Page 10 of Return of the Spider
At two feet away, he saw they were both topless and entwined in a kiss.
He flashed on an image of Joyce freed of her shirt and bra, then shook the memory off.
Soneji lifted the gun. He aimed through the side window at the back of the lacrosse captain’s head, thinking beyond what the genius had done, trying for two dead with one shot. A split second before the gun went off, however, the girl moved her head.
The shot was much louder than he’d expected. Soneji looked at the spiderwebbed window and felt an overwhelming urge to flee the scene. So he did.
He took off, running back toward the spur road and into the darkened woods. He tripped and almost fell, stuck the pistol back in his pocket, and got out the penlight.
He sprinted to the back of the van, meaning to return the pistol, the balaclava, and the socks to the duffel bag, reached for the door handle, and froze.
Someone had scrawled with a finger across the two dirty back doorsBike trail, asshole. Reporting you to police.
For two or three beats, Soneji stood there, his mind unable to process the ramifications of the message. Then his survival instinct, honed over years of abuse as a child, kicked in.
He looked at the ground and saw the bike’s thin track. The bicyclist must have come from the south, seen the van, stopped to write the note, then looped right and continued north.
Soneji jumped into the van, started it, and rammed it into reverse. He spun the van around, then smashed it into drive. He figured he’d been gone no more than fifteen minutes. The bicyclist had a head start, but how much of a head start? If he’d seen the van right away, he could be across the lock and up on the parkway by now. But if the bicyclist had spotted the van a few minutes later, he might still be on the towpath. And he might have heard the gunshot.
Soneji turned on the fog lights and sped up.
For almost a minute, he felt nothing but anxiety and uncertainty. Then, four hundred yards short of the bridge off the island, he saw a bicycle taillight about a hundred yards away, blinking red, and the bright reflectors of a safety vest.
He floored the gas pedal. When he was fifty yards away and closing, the bicyclist turned, revealing a headlamp and the concerned face of a bearded man.
When Soneji was twenty-five yards from him, the man tried to pull over to his left to let Soneji pass. He was facing away from the van and had not come to a full stop when the van’s left front bumper plowed into him, launching both rider and bike off the path and into the darkness of the woods.
CHAPTER
5
Sampson and i wereassigned to the Tony Miller murder case, but we were pretty far down in the hierarchy at Metro, so the day after Tony’s funeral, we also took a six a.m. call from Dispatch.
An angler had found two bodies in an old Ford Bronco out on Bear Island, within District lines, which made the killings Metro’s responsibility. It was misty and foggy when we got to lock five. A National Park Service vehicle was blocking the way across, its lights flashing.
A Bethesda Police cruiser was parked beside it, its lights flashing as well. A police officer was turning away angry bikers who were trying to get on the towpath heading to Georgetown.
Ranger Carrie Mulberry saw us, came over, and said, “We’ve closed off the island, and I’ve got rangers blocking access at the north and south ends. All went in by bike.”
“You been to the vehicle yourself?” Sampson asked.
Mulberry made a sour face and said in a soft voice, “After hearing what Mr. Quirk saw, we decided to hang back and not mess up any evidence for you. He says there are large vehicle tracks all over the towpath leading to the scene.”
“Mr. Quirk is the fisherman who found the bodies?”
“Dudley Quirk the Fourth,” Gene Lamont, the Bethesda officer, said to us after turning away another bicyclist. “One of those.”
“One of those?” I asked.
“One of those people who’s gotta tell you they’re the Fourth. Lack of naming imagination in the family if you ask me.”
“No one did,” Sampson said shortly. We looked over at the fisherman, who was sitting on a rock wall.
“He doesn’t hear that well,” Mulberry warned us before turning to stop a pack of four bicyclists.
We walked up to Quirk, showed him our badges.
Quirk nodded. “I don’t usually bring my hearing aids when I’m going to fish. I dropped one in the drink last year and they’re awful expensive,” he explained, then launched into his story. “I come here on my bike in the dark a couple mornings a week, and I ride over to the other side of the island, close to where you can see the falls upstream, and I fish as the sun rises.
