had pulled the Suburban out. It looked to me as though the vehicle had been pushed into the water from the edge of a wooden bridge where the pond narrowed into a channel.
Looking down from above, one would assume the water was plenty deep enough, but it obviously wasn't. In any case, it wasn't the kind of thing you could undo.
Once I'd taken all of that in, I headed back to my car. I figured it couldn't be too hard to the find the police station in town, but that's when I saw a cruiser coming up the road, fast.
It sped along the pond a ways, curved into the woods, and then came back out again. It stopped right behind where I'd parked.
A uniformed officer, a blond woman, got out and waved as I came over.
'Detective Cross?'
'That's me.'
'I'm Officer Guadagno. Detective Cowen asked me to drive out here and bring you back as quickly as possible. There's been a homicide in town, a woman by the name of Bernice Talley.'
I assumed she just meant that Cowen had been pulled away from my case.
'Do we need someone else to let us into the impoundment lot, or can you do that for me?' I asked Guadagno.
'No,' she said. 'I mean, you don't understand. Cowen wants you to come to the scene. He thinks Mrs. Talley's murder may be related.'
'To the Suburban?' I said. 'To my sniper case?'
The cop fiddled with the brim of her hat. She seemed a little nervous. 'Maybe both,' she said. 'It's nothing conclusive, but this same woman's husband was found shot dead two years ago, right over there.' She pointed to a patch of woods about a hundred feet up the shore. 'The ME called it a hunting accident at the time, but nobody ever came forward. Cowen figures whoever dumped that Suburban didn't just stumble onto this place, and frankly we don't get too many homicides around here. He's naming the son, Mitchell Talley, as a person of interest in all of it, both deaths.'
She stopped then, her hand on the open car door, and looked at me more directly than before.
'Detective, this may be none of my business, but do you think this guy could be your shooter down in Washington? I've been following the case since it broke.'
I demurred. 'Let me go take a look at that scene before I say anything,' I told her.
But, in fact, the answer to her question was yes.
Chapter 79
THE POLICE VEHICLES in front of Bernice Talley's home were two-deep when we got there. They had a tape line around the house, while the neighbors watched from the fringes. I had no doubt that all of them would be locking their doors and windows that night and for many nights to come.
My escort officer walked me inside and introduced me to Detective Scott Cowen, who seemed to be running the show. He was a tall, barrel-chested guy, with a shiny bald head that caught the light as he talked – and talked.
Just like on the phone, he briefed me with a long but mostly informative monologue.
Mrs. Talley had been found dead on her kitchen floor by the boy who mowed her lawn every Sunday. She'd been shot once at close range through the temple, with what looked like a nine millimeter. They were still working on time of death, but it was sometime within the last seventy-two hours.
The woman was believed to have been living alone, ever since the son, Mitchell, had moved out two years earlier – just a short while after the father was killed. Also, there was some word through the grapevine that the elder Mr. Talley had been known to knock his wife around over the years, and maybe to strike Mitchell, too.
'That could go to motive, at least on the father's death,' Cowen added. 'As to why he'd want to come back here and kill his poor mother, I wish to hell I knew. And then, of course, there's all of these.'
He showed me a shelf in the living room, crowded with trophies and ribbons. They were all shooting awards, I saw – New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Club, Junior NRA, various fifty- and three-hundred-meter competitions, target skill awards. Most of them were first place, some second and third.
'The kid is an ace,' Cowen said. 'Some kind of prodigy or whatever. Maybe also a little… you know. Simple.'
He pointed at a framed photo on one of the side tables. 'This is him, maybe ten years ago. We're looking for something more recent we can use.'
The boy in the picture looked to be about sixteen. He had a round face, almost cherubic, except for the dull look in his eyes and the half-assed attempt at a mustache. It was hard to imagine anyone taking him too seriously at that age.
The guns are his power, I thought. Always have been.
I looked back over at all the trophies and awards. Maybe this was the one thing Mitchell Talley had ever been good at. The one thing in his life he'd ever known how to control. On the face of things, it seemed to make sense.
'When was he last seen around here?' I asked. 'Did he ever come to visit?'
Cowen shrugged apologetically. 'We're still not sure. You're catching us right at the beginning of this thing,' he said. 'We don't even have prints on the house yet. We just found the mother. You're lucky that you're here.'
'Yeah, lucky me.'
I had the impression that the high profile on this sniper case was making people nervous around here, too. Everyone seemed to know who I was, and they were all giving me a wide berth.
'Don't worry about it. You aren't any further along than I would have expected,' I told Cowen. 'But I do have some ideas about how we might handle things from here.'
Chapter 80
SEVERAL THINGS HAPPENED really fast in Brick Township, mostly because I needed them to.
I worked my contacts with the Field Intelligence Group in Washington to get hold of the FIG coordinator up in the Newark field office. Because it was a Sunday night, and because we had sufficient reason to believe Mitchell Talley had crossed, or would cross, jurisdictional lines, we were able to get an immediate Temporary Felony Want. Cowen would have forty-eight hours from there to secure an actual warrant, signed and issued. In the meantime, Newark could get word out to law enforcement up and down the eastern seaboard right away.
The idea for now was to leave off any mention of Steven Hennessey, or any accomplice at all. The Want specified only that Mitchell Talley was being sought for questioning in the deaths of Bernice and Robert Talley. Wherever our presumed snipers were, I didn't want them knowing we'd connected any of this to DC until I had more information.
Cowen agreed to give me some cover on that front. In the meantime, I got his people hooked up with Newark in the search for their suspect. Someone found a more recent snapshot in one of his mother's photo albums, and they used a scan of it for the local and regional BOLO – Be On The Lookout.
Realistically speaking, no one expected Talley to be in the area. The larger effort was focused on looking at stolen-car reports, monitoring transportation hubs, and tracking down surveillance tapes at area airports and bus and train stations. With luck, someone would be able to turn up an eyewitness or maybe even a relevant piece of video somewhere.
The closest thing to a lead so far had come from an elderly neighbor of Mrs. Talley's. She'd seen a sedan of some kind parked in front of the house a few nights ago but couldn't say what kind it was, or what color, or even how long it had been there.
For whatever that was worth, I forwarded the information down to Jerome Thurman, who had been tracking vehicle-related leads on this case for me from the start.
By now, I was beginning to feel like I'd been away from DC for too long. Maybe Talley and Hennessey had no
