough?”

  “Yes, I’m fine. How long have you been sheriff here in Maestro?”

  “Nearly eleven years now. I was elected when I was twenty-six.”

  An eyebrow went up. “Oh? And how did that miracle come about?”

  He laughed. “Actually, I married the mayor’s daughter when I was twenty-two and newly assigned to the Twenty-seventh Precinct in Manhattan. After five years in New York, we decided to move back here. Christie’s father, Chapman Holcombe, or Chappy as he’s called by everyone, offered the best inducement by backing me as sheriff. He owns half of Maestro, along with fistfuls of other business interests in Virginia, so winning wasn’t that hard.”