Backfire by Catherine Coulter
Neighbors were standing around, staring and talking, looking generally horrified, huddled beneath umbrellas and awnings as the rain beat down.
The white wooden house was a single story with a big solar panel on the roof, built some thirty years ago. It still managed to look stylish, its three palm trees in the front yard adding a bit of tropical charm.
Sheriff Bud Hibbert met them at the front door. “I’d just as soon not have seen you guys until the Christmas party. What this guy did, how fast he moved—it’s frightening. They’re in the bedroom.”
They left their umbrellas on the front porch and walked around two forensic techs and a sheriff’s deputy through the country feminine living room and a small country kitchen with a connected eating area, and down the carpeted hall to the end of the corridor.
Sheriff Hibbert asked for the photographer to stand back for a moment and motioned them around the big king-size bed. It was a god-awful scene, Sherlock thought, so much blood. There was always so much blood. She sometimes wondered how a human body could hold that much blood.
The sheriff said, “I haven’t let them touch the bodies. The crime scene’s just as it was when a deputy arrived after we got a call from a neighbor who heard Pixie’s dog carrying on and came to see what was happening.”
None of them really wanted to, but they looked closely at what had once been two living, breathing people until Xu had slit their throats.
The sheriff said, “All their clothes are in place, so no sexual activity had begun even though they were lying on the bed. Look at the blood splatter, the way their bodies ended up when they died. Siles’s head has nearly fallen off the near side of the bed, and she’s fallen nearly off the other side of the bed. I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what happened.”
Savich pointed at Sherlock. She was standing quietly at the foot of the bed, and he knew she was putting it all together in her mind, using her special gift to picture what few people could see at a crime scene.
“Sherlock?”
She said, “He came in quietly, saw them. He was fast, silent, and smart—even managed to lock Pixie’s terrier outside without alerting them. Milo was first. He grabbed him by his hair, jerked his head back, sliced his throat—again, right to left. Not even a second, that’s all the time it took. He let Milo fall, reached over him, grabbed Pixie by her hair, jerked her head toward him, then back so violently it snapped her neck. When he sliced her throat he must have been staring down at her, watching her eyes as she realized she was dying. The coroner might be able to determine which of those things killed her, not that it makes any difference.
“You can see the dried tears on Milo’s cheeks. He was crying, his head probably against Pixie’s shoulder. She was—comforting him.”
Sheriff Hibbert stared at Sherlock for a moment. He said slowly, “Yes, I can see that now. Thank you.”
Cheney said, “Milo came to her for comfort. And he got her killed.”
Sheriff Hibbert said, “Let’s back out now, let the coroner and the CAU people do their jobs.”
Sherlock paused. “The CAU?”
“Yeah, the Crime Analysis Unit; that’s what we call our forensic section.”
Sherlock said, “Of course. We’re from the CAU in Washington, the Criminal Apprehension Unit.”
Sheriff Hibbert said as he walked them to the back of the house that gave onto the waterway and the boat dock, “The neighbor—Mrs. Dee Kotter—saw Pixie’s terrier, Bob. He was locked out of the house, and that surprised her, since it was raining. She knocked on the door, found it wasn’t locked, and found them. She told us Milo was a twice-a-week fixture at Pixie’s house, her longtime boyfriend. He was always polite, spoke to the neighbors who spoke to him, and made Pixie happy. She said it was sort of a joke with Pixie, always saying why marry a man and put up with the toilet lid being up all the time? Better to have him visit, orderly and planned, and that was the way she liked it. The neighbor didn’t know Milo was married.
“Mrs. Kotter took Bob. Last time I saw her, she was petting him, kissing him over and over, and crying.
“It’s nearly dark, so canvassing the neighborhood is tough. And the damned rain doesn’t help. We don’t believe it was raining when the killer got here, so hopefully someone saw a stranger, a car, something.
“We also have men over on Caribe Isle—that’s the spit of land across the water—interviewing everyone along the street. There’s a small park at the end of the spit, and a narrow beach with a nice view of the back of all the houses along this street, including Pixie’s house.
“Even though there was a break in the rain, I don’t know if anyone was in the park or on that skinny beach. So far, we don’t have anything.”
Savich cursed. Sherlock was so surprised she nearly tripped over a Christmas cactus on the wide back porch.
Savich said, “I just realized, Xu’s got two major loose ends left—the Cahills. You know he’s going after the Cahills. Ramsey, at least, is safe from him for the moment.”
He got Eve on the first ring.
“Barbieri.”
“He’s going after the Cahills next. I know in my gut he’s got a pipeline into the jail. Xu has to know they’re going to flip on him now he’s killed Siles. Eve, get over to the jail, get them to safety.”
When Savich punched off, he said, “She’s going to bring the Cahills to the twentieth floor, put them in one of the pre-court holding cells.”
They stood under the wide porch and looked out over the water to Caribe Isle, listened to the waves bumping against the dock. It was dark and miserable, the rain coming down in torrents. A deputy sheriff strode through the rain from the neighbor’s yard, a black umbrella over his head.
He shouted, “Sheriff, we got a winner!”
They’d found an old gentleman on Caribe Isle who’d been walking on the narrow beach beyond the small park. He had a straight view to the back of Pixie McCray’s house and her dock. He was chewing on his pipe since he didn’t smoke anymore, he told the deputy, hurrying because he knew the rain was going to start up again, and that wasn’t good because Purlie, his bulldog, hated to do her business in the rain. He said it was nearly four o’clock when he saw a small outboard motorboat come through the lock, turn left, and motor to Pixie’s dock. He saw a man climb onto the dock and go into the house.
Did he see the man leave?
Nope. Purlie was through doing her business, and it started drizzling again, so he took her home.
Xu had come by boat, just as he’d done the night he’d motored the Zodiac to Sea Cliff and shot Ramsey.
They went to speak to Mrs. Dee Kotter, Pixie’s neighbor, but she was in shock, numb. She was crying again, holding Bob close, both of them shivering in disbelief and horror at what had happened, here, in Bel Marin Keys, and nothing ever happened here.
San Francisco
Monday night
Xu stood beneath the striped awning of Morrie’s Deli on Seventh Street, looking through the rain at the Hall of Justice across the street, and waited. It really didn’t make any difference that he was there because there wasn’t anything more he could do. But even if he couldn’t control what would happen, he wanted to be close.
He hated feeling impotent. He’d had no choice but to put his trust in people he hardly knew to carry out his plans, too often a recipe for disaster. His Chinese trainers had dinned into his head over the years never to give anyone else a task that was critical to a mission. And nothing could be more critical to him than Cindy and Clive Cahill dying tonight.
It was at moments like this that he wondered what his life would be like if he had stayed Joe Keats, the name he’d picked for himself when he was eighteen and tired of having Xian Xu mangled and then mocked as a girl’s name by the uneducated idiots in Lampo, Indiana. No one ever mispronounced Joe Keats. Except for some of the br
He drew a calming breath. He had done what he could, and if his plans went south, he was ready to run, from the FBI, even from Chinese intelligence, if he had to. He would survive.
Joyce Yang, the girl who’d turned him to the dark side, she’d say and laugh her husky laugh that made him mad with lust, and why not, he’d been only twenty years old. He’d loved her with everything in him, at least in those long-ago days before she’d betrayed him with a mid-rung operative, Li Han, in Chinese intelligence, and Xu had cut her throat and buried her deep near her precious hometown of Beijing, where he knew the choking sand from the Gobi Desert would score her grave until her bones were uncovered in the years to come, a fitting place for her, he’d thought at the time. As for Li Han, a man who looked like he was supposed to—Chinese through and through—Xu had left him with a slit throat in an alley in one of the many nasty parts of Beijing where murder was as common as girls selling themselves for a bowl of rice. Would their kids have looked Caucasian like him or like their mother, a full-blooded Chinese?
He looked at his watch. Nine-twenty on this dark rainy night in San Francisco. Soon he’d be drinking scotch at the Fairmont Hotel, watching the football wrap-up of the Monday-night game on the big flat-screen TV in the sports bar.
He whistled, realized he didn’t have enough spit in his mouth. For twelve years he’d survived—indeed, he’d thrived—working undercover in the American section of Chinese intelligence. They had taken to calling him mingzing—the star—because of what he’d accomplished for them. He’d learned to be ruthless in the way they respected, and yet he was charming enough to talk people out of their paychecks. Maybe his black hair was a bit too glossy and coarse, but no one would question that he looked entirely American, just like his mother, Ann Xu, who’d been an American history teacher at Lampo High School. The principal, fat Mr. Buck, hadn’t made fun of him like his peers had, since Xu was the school system’s expert in cyber-security. Buck even managed to get him a computer science scholarship to Berkeley. Xu wondered sometimes what Mr. Buck was doing these days. He smiled now. No way Mr. Buck, the bulwark of American conceit and smugness, could know his prized student had killed three students on his watch. Even then, Xu had been good at making people simply disappear.
Joyce poked into his memory again, those beautiful almond eyes of hers, whispering her flawless English in his ear how it would astound her trainers that he could so easily pass for a Caucasian. Like him, she’d been born in the U.S., not twenty miles from Berkeley. Ah, those days at Berkeley, hoisting up the Chinese flag, screaming with other protesters about the brilliance and honor of the Chinese people and the profligacy and corruption of Americans. He’d learned over the years, though, that it was the Chinese who had the market cornered in corruption. He wasn’t like the Chinese, he wasn’t corrupt, he carried his assignments out promptly and professionally—but now he was watching in disbelief as his life spiraled into the crapper in the span of five short days.
He’d failed in his mission—his anli—his superiors had told him, because he’d chosen defective tools, yet they’d happily approved Xu’s plans when he’d assured them Cindy Cahill could focus her attention on Mark Lindy and he’d be stuttering to do whatever she wished. And he’d been right, Lindy couldn’t resist her, just as his handlers couldn’t resist trying to get their hands on the latest generation of the Stuxnet worm Lindy was working on. Even the original Israeli worm had infected sixty percent of Iranian computers and slowed down their production of nuclear fuel for years. Having the access codes to Lindy’s work was as important to their industrial security as having the hydrogen bomb.
But his superiors had ended up being right about those two losers, Cindy and Clive Cahill. To cover themselves, they said they’d known Lindy would be too smart and too cagey to fall for a Mata Hari, that he’d be as careful with his passwords as the devil with a bowl of ice cubes.
Xu remembered as clearly as if it had happened today when he’d gotten a call from Cindy more than eight months ago, hysterical, screaming—Lindy was dead, that it wasn’t her fault he’d been called in by some sort of incident response team and they’d questioned him about accessing private networks that Lindy knew he hadn’t accessed, and he’d accused her of calling up the Stuxnet program on his computer. She’d called in Clive, and he’d held Lindy down while Cindy had poured the poison down his throat. Idiots, both of them, asking to be caught, and they had, of course.
All his superiors in Beijing had wanted was to have him steal the information and leave the country, with no one the wiser, if possible. They blamed him that a high-ranking American cyber-intelligence officer had died. They made it clear they wanted no more killings, and so he’d made a deal with the Cahills, hired Milo to keep them quiet, gotten O’Rourke in line, and waited.
Until everything went to hell. O’Rourke had panicked, ready to spill his guts to that damned judge when he’d suspended the trial. He’d fixed that problem, but he still couldn’t be sure how much Judge Hunt knew, or suspected.
From the moment he’d slit O’Rourke’s throat, he’d been on his own. From that point on, the Chinese would be more likely to have him killed to prevent his arrest than to help him. Perhaps if he succeeded tonight, the Chinese would see he’d acted in their best interest as well as his own.
It will be all right, Xu, you’ll see, it doesn’t matter that those silly kids are making fun of you, my darling, that just makes them stupid. And his mother had rocked him when he was small, and he’d believed her, but he’d started to feel a simmering rage, a rage that seemed to encase him like a tunnel, and he knew he wanted to kill them all for mocking him. When Xu was fourteen, one of the bullies with a brand-new driver’s license had died in an auto accident, or so it was ruled. He remembered his mother had looked at him as if she knew what he’d done, but she’d said nothing. But he remembered now, she was watchful, always watchful after that. He’d been more careful with the other two bullies.
Xu shook his head, wondering why he’d think of his mother now, wondering, too, if she would rock him now, tell him he was smart, that he’d figure his way through this fiasco, and everything would be all right. Had she known then he would kill again? And again?
As for his father, he was grateful to the loser for two things—he’d forced him to learn Mandarin and had sent him to Beijing to visit his grandfather before the old man dropped over dead during Xu’s last visit when he was seventeen.
He looked down at his watch again, saw a streak of blood on his left wrist. How could he have missed it? He scrubbed his skin until the dried blood flaked off. Was it Milo’s blood, or the woman’s? What was her name? Pixie, that was it, like some lame rip-off of Tinker Bell.
No matter. Soon Billy Cochran would be dispatching Clive Cahill to hell. He knew Cochran as an angry man who’d killed before, a three-time felon set to transfer out to San Quentin in the morning. Cochran had very little to lose, and was enough of a veteran inmate to know how to kill Clive without being caught. Cochran had been eager enough to accept the offer Xu had made when he’d visited him—he was leaving an aging grandmother who needed money badly. Cochran was vicious enough and would feel no remorse, but there was always the question of whether he could pull it off. He’d been caught three times, after all. Xu wished he could do it himself, but it wasn’t possible.
Nine-twenty-nine—one minute until Cochran killed Clive. Xu himself had set the time. That was when the TVs were turned off and the prisoners were herded to the showers before they returned to their cells for the night.
Nine-thirty exactly. Cochran should be smoothly slipping his shiv into Clive’s back to penetrate his heart, and he’d fall dead without a sound, leaving trails of his blood to mix with the water going down the shower drain. Cochran would be gone in the morning, and there was no missing
Cindy’s death might be more problematic, and a pity, really. He thought of the last time he’d had sex with Cindy, what a delight she was as she slid her fingers beneath her thong and shimmied it down her legs. Yes, a pity. Once, a long time ago, he’d thought they might work together again.
The best he could find was a scared little Asian woman, maybe five feet tall, and one hundred pounds. She’d spoken to Cindy to gain her trust; he’d made sure of that. He’d found Lin Mei himself, out on bail, and he’d found she had a little boy. She didn’t have Cindy’s physical strength, and that might be a problem if Cindy spotted the blade at the last second. Still, he had more faith in Lin Mei than in Cochran. She was an immigrant, and he’d been right to think she’d believe him absolutely when he looked her directly in the eyes and told her in fluent Mandarin her son would die if she failed in her task.
It was nine-thirty-five now, and it was over, one way or the other. He looked into the rain-soaked night and imagined fireworks, bursting balls of sparkling red shooting out of the top of the Hall of Justice.
He prayed the whole nightmare was over.
He pulled his collar up on his Burberry rain jacket and walked down Seventh Street toward the Bayshore Freeway, where his Audi was parked in a safe underground garage.