The purpose is to try to get inside the head of a killer. To retrace the steps from that time back in 2016. It’s for a book. I’ve already made a start on it. The working title is The Minneapolis Avenger. I expect the publisher will have an opinion on that, although they might be less sure exactly how to market it. True crime is the hottest genre in the book market right now. People just can’t get enough of stories about bloody and preferably spectacular murders — there’s the air of mystery, unexpected turns of events, villains and heroes on both sides of the law, and, if possible, an uncertain denouement that leaves plenty of room for wide-ranging conspiracy theories. My book will have all of these, apart from the last. The answers are all there, there’s no question about where the guilt lies. What remains is the business of trying to understand how and why what happened did happen. And to achieve this I need to get inside not only the killer’s head but the heads of all the players in this story. Use everything I already know plus a bit of my own imagination to see the world, see the sites where it all happened, see it all played out through their eyes. Find the human in among all the inhuman. Force the reader — and myself — to ask the question: could that have been me?
I’m giving these field studies eight days, so I don’t have all that much time. I need to make a start. And that means starting with the guy who was where I am now, also at dawn, on that morning six years ago.
I close my eyes and look. I can see the tower blocks rising up from the ground. Blocking out the sky. There, on the sixth floor, is an open window. I fly up there. Right now I’m him. I look out. I can see in all directions. Height means overview.
2
Cross Hairs, October 2016
The height gave perspective. For a while I could be a dispassionate observer, or at least pretend I was. Pass what I felt to be an objective judgement on society, human beings and their lives down there. I’d been sitting at that sixth-floor window since seven o’clock looking down on that antheap. At the people emerging from the doors of the apartments of the Jordan projects. It was Tuesday morning. Eleven minutes past eight. I saw cars that pulled away from the kerbside, and the parking lots behind the blocks. The white smoke from the exhausts. Yellow school buses, picking up kids — bars on the windows, like mobile jails, like some kind of prelude to the lives that lay ahead of them. Other buses that ferried people to work. Some to the factories, most to the service industries, at the bottom level. But here at the Jordan projects there were plenty of people who didn’t have school or a job to go to, and a lot of them were still in bed. Some lay staring up at the ceiling, having lost any of the hope that came with the country’s first black president eight years ago but who, in three months’ time, would be leaving the White House, along with everything else in the removal van. So they lay there and tried to come up with an answer to the question that never really went away: Why? Why get up?
One of those who had found a reason emerged from the door now. An interesting feature at Jordan was the way the entrances opened inward, not outward. People said it was because it was harder to break in with the crack protected by the frame, and because in Jordan you were in more danger of being killed during a break-in than you were of being burnt to death inside your apartment, even though Jordan had, statistically, more arson attacks than anywhere else in all Minneapolis.
Thirteen past eight. A pale autumn sun struggled to penetrate the morning haze. I put my eye to the gunsight and adjusted the cross hairs until they focused on the door to Block 3. Yesterday he emerged from that door at exactly 08.16. Yesterday was Monday, today was Tuesday; people are creatures of habit and there was no reason to suppose he wouldn’t be heading out to work at about the same time today. And yet, I’d been sitting there since seven o’clock. After all, he was self-employed, so maybe he gave himself a bit of a lie-in on Mondays, but left home earlier on every other weekday.
I rubbed my hands together. There was a frost last night and a cold wind blew in between the drapes. I had taped them to the glass, so they wouldn’t blow about and disturb my aim. I had seen the pushers take their places on the street corners, seen the first deals made. Most of the customers were black, a few Latinos, but a few cars pulled up with white hands sticking out the windows. Quarter past eight. I inhaled the harsh odour of cooking oil, garlic and cigarette smoke. I’d scrubbed this one-room apartment for the last time, but the stink from that old wallpaper was still there. It’ll still be there when they pull this block down in a little while.
Sixteen past eight. My thighs had started to ache. I squatted back on my heels again to relieve them. The position was not optimal. I knelt on the couch, which I had pulled over to the window. I leaned the barrel against a chair back. A distance of 330 yards. A little further than ideal, particularly with those gusts of wind. Just one shot to the head and get it over with would be best. But that was too risky, I could miss and spoil the whole thing. So the plan was first a shot to the chest, to bring him down, then reload and give him the kill-shot. The rifle was an M24. I’d bought it six days ago for nineteen hundred dollars. Obviously, I didn’t buy it from a gun store, I bought it from a local dealer who used front men, mostly junkies with no criminal record who needed money quick. The dealer sent them into some ‘easy’ gun store, some place where the owner didn’t ask a lot of questions, even though the whole business reeked of a front man, he just checked the application up against the register, and then calmly sold twenty potential murder weapons to some dope fiend who didn’t know one end of a gun from the other. The dealer paid the junkie at most twenty dollars for each weapon, then sold them on for one and a half times the price in the store. His name was Dante, a fat peacock of a man, born and raised in the country outside Minneapolis but he dressed like an Italian, ate Italian and talked with a fake Italian accent. And, of course, cheated like an Italian in the business he ran out of a garage just two blocks away from here. His customers were all people with criminal records. Not small-time crooks who sent their girlfriends into the gun store or walked in themselves carrying a fake ID, but people who were willing to pay that little bit extra for a professional service. Pay in the certain knowledge that if they lost the weapon at a crime scene there was no way the police were going to be able to trace the gun back to them.
Dante paid little attention to his weight and his health, but he made up for it with the care he took with his appearance. His hair and beard looked as though they’d been trimmed with nail cutters, and his clothes always matched. And he loved gold. He had gold in his eyebrows, gold in his ears, gold around his neck. And — not least — gold in his teeth.
Those gold teeth of his were the first thing I noticed that day I went to his garage. They blinged wetly at me as he told me he hoped I was going deer hunting and the gun he was selling me wouldn’t turn up at some crime scene, because this particular weapon he had bought himself, he hadn’t used a front for it.
‘I’m just saying, you don’t have to tell me, amigo.’
He didn’t really have to say that as I hadn’t spoken a word since entering the garage. Anyway, what could I have said? That he was the one I was going to be hunting? That he was standing there and selling me the very weapon that was going to be used to kill him? He was alone at the time, but even so I was careful not to remove my sunglasses or pull back the top of the hoodie I was wearing. I just nodded, pointed to the one I wanted — the rifle plus two hand grenades — counted out the money and when he dug out the holster that came with the gun I wrapped it up myself in bubble wrap and put it down beside the telescopic sights and the two hand grenades. He had stared at my hands. Stared and stared at my hands. Maybe he was noting the pentagram on my wrist. Maybe he’d mentioned it to someone. Didn’t really matter. No more than that goodbye he had called after me in what he probably thought was a passable Spanish accent — Hasta la vista. ‘See you later.’