Free The Double Tap (Stephen Leather Thrillers) by Stephen Leather Page A

Cramer picked up the toothpaste and smiled, wondering who had done the shopping and why they’d chosen the tartar control formula. He cleaned his teeth and shaved and then climbed into the bathtub and stood under the shower. There was no shower curtain and water cascaded off his body and onto the tiled floor. He noticed a fresh bar of soap in a shell-shaped soap dish and he used it to wash himself thoroughly. He hadn’t realised how long it was since he’d felt truly clean.
            He wrapped himself in clean towels and sat on the bed and read another of the files as he dried himself. It was an American killing; the victim had been a Chicago lawyer. The lawyer had several Mob figures as clients and the Chicago newspapers had suggested that the killing was one of a series of tit-for-tat murders, as two crime families fought for control of lucrative concrete-pouring contracts. The police file was never closed, though, and the latest addition, a memo from the Marseilles field office of the Sûreté – in response to an official Chicago Police Department enquiry – pointed out that the lawyer’s widow had remarried within the year and that she and her new husband were now living in the South of France. The new man in her life was twenty years younger and a good deal poorer than her husband had been. The file also contained a photograph of them together, she with the over-tight cheeks and slightly too-open eyes that indicated a face lift, he with a weightlifter’s chest, slick-backed hair and movie star looks. She’d been questioned several times but there was no evidence linking her to the assassin. It looked like the perfect crime, but Cramer wasn’t concerned about who’d financed the murder, it was the killer he was interested in.
            The fact that it was the same man in both shootings wasn’t in question. Two shots, one to the face, a second to the chest: that appeared to be the killer’s trademark. When Cramer had attended the SAS’s Killing House in Hereford, he too had been trained in the ‘double tap’ – two shots fired in quick succession. However, the SAS instructors had stressed the importance of aiming at the torso so that there was less chance of missing – head shots were deemed too risky.
            The killer had walked into the lawyer’s office and shot him dead in front of his secretary. The secretary’s description of the killer was detailed, but unhelpful: brown hair, brown eyes, just under six feet tall, lightly tanned skin. Any or all of those characteristics could be altered, Cramer knew. Hair dye, coloured contact lenses, lifts in the shoes, sunbeds or tanning cream. There was an artist’s impression based on the secretary’s description, and a computer-generated photo-fit, and while they did resemble each other, they had little in common with the pictures in the other files Cramer had read.
            All the files on killings which had taken place in America contained FBI Facial Identification Fact Sheets, which had been filled in by investigating agents prior to the photo-fits being generated. They contained a list of facial features, and witnesses were asked to tick the pertinent boxes. Cramer took the sheets from the various files and compared them. They were just as disparate as the photo-fit pictures. The shape of the head could be categorised as oval, round, triangular, long or rectangular. All of the boxes had been ticked by at least one of the witnesses. The mouth could be classed as average, both lips thick, both lips thin, lips unequal, large or small. Most of the witness reports ticked the lips as average, but there was at least one witness who ticked each of the other categories. The consensus seemed to be that the man’s eyebrows were average, his ears were average, his chin was average and his nose was average, but there was no consistency. Two witnesses said the man had a double chin, one said his eyebrows met in the middle, another said he had