Cross Fire (22 page)

Max surprised me by showing up himself, along with two eager young assistants. We split up the list and agreed to come together at the end of the day to check out mealtime and evening sign-in at one of the larger facilities.

At five o’clock that afternoon, we were all at Lindholm Family Services when they opened their doors for dinner. The shelter served more than a thousand meals a day, to a clientele that was everything you might expect, and some things you might not.

There were families with kids, and people who talked to themselves, and folks who looked like they just came from
an office somewhere, all eating shoulder to shoulder at long cafeteria tables.

For the first hour or so, it was a frustrating repeat of the day before. None of the people who were willing to talk to me recognized Mitch’s picture or the old file photo I’d pulled of Steven Hennessey, aka Denny. And some people wouldn’t talk to the police at all.

One guy in particular seemed to be in his own world. He was sitting at the end of a table, turned away from everyone else, with his tray balanced on the corner. He mumbled to himself as I came over.

“Mind if I talk to you for a second?” I said.

His lips stopped moving, but he didn’t look up, so I held the picture down low where he could see it.

“We’re trying to get a message to this guy, Mitch Talley. There’s been a death in the family he needs to know about.”

This is the kind of half-truth you have to be comfortable with to get things done sometimes. We were all in street clothes today, too. Jackets and ties can be counterproductive in a place like this.

The man shook his head. “No,” he said, too fast. “No. Sorry. I don’t recognize him.” He had a thick accent that sounded eastern European to me.

“Take another look,” I said. “Mitch Talley? Usually hangs out with this guy named Denny. Any of it ringing a bell? We could use your help.”

He looked a little longer and ran a hand absently over his salt-and-pepper beard, which was matted halfway to dreadlocks.

“No,” he said again, without ever looking up. “I’m sorry. I do not know him.”

I didn’t push it. “All right,” I said. “I’ll be around for a while if you think of anything.”

As soon as I stepped away, he went right back to the mumbling, and on a hunch, I kept an eye on him.

Sure enough, I’d barely started talking to the next person before the mumbler got up to leave. When I looked over, his tray was still there — along with most of his dinner.

“Excuse me, sir?” I called out loudly enough that a few people around him turned their heads.

But not him. He just kept going.

“Sir?”

I was moving now, and that caught Sampson’s attention. The mumbling guy was clearly making a beeline for the exit. When he finally did look back, realizing we were coming after him, he broke into a run. He shot straight out the double doors and onto Second Street ahead of us.

OUR RUNNER WAS HALFWAY to the corner by the time Sampson and I got outside. He’d looked maybe early fifties to me, but he was moving pretty well.

“Damnit, damnit, damnit —”

Foot pursuit sucks. It just does. Never mind all the variables — it’s nothing you want to be doing at the end of a long day. But here Sampson and I were, tearing ass down Second Street after a crazy man.

I shouted a few times for him to stop, but that obviously wasn’t in his game plan.

The rush-hour traffic on D had bunched up enough that he made it across the street fairly easily.

I cut right behind him between a taxi and an EMCOR truck, while a couple of guys on lawn chairs outside the shelter shouted after us.

“Go, buddy! Go!”

“Dig, dig, dig, dig, dig!”

I was guessing they weren’t talking to me.

He ran straight on, into the little park by the Labor Department. It cut a diagonal between the high-rise buildings toward Indiana Avenue, but he never got that far.

The ground was terraced here, and when he lurched up and over the first retaining wall, it slowed him down just enough. I got one foot on the wall and both my hands on his shoulders, and we came down hard in a patch of ground cover. At least we weren’t on the sidewalk anymore.

Right away, he started scrabbling with me, trying to pull free, then trying to bite me. Sampson got there and put a knee down on his back while I stood up.

“Sir, stop moving!” John shouted at him as I started a quick pat down.

“No! No! Please!” he yelled from the ground. “I haven’t done anything! I am an innocent person!”

“What’s
this?
”

I had pulled a knife out of the side pocket of his filthy barn coat. It was sheathed in a toilet paper roll and wrapped in duct tape.

“You can’t take that!” he said. “Please! It is my property!”

“I’m not taking it,” I told him. “I’m just holding on to it for now.”

We got him up on his feet and walked him back over to the wall to sit down.

“Sir, do you need medical attention?” I asked. There was an abrasion on his forehead from where we went down. I felt a little bad about that. Trembling here in front of me, he just seemed kind of pathetic. Never mind that he’d been holding
his own until a minute ago, trying to bite off one of my fingers.

“No,” he said. “No.”

“You’re sure?”

“I am not required to talk to you. You have no reason to arrest me.”

His English was good, if a little stilted. And he obviously wasn’t as out of it as I’d thought, although he still wouldn’t look at us.

“How about this?” I said, indicating the knife. I handed it to Sampson. “Look, you just ran away from your dinner. You want a hot dog? Something to drink?”

“I am not required to talk to you,” he said again.

“Yeah, I got that. Coke okay?”

He nodded at the ground.

“One hot dog, one Coke,” Sampson said, and headed over to the carts on D Street. I could see Siegel and his guys on the sidewalk, waiting to find out what had happened. At least Max was keeping his distance; that was a welcome change.

“Listen,” I said. “You notice I haven’t asked for your name, right? All I want is to find the guy in the picture, and I think you know something you’re not saying.”

“No,” he insisted. “No. No. I am just a poor man.”

“Then why did you run?” I said.

But he wouldn’t answer, and I couldn’t force him. He was right about that. My hunch wasn’t enough to detain him.

Besides, there were other ways to get information.

When Sampson came back with the hot dog, the guy ate it in three bites, downed the soda, and stood up.

“I am free to go, yes?” he said.

“Take my card,” I said. “Just in case you change your mind.”

I gave it to him, and Sampson handed back the knife in the cardboard sheath. “You don’t need money for a call,” I said. “Just tell any cop on the street you want to talk to me. And stay out of trouble with that blade, okay?”

There was no good-bye, of course. He pocketed the knife and headed straight up D Street while we stood there watching him go.

“Talk to me, Sampson,” I said. “Are we thinking the same thing here?”

“I think we are,” he said. “He knows something. I’m just going to let him get around the corner first.”

“Sounds good. I’ll ask Siegel to finish up at the shelter. Then I want to get this Coke can over to the lab, see if it tells us anything.”

Our mystery man had just reached First Street. He turned left and continued on out of sight.

“All right, that’s my cue,” Sampson said. “I’ll call if there’s anything to tell.”

“Same here,” I said, and we split up.

WALKING AWAY from the police detectives, Stanislaw Wajda could feel his heart still bucking in his chest. This wasn’t over yet.
No. No. Not at all.

In fact, when he reached the corner and chanced a quick look back, they were still watching. They’d probably follow him, too.

It had been a mistake to run like that. It only made things worse. Now there was nothing to do but keep moving.
Yes.
Figure it out later.
Yes.

The grocery cart was right where he’d left it, in an alcove at the back of Lindholm. You weren’t supposed to use the back door here. In fact, very few people seemed to even know about it.

The alcove was just big enough to tuck the cart away — out of sight of the street — when he couldn’t keep an eye on it himself. He pulled it out now and proceeded up the road, slowly and cautiously, but ready to run again if he had to.

It felt good to move. The walking eased his mind. And the sound of the cart rattling and shimmying over the sidewalk was a kind of white noise that blocked out the other sounds of the city. It created a space where he could think clearly and focus on his work, and what to do next.

Now, if he could just remember where he’d been when he left off.

Mersenne 44, was that it?
Yes.
That was it. Mersenne 44.

It came back slowly, shimmering into his mind as if out of the shadows, until he could see it clearly.

See it and speak it.

The words tumbled out of him when they came, but quietly, in nothing more than a mumble. Nothing anyone would overhear, just enough to help make the number real once again.

“Two to the thirty-two million, five hundred eighty-two thousand, six hundred and fifty-seventh,” he said.

Yes.
That was it precisely. Mersenne 44.
Yes. Yes. Yes.

He picked up his pace now and continued up the street without looking back again.

IT WAS QUIET at the Fingerprint Analysis Section when I got there. The only person in the lab was one of the civilian staff, an analyst named Bernie Stringer who usually went by “Strings.” I could hear the heavy metal on his iPod blaring away while he worked.

“I hope that’s not priority!” he shouted, and then pulled out an earbud. “Narcotics is already kicking my ass here.” There were two full boxes of slides on the bench next to him.

“I just need some prints off of this,” I said, holding the Coke can up by the lip.

“Tonight?” he said.

“Yeah, actually. Now.”

“Knock yourself out, man. Cyanoacrylate’s in the drawer by the fuming chamber.”

That was fine by me. I like working in the lab every once in a while. It makes me feel smarter, even if printing is Forensics 101.

I went over to the fuming chamber and set the can upright inside. Then I put a few drops of cyanoacrylate, which is really just superglue, on a dish and sealed it all up to heat for a while.

In about fifteen minutes, I had a nice four-print set standing out on the surface of the can. Sampson’s paw print was there, too, but it was easy enough to differentiate, sizewise.

I dusted the ones I wanted with black powder and took a few pictures, just in case.

After that, it was only a matter of lifting them with clear tape and laying them back down on a card for scanning.

“Hey, Strings!” I shouted over. “Can I use your system?”

“Knock yourself out! Password’s B-I-G-B-U-T-Z.”

“Of course it is,” I said.

“Huh? What’s that?”

“Nothing.”

Once I got the prints onto the computer, it took IAFIS about half an hour to spit out four possible matches. A lot of the time, the final comparison is done by eye, which is good. It helps keep the process human.

And it didn’t take long for me to confirm one of the four.

The tented arch pattern on our man’s index finger was fairly distinctive, even as these little puzzles go.

With a few keystrokes, I had his name and record right there in front of me.

He was Stanislaw Wajda.

That explained the accent anyway. He’d been arrested just once, on a domestic assault charge in College Park, Maryland, a year and a half earlier. It didn’t seem like too much to go on.

But, in fact, I’d just stumbled onto a killer.

AN INITIAL ONLINE search for “Stanislaw Wajda” brought up all kinds of different results. When I filtered for news reports, I got a whole slew of year-old stories about a missing-persons case.

That seemed promising, and I clicked on the first one, from the
Baltimore Sun.