Supreme Justice (6 page)

“I don’t know about that. Eaton seems
marinated
in Brut. I didn’t know they even still made that shit.”

The laugh burst out of her before she could stop it.

But it caught in her throat when he said, “Sloan claims you’re brilliant, but I’ve seen no evidence of that.”

“Is that so?”

“Oh, I can tell you’re smart. But we need to get at it, so you can demonstrate that side to me. What do you say?”

She sighed, nodded. “I’m up for that. We better check in with those homicide detectives. We seem to be carrying water for them.”

He sighed. “If we’re going to chase our tails, we might as well get started.”

“Chase our tails?”

“I know what I saw,” Reeder said. “And it wasn’t a robbery. Not really.”

“I saw the footage, too,” she said.

“What did
you
see?”

“After listening to you? Taking in what you picked up on? An assassination.”

He grinned at her. “
Now
you’re brilliant.”

“
Crime and the fear of crime have permeated the fabric of American life
.”

Warren E. Burger, Fifteenth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, 1969–1986.
Section 5, Lot 7015-2, Grid W-36, Arlington National Cemetery.

SIX

For just over an hour, Patti Rogers, munching a carrot stick, had been watching security videos from the out-of-state tavern stickups when something on the Bowie, Maryland, video sat her up straight. The carrot bobbing like a cigarette in her mouth, she rewound the footage and watched again.

The camera was mounted high and angled down onto the bar area. Plenty of patrons, but the joint was not what you’d call packed. The mirror behind the bar, before which rows of bottles stood sentry, gave an illusion of a bigger place, and more people, but finally also a sense of how many others were present.

On her monitor, the two holdup men entered. In black, nondescript but for their ski masks, and of course guns. After an initial stunned response from the clientele, the perps herded the customers away from the counter, and the bartender from behind it, into a group near others seated at tables.

As in the Venter killing/robbery, the holdup man with an AK-47 stood at the bar, near the door, weapon trained on the cowed crowd, while his partner with the pistol relieved the customers of their valuables. With his back to the bar, AK-47 didn’t see an employee emerging from the back room into the serving area behind him.

Chewing a last bite of carrot like Bugs Bunny contemplating Elmer Fudd’s next move, Rogers paused the video to check her printout of the police report.

This new player was Nick Karlin, twenty-six, another bartender, who—before the robbery began—had gone back into the stockroom. No police record. Husky Nick had been a walk-on with the University of Maryland Terrapins football team; just as the media had made much of Venter’s gridiron career fueling his “heroics,” Karlin really was an athlete, or anyway a former one. He was also the only person hurt in any of the out-of-state robberies.

She unpaused the video.

AK-47 was standing close enough to the counter that Karlin could reach over and hook the intruder around the neck, jerking him backward.

Stupid
,
she thought.
What if the intruder had started firing, spraying bullets around the bar?

But that hadn’t happened, thankfully. With the counter awkwardly between them, the two men struggled, the gunman using only one hand on his surprise attacker, his other hand maintaining a grip on the AK-47; but at these close, clumsy quarters, the intruder couldn’t bring his weapon to bear on the ill-advisedly heroic bartender.

As they grappled, the gunman managed to gradually turn, until finally he was facing Karlin, who tore at the man’s mask, pulling it almost off before the gunman broke away, swinging the AK-47 up and jamming its stock in Karlin’s face. The bartender dropped behind the counter, a reverse jack-in-the-box.

Rogers knew from the police report that Karlin was unconscious, his nose and jaw broken.

Karlin had almost gotten the intruder’s mask off, but at the time his head was buried in the man’s shoulder and he had not seen the man’s briefly exposed face. And the camera angle didn’t help.

Shit.

She watched the two men do battle again, this time in slow motion, and then went through the footage again. Only this time, she observed the struggle in the mirror behind the bar . . .

Frame by frame now, she watched as the pair grappled, the gunman turning as Karlin ripped at his mask. Then . . .
there
!

She froze the video.

In the mirror, the reflection of the gunman’s largely revealed face glowered at her.

“Miggie!”

Altuve looked up from his monitor, and Rogers waved him over, then turned toward Reeder at his desk. “Joe—you should see this, too.”

The two men came over and peered over her shoulders as she pointed to the scowling oval face in the barroom mirror—close-set eyes, lumpy nose, wide mouth with irregular teeth.

“Miggie,” she asked, “is that image clear enough for you to use your facial-recognition software on it?”

Altuve frowned in thought. “Maybe. Yeah. Have to reverse it, obviously. Yeah, maybe, possibly.”

Jeez, Mig, could you hedge a little bit more?

Reeder patted her shoulder. “Gabe said you were smart, kid. Good catch.”

She grinned back at her new partner. “Thanks . . . Okay, Miggie—
‘do
do that
voo
-doo that
you
do so well.’ ”

Reeder returned her grin. “Sinatra reference. I like a youngster with a sense of history.”

She shrugged. “So we liked the Rat Pack down on the farm.”

The computer expert, not much for chitchat, had already slipped back to his station.

Reeder went over to Bishop’s desk. Riding the high of finding a real clue, Rogers sneered at the monitor. “Got you,” she told the contorted face in the barroom mirror.

She felt, more than heard, Reeder go back to his desk. Before he sat down, he said, “Heads up.”

Rogers turned to see something flipping toward her like a
2001
obelisk. Reflexively, she caught it.

A Snickers bar.

“Your reward,” Reeder said. “Guess who I begged it off.”

She looked over to see Bishop grinning at her. She nodded her thanks to the DC cop, then tore the wrapper with a satisfying rip. Soon the taste of carrot was a memory as chocolate fueled her tedious return to checking security video from the other, probably less significant robberies.

Ninety minutes later, Miggie materialized beside her like a nerdy apparition.

“Something?” she asked, hope rising.

He said, “First, a question.”

“Okay.”

“How did Bowie PD not see this?”

With a shrug, she said, “Easy to miss. I didn’t catch the reflection until I went through it frame by frame—twice.”

“Pretty major screwup,” he said, “if this is what it could be. I mean, Justice Venter might still be alive.”

“Meaning you
do
have something.”

He handed her several printout pages. “Facial rec got us a possible in the system.”

“ ‘Charles Granger,’ ” she read from the guy’s lengthy rap sheet. “Armed robbery, assault . . . busy boy.”

“He seems a dedicated professional, yeah. Check the picture out.”

“Looks right. Is this address still good?”

“You know as much as I do. Oh, except for one thing.”

“Yeah?”

“That’s his mom’s house.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Charles Granger lives at his mom’s house.”

“He does.”

“An armed robber who’s a nerd?”

“
I
live at my mom’s house.”

She looked at him as if to say,
I rest my case
.

Studying the rap sheet, she said, “Mom’s house or not, this address is two years old.”

“Best we got, Patti.”

“Probably worthless.”

“Probably.”

Reeder, who hadn’t seemed to be listening as he went over security footage, said, “Only one way to find out.”

She squinted at him, as if trying to bring him into focus. “I thought you made these guys as a waste of time.”

“I could be wrong.”

She blinked at him. “That’s happened
before
, has it?”

“Sure.” His smile was damn near angelic, which somehow went with the white hair and tanned rugged face. “As recently as last year.”

She grunted a laugh. “Well, the pair on this bar robbery look like the guys from the Venter hit.”

“Looks can be deceiving.”

“Let me write that down.”

He nodded toward his monitor. “I’ve been comparing the out-of-state footage to the Verdict stuff, and there are things about how the two holdup men stand, and carry themselves, that don’t jibe.”

“Oh, really? But then, like you said—you could be wrong.”

He got up, took his suit coat from the back of his chair, and climbed into it; he wore no sidearm that she could see.

Then he said pleasantly, “But if I’m right, Patti, why don’t we get these clowns out of the way, so we can get cracking on the real assassins?”

She winced. “So . . . shouldn’t we go over and tell Bishop and Pellin? It’s
their
lead.”

Buttoning his suit coat, Reeder thought for a moment. She followed his eyes over to Sloan, seated at the conference table talking with Eaton, the hostile Homeland Security guy. Reeder stared at Sloan and damned if the man didn’t seem to sense it. With a glance, Reeder summoned their boss.

Shortly, Sloan was leaning in to study the freeze frame on her computer. “That’s not much of an image. You got facial rec on this?”

Rogers said she did.

The SAIC took a long look at the suspect’s rap sheet.

“So we have an address,” Sloan mumbled.

“We do,” she said redundantly.

Sloan called Miggie over, who reiterated that this was a possible match, but not one hundred percent.

A little crossly, Sloan asked him, “What
would
you give it?”

“Fifty-fifty would be a push,” the computer analyst said. “Nothing that would hold up in court.”

“Not arrest-warrant-worthy?”

“God no.”

Sloan nodded his thanks and dismissal, and Miggie went back to his desk.

Reeder said, “Gabe, we don’t need a warrant to knock on a door.”

The SAIC frowned in thought. “I suppose you two want to check this Granger out.”

“Patti here caught it,” Reeder said with a shrug.

“But you’re backing up Bishop and his partner, what’s-his-name.”

“Pellin. I haven’t shared this with them yet.”

The SAIC frowned again. “Why not?”

“Why do you think?”

Sloan and Reeder were talking to each other in a way Rogers couldn’t quite follow—the shorthand of agents who’d worked together a long time.

She said, “Maybe we should bring in SWAT . . .”

Sloan grimaced. “Means money if it turns out to be nothing.”

Reeder said, “I thought you had carte blanche, Gabe. Supreme Court justices don’t get murdered every day, you know.”

“Carte blanche,” Sloan sighed, “within budgetary constraints.”

Rogers said, “Could be a dead end.”

Sloan thought about it endlessly, for maybe ten seconds, then said at last, “Okay. All right. Check it out, you two.”

Rogers, still not quite following, said to Sloan, “But
don’t
take Bishop and Pellin?”

Sotto voce, Reeder said, “Tell ’em and they’ll be taking
us
along. You like the sound of that?”

Her head was swimming. “But the out-of-state tavern holdups are
their
assignment.”

“Yes, I know,” Sloan said. “I gave it to them.” He was almost whispering, his manner casual—no one else in the room would guess theirs was a key conversation in the case. “Familiar with the Beltway sniper shootings?”

“Vaguely,” she said. “Before my time . . .”

“Peep, you remember what a jurisdictional nightmare that was. I won’t put up with that this time around.”

She asked Sloan, “What happened?”

But Reeder answered: “October 2002, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo drove up and down I-95 sniping people from the trunk of their ratty-ass Chevy Caprice. First five victims were in Maryland, number six was in DC proper, then one in Fredericksburg in Virginia, before going back for one more in Maryland, another four in Virginia, then, finally, one more in Maryland.”

“My God,” Rogers said. “How many victims?”

Sloan said, “Thirteen Beltway victims, and as many as twelve more as far away as Louisiana and Alabama. The whole investigation was a clusterfuck, full of jurisdictional hiccups, piss-poor management, and just plain shitty information.”

Reeder said, “The man does not exaggerate.”

Still seemingly casual, Sloan said, “In the end, a citizen saw the car, and the two killers were apprehended sleeping in a rest area in Maryland. All the law enforcement in the DC area, and it’s a
citizen
who finally tracks them down. Not this time.
We’ll
find Justice Venter’s killers and be the ones to bring them in.”

Half an hour later, Rogers pulled the unmarked Ford in front of a bungalow on Byrd Lane in Groveton, an unincorporated part of Fairfax County. Two modest oaks guarded either side of the sidewalk leading to a front stoop with white pillars, an antebellum anachronism for this glorified shack with its yellow aluminum siding.

They were still in the car when Rogers asked Reeder, “Need a gun? There’s an extra in the glove compartment.”

“No, thanks.”

“We might be facing Justice Venter’s killer in a couple of minutes, you know.”

“Doubtful, but thanks for the concern.”

“Why, do you
already
have a gun?”

She thought maybe he kept one in an ankle holster or some damn thing.

“I own a gun,” he said. “I don’t have it with me.”

“You do know we’re on duty here.”

“Hey, I’m not law enforcement, remember—I’m just a consultant. We can always call for backup.”

She stared at him. He looked as ready for action as a Buddhist monk.

As they got out of the car, she said, “Stay in back of me, then. That’s where consultants belong.”

They went up the stairs to the stoop, Rogers in the lead as she’d dictated. A screen door protected a varnish-blistered wooden front door whose small window provided no look inside.

She got her pistol out, her other hand on the screen-door handle. With a glance at Reeder, she said, “Ready?”

He was regarding her with a lifted eyebrow. “We left the SWAT team back at the ranch, remember? It’s his mother’s house. You
could
ring the bell.”

She shook her head.
These old-timers.
They always wanted to keep faith with the Fourth Amendment, even though the Supreme Court had rejected it years ago. She’d be damned if she would give up the element of surprise just to coddle a living legend who most people wanted to see drop dead.

With a quick nod to her supposed partner, she yanked the screen open, and it squeaked and creaked like something out of an old horror film. Within, a small dog started yapping.

Shit
—so much for the element of surprise.

She twisted the handle of the inside door, and it was unlocked but sticking, so she thrust her shoulder against it like a tackle throwing a block. Gun at the ready, she almost tumbled in, Reeder behind her, though he halted as he reached the threshold.