Spin (Captain Chase)

by Patricia Cornwell

  She’s holding her Bond Arms Bullpup 9 mm pistol with its quick-detach suppressor, and an assault rifle that looks military. Walking toward her, I realize that the Denali’s interior light has been turned off the way cops, criminals, and other streetwise people do when they don’t want to be an easy target.

  I hope like crazy that Carme didn’t shoot someone she shouldn’t have, an undercover agent, an intelligence operative, a spy tailing me, maybe thinking I’m the other twin, an outlaw on the run. Most people get us confused with each other, even family and other intimate relations do. I might have been taken out or hauled off to lockup because someone assumes Carme and I are doubling for each other, trading places.

  For all I know, the man in the Denali was after me because he thought I was her. And how often is this going to happen from now on?

  “Do you know who he is?” I reach my sister, and she seems impervious to the cold while I’m trying not to shake and shiver.

  “I know what he is,” her eyes are constantly moving. “A meat puppet,” her term for primitives, those disconnected from the source. “An attack mongrel sent by the adversary as a special thank-you.”

  “For what?”

  “For screwing up her little plan earlier this morning,” and my sister is talking about Neva. “You thought fast enough to restore communications with our astronauts before the situation became critical. Gotta admit you were pretty impressive,” and it seems an odd time to be paying me a compliment.

  “A thank-you intended for whom? Me? Or did he have us confused?” I holster my Glock, digging out my tactical light and turning it on.

  “I wasn’t the initial target,” Carme says.

  “How can you be sure?” I illuminate a beefy left hand hanging below the open driver’s door.

  “He didn’t know I was here. But he knew you were coming. If it had been his lucky day, he would have taken out both of us.”

  Silvery rings on the dead man’s fingers shine in the intense beam of my flashlight. Steamy blood drip-drips from the driver’s seat, instantly cooling and coagulating on the red-spattered snowy pavement.

  “A name would be helpful,” I bend down to get a better look at the oversize rings.

  A winged skull with ruby eyes . . .

  A coiled snake . . .

  A gothic wedding band . . .

  Carme leans inside the Denali, peering at the man she killed.

  “Don’t know him,” she says as if she might. “Let’s see if he’s got an ID of some sort.”

  Checking pockets with her eel-skin-like gloved hands, she produces a wallet. Removing a driver’s license from it just long enough to look, she returns it, tucking the wallet back where she found it. My sister steps back from the open door as if shooting someone to death is all in a day’s work, and she has no concerns about it.

  “A Texas license, name on it is Hank Cougars, 37 years old,” Carme says. “But it’s not who this dude really is, and it’s also not for me to follow up on. The Virginia tag on the truck was stolen from a car in long-term parking at the Richmond airport. Some poor fool who’s traveling and has no clue,” and I can’t figure out where the hell-o she’s getting her information.

  “You got any idea how he might have known that I was on my way here in the middle of nothing? When no one else is on the road? Because this isn’t random,” I elbow the driver’s door open all the way.

  “Nope, it’s definitely not random,” she says as I think of the Tyvek protective clothing, face masks, nitrile exam gloves and other forensic gear stored in the back of my truck.

  I already know I won’t be needing such things anymore, not for the expected reasons of properly preserving evidence the way I’ve done until now. I work my hands into black leather tactical gloves that won’t help much in the extreme cold. But they’re better than nothing.

  00:00:00:00:0

  PROBING INSIDE the Denali with my flashlight, I try not to brush against the dead man slumped back in the seat.

  The two wounds in the middle of his forehead are almost perfectly round. The angle dead on, one small hole slightly higher than the other, as close to causing instant incapacitation and death as one can get, a kill shot my sister calls a snake eyes.

  A very bad roll of the dice, she likes to say, and I’ve witnessed my share of them on the firing range when we go to town with our Bond Arms Bullpups. She rips through the heads of human silhouette targets while I play it statistically safe, mostly plugging center mass with only the occasional head shot for good measure.

  Based on the blood, bits of bone and brain tissue I’m seeing, it’s not hard to reconstruct what went down when the hitman roared in on top of me and opened his door. The explosion of high velocity rounds would have made my ears ring were it not for the suppressor attached to Carme’s pistol barrel.

  He didn’t see what was coming. Didn’t feel it happen, his lights knocked out with a one-two hollow-point punch, the back of his skull exploded. The impact pushed him into the seat, and he slid down halfway, leaving a swath of blood on gray leather, his body listing to the left, his arm hanging out.

  He’s unfamiliar, and I’m fairly certain I’ve never seen him before, light skinned, a full beard, long hair, a tattoo of a winged woman warrior on the side of his neck. In jeans, flannel, a down vest, he could pass for a lot of folks in these parts but that’s not why he knows his way around Hampton’s back roads.

  Displayed on the tablet mounted on the console is a map that shows my route since I left Vera Young’s Fort Monroe apartment last night after working her death scene for hours. While my truck was parked on the street, this man or someone placed a GPS tracker on it.

  “I remind you that Neva dropped in on Vera unannounced yesterday,” as I paint light over an open range bag on the floor below the passenger’s seat.

  “I’m aware,” Carme says in a way that makes me think she was there or remotely watching.

  “Neva showed up unexpected it seems, and not long afterward her sister was dead,” I remind her.

  My light shines on large-capacity magazines loaded with copper-jacketed ammunition, at first glance similar to .223 assault rifle rounds or comparable. Some have blue plastic ballistic tips associated with hunting down varmints, others without, telling me the objective wasn’t to capture but to exterminate.

  “We’d just better hope nobody shows up while we’re doing all this,” I’m willing myself not to panic.

  Powering up the stereo to see what addresses are plugged into the GPS, I’m startled by Neva Rong’s voice on satellite radio. It’s as if talking about her has conjured her up somehow.

  “. . . Absolutely, we should question any vendor who has repeated malfunctions, and worst of all, vulnerabilities to cyberattacks . . . ,” she’s saying, and it would seem the hitman was listening to The Mason Dixon Line at some point earlier the same way I was.

  “Can you believe it?” I open the door behind the driver’s seat. “Any doubt about who’s behind this?”

  I shine my light over padded gun cases and duffel bags. A Mossberg 590A1 pump shotgun. Boxes of 12-gauge shells. A bulletproof vest, towels, a baseball cap with a mallard duck on it and several burner phones.

  “I hate to be the one who breaks the news to you, Sisto, but she’s none too fond of us,” Carme ducks inside to turn off the ignition, shutting up Neva and taking the key.

  “We’ve got to prove what she’s doing, that she murdered her sister, and just tried to smoke me, possibly both of us, that she’s behind everything going on,” I walk around to the back of the Denali. “We’ve got to show evidence of her crimes.”

  “Really? Then what?” Carme knows as well as I do that if traditional means could stop Neva Rong, it would have happened years ago.

  She pops up the hood, disconnecting t
he battery, making certain the SUV can’t be started, controlled or tampered with remotely. While she’s doing that, I open the tailgate, taking a mental inventory of the various tools and hardware in back. A branch lopper, pruning shears, a hacksaw. Rolls of duct tape. Boxes of heavy-duty trash bags.

  Half a dozen 5-gallon plastic buckets are filled with a concrete mix like Quikrete, an eyebolt in the center of each. Plus, there are piles of zinc-coated mooring chain, I’d estimate at least 9 meters (29.5 feet) of it, everything needed to dispose of untidy messes with the help of inexpensive homemade anchors.

  And around here where rivers and the bay meet the sea, if you don’t want something found, a good place to deep-six it is the water.

  “This guy was a fixer,” I decide. “A freakin’ death-and-disposal factory on wheels.”

  “That was the objective, I believe,” Carme agrees.

  Covered from head to toe in her wetsuit-like skin with only her face showing, she’s menacing and surreal as she moves around with the pistol and carbine.

  “It looks like I was about to be fish food,” I add. “Maybe you too.”

  “Fortunately, I had just enough warning,” is as much as she’ll explain, and I can only figure that my military special ops spitting image must have picked up signals on a spectrum analyzer.

  Or she may have hacked. Or was given intel, and I envision the clerk parked by the door at the Hampton Hop-In. I think of Dick calling me on a CIA line, and my mom checking in and asking where I was. One way or another, Carme got the information she needed. When she realized what was tailing me and headed in her direction, she got ready to take care of the problem.

  The logical place to lie in wait was behind the unlit ice machine near the snow-dusted blue bench where Mrs. Skidmore used to sit. I imagine my sister ducked out of sight, biding her time, patiently watching me drive through the parking lot, ready as the silver Denali roared in right behind me. When the would-be assassin opened his door, she nailed him before he was out of his seat.

  “Make yourself useful,” Carme hands me the carbine over my protests. “I’ve not cleared it yet,” she adds as I touch the weapon with my contaminated leather-gloved hands. “I don’t have much experience with these. So, you’re on your own but I think you can figure it out.”

  Lightweight, less than 10 pounds fully loaded I estimate, the weapon that almost did me in is tricked out with a suppressor, a tactical scope, an under-barrel-mounted grenade launcher. None of it normal, not even in Virginia where people like us grew up with guns and more guns, knives, weapons of all persuasion.

  Dropping out the curved black polymer 30-round magazine, I snap back the bolt to unseat a thick tapered brass cartridge from the chamber.

  “Not sure what this is,” I announce, sliding my badge wallet out of a pocket. “Same thing he has inside his truck. Some of the cartridges have ballistic tips. Some like these don’t.”

  Inside my wallet’s credit card slot is a trusty NASA souvenir refrigerator magnet that I never leave home without. Not always the same one, of course, because I give them away as souvenirs on a regular basis if I don’t lose them first. Fortunately, there are always plenty in stock at the Langley exchange outside the cafeteria.

  But any small, weak magnet will do, and touching it to the bullet, I feel the attraction through the thin copper cladding. The metal projectile beneath is steel, not lead, and the intention likely was to shoot me inside my vehicle.

  “Armor piercing,” I let Carme know what the assassin had in store for me and possibly both of us.

  I shine my light over the flat-black-painted carbine, looking for anything that might tell me what kind it is, not finding a single marking. Then I probe for the two cartridge cases ejected when Carme fired her kill shots from her Bullpup. They’re not hard to find, shining like rose gold on the snow-blown concrete, in front and to the right of the ice machine.

  Winchester +P+, my sister’s takedown ammo of choice, I note as she instructs me to leave her spent brass alone, not to touch it.

  “I’ll take care of it,” she shouts.

  “We can’t run the risk of anyone else finding them,” I yell back at her as I pluck up the evidence without proper protection or taking a single photograph.

  Without a thought to preservation or procedures, I continue destroying the crime scene and breaking the law.

  4

  “ANYTHING ELSE you might have left lying around?” I head back in her direction. “Besides the elephant in the middle of the parking lot,” and I mean the dead man inside his big truck.

  “Trust me,” Carme walks around the Denali, shutting the doors. “It will be as if we were never here.”

  “We’re tampering with evidence, and leaving it all over the place!” I tuck her spent cartridge cases into a pocket.

  “We’re fine.”

  “Not to mention obstructing justice!”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she points the remote key, locking up the big SUV with the dead hitman inside it.

  “Don’t worry about it? Because now our DNA is everywhere!” and as if things aren’t insane enough, I remember I’m holding a grenade-launching automatic rifle. “And his DNA and who knows what are all over us!”

  “We’re way beyond any of that mattering, Sisto,” she places a hand on her hip, the long-barreled pistol down by her side.

  Eye to eye in the wind and cold, we’re unevenly illuminated by my Silverado’s headlights, my flashlight.

  “Look, Calli, if you want out, now would be a good time to skedaddle home,” she says with a hint of a taunt. “I’ll take care of things. You don’t have to be part of this crazy-ass scheme anymore.”

  It’s the same sort of thing she’d say when setting off illegal fireworks or trying out superhero capes at breakneck speeds on the zip line that stretched from the barn to the dock. In addition to her scary games in spooky places like the pet cemetery at Fort Monroe, and the root cellar on our farm that in the 19th century was part of the Underground Railroad.

  Whenever I’d had enough of Carme’s high-octane drama, she’d give me an out. Usually telling me it’s okay to be a chicken while flapping her arms and clucking like one.

  “What scheme? And what do you mean, anymore?” I demand to know as we face each other in the motel’s parking lot.

  “What scheme?” as if she can’t believe her hood-covered ears. “Just the one we’ve been living our entire lives. But you’re too much of a Pollyanna to see it, especially when it comes to him.”

  “No, I’m not!” my eyes are streaming in the pelting snow, my lips almost too frozen to talk.

  “You care too much about his approval, always did,” and she’s not referring to our father.

  “No, I don’t!”

  “The problem is, you’ve always done everything Dick says. Never pushing back with him or anyone, and then you get into one of your spins. That’s what we’re here to fix.”

  “You have one heck of a way of fixing things! And the only problem I have is you!” I hurl back at her before I can stop myself, and she stalks off, the cold feeling colder.

  Never saying she’s stung, she doesn’t have to for me to know her every feeling. She opens the driver’s door of my police truck, killing the ignition, the lights.

  “It doesn’t have to be your problem anymore, Sisto. I’m offering you an exit once and for all. And you can pretend none of this ever happened.”

  “Are you crazy? I can’t pretend any such thing!” I pop my cork again, looking around frantically.

  I’m expecting a squadron with lights and sirens to appear on the street, to thunder into the parking lot. Any second I’ll find myself facedown on the frozen ground, aggressive hands all over me, searched like I was hours earlier on top of the hangar. And
I don’t need that indignity repeated.

  “You might be surprised what you can pretend and endure,” Carme announces to the empty morning.

  There’s no sign or sound of anybody headed this way to nab us, just biting air blowing and gusting, shaking shrubbery like pompoms, rocking bare trees. My ears are numb, my leather-sheathed hands stiffening into death grips on the carbine and flashlight.

  While my sister moves about silently, nimbly in her peculiar formfitting bodysuit that seems to keep her limber, warm, and surprisingly sure footed in slick conditions with bad visibility.

  “It’s not too late to turn back,” she steps around to the other side of my truck. “This is some scary crap that wasn’t part of the plan,” she back kicks shut the door I snaked my way out of moments ago. “I’m sure you realize how close you were to being filled with as many holes as Bonnie and Clyde.”

  Carme goes on to inform me that the assault carbine I’m holding is a QBZ-95, full auto, 650 rounds a minute, 5.8-millimeter heavy ammo. Chinese made, and I don’t understand how she could know all this at a glance when there are no visible markings anywhere on the weapon.

  “Whoever he was, he didn’t hang with a good crowd,” Carme locks my truck with a chirp that sounds absurdly normal. “I’m sorry something like this had to happen while you were headed here. But it will be taken care of.”

  “Taken care of?” I’m incredulous, on the verge of losing my temper again. “You just killed someone right in front of me!”

  “Yes and no. You were hiding behind your truck . . .”

  “I wasn’t hiding, I was taking cover.”

  “Whatever you were doing, you didn’t actually see me or anyone shoot him.”

  “Well, if you didn’t, then who did?”

  “The only other person here is you,” she pads to the covered walkway, and I’m right behind her.