by L T Vargus
One by one, as the hours dragged on, the bodies were bagged and taken away. Human beings with families, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives. People who had started the night thinking they were going to a party, stepping outside the daily grind for a little while to unwind, let their hair down and have some fun.
At midnight, all of their dreams had been intact, their life an ongoing “now” that had seemed to stretch out endlessly in front of them. But the end had come. Not as a finality, but a violent interruption that left them forever incomplete. Stopped them in the middle. Unsuspecting. Left hanging forevermore.
Deluca waved Loshak over.
“We’ve got the security footage,” she said. “Way higher res than that crap from the mall.”
Silently, he followed her and Brunhauser back through the lobby, and down an employee’s hall to the security room. The night shift guard ran back the footage.
And there he was. Their shooter, in a ski mask and long dark coat. He strode into the crowded ballroom and struck a pose like a rock star or superhero, feet set wide, back straight, head high. Flipped the assault rifle up and started mowing people down. It rattled in his arms, shaking him a little, but he didn’t move.
He threw a grenade into the crowd, confirming Loshak’s earlier guess.
“Looks like an M67,” Brunhauser mumbled.
He, Loshak, and the night guard all flinched when a guy from the crowd jumped on the explosive device. Deluca didn’t. She was too busy tapping the pregnant woman’s image on the screen.
“I interviewed her before they took her to the hospital,” Deluca said. “She didn’t even know the guy. He just did it. Just shoved her out of the way and did it.”
The hitch in the detective’s voice made Loshak look up. Tears were streaming down Deluca’s face. Brunhauser grunted and threw an arm around his partner, kind of shaking her, like a coach consoling a player.
From another camera angle, Loshak watched the shooter’s face. Eyes and mouth impassive. No humanity to read in his expression. Not disturbed at all by the carnage or the screaming. And there was plenty of that. The hotel’s security cameras captured not only video but sound. They stood there, listening to the sound of people dying.
The night guard apologized, then left. Deluca stayed, still crying silently, and eventually even Brunhauser broke down. Loshak kept his own face blank while the slaughter played out, disconnected from the emotions fighting toward the surface.
In the academy, they played prospective agents an audio recording of Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, the so-called “Tool Box Killers,” torturing and killing one of their victims. It was a warning that this was the sort of evil they would be facing if they continued on to graduation and joined the Bureau. It was also a way to teach them to detach themselves from their emotions.
There were times when feeling would render an agent useless, destroy them. They had to learn how to disconnect in the short run so they could find the killer in the long run. But the empathy, the compassion, those were still there, waiting for an opening to spill out.
Loshak didn’t read that potential for empathy in the shooter’s expression. Instead, there was an undercurrent of confidence. Almost arrogance. He was unflappable. Unstoppable. It was there in his stance, in the slow walk through the dead after the shooting ended, exiting the building with his head high. A purposely slow strut.
No rush. No worries. No fear.
It was eerie.
Deluca sat forward to skip through the next chunk of video, not hitting play again until law enforcement arrived on the screen. Finally, SWAT burst into the ballroom and started clearing the scene. Too late. The shooter was six and a half minutes gone, according to the timestamp on the footage.
With the video review over, Deluca and Brunhauser both headed for the door. Loshak followed them back out to the lobby, then stepped outside.
Subzero Chicago wind hit him like a slap in the face. It felt good. He stood there on the hotel steps with his eyes shut for a while, breathing in the air. Feeling the mucous membranes in his sinuses and throat dry out and freeze. Tiny snowflakes, more like shards of ice than fluffy white snow, battered his face and shoulders.
The cold was cleansing somehow. A fog he hadn’t realized was settling in lifted from his brain.
The image of that smear of congealing blood stuck to the tech’s boot at the pier flashed through his mind. Then a replay of the killer strutting through the dead, almost as if he were imagining himself in slow motion.
Loshak shoved the images away and took a breath big enough to hurt his chest. Blew it out in a white cloud. Back to logic. Back to the facts at the center of the investigation. A snippet of some poem he’d had to memorize in elementary school came back to him, something about centers not holding true. But facts did. Time and again, facts, logic, reason, they caught murderers.
He ran through everything they knew, walking through each of the scenes and everything they had learned from the investigation into the car, the traffic cams, the hours of footage from across Chicago.
Eventually he circled back to the pharmacists and the plate database they’d been working on earlier. It was a long shot. He knew that. But at some point, you had to start taking long shots just to give yourself any kind of chance.
Chapter 49
Screaming, chaos, gunfire. Loshak needed to open his eyes. Find the shooter, neutralize the threat. But his eyelids were glued shut. He felt them fluttering, stirring, struggling to open, but he couldn’t get them wide enough to see anything. He fumbled around with his arms out in front of him, feeling through the dark. The shrieking grew louder. Right in his ear. Jan screaming for help. She was pregnant with Shelly, and he was still just a rookie, and he couldn’t open his goddamn eyes.
He jammed his middle finger against something wooden. Pain shot down through the knuckles and into his wrist, waking him up to a tangle of sweaty sheets and pillows.
Gray, wintry light leaked in around the hotel’s blackout curtains. Honking and the scrape of snowplows drifted up from the streets below.
On the nightstand, his phone flashed and screamed out a shrill note.
It took him another second to unhook his arm from the covers and grab the phone. A Chicago area code stared back at him from the screen.
“Loshak,” he answered.
“We ran the plates from the parking garage and traffic cams,” Brunhauser said in lieu of a greeting. There was a breathy, excited note to his voice. Almost a wheeze.
Loshak scrubbed at some particularly stuck-on crust at the corner of his left eye and checked the clock. Just after eleven in the morning. He’d gotten almost four hours of sleep. Brunhauser couldn’t have slept at all if he’d had time to finish the database and run the plates, but the detective didn’t sound at all like he was feeling the all-nighter spent combing shooting scenes.
“Anything?” Loshak asked, then shook his head at himself. He’d heard the excitement in the heavyset detective’s voice. Obviously the search had turned up something. He sat up, his brain starting to fire a little brighter at the prospect of a new lead. “What did you find?”
“Six hits,” Brunhauser said. “On the afternoon of the theater shooting, six registered pharmacists passed through the monitored intersections in the radius of the parking garage.”
Loshak ran his fingers over his scalp, ruffling his hair. Six was a really small number to work with. Between him, Spinks, Brunhauser, and Deluca, they could interview that many suspects in an afternoon.
Loshak kicked his feet over the side of the bed.
“I’ll be there in an hour.” He started to get up, then paused. “Did you file the paperwork on that yet?”
On the other end of the line, Brunhauser cursed. “I’ll get on it.”
“Actually, hold off on it for now.” Loshak felt a twinge of guilt at asking the guy to disobey Millhouse’s direct orders to the task force, but he wasn’t sure how the Deputy Chief would take the news. “No need to run the
risk of the red tape slowing us down. We’ll just talk to the suspects, keep it informal. Once we see whether we have anything, we’ll put it into the reports, yeah?”
The detective didn’t answer right away.
“When you say ‘we’…”
Understanding dawned on Loshak. “By ‘we,’ I mean I’ll do all the paperwork.”
“Deal,” Brunhauser agreed.
* * *
After fighting the slow crawl of lunchtime traffic for a full hour, Loshak and Spinks met Deluca at the station.
“Where’s your partner?” Spinks asked.
Deluca hooked a thumb over her shoulder. “His daughter’s dance recital. If Snowmageddon holds off, I’m picking him up from the dance school at two-thirty, and we’ll take whoever’s still on the list.” She waved a handful of paper at them. “Our suspects, gentlemen.”
She divvied them up. Loshak flipped through his. Names, addresses, basic identifying information on their six pharmacists.
“OK, I’ll take the first name, Spinks, second, Deluca, third.”
He glanced from the detective to the reporter as he spoke, ready to defend his decision to split up on this. Especially where a civilian like Spinks was concerned. But Deluca didn’t argue.
“How do we want to play the interview?” she asked.
“Treat them like potential eyewitnesses.” Loshak ticked off fingers with the corner of his papers. “Ask them what they saw, what they were out doing, the basics. You’re looking for anyone who seems nervous, twitchy, anybody lying, that sort of thing. Essentially, you don’t suspect anything, this is just a routine follow-up with anybody who might have seen something.”
Deluca nodded. “Got it.”
“Should we establish who’s going where next?” Spinks asked. “In case we get done and can’t get in touch with each other?”
A uniform squeezed past them headed toward the desk pool, and they all went silent at once. Loshak cringed internally. They couldn’t look guiltier if they had all started whistling and scuffing their shoes on the floor.
Deluca jerked her head at them, and they followed her into the copy room.
“Here.” She took back their papers and flattened them out on top of the copier, then dug a pen out of an inside pocket on her jacket. “These two are in South Austin, so when you get done with the first interview, head over here,” she told Spinks, marking an S by the two suspects she’d indicated.
Keeping his face blank, Loshak glanced over Deluca’s shoulder at the names she’d given Spinks. Good, she still had him interviewing Suspect Number 2. Loshak hadn’t said anything earlier when he assigned Spinks to Krysta McDonagh, but the female pharmacist was the safest interview out of the six. Statistically, for every hundred mass shootings that took place in the US, only three were committed by women. It wasn’t that Loshak didn’t think Spinks would do a decent job with the interview — if anything, a people-person like Spinks would suss out the murderer like the Scooby Gang pulling masks off suspects — but he was still a civilian, and he wouldn’t be armed. The one time the reporter had gotten into a confrontation with a killer had been in Florida, and Zakarian had stabbed him. Deluca was trained to handle herself if things went south.
The detective copied the letters onto the other sets of papers, then moved on.
“I’ll take the Avondale guy because he’s closest to where I have to pick up Brunhauser. From there, we’ll head down to the Ukrainian Village.” She scribbled a D next to one block of print, then a D&B by another.
When she’d finished copying those initials, she put Ls next to the remaining pair of suspects.
“Sorry, Agent Loshak, but that leaves you doing some driving. You should be able to take I-90 most of the way, though. If the weather takes a nasty turn like they’re saying, call me. Brunhauser and I can talk to the last guy.”
Loshak nodded.
They each grabbed a paper. There was a weird beat of silence, like they were all waiting for a dismissal.
“OK,” Loshak said. “Check in by text when you finish an interview. If we’re lucky, something will shake loose.”
Chapter 50
Loshak’s first interview took longer than it should have, but Andrew Gharry, the first pharmacist on his list, was a talker. Gharry spent most of the time Loshak was there recounting the nightmare of a day he’d had trying to fire a technician who kept calling in sick. When Loshak finally got him focused on the interview, it turned out Gharry hadn’t even been driving his car the day of the theater shooting. His wife had been using it to pick their kids up from school.
By the time Loshak left Gharry’s, it was dark. The temperature had risen two degrees, bringing it up to a solid zero, and the snow had started blowing in. He found the scraper-slash-brush thrown into the backseat of the rental and cleaned off the windows, then climbed inside.
He had gotten four texts while he was inside. He checked them while holding both hands and the phone directly over a vent. One was from Spinks saying he was heading to his next stop, and the other three were from Deluca. She and Brunhauser had finished both their interviews and were headed back to the station.
Want us to drive over and talk to your second suspect? She’d sent that last one ten minutes ago.
Loshak searched the address on Google Maps. Accounting for a long red stretch around an accident on I-90, the next pharmacist, Benjamin Walsh, was almost an hour away. If Loshak avoided the interstate, Google claimed it would take half that. He could probably make it there and back to the hotel before the weather got too bad, but he didn’t want to go if the detectives had headed over to interview Walsh without waiting for confirmation from him. Deluca seemed like the type for that sort of thing, not the kind of detective that liked waiting around when she could be doing something productive.
He hit the Call icon next to her name. She answered on the first ring.
“Agent Loshak, we were starting to get worried about you,” she said. “Was he our guy?”
“No, just a talker. Did anything jump out at you during your interviews?”
“One was a little shaken up about the whole thing, but just because his grandson lives out by the Woodfield Mall. The other one didn’t have the right vibe to him.” Brunhauser said something in the background. “Yeah, we don’t like either one for it.”
That meant that he and Spinks would be talking to their last two potential suspects. Their last hope at this plan working out. Loshak checked his watch. It had been almost forty-five minutes since Spinks had mentioned moving on to his second name, but he’d said nothing else since then. Fingers of apprehension reached into Loshak’s gut, and he imagined the Scooby Gang again, unmasking villains. Except Spinks was alone, didn’t carry a weapon, and didn’t have the magical TV guarantee of a safe and happy ending.
“You’re back at the station?” Loshak asked.
“Just walked in a minute ago. Do you want us to head over to the Walsh interview for you? It’s no problem.”
“That’s alright. You haven’t heard from Spinks yet, have you?”
There was a rustling on Deluca’s end. “I got a text a while back that he was finished with his first name and headed to number two.”
“Same here.”
Something pinged along the driver’s side of the rental like a handful of gravel, and Loshak twisted in his seat to watch a bulky City of Chicago truck roll down the street, spreading ashy salt mix on the road and the cars lining it. The yellow light on top flashed, lighting up the swirl of snowflakes.
“Honestly, if you guys are itching to go somewhere, I’d rather you head over to Spinks’ second interview and make sure everything’s alright there. It’s been a while since he checked in.”
“He probably just hit traffic on the way,” Deluca said. “That, or he’s stuck listening to a talker, like your last guy.”
Both were plausible, but Loshak couldn’t shake that feeling of dread worming around in his guts. They had cleared everybody but the last two pharmacists. Mayb
e it was nothing — the plan was a long shot, after all. But there was a chance Spinks was talking to the shooter now, a guy who would probably seem calm at first but had a volatile mixture of rage and hatred boiling just under the surface, waiting to blow.
Deluca caught his hesitation.
“We’ll head over and give him some backup, just in case,” she said. “Him being a civilian and all, better safe than sorry. ”
Loshak relaxed a little.
“Thanks.”
Deluca agreed to check in by text when they knew Spinks was alright. They made arrangements to meet back at the station when the interviews were over, then hung up.
The city truck was out of sight by then. Loshak switched his phone over to the navigation and propped it on the dash where he could see the screen. The evening traffic had thinned to almost nothing. A few commuters heading home to settle in for some real weather. The few cars that were out were driving well under the speed limit.
After letting a contractor’s van pass, Loshak took his opening and pulled out onto the slushy street.
The roads weren’t too bad yet. Tiny flakes swirled and danced in the headlight beams, reflecting the light back and giving the view farther ahead an almost smoky look. Loshak had to squint up at the street signs to read them through the white swirl.
But the snowfall didn’t bother him. He knew how to drive in a blizzard. Virginia got dumped on a few times a year, and the Bureau didn’t take snow days. If Chicago wanted bragging rights for their snow apocalypse, the weather was going to have to pick up some slack.
Chapter 51
“You know, I think I figured out something about Candy Crush,” Vince said.
Frank scowled. His gaze slid sideways to look at Vince in the passenger seat.
“That’s what you’ve been doing over there this whole time? Playing that fucking mindless game?”
Vince’s jacket strained against the movement of his shoulders shrugging.
