Sniper's Moon

by Carsten Stroud

Genres: Police Procedurals; Crime Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

“A first-rate police thriller.”—Jonathan Kellerman

Detective Frank Keogh. He’s a man who trades on nerve and luck—and a cop who’s about to become an executioner’s target.

Detective Frank Keogh has a rare gift—for killing. He picked it up in the jungles of Vietnam and perfected it on New York’s mean streets. It’s a talent that comes in handy when you’re a sniper for the NYPD. But over the years his calling has produced a numbness that has his partner worries: Is Frank finding it too easy to pull the trigger now?

Then, on a steamy August night in the South Bronx, a cop connected to Frank is found bizarrely murdered. No one really believes that Keogh is capable of such a brutal act . . . until a second savagely mutilated body is found, and the MO echoes a famous case solved by Frank’s father, a retired detective. Suddenly, Frank Keogh is a fugitive, dodging cops and meeting violence as he takes off on a cross-country chase to the Southwest desert . . . desperately searching for the man who framed him—and the father who could be his last, best hope of staying alive.

“An epic police thriller . . . crackling with narrative energy . . . and a deep-grained savvy about cop ways and mores.”—Kirkus Reviews

Release date: January 18, 2012

Publisher: Bantam

Print pages: 428

Sample

PROLOGUE
 
August 17, 1968
Two o’clock in the morning
 
John Keogh was a man without metaphor. Madelaine was his wife and her body was as well known to him as his own; a sequence of sensations and images, surfaces, tastes, scents, warmth in the hollow places of her neck, the rising of muscle and bone along the line of her shoulders, her black hair with a soft light in it fanned out across the white sheet in the pale-blue glow from the window, her voice a wine-scented vibrato, sharp and somehow dizzying in the darkness of their room. Keogh was on his right side, close to her hip, aware of her heat, his left hand on her chest so he could feel her voice, her left knee touching his thigh. The sheet, rumpled and twisted from their movements, was now pulled away to uncover his wife from her breasts to her knees.
 
Something about the openness of it, the dark shadow at the base of her rounded belly, her strong tanned legs apart, her heavy white breasts with the nipples hard and violet in the slow blue light—all of this made Keogh hard again, slowly, in time to his pulse, the way hardness comes back to men in their forties.
 
Madelaine felt him at her hip.
 
“Well, Johnny … this is a compliment.”
 
Keogh was past talk. He was feeling a violence that was disturbing to him. He did not think of himself as a man with passions. Men with passions seemed weak to him. He dealt with them every day, down in the city, men who had a hundred reasons for the damage they did, every one of them rooted in passion.
 
Madelaine took him in her left hand.
 
“After twenty years and a child, Johnny?” Her smile changed as Keogh moved his hand down over the soft swell of her belly, through the delicacy of her hairs, sliding a finger into her, the heat and the silkiness making his heart pound in his thick chest.
 
For a long moment she moved against his hand, her legs stretching and opening. When she pulled him down to kiss her, Keogh could feel the nails on her right hand cutting into his neck. There was a singing of blood in his ears. Then she was up and gone, taking the sheet with her, leaving him sprawled stupidly in the middle of the empty bed, on his back, watching her as she went to the glass doors that opened onto the backyard. Blue light from the swimming pool poured in through the sheer curtains. A blue aura shone around her hair and her hips and her shoulders.
 
“Johnny, you look like a moth pinned to a card. Get up and come for a swim.” She turned, pulling the sheet around her, and opened the glass doors.
 
“What? Skinny-dip? Madelaine … come back here. What about the Bukovacs?” Keogh was sitting up now, fumbling in the tangle of bedclothes for his pajama bottoms, finding them, tugging them up and over his hips and his erection. The sight of this made her laugh, a sharp clear sound that went right across their yard.
 
“Madelaine! Come inside!”
 
She laughed again and, turning, let the sheet fall to her feet. She stepped out onto the damp stones of the patio. Keogh stood there for another three beats, staring at his wife’s naked bottom, watching her as she went on tiptoe across the flagstones and out onto the lawn. Halfway to the shimmering blue of the in-ground pool, she turned and waved him on.
 
The sight of his wife standing naked on the family lawn, in the middle of the family lawn furniture, the outrageousness of the thing filled him up and pulled him out the door. Natural velocity carried him to her, standing there in the blue light, her tanned body marked by white breasts and the violet delta below her blue-white belly, her hands on her hips, smiling at him and feeling the cool night wind on her skin. Keogh came down the steps and across the lawn to her, stepping on the cuffs of his pajamas, the grass wet and slippery between his toes.
 
“What if they see us?” he whispered, looking over toward the dark bulk of the Bukovac house beyond the cedar hedge.
 
“What if they do? Irina runs around her backyard in a towel all the time. I’ve seen you lusting after her, you hound. This just makes us even. Come on.”
 
She took his arm and led him over to the tiles at the edge of the pool. All the lights were on. The water was as clear as the air above it, tinted a tourmaline blue by the round porthole lights set into the pool walls a few inches below the surface. Keogh and his wife stood by the waterside for a while, arms around each other. Keogh was thinking about the water. It would be cold. Leaves had blown into the pool. There was a cluster of them in the deep end. He’d have to get them out with the vacuum. God, he thought. Romantic sonovabitch, aren’t you?
 
“John … I got a letter from Frank today.”
 
Keogh felt a dull surge of old anger. Oh, yes, little Frankie would be sure to write his mother. Where was a letter for his da? No no. Go straight to mother. Standard for that boy.
 
“Well, is he doing all right?”
 
She thought about it for a while.
 
“Yes. Well, he says he is. It’s over a month old. Military mail. It went from Danang to Honolulu. He doesn’t say a lot. That boy from Union City? He’s related to your desk sergeant?”
 
“Nicolucci?”
 
Madelaine shook once under his arm. He pulled her closer.
 
“He stepped on … a Betty Crocker? Something like that?”
 
“A Bouncing Betty. A kind of bomb they put in the ground.”
 
Keogh had been learning the names of a new war. His son was twenty now, a rifleman in the Sixth Cavalry. Keogh had read all about the Tet offensive, about Hue and Khe Sanh. Cronkite had talked on the news about America losing this war. He got secondhand stories from other cops about Arc Lite creepback, and hearts and minds, and body counts. It seemed a damned stupid little war to John Keogh, fought on the far side of the moon for thieves and criminals.
 
Well, his own war hadn’t made much sense either. Sticking a flag on Suribachi—they’d asked those men to do it again for the cameras. Half of Iwo was still in Japanese hands. Most of the men who raised that flag were dead in a week. And Kwajalein was worse, except there’d been no cameras.
 
Madelaine was silent for a longer time. Keogh could feel her thinking of Frank over there in a strange country, a country where they put bombs in the ground and called them cute names. He stroked her hair and she turned to hold him. She looked down at his waist.
 
“Johnny … what happened to Steve and the Twins?”
 
He smiled, a slow revelation of ragged teeth in a face full of planes and angles.
 
“They’re in there somewhere. Whyn’t you go look for them?”
 
Madelaine pushed him hard toward the water. He staggered at the brink, waving his arms, getting his balance.
 
He recovered and lunged for her. She darted away around the edge of the pool, hair flying, on her toes, slipping away from him, Keogh coming after her, a lumbering heavy man coming down hard on his bare heels. He had just turned forty-eight. His wife was forty.
 
They played at the poolside for a time, Madelaine pretending to elude him, Keogh lurching after her, regretting all the cigarettes and some of the red wine he drank at the B and V in Hunts Point.
 
Finally she slipped by and stepped lightly up onto the diving board. Keogh, breathing hard, came up after her. She walked out to the end and did a ballerina spin.
 
Keogh stood and looked at her for a while, taking her in, remembering all the things there were to remember about this woman. Her dark eyes, the sounds of her various voices, her tanned and untanned secrets, and her way of going.
 
She knew he was admiring her. She felt a rush of strong emotion for the man, for the years they had seen together. For his fidelity. Solid John Keogh, honest as stone, serious and steady. He’d loved her for twenty years in his slow tidal way. She thought of him as inexorable. He was like that on the job, so they told her. She tried hard not to know anything about his days or nights in the city. What was the point of the two of them knowing such things?
 
Tonight had been a fine moment between them. They had not fought. They had talked about Frank and they had not fought. She was happy for both of them. Madelaine turned to face the water. Stirred by a night wind, the water burned tourmaline and cerulean blue. It shone up at her, ruffled and restless and glittering.
 
Keogh looked down at the water. The leaves, that cluster of dead leaves … something …
 
Madelaine arched, an alabaster figure in the blue-green light.
 
The cluster of dead leaves … too brown for high summer. Keogh tried to see through the wavering light. Not leaves …
 
“Madelaine …”
 
Birds. Dead birds. Four of them … Why?
 
“Madelaine—the lights!”
 
But she was already in the air.