“When the van drove by, did you see the passengers?”
“Well, even though the windows were tinted, the passenger window was partially open and I got a quick look at one of them. He wore a Red Sox cap and was disfigured.”
“Disfigured? In what way?”
“His face was covered with burn scars . . . ”
Houston made a note.
Once again, Blackman looked bewildered. “Will I have to testify in court?”
“I don’t know. That depends on a number of things.”
“Like what?”
“Like if we catch this guy and a grand jury wants your testimony. On the other hand, if someone else can better identify the shooters, they probably won’t bother bringing you back from—”
“Illinois. I live in the suburbs, west of Chicago.”
“Illinois.” Houston verified the address he had provided to the officer on the scene. It checked; Blackman had given a home address in Naperville, Illinois. “What about the hooker? Did she see anything?”
“I don’t know. She wasn’t with me at the time. As I said, I was going to meet her near the Cheers bar.”
“Cheers bar? Are you talking about the Bull & Finch Pub?”
“Yes, that’s the place. She saw all the cops and for obvious reasons didn’t want to get in the middle of things. She called me on my cell phone.”
Houston drank the last of his coffee. “Is this number your cell?” He read the phone listing from the crime scene report.
“Yes, you can reach me on it anytime.”
Houston saw Anne walk into the restaurant and waved to her. “All right, Mr. Blackman, if there’s anything else I’ll be in touch. When are you leaving Boston?”
“I have an early flight to O’Hare the day after tomorrow.”
Houston slid a business card across the table, stood up and shook hands with Blackman. “Well, I hope you enjoy the rest of your stay.”
Houston started to leave, but stopped when Blackman said, “I’m sorry I can’t help you more.”
“Every little bit helps.” Houston nodded and left him sitting there. As Houston walked away, he knew Blackman was more worried about the little woman in Naperville learning about his expensive friend than he was being a witness to a mass murder.
When they were back in the car, Anne asked, “Did you get anything?”
“Maybe. He reinforced the fact that we’re looking for a white van and he said one of the people inside had burn scars on his face. What did you get from his friend?”
“Nothing. She was killing time in a bar before meeting him. When she saw all the cops and commotion, she decided to stay put. She called him on his cell.”
“That’s what he said. Either they’re telling the truth or they got their story straight before we got here.”
“I believe them,” Anne said. “First of all, none of the officers on scene mentioned her in any report. Second, I thought he was going to cry when he realized he’d been caught with his pants down.”
“Yeah, for some reason I don’t think he’s heard the last of this.”
“Where to next?”
“Copley Square. There are two witnesses staying at the Plaza.”
The Marriott desk clerk hesitated when the badly scarred man approached the front desk. He made an ineffective attempt to keep from staring at his hideous burns. The scarred man opened his wallet and flashed his identification card at her. He closed the small wallet before he was able to read anything other than FBI in large letters.
“The two police officers that just left,” he asked, “who did they talk to?”
The clerk hesitated. The last thing he wanted to do was to hinder a police investigation, let alone an FBI agent asking for information. “Mr. Blackman.” He pointed toward the coffee shop. “That’s him over there, the heavy-set man wearing the wrinkled Hawaiian shirt.”
The FBI agent turned and looked at Blackman, seeming to commit him to memory. “Thank you.”
The clerk stood dumbfounded when he left without speaking to Mr. Blackman. He noted that the agent limped as he departed through the revolving door. The clerk would never have thought that anyone so badly disfigured could get into the FBI. He shrugged his shoulders and turned back to his work.
6
“Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter.”
—Ernest Hemingway
“Nobody is saying anything, Tony,” O’Leary said into the phone. “I just want to know if you’ve heard of anyone looking for or buying a .308 rifle and ammo under the table.” He ignored the irate tone of the loud voice on the other end and slowly rotated his cigarette back and forth between his thumb and index finger as he listened.
Finally, he had listened to enough of Tony Petrano’s caustic remarks. O’Leary cut him off. “All right, enough of the bullshit. If the cops are looking at my organization for this, then you better fuckin’ believe they’re lookin’ at you guys too. You hear anything, the next goddamned person you talk to is me. You got that? Because if I find out you’re holding back, there’ll be hell to pay.” He slammed the phone into its cradle and felt it flex in his hand. He turned it over and saw a crack running across the keypad. He held the broken phone up so it was visible to Gordon Winter. “Remember when we were kids and shit didn’t break every friggin’ time you looked at it cross-eyed?”
“Sounds like you’re getting the runaround?”
O’Leary ignored the way Winter had discounted his comment about the fragility of modern appliances.
For several seconds, O’Leary stared at the broken phone. Then he yanked the cord from the wall and tossed it in his wastebasket. He turned his attention back to Winter. “This one has me by the balls. No one has heard anything about this whack-job. It ain’t natural that some asshole is shooting the city up and nobody has a clue about who it is.”
Winter contemplated his response for a brief moment. “Are the cops really tryin’ to lay this bullshit at our feet?”
“I don’t know about the rest of the cops, but I don’t think Houston believes we had anything to do with it. He knows me better than that. He should know that I ain’t never hit no one that didn’t give me reason to. Shit, there’s any number of buttheads walkin’ around that I probably should have whacked years ago.”
“Want me to check around?”
“Yeah, but before you do that, I got something else for you.”
“Name it.”
“You recall the woman that came in here yesterday afternoon?”
“Are you referring to the black broad?”
“Yeah, seems some local gangbangers raped and killed her thirteen-year-old daughter.”
Gordon’s face turned hard. “This city is fuckin’ out of control. The kid was only thirteen?”
“Yeah, she was still a goddamned baby.”
“You get a name . . . someplace for me to start?”
“A local shithead who uses the street name Razor may be involved. The name his mother gave him is Jermaine, Jermaine Watts.” O’Leary held out a scrap of paper. “He hangs out in the ‘Bury, around Martin Luther King Boulevard, near Malcolm X Park. Here’s an address for his grand-mother—she’s raising him. I suppose ‘supporting him’ is more accurate.”
Winter stood, took the slip of paper and, after memorizing what was written on it, tossed it into the wastebasket with the now useless telephone. “Consider it done. How you want it handled?”
“Bring him to the usual place and then call me. I’ll talk to him there.”
The smile on Winter’s face was the one that made women grab their kids and scurry across the street. When Jimmy saw it, he knew the job was, for all intents and purposes, done.
“You got a picture of this asshole?”
“No, but he shouldn’t be hard to find. Marian said he has spider webs tattooed around his eyes, like the damn Lone Ranger’s mask.”
&
nbsp; “Once I get Watts, what we going to do about this sniper thing?” he asked.
“Since nobody wants to talk, we’ll just have to go bust a few asses. Get me anything you can.”
Winter leaned against the fender of his Lincoln Navigator, sipping coffee from a takeout cup. To a casual observer, he appeared relaxed; however, his eyes were in constant motion, studying everything on the street and missing nothing. If O’Leary’s information was accurate, Jermaine Watts hung out in this neighborhood and it was only a matter of time before he would be roaming around. Winter believed that, as a rule, gang-bangers were as territorial as a pack of dogs and spent most of their time patrolling their turf to protect it from other gangs. Winter also knew that it was unlikely that a white man was going to learn much asking questions in the hood, so he did what he had learned to do as an army ranger; he observed and he listened.
Ten minutes passed before his quarry appeared. Jermaine Watts was still a quarter of a block away when Winter identified him by his tats. The kid bopped along, carrying an MP3 player with an earphone stuck in his right ear. Probably playing an incomprehensible rap song, Winter thought. He acted as if he were king of the streets. His baggy black jeans hung down exposing the top half of a greasy-looking, shiny pair of floral-print designer boxers. He wore a black Celtics cap, coated with enough hair gel to make it glisten in the sun. The cap’s brim pointed three-quarters of the way toward the back of his head. Winter knew the angle designated the gang to which Razor belonged. There was nothing Winter hated more than people who wore hats backward—he believed that only catchers were supposed to do that and this punk was no ballplayer.
“Could you spare some change?”
Winter turned toward the voice. A grubby tramp stood beside him holding his soiled hand out. Winter made no effort to hide his loathing and said, “Change? What you need is to take a fuckin’ bath in sheep dip and scour your cruddy carcass with a wire brush. Now get out of my goddamned face before I do something about it.”
The tramp’s eyes widened with fear and he scurried away.
Winter downed the last of his coffee, crumpled the cup and tossed it into a nearby trash can. He returned his attention to Jermaine, who was still shuffling and dancing his way toward him. As the gangbanger closed with him, his spider-web tats became more defined. The idiot had no idea that his life was about to turn to shit. Winter thought about what lay in Jermaine’s near future and smiled. “Ignorance is bliss . . . ”
7
“To the enemy, who knows the real capabilities of a sniper, he is a very feared ghostly phantom who is never seen, and never heard until his well-aimed round cracks through their formation or explodes the head of their platoon commander or radio man.”
—US Marine Corps Scout/Sniper Training Manual
After leaving the Plaza, Anne and Houston stopped for lunch. There was a time when lunch had meant a couple of beers to Houston. But he had learned the hard way to be careful around booze. He looked across the table at Anne, toasted her with a frosty glass of lemonade and said, “I’m bushed. I must be getting old.”
Anne leaned forward and looked into his eyes. “Mike, when was your last physical?”
“What has that got to do with anything? Don’t start in on me, okay?”
“It’s not even one o’clock and you look like something the cat dragged in and the dog was afraid to drag back out.”
“Christ, Anne, I’m just tired, that’s all. I didn’t sleep worth a damn last night.”
She sat back, her delicate hands slowly turned her glass and she softened. “Fatigue is our greatest enemy—you know that. It causes us to fail to see what we should and to see what we shouldn’t and also increases our reaction time.”
“I’ve operated under those conditions most of my life . . . I’ll make it.”
“I understand all that,” Anne said. “It’s just that you’re my best friend and I worry about you.”
“We have come a long way together, haven’t we?”
She smiled. “Mike, you’ve come a lot further than I have.”
“Maybe so, but without you I don’t think I’d have survived the trip. How long have we been partners now?”
“Over five years.”
“I was a mess back then,” Houston said.
“Well, you had just gotten over a very traumatic divorce.”
“There’s something that I have to confess to you.”
“Oh?”
“If I didn’t agree to taking a partner—namely you—Dysart was about to shit-can me for being half-drunk all the time.”
“I don’t think they’d throw you off the force that easily. After all, you did have the highest rate of cleared cases.”
“Oh, he wasn’t going to throw me out . . . just make me a parking meter attendant.”
Anne smiled.
“What?”
“I just got a mental picture of Mike Houston, meter maid.”
He too smiled. “Yeah, with my legs, I’d look like hell in a skirt.”
The sniper stood back in the shadows of the door and studied Houston and the woman. They were at ease, sitting like a couple of love-struck teenagers. He glanced at his watch and wondered if he had overestimated Houston. How could he be so stupid as to sit at a table next to a window where they were perfect targets? But there was time for Houston later; first he had another mission to complete. He saluted. “Be seein’ yah, Mike.”
Houston and Anne stood on the sidewalk, basking in the midday sun. Houston stretched. “Every time I eat lunch I get like a bear and want to hibernate.”
Anne smiled at him. “So where do we go now?”
“We need to check out the victims’ families.”
“I’m not looking forward to that,” Anne said, her eyes locked forward as she drove.
“Me neither. Still, it has to be done.”
“Who should we see first?” Anne asked.
“Stephanie Leopold’s family.”
“Okay, but why is she first? She lives in Reading, the furthest away of all the vics.”
“No particular reason. I thought I’d relax and take a ride while I let my lunch settle.”
“Okay, you’re the lead detective.”
Anne drove onto I-93 and headed north to the junction of I-95/Route 128. Since they were heading out of the city and it was a couple of hours before afternoon rush hour, traffic was light and in no time, they turned off the expressway and onto Route 28. Mike had been silent for most of the drive. But when Anne stopped at a red light, he said, “One of DeSalvo’s vics lived here.”
“Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler?”
“That’s what’s generally believed. Lately there’ve been questions raised. I know several people who think he wasn’t capable of that level of violence or smart enough to elude capture as long as he did.”
“But he confessed,” Anne said. Her demeanor and tone said that was all the evidence of his guilt she needed.
“Wouldn’t be the first time some mentally defective fool, looking for attention, fessed up to something he didn’t do.”
“But as soon as he was caught, the killings stopped.”
Houston shrugged. “Makes you think, doesn’t it? A perp smart enough to elude capture for two years is certainly smart enough either to stop or change his or her MO once the cops thought they had their perp. It’s kind of like this case.”
“How is it like this case?”
“Both are high profile and generate a lot of political heat.”
Anne stared through the windshield, studying the slow-moving traffic ahead. “You know what scares me the most?”
“That I’m right?”
“That too, but what scares me most is that there are times when I think they were wrong when they told me you weren’t the sharpest crayon in the box.”
Charles Leopold was an impressive man. He stood a couple of inches over six feet and his biceps rippled under the sleeves of the form-fitting golf shirt he wore. When Houston and Ann
e identified themselves, he stepped back and allowed them entrance to the living room. It was immediately evident that a woman had decorated the house. The room was tasteful and everything seemed to be carefully placed so each item complemented the others.
“Your home is nice,” Anne commented.
“Thank you, but I can’t take the credit. My wife . . . ” His eyes became shiny with tears. “ . . . Stephanie did the décor. She had a talent for interior decorating. I don’t know why she didn’t pursue it as a career . . . ” He took a deep breath and motioned toward a couple of easy chairs. “Please, sit down. Can I offer you something to drink?”
“I’m fine,” Houston answered.
Leopold turned his head slightly and looked at Anne.
“I’m fine too.”
Houston and Anne glanced at each other, looking for a cue as to who should start the questioning. Knowing Anne’s skill with people, especially bereaved people, he gave a slight nod to her.
“Mr. Leopold, I’d like express the Boston Police Department’s deepest sympathy for your loss.”
“Thank you.” Leopold’s lips formed a straight line and his eyes narrowed. “All I want the Boston Police Department to do is catch the son of a bitch who murdered my wife . . . ”
“That’s why we’re here. Can you think of any reason why someone might want to target Stephanie?”
“Not one. Hell, she was a grammar school teacher, third grade. All the students loved her. She was that type of teacher . . . you know the one that all the kids cluster around during recess.”
“Why was your wife in Boston that day?” Houston asked.
“She loved going into the city. On warm summer days, she liked nothing better than to walk on the Common. School starts in a couple of weeks and she thought that this might be her last chance to do it.” The irony of the statement hit him and he swallowed hard, choking back a sob.
Houston and Anne said nothing. The last thing the grieving husband wanted to hear was platitudes.
Sniper Page 5
