Shockwave by Andrew Vachss Page B

death. If they planned on dumping him in the ocean, they would have known enough to gut him first—a knife would do that, and they’d have one handy for sure.
    “Except they
didn’t
open him up. So the only thing we know for sure is that there was more than one man in on it. As for that porous rock, you said it yourself—it rains all the time, like a natural scrub-down. Besides, they wouldn’t worry about the cops collecting anything from the spot where they finished him. Even if they somehow got the idea to check the top of that outcropping, you know how many tourists pass over that same spot every day?”
    I could hear “How does this guy know so much about killing?” running thru Mack’s head, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “How do you know there was more than one man in on it?” is all he said.
    “Whatever was used to crack through his skull, it wouldn’t be something you could hide under your coat. And who turns his back on someone he thinks might be a threat? Prison alone would have taught him at least that much.”
    We were quiet for a couple of seconds. Then my phone rang.
    “C ome home” is all Dolly said.
    I could tell from the tone of her voice that this wasn’t some “Help!” thing. And she hadn’t used any of the signals, either. So I told Mack I’d find him later. Meaning, “Drop me off and keep going.”
    When I walked in, Dolly pointed toward the basement and raised her eyebrows. She wouldn’t go down there without me, and there wasn’t enough privacy upstairs to show me whatever she wanted transferred from that camera-phone I’d given her.
    “That’s the skull,” she said, pointing at the X-ray shot projected against a five-foot square of whiteboard I’d put up in the basement. “See the intrusion line? It was one blow, powerful enough to penetrate all the way to the brain.”
    “So he never saw it coming?”
    “Probably not. Even the slightest movement—or even a sound like a sharp intake of breath—would have altered those intrusion lines. This looks almost … surgical.”
    “Un piton?”
I wondered aloud. Nobody would need one to climb to the top of the promontory I’d explored … but nobody would look twice at one dangling from a man’s belt, not around here.
    “A mountain climber’s spike? I guess it could be. But why would a killer use something like … that thing?”
    “One shot; one kill.”
    “I’m not following you.”
    “A sniper only gets one shot—if he misses, or even if he just wounds the target, it’s worse than if he’d never tried. Look,” I said, using the arrow pointer to show her, “there’s that … ‘intrusion line’ you called it … but the skull’s missing a whole wedge, like a triangle was pulled out. Whoever took this guy out, he was good. And he’d done it before, to
get
that good.”
    “So they brought him up to that spot on purpose. That’s where they
wanted
to kill him.”
    “That’s what it looks like.”
    “That means it happened
here
, Dell.”
    “Happened here? Sure. But that doesn’t mean the dead guy was
living
here. There’s a million ways to explain why whoever killed him took him up on those rocks.”
    “Mack wants—”
    “I don’t give a damn what Mack wants. You want me to run around, sticking my nose in places, taking chances, just so some crazy man can get turned loose?”
    “If you had let me finish, I would have said that Homer isn’t why I have to do this. I don’t care where the dead man was from. He’s gone now. But if the
killers
are here—
live
here, I mean—how long is it going to be before they do the same thing to someone else?”
    “Kill more Nazis? Good for them.”
    “Will you stop? You know exactly what I’m saying, Dell. Whoever did that … killing, he was good at it—you said so yourself. Someone like that, he didn’t learn without practice. Maybe a lot of practice. You said
that
, too.”
    “Dolly, we don’t even know if there are any ‘people like