Eye of Vengeance (24 page)

Chapter 28

M
ichael Redman was working the rooftops in the predawn hours of his last week in Florida. No operation he’d worked had ever come off so smoothly. Targets identified. Intel right on the mark. Clean shots. Perfect regress and four confirmed kills. This one should be no different.

He had done reconnaissance on the target, just like the others. He’d mapped out the probable movements and used the sight lines from the street to pick two spots that his experience told him would work.

Today he was up top, checking out the closer of the two. He’d used the height of a Dumpster behind the building to gain access to the second floor and then jimmied a simple half-moon lock on the sash to get into a stairwell. The door to the roof opened from the inside and he used a piece of gravel from the tarred deck itself to wedge it open. If anything happened, there would be no evidence left behind. At the east roof edge he raised the night-vision goggles to his face and scoped the front of the target building. Firing from here would be nearly a six-hundred-yard shot. His optimum distance. Easily done. Sure and clean.

He knew that this detective Hargrave, Mr. This Is a Democracy, would be scratching his head after this one, trying to figure out how it came out of left field at him. But such was the way of statement killings. There was a purpose to them. In Iraq they were the only targets he had considered true.

He recalled the recruiter, the Iraqi who intelligence knew was luring or intimidating Sunni men and boys into the insurgency. You watched him and he watched you during the days in the marketplace. You standing with your rifle slung across your arm while smiling dumbly at the people. The recruiter acting like he was just a local, moving about, slipping into conversations among groups on the corner or in lines where the real citizens waited for U.N. food handouts. When he left, you never followed him. Instead you followed the young men he’d talked to and then had an Iraqi CI follow them to a meeting place in one of the neighborhoods. Then you set up a spot not unlike this, and when the recruiter stepped outside … smoke check.

When word spread that the recruiter himself was not safe, those who had been willing to join him would quickly change their choice of the insurgent life. Statement killing. Mullins would understand this, Redman thought. Mullins had done his job as a spotter and deserved to be thanked and rewarded. Redman was sure he would understand without explanation because after this last shot, Redman would be gone.

A blinking of small lights and a far-off
bing, bing, bing
of bells pulled his attention to the north. Only in the early morning quiet would the sound carry this far and he watched with the scope as the Seventeenth Street Causeway Bridge dropped its barricades in preparation to open. Redman thought of his exit route. He had calculated traffic for early morning. It would be heavy, but most of it coming east on the bridge to the oceanfront while he would be going west. But he had not figured in the possibility of a bridge opening. He took one more look down the firing line and decided he would check the shooting nest farther back. An eight-hundred-yard shot would be technically more difficult, but he had done it before. He pulled back from the roof edge and went through the door, kicking away the blocking stone as he went.

Nick was up at eight. After Hargrave left, he’d drunk a quart of water with his two aspirin, and the preemptive strike against a hangover that had worked for years in the past worked again.

The fact that he’d not learned to clean up after himself, however, resulted in a partially empty whiskey bottle and two glasses on the patio table. He gathered and hid the evidence in the garage. While he made coffee for himself, Elsa came out to make breakfast and did not say good morning to him, just looked with a coolly raised eyebrow at the kitchen clock. When Carly got up and sat down at her place to eat, she picked up on the frigid atmosphere and whispered to her father, “Is Elsa mad because we made fun of her last night at Pictionary?”

“No, sweetheart. It’s a woman thing,” Nick said. He knew Elsa had probably seen the bottle and the glasses before he moved them, and immediately regretted the remark. When Carly left for school, Nick followed her out to the driveway and hugged her a second longer than usual before waving her off to the bus stop.

On his way back he picked up the newspaper, wrestled it out of the plastic bag and only scanned the front page centerpiece story about the OAS meeting. When he flipped the paper over he was met by the headline:

VIGILANTE SNIPER

GUNMAN USING NEWSPAPER
’S

COVERAGE TO SELECT TARGETS

The story ran two columns below the front-page fold and Nick stood reading it in the middle of his driveway.

By Joseph P. Binder, Staff Writer

A marauding killer, armed with a powerful but silent sniper rifle, is hunting ex-convicts and criminals in South Florida and sources believe he is using the
Daily News
to select the worst of the worst in his deadly spree. According to this newspaper’s research, five men, each killed by a single bullet to the brain, were prominent subjects of
Daily News
stories that documented their heinous crimes at the time they wreaked havoc on citizens and loved ones and may be the victims of the serial sniper.

The story listed the names of Chambliss, Crossly, Ferris, Kerner and Michaels as the suspected targets of the sniper along with brief descriptions of their crimes and their recent deaths. The fact that the former M.E. and Kerner were not killed in South Florida was conveniently ignored to help boost the local angle. When he opened the paper and continued to read, Nick felt a sickness in his stomach and knew it had nothing to do with whiskey.

Broward sheriff’s homicide detective Maurice Hargrave, who earlier said the dead convicts had been “gunned down in the streets” by the vigilante, is heading the investigation and has been using the
Daily News’
database to collect information on the sniper’s next target, according to computer research and documents.

Hargrave was not available for comment yesterday, but sources say ballistics experts have matched the deadly bullets from the most recent killings as coming from the same high-powered rifle commonly used by highly trained snipers.

“Shit,” Nick said out loud. Had they somehow tracked the e-mail from Lori to Hargrave’s private e-mail account? They easily could have snatched the printouts off Nick’s desk and made assumptions about the link between the five victims. A trickle of sweat caught enough gravity to cause it to slip down his back and Nick realized he was still standing on the concrete in front of his house in the direct morning sunlight. He went inside and sat at his kitchen table, laying the newspaper out in front of him.

They’d cribbed the partial quote from Hargrave off Nick’s earlier story. But where the hell did they get the ballistics match? He scanned the rest of the piece—not a single named source other than a boilerplate quote from Joel Cameron saying “the investigation is continuing.” Nick was trying to re-create his earlier stories on the first two shootings and recalled writing the vigilante angle and the bullet match in his notes but then deleting them when he put the pieces together. But as he knew, that wouldn’t stop them. As he feared, they’d used their unrestricted eavesdropping in the editorial computer system. Cops would need a court order to listen in to a citizen’s conversations or read that person’s mail. But in a newspaper’s offices, management could electronically watch a reporter write with impunity. Work product, they would argue. It belongs to us. You’re just an employee.

Nick went back to the front page to reread the story. Every scrap of information was his, no matter how they’d juiced it up and delivered it. Poor Joe Binder just followed orders and had his byline slapped on it. Then Nick noticed he’d missed the “Interactive news” box on his first reading. Below the line that said “continued on 12A” was a shadow boxed teaser inviting readers to go to the newspaper’s Web page and vote in a poll question:
Do you think the vigilante sniper is wrong for targeting former killers? Yes or No?
Jesus, Nick thought. I gotta get out of this business.

Chapter 29

T
he traffic on 1-95 seemed incredibly heavy. Nick wasn’t used to being on the interstate so close to the lunch hour. When he pulled off onto the Broward Boulevard exit he had a decision to make: Turn right and drive to the Sheriff’s Office headquarters and talk with Hargrave, or turn left and go to the newspaper office to clear out his personal stuff and take the chance of letting his short fuse get him to the jail-house in the back of a cruiser.

What the hell, he turned left.

When he parked in the employee lot, Nick was surprised that his staff I.D. still worked and automatically raised the barricade arm. He grinned at the little victory and purposely left the badge in his car in case they asked him to turn it in. But as he got off the elevator on the tenth floor, Jim, the security guard, was as vigilant as ever.

“Good afternoon, Nick,” he said, looking at Nick’s shirtfront. “Got your I.D. with you?”

Nick and Jim had greeted each other nearly five days a week for the past eight years. The guard had commented on Nick’s stories, had even congratulated him when he’d bought a new car three years ago. Yet after 9/11 all employees had to wear a badge identifying themselves. The first time he’d misplaced his I.D. and Jim made him sign in, Nick joked about joining al-Qaeda after eight years as a staff reporter, but the look the guard had given him was scary.

This morning Nick just shook his head and signed in.

“Try to find it, Nick. Or you’ll have to buy a new one,” the guard said.

Nick looked up at him. “How did you know my name without it, Jim?” he said and walked away.

Down in the newsroom the usual din was running. Most of the reporters were out on their beats. But folks on the daytime copy desk were in their nose-to-the-grindstone mode. While he worked his way through the back of the maze, Nick kept his eyes down, trying to be low-profile. Get in, get your stuff and leave. Simple as that. He ducked into a back room where they stored supplies and picked out an empty cardboard box and then made it to his desk.

The computer he’d used for the last several years was gone. Even the monitor. The only thing left was a pattern of dust where it once sat. When he tried the drawers of his desk, they’d been locked. He tried his key. No go, as he had figured. Even the belly drawer, which only held pencils and paper clips and stale breath mints, was locked. On the desktop the documents that Lori had delivered to his desk were predictably gone, used no doubt to put together this morning’s story. His personal dictionary, a thesaurus and a copy of Bernstein’s
The Careful Writer
were still stacked on one corner. There was a clay sculpture of a green-and-blue dog that his oldest daughter, by three minutes, had made and given to him on a Father’s Day several years ago. The family photo, showing the four of them, was lying face down, apparently knocked over during the hasty removal of his computer. Nick could feel eyes on him when he picked it up and, refusing to be emotional, he slid it into the bottom of the box and then piled the rest of his stuff in after. On his way out Nick avoided Joe Binder’s desk, even though he could see the back of the reporter’s head, bent low as if he were studying some newly installed hieroglyphics on his keyboard. Carrying the box, he took the back way to the research center and when Lori saw him she got up from her terminal and walked straight to him. Her eyes were red-rimmed when she stepped up to the counter.

“I’m sorry, Nick. Really, I tried to call you and—”

Nick reached out and touched her hand. “It’s OK, Lori. I shouldn’t have put you in a bad position. It’s all on me. Please. You’re the best,” he said and then hugged her to him, longer than he needed to, but not as long as he wanted to. “I’ll call you. I’d like to see you, you know, off campus.”

He smiled at the joke as he walked away, somewhat mystified that a moment that should have been sad had somehow left a lightness in his head.

Chapter 30

T
hey met under the shade of a bottlebrush tree, gathered at a picnic table that was set up behind the county’s fire and paramedics warehouse. It was a short walk for Canfield and Hargrave. Nick needed only to take the short drive from the newspaper he’d passed on earlier.

The meeting place was suggested by the detective after Nick called him on his cell. It was eighty degrees in the shade and the lieutenant in uniform was sweating twice as much as the two in plain clothes.

“It’s out of the pattern. It’s out of the sequence of logic. And you two are out of your minds,” Canfield was saying to both of them but looking directly at Hargrave, who, for the first time since Nick had laid eyes on him, was appearing unsure.

“What, you’re going to call this ex-con Walker and tell him some sniper might be targeting him because his good friend Mr. Mullins has an angel of death killing the subjects of his stories?

“And, I might add,” he said, shifting his focus onto Nick, “you didn’t write the story about the death of your own family, did you?”

Nick felt the anger starting up from that spot deep in his limbic system, the source in the very top of his spine where it always came from and where he so infrequently got it to stop before it came tumbling out of his mouth. This time he held it.

“Why don’t you tell him yourself, Mullins?” Canfield continued, unaware of Nick’s struggle. “You tell this Walker asshole he’s in danger.”

“I can’t,” Nick said. “I’m not allowed to have any contact with the guy.”

“Yeah, no shit. We’ve got that in your file too. Stalking this guy, Christ. Why even bring it up? If you’re so convinced this sniper is going to take Walker out, let him,” Canfield said. “I would.”

Nick could take the fact that the lieutenant would have pulled a copy of the dossier they undoubtedly put together on him when they invited him into this mess. But the suggestion of letting Walker be shot down in the street was one that made all three of them shift their eyes and go quiet. Nick had spun that scenario in his head a thousand times. He even thought of doing it himself but dismissed the notion by thinking of Carly having to come on visiting days at the prison. He’d done jail-house interviews himself and had seen children, dressed in their Sunday best, standing fidgety and unsure while their fathers, dressed in blue prison garb, tried to coax them into a smile. Could you trade retribution for that?

Canfield finally shifted his weight, stood up. The heat had caused dark semicircles to form under the arms of his uniform shirt.

“Mo, I can’t believe you’re going for this,” he finally said to Hargrave, using a shortened form of the detective’s first name that had not been used in Nick’s presence before.

Hargrave shook his head. “Hard to judge this shooter, Lieutenant, I think we can all agree on that,” he said, his voice flat and deliberately lacking in emotion. “The fact that he contacted Mullins gives a hell of a lot of credence to the theory that he’s picking victims from Mullins’s stories. That leads into the logic that he’s read Mullins’s work and has some kind of connection to him and would know about the accident that killed his family. So I’m not convinced it’s that far of a jump to figure that the statement Redman made to Mullins—‘One more. You’re owed’—could mean he’s going to take out this Walker character.”

Nick remained silent. He couldn’t have put it any better.

“I’m sorry, guys. I just can’t go for it. I’ve already got deputies all over this OAS meeting and the Secretary of State coming to town and now some goddamn public relations thing they’re going to do. You want to tell this guy Walker what you’re thinking, go ahead, Mo. But I can’t authorize some kind of protective custody or some damn sniper watch on a theory. You want to make it part of your investigation, go to it.”

Canfield started to leave when Hargrave stopped him. “Sir, how about our man Fitzgerald? Did he show any interest in the story Mullins did about the secretary?”

Nick was looking at the tabletop when he heard the question. His head snapped up like he had been yanked by the hair.

“What the hell are you … What story?” he said, staring stupidly at Hargrave.

The detective pulled a folded sheet of paper from his back pocket and handed it to Nick. “Your research person faxed this after you left,” he said. “Remember you asked them to send you anything political you’d done that mentioned the Secretary of State?”

Nick unfolded the sheet and read the headline:

LOCAL GUARDSMAN KILLED IN IRAQ

REMEMBERED BY FAMILY, FRIENDS

Someone had highlighted certain lines in the story, including a quote by the dead boy’s father blaming the Secretary of State for keeping his son overseas beyond his assigned date to come home.

“I’ve kept Fitzgerald in the loop on your investigation all along,” Canfield said to Hargrave. “I’m not sure how seriously he’s taking this connection between Mullins and the sniper, but he did seem interested in talking to Redman if we ever find him. But that mention of the secretary carried a lot more weight than any mention of this Walker character.” He nodded at the clipping in Nick’s hands. “I got the feeling that Fitzgerald was going to do his job protecting the secretary, but wasting manpower on Walker was not his inclination.”

Hargrave remained sitting on the edge of the picnic table until Canfield disappeared around the corner of the building.

“Not his inclination,” he said in a mocking voice just loud enough for Nick to hear.

“What?” Nick said, just finishing the story and flipping the paper to see if it continued on the backside.

“Nothing,” Hargrave said and then pointed at the clipping. “What do you think?”

“Hell, I don’t even remember that quote,” he said, tapping the backs of his fingers on the sheet of paper. “I remember doing this story on the National Guard kid, but not that quote about the secretary. I mean, that’s kind of reaching. Unless Redman somehow knew the guy or his parents.”

The story had been written shortly after Nick had returned to work. At the time he was doing both the cop shift and some home-front stories about area soldiers who were shipped out to Iraq. Some of those stories were obituaries, like the one in his hand.

By Nick Mullins, Staff Writer

South Florida friends and family of Corporal Randy Williams gathered at his parents’ home Friday to remember a young man “who never walked away from a pal and always covered your back,” when he grew up here in Fort Lauderdale.

Williams, 28, was killed in Iraq earlier this week during a routine patrol according to the Defense Department. He had been serving with a National Guard unit based in Homestead and was sent to the Gulf more than a year ago. He had been scheduled to return home in January but a change in policy in which guardsmen were to serve only one year of active duty was altered.

“If the Secretary of State had honored her promise, my boy would be back here now, alive and safe with us. He did his job,” said Williams’s father, Vern.

Vern Williams later said he was referring to a speech made last week by the secretary that defended the military’s controversial ruling.

“The interpretation of the contract for guardsmen is that deployments are to mean twelve months, boots on the ground, in the service of the country and do not include the months of stateside preparations and training they spent away from their homes and stateside jobs,” the secretary said at the time. “We hope this clears up any confusion and we regret if those families of the soldiers protecting our nation misinterpreted that commitment.”

The secretary’s words did not mollify the Williams family.

“That’s not what our son’s commanders told us before he shipped out. They said he’d be home three months ago. If you make a promise to these boys and then ship them off to risk their lives, you should honor that promise,” said Vern Williams.

Williams was a highly regarded member of his unit and was guarding the rear flank of his patrol in Iraq when he was killed by a single gunshot fired by an insurgent sniper.

“We still have not taken down his stuff in the barracks,” wrote Josh Murray, a fellow unit member from Coconut Creek in an e-mail sent to the
Daily News
yesterday. “He was a special guy. Always watchin’ out for us.”

The story went on, quoting friends and other members of Williams’s Guard unit praising the kid’s intensity and loyalty both at home and in Iraq. But Hargrave had circled the paragraphs that held the secretary’s name.

“And Canfield showed this to the Secret Service?” Nick said, working it in his head.

“You heard the man,” Hargrave said.

“Do we have any connection between Redman and this guy Williams?”

“Checking. But they weren’t with the same Guard unit, nor did their units work together over there as far as anyone can find,” Hargrave said. “But then it hasn’t been easy to nail down exactly what Redman was doing over there. The information officer with the Florida National Guard will only tell us that he was with a special operations group that was farmed out across the country. No specifics.”

“So what? You’re thinking Redman reads this piece by me and gets juiced up about avenging this kid’s death by assassinating the secretary who justified keeping him over there?” Nick said, to himself as much as to Hargrave.

“Hell if I know,” the detective said. “I showed it to Canfield, just like that tight-ass Fitzgerald asked.”

Nick could feel the sun cooking the back of his neck. He folded the story and unconsciously slipped it into his back pocket. Hargrave noticed and extended his hand and flexed his fingers in a give-it-back signal. Nick shrugged his shoulders and returned the paper.

“So what do we do now?”

“We?” Hargrave looked up. “We?”

It was hard for Nick to look wounded; he’d made himself an expert at not looking wounded. “What, you’re going to sit back and just wait for the next victim to drop?”

“No,” Hargrave said. “I’m going to get a return call from the P.D. up in Birmingham on this Kerner shooting and keep all possibilities open.”

He gave a nod in the direction of Canfield’s departure.

“That’s what he was saying, between the management-speak. That goes with his job, not mine.”

The detective flicked a furry red blossom, which did indeed look like a bottlebrush, off the table with one finger and then stood.

“Speaking of jobs, Mullins. I see from the front page this morning that someone else has taken over your story.”

You can tell a cop either accepts you or despises you by the tone he uses when he takes a verbal shot.

Nick grinned at the statement and answered with an edge of bravado. “No way, Mo. Nobody else has my story. Because I’m the only one who has the true one. This is no marauding killer,” he said, thinking of the lead paragraph on Joe Binder’s front-page piece. “This guy’s got it all planned out.”