James PATTERSON: Cross Fire

THE TWENTY-FOUR HOURS following the hits at the Harman were a full-court press like I’d rarely seen in Washington. Our Command Information Center had traffic checks going on all night; Major Case Squad put both units on the street; and NSID was told to drop all nonessential business, and that was just inside the MPD.

Details were operating out of Capitol Police, ATF, and even the Secret Service.

By morning, the hunt for Steven Hennessey had gone from regional to national to international. The Bureau was fully activated and looking for him everywhere it was possible for the Bureau to look. The CIA was involved, too.

The significance of these murders had really started to sink in. Justices Summers and Ponti had been the unofficial left wing of the Supreme Court, beloved by half the country and foxes in the henhouse, basically, to the other half.

At MPD, our late-afternoon briefing was like a march of the zombies. Nobody had gotten much sleep overnight, and there was a palpable kind of tension in the air.

Chief Perkins presided. There were no introductory remarks.

“What are we looking at?” he asked straight-out. Most of the department’s command staff were there, too. Every seat was taken, and people were standing around the edge of the room, shifting on their feet.

“Talk to me,” he said. “Anyone.”

“The hotline and website are on fire,” one of the district commanders, Gerry Hockney, reported in. “It’s all over the place, literally. Hennessey’s a government operative. He’s holed up in a storage facility in Ohio, he’s in Florida, he’s in Toronto–”

Perkins cut him off. “Anything credible? I need to know what we have, not a lot of useless bullshit.”

“It’s too early to say, to commit to anything. We’re overwhelmed, sir.”

“In other words, no. Who else? Alex?”

I waved from where I was. “Waiting on a weapons report from that double homicide on Vermont Avenue last night. Two John Does found shot dead in a car, with cash on them but no IDs.

“It was definitely nine millimeter, but we don’t know yet if it was the same weapon that killed Mitch Talley.”

A huge buzz went up around the room, and I had to shout to get everyone’s attention back.

“Even if it was,” I went on, “the most it can tell us about Hennessey in the short term is that he was in the city sometime between twelve and four a.m.”

“Which means he could be anywhere by now,” Sampson said, giving the shorthand version for me. “Which means we should wrap this shit up and get back out there.”

“Do you think Hennessey was working for the two dead guys in the car?” someone asked anyway.

“Don’t know,” I said. “We’re still trying to track down who they were. It does seem like he’s cleaning house, though. Whether or not he’s finished is another question we don’t have an answer for.”

A lieutenant in the first row spoke up. “Do you mean finished cleaning house, or finished with these sniper killings?”

The questions were natural, but they were starting to get on my nerves. I held my hands out in a shrug. “You tell me.”

“So, in other words,” Chief Perkins cut in, “we’re nearly twenty-four hours out and we know less than we did before these murders, is that it?”

Nobody wanted to answer. There was a long silence in the room.

“Something like that,” I said finally.

TWO MORE DAYS of nerve-rattling quiet went by without much progress or any sign of Steven Hennessey or even anyone who might know him. Then, finally, there was some movement over at the Bureau. Max Siegel called me himself to tell me about it.

“We got something over the Web,” he said. “Anonymous, but this one checked out. There’s a guy going by Frances Moulton, supposedly fits Hennessey’s description down to the toenails. He’s got an apartment over on Twelfth, except nobody’s seen him for approximately two months. Then, this morning, someone spotted him coming out of there.”

“Someone – who?” I asked.

“That’s the ‘anonymous,’” he said. “The super at the building backed it up, though. He hasn’t seen this Moulton character in months either, but he gave me a positive ID on Hennessey’s picture when I brought it over.”

Either this was huge or it just felt that way given the zeros we’d racked up until now. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference, when you’re desperate.

“What do you want to do with this?” I asked. Whatever it meant, it was still Siegel’s lead, not ours.

“I’m thinking you and I might sit up on this place for a while, see what happens,” he said. “If you want, I’m game. See? I can change.”

It wasn’t the answer I’d expected, and my own pause spoke for itself.

“Don’t bust my balls, here,” Siegel said. “I’m trying to play nice.”

In fact, it seemed like he was. Did I love the idea of spending the next eight hours or more in a car with Max Siegel? Not really, but more than that, I didn’t want to be on the outside of this investigation for a second.

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “I’m in. Where can I meet you?”

I EVEN BROUGHT coffee.

Siegel brought some, too, so there was plenty of caffeine to go around. We parked in a Bureau-issue Crown Vic on the east side of Twelfth Street between M and N. It was a narrow, tree-lined block with a lot of construction going on, but not at the Midlands. That was Frances Moulton’s place and, if we were on the right track, Steven Hennessey’s address as well.

The apartment in question was on the eighth of ten floors, with two large windows facing the street. They were both dark when we got there. Max and I settled in for the long haul.

Once we’d said everything there was to say about the case, it got a little awkward – long silences set in. Eventually, though, the conversation loosened back up. Siegel threw me a softball, the kind of thing Bureau guys ask when they don’t have something better to say.

“So, why’d you get into law enforcement?” he asked. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

I smiled into my lap. If anything, he was trying too hard to do the buddy-buddy thing.

“Hollywood just didn’t work out. Neither did the NBA,” I deadpanned. “What about you?”

“You know. The exotic travel. The great hours.”

For once, he got a laugh out of me. I’d decided before coming that I wasn’t going to just sit there and hate him all night. That would have been like torture.

“I’ll tell you this much,” he said. “If things had gone differently? I think I could have been a pretty good bad guy, too.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “You have the perfect murder in your head.”

“Don’t you?” Siegel said.

“No comment.” I popped the lid on my second coffee. “Most cops do, though. Perfect crime anyway.”

After another long pause, he said, “How about this: if you could take someone out – someone who really deserved it – and you knew you could get away with it, would you be torn?”

“No,” I said. “That’s too slippery a slope for me. I’ve thought about it.”

“Come on.” Siegel laughed and leaned back on the car door to look at me. “Say it’s just you and Kyle Craig alone in some dark alley. No witnesses. He’s all out of ammo and you’ve still got your Glock. You’re telling me you don’t pull the trigger now and ask questions later?”

“That’s right,” I said. The Kyle reference was a little weird, but I let it slide. “I might want to, but I wouldn’t do it. I’d take him in. I’d like to bring him back to ADX Florence.”

He looked at me, grinning as if he were waiting for me to break.