Chill Factor (4 page)

In high school, he discovered similar tactics that worked
with select teachers. And he remained ever watchful for opportune situations. He found the gym teacher’s peephole into the girls’ dressing room. He caught Jane Greer letting other guys feel her up while her boyfriend ran laps at football practice. He discovered the marijuana hidden in Ms. Skinner’s bottom desk drawer.

At college, his web encompassed every department on campus. Powerful enough to amass him a sizable bank balance, it got him laid as often as he wanted, prompted an associate professor’s dismissal, and encouraged a sophomore’s suicide. That last unfortunate incident forced him to relocate, sever all connections with his past, and change his name. Now his web reached from coast to coast and deep into the national bureaucracy. Every experiment captured another gossamer layer of knowledge toward assuming control of more power than any U.S. president had ever dreamed of.

The brown spider swung a strand from a third mimosa leaf. The shimmering threads defined an area roughly thirty inches in diameter—ambitious, for such a small arachnid.

When Edna’s blue Subaru zipped out of the bank parking lot right on schedule and passed through the intersection, the Shepherd meticulously penned the fact in his notebook. He waited ten seconds, allowing a pickup truck and two cars to pass between them, then pulled into the street. The Subaru turned at the boarded-up strip center as planned, to circle behind and exit on the side street.

Would she drop the money in the clump of weeds behind the old pharmacy, as rehearsed? Or would she make the adjustment and drop it outside the workers’ line of sight?

Spying the canvas bags lying in the shadows four yards beyond the original drop spot, he smiled, braking just long enough to pull the bags into his car. The merry widow had performed outstandingly. He recalled how determined she’d been to succeed at this assignment. All in all, Edna had been much happier over these past months than when he’d first met her: He prided himself on that. Too bad her usefulness had come to an end.

Thrum.

The officer interviewing Dixie couldn’t have been more than thirty days out of the academy, she decided. His shirt, so crisp it could stand on its own, retained the absolute blue of uniform fabric not yet faded from laundering. And judging from three fresh nicks on his face, he’d shaved after a bad night. His voice held the slow twang of East Texas. Officer G. Tobler.

“You said your name is …?”

“Dixie Flannigan.”
For the third time.

Dixie’s mind hadn’t yet assimilated the rush of events following the robbery—tellers babbling, a customer sobbing, Len Bacon patting the air, assuring all would be “fine, folks, absolutely fine,” if everyone simply remained calm. The young officer’s attention kept straying to his equally young partner communicating by radio with a patrol car on the Southwest Freeway—where the real action was unfolding in a highspeed chase. Apparently, someone had triggered an alarm, and a Richmond patrol unit had locked on to Edna’s Subaru. When she refused to pull over, the chase left Richmond, picking up patrol cars in two additional jurisdictions before entering Houston city limits. HPD assistance brought more units, including a helicopter—against one Subaru and a sixty-something woman who must’ve gone totally nuts.

She hadn’t a prayer of outrunning them.

Pull over, Edna.
But as Dixie continued eavesdropping on the chase, a nasty, undisciplined little voice deep down inside her cheered,
Go, Edna, go!

“Ma’am, what were you doing alone in the manager’s office?”

Dixie’d answered this question before, too, but she repeated her explanation, her gaze drifting toward a clock. Fifty-six minutes until her self-defense class. Not that Officer G. Tobler’s interview wasn’t important, but the women Dixie taught were all victims of abuse or, for other good reasons, fearful of attack. The unexplained absence of their instructor could send them wailing back to their support groups.

“And you say the perpetrator fired through the glass after you dialed 911?”

“Before I could finish—”

The radio captured the officer’s attention again. From the crackling communication between patrol cars, the dispatcher, and Tobler’s partner, Dixie deciphered that the Subaru had exited the freeway and finally pulled over.
Good, Edna. Now, tell the nice officers it was all a mistake. The devil made you do it, or late menopause craziness, or—

POP! POP! POP! crackled from the radio, then “OFFICER DOWN!”

Dixie groaned. “Oh, Edna, no!”

Officer Tobler stared at her.

“Ma’am, are you acquainted with the suspect?”

Before Dixie could answer, more shots sounded. She held her breath. The next words were like stepping from a humid, sunny day into an open freezer.

“SUSPECT DOWN.” Dixie’s stomach turned queasy.
Down … did that mean dead?

“I have to get there,” she told Tobler in a voice she hoped held the snap of command.

Maybe it was the rookie’s own eagerness to be involved in the drama, or maybe it was the fact that Dixie knew most of the senior officers in the Richmond Police Department, but Tobler radioed the patrol officer who’d originally tagged the Subaru. After a moment, a voice came back with a brusque order to escort the witness to the scene of the shooting.
The suspect has no identification
, Dixie figured.
They need my assistance.

Praying she’d been mistaken, that a trick of light had betrayed her into seeing Edna’s face on the shoulders of a stranger, Dixie hurried with Tobler to his car. Then realization finally trickled through to her resistant brain cells. If the suspect were still alive, Tobler would’ve been instructed to take Dixie to the hospital.

Her steps faltered beside the police car. When the officer opened the door, the sharp scent of floral freshener engulfed her, and Tobler’s earnest young face suddenly looked too eager, his black shoes too shiny, too new. He was too goddamn ready to sharpen his experience on the death of an old lady who’d baked the best peanut-butter cookies ever stolen from a cookie jar. Dixie didn’t want to stare down at her neighbor’s dead face and pronounce her a thief—or worse—if the wounded officer had died, too, a capital murderer.

Tobler’s insistent grip on Dixie’s arm urged her onto the passenger seat. He shut the door and circled to the driver’s side, speaking quietly into his cell phone.

Does he think I’m an accomplice?

Dixie shrugged it off. On the drive, she almost convinced herself it would not be Edna.
Whoops, sorry, guys. Sure looked like my neighbor, there in the bank, but out here in daylight …

It was Edna. Even without seeing her face, Dixie instantly recognized the heart-shaped mole scar on her neck. Marty had insisted his mother have the mole tested after Dixie’s adoptive mother died of cancer. An inch-long, gray hair grew from the scar. With Edna’s snappy new clothes and expert makeup, the hair looked grotesque.

A bilious knot lodged in Dixie’s throat. She looked away from the corpse, scarcely hearing Tobler’s comments to the ranking sergeant. Her gaze slid around the secured area. When any HPD officer discharged a side arm, especially if injury or death resulted, a crime scene instantly became enormously complicated. The officer’s supervisor appeared, along with his union lawyer, Internal Affairs, Homicide, and the DA’s Civil Rights Division. The HPD training team, self-billed as Heckle and Jeckle, occasionally showed up. Today the whole gang had gathered.

Outside a yellow-tape perimeter, the media crowded close
with cameras and microphones. Civilian vehicles rolled slowly along the nearby freeway, rubbernecking, causing traffic to back up. A few cars had pulled off and stopped.

Dixie realized she stood at the center of the crowd, still grappling with the idea that the neighbor she knew growing up could be the same woman who now lay dead at her feet, the same woman who just minutes ago had calmly held a gun to a teller’s head. The images refused to merge.

A few feet away stood a tight blue circle of officers: the shooters. Male. Female. From a medley of jurisdictions. Some appeared stunned. A few looked as ill as Dixie felt. Others wore hard, insolent veneers.

Taking two long strides, Dixie confronted a male HPD officer who looked totally alert, yet horrified.

“Nine hotshot shooters against one old lady?” The words felt puny leaving her lips, shoved out by a cold rage. “Isn’t this how that robbery ended yesterday in Webster?”

The astonished officer opened his mouth to reply—

But Dixie pressed on. “Don’t you idiots
talk
to one another between jurisdictions?”

A hand grasped her upper arm.

“Flannigan, what’s going on here?” HPD Homicide Sergeant Ben Rashly tugged her away from the officer.

Dixie tried to yank her arm from his grip. When he didn’t let go, she allowed herself to be pulled aside.

“They could’ve handled it better, Rash! She didn’t have to goddamn die.”

He glared back at her. “You know that woman or not, Flannigan?”

“I’ve known her family since I was a kid.” The sharp burst of words had loosened something inside her. “Her name is Edna Pine. Next of kin is Marty Pine, her son, owns an art gallery in Dallas—Essence or Pleasance or something—and Edna wouldn’t do this, Rash, not the robbery, not the shooting, and she never wore high-heeled goddamn shoes in her life, at least not … not …
Shit!
She was a good person. Something’s wrong here, Rash. Totally wrong!”

“Okay, okay.” His scowl softened. “Let’s move along now and let these people finish up.” Taking her arm, he led her
toward his unmarked sedan. “We can talk downtown, if you want.”

“I can’t go downtown. I have a class to teach in fourteen minutes. We can talk here.”

The sight of Ben Rashly’s strong, square hands filling his pipe, and the familiar scent of Middleton’s Cherry Blend tobacco, dropped a layer of normality against the morning’s horror. Dixie’d worked with Ben while she was with the DA’s office. They’d developed a mutual respect as he bounced from Fraud to Sex Crimes to Accident Division. A year ago, he’d transferred to Homicide.

“Actually, Flannigan, we’re glad to have the quick ID, so we can move on this.” He took her statement and let her go, knowing where to find her if he had more questions.

And he
would
have more questions. Dixie only wished she had more answers.

Rose Yenik perched on a straight-backed chair in a plain room, two feet from her tiny television, and watched a news flash that had interrupted her favorite soap. For a sizable chunk of the year, Rose’s sixty-fifth year on God’s earth, she had occupied this room at appointed intervals. She found the plainness soothing. Natural pine furniture, white bedding, and a single garden window provided a blank canvas for thought. Rose spent hours at that window. But her church allotted only an hour a day for television, so when the dolly-faced news anchor broke in with a flash report, Rose was at first annoyed.

Now she stared at the screen, unwilling to believe her ears. First Lucy, now Edna … how the dickens had both women failed so pitifully? Of course, the newswoman didn’t yet know it was Edna she reported about so dispassionately. But Rose knew.

And what good were those roving videocams when all they showed of the shooting scene was another reporter, with the crowd milling behind?

A little square picture of Lucy popped onto the screen.

“
Last week a similar robbery occurred at a Houston branch of Texas Citizens Bank. Yesterday a robbery at the Webster branch ended in the shooting death of Lucy Aaron Ames …”

“Oh, my good friends,” Rose murmured, reaching a trembling hand to touch the screen. The first stickup had gone
without a hitch last week. Lucy’s insider information came through as good as gold … as good as the sixty-seven thousand and change that now lined the church’s coffer.

“It’ll be a snap,” Lucy had promised in her matter-of-fact style. “Bank employees are trained not to risk lives. We go in quiet, we go out fast. The money is government-insured, and we’ll certainly make better use of it than Uncle Sam ever has.”

Amen to that.

But then the bank’s security people must have wised up and changed tactics. Lucy was dead, and now Edna. Dead.

Rose pondered that for a spell, her myopic gaze resting on the TV screen, where the pretty anchor chatted earnestly with the off-site reporter. Rose realized she would never see Lucy or Edna again, not even at the funeral. The Shepherd would not allow it. Too risky.

A chilly fear wormed insistently into Rose’s head. Her eyes misted, and she felt suddenly alone.

Retrieving her eyeglasses from beside the television—she preferred watching up close rather than through the trifocal lenses—Rose placed them on her face. As she stood, an old back pain she hadn’t felt for months gave her a pinch.

“I’m strong enough to do what needs to be done,” she whispered.

Her leather slippers
shushed
on the pine floor as she walked to the closet.

I can do what needs to be done.

She removed a gray plastic case from the closet shelf and opened it on the bed. Inside, in a rubber-foam nest, lay her own Colt .38 Special, cleaned and ready to load.

I can do
…

Her hands trembled as she lifted it, though she’d held the nickel-plated revolver many times in her hours of practice. Steadying the gun in both hands, she aimed at the television.

…
what needs to be done.

And squeezed the trigger.

“Bam,” Rose said.

“Were you scared?”

Bettye, a high school librarian, was Dixie’s most dedicated student. Twice a week Dixie volunteered a ninety-minute class at a women’s health center. The center provided space and students. Thanks to one of Dixie’s corporate contacts, the space now sported mirrored walls, bright blue workout mats, and a heavy punching bag for practice.

News of the robbery had already reached the center when Dixie arrived.

“Scared?” Dixie addressed the librarian, but it was impossible not to feel the weight of the demanding eyes of all five women. “Of course I was scared. People were in danger.
I
was in danger.”