Banner picked up her own phone, trying to ignore the feeling of illicit relief that today Annie would be able to leave school by the front entrance after all.
22
I hung up on Banner, not waiting for an acknowledgment, and watched as the thin man I’d briefly locked eye contact with turned and melted into the crowd on the opposite side of the street.
The man was around six feet, about a hundred and sixty pounds. Widow’s peak, rounded glasses. He’d been dressed for the office: dark suit, white shirt, conservative tie, dark overcoat. Because it was rush hour, there were half a dozen men dressed just like him within spitting distance. But this one looked out of place.
I checked my watch again: 9:07. Twelve minutes since I’d heard the first police siren, so probably thirteen or fourteen minutes since the shooting itself. There were a lot of cops here already, more than you’d think they’d even have on the payroll in a town this size. They hadn’t yet had sufficient time to set up a fixed perimeter. Some were crowded around the priest’s body, shielding it from rubberneckers; the rest were trying to move the crowds back. When I had arrived, people were still trying to distance themselves from the scene, get away from danger. It hadn’t taken long for that impulse to wear off.
The faces in the crowd were pretty uniform in their degrees of animation, if nothing else: shock, fear, bewilderment, curiosity, excitement. That was why the thin man had stood out. Among a sea of emotion, his was literally the only impassive face on the street. That and the very specific way in which he had surveyed the kill scene. It was hard to describe, but he had seemed to be watching with a professional eye. He looked unsurprised, or at least entirely unrattled. Maybe it was noticeable to me because I was doing the same thing. In fact, going by the thin man’s demeanor and clothing, I might have made him for a federal agent. But if that was the case, why had he avoided my eyes, then furtively disappeared into the crowd?
If I had wanted to follow the thin man, I wouldn’t have been able to. The police presence in the middle of the street that separated us was as good as a twelve-foot barbed-wire fence. Instead, I took a step back, turned my attention away from the killing zone. A quarter of an hour since the shooting, and Wardell would most likely be out of town already.
I surveyed the area again. The buildings were the same, the climate was the same, but it seemed an entirely different place to the one I had passed through less than half an hour before. It was almost like some dark magic trick, the way one madman and one half-ounce piece of copper-jacketed lead could utterly transform a place so quickly and so profoundly. I’d seen it before, seen terror used as a weapon, the ripple effect often more damaging than the original incident.
My eyes scanned the rooftops and high windows again, looking for… what? A trace, I supposed. Evidence of the magician’s passing. I found what I was looking for on the roof of the county courthouse. Or rather, I found an absence of something: birds. When I’d passed through earlier, the parapet had been lined with pigeons. Perhaps that had made me subconsciously discount the spot, but that had been stupid.
There were still birds on the other buildings, but none on the parapet of the county courthouse roof. None at all.
I jogged down the street, keeping my eyes peeled for Wardell, though I knew he’d be long gone. I took the courthouse steps at a run. The foyer was a big, wide space with a marble floor. There was an older woman at the reception desk. I spoke before she could greet me: “You see anybody come by here in the last twenty minutes? Around my height, maybe carrying a long bag or a package?”
The receptionist opened her mouth as if to challenge me, thought again and then shook her head. “Nobody’s come by here. What’s going on out there?”
I ignored the question. “Have you got a back exit?”
The woman pointed to one of the corridors leading off the foyer. The corridor led back through the big old building, through a series of doors to a black metal fire door with a push bar. I ignored the sign warning of an alarm and pushed the door outward. No alarm sounded. The door opened on a slender alley. I glanced side to side, saw no one and no traces of anyone. I stepped back and examined the doorframe. A cable ran from one of the hinges to a box on the wall. Midway, the cable had been severed. There was a flight of stairs opposite the fire door. I closed the door and climbed the stairs. Thirty seconds later, they brought me out on the roof of the courthouse.
A confusion of pigeons scattered as I paced across the flat roof to the parapet, which gave me an eagle’s-eye view of Central Avenue. In the dead center of my field of vision was the spot where the police had set up shop around the body. Something glittered in the cold sunlight, twenty feet to my right. I walked to where the flat roof met the brick of the parapet on the other side of the building and went down on one knee. A spent.762 cartridge. Only one this time.
“Police! Get down on the fucking ground now.”
I winced at the sudden bark from behind me. I stayed down and put my hands around the back of my head. Slowly.
23
I sat back in the chair and drummed my hands on the tops of my thighs, staring up at the ceiling tiles again. There were fifty-eight of them. Three of those looked like they’d been replaced fairly recently; they were the same make as the rest, but not as yellowed by age and cigarette smoke. There was a clock on the wall, imprisoned behind a square wire cage. The little hand was approaching the eleven. I sighed in frustration and summoned up a mental map. Two hours. Depending on his mode of transport, Wardell might already be in Nebraska. Might be getting ready to take his father out already.
The door opened and Smith entered, the older of the two detectives who’d questioned me. He wore the resigned expression of one who’d just had confirmation that an unlikely long shot was not going to pan out.
“You’re lucky I don’t shoot you,” he said, holding up the key to my cuffs between his thumb and forefinger.
“Don’t you mean I’m lucky you didn’t shoot me, past tense?” That thought had crossed my mind on the rooftop. I’d been grateful the officers had followed correct procedure and waited to ascertain that I wasn’t a threat.
Smith ignored my correction, just roughly unlocked the cuffs when I presented my hands across the table.
“I take it you got ahold of Agent Banner,” I said.
Smith nodded grudgingly. “And instead of keeping the only suspect in custody, we’re to let him go and extend him all cooperation. God bless the FBI.”
“Come on, Detective. You know who did this. I was never a viable suspect.”
“Maybe not, but you sure as hell were a complication we didn’t need.”
I pushed my chair back, got up, and perched on the desk. I saw Smith bristle at this and pretended I hadn’t noticed. I glanced up at the clock. “So now that we’re on the same team, how about an update on the investigation?”
Smith opened his mouth and, although I couldn’t quite predict what he was about to say, I knew it would be likely to contain, as Paul Simon once said, words I never heard in the Bible. But then he reconsidered.
“Victim’s name was Father David Leary. Killed instantly by a single through-and-through gunshot wound to the throat. No autopsy or ballistics results yet, of course, but the damage is consistent with a 7.62 NATO round.” He spoke quickly and in a flat monotone, as if reciting an over-familiar recipe. Exactly as though he were briefing a disliked journalist. “They pulled a good thumbprint off of the cartridge you were kind enough to locate for us on the roof of the courthouse, and it’s a match for Caleb Wardell. Amazing how quickly you can get a print back, depending on who’s waiting on the results.”