Eye of Vengeance (17 page)

“Nick? Did you get that?”

“Repeat that name for me,” Nick said, his brain now flashing.

“Trace Michaels. M-I-C-H-A-E-L-S.”

“Thanks, Bill. I appreciate it,” Nick said.

“OK, Nicky, but remem—”

Nick hung up before the administrator could finish his sentence.

Three was too many. Four was impossible. Nick was up and on his way through the newsroom, his eyes glazed with remembering, when an editor called out his name.

“I’m going to a shooting in Pompano,” he answered, snapping his notepad on the edge of the woman’s desk as he walked by and left it at that. On his brisk walk to the elevators he was thinking, Trace Michaels, dead. Maybe they should give this shooter a medal.

Nick drove north on Dixie Highway through the bedroom communities of Wilton Manors and Oakland Park, thinking about Mary Chardain’s face, the skin on her left cheek and forehead whitened in splotches where the burned and crinkled skin had to be removed. Her thin arms, lying out straight on the hospital bed, were still gauzed and Nick had already been told by the nurse of the agony the woman would have to go through as those bandages were regularly removed, dead skin removed and then the new raw layer rewrapped. Trace Michaels had sloshed rubbing alcohol over the head of his lover of six years and set her on fire. “Jesus,” Nick said aloud in the car, remembering the guy’s face. A public defender had argued Michaels’s case, claiming that both he and Chardain were drug addicts and the alcohol had accidentally spilled on Mary when they were cooking another dose together and had caught fire. Nick had done a story on Chardain and her daughter, a bright eleven-year-old who witnessed the incident and had jumped to her mother’s aid. Michaels had gone down for attempted murder. But somehow—and Nick was thinking about the prison overcrowding that was forcing the release of model prisoners and the use of gain time, which cut their sentences down for good behavior—Michaels was back on the street.

When he got to McNab he turned east and as he went through the light at Cypress Road he could see the collection of cop cars and Pompano’s yellow-green rescue trucks blinking in the next block. He pulled over into a small shopping center, parked his car and walked the rest of the way, watching, searching the rooflines of any building tall enough to give a sniper an angle on the offices where the largest knot of paramedics and cops were gathered. By now Nick had lost his skepticism. This was another one. As he approached he saw the paramedics reloading their truck, no one to treat or transport. A couple of deputies were standing just off the sidewalk, talking quietly, their backs purposely turned to the yellow sheet that covered a lump behind them. The body had not been moved and still lay mostly on the sidewalk, only its feet jamming open the door of the parole office. Nick stopped at the crime scene tape that was stretched around three parked cars, positioned to keep the gawkers at a distance. He was looking for a familiar face among the officers to signal to when he saw Hargrave step out of the building with a pen in his mouth and a leather-bound notebook in his hand. Nick stayed silent, watching the detective look down at the body. The ballpoint pen was between his teeth and was flicking back and forth like a metronome. He bent his knees and folded himself down like some adjustable ladder so that he was on the balls of his feet. Then he peeled back the yellow sheet, looked under it and finally turned his gaze to the sky, the rooflines. Nick knew he had been right.

“Detective?” Nick called out, as any reporter at the scene would.

But unlike any other reporter, he was summoned by a crook of Hargrave’s finger and he raised the plastic tape and slipped under.

The beefy sergeant who seemed to run with Hargrave as protection, though Nick doubted that the wiry detective would need any in a street fight, stepped up to block his advance only a few feet from the body.

“It’s OK, Tony,” Hargrave said and the big man backed off.

The detective stayed in his crouch and Nick joined him. Hargrave said nothing and instead pulled back the yellow tarp and exposed the dead man’s face. Nick was not squeamish and knew that it was not Hargrave’s intent to shock him. In profile, the man’s face had already gone whiter than normal. The dark stubble on his cheek and chin was unnaturally distinct, as if each follicle were raised in relief. Nick knew that the other cheek on the ground would be the opposite, growing dark purple as the blood settled at the lowest point. The man’s exposed and wide-open right eye had already lost its glisten of moisture. Hargrave pulled the sheet back farther. The back portion of the man’s head, behind the ear, had been ripped open by a heavy round.

“The woman in front of him opened the door and then dropped a set of keys. Our victim apparently had just begun to bend down to get them when she heard a ‘slap,’ as she described it,” Hargrave said. “She’s inside, trying not to look at the blood spatter all over her dress.”

Nick stood up, not needing to see any more. Hargrave replaced the sheet and stood with him.

“Look familiar?” the detective said.

“Trace Michaels,” Nick said quietly. “I did a takeout piece on him a few years ago. He’s the guy who doused his girlfriend with alcohol and set her on fire.”

“Good memory,” Hargrave said.

“I remember them all,” Nick replied.

They both went quiet for several seconds, maybe realizing what they both shared.

“I think we better step into the office here, Mr. Mullins.”

Hargrave led the way around the body and into the reception area of the parole office. There were plastic chairs against two walls. A glassed window, slid shut, was in the middle of the third wall. They passed through a door into an interior hallway and Nick saw a small huddle of what he took to be employees sitting around a small break table in one room, talking quietly but in voices that were unnaturally high with anxiety and the breathlessness that goes with, “My God. I could have been walking in that door myself.”

Hargrave opened the third door, checked for anyone inside and then nodded Nick in. The detective sat on the edge of a crowded desktop stacked with folders and what Nick recognized as Florida Statute books. With one skinny haunch on the desk, Hargrave’s knee hung at a ninety-degree angle like a broken stick and his elbow was bent in the same geometric way while he stroked his chin. Nick had an unwanted vision of an erector set flash through his head.

“Mr. Michaels was coming in for his weekly visit to his parole officer,” Hargrave began, opening his notebook as though he were checking the time. “A nine o’clock appointment. The PO says the guy had been consistent ever since he was released from his road prison gig last July. Hadn’t missed a check-in and his spot urine had been clean of drugs every time.”

“So how would our sniper know when and where he was coming in?” Nick asked, sitting down in the one chair that was probably meant for clients.

Hargrave hesitated at the question and looked Nick in the face. “Our sniper?” he finally said.

“OK, then, my sniper,” Nick said, surprising himself with the tight anger in his own voice. He took a deep breath and then laid his findings out for Hargrave, how his research showed that now there were four felons or ex-cons who were dead of high-powered rifle fire and who had also been the subjects of major takeouts that Nick had written for the
Daily News.
Yes, he admitted the jurisdictions of the first two were different, then these two right here in his backyard.

“It’s like he’s working off my damned bylines,” Nick said.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Hargrave. “Paranoia we don’t need, Mullins.”

Nick pressed his lips together into a hard line. OK, he thought. Don’t let your mouth get you into trouble again. This time he started out calmly, just the facts.

“Chambliss, Crossly, Ferris and now Michaels,” Nick said. “I’ve done special takeouts on every one of them. Big, bylined pieces.”

“So have half a dozen other reporters,” Hargrave said.

“No, not in-depth pieces. Not the kind of coverage that really showed who and what these guys were. Hell, some of these psychopaths never got more than their five minutes of media infamy,” Nick responded, again keeping his voice under control. “The
Herald
and the local city papers all did stories on Ferris. It was a big thing. But Chambliss wasn’t local. No other paper down here followed that.

“And this guy lying out there on the sidewalk? Everybody else just treated what he did to his girlfriend like it was some domestic fight.”

Hargrave was still perched on the desk like some kind of tabletop decoration, as if his stiff crane neck were going to dip his beak down into a cup of water at any moment.

“OK, say we inject your ego into the equation, Mullins,” he finally said. “You friendly with any good snipers? You have any grand theories on which master criminal you’ve written about is next on the list to have his head blown off? Maybe he’s just doing them alphabetically.”

Nick stared at the detective, not realizing his own mouth was slightly open while he went through the names in his head and realized that the detective had already mentally sorted them.

“Speaking of lists,” Nick said, figuring where the alphabet might fit in, thinking of the Secret Service man’s list.

Hargrave might have smiled, but anyone observing would have been hard-pressed to testify to it. The detective opened up his notebook and removed a sheet of paper. Nick tightened his fist, resisting the urge to reach out and snatch it from Hargrave’s hand.

The detective read, his eyes jumping from spot to spot on a page that Nick couldn’t see.

“Since you never gave me Chambliss and this Crossly guy, I’m a little reluctant to be handing over internal documents to some reporter.”

“They weren’t in your jurisdiction,” Nick said. “I figured you wouldn’t care.”

Hargrave just looked up over the top of the paper, his pewter-colored eyes static. Nick figured he was trying to think of something pithy. Or was he actually trying to decide whether he did give a damn? The praying mantis was not without some compassion, Nick thought. After another beat the detective handed the paper to Nick.

“Your copy,” he said.

Nick flipped it over. There was no heading, just a typed list of names and dates and jurisdictions that covered a number of different states. Someone had put checkmarks next to Chambliss, Crossly and Ferris. Michaels was farther down, not yet acknowledged. Nick again started from the top, searching while his heart rate increased looking for more names that he recognized as subjects of his own writing. He stopped at a couple of last names that were familiar, but one was in California and the other in Texas. Doubtful, he thought.

“So these are the ones that Fitzgerald is checking out?” Nick said.

“At least they’re the ones he was willing to give up.”

“You think he’s made the connection between these four and my stories?”

“Like I said about your ego, Mullins. Fitzgerald’s looking for a threat to the Secretary of State. He’s gonna tap anything he can, even if it’s some vigilante offing assholes who burned their lovers or raped little girls. A psycho is a psycho. Who knows their motivations?” Hargrave said. “But our guy isn’t some paid political assassin. Our guy is a whole different breed. Frankly, I don’t know what the hell he’s capable of.”

“OK, so we’ve got Charles Bronson playing sniper from the rooftops of Broward County.”

“You might put it that way, but my name better never show up agreeing with you,” Hargrave said. “Besides, the Bronson character was being a hell of a lot less discriminating than this guy. Our guy’s obviously doing some planning, lying in wait, leaving no sign other than the damn bullet behind.”

“You match them up with forensics?”

“I just shipped this one,” Hargrave said, jerking his thumb behind him toward the front where Michaels’s body was cooling on the street. “And we’ll have to get the others from those cases of yours out of our jurisdiction if they ever found or kept them. Believe it or not, every department doesn’t exactly follow
CSI: Miami’s
television protocol.”

Nick knew that crime scene technicians rarely did so much as a fingerprint check on ninety-nine percent of the crimes committed in their territory, much less ballistics and supposed laser scans. Only the high-profile murders would warrant that and this group of dead criminals were far below priority, though he had a feeling that was about to change.

Hargrave had gone quiet and Nick had the sense that this meeting was through.

“So what’s next?” he asked.

“To the morgue,” Hargrave said, standing up. “You want me to get your CD back from Dr. Petish while I’m there?”

Jesus, Nick thought, what doesn’t this guy know?

“No, that’s alright. I’ll just get it later after you get done,” he said, grinning.

They were at the door when Hargrave suggested that Nick go over the list that he’d given him and let him know if any of the names came up familiar on second reading.

“And speaking of lists,” the detective said, mocking Nick again. “Ms. Cotton claims she doesn’t have any kind of sympathy letters that she kept from the time after her children were killed.”

Nick didn’t know how to react. He was wondering why the woman would recant such a thing.

“But she’s not a very good liar,” Hargrave said. “She stonewalled me early this morning. Why don’t you take a visit and see if she’ll give them up to you?”

“Yeah, OK,” Nick said. “But I’m also going to need some information and quotes from you on this thing for tomorrow’s paper.”

Hargrave held Nick’s eyes for a moment and then seemed to give in to something he’d probably prided himself on for a career.

“Yeah, alright. Here’s my cell number. Call me when you need it.”

Nick took down the number and watched the detective pick his way through the office and leave. Then he stopped at the room where the employees of the parole office had gathered.

“Excuse me,” he said and they all looked at him in anticipation. “I’m Nick Mullins from the
Daily News.
Can anyone tell me about what happened here?”