Backfire

13

Sea Cliff

Friday afternoon

It was late afternoon and chilly, with only a few wispy tails of fog coming through the Golden Gate when Savich and Sherlock joined Eve and Harry in the Hunts’ backyard. Sharp gusts of wind blew off the water. It was too cold to think much about the incredible view.

Savich said to Harry, “The SFPD out front aren’t fooling around. They stopped us and looked us over pretty closely since they didn’t know who we were.”

Harry said, “There was a paparazzo here who caused a commotion only a half-hour ago. The police are here to keep everyone else off the property. Deputy Marshal Barbieri here-Eve-will be heading up security.”

Savich said, “Good to know. I can see from that police tape and the height of the stone wall pretty much where Ramsey had to be standing when he was shot. He said he saw a Zodiac anchored off his little slice of beach. He didn’t mention hearing anything, which means the shooter had to have motored in before Ramsey came out, and waited. Ramsey is about my height, and he was shot from the rear under his right shoulder blade, with the exit wound higher.” He looked over the wall and studied the terrain below. “Maybe sixty to seventy feet up from the rocks, with a steep angle down.”

“Have you heard about the rock with a newspaper photo of Judge Hunt tied to it, his face marked through with an X?” Harry said, and pointed.

“We’ve heard,” Savich said, looking over at the bush.

“The conundrum is, do we have two people, the shooter from the beach and someone else who dropped the rock up here? Seems like an awfully risky thing to do just to leave a message. There’s an active neighborhood watch, according to Mrs. Hunt, that she herself helped start five years ago. Even though it was near midnight, there’s a chance one of the neighbors would have seen a second perp.”

Eve said, “You can bet someone in a neighborhood like this one would have gone on alert if they saw a stranger near Ramsey’s property. I’d wager my Sunday hat if the shooter dropped the message, he came up the trail from the beach on Mr. Sproole’s property next door and over his fence into that backyard, since that’s the only trail for a good distance. And if he risked Mr. Sproole seeing him, then why would he bother to shoot him from down below in the first place? Why not right here, then drop the rock and head back down to that Zodiac? It’s a conundrum, like Harry said.”

Sherlock said, “Show me where they found that rock.”

Eve touched the leaves about halfway down the huge hydrangea and pushed them aside. “I wasn’t here, but that flag marks the spot, there.”

Sherlock turned to Harry. “You were here when the rock was found. Tell me how the rock was set under the hydrangea. Did it look carefully placed, or like it was simply tossed there, like an afterthought?”

Harry said, “The note attached to the rock was actually upside down and set partially into that soft soil. It looked freshly placed, not covered by any dirt or leaves. The forensic team didn’t find it until it was full daylight, because the rock was under the hydrangea.”

Sherlock stuck her hand in among the leaves, felt around with her fingers. Then she went down on her haunches and continued to carefully poke around inside the hydrangea.

She looked up and cocked her head to one side, something Savich had seen her do many times, a sure sign she was picturing what had happened. “How did the shooter know Ramsey would be outside, by himself, late Thursday night? Surely he didn’t simply hang around to see if his target happened to come outside? So did Ramsey have a habit of coming out here at night by himself? To look at the Marin Headlands, the Golden Gate?”

Eve pulled her cell out of her pocket and dialed. “Molly? Did Ramsey have a habit of spending a few minutes outside every night, before bed?”

She listened. “Thank you. That helps. I’ll tell you later, I promise. We’re still out here at the house trying to make sense of how this all happened. I’ll see you soon.”

She punched off, slipped the phone back in her red jacket pocket. “Yes, every night. Molly said it was a ritual, that Ramsey came out sometimes even in the rain. She said it made him feel blessed to be able to look out from his own Wuthering Heights, like it was the center of the world.”

Harry said, “That means the shooter, or the people who hired him, knew that. They had to know his family well, or they had to be watching his house long enough to be sure he would be there. Are the Cahills even a possibility? Could they have found out a detail like that about Ramsey’s habits from jail?”

Eve said, “You’re right. How many people could have known about Ramsey’s habits at night, in his own backyard? And Ramsey was shot within twenty-four hours of his closing down the trial. That’s a small window of opportunity for the Cahills.”

“So what is it you’ve been thinking about down there, Sherlock?” Savich asked.

She pulled her arm out of the hydrangea bush. “I’ve been thinking about why the picture, why the message. Someone seeing it sitting handily under the bush, not twenty feet from where Ramsey fell, might conclude we’ve got two people involved, as Harry said. But if the second man’s job was to plant the picture for the police to find, to make some sort of statement, why on the ground under the bush? And what message were they sending?”

“The first impression it leaves,” Eve said, “is that Ramsey was shot because of what he’d done as a judge, because of his reputation and what it means to people. The crossed-out picture is a sort of in-your-face sneer; that’s what Harry thought.”

“I suppose,” Harry said, “that it could be some kind of misdirection, to point us away from the trial or from some personal motive.”

Sherlock nodded. “Here’s the deal. I agree the Xerox itself could be misdirection, but what about where it was found? It makes it seem like there were two people involved, but the fact is there was only the shooter, and he was on the beach.”

Harry said, “Then how’d the rock get here? Did the guy climb up the cliff to drop it under the bush, then scramble back down to the beach and climb back aboard his Zodiac before the cops got here?”

Sherlock smiled. “There’s a freshly broken branch inside that bush, and I doubt it was one of our forensic team who broke it. Something heavy broke it from behind, from the rear, and it’s maybe two feet directly up from where the flag on the ground marks where they found the rock. That means the rock wasn’t just laid on the ground under the bush, it hit the bush hard.”

Savich said, “So it came from a distance.” He looked down over the wall again. “It’s too far down to throw it up and hit the bush with much force. But a small rock could easily be shot up here with a slingshot, say. One of those leather Trumark models they use to hunt jackrabbits and such. It would reach up here easily, aimed at the hydrangea, a nice big target. Good going, Sherlock.”

Eve stared at her. “How’d you think to even look for that?”

Sherlock said matter-of-factly, “There had to be a solution to Harry’s conundrum, and this was the only one I could think of. The shooter was careful, he studied Ramsey and picked his spot carefully, so it didn’t make sense he’d give up that advantage by climbing up the trail to drop a message.”

“Amazing,” Eve said. “So much for our second perp.” But Harry wasn’t convinced.

Sherlock said, “Answer me this, Agent Christoff. If there was a second man, why didn’t he come out from his hidey-hole to make sure Ramsey was dead? No, what the shooter wanted was to kill Ramsey, and didn’t care too much if he missed with that rock. In the grand scheme of things, that attempt to sneer at us, to misdirect us, or whatever, wouldn’t have worked if we didn’t find the rock. So what?”

Everyone chewed on that. Harry said, “Okay, one shooter, then. I can’t get over the timing-Ramsey postponed the trial and he gets shot. It’s got to be the Cahills behind this, or someone they’re involved with. The timing makes it too coincidental, and I, for one, don’t believe in coincidences.”

“I don’t, either,” Savich said. “But as Sherlock pointed out, a stranger couldn’t predict Ramsey would be standing out here exactly when he needed him to, and so someone’s been studying him for at least a week, I’d say.”

Eve rubbed her hands over her arms. “Someone who followed him around for a week? That’s hard to take in.”

Harry said, “Okay, say it isn’t the Cahills. But the timing is still what it is-even if it was planned for some time, someone may be cashing in on a wonderful opportunity, since the Cahills are hanging over the crime scene like a black cloud.”

“Judge Hunt closing down the trial was mentioned on the local news at noon yesterday,” Eve said. “If someone had already planned to kill him, they moved very fast.”

“There’s another big question with the Cahills,” Savich said. “The way it looks now, there’ll be a mistrial because the federal prosecutor may have been compromised, and now he’s missing. Ramsey’s being shot doesn’t change that. It will all begin again for them, with a different set of players.”

Eve said, “Molly said that was one of the first things out of Ramsey’s mouth when he woke up. Why shoot him? A judge’s job is to be impartial, unlike the prosecutor who’d spent months preparing for the trial. What difference did it make to the Cahills who was sitting up there in the black robe?”

Eve looked over at the crime scene tape that marked where Ramsey had fallen. “Whoever it was made one big fat mistake.”

Everyone looked at her.

“The shooter didn’t manage to kill Ramsey. He failed. Now what’s he going to do? Try again? If it was the Cahills who targeted Ramsey, for whatever reason, they’ve already won, because he’s out of the picture for the near future. What if it was someone else?”

“That’s why we’ve got to protect him, Eve,” Harry said.

“No one will hurt Judge Ramsey Hunt on my watch,” Eve said. “No one.”

Sherlock said, “I’ll be checking on the Zodiac, and Cheney has feelers out for any word about a shooter for hire.”

“We need to talk to the Cahills,” Eve said. “Regardless, they’re certainly people of interest. It’s a place to start.”