She nods once into my chest.
Only after I draw back do I realize we’re standing outside the room where Henry was shot. Henry himself has been moved to a windowless office in the administration area and placed under FBI guard. Using mobile equipment, the staff converted the office into a makeshift hospital room.
Two more FBI agents arrive in short order, one of them the evidence specialist who processed the bones that came out of the Jericho Hole. With silent proficiency, they begin working the scene as a Concordia Parish sheriff’s detective observes. It quickly becomes obvious that John Kaiser knows more about homicide investigations than anybody else on the scene, but he takes pains to make sure Sheriff Dennis doesn’t feel the Bureau is running roughshod over his turf.
This détente lasts until Kaiser resumes questioning the deputy who was guarding the door to Henry’s room. The man had been instructed to keep a careful log of everyone entering or leaving, but no nurse or aide on his list has admitted to opening the window blinds—which made the head shot possible. Kaiser obviously believes the deputy was lax in his logging, and as he presses the man, Sheriff Dennis boils toward the limit of his forbearance.
“White uniforms all start to look the same after a while, don’t they?” Kaiser asks with apparent empathy. “They become sort of an official pass in a hospital environment.”
“Nobody went in without me logging them,” the deputy says doggedly, but I sense that he isn’t sure.
“Could you have dozed a little bit? Even for a minute? Standing post in an empty hallway is pretty boring, I know from experience. And you had the desk.”
The deputy’s lips lock shut in a thin white line. Then he says, “I wasn’t sleeping, damn it. I told you that.”
“Ease up, Agent Kaiser,” Sheriff Dennis says in a tense voice. “Tommy’s had a rough night.”
Kaiser turns to Walker and speaks with grim purpose. “A material witness in several major murder cases nearly died because somebody reached up and turned a plastic rod on a window blind. The person who opened those blinds was almost certainly working with the shooter.”
“How do you know that?” asks the deputy, who then points at Caitlin. “She was in there for two hours.”
Caitlin looks up in shock from beside Jordan Glass.
The harassed deputy sticks his chin out angrily. “How do we know she didn’t just reach up and open them blinds without even thinking about it?”
“I didn’t,” Caitlin insists.
“Agent Kaiser,” I cut in, “didn’t you tell me you were going to make sure Henry was covered? Were there any FBI agents in the hospital?”
Kaiser sighs with frustration. “We were shorthanded at the Jericho Hole. I thought Sheriff Dennis had two more men over here.”
Walker’s face is turning redder by the second.
“I’m not accusing anyone of negligence,” Kaiser goes on. “We’re here to find out what happened, not whose fault it was. But whoever opened those blinds almost certainly knows who the shooter is. It could have been a hospital employee, or it could have been a walk-in.”
He turns back to the deputy. “Your list shows five names in the past three hours, aside from the people with us here. One nurse is positive the blinds were closed shortly before Sherry left to go home. Caitlin says she didn’t open them, nor does she remember seeing anyone open them. But she was working on her computer while Henry slept, and she dozed some herself, so we have to assume that’s when the blinds were opened. We need to bring everybody on your list back down here, so you and Caitlin can verify who you remember, and see if you recall anyone else not in that group. Okay?”
The deputy nods sullenly.
Kaiser waves at one of his men, who takes the log and heads down to the central area of the one-floor hospital. Sheriff Dennis whispers to his deputy, who nods and walks down the hall toward the restroom.
Hiking up his gun belt, Walker leans close to Kaiser. “We screwed up, okay? But I went to school with Henry Sexton. I played peewee football with his little brother. And I just got off the phone with his mama, whose scream I won’t forget for the rest of my life. I appreciate your help on this case, but I’m telling you—in the nicest way possible—to ease the fuck up on my deputy. You hear?”
“I understand, Sheriff. I’ll go as easy as I can.” Kaiser turns and focuses on Caitlin. “Tell me about the shots. How many did you hear?”
“None. The first thing I heard was glass falling out of the window. That’s when I saw the blood. The same thing with the shots that killed Sherry. Just glass getting punched out of the window.”
“Silencer?” Sheriff Dennis says to Kaiser.
Kaiser nods absently. He appears to be pondering some complex question. “Shooting through glass is no simple thing. That difficulty is the only thing that saved Henry’s life. SWAT teams have a special technique for that kind of shot. They use two shooters. The first shoots out the glass, and the second takes out the target. They make the shots so fast that the target doesn’t have time to react to the first shot. Which means the primary shooter—the one making the kill shot—fires even before the hole he will fire through actually exists. To an untrained ear, it might sound like a single shot.”
“Never heard of that,” says a deputy on the periphery of our group.
“But unless we have a pair of police-or military-trained snipers roaming this parish,” I point out, “that’s not what happened.”
“The glass in there looked pretty thin,” Jordan observes.
“When was this hospital built?” asks Kaiser.
“Nineteen sixty-one,” says the hospital administrator.
“No polymers back then,” says Kaiser. “Thin glass to start with, and it would be brittle after all this time. If the shooter fired at a right angle to the glass, the bullet’s deflection would be minimal, even with a small caliber.”