Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

Wolf didn’t dare slow down or look back. He trotted unerringly from one fence to the next, each time hoisting himself up and over the identical adobe enclosures, thankful that the sudden, unseasonable start of fall had made it too cold to leave a dog outside all night. At the end of the block he waited and listened for approaching sirens, but it seemed they had all arrived by then, screeching past him on the other side of the wall as he ran from their destination. He pulled himself over the last fence and walked across the street to the far side of Galisteo.

As he walked northward toward the ancient plaza, he crossed a little bridge over the captive river with concrete banks that sliced across the town. As he did, he noticed that it had the strange quality of magnifying sounds. Far in the distance, he could hear a voice shouting into an electronic amplifier. The voice echoed and broke up, but he knew it was another police bullhorn. He also knew, from the rapid reports of guns, that the untrained North American Watch guards had been too frightened to relinquish their weapons. The heavy firing was the sound of the police reluctantly concluding that the guards, either for this reason or because they had killed Mantino or wounded the policeman, represented a danger to the community.

He hurried on toward La Fonda. Right now there would be crackling, fragrant fires of mesquite and piñon in all the big stone fireplaces, heating the bright, intricately glazed Spanish tiles along the mantels. Lots of Santa Fe natives would pass through for a drink on an evening like this, but some of them would have heard that the police were gathering on Andalusia Street. He would pass by the lighted windows and into the subterranean parking garage without crossing the threshold. By the time he had driven the few blocks to Highway 25, the heater of the little Ford would have warmed his hands as much as a fire.

* * *

“I think this is the second one,” said Elizabeth. “If he wanted Peter Mantino, this is the way he’d do it. I think it’s not over.”

“You’re making a hell of an assumption,” said Richardson. “You’ve got to act as your own censor on this kind of case.”

“I know that,” she answered, her voice close enough to a monotone to serve her purpose.

“You’re feeling frustrated and disappointed that we didn’t get him at the L.A. airport, right?”

“I admit it,” said Elizabeth. “I volunteer it, and waive all right to a jury trial, but—”

“All I’m asking,” Richardson interrupted, “is that you think about it. Is it possible—not certain, but possible—that you see another gunshot homicide of another important man and say it’s the same perpetrator because you want it to be? You want another shot at him.”

Elizabeth’s jaw clenched. “You brought me in here to analyze raw data. My preliminary hypothesis when there are two murders of ranking members of the Balacontano family within two days is that a pure coincidence is unlikely. There. I’ve done my job. Your job as section chief is to decide now, this minute, whether to send an investigator out to Santa Fe to find out what actually happened to Peter Mantino.”

“Are you volunteering?”

Elizabeth’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not calling my bluff, you know; I’d love to. But I just went to California, and I have two children who are expecting me to feed them dinner tonight and still be there when they wake up tomorrow. Have things gotten so bad since I left here that you don’t have any real field men for a case like this?”

Richardson shook his head. “No. I just figured out who to send. Give me a minute on the phone with him, and then I’ll transfer him to you.”

“Who is he?”

“His name’s Jack Hamp.”

Elizabeth turned and walked out of Richardson’s office. She had heard the name before. He could be somebody she had met on another case. No, she had read it at the bottom of some report recently. But the button on her phone was already blinking. She punched it.

“Hello,” said Elizabeth. “This is Elizabeth Waring. Is this Mr. Hamp?”

“What can I do for you, ma’am?”

Her expectations oscillated between two extremes. It was the unimaginative-sounding western official voice that California highway patrolmen used when they wrote you a ticket. But she was going to need him in the West, after all, and Richardson had picked him for a difficult situation. If Richardson knew the man’s name, he must at least be competent, and maybe a lot better than that. “I understand you’ve agreed to work with us on this case?”

“Yes, ma’am.” It was the “ma’am.” The last time she had heard it was from one of the prison guards at Lompoc.

“When can you be ready to leave for Santa Fe?”

There was a significant pause; then the voice said, “I’m at an airport now.” Then Elizabeth remembered where she had seen the name: it had been at the bottom of the report on the mess at LAX. Jack Hamp was the birdwatcher.

Hamp walked up Andalusia Street, then down Galisteo to the street behind it. He liked the feel of the sun heating the sidewalks without affecting the thin, cold air. He thought about Elizabeth Waring again. At the time he’d had to pay too much attention to what she was telling him to give her voice the sort of analysis he considered necessary. All he really had on her for sure was that she was in her mid-thirties. She had mentioned that she had young children, but she was old enough to call herself Elizabeth and not have to tone it down by a couple of syllables to Liz or Betty or Bess or whatever. She was not a large woman because there wasn’t the kind of lasting tone that came from the big-boned ones with pink hands that were all knuckles. It wasn’t a question of high or low, because women varied only from alto to soprano anyway, but something about how much real force and staying power was behind the voice. He judged that she was between five feet five and five feet eight, and probably a strawberry blonde or a redhead.

It was a brave guess, even for an expert like Hamp, because not many real redheads went through law school. A lot of the bright ones were like Hamp’s second wife, Donna, who was sort of a career redhead. She was a trained painter, but apparently she had spent her college years exploring the shades of green, blue and purple she could wear to set off her hair. The marriage had been made in heaven during what must have been a celestial holiday, when everybody up there was blind drunk and frisky. Donna had cried when she had found out he was a cop, but by then it was too late, because he had already verified her credentials as a bona-fide redhead, and she was a committed woman. At the time, his pants were hanging on the rail of her bed with the butt end of his pistol showing, but that hadn’t bothered her. Later he decided he hadn’t given her reaction as much thought as it had deserved. Not that she wasn’t a law-abiding citizen, within certain limits, but she was not a cautious person, or a docile one. They’d had a lively time of it for nearly five years, but it had ended by her going after him with the claw hammer she had been using to attach a canvas to its stretcher bars. Donna’s problem was symbolized in his mind by the fact that she had gone after him with the claw end of the hammer. It was uglier and more spiteful that way, but the bludgeon-death victims he came across professionally almost always got it with the blunt end; it was just more practical.

Maybe Elizabeth Waring had brown hair, the sort that had very tight little curls in it that made it stick out. There was a certain intensity in those women too, and a lot of them went to law school.

Hamp spotted the police sticker on the door of Mantino’s house, and took in the rest of it. The killer had seen it all the way he was seeing it now. The houses were all too close together, the streets too narrow and quiet for an easy shot and a quick retreat. Since the police had found a North American Watch car in the street, he had probably chosen to impersonate a security guard, but something had gone wrong. At that moment the ordinary man would have defeated himself. He would have tried to do something to save his skin—hide in an empty house or look for an escape route the police knew better than he did. But this man had done something else. All policemen were drilled in hesitation, firing warning shots into the air and trying to keep innocent bystanders away. If they’d had a plan, it would have been to contain his movements and assume that his desire to stay alive would make him behave rationally, and therefore predictably. But this one was an aggressor. Any victim was as good as another. Anything that caused confusion or added to the escalating violence was an advantage. His best tactic would have been to give the impression that what he was trying to do was not to run but to kill them.