Michael Prescott - Mortal Faults

Could Abby have hurt him that way? Cracked the gun across his face, crunching bone? Tess wanted to say no. Yet she couldn’t forget Abby at the Boiler Room, carving her steak with grim enthusiasm, the knife gripped tight in her hand. She’d been riding a wave of rage and hate, and there was no telling how far she’d ridden it later that night.

Of course she’d denied everything. But she had no alibi. And although there was no obvious way for her to track down Garrick, she was resourceful. She could have figured something out. She could have come here.

If she had, she came as Garrick’s guest. The lock on the door had not been tampered with. Garrick let her in-or came home with her. Typically, in her work with stalkers, Abby would arrange to meet the guy in some seemingly accidental way, ingratiate herself with him, gain access to his home. She wasn’t above holding out the promise of sexual favors. She…

Tess looked more closely at the photo. “You see this?” she asked Crandall.

“What?”

“Garrick’s pants. They’re open. Unzipped.”

Crandall shrugged. “Guys hang around with their pants open when they’re alone. You know, for comfort. Not me,” he added hastily, “but-some guys.”

She barely heard him. She was thinking of Abby’s M.O. “Mmm.”

“What does that mean?”

“It meant nothing. It was just mmm.”

Crandall started to ask something else. A voice from the doorway interrupted him.

“Crack the case yet?” It was Senior Supervisory Agent Dwight Carson, who’d finally arrived.

A tall, paunchy man testing the Bureau’s weight limit, Carson was from somewhere down south originally, a fact he liked to advertise by putting a little extra corn pone in his voice when he remembered to. Tess found him friendly enough, but behind his geniality there was an agenda, of course. He had been left in the dark about MEDEA. He didn’t know what the L.A. office was involved in. Naturally he wanted to know.

“Never seen this much interest in our friendly neighborhood Scorps before,” he observed as he stepped inside. He called the bikers Scorps, apparently to save the effort of pronouncing the extra syllables.

“It’s a zero-tolerance policy,” Tess said mildly. “We’re cracking down on premeditated homicides.”

“Not really the Bureau’s bailiwick.”

“It is today.”

“Evidently. Still seems like a lot of trouble to go to for a piece of”-he caught himself before cussing in front of a lady-“uh, piece of work like Dylan Garrick.”

“Garrick is tied in to a home invasion in San Fernando.”

“Sure, I know. Our office is the one that made the connection. But I can’t see why VALSHOOT has so many people’s panties in a twist.”

VALSHOOT, short for Valley Shooting, was the codename for the attack on Andrea Lowry’s house. The incident could hardly have been codenamed MEDEA without raising unwanted questions in Santa Ana.

“There are various considerations involved,” Tess said, hoping this formulation would be sufficiently vague to discourage further curiosity.

It wasn’t. “And one of those considerations required flying in Annie Oakley?”

“What?”

“No offense. That’s what some of us call you around here.”

“Annie Oakley.” Tess shut her eyes. “Great.”

“It’s a compliment. Annie was a straight shooter and ahead of her time. One of the original woman’s libbers, you might say.”

“Well, I guess it’s better than Ma Barker.”

“No one’s gonna call you a barker,” Carson said.

This was so cornball she would have laughed, if she hadn’t been in a room still smelling of cordite and blood. She steered their conversation in a more professional direction. “Can the shooter’s height be determined by the angle of fire?”

The question had a purpose. Abby wasn’t tall.

Carson shook his head. “Crime scene people say the gunman was probably leaning over Garrick, bent low. Which means he could be any height.”

He-or she, Tess thought.

“Both shots were fired at nearly point-blank range. No exit wounds. Coroner recovered the rounds inside the vic’s head.”

“You mean the autopsy’s already been done?”

“It was put on a rush basis. Pretty fancy treatment for a dead gangbanger. I gather there was some pressure applied all the way from Washington.” He gave Tess a shrewd look. “Though I don’t know why D.C. would care so much.”

“Neither do I,” she said evenly.

“I’ll just bet you don’t.”

It might have turned into a staring contest if Crandall hadn’t cut in. “You were saying two rounds were recovered.”

Carson looked away, conceding defeat-for now. “Right. Nine-millimeter hollowpoints. One of them was all mashed up and fragmented. Ricocheted around the skull cavity something fierce. The other’s intact. Ballistics has already matched it to Garrick’s gun.”

Tess ran a finger through some Redwop powder on an end table. “I assume forensics picked up a lot of prints.”

“Whole slew of them, but most probably belong to Garrick or the girls he brought up here. According to the neighbors there were quite a few. The prints sure as hell didn’t get left by any housekeeper. Look at this rat’s nest.”

“How about the doorknob?” Crandall asked.

“Killer wiped it clean when leaving. He’s a cool customer.”

Tess thought wiping the knob was exactly the kind of precaution Abby would take.

“You want a guided tour?” Carson asked. He headed into the kitchen without waiting for their assents. “Lots of beer in the fridge, hard liquor in the cabinets. Nothing else in here but takeout containers and fast food leftovers. No drugs on the premises. Garrick was busted for cocaine a few years ago, but lately he seems to have been staying clean.”

“Not exactly turning his life around, though, was he?” Tess asked.

Carson led them down the hall. “He was still a stone-cold killer. Probably quit the coke because he couldn’t afford a rep as a user. No one hires a hit man who’s got an itchy nose.”

They entered the bedroom. Carson waved at hand at a tall stack of magazines on the floor. “See those? Porn. And over here”-he directed their attention to homemade cabinets constructed of cinderblocks and planks-“a whole library’s worth of X-rated videos. Agent McCallum, if you’ve ever wanted to catch Debra Banger in Sperms of Endearment, this is your chance.”

“I’ll pass.”

“Other than the magazines, which you can bet he didn’t buy for the articles, there’s no reading matter on the premises. Not a book anywhere. This boy’s interests were limited to drinking and fu-uh, fornicating.”

“And killing,” Tess said.

Carson opened a bureau. The drawer was empty. “You know about the gun he kept here. The MK-23. It’s at the crime lab now. There was a silencer with it, kind of banged up, and some other gear.”

Crandall toed the pile of smut, looking thoughtful. “I’m surprised the killer didn’t toss the residence and take the MK, if only to eliminate evidence linking Garrick to the San Fernando raid.”

“Or just to get hold of an expensive piece of hardware,” Tess added.

Carson nodded. “My theory is that the killer got spooked. You know he muffled the shots with the pillow. Tried to, anyway. First shot was probably quiet enough, but the pillow’s stuffing was half blown away, and it wouldn’t have silenced the second shot nearly as well. That report was louder than our friend expected. He knew someone in the building would hear it, so he amscrayed pronto.”

That was possible, Tess thought. But it was also possible that Abby had deliberately left the gun in place so Garrick could be tied to the crime.