“I say we need a little luck.” Lawson turned her back to the street and folded her arms across her chest. She kept her eyes fixed on the wooden planks of the L platform as she spoke. “It has to be low-key. You work the case as an unofficial consultant. Your contacts are Rodriguez and myself. Above al, you stay away from the main investigation.”
“I’m getting that warm, tingling feeling inside.”
“You want to do this or not?”
I wanted to tel her about the mayor, about how he had already locked me up as the city’s “official” unofficial consultant. But then I figured what the hel, double-dipping was practical y a birthright in Chicago.
“You want to pay my daily rate?” I said. “Or a flat fee?”
“Work it out with Rodriguez. If you turn up any leads…” Lawson stopped and looked over again. “I mean anything of significance, you report it to me. Immediately. And then we decide what to do together. Are we clear?”
“One more question. Why take the chance?”
“With you?”
I nodded. “My experience with agents from the Bureau is they like to play it by the book. Even when they don’t agree with their boss.”
“How many female agents have you worked with?”
“You’re the first.”
“Exactly. The Bureau is only slightly less misogynistic than the Catholic church. Women have to work twice as hard and be three times as smart just to stay afloat.”
“And they need to take chances?”
“After a while, you figure, ‘Why not?’ Especial y on the big ones. Now, what are you going to need?”
I held up a finger. “One thing.” I wrote down Hubert Russel ’s name and number. “I need to hire this guy. He’s a little unorthodox and not real y an investigator, but he understands computers and he understands stealth.”
Lawson looked at the name. “Should I meet him?”
“I don’t see why.”
“What does he do?”
“What do we have so far? A woman shot at close range with a forty-cal, a sniper shooting, and a knife attack. No real pattern, except they al involve the city and, one way or another, the CTA. What else?”
“The bad guy reaches out to you on the phone.”
“That’s right. So we know he’s got an ego. Big surprise. But where’s the focus? What’s the overal pattern?”
“Maybe there isn’t any,” Lawson said.
“Maybe not. My guy wil create a profile.”
“I got a team at Quantico doing that right now.”
“Not like Hubert wil. Look, it might not work, but I think it’s worth a shot.”
“When can you get him up and going?”
“He already is.”
“Thanks for talking to me first, asshole. Keep me informed.”
My new favorite federal agent turned away just as my cel phone buzzed. I reached for it and a half dozen police radios exploded with sound.
CHAPTER 24
It was 9:45 when Nelson sent his text message. Robles checked it and turned the phone off. The morning rush along Lake Shore Drive was stil in ful throat, a solid line of cars creeping south at twenty miles an hour. Robles had moved forward a bit so he was under the overhang of a tree and scanned the line of cars with the zoom lens of his Nikon. Then he pul ed out a smal set of binoculars and gave the road a second look. Robles didn’t know exactly what he was searching for: a face, a gesture, a moment, something that would tel him who lived and who died. At 9:51 he stowed the camera back in his duffel and pul ed out a rifle with a scope. He was used to the weapon now and it felt good in his hands. Using the trees as cover, Robles ran over the rifle quickly. He had checked it before he left, but wanted to make sure. Then he loaded it and leaned it against a tree. From his bag, the shooter pul ed out a folding bipod and set it up with a clear view of the Drive. He threw a smal bean bag behind the bipod, dropped to the ground, and lay there for a minute or more, using his binoculars to review the sight lines a final time. At 9:55 Robles put his binoculars away and crawled back to where he’d left the rifle. He slung it over his shoulder and moved forward again to the shooting stand. Gently, he lifted the weapon onto the bipod and seated the rifle butt in the bean bag. The morning sun was glancing off the lake, partial y blinding the drivers headed south and providing even more cover. Stil, Nelson wanted no more than a minute’s worth of shooting time. Robles let out a slow, even breath and eased his eye to the scope.
The first face he saw was that of Jessica Morgan, twenty-three years old and driving a Ford Focus. Jessica was a single mom, working as a paralegal at a Loop law firm and taking classes at night to earn her col ege degree. Jessica would never know about the law degree she’d have earned from the University of Chicago, her subsequent clerkship with a federal judge, and, eventual y, her own seat on the Il inois Supreme Court. Instead, Jessica smiled in Robles’ scope and pul ed an invisible strand of hair back from her face. Then she got an education in execution. The round shattered her windshield, hit her steering wheel, and struck Jessica just under the chin, kil ing her instantly. Robles, however, never saw the fruits of his handiwork. The clock was running, and his rifle was searching.
Peter Rubenstein was two cars away, driving an almost new Cadil ac Sevil e. Peter was sixty-three years old and a widower. His wife, Marcy, had died a year and a half earlier when she fel down a flight of stairs in their home. Rubenstein wept at her funeral and sold their house within three months of putting “his Marcy” in the ground. Now he lived in a high-rise condo along the lake, courtesy of his dead wife’s insurance cash. Peter was whistling and enjoying a view of the morning sun shimmering off the water. He’d never know his insurance settlement had been flagged by state investigators. Never know about the order to exhume Marcy’s body and the subsequent report that would have established her death as a homicide, the result of several blows to the head “inconsistent with a fal down the stairs.” He’d never get to hear the charge of murder laid against his name or feel the cuffs as they slipped across his wrists. He’d never get to know any of that, but he would get to see “his Marcy” sooner than he expected. Robles’ second round hit Rubenstein in mid-whistle, just below the left eye, tearing off most of his head and making life miserable for the undertaker when Rubenstein’s family insisted on an open casket.
Robles’ third shot missed everything. His fourth punched through the chest and burst the heart of forty- seven-year-old Mitchel Case, a second-rate accountant who would never find out about the first-rate affair his wife was having, not to mention the malignant tumor percolating inside his skul. Case’s Corol a was traveling at twenty-eight miles an hour when he was struck. The car hit the divider, jumped it, and plowed into a van headed north. That driver, eighteen-year-old Malcolm Anderson, would never meet his daughter, Janine, because she’d never be born. The only passenger in the van, thirteen-year-old Randal Blake, would have his left leg crushed in the wreckage, undergo four hours of emergency surgery at Northwestern Memorial, and survive. Randal would consider himself one of the lucky ones from that day on the Drive. He’d never know about his four years as an Al — American guard at the University of Michigan or the Hal of Fame career he would have enjoyed with his hometown Bul s. Never know about the
$113 mil ion he’d have earned, the wife he’d have married and grown old with, or the five girls he’d have watched raise families of their own. Instead, Randal would walk for the rest of his life with a limp and a cane. He’d die alone, at the age of forty-six, from complications due to hepatitis C, the disease of a junkie, which is exactly what Randal would become.
Three cars behind Mitchel Case’s car, Robles’ final round creased the roof of a black 2009 Audi and caromed away harmlessly. Inside, the driver took no notice of the metal ic ping, not with the horror show unfolding in slow motion around her. Rachel Swenson locked her brakes and heard the crunch as she hit the car in front of her. A half beat later, she felt another car plow into her from behind. At the same time her air bag deployed, knocking her sil y
