“ . . . I decided that the best way to get the attention . . . was to simply go out and kill a whole bunch of people.”
—Gunnery Sergeant Jack Coughlin, USMC
Detective Mike Houston surveyed the carnage around him. The area around the bodies was cordoned off with yellow police tape. Teams from the crime scene unit and medical examiner’s office carefully crossed under to begin their work. What had started as a beautiful late summer day on Boston Common had ended with the caustic sounds of rifle fire . . . it looked more like Mogadishu after a skirmish between rival warlords than New England’s most famous park.
“This,” Houston said, “is going to turn into a real shit sandwich . . . and fast.”
Anne Bouchard, his partner, stood silently beside him. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said.
Houston mentally blocked out the sight of the devastation around them and instead studied Anne. Her complexion was pallid. A normal reaction for someone who had never experienced a crime of this magnitude. They had been partners for five years and were as close as two people could get without being “in a relationship.” Cops probably knew more about their partners than they did their significant others. But, Houston kept these thoughts to himself.
“I have—but not here . . .” When he spoke, it brought him back to the present, away from a time and place he had thought he had put behind him forever. “Time to go to work.” Houston approached the perimeter, stopping beside a uniformed cop. One glance was all Houston needed to know that he had never met this cop and he flashed his identification. “What do we have here?”
“Looks like a drive-by . . . the shooter pulled up at the corner.” The uniformed officer pointed toward Charles Street. “From what we’ve been able to piece together, it took him less than a minute to put four people down.”
“Anyone get a license plate?”
The cop looked at Houston. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Just answer my question.”
“We should be so lucky. Apparently it went down so fast nobody saw shit.”
“Looks like we’re in for a long day.” Houston clipped his ID to his chest pocket and pulled on a pair of latex gloves. The uniformed cop lifted the tape, and Houston and Anne stepped into the kill zone. They continued along the periphery of the crime scene, watching where they placed their feet. Walking a few steps ahead of Anne, Houston surveyed the Common. In spite of the throng of curious spectators who lined the police barricades, it was unnaturally quiet. The only sound was the murmur of the low voices of cops and investigators as they moved about performing their duties. Even the forensics team seemed reluctant to break the silence as its members gathered evidence and photographed the area from every angle.
Houston had dealt with violent death for most of his adult life and over the years had learned to control his emotions so that no matter how repulsive the act, he could analyze the facts objectively. Jaw clenched and eyes narrowed, Houston vowed to bring in whoever had perpetrated this butchery.
“I’ve never seen anything anger you this much,” said Anne.
“What really pisses me off is that from now on the Common will be just another damned crime scene.”
“Yeah,” Anne said, “nothing is sacred to scumbags—sooner or later, everyplace in the city is going to be one . . . ”
“I wish I could think differently . . . but I agree with you.”
Anne scanned the area, paying particular interest to the throng gathered along the Common’s periphery. “You think the perp is watching us?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me. Perpetrators of crimes like this love to hang around and watch the aftermath—their way of confirming their kills.”
“Well,” Anne said, “we better get to it.”
They headed toward the victims.
The four bodies lay within a few yards of each other. This told Houston that the shooter had probably picked his targets at random, concentrating on people who were in close proximity to one another. When Houston reached the geometrical center of the kill zone, he stopped and looked toward the corner of Beacon and Charles Streets, the location from which the uniformed officer had said the killer had attacked. Experience and the position of the victims told him that was correct—all four shots came from the same spot. Houston pictured the shooter as he calmly peered through his telescopic sight—ensuring that his sight alignment and sight picture were correct—and once he was satisfied all was in order, selected his targets.
The first victim was a woman. She lay on her back, head and torso obscured by a lush flower bed filled with radiant red and yellow flowers. Her skirt was hiked up, revealing her thighs, blood-splattered legs and lacy white thong. As hardened as he was to scenes of devastation, the sight of her scanty, intimate garment served to bring home to him the senselessness of this act. “Death doesn’t give a damn about modesty.”
They were silent as they continued through the kill zone.
The second victim was a white male. He laid on a sparse patch of grass, beneath the spreading branches of a gigantic maple tree, an ideal place for sitting in the shade and watching people as they strolled through the Common. It was a place for lazing about—not for dying.
“If he didn’t have a bullet hole in his forehead,” Anne said, “you could almost believe he was taking a nap.”
Number three was a large black man who lay on his side in the middle of the paved walk, one arm thrown up as if he were passing a football, the other tucked under his massive belly.
Victim number four was facedown in front of the park bench where he must have been sitting. A crumpled and bloodstained street map of Boston lay beneath him and an expensive camera was at his side, lying in a puddle of his blood; its strap was still looped around his shoulder. “Probably a tourist,” Houston said.
Outwardly, it appeared that these people shared only one thing. They had all stopped to enjoy a warm late-summer afternoon in the park. A few fateful minutes later, each lay dead in a dark crimson puddle of blood.
He visualized tomorrow morning’s headlines. They would all read some variation of COMMON SITE OF SECOND BOSTON MASSACRE! The Tribune would try to be tactful (if such a word could be used to describe a newspaper) and downplay it, but other papers would sensationalize the story to boost their flagging circulations. He paused and looked back at the woman, wondering which one would run a picture of her with her thighs and panties exposed on the front page. He noticed Tom Lukasic, a member of the crime lab, walking in his direction and motioned for him.
When the forensic scientist reached his side, Houston could see a shocked expression on his pallid face. “T-they never covered anything like this in school,” Lukasic stuttered.
“Don’t think about it. Just do your job.” Houston nodded to the female victim. “Take care of her first. Okay? Try to get her body covered up before some press vulture photographs her.”
Lukasic swallowed and some color returned to his face. “I’m on it . . . ” Houston stared at the cluster of forensics people, who were gathered around the spot from which the shots were fired. “Tom.”
“Yeah?”
“How far you think it is from here to where the furthest vic is?”
Without rising, Lukasic looked toward the corner. “Three, maybe four hundred yards—why?”
On a summer afternoon, the Common was always crowded. Why had the shooter targeted victims so far out? Why not pick closer, easier-to-hit targets? Was this shooter leaving a message?
“Either way, if he hit what he intended to hit, he knows his way around weapons. Pretty stiff breeze today.”
Exactly what I thought, Houston mused. It was time to look at the scene from the shooter’s perspective. He watched until Lukasic knelt at the victim’s side and then searched the area for Anne. When he found her, he motioned for her to meet him at the corner from which the killer had struck.
The brim of the tall man’s Red Sox cap rested on top of his dark glasses, obscuring much of his face. He stood among the herd of gawkers and couldn’t help but feel like a celebrity, which, in a way, he was. Without him, there would be no throng crowding the periphery of Boston Common like jackals around a ripe carcass.
He threaded his way through the herd of sensation-seekers until he reached the cordon of yellow tape. He watched the cops and smirked as they moved through the kill zone like hounds seeking a scent. Cops, like military intelligence, were clueless.
He rested his hands on his hips and watched. The cops performed their duties much like soldiers did after a terrorist attack—it was as if they worked from the same manual.
The two in street clothes were detectives, a woman and a man. The male cop, Houston, was the reason he was here. In truth, he was the reason for this entire show. The man studied the male detective closely, trying to determine if he had changed any. The man’s eyes followed the cop’s every move, taking in everything and paying attention to the smallest of details. A good sniper (which he defined as a live sniper) was always aware of several things: the environment, the behavior and the habits of his target. He committed his target’s every move and mannerism to memory—one never knew when the enemy would unwittingly reveal a weakness. The man in the hat wondered if Houston was still the officious bastard he remembered.
Houston paused beside the female victim and said something to another man, who nodded and then quickly walked to the woman. After a minute or so, number two lowered the woman’s skirt. The shooter grinned, twisting his mouth into a ghoulish smile. “You always were a compassionate piece of shit, Mikey.”
He was unaware that he had spoken aloud until a woman next to him jerked her head and gave him a stern look.
He removed his hat, revealing a face so hideously scarred that it resembled a wax statue that had melted and then cooled. She recoiled at the sight of his damaged skin. Before she could apologize, he scowled at her and almost laughed when her disapproving look fled like a doe before a forest fire. He could have left things at that, but he had long since lost tolerance for the cretins of the world and their petty bullshit. “What’s the matter, lady . . . you got virgin ears or something?”
The sniper leered at the woman, closing in on her until his scarred face was only inches from her pallid one. He grinned, and her eyes opened with fear. He laughed a deep, condescending laugh as she scurried away, pushing her way through the crowd.