Кей Хупер - Blood Ties

“Up close and personal,” Jaylene murmured.

“Yeah. So I’m guessing either the sniper practically fell over him and had to kill him, planned to make this kill different just to mix things up, or else needed him on his feet right up until he got him on that rooftop.”

“What about the rifle?” Miranda asked.

“Could be the weapon used on Tuesday and yesterday—it’s the right caliber—but we won’t know for sure until the ballistics report is in. Probably later today.” Tony paused, then added, “Hell of an expensive gun to waste. The real killer must have known that leaving it on a roof with a fake sniper-slash-bomber wouldn’t fool us for more than five minutes. That bugs me. I don’t know why, though.”

There was another brief silence.

“We inventoried the backpack found with him,” Dean said, picking up the report in his methodical way. “Nothing unusual for a hunter expecting to spend a few days in the woods, and looks like everything belonged to him. Only his own prints were found.”

Miranda looked at Jaylene with a lifted brow, and the other woman nodded, saying, “There was… no sign it wasn’t his stuff.”

Returning her gaze to Dean, Miranda waited.

“The explosives experts say there was nothing special about the bomb, certainly no signature they recognized. It was some of the newer plastic explosive, but the stuff is fairly easy to come by if you know who to ask. The remote detonator was ready-made and could have been purchased from just about any well-equipped gun or munitions dealer.”

“Which we have a lot of around here,” Duncan offered.

Tony nodded. “I’ll say. And a few of them on the watch list, Miranda. But nothing jumps out.”

“Okay. Still, we’ll run the usual checks and see if we can chase down the dealer. It’s an assumption but a fair one that our sniper was here Tuesday evening, left, and apparently returned by early yesterday morning with the explosives. I’d like very much to know where he got them.”

Dean said, “The time span gives us a rough radius for our search, since he couldn’t have gone all that far—and back—in only a few hours. We’ll have some extra personnel to search: The Bureau field office in Knoxville is happy to help. They’ll send out agents as early as possible this morning and start canvassing gun and munitions dealers, army surplus, weapons experts, and anybody else the sniper might have dealt with. It is, as the sheriff said, a pretty long list, and it’ll probably take several days to cover all the ground, but we’ll go through it as fast as we possibly can.”

“Good. Did Dr. Edwards confirm time of death for Mr. Winston?”

Without the need to consult his notebook, Dean said, “Eighteen to twenty hours before he was found.”

She drew a breath and let it out slowly. “So there’s no way he was our shooter on Tuesday. No big surprise, I think.”

Sheriff Duncan said, “What I don’t get is why the shooter went to all that trouble. Maybe Cal being in his way was just happenstance; that was probably his deer blind your people found on Tuesday, and maybe he was in it when the sniper needed it. Or maybe he came along later and was a serious problem for the sniper. So killing him I get. But then to transport a sizable man a considerable distance—whether he was on his feet and protesting or literally dead weight—only to haul him to a rooftop and prop him up for window dressing? What would be the point?”

“A distraction,” Miranda said. “For us. And we’ve been distracted. We’ve had to use resources to identify Mr. Winston and eliminate him as a suspect. Had to take time. Trouble.”

Duncan was frowning. “So—what? The whole point was to slow you—us—down? Stall for time? Why?”

“I don’t know,” Miranda said.

“But you believe that was why?”

She hesitated, then said, “I believe that was part of the reason. I also believe the shooter was mocking us. Taunting us. He believes he’s smarter than we are. More clever. And he wants us to know that.”

BJ had waffled back and forth for the better part of an hour while trying to decide on his target. He had put the crosshairs of his scope on first one possible and then another, his finger caressing the trigger and a soft “Boom” whispering from his lips each time.

But he didn’t pull the trigger.

None of them was quite right.

He noted that the activity was winding down on Main Street and knew his time to choose and execute for maximum shock value was running out, but a voice in his head kept urging him to wait.

Not yet. Keep watching. Mark them all. Remember them .

We’ll get to them all in good time .

Wait. The timing has to be just right .

It was a voice he knew. A voice he listened to.

He waited.

Even when the helicopter touched down near the courthouse and she joined her team, stood talking to them for several minutes near the van housing their mobile command center, he waited. Even though it would have been so easy.

So very easy.

He put the crosshairs of the scope on her face, a face so close he felt he could reach out and touch it. The scope didn’t allow him to see the electric blue of her eyes, but he’d seen them in the daylight so they were easy to imagine. Electric blue eyes in a just-about-perfect face.

He thought about how quickly he could destroy her beauty and her life, but he waited. His finger caressed the trigger, and he whispered “Boom,” but he waited.

He watched her go into the mobile command center, wondering if he had missed the shot for tonight.

No. Wait .

He waited.

Naomi lurked. She didn’t think she was very good at it, since her pale blond hair made her sort of neon, and with power for the streetlights back on it wasn’t like it was truly dark out there anyway, but she did her best. She was a little surprised at first that none of the deputies or agents appeared to notice her—or didn’t feel she was worth shooing away if they did notice her. She was, in fact, a bit miffed by that. But eventually she decided that everybody was probably just tired.

It had been a long night.

Besides, there really wasn’t anything much to see anymore.

Still, she didn’t dare go near the mobile command center. She had a hunch the guys with the visible guns were a whole lot more alert, a whole lot less tired, and a whole lot more inclined to view her and her cameraman as threats worth taking note of.

And possibly shooting.

Ignoring the way Rob grumbled under his breath, she lurked in the spot she had chosen carefully, in the shadows beneath the now-ragged awning of one of the downtown restaurants, not more than twenty yards from the command center.

“The deputy was killed right over there,” Rob said suddenly, pointing to a spot only a few feet away from them.

“I know that.” They hadn’t cleaned the street of everything.

“And the agent was shot not far from where that command center of theirs is parked now.”

“I know that too. What’s your point, Rob?”

“Just that we’re not very far away, that’s all. And they haven’t caught the guy, you know.”

“He’s miles from here by now,” she said.

“You know that for a fact, do you?”

“What, you think he’d be stupid enough to hang around with this whole place crawling with cops and feds?”

“He was stupid enough to shoot a cop and a fed. That puts him high on the stupid list, as far as I’m concerned.”

Naomi took her eyes off the command center temporarily to look at him. “You’re scared.”

“I’d be right up there at the top of the stupid list if I wasn’t.”

“For God’s sake.”

“What? I’m not allowed to admit this whole situation gives me the creeps? An explosion Fears apart a nice town, one deputy—just a kid!—killed and a federal agent critically wounded, a nutjob sniper on the loose out there, probably watching us right now for all we know, and I’m not supposed to let it shake me up a little? Jesus, Naomi, you take the cake. Is there anything you can see other than that anchor chair in New York?”