The Kill List (6 page)

He was dressed from neck to ankles in a snow-white dishdash with a crocheted white skullcap on his shorn head. Passing several rural residences on Willow Drive, he emerged from the trees into the morning sunshine at the point where the tee shot of the fifth hole, known as Cascade, crosses Willow Drive. Here he pulled off the road and dumped his scooter in the tall undergrowth by the side of the fairway of the fourth hole, called Bald Cypress.

There were a few golfers already on other holes, but they were engrossed in their games and took no notice. The young man in white walked calmly down Bald Cypress fairway until he was close to the bridge over the stream, then stepped into the bushes until he was invisible and waited. He knew from earlier observations that anyone playing a round would have to come up the fourth fairway and cross the bridge.

He had been there half an hour, and two pairs had completed Bald Cypress and moved on to the Cascade tee. Watching from deep cover, he let them pass. Then he saw the senator. The man was in a twosome with a partner of similar age. In the clubhouse, the senator had pulled on a green windbreaker, and his opponent wore one of similar color.

As the two elderly men crossed the bridge, the young man emerged from the bushes. Neither golfer paused in his stride, though both glanced at the young man with passing interest. It was the clothes he wore, and perhaps his air of calm detachment. He moved toward the Americans until, at ten paces, one of them asked: “Help you, son?”

That was when the man brought his right hand from inside the dishdash and held it out, as if to offer them something. The something was a handgun. Neither golfer had a chance to protest before he fired. Slightly confused by the similar long-peaked baseball caps and green windbreakers, he fired two shots at each man, at almost point-blank range.

One bullet missed completely and would never be found. Two struck the senator in the chest and throat, killing him instantly. The remaining slug hit the other player mid-chest. The two shot men crumpled, one after the other. The shooter raised his eyes to the duck’s egg blue morning sky, murmured,
“Allahu-akhbar,”
put the barrel of the handgun into his mouth and fired.

The players in the foursome were clearing the green of the fourth hole, Bald Cypress. They would say later they all turned at the sound of the shots in time to see the suicide’s head spray blood into the sky, then his body slump to the ground. Two began to run to the scene. A third was already on his cart; he turned it around and gunned the quiet electric engine toward the double murder. The fourth stared for several seconds, mouth agape, then pulled out a cell phone and dialed 911.

The call was taken in the communications center behind the police HQ on Princess Anne Road. The duty telephonist took basic details and alerted the HQ across the compound and the Department of Emergency Medical Services. Both were staffed by experienced local people who needed no directions to the Princess Anne Country Club.

The first to the scene was a police patrol car that had been cruising down 54th Street. From Linkhorn Drive, the officers could see the growing crowd up on the fourth fairway and, without ceremony, drove across the hallowed turf to the crime scene. From police HQ, duty detective Ray Hall arrived ten minutes later to take control. The uniformed men had already secured the scene when the ambulance from the Pinehurst Center on Viking Drive three miles away drove up.

Detective Hall had established that two men were stone dead. The senator he recognized, both from his picture in the papers from time to time and from a police awards ceremony six months back.

The young man with the bushy black beard, identified by the horrified golfers from the foursome as the killer, was also dead, his gun still in his right hand, twenty feet from his victims. The second golfer appeared very badly wounded, with a single gunshot wound, center chest, but still breathing. Hall stepped back to let the paramedics do their job. There were three of them, and a driver.

A glance told them there was only one of the three bodies on the still-dew-flecked grass needing their attention. The other two could wait for transportation to the morgue. Nor was there any cause to waste time attempting to resuscitate, as with a drowning or gassing. This was what paramedics call a load ’n’ go.

They were equipped with ALS—advanced life support system—and they were going to need it to stabilize the shot man for the three-mile dash to Virginia Beach General. They loaded the wounded man aboard and raced away, siren wailing.

They covered the miles to First Colonial Road in less than five minutes. Early-morning traffic was light—being a weekend, there were no commuters—the siren cleared the few other vehicles out of the road and the driver kept his foot to the floor all the way.

In the back, two paramedics stabilized the near-dead man as best they could while the third radioed ahead every detail they could discover. At the emergency ambulance entrance, a major trauma team assembled and waited.

Inside the building, a surgical theater was prepared and a surgical team scrubbed up. And cardiovascular surgeon Alex McCrae hurried from a half-eaten breakfast in the cafeteria to the emergency room.

On the fairway of the fourth hole, Det. Hall was left with two bodies, a milling throng of bewildered and horrified Virginia Beach citizens and a hatful of mysteries. As his partner, Lindy Mills, took names and addresses, he had two things going for him: The first was that all eyewitnesses were adamant there had only been one killer and he had committed suicide immediately after the double shooting. There seemed to be no call to go looking for an accomplice. A single-seat scooter had been discovered in the bushes farther up the fairway.

His second plus was that the witnesses were all sensible mature people, levelheaded and likely to give good and reliable evidence. At that point, the mysteries began, starting with the first: What the hell had just happened and why?

Whatever it was, nothing like it had ever happened in quiet, sedate, law-abiding Virginia Beach before. Who was the killer and who was the man now fighting for his life?

Detective Hall took the second question first. Whoever the wounded man was, he would be likely to have a home somewhere, perhaps a wife and family waiting there, or somewhere a next of kin. Given what he had seen of the chest wound, that next of kin might be urgently needed by nightfall.

No one outside the scene-of-crime tape seemed to know who the senator’s partner had been. The wallet and billfold, unless they were in the clubhouse, had gone off with the ambulance, leaving Lindy Mills and the two uniforms to carry on with the routine name taking. Ray Hall asked for and immediately got a lift on a cart back to the clubhouse. There the ashen-faced club professional solved one of his problems. The partner of the dead senator had been a retired general. He was a widower and lived alone in a gated retirement community several miles away. The membership list provided the exact address in seconds.

Hall called Lindy on his cell phone. He asked one of the uniforms to stay with her and the other to bring him the squad car.

As they drove, Det. Hall conferred on the police band with his captain. HQ would take care of the media, even now arriving with a barrage of questions to which no one yet had the answers. HQ would also take care of the miserable business of informing the late senator’s wife before she learned it on the radio.

He was told a second, more basic ambulance, the body wagon, was on its way to bring the two cadavers to the hospital morgue, where the medical examiner was preparing himself.

“Priority to the killer please, Captain,” said Hall into the mic. “That outfit he was wearing looks like the dress of a Muslim fundamentalist. He acted alone, but there may be more in the background. We need to know who he was—a loner or one of a group.”

While he was out at the general’s home, he wanted the killer’s prints taken and checked against AFIS—the automated fingerprint identification system—and the motor scooter checked with the Virginia state vehicle-licensing bureau. Yes, it was a weekend; people would have to be roused and brought in. He disconnected.

At the gated compound designated by the golf club records, it was clear no one had yet heard of the events on a fairway called Bald Cypress, alias the fourth hole. There were some forty retirement bungalows set among lawns and trees with a small central lake, and the community manager’s house.

The manager had finished a late breakfast and was about to mow his lawn. He went white as a sheet, sat down heavily on a garden chair and muttered, “Oh, my God,” half a dozen times. Eventually, taking a key from a board in his own hallway, he led Det. Hall to the general’s bungalow.

It stood trim and neat amid a quarter acre of mowed lawn, with some flowering shrubs in earthen jars; tasteful without being too labor-intensive. Inside, it was tidy, shipshape, like the abode of a man accustomed to good order and discipline. Hall began the distasteful business of rifling through another person’s private affairs. The manager was as helpful as he could be.

The Marine general had come to live at the community some five years earlier, just after losing his wife to cancer. Family? asked Hall. He was going through the desk, looking for letters, insurance policies, some evidence of next of kin. The general seemed to be a man who kept his most private documents with his lawyer or bank. The manager called up the wounded general’s closest friend among the neighbors—a retired architect who lived there with his wife and often had the general over for a real home-cooked meal.

He took the call and listened with shocked horror. He wanted to drive straight to Virginia Beach General, but Det. Hall persuaded him there was no chance of visiting. Next of kin? he asked. There is a son, said the architect, a serving Marine officer, a lieutenant colonel, but as to where, he had no idea.

Back at HQ, Hall was reunited with Lindy Mills and his own unmarked car. And there was news. The scooter had been traced. It belonged to a twenty-two-year-old student with a name that was clearly Arabic or a variant of it. He was an American citizen hailing from Dearborn, Michigan, but presently an engineering student at a high-tech college fifteen miles south of Norfolk. The vehicle bureau had sent through a picture.

It had no bushy black beard and the face was intact; not quite what Ray Hall had seen on the grass of the fairway. That face belonged to a head with no back and distorted by the blast pressure of the exploding shell. But close enough.

He put through a call to the U.S. Marine Corps headquarters, next to Arlington Cemetery, across the Potomac from Washington, D.C. He insisted on holding the line until he was speaking with a major from Public Affairs. He explained who he was, speaking from where, and briefly what had happened five hours ago on the Princess Anne golf course.

“No,” he said, “I will not wait until after the weekend. I don’t care where he is. I need to speak with him now, Major, now. If his father sees the sun rise tomorrow, it will be a miracle.”

There was a long pause. Finally, the voice said simply: “Stay by that phone, Detective. I or someone else will be back to you in short order.”

It took only five minutes. The voice was different. Another major, this time from Personnel Records. The officer you wish to speak to cannot be reached, he said.

Hall was getting angry. Unless he is in space or at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, he
can
be reached. We both know that. You have my personal cell number. Please give it to him and tell him to call me, and fast. With that, he put the phone down. Now it was up to the Corps.

Taking Lindy with him, he left HQ for the hospital, grabbing an energy bar and a fizzy soda for lunch. So much for healthy eating. At First Colonial, he pulled down the side road, the oddly named Will O Wisp Drive, and around the back to the ambulance entrance. His first stop was the morgue, where the ME was finishing up.

There were two bodies on steel trays, covered by sheets. An assistant was about to consign them to the cooler. The ME stopped him and pulled back one sheet. Det. Hall stared down at the face. It was now scarred and distorted but still the young man in the photo from the vehicle bureau. The bushy black beard jutted upward, the eyes closed.

“Do you know who he is yet?” asked the ME.

“Yep.”

“Well, you know more than me. But maybe I can still surprise you.”

The ME pulled the sheet down to the ankles.

“Notice anything?”

Ray Hall looked long and hard.

“He has no body hair. Except the beard.”

The ME replaced the sheet and nodded to the assistant to remove the steel tray and its cargo to the cooler.

“I’ve never seen it in person, but I’ve seen it on camera. Two years ago at a seminar on Islamic fundamentalism. A sign of ritual purification, a preparation for passage into Allah’s paradise.”

“A suicide bomber?”

“A suicide killer,” said the ME. “Destroy an important national of the Great Satan and the gates of immortal bliss open for the servant passing through them as
shahid
, a martyr. We don’t see much of it in the States, but it is very common in the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan. There was a lecture on it at the seminar.”

“But he was born and raised here,” said Det. Hall.

“Well, someone sure converted him,” said the ME. “By the by, your crime lab people have already taken the fingerprints away. Other than that, he had nothing on him at all. Except the gun, and I believe that is already with Ballistics.”

Detective Hall’s next stop was upstairs. He found Dr. Alex McCrae in his office, lunching off a very late tuna melt from the cafeteria.

“What do you want to know, Detective?”

“Everything,” said Hall. So the surgeon told him.

When the badly injured general was brought into the emergency room, Dr. McCrae ordered an immediate IVI—an intravenous infusion. Then he checked the vital signs: oxygen saturation, pulse and blood pressure.

His anesthesiologist searched for and found good venous access through the jugular vein, into which he inserted a large-bore cannula and immediately started a saline drip followed by two units of type O rhesus-negative blood as a holding operation. Finally, he sent a sample of the patient’s blood for cross-matching in the laboratory.