“But... what...”
Then nothing but numb silence.
A thousand yards away, it seemed.
If not miles.
Talbot Simms squinted toward the bench, where he could see the forms of Robert Covey and Mac on their feet, backing away from the body of the woman he’d just shot. Mac was pulling out her cell phone, dropping it, picking it up again, looking around in panic.
Tal lowered the gun and stared.
A moment before, Tal had paid the vendor and was turning from the concession stand, holding the tray of drinks. Frowning, he saw a woman standing beside the bench, pointing something toward Mac and Covey, Mac rearing away then handing her purse over, the old man giving her something, his wallet, it seemed.
And then Tal had noticed that what she held was a gun.
He knew that she was in some way connected to Sheldon or Farley and the Lotus Foundation. The red hair... Yes! Sheldon’s secretary, unsmiling Celtic Margaret. He’d known too that she’d come here to shoot the only living eyewitness to the scam — and probably Mac too.
Dropping the tray of tea and coffee, he’d drawn his revolver. He’d intended to sprint back toward them, calling for her to stop, threatening her. But when he saw Mac fall to the ground, futilely covering her face, and Margaret shoving the pistol forward, he’d known she was going to shoot.
Tal had cocked his own revolver to single-action and stepped into a combat firing stance, left hand curled under and around his right, weight evenly distributed on both feet, aiming high and slightly to the left, compensating for gravity and a faint breeze.
He’d fired, felt the kick of the recoil and heard the sharp report, followed by screams behind him of bystanders diving for cover.
Remaining motionless, he’d cocked the gun again and prepared to fire a second time in case he’d missed.
But he saw immediately that another shot wouldn’t be necessary.
Tal Simms carefully lowered the hammer of his weapon, replaced it in his holster and began running down the path.
“Excuse me, you were standing where?”
Tal ignored Greg LaTour’s question and asked them both one more time, “You’re okay? You’re sure?”
The bearded cop persisted. “You were on that hill. Way the fuck up there?”
Mac told Tal that she was fine. He instinctively put his arm around her. Covey too said that he was unhurt, though he added that, as a heart patient, he could do without scares like that one.
Margaret Ludlum’s gun had fired but it was merely a reflex after Tal’s bullet had struck her squarely in the chest. The slug from her pistol had buried itself harmlessly in the ground.
Tal glanced at her body, now covered with a green tarp from the Medical Examiner’s Office. He waited to feel upset, or shocked or guilty, but he was only numb. Those feelings would come later, he supposed. At the moment he was just relieved to find that Mac and Robert Covey were all right — and that the final itch in the case had been alleviated: The tough Irish girl, Margaret, was the missing link.
They must’ve hired muscle or used somebody in the foundation for the dirty work.
As the Crime Scene techs picked up evidence around the body and looked through the woman’s purse, LaTour persisted. “That hill up there? No fucking way.”
Tal glanced up. “Yeah. Up there by the concession stand. Why?”
The bearded cop glanced at Mac. “He’s kidding. He’s jerking my chain, right?”
“No, that’s where he was.”
“That’s a fucking long shot. Wait... how big’s your barrel?”
“What?”
“On your service piece.”
“Three inch.”
LaTour said. “You made that shot with a three-inch barrel?”
“We’ve pretty much established that, Greg. Can we move on?” Tal turned back to Mac and smiled, feeling weak, he was so relieved to see her safe.
But LaTour said, “You told me you don’t shoot.”
“I didn’t say that at all. You assumed I don’t shoot. I just didn’t want to go the range the other day. I’ve shot all my life. I was captain of the rifle team at school.”
LaTour squinted at the distant concession stand. He shook his head. “No way.”
Tal glanced at him and asked, “Okay, you want to know how I did it? There’s a trick.”
“What?” the big cop asked eagerly.
“Easy. Just calculate the correlation between gravity as a constant and the estimated mean velocity of the wind over the time it takes the bullet to travel from points A to B — that’s the muzzle to the target. Got that? Then you just multiply distance times that correlated factor divided by the mass of the bullet times its velocity squared.”
“You—” The big cop squinted again. “Wait, you—”
“It’s a joke, Greg.”
“You son of a bitch. You had me.”
“Haven’t you noticed it’s not that hard to do?”
The cop mouthed words that Mac couldn’t see but Tal had no trouble deciphering.
LaTour squinted one last time toward the knoll and exhaled a laugh. “Let’s get statements.” He nodded to Robert Covey and escorted him toward his car, calling back to Tal, “You get hers. That okay with you, Einstein?”
“Sure.”
Tal led Mac to a park bench out of sight of Margaret’s body and listened to what she had to say about the incident, jotting down the facts in his precise handwriting. An officer drove Covey home and Tal found himself alone with Mac. There was silence for a moment and he asked, “Say, one thing? Could you help me fill out this questionnaire?”
“I’d be happy to.”
He pulled one out of his briefcase, looked at it, then back to her. “How ‘bout dinner tonight?”
“Is that one of the questions?”
“It’s one of my questions. Not a police question.”
“Well, the thing is I’ve got a date tonight. Sorry.”
He nodded. “Oh, sure.” Couldn’t think of anything to follow up with. He pulled out his pen and smoothed the questionnaire, thinking: Of course she had a date. Women like her, high-ranking members of the Four Percent Club, always had dates. He wondered if it’d been the Pascal-sex comment that had knocked him out of the running. Note for the future: Don’t bring that one up too soon.
Mac continued, “Yeah, tonight I’m going to help Mr. Covey find a health club with a pool. He likes to swim but he shouldn’t do it alone. So we’re going to find a place that’s got a lifeguard.”
“Really? Good for him.” He looked up from Question 1.
“But I’m free Saturday,” Mac said.
“Saturday? Well, I am too.”
Silence. “Then how’s Saturday?” she asked.
“I think it’s great... Now how ‘bout those questions?”
A week later the Lotus Research Foundation case was nearly tidied up — as was Tal’s office, much to his relief — and he was beginning to think about the other tasks awaiting him: the SEC investigation, the statistical analysis for next year’s personnel assignments and, of course, hounding fellow officers to get their questionnaires in on time.
The prosecutor still wanted some final statements for the Farley and Sheldon trials, though, and he’d asked Tal to interview the parents who’d adopted the three children born following the in vitro fertilization at the foundation.
Two of the three couples lived nearby and he spent one afternoon taking their statements. The last couple was in Warwick, a small town outside of Albany, over an hour away. Tal made the drive on a Sunday afternoon, zipping down the picturesque roadway along the Hudson River, the landscape punctuated with blooming azaleas, forsythia, and a billion spring flowers, the car filling with the scent of mulch and hot loam and sweet asphalt.