The Informant (41 page)

He reached into his pocket for his knife, opened it, and slid the four-inch blade between the latch and its receptacle to open the latch, then put away the knife and reached into his coat pocket for the small, flat pistol. He'd had the intention of buying a couple of spare magazines for the gun before he tried to use it, but things had happened too quickly. He slid open the door, stepped inside into the living room, and closed it again. He stood with his back against the wall, his body partially concealed by a baby grand piano.

He stood still. The gun was in his right hand, but not aimed. He simply held it pointed to his right because moving his right hand to his left was milliseconds faster than moving it to the right, and his aim would be surer. His left hand touched the wall so he could feel vibrations, and he let his eyes stare into space so anything that entered any part of his vision would be visible to him. He yawned silently so his ears were clear and listened.

Time passed, but he kept no count of the minutes, only tried to hear and feel where people were in the house. He heard and felt the sound of someone heavy walking above him near the back of the house, and a second later, someone else a few feet to the left.
Waring's daughter had to be under a hundred pounds and the son was tall, but thin. And kids didn't wear hard-soled shoes like that at this hour. Waring was maybe a hundred and twenty, so it wasn't her either.

It was two men, both upstairs but at least ten or fifteen feet apart, maybe in different rooms at the moment. Were they searching the place? For what? Maybe Waring and her kids weren't even home. The thought made him feel a tentative optimism, but then he heard Elizabeth Waring's voice.

It was a low "Uh, unh. No. Stop." It came from a nearby room. "Stop, please! I already told you what I know!"

Schaeffer was already moving toward her voice. It seemed to be coming from the direction of the little office off the kitchen. He kept the gun ready. There were three of them, two upstairs, probably guarding the kids. This one was downstairs with Waring.

He came to the doorway and took in the scene. The man had light, thinning hair so Schaeffer could see his pink bald spot from there as the man straddled Waring on the floor. He was in the process of tearing Waring's clothes off. He had already gotten her top off and had her bra around her waist and had her black sweatpants down to her knees, so with her pale, sun-deprived skin she looked like a classical statue that had been broken. He could tell from her eyes that she could see him.

As he stepped forward, she showed a burst of energy and tried to immobilize the man's arms by throwing hers around him in a bear hug. Two more steps and Schaeffer was there. He wrenched the man's head around to the left to break his neck, then pushed him off Waring.

Elizabeth was shaking and wide-eyed, with blood running down in streaks from her broken nose and her split lip, but he put his head close to hers and whispered. "Are there two more of them upstairs with your kids?"

She nodded. "Yes. Two." She pulled up her sweatpants, and he turned and picked up her T-shirt from the floor where the man must have tossed it. Then he handed it to her.

He stood, pulled out his pistol, and moved toward the door.

"Wait," she whispered. "I have a gun in the laundry room."

"Where's that?"

"Stay here." He could see she had a hard time getting to her feet. He could tell her arms and legs were tired from wrestling her vastly stronger opponent. But she went to the door, and he noticed that she was barefoot. She must have been hauled out of bed. She was a mess, just running on adrenaline now, and fear for her kids.

She padded into the room again, this time carrying a Glock 17 pistol and a magazine that he could see held sixteen gleaming bullets.

He took the gun and the magazine, inserted the magazine, and pulled the slide back to get a round into the chamber. He whispered, "Tell me the truth. Are you really good with this?"

"I'm okay. I've kept up my qualification for ten or eleven years."

"Do you have any reluctance at all to kill one of those guys up there?"

"No. None," she said.

"Okay." He handed her the gun. "I think they've got your kids in different rooms. They're probably tied or cuffed. If I go in and kill the guy in one room, his buddy will fire on your other kid. So we have to go in both rooms at once. You don't say, 'Stop or I'll shoot' or 'Freeze' or 'Drop it.' You step in and shoot him. And you have to shoot him enough times so he's beyond shooting back." He held her arm to keep her from going. "If you can't do it just like that, tell me."

"I can do it. I want to do it," she said.

He picked a piece of paper and a pencil off the desk and put it on the hardwood floor where they sat. "Draw me the two rooms. Show the door, the back window, the bed, any chairs."

He watched her draw, then nodded. "You take this one—your son's room. I'll get the girl. First we go up as quietly as we can. If anybody comes out of a room, kill him. It won't be your kid."

He put his arm around her shoulders to help her up and they began to walk. At the doorway he whispered, "Quiet, now. Remember, we step in shooting."

"Let's go." She stepped across the big oriental rug in the living room, letting it muffle the footsteps. When she reached the foot of the staircase, she didn't hesitate. She began to climb. Her bare feet made no noise.

He followed and realized that what he was seeing was probably something she had learned when she'd gone up the stairs when her kids were babies. Nobody knew how to go through a house as quietly as the owner. He was tempted to make her stop halfway up to listen for the men, but she was doing so well he waited until they were a step from the top to put his hand on her shoulder. She stopped and looked back at him. He held his hand up to his ear, and they both listened.

There was a steady, low-level hum of talk coming from the boy's room. That seemed good. What worried him was that he wasn't hearing noises from the other room where the girl was. He hoped she wasn't dead.

He looked at Elizabeth and nodded in the direction of the boy's room. She stepped up to the second floor hallway and sidestepped toward the open door. Schaeffer moved toward the other door. He felt a sudden chill. He hadn't taken the time to tell Elizabeth some of the things she needed to know about this situation. She had to step into the middle of the doorway boldly with her eyes wide and the gun out in front of her. There was only the search for the shot and no conceivable reason to hold fire. He reminded himself that she had said she was "qualified" with her pistol, and he had to assume that federal officers were given situational training. If not, then it was too late.

He held her on the edge of his field of vision as he stepped closer to the girl's room. When he was beside the girl's room, he leaned forward just far enough to see that the door was open. He turned to meet Elizabeth's eyes.

She stood with her left shoulder touching the woodwork around the doorway, holding the gun up with both hands and her finger on the trigger. But her eyes were closed.
What the fuck was she doing?
She opened her eyes and they met his. He could tell that she'd been praying. He swallowed his irritation. He nodded to her and saw her begin her pivot into the doorway.

He launched himself into the middle of the other doorway, staying low, his right arm extended. The man was young, broad shouldered with spiked bleach-blond hair and a tan that looked as though he'd acquired it on a tanning bed. He held the girl on his lap, and his hand was under her tank top. She was crying. There was a shot from Elizabeth's gun in the next room and he jumped, saw Schaeffer in the doorway, and tried to pull his hand back and push her off his lap so he could reach his gun where it lay on the pillow.

Schaeffer fired a round into his chest, then one more into his head as he toppled back. The girl ran past him out of the room and toward her brother's room. Schaeffer picked up the man's pistol and walked after her into the other room.

Elizabeth was beside her son's bed, trying to tear at the strips of duct tape that had been used to tie him to the iron rails of the bed. Schaeffer stepped to the man lying on the floor. He had been shot twice in the chest, but there seemed to be some movement. He was breathing. Schaeffer fired a round through his head.

"You killed him! Aren't you supposed to call an ambulance?" the daughter said.

"Quiet," Elizabeth said. "We'll talk later." Elizabeth's hands were shaking so much that she couldn't get the tape off her son's wrists.

Schaeffer said, "Go talk now. I'll do this."

Elizabeth put her arm around Amanda and they went out. Schaeffer opened his pocketknife and cut the tape at the wrists and ankles. The boy sat up and then stood.

"Thanks. When he tied me up, he said it was so I wouldn't do anything stupid when I heard what they were doing to my mother and sister."

"We were all lucky they were overconfident."

The boy left the room, and Schaeffer put his small pistol away and took the one the dead man had in his belt, then found two spare magazines in the man's pocket. As an afterthought, he rolled the body over, took out the man's wallet, looked at the California driver's license, then put it back.

He walked out into the hallway and found the three standing on the hardwood floor, their arms around one another, rocking back and forth. The mother was the shortest of the three, even shorter than the daughter, who still had that sylph look that some girls had even into their late teens, that made them seem to be something thinner and lighter than flesh and bone.

"I'd better get out of here," he said.

Elizabeth let go of her children, took his arm, and walked with him down the stairs. "Nobody's coming yet."

"They don't usually call ahead. I should go."

"Not yet. I want to—"

"Stop. Jesus didn't send me. I'm here because this was the best place to hunt for those guys. And you saved your own kids." He turned to head for the back door.

"Wait, please," she said. "I know exactly what to do. You just have to trust me."

"Why would I do that?"

"Because everything changed tonight. All three of us would be dead by now, instead of the three of them. We're alive; they're not."

"I've got to go."

"On your way out, stop by the man you caught trying to rape me. Do what's necessary. Skin the fingertips, shoot him in the face a few times so they can't use it to identify him. You'd know what to do better than I do, but make sure they can't tell who he is by looking. Afterward, leave the gun here. If you need another one, take his."

He studied her for a moment.

"Go ahead. I swear you won't be sorry."

AT THE END
of the third week, he was back in her house. She watched him looking around as he stepped in the door. "Where's the rest of your furniture?"

"Some of it is in storage, and some of it was ruined by the blood or the crime-scene people and their fingerprint dust," she said. "I'm doing some remodeling."

"What are you changing?"

"I'm having the walls knocked out in the little office and adding that space to the kitchen, which is behind it. The real estate man said having a big open space there would add to the value when I sell it."

"They know what sells."

"I decided I didn't want that room to be in my memories, or my dreams, for the rest of my life. It will help that in a few weeks it won't exist. The bedrooms upstairs are being redone, but I can't make them go away completely. So we're going away instead."

"Have you started looking for a new place?"

"Not officially, but we've seen some. Jim will be off at college in nine months, and then in another year so will Amanda. We decided that for the next phase of life a condominium with three bedrooms and a metro station nearby would be just about right."

"There must be a few of those around."

She stood silent for a few seconds, looking at him. "I've got the stuff you're going to need."

"What is it?"

"It's what I promised you." She went to the big briefcase she had left by the door. She carried it to the dining room, then stopped. "They've already moved the table out." She stepped into the kitchen and set the briefcase on the counter.

"You're not living here anymore, are you?"

"No. That first morning we checked into a hotel. The police had the run of the house for a few days, and they had it closed off. Then there was a cleanup crew, and then painters. Next it will be contractors and carpenters, more painters, and then realtors. The department is actually paying for a rental for the next couple of months until they're sure no more killers are coming back for us. We only come here to pick up things we actually need. It's surprising how few there are."

"I'm sorry my problems ruined your house for you."

"We voted, and it was unanimous that the good memories we all had would survive better without the physical house to remind us of the bad things."

"I understand."

She opened the briefcase and pulled out a big accordion file. She pulled out a blue passport, and then another. "This one is in the name Paul Foster. The second one is also you, only your name is David Parker."

He looked at the passport. "You used the picture you took of me that night."

"Are there any others?"

"None that I know of. How did you get passports made?"

"Through WITSEC. You know, the witness protection program. Nobody in the FBI or Justice had ever seen you. The man you killed when you saved me seemed about the right size and age and coloring. The others were too young. You had never left prints or DNA at any of your scenes so..."

"So he's me."

"He's you. Rest in peace."

"I will. How did you explain the condition of my body?"

"You ruined your fingerprints before you got here. Nobody knows if it was to keep from being tied to your recent killings or in preparation for this one. The facial damage was caused by your being shot by an inexperienced, terrified shooter who didn't know when to stop. You've been examined and documented and cremated."