by Blink, Bob
Jake slipped the laser range finder into his pocket and stood. He took a couple of pictures using the small camera he had brought along. His cell phone was back in Reno. He had a cheap throw-away he’d activated back in the hotel, but it didn’t have a camera. Satisfied, he turned and walked back toward the car.
It worked exactly as he hoped. He was in place an hour before the shooting had taken place. He watched as the man rode up on the motorcycle, and carried a small case, not too unlike his own, into the enclosure. Once the man had the rifle out and assembled, Jake took his position behind the LAR. It was equipped with one of the new uppers he’d just sighted in a few weeks back. He attached the small cage over the ejection port designed to capture the spent brass. This would eliminate any need to search through the grass and brush for the used cases after he fired. The killer had scanned the surrounding area when he arrived, missing Jake up the hill, and was now intent on setting up for his killing spree. Jake placed the crosshairs just under the man’s armpit, having a nice side view. Following a practiced discipline, he made the shot, and was rewarded with a solid hit. The man went down and lay still. Just to be sure Jake sent a second round into the head that was visible, ensuring the kill.
Quickly he turned the warm suppressor off the quick disconnect, stripped the suppressor from the barrel, then pulled the rifle apart. The two halves went into the case, and then the magazine. Jake clipped the case closed, and stood, checking to be sure there was nothing that would be of use to the police when they investigated the scene later. With the clothes and thin gloves he was wearing he was unlikely to have left much evidence for them. Also, this was a public spot, and any number of people used this spot everyday. They weren’t going to get much.
Returning to the car, he put the case in the trunk, important here in California, and climbed into the driver’s seat. He’d dump the upper later today, and replace it with the original barrel assembly that had come with the rifle. Better to have a complete rifle than one missing a vital part that might cause someone to wonder.
Jake drove to his hotel, parking the car and taking the case up to his room. He made the changes to the rifle, installing the factory original upper receiver. He returned the complete rifle to the special case, and then went down to the garage, stowing the weapon in the BMW. Finally Jake tossed the barrel he wished to discard, wrapped inside a black plastic trash bag along with an accumulation of bunched up newspapers, into one of the large dumpsters at the back of the hotel. Then he walked up two levels to where the rental was parked and headed back to the rental office. He turned the car in, made the airport loop, and was back in his room within an hour. He showered, changing his hair color and selected other clothing, the items he’d worn placed in a plastic bag for disposal along the way, packed his bags, and used the television to complete a quick checkout. Satisfied, he left the room and rode down the elevator and walked out of the hotel and into the garage where his BMW waited.
Traffic was heavy as he headed out of town, although less so headed north as he was at the moment. He would go north to Highway 5, then run up through California and over the pass by Truckee to loop back into Nevada. That would keep him well away from the other side of Los Angeles where he’d killed the man a few hours earlier.
Jake was well past halfway home when he conceded to himself that he had a problem. He didn’t feel bad about killing the sniper. In fact, he felt a certain satisfaction. He often had such feelings after completing a mission and knowing a large number of innocent people were going to have a chance to live as a result of his intervention. His problem was the realization he wasn’t going to be able to stop what he was doing. That meant a conflict with Karin was certain once again. He knew her sensitivities from the last time he’d told her. Perhaps he could use that knowledge to temper the realities of the situation. Perhaps he could break it to her in stages and make her realize what the alternatives to his action were. He was going to have to try, but he feared the outcome. Somehow he knew it wasn’t going to go as smoothly as he’d like. Suddenly he wasn’t as upbeat as he’d been since driving out of Los Angeles.
Chapter 9
Special Agent Susan Carlson sighed as she stood by the scarred old picnic table and stared down the slight incline toward the clump of brush adjacent to the freeway overpass. She was here with the Ontario police detective in charge of the case. She had otherwise come alone. She’d been raised in Southern California and had spent two tours for the FBI in the area and didn’t need anyone from the local office to show her around. Besides, the local agent in charge who she would have normally been with was in court today.
“You can see it was an easy shot,” the detective said, pointing toward where the body had been found.
Indeed it was. A very easy shot for a man with a good rifle and the training to use it. Less than one hundred and fifty yards Carlson estimated. She was positive of the former since they already had a report on the rifle, and certain of the latter based on other cases where the same type of rifle had been employed, twice at considerably longer distances. Those shots had been on target as well. While there was no conclusive evidence, Carlson was certain this was another incident for their task force.
“He used a Rock River Arms LAR in .308 caliber,” the detective added as if reading her mind and presenting facts that Carlson already knew from the preliminary report she’d read on the plane out here.
“You recovered both bullets?” Carlson asked, playing the game while she worked through the crime scene.
“Both bullets that were shot at the victim,” the detective confirmed. “We are assuming he didn’t fire any additional rounds. One went into the tree behind the victim after passing through him, and the second was buried in the dirt under him. It was straightforward to obtain the type of firearm. Our lab technician verified that both bullets came from the same weapon.”
From the same weapon, and from the same kind of weapon the man Carlson sought had used before, but not the identical weapon used for previous crimes. Carlson’s own people back at the Bureau had already independently confirmed what the detective was telling her, but had also verified that the bullets had not come from the same barrel as the others they had in the evidence room. That meant the shooter had either used another rifle of the same type, or equally likely simply replaced the barrel assembly after use to eliminate any chance of connecting the weapon to the crime. The man was certainly careful about picking up any evidence before he left.
Agent Carlson’s mind latched onto the term the detective was using to describe the deceased. Victim, indeed! The dead man had been found with a loaded semi-automatic rifle and sixty rounds of ammunition on his person. Given the location he was found, there was little doubt what he had been intending. Carlson let her eyes wander to the intersecting maze of freeways adjacent to where the body had been. Whoever had killed him had prevented a serious incident and probably had saved a significant number of lives.
How did he know? Carlson had seen the same kind of thing in many of the other cases. It was one of the characteristics that linked the various instances together. In every case, the “victim” appeared to have been preparing to take some kind of deadly action before being killed. They weren’t able to always identify the intended target, but in each case with a bit of investigation it was clear that the dead man had been about to go out and kill. Whoever was doing this had stopped those events from happening. At first Carlson had wondered if the shooter was somehow involved and had backed out, killing the other man to cover his own involvement. That no longer made sense. The cases stretched across the country. She could see no way anyone could have been involved with so many very different individuals. That meant he had a way of ferreting out their intent and acting before they could execute their own plans. She applauded the intent, but the shooter was still a criminal. He should be contacting the local authorities and allowing the properly appointed organizations to deal with the situation.
The shooter had chosen his spot with some care
, which further told Carlson he knew exactly where the sniper, a better term than victim in Carlson’s mind, was going to set up. The range was short and the shots were taken at right angles to the freeway and into the stand of thick trees where the sniper was hidden. None of the bullets had any likelihood of passing through and striking an innocent in the background. Carlson was just surprised at how open the position was and that the shooter hadn’t been seen by the sniper. He made the observation to the detective.
“We’ll go down and have a look,” the detective said. “From here it looks completely visible as you look downward past the trees and brush. From down below, the trees break up the view, and it’s a lot more difficult to see that anyone might be up here. If our man was careful, he would have been concealed when the victim arrived, and then set up for the shot while the man down below was getting situated.”
Carlson ran her hand along the rough and scratched wood of the table. “Were your people able to retrieve any evidence from here where the shot was made?” she asked knowing the answer.
“Nothing useful. They found dozens of fingerprints. A lot of people have used this place and fingerprints have a tendency to last, especially while the weather is good. I’ll bet our man used gloves anyway, so even if we run them all and were lucky enough that all were in the databanks, none would be his. Lots of generic fibers. Again, nothing useful, but they are all logged in the report for you. The only thing were a couple of footprints. Those were very clear. We got imprints,” the detective said smugly.
Useless, Carlson knew. The prints would be from a generic and popular shoe. New shoes, worn especially for the day and almost certainly thrown in some dumpster in the greater LA area before the day of the shooting was past. Nothing would come of the prints.
“A grounds keeper found the body?” Carlson asked, as they started down the hill to where the body had been found.
“That’s correct. He saw the bike parked there when he made an early pass and it was still there two hours later when he came by again. He went down to check, thinking someone was sleeping off a drunk or something. That’s when he found the body.”
“No one saw anything else?”
“We talked with everyone who normally works here, and put out a public request for witnesses. I can’t say if anyone was in the area and hasn’t been willing to come forward, but those we’ve talked with never saw a person. One of the ground’s keepers says he saw a car come through late a day or two before, later than people usually come here so he sort of took notice. The same car, or one similar was noted by another witness on the morning of the shooting.”
“What kind of car?”
“A gray reasonably new Chevy Malibu.”
“Rental?”
The detective shrugged. “Who knows? Might have been. But why would you make that assumption?”
Carlson ignored the question. “Did your witnesses see the license or even from which state it came from?”
“It was a California plate,” the detective added belatedly. “The witness who saw the car on the day of the shooting thinks the plate had a number “8” on it. That’s the only thing he can recall.”
“Did you run a search?”
“On a gray Malibu of unknown year with a possible “8” in the plate number? Do you have any idea how many such cars must exist in the area? No, we haven’t followed up on that clue.”
Carlson filed the information away. It was tenuous, but if she assumed the car was a rental, she might be able to get a lead from it. It was a favorite rental car, but how many would have been out on those days and she might be able to get names or credit cards for the renters.
They had reached the spot where the man had been found. Carlson knelt and looked at the stain in the dirt. Then she looked back up toward the picnic bench. She could see what the detective had meant. The table was there, but without looking carefully, it would have been very easy to miss anyone sitting there. Carlson stood and looked out at the freeway with the cars whooshing by thirty feet below. It would have been a massacre she realized. Once again she wondered how the shooter had known. She was certain they owed the man thanks for his actions, however illegal, and intended to ask him his secret if she ever was lucky enough to catch up with the man.
* * * * *
Susan Carlson looked up from her desk at the sound of the discrete knock on the frame of her open door. She had been back in Washington D.C. since yesterday afternoon and was using the morning to catch up on the paperwork that had accumulated during her brief trip across country. She noted the smiling face of Shaun Hansen peering around the edge of the frame, the half height glasses pushed down on his nose so as to allow him to see better over the tops of the rimless lenses. While only in his early thirties, Shaun had very poor eyesight, and needed the glasses to be able to read written material on his computer monitors where he spent most of his time. Carlson had suggested to the man more than once that he check into laser surgery to correct his vision, but Hansen was deathly afraid of anything that might affect his vision, and wouldn’t consider such an action. Today the computer specialist’s hair was especially unruly, indicating he had been working on a particularly vexing problem.
“Got a minute?” Hansen asked, when he observed that Carlson had seen him.
Carlson waved for the man to enter, and pointed toward the chair across from her as Hansen walked toward her desk.
“Did you find something?” she asked hopefully. She had asked Shaun to see if he could find any records of a rented Chevy Malibu in hopes they might find something in the way of a lead.
“I think so,” Shaun replied happily. “Take a look at this.”
He pushed a single page printout across the desk for Susan to look at. Four license plate numbers were shown, with a credit card number next to each. All of the license numbers had an “8” in them, although the positions of the number was different in each case.
“Four Chevy Malibus with an “8” in the number rented in Los Angeles between the dates you specified. One is an off-white color, but I kept it on the list anyway.”
“Where were they rented?”
Shaun pointed a pencil at the list and the small markings he’d made next to each number. “These two were rented at LAX. The white one was rented in Orange County near the airport down there, and the last was rented in Santa Clarita, up near Magic Mountain.”
Carlson wanted to read something into the rental at an airport but she knew that a large portion of the rentals in an area like Los Angeles were made there for obvious reasons. None of the locations were particularly close to where the vehicle had reportedly been seen, but that didn’t mean anything. Los Angeles was a maze of freeways, and the killer would have probably wanted to put distance between the location of the crime and the rental of his vehicle.
She glanced carefully at the four credit card numbers. None of them looked familiar to her, but there was really no reason to expect them to. They had a huge database of card numbers obtained from rental agencies near to all of the other suspected incidents, and not a single match had been found.
“Do any of these match up with our previous lists?” he asked hopefully. The car description and the digit in the plate had offered the best hope of narrowing the field they’d had to date.
Hansen shook his head. “None of them,” he said pointedly.
Susan looked up at the happy face of the computer genius with a perplexed look on her face. “I guess I don’t understand. I assumed you had something to show me.”
Shaun’s head bobbed up and down. “I do. I do. Look, I ran the numbers through the name retrieval program like you asked before to look for a name match.”
“And you found a match?” Carlson asked hopefully.
“Not exactly. Let me show you. Look at this.”
Shaun laid a second sheet of paper in front of Carlson. This one had card numbers with a list of names opposite the numbers. She could see that some of the names were similar, but not exact matches to one of the fo
ur names that appeared on the first sheet.
“These aren’t the same,” Carlson objected.
“No, they’re not,” Shaun agreed. “But look at the similarity. These two have the same last name, but one has a first initial “E”, whereas this one has a “B”. This one has a complete first name. This one has a different last name, but if you look carefully, you’ll see it has the same letters in the last name and starts with the same letter.”
“What are you saying?”
“I think our shooter is being clever. If you give someone an ID with a name, perhaps one of these, and then flash a credit card with any of these other names, I’d bet it would pass. People don’t look that close and they expect to see a match.”
“Did you check these names against the incident databases?”
“I did. One of these names shows up in five of the nine suspect cases.”
Carlson suddenly had a sense of movement. Shaun may have found something important here.
“Did you run a search on the names to see what you could find?”
“I did. I found numerous matches to every name, both using the initial and the full name where we had it. There is no way to tell without more information if any one of the people might be our suspect. The names selected are simply too common.”
“What about the credit cards? Can you trace them back to an owner?”
“That’s one of the things that make these instantly suspicious. Each of them trace back to a corporate account with offshore holdings. None can be used to locate the individual on the card.”
