The Third Coincidence

by David Bishop

  “Mrs. Dalton died prematurely of cancer. She left a trust fund to care for their only child, a son, Isaac Dalton. The trust fund provides Isaac a hundred thousand dollars a year with annual cost of living increases. Mrs. Dalton also left Isaac a free and clear home. It appears the son still lives in that house. They moved there the year after Harry Dalton shot himself on June twenty-first—oh, that’s tomorrow—in the Baltimore house where the family had lived when Isaac was born. The son found his father’s body after the suicide. We have an address, phone number, and a social security number for Isaac Dalton.”

  “Millet, get on your computer,” Jack blurted, no longer able to contain himself. “Now! Find out if Isaac Dalton shows up on the lists of people with a history of violent behavior who had been in the military or had worked in the intelligence community.”

  Millet had begun stroking his keyboard by the time Jack finished his instructions.

  “Do you recall whether or not the name Isaac Dalton showed up anywhere on the lists from the shooting ranges?” Colin asked Marsha.

  “Isaac Dalton is on one of the lists of people who dropped their memberships.”

  “Within the past three years, right?” Rachel asked.

  “Isaac Dalton dropped out of the Baltimore Gun Club just about three years ago.”

  “And Isaac Dalton didn’t use any other gun club after that?” Nora asked.

  When Marsha shook her head, Rex slammed his fist on the table and exclaimed, “Isaac Dalton must be LW!”

  Jack could feel the group’s energy.

  Millet’s voice got back to the table before him. “Isaac Dalton joined the FBI in nineteen eighty. He resigned in ninety-five after his mother died. I called the Bureau. They’re sending over his full jacket by helicopter. To hold down rumors I asked for the personnel files on all the ex-FBI agents with violence in their background. They still had them pulled from making the list for us. ETA, twenty minutes.”

  “Do you have anything more, Marsha?” Jack asked.

  “No,” she told him. “I just hope we aren’t jumping to conclusions.”

  “Take a break everybody,” Jack said. “Get some fresh coffee. Use the restroom. Stretch your legs, whatever until those FBI files get here. Think about what questions you still want to ask Marsha. Once those files arrive, I want to let her out of here.”

  The team scattered.

  Marsha walked over to Jack. “I appreciate your concern for me, but I’m pumped. If you want me gone for security, I understand. But don’t worry about my sleep. I had everyone working on this round the clock so I shut my section down for a few hours and staggered their comebacks. If you need anything, I should be here.”

  “Stay as long as you want. You can crash over there.” He pointed to a brown leather couch.

  She yawned. “I hoped you’d let me stay.”

  As Marsha had so aptly put it, he, too, was pumped. They all were. Jack went to the men’s room. When he got back, Marsha was already asleep, the others having congregated in the kitchen area where, clearly not wanting to disturb her, they were talking in low voices. He turned off the lamp next to her head.

  Jack recalled Marsha saying that tomorrow was Isaac Dalton’s father’s birthday. Something would happen tomorrow. He just knew it.

  Where’s that damn Dalton file? Come on!

  CHAPTER 46

  The president told reporters during a news conference in the Rose Garden, “There are no plans to replace Jack McCall and there will not be any.” Today’s New York Times’s editorial page, reports, “Our sources describe McCall’s progress in one word: zero.”

  —Mel Carsten, D.C. Talk, MSNBC

  The hollow thumping of helicopter blades beating the night sky told Jack that the FBI files on violent agents had arrived. Five minutes later Millet took the box from the FBI’s courier. Jack signed the receipt. The moment the door closed behind the courier, Millet slid Dalton’s jacket down the table.

  Jack could feel his team’s eyes fixed on him as he searched through the file on Isaac Dalton. When he finished, he looked up, grinned, and said, “I think we’ve found our man.”

  After the cheers quieted, Jack shared more details.

  “His file shows the information Marsha obtained and more. Two field offices had recommended he be removed from active duty and put into therapy for his violent tendencies and antigovernment rhetoric. He resigned four months after the second recommendation, never having gone into therapy.”

  Jack flipped back a couple of pages. “Here’s a more complete physical description, as well as a good picture.” He held it up. “As you can see, it’s very consistent with the descriptions we’ve gotten from witnesses. His eyes are brown.”

  He smiled at Marsha, who had joined them at the table. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Do you want to go home?”

  “Quit worrying about me, Jack McCall, and tell me how I can help.”

  “How about making two hundred copies of his picture,” he told her. “You can do it faster down the hall than in here.”

  “Is the FBI address from his resignation still good?” Frank asked.

  “It’s the same address as on Marsha’s list,” Rachel said.

  “Rachel, Millet,” Jack said, “I want everything current you can get on this guy. Fast. His credit report, driver’s license, whatever. We need his address or verification that what we have is good. Get with Marsha for the names and addresses of all the shooting ranges within a reasonable distance of his home. What he drives. Does he have a police record? Check his bank accounts. Get a bank president out of bed if necessary. Oh, and find out where they buried his father. When you do, get a map of that cemetery and mark his father’s grave.”

  “How cool,” Millet said. “Are we gonna stake out a grave?”

  “Colin, get to that cemetery,” Jack said, ignoring Millet’s question. “Find out if Isaac Dalton’s been visiting his father’s grave. If so, get back to me so we can come up with a plan.”

  “Rex, get a SWAT team ready to roll. Have them equipped and positioned as near as possible to Dalton’s home. They have to be inconspicuous. If that can’t happen, have them hang back until we call them in. Frank, Nora, what am I missing?”

  “We should tell the protection squads to stay on their toes for the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours,” Frank said. Then Nora added, “Tell them not to leave their charges alone anywhere—follow ’em into the can.”

  “We can tell them we had an anonymous tip that LW plans to strike soon,” Nora added.

  “Do it. Keep a log of the time and the agent you speak to in each squad.”

  Marsha returned with the copies of Dalton’s pictures. “Jack,” she said while handing the pictures to him. “I may know the fictitious name Dalton uses at the local shooting range.”

  “Talk to me,” he said to her.

  “We know when Isaac Dalton quit his membership at the Baltimore Gun Club. And I assumed he still lived in the house his mother left him.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Colin said. “Go on.”

  “The two ranges closest to his house had thirty-two new non-members who could be Dalton switching clubs and using a phony name. I excluded all shooters who shot on any of the dates of the killings. That dropped the list to fourteen. After running prelims we eliminated eleven whose physical descriptions didn’t match up at all. That left three. I cross-referenced those three local shooters with the nonmember shooters on the lists from the Dallas ranges. One day in April one of those three, a Matthew Devine, used the Dallas Gun Range.”

  Jack closed his eyes and took a long breath. In every operation there was a turning point. Was this it? Did they have the right guy?

  “That left me with the possibility,” Marsh went on, “that someone named Matthew Devine started shooting using the gun club near Dalton’s home the month after Dalton dropped his real-name membership. And, that same Devine or another person with the same name used the Dallas range in April. We found no Matthew Devine living near Dalton�
��s home. However, we did find a Matthew Devine who had lived in the Dallas area for more than fifteen years. We figured if that real Devine were a shooter he would have shot at the Dallas range more than just that one day in April.”

  “Your conclusion?”

  “If you ended up thinking Isaac Dalton could be LW, we should start out thinking that Isaac Dalton used the name Matthew Devine at both the Baltimore and Dallas ranges. We weren’t able to discern a pattern as to when Devine shoots at the Baltimore South Range.”

  “Anything else?” Colin asked.

  “I rechecked the dates Matthew Devine used the Baltimore range and none of them clashed with any of the dates of the assassinations, or the immediately previous dates with respect to the murders you believe were his out-of-town killings.”

  We gotcha!

  Jack swivelled his chair to face the other end of the Bullpen. “Listen up,” he said. “This amazing woman has the name LW uses when he practices shooting: Matthew Devine, D-E-V-I-N-E. She also has identified the range in the Baltimore area where he shoots under that name. There’s no use pattern, but also no reason to think he won’t continue to shoot there.”

  Colin shot his fist into the air and they all broke into applause. Marsha blushed.

  “Rex, put together an FBI Special Operations Group to watch that range every hour it’s open until we’ve got Dalton in our hands,” Jack said. “It’s a perfect cover. Rotate special agents inside the range acting like shooters with their guns in plain sight—not standard FBI issue. Have them dress like casual shooters, not like agents. And be damn sure none of those agents were ever posted with Dalton while he was with the bureau.”

  “Shall we apprehend on sight?” Rex asked.

  “No. While he’s shooting, have them attach a magnetized satellite tracker to the underside of his car and then let us know. They’re not to apprehend unless he realizes he’s spotted. It’s possible Dalton is so accustomed to the route between his home and that range that he may be more careless about looking for a tail, but don’t rely on it. Make sure the outside agents are very familiar with vehicle-surveillance tactics. Include both wheel and pavement artists capable of using a floating-box. . . . Hey, everybody. This guy is a crack shot.”

  “Why don’t we just grab him?” Marsha asked.

  “We’re short on proof this is our guy,” Jack answered. “We haven’t connected him to a single one of the killings or even the red cap. His father wrote some strange letters that connect with LW’s communiqués, and his FBI file shows he’s violent and a crack shot. That’s all we’ve got except that he fits a general description that would probably match up with half the guys in his jury pool. That’s enough for a search warrant, but not an arrest.”

  By half past two the morning of June twenty-first they were ready. Isaac Dalton’s car registration and his driver’s license showed the address in the FBI file. Isaac Dalton drove a 1999 dark-green Ford Explorer. They had the license plate number.

  An FBI drive-by called to report a dark house and a closed garage. Rex had gotten a federal judge out of bed to get a search warrant for Dalton’s house, his car, and any places he frequented, such as storage units, second homes, or lockers at clubs. A sharp attorney might argue they were a bit light for that broad a warrant, but Jack had expected they could find a judge who would be accommodating and they had. This asshole had killed judges—Supreme Court judges. The judge also approved the installation of electronic surveillance equipment.

  Jack picked between three thirty and four in the morning for their assault. In covert ops, two-to-three hours before sunrise was a prime infiltration time.

  CHAPTER 47

  LW has killed fourteen people and there have been no arrests. Rumors persist there aren’t even any suspects.

  —Marian Little, NewsCentral 7

  Tomorrow, on the anniversary of his father’s death, Dalton would assassinate Thomas Evans, the chief justice of the United States, the king on the chessboard of the unelected government.

  The U.S. Supreme Court had already been forced to stand down for lack of a quorum. Assassinating Evans would jettison the rudder from America’s already sinking judicial ship.

  Dalton felt sexually aroused as he often did when he was about to make a kill. Since Kitt in San Francisco, he hadn’t taken the time to find relief. After a few minutes with the D.C. phone book, he used one of his disposable cell phones to call America’s Finest Escort Service. He hoped their name stood for more than a marketing tease.

  “My name is Tim LaRue,” he said to the woman who answered. “I’m at the airport. I’ll be checked into the Capitol Hill Hyatt Regency on New Jersey Avenue by eleven thirty. I want your finest woman at my room at twelve thirty—that’s half an hour past midnight.”

  “All our ladies are fine,” she told him. “Perhaps you’d like to be specific about the woman you have in mind.”

  Dalton thought of his mother’s dark hair and full figure, then said, “She must have black hair, long black hair, be busty, and she must look clean-cut.”

  Momma had always been a classy woman.

  Dalton showed his black market Tim LaRue drivers license, paid cash, and carried his own luggage up to his suite in the Hyatt Regency. His larger bag contained the rifle he’d chosen. The smaller bag held his tearaway casual pants, sweatshirt, sweatbands, and several red baseball caps. He also had a roll of orange florescent tape, the kind joggers and bikers wear so cars could see them at night.

  He watched the news for a while. There was nothing new. Then he found a music channel and went down the hall to get some ice. He had brought a bottle of wine and some Scotch in case the woman wanted a drink. He would take the bottles with him when he left.

  Fifteen minutes later he heard a quiet knock on his hotel room door. He turned up the music, but not too loud. Frank Sinatra was singing “Luck be a Lady Tonight.” Dalton knew he was about to get lucky, and also knew that whatever the woman outside his door was, she was no lady.

  The woman left his room at four in the morning. Dalton had paid the agreed fee and a tip of an extra hundred. He could not imagine his next sexual collision topping this one, but he planned to try, perhaps to celebrate his ending the reign of the chief justice of the United States.

  Already naked, he decided to risk taking a shower. It would make his DNA discoverable, but there were many places at which that could be true. He remained confident the authorities would have no reason to take note of a room rented under the name Tim LaRue.

  After taking a long shower and rechecking his gear, he decided to go downstairs for breakfast. Before leaving the room, he slipped the do-not-disturb sign into the door’s outside card-lock slot, and wedged two tiny slivers of transparent paper behind the sign in such a way that they would be dislodged if anyone moved the sign to insert a card key.

  Forty minutes later, after swallowing the last bite of a Belgian waffle, Dalton left the hotel and walked south on New Jersey Avenue, crossed Louisiana Avenue, and entered the National Mall near the Taft Memorial. He stopped next to the Peace Monument and watched the rising sun create a nimbus around the Capitol Dome. He was sure the sighting was a symbol from God, or perhaps his father. There would soon be a new dawning for America.

  Near the Smithsonian Institute, he cut over to pick up Ninth Street, then veered right at Constitution Avenue to start his trip back to the hotel. Along the meandering route, he selected the spots where he would leave the red baseball caps and several places where he could slip out of sight.

  His first choice would be the bushes behind the café in the Sculpture Garden between Constitution Avenue and Madison Drive, across Seventh Avenue from the West Building of the National Gallery of Art. If events prevented him from getting there, he would duck into either the Sudworth arborvitae and false cypress near the southwest corner of the garden, or the bushes beside the yellow buckeye tree at the corner of Seventh Street and Madison Drive. The latter would provide the poorest cover, but be directly on his route back to the
Hyatt.

  He would make the final decision on the fly, as circumstances dictated.

  After long practice he had reduced to twenty seconds the time needed to remove the velcro-attached leggings, pull off his sweatshirt, slip on the orange sweatbands and, if he had a few extra seconds, stick some bright-orange reflective tape onto his running shoes. After that he would emerge from hiding with his appearance changed from a man in full-length pants, a sweatshirt, and a red baseball cap, to just another jogger in shorts and a T-shirt.

  Then transformed, he would cross Madison Drive and, under cover of the trees, move east with the tourists and other pedestrians. To return to the Hyatt he could take either Third Avenue to D Street, or Constitution Avenue to New Jersey Avenue.

  At seven he eased his way down the hall to his hotel room and silently pulled out the do-not-disturb sign. The paper slivers softly fluttered to the hallway carpet. He smiled. No one had entered his room.

  He set the alarm clock and, for a backup, called downstairs for a noon wake-up call.

  I cannot be late. Today, is Daddy’s birthday.

  CHAPTER 48

  Nominees are delaying their appearances, waiting for Jack McCall or his rumored replacement to put an end to the terror of Commander LW.

  —Marian Little, NewsCentral 7

  JUNE 21, 3:37 A.M.

  For centuries, agents and soldiers had filled their solitary time before dangerous missions with prayers and silent messages for their loved ones, entrusted to the telepathic winds. It had likely been that way since the beginning of soldiering. It was in that kind of quiet that Jack and the members of his squad traveled north on I-95, followed by an unmarked FBI SWAT van.