by A. C. Fuller
“Holy shit. How did I not know about this?”
Warren took a long swig of coffee and frowned. “Not burnt enough.”
“Seriously, how did I not know about this?”
“Like I said, it’s pretty new. The internet made shopping and everything else we do anonymous and faceless, why not drugs and guns, too?”
Cole stood and walked a lap around the table, sipping her vanilla latte. “So if Mazzalano is being investigated for providing protection, he…what? What does that mean, exactly? Maybe he makes sure certain areas are unpatrolled for drops?”
“Maybe, or it’s even possible he has a larger role—a more direct role.”
“Like what?”
“Coordinating with a leader, leaking information about investigations, making sure they know in advance about busts—though busts are rare in this game. Or…” He trailed off, his forehead wrinkled.
“What?” Cole asked.
“Michael Wragg. The JTTF guys. Nah...”
Cole saw where he was going. “You think Wragg’s purchase of the nine weapons could have been a dropgang thing?”
“Possibly. If I was going to spend a hundred grand on nine weapons online, I’d want them dropped in a secure location, and any buyer or seller would want extra protection for a purchase that big.”
Cole agreed. Wragg had purchased nine rifles, and used one to murder Raj Ambani. But that left a major question. “If Wragg bought nine weapons and picked them up in New York City, maybe with protection from Mazzalano or someone in his crew—assuming he has a crew—how did he distribute the other eight weapons? Assuming the nine cities on the map are all going to see murders with the nine rifles, he’d have to get those weapons there somehow. So how? Another dropgang?”
“Probably not. Once Wragg had the weapons, he likely distributed them himself. Possibly through the mail. On one hand, it’s riskier. On the other, if he’d paid the seller to deliver the rifles to their final destinations, and the seller had been caught, the seller then could have blown up the whole plan by giving up all nine locations.”
Cole considered this. It was still hard for her to believe Mazzalano provided protection for the delivery of the weapons, but it explained why he’d avoided talking about the DNA testing of Wragg’s hair. Twenty-four hours earlier she’d thought of him as a sleazy but basically harmless source, now he was something much worse. “So we have two threads here. Track the actual weapons, or investigate the killing of Meyers.”
“Let’s do both at the same time.” Warren stood. “I’ll call the two guys from JTTF, the dark web guys we met. You see what’s happening with the Meyers investigation. What’s been leaked.”
“You weren’t buying that radical lefty thing, were you?”
“Under normal circumstances, I’d say it was possible. Dude had motive. In this case, seems like a misdirection or frame job.” He waved his phone at her. “I’m gonna do my cop thing. You use your reporter magic to read through the lines of what’s out there and figure out what’s actually going on.”
* * *
After Warren left, Cole opened Chandler Price’s financial records on her phone. In New York, they’d found the payment to Michael Wragg fairly quickly, but she hadn’t been back to his records since. She looked for unusual transactions. Maybe she’d get lucky and find something that stood out, like a large payment to someone in D.C., Vegas, Miami, or another of the cities on the map.
She looked for transactions over a thousand dollars, wire transfers, suspicious purchases. Nothing. Price spent a lot of money, but most of it was travel, shopping, and everyday stuff. They’d found the Wragg transaction quickly because it was unique. Chandler Price had paid Wragg for the rifles, but if his financial statements were any indicator, he hadn’t paid anyone else. It was possible he wasn’t aware of the entire plot. As far as Cole knew, he was out of the country. Chances were low he’d be in the U.S. any time soon.
Next, she scanned Twitter for news on the murder of the former VP. Suspicions were surfacing that his murder was connected to Raj Ambani, but they were still rumors. Nothing official. On Twitter—a platform where everyone gets a voice—there were rumors about almost everything. There were equally-credible theories connecting Meyers’ assassination to the killings of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Tupac Shakur, and Sharon Tate. It was enough to shake Cole’s faith in the actual evidence she’d seen, at least momentarily.
She studied the helicopter footage of the body on the hotel rooftop, the body of the alleged killer. Next to his still form was a black, stick-shaped thing—likely the gun—but there was no way of telling whether it matched the gun used by Wragg. Local TV news had reported that “police sources” said the shooter had “probably used a fifty-caliber rifle.” That fit with the weapons they knew were out there, but was far from proof. And it wasn’t clear whether the reports were based on eyewitness accounts, or just speculation that it must have been a fifty-caliber because of the distance of the shot.
Additional cell phone video clips had been released, and she watched them all. The great thing about Twitter was that it was often hours ahead of the news networks, even the police. The terrible thing was that much of the “information” on the app couldn’t be trusted. Half the clips claiming to show the shooting were fake—they led to random YouTube videos or porn sites. Many of the others didn’t show anything new. One was a blurry five-second clip from the street below, showing people looking up after hearing screams from the rooftop. Another was from a few minutes before the shooting, according to the message that accompanied the tweet, and showed the guests, including the former VP, mingling at the bar. Cole saved the tweet to study later. It might be useful to put together a list of everyone who attended the event.
She was about to stop scrolling when she found another video. It was shot from the window of an apartment building near the Watergate and, for the first few seconds, the Potomac was visible through an open window, a couch in the foreground. Then the video zoomed in on a long, narrow boat on the river, crewed by four women. After following the boat for a few seconds, the video panned up on the far side of the river. A tall building with black mirrored glass filled the frame. Panning up, the video passed a sign that read Potomac View Hotel. About twenty stories up, at the top of the building, it panned right to another rooftop, where a small group of birds took off. A second later, faint screams rang out. The shot had been fired. The birds had been reacting to the gunshot, which couldn’t be heard in the video.
She rewound a few seconds.
Just as the video hit the top of the Potomac View Hotel, visible for only a few seconds, was a person. Not a person. A head.
A head poking out of a low window, then withdrawing quickly.
She rewound again. If the dead man on the roof wasn’t the real shooter, maybe this guy was.
* * *
Outside, Warren pulled up the collar of his leather jacket against the snow. Dialing Norris Ubwe, he walked to the middle of the block, away from the stream of people coming in and out of the café.
Ubwe was the more assertive member of the two-man crew he’d shadowed at JTTF. Back in New York, Warren had convinced Ubwe to get Chandler Price’s bank records by using a threat. That information led to Michael Wragg, had cracked the case. He didn’t expect the dark web expert to be happy to hear from him.
Ubwe answered right away. “Hello?”
“It’s Robert Warren. Remember me?”
“Yes.”
Warren paced to keep warm. “I owe you thanks, Norris. Your help led us to Michael Wragg and, well, you probably heard how that went.”
After a long pause, Ubwe said, “I do not know what you are talking about.” Warren’s guess was that he’d studied English for years before moving to the United States because he spoke impeccable, by-the-book English with a slight Nigerian accent.
“Chandler Price?” Warren reminded him. The line was silent. Warren had screwed up. Of course Ubwe wouldn’t want to confirm that he’d pulled P
rice’s bank records. “Look,” he continued, “I need your help again.”
“Oh.” Ubwe’s tone was noncommittal.
Warren assumed that even though Wragg had accepted a wire transfer from Price, he likely would have used cash or a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin to send the other eight weapons around the world. But it was worth a shot. “Can you get me the financial records of Michael Wragg, the dude who shot Raj Ambani?”
“No.” The word was clipped and firm.
“From your surveillance of the dark web, can you tell where and how a transaction is going to go down?”
“Sometimes.”
“Can you elaborate?”
“Once a transaction begins, it often moves to a private chat room. In general, different pieces of a transaction are handled by different members of a crew, each digitally walled off from all the others. So it is difficult to track.”
“But it’s possible?” Warren asked.
“Sometimes, but we only do so in important cases.”
“The sale of rifles I witnessed was not one of the important ones?”
Ubwe was silent. He didn’t want to say anything that would acknowledge their earlier interaction. Maybe Ubwe was being paranoid, or maybe someone was listening. Either way, he respected the man’s caution. “So, theoretically, let’s say I buy a pile of weapons on the Dark Web. I’m then routed to another person who takes the payment via Bitcoin, then another person who works with me to arrange a drop-off. Then yet another who actually does the drop. And if we assume I have an NYPD officer on the take, might such an officer, hypothetically, be used to protect large transactions?”
“It is possible.”
“So, a JTTF unit could, theoretically, have watched those transactions go down, if they’d followed the leads diligently from the first posting about the sale? Then—and I’m just spitballing here—they could have prevented the purchase of those weapons and any past or future murders they were used in.”
Ubwe cleared his throat. “Mr. Warren, my understanding is that you will no longer be a member of the NYPD in a matter of days. Do not speak to me this way.”
The line went dead. Threatening Ubwe had been a risk, and Warren felt bad for doing it. He hadn’t thought it would work anyway, and Ubwe had called his bluff. Word was out in the department that Warren was on his way out. Any clout he’d ever had was gone.
He stared across the street to the square, where snow was accumulating on the statue. Warren hated the cold. He’d grown up in the Bay Area and hadn’t seen snow in person until he’d moved east for college.
A car slid across a lane of traffic, almost hitting a man crossing the street. Horns blared, then traffic continued.
As he walked back to the café, he noticed a white man with a black beard reading a newspaper in the front seat of a gray SUV parked across the street. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he might have seen the SUV circling the block while he was on the phone. He should have been more alert. He was sure they hadn’t been tailed after leaving the storage unit, but it was possible a tracking device had been placed on his car, or that they’d been picked up since arriving in D.C. He stared at the man, who seemed engrossed in the newspaper.
After a minute, he returned to the café.
* * *
Cole had the video ready the moment he sat down. He watched it twice, then leaned back. “I think I know where you want to go with this, but—”
“Hear me out. We agree the guy everyone thinks did it didn’t do it, right?”
Warren nodded but his face showed skepticism.
“We think there’s going to be another shooting, right? And this shooting happened differently than the last.”
“How so?”
“Wragg shot Ambani, then disposed of the weapon and went home. In this case, the shooter took out the VP and, assuming the dead guy isn’t really the shooter, the fact that he died right around the same time means only one thing.” Warren was shaking his head, which made her pause. “What?”
“Journalists.” He passed his coffee cup from hand to hand, head still shaking like a disappointed father. “It doesn’t mean only one thing. I can think of a half dozen things it could mean.”
“Can I finish?”
He nodded.
“My guess is that it means, for whatever reason, the person who killed the VP wanted everyone to fall for a misdirection. He or she left that body on the rooftop, then killed the VP, throwing the cops and the press off the scent. That’s what makes it different than the Wragg killing. Then, whoever it was started leaking the far-left terrorism stuff on social media.”
“I’m betting you have an idea about why one might have done that?”
“Because whoever killed the VP is going to make the next kill as well, maybe all the rest. Maybe the Wragg killing was first because it was on his home turf, and because he was a lead organizer. I don’t know. Maybe they knew it would get harder after the first one because, eventually, everyone would know the murders are connected.”
Warren went quiet. Cole watched him watch the video again. When it ended, he said, “So you think whoever this dude is killed the VP and somehow set up the guy on the other roof as the patsy?”
“It’s a theory. And it’s even possible the man on the other roof did kill the VP, and right afterwards”—she tapped the phone—“this guy killed him.”
“If that’s true, either of those scenarios, police will figure it out from an autopsy, ballistics.”
“But not for a day or two. Plenty of time for the guy on the video to disappear.”
“To Las Vegas, or Miami, or Los Angeles. Even to Paris or London.”
“Or Tokyo, or San Francisco.”
Warren pulled out his phone.
“Who are you calling?” Cole asked.
“If your guess is right, we need to prove it. Has anything leaked yet on the weapon found with the dead man?”
“Nothing solid. Just anonymous police sources speculating that it was a fifty cal.”
“My hunch is that FBI, Secret Service, everyone fighting over jurisdiction on this mess will have the same hunch as you. If they don’t already have the video from the tweet, they will soon. And they won’t leak the type of gun.”
“So who are you calling?” Cole asked.
“I know a guy in Quantico.”
15
Not wanting to drive Warren’s Cougar through the increasingly snow-covered streets, they ordered an Uber to FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia. On the ride, Warren made arrangements to meet a classmate from the police academy who’d been in the NYPD only two years before the FBI recruited him as a ballistics expert.
She followed Warren into his office and realized immediately that she’d had a false assumption that all FBI agents looked and acted a certain way. She’d imagined a clean-cut, athletic man. All business. In reality, Bakari Smith was short and a little dumpy. His blue suit was too tight and his wide, jovial smile caused his wire-rimmed glasses to bow outwards, as though they might pop off his round face.
Warren took the lead, so she studied the office quietly as they caught up on old times. A small, triangular room, it had a single window looking down on a courtyard, where the wind whipped snow around in violent flurries. On a ledge behind the desk, a framed photo depicted Smith standing proudly before the Great Pyramid in Egypt. Another showed him on the field level of Yankee Stadium, holding up two hot dogs and pretending to take a bite. A third frame lay face down, causing her to frown curiously, wondering what it might display.
She tuned into the conversation when Smith said, “I’ve got a thing in ten minutes. It’s great to see you, War Dog, but what brings you out here?”
“Came to get you back into shape. Man, what happened?”
Smith laughed, patting his round belly. “Desk job, and Ben’s Chili Bowl. They say the body is seventy percent water. I think mine might be thirty percent half-smokes.”
“What are half-smokes?” Cole asked.
“Spicy local
sausage. Half pork, half beef, smothered in chili.”
“Ya gotta skip the bun,” Warren chimed in. “Empty carbs. Want me to send you some info?”
Smith nodded enthusiastically. “Hell yeah, War Dog. Hit me up with some links.”
Their interaction felt odd. Smith was being overly friendly, trying too hard. It might have just been his personality, or maybe he was uncomfortable around Warren since they’d gone through police academy together and Smith had since fallen out of shape. Simply being in Warren’s presence was enough to make all but elite athletes feel out of shape. But something didn’t feel right, and she wanted to get to the point of the visit. She inched her foot toward Warren’s and gave it a tap.
He didn’t look over, but he seemed to get it. “The Meyers killing,” he said casually. “The VP. You in on that?”
“Nah, and neither are you, so…”
“Cole’s a reporter, like I said on the phone, and since I’m about to be unemployed, I’m helping her out. Kind of a consulting thing. Show him the video.”
Cole slid her phone across the desk. Smith watched the video the news helicopter had taken of the dead man on the roof, next to what they assumed was a rifle.
Smith handed her the phone. “I’ve seen this half a dozen times. So?”
“Can you tell what kind of rifle that is?”
“No, and if I could, I wouldn’t tell you.” His face softened. “Look—and I’m not breaking any news here—only a few types of guns can make an accurate shot from a mile.”
“Fifty-cal?” Warren asked.
“Or a .338 Lapua Magnum. That thing was designed for sniping. Craig Harrison has a confirmed kill from a mile and a half using it. Also, .408 CheyTac. A thirty-cal Winchester is great, but accurate only to about three-quarters of a mile. There are some weapons that would get the job done, and”—he pointed at the phone—“I assume the weapon in the video is one, but I can’t tell just by eyeballing it.”