Difficult Run (8 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

M
.J. STOPPED BY HER APARTMENT early the next morning.
 
She showered and changed into her pantsuit, then drove to Anacostia Station where she wrote an interim report on the investigation, carefully omitting any mention of Doc Wonders.
 
She handed it to Detective Sergeant Tony Lauretta.

Tony had spent ten years in the Marine Corps.
 
He had a wife and two children who he saw very little of as a Marine, so he decided it was time for a career change and joined the Park Police.
 
Tony was about five feet eight inches tall with extremely close-cropped hair and built as solidly as anyone M.J. had ever seen.
 
Although he tried to present a gruff manor, he was actually very kind and considerate in dealing with the people who reported to him.

“Glad you’re turning this in, M.J. The Lieutenant has been bugging the hell out of me about whether there’s been any progress in the case,” he said.

“I’ll try and give you updates so he’ll stay off your back,” M.J. said.
 
“By the way, sorry I’ve been missing so many roll calls. I’m spending a lot of time at Great Falls Park on the investigation.”

“That’s OK, M.J.,” he replied.
 
“I’ll let you know if anything important comes up.”

“Thanks, Tony,” M.J. said and left for the park.

She changed into her running clothes and headed for Doc’s campsite.
 
When she reached the bottom of the path, Lola appeared at the top with her leash in her mouth, wagging all over.
 
M.J. went up the path and found Doc sitting under the tent awning in his usual chair.

“Did you teach her to do that?” M.J. asked, pointing to the dog.

Doc raised his open right hand and said, “Honest, she figured it out herself, M.J.
 
You know, ‘whatever Lola wants.’
 
How about a cup of coffee?”

“Sure, I’ll have a quick one.
 
Seen or heard anything of interest lately?” M.J. asked.

“Not a damn thing,” Doc replied. “How’s your investigation coming?”

“Slowly,” she replied.
 
“We’ve interviewed several people but haven’t gotten any leads so far.
 
It’s early though, so maybe we’ll get a lucky break.”

“Well, I’ll keep my eyes and ears open,” he said.

M.J. finished her coffee and picked up the leash, which Lola had conveniently placed at her feet.
 
“C’mon girl.
 
Let’s do our run,” she said.

They ran the Old Carriage Road to the Ridge Trail, then over the top of the hill to Difficult Run.
 
As they started up Difficult Run, M.J. was struck by the difference in the atmosphere of the place in daylight compared to the night before.
 
In the dark, it had seemed closed in, almost tunnel-like.
 
Now, it was truly beautiful, she thought, with trees in bud and the sound of the stream below punctuated by birds excitedly calling to each other.
 
For so early in the day, there were a considerable number of people on the trail.
 
Mostly hikers and dog walkers; not many runners.

They crossed Georgetown Pike and started back on the Old Carriage Road.
 
When they reached Doc’s camp, M.J. scratched behind Lola’s ears and gave her a treat.
 
She held out the leash and the dog took it, ran to the front of the tent, dropped it and came back for a second treat, looking up at M.J. with wide eyes and a smile.
 
“OK,” M.J. said, “I’ll give you another one this time, but only because you did such a good job of keeping up.”

Doc came around the corner of the tent and said with a smile, “You’re really spoiling my dog, M.J.”

“I know,” she replied. “See you next time.”

The next morning, she parked unobtrusively outside the church where the boys’ funeral was being held and watched the arrival of the mourners.
 
She knew that killers sometimes attended the funerals of their victims for reasons that she found hard to fathom.

The parking lot filled up quickly and the Fairfax County Police started directing traffic to an alternate lot where a shuttle bus had been hastily called into service.
 
By her rough count, around a thousand people came to the funeral, most of them kids from Langley, many of them crying and leaning on each other for support. She watched until they had all either entered the main sanctuary or been diverted to an attached fellowship hall with a closed-circuit television hook-up.
 
She knew this showing of love and support would help the parents of the boys and she felt a twinge of guilt for being there to spy on the crowd.
 
It was, however, part of her job. Unfortunately, she didn’t see anyone who even remotely raised her suspicions.

She continued to run almost every day in the park, both because she enjoyed running and because it was a good way to watch the comings and goings there.
 
She ran at different times of the day and on different trails to make sure she was observing the totality of the park visitors.
 
She also went back to Difficult Run several times at night to observe the activity there.

After several weeks, she knew many of the regulars on the trails, some of whom said “hello” when they saw her.
 
For the most part, the consistent park visitors were either young runners, hikers, people walking their dogs or older people just taking a leisurely walk.
 
There were also the daily visits to Mather Gorge by kayakers and rock climbers.

Before starting her daytime runs, M.J. always stopped by Doc’s camp.
 
She rationalized this in her own mind as being the same as checking in with an informant when doing undercover work, but she knew that she had actually developed a degree of affection for Doc and, of course,
 
Lola, who she always took along on her runs.
 
On several occasions, she had even given them both a ride into town so Doc could pick up his mail and supplies and return library books.

Jake had distributed the TipLine posters to the schools in the area and the case had been added to the Most Wanted List on the Park Police web site.
 
So far, neither had produced any information.

In early May, she and Jake were assigned as backup for a raid by the Narcotics and Vice Unit in the notorious Trinidad section of the District of Columbia.
 
They donned bullet-proof vests and pulled in behind the “jump-outs”, a slang term used by residents for the unmarked cars carrying plainclothes narcotics officers. Their main function was to handcuff and guard some of the dozen or so people arrested until the van arrived to take them to jail.

During the week before Memorial Day, they, along with all uniformed and plainclothes Park Police, were assigned to security on the National Mall and at Arlington National Cemetery for the ceremonies and other events.

Even with these duties and the assignment of other criminal investigations, M.J. was able to go to Great Falls Park every day.
 
She failed to see anyone suspicious, but she kept running and watching.

CHAPTER TWELVE

M
.J. WENT RUNNING WITH LOLA on the Tuesday morning after Memorial Day and repeated the routine on Wednesday. She still didn’t see anyone suspicious on the trails.

By Wednesday night, she was tired, troubled and frustrated, and she wanted to go home for a few days. She decided she would leave on Friday afternoon and be in Ronceverte in time for her mother’s home-cooked dinner. That was just what she needed; that and the chance to sit on the front porch and talk to her father about the case.

On Thursday morning, she went to Tony Lauretta and said, “I’d like to take tomorrow afternoon off.”

He looked up from some papers he was reading and said, “Why don’t you just take the whole day off, M.J.?
 
You’ve got lots of leave time and there’s not much going on right now.”

“Afternoon will do,” she said.
 
“I may want to use the half day another time.”

Tony said, “OK.
 
Enjoy your time off.”

When she got back to her desk, she picked up her cell phone and scrolled to the number marked “Home,” pushed the send button and waited.
 
Three rings later her father answered.

“I’ve heard great things about your bed and breakfast,” she said.
 
“Got room for a guest tomorrow around dinner time?”

“I think we do, but I’ll need to let the kitchen know which of our featured specials you’ll be having.
 
I checked the menu and I believe they are fried chicken and meatloaf,” her father replied.

“Hmmm.
 
I think the fried chicken sounds perfect,” M.J. said.

Her father laughed and said, “I’ll let the cook know.
 
Can’t wait to see you, Honey.”

“Love you Dad.
 
Mom too.
 
See you tomorrow,” M.J. said.

She drove her personal car, a four-year-old midnight blue Ford Mustang, to Anacostia Station the next morning and cleaned up some pending paperwork.
 
At noon, she said goodbye to Jake and headed home to see her parents.

It was about four and a half hours to Ronceverte, a small town tucked into a valley in the Appalachians in West Virginia.
 
Most of the drive would be on Interstates, with the last few miles on a two-lane road that snaked through the mountains.
 
It was a beautiful, cloudless day and she was enjoying the power and handling of her Mustang.

She crossed the Shenandoah River about an hour after leaving Anacostia and got her first glimpse of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
 
She immediately felt herself start to relax, thinking less about work and more about where she was headed.

Her parents, Walt and Ginny Powers, were in their early sixties.
 
Walt was not her birth father, who had been killed in a head-on with a drunk driver out on U.S. 219 when she was six months old.
 
He had supported her and her mother working in the management office of one of the coal mines. After he died, her mother took a job as a waitress in the coffee shop at the Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, which was about thirty minutes away from Ronceverte.
 
On the days that her mother was working, M.J.’s maternal grandmother, who lived about a mile down the road, took care of her.

As part of her duties in the coffee shop, her mother took care of a room off the kitchen where breakfast and lunch were served to visiting tradesmen and law enforcement officers.
 
One day at breakfast, she saw a tall West Virginia state trooper at the table.
 
Her mother always said that she fell in love with Walt the minute she set eyes on him.
 
Walt would always smile and say that he just liked her because she served such great breakfasts.

They got married about a year later and Walt legally adopted M.J., whose given name was Martha Jean, although she had insisted on being referred to by her initials since age six.
 
When she was in second grade, Walt transferred to the State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation.
 
She remembered asking him why he didn’t wear the trooper hat that she liked anymore and didn’t drive the car with the flashing lights on the top.
 
Her father had told her that he still had the hat, but his new job required that he dress like other folks and drive a regular car so the bad guys couldn’t figure out who he was.
 
She liked that.

She had always been a runner.
 
In grade school, she would challenge the boys to footraces, which she usually won.
 
Her middle school had a cross-country team that she joined without hesitation and in high school her team competed in all of the state and regional meets, where M.J. always finished in the top three slots.
 
During her senior year, the cross-country coach from West Virginia University in Morgantown stopped by the house to ask if she would be interested in going to school there and joining the team.
 
With the encouragement of her parents, she applied and was accepted.

She majored in criminology and applied herself to her studies while spending all of her spare time training and competing in cross-country.
 
Her team was consistently ranked nationally in the top ten by the NCAA and she won several personal awards during her junior and senior years.

She tried to get home to Ronceverte whenever she could, but her schedule made that difficult, except for holidays.
 
However, her father seemed to find reasons to regularly visit Morgantown on “official business” and they would always have lunch or dinner together.
 
She would tell him about case studies in her criminology courses and he would tell her as much as he could about investigations he was handling.
 
They loved each other’s company and loved talking shop.

During her senior year, they would often talk about what she wanted to do after college.
 
Law enforcement, of course, but where and what was the question.
 
He discouraged her from joining a state or local agency.
 
“Too much bullshit stuff,” he would say.
 
She thought about the FBI, but it required two years of job experience before applying and she didn’t want to wait that long.
 
Then, one day, there was a job fair at the university for majors in criminology and forensics.
 
She went and looked at the materials from several federal police agencies.

She stopped at the desk for the United States Park Police.
 
She didn’t know much about it, except the horse-mounted police she had seen on her high school field trip to Washington.
 
The brochure said they were the oldest police force in the United States and covered all of the national monuments and parks.
 
She was interested and filled out an application form.
 
About a week later, she received a phone call asking if she could come to Washington and take an exam and a physical fitness test.
 
She went and passed both.

She called her father to ask what he thought about her joining the Park Police.
 
In typical fashion, he said, “I don’t know much about them, but they’re cops, right?
 
If it seems right for you, go ahead with it.
 
If nothing else, you’ll get some training and experience.
 
If you don’t like it, you can always use that to transfer to another federal agency.”

After she graduated from college, she went back to Washington for an interview with a panel of Park Police officers.
 
She was told that she had been accepted and, after being sworn in, attended a one-week orientation in Washington before transferring to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia. After eighteen weeks there, she came back to D.C. for more training.
 
Her parents came to her graduation ceremony and her father, while trying to appear stoically unaffected, wound up having to dab some tears from his eyes.

That was almost six years ago.
 
Since then, she had done foot patrol duty on the National Mall, cruiser patrols on the GW and participated in all of the security details manned by the Park Police. She took the detective exam after three years on the force and, after passing it, was transferred to the Criminal Investigations Branch as an investigator.
 
Two years later, she was made a detective.

M.J. left the Interstate and began the drive through the mountains toward Ronceverte.
 
There were occasional small houses, many with yards littered with automobiles, trucks and boats resting on cinder blocks, anxiously awaiting repairs that would probably never come.
 
At some of the junctions, there were small convenience stores with ancient gas pumps out front.
 
This was the West Virginia landscape that she had known as a child and it had changed very little.
 
In some ways, it was comforting to know that it still existed in sharp contrast to the urban existence that now defined her world.

She turned up the gravel road that led to her parent’s house, a white 1920s bungalow with three second-floor dormers and an open porch across the entire front.
 
Her parents were sitting on the porch and came down the steps when she pulled up.
 
Her father, a towering figure at six feet four inches, came forward and wrapped his arms around her.
 
“About time you got here,” he said, releasing his hug so that M.J. could embrace her mother.
 
“Don’t you pay him any mind,” her mother said, “we’re just glad you got here safely.”

M.J. retrieved her suitcase from the back seat of her car and the three of them walked up to the house.
 
The living room had a pleasant and familiar smell that evoked a jumble of memories for M.J.
 
Her mother was shorter than she was and had graying hair cut to shoulder length. She plucked an apron from one of the chairs, put it on and said, “You just freshen up and go sit with your father on the porch while I start dinner.”

M.J. walked up the narrow stairs to the second floor and took her bag into her bedroom, which was virtually unchanged from her high school days.
 
The corner bookcase held all of her cross-country trophies and medals, and there were two posters still attached to the walls, one for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and another for the rock group Nirvana.
 
She smiled as she looked around the room and touched the comforter on her bed, which had been made by her grandmother when M.J. was still in grade school.

She splashed some water on her face, took a file folder out of the side pocket of her suitcase and headed for the porch.

Her father was sitting in one of the two rocking chairs and had placed an open beer for each of them on the table in between.
 
M.J. handed him the file folder.

“This is a case I need to talk to you about,” she said.

He opened the folder and looked at the crime scene picture of the two boys’ bodies.
 
It took a moment for the reality to register, much as it had for M.J. that morning at Difficult Run.

“M.J., this is horrendous!” he exclaimed.
 
“For God’s sake don’t let your mother see this!”

He paged through the file, reading M.J.’s reports of the Medical Examiner’s findings, Zerk’s forensic investigation, and the interviews she and Jake had conducted.
 
When he finished, she told him about the figure Doc had seen a year before and the daily runs she was doing to look for a suspect.

“Honey,” he said, “I’ve seen a lot of murder scenes and people killed in a lot of ways, but nothing like this. I investigated a couple of lynchings in the southern part of the state, but that’s the closest thing to these boys’ murders.”

“Dad, it’s frustrating me that there are no leads,” she said.

He thought for a moment then said, “Well, I guess you’ve already figured out that the crucial thing here is the way they were murdered.
 
That tells a lot about the person you’re looking for.
 
I don’t think you’re going to find a motive.
 
This was somebody really sick and you may see their work in the future, but then again you may not.
 
I think you’re right to run in the park.
 
You run every day anyway, and that’s the best place to spot the killer.”