Triple Homicide_Thrillers Page 6

  I thumbed the Mute button and said, “Speaker.”

  Nodding, Bree got her phone and answered the call.

  The odd, soft, almost feminine voice spoke. “Chief Stone?”

  “Who are you? What’s your name?”

  After a long pause, he said, “Nick. Nick the Avenger.”

  Bree glanced at me, pointed at her watch. I started timing. The FBI was monitoring and tracing all calls to her number. If she could keep him on the phone for just over a minute, they’d be able to locate him.

  She said, “Nick, what’s it going to take to stop the bombings?”

  That question was part of a plan we’d talked about in anticipation of his next call. We both believed we needed to draw the bomber out, get him talking about more than just his next target.

  After several moments, he said, “It’s gonna take changes on Capitol Hill, Chief. Congress needs to get off its collective butt, and start treating the people who fight their wars right. Until they quit kicking vets in the balls, it’s time for everyone to feel what vets have suffered, what they still suffer. I’d clear the Washington Monument if I were you.”

  The line went dead.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said. “Forty-four seconds.”

  We grabbed raincoats and headed out into the pouring rain. I drove. Bree started making calls to once again close off the National Mall, and summon sniffer dogs and bomb squads. Ned Mahoney called me as I turned onto Independence Avenue.

  “You hear it?” he asked.

  “Yes. The trace?”

  “Bomber’s within five miles of Capitol Hill. Closest we got.”

  “Any luck with the surveillance tapes from Union Station?”

  “I have four agents watching footage from the twenty-four hours preceding the explosion, working backward from the actual blast. So far, nothing.”

  “Quantico?”

  “Initial reports on the first two bombs came back,” Mahoney said. “The detonators are simple, the kind you might see on an IED in the Middle East. But the explosive wasn’t taggant-free C-4. That’s why the dogs were able to locate them.”

  “So what was the explosive?”

  “Black powder, like for muzzle loaders, but tricked out, made more powerful. A company out in Montana makes the stuff.”

  “So we can trace it?” Bree said.

  “Not as easy as you think,” Mahoney said. “There are no real restrictions on the stuff. You can order it from dozens of websites online, or buy it off the shelf at hunting and fishing stores. Surprising, but the company says they make and sell thousands of pounds of the stuff per year.”

  I thought out loud. “So he has knowledge of and access to a wide array of explosives. What kind of person would get that kind of knowledge and access? I mean to seek out and get the C-4?”

  Mahoney said, “Money talks. You can buy nearly anything these days on the dark side of the internet.”

  “Or he’s someone with real training, a military sapper. Or ex.”

  “You mean like a Marine master gunnery sergeant?”

  “Tim Chorey’s in detox,” I said. I started to see blue lights ahead of us, and cruisers blocking access to the Washington Monument.

  “No, he’s not,” Mahoney said. “I had someone check. Chorey walked out four days ago, within hours of you dropping him.”

  CHAPTER 20

  DAWN CAME. THE rain had been torrential and relentless all night, hampering the search for the latest bomb, and the dark, low-hanging clouds above the Washington Monument showed no sign of clearing.

  Bree and I were in our car, taking a break from the rain, listening to WTOP all-news radio and drinking coffee. I was only half paying attention to the newscast, covering the latest bomb threat and the likely effect on commuter traffic.

  I was still brooding over Tim Chorey. On the drive over to detox, he’d told me he was ready for change. He was tired of the streets, tired of living in a soundless world, and tired of being blasted all the time. Blasted. It was the exact word he’d used.

  Had the deaf veteran been playing me the entire time? I like to think of myself as a pretty shrewd judge of character, and an excellent reader of body language. I’d honestly believed Chorey, and I’d gone to bat for him.

  The back door opened. Mahoney slid inside wearing an FBI rain slicker and ball cap. He pushed back the hood and said, “It’s a monsoon out there.”

  “Anything?” I said.

  “We’re positive the inner monument is clear. But this rain’s killing us. Really messes with the dogs’ noses.”

  “And he could have used the pre-1980 C-4 again.”

  “True. Could also be he’s abandoned his penchant for garbage cans as bomb sites. We’ve checked every one in a mile radius.”

  Bree said, “Are you hearing this?”

  We looked at her. She turned up the radio, reporting on a veterans’ appropriations bill stalled in the Senate. If the bill doesn’t make it to the President’s desk before Friday, there would be slashing of funds for dozens of critical veterans’ programs across the board.

  “You think this has something to do with it?” Mahoney said.

  “He talked about Congress not treating vets right,” she said. “Maybe this is his motivation. He knows this bill has to pass in four days, so he’s pushing.”

  “But he never mentioned that specifically?” Mahoney said.

  “No,” Bree said. “He didn’t.”

  “It’s been seven hours since the call,” I said. “Maybe there’s no bomb this time. Maybe he’s yanking our chain.”

  “What makes you think that?” Bree asked.

  “It’s a freebie. He gets us mobilized, on edge, and the media worked into another frenzy, and he doesn’t have to use an ounce of plastic explosives to do it.”

  “Well, he’s got me on edge,” Mahoney said. “Six cups of coffee and two hours of sleep in the last twenty-four is not the way to better mental health.”

  “No, and neither is thinking Chorey’s our guy,” I said, looking over the backseat.

  Mahoney started to stiffen, but I held up my palm. “The bomber hears just fine. Unless Chorey’s had a cochlear implant, he’s not who’s been calling Bree. I read his medical files. There’s no way he—”

  Ned held up both hands. “Agreed, Alex. He’s not the caller. But he could be the caller’s partner.”

  I couldn’t dispute that possibility. “Are you naming him a person of interest?”

  “I’m supposed to have that conversation with the deputy director in about ten minutes,” Mahoney said.

  “You recommending it?” Bree asked.

  “I’d be remiss if I didn’t.”

  I stifled a yawn, and checked my watch.

  “Patients?” Bree asked.

  “Just one. Eight o’clock.”

  “You could cancel.”

  “I’ll power through and get some sleep afterward.”

  Before she could reply, her cell phone rang.

  “Here we go,” she said, snatching it up, and answering it on speaker.

  “I made a mistake,” the soft, strange voice said. “Silly Avenger, I put that bomb in the Air and Space Museum.”

  CHAPTER 21

  AT TWO MINUTES to eight, the bell at our basement door rang, and I snapped awake from dozing in my office. After leaving Bree and Ned on the Mall in front of the National Air and Space Museum, I’d come straight home and shut my eyes.

  “Coming!” I called, then went in the bathroom to splash cold water in my face.

  I opened the door. The rain had let up and Kate Williams was beaming at me.

  “Were you at the scenes this morning?” she asked, sounding breathless and excited.

  “All night,” I said, following her toward my office.

  “Oh? Well, I’m glad you didn’t cancel, Dr. Cross. I think I found something, something about the bomber.”

  I closed my office door, feeling a headache coming on. “You know Kate, the FBI, Metro, Park Police, and Cap
itol Hill Police are working this pretty hard.”

  Her expression turned stony. “And you don’t think I could come up with something the professionals couldn’t?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You implied it.”

  I rubbed at my temples, and took a seat. “If I did, I apologize. I haven’t had much sleep. I’ve just found over the years that when amateurs get involved with cases as big as this one, they can find themselves working at odds with the authorities, and some get charged with obstruction.”

  Kate crossed her arms. “I am not an amateur. I hunted bombs and bombers on a daily basis for more than three years, Dr. Cross. I’ve been in on explosive charges as many times as or more than anyone on your bomb squads.”

  “I get it. But with bombs and bombers, there are protocols determined by people with bigger brains than mine, who—”

  I was surprised when she suddenly burst into tears. “You don’t get it, do you? I have to do this, Dr. Cross. I have to help. You asked me about that day I got hit? I missed something. I turned the wrong way and missed something, and four IEDs went off at once. When I woke up, three of my people were dead. Brickhouse was dead, too. I lived, and good friends and the sweetest dog I’ve ever known died, Dr. Cross. So do you want to hear what I have to say, or not?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, holding out my hands. “Of course. What have you got?”

  Kate dug in her raincoat pocket and came up with a tourist map of Washington, DC, which she unfolded and laid on the rug between us. Kneeling, she showed me where she’d marked and highlighted the bomb sites.

  “Mall in front of the National Sculpture Museum,” she said. “Constitution Gardens Pond. Korean War Memorial. Union Station. Washington Monument.”

  “False alarm there,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, before stabbing her finger at the map. “Air and Space Museum.”

  “I’m predicting a false alarm there as well.”

  “Like I said, it doesn’t matter if bombs were there or not.”

  Ignoring the soft pounding at the back of my skull, I said, “Okay.”

  “What do they have in common?”

  “They’re all in and around the Mall?”

  Reaching into her raincoat pocket again, she came up with a Metro transit map.

  “They’re also all on this city bus route that started up in 2015,” she said. “The DC Circulator. It starts at Union Station and goes all around the monuments with stops that line up with the bombing sites.”

  Instantly alert, I sat forward and studied the transit map.

  “See?” Kate said. “I’m telling you, Dr. Cross. Your bomber rides that bus.”

  CHAPTER 22

  TWO DAYS PASSED without a call from the bomber.

  The deadline for the veterans’ appropriations bill loomed, with no sign that the IEDs on the National Mall were having an effect on Congressional gridlock. Senators on both sides of the aisle continued to maintain their support of veterans yet fight every effort to get the spending bill to the President’s desk.

  I’d told Mahoney and Bree about Kate Williams’s theory that the bomber was using the DC Circulator, and they’d given it enough credence to have agents and detectives interview the route’s drivers.

  None of the drivers had noticed anything out of the ordinary. Then again, it was cherry blossom season. Even with the bombings and the threats, the Circulator continued to be packed with tourists.

  In a meeting at FBI headquarters that Wednesday morning, Mahoney typed on his laptop, and said, “My agent missed it the first two times through, but he may have found something in the security video shot inside Union Station the night before the explosion. Look for the garbage can at center right.”

  The screen at the far end of the conference room lit and showed forty, maybe fifty people walking on platform four alongside an Amtrak train. The garbage can was blocked from view as passengers moved toward the last few cars.

  “Any one of them could have planted it,” Bree said when the footage stopped with the platform clear. “And there had to be other trains that used that platform earlier.”

  Mahoney said, “True, but watch the sequence again.”

  He backed the video up twenty-five seconds, saying, “Look for the one in the black hoodie carrying the book bag.”

  Bree and I studied the crowd, seeing several weary men and women in business suits, K Street–types working late, carrying briefcases and trudging along. Behind them walked a person of medium build, likely a male, wearing a black hoodie that was up, casting the face in shadows. His shoulders were hunched forward, his head down and turned, as if he knew the position of the cameras.

  “Watch for the moment John Doe and the people in front and behind him go by the trash receptacle,” Mahoney said.

  It took them no more than two seconds to go by the trash bag, and I didn’t catch what Mahoney was talking about. But Bree did.

  “We can’t see his left arm, but his shoulder moved, and there was a flash of yellow near the mouth of the trash can.”

  “Exactly,” Mahoney said. He backed it up, froze the tape on that moment, and magnified the screen so we could see exactly what was being junked.

  “Popeye’s chicken?” I said.

  “A take-out box for a five-piece dinner assortment,” Mahoney said.

  “Okay?” Bree said.

  “Now look at this footage from eleven minutes earlier.”

  The screen jumped and showed the same person, wearing jeans and black shoes, hoodie up, face blocked from view, standing near some lockers, and a trash can. He was eating a drumstick from a yellow Popeye’s box. He finished it, put the bone in the box, and then walked away when the Acela to Boston was called for boarding.

  “That’s our bomber,” I said. “He could have trashed the box right there.”

  “Exactly,” Mahoney said. “Why wait?”

  Bree’s phone and my phone buzzed almost simultaneously. I looked down at the text, and jumped to my feet. Bree did the same.

  “What’s going on?” Mahoney said.

  “Someone called in a bomb threat to Jannie’s high school,” I said. Ignoring the fact that I was suspended from the force, I followed Bree to her squad car. We raced north through the city, sirens and lights flashing, to Benjamin Banneker Academic High School. We stopped at a patrol car blocking access to Sherman Avenue and Euclid Streets.

  It was ten in the morning, almost hot, and though they were well removed from school property, the kids gathered on sidewalks and lawns looked anxious.

  “Everyone’s out?” Bree asked the principal, Sheila Jones, a woman we both liked and respected.

  Jones nodded. “They know the drill. This has happened before, Chief Stone.”

  “Bomb scares?” I said.

  “It’s usually a student or a friend of a student who’s behind on their studying before a big test. At least that’s my theory, because nothing ever comes of it.”

  “Or hasn’t yet,” Bree said. I scanned the crowd of students for Jannie.

  “Were there big tests coming up?” I said.

  Jones frowned. “Not schoolwide tests. They just finished midterms.”

  “Dad?”

  I turned to find Jannie had come up behind us. Looking very upset, she threw her arms around me and hugged tight.

  “You okay, baby?”

  She looked at me, shaking her head, on the verge of tears. “Don’t you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “The threat, Dad. It was called in to me.”

  CHAPTER 23

  LESS THAN THREE miles to the south, Kate Williams sat in the left side window seat three rows behind the driver of the DC Circulator bus, where she could study everyone who came aboard and yet not attract attention.

  Kate herself had boarded at 6:30 a.m. Four hours of riding, on top of fourteen hours she’d spent on the bus line the day before, and twelve hours the day before that.

  I don’t care wh
at I feel like, or how sore my butt gets, she thought, fighting off a yawn as the bus pulled over near the Vietnam Memorial. Whatever it takes.

  She got off at the Vietnam Memorial to stretch her legs, use the public restroom, and buy a warm pretzel and a diet soda from one of the vendors along Constitution Avenue. Another Circulator bus would come along soon and she could resume her vigil.

  He rides this bus line, Kate thought again, feeling irritated. I’m sure of it.

  Dr. Cross had been interested enough to pass her suspicion along to the FBI and to his wife, but they’d decided against putting surveillance on the routes, relying on the recall of the bus drivers. She couldn’t understand it.

  That’s just moronic. What do bus drivers know about bombers?

  Eating her pretzel slowly, Kate scanned the steady stream of tourists heading toward the Vietnam Memorial. There seemed even fewer tourists out today than yesterday, when crowds were noticeably lighter than the day before. In the dwindling pool, she felt certain she’d spot the bomber at some point.

  And she was confident a solid look would be enough. Kate had the ability to remember faces and recall them later, as in years later, even when the person had aged. Scientists called people with Kate’s gift “super-recognizers.”

  The trait had helped her in Iraq. Unless the person was wearing a veil or a turban that obscured their features, she’d remember their faces should she see them again, especially in places where IEDs were actively in use.

  Kate believed the skill would help her here. She kept combing the crowd, especially the people coming off the Circulator buses, recording faces, looking for twitches in their cheeks, or a slight hesitation when they passed the pair of police officers flanking the entrance to the walkway and the memorial.

  Noticing that the hand of a woman her age shook visibly when she raised a coffee cup passing the cops, Kate focused on her face. Click.

  She noted the excited expression of a young teenage boy coming off the next bus, in a blue school windbreaker with a hood. He was laughing and staring at his phone, watching a video no doubt. Pass.

  Then she studied a red-faced, angry-looking old guy who got off, wearing a red felt vest festooned with military pins. Click.