Out through the windows of the laundromat law enforcement officers stood around, radios to ears. On the street ambulances and paddy wagons idled, and first responders waited for the order to roll forward.
Arthur and his wife had been roused by a phone call, just after three a.m., asking them both to very quickly and quietly come to the front door to speak with police officers. They’d complied, of course, and when they did they were told they needed to leave their home immediately. Bernice had demanded to know what was going on, and an officer said there was a chemical spill on the nearby train tracks, and everything would be explained at the command center. They were whisked away by a team of armed cops in body armor and taken here to the laundromat, where dozens of cops were already set up, and whatever they were planning on doing didn’t look to Arthur like it had one damn thing to do with a chemical spill.
Guns, grenade launchers, night vision equipment, riot shields. Arthur hadn’t seen so much military gear since Saigon in 1969.
He and his wife were led to seats near the front of the laundromat and, as a group of cops parted to let them through, Arthur saw a large photograph of his basement tenant posted on cardboard and leaning against the wall.
“Oh, hell no,” Mayberry mumbled under his breath.
Fifteen minutes had passed since then, and now Arthur watched while the police looked over his hand-drawn diagram of his basement, including the corner apartment he built with his own two hands. He imagined when this was all over he was going to be in some serious trouble for all his building code violations, but he looked on the bright side . . . He sure as hell wasn’t in nearly as much trouble as Jeff Duncan.
He’d done what he could to deflect blame away from the man in his basement. Jeff Duncan was probably up to no good, but the very idea the mild-mannered white man living on his property was some sort of a terrorist was asinine. Arthur had seen something on the man’s face; a world-weariness, a hardened interior, maybe. But he wasn’t as bad as all this, Arthur felt sure.
Bernice, on the other hand, kept muttering to herself that she knew Jeff Duncan was low-down and no-account, and she berated her husband mercilessly for not seeing this for himself.
The Washington Metro Police Department refers to its SWAT unit as ERT, the Emergency Response Team. The head of the ERT unit had sat down with Mayberry a few minutes earlier and asked, “You are certain there is no access to the house from the basement apartment?”
“Look, young man. I told the other officers. I built that place myself. You would need to knock a hole in the wall to get into the basement, and even if you could bust through, you’d be over there on the side with the furnace and the water heater.”
Arthur had then drawn up the diagram, and although the police seemed to be very concerned about the man in the basement, Arthur could tell the Emergency Response Team captain was glad he wouldn’t have to split his men and hit multiple entrances at the same time. They could, instead, enter the basement, and then, if the subject wasn’t there, they could exit and reenter the home to clear it. Another thirty police officers were on the scene and charged with cordoning off the block to keep anyone from entering or exiting. If the cordon around the property was any good, and their suspect was inside, they’d get him, wherever they found him.
Now Arthur and Bernice sat quietly, waiting for the tactical officers to get on with their raid and remove their tenant from their home in handcuffs, so they could go back home and back to bed.
—
Denny Carmichael awoke from a deep sleep on his sofa.
The phone on his desk trilled and he grabbed it, both surprised and hopeful.
“Mayes?”
“It’s Brewer, sir.” She sounded almost out of breath.
“Talk.”
“D.C. Emergency Response Team has surrounded a house in Columbia Heights. They think they have the suspect from Dupont Circle holed up inside.”
Carmichael clenched the receiver tight. “And why do they think this?”
“A Crime Stoppers tip led them to the area. Detectives came out and interviewed neighbors, showing them a picture taken from the Easy Market, and another taken at Dupont. They got a hit, apparently.”
“And why are we just learning about this now?”
“We aren’t monitoring tip line calls, there are a hundred every hour, most all of them useless. We only monitor the radio traffic of dispatched police units. This call went over a landline directly to a supervisor, and not out over the radio. He used his mobile phone to send out detectives, they weren’t dispatched regularly. I guess they are suspicious a terrorist might be listening in to police radio traffic. When they decided it was a legit lead they called everyone out. We’re a good twenty minutes behind the action.”
Carmichael was furious the TOC hadn’t accounted for the possibility the D.C. police would have a special protocol set up for Crime Stoppers tips.
“Where is JSOC?”
“En route, but they won’t make it in time. ERT is going to hit that house any second.”