“I said we’ll take care of him, Lyle. I want you to come home. I want to see you in my office this afternoon at five.”
Pointer closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing. For a moment, he thought he might cry.
“Do you understand me, Lyle?”
“Yes, sir.” Pointer’s tone was flat, as though he were dead already. “Lyle?”
“Yes, Mr. Slater?”
“Make it easy on yourself, son,” the old man instructed, an unexpected touch of kindness in his voice. “Don’t make us come after you.”
Unable to make his voice work, Pointer placed the phone gently on the cradle. He cocked his head oddly as he stared at his hands. He had never seen them shake before.
Warren set up camp in an empty office, where he leafed through the Polaroids for the sixth time. Not knowing the officers involved personally, the pictures were no more or less shocking than dozens of others he’d seen, but the sheer violence of the act was baffling. The marksmanship was amazing. Three shots were fired, each one a kill shot. Where does a kid learn to shoot like that? He jotted the thought down on a yellow legal pad. One shot like this might be luck. To score three meant skill.
The circumstantial, physical evidence was undeniable, but Warren still couldn’t put it together in his head. How did a kid who had spent most of his formative years in upper-crust suburbia learn to kill with such skill? How did a twelve-year-old who was known by his peers as a wimp muster the courage and physical strength to overcome three adults and kill them? Okay, so the first one was drunk and unlucky—or so said Nathan—but what about the ones last night? How does a boy wrestle a gun from a man and still have enough composure to snap off perfect kill-shots?
For that matter, what were the cops doing wearing firearms in the cellblock? That violated the most basic security procedures followed by every jail in America.
He tried to reduce it to a timeline on his legal pad. Assuming that Nathan got as far as his cell, and according to Deputy Steadman, that was where the boy was the last time he saw him, Schmidtt had to be the first one killed. Otherwise, where would Nathan have gotten the gun? Warren wrote on his pad, Smuggled in gun?
No, the gun he took from the Grimeses’ house was found in the Honda, unused. Could always have been a second piece, but where would he hide it? Steadman’s report said that Nathan was thoroughly frisked before he was put away.
So, one way or another, Nathan whacked Schmidtt. With the door open, he had free access to the hallway. So why didn’t Watts react? He was shot in his chair, once close up, and once from further away. The Polaroids clearly showed powder burns around the mouth shot, but none on the chest. When you hear shooting down the hall, you don’t just stay in your seat. You react. At the very least, then, there should have been a shootout in the hallway, but that wasn’t the way it happened. Watts was shot dead where he sat. Shot twice.
Michaels strolled out to the watch desk and ran some quick mental calculations. The young deputy assigned to maintain security stepped aside to let him past. Standing at the side of the watch desk, at the doorway to the cellblock, Warren pantomimed a shot. His extended arm came within three feet of the taped outline on the floor. This had to be where the head shot was fired. The circled hole in the linoleum even showed where the bullet exited Watts’s brain and lodged in the floor.
That meant Watts was already on the ground when Nathan allegedly fired point-blank into his mouth. In all his years on the force, Warren could only point to a handful of sociopaths with the cojones to shoot a man in the face at close range.
Why would he do that? Warren asked himself.
Taking care not to step in the blood slick, Warren stepped in behind the watch desk to pantomime the events. “Okay,” he said aloud, talking himself through the timeline. “I’m sitting here doing paperwork, and I hear a shot from down the hall. What do I do?”
“You’d go and check it out,” the young deputy answered, apparently thinking the question was addressed to him.
“Huh?” The comment briefly broke Warren’s concentration. “Right. Yes. That’s exactly what you’d do.” He again stepped over the mess to enter the hallway. “So, reacting to the noise, you run out into the hall like this, with your weapon drawn, right? I mean, you’d be ready for a fight, right?”
“Shit, yes,” the deputy declared.
Warren nodded. It was coming together. “Yes. Shit, yes. Like you said.” He fumbled through the Polaroids again. “But Watts’s weapon remained in its holster. Why wouldn’t he draw his weapon?”
The deputy shrugged. “Beats me.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Maybe he holstered it after he was hit.”
Warren considered that. “So, you hear gunfire. You react. You come out into the hall, and you’re bushwhacked with an incredibly good shot. You’re hit in the chest. Surely you know you’re dying, or at least you know you’re in a hell of a lot of pain. Are you going to take the time to reholster your weapon?”
The deputy shrugged again. “Don’t know. Never been shot.”
Warren chuckled. The logic amused him. “Fortunately, neither have I. But I just can’t imagine that. The last thing I’d do is take away my last chance for fighting back.”
“What else could have happened?” asked the deputy.
“Suppose he never drew his weapon in the first place?” “Shit,” the deputy snorted. “That don’t make no sense either.”
Warren nodded pensively. “No. No, it doesn’t. A cop hears shots, he’s gonna pull his gun. It’s instinct. Unless…”
Suppose somebody shot Watts first? Chest shot first, then, as he lay on the ground, the head shot. That would work. And Schmidtt? He had to be shot second. Well, maybe he didn’t have to be, but it sure made sense.
The accomplice!
So, somebody comes in the front door, pops Watts, and then goes into the cellblock to break out his buddy, Nathan.
Okay, so where was this accomplice now? Helps the kid break out of the JDC and then disappears, only to reappear in New York in time to kill two cops. That Was some accomplice!
Then he saw it.
The mind is a funny thing. You program it with a certain set of assumptions, and it will dutifully draw dozens of conclusions, all of which are plainly obvious—common sense, even—so long as you never question the validity of the assumptions. The most oft-forgotten job of a police detective is not only to seek evidence, but to continually question the most basic assumptions on which the case was based.
In a single moment of inspiration, Warren realized that they’d been looking at all of the evidence surrounding Nathan’s escape from the wrong angle. Even when he had allowed himself to accept the kid’s version of what happened at the JDC, he hadn’t seen it. Those two deputies were never the target of whoever shot them. They were just in the way.
Warren’s body jumped visibly when it all crystallized for him. Nathan was in far deeper trouble than any of them had realized.
“Deputy, get me Sheriff Murphy right now,” he Commanded.
The young man seemed startled by Micliaels’s suddenly harsh tone. “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t know where he is…”
“I didn’t ask you if you knew where he is. I told you to go get him. And point me to a phone.”
Jed Hackner nearly dropped the phone when he heard Michaels’s theory. “A hit? Jesus, Warren, are you sure?”
“Think about it, Jed,” Michaels said urgently. “If we assume somebody’s got a contract out on Nathan, everything else falls into place. This kid’s not a killer. He’s just defending himself.”
Jed admitted that the theory had merit, but making sense didn’t make it so. Perhaps Brian’s death last fall was making the boss lose perspective. “With all due respect, Warren, don’t you think maybe you’re taking benefit of the doubt too far?”
“I know what you’re thinking,” Warren acknowledged, his voice getting more anxious. “I know it sounds like
