Maybe everybody was invisible down deep.
Or were they just hiding what they were thinking?
All the people she passed during the day. People she knew, went on break with. Even the man she’d let into her body. She couldn’t really see the pictures moving in their minds just behind their eyes.
Windows to the soul?
Hardly. More like the two-way mirror in the hard interrogation room. You could see out at them, but they couldn’t see in. They looked at you and saw their own reflection.
But they knew you were there, watching.
So more like-windows to the game.
Angel was through with games.
She was playing for keeps.
And right now she was daydreaming in the heat. Driving from Herberger’s Department Store up on 36, she passed a digital sign on a bank marquee. The time, then: 102 degrees.
The heat made her light-headed.
Floaty.
So get serious.
Specifically, this afternoon she would be playing for keeps with Aubrey Jackson Scott. Aubrey was a freelance photographer. He lived in a river cottage on the St. Croix north of Stillwater. He was divorced. He drove a 1995 Accord. He had no police record. Just the one complaint.
A neighbor couple had griped that Aubrey invited their eight-year-old daughter into his house to give her a new bathing suit. They suspected, but could not confirm, that Aubrey had taken photos of her when she put the new suit on.
A Washington County deputy had talked to the parents. He’d signed off when he learned that the child refused to give back the suit. County, understaffed, had let it slide.
The back-and-forth facts didn’t really matter. What mattered was that Aubrey’s name was number two on the list.
Angel parked her car, gathered her shopping bag, and went into her apartment. Just as with Moros, she took time to prepare herself mentally. She sat down in her living room and stared at the face in the picture framed on the bookcase across the room.
You told me I had to be strong.
Then, methodically, she laid out her gear: the latex gloves, the medallion, and the wig. She kept two pistols in her desk drawer. She loved the.38. Its heft and bulk. But it was a revolver, and when she’d used it the first time she was damn near as scared as that creep Dolman when she heard it go off. She’d turned the volume on his sound system way up, and still she worried people would hear.
So this time around she’d decided to do a little research on-line that took all of ten minutes.
She typed HANDGUN and HOMEMADE SILENCER into Google.com and got hundreds of sites.
The book she bought with her sister’s VISA card cost fourteen bucks and was titled Homemade Silencers Made Easy. Used automobile oil filters were the favorite home item recommended by the right-wing crazy who wrote this slim volume. But Angel couldn’t see lugging around a dirty, oily hunk of metal in her purse.
Uh-uh. Angel preferred something clean.
Like a twenty-four-ounce plastic Mountain Dew pop bottle. No complicated threading device. Just a big plug of duct tape attaching the bottle to the barrel housing of a.22-caliber Ruger Mark II target pistol.
She bought the Ruger at a chain-store gun department using her sister’s driver’s license-same height, around the same weight, same eye color. And she’d worn her sister’s wig for the first time outside of the apartment.
In her sister’s glasses, and the wig, the resemblance was uncanny, although her sister’s face in the license photo was much thinner than her own. So the salesman had perused the license, taken her sister’s name and social security number, and submitted them to a computer background check.
Two weeks later Angel was the owner of a new pistol, which-according to the author of Homemade Silencers Made Easy-was a perfect fit for the clumsy but effective pop bottle taped to its barrel housing.
And, as the visit with Father Moros demonstrated, the silencer system worked just fine. The main thing was she had to get in close.
Angel slipped out of her working clothes and her underwear. She removed the new bathing suit from the shopping bag, held it up in front of her, and pitched a sidelong glance into her full-length mirror.
Close would not be a problem.