The driver, a twenty-nine-year-old waitress, was later found to have died of a .45-caliber gunshot wound to the head. The shooting had to have occurred in broad daylight, yet no witnesses had come forward.
The second report, from the sheriff’s department in Kent County, Delaware, concerned a white Mustang convertible that crashed into a tree along Route 10 between Willow Grove and Woodside East. The driver, twenty-four-year-old Kerry Rutledge, a clothes buyer for Nordstrom’s, was found unconscious but alive around two a.m. on Labor Day. Rutledge had broken ribs, facial injuries, a concussion, and a four-inch-long wound across the back of her head.
Ms. Rutledge regained consciousness after a few hours, but she was confused and unable to remember anything about the crash. A sheriff’s detective interviewed her the following day. She told the detective she thought she’d been shot but couldn’t remember how it had happened or why. The wound to the back of the head was consistent with a bullet grazing the skin, so we thought it worth the drive to try to talk to her ourselves.
At the front desk, we learned that Kerry Rutledge was out of intensive care and under observation pending the results of neurological tests. When we reached the nurses’ station, we showed our badges. The head nurse said Rutledge’s parents had been in to see her earlier, and the last time she’d checked, her patient was asleep.
But when we knocked softly and entered her room, the Nordstrom’s buyer was propped up, sipping a cup of ice water, and gazing at a television on mute. She was a wisp of a woman with pale, freckled skin and fine copper hair that hung about the bandages that covered her bruised face.
“Ms. Rutledge?” I said, and I introduced Sampson and myself.
“You’re here because I was shot,” she said with a flat affect.
“That’s right,” Sampson said. “Did you see the person who shot you?”
Her head rotated a degree to the right and back. “I’m having trouble remembering things.”
I hesitated, thinking how best to proceed, and then said, “How do you know you were shot, Ms. Rutledge?”
Her head rotated again, and stayed cocked to the right as she blinked and pursed her lips. “He was right there. He…he had a gun. I saw it.”
“That’s good. What kind of gun?”
“A pistol?”
“Even better. Where was he? And where were you?”
Rutledge’s eyes got soft and her head started to droop ever so slightly before she frowned and came out of it and said, “I’m an idiot. What was I…”
“Ms. Rutledge?”
“I was texting,” she said. “I’d been to a party and I was on my way to my parents’ house in Dover. I had the top and the windows down. It was a pretty night and I was texting a friend. I remember that. Just before I was shot.”
“What time was that?”
“I don’t know. Late.”
“So you’re driving,” Sampson said. “Eyes on and off the road because you’re texting?”
Her mouth hung slightly open, but she gave a faint nod. “I’ve driven that road a thousand times. Maybe more. Oh God, what’s my car look like?”
“A mess,” I said. “But you were texting, and then you saw the pistol?”
“Yes. I mean, I think so.”
“What happened in between? Before you saw the gun and after you stopped texting?”
She looked at me blankly, and I decided to take another approach.
“How fast do you think you were going?”
“Not fast. Fifty? I…” Rutledge said, and she paused as if noting distant and dim things.
“What are you seeing?” I said.
“There was a headlight,” she said. “A single one in the rearview.”
“A motorcycle headlight?”
Rutledge’s eyes went wide at that. She took a deep, sharp breath and pressed hard back into the raised mattress, not realizing how much that would hurt her ribs.
“Ohh,” she moaned. “Ohh, that was just…bad.”
She closed her eyes. A minute passed, then two, and gradually the spasm of pain released her and left her breathing so rhythmically I feared she’d fallen asleep.
But then her eyelids fluttered open and she looked at us more clear-eyed.
“I’m seeing more of it now,” she said. “He drove up alongside of me, like he was passing, and then he backed off and pulled in behind me again. I put my phone on the console, got both hands on the wheel, and that’s when he came again, right up beside me on one of those big motorcycles with a windshield. I looked to my left and he was right there, five or six feet away, with, like, a black helmet and visor, aiming the gun at me. He…he…”
Rutledge looked at us with growing disbelief. “Before he pulled the trigger, I remember now, he yelled something like ‘Let this be a lesson. Never text and drive.’”
Chapter
55
Thursday afternoon, in her office in the Daly Building, Bree realized that by agreeing to become chief of detectives, she’d also agreed to go surfing on a tsunami of memos, overtime requests, and high-pressure meetings at which she was called upon to defend her handling of a job that she hadn’t been given enough time to learn.
The good times on the Delaware shore, watching Alex and Ali playing in the waves, seemed such a distant memory that Bree wanted to throw something just to hear it break.
A knock on the doorjamb jolted her from her funk. Detective Kurt Muller ducked his head in and said, “Howdy, Chief Stone.”
Looking at his waxed mustache, she couldn’t help but grin. “Howdy?”
“I’m showing my inner Oklahoman today,” Muller said. “Anyway, I know you’re COD now and all, but I’m going to Terry Howard’s storage unit. His ex-wife gave me permission to look through it, and she also gave me the combinations to two safes, which he evidently gave her in case he died.”
“I didn’t even know Howard had an ex-wife,” Bree said.
“Patty,” Muller said. “They divorced seven years ago. She’s remarried to a veterinarian. Lives in Pensacola. She said she’s in shock about Howard’s suicide and the cancer. He never told her, or their daughter, who is nine. Anyway, I wanted to know if you felt like tagging along.”
Bree almost dismissed the offer out of hand. The case was closed. Why would she want to pick through a dead man’s storage unit?
But then she remembered Alex’s dissent when Chief Michaels declared the homicides of Tommy McGrath and Edita Kravic solved, pinning them on the bitter ex-cop who’d blown his head off with the kind of gun he had never owned and didn’t like to use.
“Sure, I’ll go with you, Muller,” Bree said at last, getting up from behind her desk. “It’ll help me to clear my head, get me out of the spin cycle I’ve been on.”
“I felt like that once,” the detective replied. “Inner-ear infection. You would have thought I was on deck in a hurricane sea or drunk off my ass. I couldn’t tell which way was up.”
On the way to the storage unit in Tacoma Park, Bree actually enjoyed listening to Muller drone on about the role of the eustachian tube in regulating equilibrium.
They cut off the lock to the unit and threw open the overhead door. Near the wall to their immediate right was a baby’s crib with a mattress, mobiles, and folded dusty blankets. Behind that were stacks of boxes, an old bicycle, a rolled-up volleyball net, and two large Cannon 54 safes.
“You have the combinations?” Bree asked.
“They’re on here somewhere,” Muller said, pulling out his phone.
Bree went to the safes, noting four green army-surplus ammunition boxes on top of one.
“You still think Howard shot himself?” Bree asked, taking one box down.
Muller shrugged, still scrolling on his phone. “Seems a little convenient in retrospect. McGrath and Howard have a bad beef. Howard kills McGrath and shoots himself because he has cancer and because he’s had his revenge.”
“It wraps up in a nice package, doesn’t it?” Bree said.
She opened the
box and found smaller cardboard boxes of .40-caliber ammunition stacked neatly inside. The second box was half full of nine-millimeter ammunition. The third box carried .30-06 rounds and a single cardboard container of Federal .45-caliber pistol ammunition.
Chapter
56
Bree picked up the box of ammunition and opened it.
Six of the twenty bullets were missing from the plastic rack inside.
But there they were: fourteen .45-caliber bullets. Ammunition for a gun Terry Howard had claimed he never used.
“Got the combinations,” Muller said. “Ready, Chief?”
“Gimme a second,” Bree said, pulling out one of the bullets, noting the copper full-jacket bullet and the slight hollow spot at the tip. She inspected the primer and the rim around it and saw something that made her pause.
After a moment, she dug in her pocket and put the bullet and the box in an evidence bag.
“Ready?”
“Just let me finish here,” she said, opening the fourth ammo box.
Bree found a gun-cleaning kit with jars of bore solvent, all tightly closed but still tainting the air with their peculiar smell. She reached in and pulled out a small bottle of Hoppe’s #9.
She opened the top and sniffed. The liquid bore cleaner smelled like she remembered it, sweet, almost like hot caramel. It was bizarre that something that smelled that good stripped out spent gunpowder and metal fouling.
Something deep in her brain stopped her train of thought. She stared at the bottle of Hoppe’s #9 and sniffed it again, grasping for a memory and not knowing exactly why.
“You ready now, or do you want some glue to sniff?”
“Funny,” she said. She put the gun-cleaning kit away and stood in front of the safe’s electronic keypad. “Tell me.”
Muller called out a series of numbers that she entered and soon there was a chunking noise as the locks released. Bree opened the safe and shone her flashlight inside.
Muller whistled. “He’s got an arsenal in there.”
They would later count sixty-three guns in the two safes. There were Smith and Wesson pistols in .40, .357 Magnum, and .44 Magnum calibers on one shelf in the first safe. There was a 1962 Winchester Model 70 bolt-action hunting rifle in .30-06 caliber on another shelf. The other fifty-five weapons in the safes were gleaming side-by-side double-barreled shotguns.
Bree ignored them and started to pull open the stacked drawers below the pistol shelf. Muller, however, got out his own flashlight and shone it on one of the shotguns. Then he pulled out a pair of reading glasses, got down on his knees, and looked closer at the barrel.
“Mother of God,” Muller said, fishing in his pocket for latex gloves.
“What’s the matter?”
“Let me make sure,” he said, and he removed the gun as if it were fine crystal. He peered at the writing on the barrel and shook his head in wonder. “This was made by Purdey and Sons.”
“Never heard of them,” Bree said.
“They’re the best,” Muller said. “I had an oil-rich uncle back in Oklahoma who had one. I’ll bet this one gun is worth somewhere between twenty-five and fifty thousand dollars.”
Bree stopped pulling out drawers. “Is that right?”
“Purdeys are handmade in London,” Muller said. “They never lose value. If all the guns in here are this fine, we could be looking at two million dollars, maybe more.”
“Two million?” Bree said, shocked. “How the hell did Howard get…”
And then she knew. Of course. Howard had been guilty. The drugs. The money. But why shotguns?
She went back to opening drawers. The next two were empty. But the third contained a large manila envelope. Bree drew it out, seeing Howard’s writing across the front: To be opened in the likely event of my death.
There was a second envelope in the drawer, white, legal-size.
There was a pen scrawl there too.
It read: To COD Thomas McGrath, DC Metro.
Chapter
57
Based on information gleaned from Kerry Rutledge’s accident report, Sampson and I found the tree her Mustang had collided with, an ancient oak off Route 10 that had a nasty gouge in it.
“Fifty miles an hour?” Sampson said doubtfully. “Looks faster.”
“She said she hit the gas just before he shot,” I reminded him. “So she could have been going sixty or sixty-five if she’d reacted to the bullet grazing her head by stiffening and keeping the accelerator pinned to the floor.”
As we returned to the unmarked car, Sampson said, “I keep going back to his amplified voice.”
Rutledge had said that when the shooter told her never to text and drive, his voice had been very loud, as if he were talking through a loudspeaker on the motorcycle.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said, getting into the passenger side. “Highway patrolmen use those kinds of built-in bullhorns, but I’m pretty sure you can get them for just about any touring motorcycle these days.”
“Well, whoever he is and whatever modifications he’s made to his motorcycle, he’s killing people for traffic violations,” Sampson said as he started the car. “Three were speeding. And that girl last week, I’ll bet she was texting too.”
“Possible,” I agreed. “All of a sudden, though, I’m starving.”
“All of a sudden, me too.”
We drove west toward Willow Grove, and I caught sight of something shiny in the sky far away.
“There’s those blimps again,” I said. “What the hell are those things for?”
“One of the great mysteries of life,” Sampson said, pulling into the Brick House Tavern and Tap for lunch. I brought a road map into the tavern with me, and after ordering a chicken salad sandwich with kettle-fried potato chips, I used a pen to note where the five shootings had occurred and when.
The first was west of Fredericksburg, Virginia, months ago. The second was in southern Pennsylvania a few weeks later. Rock Creek Park was two weeks ago. Southwest of Millersville, Maryland, four days later. Willow Grove, three days ago.
“His time between attacks is shrinking fast,” I said, drawing a circle. “He could kill anytime now, and he likes it here, in this general area. He feels comfortable hunting from DC east.”
The waitress brought our food. Sampson took the map and bit into a tuna melt while looking it over.
After a few minutes, he laughed, shook his head, and said, “It was staring us right in the face, and we were too close to see it.”
I swallowed a gulp of Coke and said, “See what?”
He turned the map for me, picked up my pen, and traced short lines from each of the crash scenes to Denton, Maryland. The Rutledge scene was closest, no more than twenty miles away. The tavern we were eating in was closer still.
A half an hour later, as we drove down a dirt road south of Willow Grove, Sampson said, “I don’t think popping in again to say hi is the smart way to go.”
“Surprise is always good, though,” I said.
“Unless you’re surprising a lunatic-in-the-grass world-class sniper with a chip on his shoulder,” Sampson said.
“If we see orange flags, we’ll turn around.”
“How about we call in first?”
We rounded a curve onto a straightaway about three hundred yards long, and our options narrowed. The gate to Nicholas Condon’s farm was at the end of the straight, and it appeared to be opening, swinging out toward the road.
We were about one hundred and fifty feet from the gate when a Harley-Davidson appeared from the farm lane. Even though the rider wore dark leathers, a helmet, and goggles, I could tell by the beard that it was Condon.
He looked left toward us. Maybe his mercenary instincts kicked in, I don’t know, but the sniper saw something he didn’t like, popped the clutch, and buried the throttle. His back tire spun on the hard gravel, sliding side to side and throwing up a cloud of thick dust that curtained off the road behind him.
“Crazy sonofabitch,
” Sampson said, and he stomped on the gas.
Chapter
58
Stones and gravel hit the squad-car windshield and we had to slow down for fear of crashing. Luckily the dirt road soon met asphalt at County Road 384. By the loose soil his tires had shed on the road, we knew Condon had headed north. Sampson accelerated after him.
“Stay near the speed limit,” I said. “We have no jurisdiction here.”
“I don’t think Condon cares.”
“I imagine he doesn’t, but—there he is.”
The sniper was weaving through the light traffic ahead and headed toward a stoplight at the intersection with Maryland Route 404. It turned red and Condon stopped, first in line. We were four cars behind him when I jumped out and started running toward him.
Condon looked over his shoulder, saw me coming two cars back, waved, and then goosed the accelerator on the Harley a split second before the light turned green again. He squealed out onto 404 heading west.
Sampson slowed as he came past and I jumped in.
“I’ve got to run more,” I said, gasping, as the squad car swung after Condon.
“We all do,” Sampson said. “Desk jockeys can’t move.”
Traffic heading east was heavier, but Condon was driving the Harley like a professional, roaring out and passing cars whenever he got the chance as we tried to follow him through Hillsboro and Queen Anne.
He was ten cars ahead of us when he took the ramp onto U.S. 50, a four-lane. He seemed fully aware of us, and every time we’d close the gap he’d make some crazy-ass move and put more space between us.
Condon got off at the 301, heading west again across the bay bridge. We lost him for a minute but then spotted him getting off the exit to 450 South toward the Severn River. Ahead of us entering Annapolis, he cruised down the middle of the street while we sat stalled in traffic. But by opening the door and standing up on the car frame, I was able to see him take a left on Decatur Avenue. Three minutes passed until we could do the same.