Sergeant Able picked up the radio and pressed the send button. "Pete, we can stick a fork in Trusov. He's done. Let's go gather the carcass."
Below them, in the twins' room, Pete Coates muttered to himself, "Thank God. That son of a bitch." He stared down at the forms on the bed, forms made of artfully placed pillows. The bullets had spit up a few feathers. Julie and Carolyn and John were spending the night with Adrian Wade at her hotel.
At the roof's door, Able turned back to Gray. "You coming? Let's go dance a jig over this guy's body. I want to see you drop your paper star, just like the good old days."
Gray's rifle lay unattended on the cornice. He was slumped forward, leaning against the brick rail, blinking repeatedly and panting hoarsely. He had known he would pull the trigger. Of course he would. But the struggle to contain his disgust and confusion at his return to the profession and to suppress burning memories had exhausted him. Now it was done. With an effort, one of the most arduous in his life, he pushed himself upright, gathered the rifle.
He stared out into the darkness toward his target. He had seen a head and a rifle. His shot had been clean. He was sure of it. But he whispered to himself, "Something is wrong."
Then he followed Sergeant Able.
Shed of the bathrobe, the detective met them on the street. An unmarked police car picked them up at the curb. The sniper's lair was a five-story apartment building on Tenth Avenue. They arrived a few minutes later. According to the sign above the mail slots, the apartment building was named the Zenith.
Coates leaned against the buzzer until the landlord appeared. The detective had not alerted the landlord because of the risk of somehow spooking Trusov. The man was wearing a white T-shirt and Bermuda shorts and carried a half-empty package of Fig Newtons. The detective hung his gold badge in front of the man's eyes and pushed into the building, fairly dragging the landlord after him.
"Show us the way to the roof," Coates demanded. Gray and Able followed. The sniper rifle had been left in the police car.
"Sure, sure," the landlord cried. "Nothing up there, though. I run a clean place. No hookers, no drugs, and only one Greek couple on the third floor."
The party ran up the stairs, Coates's hand at the small of the landlord's back, prodding him along.
"It's them you're here for, ain't it?" the landlord asked, the wind loud in his throat. "Christ, I should've known. You should smell this place when they cook."
On the fourth-floor stairs to the roof Coates pushed the landlord aside and pulled his .38 from his belt holster.
"You won't need that," Able said. "I saw the spray."
Nevertheless Coates held the handgun in front of him as he climbed the last flight of stairs and opened the door to the roof, Gray and Able right behind.
Heat-softened tar clung to their shoes. They walked around the stair house to the east cornice. The body was in a tight curl three feet from the edge of the roof. Gray's eyes had not fully adjusted to the darkness after the bright hallways — he knew it took thirty minutes — but even so he could tell the body lay in a position he had never before seen, an unnaturally bent shape.
They drew close, their shoes squashing bits of brain.
"What the hell?" Coates snapped.
The body was tied to a toppled chair. Many strands of rope wound around the chest and waist and legs to secure the corpse to the chair. A duct tape gag was across the mouth.
A rifle had spilled to the roof near the body. Able lifted the weapon. "This is a Stevens .22. No sniper uses this. What's going on? A decoy?"
Pete Coates lifted a red-rimmed cartridge that had been carefully set on its end near the chair. "Here is Trusov's signature."
Owen Gray bent to the body. He grasped its shoulder to turn the face toward him. Tiny bells jingled. The top of her head was missing, leaving a gaping red and gray cleft where her lustrous hair had been.
Mrs. Orlando stared back at him in the sightless reproach of death.
PART TWO
BURNING TAPERS
The best weapon is the one closest at hand.
CHAPTER NINE
Owen Gray was going to ground. To the high country, to his old home. The land would gather him in and embrace him. Stone and sage and the summer wind would let him breathe again, and he would find his footing among the granite and grass. Or he would die in these mountains.
He had finally figured out Nikolai Trusov's message. The Russian had wanted to chase Gray from the city to the wilderness, to a proper dueling ground. Trusov would have kept on killing whomever was standing near Gray until Gray complied. And now Trusov would follow Gray to these mountains. Gray was going to prepare for him as best he could. The Russian would quickly determine where Gray was, and would be coming. Gray did not know when Trusov would arrive in the mountains, but it would be soon. Time was short.
A thicket of kinnikinnick crowded the dirt road, the shrub in full white bloom. Its oval leaves scraped the rental Jeep on both sides. Gray engaged the vehicle's four-wheel drive for the last hundred yards up the incline toward the cabin. Rocks spit from under the Jeep as the wheels found purchase. The canyon of white fir and lodgepole pine opened, allowing serviceberry and syringa to grow in patches of white sunlight. When he was twelve years old, Gray had made tobacco pipes out of syringa stems, using beetle grubs to eat through the pith to hollow the stems just as Chief Joseph had. Dogwood leaves flavored with licorice fern served as tobacco. Gray had spent his youth studying the Nez Perce and Shoshone and Kootenai.
He downshifted, then guided the Jeep around a stone outcropping to gain his first glimpse of the larch tree in the front yard. The larch was not common in the Sawtooth Range, and its grand trunk rose almost 250 feet barren of foliage until reaching a bushy top. This glorious spire had stood sentinel in front of the cabin for all of Gray's memory, and all of his father's and grandfather's.
Gray drove the vehicle around the larch to the gravel patch that served to keep mud from the front door during the spring melt. He set the parking brake. When he opened the Jeep's door he was met with the brace of mountain Idaho, the stirring redolence of red cedar and bracken and columbine blooms and damp earth, scents sharpened in the thin air, scents that always filled Gray with a longing for times past and people gone.
He stepped around the Jeep toward the porch. Birthplace of three generations of Grays, the cabin was made of lodgepole pine, used because their trunks taper so little. The building had outgrown its origins as a one-room hut with one door and one grease-paper window hastily thrown up to keep the winter of 1903 at bay. Over the decades several more rooms had been tacked on. Hardwood floors and plumbing and electricity had been added, and a porch and pantry, closets and a massive stone fireplace. Gray climbed the porch and opened the door with the key, then stepped inside.
The air was thick with dust and mold and the scent of dry pine. Gray left the door open and pulled aside window shutters to brighten the room. Memories rushed in with the light. The scene — every corner, every cranny, every worn stick of furniture — was from his youth. The three-legged stool next to the iron fireplace tools, the pole and peg coat hanger, the couch covered with a red and purple Shoshone blanket, a Sears Roebuck coffee table, the cracked leather chair with the brass brads, the rag rug in front of the fireplace, the room was as it ever had been. Gray had inherited the home and five hundred acres from his father. He had returned to Idaho for the funeral, but not since.