Millikan had collected a great many tiny bits of mostly useless information over the years. He recognized the one that was in front of him now. When a man with a gun told a group of victims to line up, the place to stand was the center of the line. Right-handed shooters shot the one on the right first, and left-handed shooters began with the one on the left. There was something in the human mind that always kept killers from shooting the man in the middle first.
He pointed at the man on the right. “That one was first, through the head.” He moved his arm to indicate the one on the left. “The one over there saw what was happening—or maybe figured out the sort of trouble he was in after the first shot—and ducked down behind the table. The shooter fired through the tabletop a few times, quickly. While he was doing that, this guy was moving too, so the shooter got him in the back and dropped him before he could get to the door. The shooter is right-handed, probably.”
“I’ll buy that,” Carrera said, then paused for a moment. “Okay, so Danny, what do you think? What are the chances it’s the same guy?”
Millikan looked at the group of brass casings on the floor, each of them already circled with chalk. There was a small numbered placard beside each one. His eyes moved to the arrangement of bodies. “Absolutely none.” He saw the look of disappointment in Carrera’s eyes. “I’m sorry, Pete.”
Carrera shrugged. “Just so you’re sure.”
Millikan knelt above one of the brass casings, with a number 8 placard beside it. “See this? In the Louisville restaurant there was no brass. He picked it all up and took it with him.” Millikan stared more closely at the shell, then stood. “Forty-one Magnum. Remember those? You don’t see many of them anymore, but they were a big deal for a while. They were supposedly going to be the next standard police load in about 1964 or ’65. He probably wasn’t alive then.”
“But he isn’t a killer with a signature,” Carrera reminded him. “He seems to be able to use whatever comes to hand.”
“He’s even better than that,” said Millikan. “He can make what he wants come to his hand. There’s no reason for him to do a paid killing with a gun in a caliber he’s not used to, especially one that’s a little bit eccentric and out-of-date. When he killed Officer Fulco at the hospital, he took her nine-millimeter Beretta. When he killed the security guard in the building on Wilshire, he got his gun too.”
“Any chance he’d do it to disguise himself, just to throw us off?”
Millikan shook his head. “Not him. But maybe whoever did this heard about him on television and gave it a try.” He stepped care-fully across the room. “This all looks a little bit like the killings in Louisville—three guys shot in a locked restaurant, and the cook taken out because she’s a witness—but it’s not. The Louisville killer would never make everybody stand in a row so he could shoot them. It’s a step that would never enter his mind.”
Millikan approached the table that had been turned on its side and punctured by several shots. “In Louisville he had two people down behind a table like this. He didn’t fire a bunch of shots through it, hoping he’d hit something. He took the time to walk around it and shoot what he could see. He stays calm and works efficiently. This just isn’t his work.”
Carrera looked around him at the bodies. “You think we’ve got a copycat?”
“Not exactly,” said Millikan. “Not the kind who got set off by hearing about the other shooting. I think the one who killed these people just figured his chances were better if you wasted some time thinking he might be the Louisville shooter.”
Carrera sighed. “You’ve got me there. As soon as I heard what kind of shooting this was, I thought of him. So did the first officers to respond to the call. I guess we all just hope he’ll do something else here, and this time he’ll screw up: leave a print, get noticed, or something.”
“Me too,” said Millikan. He wrenched his mind away from the direction it was taking, refusing to let himself return to the secret hope.
“Heard anything about how Roy Prescott’s doing?” It was as though Carrera had read Millikan’s mind, detected the vulnerability, and poked at it.
“I don’t know,” Millikan said. “I haven’t talked to him in a long time.”
Carrera nodded, pretending to look at the bodies on the floor but holding Millikan in the corner of his eye. “I suppose not. I don’t think I’d want to be in too close touch either.”
Millikan took a deep breath, and turned to face Carrera. “You and I have known each other for a long time, Pete,” he said carefully. “I won’t start hiding the truth from you now. The reason Prescott is after this guy is that I gave the father of one of the Louisville victims his phone number. I was the one who brought Prescott in. The father probably would have hired some private detective and thought he’d done everything there was to do. He had never heard of Prescott until I told him.”
Carrera returned his gaze to the floor for a few seconds. “Just now I was about to ask you why, but then I realized that I would be the one who was lying. Asking would be pretending that I didn’t understand, that I wouldn’t have been tempted to do the same thing.” He straightened, sighed, and looked Millikan in the eye. “I would like to have a cop be the one who gets this guy, especially after what he did to Fulco and Alkins. It would be better for all of us. But it wouldn’t bother me that much if Prescott got to him first.”
“I can’t say it was the best way,” said Millikan. “I don’t even know whether it helped or hurt. I talked to Prescott in Buffalo after he’d had a brush with the guy, months ago. Then he dropped out of sight. Both of them did. I don’t know what it means. It might just mean that he doesn’t want anything more from me, and I’ll hear when everybody else does.”
“If anything comes in about him—about either of them—I’ll let you know right away,” said Carrera.
“Thanks, Pete.”
“And thanks for coming to look at this mess. I guess the captain didn’t need to spoil both our dinners.”
Millikan surveyed the room again. “This one, maybe we can do something about. You have three guys here who all look about the same age, thirty-five to forty. They’re all dressed in casual clothes, but not cheap. Look at the shoes: Mephisto, Ecco. I didn’t look closely at the third guy’s, but they seem to be about the same class, and practically new. All three of them have good watches. I figure they’re all in the same social or business set, and it’s not one that usually hangs out in a place like this at night. I would guess they’re all in the same line of work, and it pays okay. They couldn’t have all come here at once, dressed the same, by coincidence. They met here for something. Probably it was some kind of business meeting. Obviously, there was a fourth guy. I would guess he wasn’t somebody they just ran into here, some stranger who killed everybody. I would guess he was the one who arranged the meeting.”
“A drug deal?”
“It doesn’t feel that way.” Millikan glanced down at the shell casings on the floor again. “I think it’s likely he’s a bit older than the others. He’s at least fifty, probably closer to sixty. He’s never done anything like this before. The brass is tarnished, as though he loaded the bullets into the gun with his bare fingers some time ago, and it’s been sitting there ever since. I wouldn’t even be surprised if he bought the gun twenty or thirty years ago, and never used up the box of ammo he bought at the same time. It will be something like this: these three business guys all conspired to cheat a supplier, and it’s putting him out of business. Or the three are partners who were just about to fire an older employee, and he found out about it. It had to be something that would make him angry long enough to plan this and go through with it. Find out what they did for a living, and how they knew each other, and you’ll be halfway there.”