Exit Strategy (32 page)

“Think I’d be overdressed?”

“Definitely, but you won’t hear me complaining.” He glanced over my head. “How about it, guys? Up for a little postassignment partying?”

Felix arched a brow. “Oh, were we included in that invitation?”

“Of course. Not like Jack would let me take Dee without him.” His gaze shot back to mine. “Is it a date then? Say…midnight?”

“Only if I can buy the first round.”

“Haven’t caught him yet,” Jack said. “Don’t get cocky.”

I looked at him, my smile fading. “It isn’t cockiness, Jack. It’s confidence…and a generous helping of hope.”

He nodded and, for a minute, we all stood in silence. Then Jack jangled his keys.

“Time to go.”

A half hour later we were rounding the corner, the opera house in sight, a crowd at the doors, moving slowly. Jack eyed the crowd, then motioned me aside and took out a cigarette. Earlier he’d grumbled about the habit, calling it the worst a hitman could have. I wasn’t sure I agreed. It certainly came in handy—a convenient excuse for standing around outside without drawing attention to yourself. Unlike that hitman at the jail, Jack could pull it off. No one watching would mistake him for an amateur smoker.

He lit the cigarette, took a drag, then said, “We okay?”

“Sure. Aren’t we?” I stepped to the side, out of the path of an oncoming foursome. “Is something bothering you? Something we missed?”

“Nah.”

His gaze slanted away, as if this wasn’t what he’d meant and he was trying to reword it. After another drag, he looked at me.

“
You
okay?”

“Me? Sure. Not having second thoughts about getting involved, if that’s what you mean.”

A small shake of his head, coupled with a look that said he’d never make that mistake. A third drag, then he passed the cigarette to me. He let me inhale, exhale, and waved it off when I offered it back.

“Might not get him,” he said, voice low, though no one was around. “Gonna try. Sure as hell gonna try. But…might not.”

“Like Quinn and I said, we don’t care who does the take-down, us or the Feds. Yes, I’d rather be the one…” I paused. “You mean—This is about that talk outside the motel—Quinn and I going on about getting this guy, making our victory celebration plans.” I felt my gaze harden. Blinked it away. “You’re worried that I’ll get cocky. Overexcited. Overeager. That I’ll screw up.”

“’Course not. You’re a pro—”

“Quinn and I were just blowing off steam, okay? Some of us need to do that. And, yes, I suppose
showing
it is unprofessional—”

“I never said—”

“I know we might not get this guy tonight. I know maybe no one will. And I know that if we stand a hope in hell of success, it’s going to take calm, controlled, focused effort. There’s no room for grandstanding, for cowboy bullshit—”

“That’s not—”

“I’m ready, okay? If you think I’m not, then just say so, and I’ll walk away now.”

He looked out over the road and, for one long minute, I was certain he was going to call me on that, tell me to walk away. Could I do it? My heart hammered at the thought, fingers trembling around the cigarette.

“Line’s going down,” he said, waving at the crowd. “Better get inside.”

As we climbed the steps to the new opera house, we were caught in a stream of high-school students—a band or music class—led by a woman talking excitedly about the production to come. I knew why the police hadn’t issued a warning and yet…well, I couldn’t shake the urge to grab that teacher and tell her to get the kids out of here, get as far away as they could.

The truth was, as cruel as it seemed by
not
letting people know of the threat, the police were doing their best to end that threat…for everyone else. This was their first chance—an excellent chance—of catching the Helter Skelter killer.

If they’d refused to play along and canceled the show, any criminal psychologist could predict the killer’s next move. Ruin his game, and he’d do something worse, as payback. Here, they could monitor every variable and ensure the guests’ safety.

Once inside the doors, we found ourselves funneled into a line through a portable metal detector and a wand-wielding guard.

“My bag?” sniffed a matron at the front. “No, you may
not
paw through my bag, young man.”

The queue ground to a halt.

“Oh, come on,” I muttered. “They’re not worried about the flask you stuffed in there.”

Jack craned his neck to see around the mob. After a moment, a guard took the woman and her party aside to let others pass though.

“Unbelievable,” huffed a diamond-dripping woman about my age. “It’s opera, not a rap concert.”

“There’s a whole industry getting rich off this terrorism nonsense,” said the gray-haired man at her side. “Did I tell you what happened on my flight to Tokyo last week? They body-searched first-class passengers. First-class! As if any of us…”

He continued to bitch about the injustices visited on the upper classes, but I turned my attention to mentally reexamining Quinn’s blueprints of the opera house. One front entrance, one staff entrance, one delivery door and three fire exits. Easy to guard and, according to Quinn, guarded they were, with no one allowed in or out any way but the front door tonight.

According to Quinn’s source, even staff had needed to pass through those main doors earlier, with the metal detectors and bag search. That would likely be the ruse the killer would use—pretending to work here. With a new business, employees would still be accustomed to seeing unfamiliar faces and wouldn’t question one more. If that was his plan, he’d have found himself out of luck. There had been a manager at the door, ticking off names, and if a new or replacement worker showed up, the Feds had turned him away.

We made it through security without incident. We weren’t armed. Too risky. The Feds would probably have wand-waving agents inside, too. Not having a gun made me uneasy, but I knew the killer wouldn’t have risked bringing one in, either. He wouldn’t need to. A real pro doesn’t need a traditional weapon to do his job.

Once inside, we veered left. Quinn said the Feds were setting up base in a storage room behind the bar, so that’s where I wanted to go first. Get an insider’s feel for security precautions, and we’d see where the holes were.

It took some wrangling, but we found a spot where we could, with the help of listening devices provided by Felix, hear what was going on in the FBI’s control room. We arrived just as they received a call from the front door, about a woman refusing to let them search or scan her evening bag. It could have been the same woman we’d seen, but I suspected they’d been dealing with similar complaints all night.

“I don’t care if she’s the wife of the goddamned president,” a man boomed. “No one gets in without a search and if you can’t handle that, then find someone who can.” He signed off. “Fucking unbelievable. Old bats thinking we’re going to swipe twenty bucks from their handbags, delivery men too lazy to carry boxes to the front door, but if something goes wrong, they’ll be the first to raise a stink, calling the papers to complain that we weren’t doing our jobs.”

“Nothing’s going to go wrong, Marty. A woman couldn’t get groped in here without us knowing about it.”

“Yeah, but if she does, I’ll have ten deadweight rookies in here asking me what they should do about it, while that fucker has free run of the building.”

The door creaked open.

“What the hell are you two doing back—?” the first man boomed.

“There’s been a seat mix-up,” a woman said. “An elderly couple is in ours—”

“Then tell them to move!”

The women continued in the same calm voice. “The usher feels it would be less intrusive if we took the seats beside them—”

“I told you where to sit! We picked out the sight lines to cover every—”

“We’ve checked the sight lines and they’d be the same.”

“I don’t care. You sit where I assigned you, and if there’s someone there, then you move them. Why the hell you couldn’t figure that out without bothering me—”

“Because you asked to be apprised—personally apprised—of all complications.”

“This isn’t a complication, Chin. It’s ass-wiping, and you can damned well do your own.”

The door clicked shut. I looked over to see a young couple in formal wear heading back to the foyer.

“Idiot,” the woman muttered.

“He’s under a lot of pressure,” her partner said. “He saw what happened to McMillan, and he knows if this goes bad, he’s next.”

“Stress, my ass. Dubois is in his element. He wants to be in control so he can take full credit if he pulls this off. But if he doesn’t, you can bet your ass it’ll be everyone else’s fault.”

Jack touched my arm and motioned that we should move on. I had to agree. All we’d accomplished here was overhearing Martin Dubois, the agent now leading the investigation after the last one had been “reassigned.” The guy might be a jerk, but he seemed to be doing the job.

As we walked through the lobby, I hoped that the undercover agents wouldn’t be as obvious to the killer as they were to me. The janitor emptying a quarter-filled trash can. The extra barman, who did nothing but wipe the counter and polish glasses. The couple lingering in a T-intersection, talking but never looking at each other. Still, if the killer did “make” them, maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. He might realize he didn’t have a chance.

Next, Jack and I scoped out all the potential blind spots—places
we’d
pick for a hit. We started with the bathrooms. The moment I walked in, I knew it was covered, by an agent playing washroom attendant, pumping lotion onto a matron’s hands and apologizing when the squirt dribbled onto her shoe instead. Oh, the joys of undercover work.

Despite the on-duty agent, I gave the bathroom a once-over, seeing it with a hitman’s eye. No closets, no windows, the dividers too low to crawl under, the stalls too small to hide in. By the time I finished using the toilet, I was satisfied enough to strike this “blind spot” off my list.

I scrubbed my hands, my mind fully aware of my surroundings yet skipping forward, planning my next move.

He was here. My target. In this very building.

I was on the trail, his scent in the wind. The real thing. Out there. Waiting for me.

And while maybe that should have had me as puppy-dog excited as Jack seemed to think I was, I felt calm. Perfect control, the kind I’d never felt off the shooting range. Everything in focus. Sharp focus—smelling the soap on my hands, hearing the squeak of shoes on the linoleum, seeing the flash of red as the woman beside me painted on fresh lipstick.

I looked at myself in the mirror. No signs of stress—no beading sweat, no parted lips, breathing hard. Just a woman enjoying her evening out and looking forward to the pleasure yet to come.

I turned to the agent at the door, passed her a smile and a tip, and walked out.

Grace

In the movies, things were always so much more dramatic. Put this scene in some Hollywood blockbuster, and there would be a deviously elaborate solution to the challenge he faced, maybe explosives hidden inside a seat, rigged to detonate when the soprano hit her first C. In real life, sometimes even the most difficult situations had solutions that were almost laughably simple.

How would he kill someone in an opera house, with only one way in or out, patrolled by dozens of top FBI agents, all devoted to stopping him? By hiding behind a door. His only tool? A pair of panty hose. Not worn on his head, like some cinematic killer. In his world, disguising yourself from your target was ludicrous—if he lived long enough to talk, then you damned well deserved to get caught.

One glance at the opera house blueprints and he’d known where he’d hide—behind the door in the one room the Feds couldn’t be inside: the handicapped washroom.

He’d been preparing for tonight since he’d first leaked the Moreland arrest. He’d bought the tickets before making the call—two, knowing they’d later search for single-ticket purchases. He’d walked right in the front door, among a group of retirees, even talking to them, as if he was just another old man out for a night of culture. Then straight to the bathroom. He’d limped in with his cane—for the benefit of anyone who saw his destination. Once inside, he’d had to tamper with the lock, to be sure he could relock it as he left. Then he’d positioned himself, turned out the light, leaned over…and unlocked the door to await the next visitor.

Laughably simple.

Grace steered her wheelchair around a group of middle-aged matrons who looked as if they’d rather be anywhere but here. A social-duty event. Grace remembered those, dragging David along, kicking and screaming, telling him he couldn’t ignore an invitation from the CEO, even if it was the company’s twentieth outing to
The Nutcracker
.

She hit a wrinkle in the carpet and the wheelchair veered, heading straight for a young woman in a green dress. The woman’s companion tried to pull her out of the way, but she grabbed the wheelchair handles, stopping and steadying it.

“Thank you,” Grace said. “Still haven’t gotten the hang of this darned thing, I’m afraid.”