He knew their relationship was a strange one, but he’d decided recently that Edita was, for the most part, good for him. She made him happy. And she made him feel young and think young, which was also a good thing.
They grabbed the shopping bags. He followed her out into a warm drizzle that made the sidewalk glisten. Traffic was already building in the southbound lane of Wisconsin Avenue even at that early-morning hour, but it was still light going north.
They turned to head south, Edita a step or two ahead of him.
A second later, McGrath caught red fire flashing in his peripheral vision, heard the boom-boom-boom of rapid pistol fire, and felt bullets hit him, one of them in his chest. It drove him to the ground.
Edita started to scream but caught the next two bullets and fell beside McGrath, the organic groceries tumbling across the bloody sidewalk.
For McGrath, everything became far away and slow motion. He fought for breath. It felt like he’d been bashed in the ribs with sledgehammers. He went on autopilot, fumbled for his cell phone in his gym-shorts pocket.
He punched in 911, watched dumbly as the unbroken bottle of Cliffton Dry rolled away from him down the sidewalk.
A dispatcher said, “District 911, how may I help you?”
“Officer down,” McGrath croaked. “Thirty-two hundred block of Wisconsin Avenue. I repeat, officer …”
He felt himself swoon and start to fade. He let go of the phone and struggled to look at Edita. She wasn’t moving, and her face looked blank and empty.
McGrath whispered to her before dying.
“Sorry, Ed,” he said. “For all of it.”
CHAPTER
2
LIGHT RAIN HAD begun to fall when John Sampson and I climbed out of our unmarked car on Rock Creek Parkway south of Mass. Avenue. It was only six thirty a.m. and the humidity was already approaching steam-room levels.
The left lane was closed off for a medical examiner’s van and two DC Metro patrol cars and officers. Morning traffic was going to be horrendous.
The younger of the two officers looked surprised to see us. “Homicide? This guy kissed a tree going ninety.”
“Reports of gunfire before the crash,” I said.
Sampson asked, “We have an ID on the victim?”
“Car’s registered to Aaron Peters. Bethesda.”
“Thanks, Officer,” I said, and we headed to the car.
The Maserati was upside down with the passenger side wrapped around the base of a large Japanese maple tree. The sports car was heavily charred and all the windows were blown out.
The ME, a plump, brassy, extremely competent redhead named Nancy Ann Barton, knelt by the driver’s side of the Maserati and peered in with a Maglite.
“What do you think, Nancy?” I asked.
Barton looked up and saw me, then stood and said, “Hi to you too, Alex.”
“Hi, Nancy,” I said. “Anything?”
“No ‘Good morning’? No ‘Top of the day to you’?”
I cracked a smile, said, “Top of the morning, Doc.”
“That’s better,” Barton said and laughed. “Sorry, Alex, I’m on an old-school kick. Trying to bring congeniality back to humankind, or at least the humankind around me.”
“How’s that working for you, Nancy?” Sampson asked.
“Pretty well, actually,” she said.
“This an accident?” I asked.
“Maybe,” she said, and she squatted down again.
I knelt next to Barton, and she shone the light into the Maserati, showing me the driver. He was upside down, hanging from a harness, wearing a charred Bell helmet with a partially melted visor, a neck brace, and a Nomex fire suit, the kind Grand Prix drivers used, right down to the gloves and booties.
“The suit worked,” Barton said. “No burn-through that I can see. And the air bag gave him a lot of protection. So did the internal roll bar.”
“Aaron Peters,” Sampson said, looking at his smartphone. “Former Senate staffer, big-time oil lobbyist. No wonder he could afford a Maserati.”
Standing up to dig out my own flashlight, I said, “Enemies?”
“I would think by definition a big-time oil lobbyist would have enemies.”
“Probably so,” I said, squatting back down. I flipped my light on and probed around the interior. My beam came to rest on a black metal box mounted on the dashboard.
“What is it?” the ME asked.
“If I’m right, that’s a camera inside that box, probably a GoPro. I think he may have been filming his run.”
“Would something like that survive a fire?” Sampson asked.
“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” I said, then I trained the beam on the driver’s blackened helmet. I noticed depressions in the upper part of it that didn’t look right.
“You’ve photographed it?” I asked.
Barton nodded. I reached up and released the buckle of the chinstrap. Gently but firmly, I tugged on the helmet, revealing Aaron Peters. His Nomex balaclava looked untouched by the fire, but it was blood-soaked from two through-and-through bullet wounds to Peters’s head.
“Not an accident,” I said.
“Impossible,” Barton agreed.
My phone rang. I was going to ignore it but then saw it was chief of police Bryan Michaels.
“Chief,” I said.
“Where are you?”