Jeffery Deaver - XO

Just fight your way out. Turn and shoot. He’ll be totally freaked out, he’ll panic. Fucking small-town cop.

Simesky started to turn, keeping the gun low, unthreatening. “I just-”

He heard a stunning bang, felt a burn in his chest.

The sensations were repeated a moment later. But both the sound of the second explosion and the tap on his skin were much softer than the first.

“BOTH DEAD?”

“That’s right,” Harutyun told Sheriff Anita Gonzalez.

Ten people were in her office at the FMCSO, which made it pretty cramped.

P. K. Madigan was back, though still unofficially, because it had, after all, been his information that had led to uncovering the plot.

Also present was a public affairs officer from the county. Dance noted that Harutyun seemed infinitely pleased at this-somebody else to handle the press conference. Which was going to be big. Very big.

Lincoln Rhyme, Thom Reston and Amelia Sachs were here too, along with Michael O’Neil and Tim Raymond, the congressman’s own security man. In the interest of safety Congressman Davis was onboard his private jet, heading back to Los Angeles.

Anita Gonzalez asked, “Any other perps working with Simesky and Babbage?”

Dance replied, “I’m sure there are. But they are-well, were -the only active participants on the scene so far. Our office and Amy Grabe, the FBI’s agent in charge in San Francisco, are tracing associates and connections.”

Michael O’Neil said, “There seems to be some affiliation with that outfit they call the Keyholders. Some political action group.”

“Political action? Hell, they’re assholes,” Madigan muttered, digging into his ice cream. “Wackos.”

Lincoln Rhyme said, “But rich and well-connected wackos.”

“Did either of them say anything before they died?” Gonzalez asked.

Tim Raymond said, “No. Myra was walking toward me when I got the text from Agent Dance to treat her like a hostile.” He shrugged matter-of-factly. “I lifted my weapon when she was about thirty feet away. She was hiding a forty-five under her coat and she engaged. Afraid I couldn’t take any chances.” He was shaken but not, Dance assessed, from the shootout; rather by the fact that he’d missed the threat posed by the assassins-who had also been masquerading as his friends and coworkers.

Harutyun said, “And Simesky didn’t seem to believe me when I said, ‘I’m not telling you again.’” He was as calm as ever, displaying no effects whatsoever from killing the congressman’s aide.

“And Edwin?” the sheriff asked.

“We found him in the back of the SUV Myra stole. The stun gun that she used was pretty powerful and he’s doped up. But the medics said he’s fine.”

“How’d you figure it out, Kathryn?” Madigan asked.

“It wasn’t just me.” She nodded toward Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs.

The criminalist said offhandedly, “Combination of things. Your man Charlie, by the way, is pretty good. Don’t let him come visit me in New York. I might steal him away.”

“He’s done that before,” Thom Reston said, earning a raised eyebrow from Rhyme, which told Dance that he was quite serious about offering Shean a job.

Since the criminalist wasn’t explaining his contribution further, Dance did. “There were some questions raised about what Charlie’s crime scene people found at the convention center and behind Edwin’s house, where he claimed somebody’d been spying on him.”

“Yeah, Edwin told me,” Madigan said with a grim visage. “And I didn’t believe him.”

Dance continued, “One was bird droppings from seagulls.”

Rhyme corrected, “The actual phrase was shit from, quote, ‘birds most likely resident in a coastal region.’ Not indigenous, mind you. I had no idea where they came from or where they were going. My only point was that the birds in question probably spent time recently on the coast dining on oceanic fish. And then we also identified some oil and fungus used in organic farming.” A nod toward Sachs. “She has a pretty decent garden, by the way. I don’t get the point of flowers myself but the tomatoes she grows are quite good.”

Dance elaborated, “I remembered that Congressman Davis, Simesky and Babbage had been in Monterey campaigning, which is on the coast, where they might’ve picked up the bird-do trace. And they’d been stumping in ecofriendly organic farms from Watsonville to the Valley here.”

“But why’d you get suspicious enough to consider that maybe Edwin wasn’t the killer in the first place?” Madigan asked.

Dance laughed. “Bird shit again, in a way. See, in the header, Lincoln wrote just that. ‘Bird shit.’ But in the evidence chart he sent me he used the word ‘excrement.’”

“That was Sachs,” Rhyme grumbled.

“Well, that made me think of the website post threatening the congressman. I realized it just didn’t sound like Edwin.”

“The kinesics of language,” O’Neil said.

“Exactly.”

She showed them the post that had raised some alarms.

I’ve seen all your postings, about Kayleigh. You claim you like her, you claim you love her music. But you use her like everybody does, you stole Leaving Home to keep the hispanics happy. Your a fucking hypocrit…

“That’s not Edwin’s tone. I’ve never heard him say or write an expletive. And there’re grammatical mistakes: commas that weren’t necessary and the misspelling of ‘hypocrite’ and ‘you’re,’ which he never did in his emails to Kayleigh. Oh, and in his emails when he referred to one of her songs, he put the title in quotation marks. In the post that threatened Congressman Davis, the title wasn’t set off at all. It struck me that it could have been written by somebody who thought that’s what a crazy stalker would post.

“Then there were some questions that came up during my interview with Edwin.” She explained about using content-based analysis in looking at what Edwin had said, rather than kinesics and body language. “Since I couldn’t use traditional kinesic analysis I looked at the facts he was telling me. And some of them were inconsistent. Like the number of letters and emails Edwin received from Kayleigh. She and her lawyers said Edwin was sent a half dozen replies-all form emails or snail-mail letters. But in the interview Edwin told me he’d received more than that… and he suggested to Pike that he’d found them very encouraging.

“I thought at first that was a product of his problems with reality awareness. But then I realized this was different. See, stalkers may misinterpret the implications of facts but they’ll know what those facts are. However Edwin misconstrued Kayleigh’s message in the letters, he’d know for certain exactly how many letters he received. Did that mean somebody else, posing as Kayleigh, had been sending him emails and letters?

“And then”-she delivered this with a wry smile at Michael O’Neil-“I wondered why was Peter Simesky so interested in me? He said the congressman wanted to bring me on board and maybe he did. But I think Simesky put that in Davis’s head. It gave Simesky a chance to see how we were coming with the investigation and what we knew. Myra also seemed very interested in who I worked for. And the two of them, and Davis, had flown into San Francisco the other day; they might’ve bought the prepaid mobiles in Burlingame then. It’s near the airport.”

Madigan muttered, “So they killed Bobby and the file sharer to establish the pattern of Edwin’s guilt.”

“As tough as it is to consider that,” Dance said, “yeah. I think that’s the only reason they died.” She glanced Rhyme’s way. “After I got your text in the safe house about the bird excrement, I got suspicious about people close to Davis. I emailed my associate, TJ Scanlon, to run deep background checks on everyone on Davis’s staff. Everybody was clean-but Simesky and Myra were too clean. They were perfect models of political aides, textbook. And they’d joined the campaign on the same day. And it was impossible to find out anything about them before they joined. TJ thought that was odd and kept digging and found some connection with the Keyholders group-who were on record as condemning many of Davis’s positions but were especially vehement about his stand on easier immigration.