Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro 4)

Broussard and I walked toward the Lexus and Broussard grabbed a pair of troopers, pointed at the abandoned mill building. “Secure that building. Now.”

The troopers didn’t even question. They placed hands to the guns on their hips and ran back up the road toward the mill.

We reached the Lexus, worked our way through the small crowd of cops blocking the front bumper, and looked through the windshield at Chris Mullen and Pharaoh Gutierrez. Gutierrez was in the driver’s seat, Mullen riding shotgun. The headlights were still on. The engine was running. A single hole formed a small spiderweb in the windshield in front of Gutierrez. An identical hole was bored through the glass in front of Mullen.

The holes in their heads were pretty similar, too—both the size of a dime, both puckered and white around the edges, both spilling a thin stream of blood down the men’s noses.

By the looks of it, Gutierrez had taken the first shot. His face registered nothing except a sense of impatience, and both his hands were empty and lying palms up on the seat. The keys were in the ignition, the shift in PARK. Chris Mullen’s right hand gripped the gun in his waistband, and the look on his face was a sudden frozen seizure of fear and surprise. He’d had about half a second to know he was going to die, maybe less. But enough time for everything to turn slow-motion on him, a thousand terrified thoughts scrambling through his angry brain in the time it took for him to register the bullet that had killed Pharaoh, reach for his gun, and hear the spit of the next bullet punch through the windshield.

Bubba, I thought.

Fifty yards in front of the Lexus, the abandoned mill with its sagging widow’s walk would have provided a perfect sniper’s perch.

In the shafts of light cast by the car’s headlamps, I could see the two Staties approaching it slowly, knees bent slightly, guns drawn and aimed up at the widow’s walk. One of them pointed to the other, and they approached the side door. One threw it open, and the other stepped in front of it, gun pointed at chest level.

Bubba, I thought, I hope you didn’t do this just for fun. Tell me you have Amanda McCready.

Broussard followed my gaze. “How much you want to bet the angle of trajectory tells us the bullets were fired from that building?”

“No bet,” I said.

Two hours later, they were still sorting out the mess. The night had turned suddenly cold, and a light sleet fell and splattered windshields and stuck in our hair like lice.

The troopers who’d entered the mill had come back out with a Winchester Model 94 lever-action rifle they’d found, with LAD target scope attached. The rifle had been dumped in a barrel of ancient oil on the second floor, just to the right of the window that led to the widow’s walk. The serial numbers had been filed off, and the first guy from Forensics who looked at it laughed when someone suggested the possibility of prints.

More troopers were sent into the mill to look for further evidence, but in two hours they hadn’t found shell casings or anything else, and Forensics had been unable to get any prints off the railing of the widow’s walk or the frame of the window leading out there.

The ranger who’d met Angie on the back side of the hill leading to Swingle’s Quarry had given her a bright orange raincoat to cover herself and a pair of thick socks for her feet, but still she shivered in the night, kept rubbing her dark hair with a towel even though it had dried or frozen hours ago. Indian summer, it appeared, had gone the way of the Massachusetts Indian.

Two divers had attempted a search of the Granite Rail Quarry but reported visibility at absolute zero below thirty feet, and once the weather kicked in, the slit deposits loosened from the granite walls had turned even the shallow water into a sandstorm.

The divers quit at ten without finding anything but a pair of men’s jeans hanging from a shelf about twenty feet below the water line.

When Broussard had reached the south side of the quarry, almost directly across from the cliff where Angie and I had seen the doll, a note had been waiting for him, placed neatly under a small boulder and illuminated by a pencil-thin flashlight hung from a branch above it.

Duck.

As Broussard reached for the note, the trees erupted with gunfire, and he dove out from the tree line onto the cliff plateau, grappling for his gun and walkie-talkie, leaving the money bag and his flashlight back at the tree line. A second barrage of bullets drove him to the edge of the cliff, where he lay in darkness, his only safety, and trained his gun on the tree line but didn’t fire for fear the muzzle flashes would reveal his exact position.

A search of Broussard’s last position found the note, the kidnapper’s pencil light, Broussard’s flashlight, and the bag, which was open and empty. Over a hundred spent shells had been found in the trees and ledges directly behind Broussard’s cliff in the last hour and the trooper who radioed it in said:

“We’re gonna find a lot more. Looks like the shooters went house back here. Looks like Grenada, for Christ’s sake.”

The troopers and rangers on our side of the quarry had called down to report finding evidence of at least fifty rounds fired into our cliff plateau or the trees behind us.

The consensus was pretty much summed up by a trooper we heard over the radio. “Major Dempsey, sir, they weren’t supposed to walk back out of here. No way in hell.”

All roads into and out of the area remained locked down, but based on the fact that the shots were fired from the southern side of Granite Rail Quarry, troopers, rangers, and local police with hounds were sent to concentrate their search for the suspects there, and even from the street on the northern side we could occasionally see the symphony of lights playing off the treetops.

Poole had suffered what doctors believed was a myocardial infarction, exacerbated by his walk downhill to Quarry Street. Once there, Poole, already disoriented and possibly delirious, had apparently seen Gutierrez and Mullen in the Lexus heading for Pritchett Street and had made his way over there in time to find their corpses and call in from the car phone in the Lexus.

Last we’d heard, Poole was in ICU at Milton Hospital, his condition critical.

“Anybody done the math yet?” Dempsey asked us. We were leaning against the hood of our Crown Victoria, Broussard smoking one of Angie’s cigarettes, Angie shivering and slurping coffee from a cup with the seal of the MDC on it as I ran a hand up and down her back, trying to push some heat back into her blood.

“Which math?” I said.

“The math that puts Gutierrez and Mullen down on the road at about the same time you three were under fire.” He chewed a red plastic toothpick, touched it occasionally with his thumb and index, but never removed it from his mouth. “’Less they had a helicopter, too, and I don’t think they did somehow…. You?”