Catherine Coulter - Backfire

The sheriff said, “I haven’t let them touch the bodies. The crime scene’s just as it was when a deputy arrived after we got a call from a neighbor who heard Pixie’s dog carrying on and came to see what was happening.”

None of them really wanted to, but they looked closely at what had once been two living, breathing people until Xu had slit their throats.

The sheriff said, “All their clothes are in place, so no sexual activity had begun even though they were lying on the bed. Look at the blood splatter, the way their bodies ended up when they died. Siles’s head has nearly fallen off the near side of the bed, and she’s fallen nearly off the other side of the bed. I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what happened.”

Savich pointed at Sherlock. She was standing quietly at the foot of the bed, and he knew she was putting it all together in her mind, using her special gift to picture what few people could see at a crime scene.

“Sherlock?”

She said, “He came in quietly, saw them. He was fast, silent, and smart-even managed to lock Pixie’s terrier outside without alerting them. Milo was first. He grabbed him by his hair, jerked his head back, sliced his throat-again, right to left. Not even a second, that’s all the time it took. He let Milo fall, reached over him, grabbed Pixie by her hair, jerked her head toward him, then back so violently it snapped her neck. When he sliced her throat he must have been staring down at her, watching her eyes as she realized she was dying. The coroner might be able to determine which of those things killed her, not that it makes any difference.

“You can see the dried tears on Milo’s cheeks. He was crying, his head probably against Pixie’s shoulder. She was-comforting him.”

Sheriff Hibbert stared at Sherlock for a moment. He said slowly, “Yes, I can see that now. Thank you.”

Cheney said, “Milo came to her for comfort. And he got her killed.”

Sheriff Hibbert said, “Let’s back out now, let the coroner and the CAU people do their jobs.”

Sherlock paused. “The CAU?”

“Yeah, the Crime Analysis Unit; that’s what we call our forensic section.”

Sherlock said, “Of course. We’re from the CAU in Washington, the Criminal Apprehension Unit.”

Sheriff Hibbert said as he walked them to the back of the house that gave onto the waterway and the boat dock, “The neighbor-Mrs. Dee Kotter-saw Pixie’s terrier, Bob. He was locked out of the house, and that surprised her, since it was raining. She knocked on the door, found it wasn’t locked, and found them. She told us Milo was a twice-a-week fixture at Pixie’s house, her longtime boyfriend. He was always polite, spoke to the neighbors who spoke to him, and made Pixie happy. She said it was sort of a joke with Pixie, always saying why marry a man and put up with the toilet lid being up all the time? Better to have him visit, orderly and planned, and that was the way she liked it. The neighbor didn’t know Milo was married.

“Mrs. Kotter took Bob. Last time I saw her, she was petting him, kissing him over and over, and crying.

“It’s nearly dark, so canvassing the neighborhood is tough. And the damned rain doesn’t help. We don’t believe it was raining when the killer got here, so hopefully someone saw a stranger, a car, something.

“We also have men over on Caribe Isle-that’s the spit of land across the water-interviewing everyone along the street. There’s a small park at the end of the spit, and a narrow beach with a nice view of the back of all the houses along this street, including Pixie’s house.

“Even though there was a break in the rain, I don’t know if anyone was in the park or on that skinny beach. So far, we don’t have anything.”

Savich cursed. Sherlock was so surprised she nearly tripped over a Christmas cactus on the wide back porch.

Savich said, “I just realized, Xu’s got two major loose ends left-the Cahills. You know he’s going after the Cahills. Ramsey, at least, is safe from him for the moment.”

He got Eve on the first ring.

“Barbieri.”

“He’s going after the Cahills next. I know in my gut he’s got a pipeline into the jail. Xu has to know they’re going to flip on him now he’s killed Siles. Eve, get over to the jail, get them to safety.”

When Savich punched off, he said, “She’s going to bring the Cahills to the twentieth floor, put them in one of the pre-court holding cells.”

They stood under the wide porch and looked out over the water to Caribe Isle, listened to the waves bumping against the dock. It was dark and miserable, the rain coming down in torrents. A deputy sheriff strode through the rain from the neighbor’s yard, a black umbrella over his head.

He shouted, “Sheriff, we got a winner!”

They’d found an old gentleman on Caribe Isle who’d been walking on the narrow beach beyond the small park. He had a straight view to the back of Pixie McCray’s house and her dock. He was chewing on his pipe since he didn’t smoke anymore, he told the deputy, hurrying because he knew the rain was going to start up again, and that wasn’t good because Purlie, his bulldog, hated to do her business in the rain. He said it was nearly four o’clock when he saw a small outboard motorboat come through the lock, turn left, and motor to Pixie’s dock. He saw a man climb onto the dock and go into the house.

Did he see the man leave?

Nope. Purlie was through doing her business, and it started drizzling again, so he took her home.

Xu had come by boat, just as he’d done the night he’d motored the Zodiac to Sea Cliff and shot Ramsey.

They went to speak to Mrs. Dee Kotter, Pixie’s neighbor, but she was in shock, numb. She was crying again, holding Bob close, both of them shivering in disbelief and horror at what had happened, here, in Bel Marin Keys, and nothing ever happened here.

San Francisco

Monday night

Xu stood beneath the striped awning of Morrie’s Deli on Seventh Street, looking through the rain at the Hall of Justice across the street, and waited. It really didn’t make any difference that he was there because there wasn’t anything more he could do. But even if he couldn’t control what would happen, he wanted to be close.

He hated feeling impotent. He’d had no choice but to put his trust in people he hardly knew to carry out his plans, too often a recipe for disaster. His Chinese trainers had dinned into his head over the years never to give anyone else a task that was critical to a mission. And nothing could be more critical to him than Cindy and Clive Cahill dying tonight.

It was at moments like this that he wondered what his life would be like if he had stayed Joe Keats, the name he’d picked for himself when he was eighteen and tired of having Xian Xu mangled and then mocked as a girl’s name by the uneducated idiots in Lampo, Indiana. No one ever mispronounced Joe Keats. Except for some of the braying asses he’d trained with in Beijing, who thought it shameful that he, with a Chinese father, had taken on an American name.

He drew a calming breath. He had done what he could, and if his plans went south, he was ready to run, from the FBI, even from Chinese intelligence, if he had to. He would survive.

Joyce Yang, the girl who’d turned him to the dark side, she’d say and laugh her husky laugh that made him mad with lust, and why not, he’d been only twenty years old. He’d loved her with everything in him, at least in those long-ago days before she’d betrayed him with a mid-rung operative, Li Han, in Chinese intelligence, and Xu had cut her throat and buried her deep near her precious hometown of Beijing, where he knew the choking sand from the Gobi Desert would score her grave until her bones were uncovered in the years to come, a fitting place for her, he’d thought at the time. As for Li Han, a man who looked like he was supposed to-Chinese through and through-Xu had left him with a slit throat in an alley in one of the many nasty parts of Beijing where murder was as common as girls selling themselves for a bowl of rice. Would their kids have looked Caucasian like him or like their mother, a full-blooded Chinese?