20th Victim: (Women’s Murder Club 20) (Women's Murder Club) Read online

  “Tracchio gave me a direct order. He said if I didn’t have real names, bodies, facts, to get the hell off Moving Targets. I did what he said. I was with SWAT. I had plenty of shooting in real life. I quit the site and never went back.”

  It was more than I’d known ten minutes before, but I still had nothing actionable. Not yet. I thanked Bud and invited him to be part of our team.

  “Thanks, no, I’m going to the Bahamas tomorrow with Bev. Our nephew is getting married. So look, I left my contact information with Brenda.”

  I wished him a good flight, and after he was gone, I headed down the corridor to debrief Brady. A half hour later, keys in hand, I left the building focused on facts.

  Drug dealers had been killed. Mostly nickel-bag nobodies, except for the Barons, celebrities who’d bought massive inventory but hadn’t yet launched their drug business. Shooting them through the windows had been much harder than killing the others on the street. Were those executions extra points for a video sniper?

  Brady had agreed with me that it appeared to be a military operation, and Stempien, too, had said that he thought Moving Targets was heavy on military.

  Had the drug dealer hits been organized by the members of Moving Targets? Was Leonard Barkley one of those hitters?

  The answers were just out of reach.

  The lights were out. And I couldn’t see a thing.

  CHAPTER 49

  I WAS STARTLED awake by a shout or a shot or a dream—but I couldn’t remember a bit of it.

  My heart was hammering and my eyes were wide open. A hint of sunrise was backlighting the gray sky as I reached across Martha to better see the clock.

  Its luminescent hands pointed to half past five.

  That’s when it hit me.

  Claire was in the hospital and would be having surgery in a few hours. Going under the knife. Was she awake, too? I stared at the ceiling, finally clapping a pillow over my face, and when I woke up again, Martha was licking my ear and the sun was rising over the windowsill.

  I tousled Martha’s coat and put my feet on the floor.

  It was still too early to call Edmund, but I had things to do. I fed Martha, made coffee, and caught up on TV news while unloading the dishwasher. I peeked in on Julie, then showered, dressed, and checked my text messages while I took sweet Martha for a quick walk. Joe had written to let me know he was going to stay longer with Dave.

  Julie-Bug was still sleeping when we returned from our rounds, and I made up a wake-up song on the spot. My voice was a little rusty but not bad for an impromptu performance.

  “Bumblebees, bumblebees.

  Time to wake up the banana trees.

  Bzzzzz, bzzz, bzzzz.”

  Julie’s eyelids flew open, and she laughed at my singing, then told me that I was wrong.

  “Bees don’t wake up banana trees.”

  I challenged her on that point, saying, “Well then, who wakes them, smarty?”

  “Bees wake the flowers, Mommy.”

  “Okay. But rhyming counts.”

  She giggled, I kissed her head, and she gave in.

  “We both win, Mommy. I’m hungry.”

  I made oatmeal, and using a magic trick I’d swiped from the back of a cereal box when I was a kid, I pierced the banana skin with a needle near the stem. Using the needle as a little knife, I sliced the fruit crosswise every quarter of an inch from stem to stern, leaving the skin whole. The pinpricks were almost invisible, and I didn’t give anything away.

  I watched Julie peel the banana, and her look of disbelief and amazement as perfect banana slices fell onto her cereal.

  “Mommy. Look at this!”

  “Bumblebees did that,” I said, very pleased with myself.

  “Noooooo. Really?”

  The doorbell rang at eight on the nose, and Mrs. Rose came into the kitchen and, clapping her hands, said, “Children wait for school buses. But school buses don’t wait for children.”

  Julie ran to the doorway and I was right behind her. I gave her the pink-and-silver backpack and received kisses and hugs in return. And once the door was closed, the worry I’d been stifling crashed in on me.

  I called Edmund, got a wrong number, tried again.

  “Hang on, Lindsay. I’m outside the hospital looking for a quiet spot. Can you hear me?”

  “I can. How’s Claire? What’s happening?”

  There was a pause; maybe it lasted only a few seconds, but all of my attention was focused on that connection.

  “She’s changing the scope of the surgery, Linds.”

  “What? Why?”

  “She was brainstorming with the surgical team. That’s all she wrote. She’s not in her room right now.”

  I said, “I don’t think I’m getting this.”

  “The docs have been watching this little spot in her lung for years. I’ll bet she didn’t tell you that.”

  “No. She only just told me.”

  “So she’s saying, ‘Spot, spot, it’s just a spot,’ and even Dr. Terk thought so. She skipped her X-ray last year, and now it’s two spots, 100 percent cancer. Terk planned to take out the spot, but now that it’s two and visible, he’s gotta get it all.”

  “Edmund. It didn’t metastasize?”

  “Nobody said that. As far as I know, Dr. Claire had a change of heart about what kind of surgery, something she read or thought up or wanted to bounce off the surgeons. She sent me a text saying, I got this. Love you, then shut off her phone. I can’t reach her or her doctor. Nurse said she’s in radiology, then on to the operating theater. I’ll call you, Lindsay. As soon as I know what’s going on.”

  I said, “I’ll call you when I get to work.” That wasn’t a question.

  “Makes more sense for me to call you. I promise I will.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I hear you, Edmund. I’ll wait for your call.”

  CHAPTER 50

  I SNATCHED THE car keys from the coatrack in the foyer and was halfway out the door when my phone rang.

  I grabbed it. “Edmund?”

  “It’s Brady.”

  “Brady. I just spoke with Edmund Washburn.”

  “How’s Claire?”

  I condensed what Edmund had told me, and Brady made appropriate sounds and comments but asked no questions. I pictured him standing in Jacobi’s old office, impatiently staring out the window at the morning rush on Bryant, and I got it. Something was on his mind, and once I stopped talking, he was going to tell me.

  I took a breath.

  He said, “Are you on the way?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “There were three fatal shootings,” he said. “Two in Houston and another in San Antonio. The MO looks the same as the others. The victims are known drug dealers. All were shot at the same time, at eight thirty a.m., local time.”

  “So you’re saying the shootings are connected to the Baron murders?”

  “Could be. Or it’s a hell of a coincidence.”

  “What can you tell me?”

  “At eight thirty a shot was heard on Warm Springs Road in the residential Westbury neighborhood in Houston. Cops responded to the 911 call. Couple of minutes later Anonymous phoned the tip line, giving the address of one of the dead men and the location of the gun.”

  “He didn’t want to get involved.”

  “Right,” said Brady. “Tip was accurate. Houston PD recovered the weapon a half mile away from the victim, Vincent Morris, black male, fifty-three, unarmed. Shot through the temple while driving. Naturally, lost control of his late-model Mercedes and crashed into an empty van parked at the curb at McKnight Street and Dunlap Street. Morris was killed with one shot.”

  “You’re saying the victim was shot dead while driving and from a half mile away? Is that even possible?”

  Brady sighed. “Several bystanders saw the Mercedes plow into the parked van, but there were no witnesses to the shooting itself.”

  I asked, “Is the gun registered?”

  “Number is filed off. It’s
at their lab. That’s all I know.

  “What about the other two victims?”

  “Where’re you at, Boxer? People are piling up outside my office. Conklin has everything—photos, coordinates, contacts. See him soon’s you get here. You two should reach out to Houston. I’ll call San Antonio. See if we get some new puzzle pieces.”

  He hung up.

  My thoughts were bouncing like a handball inside my skull. My best friend was consulting in her own life-threatening disease, and possibly convincing the surgical team to improvise on the fly.

  And now there was a new direction in the sniper case. Three dead people in Texas, and at least one of them had been shot through a car window. I had to wonder if that long-shot marksman was our lone suspect, Leonard Barkley.

  If not, was the shooter a member of the same Moving Targets club? Or worse, had psycho copycats seized on a fresh new idea: real-life target practice on random subjects?

  I had many questions and one answer: anything was possible.

  Minutes after speaking with Brady, I was driving toward the Hall of Justice, cautioning myself to keep my scrambled mind on the road.

  CHAPTER 51

  BRENDA FOLLOWED ME into the war room, handed me a pile of messages, set up a coffee machine, and, pointing to a plastic-wrapped platter, told me, “I made those cookies from scratch. Peanut butter and chocolate chip.”

  “Awww. Thanks, Brenda.”

  “Anytime, Lindsay.”

  Cappy was taping up the new crime scene photos, and Conklin was on the phone, saying, “Got it. Thanks.”

  He turned to me and said, “Lindsay, open your laptop. You’ve got mail.”

  The email from Conklin had the pictures and names of yesterday’s shooting victims with appended details: age, marital status, occupation, police record, known associates. All had died where they’d been shot. ID on all had been recovered, as well as drugs on two of them.

  “Cindy hooked me up with the Houston PD,” Conklin told me, speaking of his beloved roommate, my pissed-off girlfriend Cindy Thomas. “She’s been on this since 6 a.m. You know, Linds, she sleeps with the police scanner next to the bed,” he said. “Brings it to work, which is where she is now. Don’t get between my girl and her Pulitzer.”

  I laughed and sighed at the same time.

  Conklin went on. “She says all three victims are known dealers. Victim number one was shot by a single bullet from a long distance.”

  “According to Brady’s contact, the shot was fired from a half mile away.”

  “Wow. Wow. Wow,” said Conklin. “A half mile away? That’s gotta be some kind of record.”

  Conklin got up, walked to the wall, and scrutinized the enlarged photo of the crash: Morris’s Mercedes having come to rest halfway through the rear compartment of the panel van.

  He moved a couple of feet to the next photo.

  “Victim number two is still unidentified, also shot in his car,” Conklin said. “The light had just changed, and the driver was heading south on San Pedro Avenue when he caught a few rounds to the left arm, chest, and head. Same time as the one in Houston, eight-thirty a.m.”

  I got up and took a good long look, trying to work out what had happened from this photo. One of the vehicles had the dead man in the driver’s seat. The other was the recipient of a rear-end collision that had turned the intersection into a four-way gridlock. The photo credit in the corner was from a Channel 7 Eye in the Sky chopper.

  “Reminds me of the so-called rehearsal murder at Taco King. That could have been personal,” I said.

  “Maybe this one, too,” said Cappy. He was taping up the last photo, victim number three, who’d been taken down in Houston. The photo showed a body spread-eagle on the sidewalk in front of a coffee shop.

  Cappy said, “This killing happened across town from the man who ran his car into the parked van. No way it was done by the same hitter. The victim has been ID’d as Linda Blatt.”

  “She was a cafeteria worker during the day, delivered dope after hours,” Conklin added. “Had a few dozen packets of crack in her bra.”

  My phone tootled. A text from Brady.

  Boxer, Houston’s Det. Sgt. Carl Kennedy waiting 4 yr call.

  I tapped in the number, broke through the gatekeepers with my authoritative mad-dog-cop-in-a-big-hurry voice.

  A man answered.

  “Hello, Sergeant Kennedy?”

  “Yes. Oh. Sergeant Boxer, good to finally make contact with you. I was with LVPD ten years back. Charlie Clapper and I were in Homicide together. We’re old friends.”

  We exchanged mutual admiration for the esteemed head of our crime lab, and then I had to get to it.

  “Kennedy, I’ve been on the case for a week now. I know a lot about the San Francisco victims, Paul and Ramona Baron in particular. But we’re not getting traction on their shooter, who looks to be a sniper with incredible skill. Our suspect has gone into hiding. We have a lead of sorts.”

  I told Kennedy about Moving Targets, that our suspect, Leonard Barkley, was a member. And I told him that our FBI tech had found the site in a hidden pocket on Tor Browser.

  “Getting access to Moving Targets has proven impossible so far, but we’re still working on it. As it turns out, a former cop on our force once had access and played target games. But it appeared to him that the website might hold competitions for kills in real life.”

  “Is that right? Here’s some news for you, Boxer,” Kennedy told me. “A small business called Moving Targets has a brick-and-mortar hole-in-the-wall in the strip mall on North Shepherd Drive in Houston.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “It’s next door to an auto parts store. I’ve passed it a hundred times. Always has a ‘No Walk-Ins’ sign on the locked door. I peeked in through the glass once and saw a dark room with a half dozen folks on computers. I checked tax records to see the name of the company because it looked so sketchy. The name is Moving Targets, but what is it? The company description said ‘Computer repair. By appointment only,’ and they didn’t list a number.

  “My caseload heated up,” Kennedy continued, “and I lost interest in this small-time little computer store. Now I’ll do more research. Maybe I’ll pay Moving Targets a visit.”

  “That would be great, Kennedy.”

  We signed off, and I summed up the whole story for Cappy, Chi, and Conklin. Brenda brought in a fresh pot of coffee, and I got a text from Edmund.

  For the first time since my lovely second honeymoon less than two weeks ago, I felt good.

  CHAPTER 52

  SEVERAL TWO-STORY, brick-and-glass medical buildings stood within a mile of Saint John’s Hospital in Napa.

  Joe was inside one of those buildings, sitting in a small chair in an L-shaped waiting room shared by a pediatrician and Dr. Alexander Murray, cardiac surgeon, the man Dave Channing believed had murdered his father.

  The pediatric side of the room was awash in primary colors. There was a bulletin board centered on the largest wall, pinned with dozens of children’s crayon drawings, a circus rug on the floor, a pile of blocks, and two little boys playing with toy cars, revving them up: “Vrooooom, vroooom.”

  Joe waited in the cardio side of the room. There was no decor to speak of, just a rack of magazines and pharmaceutical company brochures and some NO SMOKING signs on the off-white walls.

  Between the two waiting areas was a shared nurse’s station behind sliding glass windows.

  Joe flipped through a month-old Newsweek without reading it. He felt like some kind of fraud, a sometime G-man, now a private eye without a license, helping out a friend he hardly knew in a twisted endeavor he no longer believed in.

  He’d done the spadework, read the medical examiners’ reports, met with family members who’d lost a loved one in the previous year to an unexpected heart attack while at Saint John’s in the care of Dr. Alexander Murray.

  With the exception of Archer, the writer whose now-deceased thirtysomething fiancée had been a long-distance r
unner, none of the family members had hinted that Dr. Murray was to blame for the death of their loved one. And so Joe had stirred up grieving people with nothing to support a suspicious cause of death.

  And why had he done this? Because Dave Channing had become more restless and paranoid as the visit had gone on, and Joe had promised that he would do his best to clear it up: either validate or debunk his concerns.

  Before leaving the Channing Winery this morning, he’d gotten Dave to agree that whether he accepted Joe’s conclusions or not, Joe was going home that night.

  Now he was wondering if he was wronging his friend by setting an arbitrary deadline. Good investigators didn’t do that.

  Joe and Lindsay had spoken on the phone an hour ago as she drove to work. Her voice had been strained as she told him about Claire and how helpless she felt. He pictured Lindsay’s face, taut with fear and exhaustion.

  He had done his best to comfort her, but Lindsay had been too agitated to hear more than “I’ll be home tonight.”

  “God. That would be great,” she said. “Promise me.”

  “I promise to try like crazy.”

  Joe tossed the magazine on the chair beside him and hoped that soon he could resolve the complicated feelings of disloyalty and suspicion by determining one of two possible truths, that either Dave was losing his mental grip—or that Dr. Murray had caused Ray Channing’s death.

  CHAPTER 53

  A FIFTYISH NURSE with graying cinnamon-colored hair, wearing green scrubs, paused in the entrance to the waiting room.

  “Mr. Molinari, if you’ll come with me, the doctor will be with you shortly.”

  Joe followed her down a hall to a small office and took the offered seat across from the desk. Murray’s office was a plain brown study with a tidy desk opposite a couple of bookcases. There was a plastic model of a heart that could be broken down into valves, ventricles, and arteries on the desk. Between the bookcases was an oil painting of vineyards at sunset. Joe recognized the style. Nancy Channing had painted that.