“Yes.”
—
LUCAS CALLEDRussell Forte the next morning to tell him what he was planning to do. Forte worked at the U.S. Marshals Service headquarters in Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington, D.C.
“I remember Poole,” Forte said. “He was on our Top Fifteen list for a long time. We let him drift off because we had nothing to work with. If you find him, that’d be a major feather in your cap. All of our caps. Donottry to take him alone. He’s a killer. The first sniff you get, call me and we’ll get you a team from the Special Operations Group.”
“I will do that,” Lucas said.
Later, at the federal building, he found Park standing over a hot printer, putting what looked like a ream of paper between hard covers. “There’s more,” she said. “This is the good stuff, so far. I was reading through it while I dug it out, and I’ll tell you, Lucas, Poole started out as a mean kid, and he stayed that way. His father worked off and on for the state of Tennessee, different low-level jobs, but he was also a small-time crook. Got busted for scalping tickets, once for selling driver’s licenses out of the DMV where he worked, but hewas acquitted on that and got his job back. Was arrested a couple of times for selling stolen merchandise, but never convicted. His sister supposedly boosted a truckload of racing tires one time, but the charges were dropped, doesn’t say why. Garvin stepped up from that, but he didn’t come from the best of families.”
“His folks still alive?” Lucas asked.
“Don’t know, but I suppose so—Poole’s only forty-two, if he’s not dead himself,” Park said. “I could find out.”
“Do that, and print it all,” Lucas said. “If there’s anything on the parents and any brothers and sisters, I’ll want it. Files on any associates, girlfriends, everything.”
Park patted the Xerox machine: “I’ll do it, as long as this machine doesn’t break down.”
—
WHEN PARKfinished, she handed Lucas a couple of reams of paper that must have weighed ten pounds. Lucas took it home and settled into his den to read.
First up were crime scene photos out of Biloxi. Lucas had seen thousands of crime scene photos over his career, and these were nothing like the worst. All five victims had been shot in the head, and had died instantly. One of them, the little girl, looked like a plastic doll, lying spread-eagled on a concrete floor, faceup, a hole in her forehead like a third eye. She was wearing a white dress with lace, full at the knees. Lucas had seen a lot of pictures of dead kids: he glanced at the photo, and then went on to the next.
And yet...
He kept coming back to it. The little girl had been connected byDNA to one of the other counting-house victims, a much older man—the DNA analysts said she was his granddaughter. The grandfather may have been a dope-selling asshole, but the girl wasn’t. In the photo she was lying flat on her back, her eyes half-open. They still shone with the innocence of the very young, and with the surprise of how their lives had ended so early.
The dress had something to do with it, too. It reminded Lucas of the dresses worn by Catholic schoolmates, little girls going off to First Communion. Crime scene techs had found a smear of blood on the dress, where somebody—had to be one of the killers—had ripped off a piece, probably to use as a bandage.
The girl on the floor began to work on him. He made a call to Biloxi, found that nobody had claimed any of the bodies. “We don’t really expect anybody to show up and say, ‘Yeah, I’m with all those dope guys, we want to give them a nice church funeral.’”
Now Lucas began to feel something of a personal hook: get the guy who’d killed this little girl. He hadn’t had to, but he’d done it anyway. Why? Maybe simple efficiency, maybe she’d seen the killer’s face and would be able to identify him, maybe because the shooter or shooters just liked killing people.
Pissed him off, in a technical cop way. At the same time, despite the growing spark of anger, Lucas thought,Good shooting. The killer, whether it was Poole or not, was a pro—efficient, well schooled, remorseless.
—
LUCAS PUTthe photos aside, all but the one of the girl. He kicked back at his desk, looked at that for a final minute or two, then flickedit onto the pile of other photos. Neither the photos nor the investigation reports told him much, possibly because there wasn’t much to tell, other than what he could see for himself.
The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation had handled much of the work, and had done it professionally enough. When Lucas had finished reading through the reports, he called the MBI agent who’d signed off on them. It took a few minutes to get through the MBI phone system, then Elroy Martin picked up the phone and said, “This is Martin.”
Lucas identified himself and said, “I’m looking into this because of his federal fugitive status. I’ve got all your reports, unless there’s something new since yesterday.”
“There isn’t,” Martin said.
“So what do you think?”
“If you can find Poole, the DNA will take him down. I’m positive of that. But finding him is the problem. People have been chasing him for years. Good people. Guys who knew what they were doing.”
“Your notes say you don’t think he did the Biloxi thing on his own.”
“That’s right. We don’t know how many were on the job, but I don’t believe it would be less than two or three. The five dead were killed with two different guns, both.40 caliber. All the slugs and brass came out of the same batch, and all were reloads. It seems possible that two shooters would share a batch of ammo, but, you know...”
“Probably not.”
“Yeah. Probably not. Whoever did this had to spot that drug counting house—that’s what it was—and we don’t think it wasPoole. We think it was probably somebody who knew about the counting house from a drug connection, maybe because he lives around there, in Biloxi,” Martin said. “It’s possible that it was a professional spotter, a planner. A setup guy. We know he used a setup guy in the stamp robbery. We don’t think Poole would touch anything where he lives, because he’d know that we’d be all over it. We think he was brought in as the shooter. We don’t have any idea of who the spotter was, though.”
