The Beltway Assassin

by Richard Fox

  “Then the guy says, ‘Ass! Freeze holes!’” Shelton said with lisp.

  Chuckles erupted from Irene and Tony. Ritter kept his sense of humor in check.

  “Then he passed gas and left. Local cops picked him up at a bus station a block away. Worst bank robber ever,” Shelton said.

  Irene cracked up and gave Ritter, whom she’d sat next to, a playful jab in the side. Ritter bunched up in pain, and soda spat from his lips.

  “Oh my God. I’m so sorry,” Irene said. She rubbed her hand on Ritter’s shoulder to comfort him as he took forced slow and even breaths. He took her hand away and gave it a quick squeeze for Shelton’s benefit. She gave his knee a pat under the table.

  This is exactly what I don’t need right now, Ritter thought. Keeping his office romance with Cindy, a world away on a mission in the Ukraine, a secret was a challenge. Irene must have thought he was available, and rescuing her, as cliché as it sounded, might have raised him a few pegs in her estimation.

  Now he was stuck keeping up appearances to appease Shelton’s assumptions. What a tangled web we weave, he thought. He could let Irene down easily later.

  “Remember when we ate at that little farm in Greece? The best feta I’ve ever had,” Tony said.

  “Not as good as the time we went to Noma in Denmark,” Irene added.

  Ritter cleared his throat.

  “But there was that place in Salzburg where Ritter and—Ow! Who kicked me?” Tony asked.

  “Not in front of guests,” Ritter said, glancing at Shelton. “Business trips. No offense.”

  “Some taken,” Shelton said.

  A series of beeps came from Tony’s computer banks.

  Tony dabbed tomato sauce away from his shirt and stood up. “We’ve got a DNA hit,” he said.

  Ritter kept eating, uninterested, as if the results were a foregone conclusion.

  Tony tapped at his keyboard, and the picture of a soldier in a green Class A uniform came up on a wide-screen TV. The soldier was in his early twenties, fair haired. There were no ribbons on his uniform, but he had the single “mosquito wings” chevron of private rank on the sleeve.

  “DNA comes back for an AWOL soldier,” Tony said. “Erasmus Toolidge, twenty-two, enlisted in 2008—scored off the charts on his ASVAB—as an 89D, explosives ordnance disposal. Which explains how he knows so much about bombs. Have to know how to put them together before you can blow them apart. He finished basic training but went AWOL right before he graduated from Explosive Ordnance Disposal school. He was about to be kicked out for ‘failure to adapt,’ but it…seems he developed quite the beef with the war in Iraq toward the end of his training…Also something of a nut, according to a psych eval. He had the normal AWOL warrants out on him in the system, but those magically disappeared about six months ago.”

  “That’s our Jefferson. He never deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan?” Ritter asked.

  Tony shook his head.

  “Then how does he learn to make bombs just like an Iraqi insurgent?” Ritter asked.

  “The Iranian? He had the basic skills from the army; the Iranian taught him the designs. It fits the evidence,” Irene added.

  “It does,” Ritter said, “but there are better ways to design bombs than what an Iraqi could cobble together in his garage. This is America. He has access to more sophisticated material and components.”

  “To stay off the grid? He has warrants,” Shelton said. “Make the bombs with low-profile components. No one calls the FBI to report a homeless guy paying cash for commercial-grade explosives or two tons of fertilizer.”

  “There’s something we’re missing. Why have a former soldier masquerade as an Iraqi bomb maker?” Ritter asked. The room was silent, as no answer surfaced.

  “What about the other set of DNA?” Shelton asked.

  Tony shook his head. “No hits.”

  “Where’d you get his records?” Irene asked.

  “The repository. His DNA was scrubbed out of army and law-enforcement databases the same time his warrant went away,” Tony said.

  “So when the FBI finishes their tests, they still won’t know who they’re looking for. Only we know who he is, but does that do us any good?” Shelton asked.

  “Maybe. The photo is old. Can we get a facial-recognition match?” Ritter asked Tony.

  “Short answer no, long answer yes,” Tony said. “When beard and the junkie—”

  “Beard?” Shelton asked.

  “—were talking,” Tony continued, “the junkie said Jefferson killed a soldier in Baltimore a couple of months ago. I found the case, Sergeant Kyle Morrow, was on terminal leave from the army and using the Pratt Library to meet with a study group for his undergrad degree. He was shot in the back—no suspects and no witnesses. Case is still open, but no one’s working it in Baltimore PD.”

  “Why? A veteran is murdered in cold blood, and the police just don’t care?” Irene asked.

  “Baltimore has one of the highest murder rates in the country, three times worse than DC, and only a handful of homicide detectives,” Shelton said. “There’s only so much they can do on a case with no leads. I don’t excuse it, but I can understand why they aren’t pursuing the case.”

  “Video surveillance?” Ritter asked. “He would have surveilled his target, watched him for a few days to establish a pattern, and known where to hit him where the cameras wouldn’t catch the crime.”

  Shelton narrowed his eyes at Ritter.

  “That’s what I would have done,” Ritter said with a shrug.

  “Deleted months ago,” Tony said.

  “Internet records,” Irene said. “If he was hanging out at the library, I bet he was on the Internet.” She walked up to Tony and began a low conversation with him. She gave him a few terse commands before finally saying, “Move!”

  Windows displaying IP addresses and website URLs, which were meaningless to Shelton, burst on the big screen. One site he did recognize popped up several times, Reddit, an Internet forum for just about everything imaginable.

  “He and Garcia were Occupiers, right?” Irene asked as she kept typing. “They do love their Reddit…Cross-reference posts from the timeframe of the murder to the forum from the library’s IP address and…Bingo! Got a username.”

  A Reddit user profile popped up with the name xXJeffersonWOTWUXx. The avatar was a black-gloved fist raised in defiance.

  “WOTWU?” Tony asked.

  “Workers of the World Unite, a commie slogan,” Shelton said.

  “Looking through his posts and…Wow, this guys does not like Republicans,” Irene said. “He’s only ever active from public IPs—coffee shop Wi-Fi and libraries. Last time he was active was yesterday…Reading up on the new Beltway bomber discussions,” Irene said.

  “If we don’t have a more recent photo or a ping on where he is now, then what good does all this do us?” Ritter said.

  Irene was silent for a few seconds; then she smiled. “Good news. There was a murder at the last library he went to. I mean, not good news, but…Shut up.” Photo stills of a wild-eyed man holding the broken leg of a table came on the screen, parts of a wanted poster. “The local police are a little more motivated to find him now. Seems he beat a woman to death for refusing to get off her cell phone at the library.”

  “Is that photo enough for the facial-recognition database?” Ritter asked.

  Irene and Tony colluded for a few minutes. A wire frame went over the photo of Jefferson’s face; white dots popped up all over the face, creating a unique profile. “We’re on it,” Tony said, “but it’ll take a while for a hit. Assuming there is a photo to hit off of.”

  “You want to bring me up to speed?” Shelton asked.

  “We have a search engine that will scan open-source photos on the Internet, traffic cameras, and federal surveillance footage. If he’s out there, we’ll find him,” Ritter said.

  “How is that legal?” Shelton asked. “You’re conducting all these searches without a warrant. Any evidence we fin
d will be crushed by any defense attorney that can spell his own name right. Then there’s the fruit of the poisonous tree and so on.”

  “I’ll leave the parallel reconstruction up to you, if it ever comes to that. None of what you see here will ever show up in court—not me, not Tony, not Irene, not the whiz-bang search results we’re waiting on,” Ritter said.

  “Then how are we going to get a conviction in a court of law?” Shelton asked. “That’s justice, Eric. That’s what I’m here for.”

  Ritter’s laissez-faire attitude to due process was starting to gall Shelton. As an officer in the army, Shelton had sworn to a code of conduct that adhered to laws and honor. He’d kept his silence over Ritter’s war crimes to protect his soldiers and maintain the détente that existed between his company and the local Iraqi fighters. The case with Jefferson was different, and Shelton would be damned if he compromised again.

  Ritter shook his head slightly. “I need information. To know who Jefferson is working for and why they’re killing…a bunch of nobodies.”

  “The victims—you got involved after Bendis, a retiree with nothing of note to his history. The next two victims were well-known neocons and involved in the Iraq War, which fits Jefferson’s target pattern. There’s something about Bendis you’re not telling me. What is it?” Shelton asked.

  Ritter stared at Shelton for a moment, and Shelton caught one of Ritter’s tells: a slight twitch on his right eye. A lie was coming.

  “I don’t know, Greg. Sometimes even I have to be a good little soldier and follow orders,” Ritter said. “The most important thing is that we stop the killing. If we have to bother with the courts, at the very least his tax returns won’t hold up to scrutiny.”

  “‘Bother with the courts’? What do you think we’re going to do with Jefferson when we arrest him?” Shelton asked.

  “I will use whatever means necessary to find out what I need to know. If he gets shunted down your stovepipe, he’ll lawyer up, and we will never know who he’s working for,” Ritter said.

  Shelton slammed a hand on the table.

  “If you think I’m going to let you torture an American citizen on our soil, you’ve got another thing coming!” Shelton yelled.

  The outburst shook Tony and Irene from their work. They watched Ritter and Shelton’s face-off like children watching their parents fight. A ding came from Tony’s computer.

  “I’ve got a hit,” Tony said meekly.

  “We can continue this discussion after we have him,” Ritter said. Shelton said nothing and turned to Tony.

  A map came up on the flat screen, a red pin stuck on a park in Baltimore. Pictures with Jefferson in the background, looking just as disheveled and wild eyed as the surveillance photo from the library where he’d beaten a woman to death, populated the right side of the screen.

  “These are all from Twitter, conveniently geotagged to McKeldin Square in Baltimore. He’s at the Occupy rally that set up shop there last fall. Bunch more hipsters showed up in the wake of the bombings, and there are selfies all over social media. Thank you hashtag occupy and thank you self-aggrandizement,” Tony said.

  “The photos are from the last few days and odd hours. I’d say he’s sleeping there,” Irene said.

  Ritter looked between his and Shelton’s suit and tie ensembles.

  “Let’s go, but first we need to change into something a little less ‘federal agent,’” Ritter said.

  ****

  They parked three blocks from the McKeldin Square. Shelton took a pair of handcuffs from a pocket and handed them to Ritter, keys dangling from the lock.

  “You know how to use these?” Shelton asked.

  “Can’t be that different from zip ties,” Ritter said. Taking prisoners was more akin to kidnapping than making an arrest for him. Grab the target, throw a hood over his or her head, and bind the limbs before he or she could make much noise or get away. This time Ritter had a badge and needed to act like law enforcement, not a spy.

  The Occupy movement had picked one of the nicer parts of Baltimore to set up, prime waterfront real estate within site of the National Aquarium and culture centers. If they were going to protest the 1 Percent, it made sense for them to go where the 1 Percent might see them.

  Locals avoided Ritter and Shelton as they made their way to the park. Shelton’s size and Ritter’s cold gaze must have given them the air of muggers or muscle on their way to collect on a debt. Their jeans and hoodies under leather jackets certainly didn’t make them look like priests.

  “Eric, what’s a ‘beard’?” Shelton asked. “Both Tony and Irene called me that.”

  Ritter smacked his lips and glanced at Shelton. “Really? You never heard of that?” he asked.

  Shelton shrugged.

  “A beard is someone you keep around to make an impression. Gay Hollywood actors used to have sham relationships with women. That way they wouldn’t get blackballed for being gay. Like Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor was the beard. So, when you’re around, my cover as an FBI agent is that much better,” Ritter said.

  “Wait. Rock Hudson was gay?” Shelton asked.

  “Do I have to burst your bubble about Richard Simmons too?” Ritter asked.

  They heard the Occupy protest before they saw it. A garbled loudspeaker sent a muddled speech through the park and echoed through the neighborhood. Perfunctory cheers erupted with every pause, more out of rote than enthusiasm.

  Crude slogans on bed sheets and the bare backs of plastic marquees fenced in McKeldin Square. Text for Chinese food and tire repair bled through thin vinyl for slogans against the theft by the 1 Percenters. Eddies of trash collected between the crooked rows of one- and two-person tents. A stage in the middle of the park boasted floodlights and a single speaker.

  The speaker, a white man with dreadlocks and pants so tight Ritter wasn’t sure how blood circulated to the man’s feet, blathered into a megaphone. The crowd around the stage bled off spectators as the speaker shifted into market theory and the impact of free-trade coffee beans on the indigenous farmers of Honduras.

  Ritter had trouble telling the difference between the true-believer Occupy protesters and the homeless who moved into the park to coincide with the free food sympathetic businesses had donated to the protest.

  “We should split up. Call if you see him,” Ritter said.

  “We should stay together. Safer,” Shelton said.

  “Which is exactly what cops would do. He doesn’t know who we are or that we’re looking for him. We’ll spook him if we’re together,” Ritter said. “You start on the north side. I’ll go south. Work your way to the stage.” He peeled off from Shelton, not willing to discuss the manner further.

  Ritter had a snub-nosed .22 caliber pistol on the small of his back. The small-caliber gun normally carried little in the way of stopping power, but the loaded hollow-point rounds made up for that deficiency. A bullet would blow out a lump of flesh the size of a lemon if it hit. Naturally, the Occupiers had posted several gun-free zones around the park, whi Ritter ignored without hesitation.

  The park stank of unwashed bodies and stale urine. He wandered through the tents, scanning for anyone boasting Jefferson’s height and wearing the dark-green overcoat he’d worn in the last series of photos.

  “But, you got to take into account the intransigence of the proletariat, man. They’re numb to the world through TV and fast food. Pabulum of the mind and body,” a voice said from within a pup tent. The strong smell of marijuana wafted from the tent.

  “Got to spark the revolution…man,” the same voice said. Ritter stepped around to the tent opening. A woman in her early twenties, her hair twined into a single long braid and wrapped around her head like a bird’s nest, had a bong on her lap. A skinny old man, who looked like a veteran hippie, slept on a rumpled comforter, snoring through his tent mate’s speech.

  “’Sup, dude?” the woman said. “You want a rip?”

  “No, thanks. You know where I can find Jefferson?”
Ritter asked.

  The stoner coughed and retreated back into her tent. “He’s…ugh. He’s…not here. Think he left a while ago.”

  Ritter pulled out a tight roll of twenty-dollar bills. “I owe him some money. Can I leave this with you and you pass it on the next time you see him?”

  The woman’s bloodshot eyes widened at the sight of the money. She reached for the cash, but Ritter pulled it just out of her reach.

  “Where’s his tent? I’ll leave him a note to find you,” Ritter said.

  “Two rows over, blue with white mosquito panels. He’s got some awesome scrawl on it,” she said. Ritter tossed her the cash and left.

  From the tent he heard, “Edgar! Edgar wake up. We’re getting Chipotle!”

  Jefferson’s tent was easy to find. The words “The tree of liberty needs the blood of patriots” were written in silver paint marker around the tent dome. A mountain bike with wheels caked in soil was locked to a spike in the ground. Despite the era of good feelings the camp espoused, Jefferson had seen that he needed to secure his valuables.

  A tiny padlock secured the zippered entrance. Ritter faked a trip and kicked at the base of the tent. There was something heavy inside but not big enough to be a man. Ritter turned the trip into a stumble and came down on his knees in front of the padlock. He fished a tiny metal shank from his breast pocket and picked the lock in seconds.

  Ritter grabbed the pistol on his back and opened the tent. No one there. The tent didn’t smell like sweat and mud like the rest of the camp; it reeked of fertilizer. A pile of old books, a green foam mat, and a black bag were inside. Ritter ducked into the tent and closed the flap behind him.

  The books were worn copies of Thomas Jefferson’s letters, Marx, and Che Guevara’s writings. Strange bedfellows to Ritter but not his immediate concern. He thumbed through the books’ pristine pages, looking for phone numbers or scraps of paper that might hold contact information for whoever Jefferson worked for. Two sheets of paper, folded into neat halves, slipped out of a book. One sheet was bare; the other had eight printed names. Bendis, the first victim of Jefferson’s bombs, was on the list, highlighted in yellow and crossed off. Other names, hand written in spiky scrawl, were in the gaps between the names and along the margins: McBride and Allesio. Their handwritten names were also highlighted and crossed off.