Last shot

Chapter 33

Kaitlin opened the door, smoothing down a poof of bed head and yawning. Bizarrely, her face was labeled with rectangular stickers-CHEEK on her cheek and HARELINE pasted to her upper forehead. She glanced at Tim in the dim porch light, started, then clutched the rumpled fabric of her waitstaff vest above her heart. "Sorry. You look like someone I-"

She caught herself, ignoring Tim's questioning gaze. She glanced at her watch, digital glow reading 9:34 P.M. "I, uh, dozed off."

Bear stepped from behind Tim, holding his star apologetically at his hip as if brandishing a weapon he was loath to use. "We're deputy marshals, ma'am, and-"

The label on the back of her hand, which read, predictably, BACK OF HAND, caught her attention, and she said quietly, "Oh, no. Are there…?"

Tim and Bear nodded, and her hand rose to her face, finding the labels and peeling them off with a grimace that suggested smarting. She pivoted. "Sammy!" she yelled.

The interior was dark, but a boy's voice muttered something from the ratty couch. She stepped back from the door, leaving it ajar in implicit invitation, and they entered. Kaitlin made exasperated noises as she took in the labels covering most objects in sight. REFRIGARATOR. TABLE. PICKURE FRAME. Tim stared at the floor to hide his smile. FLOOR! it proclaimed.

He and Bear stood awkwardly by the door while Kaitlin spoke with annoyance to Sam. Tim heard him reply, "But it shows I liked it."

Tim glanced around the tiny walk-through kitchen to their right. The new fridge seemed out of place given the peeling starburst linoleum and the aluminum foil pressed to the window seams to hold the heat. A browning chrysanthemum on the tiled window ledge drooped in its plastic pot, a pitchforked note reading, To Tess, the best office manager. A coffee-cup ring had worn through the small table's varnish. Reminders of the dead, everywhere. Tim recalled the first year after Ginny's murder, how he ran into her in every room, how the step stool by her sink or a Krazy straw in a kitchen drawer would pull him up short.

He and Bear ought to be able to uncover more here than they'd gleaned from the elderly neighbor. Millie Kensington had reiterated her memory of the car, glimpsed at night through the junipers outside her bedroom. Low-rider. Bowling-ball hood ornament. It had been a hot night-her hip acting up-so her window had been open, or she wouldn't even have heard it pull up. When Tim had asked what kind of car, she'd replied, "Why, gasoline, I'd imagine." Afterward Tim had bent over the curb between houses, his flashlight picking up the last faded blush of the red spot on the concrete. A calling card? A mark the shooter left behind?

Kaitlin, who'd grown less stern in the face of Sam's contrition, called Tim and Bear into the living room. She clicked on a light, revealing the thin form curled up on the cushions. Despite Sam's yellow sclera and jaundiced skin, Tim placed the features immediately-Vector's AAT deficiency poster child. "Hey. I recognize you from TV."

Sam's breathing was raspy, his voice lethargic. "I'm huge in Germany."

Tim laughed. "I bet. Was it fun? Shooting a commercial?"

Sam, weathered veteran of moderate fame, shrugged listlessly. "It was pretty cool. We got to ride in a limo and everything."

Bear cleared his throat and addressed Kaitlin. "I'm sorry to bring up what may be a tough topic, but-"

"I saw he escaped last night," Kaitlin said.

"Yes, and we thought maybe we could talk to you alone for-"

Sam shoved himself upright on the couch, eyes fixed on Tim's holster. "That a Smith amp; Wesson?"

"Yup."

Bear, to Kaitlin: "Have you seen or heard from him?"

She shook her head.

Again, from the couch: "Why don't you have a semiauto?"

Tim went into his rote explanation. "Only four rounds are exchanged on average in a gunfight, and since I'm more comfortable with the weighting-" He saw Bear looking at him: Do you need to be medicated?

Bear, flustered and evidently unaware of the hour, tried an inane tack. "Wanna play outside, give us a chance to talk to your mom?"

Sam said, "She's not my mom."

"Right. Can we talk to her anyway?"

Together Tim and Kaitlin said, "It's late."

"Sammy, why don't you go play video games?" Kaitlin offered.

A sigh and a slide from the couch. Sam blew his overgrown bangs from his eyes. "Aa-right."

"Eat something," she said, then quoted him even as he replied: "I'm not hungry." He giggled, and she added, "I know. Drink a Pediasure."

"Sick of 'em."

"Have a bowl of cereal. And add MCT."

He trudged off to the kitchen cartoonishly, shoulders slumped.

Kaitlin cast an awkward glance at Tim and Bear. "It's an oil we have to put in his food to give it more calories."

Tim said, "From his commercial it sounds like Vector's doing great stuff."

"For other kids," Kaitlin said. "They dropped Sammy from the trial group. Downsized him."

Tim felt Bear's eyes pull to him, but he kept his gaze on Kaitlin. "When?"

Her hand tapped the pager at her waist, checking it, a nervous habit. "A couple months ago. Then, a week later, his mother killed herself. I think he's doing okay for all that."

Again Bear shot Tim a glance from over the top of his notepad.

Tim asked, "You're his guardian?"

Kaitlin nodded. Down the hall a door thumped shut. Emotion or exhaustion seemed to catch up to her at that moment. "He's a special kid, such a special kid, and I'm in charge of him. Because no one else was around to do it. Not one family member was clamoring, so I got okayed. Me, with my credentials." Her voice dropped to a hoarse, almost scared whisper. "But it's a lot of work."

"Tess didn't have any other family?"

An unmistakable hint of anger-"None she trusted, I guess." Kaitlin seemed made uncomfortable by the silence, so she continued, "We'd stayed in touch a bit, and then regularly after Sammy was diagnosed. Sammy and I…well, I guess we took to each other."

"He's lucky."

"I'm not able to…" She shook off the thought, then looked down the hall toward Sam's room, her face warming through the sadness. "I'm lucky."

"When's the last time you saw Walker?" Bear asked.

"Not in years. We separated."

"Not divorced? How'd it happen?"

"He went to Iraq and came back but never really came back. You know? It was different than his other stints, Iraq. He never took the armor off after that." A faint laugh. "The stint in Leavenworth off the incoming flight didn't much help matters."

"I'm sorry to pry, but was there any domestic violence?" Tim asked.

"Walk never hit me, no. Drank some. Got ugly from time to time-words, you know how it gets-but he never laid a hand."

"Did he know Sam?"

"No. Walk and Tess drifted some after Tess got married, then he was gone most always. Deployed. I doubt Walker'd even recognize Sammy if you put 'em in the same room."

"Do you mind if we take a look at her room? Maybe ask Sam a question or two?"

She looked briefly worried, a mother's protectiveness. "One or two. Don't push him-he's got an active imagination. Tess's room is the last one on the left. Go ahead. I'm just gonna straighten up out here some." With a wry grin, she added, "Peel some labels."

Sam had created a sign for his door with crayons and construction paper. SAMS ROOM. PRIVATE PRIVATE PRIVATE. NOONE ALLOWED WITHOUT NOCKING. Tim heeded the warning, rapping his knuckles against the flimsy wood.

"Come in." Sam sat on the floor, face tilted back to take in the TV on his bureau. The bowl of cereal sat to one side, the milk all but absorbed. On-screen, a would-be sleazeball took a Bonnie and Clyde fusillade to his critical mass. Game cartridges littered the floor. Champions of Norrath. WWF Smackdown. Devil May Cry 3.

"I've got a few questions for you, Sam," Tim said. "Is that okay?"

Sam paused the game, a feature Tim wished they'd had on Frogger back in the day. Bear hung back in the hall as Tim showed Sam Walker's photo.

"Do you know who this guy is?" Sam studied it, then shook his head. Tim said, "It's your uncle. We need to know if you've seen him."

Sam's eyes went to Tim's gun. "You're gonna kill him."

"Not if I can help it."

Bear opened Tess's door up the hall, and Sam's features shifted. "Are you going in Mom's room?"

"Yeah, but we'll be respectful of her stuff." It took a moment for Tim to decipher the apprehension on Sam's face. "Would you like us to keep the door closed while we're in there?"

Sam nodded, relieved. Tim headed into the next room, securing the door behind him. Bear was standing before a patch of bleached carpet, looking at a scrubbed blob of wall. A dark eye stared out from the drywall where a criminalist had dug out the slug. The smell of cleaning chemicals burned the back of Tim's throat. Sam's scared look had been sudden, acute, traumatized. He was living with more than just a potentially fatal illness. The headboard of his bed backed on the wall that had once borne his mother's brain spatter.

The plastic underwear drawers, spread-out toiletries, and photos shoved into the mirror frame reminded Tim of a dorm room. The folding closet doors were permanently laid open, broken in the tracks. Clothes seemed to bulge out of the shoulder-wide space. A rack held a collection of exhausted footwear, and Tim could see where Tess had used Magic Marker to touch up her shoes. Atop a world-weary Converse sat the empty holster the cops had left behind.

Tim zeroed in on the rickety bookcase right away, looking for materials from the company that had dropped Walker's nephew. Medical books crowded the shelves, journal articles cramming the gaps. Beneath a well-thumbed dictionary of medical terminology were some stray letters, including one in which Tess requested information from Vector's study director. She'd sought out the company, it seemed, as a last-ditch treatment option for her son.

One shelf down Tim found a report, its cover featuring the familiar Vector logo, a V with an arrow capping the second vertical like a directive to scale the evolutionary ladder. Onward and upward. Tim showed off the fancy print job.

Bear said, "We connect Walker to Vector, we've got some traction."

Inside, Tim found a report on something called Xedral, a "viral vector," Tess's notes painstakingly written in the narrow margins. X4-AAT unknown side effects? Why Lentidra fall off map? Outliers included in stats? Clearly she'd poured her energy into researching the treatment. She must've been devastated when Vector eliminated Sam from the trial-another possible suicide motive. Among the stray papers stuffed into the report, Tim found no notification of Sam's termination.

Pulling books, Tim checked the scraps of paper she'd used as bookmarks. After coming across a few magazine subscription cards and a torn grocery list, Tim hit upon a business card, used to mark a page in a primer on liver disease. CHAISSON KAGAN. CEO. VECTOR BIOGENICS. A Westwood address and a 310 area code. Another number handwritten on the back.

The videotape beside the primer had a KCOM spine sticker. Sam's sloppy hand labeled the tape, My News Segmint. Tim slid it out and walked to the next room, disrupting Sam's video game once again. "This is yours, right? Mind if I borrow it?"

"Go ahead. It's just a copy. They sent me a couple to give to other kids without a gene. But I don't know any."

"I'll get it back to you as soon as we're done."

"'Kay. Thanks. For asking, I mean. Other people just do whatever they want."

"Other people?"

"The cops, I mean. Right after."

Tim looked at him. A moment's pause.

Sam said, "What are you guys doing anyways?"

"Just getting some more information about your mom's death."

"Two months later?"

"That's right." Tim returned to Tess's room, again closing the door behind him.

A triangular desk in the corner held an antique computer monitor and a cordless phone. The drawers contained Tess's receipts and bills, which were clearly if not logically organized. Tim pulled the file holding the phone bills and set it aside on the bed-they'd ask Guerrera to start following up on the numbers she'd called in the months before her death. A checkbook showed an account that scraped the double digits several times a month.

Tim wandered into the bathroom. The ledge above the sink held a roll-on Lady Mitchum, a bottle of folic acid tablets, and a well-wrung tube of Aquafresh. Taking the bottle of pills, he went back over to the desk and sat in the tiny rolling chair, the ovoid wooden backrest of which doubled as a belt rack. He dug through the envelope stuffed with receipts from June, then moved on to May. Near the top he found a Sav-On receipt that contained what he was looking for. May 28. Folic acid-$12.99.

The bottle advertised a hundred 400-microgram tablets. He spilled those remaining on the bedspread and counted them. For both of Dray's pregnancies, she'd taken folic acid every day of her first term. Tim counted the pills. Eighty-eight remained, which meant that she'd likely taken one a day, including the morning of June 8 when she'd died. Not necessarily the sort of long-term planning one would expect from a woman about to put a bullet through her skull.

He called Bear over and explained the incongruity to him while Bear poked at a tablet in his sweaty palm, regarding the prenatal supplement uncomfortably, as he might a feminine napkin.

"Okay, but we don't really bank on the presuicidal to act rationally. Or to plan in advance. Especially, I'd guess, pregnant presuicides." Bear sank thoughtfully into the tiny rolling chair, which gave off a moribund creak and collapsed. He fell back, arm striking the desk, bouncing the keyboard in the air and turning on the computer. As he rose and made a big show of dusting himself off with reserved dignity, Tim stifled his laughter, knowing how inappropriate it would sound emanating from Tess's room.

Bear said, "Hang on."

"I'm trying."

"No, check this out." Bear gestured him over to the monitor. Save a hard-drive icon, the screen was blank. Bear double-clicked the icon, opening an empty file. No programs, no documents, no applications. He thunked to his knees on the tangle of belts, examining the computer tower jammed beneath the desk. He ran his thumb across a row of tiny scratches on the beige plastic. "Clever fucker replaced the hard drive." He moved to withdraw, banging his head, and then managed to reverse his broad frame from the cramped space. "Someone purged the computer but left it. Couldn't steal it because that would've raised robbery-murder suspicions."

Despite his excitement Tim played devil's advocate. "Unless she had the hard drive replaced herself."

Bear lumbered toward the door. "I'll ask the kid."

In the quiet of the empty room, Tim sat where Tess had sat when the bullet had entered her head.

The left side.

He turned, getting his body position correct to match the spatter from the crime-scene photos. A bit awkward but, as Dray had noted, certainly possible. He turned his head another inch and raised an imaginary pistol to his left temple. His attention snagged on one of the belts Bear had knocked to the carpet. Two distinct indentations about three inches apart notched the width of the brown leather.

He froze, staring at the familiar grooves. Standing, he went to the closet, picked up the empty holster. He pulled his own holster off his belt and slid Tess's on. The spring clip clamped down on his belt, matching the indentations.

Tess's bloodless hand in the autopsy photo had shown a filed nail on the right index finger, shorter than the rest. It wasn't a repaired break, as he'd thought; Tess kept it cut, as Dray did hers, so it wouldn't catch in the trigger guard.

Knowing of Tess's left-handedness, the killer had made the logical-and incorrect-assumption. Three words-"the left side"-had told Walker all he'd needed to know. A right-handed shooter would not leave a suicide bullet wound in her left temple.

The image of Tess at gunpoint, being posed suicide style by her killer, brought forth in Tim a familiar wrath. What had the killer threatened her with to get her to sit still? To hold her position? What thoughts had run through her head in her final seconds of life once she'd grasped the inevitable?

Bear returned. "The kid says she used that computer every day, and there were no repairs-" He halted in the doorway, taking in the empty holster fastened to Tim's belt. He blinked twice, the cogs meshing. "No," he said. "Really?"

Tim held up a hand, still aligning the remaining pieces. Walker's First Force Recon photo, his rifle slung right to left. The effortless righthand stab into Boss's neck.

Bear yanked the door shut behind him. "But Tess was left-handed. Why would she shoot right?"

"Because her right-handed brother taught her to shoot."

Bear's whistle dropped from high to low. "We'll get it reopened as a homicide."

"Looks like someone already beat us to the punch."

"Yup. Great." Bear ran his hand over his weary face, tugging his jowls even lower. "So what's next?"