Then he opened the cylinder and extracted two of the four spent rounds. Soneji crouched down and carefully pushed the bullet casings into a frayed and separated seam in what was left of the van’s floor fabric.

  Soneji closed the driver’s door and locked it, then returned to the rear of the van and opened the baggie containing the latex gloves. He’d worn two layers of gloves on his gun hand that night, and now he carefully separated the inner glove from the one with gunshot residue and blood from the dead passenger. He lobbed the contaminated glove into the mess, then opened the baggie with the bloody hair, scalp, and flesh in it. He flicked the treasure into the trash heap in the van’s rear, closed the van’s door, and locked it.

  He returned the key to the shelf and set the coffee can on top of the key, put the pieces of the headlight and turn signal into his pack, then shut the door. He picked up the rake and gently stirred the dirt behind him as he backed out.

  He threw the tarp over the front end and raked everywhere he’d been on the shed floor. When his boots reached weeds, where he would no longer leave tracks, he leaned over and placed the rake against the wall.

  The air still stank of woodsmoke. It made Soneji’s eyes sting as he set off on the path through the bramble, toward the Saab and a dreaded, dutiful long weekend with Missy and Roni.

  Part Three

  * * *

  A MORE INTIMATE WAY TO KILL

  CHAPTER 32

  THE THURSDAY AFTER THE Beltsville shooting, Sampson and I went to the rehab facility in Bowie, Maryland, where Senate aide Carl Dennis was being treated for his many injuries. Before we went to his room, his wife, Kathleen, warned us that he was heavily medicated and remembered very little of the night he was run over.

  But we had to try. It was hard to look at all the casts, traction cables, tubes, and IV lines that held Dennis together. His head was heavily bandaged. His face was swollen and bruised.

  “Carl, hon,” his wife said. “These police detectives want to talk to you about the night you were hit.”

  He said, his words sounding slurred, “Don’t ’member.”

  “Nothing?” Sampson said.

  He thought several beats before he said, “A shot?”

  “You heard a shot?”

  “Think.”

  “What else?”

  He closed his eyes a few moments, then opened them. “Lights. Fast. Low lights.”

  I thought about what we knew. “Fast, low headlights?”

  “Guess.” He shrugged.

  I said, “Could it have been vehicle headlights coming at you?”

  The Senate aide nodded.

  John opened a folder and retrieved a still shot of the white Ford Econoline van. He showed it to Dennis. “Is this the van that ran you over?”

  He studied the picture for a long time before shaking his head. “Don’t know.”

  “But it could be,” Sampson said.

  “Don’t know,” the injured man said, tears coming to his eyes as he looked to his wife in desperation. “Don’t know anything, Kat.”

  He began weeping.

  His wife moved to his side, rubbing his arm and soothing him. “It’s okay. You heard what the doctors keep saying. This is going to take time, hon.”

  He sighed again and shut his eyes.

  Kathleen said, “He had a difficult night, Detectives. Can I call you when he begins to remember more of what happened?”

  “Of course,” we said, and we left, feeling frustrated that we could not say for sure that the driver of the white van was responsible for the murder of Conrad Talbot and the attempted murder of Carl Dennis.

  The next morning, word of my Berkowitz theory leaked.

  The headline across the top of the front page of the Baltimore Sun read:

  Is Killer Mimicking Son of Sam?

  The police department phones began buzzing and jangling with calls from local and national news organizations keying in on the Berkowitz angle. The media set up camp outside Metro headquarters and squawked about it for hours, even dissecting the fact that the Son of Sam had first killed two women, then a man and a woman, the reverse of the current situation.

  The Sun’s original piece—and almost every story afterward—named me as the theorist, noting my doctorate from Johns Hopkins and the parts of my dissertation that included Berkowitz. I declined to make any comment and deferred to Chief Pittman, who actually proved remarkably adept in the spotlight, running two crisp, efficient press conferences in which he confirmed that Metro and Prince George’s County detectives were looking into a Son of Sam copycat.

  “It would be a dereliction of duty if we were not actively looking into Dr. Cross’s theory,” Pittman said on TV as Sampson and I watched from the squad room on Friday.

  Detectives Kurtz and Diehl were there in the squad room as well, both with their arms crossed. Pittman went on, “We’re telling people in the greater DC area to beware. He’s now killed three people and gravely wounded a fourth. We want to stop him before there is a fifth.”

  Kurtz reached over and clicked off the TV. Diehl shook her head.

  “He’s left you dangling, and you don’t even see it, Dr. Cross,” Diehl said, putting heavy sarcasm on the title.

  “How so?” I said, ignoring the edge.

  Kurtz snorted at my naïveté. “Pittman’s smart. He’s thought ahead. He’s pinning this all on you, so if things go more sideways than they already have—if you don’t catch someone acting like Berkowitz or if the real killer’s off in a completely other direction and someone dies because of it—well, Pittman can say it was all your idea. Maybe you don’t survive your three-month probationary period.”

  “Yeah,” Diehl said as she walked away. “Wake up, Doc. You’re in the big leagues now.”

  CHAPTER 33

  SAMPSON SAT DOWN. I caught him looking at me as I took my chair.

  “Tell me I’m wrong about this,” I said, arms crossed.

  “You’re not wrong,” John said. “Or at least, I don’t think you’re that far off. Let’s just get back to work and prove it.”

  I nodded, feeling more pressure than I’d ever experienced in my career. And my home life was strained too. Maria and I had made up after our fight, our first real one in a long time, but damage had been done. I’d still sensed friction between us that morning when she set off for work.

  Rather than think about that, I forced myself into action by taking a hard look at where we were in the four different cases battling for our attention.

  John and I remained largely stalled in our probes into the deaths of Tony Miller and Shay Mansion, but I went back through my notes on our second interview with Mansion’s mother, Rosalina Mansion.

  Her cousin Guillermo Costa had accompanied us when we’d informed Rosalina of her son’s death. She’d collapsed into her cousin’s arms, inconsolable. In our second interview with Rosalina, she’d been alone, but she claimed to have had no idea that her son had joined Lobos Rojos and vigorously disputed the suggestion that her cousin was the gang’s leader. She said that Costa had gone straight after prison.

  “You cannot blame this on Guillermo at all,” she insisted. “If Shay was involved, it’s on him. Once he quit school, I lost control over him. With his father gone, he was out at all hours, sometimes sleeping at home, sometimes not. And he never asked for money.”

  She hung her head. “I think I lost him almost a year ago, to be honest.”

  I’d written that down, and now I stared at that sentence in my notebook, feeling the poor woman’s sadness all over again. Then I set the file aside and turned once again to the Bulldog murders, as I’d taken to calling them, after the unusual gun that had been used.

  Over the past few days, Sampson and I had formed a decent alliance with Detective Matt Brady, who was damn good at his job.

  In the first forty-eight hours, Brady and his partners had focused on the victims, both of whom were medical techs who worked at a hospital not far from the murder scene and who had been friends since their early teens. We checked everything they found out about the two women against our evidence in the Talbot murder case.

  At first, John and I saw no definitive crossover, no commonality save the caliber of the weapon and the angle the killer had shot from. Then, yesterday afternoon, the full ballistics report came back from the Maryland crime lab, confirming that the bullets in both attacks had been fired from the same gun.

  “This is interesting, Alex,” Sampson said now.

  I looked up from the ballistics report. “What’s that?”

  “The medical examiner’s autopsy report,” he said. “It notes that a sizable piece of scalp and hair from Alice Ways, one of the victims, is missing.”

  “Saw that last night,” I said. “And Brady confirms the piece was not found in the car.”

  “You think the shooter took it?”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Could be a trophy.”

  “Why didn’t he do it with Conrad and Abby?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe he didn’t think of it. Maybe this time he thought having that piece of scalp and hair would remind him of the event more vividly.”

  “That’s disturbing. I’ve heard of killers taking little mementos like bracelets or necklaces, but not a hunk of scalp.”

  “I’m not saying it’s normal behavior, John. Quite the opposite. We’re dealing with an abnormal mind at play, which is how I think he sees this. As a game.”

  “Like he’s saying, Catch me if you can?” Sampson said.

  “Partially. It’s also a sign of increasing boldness.”

  “You’re thinking he’ll do it again soon?”

  I nodded. “He’ll escalate. Broaden the number of victims taken at once or kill again sooner than he did between the first and second murders.”

  “So in the next five days?”

  “That’s what has me on edge.”

  Sampson’s desk phone rang. He answered. I returned to the Bulldog murder book.

  “Thank you, Officer,” John said a moment later, and hung up. “We’re out of here, Alex.”

  “What’s up?”

  “That was Donovan, the undercover working LMC Fifty-One. Patrice Prince is on the move, and she thinks she knows where he’s going.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Chesapeake Beach, Maryland

  SAMPSON PULLED OUR SQUAD car into a parking stall a block off the shore. Despite it being October, the resort town was surprisingly busy.

  I commented on it as Sampson climbed out.

  “It’s the warmth,” he said. “We haven’t had a really cool day yet. Might as well be August.”

  That was true. Temperatures along the mid-Atlantic had been in the seventies or higher since August.

  I got out, regretting the jacket almost immediately, feeling sweat beading on my brow and the nape of my neck. “I hope Donovan’s right. I’m going to have to dry-clean this coat, I’m sweating so much.”

  “Good chance she is right,” John said. “Jibes with what Costa told us.”

  “It does. Worst case, we have spicy crab for lunch.”

  “Hope my gut can handle it.”

  We walked past a British pub, crossed a street, and made our way to a restaurant in the middle of the next block.

  This was TANTE COCO’S HAITIAN CRAB SHACK, according to the sign, and it featured eight picnic tables inside, five of which were occupied, two by older tourists, two by younger couples, and one by three surfer dudes in their late teens. The reputed gang leader of LMC 51 was nowhere in sight, although both Costa and Donovan had told us that Patrice Prince was often here. Prince loved the crab and spice in Tante Coco’s secret boil recipe.

  The spice in the air tickled my nostrils and made my mouth water.

  The other patrons hardly looked at us. They were eagerly breaking shells with wooden mallets and picking out the crab until they had suitable piles to gorge on.

  The waitress, a big gal in her thirties, came out with several large sheets of brown wrapping paper that she taped to the top of one of the empty picnic tables. Then she nodded to us, set out two mallets, shell crackers, metal picks, plastic bibs, and a pile of napkins and motioned to us to sit.

  “Your drink order?” she said in a light Haitian accent. “We have cold Pepsi products, homemade lemonade, Coors beer, and boxed white wine that isn’t half bad.”

  “Lemonade,” I said.

  “Same,” Sampson said.

  The waitress turned to leave. I said, “Can we see a menu?”

  She shook her head. “Boil’s the only thing we serve.”

  John said, “Boil for two, then.”

  “Way ahead of you, mon ami,” she said and went through a set of double doors.

  About five minutes later, she returned with the drinks. She also brought warm corn bread in a basket and a heaping bowl of fresh coleslaw, both of which were some of the best I’d ever had. The boil that followed was equally impressive.

  I’d been eating boiled crab since I was a kid, and I wasn’t bad at making them myself. But the spices used at Tante Coco’s gave the shellfish a smoky beginning and a fiery ending with just the right amount of balance between sweet and heat.

  We were halfway through the mound of crabs set before us when a lean, powerfully built Black guy in his mid-twenties wearing Versace sunglasses, a black T-shirt, and dark slacks and sneakers came in. He scanned the place.

  I did my best businessman-having-lunch-with-a-client act, laughing with Sampson as I picked at a crab leg. Versace left.

  “Scout, probably,” I said quietly.

  “My bet too,” Sampson said.

  Three minutes later, Versace returned, this time followed by another big dude wearing a similar outfit. The waitress came out, taped wrapping paper onto the empty table next to us, and nodded at them.

  The second guy went to the door and waved. A third man, the tallest of the three, entered. He wore pressed black slacks, black loafers, a black long-sleeved shirt, and Vuarnet cat-eye sunglasses with a mirror finish.

  It was like Maria had said. When Patrice Prince came through the door and made his way to the table next to us, I felt a sense of menace, though I could not pinpoint exactly what about him was causing it.

  Prince ignored us, sat between his two men, and began speaking in Haitian Creole. I put down my crab mallet, took off my bib, reached in my jacket, and retrieved my ID and badge.

  I went over to their table, right hand inside my jacket, on the butt of my weapon. Versace and his friend saw me and started to reach around their backs, low at the waist.

  “That would be a bad idea,” I said in a soft voice, showing them my badge, which I held cupped in my hand to the side of my hip.

  “A very bad idea,” Sampson said, equally low-key. He was standing beside me now, one hand on his service weapon, the other holding his badge in a way that only Prince and his guys could see. “Hands on the table, everyone. Mr. Prince, we just want to talk.”

  “About?” he said, not looking at us.

  “Why don’t you lose the shades and join us,” I said. “We’ll take just ten minutes of your time. And the box wine is on us.”

  CHAPTER 35

  “I’LL PASS ON THE box wine.” Prince sniffed, then nodded to his men, got up, and moved over to sit at our table. He took off his sunglasses, revealing hazel agate-like eyes that cut back and forth over us, and calmly folded his hands on the table. “What is it you want from me?”

  “Information about Shay Mansion,” Sampson said.

  Prince raised and lowered his shoulders slowly, his attention never leaving us, his calm demeanor and sharp gaze unchanged. “I do not know this name.”

  “Sixteen-year-old kid,” I said. “Recruit to Los Lobos Rojos. Found wired to a tree in a park in Southeast DC. He’d been caned to death.”

  The reputed gang leader winced, closed his eyes a second, then opened them and gazed at us unmoved once more. “How terrible. Who would do such a thing?”

  Sampson said, “I don’t know. The son and grandson of Tonton Macoute members?”

  Prince made a clicking noise and said in that same even, disarming tone, “I am hardly a secret policeman, Detective. But—how do you say it? The jury is out on you two.”

  “We’re homicide detectives with Metro police,” I said.

  “So you say. But who knows where your true allegiances lie.”

  “They lie with the dead,” Sampson said, getting irritated.

  “As they should,” Prince said. “But that has nothing to do with me.”

  I said, “Or LMC Fifty-One?”

  He did not react, just trained those odd hazel eyes on me, his expression serene, and yet somehow he broadcast a sense of deep, inner darkness that made me feel he was capable of unfathomable violence. Menace seemed to seep out of the man’s pores. I tried not to shiver.

  “I run an import/export company,” Prince said finally. “We bring in Haitian cocoa and cane sugar, which we distribute to chocolate makers across North America. We try to send back whatever money we can to the markets in Haiti, and we make donations to many NGOs operating there.”

  “So you’re really just a misunderstood humanitarian philanthropist,” Sampson said.

  Prince smiled, revealing a gold canine on the lower left. “Now you’re beginning to understand my situation.”

  I asked him where he’d been on the night of the murder.

  He thought. “In bed. At home.”

  “Can anybody confirm that?”

  “The two women sleeping with me and my friends here, who were in the outer room,” Prince said. His men, who had been watching intently, nodded.

  “We’d like names and phone numbers, please,” Sampson said.

  Prince sighed. “Is that necessary?”

  “It’s a murder investigation, so yes.”

 

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