Death Sentence by Brian Garfield

noon Christmas Service inside the church came to an end, and the first worshipers to leave the building were in time to see a youth with a knife in his hand accost Mr. Tunick and wrest the cylindrical donations box away from him. Several of the witnesses ran down the church steps, trying to catch the thief or frighten him off.
    Suddenly a shot was fired. Witnesses have been uncertain where it was fired from; most of them believe it was fired from a passing automobile which then sped away. The bullet struck Mr. Tunick’s assailant, William O. Newton, 17, in the chest. Newton died less than twenty minutes later in an ambulance en route to city hospital.
    A police spokesman said the death bullet had been fired from a .45 caliber automatic pistol. Ballistics technicians are comparing it with bullets of the same caliber which yesterday were reported as having killed two alleged burglars on the South Side.
    â€œIf the bullets match up,” the spokesman said, “we’ll regard it as a strong indication that the vigilante is still in operation. He may have traded in his .38 revolver for a heavier .45.”
    The vigilante—whose existence is still disputed in some official circles—has been accused of at least eight killings in Chicago in the past week, all of them involving the deaths of convicted or suspected felons. If the three .45 caliber homicides can be linked to the eight committed with a .38 caliber revolver, it will raise the vigilante’s death toll to eleven.
    Captain Victor Mastro, in a telephone interview last night, said, “Eleven homicides in a week isn’t unusual for Chicago, unfortunately. Sometimes we have eleven in a single day. But if all of these have indeed been committed by one man, then it’s not too strong a statement to say we’ve got a one-man murder wave on our hands. We’re doing everything in our power to locate and arrest whoever is responsible for these killings, whether it’s one man or half a dozen.”
    Captain Mastro, of the Homicide Division, is in charge of the vigilante case. His closing remark may have been in reference to several heated statements made lately by members of civil rights organizations, religious leaders, spokesmen for community groups, and two members of the Chicago Crime Commission, one of whom, Vincent Rosselli, spoke up in a County Council meeting on Tuesday, demanding “an end to vigilante terrorism in the streets of Chicago.”

16
    H E MET HER for cocktails at the Blackstone; she was at a table reading a newspaper. She was in her working clothes—the orange tweed suit he’d seen before. “How’d your exploring go today?”
    â€œI did a couple of museums,” he said. “No point driving around in this blizzard.”
    â€œHave you seen the papers?”
    â€œYes.”
    She put a fingernail on the vigilante headline. “It’s got the machine in a real uproar.”
    â€œI imagine it would.” He contrived to make his voice casual. “Do you want another one of those?”
    â€œNot just yet.”
    He ordered scotch and water. The waitress repeated the words in a heavy French accent and went away wiggling the tail of her bunny costume.
    â€œI spent half the day in the Museum of Science and Industry. You could get lost in that place.” He’d been looking for muggers in the dark corridors where they liked to prey on wandering teen-agers and old women.
    â€œI keep wondering if it isn’t one of our esteemed mayor’s crazy stunts.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œThe vigilante,” she said. “It could be a cop, you know.”
    â€œI suppose it could be.”
    â€œOr the whole thing might be a phony. Suppose it’s something they’ve cooked up in the crime lab? The victims could have been shot by eleven different guns, for all we know—we’ve only got the crime lab’s word for it that there are only two guns