7th Heaven

ambulance.

I went to the gurney, observed as much of the victim as I could. An oxygen mask half covered his face, and a sheet was pulled up to his chin. I judged that the young man was in his late teens or early twenties, white, with well-cut, dirty-blond hair, maybe five ten.

Most important, he was alive.

“Is he going to make it?” I asked one of the paramedics.

She shrugged, said, “He’s got two slugs in him, Sergeant. Lost a lot of blood.”

Inside the house, Jacobi and Conklin were debriefing the former governor and Valentina Campion, who sat together on a sofa, shoulder to shoulder, their hands entwined. Conklin shot me a look: something he wanted me to understand. It took me a few minutes to get it.

Jacobi filled me in on what had transpired, told me that there was no ID on the kid Campion had shot. Then he said to the former governor, “You say you can identify the second boy, sir? Help our sketch artist?”

Campion nodded. “Absolutely. I’ll never forget that kid’s face.”

Campion looked to be in terrible pain. He’d shot someone only minutes before, and when he asked me to sit down in the chair near the sofa, I thought he wanted to tell me about that. But I was wrong.

Campion said, “Michael wanted to be like his friends. Go out. Have fun. So I was always on his case, you know? When I caught him sneaking out at night, I reprimanded him, took away privileges, and he hated me for it.”

“No he didn’t,” Valentina Campion said sharply. “You did what I didn’t have the courage to do, Connor.”

“Sir?” I said, wondering where he was going with this.

Campion’s face sagged with exhaustion.

“He was being irresponsible,” Campion continued, “and I was trying to keep him safe. I was looking ahead to the future – a new medical procedure, a pharmaceutical breakthrough. Something.

“I told him, straight up, ‘When you decide to act like an adult, let me know.’ I wasn’t angry, I was afraid,” Campion said, his voice cracking. “So I lost him before I lost him.”

His wife tried to calm him, but Connor Campion wouldn’t be soothed. “I was a tyrant,” Campion said. “Mikey and I didn’t speak for the whole last month of his life. If I’d known he had a month to live… Michael told me, ‘Quality of life, Dad. That’s what’s important.’ ”

Campion fixed me with his bloodshot eyes.

“You seem to be a caring person, Sergeant. I’m telling you this so you understand. I let those hooligans into my house because they said they had information about Michael – and I had to know what it was.

“Now I think they killed him, don’t you? And tonight they were going to rob us. But why? Why?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

I told Campion that as soon as we knew anything, we’d let him know. That was all I had for him. But I got it now, why Conklin had given me that look when I’d walked in the door. My mind was running with it.

I signaled to my partner and we went outside.

Chapter 103

CONKLIN AND I leaned against the side of my car, facing the Campion house, staring at the lights glowing softly through a million little windowpanes. Campion and his wife didn’t know what kind of death Hawk and Pidge had planned for them tonight, but we knew – and thinking about that near miss was giving me the horrors.

If Connor Campion hadn’t fired his gun, Hawk and Pidge would have roasted him and his wife alive.

Rich pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one – and this time I took him up on it.

“Might be some prints on that foil around the bottle of booze,” he said.

I nodded, thinking we’d be lucky if those kids had records, if their prints were in AFIS, but I wasn’t counting on it.

“Hawk. Pidge. Crazy names,” Conklin said.

“I got a pretty good look at Hawk,” I said. “He matches Molly Chu’s description of the so-called angel who carried her out of the fire.”

Conklin exhaled a long stream of smoke into the night. He said, “And the governor’s description of Pidge sounds like the kid who pawned Patty Malone’s necklace.”

“And of course there’s the fishing line. So… what are we thinking?” I said to Conklin. “That Hawk and Pidge also killed Michael Campion? Because I don’t see two guys killing a kid when their MO is to tie up rich couples, leave a few words in Latin inside a book, and then burn the house down.”

Conklin said, “Nope. That doesn’t work for me, either. So why do you think these birds targeted the Campions?”

“Because the Campions are in the news. Big house. Big fire. Big headlines. Big score.”

Conklin smiled, said, “Only they screwed up.”

I smiled back, said, “Yeah.”

We were both starting to feel it, the kind of incomparable exhilaration that comes when after nothing but dead ends, A leads to B leads to C. I was sure that Hawk and Pidge were the sadists who did the arson killings, but not only couldn’t we prove that, we didn’t know who Hawk and Pidge were.

I stamped out my cigarette on the street, said to Conklin, “That Hawk bastard had better live.”

“At least long enough to talk,” said my partner.

Chapter 104

HAWK’S SURGEON, Dr. Dave Hammond, was a compact man with rusty hair and the tight manner of a perfectionist who’d spent the night stitching his patient’s guts back together. Conklin and I had spent the same eight hours in a small, dull waiting room at St. Francis Hospital, waiting for Hammond ’s report.

When the doctor entered the waiting room at 6:15 a.m., I shot to my feet, asked, “Is he awake?”

Hammond said, “Right now, the patient’s condition defines touch-and-go. He was bleeding like a son of a bitch when he came in. One slug punctured his lung and nicked his aorta. The other damn near pulverized his liver.”

Conklin said, “So, Doctor, when can we talk to him?”

“Inspector, you understand what I just said? We had to inflate the kid’s lungs, transfuse him, and remove a chunk of his liver. This is what we like to call major surgery.”

Conklin smiled winningly. “Okay. I hear you. Is he awake?”

“He just opened his eyes.” Hammond sighed with disgust. “I’ll give you one minute to get in and get out.”

One minute was all we’d need, enough time to wring two words from that bastard – his first name and his last. I pushed open the door marked RECOVERY and approached Hawk’s bed. It was a shocking sight.

Hawk’s body was lashed down in four-point restraints so that he couldn’t flail and undo the work his surgeons had just done. Even his head was restrained. IV bags dripped fluids into his body, a chest tube drained ooze out of his lungs, a catheter carried waste into a canister under the bed, and he was breathing oxygen through a cannula clipped to his nose.

Hawk looked bad, but he was alive.

Now I had to get him to talk.

I touched his hand and said, “Hi there. My name is Lindsay.”