Cross Fire (10 page)

For Mitch’s part, he liked the hoopla well enough, but as the days slipped by, he seemed to get a little more sluggish, a little less engaged. There was no doubt about it in Denny’s mind: these “missions” were the thing that kept Mitch focused. Nothing else did it for the big guy.

So on the seventh day of no action, Denny told Mitch it was time to go again.

They were driving on Connecticut, away from Dupont Circle in rush-hour traffic, which was perfect, as it turned out. The longer it took to crawl past the Mayflower Hotel, the more they could scope it out on the first pass.

“That the place?” Mitch asked, looking up from the passenger seat.

“We’ll do a full recon tonight,” Denny said. “Tomorrow night, we go.”

“What kind of crumbum we bringing down this time, Denny?”

“You ever heard of Agro-Corel?”

“Nope.”

“You ever eat corn? Or potatoes? Or drink bottled water? They were into everything, man, a whole vertically integrated conglomerate, and our boy sat right at the top of the pyramid.”

“What’d he do?”

Mitch kept picking Taco Bell crumbs out of his lap and eating them, but Denny knew he was listening, too, even if some of it went over his head.

“Man lied to his company. Lied to the Feds, too. He sent the whole place down the shitter and took some hundred-million-dollar parachute, while everyone else took the shaft — no pensions, no jobs, nothing. You know what that’s
like, don’t you, Mitchie? Doing everything you should, and still getting the short end while the Man just keeps getting fatter?”

“Why ain’t the Man in jail, Denny?”

He shrugged. “How much does a judge cost?”

Mitch stared out the windshield, not saying anything. A light changed, and the traffic surged forward again.

Finally, he said, “I’ll put a bullet in his brain stem, Denny.”

THE NEXT NIGHT, they did things a little differently, trying to shake up the routine. Denny dropped Mitch off with both packs in an alley behind the Moore Building, then parked a good four blocks away and walked back. Afterward he’d pull the car around again.

Mitch was waiting inside the building. Neither one of them spoke while climbing the twelve flights of stairs. The packs were sixty pounds each. It wasn’t a picnic anyway.

On the roof, they could hear traffic noises from down on Connecticut but could see nothing until they got right up to the edge.

The whole facade of their building was built up, so all anyone could see from the street was a twenty-foot-high triangle of brickwork instead of the usual flat roofline. The spot was like a bird blind, with a perfect view of the Mayflower Hotel across the street — still one of the most famous hotels in DC.

Denny scoped things out while Mitch got himself set up for the turkey shoot.

The target, Skip Downey, had some very regular habits. He liked one suite in particular, which made Denny’s job a hell of a lot easier than it might have been.

Right now, the curtains were open, which meant Mr. Downey hadn’t checked in yet.

Twenty minutes later, though, Downey and his “friend” were waiting around for the bellman to take his twenty-dollar tip and skedaddle out of the suite.

Downey had an embarrassing reddish-blond comb-over to go with his million-dollar bank account. And apparently he liked the Mensa type. His companion today had her hair up in a bun, with heavy horn-rimmed glasses and a little business suit that was way too short for any real librarian to wear.

“Bow-chicka-wow-wow,”
Denny sang — a little porn theme for the occasion. “Two windows down and four over — you got it?”

“I’m there,” Mitch said. He was eyeing over his own scope and flipped off the safety as he watched. “Nice-looking piece of ass, Denny. Shame to mess her up, you know?”

“That’s why you’re just going for the shoulder, Mitchie. Just enough to put her down on the ground. Mr. D. first, and then the girl.”

“Mr. D. first, and then the girl,” he repeated, and settled into his final stance.

Downey poured a couple of scotches on rocks. He drained his own and then walked straight over to the suite’s living room window.

“Shooter ready?” Denny asked.

“Ready,” Mitch said.

The man of the moment reached up to close the heavy coffee-colored drapes, his arms spread in a wide V.

“Send it!”

AT TEN THIRTY that night, I was standing on the roof of the Moore Building, looking across to the hotel suite where Skip Downey had just joined a small but growing fraternity of those recently deceased by sniper fire.

This latest made three incidents — the magic number. Our guys were now serial killers in the public eye.

Connecticut Avenue down below was a forest of mobile broadcast towers, and I knew from experience that the blogosphere was about to officially catch on fire with this thing.

“Can you see me?” I said into my radio.

I had Sampson on the wireless, from inside the hotel room. He was standing right where Skip Downey had gone down.

“Wave your arm or something,” he said. “There you are. But, yeah — that’s pretty good cover.”

Someone behind me cleared his throat.

I wheeled around and saw Max Siegel standing there.
Great. Just who I didn’t want to see.

“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“No problem,” I said. Unless you counted the fact that he was up here at all.

“What have we got?” He came over to get the same view I had, and looked out across Connecticut. “How far a shot is that? Fifty yards?”

“Less,” I said.

“So they’re obviously not trying to top themselves. At least, not in terms of distance.”

I noticed he said “they” and wondered if he’d been on that FIG conference call — or if he’d come up with it on his own.

“The MO’s the same otherwise,” I said. “The shots came from a standing position. Caliber seems like a match. And then there’s the target profile, of course.”

“Bad guy out of the headlines,” he said.

“That’s it,” I said. “Plenty of people got screwed over by this Downey guy. The whole thing has vigilante justice written all over it.”

“You want to know what I think?” Siegel asked — of course, it wasn’t really a question. “I think you’re oversimplifying. These guys aren’t hunting, not in the traditional sense. And there’s nothing personal in the work at all. It’s completely detached.”

“Not completely,” I said. “That print they left at the first scene had to have been deliberate.”

“Even if it was,” Siegel said, “that doesn’t mean the whole thing was their idea.”

Already I was getting tired of the jawing. “Where are you going with this?”

“Isn’t it kind of obvious?” he said. “These guys are guns for hire. They’re working for someone. Maybe there’s an agenda — but it belongs to whoever’s footing the bill. That’s who wants all these bad boys dead.”

He had laid out his opinion as fact, not to be questioned — as usual. But, still, the theory wasn’t completely off the wall. I owed it to myself to consider it, and I definitely would. Score one for Max Siegel.

“I’m a little surprised,” I told him honestly. “I’m used to the Bureau sticking to harder evidence and staying away from supposition.”

“Yeah, well, I’m full of surprises,” he said, and put an unwelcome hand on my shoulder. “You’ve got to widen your mind, Detective, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

I minded very much, but I was determined to do the one thing Siegel seemed incapable of — taking the high road.

I LEFT THE MAYFLOWER crime scene soon after that, glad for an excuse to get away from Siegel.

Our second victim that night, Rebecca Littleton, was at George Washington University Hospital with a single gunshot wound to the shoulder. Word from the emergency room was that it had been a penetrating trauma, as opposed to a perforating one. That meant the bullet still had to come out. If I hurried, I could catch her before surgery.

When I got there, they had Littleton on a gurney in one of the blue-curtained ER cubicles. The truss over her shoulder was stained dark with Betadine, and whatever the IV meds were doing for her physical pain, they sure weren’t helping her mental state — she still looked ghost white and scared as hell.

“Rebecca? I’m Detective Cross from Metro Police,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”

“Am I, like, being charged with anything?” I don’t think
she was much more than eighteen or nineteen. Barely legal. Her voice was tiny, and it quavered when she spoke.

“No,” I assured her. “Nothing like that. I just need to ask you some questions. I’ll try to make this easy, and fast.”

The truth was, even if someone wanted to pursue the solicitation angle, there were no witnesses to it — with the possible exception of the man who had shot her.

“Did you see anything tonight that might give you an idea of who did this? Anyone outside the window? Or even just something out of place in the hotel room?”

“I don’t think so, but… I don’t remember very much. Mr. Downey started to close the curtains, and then I was just… on the floor. I don’t even know what happened after that. Or right before.”

In fact, she’d been the one to drag a phone off a side table and call for help. The incident would probably come back to her in pieces, but I didn’t push it for now.

“Was this the first time you’d met up with Mr. Downey?” I asked.

“No. He was kind of a regular.”

“Always at the Mayflower?”

She nodded. “He liked that suite. We always went to the same room.”

A nurse in pink scrubs came into the cubicle. “Rebecca, hon? They’re ready for you upstairs, okay?”

The curtain around us slid open, and several other people were there now. One of the residents started unlocking the wheels on her gurney.

“Just one more question,” I said. “How long were you in the room tonight before this happened?”

Rebecca closed her eyes and thought for a second. “Five minutes, maybe? We just got there. Detective…
I’m in college. My parents
…”

“You won’t be charged with anything, but your name will probably get out. You should call your parents, Rebecca.”

I walked with her as she was rolled out into the hall and toward the elevators. There didn’t seem to be any family or friends around, and it broke my heart a little that she had to go through this alone.

“Listen,” I said. “I’ve been where you are. I’ve had a bullet in my shoulder, and I know how scary this is. You’re going to be fine, Rebecca.”

“Okay,” she said, but I don’t think she believed me. She still looked terrified.

“I’ll check on you later,” I said, just before the elevator doors slid shut between us.

I HOOFED it back to the car and started scribbling notes against the steering wheel, trying to capture all the different threads running through my head.

Rebecca said she and Downey had been in the room for only a short time. That meant the snipers were set up and ready for them. The killers knew exactly when and where they needed to be, just like they knew when Vinton and Pilkey would be outside the restaurant, and just like they knew Mel Dlouhy’s neighbors were out of town when they came by to murder him.

Whoever was behind this had a firm handle on the victims’ habits, the movements of the people around them, and even the most private details of their otherwise public lives. It struck me that this kind of intelligence gathering took time, manpower, and know-how, and quite possibly money.

I thought about what Siegel had said to me on the roof of
the Moore Building tonight.
These guys are guns for hire.
I hadn’t ruled it out then, and I was a step closer to ruling it in now. I just didn’t like thinking that Siegel had beaten me to it. Usually I’m not like that, but he just rubbed me the wrong way.

There was obviously some kind of specific and disciplined agenda behind these killings. If a shooter as skilled as this one had wanted Rebecca taken out, she would have been dead for sure. But she didn’t fit the profile; her only crime had been to land in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not so for the others. By the apparent rules of this game, Rebecca didn’t deserve to die, but Skip Downey and the other Washington “bad guys” did.

So whose game was it? Who was writing the rules? And where was it all heading?

I still couldn’t dismiss the possibility that our gunmen were operating on their own. But I also was just paranoid enough by now — or maybe experienced enough — that a list of scarier alternatives was taking shape in my mind.

Could this somehow be government backed? Some domestic agency? An international one?

Or was the Mob behind it somehow? The military? Maybe even just a very well-connected individual, with deep pockets and a serious ax to grind?

In any case, the most important questions were still left hanging: Who did they have their eye on next? And how the hell were we supposed to protect every high-profile scumbag in Washington? It just couldn’t be done.