I had the impression that the high profile on this sniper case was making people nervous around here, too. Everyone seemed to know who I was, and they were all giving me a wide berth.
“Don’t worry about it. You aren’t any further along than I would have expected,” I told Cowen. “But I do have some ideas about how we might handle things from here.”
Chapter 80
SEVERAL THINGS HAPPENED really fast in Brick Township, mostly because I needed them to.
I worked my contacts with the Field Intelligence Group in Washington to get hold of the FIG coordinator up in the Newark field office. Because it was a Sunday night, and because we had sufficient reason to believe Mitchell Talley had crossed, or would cross, jurisdictional lines, we were able to get an immediate Temporary Felony Want. Cowen would have forty-eight hours from there to secure an actual warrant, signed and issued. In the meantime, Newark could get word out to law enforcement up and down the eastern seaboard right away.
The idea for now was to leave off any mention of Steven Hennessey, or any accomplice at all. The Want specified only that Mitchell Talley was being sought for questioning in the deaths of Bernice and Robert Talley. Wherever our presumed snipers were, I didn’t want them knowing we’d connected any of this to DC until I had more information.
Cowen agreed to give me some cover on that front. In the meantime, I got his people hooked up with Newark in the search for their suspect. Someone found a more recent snapshot in one of his mother’s photo albums, and they used a scan of it for the local and regional BOLO — Be On The Lookout.
Realistically speaking, no one expected Talley to be in the area. The larger effort was focused on looking at stolen-car reports, monitoring transportation hubs, and tracking down surveillance tapes at area airports and bus and train stations. With luck, someone would be able to turn up an eyewitness or maybe even a relevant piece of video somewhere.
The closest thing to a lead so far had come from an elderly neighbor of Mrs. Talley’s. She’d seen a sedan of some kind parked in front of the house a few nights ago but couldn’t say what kind it was, or what color, or even how long it had been there.
For whatever that was worth, I forwarded the information down to Jerome Thurman, who had been tracking vehicle-related leads on this case for me from the start.
By now, I was beginning to feel like I’d been away from DC for too long. Maybe Talley and Hennessey had no plans to return to Washington, if that’s where they’d even come from in the first place. But I had to assume otherwise. For all I knew, they were already back there and planning their next hit.
The minute I got things wrapped up with Detective Cowen, I was in the car and headed for home. And I was moving fast, using a siren all the way.
Chapter 81
AT EIGHT THIRTY the next morning, Colleen Brophy turned off of E Street and into the churchyard, where I was waiting outside the True Press office. She had a bulging backpack on her shoulders, an armload of newspapers, and a nearly finished cigarette in the corner of her mouth.
“Oh God,” she said when she saw me. “You again. Now what do you want?”
“I wouldn’t come if it wasn’t important, Ms. Brophy. I’m well aware of how you feel about all this,” I said. Still, after my long Sunday on the road, I was in “no mood for ’tude,” as Sampson likes to say.
The True Press editor set down her load of papers and sat on the stone bench where I’d just stood up.
“How can I help you?” she asked, her sarcasm still intact. “As if I have a choice.”
I showed her the picture of Mitchell Talley. “Have you ever seen this man?”
“Oh, come on,” she said right away. “You think this is the guy who sent me those e-mails?”
“I’ll take that as a yes. Thank you. When was the last time you saw him?”
She took out a new cigarette and lit it off the last of the old one before she answered.
“Do you really need me to participate in this?” she said. “The trust I have with these people is so tenuous.”
“I’m not trying to bust a shoplifter, Ms. Brophy.”
“I understand, but it’s the shoplifters I’m worried about. A lot of the homeless people I work with have to break the law from time to time just to get by. If any of them see me talking to you —”
“This can stay a private conversation,” I told her. “Nobody has to know about it. That is, assuming we can get on with this. Do you know this man?”
After another long pause and a few more drags, she said, “I guess it was last week. They picked up their papers on Wednesday, like everyone else.”
“‘They’?” I asked.
“Yeah. Mitch and his friend Denny. They’re kind of like a —”
She stopped short then and turned slowly to look at me. It seemed maybe she’d just put two and two together about something. Or maybe I should say one and one.