Crosshairs Read online

  I tend to be realistic. I don’t lust after much that I can’t have: Angelina Jolie. Another Super Bowl appearance for the Cowboys. And a soft-as-butter La-Z-Boy recliner in front of a hi-def television. Is any of that too much to ask? Well, maybe the Cowboys part.

  “I worked hard to be where I am,” she said. “I am not about to lose it.”

  “Did you save the last e-mail?”

  She nodded and sat down beside a laptop resting on the kitchen counter. After tapping a few keys, she motioned for me to join her.

  I sat on the bar stool next to hers and read the messages. It was from a Hotmail account, the user name a nonsensical series of numbers and letters.

  “Address have any significance?”

  “No.”

  I looked at the headers and saw nothing unusual. Then again, I could barely spell RAM, so that didn’t mean much.

  “You were in the front yard, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go outside and you show me how it happened.”

  “Would you like a drink? Or something to eat?”

  “No.”

  “I could make some tea.”

  I shook my head and walked toward the front door.

  “It’s no trouble …” Her voice trailed off as I reached the entrance.

  I stepped outside and looked up and down the block. The houses were all new—and big. I doubted if any was smaller than four bedrooms, maybe four or five thousand square feet.

  Anita Nazari stood beside me on the porch.

  “I was there.” She pointed to the flower bed. “Tom drove up.”

  “Tom?”

  “A man I’ve been seeing for the past couple of months.” She waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. “He’s unimportant.”

  “Poor Tom.” I smiled for a moment.

  “Are you mocking me?”

  “It was a joke.”

  She didn’t reply.

  “Never mind.” I quit smiling. “Tell me what happened.”

  “I told her to go inside.” Anita hugged herself. “But she went to the curb. The blast was so loud.”

  “Did anybody call the police?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Conversing with Dr. Anita Nazari was an interesting exercise. I asked about apples. She responded with an incomprehensible comment on Paraguayan fruit flies.

  “About the explosion,” I said. “Did you call the police? Did any of your neighbors hear it?”

  “No.” She pursed her lips. “It seemed louder to me than it was.”

  “Tell me about your neighbors.” I headed toward the curb and the trash can.

  “I don’t know them all that well.” Anita followed. “A lawyer and his family live across the street. They have a son a year older than Mira. Oh, and Tom, he lives behind me.”

  I looked in the trash can. It was empty except for a brownish sludge in one corner that smelled like rotten cantaloupe. The receptacle stood next to the brick mailbox, which was resting on a concrete pad by the entrance to the driveway. I leaned against the mailbox and put my eyes level with the top, peering down the street. All the other mailboxes were the same height, set in exactly the same place on their respective lots. Things were certainly orderly and regimented in the suburbs.

  “Do you know anything about the people who own the house under construction?” I pointed to a half-finished home across the street and down a couple of lots.

  “No.”

  “That would be the ideal place.” I drummed my fingers on the top of the mailbox. “A clear line of sight to your front yard.”

  “What are you going to do?” Anita Nazari said.

  “Investigate.”

  “I thought you were out of the business.” Her tone was sarcastic.

  I ignored her and walked down the street.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Professor turned on the scanner and listened for any police chatter. Nothing appeared to be going on except the usual suburban law enforcement issues of a typical Monday. Stray dogs, illegally parked cars, busybody neighbors. No mention of a man wanted in connection with a murder at a construction site or a body found in the neighborhood.

  This gave him pause. Why hadn’t the witness notified the authorities? Maybe he didn’t want to get the police involved for reasons of his own. The Professor smiled for just a moment before shutting off the machine.

  He put on a windbreaker and a tie, grabbed a clipboard, and got out of the car, heading for the alley running behind the house where he’d hidden yesterday. He knew his actions were well outside the scope of work for this assignment. He was returning to the scene, and he’d been specifically warned against doing so by his employer.

  But he had no choice.

  The alley was immaculate, not so much as a soft drink can lying around. The Professor held the clipboard in one hand and feigned interest in the power lines running behind the houses. He walked toward the home where he’d hidden the day before, jotting notes as he went. The air was fresh and clean, the nearest highway and its mass of petrochemical pollutants miles away.

  The Professor felt good. He felt alive. He was on the move again, doing what he did best.

  He heard tires crunch on the pavement behind him. He turned around, then smiled and nodded before resuming his investigation of the power lines.

  The police car drove slowly by him and turned into the driveway of the house under construction.

  I walked down Anita Nazari’s street toward the half-built house. The exterior was raw, nothing but Tyvek panels on the outside, making it hard to tell what the finished product was going to look like.

  The place next door, nearest to Anita’s, had three stories and was constructed to look like a British manor. The English country house effect might have worked a little better if the yard had grass installed. Or even trees. The one on the other side looked like something Liberace might have designed if he’d been an architect.

  I walked inside through the gap where a front door would go. The interior was silent, no workers anywhere that I could tell.

  The raw design felt similar to Anita’s: stairs in the middle of the entryway, a hallway leading to the back where the granite countertops and stainless designer appliances would go.

  I headed up to the second floor and went to the front, where the house faced the street. In one of the bedrooms I found what appeared to be a table assembled from discarded chunks of construction material. The makeshift piece of furniture sat at an angle to the rest of the room, about four feet away from the window opening.

  It could have been built as a sawhorse, but I doubted it.

  I stood behind the table, my thighs pressed against the edge of the wood so that I was facing the same way it was aligned.

  I looked out the window. The positioning provided a perfect view of Anita Nazari’s front yard. A couple of cinder blocks were lying to one side of the platform, next to a piece of three-quarter-inch plywood. I put the blocks behind the table and placed the wood across them, forming a stool about the right height for an adult to sit on in relation to the table.

  I sat down. Propped my arms up as if I were holding a rifle.

  “Bang.” I squeezed an imaginary trigger. The setup was perfect for surveillance—or a hit. The target would have been about seventy or eighty yards away, an easy shot with a silenced rifle. Or well within range of a remote control device.

  I stood up.

  The piece of plywood slid off the cinder blocks, hitting the floor with a thud.

  Footsteps downstairs. A voice on a radio squawked once before being silenced in midsentence.

  My choices were limited. Out the window or down the half-finished steps. I chose the latter and walked down the stairs and into the hallway.

  The Plano police officer was young, maybe twenty-five. He was a weight lifter, chest the size of a beer keg. He held a semiautomatic pistol in the prescribed two-handed grip, pointing it at my heart.

  “Freeze,” the cop said. />
  “Hi, how’re you doing?” I placed my hands on top of my head.

  A man in his midforties appeared behind him. He was expensively dressed in a pair of starched khakis, alligator loafers, and a golf shirt. He had a gold bracelet around each wrist, a Presidential Rolex on the left one.

  “Who the hell are you?” he said.

  “Nobody important.” I smiled.

  “I own this house.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Okay, smart guy.” The cop holstered his piece and shoved me against the wall. “Assume the position.”

  I did as requested and ran the numbers in my head. Back in the life for about an hour and cuffed already.

  The cop patted me down, pulled out my wallet, and left me leaning against the unfinished drywall. He removed my ID.

  “Says your name is…Lee Oswald?”

  “Yep.”

  “Let me see that.” Mr. Homeowner grabbed the driver’s license. “What are you doing up here? You live in Dallas.” He said the last part with a trace of condescension.

  “Just passing through.”

  “Don’t know how it is in Big D.” The cop slapped one side of a set of handcuffs on my right wrist. “But here in Plano, we’ve got laws against trespassing.”

  “There’s no door,” I said. “Or signs.”

  The cop pulled my arms behind me and snapped the other end of the cuffs in place without saying anything.

  “Bring him into the kitchen.” Mr. Homeowner’s tone sounded like he was used to giving orders.

  “You in charge or is he?” I spoke to the cop as he guided me toward the rear of the house.

  The police officer didn’t respond. He tightened his grip on my elbow until it hurt.

  We entered the kitchen area. No drywall installed yet, only studs, fiberglass insulation, and plastic PVC pipes jutting up from the floor like perfectly round stalagmites.

  The homeowner was standing by the rear wall. The cop pushed me that way. After a few more feet he stopped and pointed to the ground. “You know anything about that, Mr. Lee Oswald?”

  A large brown stain about two feet square was on the plywood subflooring. It looked like someone had tried to mop it up but the porous nature of the wood made the job impossible. Several flies buzzed around the perimeter of the stain.

  “That’s blood,” the homeowner said.

  I raised an eyebrow. “That’s one opinion.”

  “I don’t think I like your attitude very much.” He shook one wrist; his bracelet and watch rattled.

  “Mr. Jenkins has had some problems with the construction of his home.” The cop pointed to the homeowner. “Contractor went flaky on him.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?”

  The cop shrugged. “We’ve got what looks like a bloodstain and you trespassing.”

  “This place is an attractive nuisance.” I nodded toward the front. “No doors anywhere.”

  “What are you? A lawyer?” Jenkins put his hands on his hips.

  I looked at the cop. “You gonna charge me with anything?”

  He pulled a radio from his belt and recited my name and driver’s license number into the mouthpiece.

  Footsteps sounded from the front of the house. The three of us turned as a middle-aged man wearing thick glasses, chinos, and a cheap-looking blazer entered the room. He had an ID tag clipped to his breast pocket.

  “What’s going on in here?” he said.

  “Who the hell are you?” Jenkins puffed up, thumbs hitched in his belt.

  “Building inspector.” The man cocked his head to one side. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Uhhh.” Jenkins’s face turned pale.

  “Somebody called in a bunch of work going on here over the weekend,” the new man said. “On a closed site.”

  “That’s impossible.” Jenkins had recovered a little bit. “I certainly haven’t hired anybody.”

  The inspector looked around the room for a few moments and then spoke to the cop. “You okay if I nose around a little?”

  “Fine with me.” The officer put his radio back on his belt and pointed to Jenkins. “Property owner reported a possible crime scene. Let me fill you in.” He motioned to the front of the house. Both city officials walked that way.

  Jenkins licked his lips a few times and watched them go. When they were out of earshot he said, “You better tell me what’s going on here.”

  “Did you hire somebody to work here while the contractor situation got straightened out?”

  He didn’t say anything. The air was getting hotter. Beads of perspiration dotted his forehead.

  “Maybe somebody who’s not too picky about green tags and pulling permits?”

  “I’ve got payments on two houses,” he said. “You have any idea what this contractor flap is costing me?”

  “Who did you hire?” I took a step closer and kept my voice low.

  “My brother-in-law said they were good.” He leaned against a sawhorse. “And cheap.”

  The cop’s radio buzzed from the front of the house. The inspector said something I couldn’t understand. The noise sounded close.

  “How about a name?”

  “That’s really blood, isn’t it?” Jenkins pointed to the stain, a confused look on his face now.

  I nodded. “Probably so.”

  The cop laughed once. Footsteps headed our way.

  “How do I know you didn’t kill someone here?” Jenkins said.

  “You don’t.” I shrugged as best I could with the handcuffs on. “But if you don’t tell the cop to cut me loose, I’m going to tell the inspector you hired me to work here illegally.”

  He opened his mouth but didn’t say anything.

  The two city officials returned.

  “What about this guy?” The cop pointed to me. “He’s clean.”

  Jenkins shook his head slowly. “Let him go.”

  The officer undid my handcuffs. I headed to the front door as the inspector started writing on his clipboard.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Professor got back into the stolen Ford and stared at the clipboard, contemplating his next move.

  The gullibility of the general population never ceased to amaze him. That he could act like a minor bureaucrat in an insignificant city in this godforsaken state. That he could bluff cooperation from a self-important toad such as Jenkins. That an actual police officer would fail to see through the charade.

  His acting skills aside, however, the cleanup plan was not progressing satisfactorily.

  A visit to the city offices as well as to the house where he had encountered the contractors had yielded little new information. After checking in with his employer, he would have to head west and search for the missing man, using the address on the card as a starting point. He would have about twenty-four hours to find and eliminate the witness before having to contact his employer again.

  Before he left, though, he wanted to learn what he could about the hard-eyed man with the improbable name.

  Lee Oswald.

  The property owner appeared eager to have Oswald leave as soon as possible, even though he’d been detained for trespassing. The Professor wanted him to stick around, cuffed preferably, until he could determine what if any part the man played in the messy little drama that was the life of Anita Nazari, but to insist could have called attention to himself and his forged City of Plano ID. So he let the man wander away, without so much as a peek at which direction he went.

  The Professor started the car with the intention of driving toward a nearby Starbucks and the anonymous Internet connection it offered. Before he could put the transmission into gear, an idea popped into his head.

  The most likely scenario was that Oswald worked for the Opposition. He was fit and carried himself like a player in the game, a man accustomed to living on the fringes of society.

  On the other hand, there was something about the way he talked, the insolence in the few words the Professor had overheard him speak befo
re entering the kitchen. Most operatives would have remained quiet, offering only minimal comments.

  Not this Oswald fellow.

  Could he be working for someone other than the Opposition?

  The Professor switched off the ignition and got back out of the car, clipboard in hand.

  I pushed open Anita Nazari’s front door without knocking. A blast of cold air carrying the cloying smell of men’s aftershave hit me in the face.

  I recognized the cologne.

  Brut. The musky scent worn by the make-out artists of my youth, the boys who would be men, teenage Lotharios in Izods and Top-Siders, trolling through the Reagan-era shopping malls of Dallas in search of Laura Ashley-wearing young women.

  A man about my age stood by the stairs. He was heavyset, like a linebacker after too much beer and pizza, and wore a two-button gray suit that was just a tad too tight, a white oxford cloth shirt with a striped tie, and a slightly confused look on his face.

  I said, “Hi.”

  “You just open the door to a lady’s house and stroll on in?”

  “Uh, I’ve already been here.” I pointed to the back. “Anita and I were in the kitchen just a few minutes ago.”

  “Ahh-nee-ta?” He crossed his arms, pronouncing each syllable.

  “Then I went outside, see, and I was across the street and…” My voice trailed off. I figured him to be the boyfriend who was deemed “unimportant.” I was starting to understand what she meant.

  The man frowned.

  “I’m Hank Oswald.” I scratched my chin for a moment, trying to come up with something reasonable. “Anita’s security consultant.”

  “Security?” He knitted his brow, the wheels turning somewhere in there.

  “Yeah.” I smiled and wondered where my newest client was at the moment. “Trying to make sure everything is safe.”

  “Safe?”

  “Actually, this really isn’t my kind of gig,” I said. “I used to be a private investigator.”

  “Investigator?”

  I sighed and slumped my shoulders “Moose, you and I are never going to get anywhere if you keep repeating everything I say.” I walked around him toward the kitchen.