Authors: Max Allan Collins
“Got it, sir.”
“And round up any media members that you
know
were back there and confiscate their shoes.”
“Their . . . shoes?”
“Shoes. If the path the killer took is through the woods, we have to eliminate all other footprints. That’s going to include any members of the media who were back there, and any officers that were there, too . . . at least, pre–blue booties.”
The young detective half smiled, nodded, and went over to a uniformed officer, and started delegating.
Sloan said, “Maybe this
is
his first homicide.”
“No,” Reeder said. “Like he said—just his first big one. He’s never had national media tromping around his crime scene before.”
When McCrosky returned, he said, “For the time being, if you don’t mind, Agent Sloan, I’ll be keeping
my
shoes on.”
“That’s fine,” Sloan said with a mild smile. “Let’s get started, son. Who found the body?”
“Mrs. Gutierrez. She wondered where her husband was, looked out the window, then ran to him. Called 911 from his cell. She was in her robe. Just been showering.”
“That’s why she didn’t hear the shot?”
“Apparently. Must’ve had her head under the spray.”
Sloan shared a glance with Reeder, then asked, “Who’s with her now?”
“Officer Johnson, first uniform on the scene. Been with her the whole time. He’s got a nice touch with folks who are in a bad place.”
Sloan nodded. “Always a good thing for a cop to have. You interview her yourself yet?”
McCrosky shook his head. “I knew someone with a higher pay grade than mine would show up soon. Pretty much, we just sat tight.”
“Well, that wasn’t such a bad thing to do, Detective McCrosky. Good job.”
The kid puffed up a little.
Sloan gave the detective a dismissive nod. “We’ll take it from here.”
The young detective went off to supervise his men while Sloan rounded up his team in the front yard to dispatch assignments. As they assembled in a tight semicircle, Sloan noticed Rogers staring daggers at him.
Shit. Maybe I should deal with this now . . .
He curled a finger at her, and they stepped off to one side.
She just looked at him. It was an ability Rogers shared with his ex-wife, Beth—waiting him out. Forcing the play on him.
“I can see you’re unhappy with me,” he said. “About yesterday.”
“Why would I be unhappy with you?”
“We don’t have time for this, Patti. You tell me.”
“All right. I will. You screwed up.”
“How exactly did I screw up?”
“You took Reeder along and not me. If I’d been on the scene, with my
recent
field experience? Brooks might still be alive, and we’d have two suspects to talk to.”
He let out a world-weary breath. “Look—if I did screw up, it’s my weight to carry. You won’t be the one in front of the shooting board—
I
will.”
But she didn’t seem the least bit satisfied by that.
So he admitted it: “Patti, I should have taken you with us.”
Her face softened some.
“I have a history with you,” he told her, “but I have a longer history with Peep. And in his defense, he did fine on the Brooks raid.”
Her chin crinkled. “If I’d been along, you wouldn’t have left me to guard an exit. We’d have checked those rooms out together, and—”
“And Brooks would have shot at you instead of me, maybe, and then what? He’d still be dead, right? Or maybe you would be.”
“Well, we can’t know that.”
“That’s right, Patti. We can’t. If I had it to do over, though, I’d take you instead. Okay? That enough?”
She nodded. It was.
“Now—if we’re friends again, could your big, bad boss ask you to please go inside and interview Mrs. Gutierrez? Can you do that?”
She smiled ever so faintly. “On one condition.”
“Oh, there’s a condition?”
“Never leave me out of the loop again. We cool?”
He laughed, once. “We’re cool. While you interview the wife, Peep and I’ll check the body while the rest of the team canvasses the neighbors.”
“Haven’t the local cops done that?”
“The young man in charge seems to have just held down the fort till we got here. Anyway, I want our people on it. We’ve interviewed more witnesses individually than all these locals put together.”
“I hear that,” she said.
Within a couple of minutes, the team had dispersed for the neighborhood canvass, while Detective McCrosky accompanied Rogers inside for the Mrs. Gutierrez interview.
Sloan felt a pang for the widow. She’d been taking a shower, such a mundane daily activity, unaware of the tragedy going on in the yard just outside her window. Things in this life could change fast, hard, and forever. Sloan knew that all too well.
In the expansive backyard, with Reeder nearby, Sloan approached the massive canvas curtain the deputies had erected to keep the press from prying. In front of it, lying on the ground, a sheet covering him, was Justice Gutierrez.
While plenty of blue-bootied deputies were in the yard, they kept their distance from the immediate crime scene, and a couple of them waited off to one side with the crew from the coroner’s office.
Sloan and Reeder stood over the body for only a second before the SAIC dropped to a crouch and drew back the sheet. Gutierrez lay on his back, a saucer-shaped hole in his abdomen, his T-shirt drenched with blood, already blackening, his eyes staring emptily into the sunny sky.
“Shotgun,” Reeder said. “Deer slug.”
“Oh yeah.”
“That entrance wound didn’t stretch the fabric—perfect circle. Looks like a cog bored through. What does that tell you?”
They were both experienced enough deer hunters to know what they were seeing. “Brenneke shotgun slug.”
“Bingo.”
“Nasty damn way to go,” Sloan sighed, dropping the sheet. He stood, his eyes tracing the line of the woods. “Impossible to get any sort of decent sniper setup with a rifle, I suppose. Trees are too thick.”
Reeder frowned. “Killer just strolled out of the woods and blasted him?”
“Seems like the obvious way in.”
Shaking his head, Reeder walked over past the tarp to get a better look into the forest beyond.
“Doesn’t make sense,” Reeder said.
“What doesn’t?”
“The whole damn thing,” Reeder said, frowning into the woods. “It’s . . . sloppy.”
“Seems to have gotten the job done.”
Reeder shook his head again. “No, this is wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“Where do these woods come out?”
Sloan considered that momentarily. “There’s an access road in Fort Marcy Park. That’s what the forest actually is. You could walk in from Bent Twig Road—that borders the park, too.”
“Something’s just not right.”
Sloan had to smirk. “You mean besides a murdered Supreme Court justice?”
“Two murdered Supreme Court justices, remember?”
“Yeah, yeah. Let’s stay focused on this one, Peep.”
“All right. The two access points into the woods are public—so why carry a shotgun from a vehicle, through the woods, and into the yard, when anyone might see you?”
“There’s no traffic in either place at that hour,” Sloan said. “Seems safe enough. And maybe it was known that the Justice went out running regularly in the morning. And there are bushes to crouch behind waiting for him to get home.”
“Okay. Let’s work from that premise. But why carry a shotgun when you could easily hide a pistol?”
Sloan shrugged. “Killer prefers shotguns. Might happen to be the only weapon the shooter owns.”
“Not when you’re assassinating your second Supreme Court justice in less than a week.”
Sloan raised a surrendering hand. “Okay. I see your point.”
“Good. Because this group, whoever they are, know what they’re doing.”
“Group?”
“Has to be,” Reeder said. “When this went down, Brooks was dead, Granger in custody. There’s more going on here than we know about. It’s a conspiracy.”
“We have at least three people involved,” Sloan granted. “So it’s a conspiracy by definition.”
“Right.” Reeder’s voice was as hushed as if he were in church. “They scouted Venter. They scouted Gutierrez. The shooter knew exactly where to be, when to be there. They made the public believe Venter was the victim of a robbery gone bad. The shotgun is a weird, sloppy choice. I mean, they didn’t use a shotgun in Dallas, did they?”
Sloan looked down at the bloody corpse. “Maybe they wanted a messy death for Gutierrez, to punish him, make him suffer. Gut shot like that, he didn’t die instantly.”
Reeder shook his head, then looked from the body to the woods and back again. “Gabe, it’s like that damn Verdict shooting all over again. At first, everybody got it wrong. Same thing here. I can
feel
it. We’re missing something.”
That good morning Gabe Sloan had been enjoying was less than a memory now, as he listened to his friend, not liking the sound of it one little bit.
“
The right to revolt has sources deep in our history.
”
William O. Douglas, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, 1939–1975, longest tenure of any Supreme Court Justice, 36 years, 209 days.
Section 5, Lot 7004-B-1, Grid W-36, Arlington National Cemetery.
TEN
While Sloan entered the big brick mansion to talk to Mrs. Gutierrez, Reeder stayed behind—he wanted to spend a little more time with the late Justice. Elsewhere in the yard, the Fairfax County crime scene team had started its search for clues while the coroner’s crew huddled nearby with a stretcher.
Reeder could not shake the nagging feeling that they were missing something. He squatted near the body, pulling back the sheet. Ignoring the late judge’s startled expression, he leaned in for a better look at the wound, slowly scanning the bloody shirt—no stippling on the material. Lack of powder burns meant the Justice had not been shot up close. If the assassin had come out of the woods to take Gutierrez by surprise, why had he or she shot from a distance and not crept up to do a point-blank job?
Bending near the wound, mere inches away, Reeder tried to determine the slug’s trajectory.
“
Hey
!
” somebody shouted. “What the hell are you doing there?”
A man in a Fairfax CSI windbreaker was heading his way—no meek scientist this, more like a Redskins linebacker, six three, muscular, shovel-faced, with a dark flattop and rage in his brown eyes.
“I’m with the task force,” Reeder said, rising.
“I don’t see an ID,” the CSI said, planting himself a few feet away.
Reeder suddenly realized he didn’t have an identifying necklace or even a badge to display.
“I’m a consultant,” Reeder said, and even to him it sounded lame.
“I’m
not
going to tell you
again
—”
“
He’s with us
!
” Patti Rogers called from behind them.
They both turned to her. Her FBI badge displayed around her neck, Rogers moved swiftly but carefully across the yard to them.
“He looks like a civilian,” the CSI said defensively.
“Take a closer look. That’s Joe Reeder, former Secret Service, consultant to the interagency task force on the murders of two Supreme Court justices. You might want to stay on his good side.”
Turning to Reeder, the CSI said, “Sorry, Mr. Reeder. I just don’t like seeing evidence contaminated.”
“I haven’t touched the body,” Reeder assured him, Rogers falling in at his side. “And I don’t want anything contaminated any more than you do. You in charge out here?”
“Yeah. Grogan, Darrell Grogan. Crime scene team supervisor.”
“Then you’re just the man I need,” Reeder said as they shook hands—Grogan’s in a latex glove. “I was just trying to determine an approximate trajectory of the killing shot. Can you help?”
Grogan shrugged. “Back in the lab I could.”
“I said approximate.” Reeder nodded toward the corpse. “Something here just doesn’t track.”
The CSI let air out, took some in. “Give me a minute—I need a couple things.”
“Sure. Thanks.”
As the husky CSI strode away, Reeder turned to Rogers and asked, “Anything useful from Mrs. Gutierrez?”
Rogers said, “They went for their morning run, like always, came home, like always. Then she went inside to take a shower and Justice Gutierrez came back around to feed the birds.”
“Like . . . always?”
“Yeah,” Rogers said. “Justice Gutierrez definitely sounds like a ‘like always’ kind of guy. His wife calls him ‘punctual.’ I call him OCD.”
Reeder glanced around the yard with its CSI intruders and dead man of the house. “Not tough, then, for the assassin to know where Gutierrez would be, and when.”
“Not at all.”
“How, exactly, do you figure the assassin knew?”
As if rehearsed, they simultaneously looked toward the woods. Not really hard to hide there.
Rogers said, “Staked him out.”
“Yes. And for quite a while, I’m guessing.”
“Long enough to get the Gutierrezes’ pattern down, anyway.”
Reeder gave that a curt nod. “Right till a plan came together—which is why the shotgun as murder weapon doesn’t play.”
“That what the wound indicates? Shotgun?”
Reeder nodded. “Looks like a twelve gauge. Deer slug.”
Her eyes flared. “Somebody wanted to make a point.”
“Maybe. But I still want to know why such a big gun, when the woods have public access from the other side. Risk of being seen seems high.”
“Maybe the killer wanted to make a
big
point.”
Reeder twitched a smirk. “Then why not use a .500 S-and-W handgun, up close and personal? If you’re going to the trouble of sneaking up from the woods.”
Rogers frowned in thought. “Explain something to me.”
“Give it a try.”
“You insist the killing at the Verdict was the assassination of a Supreme Court justice hidden inside an armed robbery got out of hand.”
“I do.”
“Okay. But why bother with that elaborate rigmarole, if you’re going to openly assassinate
another
justice, just days later?”
He grinned at her, but the only humor in it was dark. “Because it
is
just days later. These conspirators had everybody looking at Venter’s killing through the robbery lens. Had it been read as an assassination, security measures to protect Gutierrez and every other justice would have gone immediately in place.”
Rogers nodded. “Yeah, we’ve already done that for the other justices, now that Gutierrez is down. So it was just that
first
killing that had to fool us.”
“Right.”
She got a grudging smile going. “Only, you weren’t fooled, were you, Joe?”
“No. But it doesn’t seem to have done Justice Gutierrez much good.”
Grogan returned, drew back the sheet, and went to work with what looked like a dowel, maybe two feet, easing it in, careful the rod did not touch the edges of the wound.
The CSI’s head reared back. “Well, hell. Isn’t
that
weird . . .”
“What is?” Rogers asked.
Taking in the rod’s angle, Reeder said, “Gutierrez was shot from above.”
Rogers seemed perplexed. “What, the killer made him
kneel?
”
Grogan, still down there, shook his head. “I don’t think so. If the Justice had been kneeling, he probably wouldn’t have ended up with his legs straight out in front of him like that.”
Reeder said, “No grass stains on his knees, either.”
The CSI carefully removed the dowel and got up. He called one of his people over and handed it off.
“So,” Rogers said, “if he was shot from a downward angle and
wasn’t
on his knees . . .”
They all looked toward the trees behind the property. Had there been a sniper’s nest there after all?
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Reeder said.
Rogers said dryly, “You don’t look like a Lewis Carroll man.”
“I’m not. My daughter was a Walt Disney girl. The quote stands—something, a
lot
of somethings, don’t add up.”
Her eyebrows rose. “Starting with, he was shot at a downward angle.”
“Yeah, and I don’t care which tree the shooter was in, that’d be a tough damn shot, the Justice standing by the bird feeder, and the shotgun only made it more so . . . if not impossible.”
She asked, “Why not use a rifle?”
“Exactly the right question. The shooter likely scouted this job him- or herself, but at any rate knew everything about where to be, when to be there, and the easiest way to do it. Why not take advantage of the available intel?”
Rogers shrugged. “Well, you can’t argue with the results. Anyway, that toolshed blocks most angles from the trees, and makes any remaining ones tougher.”
Reeder was nodding.
She kept going: “And with a rifle, the assassin could have shot the Justice anytime after he came around behind the house. Why wait until Gutierrez had gone to the shed and backtracked to the bird feeder?”
Reeder said, “Our assassin obviously knew the Justice’s OCD schedule. Why not just wait behind the shed with a pistol and a silencer? Pop out when Gutierrez got to the shed, double-tap him, and disappear into the woods?”
The CSI had been taking this all in. “It doesn’t make any sense, a sniper in the woods. Why wait until that shed was in the way?”
Reeder glanced at the shed. A wren was balancing on its perch outside the built-in birdhouse that was just below the peak of the structure’s V roof. The wren tried to get back inside, but something was blocking the way. It went back to its perch, then repeated its action with the same result.
Reeder squinted as he imagined a line from the birdhouse to where he stood.
“Dear God,” he said.
“What?” Rogers asked.
“I may know how this was done.”
Grogan asked, “What’s your thinking?”
Reeder’s only reply was to motion for them to follow as he almost ran to the shed.
He yanked open the door and was met, not surprisingly, by airless warmth and the scent of soil, albeit with a hint of mint courtesy of a Glade PlugIn in a corner.
Grogan, just behind him, put a hand on Reeder’s shoulder and said, “Sorry, sir, but you really shouldn’t be touching things without gloves on—fingerprints.”
Reeder glanced back with a humorless grin. “Point taken. But if I’m right, this assassin is far too clever to leave any of those . . . and if I’m wrong, it won’t matter.”
The CSI didn’t look happy but gave the FBI consultant no argument.
Rogers, looking around, said, “This is bigger than my first apartment.”
The two-story shed was damn near a small garage, with every tool in its designated place, bags of fertilizer and other gardening goodies stacked along walls with a neatness befitting its late owner. Access to the birdhouse was on the partial second floor, beyond the plywood half ceiling.
Reeder was already taking steps to the second floor.
“Mr. Reeder,” the CSI called, “what’s on your mind?”
The second floor, though only half the width of the shed, was as orderly as the downstairs, made cramped by the A-line roof. A small window let in sunlight revealing stacks of pots of different sizes lining the side walls. At the far end, what had been typically neat stacks of twenty-five- and forty-pound bags of potting soil, fertilizer, and mulch, about thigh-high, had been disrupted so that assorted bags could be restacked into a sort of platform to accommodate a tool that was definitely not intended for gardening.
A shotgun was set up on a bed of the bags, its barrel inserted in, and pointed through, the birdhouse.
Reeder had to bend over some as he moved down the spongy plywood floor. Behind him, Rogers and Grogan had come up and were taking in the view.
“Damn,” Grogan said.
Rogers said, “It’s a sniper’s nest.”
Reeder said, “Yes, but do you see a chair or stool? Or a seat made of these bags?”
Rogers said, “What was he, a dwarf?”
Reeder appraised the rig. The weapon was a pump-action twelve-gauge shotgun with wooden stock and pump.
“Remington 870,” Reeder said.
Grogan was next to him now. “One of around ten million or so, and this one looks pre-’68—meaning ATF won’t have any ownership records.”
Rogers was just behind the CSI, the only one of the trio who didn’t need to bend. The floor was giving a little—Reeder hoped they wouldn’t go crashing down through.
She said, “Not much chance the serial number’s still on it.”
Neither man argued with her.
Reeder said, “Whoever set this up knew what he or she was doing.”
No one argued with that, either: The gun was held in place by smaller bags of potting soil the killer had borrowed from the stacks on either side of the stock and the barrel. Both ends also rested on bags of soil, with one on top of the stock.
The thing that interested Reeder most, however, was the contraption wired to the trigger: a basic electric motorized device with an oval light and a tiny red light, set to pull the trigger when it received a specific radio-wave signal. Reeder stared at the setup for several moments, admiring the ingenuity of the gadget. Its sinister simplicity.
Rogers asked, “So Justice Gutierrez was shot from up here?”
“Yes and no,” Reeder said, sliding back past Grogan, who was now inspecting the rig. He was about to similarly slip past Rogers when she stepped in his path.
Rogers said, “Explain.”
He pointed toward the steps, and said, “Follow me.”
She let him by and did.
When they were back outside, Reeder said, “The shot came from upstairs, through the birdhouse aperture, which is why we couldn’t figure out the downward angle at first.”
She moved to where she could look up at the birdhouse and the small entrance for its inhabitants. The wren flew back and landed on its perch again.
“The hell,” she breathed, her hand acting as a sun visor.
“The assassin,” Reeder said, “may have been long gone by the time the Justice was shot. We were considering the riskiness of a killer bringing a long gun through a public access area in daylight—”
Rogers completed the thought: “But he or she could have brought it in at
night
, set it up, and just walked away.” She peered at him from under her visored hand. “But did the assassin come back this morning, and wait in the woods, to shoot Gutierrez remotely?”
Reeder didn’t answer, his attention on the corner of what he guessed was a serenity garden.
“See something?” Rogers asked, but again he didn’t reply, making a wide arc toward the garden.
She followed but was cutting through more direct when he said, “Take my route, Patti, not a straight path.”
She smirked at this seeming non sequitur, but she did as he’d said, moving around Gutierrez’s body and its shielding tarp.
Reeder’s arc around the victim was a precaution: The shotgun hadn’t been pumped again, and the round in the chamber had been used to kill Gutierrez . . . but why take chances?
Rogers asked, “Joe, what the hell are we doing?”
Reeder stopped and so did she. He pointed toward a clump of plants near the corner of the garden. “Do you see what’s in the shadow of the hostas?”
She strained to see. “I see
something
. But what?”
“Motion detector,” Reeder said. “That’s my educated guess, anyway. Spot any others?”
She made a slow scan, then shook her head.