One Scream Away (42 page)

She was getting the license plate, the Broker realized, and pulled on a pair of gloves. Stubborn, double-crossing bitch.

The Broker slipped the gun from the deep pocket of the jacket, gave the silencer a final twist, and closed in. By her own design, the woman with the camera was making things easy—she crouched behind huge bushes that separated the parking lot from the woods around the park, staying out of sight, her attention focused solely on the camera and the little boy. By her own design: easy pickings.

The Broker came in fast from behind, the gun barrel finding the woman’s throat like a missile. She must have heard it coming: She whirled and opened her mouth to scream, but the bullet caught her in the larynx and the would-be scream came out
Unkh
. She dropped and the Broker was right there, on one knee, firing two more bullets into her throat for good measure then pulling back and hitting her with the gun, over and over again on the face and head, adrenaline surging.
Bitch. Stupid bitch
. Smack, smack.
No one bucks me! Take back Austin?
Smack.
I don’t think so…

It was over in seconds. The Broker pulled away, fighting for breath, for
control
, and glanced around. No one, not back here in the woods. The woman lay on the ground, her face shredded by the gun, her legs bent at the knees and her body looking strangely like the letter
Z
. Geysers of blood from her throat fizzled to tiny gurgles.

That’s it. Settle down, keep your head. The Broker stepped back, waiting as the high of the kill drained away, and summoned a mental list: Boots, hair, shell casings. Phone call. And the camera. Above all, get rid of the pictures.

The camera was first. The Broker slipped it into a pocket with the gun, purposely stepped in some of the blood, then used a pencil to punch a number into the dead woman’s cell phone.
You’ve reached the office of Russell Sanders
… An answering service: fine. The Broker disconnected. The phone went back in the woman’s hand, pencil and gloves into the wad of jacket. Folded all together, the jacket made a carryall to simply walk away with the evidence.

Finished. The Broker looked around—no one.

Easy pickings.

K-chhr, k-chhr, k-chhr.

The camera’s shutter whirred. Mitch Sheridan squinted through the lens and adjusted the frame around the image: an old man crouched on his haunches, robes gathered around his ankles, rocket-propelled grenade on one shoulder. The sky made a blue-white backdrop behind him so bright it crinkled the eyes, the sun pulling ripples of heat from the sand. Row upon row of tents sagged in the distance, like soldiers too weary to stand.

K-chhr, k-chrr.
Mitch let the sky and the tents go fuzzy in the background and zoomed in on the man’s face. Not too small; keep the stump of his elbow in the frame—the bandage around it oozing and yellowed. Don’t ask this old man’s name or think about his pain or notice the rancid tang of infection that wafted from his wound. Don’t remember that just three months ago, before the chopper came, this man was whole. Just shoot. Get the damned pictures, tell the story.

Pretend it’ll help.

K-chhr. K-chhr.
Focus. Shoot Move on.

Mitch pressed a hand against his ribs, over still-fresh scars. After the chopper, he’d spent a month barely conscious, another healing, and a third working hours a day with weights and machines. Too soon, he knew, but he couldn’t stay holed up in Switzerland any longer. He needed the photos. The Ar Rutbah exhibition was scheduled to open in three weeks—in Mitch’s hometown in the US, where people didn’t live like this. Where people didn’t live in tents and scrounge for food and worry that choppers might come dropping insurgents with bombs. Thirteen refugees had been killed in the attack, dozens more wounded. Men, women.

Children.

The memory caught Mitch by the throat: “Mister! Mister, here!” a voice cried. “Help!” Mitch looked up, a helicopter swooping low over the camp and whipping sand into windstorms.
Thwp-thwp-thwp…
Its doors gaped open and terror poured out. Explosions, flames, death.

“Mister!”

He’d shielded his camera from whirlwinds of sand and searched for the voice. A little boy. Mitch recognized him. Nine or ten years old, Mitch had shot a series of him and a dog both rooting through trash for food. The boy had become fascinated by the Leica, followed Mitch all over camp to watch him work with it.

“Get down!” Mitch called, though the pandemonium was deafening. Mortars exploded and people screamed, while the chopper churned the sky into a raging black cloud. “Get down! Stop!”

But the boy kept coming. Mitch humped toward the child, dodging geysers of sand. His legs went out from under him and he clambered to his feet, something hot and sticky running down his thigh. Get to the boy. Get there, damn it. But the leg wasn’t working. He dragged it. Thirty yards, twenty, ten—

The ground exploded. For an instant the world flashed white, then it went black for a long, long time, and Mitch was in Switzerland, safe, in the hands of doctors…

Trembling, sweat streaming down his back, Mitch forced himself to open his eyes. He looked up at the sky. Nothing. Today, the sky was an empty, cloudless infinity, and by small degrees, the memory of the attack loosened its grip. The old man came back into focus, the rocket-propelled grenade on his shoulder, the tents in the background.

He was here to finish the pictures. Get them, damn it
K-chhr. K-chhr.

A woman’s wail pierced the air. Mitch frowned and followed the sounds. Something going on—in the third tent of the second row. He paused, watching as another woman hurried into the tent. Out of habit, he lifted the camera and focused on the tent flaps, ready to shoot whoever came through. Focus, get the story.

A hand slipped between the flaps of the tent—slender, brown, belonging to a woman. Then another hand pulled aside the other flap and a man came out carrying a bundle. A woman behind him hunched over, wailing, two friends hugging her in consolation. Mitch began snapping.
K-chrr, k-chrr
.

He followed the woman with his Leica, zooming in close on her face, catching eyes that overflowed with tears. He pulled off three more shots then moved his camera back to the old man and the bundle. The bundle—what was it?—something draped in cloths, weighing the man down only slightly yet carried with both hands, gingerly, and about the size of a—

“Jesus Christ.” Mitch dropped the camera around his neck. His heart snagged in his throat, lungs refusing to fill. “No,” he said, but knew it was true. Another one.

He spun on his heel, yanked the camera from his neck, and hurled it into the sand. It didn’t shatter, damn the thing, and he wanted to stomp on it until it did. Instead, he stared at it: a container filled with toxic images: images of pain and suffering Mitch had spent a career seeking out and documenting, letting Russ Sanders spin them into gold, all the while pretending it helped.

It didn’t. After all these years, mothers still buried their children, fathers still lost limbs, children still rooted through trash. The JMS Foundation hadn’t changed anything.

A beep sounded and Mitch jumped. He looked back to the tents, where a small crowd now followed the bereaved parents toward the outer reaches of the camp to the graveyard. The cosmic little beep came again—from the bag around Mitch’s hips. The satellite phone.

Mitch dug it from its case. “This is Mitch Sheridan,” he said, turning his back to the camp.

“Mitch, it’s Russ. Can you hear me?”

Mitch swallowed and held the phone to his mouth. It was the size of a brick, like the walkie-talkies he and his brother, Neil, used to play with, except that what used to be static halfway down the block now allowed conversation halfway around the world. Russ was in Maryland. “I can hear you.”

“Okay, good,” Russ said. “I was afraid I wouldn’t reach you. Where are you?”

“In the camp at Ar Rutbah, getting your fucking pictures.”

“My what? Mitch, are you all right?”

The damn broke. “You wanted me to finish the Ar Rutbah shots, right? Well, I did it. So you can mount the damned exhibit and it’ll be big, Russ, just like you wanted. Because it’ll be my final show. I’m done watching kids die.”

“Christ, Mitch. Listen.”

“I’m serious, Russ. I’m retiring. You can have the foundation, for all the good it does.”

“Mitch, listen. The photos aren’t the reason I called. I called because—” He paused, more than just the lag in sound transmission. The space made the hairs on the back of Mitch’s neck stand up. “I’m in trouble, Mitch. I need you.”

Mitch frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I can’t talk about it like this. You have to come home. It’s about the foundation. I’m in trouble.” A pause, then, “No.”

“Russ?” Mitch asked.

“Mitch… No!”

There was a grunt and shuffling, sounds Mitch couldn’t make out. “Russ, what’s going on?” He heard Russ’s voice, distant and muffled now, and Mitch’s grip on the phone tightened. “Russ!” He went rigid, straining to interpret sounds from the other damn side of the planet. A scrape. Something dragging. Dread congealed in his throat, then, as suddenly as it started, there was silence. No more voice, no more scuffle.

“Russ!”
But all he could hear was the thundering in his chest. The connection was dead. Mitch stood in the desert with his heart beating triple time. Jesus, what was going on?

I’m in trouble, Mitch. I need you.

He swallowed, then shoved his camera into its case and gathered up the sat-phone and bag. He raced back to the tent where he’d stayed, threw what few things he’d brought into a duffel, then tossed everything into the Jeep. Trying the sat-phone all the way.

I’m in trouble, Mitch. I need you.

Monday, September 24 Lancaster, Maryland

D
anielle Cole honked her way through traffic to a murder scene in Camden Park.
Murder
scene. It pissed her off just thinking about it. She wasn’t a homicide detective; she’d told Tifton a dozen times she wasn’t cut out for that kind of work. Homicide detectives spent their days behind desks or in courtrooms or morgues, on the phone and in cramped interview rooms, and had to be reminded to pull their guns from their desks before leaving the building. As an investigator in theft, Dani may not have been making her dad proud by going for forty years as a street-tough patrol officer, but she hadn’t degenerated to a pussyfoot homicide dick, either.

The squad sergeant didn’t give a damn about Dani’s career goals. “Tifton caught a murder this morning at Camden Park,” he’d said on the phone, dragging her from a restless night of dreams. “He wants you on it.”

“Tell Tifton to call Scarpio,” she said, still scrubbing the sleep from her eyes. “I’ve gotta go jack up a tenth-grade business teacher in a little while. The boys who lifted those computers didn’t mastermind that scam by themselves.”

“I’ll send Forsythe to the high school. You go meet Tifton. You’re his until further notice.”

“Aw, jeez…”

“Nails,” he’d said, using her departmental nickname, “is that a whine in your voice?”

Her jaw snapped shut. Dani Cole didn’t whine.

Which is why, thirty minutes later, she knocked back her last swig of coffee and rolled onto a murder scene at Camden Park.

A uniform waved her through the park gate and into a television-perfect crime scene: yellow ribbon strung around the perimeter of a parking lot and disappearing into the woods, a half dozen black-and-whites parked at various angles, a couple more gray Chevrolets belonging to investigators. An ambulance sat square to the curb, the back open and two EMTs sitting on the bumper twiddling their thumbs—no one to save. The media were roped off at a respectable distance, as if distance mattered with the kinds of magnifying lenses they used these days, and a handful of detectives in coats and ties stood in the parking lot.

Reginald Tifton was one. He spoke with two of the uniforms, pointing in an arc behind them. Dani walked up as the officers turned and jogged off in the direction Tifton had pointed.

“About time, Nails,” he said dropping from the curb and meeting her in an empty parking slot. “Your beauty routine hold you up this morning?”

Dani scowled. There wasn’t an Avon lady in the world who would call her efforts a beauty routine: three swipes of mascara per eye and a smear of lipstick. Her hair had major control issues, so she kept it two or three inches in length, tossed it with a daub of gel, and let it do its thing. In her confident moments, she thought she looked like Lisa Rinna or a dark Cameron Diaz. In her realistic moments, she knew she looked like Peter Pan with his finger in a light socket.

“You oughta try it sometime,” she shot, pointing at his clean-shaven head. “Learn the wonders of hair products.”

Tifton tried for a smile but didn’t quite get there. He was a big man pushing forty, black, going for Wife Number Three, and had a bowling-ball head perched on a neck like a tree trunk. He spoke like a Yale graduate except when it behooved him to turn on the street charm and make a suspect believe he was from the hood. He was actually from the old-money area of Cheshire Lake, and secretly, Dani suspected he
had
gone to Yale.

“I’ll borrow your hair products since they never see any action,” he said, then his eyes homed in on hers. “I haven’t seen you since your dad’s funeral. You holding up?”

Dani shot him a glare.

“Okay,” he said, showing his palms. Tifton knew when to back off. He jerked his chin toward the bushes. “Cleanup crew found a dead woman in her twenties. Shot sometime during the clown-fest this weekend.”

Dani started toward the site. “And where’s your partner? You drive him to early retirement already?”

“Thought you might know something on this one the rest of us don’t.”

She frowned. “Why?”

“The vic is one of your snitches.”

Dani stopped, a chill creeping in. Her collection of snitches was comprised of a few low-level drug dealers, a bookie, a couple of hookers, a guy who sold tickets at the dollar theater on Barker Street. And Jed, a bum who’d lived under a bridge. That was the extent of the list, and she couldn’t make any of them work at a Camden Park carnival.