20th Victim (Women's Murder Club #20) - James Patterson Page 0,53
was home but the dust bunnies and a sign hanging inside the door.”
“Sign saying what?” I asked him.
“‘Gone Fishing.’”
“That’s a sly way of saying ‘Gone hunting.’”
“Right you are.”
I told Rich I was on the way back to the Hall, but in fact I wasn’t ready to drive.
After we hung up, I sat in my car looking out at the hospital parking lot, and I thought of Carl Kennedy. He’d been upbeat, quick with an idea, and now he was dead. He and Clapper had been tight, having worked together in homicide, LVPD. I didn’t want Charlie to hear about Kennedy on TV or the internet.
I tapped Clapper’s office number into my phone and waited for his assistant to locate him. When he got on the line, he said, “Boxer, you heard about Kennedy? He told me he was working with you.”
“I just heard. Charlie, I’m very sorry.”
He said, “Thanks,” but his voice was all wrong.
He sounded removed.
“Charlie?”
“Lindsay, got a minute? I’ll take this to my office.”
I turned off the police radio, pressed my phone to my ear, and waited for Clapper. And then he was back on the line.
“Boxer, what do you know about what happened?”
I gave Clapper background on Moving Targets and said that Kennedy knew of an in-real-life location that was possibly Moving Targets’ HQ.
I said, “Kennedy was going to check them out. Then he was shot a few blocks from their store. Houston PD found the store had been cleaned out.”
“I hadn’t heard that part, Boxer. I’m starting to form a theory.”
“Tell me.”
“What if Kennedy knew these Moving Targets people? I should tell you, he was known to cross the line.”
“Like how?”
“Skim cash. Pocket drugs. Stash a gun. My just-formed theory is based on his character, Boxer, not on evidence. Maybe he told Moving Targets he wanted to make them an offer. They pay him off. He keeps the cops in the dark.”
“And so they shot him.”
“Evidence will tell, Boxer. Regards to Richie.”
And then he hung up the phone.
CHAPTER 69
CINDY DRAFTED AN email to the mystery man who had given her the tip of a lifetime: the motive for nine killings and counting, a manifesto on a “new war on drugs,” followed by a lead to a new shooting in Chicago.
The man wanted exposure. He had proven that he had inside knowledge. He wanted to get the word out that he and/or others were eliminating drug dealers, one piece of crap at a time.
He’d obscured his identity, but he wasn’t being coy.
His message to drug dealers was twofold: Do you want to live? Or do you want to “spin the wheel”?
The final draft of her email to him was short and simple. “I am sympathetic to your cause and have an idea for spreading your message. Please write or call me again so we can discuss.”
In fact, she abhorred frontier justice, but if she could be this man’s conduit to the worldwide press, he might give her the key to the whole shooting match. She would love to draw the killers out of their hidey-holes and into the hands of the SFPD.
But she was impatient. She felt a breeze. It was the passage of time. The clock on her computer screen read a couple of minutes after noon. Where was the mystery man right now? Was he at his computer, reading the news, basking in the growing public praise for what he was calling the “new war on drugs”?
Cindy sent her two-sentence email. Got the Message sent notification. And now she was on the hook, waiting for his reply.
She turned her mind to other things. She spoke with Claire, who told her she’d never been so bored in her life. They laughed when Cindy added, “Better bored than dead.”
She texted Richie to say, Can you tell me ANYTHING?
Ah. No.
Screw you, buster, she responded, forcing herself to add, Kidding! She got up, made a wide counterclockwise circle around the newsroom so that she could avoid not only McGowan but Tyler as well. The lunch wagon was in the outer corridor near the elevator. She bought an egg salad sandwich and a bag of pretzels, then took the long way back to her desk.
She checked her email, hoping that the man of the spinning wheel had replied in the ten minutes since she’d invited him to be her confidential informant.
Nope. He hadn’t. And he hadn’t called, either.
So she opened her crime blog, skimmed the new comments on her original post, and found a thread she was least expecting. It