Spiral (9 page)

They followed Dystal's beefy shoulders around to the front of the limousine. The car had climbed up on the slope of the embankment, curling the motorcycle up under its front wheels as it went. A man's bare thigh, split lengthways to the bone, which showed white through red flesh, stuck out from under the rear wheel of the motorcycle. His head, with the bullet-shattered helmet still firmly buckled, was lying under the cycle's engine. One of the header pipes coming off the engine had ripped loose and smashed through the mirrored visor, wedging itself into the space where his face should have been. Haydon could smell the burned flesh. The rest of the man was ground up under the motorcycle, out of sight. Bright green radiator coolant and blood ran down together and formed a marbled puddle under the glistening black panel of the limousine's front door.

"I doubt if the boy'll have an ID," Dystal said. "I can't tell if his motorsickle's got a license plate."

"Was there return fire?" Haydon asked, suddenly noticing the bullet holes in the cyclist's helmet.

Dystal shook his head slowly, looking at the mess at the front of the limousine. "One little detail there. Witnesses say that when this one got plowed under here, the second shooter rode up after blowing away those two boys in the Mercedes, and finished him off." He turned his dark lenses to Haydon. "How ya like that?"

Another detective walked up and started asking the lieutenant about the procedures for removing the bodies. Dystal turned, talking to him, and walked away.

Mooney stepped to the rear of the limousine and surveyed the layout of the intersection.

"They picked a good spot, Stuart. Regular stop-and-go traffic flow gave them time to get in place around the targets. No place for the limo, or the Mercedes, to evade in the bumper-to-bumper traffic once the shooting started. Easy access to the expressway, and the cycles could hump right on past the stalled cars by squeezing between the lanes. A police car couldn't have pursued them even if it'd been sitting right here at the time it happened."

Haydon nodded. "Doesn't look like an amateur hit, does it?"

The falling afternoon sun was not yet low enough to take on color, and its fierce white light reflected like scattering sparks off the chrome of the parked and moving cars. Pale splashes of red and blue from the police units skittered up and down the shallow angles of the cement embankments and overpass girders. The car radios echoed to one another through the underpass and mixed with the loose rumble of traffic.

The medical examiner's investigators were going over the bodies systematically, beginning with the two men in the Mercedes. They were followed by the police photographer, and then the crime-lab technicians.

Peter Lapierre stood in the middle of the intersection with a clipboard and pencil giving instructions to several patrolmen with measuring tapes. He made meticulous notes as they called out distances and dimensions, length of skid marks, sizes of scratches, and angles. No one surpassed Lapierre in analyzing a crime scene, and each team of assisting detectives already would have been assigned a specific aspect of the scene on which to make a report. Lapierre and Nunn would cover it all, and coordinate the investigation.

Haydon and Mooney followed the aisle of ribbons that stretched along the edge of Richmond to Guiton. Nunn was there with a couple of patrolmen, walking along with their heads down looking into the grass that grew along the shoulder of Guiton. Farther down, a patrolman and a woman from the crime lab were squatting and looking at something on the ground.

Nunn looked up as they approached.

"A mess, huh?" he said, squinting into the sun.

"Sure is," Mooney said. "Find anything?"

Robert Nunn was a good partner for the punctilious Lapierre. He was a slightly built man in his early thirties with a blond, neatly trimmed mustache and lanky hair. He was a dedicated detective who unfailingly took advantage of opportunities to attend special law enforcement seminars and courses. His only interests were his work, his wife, and twin daughters, whom he worshiped.

"Nothing," Nunn said, taking off his jacket and slinging it over his shoulder. There was a dark patch of perspiration between his shoulder blades. "The shooter who got away came out of this street. It seemed to me he was probably parked along here somewhere waiting for the limo to come by. If he waited very long I thought he might have smoked a cigarette or something. Chewed some gum, ate some peanuts, drank a Coke." He laughed and shook his head. "Left me a note, maybe."

"No tracks from the cycle?" Haydon asked.

Nunn ran his fingers through a hank of hair that was falling over his forehead and pushed it back.

"Well, we think we've got something," he said, turning toward the woman and patrolman fifty yards away. "They're trying to get a moulage."

Mooney continued talking to Nunn as Haydon walked along the shoulder to the woman in a white lab coat. She was on her knees now, mixing a latex base with a catalyst, stirring quickly, testing the consistency.

"The dust is awfully fine, but the spray fixative ought to help a little," she said to the patrolman, who was on his knees too, holding two pieces of cardboard on either side of the faint track in the sand. She was young and had her sandy hair pulled back in a ponytail. "If you mix this stuff too thick, it'll break down the original when you pour it in. If you get it too thin, it's not going to want to set."

They didn't pay any attention to Haydon as he stood behind the woman and looked over her bent back. The track was small. The shoulder along the street was mostly coarse gravel, with very little sand where a tire could make an impression. He was surprised they had found even this much.

Carefully, the woman poured the latex mixture, now the consistency of thick milk, into the indentations of the original print in the sand. Designed to be quick-drying, the pinkish liquid was set in just a few moments. When she peeled it up, the moulage was far more effective than Haydon was expecting. The herringbone pattern of the tread was clear and unmistakable.

"It's sharp," she said, pleased. "Maybe it was a new tire."

Haydon turned and walked away. The lab technician and the patrolman had been so intent on what they were doing that neither of them had given any indication they knew he had been there.

"What kind of a motorcycle was it?" Haydon asked, walking up to Nunn again.

The detective grinned. "I was just telling Mooney that that depends on who you talk to. Only three people out of all that traffic around here noticed. Two guys said it was a Kawasaki, third guy said there was no doubt about it, it was a Suzuki." Nunn looked down into the grass again. "It was probably a Harley."

"Anyone know if the shooters were Anglos or Latins?"

Nunn shook his head. "They were wearing visored helmets with mirror finishes. I guess they might be able to tell about the one over there, although it looks to me like his face is a total loss."

"Thanks, Robert," Haydon said. "We'll see you later."

Nunn nodded, and kept his eyes down to the side of the road.

As they approached the Mercedes, Dystal was going through the rest of the papers in the wallets of the two Mercedes passengers.

"These boys work for a security firm here in Houston," Dystal said, holding up plastic ID cards. "Personal Security."

"They should've seen one more film strip," Mooney said dryly. "Another half hour of training."

The men in the Mercedes were the first to be moved from the scene and put into the morgue vans. Then the police wrecker came in and towed the Mercedes away. Angiher morgue van backed up to the limousine. It was then that Haydon noticed the four television cameras being pointed down at them from the overpass above, and two reporters recording "on the scene" coverage as the bodies were dragged out of the open doors of the limousine and wrestled onto aluminum gurneys. It wasn't Haydon's case, so he kept his mouth shut and backed out of sight under the overpass.

When the last of the four men had been loaded and the van pulled away from the scene, a second wrecker backed in and started hooking onto the rear bumper of the limousine. The detectives gradually left what they were doing and gathered around the crushed cycle with their backs to the sun. Now they would see if anything could be learned from what was left of the dead assassin. As the wrecker driver put his truck in gear and eased away from cement embankment, the twisted metal in the limousine began to groan and pop. With a shrill grating sound the car slid down the incline, and the motorcycle came with it, embedded in the grille and the front of the motor. The helmeted rider came with the motorcycle, his torso clinging to the cycle. His legs dangled free, almost severed. There would be no face for identification.

No one said anything as the attendants from the third morgue van began pulling the rider off the distorted motorcycle. He came away in three parts, which they laid in approximate order on a collapsed gurney. There was a windbreaker mixed in with some of him, and Dystal had the attendants lay it aside so he could go through its zippered pockets. They were empty. The blue jeans pockets were empty. The jogging shoes were like a billion other pairs. With the last part of him the machine pistol fell out on the pavement, bent double with two fingers pinched in its creases. The morgue attendants covered the reassembled cyclist with a sheet and loaded the gurney into the van.

The wrecker drivers pried as much of the motorcycle off the limousine as they could to prevent loose parts from falling in the street as they towed it in. When the wrecker finally pulled away, the last morgue van followed it past the bright markers of the red tape and into the traffic.

The detectives stood in a loose group next to the cement pillars in the middle of the overpass and compared notes, listened to the general summaries of the information that each of them had gotten in the last hour and a half. Pigeons roosting on the trusses overhead burbled in the high shadows. The sun was still a couple of hours above the horizon, and the heat under the overpass was dry and harsh.

When they had gone over most of the known facts, there was a brief silence before Dystal said, "Okay, Pete, have you got everything covered?"

Lapierre referred to his notes. "Marshall and Coates will take the two men in the Mercedes. Singleton and Watts will take the Austin man, Lowell, and Crisman. Haydon and Mooney will get Sosa, the chauffeur, and the leasing company. Nunn and I will follow up on the prints, the DEA, and ballistics. I need to get together with you to work out the rest of it."

"So far so good," Dystal said. "Anybody want to put in their two bits before we get outta here?"

No one said anything. They knew what was next.

"Okay," Dystal said with a massive sigh. "We got to get some positive IDs, and notify families. Could take all night, so let's get going. Everybody check in tomorrow morning, sleep or no sleep. I want to stick with this thing till we have something
meaty.

C
HAPTER 10

T
HE
office of Executive Limousines was on Westheimer, not far from Chimney Rock Road and the Galleria. Haydon parked in the empty parking area in front of the white one-story building and walked up to the front door as Mooney went around back to the service area. The sign on the door said they were open from nine o'clock until six. It was five forty-five, but the door was locked. Haydon walked along a covered walkway beside a flowerbed of tattered zinnias to the side of the building and followed Mooney around to the back.

Two black men were washing a limousine in one of the stalls, and Mooney was talking to them.

"They're closed," Haydon said, walking up to them.

One of the men wearing rubber boots and a rubber apron looked at his watch.

"They not 'sposed to close till six."

"That's what the sign says, too," Haydon responded. "But the door's locked."

The two men exchanged glances over the top of the limousine, and then the one closest to Mooney looked toward the rear of the building and pointed his chin at a Lincoln sitting near the back door.

"Thas the boss's ca' right theah. You jus' bang ona back doah. He ain't gone."

"What's his name?" Mooney asked.

The man bent down and dipped his washing mitt into a bucket of foamy soap. "Val-ver-de. Jimmy Val-ver-de.
Mista
Val-ver-de." He grinned at his partner over the top of the limousine again and went back to smearing the car with giant sweeps of sudsy water.

Mooney said to the man, "How many of these damn things you wash in one day?"

"Too many," the man said, "fuh what I gets paid."

"Damn right, Pooch," his buddy agreed.

"What's the matter? Valverde a cheap-ass?" Mooney asked. He was warming up. By the time he got through with them, he would have learned more than they had ever dreamed they would tell a white man, especially a cop.

Haydon turned and walked to the back of the building. The rear door was flanked by a row of fat junipers planted in both directions to the edge of the building. He knocked on the door. No response. He knocked again, harder, and called Valverde's name.

Someone called back, but Haydon couldn't understand the words. He waited, and suddenly the door was jerked open.