“On his clothes?”
“Stranger things have happened.”
“My uncle once told me this saying-‘If you hear hoofbeats, don’t first look for a zebra.’”
Marquez laughed. “I get your point. We’ve already got a promise from the lab to try to figure out who peed on whom.”
Alex looked at the positions of the bodies and how their hands held the guns. Something about Whitfield’s arm position didn’t seem quite right, but he couldn’t say why. “Has Whitfield been moved at all?”
“Not that I know of. Crime lab took photos, though, so you can double check that. Something bothering you?”
“I don’t know.” He tried for a few minutes more to figure out what didn’t seem to fit. He couldn’t shake the feeling that the Bora was just an expensive dustbin, into which someone had swept two people who were proving to be problems. But if this was murder and not suicide, was it because the media had learned that they were seeking Whitfield? Had Whitfield been killed because the LASD knew his name? But then why kill Addison, too? And who could get close enough to these two to kill them in the car like this?
Sedgewick. Another school chum?
He shivered. The night air was cold, but he knew the chill he felt had nothing to do with the weather. Admit that these might be suicides and nothing more, he told himself. Maybe you can’t be objective after all.
He stood up and stretched. He looked back through the bloodstained windshield, unable to prevent the memory of his father’s death from intruding on his thoughts. But his father had been wracked by guilt-deeply depressed, penniless, and ashamed. What would have made these young men feel so hopeless?
“Damn, I’m tired,” he said, then saw that Enrique was watching him closely. They had known each other for a long time, and he wondered how much the other man was guessing about his mood.
“You just need some sleep, Alex, that’s all.”
“Yeah. Listen-thanks again for holding things up for me, Enrique. We’ll call a meeting of the task force for late tomorrow morning and see what we have then, all right?”
“Okay. I’m with you. No use trying to think things through on three hours of sleep. These guys aren’t going anywhere.”
Alex got back in his car and rolled down the windows, but the stench of Chase’s new friend was pervasive. He wondered what the hell had possessed him to tell that kid to go ahead and bring that stinking mutt home with him. A drive of ten minutes had been enough to make his car reek like the bottom of a Dumpster. Maybe Chase had a problem with his sense of smell.
Then he thought of Chase borrowing crime scene tape to make a leash and his excitement as they rode back to the house. Kid could have just about any material thing he desired, and he was crazy over a skinny stray.
He laughed out loud when he recalled the look on John’s face.
A little later, two questions began to nag at him.
Why had the guy in the Jeep, the reporter that Chase had waved to, been hanging around in an alley near the crime scene?
And why hadn’t Hamilton shown up on Mulholland?
37
Blue Jay, California
Thursday, May 22, 3:06 A.M.
Gabriel Taggert stood looking out at the trees beyond the deck outside his bedroom. The moon was in its last quarter. Tonight it brought a translucent silver coating to the dark green of the pines, changing the sloping, shadowy landscape before him, making it the sort of forest that inspired stories of enchantments and haunted places.
He had found a beginner’s astronomy book in Kit’s library and had learned the names of the phases of the moon, and how to tell if it was waxing or waning, and when it was that the sun and moon were closest in the sky, and when farthest apart. He had grown fond of studying the sky, in part because he realized how little attention he had paid to it before he took refuge here. That was, he thought now, an indicator of just how narrow the focus of his life had been.
He had not spent much time outdoors since hearing of the first three murders of the FBI fugitives. The more he had heard about the cases, the more afraid he had become. Thinking about a long prison sentence was one thing. Thinking about being tortured while hanging naked upside down was another.
The names and faces of those on the FBI’s fugitives list had been shown on television again and again. He feared recognition-even with his change in appearance, this much exposure would inevitably lead to someone identifying him as one of the ten. The newscasters repeatedly mentioned that new names were added whenever someone was caught or killed, but the “replacements” were hardly ever mentioned. Gabe couldn’t help but think there was a kind of countdown going on, and a rapid one at that. When he had gone to bed on Tuesday, there had been three names crossed off the list. Now, two more. Half the list in half a week. And one of the bodies had been frozen, they said, so who knew how many more were already dead and just waiting to be displayed?
But that wasn’t all that was making him fearful. He was beginning to believe that he was more than just a number on the list.
Yesterday afternoon, he had watched a live broadcast of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department press conference. He was shocked when they showed a photograph of Eric Grady. Gabe had met Eric Grady, had partied with him. Gabe had even convinced him to hang out in Topanga Canyon one summer. Must have been a year or two ago. Now someone was using Grady’s identification-someone involved in these cases.
He began to feel a little queasy. Bad enough to think that he might have introduced Eric Grady to someone who had killed him. That was just the first of the implications, though. Gabe was on the Ten Most Wanted list, and whoever was doing the killings was using the identification of a man Gabe had met. He didn’t believe that strongly in coincidence.
And sure enough, within hours, the newscasters were announcing that police were seeking Frederick Whitfield IV for questioning in connection with the killing of four members on the fugitives list.
Freddy? There had to be a mistake. Impossible to believe that he was masterminding something like this. Freddy had always been completely under the control of Everett Corey.
That idea no sooner occurred to him than he became certain of it. Everett, and probably Cameron, too. The two of them were almost inseparable, and he knew they must be behind this somehow. Maybe Morgan was in on it, too. But why?
Then came the special report on the news radio station, the story of an apparent suicide pact between two wealthy young men. Freddy was one of them, and although the reporter said the other man’s name was being withheld pending notification of his next of kin, when the car was described as a red Maserati Bora, Gabe was sure it was Morgan. There was some speculation, the reporter said, that these two were the so-called Exterminators who had been killing members on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
He had never liked either of them much, and yet hearing of their suicides was as unsettling as it was unexpected. You didn’t want to think of anyone you knew committing suicide, he supposed, let alone someone you grew up with, went to school with.
He couldn’t understand it. Freddy just didn’t seem the type to do something like this. Freddy made excuses for anything that went wrong, blamed other people. Even with the law after him, he could have found a way out of the country-he was probably wealthier than any of the people Gabe had gone to school with, with the possible exception of Kit. Hard to tell about Kit, but Gabe remembered his dad saying that Sedgewick would have kicked every other student out to have a chance to have old Elizabeth Logan as one of its patrons.
The more he thought over the events of the last few days, the more desperate his situation seemed to be. He wasn’t convinced that Freddy and Morgan were the only ones involved. He was sure that Everett and Cameron were behind what was happening, and he didn’t want to think about what they had planned for him.
He suddenly felt unbearably lonely. He turned away from the view of the trees and went into the living room. It
