I, Sniper: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel Page 8

  If anything, Mitzi’s photos were even worse. Because she was thin-boned and thin-skulled, the bullet had actually broken her face into three plates as it exited her head sideways and bent. The three plates had been propelled by hot gas and hydraulic pressure to expand, almost as if inflated, and when the trauma of that moment passed, they reassembled themselves on her skull, though not quite precisely. The result was a terrible sense of the broken: each part of the face was recognizably Mitzi Reilly, famed guerrilla warrior of the sixties turned law school professor, but each was askew from the other, and the fissures that separated them deeply were evident. The face so diverged from assumption that it had a truly nightmarish reality. Even Bob, no stranger to the horrors of war, couldn’t stomach it for long, and turned away to the autopsy diagram stapled to the report, which displayed nothing but a nude, generic body upon which the doctor had Xed the entrance and exit wounds in the frontal and rear skull and concluded that they were “consistent with death by high-velocity bullet trauma.” No shit, Sherlock. The trauma was also located cartographically, by centimeter. “The epicenter of the entrance wound is located longitudinally 133 centimeters beneath the highest point of the crown and 133 centimeters from the lowest point of the jaw. It is located latitudinally 62 centimeters from the left and right occipital bones.”

  It was here that it first hit him. A strangeness, a premonition, his subconscious telling him to pay attention. He didn’t like it. He didn’t want to make a discovery, see a clue, a trace of some other hand. It made his own and everybody else’s life so complicated. He wasn’t sure he could face it.

  But still, that feeling would not go away: what am I missing? He could feel he was missing something. Something was not right. It was so obvious that no one had seen it; he could feel it, sense it, almost touch it in the empty space of the Major Case working room. It was in the Xs. Each diagram of each body bore an X to designate an entry wound and an exit, four Xs doubled for a total of eight Xs, carrying the inadvertent meaning of pornography, but something else too, X the unknown, X the mystery. He stared at the Xs, advancing even to Mitch’s, and looked for a pattern in all eight . . . but then it

  was gone.

  Feeling frustrated, he turned to poor Mitch Greene, least important of the four comrades in arms. Mitch would have called them “comrades in holes, see?” Always the joker, Mitch, even in death; from the first photo, he looked like he’d passed out and puked, sort of lolling on the chair behind the podium of the Cleveland-area Borders, with a spew of blackness from his slack jaw. You could look at it and almost laugh, calling up the memory of the man and his antics.

  The back view, dead-on, told the truth, however. The lower part of his skull, directly behind the mouth, had been blown out, including, perfectly, the joinery between spine and brain. His head looked like a cantaloupe, with a broad scoop where the seeds and pulp had been dug free. Another great shot—didn’t disturb teeth or tongue but simply plowed through the back of the mouth into the lower cranial vault.

  Bob shook his head and turned quickly to the remaining morgue photos and the autopsy report, finding nothing particularly illuminating about them. They showed the crater, scrubbed, and the doctor had colored in a little patch on the generic diagram to document the missing skull and brain matter, at the center of which, of course, was the X signifying exit. In that case too, the bullet had been recovered, this time from beyond the wall behind Mitch, where it had bored through into the Borders’ staff break room, touching no one and extinguishing its flight in the padding of an old sofa. Slightly deformed by its journey, it had turned out to be yet another Sierra 168-grain boat tail match hollow point, like the others, straight out of the Federal casing found in Carl’s van in the motel parking lot. Four shots, four kills, just like the book said. It was sniper warfare at its best.

  Bob sat back. Pain in his head, pain in his hip, pain everywhere. Lord, he needed a drink; too bad that wasn’t in the cards. He’d essentially finished and he had nothing, not a goddamn thing. It was all as the experts from the Bureau said it was, tight as a drum. Carl had—

  He hated it, but there it was. Carl had—

  Well, Carl certainly hadn’t forgotten how to shoot. As pure warcraft, you had to say, great shooting.

  He sat back in his chair even further, wishing to be far away. He ought to run through it again and again, just to make sure he hadn’t missed a thing. He didn’t think he had, but sometimes you do, and he wasn’t as sharp as he’d once been.

  He snatched a sheet of paper from the yellow legal pad on which he’d been writing notes—there weren’t many, the only interesting one being “No beveling in Strong-Reilly; why BTHP bullets go through glass without beveling? Did shooter move gun? Why?”—which had led nowhere. He crumpled it, thought he’d go to the hotel early this evening, maybe take in a movie, have a nice booze-free meal, something like that. He pivoted in the chair and spotted a wastebasket fifteen feet away, and like nine out of ten American men would, he immediately brought the crumpled puff up in two hands, riding the line up the lapel of his jacket while he fumbled for the right touch, found it, and as his arms flowed upward, he arrived at the point of release, so he launched toward the basket, which had become an orange hoop ten feet above an arena’s wooden floor as the last shot had come to Bob Lee Swagger, shooting guard, with but a second left on the clock as the Razorbacks, down two (91–89) in the NCAA final against, who, oh yeah, Duke, they’re always good—

  The gods of small, airborne, crumpled paper balls were kind. The thing rode a perfect parabola, floated on nurturing air currents and eddies, and at the apex began its descent. He swished it. Perfect. Three. The buzzer sounded, the crowd cheered, Arkansas wins. Dead center, didn’t even rustle the net.

  His little guy drama come to an end, Bob turned back to—

  Say now. Perfect shot. Couldn’t do that again in a million years. Or could he?

  He quickly crumpled another paper ball, turned, and went through the same ritual. Arkansas still won, 92–91, and guard Bob Lee Swagger was still the nation’s hero, but this time on the descent the paper ball caught on the rim of the basket before falling in. He shot three more times, made two of them, but came nowhere near the freak dead-center perfection of the first shot.

  What does that tell you? What does that tell you?

  9

  They were adults and professionals, so it was ridiculous that on those very few occasions when the director, jacket off, sleeves rolled up, tie askew, entered a room, everyone tensed. Yet it happened, always.

  So when the great man strode into the Major Case working room, instant silence fell upon the workaday chatter, where Chandler—now called “Starling” after the Jodie Foster character in Silence of the Lambs because she was young, blond, and extremely attractive—sat with Ron Fields and a couple of other senior special agents assigned to Task Force Sniper, grousing good-naturedly about the “situation.”

  The “situation” was that nothing much was happening except re-checks, double checks, and then triple checks. It was Starling’s responsibility to maintain the time line, to chronicle the input of the investigation, to make certain every piece of evidence was logged, its source, chain of custody, and disposition kept pristine, all lab reports properly annotated and summarized, all physical evidence cataloged. She had written the first, rough draft of the report that, polished and expanded, would announce the end of Task Force Sniper and the closing of its case.

  But of late, even the hyperbusy Starling was not overworked; she’d even taken a full half hour for lunch, not the usual twelve minutes, and got home to her fiancé, a star photo analyst at a notable but unnameable government entity located in Langley, Virginia, before ten.

  “It’s eerie,” she was saying. “I keep checking and checking—”

  “Now, Starling,” said Fields, “this is the rhythm of a major investigation. It goes and goes and goes and then, poof, it goes away. You just have to get used to it. And you have to understand that one of the
things the Bureau pays you for is to wait until a genius consultant speaks his piece.”

  “Say, who is this guy anyway?” asked Bob Martin, assigned to the case as the best investigator from the Shaker Heights Police Department.

  “He’s supposedly some big gun guy. Not just in theory but in operational terms too. It’s whispered by I-don’t-know-who that Nick may have put him undercover in Bristol and that’s how he brought down the Grumley crew.”

  “He looks like Buddy Ebsen as that old detective,” said Bob. “What was it, MacGyver?”

  “No, that was the young guy. Barney Fife?”

  “No,” said Starling, who’d watched every law and order show ever broadcast, as she was from a total police-culture family, with a father in command of and two brothers supervisors in the Arizona Highway Patrol, “Barnaby Jones.”

  “Score one for Jodie,” said Martin.

  “Come on, Bob, you can’t call her that. It’s Starling.”

  “You guys,” she said, and then she went silent as His Eminence walked by.

  The director knocked on the door of Nick’s office and opened when he got the “Yo,” from inside. He left the door open, presumably so the troops could hear and get the word before Nick himself put it out. He was known to be a guy very clever in managerial skills.

  “Nick, hey, don’t get up.”

  Nick, half rising, sat back down.

  “Yes sir. Can I have someone get some coffee?”

  “I heard your coffee down here sucked. I much prefer Organized Crime’s coffee. Now that’s coffee.”

  “Yes, Mr. Director.”

  “Nick, talk to me.” He hadn’t bothered to sit, which indicated in bureaucratic language that this was a quick chat type visit, a buck-up-the-troops initiative, rather than a serious policy discussion.

  “I’m just passing by, I don’t want to be one of those asshole micromanagers, you know the type, but do we have an arrival time yet on your consultant?”

  “Sir, I’ve told him over and over that time is not on our side. But he’s a cautious, deliberate guy. That’s how he’s stayed alive all these years.”

  “I’m getting all kinds of crap on this one. I think the New York Times is working for Tom Constable, as well as his lobbyist and that congressman. I’m hearing from Chicago and New York, and I know Cleveland will be on me soon. They all want action and we’ve got people literally living downstairs in Public Information.”

  “I see ’em every morning.”

  “Okay, what I’m thinking, is there some kind of interim report we could put out? Something we haven’t given out before. Maybe it could be confirmed that we’ve matched Hitchcock’s movements to the shootings? We have, haven’t we?”

  “That part’s real solid.”

  “It doesn’t commit us, but it makes us look good. Leak it to the Times. Got anyone here who could make a creditable leaker?”

  Nick stood, looked beyond the director’s shoulder.

  “Starling, come here, will you?”

  The young woman got up instantly, came in.

  “Sorry. I shouldn’t have called you that, Agent Chandler. Have you met the director? Sir, this is Special Agent Jean Chandler, whom I’ve appointed our case monitor. She’s very good, works like a dog.”

  “Starling, eh? I get it. Well, I hope you’re as good as Starling, Starling.”

  “So do I, sir,” said Starling, for whom the original Starling was a complete goddess and the primary reason she’d decided on the Bureau for a career.

  “I think I know your dad. Arizona? Great cop.”

  “He’s the best.”

  “Starling, I’m sorry, Agent Chandler.”

  “I’m used to it, Mr. Director.”

  “Anyhow, any experience with the press?”

  “My father and brothers were not disposed to share things with the press.”

  “Well, that’s sound principle, most of the time. But sometimes it buys us some time if we can feed the dogs a little something so they fight among themselves and leave us alone for a bit. Hmm, I’m wondering if—”

  The phone rang.

  “Go ahead, Nick, answer it, this can wait.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Nick snatched the phone up, glad for the interruption. He knew that having a thing with the press was tricky; you could never outsmart them, and Starling, even if she was working under the director’s guidance, could get tagged as a snitch, never trusted, and it might hurt her career. He didn’t wish that on anybody so young, so bright, so hardworking.

  “Memphis.”

  “Swagger. I think I’ve got a little something. Should I come over? I don’t know how you want to play it.”

  “My idea is, I’d bring the upper management of the investigative team over, plus some of the forensic and ATF loaners. Is that okay? You can talk to the group.”

  “Sure, in for a penny, in for a pound.”

  “And since he’s here, I might bring the director along.”

  “Why not?” said Bob.

  “Tell me you have good news.”

  “I have news,” Bob said, “and it’s up to you whether it’s good or bad.”

  “That doesn’t sound promising.”

  “Your people did a great job. Amazing, really, in the time. They only got one little thing wrong.”

  “And that is?”

  “They got the wrong guy.”

  10

  He stood at the head of a table with his notes written on a yellow legal pad. Immediately to his right, some very pretty young woman had her own pad, presumably to take what he said down. The others in the room were the executive special agents of the Task Force Sniper investigation, two loaners from ATF, a Bureau ballistics lab guy, one or two junior analysts, an Ohio detective, a Chicago detective, a New York State Police detective, also loaners to represent local interests, Nick as the task force commander, and the director, who had allegedly “been in the area” and wandered in. All basked in the dead institutional light of the overhead fluorescent, which turned them a kind of pale gray-green.

  They knew. It was a sullen crew, hostile, not furious but disappointed and ready to fight. No smiles, no eye contact, nothing but sluggish body language, whispers with attitude launching them too loudly into colleagues’ ears, a whole “We’re not impressed” vibration throbbing in the room.

  “Folks,” said Nick when the shifting and shuffling and whispering had settled down, “as I’ve told all of you, I wanted to get an outsider’s opinion on our findings, and I asked Mr. Swagger here because he’s a former marine sniper himself. I’m sure he’ll admit that he began with the honest bias to come to a different finding, to exonerate a fellow marine, but I knew that if we convinced him, we were doing pretty good. I guess we haven’t. But I also know that he is the most experienced shooter I’ve ever met, an authentically honorable and dependable man, and I believe he has a certain kind of, uh, ‘gift’ for seeing into shooting dynamics. Not that he’s a court-approved firearms expert, but he’s just got some extra gene for seeing things that other people don’t see. So let’s listen to what he has to say. Bob, why don’t you get started?”

  “I should add,” said the director, “and excuse me Nick, I don’t mean to take over your task force, but last year as a consultant to Nick in Tennessee, Mr. Swagger performed with heroic distinction in an undercover capacity. He’s earned the right to muss a few feathers around here, so I expect complete professional respect from everybody. I will be very disappointed if this turns into a yelling match.”

  “I won’t do no yelling, I promise,” said Bob. “I can tell there’s disappointment here. I’m not here to criticize or to suggest somebody missed something. I don’t want nobody’s career hurt. I don’t want nothing but the truth. You can also tell from the way I mix them verbs and subjects up, I’m not particularly well educated, and I apologize for that also. If I try to sound like I am, I will just sound even dumber, so generally I won’t make no attempt to speak ‘smart,’ like you’d e
xpect. If I lapse into it and my verbs and subjects start agreeing, give me a kick in the butt.”

  That brought a laugh, a respite, however brief, in the hostility.

  “But it don’t matter how I talk. I’m here to bring experience none of you has, which is as a sniper, a man who’s taken lives in the field and who’s spent too much time thinking about this sort of thing. So let me thank you in advance for your attention, and let me sum up and put cards on the table. Yeah, I’m here to tell you you’re wrong and that Carl Hitchcock didn’t do nothing. He spent the last week of his life, I’m guessing, in a drug-induced coma, and right away you say, ‘How come there’s no drugs in his bloodstream?’ and the reason is, the drug they used was bourbon. There was plenty of that in there. He was an alcoholic and he was pickled forcefully via an arm drip—okay, I don’t know the medicine, maybe it was just pure alcohol—after he was kidnapped. By who? I can’t give you no name. But when I’m done you’ll have a pretty good picture of who the guy is, where he is, and what it’ll take to catch him. So shall we start?”

  A few mumbles seemed to acknowledge reluctant assent.

  “I begin with the shooting. You noted the shooter was a fellow of some experience. This boy knew what he was doing. Twice he made brain shots through heavy back window auto glass from what looks to be two-hundred-plus yards out. He drilled the actress between the ribs and into her heart. He shot Mitch Greene through the open mouth from a hundred yards out through glass. Carl Hitchcock clearly had the capacity to make those shots. So did his rifle. So did his ammunition. With that rifle and that ammunition and that skill, y’all are thinking, as I did at first, it’s a piece of cake. Cold-bore kill shot. Yes, you could have made the cold-bore kill shot, Nick could have made the kill shot, I could have made the kill shot. But these shots weren’t no cold-bore kill shots. These weren’t bull’s-eyes. These weren’t center-target hits. These, all four of them, were abnormally perfect shots.”