Neely Tucker - Murder, D.C.

John Parker and Jeff Weaver were ahead of him on the right. There were two other men in Windbreakers, who Sully guessed were DEA agents. Three or four techs were milling about little orange cones marked 1 and 2 and 3 and 4, near the bodies; Sully was pretty sure those were designating ejected shells.

Both bodies were facedown in the clumps of grass, the packed dirt. The one on the right, whoever it was, one boot had come off. Sully couldn’t help but think, Shot right out of his shoes .

John and Jeff looked at him as he stood at the edge of the light.

“Didn’t a uniform stop you at the top of the hill?” John asked.

“I told him I was a friend of yours and that you had invited me special.”

“You wearing a sport coat at three in the morning?” John said. “Where’s the Ducati? And wait a minute, you found a taxi that would actually bring you here?”

“I paid him triple, cash up front, and told him I was meeting the chief of police at a crime scene. Plus, he dropped me two blocks up.”

“You took a taxi from your house?”

“I was visiting a friend,” he said.

“At three in the morning?”

“A special friend.”

“She won’t be thinking your ass is that special for long, running out in the middle of the night,” John said. “Ask me how I know.”

He was wearing what appeared to be jeans and a pullover shirt beneath a long black trench coat, the belt knotted, the tails flapping around his knees in the wind. Jeff, shifting his weight from foot to foot, jeans and a leather jacket zipped up all the way, a Yankees baseball cap tugged down. Everybody coming out here on the hotfoot, Sully looking dapper by comparison.

“So dear old Tony and Carlos, the talented Hall brothers,” Sully said, looking down. “Four shells-two shots each? That’s what we’re talking about?”

“Appears to be,” John said, moving to his left, between Sully and the corpses, kneeling to pull the sheeting back. “Gangland action. Carlos, he took one in the back of the head, close range, then another one in the side. Tony-here-took a pair, one behind the ear, one up there at the temple. See that? Damn.”

The brothers lay facedown in the mud and dirt, the scrubby grass. Their jeans, already baggy, sagged well below their hips. Tony’s T-shirt was hitched up in the back, leaving a stretch of his back and buttocks exposed. It was a pretty lousy way to die. Tony lay with his arms at his side. Carlos, his arms were thrown above his head.

“Tony got shot first?” Sully said.

John nodded and stood up. “Hey, you get a gold star. Tony had no warning, I’d say,” flicking a hand toward the body. “Dropped like a ton of bricks. Ever see a boxer get knocked cold? He falls without getting his hands in front of him, just bam, facedown on the canvas? That’s how Tony dropped.”

He moved over a few steps, rubbed his eyes, and flicked the right hand again. “Now, Carlos, here, the way he fell, like he got in a step running before he got popped. Them arms out in front of him.”

Sully walked around both bodies, staying behind Jeff, looking for anything that stood out as unusual. Seeing a lot of war killings-bombs, grenades, air power, machine guns, pistols, machetes-led to a certain detachment at the scene of a fresh kill. It was a crossword puzzle with gore.

The way to work a fresh murder was to sequence the action, starting out with the highest elevation, when everybody was standing up, because that’s when everyone was alive and yet to be wounded. You started high and worked down low. Blood on the walls? Pick the highest splatter and that’s likely where it started. Thin, watery streaks? That was going to be aspirated blood, meaning the victim had coughed or spit, and that meant they’d already been shot in the chest. When you had a body with three or four bullet holes, that sort of intel helped you sequence the shots.

But outdoor shootings could screw you over, at least if you were reading the body of the victim or their blood. Splatter just arced and fell on the ground, with no trace of the elevation from which it started. Fingerprints weren’t going to be left behind on grass and dirt. You might get a footprint, but if it wasn’t in blood, then it didn’t help all that much, particularly in a public park.

All of these were reasons, Sully thought, why the shooter might have brought the Hall brothers outside, particularly in the Bend. Looking at how the bodies fell, and the location of the wounds, was going to be about all they had in order to try to re-create how it went down.

“You got to love the irony,” Sully said.

“Come again?” This was John.

Sully nodded, coming closer now, tilting his head to look at just how they had fallen, five or six feet apart, both toward the water. “The Halls. Twins. Born at the same time. Died at the same time.”

Jeff, nodding. “That’s hard. That’s hard.”

“What’s their momma say?” Sully asked. It was instinctive.

“We got somebody up at her house,” Jeff said, “taking a statement. She got a place up there in Brookland. They bought it for her, I guess. A little laundering. When things were better, going better for them.”

Jeff looked down at the bodies. “Nobody thinks they ever going to die.”

“Canvassing the Carolina, the apartment building?” Sully said.

“Two teams on it right now,” John said, shrugging. He sneezed. “Like somebody in there’s going to say something.”

“What floor did Tony and Carlos stay on in there?”

“They had a couple of units, safe spots, girlfriends’ places, you can’t really say they lived here or they lived there,” John said. “Stayed with their momma as much as anywhere. But they tended to hole up in 318 in the Carolina there. It’s up there on the top right. Overlooks the channel.”

“Mind if I take a peek?”

“When we’re done here, I’ll tell the unit up there you can look in the door. Can’t let you in the place itself. All I need, this comes to trial, defense gets a list of people who been in that apartment and I got to answer for you.”

“Did it look like they got rousted up there, then dragged down here?”

“Nothing one way or the other. Drug dealers, they tend not to be much on the housekeeping tip.”

“But no blood, no holes in the wall.”

“Don’t I wish.”

It didn’t appear as if the Halls had planned to be outside long. The spring weather had turned chilly, but they had on short sleeves and no jackets. The way the bodies had fallen-well, if the bodies were hands of the clock, their feet would be at the center of the dial and their bodies would be at twelve and two, with Tony at twelve. The feet, what, maybe three feet apart? The torsos five. So they had been standing together, almost side by side, when they got shot. The shooter had to have been standing behind them, just off to their left, the shooter’s right. The way he saw it: The gunman raises a right hand, the barrel almost touching the back of Tony’s head, blam, then moves the barrel to the right, blam, shoots Carlos from three feet. Doesn’t take a step. A second between shots. When they were both on the ground, he steps to both of them and puts one more in each brain. Whole thing, ten seconds.

“You roll them yet?” he asked, still circling.

“Yeah,” said John. “Just a half-turn, see if there was more damage to the front. Wasn’t any, so we laid them back till they get bagged. This right here is how they dropped.”

“Ligature on the wrists?”

“None apparent.”

“Knees muddy?”

“Nah. You thinking a classic execution, somebody ties their hands, brings them out here, puts them on their knees, blam blam. It didn’t go down like that.”

“So give me your scenario.”