Crossfire (15 page)

Emily Davenport was not dead.

The bullet, which had done exactly what Quinn had described was a possibility when aiming for a head shot, had grazed the crossing guard’s forehead, singeing her tightly permed white curls.

The shot had, unfortunately, either knocked the elderly woman to the ground or caused her to fall, resulting in what Mike Gannon, who’d made it to the scene moments after the shooting, had diagnosed as a cracked rib, and perhaps a broken hip as well.

‘‘All those kids,’’ Cait murmured, feeling as shocky as the crossing guard, who’d been taken to St. Camillus by ambulance, had looked.

It was bedlam. Helicopters—police and TV news ones—were noisily circling overhead. Cops—local and federal—had arrived and begun to swarm over the crime scene.

The children in question were currently safely locked up inside the school. Which some might feel was a bit like closing the barn door after the horse was gone, but Cait was worried the shooter might use the chaos as an opportunity to get more shots off.

Unfortunately, those parents who’d still been parked outside the church school when the shooting had taken place, which may have made them potential witnesses, had scooped up their children and rushed off—Cait guessed they were taking the children back home where they would be safe.

Good luck. If an elderly woman could be shot leading a clutch of elementary school children across a city street, was there any place in Somersett that was truly safe?

‘‘God.’’ She pressed her fingertips against her forehead. ‘‘He could have killed them all.’’

‘‘But he didn’t,’’ Quinn said. ‘‘We got lucky.’’

She looked up at him in disbelief. ‘‘Try telling that to today’s victim.’’

‘‘Who’s still alive,’’ he pointed out. ‘‘You told me the note he wrote Val said that he had something big planned. This isn’t exactly on a par with blowing away a couple of former military guys at the academy.’’

‘‘No.’’ Cait was a little surprised to find the two of them thinking the exact same thing. Then the idea hit, like a lightning bolt from a clear blue sky. ‘‘He’s not finished. Is he?’’

‘‘No.’’ Quinn’s expression was set, his flinty eyes harder than she’d ever seen them. ‘‘He’s damn sure not.’’

The joint operational task force was faced with its first challenge before the main players could even arrive at those desks Angetti had been arranging for them. Being the sole fed on the scene, Cait instructed the uniforms to shut down all the intersections around the cathedral. Then she got on the phone and asked the highway patrol to cut off access to the bridge.

As more detectives and cops flooded the scene—no one wanted to miss this party—she sent them into the neighborhood to find witnesses.

Quinn, who continued to ignore her instructions about not getting involved, had wandered off on his own. She’d lost track of him, but caught up in trying to herd cats, she decided he must have taken off on his self-assigned task of locating potential sites for the sniper to use.

He surprised her yet again by showing up in front of her as she was on the phone trying to find someone with the authority to restrict the airspace over the scene to get those news copters out of the sky before they crashed into one another. Or, worse yet, into one of the police copters.

‘‘Come over here,’’ he said.

Getting nowhere, she slammed the phone shut. ‘‘This better be good.’’

‘‘It’s interesting, at any rate.’’

She followed him across the cobblestone sidewalk and up the steps of the church to the center of three arched doorways.

‘‘I left this for you,’’ he said.

The wood had been splintered. She leaned forward, saw the bullet, and called to the ATF crime lab investigator who had appeared on the scene.

‘‘Check this out,’’ she instructed.

The woman pulled out a Swiss Army knife and chipped the bullet out of the doorframe.

‘‘Wow,’’ she murmured. ‘‘Isn’t this a lifer?’’

‘‘A lifer?’’ Cait asked as the woman looked down at the copper cartridge she was holding in her gloved palm with the same look a religious zealot might have when looking into the face of her god.

‘‘I’m a birder in my free time,’’ the ATF special agent said. ‘‘A lifer is a bird you’ve never seen before. Once you see one, it can be added to your life list.’’

‘‘And you’ve never seen this before?’’

‘‘If it’s what I think it is, I doubt many people outside the former Soviet Union have.’’

‘‘It’s an SP-5,’’ Quinn said. ‘‘A full-metal-jacket 9 mm with a small steel core and lead behind it.’’

‘‘But the M16 uses a 5.56 x 45 mm,’’ Cait said. She’d spent part of her computer time last night looking the gun up so she would know better what they were dealing with.

Quinn nodded. ‘‘You’ve done your homework.’’ ‘‘I always do.’’

‘‘The SP is a subsonic bullet, designed as a sniper load for the Russian 9 mm VSS silent sniper rifle.’’

‘‘Which is why we didn’t hear the crack, just that faint pop.’’

‘‘Exactly. The most common cartridges used in silenced guns are the 9 mm NATO and the .45 ACP. This baby has twice as much muzzle energy as those and at least three times the range.’’

‘‘It’s capable of piercing eight millimeters of steel at a hundred and ten yards,’’ the ATF agent said, dropping the spent copper cartridge into a plastic bottle and labeling it.

They’d been more than lucky. As had the crossing guard.

‘‘So,’’ Cait wondered out loud, ‘‘are we dealing with different snipers? Or a guy with one helluva arsenal?’’

‘‘It’d be my guess you’re talking about a single shooter,’’ Quinn said. ‘‘One who wants to show off.’’

For Valentine Snow? Cait wondered as she glanced at the reporter in question, standing behind the yellow police tape stretched between light poles surrounding the scene.

‘‘I guess you weren’t kidding when you said you knew about guns,’’ she said.

‘‘I never kid about deadly weapons. And, yeah, the VSS is pretty rare outside Russia. They were originally adopted by units of the Soviet Union Internal Affairs Ministry forces. Then the Soviet Army Spetsnaz, which are sort of equivalent to our SEALs and Delta Force guys, started to use them. I’ve heard the Russian Special Ops guys are still using them.

‘‘One of their advantages, along with being silenced—though it’s possible to silence just about any rifle if you know what you’re doing—is that they can be stripped down to fit into a briefcase.’’

Cait so didn’t need to hear that. ‘‘You know,’’ she muttered, ‘‘you are one fun guy, McKade.’’

‘‘It’s the circumstances,’’ he argued. ‘‘Once you nab your bad guy, you and I’ll go out dancing and I’ll show you exactly how much fun I can be.’’

She blinked.

Was he actually asking her out on a date?

In the middle of a crime scene with about a gazillion law enforcement types buzzing around them like worker bees around a hive?

‘‘In your dreams.’’

His grin was slow, totally inappropriate to their circumstances, and sexy as hell. ‘‘Well, you know, now that you bring it up, Special Agent,’’ he drawled, ‘‘I’ve gone that route. A lot lately, and it isn’t really working for me anymore.’’

Not a date. Along with the humor, his eyes gleamed with something far more deadly than the Glock 9 mm she was wearing beneath her jacket. A glint that suggested a lot more than dancing.

More like the mattress mambo.

She supposed that macho come-on might work with a lot of women.

But not her.

Definitely not her.

‘‘Look, you might be used to women throwing themselves at your feet.’’ Or, more likely another part of his anatomy. ‘‘But I’m not most women.’’

‘‘You don’t have to remind me of that.’’ His voice was deep and rough.

He was doing it again. Bringing up that damn night of the wedding. Although she still couldn’t remember whether it had been Quinn or her—or perhaps both of them—ripping off her pink taffeta Southern belle bridesmaid dress, they were going to have to deal with it.

But not here.

And not now.

‘‘I’ve got to go,’’ she said briskly. ‘‘I’ll meet you at the clinic. At seven.’’

He snapped a brief salute. ‘‘Roger that.’’

Although she refused to look back as she walked away, she could feel him watching her all the way to her car.

‘‘We need a sexy name.’’

Cait had just walked into the JOC—joint operations center —which, if anything, was even more hectic than the crime scene she’d just left. The desks were jammed so close together it was nearly impossible to move.

A team of technicians from BellSouth were crawling around beneath the desks installing additional phones. The conversations were so loud she could barely hear herself think. Let alone hear her partner.

‘‘A sexy name?’’

‘‘We’re going to need more phone lines to handle tips,’’ Angetti said. ‘‘Gotta pay for the pizza and burgers. And if this guy keeps shooting, we may even need to call in more troops, which means we’ll have to go out and find us more office space to rent, which isn’t cheap.’’

‘‘We’re going to catch him before that.’’ Cait hoped that was true, even as she secretly admitted she would love just about any excuse to get them out of this dark basement.

‘‘We’re still going to need more bucks in the meantime. I just got back from Staples. We needed bulletin boards to put maps and names of suspects and shit on. Do you have any idea how much those suckers cost?’’

‘‘No.’’

‘‘Well, they weren’t cheap. At least, the good ones that’ll stand up to this kind of case aren’t. And they damn well don’t grow on trees.’’

She was tempted to state that nothing—including leaves—grew on trees in this office, but she didn’t want to risk sounding flip.

‘‘And a projector. We’re gonna need one of those. And a larger screen for the PowerPoint presentations.’’

‘‘PowerPoint?’’

‘‘Gotta have PowerPoint,’’ he said. ‘‘And a reward for tips leading to an arrest. The public loves those. And let’s not forget what all this is going to cost in motel rooms for the troops. Unless you intend to invite everyone to crash at your place.’’

‘‘Hosting a murder slumber party isn’t on my to-do list.’’

‘‘Well, in order to get funding from headquarters, we need to get this declared a major case,’’ he informed her. ‘‘Which means we need to come up with a sexy name.’’

She’d never worked a major case before. Sure, she’d consulted on the Swann Island Slasher case, but that had been on an unofficial basis, and the island’s sheriff hadn’t tagged it with that tacky tabloid-type name. The local paper had.

‘‘Surely you jest.’’

‘‘Surely I freaking don’t. Look, kid,’’ he said, ‘‘you may be the hot new agent on the block, but you don’t know jack about how to get a case through the system.’’

She wasn’t going to argue that.

‘‘Isn’t that what the SAC does?’’ The special agent in charge was, after all, at the top of the state’s FBI pyramid.

‘‘Sure. But the more help we can give her, the more help we get back from her. It’s a quid pro quo situation. It’s just too bad the guy had to shoot that old lady.’’

‘‘That stinks.’’ There wasn’t much she and her partner could agree on, but Cait wasn’t going to argue that point. ‘‘At least she’s alive.’’ And hopefully would be okay, though at her age that hip could be a problem.

‘‘Well, yeah. But the problem is, before she entered into the equation, we had a good thing going.’’

‘‘Excuse me?’’ She pushed her hair back from her forehead. ‘‘Maybe I’m a little slow on the uptake, but how is having two men shot in cold blood a good thing?’’

‘‘Well, we all were tossing ideas around’’—he waved around at force members currently manning the phones—‘‘and kinda liked SNIPEASMA. You know, for ‘sniper’ and the academy initials?’’

‘‘Shouldn’t it be SNIPERASMA?’’ Cait asked.

‘‘Leaving the R out gives it a better ring,’’ Angetti said. ‘‘But now that he’s branched out from nailing military guys, it’s lost its relevance.’’

Cait was beginning to feel as if she’d fallen down a rabbit hole. ‘‘Are you positive we need a name?’’

‘‘Hey, call the SAC if you don’t believe me.’’

‘‘It’s true,’’ volunteered an African American who’d just walked in with a twenty-ounce cup of coffee. ‘‘It’s the same deal we’ve got over at ATF. If you want Uncle Sam to open up his checkbook, you gotta be classified as a major crime. Want to be a major crime, you gotta come up with a sexy name.’’

‘‘How about SNIPESOM?’’ she suggested, just tossing something out there so they could move on to fighting crime. ‘‘For ‘sniper’ and ‘Somersett.’ ’’

The two men exchanged a glance. The ATF agent nodded. ‘‘Works for me.’’

‘‘That’ll do it,’’ Angetti agreed. ‘‘I’ll call the SAC and get the ball rolling.’’

‘‘Good idea.’’

He’d just headed off to make the call when Derek Manning walked into the crowded office and came over to her.

‘‘I just interviewed Mrs. Jacob.’’

‘‘And?’’ Cait pulled open a drawer of one of the black metal filing cabinets and began leafing through manila folders.

‘‘She says that to her knowledge, in thirty years of marriage, the general never strayed.’’

‘‘Admirable man, the general.’’

‘‘Indeed.’’

Cait glanced up at him. ‘‘But you don’t believe her.’’

‘‘Do gators shit in the swamp? Hell, no. The lady’s tough, though. She swore in no uncertain terms that if her husband was over at Captain Hawthorne’s house, he was only there to discuss their recruiting efforts.’’

Cait went back to the files. ‘‘Which you also don’t believe.’’

‘‘Hey, I interviewed your friend’s wifey, remember? Her excuse for wearing that short robe in the middle of the afternoon was that she’d just taken a shower. To get ready to go out to dinner and watch the fireworks with her husband.’’

‘‘That’s always a possibility.’’

‘‘Maybe. But that sure as hell wasn’t Palmolive I smelled on her. It was sex.’’

She wasn’t going to question the detective’s nose. Not when his nickname around the precinct had always been Bloodhound.

‘‘There’s something else we need to talk about.’’

‘‘Okay.’’

‘‘It’s about that jerk-off partner of yours.’’

Cait sighed. On a scale of one to ten, Angetti would rate at least an eleven on her list of least favorite things to discuss. ‘‘Okay.’’

‘‘This is important.’’

‘‘I can multitask.’’ There it was. The list of county gun dealers. ‘‘Shoot.’’

‘‘If you don’t do something about that guy, you’re going to end up spending all your time putting out fires.’’

‘‘I know he can be obnoxious, but—’’

‘‘Obnoxious I can deal with. Hell, I’ve got idiot Briggs for a damn partner. But this guy’s a loose cannon. Did you hear his press conference?’’

That got her attention. Cait stopped flipping through the papers.

‘‘Frank called a press conference?’’ On whose authority, she wanted to ask, but didn’t.

‘‘Well, it might not have exactly been an official conference. But a reporter staking out the courthouse stuck a mike in front of his face, and it was like Angetti suddenly got hit with a case of diarrhea of the mouth. He gave a profile of the killer.’’

‘‘Oh, no.’’

Cait would bet a month’s pay that she wasn’t the only FBI agent who rued the day Frank Angetti had gotten tapped to attend that class he’d taken from the Behavioral Science Unit. He’d latched on to the idea of profiling like it was the Holy Grail.

‘‘What did he say?’’ she asked, bracing herself for the detective’s response.

‘‘He said he was most likely a white male between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. A loner.’’

‘‘That’s what he always says.’’ Cait sighed. It wasn’t good. But it wasn’t a disaster, either. ‘‘What else?’’

‘‘That he probably has a military background and a familiarity with weapons.’’

‘‘I’d say that speaks for itself. He has shot three people in two days.’’

‘‘He also said that he probably frequents gun shows.’’

‘‘Again, a given.’’ She told him what the ATF agent had said about the weapon used to shoot the crossing guard.

‘‘That he’s addicted to magazines, books, and movies about guns and the military, and takes pride in his prowess with firearms.’’

‘‘Quinn McKade said pretty much the same thing. He said an actual sniper would go for a body shot. That a head shot was showing off.’’

‘‘Well, it’s not surprising that the jerk-off got those right, since it’s the same thing your own people came up with.’’

‘‘They’ve already done a profile?’’ That was news to her.

‘‘A sketchy one came in from Columbia while you were interviewing the doc, but the chief wanted to keep it under wraps.’’

Add another thing to her to-do list. As the only person in the room who’d worked for both SPD and the FBI, Cait was the logical choice to smooth over intra-agency conflict.

‘‘Like I said, once your partner got started, it was as if he couldn’t shut up. He told the reporter that our UNSUB could be a guy who’s angry with how the government runs the war and has targeted anyone wearing a uniform.’’

‘‘What?’’

‘‘There’s more.’’

Detective Derek Manning’s expression was as grim as she’d ever seen it. And that was saying something, given that they’d worked a lot of homicide cases together, including the Flamemaster, a serial arsonist who’d terrorized the city.

‘‘An alternative idea is that he’s a whacked-out, hypersensitive, suspicious head case who can’t get it up with a woman and who, maybe when he got to Iraq, figured out that he really likes shooting people. So, now that he’s back stateside, he’s trying to turn Somersett into Fallujah.’’

‘‘Oh, my God.’’

Didn’t he understand that if their UNSUB was unstable—which, odds were, he was, because, let’s face it, shooting civilians who posed no threat to anyone wasn’t exactly normal behavior—being called a head case on television could drive him around the bend? Or make him lose his temper, provoking more killings?

‘‘He also, after comparing him to the Unabomber, which I suspect our UNSUB would probably take as high praise, said the profile suggests the guy won’t be confrontational—’’

‘‘What?’’ And wasn’t that all she needed? Citizens thinking they could catch the bad guy themselves and win the reward?

‘‘It gets worse.’’

Cait couldn’t see how.

‘‘Speaking directly to the shooter, he advised against suicide by cop and suggested that he turn himself in to authorities. The authority in question, natch, being Special Agent Frank Angetti.’’

It was true, Cait discovered. You really did see little white spots when your head went light.

‘‘You gotta muzzle the guy, Cait,’’ Manning said grimly.

‘‘I don’t have the authority to do that.’’

Fortunately she knew someone who did.

Five minutes later, after being assured that an FBI media expert was on the way from Columbia to handle the press briefings, Cait headed back out to start checking gun dealers.

Her partner was on the phone. From the set expression on his face and the fiery flush in his cheeks, Cait could only hope he was getting a new one reamed by Special Agent in Charge Brooke Davidson.