“Fake out!” David Hayneswiggle said into the bullhorn. “Look closely now. At her, please. Not at me. I told you, she’s our star today. Pretend I’m not even here. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Look at her!”
As the audience stared, a dark curved line appeared on the girl’s exposed throat. Then it became a sheet of red that ran down her neck and over her T-shirt. The people down below were finally beginning to realize what had happened—her throat had been cut.
Then she was still, other than the slightest rhythmic sway of her body.
“Okay, she’s gone. Show’s over. For today, anyway. Thank you all for coming. Thank you so much. Drive safely.”
People started honking their horns, and there was angry screaming. A police siren finally sounded from some-where, but it was far off, unable to get through the backed-up traffic.
David Hayneswiggle started to run in a funny duck waddle. He bobbed around the hairpin turn at the far end of the ramp and disappeared into the bushes.
He knew that it didn’t matter how many people saw which way he went. Hell, let them search for him all they liked.
Who were they going to look for, anyway—Richard Nixon?
Chapter 44
THIS WAS AS SAD and disturbing a homicide scene as I’d ever worked in my years with Metro or the FBI. Two young people were dead, and the murders seemed arbitrary and just plain cruel. The kids were definitely innocents in whatever was going on here.
The G.W. Parkway had been rerouted, but not without stranding at least a mile-long queue of cars still backed up on the roadway. They were now waiting for a flipped minivan to be cleared away by the police. That required a sign-off from Bree, who needed the medical examiner to finish with the two bodies. She had established Metro’s jurisdiction here, but not without a heavy dose of animosity from the Arlington County Police Department, which didn’t bother Bree in the least.
Helicopters flew overhead every few minutes, police and media, the latter always coming too close for comfort. I saw them as Peeping Toms with a license to look and to shoot film.
The crowd, many of whom had witnessed the actual murders, was a strange mixture of angry-aggressive and scared silly
. They were a captive audience, though. We needed to identify some of them as our witnesses, then try to get everyone else moving again. The title of an old Broadway show popped into my head: Stop the World—I Want to Get Off. I really did.
The Virginia Highway Department was there in numbers, the state police too, and they were showing their impatience and ire with body language, if nothing else. Bree, Sampson, and I had divided our part of the workload as best we could. Bree was on the immediate crime scene, checking out all the physical evidence. Sampson had the killer’s entry and exit from the scene, which had created a huge extended perimeter from the Potomac all the way into Rosslyn, Virginia. He had a team of Arlington cops working with him on-site.
My focus was on the killer and his mind-set at the time of the two murders. To ascertain this, I needed the best witnesses I could find, and I needed them in a big hurry. With a scene as sprawling as this one, I had no guarantee that the traffic wouldn’t start moving again. For the moment, at least, the killer had stopped the world, and nobody was getting off unless he wanted them to.
Chapter 45
I DID A QUICK ASSESSMENT of the cars nearest the bridge, looking for solo white males. Make no mistake about it, I believe in profiling during emergency situations like this one. The more a witness has in common with the criminal they’ve seen, the more reliable their testimony will be—at least statistically speaking. That had also been my experience at homicide scenes again and again. So I was looking for white males, preferably alone in their vehicles.
I settled on a black Honda Accord about five car lengths back from the overpass. The man inside was sitting sideways to avoid looking ahead, and he had a cell phone pressed to his ear. His car was running, with the windows rolled up.
I rapped hard on the glass. “Metro Police. Excuse me, sir? Sir? Excuse me!”
He finally held up his index finger without actually looking around at me. One minute?
At that point, I opened the car door for him and showed my creds. “Now, sir? Please hang up the phone.”
“I gotta go,” he said to whoever, and stepped outside, full of piss and vinegar, I could tell. “Officer, can you, or somebody, tell me how long we’ll be stuck here?”
“Not long,” I said, rather than lecture him about the two kids who had just died. “But I need you to tell me exactly what you saw happen on the overpass.”
He talked fast, with an irritating nonchalance, but his story corroborated what we’d gathered so far. The driver of the Honda had come to a halt seconds after the young male had been thrown down into traffic.
“At first, I didn’t realize what the accident, or whatever, was all about. I just saw cars suddenly stopping in front of me. But then I saw the dead kid.” He pointed to the bridge. “And the one up there. The girl who got her throat cut. Terrible shit. Tragic, right?” He asked the question as if he couldn’t figure it out for himself.
“Right. Can you describe the man who was on the overpass? The killer?”
“Not really. He had on one of those Halloween masks. The rubber kind you put over your whole head? I think it was supposed to be Richard Nixon. I’m pretty sure. Does that make any sense?”
“It does. Thank you for your help,” I told the man. “Another officer will come by to take down a few more particulars.”
The next eyewitness I spoke to was a limo driver, who told me the killer looked taller and much heavier than the female victim. Also that he wore a dark Windbreaker with no insignia that the driver could make out. And then a few vaguely recollected bits of what had been said over the bullhorn. “That sonofabitch bastard yelled, ‘I’m back!’ Those were his first words.”