Chapter 29
CHAPTER
When john sampson returned to the office with a thick tongue and a slightly swollen left jaw, I was in the conference room watching grainy video footage of the intersection of the Chain Bridge and Canal Street taken on the night of Talbot’s murder.
I was trying not think about my—to put it frankly—arrogance of the night before. I was going back to basics and humbly doing the raw legwork. I felt that was my best chance to break the Talbot case and get back in Pittman’s good graces.
“Hey, shunshine, why the long face?” John slurred as he came into the conference room. “I’m the one with a mouthful of Novocain.”
“I’m not going there right now.” I waved off his comment. “My friend at the FBI came through with CCTV footage of the bridge intersection and Canal where it meets the Clara Barton on the night Talbot was killed.”
“Anything?”
“The camera must be mounted over the top of the traffic light facing the bridge because the Bronco passes under it, gunning through a yellow light, at ten twelve in the evening,” I said, playing the sequence.
We watched as a Ford Explorer and a Volkswagen Scirocco took a left onto the bridge when the light on Canal changed.
The third vehicle in line, a dingy white Ford Econoline van with tinted windows, continued on in the northbound lane, followed shortly after by a Dodge pickup and a Toyota Corolla.
Then three cars came across the bridge from Virginia.
Two went north into Maryland; one headed south toward Georgetown.
I stopped the tape and sighed. “I don’t know what I’m looking for.”
“Commonalities,” Sampson said. “The ME is putting time of death around ten thirty p.m. Let it play for a while.”
I sat back and watched the intersection footage for almost twenty minutes before spotting a dingy white van with its high beams on heading south toward Canal Street.
I gave a little whoop, stopped the player, rewound the tape several seconds, and froze it on the image of the van just as it entered the intersection. “Looks like the same van to me.”
“It does to me too,” Sampson said, moving closer to the screen. “Tinted side windows. No passenger. Driver’s got the visor down, blocking his face. And the bulbs over the license plates are out. But could be old Pennsylvania plates, the blue on yellow ones with the keystone in the middle?”
I moved closer too. “I think so. And look at the front left headlight. Is the cover busted?”
“Something’s off about it,” he agreed. “We’ll get someone to really blow up the image.”
“If this is the van that hit Carl Dennis, we’ve placed him within—”
My pager went off. A Maryland number.
“Rewind and check if the van’s headlights were intact on its first trip through the intersection while I make this call,” I said. I went back to my desk, picked up my phone, and dialed the number from the pager.
“Brady, Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office,” said the same detective who’d given me the finger the night before.
When Sampson came out of the conference room a few minutes later, he saw the difference in my posture and attitude.
“Headlight’s intact going north,” Sampson informed me. “Who paged you?”
“I’ll tell you in two seconds, John,” I said. “Someone else needs to know first.”
I went straight to Chief Pittman’s office and knocked on his closed door. He barked something, so I opened it.
He took one look at me, rolled his eyes, and grumbled, “What now?”
“We may have identified the vehicle that hit the Senate aide, and it might belong to Talbot’s killer.”
“What do you mean, ‘may have’?”
I held up my hands. “More important, I just got off the phone with Matthew Brady, the detective in charge of yesterday’s Beltsville shootings.
Preliminary ballistics say the two women were shot at short range by a forty-four-caliber snub-nosed pistol shooting two-hundred-and-forty-six-grain boattail bullets.
Just like the one that hit Conrad Talbot. ”