Last Shot (2006) (23 page)

"I've got a few questions for you, Sam," Tim said. "Is that okay?"

Sam paused the game, a feature Tim wished they'd had on Frogger back in the day. Bear hung back in the hall as Tim showed Sam Walker's photo.

"Do you know who this guy is?" Sam studied it, then shook his head. Tim said, "It's your uncle. We need to know if you've seen him."

Sam's eyes went to Tim's gun. "You're gonna kill him."

"Not if I can help it."

Bear opened Tess's door up the hall, and Sam's features shifted. "Are you going in Mom's room?"

"Yeah, but we'll be respectful of her stuff." It took a moment for Tim to decipher the apprehension on Sam's face. "Would you like us to keep the door closed while we're in there?"

Sam nodded, relieved. Tim headed into the next room, securing the door behind him. Bear was standing before a patch of bleached carpet, looking at a scrubbed blob of wall. A dark eye stared out from the drywall where a criminalist had dug out the slug. The smell of cleaning chemicals burned the back of Tim's throat. Sam's scared look had been sudden, acute, traumatized. He was living with more than just a potentially fatal illness. The headboard of his bed backed on the wall that had once borne his mother's brain spatter.

The plastic underwear drawers, spread-out toiletries, and photos shoved into the mirror frame reminded Tim of a dorm room. The folding closet doors were permanently laid open, broken in the tracks. Clothes seemed to bulge out of the shoulder-wide space. A rack held a collection of exhausted footwear, and Tim could see where Tess had used Magic Marker to touch up her shoes. Atop a world-weary Converse sat the empty holster the cops had left behind.

Tim zeroed in on the rickety bookcase right away, looking for materials from the company that had dropped Walker's nephew. Medical books crowded the shelves, journal articles cramming the gaps. Beneath a well-thumbed dictionary of medical terminology were some stray letters, including one in which Tess requested information from Vector's study director. She'd sought out the company, it seemed, as a last-ditch treatment option for her son.

One shelf down Tim found a report, its cover featuring the familiar Vector logo, a V with an arrow capping the second vertical like a directive to scale the evolutionary ladder. Onward and upward. Tim showed off the fancy print job.

Bear said, "We connect Walker to Vector, we've got some traction."

Inside, Tim found a report on something called Xedral, a "viral vector," Tess's notes painstakingly written in the narrow margins. X4-AAT unknown side effects? Why Lentidra fall off map? Outliers included in stats? Clearly she'd poured her energy into researching the treatment. She must've been devastated when Vector eliminated Sam from the trial--another possible suicide motive. Among the stray papers stuffed into the report, Tim found no notification of Sam's termination.

Pulling books, Tim checked the scraps of paper she'd used as bookmarks. After coming across a few magazine subscription cards and a torn grocery list, Tim hit upon a business card, used to mark a page in a primer on liver disease. CHAISSON KAGAN. CEO. VECTOR BIOGENICS. A Westwood address and a 310 area code. Another number handwritten on the back.

The videotape beside the primer had a KCOM spine sticker. Sam's sloppy hand labeled the tape, My News Segmint. Tim slid it out and walked to the next room, disrupting Sam's video game once again. "This is yours, right? Mind if I borrow it?"

"Go ahead. It's just a copy. They sent me a couple to give to other kids without a gene. But I don't know any."

"I'll get it back to you as soon as we're done."

"'Kay. Thanks. For asking, I mean. Other people just do whatever they want."

"Other people?"

"The cops, I mean. Right after."

Tim looked at him. A moment's pause.

Sam said, "What are you guys doing anyways?"

"Just getting some more information about your mom's death."

"Two months later?"

"That's right." Tim returned to Tess's room, again closing the door behind him.

A triangular desk in the corner held an antique computer monitor and a cordless phone. The drawers contained Tess's receipts and bills, which were clearly if not logically organized. Tim pulled the file holding the phone bills and set it aside on the bed--they'd ask Guerrera to start following up on the numbers she'd called in the months before her death. A checkbook showed an account that scraped the double digits several times a month.

Tim wandered into the bathroom. The ledge above the sink held a roll-on Lady Mitchum, a bottle of folic acid tablets, and a well-wrung tube of Aquafresh. Taking the bottle of pills, he went back over to the desk and sat in the tiny rolling chair, the ovoid wooden backrest of which doubled as a belt rack. He dug through the envelope stuffed with receipts from June, then moved on to May. Near the top he found a Sav-On receipt that contained what he was looking for. May 28. Folic acid--$12.99.

The bottle advertised a hundred 400-microgram tablets. He spilled those remaining on the bedspread and counted them. For both of Dray's pregnancies, she'd taken folic acid every day of her first term. Tim counted the pills. Eighty-eight remained, which meant that she'd likely taken one a day, including the morning of June 8 when she'd died. Not necessarily the sort of long-term planning one would expect from a woman about to put a bullet through her skull.

He called Bear over and explained the incongruity to him while Bear poked at a tablet in his sweaty palm, regarding the prenatal supplement uncomfortably, as he might a feminine napkin.

"Okay, but we don't really bank on the presuicidal to act rationally. Or to plan in advance. Especially, I'd guess, pregnant presuicides." Bear sank thoughtfully into the tiny rolling chair, which gave off a moribund creak and collapsed. He fell back, arm striking the desk, bouncing the keyboard in the air and turning on the computer. As he rose and made a big show of dusting himself off with reserved dignity, Tim stifled his laughter, knowing how inappropriate it would sound emanating from Tess's room.

Bear said, "Hang on."

"I'm trying."

"No, check this out." Bear gestured him over to the monitor. Save a hard-drive icon, the screen was blank. Bear double-clicked the icon, opening an empty file. No programs, no documents, no applications. He thunked to his knees on the tangle of belts, examining the computer tower jammed beneath the desk. He ran his thumb across a row of tiny scratches on the beige plastic. "Clever fucker replaced the hard drive." He moved to withdraw, banging his head, and then managed to reverse his broad frame from the cramped space. "Someone purged the computer but left it. Couldn't steal it because that would've raised robbery-murder suspicions."

Despite his excitement Tim played devil's advocate. "Unless she had the hard drive replaced herself."

Bear lumbered toward the door. "I'll ask the kid."

In the quiet of the empty room, Tim sat where Tess had sat when the bullet had entered her head.

The left side.

He turned, getting his body position correct to match the spatter from the crime-scene photos. A bit awkward but, as Dray had noted, certainly possible. He turned his head another inch and raised an imaginary pistol to his left temple. His attention snagged on one of the belts Bear had knocked to the carpet. Two distinct indentations about three inches apart notched the width of the brown leather.

He froze, staring at the familiar grooves. Standing, he went to the closet, picked up the empty holster. He pulled his own holster off his belt and slid Tess's on. The spring clip clamped down on his belt, matching the indentations.

Tess's bloodless hand in the autopsy photo had shown a filed nail on the right index finger, shorter than the rest. It wasn't a repaired break, as he'd thought; Tess kept it cut, as Dray did hers, so it wouldn't catch in the trigger guard.

Knowing of Tess's left-handedness, the killer had made the logical--and incorrect--assumption. Three words--"the left side"--had told Walker all he'd needed to know. A right-handed shooter would not leave a suicide bullet wound in her left temple.

The image of Tess at gunpoint, being posed suicide style by her killer, brought forth in Tim a familiar wrath. What had the killer threatened her with to get her to sit still? To hold her position? What thoughts had run through her head in her final seconds of life once she'd grasped the inevitable?

Bear returned. "The kid says she used that computer every day, and there were no repairs--" He halted in the doorway, taking in the empty holster fastened to Tim's belt. He blinked twice, the cogs meshing. "No," he said. "Really?"

Tim held up a hand, still aligning the remaining pieces. Walker's First Force Recon photo, his rifle slung right to left. The effortless righthand stab into Boss's neck.

Bear yanked the door shut behind him. "But Tess was left-handed. Why would she shoot right?"

"Because her right-handed brother taught her to shoot."

Bear's whistle dropped from high to low. "We'll get it reopened as a homicide."

"Looks like someone already beat us to the punch."

"Yup. Great." Bear ran his hand over his weary face, tugging his jowls even lower. "So what's next?"

Chapter
34

Lights killed, the oversize Bronco idled beneath an overhang of pepper tree branches, Ted Sands's complaints from the cargo area muffled by a gag. Walker had taken care to dress Ted's visible half appropriately--dinner jacket, bow tie, starched shirt, even a white handkerchief teased into view. Important to observe proper etiquette. Sounds of the party trickled up the unreasonably broad street, reaching Walker at the steering wheel. Of all the Bel Air estates he'd passed, the Kagan mansion had the grandest setback, a rambling garden decorated with stone walls, trickling fountains, koi-stocked ponds, and a leisurely walk that diverged into loops before widening into a circular, bench-fringed patio about ten yards from the imposing front door of the main house.

It was a quarter past ten, and from the jazzish tunes and conversational hum pouring over the house with the glow of strung Asian lanterns, the backyard party was in full swing. The valets remained around the corner, their station positioned before the south entrance's adorned gates that led to the bash. Deliveries to the rear kitchen off the service road appeared to have slowed. The house front, a classic two-story rise, didn't seem of a particular style. Like its neighbors, it just seemed mansiony.

And right now it seemed quiet.

Keeping the Bronco's lights off, Walker accelerated up the dark street, braking sharply at the top of the walk. He got out, his slamming door renewing Ted's stifled pleas. Moving briskly, efficiently, Walker swung out the carrier and opened the tailgate, leaning the two aluminum strips into place. Encased in his concrete block atop the flatbed dolly, Ted jounced down the ramp. Hands on his shoulders, Walker pushed him, jerking in his mold and yelling into a mouthful of balled cotton, up the front walk. At the circular patio, Walker dumped the block off the dolly, the weight of it cracking the flagstone.

He stood over Ted, wide-stanced. A jerk of his wrist and the steel blade flicked out from the handle. "Hold this." Walker spun the knife, reclaimed it in a fist, and punched it down into the dense muscle of Ted's shoulder. Bellowing, veins raised in his flushed neck, Ted fought to free his hands but succeeded only in rebreaking the scabs ringing his wrists.

Walker pulled a grenade from one of his many cargo pockets, and the whites of Ted's eyes seemed to dilate. Ted fought desperately to say something. Walker pulled out his gag. Before Ted could scream, Walker rammed the grenade in his mouth and secured it with electrical tape, which he double-wound around Ted's head. Ted was screaming now, the noise no louder than the distant beat of the swing number struck up by the band.

Walker jogged up the wide steps to the massive porch. Dark strips of plexi-coating showed at the edges of the windowpanes--they were bullet-resistant. He saw deep into the house, past the dark front rooms. In the kitchen an imperious catering captain paced before her cowed waitstaff, barking orders, Patton gone gourmet. A plastered guest loosed his cummerbund and headed into a restroom.

Unspooling a few feet of fishing line, Walker tied an improvised clinch knot around the well-polished brass door handle and rang the bell. An exclamation from within.

The monofilament let out with a zip as he moved swiftly back down the walk. Ted stopped fighting the block once Walker slipped a finger through the grenade pin sticking up above the band of electrical tape. He tugged the knife from Ted's shoulder, freeing a blood flow that saturated the ivory polyester of the dinner jacket. Cutting the fishing line from the spool, he tied the end to the grenade ring.

A shrill, barely audible voice from the house: "Edwin, I don't know why, but someone's arrived at the front door."

Walker set his full weight behind a boot and shoved the block back a few screeching inches, bringing the line taut. Ted leaned forward as far as the concrete would allow, but still Walker could've strummed a high C on the razor-straight line.

Ted hyperventilated in pained grunts, snot flaring from his nostrils, eyes fixed on the burgundy front door.

From inside came the officious approach of heels on marble.

Walker nudged Ted's bow tie straight, drew himself up, and stared down at Ted's contorted form. "In ten seconds your head will explode."