Everybody used the word “nice.” They talked about his sense of fun or his good nature. There were a couple of people who used the word “decent,” as though to set him apart from somebody who was indecent. Everybody said he worked hard, but nobody said he was especially bright. He had no rap sheet with the local cops. Prescott turned to the autopsy again. He looked at the angles of the two shots, at the pictures of the entry and exit wounds. The coroner had agreed with Millikan and Prescott: he had been lying on the woman, and gotten shot at close range from above.
The exit wound in the face was so bad that a picture that had been taken while he was alive had been added to the file, so that the coroner could tell what he had looked like before. Prescott studied it for a moment, and his suspicion hardened. Prescott had been holding on to the possibility that the upper-class, educated, wealthy professional woman had taken her car in to the dealership to be fixed, seen this nice, manly young guy with a strong jaw, piercing eyes, and whatever else she liked. She would have said to herself, “Aw, what the hell,” and gotten together with him, if only for a one-nighter. That would have explained why none of her friends had been aware of him. But Gary Finch was a nice guy, a steady guy, a funny guy, and at least once in his life, a brave guy. He was not a good-looking guy. He had a small, weak jaw that accentuated his double chin, a nose that had been broken a couple of times, and small, close-set eyes.
Prescott looked at Donna Halsey’s photograph. She looked better in her autopsy photograph than most of the women he had seen alive on the streets in Louisville. She was slim, very blond, with hair tied back in a tight, shining ponytail. The suit she had been wearing would have looked good in Manhattan. He glanced at the coroner’s shots of the corpse: unusually good body.
Prescott quickly set out all the photographs of the crime scene, and his suspicion was confirmed. The table of the first victim, Robert Cushner, had one plate of food on it, almost eaten; one set of silverware; two place mats. He looked closely at the other pictures, trying to determine what was on the tables near the bodies. The pair of men had just about finished eating. Their table was still full of plates and silverware. The table above Donna and Gary’s bodies was a small one with two settings: one for a person sitting on the bench along the wall, and one for a person in a chair facing him. The others all seemed to match Prescott’s expectations. It had been late. A whole section of the restaurant had already been unofficially closed down, with the tablecloths and settings taken up for the night. That was probably what the waiter killed in the kitchen had been doing. There was only one waiter still on duty serving customers, and the late people had been seated in a small area so he could reach them easily.
Prescott looked at the spot near the entrance where the manager, who had served as maître d’, had fallen, and two customers had stepped over him to be shot trying to tug open the padlocked door. There was a table set for one. Prescott went back to the picture of Donna and Gary. There was a napkin on the floor beside Donna’s hand. He patiently went back through the pictures, searching. In ten minutes, he knew.
Donna Halsey and Robert Cushner had been together for dinner at a table for two. It was late, and there was only one waiter on duty. He had served everybody, and now he was against the wall chatting with the manager while they waited to close up. In the kitchen, the cook had stopped making food some time ago, and had begun the cleanup. The other waiter had nearly finished clearing the tables.
At Robert Cushner and Donna Halsey’s table, things were slower than at some of the others, but the party of two were nearly finished. It was easy to see what had happened. Donna Halsey took great care of her most crucial attribute, her looks. She had ordered something small and low calorie. Robert Cushner had a big slab of meat and a cloud-shaped pile of mashed potatoes. To make the inequity more pronounced, this was a guy who was full of himself. He had struck it rich a few days before. He was out with a very attractive young woman. He did most of the talking, while she gave him admiring glances and nodded her head a lot. Soon she was sitting before an empty plate.
The waiter had cleared her plate and silverware, and probably a wine glass, leaving her sitting with a napkin in her lap and a place mat, talking with Robert Cushner, the former computer guy, while he finished his entrée.
The killer stepped through the swinging door from the kitchen. He saw Cushner with a fork on the way to his mouth: bang, through the forehead. The killer had already seen the second half of his contract, and it took no time to move the gun to the left. Now Prescott saw it clearly. The second round was intended for the side of Donna Halsey’s head, but the first shot had made her jump, rise from her chair with her napkin still on her lap. Instead of her right temple, it had hit her right side. The killer had not missed: Millikan and the police had not been wrong. But now other things were happening. People were in motion. The killer focused on the doorway, and took the easy shots like a harvest: the maître d’, the two customers pulling on the door handle, the waiter. He had done all of that in four or five seconds, from just inside the door without moving his feet. He shot the two parents and the two little girls, then detected more motion in the corner of his eye, and turned his attention toward it.
The woman he had hit in the side had managed to take a couple of steps away from him. As she collapsed, Gary the mechanic tried to reach for her, then dropped to one knee to bend over her. He saw the killer take his first step toward her, and in a horrified, involuntary act, tried to hide and protect her by putting his own body over hers.
The killer took one, two, three steps, and aimed downward. Shot one went through the man’s head. Shot two went to his back. Both of them had gone through into the woman. The killer could see she was dead.
He looked to his right, gathered up the two spent casings on the floor, and put them into his pocket. Then he walked back toward the kitchen door. The rounds he had fired before were all in the same area: one for Cushner, the male target at the first table, one for Donna Halsey. One for the maître d’, one for the waiter, three for the pair of diners at the door. Four for the family. He picked up the shells, turned off the lights, stepped through the kitchen, carefully staying out of the stream of blood running across the tiles into the drain. He replaced the empty clip in his gun, stepped out, closed the steel door behind him, and walked off, feeling a growing elation as each step took him farther away and deeper into the darkness. He had gotten it done with incredible efficiency and speed, and left nothing to indicate who had done it.
He had fulfilled the contract—gotten both of them. The client would be pleased. Prescott considered who that might be. Maybe it was the wife, whose husband had just made twenty million but hadn’t yet gotten around to telling her because he was too busy celebrating with another woman. Prescott would have to look into that. The man had been first, but the one shot three times was the woman. Sometimes it was worth stopping just to count.
Prescott stacked the pictures and reports neatly, reinserted them into the envelope, and put the envelope into his suitcase. He began to fold his clothes and put them on top. He thought about his decision to begin the long drive tonight, and decided he still liked the idea. At night there would not be much traffic, and by sunup he could be half-way to Louisville. He had given the picture to Millikan, so there was no reason to stay in Buffalo. By morning Millikan would have given the picture to the police with a big lecture on how important it was, and sometime tomorrow the killer would be gone.