by L T Vargus
Spinks frowned.
“A signal from a lookout?”
“Maybe,” Loshak said.
“You don’t buy it?”
Loshak thought about it for a second. “It doesn’t really fit with the profile. But that could just mean that the profile is off.”
“Maybe it was someone unrelated to the shooting calling him,” Spinks suggested. “His mom or someone who made him feel ashamed of what he was doing. He couldn’t go on with them in his head, so he left.”
While Loshak was still chewing this over, his phone shrieked. Millhouse. At least it hadn’t gone off while he was talking to Ivy Grayson and scared the kid to death with the same sound she’d heard with a gun to her head. If it was the same sound at all.
Loshak answered.
“You spoke to the survivor from the theater?” Millhouse asked.
“Yes.”
“I didn’t authorize that,” she said.
After a second, Loshak realized she was waiting for him to apologize. Instead, he launched straight into a report on what Ivy had told him about the pupils and the phone.
“We need to be checking the local hospitals for drug theft,” he said, thinking back to his note. “They have to keep meticulous records for controlled substances, but it still happens. And I suspect that when they catch an employee pocketing pills, they prefer to keep it under wraps. No hospital wants that kind of publicity. We also want to keep from spooking this guy, so whoever draws hospital canvassing detail needs to be fairly discreet.”
There was a pause on Millhouse’s end.
Then, “Good work, Agent Loshak. I’ll add it to the list for the captains to divide up. And submit that write-up on your interview with the witness tonight so we can get everyone up to speed for tomorrow’s meeting. You can email it to me for convenience’s sake. I know it’s getting late.”
She said it as if she were granting him a favor. Like a teacher giving extra time on a homework assignment.
“Thanks,” he said anyway. “Any hits on the theater’s exterior security cam footage?”
She sighed.
“They have ten cameras in the parking lot. We’ve got him exiting the building after the shooting, but we lose him after that. That means we’re stuck logging every vehicle on camera in our time frame. With the theater cameras, plus the traffic cams from the intersections nearby, there’s a tremendous amount of footage to sift through.” She perked up a little bit. “But we’re making progress. We’re taking down plate numbers when we can and hoping we stumble across a dark sedan that matches the one from the interstate footage.”
“That’s something,” Loshak said.
It felt like he was saying that an awful lot on this case. He wasn’t sure who he was trying to convince. Technically, it was true. To some extent, anyway. The parts were moving. Progress was happening. Just not as fast as anybody wanted it to.
Meanwhile, somewhere out there, a shooter was lining up his next target.
Chapter 19
Loshak snapped his laptop closed and rolled his shoulders, trying to work out some of the tension that always built up when he was hunched over a computer, typing. Millhouse had his write-ups of both the profile and the interview, as promised.
He got up and headed for the bathroom. He wanted to shower, and then he’d hit the hay. Hopefully the canvassing of the hospitals would get underway as soon as possible. It really seemed like that had the highest chance of giving them a break one way or another. Either it would severely narrow down the field of medical professionals that fit the profile, or it would let them know they were barking up the wrong tree, and they could turn their focus elsewhere.
Loshak was unbuttoning his shirt when he heard the text notification go off in the other room. Confirmation from Millhouse that she’d gotten his email?
He left the bathroom and went to the nightstand where he’d plugged in his phone. The little blue light in the corner blinked.
It was Jan.
How’s sunny Chicago?
A smile tugged at his mouth, and a little of the pressure he hadn’t realized was building up throughout the day drained away. He sat down on the bed while he typed a reply. He sucked at texting, but he was getting better at it the more he and Jan did it.
Warm, he sent. You should get a vacation home here.
Thanks, but I would rather die.
Loshak laughed and laid back, putting his feet up on the bed. Jan was still at his house in Virginia, and it was an hour later there. He could take a shower when she went to bed.
Same here. How was it in the house today?
She didn’t get back to him as fast this time. Maybe it had been rough. Loshak was used to the house by now, having lived there for years without Jan or Shelly in it. But Jan hadn’t been alone there since the divorce.
What he’d told Ivy Grayson’s dad replayed in his mind, and for a minute, Loshak considered telling Jan how he had referred to Shelly in the present tense.
What had caused the slip-up? Being around Jan so much lately? Trying to fix things between them, almost like it was before Shelly was even born?
Loshak grimaced.
Jesus, that sounded bad. Like he was accusing Shelly of ruining their marriage. It wasn’t as if she’d wanted to waste away and die, and she sure as hell wouldn’t have wanted them to split up once she was gone. That was on him. He’d been the one throwing himself into work so he could hide from his grief. And Jan’s, for that matter.
He got up and paced a little. Maybe Jan was doing something, and that was why it was taking so long for her to text back. Maybe he should get in the shower while he waited.
Instead of heading back to the bathroom, he went to the window and pulled back the heavy hotel curtains.
Below, the city was bright. Streetlights and signs for fast food places and junk chain stores that were for some reason still open less than an hour from midnight. The standard corner businesses like McDonald’s and Walgreens added garish reds and yellows to the color palette.
The phone went off again. Jan getting back to him.
It was good. Big, though. Kind of empty.
He wanted to assure her he’d be back soon, but that might be a lie. He tried to think of something reassuring to say, something he could tell her that would make it feel a little less big, but all he could come up with was an agreement. He knew exactly what she meant because he’d been living it himself for years.
So he just sent back, Yeah.
When she got back to him again, it had nothing to do with the elephant in the room.
I snooped through the mail and papers in the stuff drawer. I know you’re too cool to actually take any of these prescriptions, but don’t you think you should’ve filled some of them so you would at least seem like a regular 53-year-old?
Loshak huffed a laugh and started to type something about waiting in line at the pharmacy and everyone assuming the old guy was there for Viagra.
His finger froze on the screen. He stared down at the word pharmacy.
It felt like he’d been punched in the gut.
He rushed back to the window and looked out at the Walgreens sign.
A pharmacist.
A drugged-up doctor terrorizing the city fit the profile. But so did a drugged-up pharmacist.
Chapter 20
Vince crept up the fire escape toward the hotel room, trying to step lightly so the old metal wouldn’t creak under his weight. The hotel probably referred to the pile of rusty stairs as balconies, but Vince knew a fire escape when he saw one. The ladders and fifty thousand coats of chipping paint were dead giveaways.
His target was only on the third floor, but already Vince was sweating and wheezing. He wasn’t made for stair-climbing. Him, he liked pumping iron. That was a man’s workout. Of course, he hadn’t done that in at least ten years and two wives. But if he did still work out, it sure as shit wouldn’t be any of that cardio nonsense.
Steam rolled off the top of his head and sweat trickled down
his back and into his asscrack, evaporating enough in the frostbitten air to make him shiver. Cold as balls out here, especially three stories up. And noisy as hell. The whoosh of traffic, horns honking, a car alarm going off somewhere.
Trash banged into a dumpster somewhere nearby, and he froze halfway up the last flight of stairs, heart thumping. Checked the window to the target’s room. The drapes didn’t move, and he didn’t see any lights come on through the gap.
He checked his watch. It was two in the morning, and all these assholes were trying to make as much noise as possible.
When a few minutes had passed, Vince relaxed and took the last few steps, his palms sliding over the railing as he went. The cold bit into his hands, numbing his exposed skin so much that he almost couldn’t feel the roughness of the paint chips and rust under his fingertips. The air smelled like snow. Kind of like when you first opened a freezer after a few months and realized it was all frost inside.
As he crept closer to the target’s window, Vince’s heart sped up again. He held his breath to keep from fogging up the glass and leaned forward, looking in through the gap in the drapes.
At first it just looked black. It was dark inside, whereas out in the wilds of the city, it was bright as noonday with all the signage and street lamps and cars. No wonder hotels dropped the extra cash for those blackout curtains. You’d never get to sleep otherwise.
Vince’s gaze followed the thin sliver of light the gap in the curtain was letting onto the carpet inside. The dimly lit bar was interrupted by his own fat head, but it still helped his eyes adjust to the light difference. He found some shoes by the TV stand. A desk with the standard coffeemaker set-up. A little armchair with a suitcase in the seat. The bed.
His heart stuttered a little and his lips pulled into an involuntary grin. Inside that pile of blankets was the target.
Looking for that sick fuck who was shooting up the city must’ve taken a lot out of the guy. Dude was sawing logs. The covers rose and fell in the slow rhythm of sleep. Slumbering away, oblivious.
With one hand, Vince reached into his coat and caressed the crosshatch pattern on the butt of his Sig. It would’ve been so easy to drop the Fed right then and there. This Loshak guy wouldn’t even know what hit him. Asleep one second, dead the next, brains everywhere. Boom.
Definitely tempting.
But Vince stepped back and took a little notebook out of the inside pocket of his sports coat instead. He checked his watch, jotted down the time, then stowed his notebook. As carefully as he’d climbed up, the hitman crept back down the fire escape and returned to the car idling just across the street.
Chapter 21
Loshak startled awake, thinking he’d heard the notification sound from his phone, but when he checked it, there were no new texts or calls.
Three-fifty-two in the morning.
He let the phone drop onto the nightstand a little harder than he’d meant to and rolled onto his back. Scrubbed his face. The old phantom loud noise waking him up trick. That hadn’t happened since right after Jan left. He would be just about to doze off when he’d hear the door slam downstairs. Scared the shit out of him. The first time, he’d grabbed his gun and crept downstairs in his boxers only to find the house empty and every door still shut and locked. It hadn’t happened every night, maybe every fourth or fifth, and it stopped altogether after a couple months. He’d forgotten all about it until now.
Kind of like the present tense slip with Ivy Grayson’s father.
Loshak checked his texts again, this time a little more awake. He’d been right the first time — nothing new. He scrolled through his messages from Jan. Most of it was joking about why anybody would live in a place like Virginia or Chicago that was basically uninhabitable during the winter when they could be living in Santa Fe. The rest was trivial stuff like whether Loshak had found anything to watch on TV or how Jan’s sister was coming up for lunch the next day if the snow held off.
They hadn’t talked about Shelly at all or anything related to the divorce. Nothing stressful. Nothing that should have set him up for waking up in the middle of the night like this.
Of course, he was also working a mass shooter case in which the perpetrator was still at large. He supposed that was plenty stressful on its own.
He glanced at the light coming through the gap in the curtains. Imagined he could see the red tint from the Walgreen’s sign.
A pharmacist would really fit the profile. It took nearly as much education as an MD or a law degree, and most pharmacists had interacting with other humans down to a science. They had to look neat and orderly, be outwardly charming and helpful, while constantly calculating the risks and interactions of multiple prescriptions before they handed them out. Unlike most people, pharmacists knew better than to blindly follow the instructions of a doctor just because they had a bunch of letters after their names.
And obviously, the easy access to drugs that would make the pupils dilate. Maybe even easier access than a doctor, if they were self-employed and didn’t have to answer to a Chief of Medicine. Just a fudge on the logbooks. For the controlled substances, a report of a break-in and a couple smashed locks would do the trick.
Slow down. Loshak pulled himself out of the rabbit hole. He was projecting scenarios that would fit a theory rather than looking at whether the evidence supported the possibility. But it wasn’t like they could round up all the pharmacists in the greater metropolitan area and test their clothes for gunshot residue.
He got up, flipped on the desk lamp, and added pharmacist-reported break-ins involving controlled or monitored substances to the notes in the margin of the shooting file. Then he added check results for registered firearms, C+C, etc.
They would probably come up with nothing, but it felt like a weight off his mind having it written down anyway. He could run it by Spinks and add it to the write-up in the morning.
Loshak used the bathroom, then climbed back in bed. The sheets and comforter went warm around him, soaking up his body heat. He shut his eyes.
Something would turn up. It wasn’t necessarily about casting a wide enough net, more like casting it in the right places. This guy couldn’t hide forever. Especially considering the latest shooting suggested his behavior was escalating.
If they just kept looking, something would eventually turn up.
Chapter 22
Frank watched that big goon Vince jog-walk back across the street to the Buick, huge puffs of steam billowing from his nose, mouth, and the top of his head before the wind ripped them away. Frank grunted with disapproval and ground the butt of his cigarette into the ashtray.
The passenger side door opened, and Vince climbed in.
“You should wear a hat, Vince,” Frank said. “You’ll get pneumonia, sweating in this kinda weather.”
“Ah, you’re not my real dad.”
Frank chuckled.
“Knowing your mom, anybody could be. Was the Fed still there?”
“Sleeping.” The big mook’s shoulders drooped a little.
When they hadn’t seen movement in the room for over an hour, Vince had been sure their target had gone out to find a hooker or something.
“I tried to tell you, guys my age don’t go running around looking for tail after, like, six PM,” Frank said. “It’s strictly early bird special or nothing at all.”
“Then when the hell are we supposed to bug the place?”
“He’s not out here for vacation, genius, he’s working. We’ll get in there when he leaves in the morning.”
The passenger seat creaked under Vince’s weight as he squirmed around, trying to get his bulk comfortable.
“It’s bullshit that we can’t just off him and be done with it,” he said.
Frank rolled his eyes.
“Yeah, I heard you the first eighty times.”
“I’m just saying, it’d be a lot faster than following him around. Just bam, bam, bam, done.”
“Do you nail your girl with that brain?”
/> Vince turned kicked puppy dog eyes on him.
“Frankie, you know Aria left me last month.”
“Yeah, and who could’ve seen that coming? I told you strippers ain’t girlfriend material.” Frank shook his head. “The point is that taking this guy out isn’t for us to decide. It’s above our pay grade. We just do what we’re told.”
Vince let out a disgusted sigh and squirmed around again until he was turned slightly more toward the passenger window than Frank. Like a little kid going off in the corner to pout.
Frank lit a cigarette and stared out at the late-night traffic flying past, splashing slush in its wake. He should probably feel a little bad about busting out the I-told-you-so routine. Vince was basically just a big, dumb, soft-hearted kid. Not even two divorces and a string of short-term arm candy had done anything to smarten him up.
“You tired?” Frank took a drag and squinted through the smoke at the younger man. “I can run you back by the motel if you want. I just had a coffee, so I’ll be up all night whether I take the first watch or not.”
Vince brightened up. “That’s nice of you, Frankie. Can we go by a gas station? I’m starving.”
Frank put the Buick in Drive.
“You just ate most of a deep-dish pizza by yourself like an hour ago.”
“But I’m hungry again. I got a fast metabolism.”
“You’re not hungry, you’re bored,” Frank said as he eased the boat of a car into the flow of traffic. The cigarette glowed between his first two fingers, sticking up from the wheel as he drove. “You gotta watch that bored eating, numbnuts. That’s why you’re sick all the time.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Frank caught Vince reaching into his pocket. He didn’t pull out the bottle of Pepto he carried everywhere, but Frank could tell he was thinking about it. Like a damn junkie making sure his works was still close at hand.
“Nah, it’s my metabolism,” Vince said. “When you’re a big guy like me, you gotta feed the muscles, or they eat you.”
