Greed: A Detective John Lynch Thriller (3 page)

“Anybody else?” Lynch asked.

“One other guy came right toward the end of the game. He was different.”

“Different how?”

She made a thinking face. “I dunno. Rougher I guess? He was real tan, which you don’t see that much around here this time of year. This wasn’t a just-back-from-vacation tan, more like, you know, weathered? And he wasn’t in the usual clothes. It was mostly suits with Mr Stein. This guy was dressed casual, but not like Banana Republic, you know? You see these guys sometimes in the cargo pants and safari shirts, and it’s like Halloween – like they’re in a costume? This guy was like whoever it is they’re trying to dress up to be.”

“You said tan, so a white guy. He tall, short?”

“Not real tall, maybe five foot nine. Not big. Pretty broad shoulders I guess, but lean. I mean you look at some guys and you can just tell. This guy, he was in shape. He just looked hard. Gray hair – not like old-man gray, but like Anderson Cooper gray? Hair was pretty short, not a fancy cut.”

“You hear a name?”

“No, which is a little strange. Mr Stein is always introducing everybody. You know, like ‘Ashley, this is my friend so-and-so. We go way back. Take good care of him.’ I’d seen this guy go in, so I stopped to see if they need anything, and Mr Stein was just ‘Thanks, Ashley; we’re good for now.’”

“Like he wanted some privacy, maybe?” Lynch asked.

She nodded, like she hadn’t thought of that. “Yeah, exactly like that.” A look on her face like there was more.

“Something else?” Lynch asked.

“Just this other guy? I could swear I’ve seen him before. At the same time, I’m positive I’ve never met him. That make any sense?”

“Seen him here, you mean?”

“That’s the weird part. I’m real good with faces, and I know I’ve never met him. But his face keeps nagging at me.”

“OK. Something comes to you, let me know. He was the last guest?”

She nodded. “That’s when I went back in to check with Mr Stein, see if he would need anything else. He said he was fine. That was the last time I talked with him.”

“He seem OK then, distracted or anything?”

“Seemed the same as usual.”

“And you never heard anything – shouting, gunshots, anything unusual?”

“No.”

“See anybody up here who didn’t belong?”

“You get a blowout like that, toward the end of the game, you got people leaving, trying to beat the traffic. You got the food service guys and janitorial service guys trying to get a jump on breaking things down – there were a lot of people around. Nobody stuck out.”

“The mystery guest, you see him after he left the box?”

“I saw him get on the elevator. I didn’t see him after that.”

“OK, Ashley. Thanks. If I need anything else, I’ll be in touch.”

 

Eight blocks west of the United Center, Membe Saturday shivered in the night air, trying to understand why the stars had moved. It had been only eight days since he’d arrived at the shelter run by the nuns he had met in Sierra Leone. His wife and sons had been killed by Taylor’s men during the war, and he had been forced to work at the mines near Kenema – until a stone went missing, and the guards lined up Saturday and the five other men who had been working near him, and cut off their right hands with an ax. Since then, he had begged and stolen and wasted away. Finally, he had gone to the hospital the nuns ran, thinking he could die there – everyone died there. But one of the sisters told him they would take him to a new life in America.

Saturday was beginning to think it had been a bad idea. It was too cold here, colder than Saturday had ever been. And the stars were not where they belonged. Saturday had never listened as a boy when his father would try to tell him what the stars meant, but now he wished he had. Saturday had a bad feeling all the time, and he was sure that these misplaced stars held a message for him.

Then he looked up past the iron fence that ran across the front of the property by the cement path in front of the street, and he saw a man he remembered from Kenema. He knew what the message from the stars was, and that he had learned it too late.

Six months earlier, he had been begging in the streets when this man walked into the house of the courier who worked for the Arabs who sold the diamonds. He had marched the courier and his wife and his two small children – a boy, maybe four, and a girl who could not yet walk – out into the street. The man made them all kneel there, except for the girl, who started to crawl away. The man shot the girl first, and then the boy, and then the woman. All in the head. And then he shot the man. First in both knees, then in both arms, and then in the stomach. He left the man to die slowly in the street with his dead family around him.

Now, the same man was standing on the cement path in front of the house in this strange city under these strange stars, and Saturday knew the man must have come for him. He could not think why, but why else would this man from Africa be here, with Saturday? The man had not yet seen Saturday in the darkness, but Saturday said, “Wetin mek? Wetin mek?”
Why? Why
? in Krio. He did not even know he had said it until he heard his own voice on the air. And then the man turned and pulled a pistol from inside his coat, and he shot Saturday.

 

Lynch was halfway through the people the uniforms had penned up in the next couple of suites. The rich and powerful and their friends, most of them not taking kindly to being detained. Nothing useful from any of them, most of them so self-absorbed that they probably never noticed anything that wasn’t going in or out of their own pockets.

McCord stepped out of the bathroom while the uniform went to fetch the next asshole. “You want the quick and dirty?”

“Sure,” said Lynch. “What’ve you got?”

“Three entrance wounds, small caliber, probably a .22. No exit wounds, so the slugs bounced around inside the skull like lotto balls, figured to puree the brain pretty good. Mob likes to do that, but it’s been on every
CSI
episode since the dawn of time, so it’s not like it’s a secret. No sign the body’s been moved. Perp made the victim kneel by the toilet and put his head down on the floor, then popped him. Evidence points to pretty much a contact wound, but we got less singeing in the hair than usual, which means something trapped some of the gas, so you’re probably looking at a suppressor. We’ll see what’s left of the slugs when we get him in to the shop, but they’ll be a mess.”

“Suppressors usually don’t work that good,” said Lynch. “Not to where you wouldn’t hear something in the next box.”

McCord shrugged. “With a .22, you can silence it up pretty good, especially if you load shorts. For this kind of work, you’d want shorts. Just enough to punch through the skull, not enough to punch back out again. Game going on, you’d have a fair amount of background noise here. I could see it.”

“Three shots? That over the top at all?”

Another shrug from McCord. “With a .22, you can put a lot of holes in somebody and leave ’em breathing. Better safe than sorry, I guess. What’s a .22 short cost you? A dime, maybe? Not like a little insurance is gonna break the bank.”

“So a pro. You got anything else?”

“Got a shitload of prints in there,” said McCord. “Some from the victim; mess of others. Got at least ten different sets in the can so far, who knows how many out here in the suite. It’ll take a while to sort that out. Have to get prints from whatever guests we can track down, from the staff. Gonna be a hairball.”

“Plus, if we got a pro who can get in and out of here without being seen, has a .22 with a suppressor that actually works, then he’s probably not leaving prints anyway.”

“Probably not,” said McCord. “But we’ll run it out. One other thing that’s a little weird. Stein’s got some kind of dirt rubbed into the right leg of his pants. His suit costs more than my car, so you gotta figure he keeps it clean. Dirt looks fresh. We’ll see what that’s about, just in case. Listen, I’m gonna have to let the techs wrap up here. Somebody popped some guy a couple of blocks west up Madison. Drive-by or something. I’m not gonna get any sleep tonight. You either, from the looks of it.”

“Job security, McCord.”

“Damn straight,” said McCord. “World ain’t ever gonna run out of evil.”

 

CHAPTER 3

 

Two days earlier, Dr Mark Heinz rode his horse on his New Mexico ranch, guiding it into the narrow arroyo that led from the higher country down toward the stables next to his home. He had purchased the land five years ago, built his dream house. Every morning, he rode the palomino for an hour, enjoying the early morning, the solitude, the views.

Time to think. He had always been a man of thought.

Today, he thought about whether his conscience should bother him. Well, not his conscience, he supposed. He’d realized long ago that he didn’t have one of those. Not didn’t
have
, really. Didn’t
need
. He was a creature of pure intellect and understood that one shouldn’t base ethical reasoning on feelings. One considered the facts of each situation, the causes and effects of each potential course of action, and one acted accordingly. Right or wrong should be the product of thought, not emotion. On the current matter, his thoughts were this:

Yes, the devices he had sold could, and in all likelihood would, result in great harm. And yes, selling those devices, even for the considerable sum he had received, would, by most standard definitions, be considered evil.

But he had invested the early part of his career in defining exactly this evil. In warning against its dangers. And he had been ignored.

And yes, those to whom he had sold the devices were agents of an anachronistic pox on the peace and order of the human society. They had repeatedly demonstrated their implacable intent to impose their horrid, backward barbarism on the rest of the world, to plunge mankind back into superstitious medieval suffering. And how had the world responded to this virulent threat? How had his own country responded? With half measures and the weak will of a society that elevated tolerance and political correctness to the level of policy.

So Heinz had acted for them. With his devices, these barbarians could finally commit an act of such magnitude and horror that the civilized world would have no choice but to respond decisively, in similar magnitude, as it should have long ago. The morally insane leaders who thought it God’s will that they infect the world with their inane philosophies would die, and those few adherents who remained would be so devastated that they would hide and quake in fear for generations.

In the end, Heinz’s act, one that those with no moral courage would consider evil, would preserve a millennium of human progress at the cost of a fraction of the number of human lives that its enemies would take in any event. By that calculus, by virtue of reason, he was not evil. He was a hero, if an anonymous one. And a rich one. Now a very rich one. That he would also profit from saving mankind, no thinking man would call that fault.

The horse shied, startled by something. Heinz sensed motion to his left, turned and saw just a blur of movement, the sense of a man, before he felt the blow to his forehead. Then he was on his back, on the ground. He had no memory of falling, and he was in no real pain, but he felt blood pouring from just under his hairline, down his face, down the sides of his head.

He heard footsteps and looked up.

It was the man who had paid him for the devices the day before. Heinz tried to rise, to turn, but his limbs were sluggish. Was the man after the money? He must know he would never get the money back with Heinz dead, not without the account numbers and the access codes. To ensure the secrecy of his mission? Surely this man and his masters must understand that Heinz could never reveal his actions. He would be jailed as a traitor, enshrined in the pantheon of evil with the likes of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. Heinz was suddenly furious. To kill him? To still his facile mind? This act served no purposed, followed no logic.

But then he realized the flaw in his own argument. He was dealing with ignorant men who were driven not by reason but by fear. As they lived in fear of their own god, they also ruled by fear, acted from fear and sought to kill anything that made them afraid. Now they were afraid of him.

The man grabbed Heinz by the left shoulder and rolled him onto his stomach, and then pulled his head up by the collar of his jacket. Looking down, Heinz could see a large rock, perhaps a foot wide, with a sharp ridge running along its length. Heinz tried to resist, but could only weakly flail his arms. The man dragged Heinz forward positioned his head over the rock and drove it down onto the sharp, jagged edge.

Heinz didn’t think anything after that.

 

CHAPTER 4

 

Shamus Fenn sat in his suite at the Peninsula Hotel off Michigan Avenue and slammed another scotch. Just not working anymore; might as well be water. It had started out as a good night. He was in Chicago shooting the next film, Lakers in town; producers got him a courtside seat, so that was cool. And then he’d seen that fucker Hardin.

Goddamn Africa thing a few years back, Mooney and his charity shindig. Last place on earth Fenn had ever planned to go, fucking Darfur. But his publicist had kept riding his ass telling him this thing was sponging up all the press. Fenn was in the running for a couple big roles just then; last thing he needed was to be on the dark side of the moon all of a sudden, so he called Mooney up, said sure, he’d love to help out.

Then he ran into that fucker Hardin.

Leno and Letterman made him their steady punch for weeks after Darfur. The parts he was up for? Nothing. Then the producers on his next picture dropped him, everybody making all the right conciliatory noises, but Fenn knew what it smelled like when they started pushing you downhill. The part went to that Leo Harris punk, kid ten years younger than Fenn. Fucking Harris got an Oscar. Fenn’s goddamn Oscar.