Head Shot

The big superintendent laughed softly. 'How are you going to get a baby chair into the MGF, Andy?'

'Sore point. The sports car's going down the road; as of next week it's turning into a new Mondeo.'

'Bloody hell! What happened to the Andy Martin we knew, and a thousand women loved?'

'Same as happened to you, McGuire. He met the right woman. Oh aye, and that reminds me. Wil ie Haggerty asked me for the okay to have your Maggie stand in for Manny English while he's away investigating Strathclyde. It came as a bit of a surprise, even to me, when he told me she's agreed.' '

'It was a surprise to her too; ACC Haggerty must be a persuasive bugger. It's only a temporary thing, though; just to let her get the feel of the job.'

Martin grinned. 'So now she's responsible for everything that goes on in the division. Every crime, every public nuisance, every waif and stray.'

'Aye,' said McGuire heavily. 'And that could be a bit of a problem.'

23

Joe Doherty, sallow-faced as ever, drew on a cigarette as he looked around Bradford Dekker's conference table. He was the only person there who was smoking, and the fixed expression on the face of the Erie County Sheriff made it clear that in his view that was one too many. 'I mean it. Those things wil kil you one day, my friend,' murmured Bob Skinner, sat on his right.

'You keep telling me that,' replied the American, quietly, 'but living does that in the end, any way you look at it. Look at your father-in-law; I bet he never smoked in his life.'

'You lose,' said Dekker, close enough to overhear. 'Mr Grace loved a Monte Cristo after dinner.'

'That's true,' Skinner agreed. 'He always had a supply handy, wherever he went. The Dominican Republic variety, of course, never Cuban,' he added with a faint grin, which vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

'Shit!' he whispered, then glanced along the table. 'Lieutenant Schultz, can you remember; did you find any cigars at the cabin? I don't remember seeing any.'

The New York detective frowned as he searched his memory, then opened a folder on the desk before him and looked through several pages. 'I don't recal that, sir,' he answered, final y, 'and there's no mention of them on the inventory.'

'So? Could that be the first thing we know about this kil er: that he's a cigar smoker, and couldn't resist taking them with him?'

'Unless the first guys on the scene found them,' said Schultz, quickly.

'Those boys out there can be a touch…'

'I resent that, Lieutenant,' snapped Dekker, cutting across him, 'on behalf of county police forces everywhere. You State people…'

'Resent all you like, Brad, but it's a valid point.' The only female voice in the room belonged to Superintendent Barbara Weston, the head of the New York State Police, a severe-looking woman in her early fifties.

Doherty's presence at the hastily cal ed morning conference in Buffalo had attracted a top-drawer turn-out from the agencies involved. There were nine people at the table; three FBI: the deputy director. Brand and Kosinski; three from the State police: Weston, Schultz and Small; Dekker and his chief of detectives, Eddie Brady, and Skinner himself. The DCC had been invited by Doherty, with Dekker's agreement, to attend the conference as an observer, although his presence had caused the superintendent to raise a disapproving eyebrow.

'Yes, it probably is, Barbara,' Doherty drawled. 'It might have been more tactfully put, that's all. We will check it out… discreetly, I promise.

If Bob and Brad are certain that there should have been cigars in the cabin, that may be significant. As Deputy Chief Skinner points out, at the moment we know nothing about this man other than he's a professional.

If he took the damn things, that's item number one in his personal profile. He's hardly going to fence them, is he; no, he's gonna smoke 'em.' He smiled. 'Trust me on this.'

He paused, stubbing out his cigarette in the heavy glass ashtray which Dekker's secretary had found for him, then taking a mouthful of coffee from the mug before him on the table. 'Okay, let's cut the trivia, end the inter-force sniping and get this discussion on the road. What are we looking at here?'

With barely a break, he answered his own question. 'Four homicides, one of them a double, in three different states, all within the last month.

Common factors are as fol ows. We have three men and one woman, all retired and aged over sixty… over seventy in the case of Mr Grace. We have three incidents reported initially as burglary-related homicide, and accepted as such by the responsible jurisdictions.

'Common factors, the men's profession, their political allegiance, and the fact that they al worked in Washington at the time of the Kennedy administration.'

Skinner raised a hand. 'Common factors that we know of, Joe.'

'Three's enough for me, buddy.'

'Maybe, but should it be?' Barbara Weston broke in. 'They have crime everywhere, even in Asshole, Montana, or wherever. And the three locations are hundreds, even thousands of miles apart. Okay, three retired lawyers are burglarised; lawyers are rich, so they get robbed. Okay, so they're all Democrats. Democrats get killed every day in this country; so do Republicans. Okay, so they al worked in Washington. It's just about before my time, but in the early sixties, it's my understanding that every ambitious young Democrat lawyer wanted to be there, and that a hell of a lot of them made it.'

'Leo Grace wasn't an ambitious young lawyer, Barbara,' Sheriff Dekker interjected. 'He was a senator in this state's legislature for six years before he joined the Attorney General's office under Kennedy.'

'Okay, strike out the young lawyer part, but don't tell me that he wasn't ambitious.' Her gaze switched to Doherty. 'And what about Garrett and Wilkins? Do we know whether they worked in the same area as Senator Grace? In fact do we know if they ever even met?'

'No, we do not,' the Deputy Director admitted, his face showing his impatience. 'Their files aren't complete, we only know that they worked in DC, not what they did there. Come on, Superintendent, spit it out. Say what you're leading up to.'

'If you insist, Mr Doherty. Frankly, I think that the Bureau's grounds for showing up here are at best questionable and at worst contrived. Our friend from Scotland… your friend… shows up here and is given instant access to material it would take me weeks screw out of you.

Next thing we know he's used it to weave a fancy conspiracy theory and you're jumping in to back him up, to the extent of letting him take part in a conference that he has no business even observing.

'He sees a hit-man rubbing out retired Democrats; I see a single burglary homicide on my territory and I see no reason why Lieutenant Schultz and his team shouldn't be al owed to clear it up. As for your friend, I sympathise with his loss, but I'd advise him to bury his father in-law and get the hell back home.'

Doherty's eyes narrowed. 'I hear…'

Skinner put a hand on his shoulder, looking past him, along the table.

'A second please, Joe. Superintendent, I know that you're a career police officer, but you're appointed by the governor, and the state senate, so let me ask you something. Have you ever in your life worked as a member of a criminal investigation team?'

Barbara Weston hesitated for a second too long.

'No,' he said, fixing her with an icy, unblinking glare, locking eyes with her so powerfully that it seemed that however hard she might try, she could not look away. 'I didn't think so; your type of copper exists the world over.

'Well, madam, I have dirtied my hands with crime for nearly al my professional career. I've chased villains of all shapes and sizes: serial killers, gangsters, thieves, terrorists, drug pushers and all the rest, and do you know what? I've caught nearly al of them; apart from the ones that the competition got to before I did.