Cross Fire (25 page)

When I opened the door, an empty expanse of roof was in front of me, with the top of the Accountability Office visible across G Street beyond that. The rain was coming down hard,
but you could still hear the sirens and shouting coming from the Harman.

I signaled for one officer to go right and the other to follow me out in the direction of the street noise.

As we came around toward the southwest corner, a row of raised skylights was blocking our view.

I saw the shadow of something by the farthest one — a pack of gear, or maybe just a garbage bag — and pointed it out to the cop next to me. I didn’t even know the guy’s name.

We worked our way along the roof with our lights off, staying low just in case.

Once we got close enough, I could see that someone was still there. He was on his knees, facing the Harman and not moving.

My Glock was up. “Police! Freeze!” I aimed low for his legs, but there was no need, as it turned out. As soon as the other officer hit him with a flashlight beam, we saw clearly the dark hole at the back of his head, washed clean by the rain. His body had lodged in the corner of the half wall that ran around the roof, holding him up that way.

One look at his face, and I recognized Mitch Talley. Now, suddenly, my legs were like Jell-O. This was too much, it really was. Mitch Talley was dead? How?

“Jesus.” The patrol officer with me leaned in for a better look. “What is that, nine millimeter?”

“Call it in,” I told him. “Get an APB on Steven Hennessey, aka Denny Humboldt. He couldn’t have gotten far yet. I’ll call CIC. We need to shut this neighborhood down — now. Every second counts.”

Unless my instincts were way off here, Hennessey had
just broken up the Patriot sniper team, for whatever reasons of his own.

If I were him, I would have been running like hell. I would already be out of Washington and I’d never look back.

But I wasn’t Hennessey, was I?

DENNY DROVE AROUND for hours. He stayed north and stopped at a couple of different drugstores in Maryland. He bought a Nationals ball cap, a shaving kit, a pair of weak reading glasses, and a box of chestnut-brown hair dye.
That should do it.

After another stop, in a Sunoco bathroom in Chevy Chase, he made his way back down to the city. He parked in Logan Circle and walked the two blocks over to Vermont Avenue, where the familiar black Town Car was waiting.

Zachary gave a rare unguarded smile as Denny slid into the backseat.

“Look at you,” he said. “All set to fade into the woodwork. I’ll bet you’re good at it, too.”

“Whatever,” Denny said. “Let’s get this done. So I can fade away, as you say.”

“It sounds as though things went off well enough, assuming the news reports are to be believed.”

“That’s correct.”

Zachary stayed where he was. “They didn’t say anything about an accomplice, though. Nothing about Mitch.”

“I’d be surprised if they did,” Denny said. “This lead investigator, Cross, likes to keep his cards close to the vest. But, believe me, it’s taken care of. And I don’t really want to talk about Mitch anymore. He did his job well.”

The contact man studied Denny’s face a little longer. Finally, he reached over the front seat and took the pouch from the driver. It seemed right this time, but Denny unzipped the bag and checked, just to be sure.

Zachary sat back now and seemed to actually unclench a little. “Tell me something, Denny. What are you going to do with all that money? Besides getting a new name, I mean.”

Denny returned the smile. “Put it somewhere safe, for starters,” he said, and tucked the pouch into his jacket as if to illustrate the point. “Then after that —”

There was no rest of the sentence. The Walther fired from inside his pocket and caught the driver in the back of the head. A spray of blood and gray matter hit the windshield.

The second shot took care of Zachary, right through those pretentious horn-rims of his. He never even got to reach for the door. It was over in a matter of seconds — the two most satisfying shots Denny had ever taken.

Except, of course, not Denny. Not anymore. That was a pretty good feeling, too. To leave this all far behind.

No time for celebrations, though. The car had barely gone quiet before he was out on the sidewalk and back to doing what he’d always done best. He kept moving.

THE TWENTY-FOUR HOURS following the hits at the Harman were a full-court press like I’d rarely seen in Washington. Our Command Information Center had traffic checks going on all night; Major Case Squad put both units on the street; and NSID was told to drop all nonessential business, and that was just inside the MPD.

Details were operating out of Capitol Police, ATF, and even the Secret Service.

By morning, the hunt for Steven Hennessey had gone from regional to national to international. The Bureau was fully activated and looking for him everywhere it was possible for the Bureau to look. The CIA was involved, too.

The significance of these murders had really started to sink in. Justices Summers and Ponti had been the unofficial left wing of the Supreme Court, beloved by half the country and
foxes in the henhouse,
basically, to the other half.

At MPD, our late-afternoon briefing was like a march of the zombies. Nobody had gotten much sleep overnight, and there was a palpable kind of tension in the air.

Chief Perkins presided. There were no introductory remarks.

“What are we looking at?” he asked straight-out. Most of the department’s command staff were there, too. Every seat was taken, and people were standing around the edge of the room, shifting on their feet.

“Talk to me,” he said. “Anyone.”

“The hotline and website are on fire,” one of the district commanders, Gerry Hockney, reported in. “It’s all over the place, literally. Hennessey’s a government operative. He’s holed up in a storage facility in Ohio, he’s in Florida, he’s in Toronto —”

Perkins cut him off. “Anything credible? I need to know what we
have,
not a lot of useless bullshit.”

“It’s too early to say, to commit to anything. We’re overwhelmed, sir.”

“In other words, no. Who else? Alex?”

I waved from where I was. “Waiting on a weapons report from that double homicide on Vermont Avenue last night. Two John Does found shot dead in a car, with cash on them but no IDs.

“It was definitely nine millimeter, but we don’t know yet if it was the same weapon that killed Mitch Talley.”

A huge buzz went up around the room, and I had to shout to get everyone’s attention back.

“Even if it was,”
I went on, “the most it can tell us about Hennessey in the short term is that he was in the city sometime between twelve and four a.m.”

“Which means he could be anywhere by now,” Sampson said, giving the shorthand version for me. “Which means we should wrap this shit up and get back out there.”

“Do you think Hennessey was working for the two dead guys in the car?” someone asked anyway.

“Don’t know,” I said. “We’re still trying to track down who they were. It does seem like he’s cleaning house, though. Whether or not he’s finished is another question we don’t have an answer for.”

A lieutenant in the first row spoke up. “Do you mean finished cleaning house, or finished with these sniper killings?”

The questions were natural, but they were starting to get on my nerves. I held my hands out in a shrug. “You tell me.”

“So, in other words,” Chief Perkins cut in, “we’re nearly twenty-four hours out and we know less than we did before these murders, is that it?”

Nobody wanted to answer. There was a long silence in the room.

“Something like that,” I said finally.

TWO MORE DAYS of nerve-rattling quiet went by without much progress or any sign of Steven Hennessey or even anyone who might know him. Then, finally, there was some movement over at the Bureau. Max Siegel called me himself to tell me about it.

“We got something over the Web,” he said. “Anonymous, but this one checked out. There’s a guy going by Frances Moulton, supposedly fits Hennessey’s description down to the toenails. He’s got an apartment over on Twelfth, except nobody’s seen him for approximately two months. Then, this morning, someone spotted him coming out of there.”

“Someone — who?” I asked.

“That’s the ‘anonymous,’” he said. “The super at the building backed it up, though. He hasn’t seen this Moulton character in months either, but he gave me a positive ID on Hennessey’s picture when I brought it over.”

Either this was huge or it just felt that way given the zeros we’d racked up until now. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference, when you’re desperate.

“What do you want to do with this?” I asked. Whatever it meant, it was still Siegel’s lead, not ours.

“I’m thinking you and I might sit up on this place for a while, see what happens,” he said. “If you want, I’m game. See? I can change.”

It wasn’t the answer I’d expected, and my own pause spoke for itself.

“Don’t bust my balls, here,” Siegel said. “I’m trying to play nice.”

In fact, it seemed like he was. Did I love the idea of spending the next eight hours or more in a car with Max Siegel? Not really, but more than that, I didn’t want to be on the outside of this investigation for a second.

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “I’m in. Where can I meet you?”

I EVEN BROUGHT coffee.

Siegel brought some, too, so there was plenty of caffeine to go around. We parked in a Bureau-issue Crown Vic on the east side of Twelfth Street between M and N. It was a narrow, tree-lined block with a lot of construction going on, but not at the Midlands. That was Frances Moulton’s place and, if we were on the right track, Steven Hennessey’s address as well.

The apartment in question was on the eighth of ten floors, with two large windows facing the street. They were both dark when we got there. Max and I settled in for the long haul.

Once we’d said everything there was to say about the case, it got a little awkward — long silences set in. Eventually, though, the conversation loosened back up. Siegel threw me a softball, the kind of thing Bureau guys ask when they don’t have something better to say.

“So, why’d you get into law enforcement?” he asked. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

I smiled into my lap. If anything, he was trying too hard to do the buddy-buddy thing.

“Hollywood just didn’t work out. Neither did the NBA,” I deadpanned. “What about you?”

“You know. The exotic travel. The great hours.”

For once, he got a laugh out of me. I’d decided before coming that I wasn’t going to just sit there and hate him all night. That would have been like torture.

“I’ll tell you this much,” he said. “If things had gone differently? I think I could have been a pretty good bad guy, too.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “You have the perfect murder in your head.”

“Don’t you?” Siegel said.

“No comment.” I popped the lid on my second coffee. “Most cops do, though. Perfect crime anyway.”

After another long pause, he said, “How about this: if you could take someone out — someone who really deserved it — and you knew you could get away with it, would you be torn?”

“No,” I said. “That’s too slippery a slope for me. I’ve thought about it.”

“Come on.” Siegel laughed and leaned back on the car door to look at me. “Say it’s just you and Kyle Craig alone in some dark alley. No witnesses. He’s all out of ammo and you’ve still got your Glock. You’re telling me you don’t pull the trigger now and ask questions later?”

“That’s right,” I said. The Kyle reference was a little weird, but I let it slide. “I might want to, but I wouldn’t do it. I’d take him in. I’d like to bring him back to ADX Florence.”

He looked at me, grinning as if he were waiting for me to break.

“Seriously?” he said.

“Seriously.”

“I don’t know if I believe you.”

I shrugged. “What do you want me to say?”

“That you’re a human being. Come on, Alex. You can’t get by in this business without at least a little walk on the dark side.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Been there, done that. I’m just saying, I wouldn’t pull the trigger.” Whether or not it was true, I really wasn’t sure. I just didn’t want to go there with Siegel.

“Interesting,” he said, and turned back to face the front door of the Midlands. “Very interesting.”

ALEX WAS LYING through his teeth. He was a good liar, but he
was
lying. If he had any idea he was sitting across from Kyle Craig right now, that Glock would be out in a heartbeat, and one round shy a second later.

But that was the whole point, wasn’t it? Cross didn’t have a clue. Any doubts about that were well behind them. This couldn’t possibly be more delicious, could it? No, it could not.

Kyle sipped his coffee and went on. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?” he said offhandedly.
Interesting
— Siegel’s speech and inflection were now more natural to him than his own.