by Mike Lawson
But Brayden didn’t join Lynch on the park bench.
Nor did Lynch get into Brayden’s car.
Brayden did the last thing Emma had expected.
Through the night-vision binoculars, she saw Brayden extend his arm and then saw two tongues of flame.
Brayden had shot John Lynch where he sat, on the bus-stop bench.
40
Emma’s phone vibrated.
Pamela screamed, “Jesus Christ! He just shot him, he fuckin’ shot him!”
Emma said, “Did you video it?”
“No. It happened too fast. I had the camera in my hand, and I was ready to start filming when he got out of the car, but then he just shot the guy. I got video of him driving away, but that’s all I got.”
Damnit! Pamela should have started filming as soon as Brayden drove up.
By now Brayden was two blocks away, and Emma, without turning on her headlights, took off after him. She didn’t know what she was going to do, other than follow him. For one thing, she wasn’t armed. She hadn’t been expecting to confront Brayden or Lynch, and she certainly hadn’t expected Brayden to kill Lynch. Nor were Pamela and Shandra armed. No way was Emma going to give those two troubled young women weapons and put them in any position where they might be forced to shoot someone.
“What do you want me to do?” Pamela said. She was screaming into the phone. This was the last thing Emma had wanted: to expose Pamela and Shandra to more violence.
As she was driving, Emma said, “Pamela, honey, calm down. Go see if Lynch is alive. Check his pulse. If he’s alive, call nine-one-one and try to help him. If he’s dead, return to your car and get away from the park as fast as possible.”
Pamela said, “Yeah, okay.” She sounded as if she was barely functioning.
Emma called Shandra. “Where are you?”
“I’m a block behind you,” Shandra said. “I can see your car. What happened?”
“Brayden shot Lynch.”
“Oh, shit,” Shandra said. “Follow me,” Emma said.
Brayden was still two blocks ahead of Emma. He’d slowed down after he’d sped away right after shooting Lynch. He clearly didn’t want to take the chance of getting pulled over by a cop and was now observing the speed limit. Emma matched his pace, hoping he couldn’t see her following with her headlights off.
Pamela called. “Lynch is dead. Jesus Christ, he’s dead. The guy shot him twice right in the heart.”
Emma said, “Pamela, I want you to take a deep breath. Go on, do it. Take a breath.” She heard Pamela inhale and exhale over the phone. “Okay,” Emma said. “Now go to your car and drive to Neil’s office. I want him to look at the video you took and see what it shows.”
Emma thought about telling Pamela to remove the tracking device from Lynch’s car, but considering Pamela’s state of mind, she decided she wanted her away from the crime scene as soon as possible. Plus the police would most likely do only a routine search of the car and the probability of them finding the tracking device hidden on the underside of the vehicle was small.
“Yeah, okay,” Pamela said.
Brayden had headed north on Columbus from the bus stop, then turned onto George Mason Drive. Emma, still two blocks behind him, hit her brakes when she saw him stop on the bridge that passed over Four Mile Run. The next thing she saw, barely visible in the streetlights near the bridge, was an object fly out the passenger-side window of Brayden’s car.
Emma had been too far away to see what Brayden had tossed from his car—but she knew what it was. She called Shandra, who was a block behind her.
“Brayden just threw a gun into Four Mile Run from the bridge on George Mason Drive.”
“I saw his car stop on the bridge,” Shandra said.
“Find the gun,” Emma said. “Call Pamela. She’s on her way to Neil’s, but tell her to come back and help you.”
“Roger that,” Shandra said. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m not sure yet. Just find the gun.”
Actually, Emma now had a plan—she just hadn’t decided if she was going to follow through with it.
Emma could tell that Brayden was headed back to his apartment in North Arlington. She remained a couple of blocks behind him and watched as he turned into the apartment building’s parking garage. After his car had entered the garage, she parked near the garage entrance.
She wasn’t sure what had made Brayden decide to kill Lynch. She figured that with Nikita Orlov disappearing, Brayden was already nervous, and then he got a panic call from Lynch right after Emma had threatened him in Rusty’s. She didn’t know what Lynch had said to Brayden, but it was probably something along the lines of: Some woman knows I killed Canton. Or maybe he said: We got a big problem. We need to meet. Whatever was said, Brayden had decided that Lynch had become an intolerable liability and had to go.
And she knew exactly what Brayden was doing right now: he was destroying all the evidence linking him to Lynch’s murder.
But what was she going to do?
41
Bill Brayden was proud that he was a man who never panicked.
He remembered one time in Afghanistan when somebody, either the Taliban or al-Qaeda—you never knew who the hell was trying to kill you over there—started lobbing rocket-propelled grenades into the Bagram air base. While everybody else had been running around, screaming and ducking for cover, he’d calmly assessed the situation and begun directing his security force to take out the attackers. He’d earned the Bronze Star for his actions that night.
He’d also been in a few tight situations while working for Sebastian Spear. With Spear, the risk of being arrested was greater than the risk of being killed, but the job still required that he stay in control and not become unnerved. And he was in control now. He’d never committed murder before, and he was pleased to see that he was focused only on the tasks he needed to perform. He wasn’t wasting mental energy second-guessing his decision or worrying that he might be caught for what he’d done.
After he parked in the garage, he popped the trunk lock before getting out of the car. He was wearing gloves and mechanics’ coveralls over his street clothes. Inside the trunk were a black garbage bag, a spray bottle of cleaning solution, and a few rags. Also inside were his license plates, which he’d removed in case someone saw his car when he shot Lynch.
He walked a few feet away from his car, carefully stripped off the coveralls and his gloves, never touching the outside of any of the items, then placed everything in the black garbage bag. Next he put the license plates back on his car and, using the cleaning solution and the rags, carefully wiped down the interior of the car, paying particular attention to the frame around the passenger-side front window. He was fairly confident that no one had seen him shoot Lynch—it had been after one o’clock in the morning, and there’d been no one on the street near the bus stop—but if by some fluke someone had seen him, he had to make sure there was no gunshot residue in the car.
After he’d wiped down the car, he deposited the rags in the same garbage bag that contained his coveralls. Then he stood for a moment, thinking, to see whether there was anything he’d overlooked.
He’d gotten rid of the gun, so that wasn’t a concern, and he knew he hadn’t left his fingerprints on it. He’d found the shell casings ejected from the gun on the passenger seat of his car, and he’d dropped them onto the street as he’d been driving back to his place. He knew his fingerprints weren’t on the shell casings, either, as he’d worn gloves when he’d loaded the magazine.
The only thing to do now was dispose of the clothes he’d worn and the cell phone he’d used to communicate with Lynch and Hector Montoya. Unfortunately, he hadn’t had time after he shot Lynch to remove Lynch’s cell phone, and the police would find it after they found the body. But what they wouldn’t be able to find was the phone that Lynch had been texting and calling—Brayden’s burner phone.
Brayden left the parking garage gripping the black garbage bag with a rag
to make sure he didn’t leave fingerprints on it. Instead of going up to his apartment on the third floor, he took the elevator to the lobby and left the building via the main entrance, which was on the opposite side of the building from the parking garage.
He walked at a normal pace to a restaurant two blocks from his apartment; he didn’t see a soul while he was walking. There were three large dumpsters behind the restaurant, overflowing with trash, and he shoved his garbage bag into one of them. On the way back to his apartment, he removed the battery from the burner phone and dumped the battery and the phone down a storm drain.
Back inside his apartment, the first thing Brayden did was pour himself a scotch. A double. It was now almost three a.m., and he was tired, but his mind was spinning and he knew he wouldn’t be able to fall asleep.
When Lynch had called him earlier in the evening while he was eating dinner, Lynch had screamed into the phone that some woman had just accused him of murdering Lyle Canton. His actual words were: Some bitch knows I killed Canton. Brayden had immediately told the idiot to shut up and disconnected the call before he could say anything more. Killing a United States congressman was not something you discussed over a fucking radio where some eavesdropping federal agency could snatch your words right out of the air.
After he disconnected the call he thought about who the woman could be. He was positive that she wasn’t an FBI agent, because the FBI didn’t work that way. If the FBI had evidence that Lynch had killed Canton, they would have arrested him. If they didn’t have enough evidence for an arrest but suspected him, they wouldn’t have told him that he was a suspect. What they would have done was throw a surveillance net around him—and Brayden knew that hadn’t happened or he would have been arrested when he shot Lynch. He figured the woman was most likely someone who worked in the Capitol and maybe saw Lynch the night Canton was killed. She might even be another Capitol cop. He also figured that she really had no interest in having Lynch arrested. If she’d wanted that to happen she would have called the FBI. Maybe she’d been thinking about blackmailing Lynch.
Whatever the case, and regardless of who the woman was, he’d decided less than ten minutes after Lynch called him that Lynch had to die. Lynch had always been the weakest link in the operation because he wasn’t terribly bright, and he needed to be killed before he did something stupid that could tie Brayden to Canton’s death. As far as Brayden knew, the only connection between him and Lynch that the cops would be able to find would be a text message on Lynch’s phone telling Lynch to meet him at Barcroft Park at one a.m.—and the phone that had sent the text message was gone, as was all the other evidence that could tie him to Lynch’s murder. Yes, with Lynch gone he should be safe.
Lynch. He couldn’t believe it when he saw the damn guy at the Capitol one day. This had been over a year ago, when Brayden, along with a couple of Spear’s lawyers, had been forced to testify in a House hearing that lasted two days. A congressman had been outraged that Spear Industries had been awarded a contract that should have gone to a company that contributed heavily to the congressman. So the outraged congressman, along with a few of his cronies who wanted to get their mugs on television, had futilely grilled Brayden and the lawyers for hours on end. The second morning of the hearing, when Brayden walked into the Capitol, he was astounded to see Lynch there, wearing the uniform of a Capitol cop.
Brayden remembered Lynch well from his days in the air force because he’d had Lynch arrested and court-martialed for stealing ten laptops that Lynch most likely had been planning to sell to college kids on a campus near the base. The problem was that although Brayden knew Lynch was guilty, he wasn’t able to prove it, not beyond a reasonable doubt, and Lynch had been acquitted. Lynch had been a slug while in the air force: lazy, undisciplined, a shirker, a drinker. Twice MPs had had to be called to his house when he was slapping his wife around. Yet here the damn guy was protecting the Capitol. If that didn’t say everything there was to say about hiring standards for federal employees, he didn’t know what did.
When Sebastian Spear had ordered him to kill Canton, one of the ideas Brayden came up with was framing someone for Canton’s murder so the investigation could be closed quickly and not traced back to him. And that’s when it occurred to him that John Lynch, with his access to the Capitol, might be the perfect person to use. He had Nikki Orlov research Lynch, and he discovered that Lynch was practically broke, living in a dump, and had no prospects for advancement with the Capitol Police. So one day he waited until Lynch left work and approached him as he was trudging to the Metro station.
He said, “John, I’d like to talk to you.” Naturally, because of their past, Lynch had been belligerent.
He said, “I don’t give a damn what you want, Colonel. I’m not in the air force, and you’re not my boss.”
That’s when Brayden said, “John, how would you like to earn half a million dollars?”
It took some time to convince Lynch to do what he wanted—but not that much time. Lynch’s character hadn’t improved since his discharge from the air force. What really took the time—almost four months—was finding someone to frame for killing Canton and preparing Lynch to do the job.
Nikki Orlov had hacked into personnel files and found a number of men who might be suitable to frame. They’d finally settled on DeMarco, this mysterious lawyer who worked in the subbasement and had a mob hit man for a father and ties to John Mahoney, a man known to despise Canton. Nikki discovered the Mahoney-DeMarco connection when he started monitoring DeMarco’s cell phone. (Nikki, Brayden recalled, had a wonderful time helping frame DeMarco. For him it was like being back in the GRU.)
Brayden had then set to work figuring out all the details: the fake insignia patch, how to make sure DeMarco would be in the Capitol the night Canton was killed, the locations of surveillance cameras, and how Lynch would get to Canton’s office without being identified. Military operations have been planned with less precision. He’d had Lynch make a copy of DeMarco’s office key—the Capitol Police had keys for every room in the building—and had Lynch take pictures of DeMarco’s office. When Brayden saw DeMarco’s rain hat hanging on a coatrack, he told Lynch to remove as many hairs as he could from the hat, hoping to use DeMarco’s DNA to tie him conclusively to Canton’s murder.
Another thing that had taken so long was training Lynch. With Nikki’s help, Lynch had mapped out all the surveillance cameras on the various routes to Canton’s office. Then, using three-dimensional computer modeling, Nikki had selected the exact route Lynch would take and determined how he would hide his features from the cameras. They actually laid out Lynch’s route to Canton’s office by spray-painting it on the floor of a Spear Industries’ warehouse and then had Lynch practice for days, walking the route and turning his head and holding up his hands to cover his face when he was supposed to.
Brayden, with Orlov’s help, also began monitoring Canton’s schedule, and he knew that on the Friday night they killed him, Canton would be in his office working late. It helped that Canton almost always worked late. They also knew where DeMarco was going to be that Friday night, because Nikki had learned about DeMarco’s date at 701 from monitoring his phone calls. The day of the murder, Nikki transferred a hundred grand into DeMarco’s bank account, sent a text message from Mahoney’s cell phone to DeMarco’s phone ordering DeMarco to the Capitol, and then—. Well, then everything went exactly as planned. That is, everything went as planned until this unknown woman came along who claimed to know that Lynch had killed Canton.
But now that Lynch was dead, there should be no way for anyone to tie Brayden to Canton’s murder. However, he still had two problems—which was another reason he’d poured a drink to help him sleep.
One problem was DeMarco—the fact that the lucky son of a bitch was still alive. But that was a problem that should be rectified shortly by Hector Montoya.
The second problem was Nikki Orlov.
Brayden had no idea where Orlov was or why he’d disappeared or why
he wasn’t answering his phone. Maybe Orlov, an incorrigible womanizer, had met a bimbo and was having some sort of sexual marathon. That seemed unlikely, however. Orlov had taken a few days off in the past when he was enamored with a woman, but he’d always remained in touch.
Another possibility was that Orlov had convinced himself that he was going to be caught for his role in Canton’s murder and had decided to run so he wouldn’t be arrested. But that too seemed unlikely. Orlov hadn’t shown any concern that he might be caught after Canton was killed; in fact, he’d acted as if framing DeMarco for the murder was some sort of elaborate video game.
A third possibility that Brayden could think of when it came to Orlov’s disappearance was that maybe the Russians had spotted him and decided to snatch him. Or kill him. For his first few months of working for Brayden, Orlov had been extremely nervous that the Russians might locate him in the United States, and he’d maintained a low profile. But then, for whatever reason, he suddenly stopped worrying about the Russians and began to live a normal life. Even a flamboyant life. Whatever the case, if Orlov ever showed up again, Brayden might kill him, too, to make sure that Canton’s death could never be traced back to himself. That would really be a shame, as Orlov was extremely valuable.
Brayden finished his drink and decided to go to bed. He hoped he’d be able to sleep.
42
As Emma sat in her car near the entrance to Bill Brayden’s parking garage, her phone rang. It was Shandra.
“We found the gun.”