Return of the spider, p.3
Return of the Spider, page 3
part #33 of Alex Cross Series
Soneji slowed, put on his blinker, lowered the visor, and let the car go by, which left the road ahead empty. He turned into the parking lot at lock five, deserted at that hour. His headlights revealed trees and the entrance to the wide top of the lock.
There were signs warning that only pedestrians, bikes, and official vehicles were allowed to cross. But there was no gate.
With no cars coming in either direction behind him, Soneji turned off his headlights, waited several seconds to let his eyes adjust, then drove slowly over the top of the lock. It was a tight squeeze, but he made it. Conrad had been right—there was more than enough light from the moon to see, and he never touched the wooden rails.
Once he reached the other side, he glanced to his left and saw headlights flickering on the parkway. He crossed the second bridge much quicker and again without touching the rails.
Soneji was on the actual towpath now, which was easily wide enough to drive on, heading south. A broken line of trees and kudzu to his left partially blocked his view of the river and the parkway beyond. Feeling safe, he took a chance and briefly flicked the van’s fog lights on and off.
He smiled. The fog lights had revealed the Bronco’s big tire tracks on the gravel and dirt ahead.
As the map had shown and as Talbot’s tracks confirmed, a maintenance road branched off from the main trail and headed at an angle across the island toward the Potomac’s west branch.
Soneji pulled over just inside the road entry. He turned the van off, sat there a moment listening to the ticking of the engine, and climbed out.
It was a cool October night. The bright moon filtered through the trees, making the way forward much clearer than he’d expected.
Walking around to the back of the van, Soneji flashed on several memories of Joyce Adams in the basement of his uncle’s old cabin in the Pine Barrens. The images were all of one flavor: her eyes lit up with terror, his feeling of absolute control over her. He craved that feeling, the power of holding someone captive.
But he had much to learn before he took that kind of chance again. Stay focused, he told himself. You’re here to study.
He opened the van’s rear doors, eager now to find out what worked and what didn’t. The mechanics. The potential pitfalls of this particular modus operandi.
Soneji turned on a small penlight and put the back end of it in his mouth. His heart rate quickened as he opened a duffel bag he’d stowed there. He pulled out heavy wool socks and a black balaclava and stuffed them in the inner pockets of the jumpsuit.
Shining the light back into the duffel, he picked up a snub-nosed .44-caliber pistol in a quart-size plastic bag and slid it deep into the front right pocket of the coverall. Soneji shut the doors quietly, turned off the light, and started down the shadowed path to the west side of the island.
He tried to see the gun not as his salvation but as a tool. Focus on the gun, he told himself. You can bring a city to its knees with a gun like this. It’s been done before.
CHAPTER 4
GRAVEL CRUNCHED BENEATH Gary Soneji’s sneakers. When he saw the woods open ahead, he put the wool socks on over his sneakers and the balaclava over his curly blond hair.
He took a few steps into the clearing and spotted the old Bronco about forty yards away on a concrete pad above the river. It was parked facing away from him toward Little Falls. The moonlight had turned the scene a dusky blue.
Soneji felt a thrill shoot through him.
It wasn’t a Joyce scenario, but his heart was suddenly booming. He got out the weapon, breathless at the solid weight of the pistol in his hand.
After gauging where the moon would throw his shadow and locating the blind spot of the Bronco’s side-view mirror, Soneji padded forward. He heard the low roar of the nearby rapids and the distant wail of a siren somewhere on the Virginia side of the river.
Feeling the blood pound in his temples, he watched for movement in the car as he closed the distance. At five yards, he could see the silhouettes of the jock and his girlfriend in the moonlight and the glow of the radio, which was playing the intro to Springsteen’s “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.”
At two feet away, he saw they were both topless and entwined in a kiss.
He flashed on an image of Joyce freed of her shirt and bra, then shook the memory off.
Soneji lifted the gun. He aimed through the side window at the back of the lacrosse captain’s head, thinking beyond what the genius had done, trying for two dead with one shot. A split second before the gun went off, however, the girl moved her head.
The shot was much louder than he’d expected. Soneji looked at the spiderwebbed window and felt an overwhelming urge to flee the scene. So he did.
He took off, running back toward the spur road and into the darkened woods. He tripped and almost fell, stuck the pistol back in his pocket, and got out the penlight.
He sprinted to the back of the van, meaning to return the pistol, the balaclava, and the socks to the duffel bag, reached for the door handle, and froze.
Someone had scrawled with a finger across the two dirty back doors Bike trail, asshole. Reporting you to police.
For two or three beats, Soneji stood there, his mind unable to process the ramifications of the message. Then his survival instinct, honed over years of abuse as a child, kicked in.
He looked at the ground and saw the bike’s thin track. The bicyclist must have come from the south, seen the van, stopped to write the note, then looped right and continued north.
Soneji jumped into the van, started it, and rammed it into reverse. He spun the van around, then smashed it into drive. He figured he’d been gone no more than fifteen minutes. The bicyclist had a head start, but how much of a head start? If he’d seen the van right away, he could be across the lock and up on the parkway by now. But if the bicyclist had spotted the van a few minutes later, he might still be on the towpath. And he might have heard the gunshot.
Soneji turned on the fog lights and sped up.
For almost a minute, he felt nothing but anxiety and uncertainty. Then, four hundred yards short of the bridge off the island, he saw a bicycle taillight about a hundred yards away, blinking red, and the bright reflectors of a safety vest.
He floored the gas pedal. When he was fifty yards away and closing, the bicyclist turned, revealing a headlamp and the concerned face of a bearded man.
When Soneji was twenty-five yards from him, the man tried to pull over to his left to let Soneji pass. He was facing away from the van and had not come to a full stop when the van’s left front bumper plowed into him, launching both rider and bike off the path and into the darkness of the woods.
CHAPTER 5
SAMPSON AND I WERE assigned to the Tony Miller murder case, but we were pretty far down in the hierarchy at Metro, so the day after Tony’s funeral, we also took a six a.m. call from Dispatch.
An angler had found two bodies in an old Ford Bronco out on Bear Island, within District lines, which made the killings Metro’s responsibility. It was misty and foggy when we got to lock five. A National Park Service vehicle was blocking the way across, its lights flashing.
A Bethesda Police cruiser was parked beside it, its lights flashing as well. A police officer was turning away angry bikers who were trying to get on the towpath heading to Georgetown.
Ranger Carrie Mulberry saw us, came over, and said, “We’ve closed off the island, and I’ve got rangers blocking access at the north and south ends. All went in by bike.”
“You been to the vehicle yourself?” Sampson asked.
Mulberry made a sour face and said in a soft voice, “After hearing what Mr. Quirk saw, we decided to hang back and not mess up any evidence for you. He says there are large vehicle tracks all over the towpath leading to the scene.”
“Mr. Quirk is the fisherman who found the bodies?”
“Dudley Quirk the Fourth,” Gene Lamont, the Bethesda officer, said to us after turning away another bicyclist. “One of those.”
“One of those?” I asked.
“One of those people who’s gotta tell you they’re the Fourth. Lack of naming imagination in the family if you ask me.”
“No one did,” Sampson said shortly. We looked over at the fisherman, who was sitting on a rock wall.
“He doesn’t hear that well,” Mulberry warned us before turning to stop a pack of four bicyclists.
We walked up to Quirk, showed him our badges.
Quirk nodded. “I don’t usually bring my hearing aids when I’m going to fish. I dropped one in the drink last year and they’re awful expensive,” he explained, then launched into his story. “I come here on my bike in the dark a couple mornings a week, and I ride over to the other side of the island, close to where you can see the falls upstream, and I fish as the sun rises.
“I got there and saw the Bronco sitting there, and I got angry because you’re not supposed to be in here with a rig, you know? I walked up and saw the bullet hole through the side window. And then the boy lying on top of the girl. I turned around and rode back here just as the ranger was pulling into the parking lot. End of story.”
“Thank you,” I said, exaggerating my lip movements to be clear.
He shrugged. “A prime fishing dawn ruined. But it could have been worse. I could have been in the car with them.”
Quirk told us he’d seen two sets of big tire tracks traveling the towpath south to the cutoff toward the west branch of the Potomac, then only the Bronco’s tracks heading down the cutoff and another vehicle’s coming back the other way.
“You an expert on tire tracks?” Sampson asked.
“Hard not to see them,” Quirk said.
We left him, went back to Ranger Mulberry. “Can you drive us to within a hundred yards of that cutoff?” I asked.
“We’ll be driving over their tracks,” she said.
“They’ll be the same tracks down there,” Sampson said. “We’ll have forensics take samples over there.”
“Your jurisdiction, your call,” the ranger said.
We crossed the lock and the bridge and headed south on the towpath. Quirk had been right—it was hard to miss the tire tracks in most places.
A few hundred yards south of the bridge, I noticed something on the towpath and said, “Stop.”
The ranger stopped. Sampson and I got out and saw shards of clear and red plastic on the path. John said, “Looks like pieces of a headlight and blinker.”
Almost as soon as he said that, we heard “Ahh” coming from the woods to our right. We went toward the sound and saw a man lying by a tree stump, a good thirty feet from the path. He was on his side, facing us, entangled in a bicycle frame that was bent like a V.
“Call an ambulance!” I shouted to the ranger and followed Sampson into the woods. The closer we got, the more blood we saw on the biker’s bearded face and the more unnatural the angles of his legs and arms looked.
“Sir, can you hear us?”
“Ahh,” he wheezed. “Hepp.”
“Help’s coming,” I said.
“Who hit you?” Sampson said.
He wheezed again. His jaw looked swollen.
“Sir?”
But he’d closed his eyes. Mulberry ran up. “Ambulance is ten minutes out. Jesus, what happened to him?”
I said, “Wild guess, I bet he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and got hit by whoever was fleeing.”
John said, “We have to treat this part of the path as its own crime scene.”
“Agreed,” I said. “I think we should call for a backup team to treat this as an attempted murder, and we’ll go to the primary scene on foot.”
“You go on ahead,” the ranger said. “I’ll stay with the vic.”
Sampson said, “Once the EMTs get here and stabilize him, go through his pack there, see if he’s got identification.”
The bicyclist wheezed again. Mulberry went to him, said, “Just hang on a little bit longer and we’ll get you to a hospital.”
We left the two of them and walked in the weeds next to the towpath all the way to the cutoff. As Quirk had said, there was a single set of tracks there heading to the west fork.
It was nearly eight a.m. when we reached the opening above the river and saw the Bronco. Sampson walked toward the SUV, looking for footprints in the soil.
He stopped, squatted, and said, “These are something, but I can’t see a tread, and there’re little strands of fabric in the prints.”
“He’s wearing wool socks,” I said.
“So he can come in silent and not leave an identifiable trace,” John said. “This is premeditation.”
Sampson set his police radio on the roof, and we put on gloves and opened the Bronco’s front doors. The victims were both Caucasian, topless, and in their teens.
The male victim had been shot through the back of the head at close range. The round had blown a ragged exit hole in his forehead and hit the female victim.
There was so much blood and brain matter on her face, it was hard to tell exactly where she’d been hit—until she groaned and rolled her head to one side, revealing a large scalp wound.
“She’s alive!” I shouted.
John grabbed his radio off the roof of the Bronco. “Dispatch, this is Sampson at the one-four-zero on Bear Island. We need a medevac helicopter here right now!”
CHAPTER 6
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, WE watched the helicopter lift off the island carrying a gravely injured but very much alive seventeen-year-old Abigail Howard to the trauma team at George Washington University Hospital.
But there was no such miracle for Conrad Talbot, also seventeen. We knew who they were because we’d found his school ID in his wallet and hers in a small bookbag.
The District’s medical examiner was working on the scene, and as we waited for his report, a familiar figure emerged from the woods.
“Here we go,” Sampson sighed as the chief of detectives approached us.
George Pittman walked over while unwrapping a stick of gum. “I’m trying to quit smoking, so this is all I get.”
“Better than smoking,” I said.
Chief Pittman grunted noncommittally and chewed the gum for a moment.
“One dead, one alive?” he asked.
“Correct,” I said.
“Who are they?”
“Students at the Charles School in Alexandria,” I said.
“Private school. They come from cash, then, right?”
I squinted. “I suppose you can assume that. Why?”
“Because this is going to get a lot of media attention, that’s why,” the chief said, and chewed a few more times. Sampson and I filled him in on what we’d learned so far. I was surprised when Pittman recognized one of the kids’ names.
“The dead one, Talbot. I saw a story about him in the Post last spring. Captain of the lacrosse team. Good-looking too. And it turns out that guy on the bike is some Senate aide. We are going to need more manpower here.”
I thought about Tony Miller’s funeral the day before. Where was Pittman then? But this was only my second homicide case. I wasn’t going to turn down help.
The chief went on. “So, gentlemen, I’m bringing in Diehl and Kurtz to take the lead on this.”
Sampson grimaced. “Chief, we can—”
“No, Detective,” Pittman said flatly. “I can’t have two junior members of my team running an investigation like this. I’m sorry. The two of you will work with Diehl and Kurtz, and hopefully you’ll both learn something.”
I could tell John wanted to counter that with something snarky, but he held his tongue. Well, almost.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “Do you want us to notify the families? Or should we leave it to the dynamic duo?”
The chief stopped chewing, and his eyes narrowed. “You and Cross can do it. After that, report to Diehl and Kurtz and me in my office downtown, bring us up to speed. We’ll figure out what’s next.”
“Right away, Chief,” Sampson said.
Our boss studied him a moment, searching for evidence of sarcasm. After a beat, he glanced at me and said, “I’ll wait here for Diehl and Kurtz.”
We nodded and walked away. When we were back in the trees and out of earshot, Sampson said, “You know what that was really about, right?”
“He doesn’t want two Black junior detectives being the faces of an investigation into the murder of a rich white kid and the attempted murder of the kid’s girlfriend and a Senate aide.”
“Nah,” John said. “More like he doesn’t want two Black junior detectives getting the credit if they solve the murder of a rich white kid and the attempted murder of his girlfriend and a Senate aide.”
CHAPTER 7
BEFORE WE DROVE OVER to Alexandria, Virginia, to meet with Conrad Talbot’s family, I got Abby Howard’s number from Dispatch and called her house. I spoke to her mother, Lisa Howard, and informed her that her daughter had been injured and was en route to GWU Hospital. I said we’d meet her at the hospital later this morning.
When Sampson and I got back in the car, he said, “FYI, you should have asked the mother not to call Conrad’s parents.”
“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t think of that. Does it matter? Why do you think she would?”
“Well, I’m assuming Abby’s mother knew her daughter was out with Conrad last night, and she must have called his family when her daughter didn’t come home, so maybe she’ll call them now to give them an update. But I’d rather inform the family in person. Especially in cases like this, when it’s the death of a kid with his whole life ahead of him. I see it as part of the job. Our responsibility.”
“I didn’t tell her Conrad was dead.”
“I know,” he said. “But you get the point.”
“Learning.”
“Every day.”
The Talbot family lived in a sprawling red-brick Colonial on a shaded cul-de-sac in Alexandria about two miles from the Charles School. It was ten minutes to nine when we knocked on the front door with our badges out.
