Читать книгу Don’t Look Twice - Andrew Gross, Andrew Gross - Страница 11

CHAPTER SIX

The victim was a federal prosecutor working out of the Hartford, Connecticut, office. David Sanger. His driver’s license indicated he was forty-one years old. The address on it was on Pine Ridge Road off Stanwich, just five minutes out of town.

The headline had just changed.

Once more, Hauck thought back through the chain of events. The red truck screeching to a stop. The darkened window rolling down. The muzzle of the gun extending.

At him.

Sanger had been standing only a few feet away, right behind Jess in line. The bullet pattern seemed to go from right to left. It seemed likely he had been hit in the initial barrage.

“Any chance you’re thinking he was the target?” Munoz questioned. The victim’s ID made anything possible.

Hauck thought back. The attack had continued for a full minute after Sanger would have been struck. The shooter had even reloaded. Bullet marks were everywhere. Glass shattered on the refrigerated unit in back. The type of weapon used, a Tec-9 or a Mac-10, wasn’t exactly the kind of pinpoint weapon one might choose if they were trying to target someone.

“No.” Hauck shook his head. “Just the wrong place at the wrong time, Freddy.”

Still, a federal prosecutor gunned down this way would bring a lot of attention to this. Every media outlet across the country would be on their backs. Not to mention the Feds. They’d have to take a look at everything. What Sanger was doing here. Any personal vendettas against him. What cases he was working on.

“You know what this means, LT?” Munoz said, standing up.

“Yeah, I know what it means…” He slid out a small photo from David Sanger’s wallet. His wife—pretty, blonde, her hair in a ponytail. Smiling. Two kids. Just a few minutes ago that had been his world.

He handed Munoz back the wallet. “It means you can forget about that angel, Freddy.”

The shells were nine-millimeter. Dozens were lodged all over the walls. Judging from what Hauck recalled—the amount of bullets, casings, the fast reload—the gun was probably a Tec-9.

Not the kind of weapon one could expect to make a precision shot with.

A canvas of the witnesses mostly confirmed Hauck’s own recollection of events. No one had been able to get a clear description of the assailants. The truck’s windows were tinted. The shooter faced away from the crowd. Only Hauck had caught a glimpse. Everyone else had ducked or panicked as soon as the initial shots rang out. It had all happened so fast.

Except several people recalled the shooter shouting something prior to driving away.

The woman who had been in front of Hauck at the counter just before it happened said it sounded something like “Tarantino, asshole…”

“Like the director?” Hauck asked.

“That’s what she heard,” Steve Chrisafoulis said. “The guy filling up his Prius on pump two heard it different. More like ‘Porsafina.’”

“Porsafina?”

“Just telling you what they heard, LT.”

It was going to be difficult, if not impossible, Hauck realized, to get any agreement. The sudden shock and panic. Twenty people were going to have twenty different recollections of what had taken place.

Munoz turned to Hauck. “You said the shooter was Hispanic, right?”

Ed Sweeney offered, “No one seemed to get much of a view, Lieutenant.”

Hauck said, “I think so. Why?”

“’Cause what if it was more like, For Sephina, maybe? Por Sephina? That mean anything to you, LT?”

“No.” If he had somehow been the target of this, he didn’t see the connection.

He went back inside the store. Sunil still had a medical tech attending to him. “You doin’ okay?”

The Pakistani had a cut on his arm from flying glass. He blew out his cheeks. “I suppose so, Lieutenant.”

“Lemme ask you, Sunil, any reason someone would want to do something like this to you? Any enemies we should know about? Any money you owe out there?”

“Enemies?” The gas station manager rounded his eyes wide. “No, I’m a good guy, Lieutenant. I don’t have enemies…”

“People heard the gunman shouting something like ‘Tarantino’ as they pulled away.”

Sunil furrowed his brow. “You mean like that Hollywood guy, Lieutenant?”

“I don’t know what I mean, Sunil. ‘Tarantino.’ Or maybe ‘Por Sephina.’ Spanish. Anything like what I’m saying meaning anything to you, Sunil?”

The Pakistani looked perplexed. He dabbed a hand through his thinning dark hair. “You know me, Lieutenant. I don’t make problems for anyone.”

He wasn’t lying. Hauck patted him on the shoulder. “I know. You get that nick looked after, Sunil.”

The ME van had arrived, lights flashing, from the state facility up in Farmington.

So had Chief Fitzpatrick. In golf attire. He wove his Saab through the maze of news vans and police lines right into the station. Hauck saw him chat for a second with a patrolman, then jog his way.

“Jesus, Ty, I just heard…How’s Jessie doing?”

“She’s okay, Vern. Just a little shock. Thanks.”

“What about you…?” Fitz’s eyes shot to the bandage on Hauck’s neck.

“Just some flying glass. From the window…”

The chief of police looked at him skeptically and snorted back a smile. “Flying glass, my ass, Ty. You’re a lucky dude.”

Hauck smiled wistfully at him, scratched the back of his head. “We got issues, Vern. The dead guy’s a federal prosecutor from up in Hartford. Best I can say, he just stepped into it. Random. I don’t know who this goddamn thing was aimed at—me, Sunil here—you can see they tore the place up pretty good. But there’s going to be a lot of eyeballs on our backs. Freddy will brief you, if that’s okay. I’d appreciate it if you could run some interference on the press for me on this.”

“Don’t even think about that, Ty. You should stay with Jessie…”

“Jess is fine. Her mom’s on the way.”

A sharp beeping tone rang from inside. It took a moment for everyone to realize just where it came from. The victim’s cell phone. Still on him.

“Christ.” Hauck bent down and found it inside David Sanger’s vest.

The digital display read HOME. Everyone stood around and just listened as it continued to ring, four, five times, looking at one another silently before it finally went into voice mail.

“No.” Hauck exhaled at Vern. “There’s something else I have to do.”

He jotted down the address they had found in the victim’s wallet, 475 Pine Ridge Road. Only a mile or two from there. This was one of the jobs nobody vied for, the unenviable responsibility of rank. He grabbed a local patrolman he knew and asked him to follow in his car. This sort of thing was always done better in twos.

Outside, by the fuel pumps, Hauck grabbed hold of Munoz.

Freddy asked, “You want me to come with you, LT?”

“No. I want you to stay and brief the crime scene guys. And listen, Freddy—I got that APB out within a minute or two; no way they could’ve gotten very far. If we haven’t heard anything back, you know what I’m thinking…”

Munoz nodded. “That the truck’s still somewhere around here. That they dumped it somewhere.”

Hauck backed away to where his Explorer was and pointed at Freddy. “You find that truck.”