Chapter 5
CHAPTER
Sampson and i were assigned to the Tony Miller murder case, but we were pretty far down in the hierarchy at Metro, so the day after Tony’s funeral, we also took a six a.m. call from Dispatch.
An angler had found two bodies in an old Ford Bronco out on Bear Island, within District lines, which made the killings Metro’s responsibility. It was misty and foggy when we got to lock five. A National Park Service vehicle was blocking the way across, its lights flashing.
A Bethesda Police cruiser was parked beside it, its lights flashing as well. A police officer was turning away angry bikers who were trying to get on the towpath heading to Georgetown.
Ranger Carrie Mulberry saw us, came over, and said, “We’ve closed off the island, and I’ve got rangers blocking access at the north and south ends. All went in by bike.”
“You been to the vehicle yourself?” Sampson asked.
Mulberry made a sour face and said in a soft voice, “After hearing what Mr. Quirk saw, we decided to hang back and not mess up any evidence for you. He says there are large vehicle tracks all over the towpath leading to the scene.”
“Mr. Quirk is the fisherman who found the bodies?”
“Dudley Quirk the Fourth,” Gene Lamont, the Bethesda officer, said to us after turning away another bicyclist. “One of those.”
“One of those?” I asked.
“One of those people who’s gotta tell you they’re the Fourth. Lack of naming imagination in the family if you ask me.”
“No one did,” Sampson said shortly. We looked over at the fisherman, who was sitting on a rock wall.
“He doesn’t hear that well,” Mulberry warned us before turning to stop a pack of four bicyclists.
We walked up to Quirk, showed him our badges.
Quirk nodded. “I don’t usually bring my hearing aids when I’m going to fish.
I dropped one in the drink last year and they’re awful expensive,” he explained, then launched into his story.
“I come here on my bike in the dark a couple mornings a week, and I ride over to the other side of the island, close to where you can see the falls upstream, and I fish as the sun rises.
“I got there and saw the Bronco sitting there, and I got angry because you’re not supposed to be in here with a rig, you know?
I walked up and saw the bullet hole through the side window.
And then the boy lying on top of the girl.
I turned around and rode back here just as the ranger was pulling into the parking lot. End of story.”
“Thank you,” I said, exaggerating my lip movements to be clear.
He shrugged. “A prime fishing dawn ruined. But it could have been worse. I could have been in the car with them.”
Quirk told us he’d seen two sets of big tire tracks traveling the towpath south to the cutoff toward the west branch of the Potomac, then only the Bronco’s tracks heading down the cutoff and another vehicle’s coming back the other way.
“You an expert on tire tracks?” Sampson asked.
“Hard not to see them,” Quirk said.
We left him, went back to Ranger Mulberry. “Can you drive us to within a hundred yards of that cutoff?” I asked.
“We’ll be driving over their tracks,” she said.
“They’ll be the same tracks down there,” Sampson said. “We’ll have forensics take samples over there.”
“Your jurisdiction, your call,” the ranger said.
We crossed the lock and the bridge and headed south on the towpath. Quirk had been right—it was hard to miss the tire tracks in most places.
A few hundred yards south of the bridge, I noticed something on the towpath and said, “Stop.”
The ranger stopped. Sampson and I got out and saw shards of clear and red plastic on the path. John said, “Looks like pieces of a headlight and blinker.”
Almost as soon as he said that, we heard “Ahh” coming from the woods to our right. We went toward the sound and saw a man lying by a tree stump, a good thirty feet from the path. He was on his side, facing us, entangled in a bicycle frame that was bent like a V.
“Call an ambulance!” I shouted to the ranger and followed Sampson into the woods. The closer we got, the more blood we saw on the biker’s bearded face and the more unnatural the angles of his legs and arms looked.
“Sir, can you hear us?”
“Ahh,” he wheezed. “Hepp.”
“Help’s coming,” I said.
“Who hit you?” Sampson said.
He wheezed again. His jaw looked swollen.
“Sir?”
But he’d closed his eyes. Mulberry ran up. “Ambulance is ten minutes out. Jesus, what happened to him?”
I said, “Wild guess, I bet he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and got hit by whoever was fleeing.”
John said, “We have to treat this part of the path as its own crime scene.”
“Agreed,” I said. “I think we should call for a backup team to treat this as an attempted murder, and we’ll go to the primary scene on foot.”
“You go on ahead,” the ranger said. “I’ll stay with the vic.”
Sampson said, “Once the EMTs get here and stabilize him, go through his pack there, see if he’s got identification.”
The bicyclist wheezed again. Mulberry went to him, said, “Just hang on a little bit longer and we’ll get you to a hospital.”
We left the two of them and walked in the weeds next to the towpath all the way to the cutoff. As Quirk had said, there was a single set of tracks there heading to the west fork.
It was nearly eight a.m. when we reached the opening above the river and saw the Bronco. Sampson walked toward the SUV, looking for footprints in the soil.
He stopped, squatted, and said, “These are something, but I can’t see a tread, and there’re little strands of fabric in the prints.”
“He’s wearing wool socks,” I said.
“So he can come in silent and not leave an identifiable trace,” John said. “This is premeditation.”
Sampson set his police radio on the roof, and we put on gloves and opened the Bronco’s front doors. The victims were both Caucasian, topless, and in their teens.
The male victim had been shot through the back of the head at close range. The round had blown a ragged exit hole in his forehead and hit the female victim.
There was so much blood and brain matter on her face, it was hard to tell exactly where she’d been hit—until she groaned and rolled her head to one side, revealing a large scalp wound.
“She’s alive!” I shouted.
John grabbed his radio off the roof of the Bronco. “Dispatch, this is Sampson at the one-four-zero on Bear Island. We need a medevac helicopter here right now!”