Cross Fire (20 page)

“You’ve got a nice place here,” Siegel said, looking out the window at the backyard. “Great setup in the middle of the city.”

“Thanks.” I handed him a short pour of the scotch, and then one for Bree and myself, and one with water for Nana.

“So here’s to fresh starts,” Bree said pointedly, and raised her glass.

“Here’s to summer coming!” Ali chimed in.

Siegel smiled down at him and put a hand on his shoulder.

“And here’s to this good family,” he said. “It’s really nice to meet you all.”

SOMETIMES THE BREAKS in a murder case come out of the blue — like a phone call on a Sunday morning, from somewhere you never expected.

“Detective Cross?”

“Yes?”

“This is Detective Scott Cowen from Brick Township PD, in New Jersey. I think we may have a line on your sniper problem up here.”

MPD had been fielding literally hundreds of tips every week on a newly dedicated sniper hotline. More than 99 percent of those calls were fantasy fiction or dead ends, but whatever Cowen was sitting on, it had gotten him past Dispatch. He now had my attention.

I turned my newspaper sideways and started writing in the margin next to the crossword.
Cowen. Brick Township.

“Go ahead,” I said.

“Yesterday afternoon, we pulled a white ninety-two Suburban out of the water over at Turn Mill Pond near here. The plates were already gone, no surprise, but I don’t think whoever put it there expected us to find it, at least not this fast. The thing was, we had an ultralight air show going on at the airport this weekend, and a couple of guys flying over saw something down there and called it in —”

“Yes?” I said. Cowen seemed to talk without taking any breath at all.

“Yeah, so it couldn’t have been in the water more than forty-eight hours, I’m thinking, because we still managed to pull some damn good prints off of it. Six of them had a dozen or more points each, which was great in theory, until none of them came up on my first pass through IAFIS —”

“Detective, I’m sorry, but can you explain to me how this connects to my case?”

“Well, this is the thing. I’m thinking we’ve got a dead end here, too, but then this morning I get a call from the state — apparently one of those six prints is a match for your UNSUB down there.”

Now we were getting somewhere
. I stood up off the couch and started toward the attic, double time. I needed my charts and notes right now.

UNSUB stands for Unknown Subject, which was the only designation we had for our phantom gunman. The print he’d left behind on the night of the first sniper hit, and then again at the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial, had been deliberate, like a calling card. This new print sounded a lot more like a mistake to me, and at this point in the game, I loved a good mistake.

I wondered whether all of the remaining prints from the car belonged to the same guy, or if maybe we’d just gotten a line on both members of our sniper team.

That thought, I kept to myself for the time being.

“Detective Cowen from Brick Township, you may have just made my month. Can you send me everything you have?” I asked.

“Give me your e-mail,” he said. “They’re all scanned and ready to go. We’ve got six full prints, like I said, plus another nine partials. It was really just a lucky break that we found that vehicle so fast —”

“Here’s my e-mail,” I said, and spit it out for him. “Sorry to rush you, but I’m a little eager to see what you’ve got.”

“No problem.” I heard typing in the background. “Okay, they’re on the way. If you need anything else, or want to come take a look around,
or whatever,
you should just let me know.”

“I will,” I said.

In fact, I’d already mapped out the route to Brick Township, New Jersey, on my laptop while he was talking. If this turned out to be what it seemed, I’d be meeting Detective Cowen face-to-face before the day was out, and he and I would be taking a look around —
or whatever.

THE LIMITATION ON THESE new prints from New Jersey was that I had nothing to compare them to. No criminal records anyway. Accordingly, there was no way to know whether they’d all come off the same person or not.

I thought about Max Siegel’s offer of help the other day. With the Bureau’s resources, he probably could have gotten further with these than Detective Scott Cowen had. But I just wasn’t ready to jump in there.

Instead, I put in another request with my Army CID contact in Lagos, Carl Freelander. Better to go with a known quantity, I figured, even if he was halfway around the world and maybe getting sick of my calls.

“Twice in one month, Alex? We’re going to have to get you one of those punch cards,” he said. “Tell me what I can do for you people.”

“Meantime, I owe you another drink,” I told him. “And,
for what it’s worth, I may just be chasing the same ghost as the last time, but I need to be sure. I’ve got six more prints I want to run through the civil database. Maybe all from the same person, and maybe not.”

Cowen had been right about the quality of the prints. MPD’s standard is thirteen points, meaning anywhere a ridge or line ends, or intersects with another ridge or line. If two prints line up in thirteen or more of those places, it’s a statistical match, and I had half a dozen viable scans to work with.

Carl told me to send them along and leave my line open for an hour or so.

True to his word, he called me back fifty minutes later.

“Well, it’s a good news / bad news kind of thing,” he said. “Two of the six prints you sent me came up military. You got the left index and middle fingers on a guy named Steven Hennessey. U.S. Army Special Forces, Operational Detachment–Delta, from nineteen eighty-nine to two thousand two.”

“Delta Force? There’s a red flag,” I said.

“Yeah, the guy saw action in Panama, Desert Storm, Somalia — and get this: he ran long-gun training for ground forces in Kunduz. Sounds a hell of a lot like a sniper to me.”

I felt as if my slot machine had just come up bar-bar-bar. We’d almost certainly just found our second gunman, and this one had a name.

“What about a last known address?” I said. “Do we know where Hennessey is now?”

“Yeah, that’s the bad news,” Carl said. “Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky. Hennessey’s been dead for years, Alex.”

THE THREE-AND-A-HALF-HOUR DRIVE to New Jersey flew by. Probably because my mind was running the whole time. It was too bad I was so pressed, because I would have liked to have visited my cousin Jimmy Parker at his Red Hat restaurant along the Hudson in Irvington. God, I needed a break, and a good meal.

Maybe someone was buried down there in Louisville, but I was willing to bet that it wasn’t the real Steven Hennessey. Not with his prints on that Suburban.

The question was, who had Hennessey become in the last several years? Also, where was he now? And what were he and this phantom partner of his doing in New Jersey?

My plan was to meet Detective Cowen at Turn Mill Pond, where the car had been pulled out of the water. I wanted to catch that scene while there was still daylight, then follow him back to the impoundment lot to see the vehicle itself.

But when I called Cowen to tell him I was almost there, he didn’t pick up.

The same thing happened when I got to the meeting point at the south end of the pond. I was pissed, but there was nothing to do now except get out and take a look around.

Turn Mill was one of several bodies of water in the Colliers Mills Wildlife Management Area, which encompassed thousands of acres. From this spot, all I could see were trees, water, and the dirt road I’d just driven in on.

Plenty of privacy for dumping a car anyway.

The ground at the edge of the waterfront was heavily rutted and tamped down, presumably where the police had pulled the Suburban out. It looked to me as though the vehicle had been pushed into the water from the edge of a wooden bridge where the pond narrowed into a channel.

Looking down from above, one would assume the water was plenty deep enough, but it obviously wasn’t. In any case, it wasn’t the kind of thing you could undo.

Once I’d taken all of that in, I headed back to my car. I figured it couldn’t be too hard to the find the police station in town, but that’s when I saw a cruiser coming up the road,
fast.

It sped along the pond a ways, curved into the woods, and then came back out again. It stopped right behind where I’d parked.

A uniformed officer, a blond woman, got out and waved as I came over.

“Detective Cross?”

“That’s me.”

“I’m Officer Guadagno. Detective Cowen asked me to drive out here and bring you back as quickly as possible.
There’s been a homicide in town, a woman by the name of Bernice Talley.”

I assumed she just meant that Cowen had been pulled away from my case.

“Do we need someone else to let us into the impoundment lot, or can you do that for me?” I asked Guadagno.

“No,” she said. “I mean, you don’t understand. Cowen wants you to come to the scene. He thinks Mrs. Talley’s murder may be related.”

“To the Suburban?” I said. “To my sniper case?”

The cop fiddled with the brim of her hat. She seemed a little nervous. “Maybe both,” she said. “It’s nothing conclusive, but this same woman’s husband was found shot dead two years ago, right over there.” She pointed to a patch of woods about a hundred feet up the shore. “The ME called it a hunting accident at the time, but nobody ever came forward. Cowen figures whoever dumped that Suburban didn’t just stumble onto this place, and frankly we don’t get too many homicides around here. He’s naming the son, Mitchell Talley, as a person of interest in all of it, both deaths.”

She stopped then, her hand on the open car door, and looked at me more directly than before.

“Detective, this may be none of my business, but do you think this guy could be your shooter down in Washington? I’ve been following the case since it broke.”

I demurred. “Let me go take a look at that scene before I say anything,” I told her.

But, in fact, the answer to her question was yes.

THE POLICE VEHICLES in front of Bernice Talley’s home were two-deep when we got there. They had a tape line around the house, while the neighbors watched from the fringes. I had no doubt that all of them would be locking their doors and windows that night and for many nights to come.

My escort officer walked me inside and introduced me to Detective Scott Cowen, who seemed to be running the show. He was a tall, barrel-chested guy, with a shiny bald head that caught the light as he talked — and talked.

Just like on the phone, he briefed me with a long but mostly informative monologue.

Mrs. Talley had been found dead on her kitchen floor by the boy who mowed her lawn every Sunday. She’d been shot once at close range through the temple, with what looked like a nine millimeter. They were still working on time of death, but it was sometime within the last seventy-two hours.

The woman was believed to have been living alone, ever since the son, Mitchell, had moved out two years earlier — just a short while after the father was killed. Also, there was some word through the grapevine that the elder Mr. Talley had been known to knock his wife around over the years, and maybe to strike Mitchell, too.

“That could go to motive, at least on the father’s death,” Cowen added. “As to why he’d want to come back here and kill his poor mother, I wish to hell I knew. And then, of course, there’s all of these.”

He showed me a shelf in the living room, crowded with trophies and ribbons. They were all shooting awards, I saw — New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Club, Junior NRA, various fifty- and three-hundred-meter competitions, target skill awards. Most of them were first place, some second and third.

“The kid is an ace,” Cowen said. “Some kind of prodigy or whatever. Maybe also a little… you know. Simple.”

He pointed at a framed photo on one of the side tables. “This is him, maybe ten years ago. We’re looking for something more recent we can use.”

The boy in the picture looked to be about sixteen. He had a round face, almost cherubic, except for the dull look in his eyes and the half-assed attempt at a mustache. It was hard to imagine anyone taking him too seriously at that age.

The guns are his power,
I thought.
Always have been.

I looked back over at all the trophies and awards. Maybe this was the one thing Mitchell Talley had ever been good at. The one thing in his life he’d ever known how to control. On the face of things, it seemed to make sense.

“When was he last seen around here?” I asked. “Did he ever come to visit?”

Cowen shrugged apologetically. “We’re still not sure. You’re catching us right at the beginning of this thing,” he said. “We don’t even have prints on the house yet. We just found the mother. You’re lucky that you’re here.”

“Yeah, lucky me.”

I had the impression that the high profile on this sniper case was making people nervous around here, too. Everyone seemed to know who I was, and they were all giving me a wide berth.