T. Parker: The Triggerman Dance

It was likely fired from one of the two. 30/06 cartridge casings that had been collected in the gutter of Fairway Boulevard, where the parking lot ended and the homes began. This corner was easily over three hundred yards from the Lincoln, suggesting a very good marksman using a very good firearm.

Something had been skillfully etched onto the shells: The script was flowing, as if handwritten. It looked like the engraving inside a wedding band, but larger.

One case read, "When in the course of human events-"

The other, "-it becomes necessary."

"Constitutional scholar," said a cop."

“That's the Declaration of Independence," said another.

One neighbor described seeing an older Chevrolet van white, parked streetside before the shots were fired. There were two, three, four or five shots, she wasn't positive. Of course, they had sounded to her like firecrackers. Loud firecrackers. The van was there for "at least twenty minutes" before the shooting. It was gone, westbound on Fairway, just after the shots rang out. She hadn't gotten a look at the van's occupants because when the van was parked she didn't see anybody in it, and by the time she reached the window after hearing the shots, it was already blending into the traffic on Fairway, headed for the Interstate. It was quite possible that the shots had not even come from the van. No plate numbers, no distinguishing characteristics.

The entire crime scene took on a different personality when a newish Ford blazed into the parking lot at high speed and cam to a fishtailing, tire-smoking stop just outside the yellow crime scene ribbon.

Two people jumped from the car, ducked the ribbon and walked directly toward the covered body. They took the long assured strides of the indispensable. A Costa Mesa Police office approached them and they badged him without missing a step o even slowing down. They both wore dark suits and the lightweight, nylon overcoats Southern Californians mistakenly believe will protect them from heavy weather. The woman was tall early thirties, had very dark wavy hair, a clenched expression on her suntanned face, and the calves of a weightlifter. The man roughly her height, was bespectacled, pale and thin, with black hair cropped short. He had a prominent Adam's apple, nose and ears, and he could have been twenty-five or thirty-five. He looker scholarly, except for the lean, pronounced muscles of his jaw and neck. He projected into the space around him the kind of calm with which a mountain lion might observe.

He approached the body, stopped and considered the photographers still milling about the scene.

"If you shoot any film of me, I'll confiscate that film an your cameras," he announced. For a thin pale man, his voice was quite clear and deep. His knot of a larynx rose and fell as if in emphasis. His partner put her hands on her hips and made a slow turning circle, locking eyes, briefly, with each person holding a camera. No one moved.

He went over to the blanketed form, knelt, looked up once at the ominous dusk, then lifted the material. He seemed to study Rebecca's face for a long time. He touched her lips, then her forehead, pressing a soaked blond curl back under the hat. He kissed his fingertips and touched them against her lips again.

After that he froze there, kneeling beside Rebecca for a long time. Then he slowly rose and stood over her, but to many of the observers-and they were trained, professional observers-the man who had kneeled beside Rebecca Harris was not the man who stood up a few minutes later. The new man had a different posture. He was stooped a little, whereas the original was erect. His face was no longer simply pale, but ivory colored and very hard, as if cast from a mold or sculpted. He was most definitely smaller. And certainly, the man who first approached the body did not have the very large black eyes that now challenged each of their faces-eyes so filled with fury and heartache that some of the journalists couldn't even meet them, let alone think of taking a picture.

Susan Baum, possessing the keenest instincts of all the Journal writers, felt in her pocket for the notepad and pen, and approached the bespectacled statue standing over Rebecca.

The young man in the leather coat and fedora had retreated from the throng outside the crime scene tape, and stood alone in the vague middle distance, studying this newly arrived official with the booming voice and the corded neck muscles. He thought: I wonder if that's him.

The pale man took a few steps away from the body, and considered the dozens of people-police, sheriff department, Journal staff, plant security-still meandering on either side of the crime scene ribbon. He held up his badge again, showing it around. His voice was resonant and did not seem to belong to his slender, almost ascetic body.

"My name is Joshua Weinstein, FBI, Orange County Office. This is my partner, Special Agent Sharon Dumars. Anyone… anyone not on the other side of that tape in the next ten seconds will be placed under arrest and face federal charges of tampering."

Astonishingly, he actually started counting.

There was a generalized grumble from the crowd, but everyone inside the tape migrated toward it, their movements accelerating noticeably when the count got to eight. Everyone except Susan Baum, who on the count of ten stood directly before Weinstein and gazed straight into his huge dark eyes.

"God, Joshua," she whispered. "She'd mentioned you to me.

"Get behind the tape, Ms. Baum."

"If I remember right, the wedding was planned for June."

"You remember right. Now get behind the tape."

"Can we talk later?"

"We have forever to talk."

"I want to tell you something right now. I won't die before write the name of the man who did this in one of my column: He'll be identified. I swear this, to every god that's ever slept night in Heaven."

"Thank you. Now step back."

A tragedy creates waves, and waves can carry people away. For those involved, everything changed with those shots, at approxmately 4:45 p.m. on Wednesday, March 22. Rebecca Harris, age 24, a bright, kind-hearted and lovely young woman in the prime of her young adulthood, died almost instantly. Her fiance, Joshua Weinstein of the Orange County, California office of the Federal; Bureau of Investigation, was swept by one wave into a journey of hatred so deep that, according to those who know him, he has yet to fully return. Rebecca's father was carried away by another wave, straight to heart failure three weeks later. The young man in the long leather coat and fedora, a talented if underproductive staff writer for the Journal named John Menden, rode yet another wave outward from Rebecca. He quit his job and floated around the South Pacific for three months until both his money and liver were close to giving out, then returned to move into a batten old trailer way out in the bleak Southern California desert. The security guard with the radio was fired. In fact, his entire company was released from its contract with the Journal -financial waves for financial concerns. The photographer who snapped the now famous picture of Rebecca won an award, then several more. The only living things proximate to the event that remained truly unrippled were the eucalyptus tree and the poppies in the planter near where Rebecca, heart-shot and staggering, then heart-shot again, fell and died in the pouring rain.

Six months came and went.

During this time, the lead agency responsible for the case was the FBI, taking its powers under recent Federal Hate Crimes provisions. They worked in concert with the police and sheriffs and, intermittently, with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Joshua Weinstein took all his vacation time, then an unpaid leave of absence for nearly half a year. He said he was going to Israel, and vanished with hardly a good-bye for anyone.