Karma Patrol (12 page)

The same crosswalk the car had sped through.

Luke ducked out from behind the hot dog cart, his mind racing as he hurried to keep pace with Jade. There was no way she would have been able to see that car coming when she’d first backtracked to wait at the corner; it had been traveling too fast. She’d obviously known that the woman was going to walk through the same crosswalk the car would barrel through. She’d waited at the corner in order to ask her for the time even though she had a watch and a cell phone of her own, and in doing so she’d delayed the woman just long enough that she wasn’t standing
in the crosswalk when the car sped through it.

Jade Bailey had just saved that woman’s life. The question was,
how
had she done it?

“We’re stumped.”

“We aren’t stumped,” Kalindi sighed, giving Aaron an exasperated look. “What, our resident pessimist takes the morning off and you turn into the voice of doom in his place?”

Aaron gestured to the stack of papers on his desk. “We have two shootings that we know are connected, but we don’t have any idea how or why. We have seven victims who we think might somehow be connected, but even though five of them are politicians, there’s no evidence that any of them ever even met each other. We’ve turned up nothing on canvass of both crime scenes: no witnesses, no physical evidence, and no suspects. To top it all off, we aren’t even officially working this case anymore because the FBI is calling it domestic terrorism. Explain to me how we aren’t stumped.”

“Let’s run through everything we do have and see if there’s something obvious we’re missing,” she proposed, and he shrugged.

“We know the ballistics,” he offered, holding up the report. “He’s shooting 7.62mm NATO rounds. Does that tell us anything we can use?”

“Nah. It’s a standard caliber for a sniper rifle,” Kalindi replied. “Militaries all over the world have been using those bullets since the sixties.”

“So maybe this guy is military?”

It was her turn to shrug. “He could be. Plenty of military snipers learn the trade using those rounds, but they aren’t exclusive to the military. You can pick up a box at your local gun store for about twenty bucks.”

“God bless America,” he replied, his tone thick with irony.

She gave him an amused look. “Says the well-armed male cop who’s never lived in a country where he didn’t have the freedom to defend himself,” she replied dryly. “Was Ballistics able to tell us anything about the gun?”

He shook his head. “It’s not in the system. If we find a gun and bring it to them, they can tell us if it’s the right one, but outside of that there’s nothing else they can do.”

“The tech unit used that computer program of theirs to backtrack along the lines of fire and find the vantage points for both shootings. Their best guess is that the shooter was on the roof of both buildings while he was doing the shooting, but there was no physical evidence left at either site. Not even shell casings.”

“If he goes to the trouble to pick up his brass, he’s a pro,” Aaron concluded. “At the very least, he’s no amateur.”

“We already knew that, though. At the first crime scene, there were a couple of surveillance cameras in the neighborhood, but I wasn’t surprised that we didn’t manage to catch him on tape. The second shooting was right down the street from the Port Authority bus terminal, which has about a million cameras, and we still don’t have any helpful footage. He knew to avoid the cameras.”

“Tech went over all of the tapes?”

She nodded. “Looking for any unusual reactions or people behaving strangely. They’re still scanning through the last of the footage, and I’m going to check back in with them later, but so far the only thing that stands out is Jade Bailey running into that hotel before the shooting started, and we’ve already tossed that as a lead. They haven’t found any suspicious characters.”

“How about someone carrying a big silver briefcase that screams ‘there’s a sniper rifle in here?’” he asked, half-serious, but Kalindi shook her head.

“Only in the movies, Aaron,” their resident weapons expert told him. “Most of these sniper rifles break down small enough to fit into a backpack or a gym bag, or even tucked into a guy’s belt beneath his coat. There are plenty of harmless-looking places to hide a gun like that. I thought he might’ve hidden it at the scene and planned to come back for it later, but the crime scene guys tore those buildings apart and found nothing.”

“What about a camera bag?” he said slowly.

“What?”

“You said the rifle would fit into a backpack. Would it fit into a camera bag?”

Kalindi frowned at the odd note in his voice but nodded her agreement.

“Sure, if the bag was big enough. What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking it might turn out that another one of Luke’s crazy theories actually holds water.”

Kalindi gave him a puzzled look and he nodded toward the interrogation room, where he and Luke had questioned Jade the day before.

“The photographer, Jade Bailey? She showed up at both crime scenes.”

“You don’t seriously think she’s involved, do you? She had that bag on her yesterday when Jackson brought her in for questioning. I’ll admit he’s been a little off his game since we caught this case, but if she’d been carrying a broken-down sniper rifle when he searched her, surely he would’ve found it.”

Aaron shrugged. “All I know is that he’s tailing her right now. If she’s involved, he’ll figure it out.”

Luke spent the rest of the morning following Jade through Midtown West, his sharp eyes finally catching on to what she was doing. She directed pedestrians as ably as any traffic officer, but on a far more subtle level. She delayed a businessman from entering a Starbucks for a few minutes, distracted a skinny hipster from his phone for as long as it took him to give her directions, and redirected a mother’s attention from the bustling surroundings of Times Square to the six-year-old who’d been about to fall into an open manhole. Everywhere she went, she changed the courses people were on, nudging them gently into new patterns of behavior. He saw multiple instances of her keeping people from getting hurt; the manhole and the speeding car were just the most obvious. There were other encounters where he couldn’t discern her purpose at all, but judging by how often people checked their watches or cell phones for her, asking for the time was one of her default excuses to interact with them.

He watched grimly as she disappeared into the Starbucks on Seventh Avenue between Fifty-Fifth and Fifty-Sixth. He was going to have to catch her alone, not in a coffee shop, because he didn’t want witnesses for the conversation they needed to have. She only stayed in the Starbucks for a few minutes, though; just long enough to order her drink and leave. Luke watched her from across the street as she exited the coffee shop and headed back down Fifty-Fifth Street toward the Hudson River. Toward her apartment building, he realized, and hurried to keep pace with her. His hunch turned out to be correct. She made it to Tenth Avenue and then turned back toward Fifty-Fourth Street, headed for her apartment.

Jade made it as far as the front door of her building before he caught her, his hand on her shoulder. She didn’t react defensively, which surprised him a little given how sharply she’d reacted to every threat she’d spotted out on the street today. She actually turned around with a smile on her face, although the smile disappeared when she realized whose hand was on her shoulder.

“Detective Jackson.” She managed to dredge up a pale imitation of her original smile. “What a surprise.”

“We need to have a conversation.”

“Charming. Would you like me to join you for another delightful afternoon in the interrogation room?” she asked, and he shook his head.

“Your apartment. Now.”

“Why, Detective, how forward.”

She didn’t argue with him, which she could have tried to do. She would have succeeded, too; he didn’t have any hard evidence against her, and the circumstantial evidence he did have would earn him nothing but disbelieving laughter from any assistant district attorney in the city. He’d watched Jade save a pedestrian from being hit by a speeding car and a child from falling into a manhole. His suspicions about how she’d known those things were going to happen would get him mocked by his colleagues and sent for a psychiatric evaluation by his boss. The only chance he had was to convince Jade to tell him the truth of her own free will.

He escorted her upstairs in silence, but he couldn’t help the snort of laughter that escaped him at the sight of her apartment. Either her decorator had a sense of humor or Jade had atrocious taste. The walls were decorated with actual dresses on clothes hangers, hung on nails as though they were paintings, and the dresses themselves were patterned with flowers or nautical themes in an array of bright colors that threatened to give him a headache just from looking at them. She had apparently eschewed traditional lighting, and the ceiling was instead covered with what had to be at least a hundred strands of clear icicle lights that dripped down in what he had to admit would be a cool effect if she’d built it as a Christmas display. As an everyday lighting scheme, it was bizarre.

“Interesting place,” he informed her, and she smiled brightly.

“Thank you,” she said, as though she’d taken it as a compliment. “It doesn’t have much closet space, but that lets me decorate with my favorite clothes, so it’s a win-win situation. Can I offer you a drink?”

She was still holding her Starbucks cup, but she’d made that offer from in front of the small collection of wine bottles on the kitchen counter, and it was clear she wasn’t talking about coffee.

“No,” he replied flatly, gesturing to the couch. “Have a seat.”

It was a small studio apartment, and the only place to sit other than the couch was the bed. He was
not
going to try to conduct this particular interrogation while sitting on a piece of furniture that inspired all sorts of inappropriate thoughts in him, so he sat down awkwardly beside her on the couch, cursing himself for not being able to get the image of Jade in that bed out of his mind. She was a suspect, not a potential hookup.

She waited patiently next to him on the couch, her elbow propped up on the back of the seat and her chin leaning against her hand as she watched him. He felt like she was laughing at him; even though her expression was serious, her eyes sparkled with good humor.

“What?” he asked finally, and she let out a short laugh.

“What?” she repeated, sounding incredulous. “I’m not the one who ambushed you at the door to your building and demanded to come up to your apartment to have some sort of cryptic conversation. I realize you aren’t big on interpersonal communication, but if you want to discuss something, you’re going to have to bring it up yourself.”

He sighed, glancing around the room, and his gaze caught on the bookshelf against the far wall. Jade Bailey might have been a looker, but she was also a reader, and he grudgingly gave her points for a Shakespeare collection that rivaled his own. Next to the set of leather-bound books was a globe, turned to show North America, and there was a bright pink arrow painted on its surface to indicate some place in the southeastern United States.

“What’s the arrow pointing to?” he asked, gesturing to the globe, and she raised her eyebrows at him.

“I’m from South Carolina, which I’m sure you learned in your extensive background check on me after our chat yesterday. The arrow is pointing to my hometown. Did you come up here to talk about my home decor?”

He sighed again. She was impossible, he decided, conveniently forgetting that he’d been ten times more unpleasant to her during every interaction they’d ever had than she was being to him right now.

“I came up here to talk to you about the things I saw you doing today,” he informed her, and she gave him a baffled look.

“The things you saw me doing? Were you following me, Detective?”

“All morning,” he confirmed. “You had a hand in several interesting sequences of events. I’d like an explanation for those, actually.”

“I’m a private citizen and it’s a free country. I don’t owe you an explanation for anything.”