Walk the Wire (Amos Decker #6)(71)

“That’s a motive to kill her. But why slice open her stomach and intestines?”

“Her mother was a spy. Maybe she taught her kid to swallow secrets, or she saw her mother do it before. The people who killed Cramer might have somehow known this and cut her open to get it back. Then they tried to hide that by performing a postmortem on her and also blackmailing Walt Southern.”

“But why leave the body out there like that? I mean, they could have buried it somewhere. No one would have found her and we’d never have been called in.”

“Well, one explanation is that they didn’t know about her past. Local murder, local cops working on it, not the FBI. If it came out she was a prostitute the local cops would have chalked it up to that. And if they had blackmailed Southern to mess with the postmortems, the cops probably wouldn’t have even focused on the stomach and intestines. I had to read that report three times to find a reference to it.”

“I’m surprised he even referred to it at all.”

“Guy was covering his ass in case this all came out. He could say, hey, it’s right there, even if I didn’t highlight it or take photos of that specific region. I checked for contraband and found none. And the livor mortis miscue? He could chalk that up to not being a full-time pathologist. No, he was hedging his bets all right.”

“So they would have found her body, done the post, conducted the investigation, and come up with zip.”

“Which is better for them than no one finding her, and the cops keep digging and maybe call in other resources to try to find her. The fact that she was a prostitute, or at least holding herself out as one, would make for an easy answer for the cops. It’s a high-risk profession. Women like that get murdered all the time and their bodies get dumped. Cops poke around and then move on to the next case.”

“That does make sense.”

“Well, that’s something, since nothing else in this damn case makes the least bit of sense,” growled Decker.





ROBIE PARKED THE SCOOTER outside the same abandoned apartment building where he had taken Decker and Jamison to meet Blue Man. His boss wasn’t here, but Robie had secure communications inside the building to contact him. And Robie had also made this derelict place his home base for now.

The sound reached his ears a few seconds before it would have been picked up by anyone not as well trained as he was.

Seconds of warning meant he got to live another day.

Maybe.

He immediately flitted for cover near the building’s front doors and pulled his pistol. There were at least five men that he could see. Where they had come from he couldn’t tell. Most likely they had already been here before he arrived. Which meant his hiding place had been compromised.

In the moonlight he could see that they wore light armor and carried automatic, combat-grade weaponry. They were advancing in a diamond-shaped attack pattern. There was no way he could fire at one without revealing his location. And his cover position could not withstand concentrated counterfire.

This dilemma presented a clear tactical first step. Since his current position was indefensible, he moved. He was through the front doors and up the stairs before any of them could gain a line of sight on him to fire. Any building that Will Robie had ever occupied had been thoroughly researched by him beforehand, and this one was no exception.

He turned left and sprinted down the hall that bisected the main floor. He reached the rear doors, knelt, and peered out. Tac lights and gun muzzles were coming his way. They were smart enough to have cut off his rear exit. This op had involved some planning. He heard the front doors opening. Robie hit the stairwell, running up three flights of stairs, popped through the door, and hustled down the hall to the last room on the left.

He unlocked the door and then bolted it behind him. He raced to the window even as he heard the reverberations of multiple feet pounding up the stairs. He never thought about calling anyone for help because there really wasn’t anyone to call—and even if there were, they would never get here in time. Robie had to rely on himself, which was nothing new for him.

He opened the window and pulled out a coil of rope that he had earlier placed behind a piece of furniture. There was also a small duffel with some things that might prove helpful, along with his comm equipment. He slung the duffel over his shoulder and tied the rope to the railing that ran around the small balcony attached to the side of the building. He looked down and now saw no tac lights or other signs of someone being down there. They must have entered the building already.

In the distance he saw the blinking lights of an aircraft as it zipped across the clear sky. The flare lights of the oil fields burned far away, looking like clusters of shiny objects.

He slipped over the side of the balcony and, using his legs around the rope as stabilizers, he methodically made his way down. As soon as his feet touched dirt, he took out his weapon, screwed a suppressor can onto the muzzle, knelt down, took aim, and shot the man who had just come around the corner. The fellow dropped silently to the ground, but the sound of the suppressed round seemed to boom across the flat, dark land like cannon fire.

What was up was now coming down, as from inside the building Robie heard the sounds of feet charging down to the first floor. He sprinted to his left even as gunfire rained down on him from above. They also had the high ground now, which was the best ground to possess. Fired rounds careened off the stucco hide of the building, and shrapnel flew off like little whirlwinds of twisted metal. Robie felt one slice into his arm, but he never slowed until he reached the man he’d killed. In one smooth motion he jerked the man up and used him as a shield while he grabbed the loaded sub gun out of his hands along with three spare thirty-round mags from ammo sleeves in his pants. As rounds slammed into the dead man, Robie waited for a pause in the firing, then dropped the body and sprinted around the corner of the building.