Hunter: A Thriller (12 page)

Something banged against his chest, like a hammer. Then the bearded man’s face faded away....

*

He didn’t have much time.

He unscrewed the AAC Evolution 9 suppressor from the barrel of the
Glock
17, shoved the silencer into a pants pocket and the gun into the holster inside his windbreaker.

He went to the door, opened it. Loud music down the hall, but nobody in the hallway. He grabbed the rolling plastic trash container that he had left just outside the door and rolled it into the apartment.

Inside was a folded plastic tarp and a roll of duct tape. He opened it on the floor beside the body. Careful not to get blood on his uniform, he flipped
Valenti’s
body onto it, then wrapped it up, quickly sealing it with a few strips of the tape. He lowered the trash container onto its side, its bottom braced against a wall; then he slid and pushed the body inside. He muscled it upright, closed the lid, and rolled it out of the apartment toward the exit door down the hall.

He was just hoisting the ramp back into the rear of the van when the Mustang pulled into the parking lot and took the space next to him, on his passenger’s side. The blond kid, never glancing his way, carried the pizza toward the apartment building.

He slammed the back doors shut, then jumped in and drove off. He didn’t want to be in the neighborhood when the kid found nothing of Jay-Jay, except his blood on that filthy gray shag carpet.

ALEXANDRIA
CIRCUIT COURT
ALEXANDRIA
,
VIRGINIA
Tuesday, September 9, 8:48 p.m.

George Crenshaw heard the noise before the cleaning guy rounded the corner and approached his security desk. The noise came from the wheels of the big plastic garbage bin he pushed in front of him.

“Hi,” the bearded guy said, smiling at him. He wore a gray baseball cap with the brim pulled low over his eyes, and the gray
Sorkin
Cleaning Services uniform. “I’m the replacement they sent over.”

“You’re early.” Crenshaw pawed through the papers on his desk and found the memo. “Yeah. Here it is. Your company called it in this afternoon. Said they’d be sending in somebody new tonight.”

“That’s me.” The bearded guy tapped the plastic photo ID clipped to his uniform pocket.

“Let me get the number off your badge. You can sign in here.”

The guy didn’t use the pen chained to the sign-in clipboard, but instead drew one out of his own pocket and scribbled his name. Crenshaw leaned forward, checked the photo on the badge against the guy’s face, then took down the name and number on it and entered them next to the signature.

“Okay, that’s all I need Mr.
Dantes
.”

“Just call me
Edmond
.”

Crenshaw glanced at the guy and returned his smile. “Well,
Edmond
, I suppose you need help finding your way around here.”

“No problem. I can figure it out if there’s a directory.”

The security guard pointed. “Right over there near the elevators.”

“Thanks. I won’t be long,”
Dantes
said. “I’ll leave some things upstairs, but then I have to go back to the office and get some stuff I forgot.”

“Sure.” Crenshaw reached under his desk, pulled a key off a hook, and handed it to the cleaning man. “Here’s a copy of the master. You can just walk right around the metal detector.”

“I appreciate your help. Well, I’d better get to it. See you in a bit.”

He watched the guy head off toward the elevators, whistling. Crenshaw shook his head. Amazing that anybody could enjoy such a job.

*

This would be tricky.

He emerged from the elevator with his latex gloves on. He rolled the trash bin down the hallway, noting the position and angles of the various closed-circuit cameras. He needed to find just the right spot.

He did. The angle of the overhead camera in the reception area of the Commonwealth Attorney’s office appeared to leave a blind spot to the right of the receptionist’s desk. He also noticed the very tall, broad-leafed potted plant standing in the corner. He dragged the plant to where it would block even more of the camera’s line of sight.

He pushed one of the chairs from the waiting area and positioned it beside the reception desk, facing the entrance. Then he rolled his trash container into the blind spot and carefully tipped it to the floor. After he slid out
Valenti’s
body, he used scissors from the receptionist’s desk to cut away the plastic tarp. He heaved the corpse onto the chair, tying it in position with a cord he’d found days ago in a Dumpster.

Then he used tape from the desk to stick a copy of the
Inquirer
article to
Valenti’s
shirt, just above the bullet hole. Beneath it, on
Valenti’s
lap, he carefully placed a much older news clipping.

It reported the tragic discovery of the body of Roberta Gifford. For a few seconds, he looked at the face of the girl in the photo.

Then he pulled a small digital camera from his pocket and began snapping photos.

When he was done, he tossed the tarp, scissors, tape, and everything else he had used or touched into his trash container. Before he left, he checked the whole area carefully. He kept the gloves on as he took the cart back down to the lobby.

“All done?” the guard asked him when he dropped off the key at the security desk.

“For the time being.”

*

Across town, in a warehouse area, he stopped in an alley that he had checked earlier. He got out and stripped the magnetic janitorial sign from the side of the van, replacing it with a larger, gaudier one advertising a nonexistent nightclub in
Baltimore
. He snapped a plastic cover off the license plate, revealing a different, equally
phony
number from
Maryland
.

He headed north out of
Alexandria
. In a few miles, he pulled off the
George Washington Parkway
into the Gravelly Point parking area near
Reagan
National
Airport
. He waited for the noise to subside as a jet glided down the
Potomac
just a few hundred feet away and landed on the nearby runway.

From the glove compartment he took a hand-held recorder and a disposable cell phone. Replacing the battery in the phone, he powered it on and dialed a second disposable cell, hidden in another location. That one was set for call forwarding, to the night desk at the
Inquirer.
But the call would go first through a “spoof” website, so that a different phone number would show up on the editor’s Caller ID. The number was that of Youth Horizons in
Alexandria
.

He liked that touch. In any case, the police would never track the calls to him—especially after he destroyed and dumped both phones within the hour.

When he heard the night guy at the paper pick up, he pressed the “play” button on the recorder. His voice, electronically distorted by the spoof site, told the astonished editor exactly what would be found in the
Alexandria
courthouse.

ALEXANDRIA
,
VIRGINIA
Wednesday, September 10, 1:30 p.m.

It wasn’t the best of days for the Alexandria Police Department.

As supervisor of the Violent Crimes Unit, Ed Cronin stood beside two of his superiors: the police chief and the deputy chief of the Investigations Bureau. Inside a conference room of their headquarters just off the Capital Beltway, under the TV camera lights and reporters’ probing eyes, they manned a podium spiked with microphones, fielding embarrassing questions to which they could give only awkward answers.

He felt particularly sorry for his chief. The man was trying to back-pedal away from the press statement that he had issued earlier that morning. But it was hard to do, because that statement had been a lie, and now he was caught in it.

Last night, a reporter at the
Inquirer
was tipped about the stiff in the courthouse, and he showed up with a photographer. The guard at the front desk had no clue what the hell they were talking about. He made them wait while he went upstairs to check out their crazy story.

Then rushed back to phone it in.

Since it was obvious from the
m.o
. that
Valenti’s
murder was connected to Bracey’s, the investigators didn’t want details to leak out, details that could be useful later when questioning suspects. So, this morning—in answer to the front-page story in the
Inquirer
—the chief issued a flat denial that any messages had been left by the killer or killers at either crime scene.

But around noon, the
Inquirer
and other media outlets received anonymous phone calls directing them to envelopes left at various places around the District. Inside, they found photos of
Valenti’s
body posed in the Commonwealth Attorney’s office, including a close-up shot of the newspaper clipping taped to the corpse.

Naturally, this caused a sensation, and it forced the chief to call this second news conference to rationalize his deceptive remarks at the first. Cronin was relieved not to be fielding any of those questions—they were the chief’s problem. But the reporters finally got around to singling him out.

“Nan Lafferty, the
Post
,
for Sergeant Cronin: Have you been able to connect the two shootings as having been done with the same weapon?”

No, two different guns
.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t get into issues of physical evidence.”

“A follow-up, if I may,” the woman continued. “You have at least one eyewitness, the guard in the lobby, and the courthouse has plenty of security cameras. Will you be releasing a description or video footage of the suspect to the public?”

The commander of the Investigations Bureau leaned into the fountain of
mics
. “Yes. We’re processing the footage and expect to release a clip and some stills for you in another few hours, along with some additional details from the witness.”

“Would any of you please comment on the statement just released from the Commonwealth Attorney, in which he blamed ‘incendiary media coverage’—specifically, the article in the
Inquirer
last week—for inciting these killings?”

“With all due respect to him, I think that’s premature,” the commander said. The chief shook his head and added, “We don’t have enough yet to speak to motive.”

“Darrell Ellis, WTOP. Sergeant Cronin, how about you? As the lead investigator, do you think the killings were motivated by revenge?”

“Well, that assumes the perpetrator or perpetrators were personally involved with the deceased. We aren’t able to draw any conclusions like that at this early stage.”

“So you think there’s a possibility of more than one person being involved?”

Sure as hell looks that way.
“We aren’t prepared to rule anything out at this point.”

He saw another hand waving in the back, near the door.
Oh Jesus.
He pointed. “Yes, Mr. Hunter.”

Everybody turned around to look at the guy.

“Dylan Hunter, on assignment for the
Inquirer
,” he said. “It seems that I’ve become part of this story, whether I want to be or not. So, Sergeant, why don’t we simply connect the dots here?”

“What do you mean?”

“First dot: Just after my article outlining their criminal histories appears in print, Bracey and
Valenti
are both shot, execution-style, within a three-day period. Second dot: A clip of that article is placed on
Valenti’s
body, which is left right inside the prosecutor’s office. Third dot: Whoever did all this then notifies the media, and encloses photos of the body and also of the clipping. So, isn’t it reasonable to assume that the two killings are connected by a common motive—such as revenge—and that the killer or killers left that clipping behind as their explanation or rationale?”

“We’re not in the business of operating on assumptions, Mr. Hunter.”

“You don’t see an obvious message here?”

The chief interrupted. “We’ve called upon the FBI’s behavioral profiling experts to assist us in interpreting the crime scene evidence. But as Sergeant Cronin said, at this point, we aren’t prepared to leap to conclusions.”

*

When the news conference ended, Cronin’s two bosses huddled with him away from the microphones.

“That
Inquirer
dude,” said the deputy chief of Investigations. “What do you know about him?”

Cronin watched as Hunter, brushing off a knot of reporters, left the room.

“Not a lot. Maybe if I ever get some time, I’ll find out and let you know.”

TYSONS CORNER,
VIRGINIA
Wednesday, September 10, 7:25 p.m.

Hunter descended the stairs into the spacious, rustic den of the
Copelands
’ gracious Colonial home. The conversations among the fifteen people in the room trailed off as they turned his way.

The first person whose eyes his found was Annie Woods. He nodded.

She nodded back.

Smiling, Susanne got up from an armchair and approached. “I’m so glad you made it, Dylan. Everyone, this is Dylan Hunter, the
Inquirer
reporter.”

She led him into the room and performed the introductions. He filed away their names in memory as he shook hands. The executive committee of Vigilance for Victims was a demographically diverse group: couples and singles, young and old, a mix of races and ethnic backgrounds. Their only common denominator was something he saw in their eyes. He’d seen that haunted look many times in the eyes of victims of violence. It added a tinge of poignancy to their smiles and friendly greetings.

Declining the offer of the punch and cookies spread on their bar, he found a spot in a folding chair against a paneled wall covered with framed vacation photos of the
Copelands
in various countries. They looked young and happy and in love.

As the group reclaimed their seats, Susanne spoke again. “I know you all share my gratitude to Dylan for the courageous work he’s been doing on behalf of crime victims.” They began to applaud.

“Thank you,” he said. “But you’re the courageous ones, not me.”

“You’re too modest, Dylan.”

He shook his head. “My job is merely to chronicle your courage. The word ‘crime’ means nothing to public officials, except pages of cold, empty statistics. But when you stand up and speak out for justice, you put human faces on all those abstract numbers. I’m honored to be in your presence.”

Morgan Jackson, a dignified, middle-aged African-American, and co-chair of the group, took the floor to open the session with a prayer. As he spoke, those in the room bowed heads and joined hands. A frail elderly woman, who had been introduced to him as Kate Higgins, rested a pale, thin hand on Susanne’s shoulder.

“And Lord,”
Jackson
concluded, “in Your infinite mercy, please lift the burdens from our hearts. Remember especially in this difficult hour our sister Susanne. Give her comfort, even as You welcome into Your holy presence the soul of her dear husband and our beloved brother, Arthur. And Lord, continue to shine Your grace upon the souls of those whom we have lost. Amen.”

The meeting began with reports from various fundraising and project committees. Before long, the agenda turned to new business. Jeri West, a svelte blonde in her early fifties, stood and faced the group with a grim expression.

“I spoke this morning with the chief of staff in Congressman
Shipler’s
office. He told me that H.R. 207 was going to pass favorably out of committee.”

The room erupted in protests; she raised a hand. “I know. Last week we were told it wasn’t going to happen. But it looks like the ‘prisoner rights’ lobby finally got to some of the committee members. So did the idea of getting a lot of federal money in their districts.”

“Damn the bastards! We can’t let them get away with this!” George
Banacek’s
eyes blazed. Well into his sixties, he had the rugged face and rough manner of a man who had worked all his life with his hands. There was no sign of pain in that face; whatever private agony he had endured had long since metastasized into unforgiving anger.

“I’m sorry,” Hunter said, “but I don’t know the bill you’re referring to.”

Jeri explained that if passed into law, H.R. 207 would provide states tens of billions of federal dollars to fund and expand experimental “alternatives to incarceration” programs. Strapped for cash, state and local governments were eager to slash their prison budgets, even if it meant dumping thousands of dangerous inmates back out onto the streets.

Banacek
exploded again. “No way we let this pass! You all know my boy Tommy was murdered by a couple of punks who never should’ve been on the streets.”

Kate Higgins covered her face with her hands.

Banacek
saw her and pointed. “And poor Kate here, her Michael, he was—”

“George, stop it!” Jeri interrupted. “Please. This is hard enough on many of us. We’ll just have to fight it when it gets to the House floor.”

“What good’s it going to do? Once it gets out of committee, we know they got the votes to pass it in the House. The Senate, too. And our dear president—hell, he’s a lost cause. He’ll sign the damned thing in a heartbeat.”

“We just can’t let the sentences be slashed on all the vicious criminals who did these things to us and our families,” added Bob West, Jeri’s husband. “Once they’re out again, they’ll just prey on others.”

“After what that monster did to my little Loretta, I don’t think I could deal with it if he got out,” Lila Jackson, Morgan’s wife, said in a soft voice. “I don’t care if it sounds un-Christian. Those vigilante people who killed Susie and Arthur’s attackers. Whoever they are, I pray to God they would do the same thing to
him
.”

“Easy, honey,” Morgan said, putting his arm around her. “You know you don’t mean that.”

“I do! God help me, I do. But that’s too much to hope for. There’s just no justice in this world. No justice at all. People just don’t have a clue what’s going on in the legal system. We have to stop this madness.”

“Maybe we can, if we bring it to public attention,” Jeri said.

“How the hell we going to do that?”
Banacek
demanded.

“Perhaps I can help,” Hunter said.

They all looked at him. He drew a slim black recorder from his sports jacket.

“If you tell me your personal stories, I’ll give them the attention they deserve. I’ll tell everybody how the early-release programs in this bill will lead to more crimes like those that you’ve experienced. Together, we can make that bill so radioactive that no politician will dare touch it.”