There was no rest of the sentence. The Walther fired from inside his pocket and caught the driver in the back of the head. A spray of blood and gray matter hit the windshield.
The second shot took care of Zachary, right through those pretentious horn-rims of his. He never even got to reach for the door. It was over in a matter of seconds — the two most satisfying shots Denny had ever taken.
Except, of course, not Denny. Not anymore. That was a pretty good feeling, too. To leave this all far behind.
No time for celebrations, though. The car had barely gone quiet before he was out on the sidewalk and back to doing what he’d always done best. He kept moving.
Chapter 100
THE TWENTY-FOUR HOURS following the hits at the Harman were a full-court press like I’d rarely seen in Washington. Our Command Information Center had traffic checks going on all night; Major Case Squad put both units on the street; and NSID was told to drop all nonessential business, and that was just inside the MPD.
Details were operating out of Capitol Police, ATF, and even the Secret Service.
By morning, the hunt for Steven Hennessey had gone from regional to national to international. The Bureau was fully activated and looking for him everywhere it was possible for the Bureau to look. The CIA was involved, too.
The significance of these murders had really started to sink in. Justices Summers and Ponti had been the unofficial left wing of the Supreme Court, beloved by half the country and foxes in the henhouse, basically, to the other half.
At MPD, our late-afternoon briefing was like a march of the zombies. Nobody had gotten much sleep overnight, and there was a palpable kind of tension in the air.
Chief Perkins presided. There were no introductory remarks.
“What are we looking at?” he asked straight-out. Most of the department’s command staff were there, too. Every seat was taken, and people were standing around the edge of the room, shifting on their feet.
“Talk to me,” he said. “Anyone.”
“The hotline and website are on fire,” one of the district commanders, Gerry Hockney, reported in. “It’s all over the place, literally. Hennessey’s a government operative. He’s holed up in a storage facility in Ohio, he’s in Florida, he’s in Toronto —”
Perkins cut him off. “Anything credible? I need to know what we have, not a lot of useless bullshit.”
“It’s too early to say, to commit to anything. We’re overwhelmed, sir.”
“In other words, no. Who else? Alex?”
I waved from where I was. “Waiting on a weapons report from that double homicide on Vermont Avenue last night. Two John Does found shot dead in a car, with cash on them but no IDs.
“It was definitely nine millimeter, but we don’t know yet if it was the same weapon that killed Mitch Talley.”
A huge buzz went up around the room, and I had to shout to get everyone’s attention back.
“Even if it was,” I went on, “the most it can tell us about Hennessey in the short term is that he was in the city sometime between twelve and four a.m.”
“Which means he could be anywhere by now,” Sampson said, giving the shorthand version for me. “Which means we should wrap this shit up and get back out there.”
“Do you think Hennessey was working for the two dead guys in the car?” someone asked anyway.
“Don’t know,” I said. “We’re still trying to track down who they were. It does seem like he’s cleaning house, though. Whether or not he’s finished is another question we don’t have an answer for.”
A lieutenant in the first row spoke up. “Do you mean finished cleaning house, or finished with these sniper killings?”
The questions were natural, but they were starting to get on my nerves. I held my hands out in a shrug. “You tell me.”
“So, in other words,” Chief Perkins cut in, “we’re nearly twenty-four hours out and we know less than we did before these murders, is that it?”
Nobody wanted to answer. There was a long silence in the room.
“Something like that,” I said finally.
Chapter 101