Cross the Line, Page 4

  “That’s Sylvia Plath,” Howard said. “She’s got issues.”

  He laughed uproariously at that and then started coughing hard. He picked up a tissue, spit into it, and then said, “Aren’t you going to ask me where I was when Tommy got it?”

  “We figured we’d dance with you awhile before that,” Sampson said.

  Howard sobered, said, “No reason to. I was right here at the time the TV guys say he was killed.”

  “Anyone see you?”

  “Six of the fine ladies from my neighborhood Hooters were supposed to come over for breakfast and watch last night’s game with me on the DVR,” Howard said. “But, alas, they stood me up. Too bad. Good game. Senators demolished the Red Sox in interleague play. Harper went three for four.”

  “So you have no alibi,” I said.

  “Nope,” Howard said, going to the kitchen and pouring orange juice and vodka into a dirty highball glass. “But I know you can’t put me on upper Wisconsin because I wasn’t there. Hell, I can barely walk two blocks.”

  “You must have wanted to kill Tommy at one time,” Sampson said.

  “Man destroys your life, it crosses your mind,” Howard said, shuffling back and settling into a recliner. “But I did not pull the trigger on COD McGrath.”

  “You own a Remington 1911?” I asked.

  “I have always been a devotee of Smith and Wesson, so no.”

  “Mind if we look around?”

  “Hell yeah, I mind,” the disgraced detective said. “You got a warrant, Cross, have at her. Otherwise, and with all due respect, we’re done here. Me and Sylvia P. got another game to watch.”

  Chapter

  10

  Sampson and I didn’t argue with Howard. The former detective didn’t strike me as being physically or mentally capable of shooting McGrath. He seemed to have given up and was at some bitter peace with that.

  So we left and returned to the office, where I found Bree and Muller waiting with Rico Lincoln and Martin O’Donnell, the other detectives Chief Michaels had assigned to the murder of Tom McGrath. Bree and Muller described their meeting with Vivian McGrath and we brought them up to speed on what we’d found at McGrath’s, Edita Kravic’s, and Terry Howard’s.

  When we finished, I looked at Detective Lincoln, a tall, skinny marathoner who’d been smiling and acting impatient during our reports.

  “You got something you’d like to share, Rico?”

  “I do,” Lincoln said. “I mean, we both do.”

  “You first,” O’Donnell said.

  Lincoln got on his computer and linked it to a large screen on the wall. The screen jumped to a traffic-camera perspective of upper Wisconsin Avenue. Cars in both northbound lanes came at the camera head-on so we could see each vehicle and its passengers best at a distance. With the rain, it was hard to get a good look through the windshields, especially the ones in the right lane.

  Lincoln sped the video up, watching the data in the lower corner, and then paused at the time stamp reading 7:20 a.m.

  “Tommy McGrath and Edita Kravic are gunned down at seven twenty,” he said, and he hit Play. “Coming at you in the northbound right lane, dark-primer four-door sedan, stripped, almost looks like it’s about to be repainted.”

  “That Treasury agent called it,” Sampson said.

  “Watch now,” Lincoln said.

  The car was passing, rain spattering its windshield, and you couldn’t see a thing. Lincoln froze the screen when the front of the car was almost out of view. He pointed to the left side of the windshield. Up on the dashboard, there was a red Washington Redskins ball cap.

  “We saw Howard wearing a red Redskins cap just like that not an hour ago,” Sampson said.

  It was true. Same hat.

  Lincoln said, “Something else.”

  The detective advanced the frames so the windshield of the car and then the tinted driver-side window disappeared. When he stopped the film again, we had a side-angle view through the open rear window.

  We could see the silhouette of a person with a wild mop of hair sitting in the middle of the backseat.

  “Okay?” I said.

  Lincoln advanced the film two frames. Here, the shadows were different. Three-quarters of the face was revealed.

  I stared for a second and then said, “Raggedy Ann?”

  “That was our reaction,” Detective O’Donnell said. “At first we thought we had the wrong car and the cap on the windshield was just chance.”

  Lincoln said, “But the more we thought about it, the more we became convinced that there wasn’t a third person in the backseat. A scarecrow was sitting there. See the shadows here and here? That’s the shoulders of a dark coat. See the lapels?”

  “I get it,” I said. “Why’s Raggedy Ann wearing a coat?”

  “Exactly,” Lincoln said.

  Rubbing my chin, I said, “I agree that’s our shooter’s car. Have pictures of it at the best angles sent to every officer on the force.”

  “On it,” Lincoln said, and he started typing.

  Bree fought off a yawn. I fought off a yawn too and then nodded at O’Donnell, who said, “I started going through Chief McGrath’s work files. Right away, I found a threatening e-mail.”

  He typed on his computer, and the screen changed from the close-up of the Raggedy Ann doll to a July 3 e-mail to McGrath from TL.

  You push too hard, we gonna push right back. Only it’s gonna be lethal this time, Chief McG.

  “TL?” Sampson said. “That Thao Le?”

  “Has to be,” Bree said, sitting forward.

  Muller said, “I thought Le got convicted in Prince George’s last year.”

  “Got off on appeal four months ago,” O’Donnell said, showing us an investigative file he’d found in McGrath’s desk. “Tommy had evidently been running a solo investigation into Le’s activities since his release.”

  “What did he find?” Bree asked.

  “That Le was back in the game. Associating with known criminals and members of his old gang. Drugs. Women. Loan-sharking. Extortion.”

  “Why wouldn’t Tommy have told someone?” Sampson asked.

  “Nailing Le was personal with Tommy,” O’Donnell said. “He even wrote about it. He thought Le was the one who’d planted the evidence in Terry Howard’s case, and even though Terry hated him, Tommy was out to prove it.”

  “So maybe Tommy got close enough to spook Le into making good on his threat,” Bree said.

  “Where’s Le now?” I asked.

  “No clue yet,” O’Donnell said. “But the last two times Le was picked up on weapons charges, he was carrying a forty-five-caliber Remington 1911.”

  Chapter

  11

  I was up before dawn, startled awake by a dream where a pistol-packing Raggedy Ann drove a motorcycle down Rock Creek Parkway, which was littered with fifty-dollar bills. The cash almost covered the corpses of Edita Kravic and Tommy McGrath.

  I eased from bed, letting Bree sleep. We’d gotten home after midnight, wolfed down leftovers from the fridge, and gone straight to sleep.

  After a shower, I went downstairs to find my ninety-one-year-old grandmother making breakfast.

  “You’re up kind of early, Nana Mama,” I said, kissing her on the cheek.

  “Big day ahead for you,” she said. “I wanted to make sure it starts right.”

  “We appreciate it,” I said. I poured myself some coffee and got the papers from the front porch.

  The murder of Tommy McGrath and Edita Kravic led the front page of both the Washington Post and the Washington Times. Chief Michaels was quoted as saying DC Metro had lost one of its best men and that the department would be relentless in its pursuit of the killers. He announced the formation of an elite task force to investigate the murders, and he named me as team leader.

  “Pop?”

  I glanced up from the papers to see my oldest child, Damon, standing there, looking excited.

  I smiled, asked, “You ready?”

&
nbsp; “As I’ll ever be.”

  “Sit down there and Nana will give you one last proper breakfast.”

  Damon’s six foot five and towers over my grandmother. He scooped her up and gave her a kiss, which caused her to shriek with laughter.

  “What was that for, young man?” she demanded, looking ruffled when he set her down.

  “Just because,” Damon said. “Can I get three eggs this morning?”

  She sniffed. “I suppose I can manage it.”

  “Two for me,” said my fifteen-year-old daughter, Jannie, who was still in her pajamas and rubbing her eyes when she came in. “I’ll make my own shake.”

  Ali, almost eight and my youngest, ran in after her and said, “I want French toast.”

  “No sugar-bombing in my kitchen,” Nana Mama said. “Eggs. Protein. Good for your brain.”

  “So’s French toast.”

  I looked at him, said, “You’ll never win that one.”

  Ali acted like the weight of the world was on him. “Can I get two sunny-side up with regular toast?”

  “That you can have,” my grandmother said.

  Bree joined soon after. It was a nice treat, all of us sharing breakfast together on a weekday. All too soon, though, we were out in front of the house helping Damon load the last of his things into our car.

  “That’s it?” I said, shaking my head. “Really not that much.”

  “That surprises you?” Damon asked.

  “I guess it does,” I said. “Back when I left for school, I had twice the amount of stuff, or maybe my stuff was just bigger. That’s it—there’s no huge stereo system anymore. Everything’s gotten smaller.”

  “That’s a news flash, Alex,” my grandmother said impatiently, and she rapped her cane on the sidewalk. “Now, Damon, you come over here and give your Nana Mama some love before you go, but do not pick me up again. You’ll break my back.”

  Damon smirked before bending over and kissing Nana Mama good-bye.

  “I’m so proud of you,” she said, her eyes getting glassy. “You are a gentleman and a scholar.”

  Coming from my grandmother, a retired English teacher and former high school vice principal, that was high praise.

  Damon beamed, said, “That’s because you taught me how to study.”

  “You learned it and ran with it,” she said. “Give yourself some credit.”

  He kissed her on the cheek again and then turned to Jannie. “You keep killing it, you hear?”

  “That’s the plan,” she said, and hugged him. “You’ll come to the invitational, right?”

  Damon said, “Wouldn’t miss out on watching the fastest woman on earth.”

  “Not yet,” Jannie said, grinning.

  “Dream it, own it, give it time,” Damon said, and then he picked up Ali, who was looking morose. “Why the face, little man?”

  Ali shrugged, said, “You’re going away. Again.”

  “I’ll be an hour away,” Damon said. “Not six hours, like when I was up at Kraft, so I’ll be home to see you a whole lot more.”

  Ali perked up. “Promise?”

  “You know I need my Ali Cross fix,” Damon said, and he tickled Ali until he howled with laughter.

  Then he hugged Bree, told her to take care of me.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  “Whole new life waiting,” Damon said, and even though he was trying to remain cool, I could see he was vibrating with emotion as we drove away.

  Chapter

  12

  We took 295 heading north toward Baltimore and drove in a pleasant quiet. Part of me wanted to be a helicopter parent, remind him to do this or do that, tell him how to handle one academic crisis or another.

  But Damon had left home at sixteen to chase his dreams. He knew how to take care of himself already, and that made me both proud and sad. My job as a parent had shrunk to the role of adviser, but once upon a time, I had been all he had.

  Passing Hyattsville, Maryland, I flashed on the moment Damon was born, how my first wife, Maria, had sobbed with joy when the nurse laid him on her belly, a squirming, squealing miracle that I’d loved in an instant.

  I managed to keep my mind from going to the night Maria was killed in a drive-by. Instead, my memories were of those first few years after Maria died, how ripped apart I’d felt unless I was holding Damon or Jannie, who’d been an infant at the time. Without Nana Mama I would never have been able to go on. My grandmother had stepped in as she had when I was a boy. She was Damon’s mother as much as she’d been mine.

  Damon and I talked baseball near Laurel, Maryland, and both of us agreed that if Bryce Harper could stay healthy, he would put up Hall of Fame statistics. We’d gone to New York a few years ago for the All-Star Game and watched him hit in the Home Run Derby. Harper had freakish quickness and strength.

  “He’s like Jannie, you know?” Damon said. “An outlier. There’s something special about them. You just see it when they move.”

  “You’re not so bad yourself,” I said.

  “I’m good enough to be a seventh or eighth man in Division One.”

  “Never sell yourself short,” I said.

  “Just being honest, and I’m good with coming off the bench, Dad,” he said. “Jannie, though? She’s in a world where very few people get to live.”

  That was true. Seeing my daughter run on a track was like watching a gazelle chased by a lion and—

  “Dad! Watch out!”

  Six or seven car lengths in front of us, a twenty-seven-foot Jayco camping trailer attached to the back of a Ford F-150 pickup had started to swerve wildly. I got my foot on the brake a split second before the camper and pickup went into a wide, arcing skid and then jackknifed, flipped, and careened left, inches off our front bumper.

  I hit the gas, shot forward, and went by it. The trailer smashed an oncoming car, the pickup slammed into something else, and then the whole mass of twisted metal went across the fast lane and down the embankment behind us.

  “Holy shit!” Damon yelled. “Holy shit, we just almost died!”

  My heart was slamming in my chest, and my hands were trembling on the wheel as I got over on the shoulder. We had almost died. The Grim Reaper had been right there but passed us by.

  “C’mon,” I said, yanking out my cell and dialing 911. “We’ve got to help.”

  Damon jumped out and ran back down the road to the embankment while I told the dispatcher what had happened.

  When I reached the pickup, Damon shook his head. The driver was dead and hanging out the back window. We heard a baby crying in the car that had been hit by the travel trailer and flipped onto its roof.

  “Help!” a woman yelled. “Someone please help us.”

  Damon got down on his knees by the car and I did too. The young mom’s head was bleeding hard. The baby was upside down but appeared uninjured, mostly just upset about being upside down.

  “We’ve got an ambulance coming,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Sally Jo,” she said. “Sally Jo Hepner. I’m bleeding like a stuck pig. Am I gonna die?”

  “I think you’ll need a lot of stitches, but you’re not going to die. What’s your baby’s name?”

  I could already hear sirens.

  “Bobby,” she said. “After my dad.”

  Damon had wriggled in through the window and gotten the car seat free. He squirmed back and pulled him out. Bobby Hepner was fussing, but just showing him his mother seemed to quiet him down.

  Firemen and EMTs were on the scene within five minutes of the crash. We stayed until we saw the mom safely extracted from the car and put on a backboard with a neck collar, just in case. One of the EMTs carried her baby into the ambulance.

  “Looks like our work here is done,” I said. “Let’s get you to school.”

  Damon smiled, but when we got back in the car, he was brooding. “Strange how life is. Here one minute and gone the next.”

  “Don’t worry about it too much.”

  “I
guess. But seeing that, it’s like, what’s the point? You never know when your time is up.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “So live every minute like it’s your last, and be grateful. The way I see it, that near miss was a message. We came close, but we weren’t meant to be in a car accident today. We were reminded of how fragile and precious life is, but we weren’t supposed to die. We were supposed to get you to college, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

  Damon dipped his head, but then he grinned, said, “Okay.”

  Johns Hopkins had changed in some ways since I was a student, but the Homewood campus was still an oasis of green quads and red-brick halls in the city of Baltimore, and I still felt the electricity of the place when we arrived. We were met by student volunteers, who steered us through the various lines and gave us a thick orientation packet for incoming freshmen.

  We found Damon’s room and met his roommate—William Clancy, a lacrosse player from Massachusetts—and his parents. The boys seemed to click from the start. We helped them get squared away, and then there was an awkward moment when it was obvious they wanted the parents to leave.

  “Walk me to the car,” I said. “There’s something down there that I want you to have.”

  “Uh, sure,” Damon said, and he nodded to his roommate. “Be back, and then we’ll go to the welcome picnic?”

  “Sounds good,” William said.

  We got to the car, and I looked at him with fierce pride and love.

  “What did you want me to have?” Damon asked.

  I grabbed him and bear-hugged him, unable to stop the tears.

  “Your mom,” I choked out. “She would have been very, very happy to see who you’ve become.”

  Damon looked uncomfortable when I released him and stepped back. A few tears slipped from his eyes before he said, “Thank you, Dad. For everything.”