“You know the model?” he asked, cracking the cylinder open. It was loaded.
“Smith & Wesson Model 642,” I said. “A snubbie. Five rounds. As accurate as you are. Well, out to about fifteen feet.”
“A good holdout gun?”
I nodded. “Very good. It’s got a shrouded hammer, so nothing to snag on your clothes when you pull it out. Light. Small. Puts up with neglect.”
“Like sitting in the back of a junker until you need it.” Bloch put the gun back in the holster and secured it. He had already removed the tire and the jack and had removed some of the crap that always seems to accumulate in the wheel well. I got down on the ground and ran my hands along the underside of the frame. My hands encountered a small, rectangular anomaly.
“Oh, ho, I say. For the third time.” I tugged at the rectangle and the magnet holding the box in place gave way. I stood. My turn for show and tell. The box had a latch but no lock. I opened it. A key chain with a plastic flag of Mexico for a fob and four keys dropped in my hand. I flipped through the keys.
“Ford,” I said. “Toyota.”
Bloch pointed at two others. “Those are house keys. Front and back door?”
“Or a front door and a garage,” I said. I went to the front of the car and tried locking the door with the Toyota key, then plopped down in the driver’s seat and tried it in the ignition. It didn’t work either time. I held the key up. “Think this starts up a Corolla sitting in the driveway of a house in Chantilly?”
He nodded, then pulled out his cell phone and dialed a number. He lit a cigarette while he waited. Someone on the other end picked up and he spoke for a few minutes, walking off a little ways and staring into space like people do when they’re on the phone. He waited, pulled out a small notebook and jotted something down, then turned back to me after hanging up.
“We got two keys off of Danny’s body.”
“An older model Toyota?” I said, gesturing at the Camry.
“And a house key,” he said. “No markings on the key chain.”
“Call back. Ask where the parking tickets were handed out.”
He held up the notebook. “Dumont Street, Southeast.”
“Not too far from where Danny’s body was found.”
Bloch nodded.
“You haven’t thought of everything,” I said. “How about our ride back to the gate?”
He pointed down the quarter-mile-long row of cars. In the distance, I could see a figure that might be wearing a green jacket get into a golf cart.
I looked at the smirk on Bloch’s face and shook my head.
Chapter Eleven
“So you didn’t know about the Camry?” I asked. “It’s not a HIDTA car?”
We were sitting in a skuzzy booth in a doughnut shop and swatting ideas back and forth. We’d driven back separately to the HIDTA offices where I dropped off my car. Bloch grabbed the keys that had been bagged at the scene of Danny’s murder and then we headed for the doughnut shop to grab some coffee and think. We both knew we were close to something, but wanted to get it right. My own anxiety was probably written all over my face—the clock could still be ticking down to the next murder—as it was on Bloch’s, but we needed to stop and figure out what we’d just unearthed at Blue Plains.
“Nope,” Bloch said, slurping through the plastic lid. He winced and pulled the lid off to let some of the heat escape. “You feel like a cop again? Sitting in a doughnut shop?”
“I never liked doughnuts,” I said. “It was snapping on a pair of surgical gloves and giving the car the once-over that gave me déjà vu.”
“Show me a cop that doesn’t like doughnuts.”
I made a frame around my face with the forefinger and thumb of each hand. “You’re looking at him.”
“What about coffee? You don’t like coffee?”
“I love coffee, but you don’t have to get it at a doughnut shop,” I said. “Anyway, about the Camry.”
“It’s Danny’s.”
“But not Libney’s,” I said.
“Right. It’s part of his undercover life.”
“So, the Camry’s a holdout car that says junkie or dealer all over it that his wife probably never knew about. It’s got a small armory in the trunk and room for more. Which wouldn’t be that unusual for an undercover cop—if his boss knew about the guns, too.”
“This boss didn’t know.”
“You said he had a long leash. Was it this long?”
Bloch shook his head and put his coffee down. “No. I mean, a lot of cops have holdout guns. Big deal. And maybe they own a junker they drive to work. Undercover has all that and more. They have to live the life. But no cop is going to buy all that on his own dime.”
I held up the keys we’d gotten from the HIDTA evidence locker, thinking. “What’s this other key to?”
“Storage facility? Apartment? Another house?”
I turned the keys over in my hand. “These keys were on his body when he was killed. They’re his junkie keys, the one he needs for the Camry. But his everyday keys were in the spare box under the Camry.”
Bloch nodded, seeing it. “He was working his undercover thing, which is why we found the piece-of-shit Camry keys on his body. But he wasn’t going to drive home in the Camry. He expected to swap it with something else.”
“So he could go home to his normal life,” I said.
“Right. Like punching out of one life and starting another.”
“If he did that, he would’ve had to leave the Camry somewhere, right? He wasn’t going to take the secret car home to his wife. But he was killed before he could do the swap.”
“Which means he had another car. And it should still be wherever he left it,” Bloch said and reached for his notebook. He flipped some pages back and forth, then pulled out his cell phone and dialed a number. He talked for a few minutes, hung up, said “Hold on a minute” to me, and dialed again. He waited, spoke for a minute more, and jotted something down in his notebook. He sipped coffee as he read his notes.
“It was the Bronco,” he said. “It was booted, then scheduled to be towed. Probably right out to Blue Plains like the Camry. Paul Garcia paid the ticket and picked it up a few weeks ago.”
“The overdue notice got sent to his home,” I said, “because it’s registered there.”
“Right.”
“Where was
it
ticketed?”
“Chalmers Street, Southeast. Near St. Elizabeth’s.”
I frowned. “Barry Farm?”
“Yeah,” Bloch said. Then, “Oh, hell. Witherspoon.”
“Yeah,” I said. I pulled out the fast food and gas station receipts I’d salvaged from the search of the Camry and shuffled through them like cards. “I don’t know all of these addresses, but the two or three I know are all down there. Terry Street, Holtz Avenue, Fairlington.”
Bloch put the lid back on the coffee and stood up. “Time to check out Chalmers Street.”
I stood, too. “You think?”
. . .
We drove to the address where the Bronco had been towed. It was no surprise it had been ticketed; Chalmers was a busy street with businesses in both directions for six blocks. The sounds of honking cars, people yelling to each other, and the beeping of trucks in reverse filled the air. The neighborhood wouldn’t have won any prizes for community safety, but the constant traffic and commerce at least meant it wasn’t stagnant.
Bloch eased into a spot across from where the Bronco had been ticketed. The block was made up of a lineup of the ’50s-era, two-story, brown and gray row houses that had sprung up in the boom after World War II. They cover about two-thirds of DC and if you’re an urban history buff, you can track the growth of the city by them, like counting the rings on a tree.
This clump had seen better days. There were eight separate doors in the run of connected homes. Plywood covered the windows of several and at least one had an eviction notice tacked to the door. Artless graffiti, simple vandalism, covered the porches and fronts of two. Bottles and papers had been caught and mounded in the corners where the brick steps met the sidewalk.
“Knock on some doors, see what crawls out?” I asked.
“Sounds good,” he said.
We skipped the one with the eviction notice. Of the seven remaining, four were occupied. Most were black grandmothers or young mothers with two or three kids in tow. None of them recognized the picture of Danny Garcia that Bloch showed them. Or they didn’t want to admit to it. In any neighborhood, under most circumstances, people denied the simplest things when asked by a cop. I’d had people deny the car on the curb outside their house was theirs, deny they lived in the house they were standing in. It was instinct. The less the fuzz knew, the better. To be honest, we half expected it. We were looking for the reaction more than anything. Did they gasp, or shake their head too much, or react strangely? Unfortunately, Bloch and I didn’t get any of that.
“You want to try the more direct route?” Bloch asked me after we’d struck out on the seventh house.
“Beats knocking on all the doors again,” I said.
I took the key and we tried it on the three houses that hadn’t answered. It fit into two of them but didn’t work and on the third it wouldn’t even go in the lock. We tried it on the house with the eviction notice, but it didn’t work there, either. We stood on the sidewalk, stumped.
“This is the right place, isn’t it?” Bloch asked, looking at his notebook. “Where the car got the ticket?”
“Yeah,” I said and pointed to the corner opposite us. “That gas station is one of the ones we have a receipt for. And I think we passed a Burger King at the end of the block that he stopped at, too.”
“What do you want to do? It wouldn’t be hard to look up the landlord’s name, work backwards from that.”
“We’re here, though,” I said. I headed for the alley that split the block from the rest of the street. “Let’s try one more thing.”
The row backed up onto another alley where people dumped their garbage, not always with the benefit of a can or a bag. Two cars were parked there, hugging the wall so close that they almost touched. The houses had windowless, industrial-looking back doors made of steel and painted a dull black or green. I counted down the end of the row until I got to the house with the eviction and tried the key on the back door. No go.
I moved down row to the houses that hadn’t answered. On the second one I tried, the key went in and turned easily in the lock.
“Bingo,” I said with a grin.
We drew our guns and I opened the door. Nothing came out and I fumbled around the inside wall for a light switch. A weak overhead lamp came on and we covered each other while we did a quick look around. Since the whole place consisted of the room we were in, a closet, and a bathroom, it took approximately ten seconds to ascertain that we were alone.
“I’m an idiot,” Bloch said, holstering his gun. “A basement apartment. Different tenants out front. Of course the key didn’t work.”
“You’ve worked on a task force too long,” I said. “It’ll rot your brain, all those lackeys doing your work for you.”
“Lackeys? I’m lucky they gave me a gun.”
Like we’d done for the Camry earlier in the day, we split the apartment to cover more ground. I worked counter-clockwise from the door, Bloch the opposite. The place was missing the kind of cozy touches Amanda might try to put in, but for an eight-hundred-square-foot efficiency, it was packed with stuff. On the side with the longest wall, a couch and a chair sat catty-corner to each other with a coffee table between. A dilapidated end table covered with coffee rings propped up one end of the couch.
A folding cot took up another corner with a foot locker at its…well, feet. A card table with two cheap wire-frame chairs was pushed up against a wall near the kitchenette. The refrigerator had a plastic bucket full of single-serving non-dairy creamers, a five-pound bag of coffee, and two cases of Coke. An old coffee maker squatted on the counter with a stack of a thousand coffee filters next to it. There was no china in the cupboards, just a few dozen foam plates and cups, paper napkins, and plastic utensils. No food in any of the cabinets.
“Got something,” I said when I looked in the foot locker. Inside were ammo boxes for a .38 and shells for a twelve-gauge shotgun. There were zip ties, the kind used in place of handcuffs. And there was a host of first aid supplies, ranging from the antiseptic sprays and bandages you could get in any pharmacy to some not-so-over-the-counter doses of injectable pain killers and antibiotics.
“Does it beat this?” Bloch asked from the open closet.
I walked over and peeked over his shoulder, then whistled. Inside was a small armory. Two shotguns were propped in a corner. Both appeared to have been cleaned and oiled recently. A Kevlar vest without the ceramic inserts hung from a peg. The rest of the hanger space was devoted to variations on camouflage or black clothing. Two pairs of well-worn black combat boots, identical size, were lined up neatly on the floor of the closet.
“Holy crap,” Bloch said. He pushed the clothing on the hangers to one side. Several wooden pegs hammered into the wall acted as a homemade rack for a compact, crazy-looking gun straight out of the future. It was all harsh angles and made of some dull, synthetic material. Bloch took it off the rack, holding it gingerly by the ends. He gave it a once-over, then handed it to me. It was about the length of my forearm, with a folding wire stock that, if extended, would make it two-and-a-half or three feet long.
“H&K?” I said. “An MP7, I think. Sub-machine gun. Not exactly standard-issue at HIDTA?”
“I think we’ve already established Danny didn’t do anything standard. That thing is right out of
Star Wars
,” Bloch said. He took the gun back from me and placed it back on the rack. “You find anything?”
I showed him the contents of the locker. He shook his head. “What do we have?”
I turned to the room. “Besides the hardware? Lots of caffeine. No long-term living. No plates, cups, food. I guess that’s where Burger King came in. No personal effects.”
“It’s a bolt-hole,” he said. “Or a staging area.”
“It ain’t a love nest,” I said. “Unless Danny was seeing a gun nut with no sense of romance and a thing for carryout.”
“Is that it? Besides the filing cabinet?”