Dead Is Dead (The Jack Bertolino Series Book 3) by John Lansing Read Free Book Online Page B

dwelling with a wraparound porch.
    Jack knocked on the front door, got no response, and tried again.
    “She’s at work,” Mike shouted from his driveway. “It’s the Montenegro woman, owns the deli down on Venice. She’d be okay with you looking around. She’s devastated.”
    Jack waved his thanks and stepped off the porch into the side yard. A rangy stand of bamboo partially obscured the view toward the Sanchez house, but if Jack crouched next to the house, it made a perfect sniper’s nest.
    He continued into the backyard and sized up the chain-link fence to the street beyond. An easy up and over protected from neighbors’ eyes. Jack made a mental note to canvass the street one over, see if anyone had seen or heard anything unusual the day of the shooting.
    Jack walked back along the side of the house, inspecting the tidy bed. He was looking for footprints or markings, but knew the rain had probably destroyed any evidence left behind.
    And then he saw it.
    A shiny brass object shone from beneath a wet tuft of grass.
    He squatted down and carefully pulled back the grass without disturbing the object.
    It was a spent .22 shell casing.
    Jack had a momentary thought to call Gallina, but vetoed the notion. If the information was made public, the shooter would be put on notice, making the hunt for him or her that much more difficult. Returning to his car, Jack popped the trunk and pulled out a small brown paper bag he stored with his evidence kit.
    He snapped on a pair of rubber gloves as he jogged back. First, he pulled out his cell phone and snapped shots of the side of the house, the view toward the Sanchez property, the view over the back fence, the location of the spent shell casing, and then the shell itself. Then Jack carefully bagged the evidence. As a final precaution he crisscrossed the area to see if he could spot anything else of interest. He came up empty.
    Jack heard a car pull to the curb across the street. He went back to the sniper position and watched as Juan Sanchez and Jeff jumped out of the lawyer’s Camaro. The young man ran toward the front door and into the arms of his father, who came out onto the porch and lifted his son in a bear hug. Both men started wailing, and Jack flashed on Chris and the powerful love he felt for his own son.
    Mrs. Sanchez ran out and wrapped her arms around her men. The distraught family disappeared back inside the house.
    Jeff followed slowly in the family’s wake. Jack was sure he saw the young lawyer swipe away a few tears of his own before closing the door behind him.
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    Jack slid behind the wheel of his Mustang, and as he drove away from the curb, he replayed the logistics of the double homicide, as he now understood it.
    Someone had killed Tomas Vegas from a sniper’s nest. A lying-in-wait charge, added to the murder beef, meant the shooter would be eligible for the death penalty. It didn’t feel like a straight-up gang execution. Not their MO. Jack needed everything he could find on Tomas Vegas. He’d have Cruz compile a list of anyone who had a grudge against the Lenox Road banger and see where it led.
    All in all, Jack thought, a fruitful visit to the scene of the crime. When he had amassed enough evidence, he might even inform Lieutenant Gallina.
    In the meantime he phoned Molloy, the medical examiner who was handling the autopsies. He would be in a position to check the shell casing for prints—on the QT—and answer a few of Jack’s questions about the lead slug he had pulled out of the skull of six-year-old Maria Sanchez.

Seven
    Chris had always been the perfect son, Jack thought as he booted up his iMac and clicked on Chris’s number. Jack’s stomach clenched as he waited for him to pick up.
    Chris had weathered his parents’ brutal divorce while maintaining a 4.0 grade average at Saint Johns Prep, and won a full baseball scholarship to Stanford. No small feat. One of the reasons Jack moved to the West Coast was the proximity to his son. Father