“What are you talking about, Denny?” Mitch still looked a little glazed from the checkpoint stop.
“The dead cop, man. Aren’t you listening?” Denny said. “It’s all going down exactly like we hoped. We just bagged ourselves a goddamn copycat!”
Chapter 62
NELSON TAMBOUR HAD been shot just before dusk, on a grassy strip of no-man’s-land between Rock Creek Parkway and the river. The highway was already shut down by the time I got there, all the way from K Street to the Kennedy Center. I parked as close as I could and walked the rest of the way in.
Tambour had been a detective with NSID, the Narcotics and Special Investigations Division. I didn’t know him personally, but that didn’t make this incident any less of a nightmare. MPD had just lost one of its own, and horribly so. Detective Tambour had been found with his skull blown half open — a large-caliber bullet had passed right through his head.
It was dark now, but several klieg lights had the scene lit up like the inside of a football stadium. Two tents had been erected off to the side, one as a command center, and another for evidence collection out of sight of the pesky news choppers circling overhead.
We also had Harbor Patrol on the water, keeping pleasure craft at a good distance from the shore. And command staff were everywhere.
When I saw Chief Perkins, he motioned me right over. He was huddled off to the side with the assistant chiefs from NSID and Investigative Services, as well as with a woman I didn’t recognize.
“Alex, this is Penny Ziegler from IAD,” he said, and the knot in my stomach tightened right up. What is Internal Affairs doing down here?
“Something I should know about?” I said.
“There is,” Ziegler told me. Her face was just as creased with tension as ours were. Murdered cops tend to make everyone wiggy.
“Detective Tambour’s been on no-contact status for the last month,” she said. “We were going to be filing criminal charges against him later this week.”
“What charges?” I said.
She looked to Perkins for a nod before she went on. “Over the last two years, Tambour oversaw an undercover operation at three of the big housing projects in Anacostia. He’s been skimming half of everything they’ve seized, mostly PCP, coke, and Ecstasy. He was reselling it through a network of street dealers in Maryland and Virginia.”
“He may have been on a drop right here,” Perkins added with a shake of his head. “They found a key of coke in his trunk.”
Four words flashed through my mind: Foxes in the henhouse.
Suddenly Tambour was a lot more in line with the snipers’ victim profile than he’d been a minute ago.
At the same time, though, he was an unknown to the general public. He hadn’t been in the headlines like the others, at least not yet, and that was a difference.
An important one? I couldn’t be sure, but I also couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe something was off here.
“I want to impose radio silence on anything to do with the investigation,” I told Perkins. “Whoever made this hit obviously has some kind of inside line.”
“Agreed,” he said. “And, Alex?” Perkins put a hand on my arm as I turned to go. His eyes looked strained. Maybe even a little desperate. “Work the hell out of this,” he told me. “This is close to getting out of control.”
If this hit wasn’t by our sniper team, it already was out of control.
Chapter 63
FBI PERSONNEL STARTED showing up right after I did. That was definitely a double-edged sword for me. Their Evidence Response Teams bring some of the best toys in the business — but it also meant Max Siegel wouldn’t be far behind.
In fact, we bumped heads over Nelson Tambour’s body.
“That’s a hell of an exit wound,” Siegel said, coming into my airspace with his usual sensitivity. “I heard the guy was dirty. Is it true? I’ll find out anyway.”
I ignored the question and answered the one he should have been asking. “It was definitely long-range,” I said. “There’s no stippling at all. And, given the body position, the shots probably had to come from over there.”
Directly across from us, maybe 250 yards offshore, we could see flashlight beams crisscrossing the underbrush on Roosevelt Island. We had two teams over there, scouring for shells, suspicious footprints, anything.
“You said shots, plural?” Siegel asked.
“That’s right.” I pointed at the slope behind the spot where Tambour had gone down. Four yellow flags were stuck into the ground, one for each of the slugs that had been recovered so far.