“Okay, I’ll stand by.”
Caruso didn’t have a portable radio—that was for local cops, not the Bureau—and so was now out of touch, except for his cell phone. His personal side arm was a Smith & Wesson 1076, snug in its holster on his right hip. He stepped out of the car, and closed the door without latching it, to avoid making noise. People always turned to see what made the noise of a slammed car door.
He was wearing a darker than olive green suit, a fortunate circumstance, Caruso thought, heading right. First he’d look at the van. He walked normally, but his eyes were locked on the windows of the shabby house, halfway hoping to see a face, but, on reflection, glad that none appeared.
The Ford van was about six years old, he judged. Minor dings and dents on the bodywork. The driver had backed it in. That put the sliding door close to the house, the sort of thing a carpenter or plumber might do. Or a man moving a small, resisting body. He kept his right hand free, and his coat unbuttoned. Quick-draw was something every cop in the world practiced, often in front of a mirror, though only a fool fired as part of the motion, because you just couldn’t hit anything that way.
Caruso took his time. The window was down on the driver-side door. The interior was almost entirely empty, bare, unpainted metal floor, the spare tire and jack . . . and a large roll of duct tape . . .
There was a lot of that stuff around. The free end of the roll was turned down, as though to make sure he’d be able to pull some off the roll without having to pick at it with his fingernails. A lot of people did that, too. There was, finally, a throw rug, tucked—no, taped, he saw, to the floor, just behind the right-side passenger seat . . . and was that some tape dangling from the metal seat framing? What might that mean?
Why there? Caruso wondered, but suddenly the skin on his forearms started tingling. It was a first for that sensation. He’d never made an arrest himself, had not yet been involved in a major felony case, at least not to any sort of conclusion. He’d worked fugitives in Newark, briefly, and made a total of three collars, always with another, more experienced agent to take the lead. He was more experienced now, a tiny bit seasoned . . . But not all that much, he reminded himself.
Caruso’s head turned to the house. His mind was moving quickly now. What did he really have? Not much. He’d looked into an ordinary light truck with no direct evidence at all in it, just an empty truck with a roll of duct tape and a small rug on the steel floor.
Even so . . .
The young agent took the cell phone out of his pocket and speed dialed the office.
“FBI. Can I help you?” a female voice asked.
“Caruso for Ellis.” That moved things quickly.
“What you got, Dom?”
“White Ford Econoline van, Alabama tag Echo Romeo Six Five Zero One, parked at my location. Sandy—”
“Yeah, Dominic?”
“I’m going to knock on this guy’s door.”
“You want backup?”
Caruso took a second to think. “Affirmative—roger that.”
“There’s a county mountie about ten minutes away. Stand by,” Ellis advised.
“Roger, standing by.”
But a little girl’s life was on the line . . .
He headed toward the house, careful to keep out of the sight lines from the nearest windows. That’s when time stopped.
He nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard the scream. It was an awful, shrill sound, like someone looking at Death himself. His brain processed the information, and he suddenly found that his automatic pistol was in his hands, just in front of his sternum, pointed up into the sky, but in his hands even so. It had been a woman’s scream, he realized, and something just went click inside his head.
As quickly as he could move without making much noise, he was on the porch, under the uneven, cheaply made roof. The front door was mostly wire screening to keep the bugs out. It needed painting, but so did the whole house. Probably a rental, and a cheap one at that. Looking through the screen he could see what seemed to be a corridor, leading left to the kitchen and right to a bathroom. He could see into it. A white porcelain toilet and a sink were all that was visible from this perspective. He wondered if he had probable cause to enter the house, and instantly decided that he had enough. He pulled the door open and slipped in as stealthily as he could manage. A cheap and dirty rug leading down the corridor. He headed that way, gun up, senses sandpapered to ultimate alertness. As he moved, the angles of vision changed. The kitchen became invisible, but he could see into the bathroom better . . .
Penny Davidson was in the bathtub, naked, china blue eyes wide open, and her throat cut from ear to ear, with a whole body’s supply of blood covering her flat chest and the sides of the tub. So violently had her neck been slashed that it lay open like a second mouth.
Strangely, Caruso didn’t react physically. His eyes recorded the snapshot image, but for the moment all he thought about was that the man who’d done it was alive, and just a few feet away.
He realized that the noise he heard came from the left and ahead. The living room. A television. The subject would be in there. Might there be a second one? He didn’t have time for that, nor did he particularly care at the moment.
Slowly, carefully, his heart going like a trip-hammer, he edged forward and peeked around the corner. There he was, late thirties, white male, hair thinning, watching the TV with rapt attention—it was a horror movie, the scream must have come from that—and sipping Miller Lite beer from an aluminum can. His face was content and in no way aroused. He’d probably been through that, Dominic thought. And right in front of him—Jesus—was a butcher knife, a bloody one, on the coffee table. There was blood on his T-shirt, as if sprayed. From a little girl’s throat.
“The trouble with these mutts is that they never resist,” an instructor had told his class at the FBI Academy. “Oh, yeah, they’re John Wayne with an attitude when they have little kids in their hands, but they don’t resist armed cops—ever. And, you know, that’s a damned shame,” the instructor had concluded.
You are not going in to jail today. The thought entered Caruso’s mind seemingly of its own accord. His right thumb pulled back the spurless hammer until it clicked in place, putting his side arm fully in battery. His hands, he noted briefly, felt like ice.
Just at the corner, where you turned left to enter the room, was a battered old end table. Octagonal in shape, atop it was a transparent blue glass vase, a cheap one, maybe from the local Kmart, probably intended for flowers, but none were there today. Slowly, carefully, Caruso cocked his leg, then kicked the table over. The glass vase shattered loudly on the wooden floor.
The subject started violently, and turned to see an unexpected visitor in his house. His defensive response was instinctive rather than reasoned—he grabbed for the butcher knife on the coffee table. Caruso didn’t even have time to smile, though he knew the subject had made the final mistake of his life. It’s regarded as holy gospel in American police agencies that a man with a knife in his hand less than twenty-one feet away is an immediate and lethal threat. He even started to rise to his feet.
But he never made it.
Caruso’s finger depressed the trigger of his Smith, sending the first round straight through the subject’s heart. Two more followed in less than a second. His white T-shirt blossomed in red. He looked down at his chest, then up at Caruso, total surprise on his face, and then he sat back down, without speaking a word or crying out in pain.
Caruso’s next action was to reverse direction and check out the house’s only bedroom. Empty. So was the kitchen, the rear door still locked from the inside. There came a moment’s relief. Nobody else in the house. He took another look at the kidnapper. The eyes were still open. But Dominic had shot true. First he disarmed and handcuffed the dead body, because that was how he’d been trained. A check of the carotid pulse came next, but it was wasted energy. The guy saw nothing except the front door of hell. Caruso pulled his cell phone out and speed-dialed the office again.