Fisher said, “So my boss went over to check on your brother.”
Gifford’s eyes met Fisher’s in the rearview mirror.
“Kevin pulled a gun on him. Now why would he go and do a thing like that?”
Gifford turned to look out the window.
“I have to say, Dylan, it kinda pisses me off that I tried to do you a favor, and my boss almost got shot for it. And you still won’t tell me what in the hell is going on?”
Gifford mumbled something, but Fisher couldn’t make it out through the plexiglass barrier.
“What’s that?” Fisher asked. He turned in his seat to look at him. “Speak up. It’s all right. You can talk to me.”
“I can’t. If I tell you . . .”
“You think if you talk, whoever you’re mixed up with is gonna hurt your brother?”
“Or my mom.” Gifford closed his eyes, and a tear fell.
* * *
Rachel looked at Kevin’s shiny pistol, presently lying on the hood of the unmarked Crown Victoria, and said, “You’re not out here wandering around in the dark with that cannon for no reason. Who are you afraid of?”
“No one. I done told you. I just don’t like people drivin’ up on my property at night is all.”
“We already know you were supposed to skip town with your mother if Dylan got busted. And we think it’s because someone might be coming after you. You need to stop holding out on us. Does this have something to do with your operation in Whittier?”
Kevin looked up, confusion and surprise on his face. “What? No . . . it don’t . . . I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, lady.”
“You’re telling us Dylan isn’t involved in your little business?” Braddock asked.
Kevin’s eyes moved from Rachel to Braddock and back. “Look, I don’t know what business y’all are talkin’ about, but it ain’t got nothin’ to do with Dylan, okay? I don’t know what he’s gotten himself into.”
“Okay,” Rachel said, “so you two aren’t in it together. That’s fine. But he must have given you some idea of who would be coming for you.”
“I don’t know . . . I mean, he didn’t say, exactly.”
“What did he say?” Braddock asked.
When he hesitated, Rachel said, “Dylan’s in a lot of trouble right now. If someone else is involved, he can use that as leverage to help his case. But he’s not talking to us. If you want to help him, the best thing you can do is tell us everything you know.”
“I’m tellin’ you,” he said, “I don’t know what’s goin’ on. He just said that if anything happened to him . . . if he got in trouble or got hurt, I was supposed to get Momma and head west.”
“That’s it?”
He looked into her eyes, held a wary gaze for a moment, and said, “He told me he was workin’ with some guy on somethin’ that was gettin’ jacked up, and I could tell it had him scared. I ain’t never seen him like that before. He said he wanted to know that me and Momma would be safe—”
Kevin turned toward a rustling behind him. The deputy shined his flashlight, and Braddock’s hand moved to his sidearm. Rachel’s eyes followed the deputy’s beam as it swept the trees. She glanced back at Kevin and saw that he was staring at her with fear in his eyes. Braddock took a step forward, and there was a commotion about thirty yards away. He drew his pistol just as an owl took flight with a tiny rodent clutched in its talons.
* * *
“Your family’s safe now, Dylan,” Fisher said.
Gifford looked at him in the rearview but didn’t respond.
“All three of you are gonna be locked up tonight, safe and sound. And if you’ll tell us who you’re worried about, we can make sure your mom and your brother stay that way whenever they get out.”
“What makes you think we’ll be safe in jail?” Gifford asked.
Fisher twisted in his seat. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He shook his head but didn’t answer.
When they reached the junction, Howard eased to a stop, looked left to check that the lane was clear, and gasped. Her window shattered. Red mist burst from her head and sprayed the plexiglass just as Gifford registered the sound of gunfire and ducked down for cover. Fisher started to reach for the gun on his hip but was struck twice in the chest as the window behind him became a spider’s web of cracked glass. He braced his hands against the dash and fought to draw in wheezing breaths.
* * *
The driver was slumped over. Her foot came off the brake, and the patrol car crept forward into the intersection. Bishop kept the muzzle of his AR-15 on the windows as he jogged around the back to the passenger side. He saw the young detective, Shane Fisher, struggling to breathe and fired two rounds into his temple. Then he looked in the back and saw Gifford lying on his side, looking up at him.
Bishop expected to hear screaming, begging, maybe even cursing, but Gifford stared at him without making a sound. Keeping pace with the car, Bishop aimed the red dot of his sight on Gifford’s chest and fired four shots through the window. Then he put the dot on Gifford’s contorted face and fired two more. He took a quick look inside to make sure the bullets had found their mark before he turned and ran back to his Nissan Juke hidden in a turnout on the next street over. The patrol car drifted off the road, rolled down an embankment, and struck a tree.
37
Braddock veered onto the shoulder and charged past the news vans and the DCPD patrol car blocking the road. It was another hundred yards to the scene of the shooting, which had been cordoned off with red crime scene tape. The area in front of the tape was teeming with sheriff’s deputies and DCPD officers. Braddock parked as close as he could, jumped out, and ran up to Curtis and Pratt. Pritchard was on the far side of the road talking to Chief Miller.
Rachel lagged behind. She searched beyond the crowd into the crime scene and caught a view of Howard’s patrol car. Just a part of it. The bumper was barely visible above the shoulder. Then she looked back at the reporters silhouetted by camera lights, and her heart sank. The anxiety was overwhelming. Had she missed something? Should she have seen this coming? Perhaps the deal with Jensen had been a mistake. People were dead, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was her fault somehow. She scanned the sea of uniforms and wondered how many of them blamed her. There was a voice in her head telling her to go back and hide in the car.
Carly climbed up the embankment holding her camera at her side. She had been taking pictures of the car and the victims. The sight had shaken her. She ducked under the tape to rejoin the others, took a faltering step, and stopped. The camera fell away as she sat down on the grass and started to weep.
Rachel ran up and caught the camera before it slid downhill. She looked down at Carly and tried to find the courage to apologize.
“You have to help us,” Carly said. She stood and turned away, taking a second to compose herself. She turned back, wiped her eyes with her forearms, and said, “You have to help us catch the sorry fuckers who did this. You have to stay as long as it takes.”
Before Rachel could say anything, Carly took her camera and walked away. Braddock was there a moment later. “Jensen will be here soon,” he said. “Sanford’s coming too. And Bruce Moore.”
“I’m so sorry, Danny,” Rachel said.
They stared at the car. It sat on three wheels, pitched on the uneven slope. The front end was crumpled against the large oak that held it from sliding farther downhill. From where Braddock and Rachel were standing, they couldn’t see the occupants, but there was a lock of blood-soaked blonde hair stuck to the driver-side door beneath the broken window.
Braddock looked away. “I can’t go down there, Rachel. I can’t see them like this.”
“You don’t have to,” she said.
“Shane was only twenty-nine years old.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Had a wife and a little girl . . . And Melissa . . . Jesus . . . she couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.”
* * *
Justin
Sanford was in a navy-blue windbreaker with “SBI” written in bold white letters across the back. Jensen, still in a suit, met him as he stepped out of his car. Together, they approached Pritchard and spoke to him for several minutes before calling Braddock and Rachel over.
“I’m sorry about the people you lost here, Danny,” Sanford said. “Truly.”
“Thanks,” Braddock said with a solemn nod.
“I also want to say that you and your team”—he glanced at Rachel—“did a hell of a job tracking down this Dylan Gifford and catching him. That was good work. But at this point, it’s obvious that we’re dealing with some sort of organized criminal activity. So after talking with Sheriff Pritchard, we’ve decided that the wise course would be for our office to take the lead in the investigation moving forward. Having said that, we’re still going to need your help, and no matter what happens, you have my word that we’ll keep you in the loop every step of the way.”
“I appreciate that.”
“It’s the least we can do,” he said. “Right now, I’ve got another crime scene search unit on the way. They’ll go over every square inch of this place, but as you know, that’s gonna take some time. Ordinarily, I’d suggest you go home and try to get some rest, but something tells me I wouldn’t be able to drag you outta here with a Mack Truck if I tried.”
“You’re right about that,” Braddock said. “Is there anything else?”
“That’s it,” Sanford said.
Braddock walked away. As Rachel turned to follow, Sanford said, “Miz Carver? Can I have a word?”
He led her back toward his car, away from the crowd. Her eyes caught Jensen’s for a moment, and she thought she saw a look of concern in them.
“I spoke to SAC Penter about you on the way over,” Sanford said.
It was the last thing Rachel needed to hear—Sanford had called her former boss at the SBI, her mentor, to talk about her involvement in a case that had gone tragically astray.
“He had a lot of good things to say about you. He said you were one of the best investigators he’s ever seen.”
Were, Rachel thought, wondering how deliberate that choice of words had been.
“Of course, I already knew that,” he said. “You had quite the reputation while you were still an agent.” He glanced over her shoulder at the crime scene. “On the other hand, he did mention something that I didn’t know. He said that you have a tendency to become obsessed with your work. That you have a hard time letting go.”
Rachel’s hands were starting to shake. She found herself staring at the bridge of his nose, at the pronounced bump where the bone turned to cartilage, just before it swung ever so slightly to the left. Someone had broken that nose, it appeared, years before. Probably an old wound from his days as a beat cop. She wondered if she should try to straighten it for him.
“I’m not going to have to worry about that here, am I?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “It’s all yours now.”
38
Bishop’s cabin was ten miles outside Asheville. He sped through the winding mountain roads, making good time. The black, compact Juke was perfect for negotiating the tight curves at high speed, and the thrill of the ride helped burn off the nervous edge.
He checked his watch as he hit the gravel drive. It was just before 11:00 PM—a new record. Smiling to himself, he passed the Wrangler sitting out front and slowed to a stop inside the detached garage that doubled as his workshop. He turned off the engine and closed the overhead door with the remote before he got out. Then he went to the passenger side of the car to finish the night’s work.
The AR-15 was stowed in a slender metal box he had attached to the undercarriage. A hiding spot in case he was ever pulled over for speeding. There was always the chance that a cop would ask to search the interior, and he would cooperate, knowing that his weapon would never be found during a routine traffic stop. He withdrew the rifle and carried it to his workbench, gathered his tools, and began the process of taking it apart.
Once he had the barrel separated and stripped of its accessories, he walked to the corner of the garage and dropped it on the steel plate he had embedded into a section of reinforced concrete. He grabbed the twenty-pound sledgehammer leaning against the wall, heaved it over his head, and slammed it down onto the chamber end of the barrel.
After three blows, he picked it up and examined it, then dropped it again and went to work on the rest of its length. When he was finished, the battered piece of metal could no longer chamber or fire a round, which meant it could never be tested for a match to the bullets and cartridge cases the police would recover from the scene. But there was still more to do.
He wiped the barrel clean of prints and placed it into a form he had built with plywood and two-by-fours. The burner went in next, along with the battery. The SIM card had been discarded on the way home. There was a bag of quick-setting concrete and an empty bucket by the side door. He dumped a third of the bag into the bucket, got some water from the spigot outside, then mixed it with a hand trowel. When the consistency was right, he dumped the mix into the form, encasing the barrel and the phone. It would solidify into a block within an hour, and he would dispose of it first thing Monday morning.
He turned off the light and locked the side door, went to the burn pit behind the cabin, and stripped off his clothes. His shirt, jeans, socks, and boxers all went into the hole on top of a pile of dry pine. He doused the clothes with lighter fluid, lit a book of matches, and threw it in. It took a few minutes of poking around with a stick to burn all the fabric. When it was done, he let the fire settle and went inside.
It was dark and quiet in the cabin. Too quiet. He turned on the TV and switched to one of the local stations. A reporter stood in front of a police car barricading the scene. She was giving a recap of everything she knew, everything the DCPD spokesman had told her. They were waiting for a statement from the State Bureau of Investigation, which they would broadcast live. It was expected in the next ten minutes.
Bishop took a quick shower and came back into the living room to dry off and wait for the statement. A few minutes later, the special agent in charge appeared on the screen. Surrounded by reporters holding outstretched microphones, he patted down his red hair, cleared his throat, and delivered a somber summary of the evening’s events. He didn’t reveal much, but he promised a lot. Did a good job of sounding confident and reassuring.
A phone rang, and Bishop had to think for a second to remember which of his remaining prepaid burners was set to that tone. He followed the sound to his dresser and answered it, knowing that there was only one person who had the number.
“What the hell happened out there tonight?” his partner asked.
Bishop should have expected the call. He fought the urge to yell as he said, “Had to happen.”
“Had to . . . Jesus Christ, this is getting out of hand. This isn’t what I wanted.”
“No, but it’s what you got, so I suggest you come to terms with it real quick.”
There was a deep breath, and the man said, “Just tell me you’ve still got this under control.”
“Everything is under control.”
Another deep breath.
Bishop said, “If it makes you feel any better, the kid was always going to die.”
“Why in the world would that make me feel better?”
“It was inevitable. Part of the plan.” He walked over to a window facing out back and watched the flames flickering in the pit. “Even if he had finished the job and gotten away with it, I never would have let him live.”
“Loose end, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“And when all this is over, am I going to be one of your loose ends?”
“Not if you keep your mouth shut.”
Bishop ended the call.
* * *
The reporter was repeating herself, so Bishop turned the TV off, grabbed a beer from the fridge, and went outside to sit by the fire. The flames and th
e crackling wood were mesmerizing. His eyes felt heavy, and the tension he had been carrying in his neck and shoulders finally started to ease.
Gifford’s arrest could have been a disaster had Bishop not acted in time. He only hoped the detectives had not gotten anything during the interrogation. Pratt would tell him as soon as he got her alone. She was always willing to say more than she should, and he was willing to force it out of her if it came to that.
Assuming he was in the clear, Bishop would be free to take out the last two targets on his own. There was no need to get creative or introduce anyone else into the mix. The sheriff’s office and the DCPD were already off balance, and the SBI would be spinning their wheels for weeks chasing tweakers.
Gifford had been an effective instrument, even if he hadn’t lasted as long as Bishop had wanted. With all the surveillance that Bishop had conducted on the victims—countless hours over the course of several months—there was a good chance that he had been spotted a time or two. But with Gifford carrying out his plans, he had been free to establish alibis for the nights of both murders.
He had been with Pratt during the McGrath killing. When Coughlan had died, he had been busy hitting on a brunette at a bar in Asheville. He knew the bartender, and he had a credit card receipt that showed the time and date. If Gifford had managed to finish the job, Bishop could have retired him, permanently severing any link between himself and the victims. And the brother’s meth business would have become the obvious focus for investigators with nothing else to go on. Unfortunately, the cops had found the video of Gifford’s truck, bringing his utility to an end a little too early.
Bishop had tried to accelerate the plan to compensate. He had tried to convince Gifford to take out both targets in one night, but that wasn’t necessary anymore. He no longer had the luxury of being able to set up an alibi, but he didn’t have to worry about anyone else getting caught either. It was all on him now. All he needed was a new plan.
39
Among the Dead Page 16
