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.Dew still clung to the new sod.Grass probably wouldn’t last long here, but they always seemed to make the effort when they put up one of these new homes.The house he stood behind had been built within the last six months and only inhabited for the last two.The mark inside, some guy named Fortunato, had pissed off the wrong people.Houses on either side held families that still slept peacefully.Behind the house, where he now stood puffing away on his Marlboro, the backyard butted up against one from the next block.Those homes, however, had not been completed, and the construction crews hadn’t yet arrived to begin the day’s work.So he had the neighborhood to himself….Fortunato’s schedule seemed etched in stone.For the week the hitter had been watching him, the mark had left the house within a two-minute window, every morning.The hitter loved a clockwork guy.Same time, same path, every day, an invitation for someone to cap a poor, sad son of a bitch.He took another drag, let the smoke settle in his lungs, then slowly blew it out through his nose.Glancing at his watch, he smiled.Plenty of time to enjoy this cigarette, no reason to rush.Finish the smoke, put on his gloves, then go to work.Taking one last drag, the hitter held it in for a long time before blowing the smoke out and stubbing the butt into the yard with his foot.He pulled the gloves from his pocket and slipped them on.Rotating his head, he felt the bones in his neck crack as he loosened up; then he checked his watch one last time.Time to punch the clock.He withdrew his automatic from its holster, checked the clip, then screwed on the silencer.He shifted slightly so he could see around the corner.No target yet.Ducking back, he slowed his breathing, waited….The mark walked out of the door, closed it, then the screen, and turned to his car.The hitter came up behind Fortunato, squeezed the trigger and felt the small pistol buck in his hand.A tiny flower of red blossomed from the back of the mark’s head.Didn’t even have time to yell, simply folded in on himself and dropped.Going down with him, the killer put another shot one inch above the first—an insurance policy and a signature.Then the killer pulled the car keys from the dead man’s hand, peered over the fender of the car to make sure no one had seen the action.Satisfied the neighbors still slept, he jumped up, opened the trunk, picked up the body and dumped it in, slammed the lid, then got in the front, behind the wheel, and turned the key.The engine turned over, rumbling to life and, not rushing, the hitter backed the car out of the driveway and eased down the street, just another middle-class joe on his way to work.There was no one around when he arrived at the vacant lot off Russell Road.None of the passing motorists paid any attention to a guy driving into the lot to dump his trash, like so many others had before him.It took only a moment to find what he sought.To his left, shielded from the road, was the abandoned house trailer he’d spotted earlier.The hulk had already begun to rust, and he figured no one would be nosing around it for some time.Several sheets of its aluminum skin had slipped off.Some hung precariously from the side, others lay scattered like molted scales.He pulled the body from the trunk, careful to avoid the bleeding skull, and dragged the meat by its feet to the trailer.He shoved the body onto a sheet of aluminum, then pushed the sled of metal underneath the trailer.As a parting gift, he unscrewed the silencer, which he dropped in a pocket; then removed the barrel from the automatic and tossed it under the trailer with the corpse.With more strips of trailer skin, some wood and rubble, he blocked the opening.Then, using his foot, he covered over the blood trail with dirt, wiping out most of the footprints (among so many footprints already), and casually drove off.He would ditch the car elsewhere.The cell phone rang and shook Catherine from her reverie-cum-reconstruction.“Write down this address,” Nick said, and he gave it to her, and she did.“Dr.McNeal’s nurse’ll have Malachy Fortunato’s file waiting for you.”Within an hour an energized Catherine Willows was driving back to headquarters with the dental records in hand, certain she was about to establish the identity of their mummy.Finding him had only been yesterday; today, with the victim identified, the search would shift to his killer.7A s if hypnotized by a fascinating work of cinematic art, Grissom watched the gray grainy picture crawling across the monitor; this was yet another Beachcomber video, one of scores he’d examined over the past twenty-four hours.Right now he was taking a second pass through the stack of tapes that represented the morning of the shooting.Occasionally he would remove his glasses and rub his eyes, and now and then he would stand and do stretching exercises, to relieve the low back pain all this sitting was engendering.But mostly he sat and watched the grainy, often indistinct images.A normal person might have gone mad by now, viewing this cavalcade of monotony; but Grissom remained alert, interested.Each tape was, after all, a fresh piece of evidence, or at least potential evidence.Right now, in an angle on the casino, the time code read 5:40 A.M.The ceiling-mounted camera’s view—about half-way back one of the casino’s main aisles, looking toward the front—included a blurry picture of the path from the lobby to the elevators.At this time of morning, casino play was relatively sparse.Notably apparent in frame were a man sitting at a video poker machine, on the end of a row near the front, and a woman standing at a slot two rows closer to the camera, this one facing it.For endless minutes, nothing happened—the handful of gamblers gambling, the occasional waitress wandering through with a drink tray; then Grissom noticed a figure in the distance—between the lobby and the elevator.Sitting a little straighter, forcing his eyes to focus, Grissom felt reasonably certain the blurry figure in the background was their victim from upstairs.He hunched closer to the screen, eyes narrowed, watching—yes!—John Smith as he took a few steps, and then glanced casually in the direction of the man at the video poker machine.Almost as if Grissom had hit PAUSE, John Smith froze [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]