Head Shot

30

If Doherty and Skinner had driven around eight hundred miles down Interstate Fifteen from Helena, Montana, down across Idaho and on south, through Salt Lake City, and St George, Utah, skirting Arizona and into southern Nevada, they would have come to Las Vegas.

They would have come also to the aid of Special Agent Isaac Brand.

Thompson Hal, Chief of Police of the City of North Las Vegas, had been less co-operative than Doherty had hoped or expected. At four p.m., almost five hours after he had touched down at McCarran Airport, Brand was still seated in his outer office, waiting with growing impatience for the conclusion of what he had been told was a meeting with the mayor. He was staring at Hal 's smoked glass door when his cellphone rang.

'Zak, how goes it?' Joe Doherty sounded as amiable as ever; until the young agent told him how it went. 'You been sat there for four hours?'

'Not quite, sir. The chief took a lunch break at one p.m.; his secretary suggested that I do the same. I know, sir,' he admitted, 'it's almost intolerable, but what can I do?'

'You can drop the "almost", son. It's completely fucking intolerable.

You've never had a detail like this before, have you?'

'No, sir.'

'Then blaine me. I should have made sure you got a better welcome.

Is Chief Hall's secretary close to you?'

'Yes, sir. She's sat across the room.'

'Then here's what you do. Don't ring off; just give her your cellphone, and tell her… do not ask her, instruct her… to take it into the chief's room and, mayor or no mayor, to stick it in his fucking ear. You understand?'

'Yes, sir.'

'So go do it.'

He rose from his chair and did what Doherty had told him. The secretary, a frosty brunette who fitted every description of a Vegas showgirl that he had ever read, protested at first, but Brand, knowing that the line was stil live and that his boss could hear him, stuck to his guns.

'Miss,' he said, slowly and with emphasis on every word, 'the Deputy Director of the FBI is on the line and requires to speak with Mr Hall. Do as I say.'

She gave in, took the cellphone from him as she stood, and disappeared into the chief's room, without, he noticed, bothering to knock. He looked at his watch as he waited, watching the second hand as it swept steadily round.

It was just short of completing its second revolution when the door opened, and a man appeared. He was short for a policeman, five eight at most, several inches shorter than Brand, with a spreading waistline, emphasised by a belt which was cinched at least or too tight, from which the hem of his blue short-sleeved shirt was escaping. He held the cel phone in his left hand; the other was stretched out in greeting. 'Hi, I'm Thompson Hall; welcome to North Las Vegas.

'Son, son,' he said, with the forced heartiness ofaTexan governor on the stomp, as the agent accepted his handshake, 'why have you been sitting here in silence for all this time? Goddamn, if you had only said how important this thing is, Rosalie would have broken up my meeting, mayor or no mayor. Come on, come on, let's waste no more time. Rosie, fix us up with coffee and doughnuts.'

He handed back the cellphone then led the way into his office and walked round behind his desk. Brand looked around; there was no sign of any other visitor, but, at the back of the room, he saw what could have been an exit door, and so he gave the chief the benefit of the doubt.

Nevertheless, the last of his diplomacy had evaporated around an hour before, and so, as soon as he was seated he launched into the reason for his visit.

'Sander Garrett…'

'Yes, son. I understand from your boss that the Bureau's got a burr up its ass about this guy. To me this is just a run-of-the-mil homicide, so what's the story?'

'What do you know about the man, chief?' the agent asked.

'Zilch,' the man replied, abruptly. 'I know that this is only North Las Vegas, the poor sister of the big city, but this place is still full of retired geezers come here for the golf, the gambling and the girls. Garrett paid his taxes and didn't get into trouble so we had no dealings with him till he got his head blown off.'

'Mr Garrett may have been retired, chief, but as I understand it he was 122 no newcomer to the area. He was a partner in a law firm on the strip, and still went in there occasionally.'

'Is that so?'

'Yes. We've done some follow-up investigation, through the American Bar Association; he's practised law here since nineteen sixty-eight.'

'Goddamn, you say?'

'Goddamn I do, sir. Can you tell me, how was Mr Garrett kil ed?'

Hal picked up a bound file from his desk and tossed it across to Brand. 'See for yourself.'

The policeman watched with malicious amusement as his earnest young visitor opened the file. What he had given him was a close-up colour shot of Sander Garrett, taken on a mortuary table. He saw Brand look at it, then, in what seemed to be an involuntary reflex action, close his eyes. When he opened them again, he seemed to focus on the man's small moustache and on a gold fil ing on one of his front teeth, as if to help him cope with his revulsion. Where the centre ofGarrett's forehead should have been, there was a dark jagged hole, speckled with white dots, which he knew had to be bone fragments.

'Kinda grabs you, kid, doesn't it?' said the police chief. 'That's what a soft-nosed forty-five bullet will do on the way out, if you put the barrel against the skul. Doesn't leave any room for doubt, you might say.

'Garrett was in his kitchen when he was kil ed, fixing his supper. The way my guys read it the shooter just walked in through the back door, which wasn't locked, pul ed out a cannon and shot him through the back of the skul, spreading his fucking brains all over the malted milk and cookies. Then he got on with robbing the place.' Halfway through his graphic description, Rosalie came into the room with coffee and doughnuts, which she laid on the desk; Hal did not pause, nor did she flinch.

As she left, Brand closed the folder. Hal offered him a doughnut, but he declined. 'Did the back door open directly on to the kitchen?'

'No. It opens into a laundry; then you have the kitchen.'

'Was the front door locked?'

'Hell, I don't know. Why you ask?'

'Because we are not convinced that this was an opportunistic burglary, as you have described it. We believe that it ties in with two other recent kil ings. If that is right, the kil er had the skil to come through the door whether it was locked or not.' Brand tapped the folder. 'Are your forensic reports in here, chief?'

'No, that's just the photograph book. But the guy didn't leave any traces. There were no prints, other than the ones left by Garrett, his cleaning lady, and a forty-year-old blonde called Charlene Stacey Garrett was widowed; Stacey was his lady-friend. We thought about her for a while, but we couldn't tie her to it. She's a sales rep and she was out of town at the time.'

'Who claimed the body?' asked the agent

'She did.'

Brand opened the folder once more; he flicked past the morgue photographs and turned to those taken at the crime scene; several showed Garrett face down across his kitchen table, slumped in the midAe of a lake of blood. 'The guy didn't exactly barge in,' he said, quietlyBt

'How do you work that out?' V

'The victim was shot through the back of the head. If he had heard the door open, he'd have turned around. How about the gunshot itself? Did any neighbours hear anything?'

'Nope. The lab said he used a muffler.'

'Just like your average burglar,' murmured Brand. 'He goes out on a job carrying a silenced forty-five.' If Hal picked up his irony, he said nothing.

'So what was taken from the house?'

'Money, Garrett's watch, credit cards and other valuables.'

The FBI agent spun the folder around and pushed it across the desk.

'See the display cabinet in that photograph?' Hal nodded. 'It's ful of Meissen pottery; collectables, very expensive. Those are valuables, yet they were left.'

'Okay,' the chief grunted irritably, 'but they are also very identifiable.

This wasn't no col ector. It was probably some spic crack-head out to feed his habit.'

'So where did he sell the watch? Where did he use the cards?'

'He ain't done that, so far.'

'Let's hope he does,' said Brand, maintaining his patience. 'Those other valuables: what were they?'

'According to Ms Stacey, he took two items. An Apple laptop computer, plus… wait for this… he took a box of very expensive Cuban cigars.'