“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.
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.
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.