Bullseye (Michael Bennett 9)

But President Buckland was all over it, I saw. As I watched, he started a slide show with satellite surveillance photos that showed Russian military trucks and soldiers coming in from the north to the supposedly Ukrainian-attacked hospital and school.

Take that, Putin, I thought. Wow. That was a bold move. Buckland was calling out Putin’s bullshit for all the world to see.

Was that why that hit man had been there to shoot the president? I wondered. Putin knew he now had a formidable foe in our new president; did he figure the best way to beat him was to clear the playing field?

Doyle called me a minute later. “Hey, Mike. Major score last night on the recanvass. A super up the block showed us a security cam we missed. I just e-mailed it to you. It captures what happened. It’s incredible. Watch.”

I did. It was murky black-and-white. First, it showed three drug crew guys standing on the sidewalk. Then, a second later, they were flying like bowling pins as a motorcycle streaked into them. Two people leaped off the bike, already shooting. They were all in black, wearing helmets. One was smaller than the other, with wide hips. A woman? I watched as she put a bullet in one of the downed drug guys’ temples, then casually walked toward the building’s front entrance.

Were we looking at a male-female hit team? That was a new one. And two on seven? That took some major guts. Not to mention training.

I watched the video again. The hit team was so smooth, so calm, just taking their time. These were no rival gangbangers. These people were military or ex-military, major pros.

I looked up again at the president on

TV.

Two pros take down a drug crew a week before another pro tries to pull a Lee Harvey Oswald on Buckland?

I ran through the video of the hit team again and again on my phone. I sipped my coffee as I stared at them. I especially concentrated on the male.

I tried to match him up with the brief glimpse of the shooter I’d gotten at the MetLife Building. Both were about six feet with a slim build.

But was it the same guy? I wondered.

I just wasn’t sure.

Chapter 20

Lisa Hunter was a pretty, full-bodied, olive-skinned girl with shoulder-length raven-dark hair and a lot of dark eye makeup. I met with the Columbia premed student at a little after two in the afternoon.

Lisa was one of Rafael Arruda’s chem students. After lunch, I’d gone over to the bursar’s office, and after talking to a surprisingly unfussy, cooperative clerk, I’d actually been able to track down a few names.

One of the students I’d interviewed told me that Lisa was rumored to have been Rafael Arruda’s lover. If that was true, my long shot hope was that she might have some insight into why he’d been taken out by a team of professional assassins.

I sat with Lisa on the edge of a sunny windowsill in the back of an empty Havemeyer Hall chemistry lab. Outside the window, across the quad, workers were brushing snow off the top of the massive dome of the campus’s famous library.

“Is it too warm?” I said as I laboriously opened the big window beside us a crack.

Lisa shrugged as she kept her eyes down on her brown leather boots. She took a Zippo lighter out of her laptop bag and started playing with it. She wore a gray hoodie that was too big for her, and I thought she seemed very depressed and vulnerable. Was that why the creep Arruda had seduced her? I wondered. Her vulnerability? Probably. I felt sorry for her.

“So it’s true about Rafael?” she said, her face going a little gray. “I mean, Dr. Arruda. He’s dead? He was murdered by drug dealers?”

As I nodded, an old-fashioned bell clanged loudly out in the empty corridor for a moment and stopped.

“I can’t believe it,” she said, blinking. “He was so smart. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Some of the other students I talked to said he gave them drugs. Namely, ecstasy. Did he ever give you any drugs, Lisa?” I asked.

“No,” she said, not looking at me. The rapid snap of her lighter was loud in the empty room.

“That’s a lie,” she said after another second. “Yes, he gave me drugs. Ecstasy, ketamine, even crystal meth once. I never even really did drugs before. He was really interested in their effects on me. Like, obsessive about it. He sometimes even gave me a survey sheet to fill out. Like it was an experiment.”

I’d heard the same thing from some of his other students. He must have been using them as guinea pigs for his drug batches, testing their strengths so he could price them accordingly. His own students. He easily could have poisoned or killed them. Arruda was a real piece of work, all right.

“We were sleeping together,” Lisa suddenly said as she looked out the window. “You probably heard that, I’m sure. I thought I loved him. I guess I did.”

She snapped the lighter again and again.