John Verdon - Let the Devil Sleep

“Any distribution angle, stores, factory variables, ways of tracing that particular set?”

“Dead end. Very popular toy. A Walmart staple. They sold like seventy-eight thousand of them. All identical, all made in one factory in Hung Dick.”

“Where?”

“China. Who the fuck knows? It doesn’t matter. The sets are all the same.”

“Any theories regarding the significance of those individual animals?”

“Lots of them. All bullshit.”

Gurney made a mental note to readdress that issue later.

When later? What the hell was he thinking? The plan was to look over Kim’s shoulder. Not volunteer for a job no one had asked him to do.

“Interesting,” said Gurney. “Any other little oddities that weren’t released for public consumption?”

“I suppose you could call the gun an oddity.”

“My recollection is that the news reports just referred to a large-caliber handgun.”

“It was a Desert Eagle.”

“The.50-caliber monster?”

“The very one.”

“The profilers must have zeroed in on that.”

“Oh, yeah, big-time. But the oddity wasn’t just the size of the weapon. Out of the six shootings, we retrieved two bullets in good enough shape for reliable ballistics and a third that would be marginal for courtroom use but definitely suggestive.”

“Suggestive of what?”

“The three bullets came from three different Desert Eagles.”

“What?”

“That was the reaction everyone had.”

“Did that ever lead to a multiple-shooter hypothesis?”

“For about ten minutes. Arlo Blatt came up with one of his dumber-than-dumb ideas: that the shootings might be some kind of gang-initiation ritual and every gang member had his own Desert Eagle. Of course, that left the little problem of the manifesto, which read like it was written by a college professor, and your average gang member can barely spell the word ‘gang.’ Some other people had less stupid ideas, but ultimately the single-shooter concept won out. Especially after it was blessed by the Behavioral Unit geniuses at the FBI. The attack scenes were essentially identical. The approach, shooting, and escape reconstructions were identical. And after a little psychological tweaking of their model, it made as much sense to the profilers for this guy to be using six Desert Eagles as it made for him to be using one.”

Gurney responded only with a pained expression. He’d had mixed experiences with profilers over the years and tended to regard their achievements as no more than the achievements of common sense and their failures as proof of the vacuity of their profession. The problem with most profilers, especially those with a streak of FBI arrogance in their DNA, was that they thought they actually knew something and that their speculations were scientific .

“In other words,” said Gurney, “using six outrageous guns is no more outrageous than using one outrageous gun, because outrageous is outrageous.”

Hardwick grinned. “There’s one final oddity. All of the victims’ cars were black.”

“A popular Mercedes color, isn’t it?”

“Basic black accounted for about thirty percent of the total production runs of the models involved, plus maybe another three percent for a metallic variant of black. So a third-thirty-three percent. The odds, then, would be that two of the six vehicles attacked would have been black-unless the color black were part of the shooter’s selection criteria.”

“Why would color be a factor?”

Hardwick shrugged, tilting his coffee container and draining the last of it into his mouth. “Another good question.”

They sat quietly for a minute. Gurney was trying to connect the “oddities” in some way that might explain them all, then gave up, realizing he would need to know a lot more before such random details could be arranged into a pattern.

“Tell me what you know about Max Clinter.”

“Maxie is a special kind of guy. A mixed blessing.”

“How mixed?”

“He’s got a history.” Hardwick looked thoughtful, then let out a grating laugh. “I’d love to see you guys get together. Sherlock the Logical Genius meets Ahab the Whale Chaser.”

“The whale in question being…?”

“The whale being the Good Shepherd. Maxie always had a tendency to sink his teeth into something and not let go, but after the little mishap that ended his career, he became a walking definition of demented determination. Catching the Good Shepherd was not the main purpose of his life, it was the only purpose. Made a lot people back away.” Hardwick gave Gurney a sideways look, accompanied by another rough laugh. “Be fun to see you and Ahab shoot the shit.”

“Jack, anybody ever tell you your laugh sounds like someone flushing a toilet?”

“Not anybody who was asking me for a favor.” Hardwick rose from his chair, brandishing his empty coffee container. “It’s a miracle how fast the human body converts this stuff into piss.” He headed out of the room.

He returned a couple of minutes later and perched on the arm of his chair, speaking as though there’d been no interruption. “If you want to know about Maxie, best place to start would be the famous Buffalo mob incident.”

“Famous?”

“Famous in our little upstate world. Important Big Apple dicks like you probably never even heard about it.”

“What happened?”

“There was a mob guy in Buffalo by the name of Frankie Benno, who had organized the resurgence of heroin in western New York. Everyone knew this, but Frankie was smart and careful and protected by a handful of scumbag politicians. The situation started to obsess Maxie. He was determined to bring Frankie in for questioning, even though he couldn’t find anything specific to charge him with. He decided to bring things to a head by ‘harassing the fucker into making a mistake’-that was the last thing Maxie said to his wife before he went to a restaurant that was a known hangout for Frankie’s people, in a building that Frankie owned.”

Gurney’s first thought was that “harassing the fucker into making a mistake” was a tricky objective. His second thought was that he’d done it often enough himself, except he called it “putting the suspect under pressure to observe his reactions.”

Hardwick went on. “Maxie goes into the restaurant dressed and acting like a thug. He goes straight into the back room where Frankie’s crew hung out when they weren’t busy cracking heads. There’s two wiseguys in the room, sucking up linguine in clam sauce. Maxie walks over to them, pulls out a gun and a little disposable camera. He tells the wiseguys they have a choice: They can have their picture taken with their brains blown out or they can have it taken giving each other blow jobs. Up to them. Their choice. They have ten seconds to decide. They can grab each other’s cocks or their brains are on the wall. Ten… nine… eight… seven… six…”

Hardwick leaned toward Gurney, eyes sparkling, seemingly enthralled by the events he was recounting. “But Maxie is standing kinda close to them-too close-and one of the wiseguys reaches out and grabs the gun away from him. Maxie backs away and falls on his ass. The wiseguys are about to stomp the shit out of him, but Maxie suddenly drops the thug routine and starts screaming that he’s not what he was pretending to be, he’s really just an actor . He says somebody put him up to it, and nobody would have gotten hurt anyway, because the gun isn’t even real, it’s a stage prop. He’s practically crying. The wiseguys check the gun. Sure enough, it’s a fake. So now they want to know what the fuck’s going on, who put him up to it, et cetera. Maxie claims he doesn’t know, but that he’s supposed to meet the guy the next day to give him back the camera with the blow-job pictures and get five grand for his trouble. One of the wiseguys goes out to a pay phone on the street-this is before everybody had cell phones. When he comes back in, he tells Maxie they’re going to take him upstairs because Mr. Benno is upset. Maxie looks like he’s about to shit in his pants, begs them please just let him go. But they take him upstairs. Upstairs there’s a fortified office. Steel doors, locks, cameras. Major security. Frankie Benno is up there with two other wiseguys. When they bring Maxie into the inner sanctum, Frankie gives him a long, hard look. Then a nasty smile-like a great idea has just dawned on him. He says, ‘Take off your clothes.’ Maxie starts to whine like a baby. Frankie says, ‘Take off your fucking clothes and give me the fucking camera.’ Maxie gives him the camera, backs up against the wall like he’s trying to get as far away from these guys as he can. He takes off his jacket and shirt, then drops his pants. But his shoes are still on. So he sits down on the floor and starts pushing his pants down, but they’re caught up in a bunch around his ankles. Frankie tells him to hurry up. Frankie’s four wiseguys are grinning. Suddenly Maxie’s hands come up from the pants around his ankles, and in each hand he’s got a neat little SIG.38 pistol.” Hardwick paused dramatically. “What do you think of that?”