by John Verdon
Turlock’s reply was a dead stare.
“Some messages have a huge impact,” said Gurney, glancing at his car windows to make sure they were closed and the woman inside wouldn’t hear him. “So imagine this message on every news site tomorrow morning: ‘Deputy Police Chief Stands between Pregnant Wife and Dying Husband.’ You think that’s the kind of message your boss has in mind? Think fast. Your career is circling the drain.”
Turlock’s mouth twitched into a hint of an ugly smile. “Okay,” he whispered. “We’ll do it your way. For now.”
He gestured to his driver, who moved the Explorer just far enough to allow Gurney room to turn around and head for Mercy Hospital.
With the help of his GPS, Gurney soon had the hospital in sight at the end of a long avenue, which seemed to calm his passenger just a little. He took the opportunity to ask if she’d actually seen what had happened.
Her voice was shaky. “He’d just gone out the front door. I heard a sound, like a rock hitting the house. I looked out . . . I . . .” She bit her lip and fell silent.
He assumed that what sounded like a rock was the impact of the bullet that had passed through the side of her husband’s head. He asked, “Do you know what a gunshot sounds like?”
“Yes.”
“Did you hear anything at all like that?”
“No.”
“When you came out, did you see anyone? A car driving away? Any movement at all?”
She shook her head.
When they arrived at the hospital, the EMTs already had the stretcher out of the ambulance and were rolling it toward the open doors of the emergency entrance.
As Gurney brought the Outback to a halt beside the ambulance, his passenger was already stepping out the door. Abruptly she stopped and turned toward him.
“Thank you for what you did back there,” she said. “Thank you so much. I don’t even know your name.”
“Dave Gurney. I hope your husband will be all right.”
“Oh my God!” Her hand went to her mouth, her eyes widening.
“What? What is it?”
“You’re the person Rick was on his way to meet!”
23
Heather Loomis’s frantic need to follow her husband into the hospital prevented any discussion of the unsettling revelation. Gurney decided that sitting there would be a waste of time and would risk another confrontation with Turlock, who’d likely be coming to the hospital to interview Heather. It would make more sense to return to the crime scene, which Kline had asked him to observe.
He retraced his route and was soon back on Oak Street. Clusters of curious neighbors were still in front of their homes. There was no sign of Turlock or his blue Explorer, and only one of the five police cruisers was still there, its lights no longer flashing. On the far side of the cruiser there was a black Ford Crown Victoria—the most common unmarked police vehicle in America. In the driveway there was a gray van with a WRPD logo on its door. Gurney parked next to the cruiser.
Yellow crime-scene tape extended from one corner of the house to a series of metal stakes about twenty feet out on the lawn and back to the far corner of the house. An evidence tech was standing in a flower bed next to the front door. He was probing a hole in the wood trim with a bright metal tool that looked like a surgeon’s pliers. He was wearing the latex gloves and Tyvek coveralls common to his occupation.
Gurney got out of his car, credentials in hand, and was heading across the lawn toward the taped-off area when he was stopped by a familiar voice.
“Hey! Dave! Over here!”
He turned around and saw Mark Torres gesturing with his phone through the open window of the Crown Vic. He walked over and waited until Torres concluded his call.
Getting out of the car, the young detective looked concerned. “I was afraid I’d missed you. Was there a problem here . . . after the shooting?”
Gurney shrugged. “Nothing major. Heather Loomis wanted to be with her husband. It could have been her last chance to see him alive. So I took her.”
“Ah. That makes sense.” Torres looked relieved, but not entirely so.
“Where’s Turlock?”
“I don’t know. I was at headquarters. He told me to get over here and find the location used by the BDA sniper.”
“The BDA sniper? Those were his words?”
“Those were his words.”
“He was that sure about a BDA connection?”
“Absolutely positive. You have doubts about it?”
“I have doubts about everything connected with this case.”
“We’ll know more as soon as Garrett pulls the bullet out of the woodwork. It’s taking extra time because we’re trying to preserve as much of the entry channel as we can.”
Gurney looked over at the tech in the flower bed, his coveralls hanging loosely on his tall, gangly frame. He was up to his knees in purple alliums and evening primrose—which Gurney recognized as two of Madeleine’s favorites, along with bee balm and foxglove.
Torres went on. “We figure the shot had to have come from up there.” He gestured toward a broad area of houses several blocks up the hill. “I have four of our guys up there now doing door-to-doors, trying to find out if anyone heard or saw anything. Somebody up there must have heard the gunshot, even if it was suppressed—which I guess it was, or some of the neighbors down here would have heard it, and nobody did.”
Gurney recalled that the police canvassing of the Grinton neighborhood for information at the time of the Steele shooting hadn’t produced much cooperation. But Bluestone was a different kind of place, the kind where cops were viewed as allies, not enemies.
“Got it!” With a satisfied smile, the tech in the flower bed was holding up what appeared to be a remarkably intact bullet. Gurney and Torres stepped under the tape and went over for a closer inspection.
“Looks identical to the one you dug out of the tree in Willard Park,” said Torres.
“Yep. Same caliber, same full metal jacket, no significant deformation, nice and clean for ballistics.” He slipped the bullet into a small evidence envelope, already labeled and dated.
“Great work,” said Torres. “Thank you.”
“So that’s the whole deal here, right? Just the bullet recovery? No combing the site?”
“Nothing here to comb for. We’ll be in touch when we find the shooter site.”
The tech got into his van and departed.
Gurney, followed by Torres, headed for the hole in the woodwork. After giving it a quick examination, he took out his pen and inserted it as far as it would go, about three inches below the surface. The range of vectors created by the angle of the pen substantially reduced the portion of the hillside that Torres had originally indicated as the area from which the shot had come. Even allowing for the imprecision of the method and the possibility of the bullet channel being skewed one way or the other by contact with the victim or by the grain of the wood, it narrowed the area of interest to a couple of dozen hillside houses.
As Gurney was removing his pen from the channel, Torres’s phone rang.
He took the call and mostly listened, eyes widening with excitement.
“Okay, I got it. Thirty-Eight Poulter Street. We’ll be right there.”
He grinned at Gurney. “We may have lucked out. Uniforms found a couple of homeowners who say they heard something that could have been a shot—coming from a vacant house that sits between them. Let’s roll.”
They got into the Crown Vic and three minutes later were parked behind two WRPD cruisers at the Poulter Street address. It was a street of two-story Colonials on modest plots of land with driveways leading to detached garages. Most of the front yards consisted of neatly trimmed lawns with a few azaleas or rhododendrons in mulched planting beds.
The exception was number thirty-eight—where overgrown grass, wilted shrubs, and lowered blinds created an impression of abandonment. The open garage door was the only indica
tion of recent use. Two patrol cops with yellow tape were turning the house, garage, driveway, and backyard into a restricted area. A third officer—a heavy-shouldered, thick-necked young man with a shaved head and a stolid expression—was emerging from the neighboring house on the left.
Gurney and Torres met him in front of the driveway. Gurney learned his name was Bobby Bascomb when Torres introduced them. He pointed back to the house he’d come from. “Lady in that house, Gloria Fenwick, says she heard a car pulling into this driveway earlier this afternoon.”
“She know the time?” asked Torres.
“Not when it pulled in, but she knows it pulled out at exactly thirty-six minutes after three. And she knows it was a black Corolla sedan and the driver was in a hurry.”
“She’s that sure about the time and car model?”
“She’s sure about the car because she has an old Corolla herself. She’s sure about the time because it was unusual for anyone to come to that house, so when she heard a car pulling in she went to her side window, trying to see who it might be. She couldn’t see anyone because the car was already in the garage. But she stayed by the window. A few minutes later she heard a loud ‘bang’—which she thought was a door slamming. Maybe thirty seconds after that, the car came backing out of the garage onto the street and, as she put it, ‘peeled rubber’ and was gone. That got her attention. That’s when she looked at the clock.”
“She get a look at the driver?”
“No. But she said it had to be a man because women don’t drive that fast.”
“Did you call in a description of the car?”
“Yep. They’ve put an APB out on it.”
Torres called headquarters and told them to add the plate number of the car associated with the Steele shooting to the APB on the black Corolla in Bluestone.
He resumed his debriefing of Bascomb. “Does the lady know anything about the people who own this house?”
“She said they moved to Florida six months ago. They weren’t able to sell the house before they left, so they put it up for rent.”
“She know anything about the renters?”
“Just that she’s never seen them, but a friend in the real estate business told her it was someone from down in Grinton.”
“How’d she feel about that?”
Bascomb shrugged. “About like you’d expect. ‘Grinton’ is not a popular word on this side of town.”
“How about the neighbor on the other side?”
“Hollis Vitter. Piece of work. Pissed off at the grass not being mowed, pissed off at ‘the Grinton element’ moving into Bluestone, pissed off at ‘gun-control faggots.’ Lot of things piss him off.”
“Has he ever seen the people who rented the house?”
“No. But he thinks they must be foreigners.”
“Why?”
“Some bullshit about them not cutting the grass. He wasn’t making a lot of sense.”
“Jesus,” muttered Torres. “Did he tell you anything that could be relevant to the case?”
“Actually, yes. And that part’s more interesting. Like the lady on the other side, he heard a sharp ‘bang,’ but he didn’t get to the window right away. Says he was locked in the shitter.”
“Locked?”
“That’s the word he used. The point is, the window was open, and he’s sure what he heard leaving wasn’t a car. He says it was a motorcycle and that the sound didn’t come from the street, it came from the weedy little hill that drops off in back of these houses.”
Torres looked uncertain. “Do we trust what he says about the sound?”
Bascomb sucked at his teeth. “I kinda pushed him on that, and he said he used to be a motocross mechanic down at Dortler’s Speed Sports.”
Torres appeared puzzled by the conflicting vehicle descriptions. “We’ll have to get that sorted out. Right now we need Garrett up here. And we need to get into that house. I’ll call in a request for a search warrant.”
“If you want to, for the record,” said Gurney. “But we have justification to go in immediately. We have reason to believe a shot was fired from the premises, and we have to ensure that the evidence techs aren’t blindsided when they go in, which they need to do ASAP.”
Torres made the warrant call, then a call to Garrett Felder, the head crime-scene tech.
“Okay,” he said, putting away his phone. “Let’s do it. How many doors does that house have?”
“Three,” said Bascomb. “Front, back, and left side.”
Torres looked questioningly at Gurney.
“Your show, Mark. Put us where you want us.”
“Right. Okay. You take the back. Bobby, you take the side. I’ll take the front and give the signal for going in.”
One of the two cops taping off the area looked over. “You want us somewhere?”
Torres thought about it for a moment, then pointed. “Go to diagonal corners of the yard, so you can each see two sides of the house, and keep an eye on the windows.” They nodded and went to their assigned positions. Bascomb, Gurney, and Torres did the same.
As Gurney was passing the side door, he noted that it was slightly ajar. The back door, he discovered a few seconds later, was wide open. He reached down to his ankle holster, pulled out his Beretta, slipped off the safety, and waited for the entry signal.
A moment later he heard Torres’s knocking at the front door, a pause, then more insistent knocking, followed by “Police! Open the door now!” Then several seconds of silence, followed by “Officers going in! Now!” And the sound of glass breaking.
Gurney stepped through the open back doorway into a narrow hall that led past a small bathroom into a stale-smelling kitchen. The layout was similar to that of the Steele house, but everything here was duller, dustier. He passed through the kitchen into a small dining room, separated from the living room by a wide arch.
In the living room there were no rugs, one flimsy-looking floor lamp, and very little furniture—a shabby couch, an armchair, an end table—adding to the uninhabited feeling. In the dim light coming through the partially closed blinds, he could see a stairway to the second floor. A hall behind the stairway led to the side door. He assumed that the door he saw beneath the stairway would lead to the basement.
Torres was at the foot of the stairs to the second floor, his Glock in a two-handed grip close to his chest. Bascomb was in the hall, a similar weapon in a similar position.
Torres called out, “This is the police! Anyone in the house, show yourself now!”
The response was a dead silence. In a low voice he directed Bascomb to check out the basement and asked Gurney to come with him to check out the upstairs.
There was no carpet on the stairs and the creaking of each tread was sufficient to give anyone who might have been lurking up there a step-by-step sense of their approach.
The upstairs turned out to be as bleak and deserted as the downstairs. There were three bedrooms, each containing a double bed. There was a bathroom with a dusty bathtub, a shower stall with no shower curtain, and a towel rack with no towels.
The bedroom that attracted Gurney’s attention was facing the rear of the house. The bed and chair had been pushed out of the way against a side wall. The window was open. Enough afternoon sunlight was slanting in to reveal three dime-sized impressions on the dusty floor. From the doorway Gurney could see through the open window, several blocks away and lower on the hill, a row of modest homes. The front yard of one was cordoned off with yellow tape. A few of the local residents were still gathered in the street—like fans lingering at an athletic field after the players have gone home.
Now that the dismal house at 38 Poulter Street had been identified with reasonable certainty as the second sniper site, the collection and protection of trace evidence became a priority. So it was no surprise that Garrett arrived with help. The surprise was the package the help came in—a short, stout woman he introduced as Shelby Towns, whose head was shave
d as clean as Bobby Bascomb’s. She had silver studs in her lips, nostrils, and ears. She was wearing a black tee shirt with the word GENDERBENDER emblazoned in white letters across her ample chest.
Perhaps to defend her getup, Torres told Gurney that Shelby was involved in a long-term undercover assignment, but that her dual college degrees in forensic science and chemistry made her an ideal part-time addition to high-priority crime-scene examinations.
Gurney filled her and Garrett in on the layout of the house and what he’d seen in the upstairs bedroom. Bascomb mentioned Gloria Fenwick’s report of a car and Hollis Vitter’s report of a motorcycle. Torres added that it was strange to find in the bedroom floor dust indications of another rifle-support tripod, apparently like the first. “Why throw the first tripod in the river and keep the rifle?” he mused aloud to no one in particular. “If the shooter was going to get caught with one or the other, it’s the rifle that would nail him.”
Torres directed Bobby Bascomb and the other two cops at the scene to canvass the neighborhood for witnesses to the arrival or departure of a car or motorcycle, and for any information concerning the renters. Then he called headquarters and asked someone to look into city, county, and law-enforcement records concerning ownership, tenancy, tax payments, liens, complaints, or anything else they could uncover relevant to the use of the property.
Meanwhile, Garrett and Shelby donned disposable coveralls, booties, gloves, and caps. They gathered their special lights, chemicals, and evidence-processing paraphernalia from their van and headed into the house.
Torres suggested that while the techs were going about their business, he and Gurney should reinterview the two immediate neighbors to see if they recalled anything beyond what they’d already reported to Bascomb. Gurney agreed, and Torres volunteered to talk to Gloria Fenwick in the house on the left.
