“No questions, baby. Just do as I say.
Right now.
Go ahead.”
Once the girl had disappeared back into the duplex, Denny figured it was time to insert himself into the mix. “How you doing?” he said, all friendly-like. “I’m Mitch’s buddy and expert driver, but you can call me Denny.”
Her eyes flitted his way just long enough to throw a few poison darts. “Mister, I don’t have to call you shit,” she said, and then turned back to Mitch. “And I asked you what the hell you’re doing here. I don’t want you around here. Neither does Destiny.”
“Go ahead, man,” Denny said, and nudged him in the shoulder.
Mitch pulled a small envelope out of his pocket. “It ain’t much, but here.” Inside was a twenty, two fives, and fifty rumpled singles. He tried to hand it to her right through the broken screen, but she shoved it back at him.
“Oh,
hell no!
You think that little envelope gon’ make you a daddy?” Her voice dropped. “You’re just an old mistake, Mitch, that’s all. Far as Destiny’s concerned, her daddy is dead, and that’s how we gon’ keep it. Now, are you two getting off my property — or am I calling the police?”
Mitch’s round face looked about as long as it could get.
“At least take this,” he said.
He opened the screen door, and when she stepped back fast, he dropped the stuffed monkey on the floor at her feet. It
was pathetic to watch. Besides, Denny had seen all he needed to.
“Alrighty, then,” he said, “we got a long drive back to Cleveland, so we’ll just be on our way to O-hi-o. Sorry to bother you, ma’am. I guess this little visit wasn’t such a good idea after all.”
“You think?” she said, and slammed the door in both their faces.
On the way down the walk, Mitch looked like he wanted to cry.
“It sucks, Denny. She’d be proud if she knew what we were doing. I wanted to tell her so bad —”
“But you didn’t.” Denny threw an arm around his shoulder and spoke close. “You stuck to the mission, Mitchie, and that’s what counts. Now come on — let’s hit ourselves a Taco Bell on the way out of town.”
While he walked around to the driver’s side of the car, Denny reached inside his jacket and flipped the safety on the Walther nine millimeter holstered there. As it turned out, Mitch was more of a hero than he’d ever get to know. He’d just saved his own daughter’s life.
Alicia may have been fairly cunty, but she was clueless; and there was no way in hell Denny was going to shoot a five-year-old girl who didn’t even know who Mitch was. The whole point of the assignment was threat assessment, and there was no threat here.
If the man back in DC didn’t like it, he could find himself another contractor.
ACTUALLY, IT HAD been kind of a fun day — relaxing and surprising, especially Mitch’s pretty ex-wife. It was just after dark when they reached Arlington that night. Mitch had spent most of the trip watching the side of the road, sighing and tossing around like someone who couldn’t sleep.
But now, as they came up on the Roosevelt Bridge, he sat bolt upright, looking straight ahead through the windshield.
“What the hell is that, Denny?”
Cars were backed up on the highway in either direction. There were cruisers with lights flashing on both sides, and uniformed officers out on the road. It wasn’t just a traffic jam, and it didn’t look like an accident either.
“Traffic checkpoint,” Denny said, realizing what it was.
The city had been instituting them for a few years now, but only in the really violent neighborhoods. He’d never seen anything like this before.
“Something big must have happened. Like, really big.”
“I don’t like this, Denny.” Mitch’s knee started bouncing. “Ain’t they been looking for a Suburban since we made that hit in Woodley Park?”
“Yeah, but a dark-blue or black one. Besides, they’re stopping everyone, see? Hell, I wish we had some papers to sell in this traffic,” Denny said, as upbeat as he could make it. “Might earn back some of that gas money we spent today.”
Mitch wasn’t buying it. He stayed all hunched down and tense as they crawled along toward the head of the line.
Then, out of the blue, Mitch said, “Where
did
we get the gas money, Denny? And that envelope for Alicia? I don’t get how we’re paying for this.”
Denny gritted his teeth. The one thing Mitch could usually be counted on for was a distinct lack of probing questions.
“You know what happened to that curious cat, don’t you, Mitchie? D-E-D, dead,” he said. “You just focus on the big stuff and let me handle the rest. Including this.”
They were coming up on the checkpoint now, and an NBA-size officer motioned them forward.
“License and registration, please.”
Denny reached into the glove compartment and handed them over without a blink. Here’s where it paid to work for the right people. “Denny Humboldt” had a record as clean as a show cat’s ass — even that parking ticket would be history by now.
“What’s going on, Officer?” he asked. “It looks big.”
The cop answered with a question, while his eyes played over the piles of junk in the backseat. “Where are you two coming from?”
“Johnsonburg, PA,” Denny said. “Nowhere you ever want to go, by the way. The place is a hole.”
“How long have you been gone?”
“Just since this morning. Day trip. So I guess you can’t tell me anything, huh?”
“That’s right.” The officer handed him back his items and motioned them on. “Move along, please.”
As they pulled away, Mitch pried his hands off his knee and heaved a big sigh. “That was too damn close,” he said. “That sonofabitch knew something.”
“Not at all, Mitchie,” Denny told him. “Not at all. He’s like everybody else — none of ’em have a clue, not a clue.”
It didn’t take them long to find some coverage on the radio. Word was coming in fast that the DC Patriot sniper had struck again. An unnamed police officer had been gunned down from a distance, right there on the DC side of the Potomac.
Sure enough, as they crossed the Roosevelt Bridge into the city, they could see a whole mass of law enforcement parked along Rock Creek Parkway off to the left. Denny hooted out loud. “Check out the piggy convention! Looks like Christmas came early this year.”
“What are you talking about, Denny?” Mitch still looked a little glazed from the checkpoint stop.
“The dead cop, man. Aren’t you listening?” Denny said. “It’s all going down exactly like we hoped. We just bagged ourselves a goddamn copycat!”
NELSON TAMBOUR HAD been shot just before dusk, on a grassy strip of no-man’s-land between Rock Creek Parkway and the river. The highway was already shut down by the time I got there, all the way from K Street to the Kennedy Center. I parked as close as I could and walked the rest of the way in.
Tambour had been a detective with NSID, the Narcotics and Special Investigations Division. I didn’t know him personally, but that didn’t make this incident any less of a nightmare. MPD had just lost one of its own, and horribly so. Detective Tambour had been found with his skull blown half open — a large-caliber bullet had passed right through his head.
It was dark now, but several klieg lights had the scene lit up like the inside of a football stadium. Two tents had been erected off to the side, one as a command center, and another
for evidence collection out of sight of the pesky news choppers circling overhead.
We also had Harbor Patrol on the water, keeping pleasure craft at a good distance from the shore. And command staff were everywhere.
When I saw Chief Perkins, he motioned me right over. He was huddled off to the side with the assistant chiefs from NSID and Investigative Services, as well as with a woman I didn’t recognize.
“Alex, this is Penny Ziegler from IAD,” he said, and the knot in my stomach tightened right up.
What is Internal Affairs doing down here?
“Something I should know about?” I said.
“There is,” Ziegler told me. Her face was just as creased with tension as ours were. Murdered cops tend to make everyone wiggy.
“Detective Tambour’s been on no-contact status for the last month,” she said. “We were going to be filing criminal charges against him later this week.”
“What charges?” I said.
She looked to Perkins for a nod before she went on. “Over the last two years, Tambour oversaw an undercover operation at three of the big housing projects in Anacostia. He’s been skimming half of everything they’ve seized, mostly PCP, coke, and Ecstasy. He was reselling it through a network of street dealers in Maryland and Virginia.”
“He may have been on a drop right here,” Perkins added with a shake of his head. “They found a key of coke in his trunk.”
Four words flashed through my mind:
Foxes in the henhouse.
Suddenly Tambour was a lot more in line with the snipers’ victim profile than he’d been a minute ago.
At the same time, though, he was an unknown to the general public. He hadn’t been in the headlines like the others, at least not yet, and that was a difference.
An important one? I couldn’t be sure, but I also couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe something was off here.
“I want to impose radio silence on anything to do with the investigation,” I told Perkins. “Whoever made this hit obviously has some kind of inside line.”
“Agreed,” he said. “And, Alex?” Perkins put a hand on my arm as I turned to go. His eyes looked strained. Maybe even a little desperate. “Work the hell out of this,” he told me. “This is close to getting out of control.”
If this hit wasn’t by our sniper team, it already was out of control.
FBI PERSONNEL STARTED showing up right after I did. That was definitely a double-edged sword for me. Their Evidence Response Teams bring some of the best toys in the business — but it also meant Max Siegel wouldn’t be far behind.
In fact, we bumped heads over Nelson Tambour’s body.
“That’s a hell of an exit wound,” Siegel said, coming into my airspace with his usual sensitivity. “I heard the guy was dirty. Is it true? I’ll find out anyway.”
I ignored the question and answered the one he should have been asking. “It was definitely long-range,” I said. “There’s no stippling at all. And, given the body position, the shots probably had to come from over there.”
Directly across from us, maybe 250 yards offshore, we could see flashlight beams crisscrossing the underbrush on Roosevelt Island. We had two teams over there, scouring for shells, suspicious footprints, anything.
“You said shots,
plural?
” Siegel asked.
“That’s right.” I pointed at the slope behind the spot where Tambour had gone down. Four yellow flags were stuck into the ground, one for each of the slugs that had been recovered so far.
“Three misses and one hit,” I said with a sigh. “I’m not sure we’re looking at the same gunmen here.”
Siegel peered back and forth between the river and Tambour’s body several times. “Maybe they were firing from a boat of some kind. There’s a decent chop out there today. Could explain the multiple shots, the misses.”
“There’s no cover on the open water,” I said, “and all kinds of risk for an eyewitness. Besides, it’s always been one shot, one kill with these guys. They don’t miss.”
“The sniper’s motto,” Siegel said. “What about it?”
“I think it’s a point of pride for them. If nothing else, the work’s been immaculate. Up until now.”
“So it’s more likely that we have another wackjob with a high-powered sniper rifle running around out there?”
I could just hear the disdain rising in his voice.
Here we go again.
“Isn’t that exactly the contingency your office has been working on?” I said. “That’s what Patel told me — at the meeting you blew off.”
“I see.” Siegel rocked back on his heels. “So are you working up any theories of your own these days — or just going by what you overhear at the office?”
My guess was that he felt threatened by me, and it helped him if he could goad me into some kind of unprofessional behavior. I’d already put a toe in, but I pulled back now and focused on the ground around Tambour’s body instead.
When it became clear I wasn’t going to respond, he tried again from a different angle.
“You know, it’s possible these guys are just that good,” he said casually. “Terrorism One Oh One, right? Best way to stay ahead of the police is to keep everything unpredictable. That’s a valid perspective on this, right?”
“I’m not ruling anything out,” I said without turning around.
“That’s good,” he said. “It’s good that you learn from your mistakes. I mean, isn’t that what tripped you up with Kyle Craig?”
Now I did look up.
“He basically just outthought you, right? Just kept changing up his game? I mean — that’s what he’s still doing, isn’t it? Even today?” Siegel shrugged. “Or am I getting that wrong, too?”
“You know what, Max? Just —
stop talking.
” I stood up to face him now, getting closer than I needed to be. I wasn’t trying to “manage” Siegel anymore. I just needed to say what I was going to say.