accessory for any burglar to carry. If they carry any firearm at all, it’s usually a snub-nosed revolver or a small automatic – the extra length of a silencer just makes a pistol more cumbersome and a lot more difficult to conceal.
‘Second, as far as we’ve been able to check, nothing was taken. Richards had a few nice pieces of hi-fi and video equipment and couple of expensive cameras plus around a thousand bucks in cash right there in his living room, and the perp just left them and walked away.
‘Third, we found no evidence of a break-in. As far as we can tell, the perp came right through the front door, which means Richards let him into the house himself. So pretty obviously he knew his attacker.’
‘So maybe a falling-out between friends?’ Westwood hazarded.
‘Possible, but we think that’s unlikely,’ Delaney said. ‘People don’t usually go calling on their buddies carrying silenced pistols unless they’ve got a real serious attitude problem.’
‘The weapon didn’t belong to Richards?’ Hicks asked.
‘No, sir,’ Delaney replied. ‘Richards had a couple of pistols in the house, with permits, naturally. Neither of them had been fired for some time, and neither had a silencer fitted. That’s another anomaly – the pistols were found in a drawer in the desk in his lounge, but as far as we can see Richards didn’t go anywhere near the desk. If the killer had been a burglar or someone else he didn’t know and trust, we would expect him to try to pick up one of those weapons just as a precaution.
‘No,’ Delaney said firmly, ‘what we’re looking at here is a murder committed by someone Richards knew well and trusted enough to let into his home late in the evening. It looks like the perp pulled the gun on him and he fought back – that’s how he picked up the wound in his arm. Then the killer finished him off with the fireside poker.’
‘Why use the poker?’ Westwood asked.
‘Probably didn’t want to risk a second shot. Even a silenced weapon makes some noise, but nobody would hear him crushing Richards’s skull with a poker unless they were right there in the room with him.’
‘What about the bullet that wounded Richards?’
Delaney shook his head. ‘The perp took it with him. It went right through the victim’s arm, but missed the bone. We found a hole in some wooden panelling where we guess the guy who pulled the trigger dug it out and took it away. Our best guess is it was probably either a twenty-two or a point-two-five-calibre weapon, certainly no larger than a thirty-two, but that’s about it.’
As Delaney fell silent, Walter Hicks leaned forward, looking at Westwood. ‘Right, John, I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering why the murder of a former CIA employee would bring the Washington DC police to the Company, right?’
Westwood nodded. Hicks was sharp, and that had been almost exactly what Westwood had been thinking as Delaney completed his account of the crime.
‘If it was just the murder of James Richards, we wouldn’t get involved at all. Granted, there are some peculiarities about the murder itself, but in the normal course of events there’s no way we would become involved in what seems purely a police matter. What has brought us together here is the second death on the same day. Right, Frank, it’s your ball – you run with it.’
‘OK,’ Delaney said. ‘The second death could possibly have been suicide, but we don’t think so. The victim’s name was Charles Hawkins. He retired from the Agency a couple of years before Richards and lived with his wife – her name’s Mary – in Popes Creek on the edge of the Potomac, a few miles south of DC. It’s the same house he owned when he was an Agency employee. They had three children, now all grown up and living away from here. That’s the background.
‘Late last night a guy out walking his dog at Lower Cedar Point – that’s just south of the Nice Memorial Bridge on the Maryland side of the river – noticed a car parked near the water, and figured that the man sitting behind the wheel was just sleeping. He came back with his dog a half-hour or so later and the car was still there, with the driver slouched in exactly the same position. The dog-walker peered in and couldn’t see any signs of life, so he knocked on the window and then tried the door when he got no response. The door wasn’t locked.
‘Having had some training as a paramedic, this guy felt for a pulse but couldn’t find one. He closed the car door, walked to the nearest phone and dialled for an ambulance. When the meat wagon arrived the paramedics tried for a pulse as well. After confirming that the driver was dead, they checked his identity. They found his driver’s licence, noted his home address and requested a black-and-white to go tell his wife the good news.
‘And that’s when we got involved, because when the squad car arrived at Popes Creek, they found that Mrs Mary Hawkins was also deceased. She’d died of a drug overdose, same as her husband, but in her case it certainly hadn’t been self-induced. There were bruises all over her where somebody had knocked her about, then forced a pill down her throat.’
‘Could have been a domestic?’ Westwood interjected. ‘Maybe Hawkins killed his wife then killed himself in a fit of remorse. It’s been known to happen.’
Delaney nodded. ‘Certainly has. However, when one of the neighbours saw Charles Hawkins driving away from his home at around seven-thirty that evening, Mary Hawkins was waving him goodbye from the front door. Hawkins never returned home, but around ten minutes after he’d left, another neighbour spotted an unknown male arrive at the Hawkins residence. Mrs Hawkins let him inside, so presumably she knew him. Nobody, as far as we know, saw this unsub – the unknown subject – leave.’
‘Anybody get a description of this guy?’ Westwood asked.
Delaney nodded. ‘Yes, but it’s not going to help a lot. White male, six feet tall, dark coat.’
‘That’s it?’ Westwood asked, incredulous.
‘That’s it,’ Delaney echoed. ‘It’s a quiet, good-quality area. People don’t scrutinize what their neighbours are doing, or what their visitors look like. We’re lucky we’ve got somebody who saw the unsub at all, otherwise we’d be looking at a murder–suicide scenario pretty much like the one you sketched out.’
‘Right,’ Walter Hicks said, ‘you see the pattern. With Richards it’s been by deduction, but in the case of Mrs Hawkins by direct observation. The killer – my money’s on a single perpetrator – was known to two of his victims, and by implication was also known to Charles Hawkins. There were no marks of violence on Hawkins’s body, so we presume that the only way he was persuaded to swallow the tablet that killed him was by the perp holding a gun to his head.’
‘What was in the tablet? Were Hawkins and his wife killed with the same substance?’
Delaney shuffled through the papers in front of him on the conference table and pulled out a single slightly crumpled sheet.
‘OK, we’re still waiting for some final tests to be completed, but the initial results suggest that both the Hawkinses swallowed the same poison. The last time I talked to the toxicologist he was waiting for the X-ray crystallography results, but in his opinion it was a vegetable alkaloid. He thinks it was probably a highly concentrated form of coniine.’
‘Never heard of it,’ Westwood said.
‘It’s the active principle in hemlock,’ Delaney said. ‘You know, what the ancient Greeks used when they wanted to take the night train.’
Westwood looked puzzled for a second or two, then nodded. ‘You mean, commit suicide?’
‘Yup,’ Delaney replied.
Westwood glanced up at Hicks, who’d just lit a cigar. He was trying to cut down, as he told anyone who asked him, but as far as Westwood could see he was smoking fewer, but much larger, cigars than before, which probably meant his nicotine intake was pretty much the same as it had always been.
‘OK, Walter,’ Westwood said. ‘I see that there’s a pattern, and it’s probably more than a coincidence that two ex-CIA employees have been killed on the same day, but what exactly is my role in all this?’
‘Just what I said at the start of the meeting, John. Liaison. Frank will be handling the strictly criminal aspects of this investigation. What I want you to do is dig back through the old files here at Langley. Identify all the cases that Hawkins and Richards worked on together, just in case what we’re looking at here is some kind of revenge killing spree – a guy assassinating Company agents who were involved in some operation that went wrong, or even went right.’
‘Not quite so many of those, Walter,’ Westwood said with a smile.
Hicks just looked at him. ‘Smart answer,’ he muttered. ‘And, while you’re doing that, identify everybody else who was involved with these two guys, just in case we can stop any other retired employees getting themselves
