Barton nodded. I reached up and released the buckle of the chinstrap. Gently but firmly, I tugged on the helmet, revealing Aaron Peters. His Nomex balaclava looked untouched by the fire, but it was blood-soaked from two through-and-through bullet wounds to Peters’s head.
“Not an accident,” I said.
“Impossible,” Barton agreed.
My phone rang. I was going to ignore it but then saw it was chief of police Bryan Michaels.
“Chief,” I said.
“Where are you?”
“Rock Creek,” I said. “Murder of an oil lobbyist in his car.”
“Drop it and get to Georgetown. One of our own is down, part of a double drive-by, and I want our best on the scene.”
I stood, motioned Sampson back toward the car, and broke into a trot, saying, “Who is it, Chief?”
He told me. My stomach turned over hard.
Chapter
3
Sampson put the bubble up on the roof and hit the siren, and we sped toward Georgetown. I noticed the light rain had finally stopped as I was punching in the number for Detective Bree Stone, my wife. Bree was testifying in court that day and I hoped she’d—
Bree answered, said, “Rock Creek an accident?”
“Murder,” I said. “But FYI, Michaels just moved us to Georgetown. Two shooting victims. I’m afraid one is Tommy McGrath.”
There was a long stunned silence before Bree choked out, “Oh Jesus, Alex. I think I’m going to be sick.”
“Exactly my response. Anything I should know?”
“About Tommy? I’m not sure. He and his wife separated a while back.”
“Reasons?”
“We didn’t talk about personal stuff, but I could tell he was quietly upset about it. And about the fact that the new job kept him from working cases. He said he missed the streets.”
“I’ll keep it all in mind, and I’ll text you when we get on the scene.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I’m going to have a cry.”
She hung up, and my stomach felt sour all over again because I knew how much Tom McGrath meant to her. McGrath had been DC Metro’s controversial chief of detectives and our boss. But back when Bree was a junior-grade detective, and McGrath was still working cases, he had taken her under his wing and guided her, even served as her partner for a brief time. He’d mentored her as she rose in the ranks and was the one who’d recommended that she move to the major cases.
As the COD, McGrath was a competent and fair administrator, I thought. He could be tough, and he played politics at times, the kind of cop who made enemies. One of his former partners even thought McGrath had turned on him, planting evidence and driving him from the force.
As a detective, though, Tommy had keen instincts. He was also genuinely curious about people and a good listener, and as I drove across the city toward his death scene, I realized I would miss him a great deal.
There were patrol cars with flashing blue lights, uniformed cops, and barriers closing off the 3200 block of Wisconsin Avenue. We parked down the street, and I took a moment to steel myself for what I was about to see and do.
I’ve spent years as an investigator with the FBI and with DC Metro, so I have been to hundreds of murder scenes, and I usually go to work inside a suit of psychological armor that keeps me at an emotional distance from all victims. But this was Tommy McGrath. One of the brethren was down, one of the good guys, and that put chinks in my armor. It made this all personal, and when I’m dealing with murder, I don’t like it to be personal. Rational, observant, and analytical—that’s my style.
I got out of the unmarked car trying to be that detached observer. When I reached the bloody scene, however, and saw McGrath in his workout shorts and T-shirt lying next to a beautiful woman in yoga gear, both of them dead of multiple gunshot wounds, the cold, rational Alex Cross took a hike. This was personal.
“I liked McGrath,” Sampson said, his face as hard and dark as ebony. “A lot.”
A patrolman approached and laid out for us what seemed to have happened based on the initial statements he’d taken from witnesses. They said the car had come rolling toward McGrath and the woman. There were shots, three and then two. On that, all the witnesses agreed.
McGrath was hit first, then Jane Doe. Chaos ensued, as it always does when there’s gunfire involved, witnesses diving out of the way, trying to find cover or safety, which is entirely understandable. Folks have the right to survive, but fear and panic make my job harder, because I have to be sure those emotions don’t cloud their judgments or taint their memories.
The witnesses were waiting for us inside the Whole Foods, but before I went in, I walked the perimeter of the scene, seeing the organic goods strewn about the bodies: fresh produce, beeswax candles, and two broken bottles of kombucha tea.
Lying in the gutter about ten feet from the corpses was a bottle of Cliffton Dry, some kind of bubbly apple wine, which I thought was odd.
“What are you seeing, Alex?” Sampson asked.
I shrugged, said, “I thought Tommy McGrath always drank Bud.”
“So it’s her bottle. They together?”
“Bree said McGrath and his wife were separated.”
“Divorce is always a possible motive in a murder,” Sampson said. “But this looks gangland to me.”
“Does it?” I asked. “This wasn’t the normal spray-a-hail-of-bullets-and-hope-you-hit-something killing. This was precision shooting. Five shots fired. Five hits.”
We looked over at the woman, who lay on her side at an awkward angle.
I noticed the fanny pack, put on gloves, and knelt down to open it.
Chapter
4
In addition to three hundred dollars in fifties, the fanny pack contained a student ID card from American University’s law school and a District of Columbia driver’s license, both in the name of Edita Kravic. She was three days shy of her thirty-second birthday and didn’t live far from the Whole Foods store.
I also found two business cards emblazoned with THE PHOENIX CLUB—THE NEW NORMAL, whatever that meant; according to the cards, Edita Kravic worked there as a Level 2 Certified Coach, whatever that meant. Below the club’s name was a Virginia phone number and an address in Vienna, near Wolf Trap.
I stood up, thinking, Who were you, Edita Kravic? And what were you to Chief of Detectives McGrath?
Sampson and I went inside the Whole Foods and found the shaken witnesses. Three of them said they’d seen the entire event.
Melanie Winters, a checkout clerk, said the victims had just been in the store, laughing and joking with each other. Winters said they’d seemed good together, Tom and Edita Kravic, like they had chemistry, although McGrath had complained in the checkout line about her not letting him buy beer.
I glanced at Sampson. “What did I say?”
As McGrath and Kravic left, the checker said, she started moving empty produce boxes by the front window. She was looking outside when a dark blue sedan rolled up with the windows down and bullets started flying. Winters dived to the floor and stayed there until the gunfire stopped and the car squealed away.
“How many people in the car?” Sampson said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just saw these flashes and heard the shots.”
“Where were the flashes?” I said. “Front seat or back or both?”
She winced. “I’m not sure.”
Lucas Phelps, a senior at Georgetown, had been outside, about half a block south of the store. Phelps had been listening to a podcast over his Beats headphones when the shooting started. The student thought it was part of the program he was listening to until he saw McGrath and Kravic fall.
“What kind of car?” Sampson said.
“I’m not good at that,” Phelps said. “A four-door car? Like, dark-colored?”
“How many people in the car?” I asked.
“Two, I think,” Phelps said. “From my angle, it was kind of hard to say.”
“You s
ee flashes from the shots?”
“Sure, now that you mention it.”
“Where were the flashes coming from? Front seat, back, or both?”
“Front,” he said. “I think. It all happened so fast.”
The third witness, Craig Brooks, proved once again that triangulation is often the best way to the truth. The seventy-two-year-old retired U.S. Treasury agent had been coming down the sidewalk from the north, heading to Whole Foods to get some “gluten-free crap” his wife wanted, when the shooting started.
“There were three people in that car, and one shooting out the window from the front seat, a Remington 1911 S, forty-five caliber.”
“How do you know that?” Sampson asked.
“I saw the gun, and there’s a fresh forty-five casing out there by the curb.”
I followed his gesture and nodded. “You touch it?”
“Not stupid.”
“Appreciate it. Make of the car? Model? License plate?”
“It was a GM of some sort, four-door, dark-colored but flat, no finish, like primer. They’d stripped it of any identifiers and covered the license plate too.”
“Male? Female?”
“They were all wearing ball caps and black masks,” Brooks said. “I got a clear look at the shooter’s cap, though, as they went by me. Red with the Redskins logo on it.”
We took phone numbers for possible follow-up, and I walked back outside. By then a team of criminalists had arrived and were documenting the scene.
I stopped to look at it all again now that we’d been given three versions of how the shooting had gone down. I could see it unfold in my mind.
“The shooter was more than good—he was trained,” I said.
“Gimme that again,” Sampson said.
“He’d have to be a pro to be able to shoot from a vehicle going fifteen to twenty miles an hour and still hit moving targets five out of five times.”
“The difficulty depends on the angle, doesn’t it?” Sampson said. “Where he started shooting and when, but I agree—he practiced for this scenario.”
“And McGrath was the primary target. The shooter put three rounds in him before turning the gun on Edita Kravic.”
One of the crime scene guys was taking photos, a dull aluminum lamp throwing light on the victims. I’d looked at McGrath in death at least six times now. Every time it got a little easier. Every time we grew apart.
Chapter
5
Word gets out fast when a cop is killed. Wisconsin Avenue was a media circus by the time Sampson and I slipped out through an alleyway behind Whole Foods. We didn’t want to talk to reporters until we had something to report.
The second we were back in the squad car and Sampson had us moving, I called Chief Michaels and filled him in.
“How many men do you need?” he asked when I’d finished.
I thought about that, said, “Four, sir, including Detective Stone. She and McGrath were friends. She’ll want in.”
“Done. I’ll have them assembled ASAP.”
“Give us an hour,” I said. “We’re swinging by McGrath’s before we head in to the office.”
“No stone unturned, Alex,” Michaels said.
“No, sir.”
“You’ll have to look at Terry Howard.”
“I heard Terry’s in rough shape.”
“Just the same. It will come up, and we have to say we’ve looked at him.”
“I’ll do it myself.”
Michaels hung up. I knew the pressure on him to find the killer was already building. When a fellow cop is murdered, you want swift justice. You want to show solidarity, solve the case quick, and put someone in cuffs and on trial.
Then again, you don’t want to leap to conclusions before you’ve collected all the evidence. With six detectives now assigned to the case, we’d be gathering facts fast and furious for the next few days. We’d be working around the clock.
I closed my eyes and took several deep, long breaths, preparing for the hard road that lay ahead and for the separation from my family.
The prospect of hard work didn’t bother me; being apart from my family did. I’m better when I have a home life. I’m a more grounded person. I’m also a saner cop.
The car slowed. Sampson said, “We’re here, Alex.”
McGrath’s place was a first-floor apartment in a converted row house near Dupont Circle. We got out the key our dead boss had been carrying and opened his front door.
It swung open on oiled hinges, revealing a sparsely furnished space with two recliners, a curved-screen TV on the wall, and a stack of cardboard packing boxes in the corner. It looked like McGrath had not yet fully moved in.
Before I could say that to Sampson, something crashed deep inside the apartment, and we heard someone running.
I drew my weapon, hissed, “Sampson, around the back.”
My partner pivoted and ran, looking for a way into the alley. I went through McGrath’s place, gun up, moving quickly, taking note of how few possessions the chief of detectives had had.
I cleared the floor fast, went to the kitchen, and found a window open. I stuck my head out. Sampson flashed by me. I twisted my head, saw he was chasing a male Caucasian in jeans, a black AC/DC T-shirt, and a black golf hat, brim pulled down over a wild shock of spiky blond hair.
He was a powerful runner; an athlete, certainly. He was carrying a black knapsack, but he still bounded more than ran, chewing up ground, putting a growing distance between himself and my partner. I spun around, raced back through McGrath’s house and out the front door, jumped into the car, threw on the bubble and siren, and pulled out, trying to cut the runner off.
I came flying around the corner of Twenty-Fifth and I Streets and caught a glimpse of his back as he dodged a pedestrian and vanished at the end of the block. It was astonishing how fast he’d covered that distance. Sampson was only just coming out of the alley, at least a hundred yards behind the guy.
I felt like flooring it and roaring after him, but I knew we were already beaten; I Street jogs at the end of the block, becomes Twenty-Sixth Street, and dead-ends at Rock Creek Park, which had enough vegetation and terrain changes to swallow up any man who had that kind of wheels. Oddly, we weren’t far as the crow flies from where the Maserati had crashed and exploded earlier in the day.
I turned off the siren, stopped next to Sampson, and got out.
“You okay, John?”
My partner was bent over, hands on his knees, drenched in sweat and gasping for air.
“Did you see that guy go?” he croaked. “Like the Flash or something.”
“Impressive,” I said. “Question is, what was the Flash doing in Tommy McGrath’s place?”
Chapter
6
Two hours later, Detective Bree Stone drove into the tony West Langley neighborhood of McLean, Virginia.
“What do you think Tommy had on his laptop?” asked Detective Kurt Muller, the older man sitting beside her in the passenger seat. He was working the ends of his silver mustache so they held in tight curls.
“Something that got the laptop stolen and maybe also got him killed,” Bree said, thinking back to the meeting they’d just left and the briefing they’d gotten from Alex and Sampson.
There was a lot to absorb, but they were sure that the fast-running burglar had taken McGrath’s computer and probably his backup drive from his home office. They had DC Metro’s IT experts going over McGrath’s work files, and there was a detective looking at every security-camera feed within six blocks of the Whole Foods. Another top investigator was searching through all of McGrath’s old cases to see if he had done anything that might warrant assassination.
Alex had asked Bree and Muller to pay a visit to McGrath’s estranged wife at her home in McLean, Virginia. Alex and Sampson would focus on Edita Kravic and Terry Howard.
“Heard Howard’s sick,” Muller said.
“Hate to think that he was involved,” Bree said as they drove.
> “Me too,” Muller said. “He used to be a friend of mine.”
She slowed, spotted the mailbox with the address she was looking for, and turned into the long driveway of a sprawling Cape house with gray cedar-shake siding and a lushly landscaped yard.
“This must have cost a small fortune,” Bree said.
“One point seven five million,” Muller said. “I checked before we left.”
“How does a chief of detectives afford a place like this?”
“Wife’s money,” Muller said. “She came with a trust fund.”
That had Bree chewing the inside of her cheek. Parking, she said, “How come I didn’t know that?”
“I take it you were never invited out here for dinner or a barbecue.”
“I’ve never been here before in my life.”
“I have,” Muller said, and he climbed out.
Bree followed him as he crossed the driveway. When they were twenty feet shy of the door, it opened, and a tall, distinguished-looking man in a well-cut suit exited carrying a briefcase. The man stopped when he saw them.
A woman in her forties appeared in the doorway behind him. She had sandy-blond hair, a tennis-honed body, puffy red eyes, and a tortured expression on her face.
“Kurt,” she called to Muller in a wavering voice. “I’m crushed to see you like this.”
Muller nodded, said, “I am too, Vivian.”
The well-dressed man half turned toward her.
Vivian McGrath gestured to the man absently. “Kurt, this is Lance Gordon, my attorney. Detective Muller used to work for Tommy, Lance.”
“We both did,” Bree said.
“I’m sorry for your loss, all of you,” Gordon said. “Vivian, call anytime if you have questions.”
“I appreciate it, Lance,” she said. “Really.”
The lawyer pursed his lips and nodded before walking past Muller and Bree. When he went by, Bree noticed an oddly familiar odor trailing him. Weirdly sweet. But she couldn’t place it.
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