‘She was just born lucky,’ Leo said and introduced himself. ‘You run this whole place by yourself?’
‘I usually have a helper. My daughter took her baby in for a six months’ check-up,’ Martina said. ‘What you got there, more trouble?’
‘Maybe some answers for a change,’ Sarah said. She held out a passport photo. ‘Does this look like the man next door?’
‘Yes. That’s him. Better without the blood, eh? Poor man – he won’t need a passport no more, will he?’
‘Guess not. You ever see him when he looked like this?’ She held out one of the old passport pictures of the smiling, black-haired man.
‘No.’ Martina shook her head, looking down. ‘Hoo, he was good looking when he was young, huh? He must have always shaved his head since he lived here.’ She thought for a few seconds. ‘Lotta times he wore a sort of doo-rag wound around his head. Or he had a big old straw cowboy hat with a wide brim. I never saw him with any hair showing.’ She added thoughtfully, ‘I never saw him smile like that, either. But the passport says it’s the same man, huh?’
‘Years ago. Before a lot of stuff happened.’
‘Ah. Life.’ They turned toward her round table where Leo Tobin sat with a small child on each knee, a third between his knees talking earnestly. Martina’s face softened. ‘This one is good with kids, is he?’
‘Seems to be,’ Sarah said. ‘First I knew about it.’
In the car she opened her tablet, getting ready to make some notes, and asked Leo, ‘Well, what did you think of that little baby factory?’
‘It’s amazing how well she manages all those kids in such a small space, isn’t it?’ Squinting into the bright sun bouncing off car bodies, he said, ‘You know, I feel a little disoriented.’
‘Do your arms feel funny? You want me to stop at Urgent Care?’
‘No, not that way. My health is fine now. I think it was the stress of watching Tommy worry his way through training that brought on the heart business. No, I mean … I thought we were chasing a badass named Bill McGinty who was skimming off Calvin Springer and probably spied on him for the cartel and maybe also killed him. But now we’re saying no, Bill McGinty was Calvin Springer and somebody else killed both guys? Is it just because I’ve been stuck off there in cold cases? I feel like we’re coming up one body short.’
‘Wait till the rest of the evidence is in. As soon as Jody finds a match for those prints we found in McGinty’s box it will start to make sense to you.’
‘Well, I’m looking forward to that.’ After another humming mile, he said, ‘So now we’re back to Lois Johnson’s theory, hmm? A team hit by anonymous killers we’ll probably never identify?’
‘I don’t like that idea much.’
‘Me neither. Let’s keep digging till we find one we like better.’
‘Deal.’ They did a fist bump to seal it.
At the station, Sarah poked her head into Delaney’s office. He looked up with a phone at his ear and waved her to a seat. She waited through three minutes of quiet monosyllables till he punched OFF and said, ‘Well, where are we?’
‘Martina confirms the passport photo is her neighbor. I didn’t bother her with the news that the passport belonged to a man named William McGinty. Gloria had work in front of ours but will try to match the photos as soon as she can. Ditto Jody with the prints. I was going to tell you Jason Peete needs a three-day weekend as much as anybody I ever saw, but he got all fired up again this morning when he heard he was going to Benson. Now he seems good to go another couple of laps. Too bad it’s Thursday; I feel like everything’s starting to pop.’
‘Tell me about it. Those boxes of money our team found are generating a ton of paperwork. I like this schedule but almost every Thursday afternoon I wish I had my Fridays back.’
‘Good luck with that. I’ll let you know if Gloria left me any phone messages.’
Gloria had, and when she answered Sarah’s call she was bristling with questions. ‘Why the devil didn’t it occur to any of us to ask where this man had been all his life? I mean, until somebody offed him, Calvin Springer didn’t have any records.’
‘Oh, we were asking. But we got led down a garden path full of funnel accounts … never mind. Fact is Calvin Springer invented himself eighteen years ago and he’s been a model citizen ever since.’
‘But a model citizen with no medical records? No Medicare card? Doesn’t that ring every bell we have?’
‘Sure. We were looking for the answers and we followed the money. Now we have some answers. Calvin Springer is really William F. McGinty who ran a money-laundering operation for the Sinaloa cartel.’
‘So that’s who killed him?’
‘Maybe. Far as I can see he’s been doing the same thing for eighteen years or so, getting a little bigger and more successful every year. Why kill him now? Plenty of good questions left, Gloria. Job security for all next week, at least.’
‘Oh, you’re in a jolly mood, aren’t you? There’s a big hot rumor going around the halls here about a couple of department lawyers looking for overnight storage for a whole shitload of money. Is that the money you followed to your answers?’
‘Could be. I try to keep as much space as possible between me and loose money. Have you found any prison records for Bill McGinty?’
‘Haven’t had time to search. You think I’ll find a lot?’
‘I’m betting you don’t find any. Have a nice weekend.’ Turning away from the phone, she remembered it was her turn to fetch Denny from swim practice. She quickly loaded her daypack, scribbled a note for Monday morning and found her keys.
She ran downstairs, jumped in her overheated car without waiting to blow any air out and drove fast to pick up Denny, who as usual after practice looked wasted. Driving home in rush-hour traffic, she felt suddenly exhausted.
She turned to ask Denny if she wanted to watch The Price is Right after supper and saw she had curled up in the seat with her head against the window and was nodding off.
Damn, I’m sick of this boiling hot summer and I’m starting to hate this swim team, Sarah thought. She drove a little slower, careful on the turns, feeling her muscles twitch with fatigue.
As she turned into her driveway she heard a loud crack! like a rifle shot. Denny sat up straight, looking out the window, and said, ‘What was that?’
‘Get down!’ Sarah said and pushed her onto the seat. She crouched as low as she could, squinting along the hood to see her way into the carport. Once inside the shelter of the vine-covered lattice, she turned to look at her shattered back window. ‘Damn, damn, damn.’
‘Aunt Sarah, I saw a man—’
‘I know. Look at the window. Somebody shot at us.’
Sarah took Denny, crouching, out of the car on the driver’s side, away from the yard. They crept inside through the kitchen and hustled along the hall to the spare bedroom. ‘Lie down on the floor. Here’s a couple of pillows. Don’t go near the windows,’ she said, speed-dialing 911 while she pulled the drapes closed. ‘I’ll get us some help here and then go get Grandma.’ Dispatch answered promptly. A few words were enough to get sirens screaming toward her. A few seconds later she crept out the back door with her Glock in her hand.
Aggie was in her casita out back, napping. She hadn’t heard anything, she said, but, ‘You’ve got your cop face on. Is it serious?’
‘Yes,’ Sarah said. ‘These shoes OK?’ Aggie stepped into her canvas slides and they scuttled hand in hand across the flagstone patio to the kitchen door. Officers in tactical gear were piling out of cruisers in the driveway. Sarah sent Aggie to join Denny on the floor of the guest room and ran to meet them.
The SWAT team was deployed around her house while she showed the hole in her car window to Norman Krantz, the team commander. Norman asked Sarah to stay indoors and away from windows until they cleared the area. She went back down the hall to sit on the floor between Denny and Aggie, listening as more vehicles arrived. Being inactive at a crime scene felt so wrong, he
r nerves began to jerk.
Her phone chirped. Will Dietz, in the field, sent her a text. ‘Call when u can.’
‘The cop’s grapevine – works every time,’ Sarah said. ‘Dietz knows already.’ She texted him back: ‘SWAT team here. All well. 1 shot back wndo my car.’
Aggie said, ‘How would it be if I called Howard and asked him to come get me and Denny? We could bunk at the ranch tonight. Two less bodies for you to think about.’
‘It sounds like heaven and I’d like to go with you,’ Sarah said, ‘but I know what Norman would say. They can’t protect you at a spread-out property like the ranch – it would take fifty men.’
‘Let’s not get ridiculous,’ Aggie said. ‘Whoever’s doing that shooting is not after me.’
Sarah agreed but said they couldn’t prove it to a SWAT team’s satisfaction. Then she remembered that someone should tell Howard what was going on. She started to dial but decided the call shouldn’t come from here in case she was being monitored. She sidled to the kitchen, avoiding windows, gave the patrolman stationed at her back door her brother’s number and told him what to say.
‘Be sure to tell him not to call me here. That’s very important. Tell him I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.’
When the chief understood that one of his own detectives had been attacked in the course of an active case, he authorized as many extra hours as necessary. After that the yard filled up fast.
Banjo assembled a full night lab crew, which arrived in a van equipped to face anything from blood sacrifice to a flesh-eating plague. They stared in disappointment at her tidy yard and clean house before they set up a bank of super-bright LED lights in the carport and began doing a full work-up on her car.
The bullet had made a small, clean entry hole in her rear left-side window, with cracks radiating out. There was no exit hole in the opposite window so they played lights around till they found a jagged tear in the seat, just where it tucked into the sidewall behind the passenger seat. In a couple of minutes they dug a misshapen bullet out of the right rear corner of the backseat upholstery.
Krantz had the street blocked off in both directions and guards posted all around the yard. He told Sarah it was safe now to move freely within the house but asked her not to come outside until he authorized it.
She spent most of the next hour in the kitchen, making one pot of coffee after another and pouring cups of it for members of her own detective squad as they arrived. They came in saying things like, ‘What the hell, Sarah?’ They had all been in touch with their own homes. None had been attacked.
The incident was ridiculously simple to describe, so she had the same short conversation over and over. They knew what she was working on and shared most of her cases. At the end of each conversation another detective thumped her shoulder and said something like, ‘We’ll get this bastard, don’t worry.’
Then they moved outside and walked around shaking their heads during muted conversations with each other. She could see they were puzzled by the behavior of this oddly inept shooter.
Denny and Aggie, glad to be released from the bedroom floor, came down to the kitchen and began filling platters with snacks and offering them to every cop who came through the house. Denny seemed to have forgotten all about being tired. She watched everything with wide-open eyes and occasionally nudged up to Sarah to ask a quiet question. Since there was no way to keep her from being involved, Sarah thought she would be least anxious if she felt fully informed, so she did her best to help her understand the procedure.
The procedure was all she understood herself. The attack didn’t seem to her to make sense. But the officers in her yard weren’t waiting to ask questions before they got ready to face a massacre. Every day they saw TV reports of terrorist attacks and hate killings. They all wore Kevlar vests and helmets, and carried assault weapons with extra clips.
The bullet was on its way to the lab now and the mobile lab crew was taking photos of the shattered window and the scar in the upholstery. But that’s all there is, Sarah kept thinking. Damn hard to make a case out of one mashed bullet.
Then Leo Tobin came into the kitchen and told Sarah, ‘They think they found the shooter’s hiding spot. You want to come out and take a look? I cleared it with Norman.’
An impressively armored SWAT team member guarded the spot. Between the oleander hedge that grew along the side of the yard and the metal corner post that anchored the front wall she saw a small hollow of flattened gravel under the low-growing leafy branches.
‘Nice find,’ Sarah said. ‘This hedge has gotten so thick – how’d you ever spot it?’
‘I had a couple of guys doing assholes-and-elbows all around the yard, searching for that casing. Lopez noticed this funny hollow in the gravel and called me. Looks like the perfect place for the shot to come from. The range is about twenty-five yards. An easy shot.’
‘Yeah. Makes you wonder why he missed,’ Sarah said.
‘Better not think too long about that,’ Norman said. ‘We’re still looking for the casing, by the way.’
Sandy the lab tech stood by, waiting to search for something to swab for DNA in this sunbaked patch of gravel.
‘He had good shelter from the street,’ Sarah said, looking around. The wall was six feet tall here, the bushes a couple of feet taller. ‘But inside—’ She turned again to look at the house. ‘Four windows on the front of the house and he couldn’t have known there was no one in there.’
‘He must be slim enough to get all of himself inside the hedge,’ Leo said.
‘This oleander’s big enough to hide in, for sure – fat and bushy all the way up.’ Sarah leaned her head between the bush and the post, pulled it out quickly and said, ‘But wow, it’s prickly in there.’ Each slender gray-green leaf was like a serrated double-edged knife. She wiped her face on her sleeve. ‘Hot too. If he stood in there very long he must have been sweating like a hog. Sandy, let’s give this corner post a good swab, huh? Doesn’t this look like a smear right here?’
‘Could be,’ Sandy said. ‘I’ll test the whole thing. If he waited very long he might have leaned on it.’
‘This is definitely where he went in and out, see?’ Leo said. ‘There’s a little gravel kicked out on the sidewalk there.’
‘I see it.’ Sarah pointed. ‘And hey, isn’t that a button hanging in there?’
‘By God, you’re right,’ Krantz said. ‘Hanging by a thread from that leaf. Oleanders really are good grabbers, aren’t they? Is the photographer still here? Let’s get a picture of that before we collect it.’
‘He must have parked nearby,’ Sarah said as she watched Gloria’s flash light up the bush. ‘He wouldn’t want to walk far in daylight carrying a rifle.’ She tried to call back a mental image of the side street as she passed it – was there a car sitting along the curb? She couldn’t remember one, but why would she notice?
Will Dietz was suddenly at her side. Reluctant to drive into the security cordon the police had established around his yard and perhaps get his car sequestered, he parked a block away, showed his ID to the guard holding the posse box in his driveway and walked in looking for Sarah. He hugged her hard and said, ‘You got time to tell me about it?’
‘Yes. Come in the kitchen.’ They sat close together on two stools while she told him the short story of the attack and the longer account of everything that had happened since.
Dietz said, ‘Is Krantz running the SWAT team today?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m going to go talk to him, get his OK to walk around the yard.’
‘OK. Watch the team’s faces when you do, will you?’
‘Because?’
‘Something about this whole thing is hinky, Will. And the guys out there – they don’t want to say so but watch the way they look at each other, the way they raise their eyebrows. See if you can figure out what’s bothering them.’
‘’K.’ Not a big talker on his liveliest days, under pressure Will Dietz could wear silence like a
favorite shirt. She saw him drifting around the yard for the next hour, watching and listening, so unobtrusive he was almost not there.
Then Banjo Bailey called from the lab and she got an answer to what was eating them all.
‘I can say for sure that the bullet is a .22 Long Rifle,’ he said, ‘and that it was fired by a Winchester. I’ve test-fired several similar models and I’m pretty sure your attacker used a Winchester pump action, probably model sixty-one.’
‘A squirrel gun? What the hell?’
‘Yes. The toolmarks are pretty clear,’ Banjo said.
‘I’m not questioning your work,’ Sarah said, ‘only my situation.’
‘Which is what?’
‘For weeks,’ she said, ‘we’ve been on the trail of a drug cartel that we’re pretty sure murdered one of their money-launderers. That call we had on the Fourth of July? Yeah, the day of the storm. Lately we all felt like we were getting close, so when somebody shot out my window—’
‘You figured it was Pablo’s thugs coming after you.’
‘Right. But since when does the Sinaloa drug cartel go after its enemies with a pea shooter?’
‘Since never before that I know of. But hey, I just work here,’ Banjo said. ‘I don’t get to choose the weapons.’
‘So true,’ Sarah said. Feeling her sense of humor going south, she thanked Banjo and his crew for working so late. As soon as she got off the phone she went looking for Will Dietz. She needed to vent, and for that you need a mate.
‘This whole thing is total bullshit, Will,’ she said. ‘The bullet is too small, the gun he’s saying it came from is too low caliber. Everything Banjo said is wrong – it has to be wrong – but we all know Banjo’s never wrong!’
‘No need to yell at me, Sarah, I’m right here.’
‘OK, sorry. But I’m telling you, this is not how a team of professionals goes hunting, damn it.’
‘So it’s not a team of professionals. It’s one local yahoo on a shooting spree.’
‘One shot is not a spree. And why would one local yahoo choose to shoot at my car just when I’m closing in on a pack of international bandits?’
Denny's Law Page 18
