Jonathon King - Eye of Vengeance

"Jesus, Detective, you're siding with Fitzgerald now?" Nick said.

Hargrave shook his head and blew out a long breath.

"Now, there's a fed with some major responsibility pushing on his sphincter," Hargrave continued. "But the secretary is coming to town and it would be a hell of a venue to make a statement."

Nick took another drink, like he thought the booze was going to make things clearer. "OK, so you're following the theory that you can never say never, but I can't see it. I don't see a man like Redman targeting his own country's leaders. That's not who he's after."

Hargrave matched Nick's feat of emptying his glass and sat back like he had given up and was just staring into the pool. Then he said in a clear, matter-of-fact voice, "How about Mr. Walker, Nick?"

He let the question and the name hang in the night air, not looking to see the reaction in Nick's face like he would if it were a question posed to some arrestee in the interview room.

"What were Redman's words again, Nick? Do you a favor?" he said just as clearly. "This one's just for you? How about killing the man who put your family in the ground?"

Nick wondered if the detective could hear the sound of his heart, impossible to ignore with the way it had started thumping in his ears. The detective had not trusted his explanation for the last name on the list. Hell, he might have recognized it right off. Why wouldn't he have been briefed on Nick's background before they gave the reporter such access? Why wouldn't he see immediately that a name that starts with W fits perfectly with the alphabetizing of Redman's own victims list?

"Yeah," Nick finally said out over the glow of the pool. "How about him?"

Michael Redman was working the rooftops in the predawn hours of his last week in Florida. No operation he'd worked had ever come off so smoothly. Targets identified. Intel right on the mark. Clean shots. Perfect regress and four confirmed kills. This one should be no different.

He had done reconnaissance on the target, just like the others. He'd mapped out the probable movements and used the sight lines from the street to pick two spots that his experience told him would work.

Today he was up top, checking out the closer of the two. He'd used the height of a Dumpster behind the building to gain access to the second floor and then jimmied a simple half-moon lock on the sash to get into a stairwell. The door to the roof opened from the inside and he used a piece of gravel from the tarred deck itself to wedge it open. If anything happened, there would be no evidence left behind. At the east roof edge he raised the night-vision goggles to his face and scoped the front of the target building. Firing from here would be nearly a six-hundred-yard shot. His optimum distance. Easily done. Sure and clean.

He knew that this detective Hargrave, Mr. This Is a Democracy, would be scratching his head after this one, trying to figure out how it came out of left field at him. But such was the way of statement killings. There was a purpose to them. In Iraq they were the only targets he had considered true.

He recalled the recruiter, the Iraqi who intelligence knew was luring or intimidating Sunni men and boys into the insurgency. You watched him and he watched you during the days in the marketplace. You standing with your rifle slung across your arm while smiling dumbly at the people. The recruiter acting like he was just a local, moving about, slipping into conversations among groups on the corner or in lines where the real citizens waited for U.N. food handouts. When he left, you never followed him. Instead you followed the young men he'd talked to and then had an Iraqi CI follow them to a meeting place in one of the neighborhoods. Then you set up a spot not unlike this, and when the recruiter stepped outside… smoke check.

When word spread that the recruiter himself was not safe, those who had been willing to join him would quickly change their choice of the insurgent life. Statement killing. Mullins would understand this, Redman thought. Mullins had done his job as a spotter and deserved to be thanked and rewarded. Redman was sure he would understand without explanation because after this last shot, Redman would be gone.

A blinking of small lights and a far-off bing, bing, bing of bells pulled his attention to the north. Only in the early morning quiet would the sound carry this far and he watched with the scope as the Seventeenth Street Causeway Bridge dropped its barricades in preparation to open. Redman thought of his exit route. He had calculated traffic for early morning. It would be heavy, but most of it coming east on the bridge to the oceanfront while he would be going west. But he had not figured in the possibility of a bridge opening. He took one more look down the firing line and decided he would check the shooting nest farther back. An eight-hundred-yard shot would be technically more difficult, but he had done it before. He pulled back from the roof edge and went through the door, kicking away the blocking stone as he went. Nick was up at eight. After Hargrave left, he'd drunk a quart of water with his two aspirin, and the preemptive strike against a hangover that had worked for years in the past worked again.

The fact that he'd not learned to clean up after himself, however, resulted in a partially empty whiskey bottle and two glasses on the patio table. He gathered and hid the evidence in the garage. While he made coffee for himself, Elsa came out to make breakfast and did not say good morning to him, just looked with a coolly raised eyebrow at the kitchen clock. When Carly got up and sat down at her place to eat, she picked up on the frigid atmosphere and whispered to her father, "Is Elsa mad because we made fun of her last night at Pictionary?"

"No, sweetheart. It's a woman thing," Nick said. He knew Elsa had probably seen the bottle and the glasses before he moved them, and immediately regretted the remark. When Carly left for school, Nick followed her out to the driveway and hugged her a second longer than usual before waving her off to the bus stop.

On his way back he picked up the newspaper, wrestled it out of the plastic bag and only scanned the front page centerpiece story about the OAS meeting. When he flipped the paper over he was met by the headline:

The story ran two columns below the front-page fold and Nick stood reading it in the middle of his driveway. By Joseph P. Binder, Staff Writer A marauding killer, armed with a powerful but silent sniper rifle, is hunting ex-convicts and criminals in South Florida and sources believe he is using the Daily News to select the worst of the worst in his deadly spree. According to this newspaper's research, five men, each killed by a single bullet to the brain, were prominent subjects of Daily News stories that documented their heinous crimes at the time they wreaked havoc on citizens and loved ones and may be the victims of the serial sniper.

The story listed the names of Chambliss, Crossly, Ferris, Kerner and Michaels as the suspected targets of the sniper along with brief descriptions of their crimes and their recent deaths. The fact that the former M.E. and Kerner were not killed in South Florida was conveniently ignored to help boost the local angle. When he opened the paper and continued to read, Nick felt a sickness in his stomach and knew it had nothing to do with whiskey. Broward sheriff's homicide detective Maurice Hargrave, who earlier said the dead convicts had been "gunned down in the streets" by the vigilante, is heading the investigation and has been using the Daily News' database to collect information on the sniper's next target, according to computer research and documents.