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The Shadow Priest Page 4
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"It also helped the shooter that we're at fairly high altitude here," Arkin said. The lower air density improves bullet performance. Stretches its effective range." He turned to Cornell. "Can we help you with the firearm identification?"
"That would be great. I'm pretty sure our forensics guy has never so much as seen a weapon like the one used here."
"I think I can get a high-priority turnaround from the lab in Albuquerque. And I'll get you a copy of everything as soon as I get it."
"Perfect."
"Do you have a plat map showing the location of roads in relation to the compound here?" Arkin asked Cornell.
"Yeah, in my car."
Arkin and Morrison examined the map on the hood of Cornell's vehicle while Pratt applied more white zinc oxide paste to his lips. As he rejoined the group by the map, Morrison said, "Cornell, man, your guys need to do a better job securing the crime scene."
"The hell you talking about?"
"Don't get defensive. I'm just saying you shouldn't let Cirque du Soleil performers just waltz around here like this," he said, gesturing to Pratt.
"I just read a thing on the internet about ultraviolet," Pratt said. "They had a picture of a dude with melanoma on his lip. Nasty. You have to really be careful."
"Apparently at the cost of fashion sense," Arkin said. "But thanks for the advice, Marcel."
"Who's Marcel?"
"Pratt, bless your heart," Morrison said. "This Christmas I'm going to get you a forehead tattoo that says 'douche bag.'"
"Yeah, well, we'll see if y'all are laughing when you have sunburned lips tonight."
"Point," Arkin said. "There's nothing funny about sunburned lips."
*****
Arkin, Morrison, and Pratt set off on foot toward a knoll at least 700 yards beyond and a few points east of the spot where Cornell's people were already searching. Pratt lugged an evidence kit in a heavy black duffel. From looking at the map, they knew a dirt road ran behind the knoll, alongside a defunct irrigation canal. As they drew near, Arkin, in the lead, turned so that they were headed for the north side of the knoll, and slowed his pace to a crawl, all the time searching the ground, sometimes dropping to his knees to look at something more closely.
"Are we going to be doing this all day?" Morrison asked. "I'm hungry. Let's go get some tamales at Ren's."
"Just stay behind me."
"You ask me, you're going around your ass to get to your elbow."
"What?"
"Wouldn't it be better if we fanned out?"
"And risk having you trample over evidence like some blind elephant? Anyway, I'm pretty sure I know where to go."
"Why don't you let Cornell's people handle this?"
"That's a good one."
Arkin kept moving, scanning the ground as he went.
"See, this is the type of thing I was alluding to earlier," Morrison said. "Obsessively combing the scrubland in a $1,200 suit and $500 Italian shoes when there are a dozen locals standing around with their dicks in their hands ready to do the same thing isn't the behavior of a quote-unquote burnout." Arkin tried to ignore him. "And maybe more interestingly, your behavior creates a paradox."
"Paradox?"
"Being a type-A, as you are—"
"I'm not a type-A."
"You're a type-A with a capital 'A.' Overachieving. Driven to perfection by an agonizing psychological deficiency need to fill an unfillable—"
"Please," Arkin groaned. "Am I going to have to listen to this all morning?"
"You don't see the paradox?"
"I'm probably missing all kinds of things, being distracted by your babbling."
"It's that your obsessive pursuit of perfection is, in and of itself, a profound personality flaw. An imperfection. You follow me?"
"You're a doctor of logic now."
"See, Pratt, the difference between Arkin and me is I know that nothing we do makes any real difference in the big picture, so I don't care. Whereas Arkin here knows that nothing we do makes any real difference in the big picture, but the poor fool can't let go. It's not his fault though. If you look at his childhood—"
"Please. Please, just give me a few minutes of peace and quiet here to find our firing position, and then we can all go back to our endless bitching about how meaningless everything is."
Pratt looked doubtful. "With all this territory, what makes you think the shooter would have been way out here?" he asked.
"The longer morning shadows afforded by the northwest facing slope, for one thing," Arkin said. "It would have made him harder to spot from the compound. There's also a decent amount of scrub brush for cover, and it's more-or-less downwind of the house."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning the shooter would have had minimal crosswind to contend with in setting up a long-distance shot. And, of course, there's the road behind the knoll. An egress route."
"Elementary," Morrison said.
After another half hour of painfully slow forward progress and sporadic backtracking, Arkin found the firing position marked by scuffing and faint depressions where elbows, knees, and toes had rested on the dirt. The marks had clearly been made by a man lying prone with his head and upper torso raised up on his elbows and forearms. Arkin hung his suit coat on a nearby tree branch, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and began a methodical examination of the area, starting where the toes of the man's boots had scratched small trenches into the earth, and noting every bent twig, every stone that seemed out of place, pointing out each discovery to his companions as he went. Pratt took photos and marked evidence with small, brightly colored flags stuck into the ground.
"There are the marks of a small tripod, there," Arkin said at one point, gesturing toward the ground to his left. "Probably for a telescope and laser range finder."
He searched every inch of ground with his pocket magnifying glass. At one point, he pulled out a set of tweezers to pick up fragments that he guessed were pieces of freeze-dried black beans. At last he reached the area where the gun's bipod would have stood, only to find the dirt brushed to obliterate the bipod's prints. Then Arkin, despite his delicate clothing, lay down on the bare earth in the impression left by the shooter, mirroring the position he thought the shooter had taken, and looked back across the high scrubland toward Egan's compound.
"Come on, Columbo," Morrison groaned, beginning to sound genuinely grumpy. "Let's pick up the pace. I'm starving."
"You could help track the guy's egress instead of standing there like a stroked out ape."
"Well, this stroked out ape has some dime store psychology that might do more to help you."
"Would it hurt your feelings, Bill, if I told you that even after all these years I'm still really not interested in your opinion?"
"Even if you break every case ever assigned to you, you're never going to rid the world of evil. And more importantly, you're never going to fill that bottomless hole in your heart. Those are, as we say in logic, impossibilities. So give it up. You'll sleep better at night."
Arkin, just as hungry as Morrison, turned and glared at him without a word. Despite his rant, Morrison began ferreting out and following the path of the shooter's escape. As he moved off, Arkin used a tape measure to record the length of the impression of the shooter's body, from elbows to toes. Then, as he began a wider grid search of the surrounding area, he saw something that made him freeze. Oh, no. Eight inches in front of his face, hanging from a twig of sagebrush, was a long, jet black strand of moderately curly hair. He reached out with his gloved hand, carefully removed the hair from the branch, sat back cross-legged, and stared at it.
"Is something wrong?" Pratt asked.
But Arkin didn't hear him. He stared down at the hair held between his fingers, his mind far away.
"Nate?"
"Hmm?"
"Are you alright? You look like you just saw a ghost."
"This is broken off short of the follicle," he muttered.
"What?"
"Could you hand me an eviden
ce bag please?"
*****
Half an hour later, Arkin had placed several rocks and twigs in evidence bags in the unlikely hope they would yield a useable print. Then, as he was clipping leaves from which he hoped to extract gun powder residue, Morrison came waltzing back up the trail. "Our shooter was a big guy."
"Tell me something I don't know."
"Probably in the neighborhood of six-foot-four and 230 pounds."
"I'll say it again."
"Whatever gun and gear he was carrying probably added a good 40 to 45 pounds to his gross hiking weight. He wears size 13 military boots with moderate wear on the treads. He has high arches and an over-pronated stride. Best I can tell, it looks like he made the round-trip to his firing position four different times over at least a couple of days. His tracks run from here, about a quarter mile, to a dogleg in the dirt road we saw on the plat map. There, he parked his car, a full-size sedan, on a gravel spur that ends at a small abandoned sand pit out of sight of the road. New tires. Brand new."
"A rental car," Arkin said. "And our shooter had moderately curly, long, black hair. By the look of it, maybe Southern European. Maybe Black Irish or Circassian. Maybe Balkan." Arkin tried to beat some of the dirt off the front of his suit pants and shirt. "So, Marcel," Arkin said, turning to Pratt, "what do we deduce from all of this?"
"I don't know."
"We deduce that this guy is big and strong enough to carry a monster of a gun a quarter mile. That he's disciplined. Patient. A thorough planner. That he probably knew the direction of the prevailing winds. That he scouted the target over several days, studied his movements, established the patterns. That he was already prepared to fire at the very moment Egan came out of his house. That he was good enough to fire off two highly accurate shots, including a kill, with what was probably a bolt-action rifle, from more than 1,200 yards out. That he had good enough intel to know the job might call for a heavy, anti-material sniper rifle firing armor-piercing bullets, instead of a more common and lighter anti-personnel rifle firing ball, on account of Egan's armored car. That he was clever enough to lie here for days, take out his target, and then escape, on foot and then in a car, without being detected by anyone, let alone Egan's security detail, which included in its ranks an experienced, though apparently obtuse, military-trained personal security expert. That he knew the imprints left by his bipod might help us narrow down the type of gun he used. That he is a pro, probably military trained. And that he has done this before." Arkin looked up at the blue sky. "Yes, that he has certainly done this before."
"Bravo," Morrison said. "I tell you, Pratt, you should keep your eye on this guy. His cause is futile in the greater scheme, as I so enjoy reminding him. But the son of a bitch is good."
"We should ask about a big guy with long, black, curly hair at all the motels in town," Pratt said.
"He stayed out here," Arkin said. "Ate backpacker's food. Probably slept in the car."
"For days? Well, if he was out here for days, should we look for his urine and feces?"
"You can if you think it will help earn you your Eagle Scout badge. But he probably took it with him."
"Took it with him?"
"Like I said, he's a pro." For a moment, they stood quiet. "But everyone leaves some sort of trail. Maybe he was a local. But I doubt it. And if he wasn't, then he probably had to buy gas somewhere within a 150-or-so miles of here. Maybe he used a credit card."
"That would have been stupid of him."
"It's a balancing of risks. If he paid cash, he would have had to go into a gas station and be seen up close by a clerk, maybe even a security camera. Which option presents the greater risk?"
"I suppose it depends on how memorable the guy is," Pratt said. "If he looks funny or has a foreign accent or something like that."
"Which he very well could. Very good, apprentice. It might be worthwhile to subpoena some credit card data. Run some formulas. Look for patterns."
"Sounds like looking for a needle in a haystack."
"And then we'll cross-reference it against other data."
"What other data?" Morrison asked.
Arkin didn't answer.
FIVE
As they arrived back at their parked cars, Morrison said, "I might run over to McCready's too. Can you give Pratt a ride home?"
"As long as he removes that ridiculous neon eyewear strap and the white mime lipstick."
"You want anything from McCready's, Pratt? Some roasted chilies?"
"No, I'm good. Thanks."
"What about for your wife?"
"She doesn't do spicy."
"Are we still going to the range later?"
"Four o'clock," Arkin said.
"See you boys there."
Arkin and Pratt got in Arkin's G-ride—an old navy blue Crown Victoria, immaculate inside and out. Arkin held the keys in his hand but stared out the windshield without putting them in the ignition, taking a deep breath as he revisited the evidence in his mind, wondering whether the similarities between what he'd seen here and a case from years past, a case that still haunted him, were an unbelievable coincidence or, as he suspected and dreaded, something more.
Pratt sat in the passenger seat, a newly opened bottle of SunnyD orange drink held between his thighs, writing notes on a pad that looked to Arkin like a pink cartoon rendering of a monkey's face.
"What the hell kind of notepad is that? Is that what they're issuing in crime scene kits at DCI these days?"
"You don't know about 'Strawberry Monkey'? It's Kayla's favorite cartoon character. You're out of touch, my friend."
"Very professional."
"She gave it to me for Father's Day, so I have to use it. You'll understand when you—" Pratt choked off his statement. He shook his head and looked down at his own lap. "Sorry."
"It's alright."
A quiet moment passed.
"Oh, I almost forgot," Pratt said, "do you want a cookie?"
"Do I want a cookie?"
"A lady bug cookie." Pratt pulled it from his gun bag—a large, round sugar cookie in plastic wrap, its surface a mass of red frosting with black dots. "Ella baked them yesterday, and Kayla did the frosting. Kayla said I was supposed to give you the ladybug because you caught one for her at the park."
Arkin smiled wearily. "Thanks, but I'm afraid I don't have much of an appetite after seeing Egan's brains blown all over the place."
"Take it home then. You don't want to hurt Kayla's feelings."
"No, I do not." Arkin took the cookie and slid it into his computer bag. "I can't believe she's turning 5 already."
"You guys are coming to the party, right?"
"Wouldn't miss it."
Arkin selected a CD, popped it into the car stereo, and fired up the big 4.6-liter V8 engine. The quiet notes of a Chopin nocturne softened the road noise as they flew back down the country road toward town, passing open rangeland dotted with clumps of brush and scrub trees. But barely a mile on, as Arkin gave further thought to the crime scene, his eyes caught a flash of movement—something small and brown—crossing the path of their car. He stood on the brakes, locking them. The car began to skid sideways. Arkin turned into the slide, regaining control as they came to a roaring stop, gravel flying everywhere, an enormous dust cloud catching up with and enveloping them. He turned to see that Pratt had dropped his bottle of SunnyD as he reached for the dashboard to brace himself, and that most of the beverage had spilled onto his lap. Then Arkin, his heart pounding, frantically scanned the scrubland to the left of the car until he spotted a tiny, limping fawn just as it disappeared behind the trees. It couldn't have been more than a month old.
"Oh, that's nice. My pants are soaked. You out of your mind?"
"There was a baby deer."
"Yeah, I can see that. But why go all Starsky and Hutch like that? We could have gone off the road."
"I'm too good a driver."
"Whatever. That thing wouldn't have even put a dent in your bumper. And it was limping."
>
"I didn't hit it."
"I didn't say you did. My point is that it was already injured or born with a birth defect or whatever. And it's lost or was rejected by its mother. So it isn't going to survive anyway."
"You don't know that. It could survive and be just fine. It could prove to be the next Donner or Blitzen."
"Gimpy, reject, motherless, month-old fawns don't survive, city boy. That's a fact of life."
"You don't know that."
"And to think you were smirking at me because of that butterfly."
"Alright, already."
"And why are you being grumpy? I'm the one who got his pants soaked."
"Because I'm starving."
"So eat something."
"I can't. I have to get a damned colonoscopy tomorrow morning."
"What's that?"
"Ask Morrison. He probably gets them for the fun of it." He took a deep breath to settle himself. "And come to think of it, why don't you take a turn driving, young buck. I need to read a file on the way home."
"I'm only five years younger than you."
"Whatever," Arkin said, tossing Pratt the keys. "Drive, Jeeves."
*****
As they drove toward Durango, just passing the entrance to Mesa Verde National Park on Highway 160, Pratt began telling Arkin about a bestselling novel he'd nearly finished, insisting that Arkin read it. Khyber Recon was about a Marine recon team that was watching for Taliban crossing into Afghanistan near the Khyber Pass. Pratt described several scenes to Arkin, asking him if the tactics described in the book were accurate and if the action was realistic. One scene involved the team getting pinned down, outnumbered 3-to-1 by a group of insurgents, then forced to retreat into a cave where they found themselves trapped.
"Well, for one thing," Arkin said, "a 3-to-1 ratio of Taliban to recon Marines is still a pretty good ratio as far as the Marines are concerned. So having them be allegedly pinned down and forced to retreat into a cave isn't realistic. But that aside, how did they escape?"
"I don't want to ruin it for you."