“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.
Chapter 77
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.”
Chapter 78
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 j
ust 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.
Chapter 79
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.
“Don’t worry about it. You aren’t any further along than I would have expected,” I told Cowen. “But I do have some ideas about how we might handle things from here.”
Chapter 80
SEVERAL THINGS HAPPENED really fast in Brick Township, mostly because I needed them to.
I worked my contacts with the Field Intelligence Group in Washington to get hold of the FIG coordinator up in the Newark field office. Because it was a Sunday night, and because we had sufficient reason to believe Mitchell Talley had crossed, or would cross, jurisdictional lines, we were able to get an immediate Temporary Felony Want. Cowen would have forty-eight hours from there to secure an actual warrant, signed and issued. In the meantime, Newark could get word out to law enforcement up and down the eastern seaboard right away.
The idea for now was to leave off any mention of Steven Hennessey, or any accomplice at all. The Want specified only that Mitchell Talley was being sought for questioning in the deaths of Bernice and Robert Talley. Wherever our presumed snipers were, I didn’t want them knowing we’d connected any of this to DC until I had more information.
Cowen agreed to give me some cover on that front. In the meantime, I got his people hooked up with Newark in the search for their suspect. Someone found a more recent snapshot in one of his mother’s photo albums, and they used a scan of it for the local and regional BOLO – Be On The Lookout.
Realistically speaking, no one expected Talley to be in the area. The larger effort was focused on looking at stolen-car reports, monitoring transportation hubs, and tracking down surveillance tapes at area airports and bus and train stations. With luck, someone would be able to turn up an eyewitness or maybe even a relevant piece of video somewhere.
The closest thing to a lead so far had come from an elderly neighbor of Mrs. Talley’s. She’d seen a sedan of some kind parked in front of the house a few nights ago but couldn’t say what kind it was, or what color, or even how long it had been there.
For whatever that was worth, I forwarded the information down to Jerome Thurman, who had been tracking vehicle-related leads on this case for me from the start.
By now, I was beginning to feel like I’d been away from DC for too long. Maybe Talley and Hennessey had no plans to return to Washington, if that’s where they’d even come from in the first place. But I had to assume otherwise. For all I knew, they were already back there and planning their next hit.
The minute I got things wrapped up with Detective Cowen, I was in the car and headed for home. And I was moving fast, using a siren all the way.
Chapter 81
AT EIGHT THIRTY the next morning, Colleen Brophy turned off of E Street and into the churchyard, where I was waiting outside the True Press office. She had a bulging backpack on her shoulders, an armload of newspapers, and a nearly finished cigarette in the corner of her mouth.
“Oh God,” she said when she saw me. “You again. Now what do you want?”
“I wouldn’t come if it wasn’t important, Ms. Brophy. I’m well aware of how you feel about all this,” I said. Still, after my long Sunday on the road, I was in “no mood for ’tude,” as Sampson likes to say.
The True Press editor set down her load of papers and sat on the stone bench where I’d just stood up.
“How can I help you?” she asked, her sarcasm still intact. “As if I have a choice.”
I showed her the picture of Mitchell Talley. “Have you ever seen this man?”
“Oh, come on,” she said right away. “You think this is the guy who sent me those e-mails?”
“I’ll take that as a yes. Thank you. When was the last time you saw him?”
She took out a new cigarette and lit it off the last of the old one before she answered.
“Do you really need me to participate in this?” she said. “The trust I have with these people is so tenuous.”
“I’m not trying to bust a shoplifter, Ms. Brophy.”
“I understand, but it’s the shoplifters I’m worried about. A lot of the homeless people I work with have to break the law from time to time just to get by. If any of them see me talking to you–”
“This can stay a private conversation,” I told her. “Nobody has to know about it. That is, assuming we can get on with this. Do you know this man?”
After another long pause and a few more drags, she said, “I guess it was last week. They picked up their papers on Wednesday,
like everyone else.”
“ ‘They’?” I asked.
“Yeah. Mitch and his friend Denny. They’re kind of like a–”
She stopped short then and turned slowly to look at me. It seemed maybe she’d just put two and two together about something. Or maybe I should say one and one.
“Oh God,” she said. “They’re kind of like a team. They’re the ones, aren’t they?”
I could feel that mental click, when something falls into place. Had I just found my Steven Hennessey?
“What’s Denny’s last name?” I asked her.
“I honestly don’t know,” she said. “He’s white, tall, and thin. He’s got lots of stubble, and kind of a–” She waved her hand under her jaw. “Like a sunken chin, I guess you could call it. He sort of leads Mitch around.”
“And you say they pick up papers on Wednesday?”
She nodded. “Sometimes they come back for more if they sell out, but I haven’t seen them lately. I swear. I know this is serious now.”
“I believe you,” I said. Everything about her demeanor had changed. Now she looked more sad than anything. “Any idea where I might look for the two of them?”
“All over. Denny has this old white Suburban he drives around, when he can get gas. I know they sleep in there sometimes.” The Suburban was a dead end now, but I didn’t say anything about it to Ms. Brophy.
“And you can try the shelters. There’s a list of them in the back of the paper.” She took a copy off the top of her stack and handed it to me. “God, you know, I hate myself for telling you all this.”
“Don’t,” I said, and paid her a dollar for the paper. “You’re doing the right thing.”
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