now looked like the media center in Baghdad's Green Zone. Satellite uplinks, news vans with station call letters on the sides, a craft services section complete with a catering truck advertising five choices of hot meals.
'American journalism at its finger-lickin' best,' Hitch said, checking out the food truck. We walked past a phalanx of microphone-wielding reporters gathered by the gate. I knew a few of them. They all knew Hitch.
'Hey, Hitch, over here!' they shouted, gunning off footage.
'Sorry, guys,' he said, smiling and waving like a red-carpet celebrity. 'I'm working right now.'
They shot tape of us, but we made it past without giving an interview, and proceeded on up the driveway.
'This was a good wardrobe choice,' Hitch said to nobody in particular. 'This rust suit looks hot on camera.'
Our evidence team showed up ten minutes later and we went to work with them, hunting with metal detectors for spent cartridge casings and stray bullets.
Doing the math, if the clip contained sixty-four rounds, with nine bullets in our three vies and fourteen more bullets recovered from the crime scene, that meant if he shot 'til slide lock, there were forty-one slugs missing, and forty-four cartridge casings.
After an hour we had found six more Makarov slugs and one more brass cartridge. By early afternoon, it was starting to be longer and longer between shrill electronic beeps. Hitch and I were bushed and took a break, stretching out under an umbrella on the pool chaises.
At around three, we were both dozing when the metal detector lit up something.
'Got a hit,' the operator called out.
We both rolled into sitting positions, rubbed our eyes, and ambled over to where he was working.
The way you retrieved this stuff was with little forensic tools. Tiny Barbie-sized spades and brushes. Finally, the technician exposed the find, pulled a bullet out of the ground and dropped it into an evidence bag. But this one was much smaller than the 9 mm Makarovs we'd been digging up.
'What the hell is that?' Hitch asked.
'7.65 mm slug,' I replied, peering down at it.
'So our guy used two weapons?' Hitch said.
'Or we've got a second shooter.'
Hitch turned to me with a troubled look. 'We don't want a second shooter, Shane.'
'Whatta you mean we don't want? You got the wrong verb there, partner.'
'It's way too late in Act One for a second heavy. Splits the focus.'
I glared over at him. It didn't even deserve a response.
'I just don't think we should jump to conclusions,' he persisted. 'We don't know there was a second shooter. A second shooter? Why? Sladky had a weapon that could put out six hundred rounds a minute and for backup, he brings along some guy with a pathetic little 7.65 automatic?'
'7.65 slugs originally came from Europe. Same with Makarov nines,' I said.
'I don't like it, homes. It's not working for me.'
By then I'd really had it with this movie bullshit. 'How 'bout this?' I snapped. 'What if our second shooter is Scott Berman's hot bitch lover from Sarajevo? She could be over here with the Czechoslovakian female fitness team, which maybe Karel Sladky coaches. All of them wearing tiny little string bikinis, glistening with baby oil. Berman discovers that these hard bodies are really trying to blow up LAX with a stolen Russian suitcase nuke but before he can go to the cops, he gets greased, taking our story down a whole new path with a lot of great shit for Act Two. Does that make it work any better?'
'I know you're just playin' with me, but that's not half bad,' Hitch replied.
Chapter 16
While I called Jeb and told him what we'd found, Sumner Hitchens was talking to the metal detector operator. They were rummaging around next to the trash area where the 7.65 bullet was found, looking for another hit. Jeb wanted us to bring in the slug right away. As I hung up, I saw Hitch walking toward me.
'Come over here,' he said.
'Find something?'
'Yeah.'
I followed him across the yard around to the side where the smaller bullet had been uncovered. There, built into the eaves of the trash shed, was a new-looking video surveillance camera in a waterproof box that was so well hidden that everybody had missed it the night before. If it had a wide-angle lens, it would cover the entire pool area.
'Hello, hello,' I said, standing under the camera and sighting in the genera] direction it was pointed.
'I love it when we catch the killing on tape,' Hitch said. 'It really fucks with the defense attorneys head.'
We followed the hidden ground cable to where it led into the mansion through a small hole drilled in the stucco at the base of the exterior wall.
'Video deck's inside the main house,' I said. 'Call Jeb and see if he can get us a warrant, or better still, to save all that trouble, maybe somebody from the Dorothy White Foundation will come out here and just open this up for us. Give us verbal permission to go inside.'
While Hitch made the call, I walked around the side of the mansion and looked through every available window.
I hadn't done it the night before because I was positive that the house was deserted. I should have, because by the light of day, even though the windows were dirty, I could now see that the mansion still had some furniture inside, unusual for a deserted house.
Making this discovery even more intriguing was the fact that through one window I could just barely see a fully decorated Christmas tree standing on the far side of the solarium in the living room. The tree looked to be about seven feet tall and there were a lot of unopened Christmas gifts underneath.
Hitch came back after making his call and found me peering through the big round solarium window. 'Jeb already called the lawyer at the foundation last night. They're gonna open this up for us without a warrant. What ya got?' he asked.
I pointed and he looked through the dirty glass at the sparsely furnished room and the fully decked-out tree and presents barely visible in the living room beyond.
'Thought nobody lived here,' he said.
'Somebody's sure as hell all ready for Christmas,' I said.
'Act One was on life support but its sure got a nice heartbeat now' Hitch replied.
'We've gotta go through this house,' I said. 'If somebody's in there then they could be a witness to the shooting.' 'Right.'
'Why would everybody lie about this?'
Jeb Calloway arrived in about an hour, followed a few minutes later by Stender Sheedy Sr.
The legendary letterhead partner of Sheedy, Devine amp; Lipscomb turned out to be a seventy-year-old gray eminence in a charcoal suit with hair the color of roadside snow and such a pale complexion that it looked like he never got into the sun.
His manner indicated he was accustomed to being treated with deference. The only cops he'd ever dealt with had probably been holding traffic citations.
'I don't have much time,' he announced abruptly. 'I came personally because I conversed with Thayer Dunbar in Houston this morning and he's getting extremely annoyed. He doesn't want the house involved with all this.'
What that had to do with a triple murder escaped me.
Stender Senior had a large ring of keys in his hand and walked past the pool where Chrissy and Paula had died without even bothering to glance at the blood-tinged water. Then he pulled up the ball of keys and, like a school janitor about to open a delinquent's locker, started trying keys in the heavy Yale padlock.
'We were told that nobody lived here,' I said.
'Nobody does,' he replied curtly.
