The 20th Victim Read online

  “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-bi
g-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. Daniel Perkins, 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. Daniel Perkins.

  With the exception of Archer, the writer whose now-deceased thirtysomething fiancée had been a long-distance runner, none of the family members had hinted that Dr. Perkins 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. Perkins 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. Perkins’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.

  “I’m Carolee Atkins,” said the nurse. “We spoke on the phone yesterday.”

  Joe said, “I remember. Thanks for fitting me in.”

  “Would you like me to weigh you and take your blood pressure just for the hell of it?”

  Joe grinned and said, “No, thanks. I’m up-to-date. Six one, 178, 127 over 70.”

  Atkins smiled and said, “Very good, Mr. Molinari. How’s Dave doing?”

  Joe made the universal hand motion for so-so and added, “He doesn’t understand why his father went from alive and well to suddenly dead.”

  Atkins said, “That happens with thoracic aortic aneurysms, but that’s my unofficial opinion. Ray has been a patient and friend of Dr. Perkins’s for over five years. I guess I can tell you that the doctor is heartbroken. He considers Dave a friend, too. Hold on. I’ll see how much longer he’ll be.”

  Joe said, “Wait. Explain ‘heartbroken.’”

  The nurse hesitated, then stepped back into the office.

  “Obviously, Dr. Perkins cared about Ray Channing very much, and he cares about Dave, too. Dave is taking his grief out on Dr. Perkins, which is so unfair and maybe a little bit unbelievable.”

  “Really?”

  “See for yourself. I don’t know exactly what salt of the earth means, but I’m pretty sure Dr. Perkins fits the definition. I’ll make sure he knows you’re here.”

  Five minutes later Dr. Perkins entered the room. He was a white-haired man in his sixties, about twenty pounds overweight, wearing metal-framed glasses and a bright-red tie under his lab coat.

  He smiled as he introduced himself and shook Joe’s hand. Then he said, “You look familiar. Do I know you?”

  Joe said, “You might have seen me on the news years ago. I was with Homeland Security during the Bush administration.”

  “Maybe that was it,” said Dr. Perkins. He went around his desk, sat down, felt his coat pocket for his glasses, then touched them on the bridge of his nose.

  “These things are so light, you can’t even feel them.” He smiled, then said, “You’re Dave Channing’s friend. I’ve gotten his letter giving me permission to discuss Ray’s condition up to and including his death.”

  “I’m trying to help Dave reconcile how his father seemed so healthy befo
re he died.”

  “I understand. I know you and Dave are very close. Ray showed me pictures of you two in your football uniforms. He talked about you like you were a second son.”

  “Ray came to all of our games. We always knew where he was sitting in the stands from his yelling and cheering.”

  “Back to the future—if you don’t mind my asking, in what capacity are you here today?”

  “Friend of the family. That’s all.”

  “Okay, Joe. I have a patient in fifteen minutes, so how can I help you?”

  Chapter 54

  Joe fixed Dr. Perkins with a hard Don’t dare lie to me stare and said, “Dave feels that something untoward happened to Ray.”

  “He’s made that pretty clear,” the doctor said. “He barged into the waiting room last week and accused me of murdering Ray. Murder. Me. In front of a roomful of people.”

  The doctor shook his head. “Maybe I should be asking you how you can help me. I don’t want to have him arrested. Kid got dealt a beautiful hand, then it all got taken away, and he blames himself for that. Then his mother dies. Now his father. I feel terrible for him. But if he can’t get a grip on himself, he has to get help.”

  “I have a couple of questions myself, Dr. Perkins. Dave gave me a look at Ray’s medical charts, and the ME’s report says that Ray died of complications from his thoracic aortic aneurysm. Is that your opinion?”

  “No doubt about it.”

  Perkins lined up his pens, straightened the plastic heart and the papers on his desk. He had a slight tremor in his hand.

  He went on, “Ray refused to believe that he wasn’t in perfect health. He was seventy-two with the arteries of a man ten years older. I would tell him, time for a prostate test. Colorectal. Calcium score. CMIT. He wouldn’t take statins. He stopped taking his blood pressure meds. When he came to the ER, he told admissions that he felt tired and a little weak. He said he’d been working hard, not sleeping. Mr. Molinari, those are symptoms of about fifty things. You know what I call it? He had an invincibility complex.”