Blood Silence (3 page)

“I don’t.”

“Ah.” Coolidge smiled knowingly. “But someone in those elite circles you occasionally troll in does.”

“Correct, and we’re pretty high up the food chain here,” Mac answered quietly, casually sipping from his bourbon and making a quick scan of the mostly empty bar. Mac put his glass up to his lips and before he took a drink, whispered, “Shane Weatherly was the godchild of Judge Dixon.”

Coolidge sat upright, as if the great man himself had just walked in. Judge Dixon’s name had that effect on people, particularly in DC.

“I’m here on his behalf,” Mac stated plainly.

“You sound like Tom Hagen in
The Godfather
,” Coolidge quipped.

Mac did his best Brando shrug and impression. “Are you ready to do me this service?” Coolidge chuckled, shook his head, and put his bourbon glass to his lips.

Mac turned serious. “The Judge would appreciate knowing what happened, Linc. He’s crushed. Weatherly meant quite a bit to him. The father is one of the Judge’s best friends.”

“Best political friends, I’m sure.”

“No,” Mac answered, shaking his head, “just best friends. Weatherly senior was the Judge’s college roommate, best man at his wedding, and a retired architect living in San Diego. Other than undertaking his civic duty to vote every so often, he has played no role whatsoever in politics.”

“So he’s an authentic friend?”

“Yes.”

“What does the good Judge want?”

“He asked me to come and find out what happened to Shane Weatherly. I know sharing details of an ongoing homicide isn’t exactly SOP, but I think you can trust my discretion. And Judge Dixon is not a bad guy to have a marker with.”

“No, no he’s not,” Coolidge answered, and Mac could tell there was something percolating in the detective’s mind as he slowly nodded at Mac. “Okay.”

Coolidge opened the folder and began walking Mac through the case. The two men were found in the front seat of Kane’s car at the end of a long parking lot that ran between the back side of the tavern and a small accounting office and a plumbing supply company. “The car was parked between two panel vans for the plumbing supply company,” Coolidge explained. “Kane was shot four times and Weatherly five times, nine shots in total, yet nobody appears to have heard a thing.”

“How long were they in here on Monday night?”

“A couple hours, but let’s backtrack for a second, Mac. Weatherly arrived in town Monday night on a flight from your neck of the woods, Minneapolis, after he started the day flying to Minneapolis from Bismarck, North Dakota.”

“So he flew in from North Dakota and met with Kane. What’s the connection?”

“At this point, all I’ve been able to find to connect them is that Kane and Weatherly graduated from Cal-Berkeley together.”

“So we just have two old college friends catching up?”

“Possibly,” Coolidge answered, but Mac sensed he didn’t believe it was just that.

“Any idea what Weatherly was doing in Bismarck?”

Coolidge shook his head.

“Who was he working for?”

“I don’t know, Mac. It looks like his home is in Sausalito, California, but from what I can tell, he was a geologist for hire, a freelancer, going from place to place to work. In the last year, he’s received checks from environmental groups in California and Pennsylvania, one from the city of Edmond, Oklahoma, and most recently, twenty thousand dollars from Soutex Solutions about a month ago. I looked up Soutex, but all I could find was a PO Box in New Orleans. From there, the trail is nonexistent at this point.”

“So Weatherly arrives, and the first thing he does is come here.”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“The bartender says Kane was waiting for Weatherly. They drank a few beers and ate a pizza, and then Kane closed out the tab with his credit card just after 11:00
P.M.
The tavern here has a surveillance camera.” Coolidge pointed over each end of the bar. “One camera has the front of the tavern, and the other focuses on the back of the place.”

“Anyone follow our guys out?”

“No,” Coolidge answered, shaking his head. “Kane and Weatherly exited out the back of the tavern, and nobody left in that direction for a good half hour after they did.” Coolidge took out some photos. “I have the video back at the precinct, but these are stills. You’ll see our two boys sitting in the back booth here.” He pointed. “You’ll see some papers and the open laptop.” The detective took out three more still photos. “These are the rest of the people from that night—six guys sitting at the bar, baseball caps on three of them, a cowboy hat on another, and a couple guys in ties, all generally solo, and then our boys, and then three booths close to the front of the bar were also occupied. Nobody followed them out. In fact, nobody talked to them at all or seemed to pay any attention to them.”

“I assume you watched the footage all the way through?” Mac asked.

“Yes, but nothing jumps out. It was just a small number of people quietly drinking away.”

“What did the bartender or bartenders have to say?”

“Nothing. No issues. Nothing unusual or noticeable happened. No interaction amongst the customers. It was very quiet.”

“Were the patrons that night regulars?”

“A few were. Some weren’t, but the bartender said that wasn’t unusual. He said there was nothing unusual about the night. Just a normal, quiet Monday night.”

“So what’s your initial assessment?” Mac asked, taking a drink from his second bourbon. “What do you think this was all about?”

“It looks like a simple robbery. Gone are cell phones, watches, wallets, credit cards, and everything else possible from the car. It looks like they cleaned out the glove box and the center console. Weatherly’s backpack and luggage were gone. The two victims’ pockets were pulled inside out. The only thing not taken was the car itself.”

“Did these guys have a lot of money on them?”

“I don’t know, Mac.”

“How much did they spend in the bar?”

“They paid $38.42 for beer and pizza with Kane’s credit card, which is missing. I mean, this is not a place you come to if you have a lot of cash. This is a working-class joint.”

“Weatherly flew into town on Monday. Did he fly first class?”

“No.”

“How about Kane, any history of money?”

“No. He has a small apartment here in DC. He draws a government paycheck at the EPA, drives a Hyundai, and has a little over ten grand in a savings account. He’s not poor, but he’s certainly not rich, either. Isador Kane is your standard dime-a-dozen, upper-middle-management government bureaucrat.”

“And we had nine gunshots, right?”

“Correct.”

“And nobody heard a thing?” Mac asked. “I find that impossible to believe.”

“We canvassed pretty hard, and nada,” Coolidge replied. “These guys left the bar a little after 11:00
P.M.
They weren’t discovered until early the next morning when the plumbing guys showed up for work and found the car and the bodies. That’s how quiet and unnoticeably this whole thing went down.”

Mac flipped to the forensics report. “Same gun for all nine shots, it appears. Slugs are Remington Subsonics.”

“Yes. Not a terribly unusual casing. I was thinking that it was good ammunition for a little Ruger, maybe.”

Mac raised his eyebrows. “With a suppressor?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Those can be pretty quiet,” Mac replied knowingly. “There’s still a pop, but it’s a little one. That might explain why nobody heard anything.” Mac flipped through the report. “Linc, what’s the story on this muddy boot tread?”

“Oh, that,” Coolidge replied, walking to Mac’s side and looking down at the page. “It was odd, but we found some mud inside the car, on the passenger side, on the foot plate next to the seat. I think it was possibly from the shooter as he stretched over Weatherly and reached for the center console. He had to put his foot by the seat there to reach over. It left a little bit of a boot tread, like from a hiking type of boot that neither Kane nor Weatherly were wearing. I had our forensics people take pictures of the print and a sample of the mud for testing to see if the dirt is local or not.”

“It is worth a shot, I suppose.”

“Yeah,” Coolidge answered. “It will probably take a week or two to find out that part of it. I don’t hold out huge hope. Unless the boot tread is truly exotic, it probably won’t amount to anything.”

“Can we go walk the murder scene?” Mac asked.

Coolidge nodded and tilted his head to the back of the bar. “Let’s go.”

Mac and Coolidge walked out the back of the tavern and turned right. The crime-scene tape was still twisting in the light-evening breeze at the far end of the parking lot. Coolidge took out the crime scene photos and handed them over to Mac as they approached the tape. Mac activated the flashlight app on his cell phone and flipped through the pictures. He shook his head when he looked at the pictures of the victims in the car and then lingered over the last one, which was taken from the front of the car with both victims slumped over, dead in their seats.

“So, Linc, I’m looking at this. Weatherly and this Kane walk out the back of the tavern, take a right, walk down here about thirty yards, get in his Sonata, snap in their seatbelts all safe like, and once they’ve done that and can’t get away, some guy jumps out in front and starts going all Tony Montana.”

“That’s right.”

“And after he does that, he takes all of their belongings. Wallets, watches, phones, briefcases, backpacks, anything these guys had. So, a robbery?”

“That’s what it
looks
like.”

Mac caught the little inflection in Coolidge’s tone. It matched the little voice talking in his head that was telling him this scene was not what it seemed. Standing where the front of the car would have been, he started walking around the taped off area again, stopping from time to time and checking details in the photos. Once he’d worked his way all the way around the tape and back to the front again, he stopped. He flipped through the pictures once more and again lingered on the last photo. “You don’t really believe this was a simple robbery, do you, Linc?” Mac asked with his eyes still laser focused on the gruesome photo.

“No. No, I don’t, Mac,” Coolidge said after a moment. “Now, tell me why I don’t.”

“Because this is an ad hoc attempt at making it look like a robbery, like it was improvised on the spot. But it wasn’t a robbery.”

“What was it?”

“It was an execution.”

Coolidge raised his eyebrows. “That’s a pretty quick conclusion. Why do you say that?”

“At least three reasons I can think of. First, if this were a robbery, the whole thing is overkill. I mean, your typical stickup guy would just wave the gun at them, ask for their wallets, watches and phones, and these two would just hand them over and pray that was the end of it. Unless you have some sort of bloodthirsty stickup guys around here, I just don’t think this is how a simple robbery goes down. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, a stickup guy takes the money and the goods, and runs.”

“I’ll buy that.”

“Second, there were nine shots, Linc. Nine.” Mac waved his arms to the area behind him, a residential neighborhood of houses, duplexes, and apartment buildings. “The only way you don’t hear nine shots is your shooter used a suppressor, and a really quiet one. I mean, in real life, a suppressor takes some sound away, but it’s not like the movies, there’s still a pretty good pop. You mentioned a Ruger earlier because the slugs and caliber would be good for one, a .22 perhaps. I’ve been told those can be pretty quiet. If this guy used something like that, that suggests planning, sophistication, and experience. Now, if this were your simple robbery, would the asshole you’re looking for be engaging in that kind of advance planning?”

“Well, we’re asking around,” Coolidge answered halfheartedly but then shook his head. “But I wouldn’t disagree with you.”

“And you won’t find anyone, because of my third reason.”

“Which is?”

Mac walked to Coolidge, holding up the last photo. “Look at the pattern of shots in the photos. Kane was shot four times, three sprayed randomly in his chest and one right in the center of his forehead. Weatherly has four random to his chest—two in his left shoulder, one just left of center mass, another in his right arm—and then one perfectly in the middle of his forehead, almost identical placement to Kane.”

“What are you saying?”

“The first two shots taken were the one to Kane’s head and then the one to Weatherly’s. The other seven are window dressing, Linc, for show, hoping an overworked police department low on investigative resources with more homicides than it knows what to do with will treat it for what it was intended to look like—a crazy, senseless robbery.” Mac looked over to Coolidge, who was nodding slightly. “But I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, am I, Linc?”

“Not entirely true, Mac,” Coolidge answered, walking over and taking another look at the last photo. “I didn’t pick up on the shot pattern, but I think you’re right. Both of them were shot execution style in the forehead, dead center. The rest of the shots are for show—I think you’re right about that. Good catch.”

“So why did
you
think execution?” Mac asked.

“Your boy comes into town yesterday and immediately meets up with a guy from the EPA. They sit in the bar and open up a laptop, look at papers, and discuss this stuff for a couple hours. Then they end up dead just minutes later. When I show up, all that shit is missing. Why?”

“The killer wanted it.”

“Or whoever hired them did. If your analysis of the wounds is correct, then a professional took these guys out. It takes a pro to get those two shots in the forehead.”

“I don’t think it was just one killer, either,” Mac suggested.

“Ballistics says all the slugs are from the same gun. Why do you think there are killers, plural?”

“It’s a guess,” Mac answered as he walked to the area that would have been the rear of the car. “Wallets, phones, watches, pulling out pockets, taking luggage, laptops, cleaning out the glove box and center console—that takes time, too much time for one man. That’s too much exposure. One man may have been the shooter, but I’m thinking he had help. Maybe a driver who pulled up once the deed was done and helped grab everything. I could be wrong, but I’d bet the killer had help.”