Page 41 of Return of the Spider
“I’m not going there right now.” I waved off his comment. “My friend at the FBI came through with CCTV footage of the bridge intersection and Canal where it meets the Clara Barton on the night Talbot was killed.”
“Anything?”
“The camera must be mounted over the top of the traffic light facing the bridge because the Bronco passes under it, gunning through a yellow light, at ten twelve in the evening,” I said, playing the sequence.
We watched as a Ford Explorer and a Volkswagen Scirocco took a left onto the bridge when the light on Canal changed. The third vehicle in line, a dingy white Ford Econoline van with tinted windows, continued on in the northbound lane, followed shortly after by a Dodge pickup and a Toyota Corolla. Then three cars came across the bridge from Virginia. Two went north into Maryland; one headed south toward Georgetown.
I stopped the tape and sighed. “I don’t know what I’m looking for.”
“Commonalities,” Sampson said. “The ME is putting time of death around ten thirty p.m. Let it play for a while.”
I sat back and watched the intersection footage for almost twenty minutes before spotting a dingy white van with its high beams on heading south toward Canal Street.
I gave a little whoop, stopped the player, rewound the tape several seconds, and froze it on the image of the van just as it entered the intersection. “Looks like the same van to me.”
“It does to me too,” Sampson said, moving closer to the screen. “Tinted side windows. No passenger. Driver’s got the visor down, blocking his face. And the bulbs over the license plates are out. But could be old Pennsylvania plates, the blue on yellow ones with the keystone in the middle?”
I moved closer too. “I think so. And look at the front left headlight. Is the cover busted?”
“Something’s off about it,” he agreed. “We’ll get someone to really blow up the image.”
“If this is the van that hit Carl Dennis, we’ve placed him within—”
My pager went off. A Maryland number.
“Rewind and check if the van’s headlights were intact on its first trip through the intersection while I make this call,” I said. I went back to my desk, picked up my phone, and dialed the number from the pager.
“Brady, Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office,” said the same detective who’d given me the finger the night before.
When Sampson came out of the conference room a few minutes later, he saw the difference in my posture and attitude.
“Headlight’s intact going north,” Sampson informed me. “Who paged you?”
“I’ll tell you in two seconds, John,” I said. “Someone else needs to know first.”
I went straight to Chief Pittman’s office and knocked on his closed door. He barked something, so I opened it.
He took one look at me, rolled his eyes, and grumbled, “What now?”
“We may have identified the vehicle that hit the Senate aide, and it might belong to Talbot’s killer.”
“What do you mean, ‘may have’?”
I held up my hands. “More important, I just got off the phone with Matthew Brady, the detective in charge of yesterday’s Beltsville shootings. Preliminary ballistics say the two women were shot at short range by a forty-four-caliber snub-nosed pistol shooting two-hundred-and-forty-six-grain boattail bullets. Just like the one that hit Conrad Talbot.”
CHAPTER
30
Gary soneji fought theurge to exit Interstate 495, cruise into Beltsville, and roll past the scene to see what the cops were doing.
That would be a rookie move, he decided, shaking his head as he passed the exit. He’d been near perfect the other night and wanted to be as meticulous in every aspect of his follow-through.
With that motivation taking firm hold, Soneji got onto I-95 heading north toward Baltimore and Wilmington, Delaware. He set the cruise control in the Saab to sixty-seven, just two miles above the speed limit. He had no desire to attract the attention of a state trooper, especially with the items he had stowed in the trunk.
As Soneji drove, he listened to a jazz station out of the University of Maryland. With Herbie Hancock providing backgroundmusic, he relived last night, saw every moment of his flawless stalk, every step an exquisite eternity of anticipation.
He’d had the angle coming at the green Chevy Malibu, was positive he would not be noticed as he eased his latex-gloved hand into the pocket of his dark hoodie and slipped the Bulldog from a plastic bag.
