Ryne Pearson - Capitol Punishment

“Okay.”

A log, consumed to the point of being a single roll of orange embers, collapsed in the fireplace, sending a plume of sparks upward into the dark recesses of the riverstone chimney. A burst of heat accompanied the disintegration, causing John to slide his chair back from the hearth.

“What about you, Pop?”

John touched his growing gray locks, which he’d maintained at a military-like one inch since high school. “Shaggy red hair and a goatee.”

“That’ll do it,” Toby commented, smiling at the thought of his father as a carrot-top.

“What about the Africans?” John inquired.

“I’ll put an ad in the Baltimore Sun in a couple of weeks. They’ll be expecting it then.”

“And Vorhees?”

The sound of scissors clicking rapidly drew Toby’s eyes toward the kitchen briefly. “Stan’s going to start on that soon. We’ll be ready. What about the tools and stuff?”

In his earlier life, before exposition of his views generated the kind of money that could finance an organization and support a family, John Barrish had made a modest living as a machinist. Nothing so complicated would be needed in this instance. Mostly hand tools, an arc-welding rig, and several types of metal. Light metal. Strong metal. Yes, expensive metal, but the money had to be spent on something. “I’ll take care of those.”

Toby nodded and let his body press into the soft cushions of the couch. They had been on the move, always busy, for so long that relaxation felt alien. But it also felt good. “Hey, Pop. You wanna go find a lake tomorrow? There’s got to be one around here somewhere. We ain’t got anything else to do. Maybe have a picnic, or go fishing?”

“It’s winter, Toby,” John said. “The fish don’t bite well this time of year.” The father-to-son instructions on life’s important matters flashed in John’s mind. His father had said something about fishing then. Don’t fish in the winter , or something like that. He hadn’t passed things such as that to his boys. He wondered if he should have.

“I didn’t say we had to catch anything,” Toby said. “C’mon. You, me, Stan. We’ll just sit, and throw some lines in the water, and shoot the shit.”

His eldest boy had a way of conversing with innocent vulgarities, John knew. He’d never gotten that out of him. But the suggestion behind the four-letter word did hold some appeal. Some day, when all that was to come had run its course, there would be much time to relax, to recreate. It might be a good time to practice for that day.

“What do you say?”

John nodded, realizing he should accept the calm before the storm. “All right, son.”

Frankie held the three-year-old police mug shot up to the freeze-frame image on the conference room’s thirty-inch television monitor. “That’s him.”

“Roland Kirk,” Art said, referring to the enhanced image of the Oldsmobile’s right front passenger. “AKA Ronald Christopher. AKA Mustafa Ali.” He flipped back to the man’s arrest and conviction record. “Hmmm.”

“What?”

“The two most recent hits — B and E, and a simple assault — go under the Ali name. He must have changed it legally.”

“Converted to Islam,” Frankie observed.

“This is a hell of a way to exemplify the religion.” Art set the three suspect profiles side by side on the dark brown table. “Darian Brown, Roger Sanders, Mustafa Ali, and a mystery rider.”

“I remember Sanders from his playing days,” Frankie said. “He blew his knee out, I think.”

“He also liked punching folks out,” Art told his partner. “Two counts of aggravated assault, served a year at Chino.”

Frankie spun Brown’s profile around to face the seat she took across from Art. “Fearless leader here has one aggravated, two petty thefts, one GTA, one burglary. He beat a murder one. He’s spent a total of three years inside, a combination of county and state time.”

“And for every time they were caught…” Art, like all law enforcement officers, knew that an arrest or conviction on a person’s record represented just a fraction of the crimes actually committed. The sad fact was that men like Brown, Ali, and Sanders put their hands in the cookie jar without getting caught more than anyone would ever know.

Art looked to the screen and rewound it to a point before the enlargements of each individual. “Sanders driving.” They knew now that he had purchased the Oldsmobile in a plainly illegal transaction in Los Angeles before the attack. A glance at Sanders’s picture and a threat to bother the man with “accessory” charges had refreshed his memory quite fast. “Ali in right front. Brown, right rear.” His eyes locked on the small head in a darkened profile. “The lab wasn’t able to do much with him, were they?”

“The light was coming in at the back of his head,” Frankie said.

“Looks young,” Art observed, though there was little else he could discern. The profile as the head turned showed sharp lines, tight skin, smooth even. Short, neat hair. Familiar, almost, but then a kid in silhouette was likely to look like any other.

The tape raced back, then slid forward from the time that the left rear window exploded. Trooper Fitzroy rocking side to side as the bullets stitched across his torso, sound on the tape ending as a round cut the trooper’s body mic, falling, crawling with only his legs driving him, Brown coming out, following — no, stalking Fitzroy, his mouth moving as something was said, and two shots.

Art froze the tape there. “The bullets that killed the trooper and the World Center’s plant manager, Harback, came from the same gun. That ties the two events.”

“And the prints,” Frankie added. Dan Jacobs’s team had pulled fingerprints from both Brown and Sanders from the cylinder found in the ventilation system. Doing so had been a trick in itself, as decontaminating the small tank with high-pressure steam and chemical neutralizes would have destroyed any prints. The solution was to take a video feed of the prints as illuminated by a helium laser and analyze those after the feed was digitized and stored as computer data. Jacobs seemed more magician than special agent at times.

Art stayed focused on the screen, rewinding then moving slowly forward as the boxy weapon in Brown’s hand bucked twice. “Harback and Fitzroy with forty-fives. Mankowitz with a forty-five. Mankowitz was hit with automatic fire.” Art froze the image again. “Not too many automatic forty-fives out there other than a MAC-11.”

“All firing hundred-and-eighty-five-grain jacketed hollow-points,” Frankie added. “But the lab couldn’t batch all three.” Expended bullets could be matched to a particular weapon based on the rifling characteristics of the barrel, and could also be closely matched to each other based upon their lead composition. This information was accurate enough to place bullets to specific production runs at ammunition manufacturers. But distribution and inventory anomalies at retailers made the system less than consistent in the real world. A weapon like the Ingram could spit out more than a box of .45 rounds in a second, meaning it could chew through a shelf full of boxes in no time. And that shelf could hold boxes from production runs completed six months earlier, or from the week before.

“The guns,” Art said, adding no more for a moment. “Forty-fives across the board here, and three-eighties for Royce and Kostin. Freddy had a three-eighty on him.”

Frankie sensed her partner’s line of thought. “You think Barrish was behind all these guns?”

“He’s proven proficient at it before,” Art responded. The two Uzis that had been used in the Saint Anthony’s massacre and found dumped at a construction site were purchased by John Barrish while at a festival of hate in Idaho. The law said differently, but they were dealing with reality right now. “Plus Allen had the three-eighty that was used with the other guns at Saint Anthony’s. Danbrook said that Barrish told him, specifically, that he could get guns whenever he wanted.”