“Are you volunteering?”
Elizabeth’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not calling my bluff, you know; I’d love to. But I just went to California, and I have two children who are expecting me to feed them dinner tonight and still be there when they wake up tomorrow. Have things gotten so bad since I left here that you don’t have any real field men for a case like this?”
Richardson shook his head. “No. I just figured out who to send. Give me a minute on the phone with him, and then I’ll transfer him to you.”
“Who is he?”
“His name’s Jack Hamp.”
Elizabeth turned and walked out of Richardson’s office. She had heard the name before. He could be somebody she had met on another case. No, she had read it at the bottom of some report recently. But the button on her phone was already blinking. She punched it.
“Hello,” said Elizabeth. “This is Elizabeth Waring. Is this Mr. Hamp?”
“What can I do for you, ma’am?”
Her expectations oscillated between two extremes. It was the unimaginative-sounding western official voice that California highway patrolmen used when they wrote you a ticket. But she was going to need him in the West, after all, and Richardson had picked him for a difficult situation. If Richardson knew the man’s name, he must at least be competent, and maybe a lot better than that. “I understand you’ve agreed to work with us on this case?”
“Yes, ma’am.” It was the “ma’am.” The last time she had heard it was from one of the prison guards at Lompoc.
“When can you be ready to leave for Santa Fe?”
There was a significant pause; then the voice said, “I’m at an airport now.” Then Elizabeth remembered where she had seen the name: it had been at the bottom of the report on the mess at LAX. Jack Hamp was the birdwatcher.
Hamp walked up Andalusia Street, then down Galisteo to the street behind it. He liked the feel of the sun heating the sidewalks without affecting the thin, cold air. He thought about Elizabeth Waring again. At the time he’d had to pay too much attention to what she was telling him to give her voice the sort of analysis he considered necessary. All he really had on her for sure was that she was in her mid-thirties. She had mentioned that she had young children, but she was old enough to call herself Elizabeth and not have to tone it down by a couple of syllables to Liz or Betty or Bess or whatever. She was not a large woman because there wasn’t the kind of lasting tone that came from the big-boned ones with pink hands that were all knuckles. It wasn’t a question of high or low, because women varied only from alto to soprano anyway, but something about how much real force and staying power was behind the voice. He judged that she was between five feet five and five feet eight, and probably a strawberry blonde or a redhead.
It was a brave guess, even for an expert like Hamp, because not many real redheads went through law school. A lot of the bright ones were like Hamp’s second wife, Donna, who was sort of a career redhead. She was a trained painter, but apparently she had spent her college years exploring the shades of green, blue and purple she could wear to set off her hair. The marriage had been made in heaven during what must have been a celestial holiday, when everybody up there was blind drunk and frisky. Donna had cried when she had found out he was a cop, but by then it was too late, because he had already verified her credentials as a bona-fide redhead, and she was a committed woman. At the time, his pants were hanging on the rail of her bed with the butt end of his pistol showing, but that hadn’t bothered her. Later he decided he hadn’t given her reaction as much thought as it had deserved. Not that she wasn’t a law-abiding citizen, within certain limits, but she was not a cautious person, or a docile one. They’d had a lively time of it for nearly five years, but it had ended by her going after him with the claw hammer she had been using to attach a canvas to its stretcher bars. Donna’s problem was symbolized in his mind by the fact that she had gone after him with the claw end of the hammer. It was uglier and more spiteful that way, but the bludgeon-death victims he came across professionally almost always got it with the blunt end; it was just more practical.
Maybe Elizabeth Waring had brown hair, the sort that had very tight little curls in it that made it stick out. There was a certain intensity in those women too, and a lot of them went to law school.
Hamp spotted the police sticker on the door of Mantino’s house, and took in the rest of it. The killer had seen it all the way he was seeing it now. The houses were all too close together, the streets too narrow and quiet for an easy shot and a quick retreat. Since the police had found a North American Watch car in the street, he had probably chosen to impersonate a security guard, but something had gone wrong. At that moment the ordinary man would have defeated himself. He would have tried to do something to save his skin—hide in an empty house or look for an escape route the police knew better than he did. But this man had done something else. All policemen were drilled in hesitation, firing warning shots into the air and trying to keep innocent bystanders away. If they’d had a plan, it would have been to contain his movements and assume that his desire to stay alive would make him behave rationally, and therefore predictably. But this one was an aggressor. Any victim was as good as another. Anything that caused confusion or added to the escalating violence was an advantage. His best tactic would have been to give the impression that what he was trying to do was not to run but to kill them.
Hamp looked around. There were lots of long, straight firing lines he could use: adobe walls around the houses to hide his movements, tall trees and thick hedges to complicate their view but not his. In the dark the police had to distinguish which, among the twenty or thirty silhouettes they could discern, belonged to their comrades and which to another man they didn’t even have a description of. By the time there were fifty policemen and armed civilians on the scene, any shot fired had a two percent chance of hitting a murderer and a ninety-eight percent chance of creating one.
This was what the old gangster in the California prison had been trying to describe to Elizabeth Waring. The tape-recorder team in New York had managed to stumble on a man who had never done anything for a living except kill people. He had been doing it for, say, twenty years, and he had gotten pretty good at it.
There was only one stop left to make, and that would have to wait a few hours. Evening was the time for visiting policemen, when you could talk to them in their homes.
Hamp walked to the door of the freshly painted one-story gray house and rang the bell. He could hear a dog barking somewhere in the back, then the loud scratching noise of its toenails as it ran across an uncarpeted floor to sniff under the door. He sensed that it was big, probably a shepherd or a Doberman, and he felt better when he heard a deep male voice cajole it away from the door. “Go on,” it said. “Into the kitchen.” Then, “Kitchen. Stay.” The toenail sound receded into the distance.
A dead bolt gave a metallic clank as the man slipped it. Hamp conceded that the precautions were understandable. Lorenz was an ordinary policeman. He’d have spent enough of his career looking at the work of intruders to develop a desire and talent for home security. His house wasn’t impregnable, by any means, but a burglar would find it discouraging enough to make him move on to the next one. The door opened, and Hamp looked the man in the eye and held out his hand. “Jack Hamp,” he said. “FBI.” Now he rapidly revised his expectations. Lorenz was in his early thirties, over six feet tall and athletic, his black hair cut by a good barber.