Fever Dream - Douglas Preston [112]
Hudson picked up the briefcase and stepped out of the shade into the baking parking lot.
With a final curse, Nancy Milligan slammed the car door and it stayed shut. She was sweating, exasperated, and mad: mad at the unusual heat, mad at the old clunker of a car, and particularly mad at her husband. Why did the blame fool make her run his errands instead of getting up off his fat ass and doing them himself? Why the city of Baton Rouge needed a copy of his birth certificate at his age… it made no sense.
She straightened up and was embarrassed to see a man standing across the parking lot, fedora pushed back on his head, mopping his brow, looking in her direction.
In that very moment his hat flew into the air and the entire side of his head went blurry, coalescing into a jet of dark fluid. At the same time a sharp crack! rolled through the spreading oaks. The man slowly toppled to the ground, straight as a tree, landing so heavily his body rolled like a log before coming to rest, arms wrapped around in a crazy self-hug. The hat hit the ground at the same time, rolling a few yards and then, with a wobble, coming to rest on its crown.
For a moment, the woman just stood beside her car, frozen. Then she took out her cell phone and dialed 911 with numb fingers. “A man,” she said, surprised by the calmness of her voice, “has just been shot in the parking lot of the Vital Records Building, Louisiana Avenue.”
In answer to a question she replied, “Yes, he is most certainly dead.”
53
THE PARKING LOT AND PART OF THE NEARBY street had been marked off with crime-scene tape. A crowd of reporters, news teams, and cameras seethed behind blue police barricades, along with a smattering of rubberneckers and disgruntled people who couldn’t get their cars out of the lot.
Hayward stood next to Pendergast behind the barriers, watching the investigators do their work. Pendergast had persuaded her, against her will, that they should remain civilians and not involve themselves in the investigation. Nor should they reveal that the PI had been working for them. Hayward reluctantly agreed: to admit their connection to Hudson would involve them in endless paperwork, interviews, and difficulties; it would hamper their work and expose them to press reports and public scrutiny. Bottom line, it would almost guarantee they would never find Vinnie’s attacker and this man’s killer—evidently the same person.
“I don’t get it,” Hayward said. “Why go after Hudson? Here we are, interviewing everyone, blundering about, stirring the pot—and all he was doing was pulling some public files on June Brodie.”
Pendergast squinted into the sun, his eyes narrowed, and said nothing.
Hayward tightened her lips and watched the forensic team do their work, crouching over the hot asphalt. They looked like crabs moving slowly over the bottom of the sea. So far they had done everything right. Meticulous, by the book, not a single misstep that she could identify. They were professionals. And perhaps that was no surprise; the very public assassination of a man in broad daylight in front of a government building was not an everyday event in Baton Rouge.
“Let us stroll over this way,” Pendergast murmured. She followed him as he slipped through the crowd, moving across the large lawn, circling the parking lot, heading toward the far corner of the Vital Records Building. They stopped before a cluster of yews, severely clipped into oblong shapes, like squashed bowling pins.
Hayward, suddenly suspicious, watched Pendergast approach the bushes.
“This is where the shooter fired from,” he said.
“How do you know?”
He pointed to the tilled ground around the yews, covered with raked bark chips. “He lay down here, and the marks of his bipod are there.”
Hayward peered without getting too close and, with some effort, finally made out the two almost invisible indents in the ground where the bark had been pushed aside.